Fair play.

• Author: Montopoli, Brian
• Position: Book Review

THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson Crown Publishing, $25.95

IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY, THE Eastern elite considered Chicago a cultural backwater, a "crude, upstart, pork-packing city," in the words of one New York editor, with a vulgar populace and a foul, rotting stench rising from the stockyards. Chicago had just eclipsed Philadelphia to become the nation's second-largest city, but its political and business leaders longed for respect and knew that a galvanizing event would force the snobs back east to take the city seriously. France had held its Exposition Universelle, a World's Fair showcasing the Eiffel Tower, in 18.89, and the fair's implicit declaration of French cultural superiority had inflamed American sensibilities. Flush with Paris envy, Congress decided to hold a fair of its own, and it needed to find a host city: After a nasty fight with New York (during which another of New York's editors dubbed Chicago "the windy city" for its politicians' blustery boasts that they would ultimately prevail), Congress awarded the fair to Chicago. The question then became whether the fair would be Chicago's great triumph or, as author Erik Larson puts it, a "humiliation from which the city would not soon recover."

So begins The Devil in the White City, Larson's sprawling account of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which has largely faded from the popular imagination despite its tremendous cultural, social, and architectural impact on turn-of-the-century America. For its time, the fair was impossibly grand, the biggest American event since the Civil War; it would introduce Cracker Jacks, Aunt Jemima's pancake mix ("slave in a box," as its makers dubbed it), the Ferris Wheel, and a whole host of other products, as well as popularizing the new miracle of alternating current. But the fair's greatest feat was convincing Americans that cities need not merely be filled with pragmatic structures in which form followed function; the fair's mere existence seemed to argue that the city could be beautiful. Though their work would later be derided by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright as hobbling America's organic architectural movement, the fair's primary architects Daniel Burnham and John Root oversaw the creation of neoclassical buildings that...