The Devil in the White City

Freaks

ON JULY 31, 1893, after two investigative hearings, the Retrenchment Committee gave its report to the exposition’s Board of Directors. The report stated that the financial management of the fair “can only be characterized as shamefully extravagant.” Drastic cuts in spending and staff were necessary, immediately. “As to the Construction Department, we hardly know what to say,” the report continued. “We had no time to go into details, but have formed the decided impression that this is being run now, as in the past, upon the general theory that money is no object.”

The Retrenchment Committee made it clear that, at least for its three members, the financial success of the fair was as important as its obvious aesthetic success. The honor of Chicago’s leading men, who prided themselves on their unsentimental—some might say ruthless—pursuit of maximum profit, was in peril. The report closed, “If we are not to be disgraced before the public as business-men, this matter must be followed up sharply and decisively.”

In separate statements, the Retrenchment Committee urged the directors to make the committee permanent and invest it with the power to approve or deny every expenditure at the exposition, no matter how small.

This was too much, even for the equally hardened businessmen of the exposition board. President Higinbotham said he would resign before he would cede such power to anyone. Other directors felt likewise. Stung by this rejection, the three men of the Retrenchment Committee themselves resigned. One told a reporter, “If the directory had seen fit to continue the committee with power as originally intended, it would have dropped heads enough to fill the grand court basin…”

The retrenchers’ report had been too harsh, too much a rebuke, at a time when the mood throughout Chicago was one of sustained exultation at the fact that the fair had gotten built at all and that it had proven more beautiful than anyone had imagined. Even New York had apologized—well, at least one editor from New York had done so. Charles T. Root, editor of the New York Dry Goods Reporter and no relation to Burnham’s dead partner, published an editorial on Thursday, August 10, 1893, in which he cited the ridicule and hostility that New York editors had expressed ever since Chicago won the right to build the exposition. “Hundreds of newspapers, among them scores of the strongest Eastern dailies, held their sides with merriment over the exquisite humor of the idea of this crude, upstart, pork-packing city undertaking to conceive and carry out a true World’s Fair…” The carping had subsided, he wrote, but few of the carpers had as yet made the “amende honorable” that now clearly was due Chicago. He compounded his heresy by adding that if New York had won the fair, it would not have done as fine a job. “So far as I have been able to observe New York never gets behind any enterprise as Chicago got behind this, and without that splendid pulling together, prestige, financial supremacy, and all that sort of thing would not go far toward paralleling the White City.” It was time, he said, to acknowledge the truth: “Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world.”

None of the exposition directors or officers had any illusions, however. The rate of paid admissions, though rising steadily, had to be increased still more, and soon. Only three months remained until the closing ceremony on October 30. (The closure was supposed to happen at the end of October, meaning October 31, but some unidentified crafter of the federal legislation erred in thinking October only had thirty days.)

The directors pressured the railroads to lower fares. The Chicago Tribune made fare reductions a crusade and openly attacked the railroads. “They are unpatriotic, for this is a national not a local fair,” an editorial charged on August 11, 1893. “They are also desperately and utterly selfish.” The next day the newspaper singled out Chauncey Depew, president of the New York Central, for a particularly caustic appraisal. “Mr. Depew all along has posed as the special friend of the World’s Fair and has been lavish in his declarations that his roads would do the fair thing and would enable tens of thousands to come here beyond Niagara Falls…” Yet Depew had failed to do what he promised, the Tribune said. “It is in order for Chauncey M. Depew to hand in his resignation as Chicago’s adopted son. Chicago wants no more of him.”

Frank Millet, director of functions, meanwhile stepped up his own efforts to promote the fair and arranged an increasingly exotic series of events. He organized boat races in the basin of the Court of Honor that pitted inhabitants of the Midway villages against one another. They did battle every Tuesday evening in vessels native to their homelands. “We want to do something to liven up the lagoons and basin,” Millet told an interviewer. “People are getting tired of looking at the electric launches. If we can get the Turks, the South Sea Islanders, the Singalese, the Esquimos, and the American Indians to float about the grand basin in their native barks, it will certainly add some novelty as well as interest to the scene.”

Millet also organized swim meets between the Midway “types,” as the press called them. He scheduled these for Fridays. The first race took place August 11 in the lagoon, with Zulus swimming against South American Indians. The Dahomans also competed, as did the Turks, “some of them as hairy as gorillas,” the Tribune said, with the anthropological abandon common to the age. “The races were notable for the lack of clothing worn by the contestants and the serious way in which they went at the task of winning five-dollar gold pieces.”

Millet’s big coup was the great Midway ball, held on the night of Wednesday, August 16. The Tribune called it “The Ball of the Midway Freaks” and sought to whet the nation’s appetite with an editorial that first noted a rising furor within the Board of Lady Managers over the belly dancers of the Midway. “Whether the apprehensions of the good ladies … were due to infringements of morality or to the anticipation that the performers may bring on an attack of peritonitis if they persist in their contortions is not clear, but all the same they have taken the position that what is not considered very much out of the way on the banks of the Nile or in the market places of Syria is entirely improper on the Midway between Jackson and Washington Parks.”

But now, the Tribune continued, the belly dancers and every other depraved jiggling half-dressed woman of the Midway had been invited to the great ball, where they were expected to dance with the senior officers of the fair, including Burnham and Davis. “The situation therefore, as will be seen, is full of horrifying possibilities,” the Tribune said. “It should cause a shiver in the composite breast of the Board of Lady Managers when they consider what may happen if Director-General Davis should lead out some fascinating Fatima at the head of the grand procession and she should be taken with peritonitis in the midst of the dance; or if [Potter] Palmer should escort a votary of the Temple of Luxor only to find her with the same ailment; or if Mayor Harrison, who belongs to all nations, should dance with the whole lot. Will they suppress their partners’ contortions by protest or by force, or, following the fashion of the country, will they, too, attempt Oriental contortions? Suppose that President Higinbotham finds as his vis-à-vis an anointed, barebacked Fiji beauty or a Dahomeyite amazon bent upon the extraordinary antics of the cannibal dance, is he to join in and imitate her or risk his head in an effort to restrain her?”

Further enriching the affair was the presence at Jackson Park of George Francis Train—known universally as “Citizen Train”—in his white suit, red belt, and red Turkish fez, invited by Millet to host the ball and the boat and swim races and anything else that Millet could devise. Train was one of the most famous men of the day, though no one knew quite why. He was said to have been the model for Phileas Fogg, the globe-trotter in Around the World in Eighty Days. Train claimed the real reason he was invited to the exposition was to save it by using his psychic powers to increase attendance. These powers resided in his body in the form of electrical energy. He walked about the fairgrounds rubbing his palms to husband that energy and refused to shake hands with anyone lest the act discharge his potency. “Chicago built the fair,” he said. “Everybody else tried to kill it. Chicago built it. I am here to save it and I’ll be hanged if I haven’t.”

The ball took place in the fair’s Natatorium, a large building on the Midway devoted to swimming and bathing and equipped with a ballroom and banquet rooms. Bunting of yellow and red hung from the ceiling. The galleries that overlooked the ballroom were outfitted with opera boxes for fair officials and socially prominent families. Burnham had a box, as did Davis and Higinbotham and of course the Palmers. The galleries also had seats and standing room for other paying guests. From railings in front of the boxes hung triangles of silk embroidered with gold arabesques, all glowing with the light of adjacent incandescent bulbs. The effect was one of indescribable opulence. The Retrenchment Committee would not have approved.

At nine-fifteen that night Citizen Train—dressed in his usual white, but now for some reason carrying an armful of blooming sweet pea—led the procession of exotics, many barefoot, down the stairway of the Natatorium to the ballroom below. He held the hand of a ten-year-old Mexican ballerina and was followed by scores of men and women in the customary clothing of their native cultures. Sol Bloom kept order on the ballroom floor.

The official program dedicated dances to particular officials and guests. Director-General Davis was to lead a quadrille, Burnham a “Berlin,” Mayor Harrison a polka. Once the dances were completed, the crowd was to sing “Home Sweet Home.”

It was hot. Chief Rain-in-the-Face, the Sioux chief who had killed Custer’s brother and now occupied Sitting Bull’s cabin in the Midway, wore green paint that streamed down his face. A Laplander wore a fur shirt; Eskimo women wore blouses of walrus skin. The maharajah of Kapurthala, visiting that week from India, sat in a makeshift throne on the ballroom stage fanned by three servants.

The ballroom burst with color and energy: Japanese in red silk, Bedouins in red and black, Romanians in red, blue, and yellow. Women who ordinarily would have come wearing almost nothing—like Aheze, an Amazon, and Zahtoobe, a Dahoman—were given short skirts constructed of small American flags. The Tribune, in an unintended parody of its own penchant for describing the gowns of the rich, noted that Lola, a South Sea Islander, wore her “native costume of bark cloth covering about half the body, with low cut and sleeveless bodice.” As the night wore on and the wine flowed, the line to dance with Lola grew long. Sadly, the belly dancers came in robes and turbans. Men in black dress suits circled the floor, “swinging black Amazons with bushy hair and teeth necklaces.” Chicago—and perhaps the world—had never seen anything like it. The Tribune called the ball “the strangest gathering since the destruction of the Tower of Babel.”

There was food, of course. The official menu:

RELISHES.

Hard boiled potatoes, à la Irish Village.

International hash, à la Midway Plaisance

COLD DISHES.

Roast Missionary, à la Dahomey, west coast of Africa.

Jerked buffalo, à la Indian Village.

Stuffed ostrich, à la Ostrich Farm.

Boiled camel humps, à la Cairo street.

Monkey stew, à la Hagenbeck.

ENTREES.

Fricassee of reindeer, à la Lapland.

Fried snowballs, à la Ice Railway.

Crystallized frappé, from Libby glass exhibit.

PASTRY.

Wind doughnuts, à la Captive Balloon.

Sandwiches (assorted), especially prepared by the

Leather Exhibit.

And for dessert, the program said, “Twenty-five percent of gross receipts.”

The ball ended at four-thirty A.M. The exotics walked slowly back to the Midway. The guests climbed into their carriages and slept or softly sang “After the Ball”—the hit song of the day—as their liverymen drove them home over empty streets that echoed with the plosive rhythm of hooves on granite.

The ball and Frank Millet’s other inventions imparted to the exposition a wilder, happier air. The exposition by day might wear a chaste gown of white staff, but at night it danced barefoot and guzzled champagne.

Attendance rose. The daily average of paid admissions for August was 113,403—at last topping the vital 100,000 threshold. The margin was slim, however. And the nation’s economic depression was growing steadily worse, its labor situation more volatile.

On August 3 a big Chicago bank, Lazarus Silverman, failed. Burnham’s firm had long been a client. On the night of August 10 Charles J. Eddy, a former top official of the bankrupt Reading Railroad, one of the first casualties of the panic, walked into Washington Park just north of the Midway and shot himself. Of course he had been staying at the Metro-pole. He was the hotel’s third suicide that summer. Mayor Harrison warned that the ranks of the unemployed had swollen to an alarming degree. “If Congress does not give us money we will have riots that will shake this country,” he said. Two weeks later workers scuffled with police outside City Hall. It was a minor confrontation, but the Tribune called it a riot. A few days after that, 25,000 unemployed workers converged on the downtown lakefront and heard Samuel Gompers, standing at the back of speaker’s wagon No. 5, ask, “Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?”

For the city’s industrialists and merchant princes who learned of Gompers’s speech in their Sunday morning newspapers, this was a particularly unsettling question, for it seemed to embody a demand for much more than simply work. Gompers was calling for fundamental change in the relationship between workers and their overseers.

This was dangerous talk, to be suppressed at all costs.