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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Symbols & Motifs

The Devil

Larson describes turn-of-the-century Chicago as a Hephaestus forge of businessmen on the make, sometimes at any cost: “[The city] got bigger, taller, and richer; but it also grew dirtier, darker, and more dangerous. A miasma of cinder-flecked smoke blackened its streets and at times reduced visibility to the distance of a single block, especially in winter, when coal furnaces were in full roar” (27).

French editor Octave Uzanne described it as “that Gorgon city, so excessive, so satanic” (28). In the atmosphere of enterprise of late 18th century America, the devil became the country’s doppelgänger. Entrepreneurial devils dance through the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s 1839 “The Devil in the Belfry” has the devil disturb the commerce of a small town by causing the local clock to strike 13. Satan’s trickery is, Poe suggests, an expression of the urge for gain itself. In Mark Twain’s short story, “Sold to Satan,” American innovation is powered by Satan—an ominous anticipation of nuclear power, considering Twain wrote the short story in the wake of Marie Curie’s discovery of radium. In Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, Satan laughs not only at the dark side of the American spirit but gives voice to Twain’s nihilism. As a voice critiquing religion, Satan was beguiling as industrialization continued to advance in America.

Life and Death

Larson’s portrait of Chicago, and America by extension, is marked by profound ambivalence. From the opening sentences of Larson’s book, Chicago is sculpted from darkness by glowing lights, a chiaroscuro city, morally riven by its own upward ascent. Like Romeo’s Verona, Chicago at the time of the World Fair (as characterized by Larson) is oxymoronic, “fragrant muck” (28). The city for Larson is archetypal, a contemporary Gomorrah, redolent with the fire and the brimstone of economic growth. Larson quotes Ben Hecht: “[O]utside their windows, the devil was still capering in a flare of brimstone” (11). Amid the bustle of life and civilization, death was common, Larson tells us, with a Freudian sensitivity for the concurrence of Eros and Thanatos. Eros and Thanatos produce each other, with Burnham and Root working toward societal progress, and Holmes destroying life just blocks away. The space that separates them, Jackson Park, appears characterized by this juxtaposition: “Given the season, the dead were hard to distinguish from the living” (94). This contrast was inescapable and is everywhere in Larson’s rendition of events: “[A]n assassin had transformed the closing ceremony from what was to have been the century’s greatest celebration into a vast funeral” (5). Not only were Burnham and Holmes individuals in pursuit of their own destinies, their actions were symbolic of the transition from old to new America and from one century to the next. As the Chicago Times-Herald wrote of Holmes’ crimes, which came to light in the wake of the fair: “The story, too, tends to illustrate the end of the century” (370).