White City rising in Jackson Park, required new leadership—certainly not Harrison.
The city’s legions of working men disagreed. They always had counted Harrison as one of their own, “Our Carter,” even though he was a plantation-reared Kentucky man who had gone to Yale, spoke fluent French and German, and recited lengthy passages from Shakespeare. He had served four terms; that he should serve a fifth in the year of the fair seemed fitting, and a wave of nostalgia swept the city’s wards.
Even his opponents recognized that Harrison, despite his privileged roots, made an intensely appealing candidate for the city’s lesser tier. He was magnetic. He was able and willing to talk to anyone about anything and had a way of making himself the center of any conversation. “His friends all noticed it,” said Joseph Medill, once an ally but later Harrison’s most ardent opponent, “they would laugh or smile about it, and called it ‘Carter Harrisonia.’” Even at sixty-eight Harrison exuded strength and energy, and women generally agreed that he was more handsome now than he had been in his fifties. Widowed twice, he was rumored to be involved with a much younger woman. He had deep blue eyes with large pupils and an unwrinkled face. He attributed his youthful aspect to a heavy dose of morning coffee. His quirks made him endearing. He loved watermelon; when it was in season, he ate it at all three meals. He had a passion for shoes—a different pair each day of the week—and for silk underwear. Almost everyone had seen Harrison riding the streets on his white Kentucky mare, in his black slouch hat, trailing a plume of cigar smoke. At his campaign talks he often addressed his remarks to a stuffed eagle that he carried with him as a prop. Medill accused him of nurturing the city’s basest instincts but also called him “the most remarkable man that our city has ever produced.”
To the astonishment of the city’s ruling class, 78 percent of the 681 delegates to the Democratic convention voted for Harrison on the first ballot. The Democratic elite implored the Republicans to come up with a candidate whom they too could support, anything to keep Harrison from returning to office. The Republicans chose Samuel W. Allerton, a rich packer from Prairie Avenue. The biggest and most powerful newspapers formed an explicit combine to back Allerton and undermine Harrison.
The ex-mayor countered their attacks with humor. During a talk before a large group of supporters at the Auditorium, Harrison called Allerton “a most admirable pig sticker and pig slaughterer. I admit it, and I don’t arraign him because he slaughters the queen’s English; he can’t help it.”
Harrison rapidly gained ground.
Patrick Prendergast, the young mad Irish immigrant, took pride in Harrison’s renewed popularity and believed his own efforts at promoting the ex-mayor for reelection had had a lot do with the campaign’s new momentum. An idea came to Prendergast. Just when it entered his brain he could not say, but it was there, and it gave him satisfaction. He had read extensively into law and politics and understood that political machines operated on a first principle of power: If you worked to advance the interests of the machine, the machine paid you back. Harrison was in his debt.
This notion came to Prendergast initially as a glimmer, like the first sunlight to strike the Masonic tower each morning, but now he thought of it a thousand times a day. It was his treasure and made him square his shoulders and raise his chin. When Harrison won, things would change. And Harrison
The idea caused moments of exultation. Prendergast bought more postcards and sent exuberant notes to the men who soon would be his associates and clubmates—the judges, lawyers, and merchant princes of Chicago. He of course sent another card to his good friend Alfred S. Trude, the defense attorney.
“My Dear Mr. Trude,” he began. He intended the next word to be “Hallelujah!” but certain words gave him trouble. In his fever to write, he plunged ahead.
“Allielliuia!” he wrote. “The attempt of the Herald gang to prevent the manifestation of the popular will has been checked—& Carter H. Harrison the popular choice will be our next mayor. The newspaper trust has been ingloriously sat down upon. What do I know about the candidacy of a Washington Hesing poor fellow—he has the ‘tail end’ of my sympathy. In his present trouble I hope it will not overcome him—& the noble newspaper trust. Glory to The Father Son & Holy Ghost!” He rambled on for a few more lines, then closed, “Friendship is the true test of character after all Sincerely,
“P. E. J. Prendergast.”
Again something in the card drew Trude’s attention. Many other recipients of Prendergast’s cards also took note, despite the crush of mail each received from his true peers, this being a time when everyone who knew how to write did so and at length. In that glacier of words grinding toward the twentieth century, Prendergast’s card was a single fragment of mica glinting with lunacy, pleading to be picked up and pocketed. Once again Trude kept the letter.
In April 1893 the citizens of Chicago elected Carter Henry Harrison to his fifth term. In preparation for the fair, he ordered two hundred barrels of whiskey, to be used by his office in the entertainment of dignitaries.
He gave no thought whatsoever to Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast.
The Invitation
FOR THE MOMENT HOLMES held off on doing anything more with Minnie’s property. Minnie had told her sister, Anna, of the transfer of the Fort Worth land, and now Holmes sensed that Anna was becoming suspicious of his true intentions. This did not trouble him, however. The solution was really quite simple.
One bright and fragrant spring day—as if on a wild equinoctial whim—Holmes suggested that Minnie invite her sister to Chicago to see the world’s fair, at his expense.
Minnie was delighted and sent the good news to Anna, who immediately accepted. Holmes knew she would, for how could she have done otherwise? The chance to see Minnie was compelling in itself. Add Chicago and the great fair, and the combination became too alluring to turn down, no matter what Anna suspected about his and Minnie’s relationship.
Minnie could hardly wait for the end of the school year, when her sister at last would be able to extricate herself from her duties at the Midlothian Academy. Minnie planned to show Anna all the wonders of Chicago—the skyscrapers, Marshall Field’s store, the Auditorium, and of course the world’s fair—but above all she looked forward to introducing Anna to her own personal wonder, Mr. Henry Gordon. Her Harry.
At last Anna would see that she could put her suspicions to rest.
Final Preparations
IN THE FIRST TWO WEEKS of April 1893 the weather was gorgeous, but other cruelties abounded. Four exposition workers lost their lives, two from fractured skulls, two electrocuted. The deaths brought the year’s total to seven. The exposition’s union carpenters, aware of their great value in this final phase of construction, seized the moment and walked off the job, demanding a minimum union wage and other long-sought concessions. Only one of the eight towers of the Ferris Wheel was in place and workers had not yet completed repairs to the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. Each morning hundreds of men climbed to its roof; each evening they picked their way gingerly back down in a long dense line that from a distance resembled a column of ants. Frank Millet’s “Whitewash Gang” worked furiously to paint the buildings of the Court of Honor. In places the staff coating already had begun to crack and chip. Patch crews patrolled the grounds. The air of “anxious effort” that suffused the park reminded Candace Wheeler, the designer hired to decorate the Woman’s Building, “of an insufficiently equipped household preparing for visitors.”
