The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

In 1900, Theodore Dreiser was inspired to write Sister Carrie, a novel about a young country girl who moves to the big city just as many of Holmes’ victims did. In the city, Carrie is impressed by powerful men and becomes a mistress and later a famous actress. It is significant that Holmes also read Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe as a child. Verne was famous for writing a series of adventure novels—the Voyages Extraordinaires—about the enterprises of great men. Both Burnham’s celebration of progress and in a very different way, Holmes’ antisocial conduct, fit this model of triumphing over the odds. In Poe, Holmes found a much darker model and no doubt read the short stories, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” about the brutal killing of two women, and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” about hiding the innards of a murder victim beneath the floorboards. In his own murders, Holmes brought both these stories to life.

Larson presents a world at the turn of the last century that was viscerally shaped by the flourishes of the pen, just as Holmes translated the writings of Poe into gory dissections. Larson refers to “[t]ypewriters—the women who operated the latest business machines” (16) and underlines the intimate connection between life and journalism in the city: “The messenger boys raced off with the news” (30); “Initially even Chicago’s editors agreed” (15). When Root is married and when the fair closes, Harriet Monroe memorializes the event in writing. Literature in America, like its engineers, had a new impetus, in the form of Modernism. At the head of this new literary movement was Ezra Pound, first published in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine.

If, as Goethe wrote, architecture is “Part 1” in turn-of-the-century America, it resonated with nationalism: “America’s pride in its growing power and international stature had fanned patriotism to a new intensity” (15). The Eiffel Tower, which stirred such competitiveness in American architects like Burnham, resembled “the trail of a skyrocket” (15). The skyscrapers that Burnham and Root designed came to dominate city skylines and altered the business landscape, propelled by economic growth that for the first time outstripped anything in Europe. While Burnham had a blue-sky vision of the future, he shared that “blue gaze” with a less benevolent engineer, Holmes, who used his blue eyes to mesmerize his victims: “Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes” (35). Larson is keen to present the ambivalence of this age of activity. Even writers such as himself, of Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast, were suspect amid the smoke and bustle of the new century: “The club’s president held the official title of the Ripper; its members were mainly journalists” (31).