- Larson, Erik.
The Devil in the White City.
New York: Vintage Books, 2003.
ISBN 0-375-72560-1.
-
It's conventional wisdom in the publishing business that you
never want a book to “fall into the crack” between
two categories: booksellers won't know where to shelve it,
promotional campaigns have to convey a complicated mixed
message, and you run the risk of irritating readers who
bought it solely for one of the two topics. Here we have a book
which evokes the best and the worst of the Gilded Age of the
1890s in Chicago by interleaving the contemporary stories of
the 1893
World's
Columbian Exposition and the depraved series
of murders committed just a few miles from the fairgrounds by
the archetypal American psychopathic serial killer, the
chillingly diabolical Dr.
H. H. Holmes
(the principal alias
among many used by a man whose given name was Herman Webster
Mudgett; his doctorate was a legitimate medical degree from
the University of Michigan). Architectural and industrial history
and true crime are two genres you might think wouldn't mix, but in the
hands of the author they result in a compelling narrative which I
found as difficult to put down as any book I have read in the last
several years. For once, this is not just my eccentric opinion; at
this writing the book has been on The New York Times
Best-Seller list for more than two consecutive years and won the Edgar
award for best fact crime in 2004. As I rarely frequent best-seller
lists, it went right under my radar. Special thanks to the visitor to
this page who recommended I read it!
Boosters saw the Columbian Exposition not so much as a commemoration
of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in the New
World but as a brash announcement of the arrival of the United States
on the world stage as a major industrial, commercial, financial,
and military power. They viewed the 1889 Exposition
Universelle in Paris (for which the Eiffel Tower was built)
as a throwing down of the gauntlet by the Old World, and vowed to
assert the preeminence of the New by topping the French and
“out-Eiffeling Eiffel”. Once decided on by Congress, the
site of the exposition became a bitterly contested struggle between
partisans of New York, Washington, and Chicago, with the latter
seeing its victory as marking its own arrival as a peer of the
Eastern cities who looked with disdain at what Chicagoans considered
the most dynamic city in the nation.
Charged with building the Exposition, a city in itself, from scratch
on barren, wind-swept, marshy land was architect Daniel H. Burnham, he
who said, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir
men's blood.” He made no little plans. The exposition was to
have more than 200 buildings in a consistent neo-classical style, all
in white, including the largest enclosed space ever constructed.
While the electric light was still a novelty, the fair was to be
illuminated by the the first large-scale application of alternating
current. Edison's kinetoscope amazed visitors with moving pictures,
and a theatre presented live music played by an orchestra in New York
and sent over telephone wires to Chicago. Nikola Tesla amazed
fairgoers with huge bolts of electrical fire, and a giant wheel built
by a man named George Washington Gale Ferris lifted more than two
thousand people at once into the sky to look down upon the fair like
gods. One of the army of workers who built the fair was a carpenter
named Elias Disney, who later regaled his sons Roy and Walt with
tales of the magic city; they must have listened attentively.
The construction of the fair in such a short time seemed
miraculous to onlookers (and even more so to those
accustomed to how long it takes to get anything built a
century later), but the list of disasters, obstacles,
obstructions, and outright sabotage which Burnham and
his team had to overcome was so monumental you'd have
almost thought I was involved in the project!
(Although if you've ever set up a trade show booth in
Chicago, you've probably gotten a taste of it.) A total
of 27.5 million people visited the fair between
May and October of 1893, and this in a country whose
total population (1890 census) was just 62.6 million.
Perhaps even more astonishing to those acquainted with
comparable present-day undertakings, the exposition
was profitable and retired all of its bank debt.
While the enchanted fair was rising on the shore of Lake
Michigan and enthralling visitors from around the world,
in a gloomy city block size building not far away,
Dr. H. H. Holmes was using his almost preternatural powers
to charm the young, attractive, and unattached women who
flocked to Chicago from the countryside in search of
careers and excitement. He offered them the former in
various capacities in the businesses, some legitimate
and other bogus, in his “castle”, and the latter
in his own person, until he killed them, disposed of their
bodies, and in some cases sold their skeletons to medical
schools. Were the entire macabre history of Holmes
not thoroughly documented in court proceedings, investigators'
reports, and reputable contemporary news items,
he might seem to be a character from an over-the-top
Gothic novel, like Jack the Ripper. But wait—Jack
the Ripper was real too. However, Jack the Ripper is only
believed to have killed five women; Holmes is known
for certain to have killed nine men, women, and children.
He confessed to killing 27 in all, but this was the third
of three mutually inconsistent confessions all at variance
with documented facts (some of those he named in the third
confession turned up alive). Estimates ran as high as
two hundred, but that seems implausible. In any case, he
was a monster the likes of which no American imagined inhabited
their cities until his crimes were uncovered. Remarkably,
and of interest to libertarians who advocate the replacement
of state power by insurance-like private mechanisms,
Holmes never even came under suspicion by any government law
enforcement agency during the entire time he committed his
murder spree, nor did any of his other scams (running out on
debts, forging promissory notes, selling bogus remedies)
attract the attention of the law. His undoing was when he
attempted insurance fraud (one of his favourite activities)
and ended up with Nemesis-like private detective Frank
Geyer on his trail. Geyer, through tireless tracking and the
expenditure of large quantities of shoe leather, got the
goods on Holmes, who met his end on the gallows in May of
1896. His jailers considered him charming.
I picked this book up expecting an historical recounting
of a rather distant and obscure era. Was I ever wrong—I
finished the whole thing in two and half days; the story
is that fascinating and the writing that good. More
than 25 pages of source citations and bibliography are
included, but this is not a dry work of history; it reads
like a novel. In places, the author has invented descriptions
of events for which no eyewitness account exists; he says
that in doing this, his goal is to create a plausible narrative as a
prosecutor does at a trial. Most such passages are identified
in the end notes and justifications given for the inferences
made therein. The descriptions of the Exposition cry out
for many more illustrations than are included: there
isn't even a picture of the Ferris wheel! If you read this
book, you'll probably want to order the Dover
Photographic Record
of the Fair—I did.
March 2006 