The Devil in the White City: Part III

Many thousands of others boarded trains and jammed the bright yellow cars, dubbed “cattle cars,” built by the Illinois Central to haul as many people as possible to the fair.

The carriages rolled past Sitting Bull’s Cabin, the Lapland Village, the compound of the allegedly cannibalistic Dahomans, and, directly opposite, the California Ostrich Farm, redolent of simmering butter and eggs.

Chastened by criticism of the stupefying length of October’s Dedication Day ceremony, the fair’s officers had kept the Opening Day program short and pledged to honor the timetable at all costs.

Those privy to the warfare within and between these agencies watched Burnham closely but saw no change in his expression.

The yellow cattle cars were mostly empty, as were the cars of the Alley L that ran along Sixty-third Street. All hope that this was merely an anomaly disappeared the next day, when the forces that had been battering the nation’s economy erupted in a panic on Wall Street that caused stock prices to plummet.

Word that the bank was near failure caused the street out front to fill with children pleading for their money. Other banks came to Nebraska Savings’ rescue, and the so-called “children’s run” was quelled.

His guest rooms began to fill with women, most quite young and apparently unused to living alone. Holmes found them intoxicating.

He was neat—maybe fastidious was the better word—and his clothing and behavior suggested financial well-being.

They saw even more ungodly things—the first zipper; the first-ever all-electric kitchen, which included an automatic dishwasher; and a box purporting to contain everything a cook would need to make pancakes, under the brand name Aunt Jemima’s.

The court, he wrote, “was practically blameless; the aesthetic sense of the beholder was as fully and unreservedly satisfied as in looking at a masterpiece of painting or sculpture, and at the same time was soothed and elevated by a sense of amplitude and grandeur such as no single work of art could produce.”

His quest to create a powerful first impression was good showmanship, but it also exposed the aesthetic despot residing within.

This alone began to draw an increased number of visitors, especially young couples locked in the rictus of Victorian courtship and needful of quiet dark places.

Reporters from far-flung cities wired the same observation back to their editors, and stories of delight and awe began to percolate through the most remote towns.

They saw the Pullman Company’s “Ideal of Industry” exhibit, with its detailed model of Pullman’s company town, which the company extolled as a workers’ paradise.

Below the chandeliers spread an indoor city of “gilded domes and glittering minarets, mosques, palaces, kiosks, and brilliant pavilions,” according to the popular Rand, McNally & Co. Handbook to the World's Columbian Exposition.

“Persuaders” called to her from raised platforms, seeking to entice her into the Moorish Palace with its room of mirrors, its optical illusions, and its eclectic wax museum, where visitors saw figures as diverse as Little Red Riding Hood and Marie Antoinette about to be guillotined.

“I did not enter the carriage with the easiest feeling at heart,” Gronau said. “I felt squeamish; yet I could not refuse to take the trip. So I put on a bold face and walked into the car.”

This reverie was broken as more bolts and nuts bounded down the superstructure onto the car’s roof.

It’s likely the board had been influenced by an accident that had occurred the previous Wednesday, June 14, at the Midway’s Ice Railway, a descending elliptical track of ice over which two coupled bobsleds full of passengers could reach speeds of forty miles an hour.

But he saw that other factors were exerting a countervailing force.

One of the most pernicious factors, Olmsted found, was the widespread fear that anyone who ventured to Chicago would be “fleeced unmercifully,” especially in the fair’s many restaurants, with their “extortionate” prices.

The exposition was a dream city, but it was Burnham’s dream. Everywhere it reflected the authoritarian spandrels of his character, from its surfeit of policemen to its strict rules against picking flowers.

The fire broke out in the cupola at the top of the central tower but was controlled quickly and caused only a hundred dollars in damage.

The resulting volume of garbage overwhelmed its disposal system, which consisted of janitors bumping large barrels of fetid garbage down the same three flights of stairs used by customers.

Indians who had once used hatchets to bare the skulls of white men drifted over from Buffalo Bill’s compound, as did Annie Oakley and assorted Cossacks, Hussars, Lancers, and members of the U.S. Sixth Cavalry on temporary furlough to become actors in Colonel Cody’s show.

Previously Hall had invented a machine capable of typing in Braille, the Hall Braille Writer, which he never patented because he felt profit should not sully the cause of serving the blind.

The twenty-eight ostriches of the Midway ostrich farm bore the loss with their usual aplomb.

The bankers were pressuring the exposition’s directors to appoint a Retrenchment Committee empowered not just to seek out ways of reducing the fair’s expenses but to execute whatever cost-saving measures it deemed necessary, including layoffs and the elimination of departments and committees.

“Hundreds of newspapers, among them scores of the strongest Eastern dailies, held their sides with merriment over the exquisite humor of the idea of this crude, upstart, pork-packing city undertaking to conceive and carry out a true World’s Fair....”

It should cause a shiver in the composite breast of the Board of Lady Managers when they consider what may happen if Director-General Davis should lead out some fascinating Fatima at the head of the grand procession and she should be taken with peritonitis in the midst of the dance; or if [Potter] Palmer should escort a votary of the Temple of Luxor only to find her with the same ailment; or if Mayor Harrison, who belongs to all nations, should dance with the whole lot.

Suppose that President Higinbotham finds as his vis-à-vis an anointed, barebacked Fiji beauty or a Dahomeyite amazon bent upon the extraordinary antics of the cannibal dance, is he to join in and imitate her or risk his head in an effort to restrain her?

From railings in front of the boxes hung triangles of silk embroidered with gold arabesques, all glowing with the light of adjacent incandescent bulbs.

A few days after that, 25,000 unemployed workers converged on the downtown lakefront and heard Samuel Gompers, standing at the back of speaker’s wagon No. 5, ask, “Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?”

Monday was an apple-crisp day with temperatures that never exceeded sixty-two degrees, under vivid cerulean skies.

Millet had planned an elaborate series of explosive “set pieces,” fireworks affixed to large metal frames shaped to depict various portraits and tableaus.

Neither McKim nor Burnham truly believed the fair should be set aflame. The buildings, in fact, had been designed to maximize the salvage value of their components. Rather, this talk of conflagration was a way of easing the despair of watching the dream come to an end.

Chamberlin had planned the meeting as a trap to try to shatter Holmes’s imperturbable façade, and was impressed with Holmes’s ability to maintain his insouciance despite the rancor in the room.

Tonight’s visitor seemed seedier than most, however, and behaved oddly.

“He died angry,” Chalmers said, “because I didn’t believe him. Even in death he is emphatic and imperious.”

“What a human downfall after the magnificence and prodigality of the World’s Fair which had so recently closed its doors! Heights of splendor, pride, exaltation in one month: depths of wretchedness, suffering, hunger, cold, in the next.”