The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson
The junior man was Frank Lloyd Wright.
Ten thousand construction workers also left the fair’s employ and returned to a world without jobs, already crowded with unemployed men. Once the fair closed, many thousands more would join them on Chicago’s streets. The threat of violence was as palpable as the deepening cold of autumn. Mayor Harrison was sympathetic and did what he could. He hired thousands of men to clean streets and ordered police stations opened at night for men seeking a place to sleep. Chicago’s Commercial and Financial Chronicle reported, “Never before has there been such a sudden and striking cessation of industrial activity.” Pig iron production fell by half, and new rail construction shrank almost to nothing. Demand for railcars to carry visitors to the exposition had spared the Pullman Works, but by the end of the fair George Pullman too began cutting wages and workers. He did not, however, reduce the rents in his company town.
The White City had drawn men and protected them; the Black City now welcomed them back, on the eve of winter, with filth, starvation, and violence.
Holmes too sensed it was time to leave Chicago. The pressure from creditors and families was growing too great.
First he set fire to the top floor of his castle. The blaze did minimal damage, but he filed a claim for $6,000 on a policy acquired by his fictional alter ego, Hiram S. Campbell. An investigator for one of the insurance companies, F. G. Cowie, became suspicious and began a detailed investigation. Though he found no concrete evidence of arson, Cowie believed Holmes or an accomplice had started the fire. He advised the insurers to pay the claim, but only to Hiram S. Campbell and only if Campbell presented himself in person.
Holmes could not claim the money himself, for by now Cowie knew him. Ordinarily he simply would have recruited someone else to masquerade as Campbell and claim the money, but of late he had become increasingly wary. The guardians of Minnie Williams had dispatched an attorney, William Capp, to look for Minnie and to protect the assets of her estate. Anna’s guardian, the Reverend Dr. Black, had hired a private detective who had come to Holmes’s building. And letters continued to arrive from the Cigrands and Smythes and other parents. No one yet had accused Holmes of foul play, but the intensity of this new wave of inquiry was greater, more obliquely accusatory, than anything he previously had experienced. Hiram S. Campbell never claimed the money.
But Holmes found that Cowie’s investigation had a secondary, more damaging effect. In the course of digging up information about Holmes, he had succeeded in stirring up and uniting Holmes’s creditors, the furniture dealers and iron suppliers and bicycle manufacturers and contractors whom Holmes had cheated over the previous five years. The creditors now hired an attorney named George B. Chamberlin, counsel for Chicago’s Lafayette Collection Agency, who had been pestering Holmes ever since he failed to pay the furnace company for improving his kiln. Later Chamberlin would claim to be the first man in Chicago to suspect Holmes of being a criminal.
In the fall of 1893 Chamberlin contacted Holmes and requested he come to a meeting at his office. Holmes believed he and Chamberlin would be meeting alone, one on one, but when Holmes arrived at the office, he found it occupied by two dozen creditors and their attorneys and one police detective.
This surprised Holmes but did not faze him. He shook hands and met the angry gazes of his creditors head on. Tempers immediately cooled a few degrees. He had that effect.
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. Chamberlin told Holmes that all together he owed the creditors at least $50,000.
Holmes adopted his most sober expression. He understood their concerns. He explained his lapses. His ambition had gotten ahead of his ability to pay his debts. Things would have been fine, all the debts resolved, if not for the Panic of 1893, which had ruined him and destroyed his hopes, just as it had for countless others in Chicago and the nation at large.
Incredibly, Chamberlin saw, some of the creditors nodded in sympathy.
Tears filled Holmes’s eyes. He offered his deepest, most heartfelt apologies. And he suggested a solution. He proposed to settle his debts by giving the group a mortgage secured by his various properties.
This nearly made Chamberlin laugh, yet one of the attorneys present in the room actually advised the group to accept Holmes’s offer. Chamberlin was startled to see that Holmes’s false warmth seemed to be mollifying the creditors. A few moments earlier the group had wanted the detective to arrest Holmes the moment he entered the room. Now they wanted to talk about what to do next.
Chamberlin told Holmes to wait in an adjacent room.
Holmes did so. He waited peacefully.
As the meeting progressed—and grew heated—the attorney who previously had wanted to accept Holmes’s mortgage stepped out of Chamberlin’s office and entered the room where Holmes waited, ostensibly for a drink of water. He and Holmes talked. Exactly what happened next is unclear. Chamberlin claimed later that this attorney had been so angry at having his recommendation rebuffed that he tipped Holmes to the fact the creditors were again leaning toward arrest. It is possible, too, that Holmes simply offered the attorney cash for the information, or deployed his false warmth and teary regret to seduce the attorney into revealing the group’s mounting consensus.
The attorney returned to the meeting.
Holmes fled.
Soon afterward Holmes set out for Fort Worth, Texas, to take better advantage of Minnie Williams’s land. He had plans for the property. He would sell some of it and on the rest build a three-story structure exactly like the one in Englewood. Meanwhile he would use the land to secure loans and to float notes. He expected to lead a very prosperous and satisfying life, at least until the time came to move on to the next city. He brought along his assistant, Benjamin Pitezel, and his new fiancée, the small and pretty Miss Georgiana Yoke. Just before leaving Chicago Holmes acquired a life insurance policy, from the Fidelity Mutual Life Association of Philadelphia, to insure Pitezel’s life for $10,000.
Nightfall
THROUGHOUT OCTOBER ATTENDANCE AT the fair rose sharply as more and more people realized that the time left to see the White City was running short. On October 22 paid attendance totaled 138,011. Just two days later it reached 244,127. Twenty thousand people a day now rode the Ferris Wheel, 80 percent more than at the start of the month. Everyone hoped attendance would continue rising and that the number of people drawn to the closing ceremony of October 30 would break the record set on Chicago Day.
To attract visitors for the close, Frank Millet planned a day-long celebration with music, speeches, fireworks, and a landing by “Columbus” himself from the exposition’s full-sized replicas of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María, built in Spain for the fair. Millet hired actors to play Columbus and his captains; the crew would consist of the men who had sailed the ships to Chicago. Millet arranged to borrow tropical plants and trees from the Horticulture Building and have them moved to the lakeshore. He planned also to coat the beach with fallen oak and maple leaves to signify the fact that Columbus landed in autumn, even though live palms and dead deciduous leaves were not precisely compatible. Upon landing, Columbus was to thrust his sword into the ground and claim the New World for Spain, while his men assumed positions that mimicked those depicted on a two-cent postage stamp commemorating Columbus’s discovery. Meanwhile, according to the Tribune, Indians recruited from Buffalo Bill’s show and from various fair exhibits would “peer cautiously” at the landing party while shouting incoherently and running “to and fro.” With this enactment Millet hoped to carry visitors “back 400 years”—despite the steam tugboats that would nudge the Spanish ships toward shore.
First, however, came Mayor Harrison’s big day, American Cities Day, on Saturday, October 28. Five thousand mayors and city councilmen had accepted Harrison’s invitation to the fair, among them the mayors of San Francisco, New Orleans and Phila
That morning Harrison delighted reporters by announcing that yes, the rumors about him and the very young Miss Annie Howard were true, and not only that, the two planned to marry on November 16.
The glory time came in the afternoon, when he rose to speak to the assembled mayors. Friends said he had never looked so handsome, so full of life.
He praised the remarkable transformation of Jackson Park. “Look at it now!” he said. “These buildings, this hall, this dream of poets of centuries is the wild aspiration of crazy architects alone.” He told his audience, “I myself have taken a new lease of life”—an allusion perhaps to Miss Howard—“and I believe I shall see the day when Chicago will be the biggest city in America, and the third city on the face of the globe.” He was sixty-eight years old but announced, “I intend to live for more than half a century, and at the end of that half-century London will be trembling lest Chicago shall surpass it…”
With a glance at the mayor of Omaha, he graciously offered to accept Omaha as a suburb.
He changed course. “It sickens me when I look at this great Exposition to think that it will be allowed to crumble to dust,” he said. He hoped the demolition would be quick, and he quoted a recent remark by Burnham: “‘Let it go; it has to go, so let it go. Let us put the torch to it and burn it down.’ I believe with him. If we cannot preserve it for another year I would be in favor of putting a torch to it and burning it down and let it go up into the bright sky to eternal heaven.”
Prendergast could stand it no longer. His visit to the corporation counsel’s office—by rights his office—had been humiliating. They had humored him. Smirked. Yet Harrison had promised him the job. What did he have to do to get the mayor’s attention? All his postcards had achieved nothing. No one wrote to him, no one took him seriously.
At two o’clock on American Cities Day Prendergast left his mother’s house and walked to a shoe dealer on Milwaukee Avenue. He paid the dealer four dollars for a used six-chamber revolver. He knew that revolvers of this particular model had a penchant for accidental discharge when bumped or dropped, so he loaded it with only five cartridges and kept the empty chamber under the hammer.
Later, much would be made of this precaution.
At three o’clock, about the time Harrison was giving his speech, Prendergast walked into the Unity Building in central Chicago where Governor John P. Altgeld had an office.
Prendergast looked pale and strangely excited. An official of the building found his demeanor troubling and told him he could not enter.
Prendergast returned to the street.
It was nearly dark when Harrison left Jackson Park and drove north through the cold smoky evening toward his mansion on Ashland Avenue. Temperatures had fallen sharply over the week, down to the thirties at night, and the sky seemed perpetually overcast. Harrison reached his home by seven o’clock. He tinkered with a first-floor window, then sat down to supper with two of his children, Sophie and Preston. He had other children, but they were grown and gone. The meal, of course, included watermelon.
In the midst of supper, at approximately seven-thirty, someone rang the bell at the front door. Mary Hanson, the parlor maid, answered and found a gaunt young man with a smooth-shaven face and close-cut black hair. He looked ill. He asked to see the mayor.
By itself, there was nothing peculiar about the request. Evening visits by strangers were a regular occurrence at the Ashland house, for Harrison prided himself on being available to any citizen of Chicago, regardless of social stature. Tonight’s visitor seemed seedier than most, however, and behaved oddly. Nonetheless, Mary Hanson told him to come back in half an hour.
The day had been an exciting one for the mayor but also exhausting. He fell asleep at the table. Shortly before eight o’clock his son left the dining room to go up to his room and dress for an engagement in the city later that night. Sophie also went upstairs, to write a letter. The house was cozy and well lit. Mary Hanson and the other servants gathered in the kitchen for their own supper.
At precisely eight o’clock the front bell again rang, and again Hanson answered it.
The same young man stood at the threshold. Hanson asked him to wait in the hall and went to get the mayor.
“It must have been about eight o’clock when I heard a noise,” Harrison’s son Preston said. “I was startled; it sounded like a picture falling.” Sophie heard it, too, and heard her father cry out. “I thought nothing of it,” she said, “because I thought it was some screens falling on the floor near the back hall. Father’s voice I took to be a yawn. He had a way of yawning very loud.”
Preston left his room and saw smoke drifting up from the entry hall. As he came down the steps, he heard two more reports. “The last shot was clear and penetrating,” he said. “I knew it to be a revolver shot.” It sounded “like a manhole explosion.”
He ran to the hall and found Harrison lying on his back surrounded by servants, the air silvered with gunsmoke. There was very little blood. Preston shouted, “Father is not hurt, is he?”
The mayor himself answered. “Yes,” he said. “I am shot. I will die.”
Three more shots sounded from the street. The coachman had fired his own revolver once in the air to alert police, once at Prendergast, and Prendergast had returned the shot.
The commotion brought a neighbor, William J. Chalmers, who folded his coat under Harrison’s head. Harrison told him he had been shot over the heart, but Chalmers did not believe it. There was too little blood.
They argued.
Chalmers told Harrison he had not been shot over the heart.
Harrison snapped, “I tell you I am; this is death.”
A few moments later his heart stopped.
“He died angry,” Chalmers said, “because I didn’t believe him. Even in death he is emphatic and imperious.”
Prendergast walked to the nearby Desplaines Street police station and calmly told desk sergeant O. Z. Barber, “Lock me up; I am the man who shot the mayor.” The sergeant was incredulous, until Prendergast gave him the revolver, which smelled strongly of blown powder. Barber found that its cylinder contained four spent cartridges and a single live one. The sixth chamber was empty.
Barber asked Prendergast why he had shot the mayor.
“Because he betrayed my confidence. I supported him through his campaign and he promised to appoint me corporation counsel. He didn’t live up to his word.”
The Exposition Company canceled the closing ceremony. There would be no Jubilee March, no landing by Columbus, no address by Harlow Higinbotham, George Davis, or Bertha Palmer; no presentation of awards, no praise for Burnham and Olmsted; no “Hail Columbia;” no mass rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” The closing became instead a memorial assembly in the fair’s Festival Hall. As the audience entered, an organist played Chopin’s “Funeral March” on the hall’s giant pipe organ. The hall was so cold, the presiding officer announced that men could keep their hats on.
Reverend Dr. J. H. Barrows read a blessing and benediction and then, at the request of exposition officials, read a speech that Higinbotham had prepared for the originally planned ceremony. The remarks still seemed appropriate, especially one passage. “We are turning our backs upon the fairest dream of civilization and are about to consign it to the dust,” Barrows read. “It is like the death of a dear friend.”
The audience exited slowly into the cold gray afternoon.
At exactly four forty-five, sunset, the warship Michigan fired one of its cannon and continued to fire twenty times more as one thousand men quietly took up positions at each of the exposition’s flags. With the last boom of the Michigan’s gun, the great flag at the Administration Building fell to the ground. Simultaneously, the thousand other flags also fell, as massed trumpeters and bassoonists in the Court of Honor played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America.” Two hundred thousand visitors, many in tears, joined in.
The six hundred carriages in Carter Harrison’s cortege stretched for miles. The procession moved slowly and quietly through a black sea of men and women dressed for mourning. A catafalque carrying Harrison’s black casket led the cortege and was followed immediately by Harrison’s beloved Kentucky mare, stirrups crossed on its empty saddle. Everywhere the white flags that had symbolized the White City hung at half mast. Thousands of men and women wore buttons that said “Our Carter” and watched in silence as, carriage by carriage, the city’s greatest men drove past. Armour, Pullman, Schwab, Field, McCormick, Ward.
And Burnham.
It was a difficult ride for him. He had passed this way before, to bury John Root. The fair had begun with death, and now it had ended with death.
So grand was the procession, it needed two hours to pass any one point. By the time it reached Graceland Cemetery, north of the city, darkness had fallen and a soft mist hugged the ground. Long lines of policemen flanked the path to the cemetery’s brownstone chapel. Off to the side stood fifty members of the United German Singing Societies.
Harrison had heard them sing at a picnic and, joking, had asked them to sing at his funeral.
Harrison’s murder fell upon the city like a heavy curtain. There was the time before, there was the time after. Where once the city’s newspapers would have run an endless series of stories about the aftereffects of the fair, now there was mostly silence. The fair remained open, informally, on October 31, and many men and women came to the grounds for one last visit, as if paying their respects to a lost relative. A tearful woman told columnist Teresa Dean, “The good-by is as sad as any I have known in all the years that I have lived.” William Stead, the British editor whose brother Herbert had covered the fair’s opening, arrived in Chicago from New York on the night of its official close but made his first visit to the grounds the next day. He claimed that nothing he had seen in Paris, Rome, or London was as perfect as the Court of Honor.