General and his agents have anything to do with exhibits.”
The conflict simmered. On March 14 Burnham joined Davis for dinner with Japan’s delegate to the fair, at the Chicago Club. Afterward Davis and Burnham remained at the club arguing quietly until five o’clock the next morning. “The time was well spent,” he wrote to Margaret, who was then out of town, “and we have come to a better feeling so that the path will be much smoother from this time forward.”
An uncharacteristic weariness crept into his letter. He told Margaret he planned to end work early that night and go to Evanston, “and sleep in your dear bed, my love, and I shall dream of you. What a rush this life is! Where do the years go to?”
There were moments of grace. Burnham looked forward to evenings on the grounds when his lieutenants and visiting architects would gather for dinner at the shanty and converse into the night in front of Burnham’s immense fireplace. Burnham treasured the camaraderie and the stories. Olmsted recounted the endless trials of protecting Central Park from ill-thought modifications. Colonel Edmund Rice, chief of the exposition’s Columbian Guard, described what it was like to stand in a shaded wood at Gettysburg as Pickett launched his men across the intervening field.
Late in March 1892 Burnham invited his sons to join him at the shanty for one of their periodic overnight stays. They failed to arrive at the scheduled time. At first everyone attributed their absence to a routine railroad delay, but as the hours passed, Burnham’s anxiety grew. He knew as well as anyone that train wrecks in Chicago were nearly a daily occurrence.
Darkness began to fall, but at last the boys arrived. Their train had been held up by a broken bridge on the Milwaukee & St. Paul line. They reached the shanty, Burnham wrote to Margaret, “just in time to hear Col. Rice tell some yarns about the war and life in the plains among the scouts and Indians.”
As Burnham wrote this letter, his sons were near at hand. “They are very happy to be here and are now looking at the large photographic album with Mr. Geraldine.” The album was a collection of construction photographs taken by Charles Dudley Arnold, a photographer from Buffalo, New York, whom Burnham had hired as the fair’s official photographer. Arnold also was present, and soon the children were to join him in a sketching session.
Burnham closed, “We are all well and satisfied with the amount and variety of work our good fortune has given us to do.”
Such peaceful intervals never lasted long.
The conflict between Burnham and Davis again flared to life. The directors of the Exposition Company did decide to seek a direct appropriation from Congress, but their request triggered a congressional investigation of the fair’s expenditures. Burnham and President Baker expected a general review but instead found themselves grilled about the most mundane expenses. For example, when Baker listed the total spent on carriage rental, the subcommittee demanded the names of the people who rode in the carriages. At one session in Chicago the committee asked Davis to estimate the final cost of the exposition. Without consulting Burnham, Davis gave an estimate ten percent below the amount Burnham had calculated for President Baker, which Baker had then included in his own statement to investigators. Davis’s testimony carried with it the unstated accusation that Burnham and Baker had inflated the amount of money needed to complete the fair.
Burnham leaped to his feet. The subcommittee chairman ordered him to sit. Burnham remained standing. He was angry, barely able to keep himself composed. “Mr. Davis has not been to see me or any of my people,” he said, “and any figures he has given he has jumped at. He knows nothing about the matter.”
His outburst offended the subcommittee chairman. “I object to any such remarks addressed to a witness before this committee,” the chairman said, “and I will ask that Mr. Burnham withdraw his remark.”
At first Burnham refused. Then, reluctantly, he agreed to withdraw the part about Davis knowing nothing. But only that part. He did not apologize.
The committee left for Washington to study the evidence and report on whether an appropriation was warranted. The congressmen, Burnham wrote, “are dazed with the size and scope of this enterprise. We gave them each a huge pile of data to digest, and I think their report will be funny, because I know that months would not be enough time for me to work out a report, even with my knowledge.”
On paper at least, the fair’s Midway Plaisance began to take shape. Professor Putnam had believed the Midway ought first and foremost to provide an education about alien cultures. Sol Bloom felt no such duty. The Midway was to be fun, a great pleasure garden stretching for more than a mile from Jackson Park all the way to the border of Washington Park. It would thrill, titillate, and if all went well perhaps even shock. He considered his great strength to be “spectacular advertising.” He placed notices in publications around the world to make it known that the Midway was to be an exotic realm of unusual sights, sounds, and scents. There would be authentic villages from far-off lands inhabited by authentic villagers—even Pygmies, if Lieutenant Schufeldt succeeded. Bloom recognized also that as czar of the Midway he no longer had to worry about seeking a concession for his Algerian Village. He could approve the village himself. He produced a contract and sent it off to Paris.
Bloom’s knack for promotion caught the attention of other fair officials, who came to him for help in raising the exposition’s overall profile. At one point he was called upon to help make reporters understand how truly immense the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building would be. So far the exposition’s publicity office had given the press a detailed list of monumental but dreary statistics. “I could tell they weren’t in the least interested in the number of acres or tons of steel,” Bloom wrote, “so I said, ‘Look at it this way—it’s going to be big enough to hold the entire standing army of Russia.’”
Bloom had no idea whether Russia even had a standing army, let alone how many soldiers it might include and how many square feet they would cover. Nonetheless, the fact became gospel throughout America. Readers of Rand, McNally’s exposition guidebooks eventually found themselves thrilling to the vision of millions of fur-hatted men squeezed onto the building’s thirty-two-acre floor.
Bloom felt no remorse.
The Angel from Dwight
IN THE SPRING OF 1892 Holmes’s assistant Benjamin Pitezel found himself in the city of Dwight, Illinois, about seventy-five miles southwest of Chicago, taking the famous Keeley cure for alcoholism. Patients stayed in the three-story Livingston Hotel, a red-brick building of simple appealing design, with arched windows and a veranda along the full length of its facade, a fine place to rest between injections of Dr. Leslie Enraught Keeley’s “gold cure.” Gold was the most famous ingredient in a red, white, and blue solution nicknamed the “barber pole” that employees of the Keeley Institute injected into patients’ arms three times a day. The needle, one of large nineteenth-century bore—like having a garden hose shoved into a bicep—invariably deposited a yellow aureole on the skin surrounding the injection site, a badge for some, an unsightly blemish for others. The rest of the formula was kept secret, but as best doctors and chemists could tell, the solution included substances that imparted a pleasant state of euphoria and sedation trimmed with amnesia—an effect the Chicago post office found problematic, for each year it wound up holding hundreds of letters sent from Dwight that lacked important elements of their destination addresses. The senders simply forgot that things like names and street numbers were necessary for the successful delivery of mail.
Pitezel had long been a heavy drinker, but his drinking must have become debilitating, for it was Holmes who sent him to Keeley and paid for his treatment. He explained it to Pitezel as a gesture born of kindness, a return for Pitezel’s loyalty. As always, he had other motives. He recognized that Pitezel’s drinking impaired his usefulness and threatened to disrupt schemes already in play. Holmes later said of Pitezel, “he was too valuable a man, even with his failings taken into consideration, for me to dispense with.” It’s likely Holmes also wanted Pitezel to gather whatever intelligence he could about the cure and its labeling, so that he could mimic the product and sell it through his own mail-order drug company. Later, indeed, Holmes would establish his own curative spa on the second floor of his Englewood building and call it the Silver Ash Institute. The Keeley cure was amazingly popular. Thousands of people came to Dwight to shed their intemperate ways; many thousands more bought Dr. Keeley’s oral version of
