Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

by Erik Larson

  Two weeks later, as if deliberately trying to intensify the rivalry between Joseph and Isaac, Willis Moore promoted Isaac and ordered him to New Orleans to take charge of a newly created Gulf Forecast District encompassing Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle. He raised Isaac’s salary $200 a year, to $2,000.

  Moore

  IN 1909 IN a widely published forecast Willis Moore announced that the weather for William Howard Taft’s inauguration would be “clear and colder.”

  Snow fell.

  Isaac

  ISAAC CAME TO see his transfer to New Orleans as punishment for his having become too successful at forecasting frosts, floods, and storms. He believed Moore considered him a threat to his own job. “When a station official performed work that attracted the attention of the public and was commended by the press,” Isaac wrote, “Moore frequently sent him to some part of the world where he could not render conspicuous service.”

  To Isaac, New Orleans was just such a place. It was, he wrote, “a dumping ground for observers who were guilty of drunkenness and neglect of duty and whom it was necessary to discipline.” The low level of talent not only made it difficult for Isaac to improve the station’s performance, it also forced him to invoke harsh disciplinary measures, which in turn poisoned his own reputation within the bureau. Many years earlier Gen. Adolphus Greely had sent troubled employees to Galveston, but Isaac saw those transfers as good-faith efforts to save careers. Moore, he believed, had other motives. “The object,” Isasac wrote, “was to give my station a bad record in dealing with personal problems.”

  Isaac’s disillusionment deepened when Moore pressured him to assist Moore’s campaign to become secretary of agriculture under Woodrow Wilson. Moore used bureau officials and bureau time to promote his ambitions and became so convinced Wilson would choose him that he designated a man to take his place as chief.

  Wilson picked someone else. The Justice Department launched an investigation of Moore’s politicking, and Moore spread the word to Isaac and other officials to destroy all correspondence related to his campaign. At nine o’clock in the morning on April Fool’s Day, 1913, an agent with the Justice Department walked into Isaac’s office and demanded to see all correspondence between him and Moore. The agent clearly expected Isaac to claim no such material existed.

  Isaac believed in loyalty and hard work and in the essential goodness of men, but he had learned much in those thirty years since his first arrival in Washington. He handed the agent a thick file containing all of Moore’s campaign directives, complete with postmarked envelopes.

  Moore was fired.

  The rivalry between Isaac and Joseph evolved into complete estrangement. The clearest evidence appears in a forlorn document deep in the records of the National Archives. It is an account of the Galveston storm that Joseph wrote in March 1922, in which he goes to great, almost comical, lengths to avoid using Isaac’s name or even to acknowledge him as his brother. When Joseph describes his own journey to Isaac’s house on the Saturday of the storm, he never identifies its owner. It is only “a house” in which fifty people happened to have congregated. “At eight o’clock,” Joseph writes, “the house we were in went to pieces, and as the house went over I broke through the window and climbed on the side of the framed house, and carried two children to safety.… Finally the house went to pieces and a short distance away I observed 3 others coming out of the water. These 3 were also saved.”

  On the night of the storm the lives of Joseph and Isaac touched with an intensity that only a man blinded by anger could disavow. Perhaps Joseph resented Isaac’s subsequent success within the bureau, or Isaac’s failure to contest Moore’s portrayal of Isaac as the great hero of the storm. And maybe Isaac, for his part, transformed his own guilt into a perverse anger at Joseph for having been right about urging everyone to evacuate. Maybe each time Isaac saw Joseph the magnitude of his own error came roaring back to him.

  Maybe Joseph sensed this, and played to it.

  The hurricane changed Isaac. He gave up the study of climate and health and concentrated instead on trying to find out why the storm had been so deadly. He wrote two books on hurricanes, thus fulfilling his childhood dream of writing an important scientific treatise. He became one of the nation’s leading hurricane experts. It was Isaac who established that a hurricane’s deadliest weapon was not direct wind damage, as bureau dogma held, but its wind-driven tide, and that this tide provided important warning signals. He was not shy about taking credit. In his monograph “A Century of Progress in the Study of Cyclones,” published in 1942, he wrote, “I was the only official in the U.S. Weather Bureau who recognized and studied the importance of the storm tides in forecasting hurricanes resulting from tropical storms.”

  But a question haunted him: Did some of the blame for all those deaths in Galveston belong to him? He blamed himself, certainly, for the loss of his wife. His decision to weather the storm in his house had been foolhardy, as had been his advice to some of the people he encountered on Saturday, among them Judson Palmer, who had lost everything. Isaac kept returning to the question. He told and retold the story of how he had asked a reporter for the Associated Press if anything more could have been done to warn the citizens of Galveston—and how the reporter replied, “Nothing more could have been done than was done.”

  Isaac’s subsequent reports to the Monthly Weather Review suggest a man obsessed with proclaiming his own prowess at warning of troublesome weather. Unlike his peers, who filed their routine district reports in spare, self-quashing language, Isaac praised his own work, or quoted newspapers and letters that did likewise. In September 1909, for example, he quoted a letter to him praising his warnings of a hurricane that struck Louisiana: “ ‘We feel that your office was solely instrumental in saving to New Orleans, through advices sent out by you in advance, many lives and thousands of dollars worth of property.’ ”

  The Galveston hurricane irrevocably collapsed the wall Isaac had erected between the personal and the professional, the irrational and the rational. On the morning of February 10, 1901, Isaac came forward “on profession of faith” to seek formal admittance to the Baptist church. A month later, the congregation convened at the YMCA pool to conduct its first baptism since the storm. Judson Palmer was there. So were Rosemary and Allie May, and of course Isaac’s baby, Esther, and a hundred members of the church. When Isaac stepped into the pool, applause rang for what seemed like hours.

  Art became his passion. It filled his spare time with the scent of linseed oil, the seductive texture of canvas. He divided his annual leave into segments as short as two hours so he could attend auctions and estate sales. He collected Early American portraits and Chinese bronzes and in 1918 sold a portion of his collection for the then-fabulous sum of twenty-five thousand dollars. When he had his photograph taken, he knew exactly what he was doing.

  He retired in 1935, at the bureau’s request, and opened a small art shop on Peter Street in New Orleans. He never remarried. He mourned the passing of slower days before cars and aircraft, but he filled his time to the maximum. He filled it with burnt umber and cerulean blue, linseed oil and turpentine, and the cold caress of ancient bronze.

  “Time lost can never be recovered,” he said, “and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.”

  Isaac Monroe Cline died at 8:30 P.M., August 3, 1955, at the age of ninety-three, just as Hurricane Connie emerged from the Caribbean. Joseph died a week later. The two had not spoken for years.

  The Law of Probabilities

  WILLIS MOORE BELIEVED the Galveston hurricane to be a freak of nature. “Galveston should take heart,” he wrote, “as the chances are that not once in a thousand years would she be so terribly stricken.” But another intense hurricane struck in 1915. It hurled a schooner and its crew over the top of the seawall into the city. Throughout the storm, there was dancing at the Hotel Galvez. Other hurricanes struck or came very near in 1919, 1932, 1941, 1943,
1949, 1957, 1961, and 1983. The 1961 storm was Carla, which caused the mass evacuation of a quarter million people from Galveston and surrounding lowlands. The seawall held Carla at bay, but the storm, as if frustrated, launched four tornadoes into the city, destroying 120 buildings over twenty blocks.

  The death toll in Galveston from all these hurricanes together was under one hundred, yet toward the end of the twentieth century, meteorologists still considered Galveston one of the most likely targets for the next great hurricane disaster. Unlike their peers in the administration of Willis Moore, they feared that the American public might be placing too much trust in their predictions. People seemed to believe that technology had stripped hurricanes of their power to kill. No hurricane expert endorsed this view. None believed the days of mesoscale death were gone for good. The more they studied hurricanes, the more they realized how little they knew of their origins and the forces that governed their travels. There was talk that warming seas could produce hyper-canes twice as powerful as the Galveston hurricane. Insurance companies, appalled by Hurricane Andrew and fearing much worse, quietly began pulling out of vulnerable areas. In the last years of the century a hurricane with the banal name Mitch killed thousands in Latin America and sank a lovely sail-powered passenger ship. The Army Corps of Engineers discovered a curious quirk in the New York–New Jersey coastline and proposed, soberly, that even a moderate hurricane on just the right track could drown commuters in the subway tunnels under Lower Manhattan. The seas rose; summers seemed to warm; the Bering Glacier began to pulse and flow just as it had one hundred years before.

  But in the narrow blue-bordered lands of Galveston, extravagant new homes rose on forests of stilts adjacent to blue evacuation signs that marked the island’s only exit. Whenever a tropical storm threatened, residents converged on the city’s gleaming Wal-Mart to buy batteries and flashlights and bottled water. Once, in a time long past when men believed they could part mountains, a very different building stood in the Wal-Mart’s place, and behind its mist-clouded windows ninety-three children who did not know better happily awaited the coming of the sea.

  NOTES

  IT IS ONE thing to write Great Man history, quite another to explore the lives of history’s little men. Theodore Roosevelt left volumes of material; Isaac Monroe Cline left little. Indeed, all that Isaac possessed prior to September 8, 1900, was destroyed. How, then, does one fill in the blanks? I approached the problem the way a paleontologist approaches a collection of bones. Even with so little to go on, he manages to stretch over those bones a vision of how the creature looked and behaved. I have been absolutely Calvinist about the bones of this story—dates, times, temperatures, wind speeds, identities, relationships, and so forth. Elsewhere, I used detective work and deduction to try to convey a vivid sense of what Isaac Cline saw, heard, smelled, and experienced in his journey toward and through the great hurricane of 1900.

  Luckily, Isaac left a memoir, Storms, Floods and Sunshine, published in 1945. It reveals little of his emotional life, but provided insights into the character of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America that one would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere. Where else could one learn that the state of Arkansas had become so fed up with improper pronunciations of the state’s name that it passed legislation making the official pronunciation “Arkansaw”?

  I hunted Isaac’s trail, too, through the wonderfully rich, achingly fragile archives of the Weather Bureau, lodged in the new National Archives Annex outside Washington—a place that makes deep historical research not a chore but an exciting and always profitable journey. I touched records, it seemed, that no one had touched for the better part of a century. I handled the very telegrams that Willis Moore, chief of the bureau, himself had touched. I sneezed a lot.

  Equally important, if more sterile, were the microfiche copies of Clara Barton’s papers at the Library of Congress. Barton knew her place in history. She kept letters and drafts of letters, telegrams and drafts of telegrams, even mundane communications aimed at securing free transportation to and from Galveston. (The Pullman Palace Company gave her a richly appointed Palace car, which railroads agreed to pull at no charge.) Most striking was her growing frustration at the discord that always seemed to accompany her forays into the field.

  The single most valuable trove of documents on the hurricane, however, lies in Galveston’s Rosenberg Library, God’s gift to any student of the great hurricane. The library has hundreds of letters and personal accounts that describe the storm, and over four thousand photographs, some quite macabre. I mined the library’s holdings for anything that might provide a fragment of my dinosaur’s skin. I used photographs as original documents and spent hours studying them with a magnifying glass. I used details from these photographs to decorate the scenes in Isaac’s Storm. For example, I describe in one section what Isaac saw from the house where he and his daughters came ashore the night of the storm. Incredibly, the Rosenberg archive has a photograph of exactly that view.

  One resource I found exceptionally useful was the library’s very detailed map of Galveston in 1899 (see “Fire Insurance Map,” in Sources), an immense bound volume that told me Isaac’s house was one of the largest in the neighborhood, that it had a slate roof, a small stable out back, and porches or “galleries” on the north and south sides. The map showed me, too, where his house stood in relation to the homes of neighbors like Dr. Samuel O. Young and Judson Palmer. It showed me that as Isaac headed toward the city Saturday morning after his first visit to the beach he would have passed near a wood-planing mill, a bulk coffee roaster, and numerous livery stables, some occupying entire blocks. Each must have perfumed the day. Anyone transported to Isaac’s time, I contend, would have found the air permeated by the scent of horse sweat and manure.

  In places I relied on my own observations. I did so, for example, in describing the big fat dragonflies of Galveston Island, the behavior of seagulls in a north wind, and the colors of wave crests during a tropical storm. I was lucky enough on one visit to arrive just after a severe tropical storm and before the arrival of another. At one point, as the sun fell, I found myself lost on a narrow spit of land somewhere east of Corpus Christi, with radio newscasters reporting that everyone living near the beach was being urged to evacuate by nightfall.

  The sea never looked so lovely, and so deadly.

  I HAVE TRIED to keep these notes as concise as possible. Where a citation refers to a document used only once, a full description of the document follows immediately. In all other cases, the citation refers to a more complete bibliographic reference in the Sources section.

  Telegram

  1 Do you hear: Telegram, National Archives. General Correspondence.

  The Beach: September 8, 1900

  1 Not everyone found Galveston a fairy land of wealth and gleaming streets. The sixteenth-century Spanish called it the Isla de Malhado, the “Isle of Misfortune.” Yellow fever scourged the place in 1867 and prompted Amelia Barr, a resident whose husband and two sons died in the outbreak, to call it the “city of dreadful death.” On the hottest days, she wrote, the city’s tropical climate could be unbearable. “An hour or two of pouring, beating, tropical rain, and then an hour or two of such awful heat and baleful sunshine, as the language … has no words to describe.” The port thrived, but at the expense of global goodwill. The Galveston Wharf Company held such monopolistic control over the wharves that the company became known from New York to Liverpool as the Octopus of the Gulf. Gen. P. H. Sheridan took the occasion of a visit to Galveston to issue one of the most infamous geographical slanders of all time. “If I owned Texas and hell,” he said, “I’d rent out Texas and live in hell.” 3. He taught Sunday school: First Baptist Church.

  2 He paid cash: Giles Mercantile Agency reference book.

  3 “I suppose there is not”: National Archives. Inspection Reports, Galveston, November 1893.

  4 A New Orleans photographer: Photograph. Isaac Cline. Louisiana State Museum. Whitesell Collection. A
ccession No. 1981.83.198.

  5 It was a time: McCullough, Path, 247.

  6 She was pregnant: Isaac Cline, Monthly Weather Review, Sept. 1900.

  7 Temperatures in Galveston: Daily Journal.

  8 For the first time: “The Incredible Shrinking Glacier.”

  9 A correspondent for: “The Galveston Horror.”

  10 In a pamphlet: In Ousley, Appendix. See also Immigrants Guide to Western Texas. Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railroad. Galveston, 1876. “It is A FABLE, generally believed in the North, that Texas is a land of snakes, tarantulas, scorpions, fleas and mosquitoes …” 103.

  11 On Sundays: Isaac never actually says he and his family visited Murdoch’s and the Pagoda on Sundays, but given their proximity to his house, the communal character of the time—and the absence of television—it is all but certain that the Clines did so. Bathhouse details: Fire Insurance Map.

  12 An electric wire: Picturesque Galveston, 10.

  13 The thudding: Cline, Isaac, “Special Report,” 372.

  14 Isaac woke: Ibid., 372; also, Cline, Storms, 93; Cline, “Cyclones,” 13; Cline, “Century,” 26; Cline, Joseph, Heavens, 49.

  15 Joseph too: Cline, Joseph, Heavens, 49.

  16 For days, however: Weems, 8–12. But see, especially, National Archives: Weather Bureau. General Correspondence. Sept. 7, 1900, William B. Stockman to Col. H. H. C. Dunwoody, summarizing reports on the storm’s early character and track. Box 1475.

  17 The bureau had long banned: Whitnah, 215.

  18 With most of the block: Fire Insurance Map.

  19 At the corner: Photograph. 2502 Avenue Q. Rosenberg Library. Street File: Avenue Q. Also, Fire Insurance Map.