by Erik Larson
Over the next century this tune and its variations would be deployed in a succession of mostly cheesy movies, typically as an accompaniment to the sinuous emergence of a cobra from a basket. It would also drive the schoolyard lyric, “And they wear no pants in the southern part of France.”
Bloom regretted his failure to copyright the tune. The royalties would have run into the millions.
Sad news arrived from Zanzibar: There would be no Pygmies. Lieutenant Schufeldt was dead, of unclear causes.
There was advice, much of it of course from New York. The advice that rankled most came from Ward McAllister, factotum and chief slipperlick to Mrs. William Astor, empress of New York society. Appalled by the vision conjured by Chicago’s Dedication Day, of crème and rabble mixing in such volume and with such indecorous propinquity, McCallister in a column in the New York World advised “it is not quantity but quality that the society people here want. Hospitality which includes the whole human race is not desirable.”
He urged Chicago hostesses to hire some French chefs to improve their culinary diction. “In these modern days, society cannot get along without French chefs,” he wrote. “The man who has been accustomed to delicate fillets of beef, terrapin pâté de foie gras, truffled turkey and things of that sort would not care to sit down to a boiled leg of mutton dinner with turnips.” The thing is, McAllister was serious.
And there was more. “I should also advise that they do not frappé their wine too much. Let them put the bottle in the tub and be careful to keep the neck free from ice. For, the quantity of wine in the neck of the bottle being small, it will be acted upon by the ice first. In twenty-five minutes from the time of being placed in the tub it will be in a perfect condition to be served immediately. What I mean by a perfect condition is that when the wine is poured from the bottle it should contain little flakes of ice. That is a real frappé.”
To which the Chicago Journal replied, “The mayor will not frappé his wine too much. He will frappé it just enough so the guests can blow the foam off the tops of the glasses without a vulgar exhibition of lung and lip power. His ham sandwiches, sinkers and Irish quail, better known in the Bridgeport vernacular as pigs’ feet, will be triumphs of the gastronomic art.” One Chicago newspaper called McAllister “A Mouse Colored Ass.”
Chicago delighted in such repartee—for the most part. On some level, however, McAllister’s remarks stung. McAllister was one particularly snooty voice, but it was clear to everyone that he spoke with the sanction of New York’s blue bloods. Among Chicago’s leading citizens there was always a deep fear of being second class. No one topped Chicago in terms of business drive and acumen, but within the city’s upper echelons there was a veiled anxiety that the city in its commercial advance may indeed have failed to cultivate the finer traits of man and woman. The exposition was to be a giant white banner waved in Mrs. Astor’s face. With its gorgeous classical buildings packed with art, its clean water and electric lights, and its overstaffed police department, the exposition was Chicago’s conscience, the city it wanted to become.
Burnham in particular embodied this insecurity. Denied admission to Harvard and Yale and the “right” beginning, he had become a self-conscious connoisseur of fine things. He arranged recitals at his home and office and joined the best clubs and collected the best wines and was now leading the greatest nonmilitary campaign in the nation’s history. Even so, the social columnists still did not write about his wife’s dresses when he and she attended the opera, the way they described the nightly couture of mesdames Palmer, Pullman, and Armour. The fair was to be Burnham’s redemption, and Chicago’s. “Outside peoples already concede our material greatness and that we are well nigh supreme in manufactures and commerce,” he wrote. “They do, however, claim that we are not cultivated and refined to the same extent. To remove this impression, the thought and work of this bureau has been mostly bent from the start.”
Advice arrived also by the bookful. An author named Adelaide Hollingsworth chose to honor the fair with more than seven hundred pages of it, which she published early in the year under the title The Columbia Cook Book. Although her book did include compelling recipes for scrapple, ox cheek, and baked calf’s head and tips for the preparation of raccoon, possum, snipe, plovers, and blackbirds (for blackbird pie) and “how to broil, fricassee, stew or fry a squirrel,” it was much more than just a cookbook. Hollingsworth billed it as an overall guide to helping modern young housewives create a peaceful, optimistic, and sanitary household. The wife was to set the tenor of the day. “The breakfast table should not be a bulletin-board for the curing of horrible dreams and depressing symptoms, but the place where a bright key-note of the day is struck.” In places Hollingsworth’s advice revealed, by refraction, a certain Victorian raciness. In a segment on how best to wash silk underwear, she advised, “If the article is black, add a little ammonia, instead of acid to the rinsing water.”
One of the most persistent problems of the day was “offensive feet,” caused by the prevailing habit of washing feet only once a week. To combat this, Hollingsworth wrote, “Take one part muriatic acid to ten parts of water; rub the feet every night with this mixture before retiring to bed.” To rid your mouth of the odor of onions, drink strong coffee. Oysters made the best rat-bait. To induce cream to whip, add a grain of salt. To keep milk sweet longer, add horseradish.
Hollingsworth offered sage medical advice—“Don’t sit between a fever patient and a fire”—and provided various techniques for dealing with medical emergencies, such as accidental poisoning. Among a list of measures effective for inducing vomiting, she included: “Injections of tobacco into the anus through a pipe stem.”
Jacob Riis, the New York journalist who had devoted himself to revealing the squalid housing of America’s poor, came to Chicago bearing counsel of a graver sort. In March he gave a talk at Hull House, a reform settlement founded by Jane Addams, “Saint Jane.” Hull House had become a bastion of progressive thought inhabited by strong-willed young women, “interspersed,” as one visitor put it, “with earnest-faced, self-subordinating and mild-mannered men who slide from room to room apologetically.” Clarence Darrow regularly walked the short distance from his office in the Rookery to Hull House, where he was admired for his intellect and social empathy but disparaged, privately, for his slovenly dress and less-than-exemplary hygiene.
At the time of Riis’s talk, Riis and Addams were two of the best known people in America. Riis had toured Chicago’s foulest districts and pronounced them worse than anything he had seen in New York. In his talk he noted the fast approach of the exposition and warned his audience, “You ought to begin house cleaning, so to speak, and get your alleys and streets in better condition; never in our worst season have we had so much filth in New York City.”
In fact, Chicago had been trying to tidy itself for some time and had found the challenge monumental. The city stepped up its efforts to remove garbage and began repaving alleys and streets. It deployed smoke inspectors to enforce a new antismoke ordinance. Newspapers launched crusades against pestilent alleys and excess smoke and identified the worst offenders in print—among them Burnham’s newly opened Masonic Temple, which the Chicago Tribune likened to Mount Vesuvius.
Carrie Watson, Chicago’s foremost madam, decided her own operation merited a little sprucing up. Her place already was luxurious, with a bowling alley where the pins were bottles of chilled champagne, but now she resolved to increase the number of bedrooms and double her staff. She and other brothel owners anticipated a big spike in demand. They would not be disappointed. Nor, apparently, would their clients. Later, a madam named Chicago May recalled the boisterous year of the fair with a cringe: “What dreadful things were done by some of the girls! It always made me sick even to think of them. The mere mention of the details of some of the ‘circuses’ is unprintable. I think Rome at its worst had nothing on Chicago during those lurid days.”
The man who helped make Chicago so hospitable to Carrie Wa
tson and Chicago May, as well as to Mickey Finn and Bathhouse John Coughlin and a few thousand other operators of saloons and gambling dens, was Carter Henry Harrison, whose four terms as mayor had gone a long way to establish Chicago as a place that tolerated human frailty even as it nurtured grand ambition. After his failed run for the office in 1891, Harrison had acquired a newspaper, the Chicago Times, and settled into the job of editor. By the end of 1892, however, he had made it clear that he would love to be the “Fair Mayor” and lead the city through its most glorious time, but insisted that only a clear signal of popular demand could make him actually enter the campaign. He got it. Carter H. Harrison Associations sprang up all over town, and now, at the start of 1893, Carter was one of two candidates for the Democratic nomination, the other being Washington Hesing, editor of the powerful German daily Staats-Zeitung.
Every newspaper in the city, other than his own Times, opposed Harrison, as did Burnham and most of Chicago’s leading citizens. To Burnham and the others the new Chicago, as symbolized by the White City rising in Jackson Park, required new leadership—certainly not Harrison.
The city’s legions of working men disagreed. They always had counted Harrison as one of their own, “Our Carter,” even though he was a plantation-reared Kentucky man who had gone to Yale, spoke fluent French and German, and recited lengthy passages from Shakespeare. He had served four terms; that he should serve a fifth in the year of the fair seemed fitting, and a wave of nostalgia swept the city’s wards.
Even his opponents recognized that Harrison, despite his privileged roots, made an intensely appealing candidate for the city’s lesser tier. He was magnetic. He was able and willing to talk to anyone about anything and had a way of making himself the center of any conversation. “His friends all noticed it,” said Joseph Medill, once an ally but later Harrison’s most ardent opponent, “they would laugh or smile about it, and called it ‘Carter Harrisonia.’ ” Even at sixty-eight Harrison exuded strength and energy, and women generally agreed that he was more handsome now than he had been in his fifties. Widowed twice, he was rumored to be involved with a much younger woman. He had deep blue eyes with large pupils and an unwrinkled face. He attributed his youthful aspect to a heavy dose of morning coffee. His quirks made him endearing. He loved watermelon; when it was in season, he ate it at all three meals. He had a passion for shoes—a different pair each day of the week—and for silk underwear. Almost everyone had seen Harrison riding the streets on his white Kentucky mare, in his black slouch hat, trailing a plume of cigar smoke. At his campaign talks he often addressed his remarks to a stuffed eagle that he carried with him as a prop. Medill accused him of nurturing the city’s basest instincts but also called him “the most remarkable man that our city has ever produced.”
To the astonishment of the city’s ruling class, 78 percent of the 681 delegates to the Democratic convention voted for Harrison on the first ballot. The Democratic elite implored the Republicans to come up with a candidate whom they too could support, anything to keep Harrison from returning to office. The Republicans chose Samuel W. Allerton, a rich packer from Prairie Avenue. The biggest and most powerful newspapers formed an explicit combine to back Allerton and undermine Harrison.
The ex-mayor countered their attacks with humor. During a talk before a large group of supporters at the Auditorium, Harrison called Allerton “a most admirable pig sticker and pig slaughterer. I admit it, and I don’t arraign him because he slaughters the queen’s English; he can’t help it.”
Harrison rapidly gained ground.
Patrick Prendergast, the young mad Irish immigrant, took pride in Harrison’s renewed popularity and believed his own efforts at promoting the ex-mayor for reelection had had a lot do with the campaign’s new momentum. An idea came to Prendergast. Just when it entered his brain he could not say, but it was there, and it gave him satisfaction. He had read extensively into law and politics and understood that political machines operated on a first principle of power: If you worked to advance the interests of the machine, the machine paid you back. Harrison was in his debt.
This notion came to Prendergast initially as a glimmer, like the first sunlight to strike the Masonic tower each morning, but now he thought of it a thousand times a day. It was his treasure and made him square his shoulders and raise his chin. When Harrison won, things would change. And Harrison would win. The great upwelling of enthusiasm in the wards seemed to assure Harrison’s victory. Once elected, Prendergast believed, Harrison would offer him an appointment. He would have to. It was the law of the machine, as immutable as the forces that propelled the Chicago Limited across the prairie. Prendergast wanted to be corporation counsel. No more dealing with newsboys who did not know their place; no more walking in the yellow stew that bubbled between pavers; no more having to breathe the awful perfume of mortified horses left in the middle of the street. When Harrison took office, salvation would come to Patrick Prendergast.
The idea caused moments of exultation. Prendergast bought more postcards and sent exuberant notes to the men who soon would be his associates and clubmates—the judges, lawyers, and merchant princes of Chicago. He of course sent another card to his good friend Alfred S. Trude, the defense attorney.
“My Dear Mr. Trude,” he began. He intended the next word to be “Hallelujah!” but certain words gave him trouble. In his fever to write, he plunged ahead.
“Allielliuia!” he wrote. “The attempt of the Herald gang to prevent the manifestation of the popular will has been checked—& Carter H. Harrison the popular choice will be our next mayor. The newspaper trust has been ingloriously sat down upon. What do I know about the candidacy of a Washington Hesing poor fellow—he has the ‘tail end’ of my sympathy. In his present trouble I hope it will not overcome him—& the noble newspaper trust. Glory to The Father Son & Holy Ghost!” He rambled on for a few more lines, then closed, “Friendship is the true test of character after all Sincerely,
“P. E. J. Prendergast.”
Again something in the card drew Trude’s attention. Many other recipients of Prendergast’s cards also took note, despite the crush of mail each received from his true peers, this being a time when everyone who knew how to write did so and at length. In that glacier of words grinding toward the twentieth century, Prendergast’s card was a single fragment of mica glinting with lunacy, pleading to be picked up and pocketed.
Once again Trude kept the letter.
In April 1893 the citizens of Chicago elected Carter Henry Harrison to his fifth term. In preparation for the fair, he ordered two hundred barrels of whiskey, to be used by his office in the entertainment of dignitaries.
He gave no thought whatsoever to Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast.
The Invitation
FOR THE MOMENT HOLMES held off on doing anything more with Minnie’s property. Minnie had told her sister, Anna, of the transfer of the Fort Worth land, and now Holmes sensed that Anna was becoming suspicious of his true intentions. This did not trouble him, however. The solution was really quite simple.
One bright and fragrant spring day—as if on a wild equinoctial whim—Holmes suggested that Minnie invite her sister to Chicago to see the world’s fair, at his expense.
Minnie was delighted and sent the good news to Anna, who immediately accepted. Holmes knew she would, for how could she have done otherwise? The chance to see Minnie was compelling in itself. Add Chicago and the great fair, and the combination became too alluring to turn down, no matter what Anna suspected about his and Minnie’s relationship.
Minnie could hardly wait for the end of the school year, when her sister at last would be able to extricate herself from her duties at the Midlothian Academy. Minnie planned to show Anna all the wonders of Chicago—the skyscrapers, Marshall Field’s store, the Auditorium, and of course the world’s fair—but above all she looked forward to introducing Anna to her own personal wonder, Mr. Henry Gordon. Her Harry.
At last Anna would see that she could put her suspicions to rest.<
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Final Preparations
IN THE FIRST TWO WEEKS of April 1893 the weather was gorgeous, but other cruelties abounded. Four exposition workers lost their lives, two from fractured skulls, two electrocuted. The deaths brought the year’s total to seven. The exposition’s union carpenters, aware of their great value in this final phase of construction, seized the moment and walked off the job, demanding a minimum union wage and other long-sought concessions. Only one of the eight towers of the Ferris Wheel was in place and workers had not yet completed repairs to the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. Each morning hundreds of men climbed to its roof; each evening they picked their way gingerly back down in a long dense line that from a distance resembled a column of ants. Frank Millet’s “Whitewash Gang” worked furiously to paint the buildings of the Court of Honor. In places the staff coating already had begun to crack and chip. Patch crews patrolled the grounds. The air of “anxious effort” that suffused the park reminded Candace Wheeler, the designer hired to decorate the Woman’s Building, “of an insufficiently equipped household preparing for visitors.”
Despite the carpenters’ strike and all the work yet to be done, Burnham felt optimistic, his mood bolstered by the fine weather. The winter had been deep and long, but now the air was scented with first blossoms and thawed earth. And he felt loved. In late March he had been feted at a grand banquet arranged largely by Charles McKim and held in New York at Madison Square Garden—the old Garden, an elegant Moorish structure designed by McKim’s partner, Stanford White. McKim assigned Frank Millet to secure the attendance of the nation’s finest painters, and these took their seats beside the most prominent writers and architects and the patrons who supported them all, men like Marshall Field and Henry Villard, and together they spent the night lauding Burnham—prematurely—for achieving the impossible. Of course, they ate like gods.