| Rating: | ★★★★ |
| Category: | Books |
| Genre: | History |
| Author: | Erik Larson |
It is done in a style that reads almost like a novel, along the lines of E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime". The celebrated ( Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, the great social worker Jane Addams, "Buffalo" Bill Cody and his Wild West Show, Annie Oakley, Susan B. Anthony, et al) enter the narrative from time to time. At the same time, the city of Chicago itself is a character--a rough-hewn metropolis of giant slaughterhouses for cattle, a center for trains that arrive right into the middle of a city without a fixed station, causing many terrible accidents. A city so cold that horses froze to death if left unattended in the streets in Winter, and stayed where they were, their corpses frozen in hideous shapes for weeks, because the city lacks an adequate sanitation system in its working class areas.
It was also a city in the grip of one of the great economic "Panics" of the 19th Century. Men and women from all over America poured into Chicago to find employment. Labor unions struggled to organize against the interest of business classes and although the gains were marginal for labor at the time, they set the stage for Chicago becoming a strong "union" city for decades after.
As the Fair opened, banks and businesses were closing all over America, and spectators to the fair were not enough to make a profit. The railroad barons, acting in character, refused the organizers' requests to cut fare prices. But the sheer magnitude of the enterprise (and the public relations work of an organizing and promotion genius named Sol Bloom) inspired enough word of mouth to make it a success.
One of the carpenters who worked at the fair was a man named Elias Disney. Eight years after the Fair, his son, Walt, was born. Larson asserts believably that Elias' tales of the Great White City was an inspiration for his son when he created the "Magic Kingdoms" of Disneyland, Disneyworld and its spinoffs in France and Japan.
There are two concurrent stories in the book--the first was the amazing work of architects, contractors, carpenters, electricians, and thousands of workmen and women in assembling and then presenting this magnificent city--all in white, all in a Greco-Roman style--right next to the great metropolis of the Midwest. The goal of the fair was to establish Chicago (and more importantly America) as a great center of culture and progress. The heroes of this part of the story are Daniel Burnham and John Root, the men who designed the world's first "skyscaper" buildings from steel girders. Burnhan was in overall charge of the fair and some of the pavilion buildings he oversaw had the largest interiors in history. It was Frederick Law Olmstead, the landscape designer of New York's Central Park, who laid out meticulous plans for the open spaces and lakes and greenery around the buildings. What was amazing about the planners and the workers was how they put the Fair together at all given the setbacks, a fair that rivaled the great Paris World Fair in 1889 (with its iconic Eiffel Tower) at all. Indeed, the opening of the Fair--meant to celebrate the 400th Anniversary of Christopher Columbus' landing in the New World-- couldn't open officially until a few months after the precise date of the quadrennial.
The second story that runs parallel to this, and it is a tale of disturbingly modern fiendishness: the inhuman activities of a certain H.H. Holmes , a doctor by profession, who used his charisma to wheedle his way into the lives of both men and women for the purpose of satisfying a lust for serial killing that dwarf the efforts of Jack the Ripper and many a modern maniac. Holmes managed to finance the building of a hotel near the Fair and many victims, mostly women, were never to leave his "castle". This is the grisliest part of the story, and the most frustrating since there were many times when the Chicago police should have investigated Holmes--but there were so many people moving in and out of Chicago at the time that many victims were simply put off as "missing persons".
It was only after the fair, in 1894, that the full nature of Holmes activity is counter-balanced by the efforts of the Philadelphia Homicide Department and, in particular, one Detective Frank Geyer. When Holmes in jail for one murder, Geyer crisscrossed the Midwest and parts of Canada and worked with local police detectives in many cities besides the still-unwitting Chicago Police--to bring the full measure of Holmes' crimes public.
This is an interesting book for anyone interested in American history during its turbulent "Gilded Age" and the true crime genre. Here's is the Random House site with more interesting facts about both the book and the 1893 Chicago Fair:
http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/devilinthewhitecity/home.html
Here is a clip from a 2008 documentary based on the book.
The Devil In The White City by Erik Larson
I read this when it first came out (fifteen years ago?) - and was drawn in immediately to the concept that a serial killer was loose in America around the turn of the century.
ReplyDeleteHadn't thought about this book in 'ever' - -thanks for the review!
Sounds an interesting book indeed. Most of what I know about Chicago in this period came from my Sociology courses. thanks Doug.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome. Yes, I think the author did a fiine job linking both these divergent main stories together--I hope to find a copy of the documentary sometime.
ReplyDeleteGlad you liked my brief overview. I'd be interested to know a little of what non-American sociologists made of old Chicago, Iri Ani.
ReplyDeleteTo me, Chicago in this era represented the epitome of social Darwinism--a tough, tough place redeemed by the work of people like Jane Addams of Hull House and the trade union movements. I know it held onto its old-fashioned corrrupt "machine" politics longer than any other major city--into the 1980's actually.
The part about those trains running right into the downtown area in the late 19th Century always interested me--an impersonal city of new arrivals, with bosses too busy making money to care about pedestrian safety.
A grandfather of mine, George F. Noakes, may have visited this Fair as a teenager. (He was living in up in either North Dakota (USA) or Canada at the time.) I have a commemerative coin of the Fair that was handed down from my dad's coin box.
Since I didn't find it until after my dad passed away I'm not sure if his father went, but given the sheer numbers of people drawn to the Chicago Exposition I'd like to think he did. The coin is not in good shape, but it has an image of Columbus on the front.
We studied the Chicago School in Sociology and I am relieved to have found a Wikipedia link here
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_(sociology) Also through Feminist Sociology I came across people like Jane Adams and Hull House, and others like Charlotte Perkins Gilman who visited Hull House. Interesting that you mention Social Darwinism which is supposedly about survival of the fittest. It was the extremities of rich and poor which occurred in Chicago that produced much sociological theory about the impact of society on the individual, the antithesis of Social Darwinism. Much theory was also driven by fleeing refugee sociologists and thinkers from Europe following pogroms, Nazism and the Second World War. Sociological thinking is often said to be driven by rapid social change in societies.
How cool btw. I love links like that. I was reading a Neville Shute book once which mentioned a "Flying Circus" travelling around England. Turned out my mother had actually seen it, although only from the outside - they didn't have the money for tickets.
ReplyDeleteHow cool btw. I love links like that. I was reading a Neville Shute book once which mentioned a "Flying Circus" travelling around England. Turned out my mother had actually seen it, although only from the outside - they didn't have the money for tickets.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the origin of this name of yours, do you know? My great grandfather brought his family to America after the Boer Wars and settled in Illinois. I don't know why he left Ireland to do this as, unlike today, they didn't want to dwell on their European pasts so wouldn't talk freely about it. Yet, I did know that my grandfather and his brothers since moved to Northern Dakota, setting up a restaurant in a train station that they simply called 'Gallaghers'.
ReplyDeleteMy time spent in Chicago has only been several times at O'Hare in route elsewhere. But the windy city has both unnerved and intrigued me, intriguing me mostly for its strong jazz and R&B origins.
Your review of 'The Devil in The White City' is well done, and what an incredibly interwoven story. I've never read it myself, but oh what a tangle. Wow.
Thanks for the link, Iri Ani. Jane Addams as you might know was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize (in 1931). I'm concerned Americans are living through some rapid changes over here right now--as well as those in other societies. The irony of the intellectual drain out of Europe is that it enriched American universities and provided incredible growth in comprehensive analysis in many subjects. Certainly one advantage to an open society that can work toward greater tolerance.
ReplyDeleteNow that's quite a story--interesting how people were cast into far-off places from their places of birth and how they changed family names and "re-invented" themselves. I don't know much about my family history--although I suspect my last name has something to do with "oak trees" ;-)
ReplyDeleteYour time in Chicago--mostly at airports--matches mine. Learning more about a portion of Chicago's history was indeed interesting. Thanks for your kind remarks.
Perhaps that is how my grandfather "saw" the Chicago Fair as well.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting social history of Chicago (and America) Doug, thanks for reviewing it here
ReplyDeleteChicago also holds a dark place in the history of organised labour.
What has come to be known as the Haymarket Affair began on May 3, 1886, when Chicago police fired into a crowd of striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works, killing and wounding several men.
The following evening, anarchist and socialist labor leaders organized a meeting of workingmen near Chicago's Haymarket Square.
Speakers at the meeting denounced the police attack of the previous afternoon and urged workers to intensify their struggle for an eight-hour workday and other improvements in labor conditions.
A bomb was thrown at the police by persons unknown and the result was a major stumbling block to workers rights in America.
This event also led to the infamous Chicago Anarchist Trial in June 1886 which led to four men being executed and one committing suicide in jail. Ten years later 3 anarchists who were imprisoned for alleged offences arising out of the Haymarket Affair were pardoned by the Governor and released.
Is this event referred to at all Doug , or was it too long before the Exposition to be included in the book?
It certainly would have been the backdrop to this event, it made a big impact across America at the time.
Great review Doug cheers AA
We are indeed (all of us) living through times of rapid social change, have been for quite some time in fact. We wind up with juxtapositions of greater tolerances against even more hard line, frightened, and resistant to change rhetoric (we see this all the time in Multiply even). A "sociologist" never quite turns off and the social interactions on social networking sites are grist for the mill. hehe
ReplyDeleteExcellent question, AA. And thanks by the way for the detailing of those gruesome events, and the subsequent miscarriages of justice.
ReplyDeleteOddly enough, despite the fact that it is so well-researched in many topics, the Haymarket Affair and Trail doesn't get a mention in the book. That is even more odd since Mr, Larson does devote space to a lot of labor trouble around the time of the Fair itself. He also covers another major American labor-owner dispute, The Pullman Strike of the Summer of 1894.
George Pullman, the boss of a railroad-coach empire, cut jobs and wages in that year---while keeping rents and prices high in the company town where most of his employees lived. Led by Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor and future socialist and World War I pacifist Eugene V. Debs of the railroad union, two to three thousand men went on strike. President Grover Cleveland sent in 12,000 federal troops when strikers blocked some train lines and set rail-cars aflame. It was also at this time that arson fires destroyed the major buildings at the Exposition--all due to be torn down anyway.
Again, although it was a nasty affair, the Pullman Strike is famous for putting backbone into the American Labor Movement.
"The heroes of this part of the story are Daniel Burnham and John Root, the men who designed the world's first "skyscaper" buildings from steel girders. Burnhan was in overall charge of the fair and some of the pavilion buildings he oversaw had the largest interiors in history. It was Frederick Law Olmstead, the landscape designer of New York's Central Park, who laid out meticulous plans for the open spaces and lakes and greenery around the buildings. What was amazing about the planners and the workers was how they put the Fair together at all given the setbacks, a fair that rivaled the great Paris World Fair in 1889 (with its iconic Eiffel Tower) at all. Indeed, the opening of the Fair--meant to celebrate the 400th Anniversary of Christopher Columbus' landing in the New World-- couldn't open officially until a few months after the precise date of the quadrennial".
ReplyDeleteI loved the video and after reading the review, I must see if I can get the book. These fairs and exhibitions that were held in many countries, were done on such a huge scale and always jam packed with people.
I love to think of the men who were given the chance to design such a vast area. There they were with the plans laid out on a huge table. What excitement to be able to get one's teeth into such work. It must have taken ages from plan to completion. We all know this kind of thing always has money issues, labour and time scale problems. Also, many of these exhibitions came to a sticky end, often from fire. That was how the- Great Exhibition (1851) at Crystal Palace met its end.
The building were usually quite beautiful, with much use of glass structures, so they were light and airy.
What times eh, Doug? How fortunate that there are people who study the history of that time and record it for us. And then there are books such as the one you reviewed.
Thank you, looks like it's a brilliant read.
Cassandra
The great fairs like this one and others you mention must have held a special excitement for patrons in a pre-electronic media age, Cassandra.
ReplyDeleteFor all the social upheavals, bad weather, financial infighting, et al, the change to create what amounted to a whole city--if not a lasting one--must have been intoxicating to the planners, the engineers, and quite a large number of those who actually got to the business of building it.
I imagine The Crystal Palace was the grandmother of all these amazing multi-national exhibits. We need such books as this one since so many of these creative monuments exist only in grainy photographs or forgotten newspaper reports. And we likely won't see their like again.
Thanks for your comments.
I believe these great exhibitions were given a grand opening with fireworks and much band playing. Yes, I suppose in this day of television, we have forgotten how exciting these events would have been. It's strange that when times are bad, people will still scrape together the money to visit these places. I wonder how many gems, or grand-dad's pictures went in to hock, to be retrieve at a later date, just to make this possible. I dare say they deserved a bit of euphoria in their lives, if only to say in years to come, "yes I was there!"
ReplyDeleteI tried without luck to find some pictures of the interior of the exhibition. Sometimes there were paintings done to record an event. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. :~(
Cassandra
I meant to say how grand the exterior of the exhibition looked in the link. What a lot of work went into these places. In such hard times, lucky the man who was hired for the duration.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, Cassandra. America was having what they called an economic "Panic" back then (i.e., a major recession, with banks closing left and right and men and women looking for any work they could find. (Not unlike parts of America today, but with even less of the skimpy social safety net we have today.)
ReplyDeleteI've had the same problem--lots of exteriors, but none of what the buildings looked like on the inside. Perhaps it was hard to capture an image from inside in 1893, when photo stock exposures were likely still rather slow and needed concentrated studio-like lighting to get an image.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking the other day how the recession pales in the light of Swine flu. The governments must be breathing a sigh of relief, for a while the press is off their back! We have had a bit of an explosion on the flu front in England. I still have memories of how ill I was at Christmas. I don't want another dose!
ReplyDeleteWhile I was checking out the site for the interior, I got sidetracked, as there were a few other exhibitions with interior photos. I spent a good hour going through them. How interesting and beautiful they made these places.
ReplyDeleteThank you Doug.
I don't blame you there, Cassandra. I had something in May that kept me too weak to even get on the computer keyboard for a few days. I don't do sickness well.
ReplyDeleteI can only hope the newest strain of Swine Flu will not be as bad as some have predicted later in this year.
The photographs of these Fairs can be fascinating--how the people of the past viewed the best of a future tha often never arrived. I have a neat little coffee table book on the Golden Gate International Exposition at Treasure Island (a man-made island in the middle of San Francisco) in 1939 and 40. Some of the national pavilions included national exhibits from the likes of Estonia and Poland, which had become captive nations by the time the Treasure Island Fair opened. Soon the "new world" would be redefined by that terrible war.
ReplyDeleteBy 1942, Treasure Island was a Naval Air Station, awaiting attack and training pilots to fight against Japan's forces in the Pacific.
It was a beautiful farewell to America's pre-WWII innocence.