Devil In The White City Evil Vs Evil

Evil’s Overpowering Affects

From the years 1890-1895 Chicago faced the effects of good and the overshadowing effects of evil. Devil in the White City is a book that puts this concept into one and makes the reader feel as if they are experiencing theses events themselves. The two main paradoxical characters, Daniel Burnham and H.H. Holmes, are the epitome of good and evil. Throughout the book, Burnham tries to bring good to Chicago while Holmes takes the good and turns it into something more brutal than the reader could ever imagine. As the book proceeds the two forces grow stronger and stronger until eventually evil stands up and destroys everything that Burnham has tried to accomplish.

Burnham and Holmes are two men who are essentially different from their morals and interests. Burnham is an architect who is good, pure, compassionate, and loyal to his wife. Whereas Holmes is a psychopathic serial killer who is evil, filled with loneliness, and has a lot of wives. They both have a passion for what they do, but Holmes always seemed to find a way to overcome the good that Burnham tried to bring to Chicago. The fair did turn out to be a significant turnaround for Chicago, but it also allowed evil and darkness to arise in Chicago.

Burnham thought the fair was spectacular, but little did he know that right down the street a source of evil and darkness was slowly crushing his precious fair to the ground.

Chicago was the city where no one wanted to go until Burnham transformed it into the White City, but as the city was being praised Holmes took this as an opportunity to create his own city, the Black City.

It’s darkness being masked by the pure White City. “The White City had drawn men and protected them; the Black City now welcomed them back, on the eve of winter, with filth, starvation, and violence” (Larson 323). Good was there to welcome the men into the goodness of the fair, but as the fair progressed and seemed to be on the verge of destruction, evil and darkness compelled them back into the darkness. Despite Burnham’s attempts to reflect Chicago as a good city, Holmes would always sabotage those plans with his evil

tendencies.
Some say that good overpowered evil because of how spectacular the fair turned out, but evil won in the end because of how easily it was able to shatter the the goodwill of the fair. In the end, the source of evil was tried and sentenced to death, but eventually, the good also came to an end with the destruction and burning of the fair grounds. “The fair was so perfect, its grace and beauty like an assurance that for as long as it lasted nothing truly bad could happen to anyone, anywhere” (Larson 289). This quote describes how the fair seemed good and how evil could never harm the fair, but it also foreshadows how the darkness creeps in and overcomes the purity of the fair. Even with all of the attempts to make Chicago the perfect city, the deep, never ending darkness embraced Chicago like a tidal wave, strangling any good the fair established.
In the end, evil was the force that corrupted anything good Chicago tried to bring forth into the world. Despite numerous attempts to bring good in Chicago, evil was always creeping in the shadows waiting for the perfect opportunity to take control. Good was not strong enough to uphold the idea of making Chicago pure, which gave evil the chance to manipulate over everything that good tried to purify. The fair was a miraculous event that gave Chicago hope, but the hope was consumed by evil and replaced with darkness and destruction.