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

Author:Erik Larson
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Burnham, (1893, Chicago, Daniel Hudson, World's Columbian Exposition, Illinois, Mudgett, Serial Muderers, Serial Murders - Illinois - Chicago, 1893, Architects, Architects - Illinois - Chicago, Chicago (Ill.) - History - 19th Century, Chicago (Ill.), History, Serial murders, Herman W, Case studies, World's Columbian Exposition (, Serial murderers, Serial Murderers - Illinois - Chicago, Biography
ISBN: 9780609608449
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2003-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

Over the next century this tune and its variations would be deployed in a succession of mostly cheesy movies, typically as an accompaniment to the sinuous emergence of a cobra from a basket. It would also drive the schoolyard lyric, “And they wear no pants in the southern part of France.”

Bloom regretted his failure to copyright the tune. The royalties would have run into the millions.

Sad news arrived from Zanzibar: There would be no Pygmies. Lieutenant Schufeldt was dead, of unclear causes.

There was advice, much of it of course from New York. The advice that rankled most came from Ward McAllister, factotum and chief slipperlick to Mrs. William Astor, empress of New York society. Appalled by the vision conjured by Chicago’s Dedication Day, of crčme and rabble mixing in such volume and with such indecorous propinquity, McCallister in a column in the New York World advised “it is not quantity but quality that the society people here want. Hospitality which includes the whole human race is not desirable.”

He urged Chicago hostesses to hire some French chefs to improve their culinary diction. “In these modern days, society cannot get along without French chefs,” he wrote. “The man who has been accustomed to delicate fillets of beef, terrapin pâté de foie gras, truffled turkey and things of that sort would not care to sit down to a boiled leg of mutton dinner with turnips.” The thing is, McAllister was serious.

And there was more. “I should also advise that they do not frappé their wine too much. Let them put the bottle in the tub and be careful to keep the neck free from ice. For, the quantity of wine in the neck of the bottle being small, it will be acted upon by the ice first. In twenty-five minutes from the time of being placed in the tub it will be in a perfect condition to be served immediately. What I mean by a perfect condition is that when the wine is poured from the bottle it should contain little flakes of ice. That is a real frappé.”

To which the Chicago Journal replied, “The mayor will not frappé his wine too much. He will frappé it just enough so the guests can blow the foam off the tops of the glasses without a vulgar exhibition of lung and lip power. His ham sandwiches, sinkers and Irish quail, better known in the Bridgeport vernacular as pigs’ feet, will be triumphs of the gastronomic art.” One Chicago newspaper called McAllister “A Mouse Colored Ass.”

Chicago delighted in such repartee—for the most part. On some level, however, McAllister’s remarks stung. McAllister was one particularly snooty voice, but it was clear to everyone that he spoke with the sanction of New York’s blue bloods. Among Chicago’s leading citizens there was always a deep fear of being second class. No one topped Chicago in terms of business drive and acumen, but within the city’s upper echelons there was a veiled anxiety that the city in its commercial advance may indeed have failed to cultivate the finer traits of man and woman.

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