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 Writing.Com Item ID: #1220477
 Title:  The Devil in the White City
 Item Type: Static Item
 Brief:  Questions and answers about the book by Erik Larson.
SPOILERS!!
 Last Modified: 02-20-2007 @ 10:41pm
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I found these questions at Reading Group Guides -- http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides3/devil_white_city1.asp. When there is no one in person with whom to discuss the book, questions such as these help me "process" what I've read. It's also kind of like a quiz after reading a book.

1. In the note "Evils Imminent," Erik Larson writes "Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow" [xi]. What does the book reveal about "the ineluctable conflict between good and evil"? What is the essential difference between men like Daniel Burnham and Henry H. Holmes? Are they alike in any way?

I don't think the book tells us why for either Burnham or Holmes. It more points out the conflict between good and evil than comments on it. Larson has a gift for creating an image. I saw the White City, and, unfortunately, I saw the World's Fair Hotel. The only comparison/contrast I sensed was the juxtaposing them in the book. For the most part he lets the readers draw their own conclusions by giving them the facts. He does allow some interpretive description in, such as Holmes' feelings of arousal at death and Burnham's grief at Root's death, but with Mrs. Pitezel, he again seems the distanced historian. I don't see that the two men were alike in any but the broadest sense. Burnham, though driven to do the fair right, still had a sense of society. To be part of society was, in part, his motivation. Holmes was the whole of the society that mattered to him. He cared for no one else, nor what they thought of him beyond what it did for him.

2. At the end of The Devil in the White City, in Notes and Sources, Larson writes "The thing that entranced me about Chicago in the Gilded Age was the city's willingness to take on the impossible in the name of civic honor, a concept so removed from the modern psyche that two wise readers of early drafts of this book wondered why Chicago was so avid to win the world's fair in the first place" [p. 393]. What motives, in addition to "civic honor," drove Chicago to build the Fair? In what ways might the desire to "out-Eiffel Eiffel" and to show New York that Chicago was more than a meat-packing backwater be seen as problematic?

There was unquestionably a desire to make a profit. Obviously there was also the desire to prove themselves, a very personal reason in Burnham's case. The architectural companies knew it would increase their business (as it would any business connected with it).

Just reading about the entries for the "Eiffel" spot in the fair shows how that might have been a problem. Under a lesser guide, the "I'll show you" attitude may have led to a whole "anything you can do, I can do better" extravagance without cohesiveness necessary to pull it all together successfully.

3. The White City is repeatedly referred to as a dream. The young poet Edgar Lee Masters called the Court of Honor "an inexhaustible dream of beauty" [p. 252]; Dora Root wrote "I think I should never willingly cease drifting in that dreamland" [p. 253]; Theodore Dreiser said he had been swept "into a dream from which I did not recover for months" [p. 306]; and columnist Teresa Dean found it "cruel . . . to let us dream and drift through heaven for six months, and then to take it out of our lives" [p. 335]. What accounts for the dreamlike quality of the White City? What are the positive and negative aspects of this dream?

Aside from the literal whiteness of it, and cleanliness (though I gather that was marred by lunch wrappers), The White City showed the positive site of a city, the hopes. It didn't show the every day dreariness, poverty, filth and often hopelessness. No one saw in the White City what Holmes and his ilk were doing. But out in Chicago, or New York, or Boston, or any city, people were hungry, men were out of work and people like Holmes (though perhaps less homicidally prolific) were doing what they did.

4. In what ways does the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 change America? What lasting inventions and ideas did it introduce into American culture? What important figures were critically influenced by the Fair?

The Fair gave the country new visions of what a city could be. The Ferris wheel is a fairly ordinary fair and carnival ride, these days. Shredded Wheat, ice cream cones (not mentioned in the book), Cracker Jack. I never could visualize the fair before I read this book. As I read it finally came to me -- it was the Disney World of its time! And indeed Walt Disney was probably influenced by the fair thru his father. Frank Lloyd Wright probably would have done his thing with or without the fair, but the classical architecture of the fair probably galvanized him and those who appreciated his work

5. At the end of the book, Larson suggests that "Exactly what motivated Holmes may never be known" [p. 395]. What possible motives are exposed in The Devil in the White City? Why is it important to try to understand the motives of a person like Holmes?

The only possible motives I emember from the book were the sexual release the murders created in Holmes and the fact that his childhood was probably not as idyllic as he wrote it to be in his memoires/autobiography. The only reason it's important to try to understand the motives of people like Homes is to learn to prevent the situations that may lead someone to be like that. That only addresses the nurture side ot the nature vs. nurture argument, though.

6. After the Fair ended, Ray Stannard Baker noted "What a human downfall after the magnificence and prodigality of the World's Fair which has so recently closed its doors! Heights of splendor, pride, exaltation in one month: depths of wretchedness, suffering, hunger, cold, in the next" [p. 334]. What is the relationship between the opulence and grandeur of the Fair and the poverty and degradation that surrounded it? In what ways does the Fair bring into focus the extreme contrasts of the Gilded Age? What narrative techniques does Larson use to create suspense in the book? How does he end sections and chapters of the book in a manner that makes' the reader anxious to find out what happens next?

There wasn't much between rich and poor, evidently, in those days. I think what middle class then sided themselves more with the rich even if financially they may have been closer to the poor. That's not how they saw themselves socially. And I don't believe there was much difference between social and financial standing. The fair was built by, and essentially for, the rich, but the labor was mostly done by the poor. The Fair was white, while Chicago was termed black. The fair was a getaway, an escape, a dream, not the real, everyday. The Fair gave the country new visions of what a city could be. The Ferris wheel is a fairly ordinary fair and carnival ride, these days. Shredded Wheat, ice cream cones (not mentioned in the book), Cracker Jack. I never could visualize the fair before I read this book. As I read it finally came to me -- it was the Disney World of its time! And indeed Walt Disney was probably influenced by the fair through his father. Frank Lloyd Wright probably would have done his thing with or without the fair, but the classical architecture of the fair probably galvanized him and those who appreciated his work

7. Larson writes, "The juxtaposition of pride and unfathomed evil struck me as offering powerful insights into the nature of men and their ambitions" [p. 393]. What such insights does the book offer? What more recent stories of pride, ambition, and evil parallel those described in The Devil in the White City?

I need to think a while on this one. Nothing comes obviously and quickly to mind.

8. What does The Devil in the White City add to our knowledge about Frederick Law Olmsted and Daniel Burnham? What are the most admirable traits of these two men? What are their most important aesthetic principles?

This book has provided everything I know about Olmstead and Burnham. Tenacity is something they both shared. They also share a vision of the "whole." It wasn't just about the buildings for Burnham. It wasn't just the plants (by any means!) for Olmstead. They each saw the other's work as part of their own

9. In his speech before his wheel took on its first passengers, George Ferris "happily assured the audience that the man condemned for having ‘wheels in his head' had gotten them out of his head and into the heart of the Midway Plaisance" [p. 279]. In what way is the entire Fair an example of the power of human ingenuity, of the ability to realize the dreams of imagination?

The whole thing was based on "How can we....?" Each step was prefaced by that question from the big questions How can we show NY and the world we are a viable city? How can we outdo the Pairs fair. How can we out Eiffel the Eiffel Tower to the smaller questions How can we best use this land? How can we arrange these buildings? How can we build these buildings in the time we have? right to the summer when it was How can we bring more people to the fair? By breaking sown the questions of dreams to the questions of the nitty-gritty, they showed how we accomplish our dreams.

10. How was Holmes able to exert such power over his victims? What weaknesses did he prey upon? Why wasn't he caught earlier? In what ways does his story "illustrate the end of the century" [p. 370] as the Chicago Times-Herald wrote?

Holmes preyed on women who were essentially alone in the world. Women of the time were over protected and probably too unaware of the evils out in the world. They saw someone who fawned over them as a brother, father son or loving suitor/spouse. Holmes know how to go further in his friendliness that a stranger would/should and make it seem that he was not a stranger, so it was acceptable. He know how to work a low self esteem in others. He wasn't caught because he know how to turn on the charm for everyone he met. He knew what to say and how to say it to everyone he met, how to play on the naivety of people in general.

I don't really know what the Chicago Times-Herald meant. Perhaps that at that same time social strides were being made. We were seeing the graft and corruption of the "good" men of the upper crust and how the poor were being taken advantage of.

11. What satisfaction can be derived from a nonfiction book like The Devil in the White City that cannot be found in novels? In what ways is the book like a novel?

The book reads like a novel, with its pacing and alternate chapters. I suppose a satisfaction not found in novels is that the reader can find out more about the main characters and about the time and place, in this case about the fair. One can't complain about the ending not being "real." The success may seem more attainable to some than if it were fiction.

12. In describing the collapse of the roof of Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building, Larson writes "In a great blur of snow and silvery glass the building's roof—that marvel of late nineteenth-century hubris, enclosing the greatest volume of unobstructed space in history—collapsed to the floor below" [p. 196–97]. Was the entire Fair, in its extravagant size and cost, an exhibition of arrogance? Do such creative acts automatically engender a darker, destructive parallel? Can Holmes be seen as the natural darker side of the Fair's glory?

I think it's a sense of humility that makes one refer to hubris, not that the undertaking actually was arrogance. I don't believe that creative acts automatically engender a darker, destructive parallel, nor that Holmes was a natural darker side of the Fair's glory. Good exists. Bad exists. Perhaps they are in some kind of balance. Certainly they tend to exist side by side. To say that one causes the other (which the word "automatically" implies) would be to darken the light. One does not cause the other. It merely shows it for what it is.

13. What is the total picture of late nineteenth-century America that emerges from The Devil in the White City? How is that time both like and unlike contemporary America? What are the most significant differences? In what ways does that time mirror the present?

I see a more stratified society than we have today. Oddly, at the same time I see a more unified society in the sense of people doing something as part of their society -- Chicago's civic mindedness. It's also a much more naive time. Essentially, people, as individuals, are still the same. We still have an evil underbelly in our cities (and everywhere else). We may be somewhat more aware of it, but it still manages to exist in darkness.