The Devil in the White City

Worry

AT THE FAIRGROUNDS LATER that night the ticketmen counted their sales and found that for that single day, July 4, paid attendance had totaled 283,273—far greater than the entire first week of the fair.

It was the first clear evidence that Chicago might have created something extraordinary after all, and it renewed Burnham’s hopes that the fair at last would achieve the level of attendance he had hoped for.

But the next day, only 79,034 paying visitors came to see the fair. Three days later the number sagged to 44,537. The bankers carrying the fair’s debt grew anxious. The fair’s auditor already had discovered that Burnham’s department had spent over $22 million to build the fair (roughly $660 million in twenty-first-century dollars), more than twice the amount originally planned. The bankers were pressuring the exposition’s directors to appoint a Retrenchment Committee empowered not just to seek out ways of reducing the fair’s expenses but to execute whatever cost-saving measures it deemed necessary, including layoffs and the elimination of departments and committees.

Burnham knew that placing the future of the fair in the hands of bankers would mean its certain failure. The only way to ease the pressure was to boost the total of paid admissions to far higher levels. Estimates held that to avoid financial failure—a humiliation for Chicago’s prideful leading men who counted themselves lords of the dollar—the fair would have to sell a minimum of 100,000 tickets a day for the rest of its run.

To have even a hope of achieving this, the railroads would have to reduce their fares, and Frank Millet would have to intensify his efforts to attract people from all corners of the country.

With the nation’s economic depression growing ever more profound—banks failing, suicides multiplying—it seemed an impossibility.