Devil in the White City free essay sample

By using his charming personality along with his manipulative and witty characteristic, Holmes is able to target weak people and exert his power over them to avoid detection of his successful killings, piled debt and fraudulent behavior. Throughout Devil in the White City, Larson points to examples of how Holmes was manipulative, intelligent, and got most anyone he met to like him just by the way he presented himself. When he arrived to Englewood, Holmes first stop was the E. S. Holton Drugs pharmacy were he met an elderly women, Mrs. Holton, working by herself because her husband was up stairs dying of cancer. Holmes, having â€Å"sensed vulnerability, sensed it the way other men might capture the trace of a women’s perfume† (Larson 36), asked Mrs. Holton if she needed assistance in the pharmacy. She agreed to give Holmes a job working at the pharmacy. After Mr. Holton died, Holmes offered to buy the pharmacy from Mrs. He became known as America’s first serial killer and was active soon after Jack the Ripper committed his last homicide. At a first glance, the difference between the two stories is extreme. One exhibits the greatest achievements of mankind, while the other exhibits the deepest evils. Although this is partially true, the reality of it all, as the reader discovers, is that they are not all that diverse. The nature of people in the story comes from a mix of ambition, pride, and evil. Accordingly, their ideas and reasons for their actions are based on these same three elements. The similarities between Daniel Burnham and H. H. Holmes and their plans are proven to be extremely similar by assessing the damage, execution and performance of the men, and the psychological toll on society. The affects of both men include financial damage and multiple lost lives. The cost of the fair began to take its toll on the country from the very beginning. After the 500,000 people that had attended opening day were replaced with a mere 10,000 24 hours later, â€Å"the forces that had been battering the nation’s economy erupted in a panic on Wall Street that called stock prices to plummet. † Dozens of banks across the nation began to fail as well, including two national banks which during a meeting between the two leaders â€Å"one president calmly excused himself, entered his private office, and shot himself through the head. † Before the fair was even over, bankers who had invested in the fair, as well as the federal funds of Chicago, were worried since â€Å"Burnham’s department [has] spent over $22 million to build the fair†¦ more than twice the amount originally planned. † Even after it was over, â€Å"thousands more workers joined the swelling army of the unemployed, and homeless men took up residence among the great abandoned palaces of the fair. † These circumstances intensified the reasoning for the nickname â€Å"the black city† and even further brightened the contrast in not only the symbolic name but in the physical appearance as well with â€Å"the white city,† the clever name given the worlds fair. On a much smaller scale, Dr. Holmes created a financial scandal of his own. When he opened his hotel, he bought everything on credit. â€Å"He had no intention of paying his debts and was confident he could evade prosecution through guilt and charm. † Surprisingly, he managed to keep many possessions without spending any real money and didn’t have to face any furniture dealers or anyone â€Å"whom Holmes had cheated over the previous five years† for a long time. What ended up happening was that he had to face them all at once. In the fall of 1893 he attended a meeting that had an unexpected â€Å"two dozen creditors and their attorneys† to collect the $50,000 that he owed. The issues that were created with these mishandlings of money left a hole in the economy, and both projects contributed to it. Another large area of damage caused by these events is the death toll. Though the deaths caused by Holmes were intentional and the ones caused by the fair were by accident, the results were the same. During the construction of the fair, time became something of the essence, and Burnham reacted by speeding up production so much that it became unsafe. He doubled the amount of workers and had the usual eight-hour day extended. These actions were not well thought out and not safe. In April 1893, â€Å"four exposition workers lost their lives, two from fractured sculls, two electrocuted. The deaths brought the year’s total to seven. † Later, on July 10, â€Å"smoke began to rise from the cupola of the Cold Storage tower. † A fire had occurred in the same spot earlier due to a missing part in the construction of the building; however, there were no moves made to fix the building. Consequently, it went up in flames again and â€Å"in all, the blaze killed twelve firemen and three workers. † Comparably, In Holmes’ final confession, he admitted to killing 27 people. However some of the people he admitted to killing turned out to be alive, so the accurate count of homicides committed my H. H. Holmes will never be known. Also, at the end of it all, with the exposition finally closed, there was still a very long missing persons’ list of people who had set out to the fair but disappeared somewhere amongst the festivities. Including the murders committed by the serial killer, the Chicago world’s fair caused many unnecessary deaths. Though the obvious answer is that the serial killer was the main contributor, one could say that the same amount of blood is on both Burnham and Holmes’s hands. Neither man managed to escape the â€Å"evils† by any means. As far as the reader can tell, both men had the same basic strategies: dream, pursue, and achieve. They both had huge ideas that to some people would have seemed impossible and the desire to achieve them. The only difference was which side of the humanistic scale they were on. Essentially, the tactics hidden underneath of the facades were exactly the same: Burnham’s dream being the fair, and Holmes’s dream being a hotel which he could successfully lure women into and kill them without suspicion. Throughout the novel there are many examples of buildings and projects that Burnham had to complete. During the process of building each one there were always challenges that he had to overcome. Before the fair, Burnham and his partner Root were commissioned to build the Montauk. This building had to face a common problem for Chicago: the foundation. There was already a common solution for the problem; however, this building did not have a usual design and required a basement that could not be filled with stone pyramids as the usual design would have made it. Instead, he came up with a better solution that involved a â€Å"floating foundation,† and seemed to fulfill its purpose. The Montauk became the first building to be called a â€Å"skyscraper. † Since Holmes was not building a skyscraper and instead a three story hotel, he did not have the same issue. Instead, he faced another common problem: money. Though he was not poor, he was only a pharmacist and wished to be able to pay for the construction of a building that would cover the entire block. Just like Burnham, he came up with a solution. He took the role of a very patronizing contractor and â€Å"as workers came to him for their wages, he berated them for doing shoddy work and refused to pay them, even if the work was perfect. † When the workers quit, or got fired, Holmes was left with the work the builder had already completed, and the same amount of money. Both men were faced with challenges, and being the geniuses they were, they came up with practical solutions. To set goals and achieve them is the basis of many people’s lives; the only varying aspect is the goals themselves. Finally, not only did these events have a physical impact pertaining to the lost lives and the economic struggles, there was a large emotional impact as well. With the fair over, and a serial killer revealed, the Black City along with the rest of the country was affected deeply by both men’s accomplishments. The exciting and enthusiastic feelings found at the fair were replaced with mourning. Even thought there was not much left of Jackson Park, some citizens went to visit the desolate grounds. Teresa Dean was one of these people, and her opinion was that â€Å"you wish you had not come. If there were not so many around you would reach out your arms, with the prayer on your lips for it all to come back to you. It seemed cruel, cruel to give us such a vision; to les us dream and drift through heaven for six months, and then to take it out of our lives. † It was such a drastic downfall that the people felt devastated. They couldn’t remember what their lives had been like before, and now it felt like the real city was groping around in the dark. Holmes’s actions also left a definite sadness in all people with any relationship to his victims. Larson especially illuminated the despair of Mrs. Pitezel, the mother of three children who were murdered by Holmes. He describes her speaking in the courtroom and says, â€Å"She wore a black dress, black hat, and black cape and looked pale and sad. † Also, throughout the story there are many explanations of family members searching for their daughters that traveled to Chicago and had stopped communicating back home. Although Larson never elaborates on the reaction of the country to the news of revealing a serial killer that had been hiding in their midst, one can imagine that it was shocking. A new depth of achievement had been reached in America, with the evils even deeper. Burnham and Holmes had done what they came to do, and both left craters in the field of human accomplishment. After analyzing the intentional juxtaposition created by Erik Larson in his book The Devil in the White City, it becomes apparent that the two revolutionary events happening around 1893, the Chicago worlds fair directed by Daniel Burnham and the serial killings of Herman Mudgett, were more similar than different. Both characters performed great evils that led to the deaths of many innocent people and money was taken that wasn’t exactly theirs to take. Also, the men had similar attitudes that led to achievements that were similar in greatness. Most of all, what Daniel Burnham and H. H. Holmes crafted will always be remembered and worshipped as momentous ends for the 19th century.