The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

by Erik Larson

  To make sure these properties were constant throughout the park, Burnham had his chief engineer, Abraham Gottlieb, test locations earmarked for other buildings. The tests yielded similar results—until Gottlieb’s men came to the site intended for George Post’s gigantic Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. The soil destined to support the northern half of the building showed total settlement of less than one inch, consistent with the rest of the park. At the southern end of the site, however, the men made a disheartening discovery. Even as workers loaded the platform, it sank eight inches. Over the next four days it settled thirty inches more, and would have continued sinking if the engineers had not simply called off the test.

  Of course: Nearly all the soil of Jackson Park was competent to support floating foundations except the one portion destined to bear the fair’s biggest and heaviest building. Here, Burnham realized, contractors would have to drive piles at least down to hard-pan, an expensive complication and a source of additional delay.

  The problems with this building, however, had only just begun.

  In April 1891 Chicago learned the results of the latest mayoral election. In the city’s richest clubs, industrialists gathered to toast the fact that Carter Henry Harrison, whom they viewed as overly sympathetic to organized labor, had lost to Hempstead Washburne, a Republican. Burnham, too, allowed himself a moment of celebration. To him, Harrison represented the old Chicago of filth, smoke, and vice, everything the fair was designed to repudiate.

  The celebrations were tempered, however, by the fact that Harrison had lost by the narrowest of margins, fewer than four thousand votes. What’s more, he had achieved this near-victory without the support of a major party. Shunned by the Democrats, he had run as an independent.

  Elsewhere in the city, Patrick Prendergast grieved. Harrison was his hero, his hope. The margin was so narrow, however, that he believed that if Harrison ran again, he would win. Prendergast resolved to double his own efforts to help Harrison succeed.

  In Jackson Park Burnham faced repeated interruptions stemming from his de facto role as ambassador to the outside world, charged with cultivating goodwill and future attendance. Mostly these banquets, talks, and tours were time-squandering annoyances, as in June 1891 when, at the request of Director-General Davis, Burnham hosted a visit to Jackson Park by a battalion of foreign dignitaries that consumed two full days. Others were purely a pleasure. A few weeks earlier Thomas Edison, known widely as “the Wizard of Menlo Park,” had paid a visit to Burnham’s shanty. Burnham showed him around. Edison suggested the exposition use incandescent bulbs rather than arc lights, because the incandescent variety produced a softer light. Where arc lights could not be avoided, he said, they should be covered with white globes. And of course Edison urged the fair to use direct current, DC, the prevailing standard.

  The civility of this encounter belied a caustic battle being waged outside Jackson Park for the rights to illuminate the exposition. On one side was General Electric Company, which had been created when J. P. Morgan took over Edison’s company and merged it with several others and which now proposed to install a direct current system to light the fair. On the other side was Westinghouse Electric Company, with a bid to wire Jackson Park for alternating current, using patents that its founder, George Westinghouse, had acquired a few years earlier from Nikola Tesla.

  General Electric offered to do the job for $1.8 million, insisting the deal would not earn a penny’s profit. A number of exposition directors held General Electric stock and urged William Baker, president of the fair since Lyman Gage’s April retirement, to accept the bid. Baker refused, calling it “extortionate.” General Electric rather miraculously came back with a bid of $554,000. But Westinghouse, whose AC system was inherently cheaper and more efficient, bid $399,000. The exposition went with Westinghouse, and helped change the history of electricity.

  The source of Burnham’s greatest dismay was the failure of the architects to finish their drawings on schedule.

  If he had once been obsequious to Richard Hunt and the eastern men, he was not now. In a June 2, 1891, letter to Hunt, he wrote, “We are at a dead standstill waiting for your scale drawings. Can’t we have them as they are, and finish here?”

  Four days later he again prodded Hunt: “The delay you are causing us by not forwarding scale drawings is embarrassing in the extreme.”

  That same month a serious if unavoidable interruption hobbled the Landscape Department. Olmsted became ill—severely so. He attributed his condition to poisoning from an arsenic-based pigment called Turkey Red in the wallpaper of his Brookline home. It may, however, simply have been another bout of deep blue melancholia, the kind that had assailed him off and on for years.

  During his recuperation Olmsted ordered bulbs and plants for cultivation in two large nurseries established on the fairgrounds. He ordered Dusty Miller, Carpet Bugle, President Garfield heliotrope, Speedwell, Pennyroyal, English and Algerian ivies, verbena, vinca, and a rich palette of geraniums, among them Black Prince, Christopher Columbus, Mrs. Turner, Crystal Palace, Happy Thought, and Jeanne d’Arc. He dispatched an army of collectors to the shores of Lake Calumet, where they gathered twenty-seven traincar loads of iris, sedge, bulrush, and other semiaquatic plants and grasses. They collected an additional four thousand crates of pond lily roots, which Olmsted’s men quickly planted, only to watch most of the roots succumb to the ever-changing levels of the lake.

  In contrast to the lush growth within the nurseries, the grounds of the park had been scraped free of all vegetation. Workers enriched the soil with one thousand carloads of manure shipped from the Union Stock Yards and another two thousand collected from the horses working in Jackson Park. The presence of so much exposed earth and manure became a problem. “It was bad enough during the hot weather, when a south wind could blind the eyes of man and beast,” wrote Rudolf Ulrich, Olmsted’s landscape superintendent at the park, “but still worse during wet weather, the newly filled ground, which was still undrained, becoming soaked with water.”

  Horses sank to their bellies.

  It was midsummer 1891 by the time the last of the architects’ drawings were completed. As each set came in, Burnham advertised for bids. Recognizing that the architects’ delays had put everything behind schedule, he inserted into the construction contracts clauses that made him a “czar,” as the Chicago Tribune put it. Each contract contained a tight deadline for completion, with a financial penalty for every day beyond. Burnham had advertised the first contract on May 14, this for the Mines Building. He wanted it finished by the end of the year. That left at best about seven months for construction (roughly the amount of time a twenty-first-century homeowner would need to build a new garage). “He is the arbiter of all disputes and no provision is made for an appeal from his decision,” the Tribune reported. “If in the opinion of Mr. Burnham the builder is not employing a sufficient force of men to complete the work on time, Mr. Burnham is authorized to engage men himself and charge the cost to the builder.” The Mines Building was the first of the main exposition buildings to begin construction, but the work did not start until July 3, 1891, with less than sixteen months remaining until Dedication Day.

  As construction of the buildings at last got under way, anticipation outside the park began to increase. Colonel William Cody—Buffalo Bill—sought a concession for his Wild West show, newly returned from a hugely successful tour of Europe, but the fair’s Committee on Ways and Means turned him down on grounds of “incongruity.” Undeterred, Cody secured rights to a large parcel of land adjacent to the park. In San Francisco a twenty-one-year-old entrepreneur named Sol Bloom realized that the Chicago fair would let him at last take advantage of an asset he had acquired in Paris two years earlier. Entranced by the Algerian Village at the Paris exposition, he had bought the rights to display the village and its inhabitants at future events. The Ways and Means Committee rejected him, too. He returned to San Francisco intent on trying a different, more oblique means of winning a con
cession—one that ultimately would get him a lot more than he had bargained for. Meanwhile young Lieutenant Schufeldt had reached Zanzibar. On July 20 he telegraphed Exposition President William Baker that he was confident he could acquire as many Pygmies from the Congo as he wished, provided the king of Belgium consented. “President Baker wants these pygmies,” the Tribune said, “and so does everybody else around headquarters.”

  On the drafting board the fair did look spectacular. The centerpiece was the Grand Court, which everyone had begun calling the Court of Honor. With its immense palaces by Hunt, Post, Peabody, and the rest, the court by itself would be a marvel, but now nearly every state in the nation was planning a building, as were some two hundred companies and foreign governments. The exposition promised to surpass the Paris exposition on every level—every level that is, except one, and that persistent deficit troubled Burnham: The fair still had nothing planned that would equal, let alone eclipse, the Eiffel Tower. At nearly one thousand feet in height, the tower remained the tallest structure in the world and an insufferable reminder of the triumph of the Paris exposition. “To out-Eiffel Eiffel” had become a battle cry among the directors.

  A competition held by the Tribune brought a wave of implausible proposals. C. F. Ritchel of Bridgeport, Connecticut, suggested a tower with a base one hundred feet high by five hundred feet wide, within which Ritchel proposed to nest a second tower and, in this one, a third. At intervals a complicated system of hydraulic tubes and pumps would cause the towers to telescope slowly upward, a journey of several hours, then allow them to sink slowly back to their original configuration. The top of the tower would house a restaurant, although possibly a bordello would have been more apt.

  Another inventor, J. B. McComber, representing the Chicago-Tower Spiral-Spring Ascension and Toboggan Transportation Company, proposed a tower with a height of 8,947 feet, nearly nine times the height of the Eiffel Tower, with a base one thousand feet in diameter sunk two thousand feet into the earth. Elevated rails would lead from the top of the tower all the way to New York, Boston, Baltimore, and other cities. Visitors ready to conclude their visit to the fair and daring enough to ride elevators to the top would then toboggan all the way back home. “As the cost of the tower and its slides is of secondary importance,” McComber noted, “I do not mention it here, but will furnish figures upon application.”

  A third proposal demanded even more courage from visitors. This inventor, who gave his initials as R. T. E., envisioned a tower four thousand feet tall from which he proposed to hang a two-thousand-foot cable of “best rubber.” Attached at the bottom end of this cable would be a car seating two hundred people. The car and its passengers would be shoved off a platform and fall without restraint to the end of the cable, where the car would snap back upward and continue bouncing until it came to a stop. The engineer urged that as a precaution the ground “be covered with eight feet of feather bedding.”

  Everyone was thinking in terms of towers, but Burnham, for one, did not think a tower was the best approach. Eiffel had done it first and best. More than merely tall, his tower was grace frozen in iron, as much an evocation of the spirit of the age as Chartres had been in its time. To build a tower would be to follow Eiffel into territory he already had conquered for France.

  In August 1891 Eiffel himself telegraphed the directors to ask if he might submit a proposal for a tower. This was a surprise and at first a welcome one. Exposition President Baker immediately cabled Eiffel that the directors would be delighted to see whatever he proposed. If the fair was to have a tower, Baker said in an interview, “M. Eiffel is the man to build it. It would not be so much of an experiment if he should be in charge of its construction. He might be able to improve on his design for the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and I think it fair to assume that he would not construct one in any way inferior to that famous structure.” To the engineers of America, however, this embrace of Eiffel was a slap in the face. Over the next week and a half telegrams shot from city to city, engineer to engineer, until the story became somewhat distorted. Suddenly it seemed as if an Eiffel Tower in Chicago was a certainty—that Eiffel himself was to do the out-Eiffeling. The engineers were outraged. A long letter of protest arrived at Burnham’s office, signed by some of the nation’s leading engineers.

  Acceptance of “the distinguished gentleman’s offer,” they wrote, would be “equivalent to a statement that the great body of civil engineers in this country, whose noble works attest their skill abroad as well as throughout the length and breadth of the land, lack the ability to cope with such a problem, and such action could have a tendency to rob them of their just claim to professional excellence.”

  Burnham read this letter with approval. It pleased him to see America’s civil engineers at last expressing passion for the fair, although in fact the directors had promised nothing to Eiffel. His formal proposal arrived a week later, envisioning a tower that was essentially a taller version of what he had built in Paris. The directors sent his proposal out for translation, reviewed it, then graciously turned it down. If there was to be a tower at the fair, it would be an American tower.

  But the drafting boards of America’s engineers remained dishearteningly barren.

  Sol Bloom, back in California, took his quest for a concession for his Algerian Village to an influential San Franciscan, Mike De Young, publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle and one of the exposition’s national commissioners. Bloom told him about the rights he had acquired in Paris and how the exposition had rebuffed his petition.

  De Young knew Bloom. As a teenager Bloom had worked in De Young’s Alcazar Theater and worked his way up to become its treasurer at age nineteen. In his spare time Bloom had organized the ushers, checkers, and refreshment sellers into a more efficient, cohesive structure that greatly increased the theater’s profits and his own salary. Next he organized these functions at other theaters and received regular commissions from each. At the Alcazar he inserted into scripts the names of popular products, bars, and restaurants, including the Cliff House, and for this received another stream of income. He also organized a cadre of professional applauders, known as a “claque,” to provide enthusiastic ovations, demand encores, and cry “Brava!” for any performer willing to pay. Most performers did pay, even the most famous diva of the time, Adelina Patti. One day Bloom saw an item in a theatrical publication about a novel Mexican band that he believed Americans would adore, and he convinced the band’s manager to let him bring the musicians north for a tour. Bloom’s profit was $40,000. At the time he was only eighteen.

  De Young told Bloom he would investigate the situation. One week later he summoned Bloom back to his office.

  “How soon could you be ready to go to Chicago?” he asked.

  Bloom, startled, said, “In a couple of days, I guess.” He assumed De Young had arranged a second opportunity for him to petition the fair’s Ways and Means Committee. He was hesitant and told De Young he saw no value in making the journey until the exposition’s directors had a better idea of the kinds of attractions they wanted.

  “The situation has advanced since our talk,” De Young said. “All we need now is somebody to take charge.” He gave Bloom a cable from the Exposition Company that empowered De Young to hire someone to select the concessions for the Midway Plaisance and guide their construction and promotion. “You’ve been elected,” he said.

  “I can’t do it,” Bloom said. He did not want to leave San Francisco. “Even if I did, I’ve got too much at stake here to consider it.”

  De Young watched him. “I don’t want to hear another word from you till tomorrow,” he said.

  In the meantime De Young wanted Bloom to think about how much money he would have to be paid to overcome his reluctance. “When you come back you can name your salary,” he said. “I will either accept or reject it. There will be no argument. Is that agreeable?”

  Bloom did agree, but only because De Young’s request gave him a graceful way of refusing the job. All he h
ad to do, he figured, was name such an outrageous sum that De Young could not possibly accept it, “and as I walked down the street I decided what it would be.”

  Burnham tried to anticipate every conceivable threat to the fair. Aware of Chicago’s reputation for vice and violence, Burnham insisted on the creation of a large police force, the Columbian Guard, and placed it under the command of Colonel Edmund Rice, a man of great valor who had faced Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. Unlike conventional police departments, the Guard’s mandate explicitly emphasized the novel idea of preventing crime rather than merely arresting wrongdoers after the fact.

  Disease, too, posed dangers to the fair, Burnham knew. An outbreak of smallpox or cholera or any of the other lethal infections that roamed the city could irreparably taint the exposition and destroy any hopes the directors had of achieving the record attendance necessary to generate a profit.

  By now the new science of bacteriology, pioneered by Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, had convinced most public health officials that contaminated drinking water caused the spread of cholera and other bacterial diseases. Chicago’s water teemed with bacteria, thanks mainly to the Chicago River. In a monumental spasm of civic engineering the city in 1871 reversed the river’s direction so that it no longer flowed into Lake Michigan, but ran instead into the Des Plaines River and ultimately into the Mississippi, the theory being that the immense flows of both rivers would dilute the sewage to harmless levels—a concept downriver towns like Joliet did not wholeheartedly embrace. To the engineers’ surprise, however, prolonged rains routinely caused the Chicago River to regress and again pour dead cats and fecal matter into the lake, and in such volume that tendrils of black water reached all the way to the intake cribs of the city water system.