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

by Erik Larson

  The first alarm reached the fire department at 1:32 P.M. Engines thundered to the building. Twenty firemen led by Captain James Fitzpatrick entered the main structure and climbed to its roof. From there they made their way to the tower and climbed stairs another seventy feet to the tower’s exterior balcony. Using ropes they hauled up a line of hose and a twenty-five-foot ladder. They secured the hose firmly to the tower.

  Fitzpatrick and his men didn’t realize it, but the fire at the top of the tower had set a lethal trap. Fragments of burning debris had fallen into the space between the iron stack and the inner walls of the tower, made of smooth white pine. These flaming brands ignited a fire that, in those narrow confines, soon depleted the available air and extinguished its own flames, leaving in their place a superheated plasma that needed only a fresh supply of oxygen to become explosive.

  As the firemen on the tower balcony concentrated on the fire above them, a small plume of white smoke appeared at their feet.

  The Fire Department rang a second alarm at 1:41 P.M. and activated the big siren at the exposition’s Machinery Building. Thousands of visitors now moved toward the smoke and packed the lawns and paths surrounding the building. Some brought lunch. Burnham came, as did Davis. The Columbian Guard arrived in force to clear the way for additional engines and ladder wagons. Riders on the Ferris Wheel got the clearest, most horrific view of what happened next.

  “Never,” the Fire Department reported, “was so terrible a tragedy witnessed by such a sea of agonized faces.”

  Suddenly flames erupted from the tower at a point about fifty feet below Fitzpatrick and his men. Fresh air rushed into the tower. An explosion followed. To the firemen, according to the department’s official report, it appeared “as though the gaseous contents of the air-shaft surrounding the smokestack had become ignited, and the entire interior of the tower at once became a seething furnace.”

  Fireman John Davis was standing on the balcony with Captain Fitzpatrick and the other men. “I saw there was only one chance, and I made up my mind to take it,” Davis said. “I made a leap for the hose and had the good luck to catch it. The rest of the boys seemed transfixed with horror and unable to move.”

  Davis and one other man rode the hose to the ground. The firemen still on the balcony knew their situation was deadly and began to tell each other good-bye. Witnesses watched them hug and shake hands. Captain Fitzpatrick grabbed a rope and swung down through the fire to the main roof below, where he lay with a fractured leg and internal injuries, half his huge mustache burned away. Other men jumped to their deaths, in some cases penetrating the main roof.

  Fire Marshal Murphy and two other firemen on the ground climbed a ladder to retrieve Fitzpatrick. They lowered him by rope to colleagues waiting below. He was alive but fading.

  In all, the blaze killed twelve firemen and three workers. Fitzpatrick died at nine o’clock that night.

  The next day attendance exceeded 100,000. The still-smoking rubble of the Cold Storage Building had proved irresistible.

  The coroner immediately convened an inquest, during which a jury heard testimony from Daniel Burnham; Frank Burnham; officials of Hercules Iron Works; and various firemen. Daniel Burnham testified he had not known of the previous fire or the omitted thimble and claimed that since the building was a private concession he had no authority over its construction beyond approving its design. On Tuesday, July 18, the jury charged him, Fire Marshal Murphy, and two Hercules officers with criminal negligence and referred the charges to a grand jury.

  Burnham was stunned but kept his silence. “The attempt to hold you in any degree responsible or censurable for the loss of life is an outrage,” wrote Dion Geraldine, his construction superintendent at the fair. “The men who gave this verdict must have been very stupid, or sadly misinformed.”

  Under customary procedures, Burnham and the others would have been placed under arrest pending bail, but in this instance even the coroner’s office seemed taken aback. The sheriff made no move to arrest the director of works. Burnham posted bond the next morning.

  With the stink of charred wood still heavy in the air, Burnham closed the roof walks of the Transportation and Manufactures and Liberal Arts buildings and the balconies and upper galleries of the Administration Building, fearing that a fire in the buildings or among their exhibits could start a panic and cause a tragedy of even greater magnitude. Hundreds of people had crowded the roof walk of the Manufactures Building each day, but their only way down was by elevator. Burnham imagined terrified men, women, and children trying to slide down the glass flanks of the roof and breaking through, then falling two hundred feet to the exhibit floor.

  As if things could not get any blacker, on the same day that the coroner’s jury ordered Burnham’s arrest, July 18, the directors of the exposition bowed to bank pressure and 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. A subsequent resolution approved by the Exposition Company’s directors stated that as of August 1, “no expenditures whatever connected with the construction, maintenance or conduct of the Exposition shall be incurred unless authorized by said committee.” It was clear from the start that the committee’s primary target was Burnham’s Department of Works.

  Equally clear, at least to Burnham, was that the last thing the fair needed right now, as he and Millet continued their fight to boost the rate of paid admissions—a campaign with its own necessary costs—was a troika of penny-pinchers sitting in judgment on every new expense. Millet had some extraordinary ideas for events in August, including an elaborate Midway ball during which fair officials, including Burnham, would dance with Dahoman women and Algerian belly dancers. That the committee would view the expense of this ball and other Millet events as frivolous seemed certain. Yet Burnham knew that such expenditures, as well as continued spending on police, garbage removal, and maintenance of roads and lawns, was vital.

  He feared that the Retrenchment Committee would cripple the fair for once and for all.

  Love

  THE REMAINS OF THE Cold Storage fire were still visible as a party of schoolteachers arrived from St. Louis, accompanied by a young reporter. The twenty-four teachers had won a contest held by the St. Louis Republic that entitled them to a free stay at the fair at the newspaper’s expense. Along with assorted friends and family members—for a total of forty travelers—they had piled into a luxurious sleeper car, named Benares, provided by the Chicago & Alton Railroad. They arrived at Chicago’s Union Depot on Monday, July 17, at eight o’clock in the morning and went immediately by carriage to their hotel, the Varsity, located close enough to the fair that from its second-floor balcony the teachers could see the Ferris Wheel, the top of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, and Big Mary’s gilded head.

  The reporter—Theodore Dreiser—was young and suffused with a garish self-confidence that drew the attention of the young women. He flirted with all but of course was drawn most to the one woman who seemed least interested, a small, pretty, and reserved woman named Sara Osborne White, whom a past suitor had nicknamed “Jug” for her tendency to wear brown. She was hardly Dreiser’s type: By now he was sexually experienced and in the middle of an entirely physical affair with his landlady. To him Sara White exuded “an intense something concealed by an air of supreme innocence and maidenly reserve.”

  Dreiser joined the teachers on the Ferris Wheel and accompanied them on a visit to Buffalo Bill’s show, where Colonel Cody himself greeted the women and shook hands with each. Dreiser followed the ladies through the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building where, he said, a man “could trail round from place to place for a year and not get tired.” In the Midway Dreiser persuaded James J. Corbett to meet the women. Corbett was the boxer who had downed John L. Sullivan in the great fight of September 1892, a battle that had consumed the entire front page of the next morning’s Chicago Tribune. Corbett too shook the women’s hands, although one
teacher declined the opportunity. Her name was Sullivan.

  Every chance he got, Dreiser tried to separate Sara White from the Republic’s entourage, which Dreiser called the “Forty Odd,” but Sara had brought along her sister Rose, which complicated things. On at least one occasion Dreiser tried to kiss Sara. She told him not to be “sentimental.”

  He failed at seduction, but was himself successfully seduced—by the fair. It had swept him, he said, “into a dream from which I did not recover for months.” Most captivating were the nights, “when the long shadows have all merged into one and the stars begin to gleam out over the lake and the domes of the palaces of the White City.”

  Sara White remained on his mind long after he and the Forty Odd departed the fair. In St. Louis he wrote to her and courted her and in the process resolved to make more of himself as a writer. He left St. Louis for a job editing a rural Michigan newspaper but found that the realities of being a small-town editor did not live up to the fantasy. After a few other stops he reached Pittsburgh. He wrote to Sara White and visited her whenever he returned to St. Louis. He asked her to sit in his lap. She refused.

  She did, however, accept his proposal of marriage. Dreiser showed a friend, John Maxwell of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, her photograph. Where Dreiser saw an enticing woman of mystery, Maxwell saw a schoolmarm of drab demeanor. He tried to warn Dreiser: “If you marry now—and a conventional and narrow woman at that, one older than you, you’re gone.”

  It was good advice for a man like Dreiser. But Dreiser did not take it.

  The Ferris Wheel became a vector for love. Couples asked permission to be married at the highest point on the wheel. Luther Rice never allowed it, but in two cases where the couples already had mailed invitations, he did permit weddings in his office.

  Despite the wheel’s inherent romantic potential, however, rides at night never became popular. The favorite hour was the golding time between five and six in the evening.

  Holmes, newly free and land rich, brought a new woman to the fair, Georgiana Yoke, whom he had met earlier in the year at a department store, Schlesinger & Meyer, where she worked as a saleswoman. She had grown up in Franklin, Indiana, and lived there with her parents until 1891, when she set out for a bigger, more glamorous life in Chicago. She was only twenty-three when she met Holmes, but her small size and sun-blond hair made her look much younger, almost like a child—save for the sharp features of her face and the intelligence that inhabited her very large blue eyes.

  She had never met anyone like him. He was handsome, articulate, and clearly well off. He even possessed property in Europe. She felt a certain sadness for him, however. He was so alone—all his family was dead, save one aunt living in Africa. His last uncle had just died and left him a large fortune consisting of property in the South and in Fort Worth, Texas.

  Holmes gave her many presents, among them a Bible, diamond earrings, and a locket—“a little heart,” she said, “with pearls.”

  At the fair he took her on the Ferris Wheel and hired a gondola and walked with her on the dark fragrant paths of the Wooded Island, in the soft glow of Chinese lanterns.

  He asked her to be his wife. She agreed.

  He cautioned, however, that for the marriage he would have to use a different name, Henry Mansfield Howard. It was his dead uncle’s name, he said. The uncle was blood proud and had bequeathed Holmes his estate on condition he first adopt the uncle’s name in full. Holmes had obliged, out of respect for his uncle’s memory.

  Mayor Harrison too believed he was in love, with a New Orleans woman named Annie Howard. He was sixty-eight and a widower twice over; she was in her twenties—no one knew exactly where in her twenties, but estimates put her between twenty-one and twenty-seven years old. She was “very plump,” by one account, and “full of life.” She had come to Chicago for the duration of the fair and was renting a mansion near the mayor’s. She spent her days at the fair buying art.

  Harrison and Miss Howard had some news for the city, but the mayor had no plans to reveal it until October 28, when the exposition would host American Cities Day. His day, really—two days before the official close, but the day when he would get to stand before several thousand mayors from around the country and revel in his stature as mayor of Chicago, the city that built the greatest fair of all time.

  Freaks

  ON JULY 31, 1893, after two investigative hearings, the Retrenchment Committee gave its report to the exposition’s Board of Directors. The report stated that the financial management of the fair “can only be characterized as shamefully extravagant.” Drastic cuts in spending and staff were necessary, immediately. “As to the Construction Department, we hardly know what to say,” the report continued. “We had no time to go into details, but have formed the decided impression that this is being run now, as in the past, upon the general theory that money is no object.”

  The Retrenchment Committee made it clear that, at least for its three members, the financial success of the fair was as important as its obvious aesthetic success. The honor of Chicago’s leading men, who prided themselves on their unsentimental—some might say ruthless—pursuit of maximum profit, was in peril. The report closed, “If we are not to be disgraced before the public as business-men, this matter must be followed up sharply and decisively.”

  In separate statements, the Retrenchment Committee urged the directors to make the committee permanent and invest it with the power to approve or deny every expenditure at the exposition, no matter how small.

  This was too much, even for the equally hardened businessmen of the exposition board. President Higinbotham said he would resign before he would cede such power to anyone. Other directors felt likewise. Stung by this rejection, the three men of the Retrenchment Committee themselves resigned. One told a reporter, “If the directory had seen fit to continue the committee with power as originally intended, it would have dropped heads enough to fill the grand court basin…”

  The retrenchers’ report had been too harsh, too much a rebuke, at a time 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. Even New York had apologized—well, at least one editor from New York had done so. Charles T. Root, editor of the New York Dry Goods Reporter and no relation to Burnham’s dead partner, published an editorial on Thursday, August 10, 1893, in which he cited the ridicule and hostility that New York editors had expressed ever since Chicago won the right to build the exposition. “Hundreds of newspapers, among them scores of the strongest Eastern dailies, held their sides with merriment over the exquisite humor of the idea of this crude, upstart, pork-packing city undertaking to conceive and carry out a true World’s Fair…” The carping had subsided, he wrote, but few of the carpers had as yet made the “amende honorable” that now clearly was due Chicago. He compounded his heresy by adding that if New York had won the fair, it would not have done as fine a job. “So far as I have been able to observe New York never gets behind any enterprise as Chicago got behind this, and without that splendid pulling together, prestige, financial supremacy, and all that sort of thing would not go far toward paralleling the White City.” It was time, he said, to acknowledge the truth: “Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world.”

  None of the exposition directors or officers had any illusions, however. The rate of paid admissions, though rising steadily, had to be increased still more, and soon. Only three months remained until the closing ceremony on October 30. (The closure was supposed to happen at the end of October, meaning October 31, but some unidentified crafter of the federal legislation erred in thinking October only had thirty days.)

  The directors pressured the railroads to lower fares. The Chicago Tribune made fare reductions a crusade and openly attacked the railroads. “They are unpatriotic, for this is a national not a local fair,” an editorial charged on August 11, 1893. “They are also desperately and utterly selfish.”
The next day the newspaper singled out Chauncey Depew, president of the New York Central, for a particularly caustic appraisal. “Mr. Depew all along has posed as the special friend of the World’s Fair and has been lavish in his declarations that his roads would do the fair thing and would enable tens of thousands to come here beyond Niagara Falls…” Yet Depew had failed to do what he promised, the Tribune said. “It is in order for Chauncey M. Depew to hand in his resignation as Chicago’s adopted son. Chicago wants no more of him.”

  Frank Millet, director of functions, meanwhile stepped up his own efforts to promote the fair and arranged an increasingly exotic series of events. He organized boat races in the basin of the Court of Honor that pitted inhabitants of the Midway villages against one another. They did battle every Tuesday evening in vessels native to their homelands. “We want to do something to liven up the lagoons and basin,” Millet told an interviewer. “People are getting tired of looking at the electric launches. If we can get the Turks, the South Sea Islanders, the Singalese, the Esquimos, and the American Indians to float about the grand basin in their native barks, it will certainly add some novelty as well as interest to the scene.”

  Millet also organized swim meets between the Midway “types,” as the press called them. He scheduled these for Fridays. The first race took place August 11 in the lagoon, with Zulus swimming against South American Indians. The Dahomans also competed, as did the Turks, “some of them as hairy as gorillas,” the Tribune said, with the anthropological abandon common to the age. “The races were notable for the lack of clothing worn by the contestants and the serious way in which they went at the task of winning five-dollar gold pieces.”