Devil in the White City Essay Example for Free

Devil in the White City Essay The Devil in the White City takes two aspects that rose in Chicago during the late 1880s and the early 1890s and interlocks them. The World Fair did not just bring millions of people to the city, it brought optimism. Even though Chicago became magnificent through the Fair, it still remained in a mind frame of racism, inequality of gender, separation of social class, and countless murders. The story of the White City of Chicago enhances the story of the Devil, H. H. Holmes, who found contentment within its walls and created a downfall of humanism all on his own. Daniel Burnham and John Root created the White City with the help of many architects from New York, Boston, St. Louis and Chicago. Burnham focused on the public relations so he mainly found the work and also took care of the money coming in. On the other side, Root was an innovator. He drew the blueprints and built what Root had agreed to do. Throughout many challenges, and tragedy, both men planned the building of the White City and enhanced its landscape. The White City was given to the 1893 Worlds Exposition celebrating Columbus discovery of America. The city of Chicago was given the honor of hosting the extravagant affair. Many people remained anxious, thinking that the Exposition would not excel a county fair, because they only envisioned Chicago as just an uncultured, meatpacking city and nothing more. But then the news came and Chicago was to be the host; the people of Chicago were ecstatic. They could finally show everyone they were as cultured and civilized as New York and maybe even better. Upon this great news, the firm of Burnham and Root was given the task of creating the Exposition grounds. The task had to be completed in approximately three years to be ready for the Dedication Ceremony and Opening Day. Three of their major obstacles were the location of the Exposition, its planning and design of the Exposition. It took them almost six months to decide on a location, so they only had two years and a half to design the building and landscape and then build the final product. It appeared to be an impossible task at the time. As soon as one challenge was met, three more would arise. One of the most prominent challenges was to create something that was comparable or preferably better than the Eiffel Tower, which was built for the Paris Exposition. America wanted the world to know that it could have a better World Fair Exposition than anything that had been done before. Other issues included the continued possibility of strikes from the workers, fighting committees for the approval of everything, deciding who would design the buildings and landscape, the economy, which was on the verge of collapsing during this period, and the power struggle between the National Committee for the Exposition and the Exposition Company. Everything was always behind schedule or at least appeared to but all of the architects from New York, Boston, Chicago and St stepped up to the plate. The workers, even with impending strikes, felt the patriotic spirit and worked harder and faster to finish their job. Burnham and his crew got the exposition grounds ready for the Dedication Ceremony, which was about one month before opening day. Things still needed to be completed, but it was closer to being done than anyone had expected. On Opening Day, things still needed to be accomplished but in general the fair had been completed. The Ferris wheel, Americas response to the Eiffel Tower, opened 51 days late, but from the day of its first rotation, people were enamored with the wheel. The landscape was not entirely done but it went on to be completed within the next couple of weeks. The maintenance of the wheel continued for the full six months that the fair was open. With many people out of work, this provided jobs for lots of poor families for a while. The World Fair Exposition was great because not only did it beautify Chicago but it also told the world that there is nothing American people could not do when they put their minds to it. As one critic said, â€Å"It was a common remark among visitors who saw the Fair for the first time that nothing they had read or seen pictured had given them an idea of it, or prepared them for what they saw† (Larson 255). The Fair ended up by being far impressive and more influential than anyone had ever imagined. The downside of this success is that this was a celebration of â€Å"white† America, the majority of the population, not all of America. Frederick Douglass fought for the chance to present the progress African-Americans had made since the end of slavery but they, the owners, wanted only to exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage and nothing else. As Douglass once said, â€Å"America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. † There were no blacks in the Exposition at all. The World Fair had a Colored People’s Day during which Native Americans would be half-naked and equipped with arrows to portray them as a lesser class as the whites. With its glory, the World Fair Exposition brought with it racism. It was ruled by the politics of rage. If the blacks had been represented, one could say that the Civil Rights movement would have happened a lot earlier than the 1960s because many people would have seen their progress since slavery and the blacks would have demanded to be treated as equals. There was also an issue of gender even before the Fair had started. During the building of the World Fair, women were not included as workers at all. They were expected to stay at home to take care of the kids and have dinner on the table when their husbands returned from work. They were treated as if all they could do was to stay at home and were incapable of bringing money in the family or take care of it financially. Another major setback was the separation of the social class. Only the upper class white men were allowed to show off what they had and everyone else was limited. Whites were portrayed as rich, powerful, and fearless during the parade while the lower and inferior class, such as African-Americans and Native Americans, were being restricted to take part of the white city. At the end of the Exposition Grounds, on the corner of Wallace and 63rd Streets, H. H. Holmes started making his plans. He had started his criminal life with insurance fraud, but found the killing part to be the most fun and exciting. He built his castle to feed his obsession, and once he discovered that the Exposition was coming to Chicago, it made his castle much more important. People, mainly women, would come to him for employment and after he gave them a job, he made sure it was their last job by killing them and selling their corpses to colleges to make money. His â€Å"castle† allowed him to commit murder at his leisure without anyone knowing about it. Before the Exposition opened, Holmes had already begun his killings. He used his charms and his intelligence to lure women into thinking that he was an ordinary man. He seduced women his looks and then killed them and their children. He continued this hobby until just before the close of the Exposition. It was said that he killed approximately 200 men, women and children; however, the courts could only prove nine actual killings due to the fact that only small bone fragments remained in the three-story house castle and the bones that were recovered from his torturous rampage could not be used to identify who the dead people due to the lack of technology. H. H. Holmes had been incarcerated on insurance fraud charges when the Pinkerton Detective Agency started probing into the disappearance of his best friend, whom he had killed so he could collect the life insurance. Battle tested, the Agency ended up by catching up with Holmes. By then a lot of people were missing or dead but it should not have been this way because he could have caught earlier but H. H. Holmes moved faster than society and society was not ready for him. The time he lived in aided him tremendously. A train trip took a couple of weeks to reach their destinations so it was not natural not to here from a relative for a long time and this made it impossible for one to know if the person was actually missing. Most of his victims were women because once they arrived in Chicago for the World Fair; they had no idea where to stay so they stayed at the Castle. As H. H. Holmes said, â€Å"I was born with the Devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing† (Larson 109) Based on this quote, one would say that Holmes did not require a motive to do what he took part in because he was already a sociopath who waited for the perfect time to strike and based his entirely life around murders and making money by selling corpses. H. H. Holmes affected more people’s lives during the Fair than the actual World Fair itself because he was not like Jack the Ripper; He was a cold-blooded murderer and sociopath that lived just a few blocks down the road. He inserting fear in the heart of every woman in Chicago and forced Detective Agencies to catch up with him by inventing the â€Å"mug shot. † One would agree with his statement because during this gruesome period, Holmes did not show any emotions for anyone that he took a life from. It seems as if he never had a goal in life so once he had this mind-blowing idea, he stuck to it and exiled himself from humanity. The fact that he also went to college and finished medical school proves that this man is more than capable of being smart but all he knew how to do was to be a Devil. Throughout The Devil in the White City, Larson does a great job by telling us that one cannot choose what he wants and avoid or disregard the rest because it will catch up sooner or later. To a certain point, Larson is emphasizing that H. H. Holmes would have never been so successful with all his killings if the World Fair Exposition had not taken place. He certainly would have had fewer victims and could have definitely been caught earlier. America, presumably Chicago, wanted to outdo Paris and thought that things such as the gruesome murders that were happening in London would never reach their home towns. At the end, America did better at both ends because they did a lot better than the Paris Exposition and they also inherited H. H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer. This book was very gripping and many of the things were quite surprising and unbelievable to say the least. It maintained a perfect balance of the World Fair Exposition and the introduction of America’s first serial killer. I would definitely urge others to pick this up and ready themselves for a train ride because it keeps you on the edge and envelops you with the endless details. REFERENCES Larson, Erik. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. New York: Crown, 2003. Borowski, John. H. H. Holmes America’s First Serial Killer: The Castle, the Murders, the Monster. Film Festival 2004.