Worry
- The novelty of the Ferris Wheel wears off, and fair attendance drops.
- Bankers pressure the exposition's directors to create a Retrenchment Committee to reduce expenses.
- Burnham knows that placing the future of the fair in the hands of bankers will surely lead to failure.
- All the fair needs to do is sell one hundred thousand tickets per day. Easy, right? Not at all. It can barely sell seventy thousand.
- "With the nation's economic depression growing ever more profound—banks failing, suicides multiplying—it seemed an impossibility" (3.13.6).