Free The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson Page B

Finn—to swell to new heights of depravity. Root was a notorious bon vivant, whom Louis Sullivan once described as “a man of the world, of the flesh, and considerably of the devil.” And Burnham, in addition to monitoring the global passage of his Madeira, each year bottled four hundred quarts of lesser stuff sent to him by a friend and personally selected the wines for the cellar of the Union League Club.
    With great ceremony Burnham handed a silver-plated trowel to Mrs. T. B. Carse, president of the Temple Building Association, whose smile suggested she knew nothing of these monstrous habits or at least was willing for the moment to ignore them. She scooped up a mound of mortar previously laid for purposes of the ceremony, then reapplied it and tapped it back into place, prompting a witness to observe, “she patted the mortar as a man sometimes pats the head of a curly-haired boy.” She passed the trowel to the fearsome Mrs. Willard, “who stopped the mortar more heartily, and got some of it on her gown.”
    Root, according to a witness, leaned toward friends and suggested sotto voce that they all cut away for cocktails.
     
    Nearby, at the distribution warehouse of the
Chicago Inter Ocean,
a widely read and respected newspaper, a young Irish immigrant—and staunch supporter of Carter Harrison—completed his workday. His name was Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast. He ran a squad of obstreperous newsboys, whom he loathed, and who loathed him in return, as was clear by their taunts and practical jokes. That Prendergast might one day shape the destiny of the World’s Columbian Exposition would have seemed ridiculous to these boys, for Prendergast to them was about as hapless and sorry a human being as they could imagine.
    He was twenty-two years old, born in Ireland in 1868; his family emigrated to the United States in 1871 and in August that year moved to Chicago, just in time to experience the Great Fire. He was always, as his mother said, “a shy and retiring kind of a boy.” He got his grade-school education at Chicago’s De La Salle Institute. Brother Adjutor, one of his teachers, said, “While in school he was a remarkable boy in this way, that he was very quiet and took no part in the play of the other students at noon time. He would generally stand around. From the appearance of the boy I would be led to think that he was not well; that he was sick.” Prendergast’s father got him a job delivering telegrams for Western Union, which the boy held for a year and a half. When Prendergast was thirteen, his father died, and he lost his only friend. For a time his withdrawal from the world seemed complete. He awakened slowly. He began reading books about law and politics and attending meetings of the Single-Tax Club, which embraced Henry George’s belief that private landowners should pay a tax, essentially rent, to reflect the underlying truth that land belonged to everyone. At these meetings Prendergast insisted on taking part in every conversation and once had to be carried from the room. To his mother, he seemed to be a different man: well read, animated, involved. She said: “He got smart all of a sudden.”
    In fact, his madness had become more profound. When he was not working, he wrote postcards, scores of them, perhaps hundreds, to the most powerful men in the city, in a voice that presumed he was their equal in social stature. He wrote to his beloved Harrison and to assorted other politicians, including the governor of Illinois. It’s possible even that Burnham received a card, given his new prominence.
    That Prendergast was a troubled young man was clear; that he might be dangerous seemed impossible. To anyone who met him, he appeared to be just another poor soul crushed by the din and filth of Chicago. But Prendergast had grand hopes for the future, all of which rested on one man: Carter Henry Harrison.
    He threw himself eagerly into Harrison’s mayoral campaign, albeit without Harrison’s