The Devil in the White City

Alone

THE EASTERN AND CHICAGO ARCHITECTS met again on Monday morning, January 12, in Burnham & Root’s library on the top floor of the Rookery. Root was absent. William R. Mead had come from New York to stand in for his grieving partner, McKim. As the men waited for everyone to arrive, the visitors from time to time would drift to the library’s east-facing windows and stare out at the vastness of Lake Michigan. The light entering the room was preternaturally intense, carrying with it the surplus radiance of the lake and its frozen shore.

Burnham rose to offer the men a formal welcome, but he did not seem at ease. He was aware of the lingering reticence of the eastern men and seemed hell-bent on winning them with flattery that verged on unction—a tactic that Louis Sullivan had known Burnham to deploy with great effect. “Himself not especially susceptible to flattery except in a sentimental way, he soon learned its efficacy when plastered thick on big business men,” Sullivan wrote. “Louis saw it done repeatedly, and at first was amazed at Burnham’s effrontery, only to be more amazingly amazed at the drooling of the recipient. The method was crude but it worked.”

Said Sullivan, “It soon became noticeable that he was progressively and grossly apologizing to the Eastern men for the presence of their benighted brethren of the West.”

Hunt noticed it too. “Hell,” he snapped, “we haven’t come here on a missionary expedition. Let’s get to work.”

Murmurs of agreement rose through the room. Adler was cheered; Sullivan smirked. Olmsted watched, deadpan, as he listened to a roaring in his ears that would not subside. Hunt grimaced; the trip from New York and the excursion to Jackson Park had worsened his gout.

Hunt’s interjection startled Burnham. It brought back in a rush the hurt of the great dual snub by the East, his rejection by Harvard and Yale; but the remark and the obvious support it garnered in the room also caused Burnham to shift focus to the work at hand. As Sullivan saw it, “Burnham came out of his somnambulistic vagary and joined in. He was keen enough to understand that ‘Uncle Dick’”—meaning Hunt—“had done him a needed favor.”

Burnham told the men that henceforth they would serve as the fair’s Board of Architects. He invited them to choose a chairman. They elected Hunt. “The natural dominance of the master again asserted itself without pretension,” wrote Van Brunt, “and we once more became his willing and happy pupils.”

For secretary they elected Sullivan, who most decidedly was not a happy pupil of Hunt’s. To him, Hunt was the janissary of a dead vernacular. Burnham, too. Both men symbolized all that stood in the way of Sullivan’s own emerging ethos that a building’s function should express itself in its design—not merely that form should follow function but that “the function created or organized its form.”

To Sullivan, Hunt was merely a relic, Burnham something far more dangerous. In him Sullivan saw a kindred capacity for obsession. Sullivan had come to see Chicago architecture as dominated by only two firms: Burnham & Root and Adler & Sullivan. “In each firm was a man with a fixed irrevocable purpose in life, for the sake of which he would bend or sacrifice all else,” Sullivan wrote. “Daniel Burnham was obsessed by the feudal idea of power. Louis Sullivan was equally obsessed by the beneficent idea of Democratic power.” Sullivan admired both Root and Adler but believed they functioned on a lesser plane. “John Root was so self-indulgent that there was a risk he might never draw upon his underlying power; Adler was essentially a technician, an engineer, a conscientious administrator…. Unquestionably, Adler lacked sufficient imagination; so in a way did John Root—that is to say, the imagination of the dreamer. In the dream-imagination lay Burnham’s strength and Louis’s passion.”

Shortly before noon Burnham left the room to take a telephone call from Dora Root. She told him her husband had awakened with a bad cold and would not be able to attend the meeting. Several hours later she called again: A doctor had come and diagnosed pneumonia.

Root’s spirits were good. He joked and sketched. “I haven’t escaped sickness all my life to get off easily now,” he told Harriet Monroe. “I knew when my turn came, it would be a Tartar.”

The architects continued to meet but without Burnham, who stayed beside his partner’s bed except for occasional departures to help resolve issues back in the library or to visit Hunt, whose gout had grown so painful he was confined to his room in the Wellington Hotel. Root joked with his nurses. At its regular Wednesday meeting the Grounds and Buildings Committee passed a resolution wishing Root a speedy recovery. That day Burnham wrote to a Chicago architect named W. W. Boyington: “Mr. Root is quite low, and there is uncertainty about his recovery, but still a chance for him.”

On Thursday Root seemed to rally. Burnham again wrote to Boyington: “am able this morning to give you a little better report. He has passed a pretty good night and is easier. While the danger is not over, we are hopeful.”

Enthusiasm among the architects rose. With Hunt still confined to his room, Post stood in as chairman. He and Van Brunt shuttled to and from Hunt’s hotel. The architects approved the original brown-paper plan fashioned by Burnham, Olmsted, and Root with few changes. They decided how big the main buildings should be and how they should be situated on the site. They chose a uniform style, neoclassical, meaning the buildings would have columns and pediments and evoke the glories of ancient Rome. This choice was anathema to Sullivan, who abhorred derivative architecture, but during the meeting he made no objection. The architects also made what would prove to be one of the most important decisions of the fair: They set a uniform height, sixty feet, for the cornice of each of the palaces of the Grand Court. A cornice was merely a horizontal decorative projection. Walls, roofs, domes, and arches could rise far higher, but by establishing this one point of commonality the architects ensured a fundamental harmony among the fair’s most imposing structures.

At about four o’clock Thursday afternoon Codman and Burnham drove to Root’s house. Codman waited in the carriage as Burnham went inside.

Burnham found Root struggling for breath. Throughout the day Root had experienced strange dreams, including one that had come to him many times in the past of flying through the air. When Root saw Burnham, he said, “You won’t leave me again, will you?”

Burnham said no, but he did leave, to check on Root’s wife, who was in a neighboring room. As Burnham talked with her, a relative also entered the room. She told them Root was dead. In his last moments, she said, he had run his fingers over his bedding as if playing the piano. “Do you hear that?” he whispered. “Isn’t it wonderful? That’s what I call music.”

The house settled into an eerie postmortem quiet broken only by the hiss of gas lamps and the weary tick of clocks. Burnham paced the floor below. He did not know it, but he was being watched. Harriet Monroe’s Aunt Nettie sat on a step high on the dark upper curve of the stairway that rose from Root’s living room to the second floor. The woman listened as Burnham paced. A fire burned in the hearth behind him and cast large shadows on the opposing wall. “I have worked,” Burnham said, “I have schemed and dreamed to make us the greatest architects in the world—I have made him see it and kept him at it—and now he dies—damn!—damn!—damn!”

Root’s death stunned Burnham, stunned Chicago. Burnham and Root had been partners and friends for eighteen years. Each knew the other’s thoughts. Each had come to rely on the other for his skills. Now Root was gone. Outsiders wondered if Root’s death might mean the death of the exposition. The newspapers were full of interviews in which the city’s leading men described Root as the guiding force behind the fair, that without him the city could not hope to realize its dreams. The Tribune said Root was “easily” Chicago’s “most distinguished architect, if indeed he had his superior in the whole country.” Edward Jefferey, chairman of the Grounds and Buildings Committee, said, “There is no man in the profession of architects who has the genius and ability to take up the Exposition work where Mr. Root left off.”

Burnham kept silent. He considered quitting the fair. Two forces warred within him: grief, and a desire to cry out that he, Burnham, had been the engine driving the design of the fair; that he was the partner who had propelled the firm of Burnham & Root to greater and greater achievement.

The eastern architects departed on Saturday, January 17. On Sunday Burnham attended a memorial service for Root at Root’s Astor Place house and his burial in Graceland Cemetery, a charming haven for the well-heeled dead a few miles north of the Loop.

On Monday he was back at his desk. He wrote twelve letters. Root’s office next to his was silent, draped in bunting. Hothouse flowers perfumed the air.

The challenge ahead looked more daunting than ever.

On Tuesday a large bank failed in Kansas City. The following Saturday Lyman Gage announced that he would quit as president of the fair, effective April 1, to tend to his own bank. The fair’s director-general, George Davis, at first refused to believe it. “It’s all nonsense,” he snapped. “Gage has got to stay with us. We can’t do without him.”

There was labor unrest. Just as Burnham had feared, union leaders began using the future fair as a vehicle for asserting such goals as the adoption of a minimum wage and an eight-hour day. There was the threat of fire and weather and disease: Already foreign editors were asking who would dare attend the exposition given Chicago’s notorious problems with sewage. No one had forgotten how in 1885 fouled water had ignited an outbreak of cholera and typhoid that killed ten percent of the city’s population.

Darker forces marshaled in the smoke. Somewhere in the heart of the city a young Irish immigrant sank still more deeply into madness, the preamble to an act that would shock the nation and destroy what Burnham dreamed would be the single greatest moment of his life.

Closer at hand a far stranger creature raised his head in equally intent anticipation. “I was born with the devil in me,” he wrote. “I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.”