Early Thoughts on "Devil in the White City"
Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, is a marvel, and though a work of history, reads rather like a novel. I have barely dug deep into the book, but already feel as though I've been thoroughly instructed in not just late 19th Century Chicago history, but indeed the mood and architecture of America's metropolitan centers of the time. The primary architects thus far are Daniel Burnham and John Root, who seem quite responsible for Chicago's earliest skyscrapers. As Larson narrows his focus to the 1893 World's Fair the city hosted, other American giants such as Frederick Law Olmsted (the landscape architect who designed Central Park) are introduced, and the reader is left with a keen appreciation at the convergence of so many brilliant and pivotal men.
The World's Fair was of course America's chance to respond to the exhibition that had previously been hosted in Paris; an event which left behind that city's most well-known structure, the Eiffel Tower. Like Einstein's math teacher who had commented with some certainty that his student was a poor one and wouldn't amount to much, critics leveled that the tangle of steel would only serve to disfigure the Parisian air. The exhibition had been a tremendous success, and the titans in the United States demanded a response.
This would lead to much wrangling between the gentlemen of America's great cities, with Washingtonians seeing hosting duties as their natural right, Chicago hoping for a chance to prove itself after much insult from New York, and New York never letting Chicago forget that it was nothing more than a Mid-Western stockyard where men wrestled farm animals for meat.
The great shadow in all of this is of course the figure of Dr. H.H. Holmes, who would abuse the fair for matters too disturbing for anyone to have anticipated. Somewhere along the way even Rudyard Kipling, the British Empire's greatest apologist, is introduced in passing - a man who never failed to describe others as "savages" and in desperate need of civilizing.
