The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

schoolyard lyric, “And they wear no pants in the southern part of France.”

Bloom regretted his failure to copyright the tune. The royalties would have run into the millions.

Sad news arrived from Zanzibar: There would be no Pygmies. Lieutenant Schufeldt was dead, of unclear causes.

There was advice, much of it of course from New York. The advice that rankled most came from Ward McAllister, factotum and chief slipperlick to Mrs. William Astor, empress of New York society. Appalled by the vision conjured by Chicago’s Dedication Day, of creme and rabble mixing in such volume and with such indecorous propinquity, McCallister in a column in the New York World advised “it is not quantity but quality that the society people here want. Hospitality which includes the whole human race is not desirable.”

He urged Chicago hostesses to hire some French chefs to improve their culinary diction. “In these modern days, society cannot get along without French chefs,” he wrote. “The man who has been accustomed to delicate fillets of beef, terrapin pate de foie gras, truffled turkey and things of that sort would not care to sit down to a boiled leg of mutton dinner with turnips.” The thing is, McAllister was serious.

And there was more. “I should also advise that they do not frappe their wine too much. Let them put the bottle in the tub and be careful to keep the neck free from ice. For, the quantity of wine in the neck of the bottle being small, it will be acted upon by the ice first. In twenty-five minutes from the time of being placed in the tub it will be in a perfect condition to be served immediately. What I mean by a perfect condition is that when the wine is poured from the bottle it should contain little flakes of ice. That is a real frappe.”

To which the Chicago Journal replied, “The mayor will not frappe his wine too much. He will frappe it just enough so the guests can blow the foam off the tops of the glasses without a vulgar exhibition of lung and lip power. His ham sandwiches, sinkers and Irish quail, better known in the Bridgeport vernacular as pigs’ feet, will be triumphs of the gastronomic art.” One Chicago newspaper called McAllister “A Mouse Colored Ass.”

Chicago delighted in such repartee—for the most part. On some level, however, McAllister’s remarks stung. McAllister was one particularly snooty voice, but it was clear to everyone that he spoke with the sanction of New York’s blue bloods. Among Chicago’s leading citizens there was always a deep fear of being second class. No one topped Chicago in terms of business drive and acumen, but within the city’s upper echelons there was a veiled anxiety that the city in its commercial advance may indeed have failed to cultivate the finer traits of man and woman. The exposition was to be a giant white banner waved in Mrs. Astor’s face. With its gorgeous classical buildings packed with art, its clean water and electric lights, and its overstaffed police department, the exposition was Chicago’s conscience, the city it wanted to become.

Burnham in particular embodied this insecurity. Denied admission to Harvard and Yale and the “right” beginning, he had become a self-conscious connoisseur of fine things. He arranged recitals at his home and office and joined the best clubs and collected the best wines and was now leading the greatest nonmilitary campaign in the nation’s history. Even so, the social columnists still did not write about his wife’s dresses when he and she attended the opera, the way they described the nightly couture of mesdames Palmer, Pullman, and Armour. The fair was to be Burnham’s redemption, and Chicago’s. “Outside peoples already concede our material greatness and that we are well nigh supreme in manufactures and commerce,” he wrote. “They do, however, claim that we are not cultivated and refined to the same extent. To remove this impression, the thought and work of this bureau has been mostly bent from the start.”

Advice arrived also by the bookful. An author named Adelaide Hollingsworth chose to honor the fair with more than seven hundred pages of it, which she published early in the year under the title The Columbia Cook Book. Although her book did include compelling recipes for scrapple, ox cheek, and baked calf’s head and tips for the preparation of raccoon, possum, snipe, plovers, and blackbirds (for blackbird pie) and “how to broil, fricassee, stew or fry a squirrel,” it was much more than just a cookbook. Hollingsworth billed it as an overall guide to helping modern young housewives create a peaceful, optimistic, and sanitary household. The wife was to set the tenor of the day. “The breakfast table should not be a bulletin-board for the curing of horrible dreams and depressing symptoms, but the place where a bright key-note of the day is struck.” In places Hollingsworth’s advice revealed, by refraction, a certain Victorian raciness. In a segment on how best to wash silk underwear, she advised, “If the article is black, add a little ammonia, instead of acid to the rinsing water.”

One of the most persistent problems of the day was “offensive feet,” caused by the prevailing habit of washing feet only once a week. To combat this, Hollingsworth wrote, “Take one part muriatic acid to ten parts of water; rub the feet every night with this mixture before retiring to bed.” To rid your mouth of the odor of onions, drink strong coffee. Oysters made the best rat-bait. To induce cream to whip, add a grain of salt. To keep milk sweet longer, add horseradish.

Hollingsworth offered sage medical advice—“Don’t sit between a fever patient and a fire”—and provided various techniques for dealing with medical emergencies, such as accidental poisoning. Among a list of measures effective for inducing vomiting, she included: “Injections of tobacco into the anus through a pipe stem.”

Jacob Riis, the New York journalist who had devoted himself to revealing the squalid housing of America’s poor, came to Chicago bearing counsel of a graver sort. In March he gave a talk at Hull House, a reform settlement founded by Jane Addams, “Saint Jane.” Hull House had become a bastion of progressive thought inhabited by strong-willed young women, “interspersed,” as one visitor put it, “with earnest-faced, self-subordinating and mild- mannered men who slide from room to room apologetically.” Clarence Darrow regularly walked the short distance from his office in the Rookery to Hull House, where he was admired for his intellect and social empathy but disparaged, privately, for his slovenly dress and less-than-exemplary hygiene.

At the time of Riis’s talk, Riis and Addams were two of the best known people in America. Riis had toured Chicago’s foulest districts and pronounced them worse than anything he had seen in New York. In his talk he noted the fast approach of the exposition and warned his audience, “You ought to begin house cleaning, so to speak, and get your alleys and streets in better condition; never in our worst season have we had so much filth in New York City.”

In fact, Chicago had been trying to tidy itself for some time and had found the challenge monumental. The city stepped up its efforts to remove garbage and began repaving alleys and streets. It deployed smoke inspectors to enforce a new antismoke ordinance. Newspapers launched crusades against pestilent alleys and excess smoke and identified the worst offenders in print—among them Burnham’s newly opened Masonic Temple, which the Chicago Tribune likened to Mount Vesuvius.

Carrie Watson, Chicago’s foremost madam, decided her own operation merited a little sprucing up. Her place already was luxurious, with a bowling alley where the pins were bottles of chilled champagne, but now she resolved to increase the number of bedrooms and double her staff. She and other brothel owners anticipated a big spike in demand. They would not be disappointed. Nor, apparently, would their clients. Later, a madam named Chicago May recalled the boisterous year of the fair with a cringe: “What dreadful things were done by some of the girls! It always made me sick even to think of them. The mere mention of the details of some of the ‘circuses’ is unprintable. I think Rome at its worst had nothing on Chicago during those lurid days.”

The man who helped make Chicago so hospitable to Carrie Watson and Chicago May, as well as to Mickey Finn and Bathhouse John Coughlin and a few thousand other operators of saloons and gambling dens, was Carter Henry Harrison, whose four terms as mayor had gone a long way to establish Chicago as a place that tolerated human frailty even as it nurtured grand ambition. After his failed run for the office in 1891, Harrison had acquired a newspaper, the Chicago Times, and settled into the job of editor. By the end of 1892, however, he had made it clear that he would love to be the “Fair Mayor” and lead the city through its most glorious time, but insisted that only a clear signal of popular demand could make him actually enter the campaign. He got it. Carter H. Harrison Associations sprang up all over town, and now, at the start of 1893, Carter was one of two candidates for the Democratic nomination, the other being Washington Hesing, editor of the powerful German daily Staats-Zeitung.

Every newspaper in the city, other than his own Times, opposed Harrison, as did Burnham and most of Chicago’s leading citizens. To Burnham and the others the new Chicago, as symbolized by the