#570: The Devil in the White City
A tale of light and darkness, of the historical moment that would define the coming century — but how much of it is true?
Initial release: 2003 (exact date unclear)
Author: Erik Larson
Though it’s almost forgotten today, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, formally known as the World’s Columbian Exposition, served as a sort of inflection point for America. There was the time before it, and the time after it. Years in the planning and construction, the Fair was a stunning sprawl of architectural and landscaping genius, painted entirely in white and lit up at night by the first full-scale alternating current electric system. It was the birthplace of numerous inventions we take for granted today: the Ferris wheel, the dishwasher, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer (so named, Pabst claims, for the award it supposedly received at the fair.) Its grand scale and purity of aesthetic would later inspire Disney World. It showed the world that America — and Chicago — could take its rightful place on the world stage as a bastion of culture.
1893 was also the year of H. H. Holmes, con-man and serial killer, a man who, alongside the fair, might have served as a portent for the century to come. Sometimes called “America’s first serial killer” (he was neither first — arguably that’s Delphine LaLaurie or the Harpe Brothers — nor, by some definitions, was he a serial killer) he was by all accounts a rather successful con artist and pathological liar who had a tendency to quietly snuff out anyone who got in his way or threatened his plans. Of course, when the public discovered his crimes, the resulting media frenzy — likely helped in no small part by the hysteria over Jack the Ripper five years earlier — attributed up to 200 murders to him, in addition to fantastical tales of a “Murder Castle,” his squat, ugly, block-long mixed-use property on Chicago’s south side supposedly containing everything from gas chambers to trapdoors to quicklime graves full of bones. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence to corroborate these claims, but that hasn’t stopped popular historians from repeating them uncritically.
Which brings us to Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City. Positioning itself as a popular history of the fair, juxtaposed with Holmes’ operations in the run-up to the fair’s tenure, Devil is written in a prosaic, novel-like style. It alternates between following the life of Daniel Burnham, one of the greatest architects of the turn of the century, and his peers, and the crimes of H. H. Holmes, whose real name was Herman Mudgett. Larson frequently emphasizes an aesthetic, even moral, divide between the fair and its founders, and Chicago and Holmes: a White City (for the fair’s buildings were painted in stark white) vs a Black City (choked by soot and reeking of filth and offal from the stockyards,) Burnham the architectural genius from middle-class origins who leveraged power and influence to pull together a crack team of America’s best architects to build the fair, and Holmes the conman who sought to make a profit and didn’t care who he had to step on to get there. This divide is so strong that Larson never really connects the two stories; we know Holmes uses the fair as a means of finding people to fleece and/or murder, and when his crimes come to light they leave a bit of a black mark on the fair and on Chicago, considering how he went for years undetected by Chicago police. But the two threads never really intertwine in any meaningful way. Larson focuses mostly on Burnham and his fellow architects, but every other chapter he reverts back to Holmes to let us know what sinister happenings Holmes is getting up to. In this respect, Devil is less about Holmes and more about the fair; and, for that matter, the material regarding the fair is more well-researched, with hundreds of notes and an extensive bibliography. The stuff about Holmes is… more fantastical in nature, regurgitating the oft-repeated claims about Holmes’ body count, his methods, and his so-called Murder Castle.
It’s during the Holmes segments that Larson’s tendency for literary indulgence is strongest; often he’ll just straight up write literary fiction, depicting how Holmes (or Burnham, or any other character he focuses on) feels or acts, in moments where there simply is no historical record otherwise. This by itself is… probably fine? I’ve said for years that history does not exist, by which I mean that the stories we tell each other about the past are forever going to be a construct, even with all the facts and data on our side. And if you’re trying to pull a good story out of all these facts and records, you’re going to have to make it readable for the average audience. Otherwise you’re just reprinting what someone else wrote down, yeah? But what bothers me about Larson’s book is that he tries to write a docudrama but can’t really thread the line between documentary and fiction — and often he doesn’t even try, inventing things out of whole cloth, such as supposing that Holmes took a pair of his victims to the fair with little to justify it.
The book does have its triumphs. One running thread is the search for an answer to France’s Eiffel Tower. The fair’s leadership spends months looking through submissions, rejecting many, including one that’s deemed too dangerous, but its creator, a young engineer, keeps trying, eventually getting a commission to build it on the Midway just outside of the White City proper. Larson teases the reader repeatedly about what this machine is and its author, until finally it’s revealed to be none other than George Ferris, civil engineer and the inventor of the Ferris wheel. It’s a fantastic reveal, and easily one of the best parts of the book.
The Devil in the White City is a decent enough book for what it is, but it’s too divided, too unable to meaningfully connect light and dark thematically, too unwilling to just commit to being historical fiction. The tale of Gilded Age America and the architects who built a shining city on the lakeshore amidst a time of great financial and social unrest is far more interesting than what I suspect most people read this book for, that of the tale of H. H. Holmes. There are arguably better books about both: Adam Selzer’s H. H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil is almost explicitly written as a response to Larson’s book, a fact-based deep-dive into Holmes as a figure, avoiding Larson’s speculation and instead using the historical record to uncover who Holmes really was; and on the other side, Stanley Applebaum’s The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record and Thomas Hines’ Burnham of Chicago tell a more direct story of the fair and of Daniel Burnham himself.
In an eerie parallel to the issues Burnham and company had getting the fair off the ground, so to speak, an attempt to adapt the book into a movie or series has been in the works for over a decade. Leonardo DiCaprio bought the film rights in 2010, with an idea that Martin Scorsese would direct and DiCaprio himself would star as Holmes. This never materialized. By 2019, DiCaprio was out, it was no longer a movie, but a Hulu series starring Keanu Reeves. Four years later and Reeves was out, Hulu was no longer interested, and last anyone heard, it was being shopped to other companies. But that was almost a year ago — I’d wager that it’s probably never going to happen.
The Devil in the White City is a pretty entertaining book for what it is; if nothing else, we can thank it for turning H. H. Holmes, once a forgotten dark figure in American history, into a regular in true crime circles. The fascination with Holmes certainly overlaps some with the “Ripperologists” who obsess over Holmes’ contemporary killer, Jack the Ripper (aided, in no small part, by direct Holmes descendant Jeff Mudgett arguing that Holmes and the Ripper were the same person — though the evidence for that is scanty and what we know about Holmes’ movements in the late 1880s doesn’t match up.) I think it also does an okay job giving a popular history of the fair, though all too often it just glosses over the cultural and social problems that defined the era, such as the nascent labor movement, women’s suffrage, and the relationship of race in the White City. (But, of course, there’s better books about all that, too.) But Larson’s inability to really draw the line between the two sides of the story ultimately hurt the book; his inability to commit to either history or historical fiction ultimately hurt the book. It’s just a shame that adaptation hasn’t happened yet — I think what Larson was trying to do would have fit better on a screen.
