One value that I found especially prominent of Burnham was the love and loyalty he had for his family. On page 128, the book tells about how the construction of the Columbian Exposition was so demanding that Burnham was having to live full-time in Chicago and rarely ever saw his family because there was never enough time. But despite the distance and time apart, he never let his wife forget that he missed her and was thinking of her. He would write his wife Margaret several letters each week, because telegrams weren’t private enough. On page 128 he writes to her, “You must not think this hurry of my life will last forever. I shall stop after the World’s Fair. I have made up my mind to this.” To me, that shows the caliber of Burnham’s loyalty and love for his wife because he was very successful at his engineering practice, but was willing to give it all up after the Fair so he wouldn’t need to be away from Margaret and their five kids anymore because he loved them.

Olmstead was in charge of all the landscaping at the World’s Fair. Right from the beginning, it’s clear that this man had his own beliefs about the proper way to handle and view landscaping. On page 50 the book tells how it was his life’s mission to “dispel the perception that landscape architecture was simply an ambitious sort of gardening and to have his field recognized instead as a distinct branch of the fine arts, full sister to painting, sculpture, and brick-and-mortar architecture.” Olmstead absolutely detested traditional landscaping, but he was one of the only people that did. He saw landscaping as a chance to capture natural beauty and he never gave up on his vision of doing so. But, he wasn’t very successful with this non-traditional approach. What this tells me is that he also valued diligence, originality and staying loyal to his own vision.

Holmes was a man who absolutely valued wealth and a prestigious reputation in society, to a fault that he was willing to achieve it through lying and deceiving. He was always scheming, finding ways to make money without ever having to spend any. He used the vulnerability of others, especially women, to position himself in a way that made them swoon over him and adore him immediately. On page 36 the book says, “To women as yet unaware of his private obsessions, it was an appealing delicacy. He broke prevailing rules of casual intimacy; He stood too close, stared too hard, touched too much and long. And women adored him for it.” He was a cunning and physically attractive man, and these are the skills he played into to get him anything he wanted. On page 37 Holmes used these very skills to persuade an old woman to give him her drug store, where he later made a lot of money and avoided a lot of responsibility.