The Devil In The White City, by Erik Larson

When one is loaned a book to read by someone, what is the intent in mind behind it? To this question another one must be added, what is the author trying to accomplish in this book by combining a discussion of the 1893 World’s Fair with the story of two murderers, one of whom was motivated by disappointment over thwarted delusional expectations of being rewarded for efforts to help elect a popular radical mayor, and the other a demented serial murderer who preyed on the women infatuated with him, as well as the families of those unfortunate enough to be close to him and thus a threat to his reputation? The author appears to have in mind a simple and straightforward juxtaposition of a noble act of civic pride meant to show the greatness of a wealthy but insecure American city, namely Chicago, with the crime that has long dragged it down, but this is not quite good enough because the author’s portrayal of even the “good” and “white” Chicago of the World’s Fair is not a particularly flattering one with its portrayal of architects, engineers, and civic boosters who appear just as insane as the murderers portrayed. Nor, for all of the historical firsts that the author strains to find in the 1893 World’s Fair, including Shredded Wheat, spray paint, and the Ferris Wheel (spoiler alert), does this book manage to be anything more than the tale of various sorts of vanity and futility in the efforts of Chicago to make a good name for itself.

This book is almost 400 pages of core material, followed by some source and endnotes, and I must admit that I found this book a difficult slog to get through. Though the book is generally chronological in nature, there is little effort that is made beyond the frequent device of ending chapters with cliffhangers to tie the narrative together into something larger and more cohesive. One thing that unites the author’s split focus in writing about the planning, construction, and passage of the World’s Fair as well as his discussion of the two murderers in the true crime narrative is a distinct love of posting trivial information that seems to be an effort on the part of the author to show off his research. Do we really need to know the menu of various empty political meals that were opportunities for the World’s Fair organizers to spend a lot of money in luxury with themselves or other elite figures? What is the benefit of visualizing the acid-dipped foot of a doomed woman making a print on a wall in a murderer’s custom-built house of horrors that no one would see for years? Why does the author dwell on the postcards sent by a delusional political junkie to people in order to hector them about his demented view of Jesus Christ’s authority in a book immensely devoid of moral virtue? So much of this book consists of an author writing about the past with the same voyeuristic relish of the evil serial murderer at the heart of the book, and he seems to want to incriminate the reader by inviting him (or her) to join in the same sort of view of the people of the past and their misdeeds as well as misguided acts of civic egoism.

This book, for all of its sales and recognition, is just as vain and futile as the deeds it chronicles and celebrates. The murders the author talks about are largely about obscure and forgotten people who lived and died largely unknown and not particularly missed by the cruel city around them. The author points out, but not necessarily very sympathetically, the danger that young women found in seeking the freedom of the city in that no one aside from their families–if even them–seemed to care about them when they suddenly went missing, always with the same person who saw them last with some kind of glib tale about them moving away to marry. Towards the end of the book, it is revealed how it is we know about certain murders, but the grounds that the author uses to construct the true crime narrative are sketchy in the extreme, including the unreliable confessions of the murderer and the writings of a Philadelphia detective who uncovered some of the evidence against him long after he began his nefarious deeds. The magic of the World’s Fair is discovered to be as ephemeral as the gleaming white buildings constructed for the exposition that went up in flames only months after the show was over. The madness of the tale is spread widely, from irritable landscape architects to engineers who flame out, their health and marriages ruined before their time. Nor is it clear that the World’s Fair of 1893 really deserves the hype it received at the time for being such a monumental event. The previous World’s Fair before that one is really only remembered, if at all, because of the Eiffel Tower, and the effort needed to undertake such an event seems better suited to a day and age where cities had the insecurity and arrogance, and budgets, to attempt such monumental acts of folly and vanity, than to our present time.