The Devil in the White City

Aboard the Olympic

ABOARD THE OLYMPIC BURNHAM waited for more news of Frank Millet and his ship. Just before sailing he had written, in longhand, a nineteen-page letter to Millet urging him to attend the next meeting of the Lincoln Commission, which was then on the verge of picking a designer for the Lincoln Memorial. Burnham and Millet had lobbied strongly for Henry Bacon of New York, and Burnham believed that his earlier talk to the Lincoln Commission had been persuasive. “But—I know and you know, dear Frank, that … the rats swarm back and begin to gnaw at the same old spot, the moment the dog’s back is turned.” He stressed how important it was for Millet to attend. “Be there and reiterate the real argument, which is that they should select a man in whom we have confidence. I leave this thing confidently in your hands.” He addressed the envelope himself, certain that the United States Post Office would know exactly what to do:

Hon. F. D. Millet

To arrive on

Steamship Titanic.

New York

Burnham hoped that once the Olympic reached the site of the Titanic’s sinking, he would find Millet alive and hear him tell some outrageous story about the voyage, but during the night the Olympic returned to its original course for England. Another vessel already had reached the Titanic.

But there was a second reason for the Olympic’s return to course. The builder of both ships, J. Bruce Ismay, himself a Titanic passenger but one of the few male passengers to survive, was adamant that none of the other survivors see this duplicate of their own lost liner coming to their aid. The shock, he feared, would be too great, and too humiliating to the White Star Line.

The magnitude of the Titanic disaster quickly became apparent. Burnham lost his friend. The steward lost his son. William Stead had also been aboard and was drowned. In 1886 in the Pall Mall Gazette Stead had warned of the disasters likely to occur if shipping companies continued operating liners with too few lifeboats. A Titanic survivor reported hearing him say, “I think it is nothing serious so I shall turn in again.”

That night, in the silence of Burnham’s stateroom, as somewhere to the north the body of his last good friend drifted frozen in the strangely peaceful seas of the North Atlantic, Burnham opened his diary and began to write. He felt an acute loneliness. He wrote, “Frank Millet, whom I loved, was aboard her … thus cutting off my connection with one of the best fellows of the Fair.”

Burnham lived only forty-seven more days. As he and his family traveled through Heidelberg, he slipped into a coma, the result apparently of a combined assault of diabetes, colitis, and his foot infection, all worsened by a bout of food poisoning. He died June 1, 1912. Margaret eventually moved to Pasadena, California, where she lived through time of war and epidemic and crushing financial depression, and then war again. She died December 23, 1945. Both are buried in Chicago, in Graceland, on a tiny island in the cemetery’s only pond. John Root lies nearby, as do the Palmers, Louis Sullivan, Mayor Harrison, Marshall Field, Philip Armour, and so many others, in vaults and tombs that vary from the simple to the grand. Potter and Bertha still dominate things, as if stature mattered even in death. They occupy a massive acropolis with fifteen giant columns atop the only high ground, overlooking the pond. The others cluster around. On a crystalline fall day you can almost hear the tinkle of fine crystal, the rustle of silk and wool, almost smell the expensive cigars.