Frank geyer devil in the white city

TheThe DeDevviill iinn the the WWhithitee CityCity

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Chicago, 1891.

Also by Erik Larson

Isaac’s Storm

Lethal Passage

The Naked Consumer

The The DeDevvil in theil in the WWhithite Citye City

Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

Erik Larson

Crown Publishers • New York

Illustration credits appear on page 433.

Copyright © 2003 by Erik Larson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Crown Publishers, New York, New York.

Member of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

www.vintagebooks.com

CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of

Random House, Inc.

Design by Leonard W. Henderson

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Larson, Erik.

The devil in the white city : murder, magic, and madness at the fair that changed

America / Erik Larson.—ed.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Mudgett, Herman W., 1861–1896. 2. Serial murderers—Illinois—Chicago—

Biography. 3. Serial murders—Illinois—Chicago—Case studies. 4. World’s

Columbian Exposition (1893 : Chicago, Ill.) I. Title.

HV6248.M8 L37 2003

364.15'23'0977311—dc21

2002154046

eISBN 1-4000-7631-5

v1.0

http://www.vintagebooks.com
To Chris, Kristen, Lauren, and Erin,

for making it all worthwhile

—and to Molly, whose lust for socks

kept us all on our toes

Evils Imminent (A Note) /xi

Prologue: Aboard the Olympic /1

Part I: Frozen Music /9

Part II: An Awful Fight /111

Part III: In the White City /233

Part IV: Cruelty Revealed /337

Epilogue: The Last Crossing /371

Notes and Sources /391

Bibliography /425

Acknowledgments /431

Illustration Credits /433

Index /435

ContContentsents

EvEvils Imminentils Imminent (A NOTE)

In Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century amid the smoke of

industry and the clatter of trains there lived two men, both handsome,

both blue-eyed, and both unusually adept at their chosen skills. Each

embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized the rush of

America toward the twentieth century. One was an architect, the builder

of many of America’s most important structures, among them the Flat-

iron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C.; the

other was a murderer, one of the most prolific in history and harbinger

of an American archetype, the urban serial killer. Although the two never

met, at least not formally, their fates were linked by a single, magical

event, one largely fallen from modern recollection but that in its time was

considered to possess a transformative power nearly equal to that of the

Civil War.

In the following pages I tell the story of these men and this event, but I

must insert here a notice: However strange or macabre some of the fol-

lowing incidents may seem, this is not a work of fiction. Anything between

quotation marks comes from a letter, memoir, or other written document.

The action takes place mostly in Chicago, but I beg readers to forgive me

for the occasional lurch across state lines, as when the staunch, grief-struck

Detective Geyer enters that last awful cellar. I beg forbearance, too, for the

occasional side journey demanded by the story, including excursions into

the medical acquisition of corpses and the correct use of Black Prince gera-

niums in an Olmstedian landscape.

Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanes-

cence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of

time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the

end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight

and darkness, the White City and the Black.

Erik Larson

Seattle

xi

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.

Daniel H. Burnham

Director of Works

World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893

I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a

murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.

Dr. H. H. Holmes

Confession

1896

Prologue

Aboard the Olympic

1912

The architects (left to right): Daniel Burnham, George Post, M. B. Pickett, Henry Van Brunt, Francis Millet, Maitland Armstrong, Col. Edmund Rice,

Augustus St. Gaudens, Henry Sargent Codman, George W. Maynard, Charles McKim, Ernest Graham, Dion Geraldine.

The date was April 14, 1912, a sinister day in maritime history, but of

course the man in suite 63–65, shelter deck C, did not yet know it. What

he did know was that his foot hurt badly, more than he had expected. He

was sixty-five years old and had become a large man. His hair had turned

gray, his mustache nearly white, but his eyes were as blue as ever, bluer

at this instant by proximity to the sea. His foot had forced him to delay

the voyage, and now it kept him anchored in his suite while the other

first-class passengers, his wife among them, did what he would have

loved to do, which was to explore the ship’s more exotic precincts. The

man loved the opulence of the ship, just as he loved Pullman Palace cars

and giant fireplaces, but his foot problem tempered his enjoyment. He

recognized that the systemic malaise that caused it was a consequence in

part of his own refusal over the years to limit his courtship of the finest

wines, foods, and cigars. The pain reminded him daily that his time on

the planet was nearing its end. Just before the voyage he told a friend,

“This prolonging of a man’s life doesn’t interest me when he’s done his

work and has done it pretty well.”

The man was Daniel Hudson Burnham, and by now his name was

familiar throughout the world. He was an architect and had done his

work pretty well in Chicago, New York, Washington, San Francisco,

Manila, and many other cities. He and his wife, Margaret, were sailing

to Europe in the company of their daughter and her husband for a grand

tour that was to continue through the summer. Burnham had chosen this

ship, the R.M.S. Olympic of the White Star Line, because it was new and

glamorous and big. At the time he booked passage the Olympic was the

largest vessel in regular service, but just three days before his departure a

Aboard the Olympic

3

sister ship—a slightly longer twin—had stolen that rank when it set off

on its maiden voyage. The twin, Burnham knew, was at that moment car-

rying one of his closest friends, the painter Francis Millet, over the same

ocean but in the opposite direction.

As the last sunlight of the day entered Burnham’s suite, he and

Margaret set off for the first-class dining room on the deck below. They

took the elevator to spare his foot the torment of the grand stairway, but

he did so with reluctance, for he admired the artistry in the iron scroll-

work of its balustrades and the immense dome of iron and glass that

flushed the ship’s core with natural light. His sore foot had placed

increasing limitations on his mobility. Only a week earlier he had found

himself in the humiliating position of having to ride in a wheelchair

through Union Station in Washington, D.C., the station he had designed.

The Burnhams dined by themselves in the Olympic’s first-class salon,

then retired to their suite and there, for no particular reason, Burnham’s

thoughts returned to Frank Millet. On impulse, he resolved to send

Millet a midsea greeting via the Olympic’s powerful Marconi wireless.

Burnham signaled for a steward. A middle-aged man in knife-edge

whites took his message up three decks to the Marconi room adjacent to

the officer’s promenade. He returned a few moments later, the message

still in his hand, and told Burnham the operator had refused to accept it.

Footsore and irritable, Burnham demanded that the steward return to

the wireless room for an explanation.

å

Millet was never far from Burnham’s mind, nor was the event that had

brought the two of them together: the great Chicago world’s fair of 1893.

Millet had been one of Burnham’s closest allies in the long, bittersweet

struggle to build the fair. Its official name was the World’s Columbian

Exposition, its official purpose to commemorate the four hundredth

anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America, but under Burnham, its

chief builder, it had become something enchanting, known throughout

the world as the White City.

It had lasted just six months, yet during that time its gatekeepers

4 • Erik Larson

recorded 27.5 million visits, this when the country’s total population was

65 million. On its best day the fair drew more than 700,000 visitors. That

the fair had occurred at all, however, was something of a miracle. To build

it Burnham had confronted a legion of obstacles, any one of which could

have—should have—killed it long before Opening Day. Together he and

his architects had conjured a dream city whose grandeur and beauty

exceeded anything each singly could have imagined. Visitors wore their

best clothes and most somber expressions, as if entering a great cathedral.

Some wept at its beauty. They tasted a new snack called Cracker Jack and

a new breakfast food called Shredded Wheat. Whole villages had been

imported from Egypt, Algeria, Dahomey, and other far-flung locales,

along with their inhabitants. The Street in Cairo exhibit alone employed

nearly two hundred Egyptians and contained twenty-five distinct build-

ings, including a fifteen-hundred-seat theater that introduced America to

a new and scandalous form of entertainment. Everything about the fair

was exotic and, above all, immense. The fair occupied over one square

mile and filled more than two hundred buildings. A single exhibit hall had

enough interior volume to have housed the U.S. Capitol, the Great Pyra-

mid, Winchester Cathedral, Madison Square Garden, and St. Paul’s

Cathedral, all at the same time. One structure, rejected at first as a “mon-

strosity,” became the fair’s emblem, a machine so huge and terrifying that

it instantly eclipsed the tower of Alexandre Eiffel that had so wounded

America’s pride. Never before had so many of history’s brightest lights,

including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams,

Clarence Darrow, George Westinghouse, Thomas Edison, Henry Adams,

Archduke Francis Ferdinand, Nikola Tesla, Ignace Paderewski, Philip

Armour, and Marshall Field, gathered in one place at one time. Richard

Harding Davis called the exposition “the greatest event in the history of

the country since the Civil War.”

That something magical had occurred in that summer of the world’s

fair was beyond doubt, but darkness too had touched the fair. Scores of

workers had been hurt or killed in building the dream, their families con-

signed to poverty. Fire had killed fifteen more, and an assassin had trans-

formed the closing ceremony from what was to have been the century’s

The Devil in the White City • 5

greatest celebration into a vast funeral. Worse had occurred too, although

these revelations emerged only slowly. A murderer had moved among the

beautiful things Burnham had created. Young women drawn to Chicago

by the fair and by the prospect of living on their own had disappeared,

last seen at the killer’s block-long mansion, a parody of everything archi-

tects held dear. Only after the exposition had Burnham and his colleagues

learned of the anguished letters describing daughters who had come to the

city and then fallen silent. The press speculated that scores of fairgoers

must have disappeared within the building. Even the street-hardened

members of the city’s Whitechapel Club, named for the London stalking

grounds of Jack the Ripper, were startled by what detectives eventually

found inside and by the fact that such grisly events could have gone undis-

covered for so long. The rational explanation laid blame on the forces of

change that during this time had convulsed Chicago. Amid so much tur-

moil it was understandable that the work of a young and handsome doc-

tor would go unnoticed. As time passed, however, even sober men and

women began to think of him in less-than-rational terms. He described

himself as the Devil and contended that his physical shape had begun to

alter. Enough strange things began happening to the men who brought

him to justice to make his claim seem almost plausible.

For the supernaturally inclined, the death of the jury foreman alone

offered sufficient proof.

å

Burnham’s foot ached. The deck thrummed. No matter where you

were on the ship, you felt the power of the Olympic’s twenty-nine boil-

ers transmitted upward through the strakes of the hull. It was the one

constant that told you—even in the staterooms and dining chambers and

smoking lounge, despite the lavish efforts to make these rooms look as

if they had been plucked from the Palace of Versailles or a Jacobean

mansion—that you were aboard a ship being propelled far into the bluest

reaches of the ocean.

Burnham and Millet were among the few builders of the fair still

alive. So many others had gone. Olmsted and Codman. McKim. Hunt.

6 • Erik Larson

Atwood—mysteriously. And that initial loss, which Burnham still found

difficult to comprehend. Soon no one would remain, and the fair would

cease to exist as a living memory in anyone’s brain.

Of the key men, who besides Millet was left? Only Louis Sullivan:

embittered, perfumed with alcohol, resenting who knew what, but not

above coming by Burnham’s office for a loan or to sell some painting or

sketch.

At least Frank Millet still seemed strong and healthy and full of the

earthy good humor that had so enlivened the long nights during the fair’s

construction.

The steward came back. The expression in his eyes had changed. He

apologized. He still could not send the message, he said, but at least now

he had an explanation. An accident had occurred involving Millet’s ship.

In fact, he said, the Olympic was at that moment speeding north at max-

imum velocity to come to her aid, with instructions to receive and care

for injured passengers. He knew nothing more.

Burnham shifted his leg, winced, and waited for more news. He hoped

that when the Olympic at last reached the site of the accident, he would

find Millet and hear him tell some outrageous story about the voyage. In

the peace of his stateroom, Burnham opened his diary.

That night the fair came back to him with extra clarity.

The Devil in the White City • 7

Part I

Frozen Music

Chicago, 1890–91

Chicago, circa 1889.

How easy it was to disappear:

A thousand trains a day entered or left Chicago. Many of these trains

brought single young women who had never even seen a city but now

hoped to make one of the biggest and toughest their home. Jane Addams,

the urban reformer who founded Chicago’s Hull House, wrote, “Never

before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly

released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unat-

tended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.” The women

sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses, and weavers.

The men who hired them were for the most part moral citizens intent on

efficiency and profit. But not always. On March 30, 1890, an officer of

the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of

the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of “our growing

conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side

of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is

good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph.

All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor

do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances.”

The women walked to work on streets that angled past bars, gambling

houses, and bordellos. Vice thrived, with official indulgence. “The par-

lors and bedrooms in which honest folk lived were (as now) rather dull

places,” wrote Ben Hecht, late in his life, trying to explain this persistent

trait of old Chicago. “It was pleasant, in a way, to know that outside

their windows, the devil was still capering in a flare of brimstone.” In an

analogy that would prove all too apt, Max Weber likened the city to “a

human being with his skin removed.”

The Black City

11

Anonymous death came early and often. Each of the thousand trains

that entered and left the city did so at grade level. You could step from a

curb and be killed by the Chicago Limited. Every day on average two peo-

ple were destroyed at the city’s rail crossings. Their injuries were

grotesque. Pedestrians retrieved severed heads. There were other hazards.

Streetcars fell from drawbridges. Horses bolted and dragged carriages into

crowds. Fires took a dozen lives a day. In describing the fire dead, the term

the newspapers most liked to use was “roasted.” There was diphtheria,

typhus, cholera, influenza. And there was murder. In the time of the fair

the rate at which men and women killed one another rose sharply

throughout the nation but especially in Chicago, where police found them-

selves without the manpower or expertise to manage the volume. In the

first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred violent

deaths. Four a day. Most were prosaic, arising from robbery, argument, or

sexual jealousy. Men shot women, women shot men, and children shot

one another by accident. But all this could be understood. Nothing like the

Whitechapel killings had occurred. Jack the Ripper’s five-murder spree in

1888 had defied explanation and captivated readers throughout America,

who believed such a thing could not happen in their own hometowns.

But things were changing. Everywhere one looked the boundary

between the moral and the wicked seemed to be degrading. Elizabeth

Cady Stanton argued in favor of divorce. Clarence Darrow advocated

free love. A young woman named Borden killed her parents.

And in Chicago a young handsome doctor stepped from a train, his

surgical valise in hand. He entered a world of clamor, smoke, and steam,

refulgent with the scents of murdered cattle and pigs. He found it to his

liking.

The letters came later, from the Cigrands, Williamses, Smythes, and

untold others, addressed to that strange gloomy castle at Sixty-third

and Wallace, pleading for the whereabouts of daughters and daughters’

children.

It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in

the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root.

This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.

12 • Erik Larson

On the afternoon of Monday, February 24, 1890, two thousand peo-

ple gathered on the sidewalk and street outside the offices of the Chicago

Tribune, as similar crowds collected at each of the city’s twenty-eight

other daily newspapers, and in hotel lobbies, in bars, and at the offices of

Western Union and the Postal Telegraph Company. The gathering outside

the Tribune included businessmen, clerks, traveling salesmen, stenogra-

phers, police officers, and at least one barber. Messenger boys stood

ready to bolt as soon as there was news worth reporting. The air was

cold. Smoke filled the caverns between buildings and reduced lateral vis-

ibility to a few blocks. Now and then police officers cleared a path for

one of the city’s bright yellow streetcars, called grip-cars for the way their

operators attached them to an ever-running cable under the street. Drays

full of wholesale goods rumbled over the pavers, led by immense horses

gusting steam into the murk above.

The wait was electric, for Chicago was a prideful place. In every cor-

ner of the city people looked into the faces of shopkeepers, cab drivers,

waiters and bellboys to see whether the news already had come and

whether it was good or bad. So far the year had been a fine one.

Chicago’s population had topped one million for the first time, making

the city the second most populous in the nation after New York,

although disgruntled residents of Philadelphia, previously in second

place, were quick to point out that Chicago had cheated by annexing

large expanses of land just in time for the 1890 decadal census. Chicago

shrugged the sniping off. Big was big. Success today would dispel at last

the eastern perception that Chicago was nothing more than a greedy,

hog-slaughtering backwater; failure would bring humiliation from which

“The Trouble Is Just Begun”

13

the city would not soon recover, given how heartily its leading men had

boasted that Chicago would prevail. It was this big talk, not the persist-

ent southwesterly breeze, that had prompted New York editor Charles

Anderson Dana to nickname Chicago “the Windy City.”

In their offices in the top floor of the Rookery, Daniel Burnham, forty-

three, and his partner, John Root, newly forty, felt the electricity more

keenly than most. They had participated in secret conversations, received

certain assurances, and gone so far as to make reconnaissance forays to

outlying parts of the city. They were Chicago’s leading architects: They

had pioneered the erection of tall structures and designed the first build-

ing in the country ever to be called a skyscraper; every year, it seemed,

some new building of theirs became the tallest in the world. When they

moved into the Rookery at La Salle and Adams, a gorgeous light-filled

structure of Root’s design, they saw views of the lake and city that no one

but construction workers had seen before. They knew, however, that

today’s event had the potential to make their success so far seem meager.

The news would come by telegraph from Washington. The Tribune

would get it from one of its own reporters. Its editors, rewrite men, and

typesetters would compose “extra” editions as firemen shoveled coal into

the boilers of the paper’s steam-driven presses. A clerk would paste each

incoming bulletin to a window, face out, for pedestrians to read.

Shortly after four o’clock, Chicago standard railroad time, the Tribune

received its first cable.

å

Even Burnham could not say for sure who had been first to propose

the idea. It had seemed to rise in many minds at once, the initial intent

simply to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s dis-

covery of the New World by hosting a world’s fair. At first the idea gained

little momentum. Consumed by the great drive toward wealth and power

that had begun after the end of the Civil War, America seemed to have

scant interest in celebrating its distant past. In 1889, however, the French

did something that startled everyone.

In Paris on the Champ de Mars, France opened the Exposition

14 • Erik Larson

Universelle, a world’s fair so big and glamorous and so exotic that visi-

tors came away believing no exposition could surpass it. At the heart of

the exposition stood a tower of iron that rose one thousand feet into the

sky, higher by far than any man-made structure on earth. The tower not

only assured the eternal fame of its designer, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel,

but also offered graphic proof that France had edged out the United

States for dominance in the realm of iron and steel, despite the Brooklyn

Bridge, the Horseshoe Curve, and other undeniable accomplishments of

American engineers.

The United States had only itself to blame for this perception. In Paris

America had made a half-hearted effort to show off its artistic, industrial,

and scientific talent. “We shall be ranked among those nations who have

shown themselves careless of appearances,” wrote the Chicago Tribune’s

Paris correspondent on May 13, 1889. Other nations, he wrote, had

mounted exhibits of dignity and style, while American exhibitors erected

a mélange of pavilions and kiosks with no artistic guidance and no uni-

form plan. “The result is a sad jumble of shops, booths, and bazaars often

unpleasing in themselves and incongruous when taken together.” In con-

trast, France had done everything it could to ensure that its glory over-

whelmed everyone. “Other nations are not rivals,” the correspondent

wrote, “they are foils to France, and the poverty of their displays sets off,

as it was 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 élan, 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

The Devil in the White City • 15

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 gov-

ernment, 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 per-

ception 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 for-

get 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.

å

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 con-

16 • Erik Larson

gressman 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 custom-

ary 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 han-

soms; 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 previ-

ously 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 ora-

tors 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 Devil in the White City • 17

The motion was overruled, but the House voted for a brief adjourn-

ment. The crowd remained in place.

After the seventh ballot Chicago was only one vote short of a major-

ity. 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 with-

out 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.

å

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 fix-

tures 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.

18 • Erik Larson

Daniel Hudson Burnham was born in Henderson, New York, on Sep-

tember 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 suc-

cessful 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 build-

ings 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

The Devil in the White City • 19

other draftsmen, a southerner named John Wellborn Root, who was four

years younger. Born in Lumpkin, Georgia, on January 10, 1850, Root

was a musical prodigy who could sing before he could talk. During the

Civil War, as Atlanta smoldered, Root’s father had smuggled him to

Liverpool, England, aboard a Confederate blockade-runner. Root won

acceptance into Oxford, but before he could matriculate, the war ended

and his father summoned him back to America, to his new home in New

York City, where Root studied civil engineering at New York University

and became a draftsman for the architect who later designed St. Patrick’s

Cathedral.

Burnham took to Root immediately. He admired Root’s white skin

and muscular arms, his stance at the drafting table. They became friends,

then partners. They recorded their first income three months before the

Panic of 1873 snuffed the nation’s economy. But this time Burnham stuck

with it. Something about the partnership with Root bolstered him. It

filled an absence and played to both men’s strengths. They struggled for

their own commissions and in the meantime hired themselves out to

other more established firms.

One day in 1874 a man walked into their office and in a single gal-

vanic moment changed their lives. He wore black and looked ordinary,

but in his past there was blood, death, and profit in staggering quantity.

He came looking for Root, but Root was out of town. He introduced

himself instead to Burnham and gave his name as John B. Sherman.

There was no need to amplify the introduction. As superintendent of

the Union Stock Yards, Sherman ruled an empire of blood that employed

25,000 men, women, and children and each year slaughtered fourteen

million animals. Directly and indirectly nearly one-fifth of Chicago’s

population depended on the yards for its economic survival.

Sherman liked Burnham. He liked his strength, his steady blue gaze,

and the confidence with which he conducted the conversation. Sherman

commissioned the firm to build him a mansion on Prairie Avenue at

Twenty-first Street among homes owned by other Chicago barons and

where now and then Marshall Field, George Pullman, and Philip Armour

20 • Erik Larson

could be seen walking to work together, a titanic threesome in black.

Root drew a house of three stories with gables and a peaked roof, in red

brick, buff sandstone, blue granite, and black slate; Burnham refined the

drawings and guided construction. Burnham happened to be standing in

the entrance to the house, considering the work, when a young man with

a mildly haughty air and an odd strut—not ego, here, but a congenital

fault—walked up to him and introduced himself as Louis Sullivan. The

name meant nothing to Burnham. Not yet. Sullivan and Burnham talked.

Sullivan was eighteen, Burnham twenty-eight. He told Sullivan, in confi-

dence, that he did not expect to remain satisfied doing just houses. “My

idea,” he said, “is to work up a big business, to handle big things, deal

with big business men, and to build up a big organization, for you can’t

handle big things unless you have an organization.”

John Sherman’s daughter, Margaret, also visited the construction site.

She was young, pretty, and blond and visited often, using as her excuse

the fact that her friend Della Otis lived across the street. Margaret did

think the house very fine, but what she admired most was the architect

who seemed so at ease among the cairns of sandstone and timber. It took

a while, but Burnham got the point. He asked her to marry him. She said

yes; the courtship went smoothly. Then scandal broke. Burnham’s older

brother had forged checks and wounded their father’s wholesale drug

business. Burnham immediately went to Margaret’s father to break the

engagement, on grounds the courtship could not continue in the shadow

of scandal. Sherman told him he respected Burnham’s sense of honor but

rejected his withdrawal. He said quietly, “There is a black sheep in every

family.”

Later Sherman, a married man, would run off to Europe with the

daughter of a friend.

Burnham and Margaret married on January 20, 1876. Sherman

bought them a house at Forty-third Street and Michigan Avenue, near the

lake but more importantly near the stockyards. He wanted proximity. He

liked Burnham and approved of the marriage, but he did not entirely

trust the young architect. He thought Burnham drank too much.

The Devil in the White City • 21

Sherman’s doubts about Burnham’s character did not color his respect

for his skill as an architect. He commissioned other structures. In his

greatest vote of confidence, he asked Burnham & Root to build an entry

portal for the Union Stock Yards that would reflect the yards’ growing

importance. The result was the Stone Gate, three arches of Lemont lime-

stone roofed in copper and displaying over the central arch the carved

bust—Root’s touch, no doubt—of John Sherman’s favorite bull,

Sherman. The gate became a landmark that endured into the twenty-first

century, long after the last hog crossed to eternity over the great wooden

ramp called the Bridge of Sighs.

Root also married a daughter of the stockyards, but his experience

was darker. He designed a house for John Walker, president of the yards,

and met Walker’s daughter, Mary. During their courtship she became ill

with tuberculosis. The disease rapidly gained ground, but Root remained

committed to the engagement, even though it was clear to everyone he

was marrying a dead woman. The ceremony was held in the house Root

had designed. A friend, the poet Harriet Monroe, waited with the other

guests for the bride to appear on the stairway. Monroe’s sister, Dora, was

the sole bridesmaid. “A long wait frightened us,” Harriet Monroe said,

“but at last the bride, on her father’s arm, appeared like a white ghost at

the halfway landing, and slowly oh, so hesitatingly dragging her heavy

satin train, stepped down the wide stairway and across the floor to the

bay window which was gay with flowers and vines. The effect was

weirdly sad.” Root’s bride was thin and pale and could only whisper her

vows. “Her gayety,” Harriet Monroe wrote, “seemed like jewels on a

skull.”

Within six weeks Mary Walker Root was dead. Two years later Root

married the bridesmaid, Dora Monroe, and very likely broke her poet-

sister’s heart. That Harriet Monroe also loved Root seems beyond dis-

pute. She lived nearby and often visited the couple in their Astor Place

home. In 1896 she published a biography of Root that would have made

an angel blush. Later, in her memoir, A Poet’s Life, she described Root’s

marriage to her sister as being “so completely happy that my own

22 • Erik Larson

dreams of happiness, confirmed by that example, demanded as fortunate

a fulfillment, and could accept nothing less.” But Harriet never found

its equal and devoted her life instead to poetry, eventually founding

Poetry magazine, where she helped launch Ezra Pound toward national

prominence.

Root and Burnham prospered. A cascade of work flowed to their firm,

partly because Root managed to solve a puzzle that had bedeviled

Chicago builders ever since the city’s founding. By solving it, he helped

the city become the birthplace of skyscrapers despite terrain that could

not have been less suited to the role.

In the 1880s Chicago was experiencing explosive growth that pro-

pelled land values to levels no one could have imagined, especially within

the downtown “Loop,” named for the turn-around loops of streetcar

lines. As land values rose, landowners sought ways of improving the

return on their investments. The sky beckoned.

The most fundamental obstacle to height was man’s capacity to walk

stairs, especially after the kinds of meals men ate in the nineteenth cen-

tury, but this obstacle had been removed by the advent of the elevator

and, equally important, by Elisha Graves Otis’s invention of a safety

mechanism for halting an elevator in free-fall. Other barriers remained,

however, the most elemental of which was the bedeviling character of

Chicago’s soil, which prompted one engineer to describe the challenge of

laying foundations in Chicago as “probably not equaled for perverseness

anywhere in the world.” Bedrock lay 125 feet below grade, too deep for

workers to reach with any degree of economy or safety using the con-

struction methods available in the 1880s. Between this level and the

surface was a mixture of sand and clay so saturated with water that

engineers called it gumbo. It compressed under the weight of even

modest structures and drove architects, as a matter of routine, to design

their buildings with sidewalks that intersected the first story four inches

above grade, in the hope that when the building settled and dragged the

sidewalks down with it, the walks would be level.

There were only two known ways to resolve the soil problem: Build

The Devil in the White City • 23

short and avoid the issue, or drive caissons down to bedrock. The latter

technique required that workers excavate deep shafts, shore the walls,

and pump each so full of air that the resulting high pressure held water

at bay, a process that was notorious for causing deadly cases of the bends

and used mainly by bridge builders who had no other choice. John

Augustus Roebling had used caissons, famously, in building the Brooklyn

Bridge, but their first use in the United States had occurred earlier, from

1869 through 1874, when James B. Eads built a bridge over the

Mississippi at St. Louis. Eads discovered that workers began experienc-

ing the bends at sixty feet below ground, roughly half the depth to which

a Chicago caisson would have to descend. Of the 352 men who worked

on the bridge’s notorious east caisson, pressure-related illness killed

twelve, left two crippled for life, and injured sixty-six others, a casualty

rate of over 20 percent.