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

by Erik Larson

  Millet’s big coup was the great Midway ball, held on the night of Wednesday, August 16. The Tribune called it “The Ball of the Midway Freaks” and sought to whet the nation’s appetite with an editorial that first noted a rising furor within the Board of Lady Managers over the belly dancers of the Midway. “Whether the apprehensions of the good ladies … were due to infringements of morality or to the anticipation that the performers may bring on an attack of peritonitis if they persist in their contortions is not clear, but all the same they have taken the position that what is not considered very much out of the way on the banks of the Nile or in the market places of Syria is entirely improper on the Midway between Jackson and Washington Parks.”

  But now, the Tribune continued, the belly dancers and every other depraved jiggling half-dressed woman of the Midway had been invited to the great ball, where they were expected to dance with the senior officers of the fair, including Burnham and Davis. “The situation therefore, as will be seen, is full of horrifying possibilities,” the Tribune said. “It should cause a shiver in the composite breast of the Board of Lady Managers when they consider what may happen if Director-General Davis should lead out some fascinating Fatima at the head of the grand procession and she should be taken with peritonitis in the midst of the dance; or if [Potter] Palmer should escort a votary of the Temple of Luxor only to find her with the same ailment; or if Mayor Harrison, who belongs to all nations, should dance with the whole lot. Will they suppress their partners’ contortions by protest or by force, or, following the fashion of the country, will they, too, attempt Oriental contortions? Suppose that President Higinbotham finds as his vis-à-vis an anointed, barebacked Fiji beauty or a Dahomeyite amazon bent upon the extraordinary antics of the cannibal dance, is he to join in and imitate her or risk his head in an effort to restrain her?”

  Further enriching the affair was the presence at Jackson Park of George Francis Train—known universally as “Citizen Train”—in his white suit, red belt, and red Turkish fez, invited by Millet to host the ball and the boat and swim races and anything else that Millet could devise. Train was one of the most famous men of the day, though no one knew quite why. He was said to have been the model for Phileas Fogg, the globe-trotter in Around the World in Eighty Days. Train claimed the real reason he was invited to the exposition was to save it by using his psychic powers to increase attendance. These powers resided in his body in the form of electrical energy. He walked about the fairgrounds rubbing his palms to husband that energy and refused to shake hands with anyone lest the act discharge his potency. “Chicago built the fair,” he said. “Everybody else tried to kill it. Chicago built it. I am here to save it and I’ll be hanged if I haven’t.”

  The ball took place in the fair’s Natatorium, a large building on the Midway devoted to swimming and bathing and equipped with a ballroom and banquet rooms. Bunting of yellow and red hung from the ceiling. The galleries that overlooked the ballroom were outfitted with opera boxes for fair officials and socially prominent families. Burnham had a box, as did Davis and Higinbotham and of course the Palmers. The galleries also had seats and standing room for other paying guests. From railings in front of the boxes hung triangles of silk embroidered with gold arabesques, all glowing with the light of adjacent incandescent bulbs. The effect was one of indescribable opulence. The Retrenchment Committee would not have approved.

  At nine-fifteen that night Citizen Train—dressed in his usual white, but now for some reason carrying an armful of blooming sweet pea—led the procession of exotics, many barefoot, down the stairway of the Natatorium to the ballroom below. He held the hand of a ten-year-old Mexican ballerina and was followed by scores of men and women in the customary clothing of their native cultures. Sol Bloom kept order on the ballroom floor.

  The official program dedicated dances to particular officials and guests. Director-General Davis was to lead a quadrille, Burnham a “Berlin,” Mayor Harrison a polka. Once the dances were completed, the crowd was to sing “Home Sweet Home.”

  It was hot. Chief Rain-in-the-Face, the Sioux chief who had killed Custer’s brother and now occupied Sitting Bull’s cabin in the Midway, wore green paint that streamed down his face. A Laplander wore a fur shirt; Eskimo women wore blouses of walrus skin. The maharajah of Kapurthala, visiting that week from India, sat in a makeshift throne on the ballroom stage fanned by three servants.

  The ballroom burst with color and energy: Japanese in red silk, Bedouins in red and black, Romanians in red, blue, and yellow. Women who ordinarily would have come wearing almost nothing—like Aheze, an Amazon, and Zahtoobe, a Dahoman—were given short skirts constructed of small American flags. The Tribune, in an unintended parody of its own penchant for describing the gowns of the rich, noted that Lola, a South Sea Islander, wore her “native costume of bark cloth covering about half the body, with low cut and sleeveless bodice.” As the night wore on and the wine flowed, the line to dance with Lola grew long. Sadly, the belly dancers came in robes and turbans. Men in black dress suits circled the floor, “swinging black Amazons with bushy hair and teeth necklaces.” Chicago—and perhaps the world—had never seen anything like it. The Tribune called the ball “the strangest gathering since the destruction of the Tower of Babel.”

  There was food, of course. The official menu:

  RELISHES.

  Hard boiled potatoes, à la Irish Village.

  International hash, à la Midway Plaisance

  COLD DISHES.

  Roast Missionary, à la Dahomey, west coast of Africa.

  Jerked buffalo, à la Indian Village.

  Stuffed ostrich, à la Ostrich Farm.

  Boiled camel humps, à la Cairo street.

  Monkey stew, à la Hagenbeck.

  ENTREES.

  Fricassee of reindeer, à la Lapland.

  Fried snowballs, à la Ice Railway.

  Crystallized frappé, from Libby glass exhibit.

  PASTRY.

  Wind doughnuts, à la Captive Balloon.

  Sandwiches (assorted), especially prepared by the

  Leather Exhibit.

  And for dessert, the program said, “Twenty-five percent of gross receipts.”

  The ball ended at four-thirty A.M. The exotics walked slowly back to the Midway. The guests climbed into their carriages and slept or softly sang “After the Ball”—the hit song of the day—as their liverymen drove them home over empty streets that echoed with the plosive rhythm of hooves on granite.

  The ball and Frank Millet’s other inventions imparted to the exposition a wilder, happier air. The exposition by day might wear a chaste gown of white staff, but at night it danced barefoot and guzzled champagne.

  Attendance rose. The daily average of paid admissions for August was 113,403—at last topping the vital 100,000 threshold. The margin was slim, however. And the nation’s economic depression was growing steadily worse, its labor situation more volatile.

  On August 3 a big Chicago bank, Lazarus Silverman, failed. Burnham’s firm had long been a client. On the night of August 10 Charles J. Eddy, a former top official of the bankrupt Reading Railroad, one of the first casualties of the panic, walked into Washington Park just north of the Midway and shot himself. Of course he had been staying at the Metro-pole. He was the hotel’s third suicide that summer. Mayor Harrison warned that the ranks of the unemployed had swollen to an alarming degree. “If Congress does not give us money we will have riots that will shake this country,” he said. Two weeks later workers scuffled with police outside City Hall. It was a minor confrontation, but the Tribune called it a riot. A few days after that, 25,000 unemployed workers converged on the downtown lakefront and heard Samuel Gompers, standing at the back of speaker’s wagon No. 5, ask, “Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them
riots?”

  For the city’s industrialists and merchant princes who learned of Gompers’s speech in their Sunday morning newspapers, this was a particularly unsettling question, for it seemed to embody a demand for much more than simply work. Gompers was calling for fundamental change in the relationship between workers and their overseers.

  This was dangerous talk, to be suppressed at all costs.

  Prendergast

  IT WAS EXCITING, THIS PROSPECT of becoming one of the city’s most important officials. At last Prendergast could leave behind the cold mornings and filthy streets and the angry newsboys who disobeyed and taunted him. He was growing impatient, however. His appointment as corporation counsel should have occurred by now.

  One afternoon in the first week of October Prendergast took a grip-car to City Hall to see his future office. He found a clerk and introduced himself.

  Incredibly, the clerk did not recognize his name. When Prendergast explained that Mayor Harrison planned to make him the city’s new corporation counsel, the clerk laughed.

  Prendergast insisted on seeing the current counsel, a man named Kraus. Certainly Kraus would recognize his name.

  The clerk went to get him.

  Kraus emerged from his office and extended his hand. He introduced Prendergast to the other men on his staff as his “successor.” Suddenly everyone was smiling.

  At first Prendergast thought the smiling was an acknowledgment that soon he would be in charge, but now he saw it as something else.

  Kraus asked if he’d like the position immediately.

  “No,” Prendergast said. “I am in no hurry about it.”

  Which was not true, but the question had thrown Prendergast. He did not like the way Kraus asked it. Not at all.

  Toward Triumph

  BY TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING on Monday, October 9, 1893, the day Frank Millet had designated as Chicago Day, ticket-takers at the fair’s Sixty-fourth Street gate made an informal count of the morning’s sales thus far and found that this one gate had recorded 60,000 paid admissions. The men knew from experience that on any ordinary day sales at this gate accounted for about one-fifth of the total admissions to the fair for any given time, and so came up with an estimate that some 300,000 paid visitors already had entered Jackson Park—more than any other full day’s total and close to the world’s record of 397,000 held by the Paris exposition. Yet the morning had barely begun. The ticket-takers sensed that something odd was happening. The pace of admissions seemed to be multiplying by the hour. In some ticket booths the volume grew so great, so quickly, that silver coins began piling on the floors and burying the ticket-takers’ shoes.

  Millet and other fair officials had expected high attendance. Chicago was proud of its fair, and everyone knew that only three weeks remained before it would close forever. To assure maximum attendance, Mayor Harrison had signed an official proclamation that urged every business to suspend operation for the day. The courts closed, as did the Board of Trade. The weather helped, too. Monday was an apple-crisp day with temperatures that never exceeded sixty-two degrees, under vivid cerulean skies. Every hotel had filled to capacity, even beyond capacity, with some managers finding themselves compelled to install cots in lobbies and halls. The Wellington Catering Company, which operated eight restaurants and forty lunch counters in Jackson Park, had braced for the day by shipping in two traincar loads of potatoes, 4,000 half-barrels of beer, 15,000 gallons of ice cream, and 40,000 pounds of meat. Its cooks built 200,000 ham sandwiches and brewed 400,000 cups of coffee.

  No one, however, expected the sheer crush of visitors that actually did arrive. By noon the chief of admissions, Horace Tucker, wired a message to fair headquarters, “The Paris record is broken to smithereens, and the people are still coming.” A single ticket-seller, L. E. Decker, a nephew of Buffalo Bill who had sold tickets for Bill’s Wild West for eight years, sold 17,843 tickets during his shift, the most by any one man, and won Horace Tucker’s prize of a box of cigars. Lost children filled every chair at the headquarters of the Columbian Guard; nineteen spent the night and were claimed by their parents the next day. Five people were killed in or near the fair, including a worker obliterated while helping prepare the night’s fireworks and a visitor who stepped from one grip-car into the path of another. A woman lost her foot when a surging crowd knocked her from a train platform. George Ferris, riding his wheel that day, looked down and gasped, “There must be a million people down there.”

  The fireworks began at eight o’clock sharp. Millet had planned an elaborate series of explosive “set pieces,” fireworks affixed to large metal frames shaped to depict various portraits and tableaus. The first featured the Great Fire of 1871, including an image of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lantern. The night boomed and hissed. For the finale the fair’s pyrotechnicians launched five thousand rockets all at once into the black sky over the lake.

  The true climax occurred after the grounds closed, however. In the silence, with the air still scented with exploded powder, collectors accompanied by armed guards went to each ticket booth and collected the accumulated silver, three tons of it. They counted the money under heavy guard. By one forty-five A.M., they had an exact total.

  Ferris had nearly gotten it right. In that single day 713,646 people had paid to enter Jackson Park. (Only 31,059—four percent—were children.) Another 37,380 visitors had entered using passes, bringing the total admission for the day to 751,026, more people than had attended any single day of any peaceable event in history. The Tribune argued that the only greater gathering was the massing of Xerxes’ army of over five million souls in the fifth century B.C. The Paris record of 397,000 had indeed been shattered.

  When the news reached Burnham’s shanty, there were cheers and champagne and stories through the night. But the best news came the next day, when officials of the World’s Columbian Exposition Company, whose boasts had been ridiculed far and wide, presented a check for $1.5 million to the Illinois Trust and Savings Company and thereby extinguished the last of the exposition’s debts.

  The Windy City had prevailed.

  Now Burnham and Millet made final arrangements for Burnham’s own great day, the grand closing ceremony of October 30 that would recognize once and for all that Burnham really had done it and that his work was now complete—that for once there was nothing left to do. At this point, Burnham believed, nothing could tarnish the fair’s triumph or his own place in architectural history.

  Departures

  FRANK MILLET HOPED THE closing ceremony would attract even more people than the fair’s Chicago Day. While Millet did his planning, many of the other men who had helped Burnham construct the fair began the return to ordinary life.

  Charles McKim disengaged reluctantly. For him the fair had been a brilliant light that for a time dispelled the shadows that had accumulated around his life. He left Jackson Park abruptly on the morning of October 23 and later that day wrote to Burnham, “You know my dislike for saying ‘Good-bye’ and were prepared to find that I had skipped this morning. To say that I was sorry to leave you all is to put it only one half as strongly as I feel.

  “You gave me a beautiful time and the last days of the Fair will always remain in my mind, as were the first, especially identified with yourself. It will be pleasant for the rest of our natural lives to be able to look back to it and talk it over and over and over again, and it goes without saying that you can depend upon me in every way as often hereafter as you may have need of me.”

  The next day McKim wrote to a friend in Paris of the deepening consensus among himself, Burnham, and most of Chicago that the fair was too wonderful a thing to be allowed simply to fall into disrepair after its official closure on October 30, just six days thence: “indeed it is the ambition of all concerned to have it swept away in the same magical manner in which it appeared, and with the utmost despatch. For economy, as well as for obvious reasons, it has been proposed that the most glorious way would be to blow up the buildings wit
h dynamite. Another scheme is to destroy them with fire. This last would be the easiest and grandest spectacle except for the danger of flying embers in the event of a change of wind from the lake.”

  Neither McKim nor Burnham truly believed the fair should be set aflame. The buildings, in fact, had been designed to maximize the salvage value of their components. Rather, this talk of conflagration was a way of easing the despair of watching the dream come to an end. No one could bear the idea of the White City lying empty and desolate. A Cosmopolitan writer said, “Better to have it vanish suddenly, in a blaze of glory, than fall into gradual disrepair and dilapidation. There is no more melancholy spectacle than a festal hall, the morning after the banquet, when the guests have departed and the lights are extinguished.”

  Later, these musings about fire would come to seem like prophecy.

  Olmsted too severed his connection. Toward the end of summer his busy schedule and the stifling heat caused his health to fail once again and reactivated his insomnia. He had many projects under way, chief among them Biltmore, but he felt himself nearing the end of his career. He was seventy-one years old. On September 6, 1893, he wrote to a friend, Fred Kingsbury, “I can’t come to you and often dream of a ride through our old haunts and meeting you and others but have pretty well surrendered to Fate. I must flounder along my way to the end.” Olmsted did, however, allow himself a rare expression of satisfaction. “I enjoy my children,” he told Kingsbury. “They are one of the centers of my life, the other being the improvement of scenery and making the enjoyment of it available. Spite of my infirmities which do drag me cruelly, I am not to be thought of as an unhappy old man.”

  Louis Sullivan, engorged with praise and awards for his Transportation Building—especially its Golden Door—again took up his work with Dankmar Adler but under changed circumstances. The deepening depression and missteps by the two partners had left the firm with few projects. For all of 1893 they would complete only two buildings. Sullivan, never easy on his peers, became furious with one of the firm’s junior architects when he discovered the man had been using his free time to design houses for clients of his own. Sullivan fired him.