I finished The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America this past week. As promised, I am offering my formal review of the book.
Two words: Spell binding! Erik Larson was masterful in weaving together two Gilded Age events that took shook that nation: The Chicago Columbian Worlds Fair and the murders of H. H. Holmes (America’s first Serial Killer), who used the Fair to lure his victims to their death.
What I found particularly fascinating was how Larson’s narrative contrasted these two events. On one hand is Chicago in the 1890s, a rapidly growing metropolis arising from the ashes of the Great Fire only twenty years earlier. The book begins with the City’s play to host the next World’s Fair. Even after being awarded the honor, Larson explains in detail all of the challenges that lay ahead for Chicago. Primary of them is the prevailing perception that the City does not have the cultural depth to pull off a Fair that meets or exceeds the prior one held in Paris, France. Even New York, who viewed Chicago as nothing more "then a greedy, hog-slaughtering backwater", feared that the Worlds Fair would be turned into a County Fair by the Windy City. The book details how this global apprehension drove Chicago and her talented architects to create the most stunning and beautiful exposition that the world has ever seen prior or since.
In contrast, Larson introduces H.H. Holmes; a smart, handsome, intelligent New Englander who moves to Englewood, IL, a suburb located just six miles west of where the Fair would be staged. Holmes faces none of the initial perception issues that Chicago is challenged with. Instead, he leverages his charisma and charm to garner instant appeal among women and men alike. Larson details how Holmes uses this instant appeal to aid him in carrying out his macabre and psychopathic obsessions, most disturbing of which is the slaughtering of young women (which there is not shortage of in Chicago at the time of the Fair).
This dichotomy of beauty and the beast at both macro and micro levels makes this book impossible to put down. Also, I found the historical facts about the Fair fascinating. I ended up wondering why there is almost zero attention paid to this event and its impact on this nation throughout my years of formal education. Most notable:
- Walt Disney’s father, Elias, helped build the “White City” of the Fair.
- The grandeur of the Fair influenced writer L. Frank Baum and artist-painter William Wallace Denslow to create the world of Oz.
- The Japanese temple on the Fair’s Wooded Island influence on architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his “Prairie” residential designs.
- The Fair prompted President Harrison to designate October 12th a national holiday: Columbus Day.
- Brands such as Pabst Blue Ribbon, Cracker Jacks, Aunt Jemima were all introduced for the first time.
- Every carnival since 1893 has had a Midway and a Ferris Wheel; both concepts introduced at the Chicago’s World Fair.
- The vast influence that the Fairs chief design architect, Burnham, and it’s chief landscape architect, Olmstead, has had on the landscape of this country.
I have already purchased and distributed 3 copies of Devil in the White City to friends and family. The Chicago Sun-Times states it best in their review:
“A wonderfully, unexpected book…Larson is a historian…with a novelist’s soul.”
Indeed!
Leave A Comment?