including Mrs. Frances E. Willard, president of the Union, and Carter Henry Harrison, a former mayor who, with four terms already under his belt, was again running for the office. When Harrison appeared, wearing his usual black slouch hat, his pocket quilled with cigars, the crowd roared a welcome, especially the Irish and union men who saw Harrison as a friend of the city’s lower classes. The presence of Burnham, Root, and Harrison beside the Temperance stone was more than a bit ironic. As mayor, Harrison had kept a couple of cases of fine bourbon in his office at city hall. The city’s stern Protestant upper class saw him as a civic satyr whose tolerance of prostitution, gambling and alcohol had allowed the city’s vice districts, most notably the Levee—home of the infamous bartender and robber Mickey Finn—to swell to new heights of depravity. Root was a notorious bon vivant, whom Louis Sullivan once described as “a man of the world, of the flesh, and considerably of the devil.” And Burnham, in addition to monitoring the global passage of his Madeira, each year bottled four hundred quarts of lesser stuff sent to him by a friend and personally selected the wines for the cellar of the Union League Club.
With great ceremony Burnham handed a silver-plated trowel to Mrs. T. B. Carse, president of the Temple Building Association, whose smile suggested she knew nothing of these monstrous habits or at least was willing for the moment to ignore them. She scooped up a mound of mortar previously laid for purposes of the ceremony, then reapplied it and tapped it back into place, prompting a witness to observe, “she patted the mortar as a man sometimes pats the head of a curly-haired boy.” She passed the trowel to the fearsome Mrs. Willard, “who stopped the mortar more heartily, and got some of it on her gown.”
Root, according to a witness, leaned toward friends and suggested sotto voce that they all cut away for cocktails.
Nearby, at the distribution warehouse of the
He was twenty-two years old, born in Ireland in 1868; his family emigrated to the United States in 1871 and in August that year moved to Chicago, just in time to experience the Great Fire. He was always, as his mother said, “a shy and retiring kind of a boy.” He got his grade-school education at Chicago’s De La Salle Institute. Brother Adjutor, one of his teachers, said, “While in school he was a remarkable boy in this way, that he was very quiet and took no part in the play of the other students at noon time. He would generally stand around. From the appearance of the boy I would be led to think that he was not well; that he was sick.” Prendergast’s father got him a job delivering telegrams for Western Union, which the boy held for a year and a half. When Prendergast was thirteen, his father died, and he lost his only friend. For a time his withdrawal from the world seemed complete. He awakened slowly. He began reading books about law and politics and attending meetings of the Single-Tax Club, which embraced Henry George’s belief that private landowners should pay a tax, essentially rent, to reflect the underlying truth that land belonged to everyone. At these meetings Prendergast insisted on taking part in every conversation and once had to be carried from the room. To his mother, he seemed to be a different man: well read, animated, involved. She said: “He got smart all of a sudden.”
In fact, his madness had become more profound. When he was not working, he wrote postcards, scores of them, perhaps hundreds, to the most powerful men in the city, in a voice that presumed he was their equal in social stature. He wrote to his beloved Harrison and to assorted other politicians, including the governor of Illinois. It’s possible even that Burnham received a card, given his new prominence.
That Prendergast was a troubled young man was clear; that he might be dangerous seemed impossible. To anyone who met him, he appeared to be just another poor soul crushed by the din and filth of Chicago. But Prendergast had grand hopes for the future, all of which rested on one man: Carter Henry Harrison.
He threw himself eagerly into Harrison’s mayoral campaign, albeit without Harrison’s knowledge, sending postcards by the dozens and telling anyone who would listen that Harrison, staunch friend of the Irish and the working man, was the best candidate for the job.
He believed that when Harrison at last won his fifth two-year term—ideally in the upcoming April 1891 election, but perhaps not until the next, in 1893—he would reward Prendergast with a job. That was how Chicago politics worked. He had no doubt that Harrison would come through and rescue him from the frozen mornings and venomous newsboys that for the moment defined his life.
Among the most progressive alienists, this kind of unfounded belief was known as a delusion, associated with a newly identified disorder called paranoia. Happily, most delusions were harmless.
On October 25, 1890, the site for the fair still unchosen, worrisome news arrived from Europe, the first hint of forces gathering that could do infinitely more damage to the fair than the directors’ stalemate. The
The next Saturday news of a truly stunning failure stuttered through the submarine cable that linked Britain and America.
In Chicago, before the news arrived, brokers spent a good deal of time discussing the morning’s strange weather. An unusually “murky pall” hung over the city. Brokers joked how the gloom might be the signal that a “day of judgment” was at hand.
The chuckling faded with the first telegrams from London: Baring Brothers & Co., the powerful London investment house, was on the verge of closure. “The news,” a
For Burnham and the exposition directors, this wave of financial damage was troubling. If it indeed marked the start of a true and deep financial panic, the timing was abysmal. In order for Chicago to live up to its boasts about surpassing the Paris exposition in both size and attendance, the city would have to spend far more heavily than the French and capture a lot more visitors—yet the Paris show had drawn more people than any other peaceful event in history. In the best of times winning an audience of that scale would be a challenge; in the worst, impossible, especially since Chicago’s interior location guaranteed that most visitors would have to buy an overnight train ticket. The railroads had made it known early and forcefully that they had no plans to discount their Chicago fares for the exposition.
Other corporate failures occurred both in Europe and in the United States, but their true meaning remained for the moment unclear—in retrospect, a good thing.
In the midst of this intensifying financial turbulence, on October 30 the exposition board appointed Burnham chief of construction, with a salary equivalent to $360,000; Burnham in turn made Root the fair’s supervising architect and Olmsted its supervising landscape architect.
Burnham now possessed formal authority to begin building a fair, but he still had no place to put it.
“Don’t Be Afraid”
AS ENGLEWOOD GAINED POPULATION, Holmes’s sales of tonics and lotions increased. By the end of 1886 the pharmacy was running smoothly and profitably. His thoughts turned now to a woman he had met earlier in the year during his brief stay in Minneapolis, Myrta Z. Belknap. She was young and blond, with blue eyes and a lush figure, but what elevated her above mere beauty was the aura of vulnerability and need that surrounded her. She became an immediate obsession, her image and need locked in his brain. He traveled to Minneapolis, ostensibly on business. He had no doubt he would succeed. It amused him that women as a class were so wonderfully vulnerable, as if they believed that the codes of conduct that applied in their safe little hometowns, like Alva, Clinton, and Percy, might actually still apply once they had left behind their dusty, kerosene-scented parlors and set out on their
