The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson was the fourth book I read for the Wednesday Whodunit Mystery Book Reading Group. I read it in June 2011 for us to discuss on Wednesday, July 6. It’s a medium-sized book at 442 pages and was first published in 2003. It is split into four parts along with a prologue and epilogue. I downloaded the Adobe epub version from the Los Angeles Public Library website and read the book on my Aluratek Libre eBook Reader PRO.
The book juxtaposes two stories that went on at the same time and had nearly the same setting. One is the planning, construction, and duration of the Chicago World’s Fair a.k.a. the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1892-1893. The man instrumental in the planning, building, and execution of the fair is Daniel Burnham, architect of Chicago’s earliest skyscrapers and the director of works of the expo. The other story is about Dr. H.H. Holmes, a pharmacist, business owner, hotel proprietor, swindler and serial murderer of possibly hundreds of young women many of whom came to Chicago alone to see the fair or to find work. The expo is the White City and Holmes is the devil in the book’s title. It’s an interesting juxtaposition of the stories, one showcasing society’s greatest achievement, and the other society’s greatest evil.
The book includes many interesting factoids as someone in the discussion group called them. Most of the factoids were included in the story of the expo (a.k.a. the White City). The ranks of the people building the fair included “a carpenter and furniture maker named Elias Disney, who in coming years would tell stories about the construction of this magical realm. His son Walt would take note.” (p. 159) For the dedication day of the fair, “Francis J. Bellamy, an editor of Youth’s Companion, thought it would be a fine thing if on that day all the schoolchildren of America in unison, offered something to their nation. He composed a pledge that the Bureau of Education mailed to virtually every school. As originally worded, it began, ‘I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the Republic for which it stands’” (p. 187). Years after the fair, Burnham devises a plan for Chicago including Michigan Avenue’s “Miracle Mile.” I thought it was called “Magnificent Mile” in Chicago and that “Miracle Mile” was Wilshire Blvd. between La Brea and Fairfax Avenues. Perhaps Chicago has its own. Another local reference is that Burnham and his firm designed the Mt. Wilson Observatory in Pasadena.
Some things in the book alluded to places where I used to live. The exotic boats at the expo’s harbor included Alaskan war canoes. The menu of a banquet for the dignitaries of the expo included Blue Points a l’Alaska. A less direct reference is mention of how some physicians “attempted to rob a grave at the Stage Asylum for the Insane in Anchorage, Kentucky” (p. 157). The author, Erik Larson, lives in Seattle and in the acknowledgments he describes how “I acquired a nice base of information from the University of Washington’s Suzallo Library, one of the finest and most efficient libraries I have ever encountered” (p. 402).
Larson usually writes well enough to keep the book interesting. Stories of promoter Sol Bloom are never boring. In San Francisco Bloom “organized a cache of professional applauders, known as a ‘claque’ to provide enthusiastic ovations, demand encore, and cry ‘Brava’ for any performers willing to pay.” Bloom was hired to select the concessions for the Midway Plaisance and guide their construction and he doesn’t want the job because he doesn’t want to leave San Francisco. Rather than turn down the job he asks “for the same salary as the president of the United States: $50,000” (p.146). Despite such a high salary demand for the time, they still hire him. The book mentions that the reason that the expo is called the White City is that all the main buildings were painted white. It contrasts with the filthy “Black City” of Chicago. One day at the fair is described as an “apple-crisp day with temperatures that never exceeded sixty-two degrees, under vivid cerulean skies” (p. 328).
Larson includes some humor in his writing. The expo’s organizers have many banquets and he writes of an early one, “It was the first in a sequence of impossibly rich and voluminous banquets whose menus raised the question of whether any of the city’s leading men could possibly have a functional artery” (p. 107). Still, the menu included Sorbet au Kirch. The expo is closed on Sundays due to the Sabbath despite objections from people such as Susan B. Anthony. Displaying the most shocking analogy he could muster, one clergyman “asked (Susan B.) Anthony if she’d prefer a son of hers attend Buffalo Bill’s show on Sunday instead of church. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘he would learn more.’… When (Buffalo Bill) Cody learned of it, he was tickled, so much so that he immediately sent Anthony a thank-you note and invited her to attend his show” (p. 292). In the acknowledgments of the book, Larson writes, “My three daughters showed me what really matters. My dog showed me that nothing matters but dinner.” (p. 438)
There were only a couple of words that I didn’t know. They both appeared in the same sentence: “The advice that rankled most came from Ward McAllister, factotum and chief slipperlick to Mrs. William Astor, empress of New York society” (p. 216). According to my dictionary, a factotum is a person employed to do all kinds of work. I had to use wiki answers to learn that a slipperlick is a yes man.
While alternating between the stories of the White City and the Devil I found that I was more interested in the former. The latter was just so disturbing. Dr. H.H. Holmes is described as “having a height of five feet eight inches and “he weighed only 155 pounds” (p. 46). The two stories do cross paths when he takes two sisters to the fair. While there he buys them “chocolate and lemonade and root beer at one of the Hires Root Beer Oases that dotted the grounds.” But during the fair Holmes committed multiple murders because he enjoyed it. The story of him getting caught is kind of like a mystery because he moves around a lot and works hard to cover his tracks. When he is finally found out the Chicago Times-Herald writes, “He is a prodigy of wickedness, a human demon, a being so unthinkable that no novelist would dare invent such character” (p. 379).
The book goes deep into the psychology that motivated Holmes and this is where it got disturbing because it’s scary to think that people can be like that. The bibliography lists the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition as a source. Larson also had a Seattle psychiatrist, Dr. James O. Raney, read the manuscript and give his “observations about the nature of psychopaths known more tediously in today’s psychiatric handbooks as people afflicted with ‘antisocial personality disorder.’ It is a good thing Alfred Hitchcock died before the change was made” (p. 403)
While reading the book I strongly preferred the story of the White City to the story of the Devil. I guess I prefer mysteries that make sense, where the murderer has a motive other than simply enjoying murder as Holmes did. People back then also thought murder always had a definite, almost explainable motive. The idea of a serial killer that killed because he or she enjoyed it was very new. The killings of Jack the Ripper were less than ten years old at the time of the expo.
We had an interesting discussion of the book on Wednesday, July 6, 2011. Rather than meet in the community room of the Covina Library, we met at a house owned by one of the discussion group members. It was built between 1911 and 1930. It was surrounded by walls all the way out to the curb and the large back yard was a separate walled area. It was only one story and had several rooms both large and small. The bathroom had two doors leading to different rooms. The kitchen did not have enough room for a full-size refrigerator but it did have a small door that led down some narrow, steep steps into a small cellar. The front yard had two large palm trees and an oval-shaped swimming pool. We met outside.
Most of us enjoyed the book, both the stories of the Devil and the White City. Building the expo consisting of so much on time was a very impressive feat. One group member had lived in Chicago and called it “a hole” apart from the fewer expensive areas. Other members had read other books by Erik Larson but seemed to agree that this one was the best. Many were impressed with Holmes’ intelligence and ability to charm anyone. He would make a profit on the murders by taking out life insurance policies or selling the bodies to medical schools. Before he was executed he made a plan to encase his body in concrete so that no one could dig him up. When he was about to be executed, the executioner, guards and warden did not want to do it because he was so charming that they liked him. Another interesting comment made by one of the members was that in the 1890s people wrote letters documenting what was going on. People don’t do that today. There are blogs, Twitter, social networks, and texting but they are not the same as descriptive letters. Larson writes in his notes section that he did not use the internet at all for his research. He only consulted books and actual letters and documents in library and other collections. The group member was probably right when she said it will be hard for someone to write a book like The Devil in the White City 120 years from now about what is going on today.
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