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

by Erik Larson

  The Ferris Company was not shy about promoting its founder’s accomplishment. In an illustrated pamphlet called the “Ferris Wheel Souvenir” the company wrote: “Built in the face of every obstacle, it is an achievement which reflects so much credit upon the inventor, that were Mr. Ferris the subject of a Monarchy, instead of a citizen of a great Republic, his honest heart would throb beneath a breast laden with the decorations of royalty.” Ferris could not resist tweaking the Exposition Company for not granting him a concession sooner than it did. “Its failure to appreciate its importance,” the souvenir said, “has cost the Exposition Company many thousands of dollars.”

  This was an understatement. Had the Exposition Company stood by its original June 1892 concession rather than waiting until nearly six months later, the wheel would have been ready for the fair’s May 1 opening. Not only did the exposition lose its 50 percent share of the wheel’s revenue for those fifty-one days—it lost the boost in overall admission that the wheel likely would have generated and that Burnham so desperately wanted. Instead it had stood for that month and a half as a vivid advertisement of the fair’s incomplete condition.

  Safety fears lingered, and Ferris did what he could to ease them. The souvenir pamphlet noted that even a full load of passengers had “no more effect on the movements or the speed than if they were so many flies”—an oddly ungracious allusion. The pamphlet added, “In the construction of this great wheel, every conceivable danger has been calculated and provided for.”

  But Ferris and Gronau had done their jobs too well. The design was so elegant, so adept at exploiting the strength of thin strands of steel, that the wheel appeared incapable of withstanding the stresses placed upon it. The wheel may not have been unsafe, but it looked unsafe.

  “In truth, it seems too light,” a reporter observed. “One fears the slender rods which must support the whole enormous weight are too puny to fulfill their office. One cannot avoid the thought of what would happen if a high wind should come sweeping across the prairie and attack the structure broadside. Would the thin rods be sufficient to sustain not only the enormous weight of the structure and that of the 2,000 passengers who might chance to be in the cars, but the pressure of the wind as well?”

  In three weeks that question would find an answer.

  Rising Wave

  AND SUDDENLY THEY BEGAN to come. The enthusiasm Olmsted had identified during his travels, though still far from constituting a tidal wave, at last seemed to begin propelling visitors to Jackson Park. By the end of June, even though the railroads still had not dropped their fares, paid attendance at the exposition had more than doubled, the average for the month rising to 89,170 from May’s dismal 37,501. It was still far below the 200,000 daily visitors the fair’s planners originally had dreamed of, but the trend was encouraging. From Englewood to the Loop, hotels at last began to fill. The Roof Garden Café of the Woman’s Building now served two thousand people a day, ten times the number it had served on Opening Day. The resulting volume of garbage overwhelmed its disposal system, which consisted of janitors bumping large barrels of fetid garbage down the same three flights of stairs used by customers. The janitors could not use the elevators because Burnham had ordered them turned off after dark to conserve power for the fair’s nightly illuminations. As stains and stench accumulated, the restaurant’s manager built a chute on the roof and threatened to jettison the garbage directly onto Olmsted’s precious lawns.

  Burnham retracted his order.

  The fair had become so intensely compelling that one woman, Mrs. Lucille Rodney of Galveston, Texas, walked thirteen hundred miles along railroad tracks to reach it. “Call it no more the White City on the Lake,” wrote Sir Walter Besant, the English historian and novelist, in Cosmopolitan, “it is Dreamland.”

  Even Olmsted now seemed happy with it, although of course he had his criticisms. He too had wanted to manage the first impressions of visitors by having a central entry point. The failure of this idea, he wrote in a formal critique for The Inland Architect, “deducted much” from the fair’s value, although he hastened to add that he was making this criticism “not in the least in a complaining way” but as a professional offering guidance to others who might confront a similar problem. He still wished the Wooded Island had been left alone, and he decried the unplanned proliferation of concession buildings that “intercepted vistas and disturbed spaces intended to serve for the relief of the eye from the too nearly constant demands upon attention of the Exposition Buildings.” The effect, he wrote, “has been bad.”

  Overall, however, he was pleased, especially with the process of construction. “Really,” he wrote, “I think that it is a most satisfactory and encouraging circumstance that it could be found feasible for so many men of technical education and ability to be recruited and suitably organized so quickly and made to work together so well in so short a time. I think it a notable circumstance that there should have been so little friction, so little display of jealousy, envy and combativeness, as has appeared in the progress of this enterprise.”

  He attributed this circumstance to Burnham: “too high an estimate cannot be placed on the industry, skill and tact with which this result was secured by the master of us all.”

  Visitors wore their best clothes, as if going to church, and were surprisingly well behaved. In the six months of the fair the Columbian Guard made only 2,929 arrests, about sixteen per day, typically for disorderly conduct, petty theft, and pickpocketing, with pickpockets most favoring the fair’s always-crowded aquarium. The guard identified 135 ex-convicts and removed them from the grounds. It issued thirty fines for carrying Kodaks without a permit, thirty-seven for taking unauthorized photographs. It investigated the discovery on the grounds of three fetuses; a Pinkerton detective “assaulting visitors” at the Tiffany Pavilion; and a “Zulu acting improperly.” In his official report to Burnham Colonel Rice, commander of the Guard, wrote, “With the tens of thousands of employees and the millions of visitors, it must be admitted that our success was phenomenal.”

  With so many people packed among steam engines, giant rotating wheels, horse-drawn fire trucks, and rocketing bobsleds, the fair’s ambulances superintended by a doctor named Gentles were constantly delivering bruised, bloody, and overheated visitors to the exposition hospital. Over the life of the fair the hospital treated 11,602 patients, sixty-four a day, for injuries and ailments that suggest that the mundane sufferings of people have not changed very much over the ages. The list included:

  820 cases of diarrhea;

  154, constipation;

  21, hemorrhoids;

  434, indigestion;

  365, foreign bodies in the eyes;

  364, severe headaches;

  594 episodes of fainting, syncope, and exhaustion;

  1 case of extreme flatulence;

  and 169 involving teeth that hurt like hell.

  One of the delights of the fair was never knowing who might turn up beside you at the chocolate Venus de Milo or at the hearse exhibit or under the barrel of Krupp’s monster, or who might sit at the table next to yours at the Big Tree Restaurant or the Philadelphia Café or the Great White Horse Inn, a reproduction of the public house described by Dickens in The Pickwick Papers; or who might suddenly clutch your arm aboard the Ferris Wheel as your car began its ascent. Archduke Francis Ferdinand, described by an escort as being “half-boor, half-tightwad,” roamed the grounds incognito—but much preferred the vice districts of Chicago. Indians who had once used hatchets to bare the skulls of white men drifted over from Buffalo Bill’s compound, as did Annie Oakley and assorted Cossacks, Hussars, Lancers, and members of the U.S. Sixth Cavalry on temporary furlough to become actors in Colonel Cody’s show. Chief Standing Bear rode the Ferris Wheel in full ceremonial headdress, his two hundred feathers unruffled. Other Indians rode the enameled wooden horses of the Midway carousel.

  There were Paderewski, Houdini, Tesla, Edison, Joplin, Darrow, a Princeton professor named Woodrow Wilson, and a sw
eet old lady in black summer silk flowered with forget-me-not-blue named Susan B. Anthony. Burnham met Teddy Roosevelt for lunch. For years after the fair Burnham used the exclamation, “Bully!” Diamond Jim Brady dined with Lillian Russell and indulged his passion for sweet corn.

  No one saw Twain. He came to Chicago to see the fair but got sick and spent eleven days in his hotel room, then left without ever seeing the White City.

  Of all people.

  Chance encounters led to magic.

  Frank Haven Hall, superintendent of the Illinois Institution for the Education of the Blind, unveiled a new device that made plates for printing books in Braille. Previously Hall had invented a machine capable of typing in Braille, the Hall Braille Writer, which he never patented because he felt profit should not sully the cause of serving the blind. As he stood by his newest machine, a blind girl and her escort approached him. Upon learning that Hall was the man who had invented the typewriter she used so often, the girl put her arms around his neck and gave him a huge hug and kiss.

  Forever afterward, whenever Hall told this story of how he met Helen Keller, tears would fill his eyes.

  One day as the Board of Lady Managers debated whether to support or oppose opening the fair on Sunday, an angry male Sabbatarian confronted Susan B. Anthony in the hall of the Woman’s Building to challenge her contention that the fair should remain open. (Anthony was not a lady manager and therefore despite her national stature could not participate in the board’s meeting.) Deploying the most shocking analogy he could muster, the clergyman asked Anthony if she’d prefer having a son of hers attend Buffalo Bill’s show on Sunday instead of church.

  Yes, she replied, “he would learn far more…”

  To the pious this exchange confirmed the fundamental wickedness of Anthony’s suffragist movement. When Cody learned of it, he was tickled, so much so that he immediately sent Anthony a thank-you note and invited her to attend his show. He offered her a box at any performance she chose.

  At the start of the performance Cody entered the ring on horseback, his long gray hair streaming from under his white hat, the silver trim of his white jacket glinting in the sun. He kicked his horse into a gallop and raced toward Anthony’s box. The audience went quiet.

  He halted his horse in a burst of dirt and dust, removed his hat, and with a great sweeping gesture bowed until his head nearly touched the horn of his saddle.

  Anthony stood and returned the bow and—“as enthusiastic as a girl,” a friend said—waved her handkerchief at Cody.

  The significance of the moment escaped no one. Here was one of the greatest heroes of America’s past saluting one of the foremost heroes of its future. The encounter brought the audience to its feet in a thunder of applause and cheers.

  The frontier may indeed have closed at last, as Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed in his history-making speech at the fair, but for that moment it stood there glittering in the sun like the track of a spent tear.

  There was tragedy. The British draped their elaborate ship model of the H.M.S. Victoria in black bunting. On June 22, 1893, during maneuvers off Tripoli, this marvel of naval technology had been struck by the H.M.S. Camperdown. The Victoria’s commander ordered the ship to proceed full speed toward shore, intending to ground her there in accord with standing fleet orders meant to make it easier to raise a sunken ship. Ten minutes later, her engines still at full steam, the cruiser heeled and sank with many of her crew still trapped belowdecks. Others lucky enough to have jumped free now found themselves mauled by her whirling propellers or burned to death when her boilers exploded. “Screams and shrieks arose, and in the white foam appeared reddened arms and legs and wrenched and torn bodies,” a reporter said. “Headless trunks were tossed out of the vortex to linger a moment on the surface and sink out of sight.”

  The accident cost four hundred lives.

  The Ferris Wheel quickly became the most popular attraction of the exposition. Thousands rode it every day. In the week beginning July 3 Ferris sold 61,395 tickets for a gross return of $30,697.50. The Exposition Company took about half, leaving Ferris an operating profit for that one week of $13,948 (equivalent today to about $400,000).

  There were still questions about the wheel’s safety, and unfounded stories circulated about suicides and accidents, including one that alleged that a frightened pug had leaped to its death from one of the car’s windows. Not true, the Ferris Company said; the story was the concoction of a reporter “short on news and long on invention.” If not for the wheel’s windows and iron grates, however, its record might have been different. On one ride a latent terror of heights suddenly overwhelmed an otherwise peaceful man named Wherritt. He was fine until the car began to move. As it rose, he began to feel ill and nearly fainted. There was no way to signal the engineer below to stop the wheel.

  Wherritt staggered in panic from one end of the car to the other, driving passengers before him “like scared sheep,” according to one account. He began throwing himself at the walls of the car with such power that he managed to bend some of the protective iron. The conductor and several male passengers tried to subdue him, but he shook them off and raced for the door. In accord with the wheel’s operating procedures, the conductor had locked the door at the start of the ride. Wherritt shook it and broke its glass but could not get it open.

  As the car entered its descent, Wherritt became calmer and laughed and sobbed with relief—until he realized the wheel was not going to stop. It always made two full revolutions. Wherritt again went wild, and again the conductor and his allies subdued him, but they were growing tired. They feared what might happen if Wherritt escaped them. Structurally the car was sound, but its walls, windows, and doors had been designed merely to discourage attempts at self-destruction, not to resist a human pile driver. Already Wherritt had broken glass and bent iron.

  A woman stepped up and unfastened her skirt. To the astonishment of all aboard, she slipped the skirt off and threw it over Wherritt’s head, then held it in place while murmuring gentle assurances. The effect was immediate. Wherritt became “as quiet as an ostrich.”

  A woman disrobing in public, a man with a skirt over his head—the marvels of the fair seemed endless.

  The exposition was Chicago’s great pride. Thanks mainly to Daniel Burnham the city had proved it could accomplish something marvelous against obstacles that by any measure should have humbled the builders. The sense of ownership was everywhere, not just among the tens of thousands of citizens who had bought exposition stock. Hilda Satt noticed it in the change that came over her father as he showed her the grounds. “He seemed to take a personal pride in the fair, as if he had helped in the planning,” she said. “As I look back on those days, most people in Chicago felt that way. Chicago was host to the world at that time and we were part of it all.”

  But the fair did more than simply stoke pride. It gave Chicago a light to hold against the gathering dark of economic calamity. The Erie Railroad wobbled, then collapsed. Next went the Northern Pacific. In Denver three national banks failed in one day and pulled down an array of other businesses. Fearing a bread riot, city authorities called out the militia. In Chicago the editors of The Inland Architect tried to be reassuring: “Existing conditions are only an accident. Capital is only hidden. Enterprise is only frightened, not beaten.” The editors were wrong.

  In June two businessmen committed suicide on the same day in the same Chicago hotel, the Metropole. One slit his throat with a razor at ten-thirty in the morning. The other learned of the suicide from the hotel barber. That night in his own room he tied one end of the silk sash of his smoking jacket around his neck, then stretched out on the bed and tied the other end to the bedstead. He rolled off.

  “Everyone is in a blue fit of terror,” wrote Henry Adams, “and each individual thinks himself more ruined than his neighbor.”

  Long before the fair’s end, people began mourning its inevitable passage. Mary Hartwell Catherwood wrote, “What shall we do when this Wo
nderland is closed?—when it disappears—when the enchantment comes to an end?” One lady manager, Sallie Cotton of North Carolina, a mother of six children staying in Chicago for the summer, captured in her diary a common worry: that after seeing the fair, “everything will seem small and insignificant.”

  The fair was so perfect, its grace and beauty like an assurance that for as long as it lasted nothing truly bad could happen to anyone, anywhere.

  Independence Day

  THE MORNING OF JULY 4, 1893, broke gray and squally. The weather threatened to dull the elaborate fireworks display that Frank Millet had planned as a further boost for the exposition’s attendance, which despite steady week-to-week increases still lagged behind expectations. The sun emerged late in the morning, though squalls continued to sweep Jackson Park through much of the day. By late afternoon a soft gold light bathed the Court of Honor and storm clouds walled the northern sky. The storms came no closer. The crowds built quickly. Holmes, Minnie, and Anna found themselves locked within an immense throng of humid men and women. Many people carried blankets and hampers of food but quickly found that no room remained to spread a picnic. There were few children. The entire Columbian Guard seemed to be present, their pale blue uniforms standing out like crocuses against black loam. Gradually the gold light cooled to lavender. Everyone began walking toward the lake. “For half a mile along the splendid sweep of the Lake-Front men were massed a hundred deep,” the Tribune reported. This “black sea” of people was restless. “For hours they sat and waited, filling the air with a strange, uneasy uproar.” One man began singing “Nearer My God to Thee,” and immediately a few thousand people joined in.