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

meant to do, the fullness of France, its richness and its splendor.”

Even Eiffel’s tower, forecast by wishful Americans to be a monstrosity that would disfigure forever the comely landscape of Paris, turned out to possess unexpected elan, with a sweeping base and tapered shaft that evoked the trail of a skyrocket. This humiliation could not be allowed to stand. America’s pride in its growing power and international stature had fanned patriotism to a new intensity. The nation needed an opportunity to top the French, in particular to “out-Eiffel Eiffel.” Suddenly the idea of hosting a great exposition to commemorate Columbus’s discovery of the New World became irresistible.

At first, most Americans believed that if an exposition honoring the deepest roots of the nation were to be held anywhere, the site should be Washington, the capital. Initially even Chicago’s editors agreed. As the notion of an exposition gained shape, however, other cities began to see it as a prize to be coveted, mainly for the stature it would confer, stature being a powerful lure in this age when pride of place ranked second only to pride of blood. Suddenly New York and St. Louis wanted the fair. Washington laid claim to the honor on grounds it was the center of government, New York because it was the center of everything. No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.

Nowhere was civic pride a more powerful force than in Chicago, where men spoke of the “Chicago spirit” as if it were a tangible force and prided themselves on the speed with which they had rebuilt the city after the Great Fire of 1871. They had not merely restored it; they had turned it into the nation’s leader in commerce, manufacturing, and architecture. All the city’s wealth, however, had failed to shake the widespread perception that Chicago was a secondary city that preferred butchered hogs to Beethoven. New York was the nation’s capital of cultural and social refinement, and its leading citizens and newspapers never let Chicago forget it. The exposition, if built right—if it topped Paris—might dispel that sentiment once and for all. The editors of Chicago’s daily newspapers, upon seeing New York enter the contest, began to ask, why not Chicago? The Tribune warned that “the hawks, buzzards, vultures, and other unclean beasts, creeping, crawling, and flying, of New York are reaching out to get control of the fair.”

On June 29, 1889, Chicago’s mayor, DeWitt C. Cregier, announced the appointment of a citizens committee consisting of 250 of the city’s most prominent men. The committee met and passed a resolution whose closing passage read: “The men who have helped build Chicago want the fair, and, having a just and well-sustained claim, they intend to have it.”

Congress had the final say, however, and now the time for the big vote had come.

A Tribune clerk stepped to the window and pasted the first bulletin. The initial ballot put Chicago ahead by a big margin, with 115 votes to New York’s 72. St. Louis came next, followed by Washington. One congressman opposed having a fair at all and out of sheer cussedness voted for Cumberland Gap. When the crowd outside the Tribune saw that Chicago led New York by 43 votes, it exploded with cheers, whistles, and applause. Everyone knew, however, that Chicago was still 38 votes shy of the simple majority needed to win the fair.

Other ballots followed. Daylight faded to thin broth. The sidewalks filled with men and women leaving work. Typewriters—the women who operated the latest business machines—streamed from the Rookery, the Montauk, and other skyscrapers wearing under their coats the customary white blouse and long black skirt that so evoked the keys of their Remingtons. Cab drivers cursed and gentled their horses. A lamplighter scuttled along the edges of the crowd igniting the gas jets atop cast-iron poles. Abruptly there was color everywhere: the yellow streetcars and the sudden blues of telegraph boys jolting past with satchels full of joy and gloom; cab drivers lighting the red night- lamps at the backs of their hansoms; a large gilded lion crouching before the hat store across the street. In the high buildings above, gas and electric lights bloomed in the dusk like moonflowers.

The Tribune clerk again appeared in the newspaper’s window, this time with the results of the fifth ballot. “The gloom that fell upon the crowd was heavy and chill,” a reporter observed. New York had gained fifteen votes, Chicago only six. The gap between them had narrowed. The barber in the crowd pointed out to everyone in his vicinity that New York’s additional votes must have come from congressmen who previously had favored St. Louis. This revelation caused an army lieutenant, Alexander Ross, to proclaim, “Gentlemen. I am prepared to state that any person from St. Louis would rob a church.” Another man shouted, “Or poison his wife’s dog.” This last drew wide agreement.

In Washington the New York contingent, including Chauncey Depew, president of the New York Central and one of the most celebrated orators of the day, sensed a tide change and asked for a recess until the next day. On learning of this request the crowd outside the Tribune booed and hissed, correctly interpreting the move as an attempt to gain time to lobby for more votes.

The motion was overruled, but the House voted for a brief adjournment. The crowd remained in place.

After the seventh ballot Chicago was only one vote short of a majority. New York had actually lost ground. A stillness settled on the street. Cabs halted. Police ignored the ever-longer chains of grip-cars that stretched left and right in a great cadmium gash. Passengers disembarked and watched the Tribune window, waiting for the next announcement. The cables thrumming beneath the pavement struck a minor chord of suspense, and held it.

Soon a different man appeared in the Tribune window. He was tall, thin, and young and wore a black beard. He looked at the crowd without expression. In one hand he held a paste pot, in the other a brush and a bulletin sheet. He took his time. He set the bulletin on a table, out of sight, but everyone in the crowd could tell what he was doing by the motion of his shoulders. He took his time unscrewing the paste pot. There was something somber in his face, as if he were looking down upon a casket. Methodically he painted paste onto the bulletin. It took him a good long while to raise it to the window.

His expression did not change. He fastened the bulletin to the glass.

Burnham waited. His office faced south, as did Root’s, to satisfy their craving for natural light, a universal hunger throughout Chicago, where gas jets, still the primary source of artificial illumination, did little to pierce the city’s perpetual coal-smoke dusk. Electric bulbs, often in fixtures that combined gas and electricity, were just beginning to light the newest buildings, but these in a sense added to the problem, for they required basement dynamos driven by coal-fired boilers. As the light faded, gaslights on the streets and in the buildings below caused the smoke to glow a dull yellow. Burnham heard only the hiss of gas from the lamps in his office.

That he should be there now, a man of such exalted professional stature in an office so high above the city, would have come as a great and satisfying surprise to his late father.

Daniel Hudson Burnham was born in Henderson, New York, on September 4, 1846, into a family devoted to Swedenborgian principles of obedience, self-subordination, and public service. In 1855, when he was nine, the family moved to Chicago, where his father established a successful wholesale drug business. Burnham was a lackluster student: “the records of the Old Central show his average scholarship to be frequently as low as 55 percent,” a reporter discovered, “and 81 percent seems the highest he ever reached.” He excelled, however, at drawing and sketched constantly. He was eighteen when his father sent him east to study with private tutors to prepare him for the entrance exams for Harvard and Yale. The boy proved to have a severe case of test anxiety. “I went to Harvard for examination with two men not as well prepared as I,” he said. “Both passed easily, and I flunked, having sat through two or three examinations without being able to write a word.” The same happened at Yale. Both schools turned him down. He never forgot it.

In the fall of 1867, at twenty-one, Burnham returned to Chicago. He sought work in a field where he might be successful and took a job as a draftsman with the architectural firm of Loring & Jenney. He had found his calling, he wrote in 1868, and told his parents he wanted to become the “greatest architect in the city or country.” The next year, however, he bolted for Nevada with friends to try his hand at mining gold. He failed. He ran for the Nevada legislature and failed again. He returned to Chicago broke, in a cattle car, and joined the firm of an architect named L. G. Laurean. Then came October 1871: a cow, a lantern, confusion, and wind. The Great Chicago Fire took nearly eighteen thousand buildings and left more than a hundred thousand people homeless. The destruction promised endless work for the city’s architects. But Burnham quit. He sold plate glass, failed. He became a druggist, quit. “There is,” he wrote, “a family tendency to get tired of doing the same thing very long.”

Exasperated and worried, Burnham’s father in 1872 introduced his son to an architect named Peter Wight, who admired the young man’s skill at drawing and hired him as a draftsman. Burnham was twenty-five. He liked Wight and liked the work; he liked especially one of Wight’s other draftsmen, a southerner named John Wellborn