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

by Erik Larson

  Hygeia secured rights to lay its pipe from its springhouse in Waukesha through the village itself but failed to anticipate the intensity of opposition from citizens who feared the pipeline would disfigure their landscape and drain their famous springs. Hygeia’s McElroy, under mounting pressure from Burnham, turned to desperate measures.

  On Saturday evening, May 7, 1892, McElroy loaded a special train with pipes, picks, shovels, and three hundred men and set off for Waukesha to dig his pipeline under cover of darkness.

  Word of the expedition beat the train to Waukesha. As it pulled into the station, someone rang the village firebell, and soon a large force of men armed with clubs, pistols, and shotguns converged on the train. Two fire engines arrived hissing steam, their crews ready to blast the pipelayers with water. One village leader told McElroy that if he went ahead with his plan, he would not leave town alive.

  Soon another thousand or so townspeople joined the small army at the station. One group of men dragged a cannon from the town hall and trained it on Hygeia’s bottling plant.

  After a brief standoff, McElroy and the pipelayers went back to Chicago.

  Burnham still wanted that water. Workers had already laid pipes in Jackson Park for two hundred springwater booths.

  McElroy gave up trying to run pipes directly into the village of Waukesha. Instead he bought a spring in the town of Big Bend, twelve miles south of Waukesha, just inside the Waukesha County line. Fair visitors would be able to drink Waukesha springwater after all.

  That the water came from the county and not the famous village was a subtlety upon which Burnham and McElroy did not dwell.

  In Jackson Park everyone became caught up in the accelerating pace of construction. As the buildings rose, the architects spotted flaws in their designs but found the forward crush of work so overwhelming, it threatened to leave the flaws locked in stone, or at least staff. Frank Millet unofficially kept watch over the buildings of the eastern architects during their lengthy absences from the park, lest some ad hoc decision cause irreparable aesthetic damage. On June 6, 1892, he wrote to Charles McKim, designer of the Agriculture Building, “You had better write a letter embodying all the ideas of changes you have, because before you know it they’ll have you by the umbilicus. I staved them off from a cement floor in the Rotunda to-day and insisted that you must have brick. … It takes no end of time and worry to get a thing settled right but only a second to have orders given out for a wrong thing to be done. All these remarks are in strict confidence, and I write in this way to urge you to be explicit and flat-footed in your wishes.”

  At the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building workers employed by contractor Francis Agnew began the dangerous process of raising the giant iron trusses that would support the building’s roof and create the widest span of unobstructed interior space ever attempted.

  The workers installed three sets of parallel railroad tracks along the length of the building. Atop these, on railcar wheels or “trucks,” they erected a “traveler,” a giant derrick consisting of three tall towers spanned at the top by a platform. Workers using the traveler could lift and position two trusses at a time. George Post’s design called for twenty-two trusses, each weighing two hundred tons. Just getting the components to the park had required six hundred railcars.

  On Wednesday, June 1, exposition photographer Charles Arnold took a photograph of the building to record its progress. Anyone looking at that photograph would have had to conclude that the building could not possibly be finished in the four and a half months that remained until Dedication Day. The trusses were in place but no roof. The walls were just beginning to rise. When Arnold took the photograph, hundreds of men were at work on the building, but its scale was so great that none of the men was immediately visible. The ladders that rose from one level of scaffold to the next had all the substance of matchsticks and imparted to the structure an aura of fragility. In the foreground stood mountains of debris.

  Two weeks later Arnold returned for another photograph and captured a very different scene—one of devastation.

  On the night of June 13, just after nine o’clock, another abrupt storm had struck the fairgrounds, and this one also seemed to single out the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. A large portion of the building’s north end collapsed, which in turn caused the failure of an elevated gallery designed to ring the interior of the building. One hundred thousand feet of lumber crashed to the floor. Arnold’s photograph of the aftermath showed a Lilliputian man, possibly Burnham, standing before a great mound of shattered wood and tangled steel.

  This, of all buildings.

  The contractor, Francis Agnew, acknowledged the wall had been inadequately braced but blamed this condition on Burnham for pushing the men to build too quickly.

  Now Burnham pushed them even harder. He made good on his threat and doubled the number of men working on the building. They worked at night, in rain, in stifling heat. In August alone the building took three lives. Elsewhere on the grounds four other men died and dozens more suffered all manner of fractures, burns, and lacerations. The fair, according to one later appraisal, was a more dangerous place to work than a coal mine.

  Burnham intensified his drive for more power. The constant clash between the Exposition Company and the National Commission had become nearly unbearable. Even the congressional investigators had recognized that the overlapping jurisdiction was a source of discord and needless expense. Their report recommended that Davis’s salary be cut in half, a clear sign that the balance of power had shifted. The company and commission worked out a truce. On August 24 the executive committee named Burnham director of works. Chief of everything.

  Soon afterward Burnham dispatched letters to all his department heads, including Olmsted. “I have assumed personal control of the active work within the grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition,” he wrote. “Henceforward, and until further notice, you will report to and receive orders from me exclusively.”

  In Pittsburgh the young steel engineer became more convinced than ever that his challenge to the Eiffel Tower could succeed. He asked a partner in his inspection firm, W. F. Gronau, to calculate the novel forces that would play among the components of his structure. In engineering parlance, it embodied little “dead load,” the static weight of immobile masses of brick and steel. Nearly all of it was “live load,” meaning weight that changes over time, as when a train passes over a bridge. “I had no precedent,” Gronau said. After three weeks of intense work, however, he came up with detailed specifications. The numbers were persuasive, even to Burnham. In June the Ways and Means Committee agreed that the thing should be built. They granted a concession.

  The next day the committee revoked it—second thoughts, after a night spent dreaming of freak winds and shrieking steel and two thousand lives gone in a wink. One member of the committee now called it a “monstrosity.” A chorus of engineers chanted that the thing could not be built, at least not with any margin of safety.

  Its young designer still did not concede defeat, however. He spent $25,000 on drawings and additional specifications and used them to recruit a cadre of investors that included two prominent engineers, Robert Hunt, head of a major Chicago firm, and Andrew Onderdonk, famous for helping construct the Canadian Pacific Railway.

  Soon he sensed a change. The new man in charge of the Midway, Sol Bloom, had struck like a bolt of lightning and seemed amenable to just about anything—the more novel and startling the better. And Burnham had gained almost limitless power over the construction and operation of the fair.

  The engineer readied himself for a third try.

  In the first week of September 1892 Olmsted and his young party left England for home, departing Liverpool aboard the City of New York. The seas were high, the crossing difficult. Seasickness felled Marion and left Rick perpetually queasy. Olmsted’s own health again declined. His insomnia came back. He wrote, “I was more disabled when I returned than when I left.” Now, however, he had no tim
e to recuperate. Dedication Day was only a month away, and Harry Codman was again ill, incapacitated by the same stomach problem that had struck him during the summer. Olmsted left for Chicago to take over direct supervision of the work while Codman recovered. “I am still tortured a good deal with neuralgia and toothache,” Olmsted wrote, “and I am tired and have a growing dread of worry & anxiety.”

  In Chicago he found a changed park. The Mines Building was finished, as was the Fisheries Building. Most of the other buildings were well under way, including, incredibly, the giant Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, where hundreds of workers swarmed its scaffolds and roof. The building’s floor alone had consumed five traincar loads of nails.

  Amid all this work, however, the landscape had suffered. Temporary tracks latticed the grounds. Wagons had gouged chasms across paths, roads, and would-be lawns. Litter lay everywhere. A first-time visitor might wonder if Olmsted’s men had done any work at all.

  Olmsted, of course, knew that tremendous progress had been made, but it was the sort that escaped casual notice. Lagoons existed now where once there had been barren land. The elevated sites upon which the buildings stood had not existed until his grading teams created them. The previous spring his men had planted nearly everything raised in the exposition’s nurseries, plus an additional 200,000 trees, aquatic plants, and ferns, and 30,000 more willow cuttings, all this under the direction of his aptly named head gardener, E. Dehn.

  In the time left before Dedication Day Burnham wanted Olmsted’s men to concentrate on cleaning the grounds and dressing them with flowers and temporary lawns of sod, actions that Olmsted understood were necessary but that clashed with his career-long emphasis on designing for scenic effects that might not be achieved for decades. “Of course the main work suffers,” he wrote.

  One indisputably positive development had occurred during his absence, however. Burnham had awarded the boat concession to a company called the Electric Launch and Navigation Company, which had produced a lovely electric vessel of exactly the character Olmsted wanted.

  On Dedication Day even the press was polite enough to overlook the stark appearance of the grounds and the unfinished feel of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. To have done otherwise would have been an act of disloyalty to Chicago and the nation.

  The dedication had been anticipated nationwide. Francis J. Bellamy, an editor of Youth’s Companion, thought it would be a fine thing if on that day all the schoolchildren of America, in unison, offered something to their nation. He composed a pledge that the Bureau of Education mailed to virtually every school. As originally worded, it began, “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands …”

  A great parade brought Burnham and other dignitaries to the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, where a standing army of 140,000 Chicagoans filled the thirty-two-acre floor. Shafts of sunlight struck through the rising mist of human breath. Five thousand yellow chairs stood on the red-carpeted speaker’s platform, and in these chairs sat businessmen dressed in black, and foreign commissioners and clerics in scarlet, purple, green, and gold. Ex-mayor Carter Harrison, again running for a fifth term, strode about shaking hands, his black slouch hat raising cheers from supporters in the crowd. At the opposite end of the building a five-thousand-voice choir sang Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus to the accompaniment of five hundred musicians. At one point a spectator recalled, “Ninety thousand people suddenly rose and stood upon their feet and simultaneously waved and fluttered ninety thousand snowy pocket-handkerchiefs; the air was cut into dusty spirals, which vibrated to the great iron-ribbed ceiling…. One had a sense of dizziness, as if the entire building rocked.”

  The chamber was so immense that visual signals had to be used to let the chorus know when a speaker had stopped talking and a new song could begin. Microphones did not yet exist, so only a small portion of the audience actually heard any speeches. The rest, with faces contorted from the strain of trying to listen, saw distant men gesturing wildly into the sound-killing miasma of whispers, coughs and creaking shoe leather. Harriet Monroe, the poet who had been John Root’s sister-in-law, was there and watched as two of the nation’s greatest speakers, Colonel Henry Watterson of Kentucky and Chauncey M. Depew of New York, took turns at the podium, “both orators waving their windy words toward a vast, whispering, rustling audience which could not hear.”

  This was a big day for Miss Monroe. She had composed a lengthy poem for the event, her “Columbian Ode,” and pestered her many powerful friends into having it placed on the day’s program. She watched with pride as an actress read it to the few thousand people close enough to hear it. Unlike the majority of the audience, Monroe believed the poem to be rather a brilliant work, so much so that she had hired a printer to produce five thousand copies for sale to the public. She sold few and attributed the debacle to America’s fading love of poetry.

  That winter she burned the excess copies for fuel.

  Prendergast

  ON NOVEMBER 28, 1892, Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast, the mad Irish immigrant and Harrison supporter, selected one of his postal cards. He was twenty-four years old now and despite his accelerating mental decline was still employed by the Inter Ocean as a delivery contractor. The card, like all the others, was four inches wide by five inches long, blank on one face, with postal insignia and a printed one-cent stamp on the other. In this time when writing long letters was everyday practice, men of normal sensibility saw these cards as the most crabbed of media, little better than telegrams, but to Prendergast this square of stiff paper was a vehicle that gave him a voice in the skyscrapers and mansions of the city.

  He addressed this particular card to “A. S. Trude, Lawyer.” He sketched the letters of the name in large floral script, as if seeking to dispatch the cumbersome duty of addressing the card as quickly as possible, before advancing to the message itself.

  That Prendergast had selected Trude to be one of his correspondents was not surprising. Prendergast read widely and possessed a good grasp of the grip-car wrecks, murders, and City Hall machinations covered so fervently by the city’s newspapers. He knew that Alfred S. Trude was one of Chicago’s best criminal defense attorneys and that from time to time he was hired by the state to serve as prosecutor, a practice customary in particularly important cases.

  Prendergast filled the postcard from top margin to bottom, from edge to edge, with little regard for whether the sentences formed level lines or not. He gripped the pen so tightly it impressed channels into the tips of his thumb and forefinger. “My Dear Mr. Trude,” he began. “Were you much hurt?” An accident, reported in the press, had caused Trude minor injuries. “Your humble servant hereby begs leave to tender you his sincere sympathy and trusts that while he does not appear before you in person, you nonetheless will not have any doubts as to his real sympathy for you in your misfortunes—you are wished by him a speedy recovery from the results of the accident which you had the misfortune to meet with.”

  He wrote with a tone of familiarity that presumed Trude would consider him a peer. As the note progressed, his handwriting shrank, until it seemed like something extruded rather than written. “I suppose Mr. Trude that you do understand that the greatest authority on the subject of law is Jesus Christ—and that you also know that the fulfillment of the whole law depends upon the observance of these two commands thou shalt Love God most of all & your neighbor as your self—these are the greatest commands if you please sir.”

  The note clicked from theme to theme like the wheels of a train crossing a freightyard. “Have you ever saw the picture of the fat man who looked for his dog while his dog was at his feet and still did not have the wit to see what was the matter—have you observed the cat?”

  He did not add a closing and did not sign the note. He simply ran out of room, then posted the card.

  Trude read the note and at first dismissed it as the work of a crank. The number of troubled men and women seemed to be increasing with each passing
year. The jails were full of them, a warden later would testify. Inevitably some became dangerous, like Charles Guiteau, the man who had assassinated President Garfield in Washington.

  For no clear reason, Trude kept the card.

  “I Want You at Once”

  IN LATE NOVEMBER THE young Pittsburgh engineer once again put his proposal for out-Eiffeling Eiffel before the Ways and Means Committee. This time in addition to drawings and specifications he included a list of investors, the names of the prominent men on his board, and proof that he had raised enough money to finance the project to completion. On December 16, 1892, the committee granted him a concession to build his structure in the Midway Plaisance. This time the decision held.

  He needed an engineer willing to go to Chicago and supervise the construction effort and thought he knew just the man: Luther V. Rice, assistant engineer of the Union Depot & Tunnel Company, St. Louis. His letter to Rice began, “I have on hand a great project for the World’s Fair in Chicago. I am going to build a vertically revolving wheel 250’ in dia.”

  Nowhere in this letter, however, did he reveal the true dimension of his vision: that this wheel would carry thirty-six cars, each about the size of a Pullman, each holding sixty people and equipped with its own lunch counter, and how when filled to capacity the wheel would propel 2,160 people at a time three hundred feet into the sky over Jackson Park, a bit higher than the crown of the now six-year-old Statue of Liberty.

  He told Rice, “I want you at once if you can come.” He signed the letter: George Washington Gale Ferris.

  Chappell Redux

  ONE DAY IN THE FIRST week of December 1892 Emeline Cigrand set out for Holmes’s building in Englewood bearing a small neatly wrapped parcel. Initially her mood was bright, for the parcel contained an early Christmas present she planned to give to her friends the Lawrences, but as she neared the corner of Sixty-third and Wallace, her spirits dimmed. Where once the building had seemed almost a palace—not for its architectural nobility but for what it promised—now it looked drab and worn. She climbed the stairs to the second floor and went directly to the Lawrences’ apartment. The warmth and welcome resurrected her good spirits. She handed the parcel to Mrs. Lawrence, who opened it immediately and pulled from the wrapping a tin plate upon which Emeline had painted a lovely forest.