Summary
Part III: In the White City
Opening Day
The Opening Day procession, which President Grover Cleveland attends, is sumptuous and grand. It heads toward the Administration Building with its gold dome, comes within view of the woefully incomplete Ferris Wheel, and enters Jackson Park. What most of the visitors do not know is the work that went on the night before Cleveland’s arrival, but the fair is more or less ready now. Cleveland and Director-General Davis speak. Buffalo Bill stands tall in the crowd.
Cleveland’s speech is short and at 12:08 he touches the gold key, and things begin to shift into motion. Engines take steam, the waterworks pump, an American flag unfurls, the guns of Michigan fire, steam whistles shriek, and the whole crowd begins to sing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”
For about 24 hours Burnham is optimistic, but on the first official day, only 10,000 people come; if that rate holds, it will be an unequivocal failure. A panic breaks out on Wall Street the next day due to the growing economic troubles, and a few banks begin to fail. It seems that in terms of the fair, people only want to go when everything is ready because money might not hold out to go more than once. Burnham and his team have accomplished a lot, but the Ferris Wheel is half-finished, Olmsted hasn’t done all the grading and planting of some grounds, and some exhibits aren’t done. Burnham knows these things have to be taken care of, and he also has to encourage people to come to Chicago. He gives Francis Millet the new post of director of functions, and Millet starts planning fireworks shows and parades and special honoring days.
Burnham hopes the economy will right itself, but the strikes, layoffs, and bank failures persist.
The World’s Fair Hotel
Holmes’s hotel begins to fill, but mostly with young women, as he tells men he has no room. Minnie becomes more and more jealous and Holmes knows he has to do something about her. He rents a flat far enough away from his building to prevent Minnie’s impromptu visits. Holmes visits the house’s owner, John Oker, and tells Oker his name is Henry Gordon and he is in real estate. Minnie wonders why the house is so far away, but it is a nice sunny flat and she thinks her sister will enjoy it.
The two officially move in, but Holmes spends most of his time at the hotel. The female guests find him charming, even if the building is a bit chilly.
Prendergast
Prendergast writes a man named W.F. Cooling and informs him he is a candidate for the corporation counsel and Cooling can be his assistant.
Night is the Magician
While the Black City is smoky and filled with garbage, the White City offers a promise of what a city could be: it is clean, efficient, beautiful. At the fair new devices and concepts are shown: a long-distance telephone, the first moving pictures, an all-electric kitchen, Juicy Fruit, Shredded Wheat, Cracker Jack, Krupps’s disturbing heavy guns, the Dewey Decimal System.
Next door to the fair, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show draws large crowds. He is here because had not gotten the fair concessions he had wanted, but if he had, that would have brought the fair money. Often Cody upstages the fair, and it is clear Chicago has fallen in love with it.
As June 1893 arrives, clean-up efforts increase. It becomes clear that “the fair’s greatest power lay in the strange gravity of the buildings themselves” (252) though “no single element accounted for this phenomenon” (252). The buildings around the Court of Honor are huge, neoclassical, and far different than anything viewers are used to. Their shared whiteness is stunning, and the absence of color “produced an especially alluring range of effects as the sun traveled the sky” (252). The nights are particularly ravishing, as the fair “consumed three times as much electricity as the entire city of Chicago” (254). It is magical as well as actually safe to stroll at night.
Early visitors report their pleasure and news begins to spread. Reporters from far-flung places wire their stories back and the trip to Chicago seems more and more necessary for Americans to undertake.
Modus Operandi
A waitress disappears from Holmes’s restaurant, then a stenographer, then another woman. Sometimes chemical odors are traceable in the hotel, especially gas. People begin to inquire after their missing family and friends.
Holmes does not kill face-to-face but he enjoys proximity, such as with his vault. He disposes of the remains because he knows it is dangerous to keep trophies; “the possession he craved was a transient thing” (257).
One Good Turn
Though the Ferris Wheel looks dangerously fragile, it is ready for its first turn on June 8, 1893. Ferris’s partner, W.F. Gronau, is there to observe. Steam pours in and the Wheel begins to revolve. There is a grating sound but Luther Rice tells Gronau everything is fine. People in the fair gather and cheer, and after 20 minutes of the first revolution, Rice telegraphs the anxious Ferris in Pittsburgh. More important tests lay ahead, such as hanging the cars and adding visitors, but everyone is thrilled.
Nannie
Anna “Nannie” Williams arrives from Midlothian, Texas. Anna is calmed to see how much Holmes obviously cares for Minnie. They tour Chicago and then come to the great fair. They tour the buildings, gasp over the lagoon, admire the electric chandeliers and the massive clocktower, and tour numerous exhibits.
For almost two weeks the trio return to the fair daily, taking in everything they can; two weeks is the commonly accepted amount of time for people to see almost everything. They see the moving pictures, the first electric chair, and spend a whole day in the Midway. “Harry” invites Anna to stay for the rest of the summer and she delightedly accepts.
Vertigo
The Wheel is ready for the first test with passengers and Mrs. Ferris insists on being one of them. Though glass and the iron grills have not been put on the windows, almost everything else is done.
Though the first thing people notice is the sensation of going high into the air, what the Wheel really yields is a tremendous view of the fair in all of its splendor and vastness.
The Wheel is supposed to get its first paying passengers on June 18, but another delay occurs; this is probably due to another tragic accident with the Midway Ice Railway and the sense that the Ferris Wheel could actually yield a potential “catastrophe of almost unimaginable scale” (273).
Heathen Wanted
Olmsted is traveling extensively and writes to Burnham. He says there is great enthusiasm about, and interest in, the fair, but people also mention its incompleteness, the weather, and their fear of the high cost of travel and lodging and food. Olmsted knows he has to concentrate on improvements that will make people write home about. He focuses on gravel paths, cleaning litter, and the Jackson Park part, which seems tedious. He also wants more spontaneous and unplanned things to occur, not just planned parades and concerts.
Burnham does not like this new plan: “Olmsted wanted to make visitors laugh. Burnham wanted [visitors] struck dumb with awe” (277). He has been controlling the image of the fair through his official photographer, Charles Dudley Arnold, whose images have “neat, well-dressed, upper-class people . . . [in] each frame” (277).
Though Burnham controls almost every aspect of the Fair, he does not hear of one thing. A small fire breaks out in the Cold Storage Building. It is put out but insurance underwriters notice that a key element of the design was never installed; seven insurers cancel policies. The acting chief of the World’s Fair Fire Department warns of the building being a “miserable firetrap” (278) but, again, no one tells Burnham any of this.
At Last
51 days late, the Ferris Wheel has its first guests. Mr. and Mrs. Ferris ride, along with other dignitaries. It is a tremendous success and Ferris cannot resist suggesting that if he’d only gotten his earlier approval the Wheel would have been ready by the opening and would have netted a great deal of money and not “stood for that month and a half as a vivid advertisement of the fair’s incomplete condition” (281).
The Wheel is safe but looks unsafe, and it is yet unknown what might happen if there are strong winds.
Rising Wave
Finally, people begin to come. Paid attendance doubles from May to June and a sense of encouragement rises among Burnham and his fellow organizers. Visitors wear their best clothes, are surprisingly well behaved, and delight in the numerous encounters they have. Illnesses and minor incidents are common but not overly problematic. Famous people visit the fair often, such as Tesla, Edison, Scott Joplin, Houdini, and more. Sometimes “chance encounters led to magic,” (285), as when the inventor of the Braille Writer met Helen Keller.
Nearby, Buffalo Bill tips his hat to one of his own special visitors, Susan B. Anthony.
The Ferris Wheel becomes the most popular attraction, with thousands riding it each day. There are unfounded stories of suicides and accidents, though one man does have a breakdown.
Overall, the “fair did more than simply stoke pride. It gave Chicago a light to hold against the gathering dark of economic calamity” (289). People love it so much that they begin prematurely mourning its inevitable close.
Independence Day
The July 4, 1893 celebration is filled with rockets and flares and extravagance, delighting all the visitors to the fair. That same day Holmes invites Minnie and Anna to go on a long trip first to Milwaukee to take the St. Lawrence River to Maine, then New York, then Germany and London and Paris, where Anna, who practices art, might stay on. Both sisters are thrilled with the plan.
Holmes suggests taking Anna to his hotel the next day to give her a tour, while Minnie readies the flat for whomever will take it next. Both women are excited for their new adventures.
Worry
While the fair does extremely well on the Fourth of July, ticket sales soon flag. Also, the fair’s auditors reveal that Burnham spent $22 million—twice as much as planned—to put it on. Burnham does not want the future of the fair in the hand of the bankers, though, and needs to figure out other ways to avoid financial failure. Raising ticket prices and asking Millet to up his efforts to draw people in might work, but the economic depression is growing worse.
Claustrophobia
Holmes takes Anna to the hotel and shows her all the interesting parts. He then takes her to his office and asks her to get something from the vault. The door closes behind her, which she thinks is an accident. She begins to get frightened but assumes it is an accident. Holmes listens in bliss. He knows he has the power to either let her out and experience her paroxysm of relief, or continue listening to her struggle and fill the chamber with gas. He is filled with a sense of sexual release, and fills the chamber with gas.
Holmes returns to Minnie and tells her Anna is back waiting for them at the castle.
Two days later Oker gets a letter saying “Harry Gordon” and Minnie no longer need the apartment. On July 7 Anna’s trunk arrives, but no one claims it and it is returned.
An Englewood resident named Cephas Humphrey receives a call from Holmes to use his team and dray to transport a large rectangular box the size of a coffin. He may have been ordered to take it to Charles Chappell.
Holmes gives Benjamin Pitezel’s wife Carrie a collection of dresses and shoes and hats that belonged to his “cousin” Minnie Williams, and Pat Quinlan two trunks, labeled MRW.
Storm and Fire
Saturday, July 9 is a hot and still day at the fair. The Ferris Wheel is full of guests when the manager of the concession of the Midway’s Captive Balloon notices a change in barometric pressure. He calls in the balloon but sees the Ferris Wheel is still operating. Clouds gather and a funnel cloud appears. Wind roars and glass begins to shatter in some of the buildings. Riders in the Ferris Wheel brace themselves but the Wheel handles it with aplomb.
On Monday there is another issue: smoke begins to rise form the Cold Storage tower’s cupola. The building “was like a house whose chimney ended not above the roof but inside the attic” (301). The fire department readies to deal with the issue. Suddenly, flames break out below where the first group of firefighters in the tower are working. Some men escape by riding the fire hose down, but others leap and perish. Overall, 12 firefighters die as well as three workers.
In the days following, there is an inquest. Burnham, Fire Marshal Murphy, and two officers are charged with criminal negligence, which will go to a grand jury. Burnham is shocked, knowing nothing about the building’s issues. Burnham posts bond and is not put in jail; no one is ever prosecuted.
In other affairs, Burnham is dismayed to see that the exposition’s directors voted to establish a Retrenchment Committee “with nearly unrestricted powers to cut costs throughout the fair, and appointed three cold-eyed men to staff it” (304). Burnham worries that they’ll declare some of the things that are crucial to the fair’s success and allure are frivolous and must be cut.
Love
24 teachers who had won a contest from the St. Louis Republic receive a free stay and visit to the Fair. A young reporter named Theodore Dreiser accompanies them and falls for a sweet woman named Sara. Dreiser is much more experienced but Sara returns his affection and he asks her to marry him.
Holmes also has a new love, Georgiana Yoke. She is enamored with this handsome man with no family and lots of money, and readily accepts his offer of marriage. She does not bat an eye when she says he has to use a different name when they marry because it was his beloved uncle’s.
Mayor Harrison has a young love as well, and he looks forward to announcing special news to the city. He is also excited for American Cities Day, two days before the fair’s close, when he can stand with other mayors and revel in Chicago’s success.
Freaks
The Retrenchment Committee delivers a harsh report on the fair’s extravagant expenditures but it ends up being too harsh, too much of a rebuke when “the mood throughout Chicago was one of sustained exultation at the fact that the fair had gotten built at all and that it had proven more beautiful than anyone had imagined” (310).
The newspapers and directors pressure railroads to lower fares and while they do not comply, Millet steps up his efforts to plan enticing events, such as the Midway Ball. It is an opulent, over-the-top affair with bursting color and energy. Food is plentiful, as are fascinating guests. The ball and the other events Millet plans give the exposition a “wilder, happier air” (315) and attendance rises.
The economic depression worsens, though, and labor unrest boils over. Samuel Gompers, a leading organizer, “was calling for fundamental change in the relationship between workers and their overseers. This was dangerous talk, to be suppressed at all costs” (316).
Prendergast
Prendergast is impatient, wondering where his appointment to corporation counsel is. He heads down to the office and asks to see the man currently in the position, Kraus. Kraus sneers and asks him when he’d like the position. Something about this does not sit well with Prendergast.
Toward Triumph
Frank Millet designates October 9 as Chicago Day, and right away attendance begins to exceed the directors’ wildest expectations. Mayor Harrison asks businesses to suspend operations; the courts and Board of Trade close. The weather is lovely and crisp, and the fireworks cap the day off nicely. That day, total admission is 751,026, “more people than had attended any single day of any peaceable event in history” (319). The directors are also able to extinguish the fair’s debts through this.
Preparations are now finishing up for October 30, closing day, and Burnham is confident nothing can tarnish the fair’s success.
Departures
Charles McKim disengages reluctantly, having seen the fair as a triumph for himself. Olmsted too says goodbye, privately realizing he is at the end of his career. Sullivan returns to Adler but the two partners are strained.
10,000 workers leave the fair for a world without jobs and “the threat of violence was as palpable as the deepening cold of autumn” (323). Harrison tries to help and create jobs but there is the sense that the White City had given protection and sustenance and now people are back in the Black City.
Holmes senses it is his time to leave as well, for creditors and victims’ families are putting too much pressure on him. He sets fire to the top floor of his building and though it does little damage, he gets a small claim. One suspicious investigator, F.G. Cowie, sees the name Holmes gives, Hiram S. Campbell, and says insurers can only give the claim to Campbell and to him in person.
Minnie’s guardians are looking for her, and Anna’s has hired a private detective. Cowie’s investigation has stirred up and brought together many creditors. They hire an attorney, George B. Chamberlain, and he requests a meeting with Holmes. Holmes attends, thinking it will be just the two of them, but two dozen creditors and their attorneys and one police detective are there.
Holmes is charming as ever, even when Chamberlain tells him he owes $50,000. Tears fill Holmes’s eyes as he speaks of getting in over his head and suffering from the nation’s panic. Chamberlain is stunned to see the sympathy in the eyes of the creditors and tells Holmes to wait in the next room.
An attorney steps out for water and it is unclear what happens next. He is either sympathetic to Holmes and tips him off or Holmes gives him money in exchange for information, but Holmes learns the sentiment is leaning toward arrest so he flees.
Holmes heads to Fort Worth, Texas, to try to take better advantage of Minnie’s land. He brings Pitezel and Georgiana Yoke. Before leaving, he acquires a life insurance policy for $10,000 to insure Pitezel’s life.
Nightfall
For the close, Millet plans music, speeches, fireworks, and a landing of replicas of Columbus’s ships.
The day before is American Cities Day, which Harrison presides over in glorious, proud fashion. He announces his upcoming nuptials to his young fiancée, and speaks volubly about the fair’s triumph. He quotes Burnham as saying the only appropriate end for it is “putting a torch to it and burning it down and let it go up into the bright sky to eternal heaven” (328).
Prendergast is frustrated that no one will take him seriously. He purchases a six-chamber revolver. He heads to the Unity Building in Central Chicago where Governor John P. Altgeld has an office, but no one will let him in.
Harrison heads home. Around seven-thirty the maid opens the door to a gaunt young man asking to see the mayor. This is not an unusual request, but she does tell him to return in a half hour. The bell rings again at eight and the maid fetches Harrison. The servants and Preston Harrison, the mayor’s son, hear shots fired. They rush to him and see Harrison dying.
Prendergast walks to a police station and proclaims himself as the man who shot the mayor. The shocked desk sergeant asks why, and the assassin replies that the mayor had betrayed his confidence, that he'd promised to appoint him to corporation counsel and then did not.
The Exposition Committee cancels the closing day ceremony. Instead, it becomes a memorial ceremony for Harrison complete with a solemn blessing from a reverend. The crowds quietly melt away. The Michigan fires its gun a last time, the flag is lowered on the Administration Building. Burnham cannot believe the fair began with death and ended with death.
Harrison’s death hits the city hard, but they come to the fair one last day. A reporter writes of the last night as one where the lake’s “shores gleamed and glowed in the golden radiance [and] the ivory city, beautiful as a poet’s dream, silent as a city of the dead” (333).
The Black City
The contrast between the White and Black Cities is too jarring for many people. Thousands of workers are left stranded. Strikes are common during the winter, “a crucible for American labor” (335). Arsonists set fire to seven of the greatest palaces of the Exposition. The Tribune wrote that there was no regret, “rather a feeling of pleasure that the elements, and not the wrecker should wipe out the spectacle of the Columbian season” (336).
Analysis
In Part III of Devil, Larsen chronicles the fair’s six months in existence (as well as Holmes’s multifarious crimes). Interestingly, he spends less time on the fair itself than with its planning. He certainly includes contemporary accounts of how impressed and mesmerized people were with what they saw and did there, thrilling moments like the winds buffeting the Ferris Wheel and a fire breaking out in the Cold Storage Building, facts about startling inventions (the electric chair and the Dewey Decimal System) and products (Juicy Fruit, Shredded Wheat) that are still around today, and compelling anecdotes about exhibitions, special celebrations, balls, and esteemed guests.
Yet the image that comes across to the reader is more or less the one that Burnham wanted orchestrated by the fair’s only official photographer: “[this] arrangement [between Burnham and Charles Dudley Arnold, the photographer] . . . had the effect of giving Burnham control over the kinds of images that got distributed throughout the country and explains why neat, well-dressed, upper-class people tended to populate each frame” (277). Larsen has little to no space in Devil for, as the McGill reviewer writes, “cleavages of class, race, and gender,” as almost all the characters are “affluent, Anglo-American men.” The experiences of visitors of color are not mentioned with any distinction, an interesting authorial choice given that the era was defined in part by racial separation and oppression.
What is perhaps even more lamentable than the elision of an analysis of the racial or class makeup of the fair’s visitors are the casual and infrequent references to the native or colonized people who are on display or represented at the fair for the amusement, amazement, and titillation of viewers; the McGill reviewer notes, “The experience of the colonized peoples brought to the Fair to populate its exhibits, often little more than human zoos, is also largely absent, or relayed through the observations of their white American managers.” Certainly, it is not Larsen’s aim with this book to do a deep dive into the experiences of these people, but giving them such short shrift perpetuates the blinding whiteness of the City and its visitors.
Critic Mona Domosh tackles this subject of the fair’s promulgation of American empire in her article, “A ‘civilized’ commerce: gender, ‘race,’ and empire at the 1893 Chicago Exposition.” Her title is clear—the fair was used by businesses and the government to promote America’s growing global dominance and to promote the buying and selling of American goods at home and abroad, and that “the discourse of civilization, with all its attendant gendered and racialized ideologies, ran rampant throughout the fairgrounds.” As America was now shifting from a period of nation-building to one of empire-building (the Mexican-American War and manifest destiny had secured much of the continent, and the Spanish-American War and annexation of Hawaii were only a few years after the fair), the fair was a perfect vehicle to shape the ideas and discourse about the country’s power. The choice of starkly white, neoclassical buildings, with their orderly presentation and massive scale, reinforced the fair’s desire to declare America’s purity and power.
Most conspicuously, the Midway Plaisance gave visitors a chance to see “living exhibits” of people from other, more “primitive” and “backwards” places around the world and make assumptions about civilization and superiority. The Midway concessions, Domosh writes, “drew on ‘orientalist’ or other exotic fantasies” and “afforded visitors touristic entertainment with the burdens of actual travel, and through this effortless tourism taught important anthropological and geographic lessons.” It was commonly accepted as fact during the late 19th century that the white race was more advanced and civilized than darker races; Social Darwinism couched this evolutionary terms, suggesting whites were more evolved because they were the strongest and the fittest. Native Americans in particular were exhibited as relics of the past, “used to signify a past stage in the evolution of mankind . . . They are depicted as archaic, representatives of prehistory that are out of place with the modern world.” They are not a cultural threat, just as they are no longer a military threat, and visitors who saw exhibits or representatives of Native Americans at the fair or the Wild West show next door would walk away knowing the white race has come much, much further than these “primitives.” Again, this did not need to be the main thrust of Larsen’s book, but perhaps a more in-depth and sympathetic account of how such people factored into this event nearly universally accepted as glorious and triumphant would be useful.
