The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

Larson develops the comparison between socially acceptable violence and socially unacceptable violence. Slavery was a part of American history and remains embedded in the cultural consciousness. However, it is the violent attacks of a serial killer that are sensationalized and considered to break social rules most profoundly. If 40 percent more murders took place in 1891 than the previous year, Holmes’ activities were the extremity of a trend. When Burnham lays off his workers, he indirectly sentences many of them to death, indirectly becoming just as much a killer as Holmes. Holmes sends Pitezel to rehabilitation because “he was too valuable a man, even with his failings taken into consideration, for me to dispense with” (161). In drawing the men’s actions together in these chapters, Larson raises the question of whether American society at the turn of the last century operated more like a serial killer than we would like to think. The fair took many lives. Even this dream of a new society, represented by the White City, was plagued by crime, fire, and natural disasters. More than once, Holmes kills at Christmas, as though taking extra pleasure in doing so during the holiday of goodwill. It is arguably the serial killer’s violent separation from the rest of society that makes him so repulsive and mesmerizing. Larson encourages the reader in these chapters to ponder the nature of civilization itself.

At times in these chapters, the actions of the men managing the fair echo those of Holmes. Burnham reflects that he “needed more power—not for his own ego but for the sake of the exposition. Unless the pace of decision-making accelerated, he knew, the fair would fall irreparably behind schedule” (156); “In August alone the building took three lives” (177). The reader wonders whether there was not some egotism in Burnham’s passion project, which earned him honorary degrees to the universities that rejected him as a young man. Sol Bloom’s public relations are vaguely reminiscent of the Machiavellian lies spun by Holmes. Despite its falseness, “the fact [that the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building could house Russia’s entire standing army] became gospel throughout America” (160). Political campaigns incorporate similar distortions of the truth. Falsehood reaches a grotesque zenith in Holmes’ manipulations however, writing of Julia Conner for instance: “That she is a woman of quick temper and perhaps not always of a good disposition may be true, but that any of her friends and relatives will believe her to be an amoral woman, or one who would be a party to a criminal act I do not think” (152). Larson encourages the reader to rethink the nature of depravity.