The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

by Erik Larson

  On Thursday, August 19, Geyer learned that during the preceding night Holmes’s castle in Englewood, his own dark dreamland, had burned to the ground. Front-page headlines in the Chicago Tribune shouted, “Holmes’ Den Burned; Fire Demolishes the Place of Murder and Mystery.” The fire department suspected arson; police theorized that whoever set the fire had wanted to destroy the secrets still embedded within. They arrested no one.

  Together Detective Geyer and Inspector Gary investigated nine hundred leads. They expanded their search to include small towns outside Indianapolis. “By Monday,” Geyer wrote in a report to headquarters, “we will have searched every outlying town, except Irvington, and another day will conclude that. After Irvington, I scarcely know where we shall go.”

  They went to Irvington on Tuesday morning, August 27, 1895, aboard an electric trolley, a new kind of streetcar that drew its power through a wheeled conducting apparatus on the roof called a troller. Just before the trolley reached its final stop, Geyer spotted a sign for a real estate office. He and Gary resolved to begin their search there.

  The proprietor was a Mr. Brown. He offered the detectives each a chair, but they remained standing. They did not think the visit would last long, and there were many other offices to touch before nightfall. Geyer opened his now-soiled parcel of photographs.

  Brown adjusted his glasses and examined the picture of Holmes. After a long pause he said, “I did not have the renting of the house, but I had the keys, and one day last fall, this man came into my office and in a very abrupt way said I want the keys for that house.” Geyer and Gary stood very still. Brown continued: “I remember the man very well, because I did not like his manner, and I felt that he should have had more respect for my gray hairs.”

  The detectives looked at each other. Both sat down at the same time. “All the toil,” Geyer said, “all the weary days and weeks of travel—toil and travel in the hottest months of the year, alternating between faith and hope, and discouragement and despair, all were recompensed in that one moment, when I saw the veil about to lift.”

  At the inquest that followed a young man named Elvet Moorman testified he had helped Holmes set up a large woodstove in the house. He recalled asking Holmes why he didn’t install a gas stove instead. Holmes answered “that he did not think gas was healthy for children.”

  The owner of an Indianapolis repair shop testified that Holmes had come into his shop on October 3, 1894, with two cases of surgical instruments and asked to have them sharpened. Holmes picked them up three days later.

  Detective Geyer testified how during his search of the house he had opened the base of a chimney flue that extended from roof to cellar. While sifting the accumulated ash through a fly screen, he found human teeth and a fragment of jaw. He also retrieved “a large charred mass, which upon being cut, disclosed a portion of the stomach, liver and spleen, baked quite hard.” The organs had been packed too tightly into the chimney and thus never had burned.

  And of course Mrs. Pitezel was summoned. She identified Howard’s overcoat and his scarf pin, and a crochet needle that belonged to Alice.

  Finally the coroner showed her a toy that Geyer himself had found in the house. It consisted of a tin man mounted on a spinning top. She recognized it. How could she not? It was Howard’s most important possession. Mrs. Pitezel herself had put it in the children’s trunk just before she sent them off with Holmes. His father had bought it for him at the Chicago world’s fair.

  Malice Aforethought

  ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1895, a Philadelphia grand jury voted to indict Holmes for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel. Only two witnesses presented evidence, L. G. Fouse, president of Fidelity Mutual Life, and Detective Frank Geyer. Holmes stuck to his claim that Minnie Williams and the mysterious Hatch had killed the children. Grand juries in Indianapolis and Toronto found this unconvincing. Indianapolis indicted Holmes for the murder of Howard Pitezel, Toronto for the murders of Alice and Nellie. If Philadelphia failed to convict him, there would be two more chances; if the city succeeded, the other indictments would be moot, for given the nature of the Pitezel murder, a conviction in Philadelphia would bring a death sentence.

  Holmes’s memoir reached newsstands. In its final pages he stated, “In conclusion, I wish to say that I am but a very ordinary man, even below average in physical strength and mental ability, and to have planned and executed the stupendous amount of wrong-doing that has been attributed to me would have been wholly beyond my power…”

  He asked the public to suspend judgment while he worked to disprove the charges against him, “a task which I feel able to satisfactorily and expeditiously accomplish. And here I cannot say finis—it is not the end—for besides doing this there is also the work of bringing to justice those for whose wrong-doings I am to-day suffering, and this not to prolong or save my own life, for since the day I heard of the Toronto horror I have not cared to live; but that to those who have looked up to and honored me in the past it shall not in the future be said that I suffered the ignominious death of a murderer.”

  The thing editors could not understand was how Holmes had been able to escape serious investigation by the Chicago police. The Chicago Inter Ocean said, “It is humiliating to think that had it not been for the exertions of the insurance companies which Holmes swindled, or attempted to swindle, he might yet be at large, preying upon society, so well did he cover up the traces of his crime.” Chicago’s “feeling of humiliation” was not surprising, the New York Times said; anyone familiar with the saga “must be amazed at the failure of the municipal police department and the local prosecuting officers not only to prevent those awful crimes, but even to procure any knowledge of them.”

  One of the most surprising and perhaps dismaying revelations was that Chicago’s chief of police, in his prior legal career, had represented Holmes in a dozen routine commercial lawsuits.

  The Chicago Times-Herald took the broad view and said of Holmes: “He is a prodigy of wickedness, a human demon, a being so unthinkable that no novelist would dare to invent such a character. The story, too, tends to illustrate the end of the century.”

  EPILOGUE

  The Last Crossing

  Statue of the Republic, after the Peristyle fire, 1894.

  The Fair

  THE FAIR HAD A POWERFUL and lasting impact on the nation’s psyche, in ways both large and small. Walt Disney’s father, Elias, helped build the White City; Walt’s Magic Kingdom may well be a descendant. Certainly the fair made a powerful impression on the Disney family. It proved such a financial boon that when the family’s third son was born that year, Elias in gratitude wanted to name him Columbus. His wife, Flora, intervened; the baby became Roy. Walt came next, on December 5, 1901. The writer L. Frank Baum and his artist-partner William Wallace Denslow visited the fair; its grandeur informed their creation of Oz. The Japanese temple on the Wooded Island charmed Frank Lloyd Wright, and may have influenced the evolution of his “Prairie” residential designs. The fair prompted President Harrison to designate October 12 a national holiday, Columbus Day, which today serves to anchor a few thousand parades and a three-day weekend. Every carnival since 1893 has included a Midway and a Ferris Wheel, and every grocery store contains products born at the exposition. Shredded Wheat did survive. Every house has scores of incandescent bulbs powered by alternating current, both of which first proved themselves worthy of large-scale use at the fair; and nearly every town of any size has its little bit of ancient Rome, some beloved and be-columned bank, library or post office. Covered with graffiti, perhaps, or even an ill-conceived coat of paint, but underneath it all the glow of the White City persists. Even the Lincoln Memorial in Washington can trace its heritage to the fair.

  The fair’s greatest impact lay in how it changed the way Americans perceived their cities and their architects. It primed the whole of America—not just a few rich architectural patrons—to think of cities in a way they never had before. Elihu Root said the fair led “our people out of the wilderness
of the commonplace to new ideas of architectural beauty and nobility.” Henry Demarest Lloyd saw it as revealing to the great mass of Americans “possibilities of social beauty, utility, and harmony of which they had not been able even to dream. No such vision could otherwise have entered into the prosaic drudgery of their lives, and it will be felt in their development into the third and fourth generation.” The fair taught men and women steeped only in the necessary to see that cities did not have to be dark, soiled, and unsafe bastions of the strictly pragmatic. They could also be beautiful.

  William Stead recognized the power of the fair immediately. The vision of the White City and its profound contrast to the Black City drove him to write If Christ Came to Chicago, a book often credited with launching the City Beautiful movement, which sought to elevate American cities to the level of the great cities of Europe. Like Stead, civic authorities throughout the world saw the fair as a model of what to strive for. They asked Burnham to apply the same citywide thinking that had gone into the White City to their own cities. He became a pioneer in modern urban planning. He created citywide plans for Cleveland, San Francisco, and Manila and led the turn-of-the-century effort to resuscitate and expand L’Enfant’s vision of Washington, D.C. In each case he worked without a fee.

  While helping design the new Washington plan, Burnham persuaded the head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Alexander Cassatt, to remove his freight tracks and depot from the center of the federal mall, thus creating the unobstructed green that extends today from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. Other cities came to Daniel Burnham for citywide plans, among them Fort Worth, Atlantic City, and St. Louis, but he turned them down to concentrate on his last plan, for the city of Chicago. Over the years many aspects of his Chicago plan were adopted, among them the creation of the city’s lovely ribbon of lakefront parks and Michigan Avenue’s “Miracle Mile.” One portion of the lakefront, named Burnham Park in his honor, contains Soldier Field and the Field Museum, which he designed. The park runs south in a narrow green border along the lakeshore all the way to Jackson Park, where the fair’s Palace of Fine Arts, transformed into a permanent structure, now houses the Museum of Science and Industry. It looks out over the lagoons and the Wooded Island, now a wild and tangled place that perhaps would make Olmsted smile—though no doubt he would find features to criticize.

  Early in the twentieth century the fair became a source of heated debate among architects. Critics claimed the fair extinguished the Chicago School of architecture, an indigenous vernacular, and replaced it with a renewed devotion to obsolete classical styles. Parroted from thesis to thesis, this view first gained prominence through a curiously personal dynamic that made it difficult and—as is often the case in the cramped and stuffy rooms of academic debate—even dangerous to resist.

  It was Louis Sullivan who first and most loudly condemned the fair’s influence on architecture, but only late in his life and long after Burnham’s death.

  Things had not gone well for Sullivan after the fair. During the first year of the postfair depression the firm of Adler & Sullivan received only two commissions; in 1895, none. In July 1895 Adler quit the firm. Sullivan was thirty-eight and incapable of cultivating the relationships that might have generated enough new commissions to keep him solvent. He was a loner and intellectually intolerant. When a fellow architect asked Sullivan for suggestions on how to improve one of his designs, Sullivan replied, “If I told you, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”

  As his practice faltered, Sullivan found himself forced to leave his office in the Auditorium and to sell his personal belongings. He drank heavily and took mood-altering drugs called bromides. Between 1895 and 1922 Sullivan built only twenty-five new structures, roughly one a year. From time to time he came to Burnham for money, although whether he sought outright loans or sold Burnham artwork from his personal collection is unclear. An entry in Burnham’s diary for 1911 states, “Louis Sullivan called to get more money of DHB.” That same year Sullivan inscribed a set of drawings, “To Daniel H. Burnham, with the best wishes of his friend Louis H. Sullivan.”

  But Sullivan laced his 1924 autobiography with hyperbolic attacks on Burnham and the fair’s impact on the masses who came through its gates. The classical architecture of the White City made such a profound impression, Sullivan claimed, that it doomed America to another half-century of imitation. The fair was a “contagion,” a “virus,” a form of “progressive cerebral meningitis.” In his view it had fatal consequences. “Thus Architecture died in the land of the free and the home of the brave—in a land declaring its fervid democracy, its inventiveness, its resourcefulness, its unique daring, enterprise and progress.”

  Sullivan’s low opinion of Burnham and the fair was counterbalanced only by his own exalted view of himself and what he saw as his role in attempting to bring to architecture something fresh and distinctly American. Frank Lloyd Wright took up Sullivan’s banner. Sullivan had fired him in 1893, but later Wright and Sullivan became friends. As Wright’s academic star rose, so too did Sullivan’s. Burnham’s fell from the sky. It became de rigueur among architecture critics and historians to argue that Burnham in his insecurity and slavish devotion to the classical yearnings of the eastern architects had indeed killed American architecture.

  But that view was too simplistic, as some architecture historians and critics have more recently acknowledged. The fair awakened America to beauty and as such was a necessary passage that laid the foundation for men like Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

  For Burnham personally the fair had been an unqualified triumph. It allowed him to fulfill his pledge to his parents to become the greatest architect in America, for certainly in his day he had become so. During the fair an event occurred whose significance to Burnham was missed by all but his closest friends: Both Harvard and Yale granted him honorary master’s degrees in recognition of his achievement in building the fair. The ceremonies occurred on the same day. He attended Harvard’s. For him the awards were a form of redemption. His past failure to gain admission to both universities—the denial of his “right beginning”—had haunted him throughout his life. Even years after receiving the awards, as he lobbied Harvard to grant provisional admission to his son Daniel, whose own performance on the entry exams was far from stellar, Burnham wrote, “He needs to know that he is a winner, and, as soon as he does, he will show his real quality, as I have been able to do. It is the keenest regret of my life that someone did not follow me up at Cambridge … and let the authorities know what I could do.”

  Burnham had shown them himself, in Chicago, through the hardest sort of work. He bristled at the persistent belief that John Root deserved most of the credit for the beauty of the fair. “What was done up to the time of his death was the faintest suggestion of a plan,” he said. “The impression concerning his part has been gradually built up by a few people, close friends of his and mostly women, who naturally after the Fair proved beautiful desired to more broadly identify his memory with it.”

  Root’s death had crushed Burnham, but it also freed him to become a broader, better architect. “It was questioned by many if the loss of Mr. Root was not irreparable,” wrote James Ellsworth in a letter to Burnham’s biographer, Charles Moore. Ellsworth concluded that Root’s death “brought out qualities in Mr. Burnham which might not have developed, as early anyway, had Mr. Root lived.” The common perception had always been that Burnham managed the business side of the firm, while Root did all the designs. Burnham did seem to “lean more or less” on Root’s artistic abilities, Ellsworth said, but added that after Root’s death “one would never realize anything of this kind … or ever know from his actions that he ever possessed a partner or did not always command in both directions.”

  In 1901 Burnham built the Fuller Building at the triangular intersection of Twenty-third and Broadway in New York, but neighborhood residents found an uncanny resemblance to a common domestic tool and called it the Flatiron Building. Burnham and
his firm went on to build scores of other structures, among them the Gimbel’s department store in New York, Filene’s in Boston, and the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. Of the twenty-seven buildings he and John Root built in Chicago’s Loop, only three remain today, among them the Rookery, its top-floor library much as it was during that magical meeting in February 1891, and the Reliance Building, beautifully transformed into the Hotel Burnham. Its restaurant is called the Atwood, after Charles Atwood, who replaced Root as Burnham’s chief designer.

  Burnham became an early environmentalist. “Up to our time,” he said, “strict economy in the use of natural resources has not been practiced, but it must be henceforth unless we are immoral enough to impair conditions in which our children are to live.” He had great, if misplaced, faith in the automobile. The passing of the horse would “end a plague of barbarism,” he said. “When this change comes, a real step in civilization will have been taken. With no smoke, no gases, no litter of horses, your air and streets will be clean and pure. This means, does it not, that the health and spirits of men will be better?”

  On winter nights in Evanston he and his wife went sleigh-riding with Mr. and Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright. Burnham became an avid player of bridge, though he was known widely for being utterly inept at the game. He had promised his wife that after the exposition the pace of his work would ease. But this did not happen. He told Margaret, “I thought the fair was an intense life, but I find the pressing forward of all these important interests gives me quite as full a day, week or year.”