was more disabled when I returned than when I left.” Now, however, he had no time to recuperate. Dedication Day was only a month away, and Harry Codman was again ill, incapacitated by the same stomach problem that had struck him during the summer. Olmsted left for Chicago to take over direct supervision of the work while Codman recovered. “I am still tortured a good deal with neuralgia and toothache,” Olmsted wrote, “and I am tired and have a growing dread of worry & anxiety.”
In Chicago he found a changed park. The Mines Building was finished, as was the Fisheries Building. Most of the other buildings were well under way, including, incredibly, the giant Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, where hundreds of workers swarmed its scaffolds and roof. The building’s floor alone had consumed five traincar loads of nails.
Amid all this work, however, the landscape had suffered. Temporary tracks latticed the grounds. Wagons had gouged chasms across paths, roads, and would-be lawns. Litter lay everywhere. A first-time visitor might wonder if Olmsted’s men had done any work at all.
Olmsted, of course, knew that tremendous progress had been made, but it was the sort that escaped casual notice. Lagoons existed now where once there had been barren land. The elevated sites upon which the buildings stood had not existed until his grading teams created them. The previous spring his men had planted nearly everything raised in the exposition’s nurseries, plus an additional 200,000 trees, aquatic plants, and ferns, and 30,000 more willow cuttings, all this under the direction of his aptly named head gardener, E. Dehn.
In the time left before Dedication Day Burnham wanted Olmsted’s men to concentrate on cleaning the grounds and dressing them with flowers and temporary lawns of sod, actions that Olmsted understood were necessary but that clashed with his career-long emphasis on designing for scenic effects that might not be achieved for decades. “Of course the main work suffers,” he wrote.
One indisputably positive development had occurred during his absence, however. Burnham had awarded the boat concession to a company called the Electric Launch and Navigation Company, which had produced a lovely electric vessel of exactly the character Olmsted wanted.
On Dedication Day even the press was polite enough to overlook the stark appearance of the grounds and the unfinished feel of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. To have done otherwise would have been an act of disloyalty to Chicago and the nation.
The dedication had been anticipated nationwide. Francis J. Bellamy, an editor of
A great parade brought Burnham and other dignitaries to the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, where a standing army of 140,000 Chicagoans filled the thirty-two-acre floor. Shafts of sunlight struck through the rising mist of human breath. Five thousand yellow chairs stood on the red-carpeted speaker’s platform, and in these chairs sat businessmen dressed in black, and foreign commissioners and clerics in scarlet, purple, green, and gold. Ex-mayor Carter Harrison, again running for a fifth term, strode about shaking hands, his black slouch hat raising cheers from supporters in the crowd. At the opposite end of the building a five-thousand-voice choir sang Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus to the accompaniment of five hundred musicians. At one point a spectator recalled, “Ninety thousand people suddenly rose and stood upon their feet and simultaneously waved and fluttered ninety thousand snowy pocket- handkerchiefs; the air was cut into dusty spirals, which vibrated to the great iron-ribbed ceiling…. One had a sense of dizziness, as if the entire building rocked.”
The chamber was so immense that visual signals had to be used to let the chorus know when a speaker had stopped talking and a new song could begin. Microphones did not yet exist, so only a small portion of the audience actually heard any speeches. The rest, with faces contorted from the strain of trying to listen, saw distant men gesturing wildly into the sound-killing miasma of whispers, coughs and creaking shoe leather. Harriet Monroe, the poet who had been John Root’s sister-in-law, was there and watched as two of the nation’s greatest speakers, Colonel Henry Watterson of Kentucky and Chauncey M. Depew of New York, took turns at the podium, “both orators waving their windy words toward a vast, whispering, rustling audience which could not hear.”
This was a big day for Miss Monroe. She had composed a lengthy poem for the event, her “Columbian Ode,” and pestered her many powerful friends into having it placed on the day’s program. She watched with pride as an actress read it to the few thousand people close enough to hear it. Unlike the majority of the audience, Monroe believed the poem to be rather a brilliant work, so much so that she had hired a printer to produce five thousand copies for sale to the public. She sold few and attributed the debacle to America’s fading love of poetry.
That winter she burned the excess copies for fuel.
Prendergast
ON NOVEMBER 28, 1892, Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast, the mad Irish immigrant and Harrison supporter, selected one of his postal cards. He was twenty-four years old now and despite his accelerating mental decline was still employed by the
He addressed this particular card to “A. S. Trude, Lawyer.” He sketched the letters of the name in large floral script, as if seeking to dispatch the cumbersome duty of addressing the card as quickly as possible, before advancing to the message itself.
That Prendergast had selected Trude to be one of his correspondents was not surprising. Prendergast read widely and possessed a good grasp of the grip-car wrecks, murders, and City Hall machinations covered so fervently by the city’s newspapers. He knew that Alfred S. Trude was one of Chicago’s best criminal defense attorneys and that from time to time he was hired by the state to serve as prosecutor, a practice customary in particularly important cases.
Prendergast filled the postcard from top margin to bottom, from edge to edge, with little regard for whether the sentences formed level lines or not. He gripped the pen so tightly it impressed channels into the tips of his thumb and forefinger. “My Dear Mr. Trude,” he began. “Were you much hurt?” An accident, reported in the press, had caused Trude minor injuries. “Your humble servant hereby begs leave to tender you his sincere sympathy and trusts that while he does not appear before you in person, you nonetheless will not have any doubts as to his real sympathy for you in your misfortunes—you are wished by him a speedy recovery from the results of the accident which you had the misfortune to meet with.”
He wrote with a tone of familiarity that presumed Trude would consider him a peer. As the note progressed, his handwriting shrank, until it seemed like something extruded rather than written. “I suppose Mr. Trude that you do understand that the greatest authority on the subject of law is Jesus Christ—and that you also know that the fulfillment of the whole law depends upon the observance of these two commands thou shalt Love God most of all & your neighbor as your self—these are the greatest commands if you please sir.”
The note clicked from theme to theme like the wheels of a train crossing a freightyard. “Have you ever saw the picture of the fat man who looked for his dog while his dog was at his feet and still did not have the wit to see what was the matter—have you observed the cat?”
He did not add a closing and did not sign the note. He simply ran out of room, then posted the card.
Trude read the note and at first dismissed it as the work of a crank. The number of troubled men and women seemed to be increasing with each passing year. The jails were full of them, a warden later would testify. Inevitably some became dangerous, like Charles Guiteau, the man who had assassinated President Garfield in Washington.
For no clear reason, Trude kept the card.
