The Devil in the White City

Night Is the Magician

DESPITE ITS INCOMPLETE EXHIBITS, rutted paths, and stretches of unplanted ground, the exposition revealed to its early visitors a vision of what a city could be and ought to be. The Black City to the north lay steeped in smoke and garbage, but here in the White City of the fair visitors found clean public bathrooms, pure water, an ambulance service, electric streetlights, and a sewage-processing system that yielded acres of manure for farmers. There was daycare for the children of visitors, and much fun was made of the fact that when you left your child at the Children’s Building, you received a claim check in return. Chicago’s small but vocal censorians feared that impoverished parents would turn the building into a depository for unwanted children. Only one child, poor Charlie Johnson, was ever thus abandoned, and not a single child was lost, although anxiety invested the closing moments of each day.

Within the fair’s buildings visitors encountered devices and concepts new to them and to the world. They heard live music played by an orchestra in New York and transmitted to the fair by long-distance telephone. They saw the first moving pictures on Edison’s Kinetoscope, and they watched, stunned, as lightning chattered from Nikola Tesla’s body. They saw even more ungodly things—the first zipper; the first-ever all-electric kitchen, which included an automatic dishwasher; and a box purporting to contain everything a cook would need to make pancakes, under the brand name Aunt Jemima’s. They sampled a new, oddly flavored gum called Juicy Fruit, and caramel-coated popcorn called Cracker Jack. A new cereal, Shredded Wheat, seemed unlikely to succeed—“shredded doormat,” some called it—but a new beer did well, winning the exposition’s top beer award. Forever afterward, its brewer called it Pabst Blue Ribbon. Visitors also encountered the latest and arguably most important organizational invention of the century, the vertical file, created by Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System. Sprinkled among these exhibits were novelties of all kinds. A locomotive made of spooled silk. A suspension bridge built out of Kirk’s Soap. A giant map of the United States made of pickles. Prune makers sent along a full-scale knight on horseback sculpted out of prunes, and the Avery Salt Mines of Louisiana displayed a copy of the Statue of Liberty carved from a block of salt. Visitors dubbed it “Lot’s Wife.”

One of the most compelling, and chilling, exhibits was the Krupp Pavilion, where Fritz Krupp’s “pet monster” stood at the center of an array of heavy guns. A popular guide to the fair, called the Time-Saver, rated every exhibit on a scale of one to three, with one being merely “interesting” and three being “remarkably interesting,” and gave the Krupp Pavilion a three. For many visitors, however, the weapons were a disturbing presence. Mrs. D. C. Taylor, a frequent visitor to the fair, called Krupp’s biggest gun “a fearful hideous thing, breathing of blood and carnage, a triumph of barbarism crouching amid the world’s triumphs of civilization.”

Mrs. Taylor adored the Court of Honor and was struck by the oddly sober manner people adopted as they walked among its palaces. “Every one about us moved softly and spoke gently. No one seemed hurried or impatient, all were under a spell, a spell that held us from the opening of the fair until its close.”

In the Midway she found a very different atmosphere. Here Mrs. Taylor ventured into the Street in Cairo, open at last, and witnessed her first belly dance. She watched the dancer carefully. “She takes a few light steps to one side, pauses, strikes the castanets, then the same to the other side; advances a few steps, pauses, and causes her abdomen to rise and fall several times in exact time to the music, without moving a muscle in any other part of her body, with incredible rapidity, at the same time holding her head and feet perfectly rigid.”

As Mrs. Taylor and her companions left the Street, she sang quietly to herself, “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” like a frightened child easing past a graveyard.

The fair was so big, so beyond grasp, that the Columbian Guards found themselves hammered with questions. It was a disease, rhetorical smallpox, and every visitor exhibited it in some degree. The Guards answered the same questions over and over, and the questions came fast, often with an accusatory edge. Some questions were just odd.

“In which building is the pope?” one woman asked. She was overheard by writer Teresa Dean, who wrote a daily column from the fair.

“The pope is not here, madame,” the guard said.

“Where is he?”

“In Italy, Europe, madame.”

The woman frowned. “Which way is that?”

Convinced now that the woman was joking, the guard cheerfully quipped, “Three blocks under the lagoon.”

She said, “How do I get there?”

Another visitor, hunting for an exhibit of wax figures, asked a guard, “Can you tell me where the building is that has the artificial human beings?”

He began telling her he did not know, when another visitor jumped in. “I have heard of them,” he said. “They are over in the Woman’s Building. Just ask for the Lady Managers.”

One male visitor, who had lost both his legs and made his way around the fair on false limbs and crutches, must have looked particularly knowledgeable, because another visitor peppered him incessantly with questions, until finally the amputee complained that the strain of answering so many questions was wearing him out.

“There’s just one more thing I’d like to know,” his questioner said, “and I’ll not trouble ye anymore.”

“Well, what is it?”

“I’d like to know how you lost your legs.”

The amputee said he would answer only on strict condition that this was indeed the last question. He would allow no others. Was that clear?

His persecutor agreed.

The amputee, fully aware that his answer would raise an immediate corollary question, said, “They were bit off.”

“Bit off. How—”

But a deal was a deal. Chuckling, the amputee hobbled away.

As the fair fought for attendance, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West drew crowds by the tens of thousands. If Cody had gotten the fair concession he had asked for, these crowds first would have had to pay admission to Jackson Park and would have boosted the fair’s attendance and revenue to a welcome degree. Cody also was able to hold performances on Sundays and, being outside the fairgrounds, did not have to contribute half his revenue to the Exposition Company. Over the six months of the fair an average of twelve thousand people would attend each of Cody’s 318 performances, for a total attendance of nearly four million.

Often Cody upstaged the fair. His main entrance was so close to one of the busiest exposition gates that some visitors thought his show was the world’s fair, and were said to have gone home happy. In June a group of cowboys organized a thousand-mile race from Chadron, Nebraska, to Chicago, in honor of the fair and planned to end it in Jackson Park. The prize was a rich one, $1,000. Cody contributed another $500 and a fancy saddle on condition the race end in his own arena. The organizers accepted.

Ten riders, including “Rattlesnake” Pete and a presumably reformed Nebraska bandit named Doc Middleton, set out from the Baline Hotel in Chadron on the morning of June 14, 1893. The rules of the race allowed each rider to start with two horses and required that he stop at various checkpoints along the way. The most important rule held that when he crossed the finish line, he had to be riding one of the original horses.

The race was wild, replete with broken rules and injured animals. Middleton dropped out soon after reaching Illinois. Four others likewise failed to finish. The first rider across the line was a railroad man named John Berry, riding Poison, who galloped into the Wild West arena on June 27 at nine-thirty in the morning. Buffalo Bill, resplendent in white buckskin and silver, was there to greet him, along with the rest of the Wild West company and ten thousand or so residents of Chicago. John Berry had to settle for the saddle alone, however, for subsequent investigation revealed that shortly after the start of the race he had loaded his horses on an eastbound train and climbed aboard himself to take the first hundred miles in comfort.

Cody upstaged the fair again in July, when exposition officials rejected a request from Mayor Carter Harrison that the fair dedicate one day to the poor children of Chicago and admit them at no charge. The directors thought this was too much to ask, given their struggle to boost the rate of paid admission. Every ticket, even half-price children’s tickets, mattered. Buffalo Bill promptly declared Waif’s Day at the Wild West and offered any kid in Chicago a free train ticket, free admission to the show, and free access to the whole Wild West encampment, plus all the candy and ice cream the children could eat.

Fifteen thousand showed up.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West may indeed have been an “incongruity,” as the directors had declared in rejecting his request for a concession within Jackson Park, but the citizens of Chicago had fallen in love.

The skies cleared and stayed clear. Roadways dried, and newly opened flowers perfumed the air. Exhibitors gradually completed their installations, and electricians removed the last misconnects from the elaborate circuits that linked the fair’s nearly 200,000 incandescent bulbs. Throughout the fairgrounds, on Burnham’s orders, clean-up efforts intensified. On June 1, 1893, workers removed temporary railroad tracks that had scarred the lawns near the lagoon and just south of the Electricity and Mines buildings. “A strikingly noticeable change in the general condition of things is the absence of large piles of boxes stacked up in the exterior courts around Manufactures, Agriculture, Machinery, and other large buildings,” the Tribune reported on June 2. Unopened crates and rubbish that just one week earlier had cluttered the interior of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, particularly at the pavilions erected by Russia, Norway, Denmark, and Canada, likewise had been removed, and now these spaces presented “an entirely different and vastly improved appearance.”

Although such interior exhibits were compelling, the earliest visitors to Jackson Park saw immediately that the fair’s greatest power lay in the strange gravity of the buildings themselves. The Court of Honor produced an effect of majesty and beauty that was far greater than even the dream conjured in the Rookery library. Some visitors found themselves so moved by the Court of Honor that immediately upon entering they began to weep.

No single element accounted for this phenomenon. Each building was huge to begin with, but the impression of mass was amplified by the fact that all the buildings were neoclassical in design, all had cornices set at the same height, all had been painted the same soft white, and all were so shockingly, beautifully unlike anything the majority of visitors ever had seen in their own dusty hometowns. “No other scene of man’s creation seemed to me so perfect as this Court of Honor,” wrote James Fullerton Muirhead, an author and guidebook editor. The court, he wrote, “was practically blameless; the aesthetic sense of the beholder was as fully and unreservedly satisfied as in looking at a masterpiece of painting or sculpture, and at the same time was soothed and elevated by a sense of amplitude and grandeur such as no single work of art could produce.” Edgar Lee Masters, Chicago attorney and emerging poet, called the Court “an inexhaustible dream of beauty.”

The shared color, or more accurately the shared absence of color, produced an especially alluring range of effects as the sun traveled the sky. In the early morning, when Burnham conducted his inspections, the buildings were a pale blue and seemed to float on a ghostly cushion of ground mist. Each evening the sun colored the buildings ochre and lit the motes of dust raised by the breeze until the air itself became a soft orange veil.

One such evening Burnham led a tour of the fair aboard an electric launch for a group that included John Root’s widow, Dora, and a number of foreign emissaries. Burnham loved escorting friends and dignitaries through the grounds but sought always to orchestrate the journeys so that his friends saw the fair the way he believed it should be seen, with the buildings presented from a certain perspective, in a particular order, as if he were still back in his library showing drawings instead of real structures. He had tried to impose his aesthetic will on all the fair’s visitors by insisting during the first year of planning that the number of entrances to Jackson Park be limited to a few and that these be situated so that people had to enter first through the Court of Honor, either through a large portal at the rail station on the west side of the park or an entry on the east from the exposition wharf. His quest to create a powerful first impression was good showmanship, but it also exposed the aesthetic despot residing within. He did not get his way. The directors insisted on many gates, and the railroads refused to channel their exposition traffic through a single depot. Burnham never quite surrendered. Throughout the fair, he said, “we insisted on sending our own guests whose opinions we specially valued into the Grand Court first.”

The electric launch carrying Burnham, Dora Root, and the foreign dignitaries cut silently through the lagoon, scattering the white city reflected upon its surface. The setting sun gilded the terraces on the east bank but cast the west bank into dark blue shadow. Women in dresses of crimson and aquamarine walked slowly along the embankments. Voices drifted across the water, laced now and then with laughter that rang like crystal touched in a toast.

The next day, after what surely had been a difficult night, Dora Root wrote to Burnham to thank him for the tour and to attempt to convey the complexity of her feelings.

“Our hour on the lagoon last evening proved the crown of a charming day,” she wrote. “Indeed I fear we would have lingered on indefinitely had not our foreign friends prepared a more highly spiced entertainment. I think I should never willingly cease drifting in that dreamland.” The scenes elicited conflicting emotions. “I find it all infinitely sad,” she wrote, “but at the same time so entrancing, that I often feel as if it would be the part of wisdom to fly at once to the woods or mountains where one can always find peace. There is much I long to say to you about your work of the past two years—which has brought about this superb realization of John’s vision of beauty—but I cannot trust myself. It means too much to me and I think, I hope, you understand. For years his hopes and ambitions were mine, and in spite of my efforts the old interests still go on. It is a relief to me to write this. I trust you will not mind.”

If evenings at the fair were seductive, the nights were ravishing. The lamps that laced every building and walkway produced the most elaborate demonstration of electric illumination ever attempted and the first large-scale test of alternating current. The fair alone consumed three times as much electricity as the entire city of Chicago. These were important engineering milestones, but what visitors adored was the sheer beauty of seeing so many lights ignited in one place, at one time. Every building, including the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, was outlined in white bulbs. Giant searchlights—the largest ever made and said to be visible sixty miles away—had been mounted on the Manufactures’ roof and swept the grounds and surrounding neighborhoods. Large colored bulbs lit the hundred-foot plumes of water that burst from the MacMonnies Fountain.

For many visitors these nightly illuminations were their first encounter with electricity. Hilda Satt, a girl newly arrived from Poland, went to the fair with her father. “As the light was fading in the sky, millions of lights were suddenly flashed on, all at one time,” she recalled, years later. “Having seen nothing but kerosene lamps for illumination, this was like getting a sudden vision of Heaven.”

Her father told her the lights were activated by electric switches.

“Without matches?” she asked.

Between the lights and the ever-present blue ghosts of the Columbian Guard, the fair achieved another milestone: For the first time Chicagoans could stroll at night in perfect safety. This alone began to draw an increased number of visitors, especially young couples locked in the rictus of Victorian courtship and needful of quiet dark places.

At night the lights and the infilling darkness served to mask the exposition’s many flaws—among them, wrote John Ingalls in Cosmopolitan, the “unspeakable debris of innumerable luncheons”—and to create for a few hours the perfect city of Daniel Burnham’s dreams. “Night,” Ingalls wrote, “is the magician of the fair.”

The early visitors returned to their homes and reported to friends and family that the fair, though incomplete, was far grander and more powerful than they had been led to expect. Montgomery Schuyler, the leading architectural critic of Burnham’s day, wrote, “It was a common remark among visitors who saw the Fair for the first time that nothing they had read or seen pictured had given them an idea of it, or prepared them for what they saw.” Reporters from far-flung cities wired the same observation back to their editors, and stories of delight and awe began to percolate through the most remote towns. In fields, dells, and hollows, families terrified by what they read in the papers each day about the collapsing national economy nonetheless now began to think about Chicago. The trip would be expensive, but it was starting to look more and more worthwhile. Even necessary.

If only Mr. Ferris would get busy and finish that big wheel.