speech at the fair, but for that moment it stood there glittering in the sun like the track of a spent tear.
There was tragedy. The British draped their elaborate ship model of the H.M.S.
The accident cost four hundred lives.
The Ferris Wheel quickly became the most popular attraction of the exposition. Thousands rode it every day. In the week beginning July 3 Ferris sold 61,395 tickets for a gross return of $30,697.50. The Exposition Company took about half, leaving Ferris an operating profit for that one week of $13,948 (equivalent today to about $400,000).
There were still questions about the wheel’s safety, and unfounded stories circulated about suicides and accidents, including one that alleged that a frightened pug had leaped to its death from one of the car’s windows. Not true, the Ferris Company said; the story was the concoction of a reporter “short on news and long on invention.” If not for the wheel’s windows and iron grates, however, its record might have been different. On one ride a latent terror of heights suddenly overwhelmed an otherwise peaceful man named Wherritt. He was fine until the car began to move. As it rose, he began to feel ill and nearly fainted. There was no way to signal the engineer below to stop the wheel.
Wherritt staggered in panic from one end of the car to the other, driving passengers before him “like scared sheep,” according to one account. He began throwing himself at the walls of the car with such power that he managed to bend some of the protective iron. The conductor and several male passengers tried to subdue him, but he shook them off and raced for the door. In accord with the wheel’s operating procedures, the conductor had locked the door at the start of the ride. Wherritt shook it and broke its glass but could not get it open.
As the car entered its descent, Wherritt became calmer and laughed and sobbed with relief—until he realized the wheel was not going to stop. It always made two full revolutions. Wherritt again went wild, and again the conductor and his allies subdued him, but they were growing tired. They feared what might happen if Wherritt escaped them. Structurally the car was sound, but its walls, windows, and doors had been designed merely to discourage attempts at self-destruction, not to resist a human pile driver. Already Wherritt had broken glass and bent iron.
A woman stepped up and unfastened her skirt. To the astonishment of all aboard, she slipped the skirt off and threw it over Wherritt’s head, then held it in place while murmuring gentle assurances. The effect was immediate. Wherritt became “as quiet as an ostrich.”
A woman disrobing in public, a man with a skirt over his head—the marvels of the fair seemed endless.
The exposition was Chicago’s great pride. Thanks mainly to Daniel Burnham the city had proved it could accomplish something marvelous against obstacles that by any measure should have humbled the builders. The sense of ownership was everywhere, not just among the tens of thousands of citizens who had bought exposition stock. Hilda Satt noticed it in the change that came over her father as he showed her the grounds. “He seemed to take a personal pride in the fair, as if he had helped in the planning,” she said. “As I look back on those days, most people in Chicago felt that way. Chicago was host to the world at that time and we were part of it all.”
But the fair did more than simply stoke pride. It gave Chicago a light to hold against the gathering dark of economic calamity. The Erie Railroad wobbled, then collapsed. Next went the Northern Pacific. In Denver three national banks failed in one day and pulled down an array of other businesses. Fearing a bread riot, city authorities called out the militia. In Chicago the editors of
In June two businessmen committed suicide on the same day in the same Chicago hotel, the Metropole. One slit his throat with a razor at ten-thirty in the morning. The other learned of the suicide from the hotel barber. That night in his own room he tied one end of the silk sash of his smoking jacket around his neck, then stretched out on the bed and tied the other end to the bedstead. He rolled off.
“Everyone is in a blue fit of terror,” wrote Henry Adams, “and each individual thinks himself more ruined than his neighbor.”
Long before the fair’s end, people began mourning its inevitable passage. Mary Hartwell Catherwood wrote, “What shall we do when this Wonderland is closed?—when it disappears—when the enchantment comes to an end?” One lady manager, Sallie Cotton of North Carolina, a mother of six children staying in Chicago for the summer, captured in her diary a common worry: that after seeing the fair, “everything will seem small and insignificant.”
The fair was so perfect, its grace and beauty like an assurance that for as long as it lasted nothing truly bad could happen to anyone, anywhere.
Independence Day
THE MORNING OF JULY 4, 1893, broke gray and squally. The weather threatened to dull the elaborate fireworks display that Frank Millet had planned as a further boost for the exposition’s attendance, which despite steady week-to-week increases still lagged behind expectations. The sun emerged late in the morning, though squalls continued to sweep Jackson Park through much of the day. By late afternoon a soft gold light bathed the Court of Honor and storm clouds walled the northern sky. The storms came no closer. The crowds built quickly. Holmes, Minnie, and Anna found themselves locked within an immense throng of humid men and women. Many people carried blankets and hampers of food but quickly found that no room remained to spread a picnic. There were few children. The entire Columbian Guard seemed to be present, their pale blue uniforms standing out like crocuses against black loam. Gradually the gold light cooled to lavender. Everyone began walking toward the lake. “For half a mile along the splendid sweep of the Lake-Front men were massed a hundred deep,” the
As darkness fell, everyone watched the sky for the first rockets of the night’s display. Thousands of Chinese lanterns hung from trees and railings. Red lights glowed from each car of the Ferris Wheel. On the lake a hundred or more ships, yachts, and launches lay at anchor with colored lights on their bows and booms and strung along their rigging.
The crowd was ready to cheer for anything. It cheered when the exposition orchestra played “Home Sweet Home,” a song that never failed to reduce grown men and women to tears, especially the newest arrivals to the city. It cheered when the lights came on within the Court of Honor and all the palaces became outlined in gold. It cheered when the big searchlights atop the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building began sweeping the crowd, and when colorful plumes of water—“peacock feathers,” the
At nine o’clock, however, the crowd hushed. A small bright light had arisen in the sky to the north and appeared to be drifting along the lakeshore toward the wharf. One of the searchlights found it and revealed it to be a large manned balloon. A light flared well below its basket. In the next instant bursts of sparks in red, white, and blue formed a huge American flag against the black sky. The balloon and flag drifted overhead. The searchlight
