A Gauntlet Dropped
EIGHTEEN NINETY-TWO BROKE COLD, with six inches of snow on the ground and temperatures falling to ten degrees below zero, certainly not the coldest weather Chicago had ever experienced but cold enough to clot the valves of all three of the city water system’s intake valves and temporarily halt the flow of Chicago’s drinking water. Despite the weather, work at Jackson Park progressed. Workers erected a heated movable shelter that allowed them to apply staff to the exterior of the Mines Building no matter what the temperature. The Woman’s Building was nearly finished, all its scaffolding gone; the giant Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building had begun rising above its foundation. In all, the workforce in the park numbered four thousand. The ranks included a carpenter and furniture-maker named Elias Disney, who in coming years would tell many stories about the construction of this magical realm beside the lake. His son Walt would take note.
Beyond the exposition’s eight-foot fence and its two tiers of barbed wire, there was tumult. Wage reductions and layoffs stoked unrest among workers nationwide. Unions gained strength; the Pinkerton National Detective Agency gained revenue. A rising union man named Samuel Gompers stopped by Burnham’s office to discuss allegations that the exposition discriminated against union workers. Burnham ordered his construction superintendent, Dion Geraldine, to investigate. As labor strife increased and the economy faltered, the general level of violence rose. In taking stock of 1891, the
The constant threat of strike and the onset of deep cold shaded the new year for Burnham, but what most concerned him was the fast-shrinking treasury of the Exposition Company. In advancing the work so quickly and on such a grand scale, Burnham’s department had consumed far more money than anyone had anticipated. There was talk now among the directors of seeking a $10 million appropriation from Congress, but the only immediate solution was to reduce expenditures. On January 6 Burnham commanded his department chiefs to take immediate, in some cases draconian, measures to cut costs. He ordered his chief draftsman, in charge of exposition work under way in the attic of the Rookery, to fire at once any man who did “inaccurate or ‘slouchy’ work” or who failed to do more than his full duty. He wrote to Olmsted’s landscape superintendent, Rudolf Ulrich, “it seems to me you can now cut your force down one-half, and at the same time let very many expensive men go.” Henceforth, Burnham ordered, all carpentry work was to be done only by men employed by the fair’s contractors. To Dion Geraldine, he wrote, “You will please dismiss every carpenter on your force….”
Until this point Burnham had shown a level of compassion for his workers that was extraordinary for the time. He had paid them even when illness or injury kept them out of work and established an exposition hospital that provided free medical care. He built quarters within the park where they received three large meals a day and slept in clean beds and well-heated rooms. A Princeton professor of political economy named Walter Wyckoff disguised himself as an unskilled laborer and spent a year traveling and working among the nation’s growing army of unemployed men, including a stint at Jackson Park. “Guarded by sentries and high barriers from unsought contact with all beyond, great gangs of us, healthy, robust men, live and labor in a marvelous artificial world,” he wrote. “No sight of misery disturbs us, nor of despairing poverty out in vain search for employment…. We work our eight hours a day in peaceful security and in absolute confidence of our pay.”
But now even the fair was laying off men, and the timing was awful. With the advent of winter the traditional building season had come to an end. Competition for the few jobs available had intensified as thousands of unemployed men from around the country—unhappily bearing the label “hobo,” derived possibly from the railroad cry “ho, boy”—converged on Chicago in hopes of getting exposition work. The dismissed men, Burnham knew, faced homelessness and poverty; their families confronted the real prospect of starvation. But the fair came first.
The absence of an Eiffel challenger continued to frustrate Burnham. Proposals got more and more bizarre. One visionary put forth a tower five hundred feet taller than the Eiffel Tower but made entirely of logs, with a cabin at the top for shelter and refreshment. The cabin was to be a log cabin.
If an engineer capable of besting Eiffel did not step forward soon, Burnham knew, there simply would not be enough time left to build anything worthy of the fair. Somehow he needed to rouse the engineers of America. The opportunity came with an invitation to give a talk to the Saturday Afternoon Club, a group of engineers who had begun meeting on Saturdays at a downtown restaurant to discuss the construction challenges of the fair.
There was the usual meal in multiple courses, with wine, cigars, coffee, and cognac. At one table sat a thirty-three-year-old engineer from Pittsburgh who ran a steel-inspection company that had branch offices in New York and Chicago and that already possessed the exposition contract to inspect the steel used in the fair’s buildings. He had an angular face, black hair, a black mustache, and dark eyes, the kind of looks soon to be coveted by an industry that Thomas Edison was just then bringing to life. He “was eminently engaging and social and he had a keen sense of humor,” his partners wrote. “In all gatherings he at once became the center of attraction, having a ready command of language and a constant fund of amusing anecdotes and experiences.”
Like the other members of the Saturday Afternoon Club, he expected to hear Burnham discuss the challenges of building an entire city on such a short schedule, but Burnham surprised him. After asserting that “the architects of America had covered themselves with glory” through their exposition designs, Burnham rebuked the nation’s civil engineers for failing to rise to the same level of brilliance. The engineers, Burnham charged, “had contributed little or nothing either in the way of originating novel features or of showing the possibilities of modern engineering practice in America.”
A tremor of displeasure rolled through the room.
“Some distinctive feature is needed,” Burnham continued, “something to take the relative position in the World’s Columbian Exposition that was filled by the Eiffel Tower at the Paris Exposition.”
But not a tower, he said. Towers were not original. Eiffel had built a tower already. “Mere bigness” wasn’t enough either. “Something novel, original, daring and unique must be designed and built if American engineers are to retain their prestige and standing.”
Some of the engineers took offense; others acknowledged that Burnham had a point. The engineer from Pittsburgh felt himself “cut to the quick by the truth of these remarks.”
As he sat there among his peers, an idea came to him “like an inspiration.” It arrived not as some half- formed impulse, he said, but rich in detail. He could see it and touch it, hear it as it moved through the sky.
There was not much time left, but if he acted quickly to produce drawings and managed to convince the fair’s Ways and Means Committee of the idea’s feasibility, he believed the exposition could indeed out-Eiffel Eiffel. And if what happened to Eiffel happened to him, his fortune would be assured.
It must have been refreshing for Burnham to stand before the Saturday Afternoon Club and openly chide its members for their failure, because most of his other encounters over exposition business invariably became exercises in self-restraint, especially when he went before the fair’s many and still-multiplying committees. This constant Victorian minuet of false grace consumed time. He needed more power—not for his own ego but for the sake of the exposition. Unless the pace of decision-making accelerated, he knew, the fair would fall irreparably behind schedule, yet if anything the barriers to efficiency were increasing in size and number. The Exposition Company’s shrinking war chest had driven its relationship with the National Commission to a new low, with Director-General Davis arguing that any new federal money should be controlled by his commission. The commission seemed to form new departments every day, each with a paid chief—Davis named a superintendent of sheep, for a salary that today would total about $60,000 a year—and each claiming some piece of jurisdiction that Burnham thought belonged to him.
Soon the struggle for control distilled to a personal conflict between Burnham and Davis, its primary battlefield a disagreement over who should control the artistic design of exhibits and interiors. Burnham thought it obvious that the territory belonged to him. Davis believed otherwise.
At first Burnham tried the oblique approach. “We are now organizing a special interior decorative and architectural force to handle this part,” he wrote to Davis, “and I have the honor to offer the services of my department to yours in such matters. I feel a delicacy in having my men suggest to yours artistic arrangements, forms and decorations of exhibits, without your full approval, which I hereby respectfully ask.”
But Davis told a reporter, “I think it is pretty well understood by this time that no one but the Director-
