friends and family members—for a total of forty travelers—they had piled into a luxurious sleeper car, named
The reporter—Theodore Dreiser—was young and suffused with a garish self-confidence that drew the attention of the young women. He flirted with all but of course was drawn most to the one woman who seemed least interested, a small, pretty, and reserved woman named Sara Osborne White, whom a past suitor had nicknamed “Jug” for her tendency to wear brown. She was hardly Dreiser’s type: By now he was sexually experienced and in the middle of an entirely physical affair with his landlady. To him Sara White exuded “an intense something concealed by an air of supreme innocence and maidenly reserve.”
Dreiser joined the teachers on the Ferris Wheel and accompanied them on a visit to Buffalo Bill’s show, where Colonel Cody himself greeted the women and shook hands with each. Dreiser followed the ladies through the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building where, he said, a man “could trail round from place to place for a year and not get tired.” In the Midway Dreiser persuaded James J. Corbett to meet the women. Corbett was the boxer who had downed John L. Sullivan in the great fight of September 1892, a battle that had consumed the entire front page of the next morning’s
Every chance he got, Dreiser tried to separate Sara White from the
He failed at seduction, but was himself successfully seduced—by the fair. It had swept him, he said, “into a dream from which I did not recover for months.” Most captivating were the nights, “when the long shadows have all merged into one and the stars begin to gleam out over the lake and the domes of the palaces of the White City.”
Sara White remained on his mind long after he and the Forty Odd departed the fair. In St. Louis he wrote to her and courted her and in the process resolved to make more of himself as a writer. He left St. Louis for a job editing a rural Michigan newspaper but found that the realities of being a small-town editor did not live up to the fantasy. After a few other stops he reached Pittsburgh. He wrote to Sara White and visited her whenever he returned to St. Louis. He asked her to sit in his lap. She refused.
She did, however, accept his proposal of marriage. Dreiser showed a friend, John Maxwell of the
It was good advice for a man like Dreiser. But Dreiser did not take it.
The Ferris Wheel became a vector for love. Couples asked permission to be married at the highest point on the wheel. Luther Rice never allowed it, but in two cases where the couples already had mailed invitations, he did permit weddings in his office.
Despite the wheel’s inherent romantic potential, however, rides at night never became popular. The favorite hour was the golding time between five and six in the evening.
Holmes, newly free and land rich, brought a new woman to the fair, Georgiana Yoke, whom he had met earlier in the year at a department store, Schlesinger & Meyer, where she worked as a saleswoman. She had grown up in Franklin, Indiana, and lived there with her parents until 1891, when she set out for a bigger, more glamorous life in Chicago. She was only twenty-three when she met Holmes, but her small size and sun-blond hair made her look much younger, almost like a child—save for the sharp features of her face and the intelligence that inhabited her very large blue eyes.
She had never met anyone like him. He was handsome, articulate, and clearly well off. He even possessed property in Europe. She felt a certain sadness for him, however. He was so alone—all his family was dead, save one aunt living in Africa. His last uncle had just died and left him a large fortune consisting of property in the South and in Fort Worth, Texas.
Holmes gave her many presents, among them a Bible, diamond earrings, and a locket—“a little heart,” she said, “with pearls.”
At the fair he took her on the Ferris Wheel and hired a gondola and walked with her on the dark fragrant paths of the Wooded Island, in the soft glow of Chinese lanterns.
He asked her to be his wife. She agreed.
He cautioned, however, that for the marriage he would have to use a different name, Henry Mansfield Howard. It was his dead uncle’s name, he said. The uncle was blood proud and had bequeathed Holmes his estate on condition he first adopt the uncle’s name in full. Holmes had obliged, out of respect for his uncle’s memory.
Mayor Harrison too believed he was in love, with a New Orleans woman named Annie Howard. He was sixty-eight and a widower twice over; she was in her twenties—no one knew exactly where in her twenties, but estimates put her between twenty-one and twenty-seven years old. She was “very plump,” by one account, and “full of life.” She had come to Chicago for the duration of the fair and was renting a mansion near the mayor’s. She spent her days at the fair buying art.
Harrison and Miss Howard had some news for the city, but the mayor had no plans to reveal it until October 28, when the exposition would host American Cities Day.
Freaks
ON JULY 31, 1893, after two investigative hearings, the Retrenchment Committee gave its report to the exposition’s Board of Directors. The report stated that the financial management of the fair “can only be characterized as shamefully extravagant.” Drastic cuts in spending and staff were necessary, immediately. “As to the Construction Department, we hardly know what to say,” the report continued. “We had no time to go into details, but have formed the decided impression that this is being run now, as in the past, upon the general theory that money is no object.”
The Retrenchment Committee made it clear that, at least for its three members, the financial success of the fair was as important as its obvious aesthetic success. The honor of Chicago’s leading men, who prided themselves on their unsentimental—some might say ruthless—pursuit of maximum profit, was in peril. The report closed, “If we are not to be disgraced before the public as business-men, this matter must be followed up sharply and decisively.”
In separate statements, the Retrenchment Committee urged the directors to make the committee permanent and invest it with the power to approve or deny every expenditure at the exposition, no matter how small.
This was too much, even for the equally hardened businessmen of the exposition board. President Higinbotham said he would resign before he would cede such power to anyone. Other directors felt likewise. Stung by this rejection, the three men of the Retrenchment Committee themselves resigned. One told a reporter, “If the directory had seen fit to continue the committee with power as originally intended, it would have dropped heads enough to fill the grand court basin…”
The retrenchers’ report had been too harsh, too much a rebuke, at a time when the mood throughout Chicago was one of sustained exultation at the fact that the fair had gotten built at all and that it had proven more beautiful than anyone had imagined. Even New York had apologized—well, at least one editor from New York had done so. Charles T. Root, editor of the
