by Erik Larson
Holmes offered Julia a cheerful “Merry Christmas” and gave her a hug, then took her hand and led her to a room on the second floor that he had readied for the operation. A table lay draped in white linen. His surgical kits stood open and gleaming, his instruments laid out in a sunflower of polished steel. Fearful things: bonesaws, abdomen retractor, trocar and trepan. More instruments, certainly, than he really needed and all positioned so that Julia could not help but see them and be sickened by their hard, eager gleam.
He wore a white apron and had rolled back his cuffs. Possibly he wore his hat, a bowler. He had not washed his hands, nor did he wear a mask. There was no need.
She reached for his hand. There would be no pain, he assured her. She would awaken as healthy as she was now but without the encumbrance she bore within. He pulled the stopper from a dark amber bottle of liquid and immediately felt its silvery exhalation in his own nostrils. He poured the chloroform into a bunched cloth. She gripped his hand more tightly, which he found singularly arousing. He held the cloth over her nose and mouth. Her eyes fluttered and rolled upward. Then came the inevitable, reflexive disturbance of muscles, like a dream of running. She released his hand and cast it away with splayed fingers. Her feet trembled as if tapping to a wildly beating drum. His own excitement rose. She tried to pull his hand away, but he was prepared for this sudden surge of muscle stimulation that always preceded stupor, and with great force clamped the cloth to her face. She beat at his arms. Slowly the energy left her, and her hands began to move in slow arcs, soothing and sensuous, the wild drums silent. Ballet now, a pastoral exit.
He kept one hand on the cloth and with the other dribbled more of the liquid between his fingers into its folds, delighting in the sensation of frost where the chloroform coated his fingers. One of her wrists sagged to the table, followed shortly by the other. Her eyelids stuttered, then closed. Holmes did not think her so clever as to feign coma, but he held tight just the same. After a few moments he reached for her wrist and felt her pulse fade to nothing, like the rumble of a receding train.
He removed the apron and rolled down his sleeves. The chloroform and his own intense arousal made him feel light-headed. The sensation, as always, was pleasant and induced in him a warm languor, like the feeling he got after sitting too long in front of a hot stove. He stoppered the chloroform, found a fresh cloth, and walked down the hall to Pearl’s room.
It took only a moment to bunch the fresh cloth and douse it with chloroform. In the hall, afterward, he examined his watch and saw that it was Christmas.
The day meant nothing to Holmes. The Christmas mornings of his youth had been suffocated under an excess of piety, prayer, and silence, as if a giant wool blanket had settled over the house.
On Christmas morning the Crowes waited for Julia and Pearl in glad anticipation of watching the girl’s eyes ignite upon spotting the lovely tree and the presents arrayed under its boughs. The apartment was warm, the air rouged with cinnamon and fir. An hour passed. The Crowes waited as long as they could, but at ten o’clock they set out to catch a train for central Chicago, where they planned to visit friends. They left the apartment unlocked, with a cheerful note of welcome.
The Crowes returned at eleven o’clock that night and found everything as they had left it, with no evidence that Julia and her daughter had come. The next morning they tried Julia’s apartment, but no one answered. They asked neighbors inside and outside the building if any had seen Julia or Pearl, but none had.
When Holmes next appeared, Mrs. Crowe asked him where Julia might be. He explained that she and Pearl had gone to Davenport earlier than expected.
Mrs. Crowe heard nothing more from Julia. She and her neighbors thought the whole thing very odd. They all agreed that the last time anyone had seen Julia or Pearl was Christmas Eve.
This was not precisely accurate. Others did see Julia again, although by then no one, not even her own family back in Davenport, Iowa, could have been expected to recognize her.
Just after Christmas Holmes asked one of his associates, Charles Chappell, to come to his building. Holmes had learned that Chappell was an “articulator,” meaning he had mastered the art of stripping the flesh from human bodies and reassembling, or articulating, the bones to form complete skeletons for display in doctors’ offices and laboratories. He had acquired the necessary techniques while articulating cadavers for medical students at Cook County Hospital.
During his own medical education Holmes had seen firsthand how desperate schools were to acquire corpses, whether freshly dead or skeletonized. The serious, systematic study of medicine was intensifying, and to scientists the human body was like the polar icecap, something to be studied and explored. Skeletons hung in doctors’ offices where they served as visual encyclopedias. With demand outpacing supply, doctors established a custom of graciously and discreetly accepting any offered cadaver. They frowned on murder as a means of harvest; on the other hand, they made little effort to explore the provenance of any one body. Grave-robbing became an industry, albeit a small one requiring an exceptional degree of sang-froid. In periods of acute shortage doctors themselves helped mine the newly departed.
It was obvious to Holmes that even now, in the 1890s, demand remained high. Chicago’s newspapers reported ghoulish tales of doctors raiding graveyards. After a foiled raid on a graveyard in New Albany, Indiana, on February 24, 1890, Dr. W. H. Wathen, head of the Kentucky Medical College, told a Tribune reporter, “The gentlemen were acting not for the Kentucky School of Medicine nor for themselves individually, but for the medical schools of Louisville to which the human subject is as necessary as breath to life.” Just three weeks later the physicians of Louisville were at it again. They attempted to rob a grave at the State Asylum for the Insane in Anchorage, Kentucky, this time on behalf of the University of Louisville. “Yes, the party was sent out by us,” a senior school official said. “We must have bodies, and if the State won’t give them to us we must steal them. The winter classes were large and used up so many subjects that there are none for the spring classes.” He saw no need to apologize. “The Asylum Cemetery has been robbed for years,” he said, “and I doubt if there is a corpse in it. I tell you we must have bodies. You cannot make doctors without them, and the public must understand it. If we can’t get them any other way we will arm the students with Winchester rifles and send them to protect the body-snatchers on their raids.”
Holmes had an eye for opportunity, and with demand for corpses so robust, opportunity now beckoned.
He showed Charles Chappell into a second-floor room that contained a table, medical instruments, and bottles of solvents. These did not trouble Chappell, nor did the corpse on the table, for Chappell knew that Holmes was a physician. The body was clearly that of a woman, although of unusual height. He saw nothing to indicate her identity. “The body,” he said, “looked like that of a jack rabbit which had been skinned by splitting the skin down the face and rolling it back off the entire body. In some places considerable of the flesh had been taken off with it.”
Holmes explained that he had been doing some dissection but now had completed his research. He offered Chappell thirty-six dollars to cleanse the bones and skull and return to him a fully articulated skeleton. Chappell agreed. Holmes and Chappell placed the body in a trunk lined with duckcloth. An express company delivered it to Chappell’s house.
Soon afterward Chappell returned with the skeleton. Holmes thanked him, paid him, and promptly sold the skeleton to Hahneman Medical College—the Chicago school, not the Philadelphia school of the same name—for many times the amount he had paid Chappell.
In the second week of January 1892 new tenants, the Doyle family, moved into Julia’s quarters in Holmes’s building. They found dishes on the table and Pearl’s clothes hung over a chair. The place looked and felt as if the former occupants planned to return within minutes.
The Doyles asked Holmes what had happened.
With his voice striking the perfect sober note
, Holmes apologized for the disarray and explained that Julia’s sister had fallen gravely ill and Julia and her daughter had left at once for the train station. There was no need to pack up their belongings, as Julia and Pearl were well provided for and would not be coming back.
Later Holmes offered a different story about Julia: “I last saw her about January 1, 1892, when a settlement of her rent was made. At this time she had announced not only to me, but to her neighbors and friends, that she was going away.” Although she had told everyone her destination was Iowa, in fact, Holmes said, “she was going elsewhere to avoid the chance of her daughter being taken from her, giving the Iowa destination to mislead her husband.” Holmes denied that he and Julia had ever engaged each other physically, or that she had undergone “a criminal operation,” a then-current euphemism for abortion. “That she is a woman of quick temper and perhaps not always of a good disposition may be true, but that any of her friends and relatives will believe her to be an amoral woman, or one who would be a party to a criminal act I do not think.”
A Gauntlet Dropped
EIGHTEEN NINETY-TWO BROKE COLD, with six inches of snow on the ground and temperatures falling to ten degrees below zero, certainly not the coldest weather Chicago had ever experienced but cold enough to clot the valves of all three of the city water system’s intake valves and temporarily halt the flow of Chicago’s drinking water. Despite the weather, work at Jackson Park progressed. Workers erected a heated movable shelter that allowed them to apply staff to the exterior of the Mines Building no matter what the temperature. The Woman’s Building was nearly finished, all its scaffolding gone; the giant Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building had begun rising above its foundation. In all, the workforce in the park numbered four thousand. The ranks included a carpenter and furniture-maker named Elias Disney, who in coming years would tell many stories about the construction of this magical realm beside the lake. His son Walt would take note.
Beyond the exposition’s eight-foot fence and its two tiers of barbed wire, there was tumult. Wage reductions and layoffs stoked unrest among workers nationwide. Unions gained strength; the Pinkerton National Detective Agency gained revenue. A rising union man named Samuel Gompers stopped by Burnham’s office to discuss allegations that the exposition discriminated against union workers. Burnham ordered his construction superintendent, Dion Geraldine, to investigate. As labor strife increased and the economy faltered, the general level of violence rose. In taking stock of 1891, the Chicago Tribune reported that 5,906 people had been murdered in America, nearly 40 percent more than in 1890. The increase included Mr. and Mrs. Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts.
The constant threat of strike and the onset of deep cold shaded the new year for Burnham, but what most concerned him was the fast-shrinking treasury of the Exposition Company. In advancing the work so quickly and on such a grand scale, Burnham’s department had consumed far more money than anyone had anticipated. There was talk now among the directors of seeking a $10 million appropriation from Congress, but the only immediate solution was to reduce expenditures. On January 6 Burnham commanded his department chiefs to take immediate, in some cases draconian, measures to cut costs. He ordered his chief draftsman, in charge of exposition work under way in the attic of the Rookery, to fire at once any man who did “inaccurate or ‘slouchy’ work” or who failed to do more than his full duty. He wrote to Olmsted’s landscape superintendent, Rudolf Ulrich, “it seems to me you can now cut your force down one-half, and at the same time let very many expensive men go.” Henceforth, Burnham ordered, all carpentry work was to be done only by men employed by the fair’s contractors. To Dion Geraldine, he wrote, “You will please dismiss every carpenter on your force….”
Until this point Burnham had shown a level of compassion for his workers that was extraordinary for the time. He had paid them even when illness or injury kept them out of work and established an exposition hospital that provided free medical care. He built quarters within the park where they received three large meals a day and slept in clean beds and well-heated rooms. A Princeton professor of political economy named Walter Wyckoff disguised himself as an unskilled laborer and spent a year traveling and working among the nation’s growing army of unemployed men, including a stint at Jackson Park. “Guarded by sentries and high barriers from unsought contact with all beyond, great gangs of us, healthy, robust men, live and labor in a marvelous artificial world,” he wrote. “No sight of misery disturbs us, nor of despairing poverty out in vain search for employment…. We work our eight hours a day in peaceful security and in absolute confidence of our pay.”
But now even the fair was laying off men, and the timing was awful. With the advent of winter the traditional building season had come to an end. Competition for the few jobs available had intensified as thousands of unemployed men from around the country—unhappily bearing the label “hobo,” derived possibly from the railroad cry “ho, boy”—converged on Chicago in hopes of getting exposition work. The dismissed men, Burnham knew, faced homelessness and poverty; their families confronted the real prospect of starvation. But the fair came first.
The absence of an Eiffel challenger continued to frustrate Burnham. Proposals got more and more bizarre. One visionary put forth a tower five hundred feet taller than the Eiffel Tower but made entirely of logs, with a cabin at the top for shelter and refreshment. The cabin was to be a log cabin.
If an engineer capable of besting Eiffel did not step forward soon, Burnham knew, there simply would not be enough time left to build anything worthy of the fair. Somehow he needed to rouse the engineers of America. The opportunity came with an invitation to give a talk to the Saturday Afternoon Club, a group of engineers who had begun meeting on Saturdays at a downtown restaurant to discuss the construction challenges of the fair.
There was the usual meal in multiple courses, with wine, cigars, coffee, and cognac. At one table sat a thirty-three-year-old engineer from Pittsburgh who ran a steel-inspection company that had branch offices in New York and Chicago and that already possessed the exposition contract to inspect the steel used in the fair’s buildings. He had an angular face, black hair, a black mustache, and dark eyes, the kind of looks soon to be coveted by an industry that Thomas Edison was just then bringing to life. He “was eminently engaging and social and he had a keen sense of humor,” his partners wrote. “In all gatherings he at once became the center of attraction, having a ready command of language and a constant fund of amusing anecdotes and experiences.”
Like the other members of the Saturday Afternoon Club, he expected to hear Burnham discuss the challenges of building an entire city on such a short schedule, but Burnham surprised him. After asserting that “the architects of America had covered themselves with glory” through their exposition designs, Burnham rebuked the nation’s civil engineers for failing to rise to the same level of brilliance. The engineers, Burnham charged, “had contributed little or nothing either in the way of originating novel features or of showing the possibilities of modern engineering practice in America.”
A tremor of displeasure rolled through the room.
“Some distinctive feature is needed,” Burnham continued, “something to take the relative position in the World’s Columbian Exposition that was filled by the Eiffel Tower at the Paris Exposition.”
But not a tower, he said. Towers were not original. Eiffel had built a tower already. “Mere bigness” wasn’t enough either. “Something novel, original, daring and unique must be designed and built if American engineers are to retain their prestige and standing.”
Some of the engineers took offense; others acknowledged that Burnham had a point. The engineer from Pittsburgh felt himself “cut to the quick by the truth of these remarks.”
As he sat there among his peers, an idea came to him “like an inspiration.” It arrived not as some half-formed impulse, he said, but rich in detail. He could see it and touch it, hear it as it moved through the sky.
There was not
much time left, but if he acted quickly to produce drawings and managed to convince the fair’s Ways and Means Committee of the idea’s feasibility, he believed the exposition could indeed out-Eiffel Eiffel. And if what happened to Eiffel happened to him, his fortune would be assured.
It must have been refreshing for Burnham to stand before the Saturday Afternoon Club and openly chide its members for their failure, because most of his other encounters over exposition business invariably became exercises in self-restraint, especially when he went before the fair’s many and still-multiplying committees. This constant Victorian minuet of false grace consumed time. He needed more power—not for his own ego but for the sake of the exposition. Unless the pace of decision-making accelerated, he knew, the fair would fall irreparably behind schedule, yet if anything the barriers to efficiency were increasing in size and number. The Exposition Company’s shrinking war chest had driven its relationship with the National Commission to a new low, with Director-General Davis arguing that any new federal money should be controlled by his commission. The commission seemed to form new departments every day, each with a paid chief—Davis named a superintendent of sheep, for a salary that today would total about $60,000 a year—and each claiming some piece of jurisdiction that Burnham thought belonged to him.
Soon the struggle for control distilled to a personal conflict between Burnham and Davis, its primary battlefield a disagreement over who should control the artistic design of exhibits and interiors. Burnham thought it obvious that the territory belonged to him. Davis believed otherwise.
At first Burnham tried the oblique approach. “We are now organizing a special interior decorative and architectural force to handle this part,” he wrote to Davis, “and I have the honor to offer the services of my department to yours in such matters. I feel a delicacy in having my men suggest to yours artistic arrangements, forms and decorations of exhibits, without your full approval, which I hereby respectfully ask.”