America at the Fair Read online

  Frances Clara Folsom was the daughter of Grover Cleveland’s law partner in Buffalo, New York. Cleveland watched over her after her father died. Despite an age difference of 27 years, the 48-year-old president married the 21-year-old Folsom in the White House. A popular First Lady, she bore him three children. Five years after Cleveland died, Frances married Thomas J. Preston Jr., a professor of archeology at Princeton. She survived Grover Cleveland by nearly 40 years.

  During 1893 America showed the world its great strengths and also its weaknesses. On May 1, 1893, within weeks of his inauguration, President Cleveland officially opened the World’s Columbian Exposition, where the United States displayed its economic prowess to the world. Almost simultaneously the nation entered its worst depression. During the financial Panic of 1893 and its aftermath, hundreds of banks and railroad companies and thousands of businesses failed. The New York Stock Exchange plunged and European investors began to withdraw their funds. Unemployment soon reached 18 percent and the national mood changed from optimism to despair. The depression would continue until 1897.

  What Caused the Panic of 1893?

  The seeds of the Panic of 1893 had been planted years before. Since the end of the Civil War the U.S. economy was growing at breakneck speed. The railroads crossed from east to west and were expanding to the south. Cotton, wheat, and grains were grown on thousands of farms and vast herds of cattle, sheep, and hogs were raised. The factories owned by Cyrus McCormick, John Deere, William Deering, and many others were making farm machinery, allowing the farmer and members of his family to do work that before mechanization had taken many more hands. The industries that started in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states were following the population flow to the center of the country. Only the South still remained largely rural and agricultural. Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born son of a hand loom worker, built his vast steel plants near Pittsburgh, and John D. Rockefeller, once a humble Cleveland bookkeeper, cornered the oil market with his Standard Oil Company. Most of this rapid growth was financed with borrowed money raised in Britain and Germany.

  At the start of the 19th century, nearly three quarters of the labor force was engaged in agriculture. As the cities grew, more and more people found work in the factories and by 1890 only 40 percent of all workers were still on the farm. By the 1890s the nation possessed 4.5 million farms and 350,000 industrial firms employing nearly five million workers. American factories were producing all kinds of goods as the nation became less dependent on imports. The Midwest was a vast field of corn and wheat, and further west, enormous herds of cattle roamed the plains. Machinery was bought with money borrowed at 8–9 percent interest. The widespread use of up-to-date machinery made farms and factories highly productive, leading to massive overproduction in the face of fierce competition. Between 1870 and 1890, the production of wheat and corn and manufactured goods doubled and far outstripped population growth. The factory owners reacted by cutting workers’ hours and wages, and the heavily indebted farmers were unable to meet their obligations.

  In the summer of 1892 the workers at the Homestead Steel Works, seven miles southeast of Pittsburgh, went on strike to protest a 20 percent reduction in wages. The Homestead Works were part of Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire. Carnegie was traveling in Europe at the time and left the plant in the hands of his general manager Henry C. Frick. Fiercely anti-union, Frick closed the plant on June 30, locked out the workers, and proceeded to hire non-union men in their place. The company employed 300 men from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (essentially a private militia), to protect the strikebreakers. In the ensuing fight several detectives and strikers were killed and many others injured. The Pennsylvania National Guard was mobilized to restore order, but emotions still ran high. The union was defeated in the Homestead Steel battle. Many of the workers were evicted from their homes and were permanently blacklisted. It took another 40 years before labor activism returned to the steel industry. Another source of worker dissatisfaction was the use of convict labor on farms and in mines. In August 1892, miners whose hours and wages had been cut attacked the convicts brought in to replace them. Several people were killed and again the national guard was called in to restrain the workers.

  With agriculture and business in decline, the railroads were carrying less freight. Farmers were caught between their debts and a glut in the market. Because of low prices, some farmers took to burning their corn for heat. On February 20, 1893, the Philadelphia & Reading Railway Company, with debts exceeding $125 million, went into bankruptcy. On May 4, the National Cordage Company—a group of ropemakers and a darling of Wall Street—collapsed. The next day, the New York Stock Exchange went into a steep decline and panic gripped America. United States Rubber fell from 46 to 25, Western Union from 101 to 67, and General Electric from 36 1/2 to 12 1/8.

  The U.S. government adhered to the gold standard, whereby it pledged to redeem paper money for gold, on demand. With the federal government and many industries and individuals deep in debt, people lost confidence in paper currency and demanded gold. Government reserves of over $100 million worth of gold was deemed safe, but by 1893 the reserves fell below that amount, causing unease. Bad news fed on itself and led to a panic, with gold reserves falling below $60 million. Caught up in the general panic, the banks started to recall loans and refused to issue new credit. People rushed to the banks to withdraw their savings and investors from abroad abruptly withdrew their gold and silver holdings from the United States. All this occurred at a time when the government did not guarantee bank deposits. The ensuing bankruptcies of many banks, businesses, and railroad companies put a brake on the economy and left millions of people without work.

  Murders and Trials in the News

  The Massachusetts town of Fall River was named for its short river, which plunges 132 feet over the course of half a mile. This fall generated the water power to run the town’s early textile mills and iron works. With the coming of steam, the town’s large mills were built fronting the harbor and the river lost its importance as a source of power. In the annals of the textile industry, the story of Fall River is less well known than Lowell and Lawrence along the Merrimack River. After the Civil War, Fall River outproduced other Massachusetts towns in textile manufacture and was known as “Spindle City.” By the close of the 19th century its population reached 100,000. Members of the Borden and Durfee families, who had lived in Fall River for generations, became mill owners and were among the town’s leading citizens.

  One such man was Andrew Jackson Borden, who owned property and was on the board of several of the town’s banks. He lived with his second wife, Abby Durfee Gray Borden, in a comfortable house at 92 Second Street. Also living in the household were Andrew Borden’s spinster daughters Lizzie and Emma, and the family’s maid Bridget (Maggie) Sullivan. The 26-year-old Maggie had emigrated from Ireland in 1886 and worked for the Borden family for four years.

  Thursday, August 4, 1892, was a stiflingly hot day and the 70-year-old Andrew Borden was lying down on the living room sofa, still wearing his heavy morning coat. His wife Abby was in the upstairs guest room. Maggie, the maid, was in her attic room, resting from the heat. At about 11:00 in the morning Lizzie Borden screamed out: “Maggie, come down. Father’s dead. Somebody’s come in and killed him.” Andrew Borden, still lying on the sofa, had been killed by 11 strokes from a sharp hatchet that left him with a crushed skull. Upstairs, the same hatchet was used to kill his wife Abby, with 19 blows to her head.

  The axe murders of the elderly Bordens of Fall River received immense media attention across the nation. Suspicion fell on 32-year-old Lizzie, a quiet and reserved Sunday school teacher. From then on Lizzie was immortalized in the ditty:

  Lizzie Borden took an axe,

  And gave her mother forty whacks,

  And when she saw what she had done,

  She gave her father forty-one.

  The trial of Lizzie Borden for the murders of her father and stepmother was set for June 5, 1893, and
lasted 14 days. Andrew Jennings, one of Fall River’s leading lawyers, ably represented Lizzie. The jury deliberated for just over one hour and returned with a verdict of not guilty. Despite this, the citizens of Fall River ostracized Lizzie. She remained in town and died there in 1927 at age 67. She left her estate to various charities, especially for animal care. Songs, books, plays, and even operas have been written about Lizzie Borden and the hatchet murders in Fall River. The identity of the murderer still remains a mystery. The city of Fall River has long since lost a textile industry that once employed 30,000 workers, but the cruel ditty about Lizzie Borden passes on from one generation to the next.

  There was little in the early life of Herman Webster Mudgett to suggest that he would go down in history as a man of cunning and evil and America’s first serial killer. His ancestor Samuel Mudgett was born in England and settled in Salisbury, Massachusetts, around 1640. Other Mudgetts settled in New Hampshire and New York. In 1761 Benjamin Mudgett and his wife moved to Gilmanton, New Hampshire to take possession of a land grant. His brother John soon followed him. Mrs. Benjamin Mudgett was the first white woman to settle in the town and her son Samuel, born in 1764, was the first white male child born in Gilmanton. Most of the settlers developed farms nearby and Gilmanton soon acquired a charming New England feel with its village green surrounded by several churches. In the year 1794, the Gilmanton Academy was chartered, with Peter Folsom, a graduate of Dartmouth College, as its first principal. Here the boys of the community were educated. The presence of iron ore and good water power gave rise to the Gilmanton Iron Works. In 1868, a shoe factory opened in the town.

  It was in this historic community that Herman Webster Mudgett was born on May 16, 1860. He was a quiet boy who spent much time reading in his room. He attended the Gilmanton Academy and after graduation worked locally as a teacher. He set his sights on becoming a physician and, at age 22, enrolled in the University of Michigan. After graduating and moving from city to city looking for a place to establish a medical practice, he arrived in Chicago in 1886. Here he took on a new name and presented himself as Dr. H. H. Holmes. Using his charm and cunning, he took over a pharmacy store in Englewood, Illinois close to the site of the planned World’s Columbian Exposition. Across the street he designed and built what seemed to be an ordinary three-story apartment building, telling people that he expected to make his fortune renting rooms to visitors attending the Fair. The ominous building had a number of rooms with windows that could not be opened from the inside. These rooms were soundproofed and fitted with gas-pipes, with the controls in “Dr. Holmes’s” own quarters. Also in these rooms, trap doors and chutes led to the basement, where Mudgett installed a dissecting table and a tank containing acid. Mudgett fired workmen after a week or two on the job, so no one but him knew the full story about the secret rooms, trap doors, and the basement.

  Over the course of several years, and in particular during the time of the Fair, people known to Dr. Holmes disappeared. They included the owner of the drug store, various women and their children and men in his employ, as well as visitors to the Fair who were staying at Dr. Holmes’s apartment building. For a number of years Mudgett managed to hide his brutal schemes. He was engaged in insurance scams, bigamy, and acquiring goods without payment, as well as killing his victims, dissolving their flesh in acid, or dissecting the bodies and selling the skeletons to unsuspecting medical schools. America’s first known serial killer murdered at least 10 people and possibly many more. Most of his victims were women, including those he had married. He murdered two children in Toronto and buried their remains in the basement. He murdered another child in Irvington, Indiana and stuffed the small body inside a chimney.

  Carter Harrison Sr. (1825–1893) moved to Chicago from Lexington, Kentucky. Harrison was re-elected mayor of Chicago in time for the Fair. Two days before the Fair closed, the mayor was assassinated in his own home by Patrick Eugene Prendergast. His son Carter Harrison Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps and served five times as mayor of Chicago.

  Chicago, during the period of its great 1893 Fair, attracted thousands upon thousands of fortune seekers and visitors. The over-extended Chicago police department was unable to trace many of those who disappeared. The laxness of the police allowed Dr. H. H. Holmes to practice his villainy for years without detection. Herman Webster Mudgett was sent to trial on October 28, 1895. After he was found guilty, he claimed to have killed at least 27 people. He was hanged in Philadelphia on the morning of May 7, 1896.

  Saturday, October 28, 1893 was a particularly good day for Carter Henry Harrison, the flamboyant mayor of Chicago. On that afternoon he had delivered a major speech in front of 5,000 mayors and city councilmen from other American towns and cities who had come to Chicago for American Cities Day and to witness the closing of the Fair. Mayor Harrison told his guests of the great progress Chicago had made since its terrible fire of 1871. The success of the Fair confirmed Chicago’s place as one of the world’s great cities. The 68-year-old mayor predicted that he would live to “see the day when Chicago will be the biggest city in America, and the third city on the face of the globe.” Now into his fifth term as mayor, Harrison returned for dinner to his mansion at 231 Ashland Boulevard. That evening, he may well have reflected on his good fortune. In two months’ time, he was due to marry Annie Hall, a friend of the wife of his youngest son. Annie was 25 years old, pretty, and rich in her own right.

  After such a pleasant and exhausting day and a good dinner, the mayor of Chicago lay down to nap. At 7:30 p.m. the front doorbell rang. The parlor maid opened the door to greet Eugene Patrick Prendergast, 25 years of age, who asked to speak to the mayor. Prendergast was under the delusion that he deserved to be the city’s corporation counsel and that the mayor had blocked his appointment. The mayor had never met Prendergast and was not aware of his insane expectations.

  Mayor Harrison prided himself in being accessible and kept special hours in his office listening to people seeking his help. The maid replied that the mayor was resting but would see Prendergast one-half-hour later. Promptly at 8:00 p.m., the doorbell rang again and Prendergast was ushered into the presence of Mayor Harrison. Almost immediately, the deranged Prendergast fired three shots at point-blank range from his .38 caliber gun, hitting the mayor in the chest. Prendergast calmly walked out of the mansion and made his way to the Des Plaines Street police station where he confessed to shooting the mayor of Chicago. Prendergast told the police that the mayor had disappointed him by failing to appoint him to the post he desired.

  The stricken mayor lingered briefly before he died. Chicago was plunged into mourning and the closing ceremony of the World’s Columbian Exposition was canceled. Thousands of people, among them mayors of other cities, followed the funeral cortège to Graceland Cemetery, where Harrison was buried. The assassination of Mayor Harrison came 12 years after the murder of President James Garfield and seven years before the assassination of President William McKinley. McKinley was shot in Buffalo, arriving on the morning of September 4, 1901 to attend the Pan American Exposition.

  The Beginnings of the Automobile Age

  On September 22, 1893, Charles and Frank Duryea took their horseless carriage on a test run along the streets of Springfield, Massachusetts. The Duryea brothers were skilled mechanics from Canton, Illinois who moved to Massachusetts to work in the factories. They bought a second-hand horse carriage for $70 and attached a one-cylinder engine with a three-speed transmission to it. They cranked up the engine and set off at a top speed of five miles per hour. Charles Duryea later quipped that the car “ran no faster than an old man could walk,” but run it did. This was the beginning of the American automobile industry. The brothers established the Duryea Motor Wagon Company, the first in America to sell gasoline-powered motorcars.

  Interest in the internal combustion engine was strong in Europe, particularly in Germany. Among the early pioneers was Rudolf Diesel. He started out as a refrigeration engineer but was drawn to the internal combus
tion engine. In 1893, he published a paper describing the engine he had designed. The following year he filed for a patent for what was dubbed the Diesel Engine. In his engine, the fuel ignited under high pressure without the need for a spark plug. The diesel engine, which could run on cheaper fuels, began to replace steam power to move ships, submarines, and automobiles.

  Very few people in 1893 paid much attention to the diesel engine or the horseless carriage. After all, horses had been used for centuries for travel and work. There were hundreds of companies in America making carts and carriages. Every village and town had its stables and blacksmiths. Many cities had street trolleys still pulled by horses, although Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and other large cities were shifting to electric power. But a profound shift in transportation was in the offing. Soon thousands of toolmakers and engineers would be busy building automobiles. The early automobiles were expensive and unreliable. It took another 15 years before a rudimentary road network was built, gasoline stations were installed, and the price of the automobile was low enough to be within the reach of the average man. The horse was still used for personal transportation and for farm work into the second decade of the 20th century. Once critical mass was reached however, the automobile rapidly replaced the horse as well as most of the electric streetcars and the railroads.