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Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903. By Nat Brandt (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. Pp. Xxiv, 180. Illus., notes, bib., index. Cloth, $25.00).
When Oliver Wendell Holmes needed an example of the limitations imposed on a citizen's right to speak for his opinion for the Court in Schenck v. United States, 294, he put forth his famous dictum, "the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic." In doing so, he could be sure that the reference would invoke a powerful image, because theaters were notoriously fire prone and had, over the years, produced some spectacular conflagrations. The most spectacular of them all, lamentably, according to the author of Chicago Death Trap, and the deadliest fire in American history, was the one that broke out during the second act of the matinee performance at the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago on 30 December 1903.
As we near the one hundredth anniversary of that catastrophe, Nat Brandt has given us a readable and...