The Devil in the White City

by Erik Larson

  For Olmsted the rain was particularly disheartening. It fell on ground already saturated, and it filled every dip in every path. Puddles became lakes. The wheels of heavily loaded wagons sank deep into the mud and left gaping lacerations, adding to the list of wounds to be filled, smoothed, and sodded.

  Despite the rain the pace of work increased. Olmsted was awed by the sheer numbers of workers involved. On April 27, three days before the opening, he reported to his firm, “I wrote you that there were 2,000 men employed—foolishly. There have been 2,000 men employed directly by Mr. Burnham. This week there are more than twice that number, exclusive of contractors forces. Including contractors and concessionaires’ forces, there are now 10,000 men at work on the ground, and would be more if more of certain classes could be obtained. Our work is badly delayed because teams cannot be hired in sufficient numbers.” (His estimate was low: In these closing weeks the total number of workers in the park was almost twenty thousand.) He was still desperately short of plants, he complained. “All resources for these seem to have failed and the want of them will be serious in its result.”

  His ulcerated tooth, at least, had improved, and he was no longer confined to bed. “My ulcer has shrunk,” he wrote. “I still have to live on bread & milk but am going about in the rain today and getting better.”

  That same day, however, he wrote John a private and far bleaker letter. “We are having bad luck. Heavy rain again today.” Burnham was pressuring him to take all manner of shortcuts to get the Court of Honor into presentable shape, such as having his men fill pots with rhododendrons and palms to decorate terraces, precisely the kind of showy transient measures that Olmsted disdained. “I don’t like it at all,” he wrote. He resented having “to resort to temporary expedients merely to make a poor show for the opening.” He knew that immediately after the opening all such work would have to be redone. His ailments, his frustration, and the mounting intensity of the work taxed his spirits and caused him to feel older than his age. “The diet of the provisional mess table, the noise & scurry and the puddles and rain do not leave a dilapidated old man much comfort & my throat & mouth are still in such condition that I have to keep slopping victuals.”

  He did not give up, however. Despite the rain he jolted around the grounds to direct planting and sodding and every morning at dawn attended Burnham’s mandatory muster of key men. The exertion and weather reversed the improvement in his health. “I took cold & was up all night with bone trouble and am living on toast & tea,” he wrote on Friday, April 28. “Nearly constant heavy rain all the day, checking our work sadly.” Yet the frenzy of preparations for Monday’s opening continued unabated. “It is queer to see the painters at work on ladders & scaffolds in this heavy rain,” Olmsted wrote. “Many are completely drenched and I should think their painting must be streaky.” He noticed that the big Columbia Fountain at the western end of the central basin still was not finished, even though it was to be a key feature of the opening ceremony. A test was scheduled for the following day, Saturday. “It does not look ready by any means,” Olmsted wrote, “but it is expected that it will play before the President next Monday.”

  As for the work under his own department, Olmsted was disappointed. He had hoped to accomplish far more by now. He knew, also, that others shared his disappointment. “I get wind of much misplaced criticism, by men as clever even as Burnham, because of impressions from incomplete work and undeveloped compositions,” he wrote. He knew that in many places the grounds did look sparse and unkempt and that much work remained—anyone could see the gaps—but to hear about it from others, especially from a man whom he admired and respected, was profoundly depressing.

  The deadline was immutable. Too much had been set in motion for anyone even to consider postponement. The opening ceremony was scheduled to begin, would begin, on Monday morning with a parade from the Loop to Jackson Park, led by the new president of the United States, Grover Cleveland. Train after train now entered Chicago bringing statesmen, princes, and tycoons from all over the world. President Cleveland arrived with his vice president and a retinue of cabinet officials, senators, and military leaders and their wives, children, and friends. The rain steamed off black locomotives. Porters hauled great trunks from the baggage cars. Caravans of water-slicked black carriages lined the streets outside the city’s train stations, their red waiting lights haloed by the rain. The hours slipped past.

  On the evening of April 30, the night before Opening Day, a British reporter named F. Herbert Stead visited the fairgrounds. The name Stead was well known in America because of Herbert’s more famous brother, William, the former editor of London’s Pall Mall Gazette and recent founder of The Review of Reviews. Assigned to cover the opening ceremony, Herbert decided to scout the grounds ahead of time to get a more detailed sense of the fair’s topography.

  It was raining hard when he exited his carriage and entered Jackson Park. Lights blazed everywhere as shawls of rain unfurled around them. The ponds that had replaced Olmsted’s elegant paths shuddered under the impact of a billion falling droplets. Hundreds of empty freight cars stood black against the lights. Lumber and empty crates and the remains of workers’ lunches lay everywhere.

  The whole scene was heartbreaking but also perplexing: The fair’s Opening Day celebration was set to begin the next morning, yet the grounds were clotted with litter and debris—in a state, Stead wrote, of “gross incompleteness.”

  The rain continued through the night.

  Later that Sunday night, as rain thumped their windowsills, editors of Chicago’s morning dailies laid out bold and elaborate headlines for Monday’s historic editions. Not since the Chicago Fire of 1871 had the city’s newspapers been so galvanized by a single event. But there was more quotidian work to be done as well. The more junior typesetters leaded and shimmed the classifieds and personals and all the other advertisements that filled the inside pages. Some that night worked on a small notice announcing the opening of a new hotel, clearly another hastily built affair meant to capitalize on the expected crush of exposition visitors. This hotel at least seemed to be well located—at Sixty-third and Wallace in Englewood, a short ride on the new Alley L from the fair’s Sixty-third Street gate.

  The owner called it the World’s Fair Hotel.

  PART III

  In the White City

  (May–October 1893)

  The Court of Honor.

  Opening Day

  TWENTY-THREE GLEAMING BLACK CARRIAGES stood in the yellow mud of Michigan Avenue in front of the Lexington Hotel. President Cleveland boarded the seventh carriage, a landau. Burnham and Davis shared the sixth. Both men behaved, although they still had not shed their mutual distrust nor resolved their struggle for supreme control of the fair. The duke of Veragua, a direct descendent of Columbus, sat in the fourteenth carriage; the duchess occupied the fifteenth with Bertha Palmer, whose diamonds radiated an almost palpable heat. Mayor Harrison took the very last carriage and drew the loudest cheers. Assorted other dignitaries filled the remaining carriages. As the procession rumbled south along Michigan Avenue toward Jackson Park, the street behind became a following sea of 200,000 Chicagoans on foot and horseback, in phaetons, victorias, and stanhopes, and packed into omnibuses and streetcars. Many thousands of others boarded trains and jammed the bright yellow cars, dubbed “cattle cars,” built by the Illinois Central to haul as many people as possible to the fair. Anyone with a white handkerchief waved it, and white flags hung from every lamppost. Damp bunting swelled from building façades. Fifteen hundred members of the Columbian Guard in their new uniforms of light blue sackcloth, white gloves, and yellow-lined black capes met the throng and cordially directed everyone to the Administration Building, recognizable by its lofty gold dome.

  The procession approached the fair from the west, through the Midway Plaisance. Just as the president’s carriage turned into the Avenue of Nations, which ran the thirteen-block length of the Midway, the sun emerged, igniting a roar of approval from s
pectators as it lit the forty concessions that lined the avenue, some the size of small towns. The carriages rolled past Sitting Bull’s Cabin, the Lapland Village, the compound of the allegedly cannibalistic Dahomans, and, directly opposite, the California Ostrich Farm, redolent of simmering butter and eggs. The farm offered omelets made from ostrich eggs, though in fact the eggs came from domestic chickens. The procession passed the Austrian Village and Captive Balloon Park, where a hydrogen balloon tethered to the ground took visitors aloft. At the center of the Midway, the procession veered around the woefully incomplete Ferris Wheel, which Burnham eyed with displeasure. It was a half-moon of steel encased in a skyscraper of wooden falsework.

  When President Cleveland’s carriage came to Sol Bloom’s Algerian Village, at the Muslim core of the Midway, Bloom gave a nod, and the women of the village dropped their veils. Bloom swore it was a customary gesture of respect, but of course with Bloom one could never be sure. The carriages skirted the Street in Cairo—not yet open, another disappointment—and passed the Turkish Village and the Java Lunch Room. Outside Hagenback’s Animal Show, the most famous traveling zoo of the day, handlers prodded four trained lions into full roar. To the right, in the smoky distance, the president saw the banners of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West flying over the arena Colonel Cody had built at Sixty-second Street.

  At last the carriages entered Jackson Park.

  There would be miracles at the fair—the chocolate Venus de Milo would not melt, the 22,000-pound cheese in the Wisconsin Pavilion would not mold—but the greatest miracle was the transformation of the grounds during the long soggy night that had preceded Cleveland’s arrival. When Herbert Stead returned the next morning, a plain of wind-rippled water still covered portions of the park, but the empty boxcars and packing debris were gone. Ten thousand men working through the night had touched up the paint and staff and planted pansies and laid sod as a thousand scrubwomen washed, waxed, and polished the floors of the great buildings. As the morning advanced, the sun emerged more fully. In the bright rain-scrubbed air those portions of the landscape not still submerged looked cheerful, trim, and neat. “When the Fair opened,” said Paul Starrett, one of Burnham’s men, “Olmsted’s lawns were the first amazement.”

  At eleven o’clock President Cleveland ascended the stairs to the speakers’ platform, erected outside at the east end of the Administration Building, and took his seat, the signal for the ceremony to begin. The crowd surged forward. Twenty women fainted. Reporters lucky enough to be in the front rows rescued one elderly woman by hauling her over a railing and laying her out on a press table. Members of the Guard waded in with swords drawn. Mayhem reigned until Director-General Davis signaled the orchestra to begin playing the introductory “Columbian March.”

  Chastened by criticism of the stupefying length of October’s Dedication Day ceremony, the fair’s officers had kept the Opening Day program short and pledged to honor the timetable at all costs. First came a blessing, given by a blind chaplain to an audience made deaf by size and distance. Next came a poetic ode to Columbus that was as long and difficult to endure as the admiral’s voyage itself: “Then from the Pinta’s foretop fell a cry, a trumpet song, ‘Light ho! Light ho! Light!’ ”

  That kind of thing.

  Director-General Davis spoke next and offered a meaty helping of distorted reality, praising the way the National Commission, the Exposition Company, and the Board of Lady Managers had worked together without strife to produce such a brilliant exposition. Those privy to the warfare within and between these agencies watched Burnham closely but saw no change in his expression. Davis offered the podium to the president.

  Cleveland, immense in black, paused a moment in sober examination of the crowd before him. Nearby stood a table draped in an American flag, on top of which lay a blue and red velvet pillow supporting a telegraph key made of gold.

  Every bit of terrace, lawn, and railing in the Court of Honor was occupied, the men in black and gray, many of the women in gowns of extravagant hues—violet, scarlet, emerald—and wearing hats with ribbons, sprigs, and feathers. A tall man in a huge white hat and a white buckskin coat heavily trimmed in silver stood a full head above the men around him: Buffalo Bill. Women watched him. Sunlight fell between tufts of fast-shredding cloud and lit the white Panamas that flecked the audience. From the president’s vantage point the scene was festive and crisp, but at ground level there was water and mud and the mucid sucking that accompanied any shift in position. The only human form with dry feet was that of Daniel Chester French’s Statue of the Republic—Big Mary—which stood hidden under a silo of canvas.

  Cleveland’s speech was the shortest of all. As he concluded, he moved to the flag-draped table. “As by a touch the machinery that gives light to this vast Exposition is set in motion,” he said, “so at the same instant let our hopes and aspirations awaken forces which in all time to come shall influence the welfare, the dignity, and the freedom of mankind.”

  At precisely 12:08 he touched the gold key. A roar radiated outward as successive strata of the crowd learned that the key had been pressed. Workmen on rooftops immediately signaled to peers stationed throughout the park and to sailors aboard the warship Michigan anchored in the lake. The key closed an electric circuit that activated the Electro-Automatic Engine Stop and Starter attached to the giant three-thousand-horsepower Allis steam engine at the Machinery Building. The starter’s silver-plated gong rang, a sprocket turned, a valve opened, and the engine whooshed to life on exquisitely machined shafts and bearings. Immediately thirty other engines in the building began to thrum. At the fair’s waterworks three huge Worthington pumps began stretching their shafts and pistons, like praying mantises shaking off the cold. Millions of gallons of water began surging through the fair’s mains. Engines everywhere took steam until the ground trembled. An American flag the size of a mainsail unfurled from the tallest flagpole in the Court of Honor, and immediately two more like-sized flags tumbled from flanking poles, one representing Spain, the other Columbus. Water pressurized by the Worthington pumps exploded from the MacMonnies Fountain and soared a hundred feet into the sky, casting a sheet rainbow across the sun and driving visitors to raise their umbrellas against the spray. Banners and flags and gonfalons suddenly bellied from every cornice, a huge red banner unscrolled along the full length of the Machinery Building, and the canvas slipped from Big Mary’s gold-leaf shoulders. Sunlight clattering from her skin caused men and women to shield their eyes. Two hundred white doves leaped for the sky. The guns of the Michigan fired. Steam whistles shrieked. Spontaneously the throng began to sing “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” which many thought of as the national anthem although no song had yet received that designation. As the crowd thundered, a man eased up beside a thin, pale woman with a bent neck. In the next instant Jane Addams realized her purse was gone.

  The great fair had begun.

  Although Burnham recognized that much work lay ahead—that Olmsted had to redouble his efforts and Ferris needed to finish that damned wheel—the success of the exposition now seemed assured. Congratulations arrived by telegraph and post. A friend told Burnham, “The scene burst on me with the beauty of a full blown rose.” The official history of the fair estimated that a quarter of a million people packed Jackson Park on Opening Day. Two other estimates put the total at 500,000 and 620,000. By day’s end there was every indication that Chicago’s fair would become the most heavily attended entertainment in the history of the world.

  This optimism lasted all of twenty-four hours.

  On Tuesday, May 2, only ten thousand people came to Jackson Park, a rate of attendance that, if continued, would guarantee the fair a place in history as one of the greatest failures of all time. The yellow cattle cars were mostly empty, as were the cars of the Alley L that ran along Sixty-third Street. All hope that this was merely an anomaly disappeared the next day, when the forces that had been battering the nation’s economy erupted in a panic on Wall Street that caused stock prices to pl
ummet. Over the next week the news grew steadily more disturbing.

  On the night of Thursday, May 5, officials of the National Cordage Company, a trust that controlled 80 percent of America’s rope production, placed itself in receivership. Next Chicago’s Chemical National Bank ceased operation, a closure that seemed particularly ominous to fair officials because Chemical alone had won congressional approval to open a branch at the world’s fair, in no less central a location than the Administration Building. Three days later another large Chicago bank failed, and soon after that a third, the Evanston National Bank, in Burnham’s town. Dozens of other failures occurred around the country. In Brunswick, Georgia, the presidents of two national banks held a meeting. One president calmly excused himself, entered his private office, and shot himself through the head. Both banks failed. In Lincoln, Nebraska, the Nebraska Savings Bank had become the favorite bank of schoolchildren. The town’s teachers served as agents of the bank and every week collected money from the children for deposit in each child’s passbook account. Word that the bank was near failure caused the street out front to fill with children pleading for their money. Other banks came to Nebraska Savings’ rescue, and the so-called “children’s run” was quelled.

  People who otherwise might have traveled to Chicago to see the fair now stayed home. The terrifying economy was discouraging enough, but so too were reports of the unfinished character of the fair. If people had only one chance to go, they wanted to do it when all the exhibits were in place and every attraction was in operation, especially the Ferris Wheel, said to be a marvel of engineering that would make the Eiffel Tower seem like a child’s sculpture—provided it ever actually worked and did not collapse in the first brisk wind.