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

“America’s pride in its growing power and international stature had fanned patriotism to a new intensity.” 

Larson aligns the vaunting ambition of America at the turn of the century with the prideful conditions of the biblical rebel angels. The powerhouse of the growing American economy is for Larson just as demonic as the serial killer to which his title refers. Larson views this power igniting a newly fiery patriotism. As his depiction of Chicago during the Exposition makes clear, this fire could destroy as well as drive. Burnham is a modern Hephaestus, slaving at the forge of progress, while Holmes constructs his own hell. The parallel suggests that even the drive for economic growth is not without ethical quandaries. 

“Typewriters—the women who operated the latest business machines […]” 

Larson’s attentiveness to the written word lends a self-referential dimension to the book. As the only source of news, the press was intimately connected with the actions of America’s heroes and villains, who were inflated to mythic proportions by the country’s prominence on the world stage. Larson’s book is a love letter to the American journalism that gave the nation its voice.  

“A lamplighter scuttled along the edges of the crowd igniting the gas jets atop cast-iron poles. Abruptly there was color everywhere: the yellow streetcars and the sudden blues of telegraph boys jolting past with satchels full of joy and gloom; cab drivers lighting the red night-lamps at the backs of their hansoms; a large gilded lion crouching before the hat store across the street. In the high buildings above, gas and electric lights bloomed in the dusk like moonflowers.” 

In this passage, Larson sets the stage for his reproduction of Chicago as a place defined by chiaroscuro. The ethical ambivalence of the city is embodied in its many lights, swathed in darkness. Larson’s Chicago is a virtual Gotham City, a battleground between dark and light. Though the setting is urban, lions crouch in the shadows, ready to pounce on vulnerable prey. These lines from the beginning of the book are ominous, promising hidden depths that Larson is about to illuminate through this investigation into the city’s heart. The alien beauty of the moonflower image is evocative of the World’s Fair, symbol of the American dream, itself an appealing but insubstantial mirage. The delirium, madness, and secrets suggested by Chicago’s moonflower light await discovery. 

“[…] the Stone Gate, three arches of Lemont limestone roofed in copper and displaying over the central arch the carved bust—Root’s touch, no doubt—of John Sherman’s favorite bull, Sherman. The gate became a landmark that endured into the twenty-first century, long after the last hog crossed to eternity over the great wooden ramp called the Bridge of Sighs.” 

The monumental quality of the neoclassical arch is suggestive of the defining influence of architecture on city life, history, and culture. An echo of Rome’s powerful yet fragile empire reverberates in Larson’s description. The work of Larson’s hero would change the face of the nation and the world. At the other end of the spectrum is the wooden bridge to the afterlife—the awareness that life is transient despite human efforts to set it in stone. In this sense, Burnham and Holmes represent opposing drives: one toward construction, civilization, and preservation, the other a harbinger of death.

“A cascade of work flowed to their firm, partly because Root managed to solve a puzzle that had bedeviled Chicago builders ever since the city’s founding. By solving it, he helped the city become the birthplace of skyscrapers despite terrain that could not have been less suited to the role.”

Ever attentive to his theme of Chicagoan devils, Larson observes Root’s triumph over the bedeviling problem of high-rise construction. Overcoming the odds, Root quite literally raised Chicago’s profile both nationally and internationally; his buildings gave expression to the growing prosperity and ambition of Americans. Triumphing against the odds identifies Root as a specifically American hero. The ability of the Chicago engineers to overcome the city’s physical limitations is emblematic of their prideful assault on the natural order. The evolution of American society in the late 19th century seemed to entail the deposition of god by man. Burnham and Root were the architects of the new world order.

“They employed it to build taller and taller buildings, cities in the sky inhabited by a new race of businessmen, whom some called ‘cliff-dwellers.’” 

In the world designed by architects like Root and Burnham, the skyscraper offered a new perspective, seeming to place American businessmen in a godlike position among the clouds. These high-rise buildings gave expression to the atmosphere of ambition in America in general and the city of Chicago in particular.

“Burnham knew that together he and Root had reached a level of success that neither could have achieved on his own. The synchrony with which they worked allowed them to take on ever more challenging and daring projects, at a time when so much that an architect did was new and when dramatic increases in the height and weight of buildings amplified the risk of catastrophic failure. Harriet Monroe wrote, ‘The work of each man became constantly more necessary to the other.’” 

The synchrony in the “frozen music” that the duo wrote together echoes the harmonious music of the spheres. Reaching like their buildings for the sky, architects move to ever more elevated echelons of society, attracting presidents to the grand openings of their buildings. Similarly, the Board of Architects collaborate to attain Olmsted’s heavenly vision of “unity of design” (55). The World Fair thus stands for civilization, achieved through partnership: “All the architects, including Sullivan, seemed to have been captured by the same spell” (114). In contrast are the Machiavellian manipulations of Holmes, whose predation is clearly the antithesis of societal cohesion for Larson.

“These artifacts marked the room as headquarters of the Whitechapel Club, named for the London slum in which two years earlier Jack the Ripper had done his killing. The club’s president held the official title of the Ripper; its members were mainly journalists, who brought to the club’s meetings stories of murder harvested from the city’s streets.” 

The perverse fascination of the journalists who frequented the Whitechapel Club with the macabre Ripper murders establishes a reciprocity in Larson’s book between heinous crimes and the journalists who cover them. Holmes dissects bodies just as journalists dissect news. It is the journalist’s job to fathom both cultural enterprise and progress, and depravity. 

“It could be done, because it had to be done, but the challenge was monstrous.” 

In Larson’s book, “monstrosity” denotes not only a vast scale but a lack of cohesion: “Jackson Park, a desolate, undeveloped wasteland” (33). A lack of social cohesion is also what casts Holmes’ behavior in the light of monstrosity. It is the absence of humanity that constitutes Cleckley’s definition of psychopathy: “[A] subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly” (88). In this, the psychopath displays an alien quality which places him at odds with the rest of humanity. His antisocial behavior is the antithesis of Olmsted’s “becomingness.” 

“Every landscape element of the fair, he argued, had to have one ‘supreme object, viz., the becomingness: the becomingness of everything that may be seen as a modestly contributive part of a grand whole.’” 

Olmsted’s ideal of becomingness is a key concept in Larson’s book. It describes Larson’s own journalistic style, which generates anticipation by moving swiftly between narratives and uses foreshadowing, wordplay, and the “cliff-hanger” ending. As the plot unfolds, the reader follows as though they too were a detective, coming to understand the whole “supreme object.” A citizen is also a “modestly contributive part of a grand whole,” the antithesis of the antisocial monster, Holmes. The fair was a triumph of American society in form and content.

“Here they were, gathered at one table, the nation’s foremost practitioners of what Goethe and Schelling called ‘frozen music.’”

By likening architecture to music, Larson traces the shifting life of the city and its international impact. As the architects of that change, the Board resembles a round table of knights, emblematic guardians of civilization. The Board is also imaged as a gathering of Renaissance men, overseeing a great cultural shift that the fair both celebrated and produced. Innovations like Shredded Wheat and the Ferris wheel would become part of the furniture of reality for generations to come. The implication of humanism is appropriate given the vast scale of what the Board of Architects accomplished in the World Exposition.

“Later, no doubt, he wished he had been more candid and had listened more closely to the whisper in his head about the wrongness of that building and the discontinuity between its true appearance and Emeline’s perception of it.” 

Miscommunication is thematic in the book, whether it be the incessant lies and aliases of Herman Mudgett, Olmsted’s emphasis on making his instructions explicit, or the crank letters of Prendergast. To some degree, Larson suggests, fallacy is inherent in language, which is perhaps why a misanthrope like Holmes was able to lie with such dexterity. Larson underlines this emphasis on the distinction between perception and reality in his description of Emeline’s physical attributes: “Pitezel had exaggerated Emeline’s beauty, Holmes saw, but not by much. She was indeed lovely, with luminous blond hair” (162). In some sense, language always lies.

“[…] the exposition was Chicago’s conscience, the city it wanted to become. Burnham in particular embodied this insecurity.” 

Burnham’s efforts to elevate the city—to build its conscience—are comparable with the Freudian superego, while Holmes’ lust for power and destruction align with the Id. Like Chicago, Burnham had been rejected by the nation’s elite, and his quest for redemption was not only professional but deeply personal. The comparison also sheds light on the nature of the psychopath, in whom Larson’s Belknap observes, “some important element of humanness was missing” (87). Holmes certainly experienced an absence of guilt, while Burnham was driven by the pursuit of an ideal. Taken together, the hero and the villain constitute Larson’s vision of Chicago in its most epoch-defining moment.

“They watched as hog after hog was upended and whisked screaming down the cable into the butchering chambers below, where men with blood-caked knifes expertly cut their throats […] Holmes was unmoved; Minnie and Anna were horrified but also strangely thrilled by the efficiency of the carnage. The yards embodied everything Anna had heard about Chicago and its irresistible, even savage drive toward wealth and power.” 

The trio’s visit to the slaughterhouse brings with it a sense of foreboding made all the queasier by the probability that it gave Holmes some pleasure. His own hotel, which would be the next stop on Anna’s tour of Chicago, was similar to the Stock Yards. Larson’s image of the ladies sliding squeamishly on the blood emphasizes their vulnerability. Larson infers that the serial killer treated his victims as remorselessly as “screaming hogs,” making his hotel into a kind of factory. 

“It was a difficult ride for him. He had passed this way before, to bury John Root. The fair had begun with death, and now it had ended with death.” 

Death is ever-present in the 1880s Chicago of Larson’s imagination, almost pedestrian: “Pedestrians retrieved severed heads” (11). Larson’s normalization of death prefigures the ghastly killings perpetrated by Holmes. In this context, Burnham’s sadness over his friend’s death, and later that of Millet, is made more poignant. A contemporary journalist wrote of Holmes’ execution: “The story, too, tends to illustrate the end of the century” (473). Burnham is instrumental in the construction of the city of the future, the old passing away.  

“He read of his increasing national notoriety.” 

Learning about his own infamy from the newspapers, Holmes writes autobiographies and letters. His deeds were so unbelievable that they remained undetected until their publication instantly gave them an “archetypal” status in the public consciousness. Like a novelist, Holmes had great facility with fiction, using his hypocrisy to maneuver multiple groups around the country and collect wives, lives, and pseudonyms.

“At one point in his diary he notes that he was reading Trilby, the 1894 best seller by George Du Maurier about a young singer, Trilby O’Farrell, and her possession by the mesmerist Svengali. Holmes wrote that he ‘was much pleased with parts of it.’” 

Larson’s observation about this particular literary interest of Holmes’ influences his ideas about Holmes’ motivation: “He was the smoothest man I ever saw,” said C. E. Davis, whom Holmes had hired to manage the drugstore’s jewellery counter” (71). Holmes’ eyes were even described as being like those of a mesmerist (71), and he seems to have exerted a powerful influence over his victims and creditors. Larson quotes Henry Owens: “He induced me to make these statements by promising me my back wages and by his hypnotising ways, and I candidly believe that he had a certain amount of influence over me. While I was with him I was always under his control” (203). Holmes’ horrific acts continue to mesmerize the nation, given the success of Larson’s book. 

“He opened the memoir as if it were a fable.” 

Holmes’ inherence within the national imagination is a direct consequence of his storytelling ability. The psychopathic facility with deceit made Holmes a master of fiction: “his fictional alter ego” (323). He was “a being so unthinkable that no novelist would dare to invent such a character” (369). Larson again draws a comparison between the operations of a serial killer and the fiction writer.

Larson presents his own tale of Chicago in fable format, as a Grimm’s tale of the making of America counterbalanced by the machinations of a psychopath: “In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black” (Introductory Note). Larson’s fable emphasizes the precariousness of social codes of behavior, of morality and of civilization itself, and the ever-present threat of the darker and more aggressive instincts of humanity that can lurk beneath that veneer.

“He had become the living representation of how men liked to think of themselves: one man doing an awful duty and doing it well, against the odds.” 

Detective Geyer’s function as a hero and the bringer of justice offers up yet another parallel with Burnham’s heroism in assuming responsibility for the fair. Harriet Monroe describes Burnham: “To himself, and indeed to most of the world in general, he was always right, and by knowing this so securely he built up the sheer power of personality which accomplished big things” (80). Geyer embodies the American spirit of the self-made man, and the struggle for justice. 

“The Chicago Times-Herald took the broad view and said of Holmes: ‘He is a prodigy of wickedness, a human demon, a being so unthinkable that no novelist would dare to invent such a character. The story, too, tends to illustrate the end of the century.’” 

Hence, Larson has chosen the historical novel form and a journalistic register to tell his tale. Holmes is both a real-life monster and an archetype, used to characterize the times by embodying their dark and lengthy shadow. The smoky and dangerous streets of Chicago, the suicides of its businessmen, and economic instability were all part of the price paid for the dream of a new society. As the nation’s “devil,” Holmes can possess the imaginations of the public just as he had sought to obsess his victims. Holmes was the corollary of the pact that America seemed to have made with the devil.

“Holmes’s talent for deflecting scrutiny.” 

Sight and oversight are thematic in Larson’s book. As Larson notes, Olmsted described his vision as though he were a painter: “Olmsted valued plants, trees, and flowers not for their individual attributes but rather as colors and shapes on a palette. […] Roses were not roses but “flecks of white or red modifying masses of green” (49). The vistas that the architects were creating with the fair contrast with the gloomy idiosyncrasies of Holmes’ hotel, with its labyrinthine rooms, secret passages, and basement of horrors. It is this dichotomy of the hidden and the apparent that drives Larson’s narrative. 

“The fair had a powerful and lasting impact on the nation’s psyche.” 

The fair launched several inventions that have remained a part of American society to this day: The Ferris wheel, Shredded Wheat, and the electric chair were among them. Yet the fair was a critical moment in the ascendancy of the nation toward becoming a world power. Like the Disneyland that it inspired, the fair was a dream city, engendering a spirit of innovation and optimism. The fair provided the foundations for architects like Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, who would come to define the American aesthetic. Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine gave voice to a generation of American poets who transformed the art form. Like the Freudian Superego, Chicago’s “conscience” (210), the fair launched many American dreams.

“I believe fully that I am growing to resemble the devil—that the similitude is almost completed.” 

It is unclear from his words whether Holmes’ identification with the devil was a genuine paranoia or another of his attempts to control the reality of his listeners. In reality, his life was almost complete. Awaiting his punishment in prison for a lifetime of horror was finally living the vassalage he inflicted on his victims. Yet Holmes’ turns the punishment for his actions into a triumph. As the devil, he is reified and powerful once again, at least in fiction.