Meticulous and Methodical
BY SHELLY BRYANT I JULY 22, 2008
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IMAGE PROVIDED COURTESY OF RANDOM HOUSE
BOOKS
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Erik Larson. The Devil in the White City. Vintage Books, New York, 2003.
ISBN 0-375-72560-1
Erik Larson has written a very rich popular history of Chicago in the late 19th century. His book The Devil in the White City is a true story, but it is so well written you could almost believe it is fiction.
Larson has a knack for putting together a very readable work of history. In The Devil in the White City, he weaves together two important stories that took place side by side in Chicago in the early 1890s. The stories revolve around Daniel Burnham, who led the construction of the White City for the World's Fair Grounds, and H. H. Holmes, who used the World's Fair as an opportunity to draw women to his hotel near the White City, where he tortured and killed at his leisure.
Burnham and his team of architects accomplished amazing things during a very short time period. The story of the construction of the White City is almost stressful to read, with the constant harping on how short the deadline was, how seemingly impossible to meet. But the idealism that drove those men and women in their work also underlies each chapter. It is an age gone by when people believed anything was possible and were willing to sacrifice nearly everything to achieve beauty and grandeur. It is the complete opposite of that moment in American Beauty where the two teenagers sit enthralled watching a video of a discarded plastic bag blowing aimlessly in the wind, finding beauty in the quotidian. Such things would not have done for Burnham and his team. For them, beauty was in the majestic, the realization of a dream, and it had to be very carefully orchestrated.
H. H. Holmes, in this regard, is not very different from the builders of the lovely White City. He too is meticulous in his work, and carefully orchestrates the realization of his dreams. The fact that his dreams are of a more macabre variety is merely incidental. He too knows just what he wants, has a vision of true perfection, and is willing to go to any expense to realize that vision. Larson's text does something very interesting in juxtaposing Burnham and Holmes, two men who were charming, and who were very adept at bending others to their own will. They were also two men who built great edifices to accomplish their visions. Burnham's White City dominated Chicago for the summer of 1893. Just west of this architectural beauty stood Holmes's bleak castle, the World's Fair Hotel. It was a psychopath's dream world, much as the White City became a dream world for visitors to the World's Fair. The number of victims who died in the gas chamber, were dissected on the table, or were otherwise tortured by Holmes remains a mystery to this day.
There are many familiar names in Larson's book. The World's Fair in Chicago really was a landmark event in American history, drawing the nation together across vast distances. Larson does a neat job of weaving that in with the story of the demented mind that dominated headlines shortly after the World's Fair ended. That Holmes was right there in the shadow of the White City performing untold gruesome acts is the irony that makes a book like Larson's possible.
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