Summary
Prologue: Aboard the Olympic
It is April 14, 1912, and the sixty-five-year-old Daniel Hudson Burnham, an extraordinarily famous architect, is sailing on the opulent R.M.S. Olympic of the White Star Line. He tries to send a wireless greeting to his friend, the painter Francois Millet, who is onboard another glorious ship, the Titanic. The message is, strangely, sent back.
Burnham and Millet had worked together on the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, officially named the World’s Columbian Exposition. Open for six months, the “White City” saw 27.5 million visitors (the population of the country was 65 million at the time). Visitors tasted new things, wandered a dream city, saw inhabitants of villages from far-flung places, observed new inventions, and much, much more. Some of the country’s most famous people congregated there or contributed to its spectacle.
There was also darkness, with workers killed in construction or fires, an assassin at the closing ceremony, and a serial killer that stalked young women coming to the city.
Burnham and Millet are some of the only men left right now (except for the bitter and drunken Louis Sullivan).
Burnham hears the news that something has happened to Millet’s ship.
Part I: Frozen Music
Chicago in the 1890s, the eve of the World’s Fair, is full of newly-arrived women looking for jobs as stenographers and seamstresses and weavers. It is a city of vice out in the open, of anonymous death due to fires, crime, and disease. It seems like the boundaries between moral and immoral behavior are eroding. It is easy to disappear and easy to deny the darkness.
“The Trouble Is Just Begun”
Chicago is the second most populous city in America in 1890, but suffers under the impression that it is a “greedy, hog-slaughtering backwater” (13).
Two of its most prominent individuals, the architects Daniel Burnham and John Root, are waiting with the rest of the city this morning for news that might decide the fate of Chicago. They had already contributed glorious skyscrapers and saw the city from heights that no one else ever had, but their past success could be eclipsed by their potential future.
The idea to celebrate 400 years after Columbus’ arrival seemed to arrive in the minds of many people at once, but the idea does not seem to coalesce. At least, it does not until the French open the Exposition Universelle in 1889. It is a glamorous and exotic event that debuts the Eiffel Tower, proof that the French are ahead in the realm of iron and steel. The Americans barely put forth an effort at the Exposition, and assume the Eiffel Tower will not be popular. They are wrong, they soon see, and the Columbian Exposition begins to take root in the minds of America’s best and brightest. Initially it is assumed that the site would be Washington D.C., but when New York and St. Louis begin to clamor for it, Chicago does as well. It desires to move past its reputation, and it waits hopefully for Congress to give them the news.
Throughout the day Congress’s votes begin to filter in, and Chicago and New York triumph or bemoan their fate multiple times. Finally, the last vote comes in, and Chicago has it.
Burnham is anxiously waiting for the news. He is an exalted figure now, but his father would have been surprised to hear it. Burnham was born to a Swedenborgian family, was a lackluster student and suffered from test anxiety, and was not sure what he wanted to do. A few careers petered out, but when his father introduced him to architect Peter Wight, he was hired as a draftsman. He liked the other draftsman, John Root, as well. They became partners and did both their own commissions and sometimes hired themselves out during hard economic times. In 1874 a man named John B. Sherman arrived and asked for Root, who was out. Burnham spoke to him and Sherman liked him enough to hire the firm to design him a mansion. Sherman was a superintendent of the Union Stockyards, an employer of 25,000 people and responsible for 1/5 of the city’s population’s survival. Burnham met an 18-year-old Louis Sullivan through Sherman, and married Sherman’s daughter, Margaret.
Sherman commissioned more buildings from Burnham and Root and their business prospered. Most of this was due to Root’s solving of a problem that had bedeviled the city builders for decades—Chicago’s soil. As more and more people came, buildings grew higher, aided by elevators, and there was a need to solve the problem of the soft soil. This “gumbo” was saturated with water and was a mixture of sand and clay. The main solution thus far, driving caissons into the soil, was fraught with problems. When Root and Burnham were commissioned to build the tallest skyscraper yet in Chicago, Root realized that he could build a floating foundation of artificial bedrock. The Montauk was the first building to be deemed a “skyscraper,” utterly confounding people with its height.
This became “the heyday of architectural invention” (25) and innovations came quickly upon each other’s heels. Burnham and Root became rich. Burnham was a talented architect but was even better with clients, while Root was renowned for his elegant designs. Burnham saw Root as the “artistic engine” (26) and a genius; both men respected each other immensely.
The city grew along with the firm. It was taller and richer and more exciting, yes, but also darker, more dangerous, and unhealthier. In poor neighborhoods garbage and mud overflowed; cats and dogs and rats and flies swarmed the streets. Forms of transportation were loud and reckless; water was unsafe to drink.
Burnham and Root were not the only notable architects on the scene, however. Young Louis Sullivan had joined forces with Dankmar Adler, and won an account for a massive and opulent auditorium. It garnered the firm acclaim and Sullivan more confidence that his streamlined artistic vision and idealism were better for the city.
When the telegraph arrives at the Chicago Tribune, the jubilation is extravagant and spreads throughout the city. The men of the Whitechapel Club, a gathering of journalists who bring the city news of murders and prurient episodes, are elated, and send off a telegraph to their New York counterpart, Chauncey Depew. Depew had boasted that if Chicago won and New York lost, he’d come to the Club’s ritualistic gatherings and pretend to be hacked apart by Jack the Ripper. He graciously acknowledges his defeat and accepts this, but, presciently, warns them that they have to be even more successful than Paris.
Chicago establishes the World’s Fair Columbian Exposition Company to finance and build the fair. Burnham and Root are the lead designers, and they know they cannot fail. They must carry out this work in record time and make a profit. Burnham believes he and Root have what it takes.
The Necessary Supply
A man calling himself H.H. Holmes arrives in Chicago in August, 1886. Confident, handsome, and young, he is very appealing to women. He is more intimate with them than conventions normally allow, but they welcome this behavior. Holmes had only been to Chicago for brief visits before, and he had gone by his real name of Herman Webster Mudgett. The sense that Chicago offers opportunities for a broader range of behaviors thrills him.
Mudgett was the child of two devout Methodists and was certainly a “mother’s boy.” He spent a lot of time alone and loved learning. However, he had some peculiarities. His one friend, Tom, died by a fall when the two were playing in an abandoned house but Holmes claimed to have nothing to do with it. He graduated high school at seventeen, took a job as a teacher, and married a young woman besotted by him, Clara Lovering. Their relationship was passionate but then cooled, and Mudgett left their house for long periods of time and eventually never returned. Their marriage was never officially dissolved.
Mudgett then went to college and medical school, enrolling in the University of Michigan. His record was lackluster but he graduated. He was working as a traveling bookseller but then got a job as a high school principal in Mooers Fork, New York, a post he held until he opened a medical practice. Troubling things still seemed to attach to him, but he was charming and no one ever pinned anything on him.
Mudgett was poor and needed money (his practice was not doing well), so he and a friend devised an elaborate life insurance fraud. They had to gather three cadavers in a state of decomposition, sue for the life insurance, and split the proceeds. Mudgett claimed he went to Chicago to get the bodies in 1885, put them in storage, and left to find a job in Minneapolis. He worked in a drugstore and then went to New York. He said he abandoned the plan but was lying; he knew how to make money off of faking people’s deaths. The idea that he was poor also didn’t seem true, as the owner of the house in Mooers Fork observed him often with large sums of cash.
Mudgett skipped out of paying his bill at the boarding house and went to Philadelphia, where he worked at a drugstore until a child who took medicine from that drugstore died. He skipped town again and went to Chicago. There he realized he would have to pass a licensing examination in Springfield before working as a druggist, so he registered his name as Holmes.
Holmes sees that the changes in Chicago—the skyscrapers, the prosperity, the smokestacks and the Loop—would bring more and more workers to the city. Englewood, a nearby suburb, is one of the fastest-growing parts of the city. It had been that way since the Great Fire of 1871. It is sometimes called the Chicago Junction, Junction Grove, or the Junction, for the railway lines that converge there. Many stockyard supervisors settle there.
Now in Chicago as Holmes, he approaches a woman (Mrs. Holton) running a drugstore in Englewood whose husband is very sick, and tells her he is happy to help her turn her store back into a thriving establishment. His kindness touches her, and once her husband dies, she accepts his offer. He purchases the store and says she can live upstairs. A new sign goes up and business booms, especially because a lot of single women begin frequenting the store. According to Holmes, Mrs. Holton returns to California to be with her family.
“Becomingness”
It has been six months since Chicago received the honor of hosting but the fair has gone nowhere; the board is stymied by squabbling. The official Dedication Day is set for October 12, 1892, and the formal opening is May 1, 1893.
One of the board members and a friend of Burnham’s, James Ellsworth, approaches Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous designer of Central Park in New York, and asks if he would like to look at the proposed fair site. Olmsted initially declines because he does not “do fairs” and because he does not think he could do it justice, but Ellsworth gives him visions of a dream city made by the country’s best architects.
Olmsted reflects on how this might be his chance to achieve something he has always wanted—to dispel the idea that landscape architecture was simply ambitious gardening instead of being a fine art as he believed it to be. This might be his chance to get greater visibility and the newest member of his firm, Henry Sargent Codman, encourages him to accept. He does, and Ellsworth secures official approval to hire him.
Burnham is pleased with Olmsted and the young Codman, and is certainly aware of Olmsted’s reputation for brilliance, tireless devotion, and acerbic candor.
The discussion for the location centers on Jackson Park in Chicago’s South Side, an area Olmsted actually knows from former studies before the Fire of 1871. He knows its flaws and the need for dredging, but he thinks he can make it a transformative landscape; plus, it has the stunning background of Lake Michigan. Olmsted offers a first report and then a second even more detailed report.
In that second report, Olmsted details the fact that everyone has to work together. All aspects of the landscape have to have “becomingness: the becomingness of everything that may be seen as a modestly contributive part of a grand whole” (55). The emphasis would be on unity, and acknowledging that the Lake was a great asset with its grandeur and beauty.
Burnham hopes the report will settle things for Jackson Park because it is getting more and more embarrassing that no site has even selected. Weeks pass and no decision is made. Burnham and Root work on other commissions.
A young Irish immigrant, Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast, is 22 years old. He moved to Chicago when he was a child with his family. A withdrawn boy, he grew more and more mentally ill as time passed. He writes hundreds of postcards to significant men in the city, presuming to be their equal. He loves Carter Henry Harrison, a former mayor running again for office. He campaigns rigorously for Harrison (though Harrison did not know it) and assumes his star will rise along with the mayor’s.
News begins to arrive in Chicago of increasing global economic turbulence and a potential panic, which is abysmal timing for the fair. Chicago will have to live up to its boasts about besting Paris in terms of size and attendance, which would not be easy in a downturn.
The board appoints Burnham the chief of construction, and Burnham makes Root the supervising architect and Olmsted the supervising landscape architect. Ironically, though, they still do not have a site.
“Don’t Be Afraid”
Englewood grows in population, and Holmes’s business flourishes. He sees women stepping off trains daily from small towns, now anonymous in the big city. For his part, he is interested in a woman named Myrta Belknap whom he knew in Minneapolis. He writes her to ask if he can court her and she immediately agrees, charmed by Holmes and his promise of a more exciting life. They marry in 1887, though he is never officially divorced from Lovering.
Now in Chicago, Myrta sees firsthand the glamour and danger of Chicago even though they live in Englewood. She sees how desirous her husband is and likes that he does not smoke or drink or gamble. She becomes pregnant and, over time, grows more possessive of Holmes. He sees her as an obstacle and gives her a lot of work in the office upstairs. She writes to her parents of her sorrow and they move to a town nearby in Illinois. Myrta has a daughter, and moves in with her parents. Holmes is dutiful, though, and visits as often as he can (which, truthfully, is not often).
Holmes learns the undeveloped land across the street from the drugstore is owned by a woman in New York. He purchases the deed and gives a fake name—H.S. Campbell. The lot will be for a home he is designing, a home that he does not want an architect to help him with. The first floor will be retail to generate income, apartments will be on the second and third, and his personal flat and large office in a second-floor corner. There are much stranger things planned, though: a chute from a secret second-floor location to the basement, a walk-in vault in a room next to his office, a gas jet in the vault controlled from his office, and a basement with hidden chambers and a subbasement.
This is his dream, but he needs to make it a reality. He hires carpenters and laborers and excavators of the land. There is a high turnover so few people know exactly how things are in the building. Holmes trusts three men—Charles Chappell, a machinist, Patrick Quinlan, soon to be the caretaker of the building, and Benjamin Pitezel, a carpenter. Pitezel later becomes Holmes’s all-around assistant. He has a sort of “hungry gauntness” (69) and suffers from many maladies. He also has numerous children.
Construction ebbs and flows. At this time, 1888, Jack the Ripper is carrying out his first murders. Everyone in Chicago follows the news, but Holmes absolutely devours it.
Holmes’s building is largely finished by May 1890. There is a police precinct nearby but Holmes charms the officers. Holmes sells Holton’s drugstore and then opens his own in his corner shop. He installs other businesses, and continues to accrue debts that he knows he can avoid prosecution for through guile and charm.
Holmes is thrilled to learn that the proposed location for the fair is due east of his building at the lake end of 63rd. He knows the area from riding his bike around, and also knows that his property is now going to be a gold mine. He begins to advertise for more construction workers and calls up Chappell, Quinlan, and Pitezel.
Pilgrimage
On December 15, 1890, Burnham boards a train for New York. Once the location had been fixed in Jackson Park, the directors ordered a plan for the fair within 24 hours. Root complied, delivering a plan featuring lagoons and canals, the main buildings and Grand Court, and space for a tower that would somehow have to rival the Eiffel Tower. Burnham knows the size of the fair is only one challenge, for there are a billion smaller obstacles with supplies, mail, transportation, police and medical forces, and more.
Burnham and Root are looking for architects to design the main buildings, which is why he is headed to New York. He has five in mind overall and three are from that city: George B. Post, Charles McKim, and Richard M. Hunt. As he is traveling to the city, he wonders why the architects he has asked do not seem more enthusiastic. He does not know that McKim already told Post he did not want to participate, but Post encouraged him to listen.
Burnham meets with them on December 22. They are all wealthy and at the peak of their careers, and cordially listen to Burnham. They are skeptical, but Burnham extols how this fair would be mainly a monument to architecture. He guarantees complete artistic independence and assures them there is enough time. He gets Robert Peabody of Boston but the others want to come to the site in Chicago in January to inspect it. Burnham knows they will not be impressed with Jackson Park and that he has to have Olmsted there to help.
Back in Chicago, Burnham learns his city’s architects feel left out and are gathering against him, so he hastily adds five Chicago firms. Adler resists, though Sullivan joins. Root goes to New York for a meeting and decides to see the architects again. Though he is personable, there is still little enthusiasm for the project. Root is tired and disappointed.
The Committee on Grounds and Building authorizes Burnham to hire the ten architects with excellent salaries and complete independence, which they eventually but tentatively accept though they have still not seen Jackson Park.
A Hotel for the Fair
Holmes’s genius idea is to turn the building into a hotel—not a luxurious one, but one that would attract a certain crowd—and then, once the fair is over, burn it down and collect the insurance money. He knows the police in the area like him, but he is starting to feel pressure from creditors. His strategies are new and skillfully employed, but still, sometimes he has to pay a bit. He hopes that a visit from Myrta’s wealthy great-uncle, Jonathan Belknap, will help him out.
Belknap is prepared not to like his great-niece’s husband, but Holmes wins him over, especially when he sees how much Myrta loves him. He gives Holmes a check for $2500 to cover the cost of a new house for the two; Holmes later forges the signature for another check for the same amount. Holmes invites Belknap for a tour of his building and the fair site, and although Belknap wants to see them, something about Holmes makes him uneasy. He eventually agrees, and Holmes takes Belknap on a tour of the site and his building, the latter which Belknap finds odd.
Holmes persistently asks if Belknap wants to see the roof but the older man declines. Holmes then invites him to spend the night, which Belknap agrees so as not to seem rude. Though his room is comfortable, he locks the door. Later that night he hears noises and a key turning in the lock. He calls out and finally Quinlan, the caretaker, asks to come in. Belknap refuses and lies awake that night.
Holmes begins to work on a special invention: a large rectangular box of fireproof brick that has an inner box that will serve as an elongated kiln. The kiln will be able to attain temperatures so high that they will incinerate whatever is within as well as the odors, or so Holmes hopes. Unfortunately it does not get hot enough so he hires a furnace expert and shows him to the dreary cellar. He is able to help Holmes with what he wants, and only later notes that the size is perfect for a human body.
Over time Holmes visits Myrta and his child less, though he insures his child’s life. His hotel continues along and he makes good money. One neighborhood woman notes that young women come and go frequently, but assumes it is the shiftlessness of the times.
The Landscape of Regret
Olmstead joins the Eastern architects on their journey from New Jersey to Chicago. He speaks of his plans and his vision, especially for the Wooded Isle. McKim does not make it to Chicago because he hears his mother has died unexpectedly.
The rest meet Burnham and travel to the park, where they look upon the land with despair. It is desolate, almost treeless, moody, ugly, and remote. The soil is marshy and the shoreline shifts with the level of the lake. A sense of discouragement pervades all the men, as well as a sense that the magnitude of their goal is perhaps impossible to achieve.
Root, who is not with the men earlier, joins up with them later. He is 41 now and feels tired. All the architects extend their time into dinner at the University Club, but Roots bows out. Lyman Gage, the president of the exhibition, gives a speech, as does Burnham. The Chicago men seem more enthusiastic than the Easterners.
Vanishing Point
Icilius Connor, or “Ned,” a jeweler, and his young wife Julia and their eight-year-old daughter Pearl move to Chicago in 1891. Ned manages the jewelry counter at Holmes’s place, Julia clerks at the drugstore, and her 18-year-old sister Gertrude joins them not long after to also work for Holmes with his mail-order medicine company. Ned sees how much women like Holmes and how he likes them, and Ned feels he is a bystander to his own life. People who come in seem to pity Ned, but Holmes is nice enough to him. One evening he enlists Ned’s help to see if anyone can hear anything from Holmes’s soundproof vault, which Ned does not find odd at the time.
In Chicago at this time people vanish frequently. Only people with money draw a response. The vanished are assumed to be ravaged if women, robbed if men, and thrown into the river or alleys. Found bodies go to the morgue, and if unclaimed, go to the dissection amphitheater at one of the hospitals or colleges.
Alone
The architects meet in Burnham and Root’s library in their building, the Rookery. Mead is here for McKim. The men are tense, restless. Burnham tries to flatter them all but Hunt gruffly says they ought to just get to work. Burnham sees this as a favor.
They elect Hunt as the chairman of the Board of Architects and Sullivan as the secretary; the latter is unhappy since he sees Hunt as a relic, and all architecture that does not emphasize function in its form as outmoded. He finds Burnham just as ambitious as himself, though, and sees Adler and Root operating on a lower plane.
Burnham gets a phone call from Dora Root, who tells him her husband has pneumonia. Burnham is concerned, but Root rallies the next day. The architects continue to work, seeing a rise in their enthusiasm. They choose a neoclassical style (Sullivan privately abhors this), set a uniform height, and plan other details.
Burnham visits Root again and can see he is not doing well. Root dies during Burnham’s visit, and Burnham paces in what he thinks is privacy, deploring Root’s death and the fact that he is alone now.
The death stuns Chicago and the press writes adulatory pieces. Burnham considers quitting the fair, especially when the press extols Root as the mastermind, but he stays on.
A major bank fails in Kansas City and Gage quits to attend to his own. Labor unrest soon breaks out. Fire, weather, and disease seem like insurmountable obstacles for the fair in terms of its construction and its attendance.
Analysis
The Devil in the White City was a phenomenally popular work of narrative history when it was published in 2003. In this study guide we will consider both the book (Larsen’s mode of storytelling, potential issues with citations, the type of history it engages with, etc.) and the story of the Fair itself.
In this first section Larsen sets his stage, laying out the setting, the characters, and the conflict. The setting is of course Chicago, the nation’s second most populous city that suffers from the “eastern perception that [it] was nothing more than a greedy, hog-slaughtering backwater” (13), a city “that preferred butchered hogs to Beethoven” (16). Regardless of its cultural reputation, Chicago is a city that is experiencing tremendous growth and concomitant social change. Skyscrapers are rising, the population is booming, money is flowing, and social norms are shifting. This is often an exciting place, but also a troubling one: “it also grew dirtier, darker, and more dangerous” (28). Larsen quotes a French editor who called Chicago “that Gordian city, so excessive, so satanic” and an author who deemed it “a gigantic peepshow of utter horror, but extraordinarily to the point” (28).
There is the sense that the World’s Fair will forever alter Chicago’s secondary reputation and elevate to the highest echelon of world cities, but this brings with it much anxiety. A notable New Yorker warns the Chicago journalists, “Whatever you do is to be compared to [Paris]. If you equal it you have made a success. If you surpass it you have made a triumph. If you fall below it you will be held responsible by the whole American people for having assumed what you are not equal to” (33). The reader is left to wonder if Chicago’s reasons for wanting the fair were not all together that civic-minded, and that the desire to “out-Eiffel Eiffel” was actually more pressing.
Larsen’s main characters are primarily architects, with Daniel Burnham at the center of the tale. Burnham is intelligent and ambitious, tireless and domineering, visionary but prone to micromanagement. He is surrounded by the brilliant but ill and ornery Olmsted, the snooty but skilled New York architects, his close friend and partner John Root, and a whole other fabulous cast of characters which Larsen fleshes out nicely in all their merits and flaws. Burnham’s true corollary, though, is H.H. Holmes, the beguiling serial killer whose story parallels Burnham’s and the rise and fall of the fair. Holmes is just as ambitious, just as methodical, just as compelling, just as willing and able to capitalize on the economic and social and technological changes sweeping through Chicago—yet, he is representative of the Black City and Burnham representative of the White.
Larsen has spoken at length about the origins of Devil, which is worth quoting to provide support for the assertion that Burnham/Holmes and Black City/White City are useful binaries with which to categorize the reality of Chicago in the 1890s: “I started reading about the history of murder and fairly early came across Dr. H.H. Holmes. I didn’t want to do a book about him because I didn’t want to do some lurid, slasher book. There is something about Holmes that at the time struck me as being like murder porn. I just didn’t want to do it. I wanted something that had character and charisma and so I continued looking for other murders that might be worthwhile . . . But what had particularly intrigued me in the interim was this connection to the World’s Fair. I didn’t know anything about it. I knew there had been a major World’s Fair in there somewhere. But I didn’t know the details. Then I started reading about that World’s Fair. And that’s when I got hooked and realized, ‘Wait a minute. Here was this monumental act of civic good will.’ It really was. This massive act of civic good will and literally in the same place, at the same time, was the opposite, this dark, dark character. And that’s what lured me. This idea that the two things happening at once—dark and light, yin and yang, however you want to look at it. And, in fact, I would not have been interested in just doing a book about the Fair. Nor would I have been interested in doing a book just about Holmes. But together they made a sort of unity. That I found kind of magical.”
