by Lee Sandlin
At the Signal Corps headquarters the news of the outbreak made Hazen bump Finley’s tornado project up to the highest possible priority. The time had come, Hazen decided, for an immediate full-scale test of tornado prediction. Finley was ordered to begin a three-month trial. He divided the country up into eighteen districts and subdivided each district into four forecast areas. Twice a day, he would make a prediction for each of these seventy-two zones. But these predictions were kept strictly within the Study Room. Even if they warned of an imminent tornado, Hazen declared that they would be kept entirely secret until the full test was complete.
Finley began the test in March and continued it till May. He was working at it at such a furious clip that Hazen midway through ordered him to slow down; one forecast a day, he decided, was sufficient. When Finley showed him his tabulation of the results, Hazen was amazed—and also suspicious. Finley was claiming a success rate of 96.6 percent. Hazen ordered him to begin another three-month trial. The results were the same.
But Hazen made no move yet to begin public tornado forecasts. In fact his ardor for tornado forecasting seemed to have cooled dramatically in the months since the Enigma Outbreak. When Finley presented the results of the second pilot study, he found that Hazen was barely interested. Instead, he was preoccupied with an issue that had nothing to do with tornadoes.
From the beginning of his tenure, General Hazen had been fighting countless bureaucratic battles with his superiors in the War Department and with Congress. He had assumed command in the middle of an ongoing scandal, a Signal Corps officer who had been embezzling funds. Soon after that, he had fought the War Department to keep them from admitting Negro soldiers to the corps. Now a new crisis was proving to be the bureaucratic war of his life.
Soon after he had taken over the corps, he had agreed to back a three-year expedition to the Arctic to establish a weather station. The expedition had gotten under way in 1881. It was led by Captain Adolphus Greely, a longtime Hazen protégé. Everyone considered it to be extraordinarily hazardous, but as it proved, they were still grossly underestimating its dangers. Captain Greely himself had been fooled by the relatively mild Arctic summer of 1881 into thinking that relief missions would be able to reach his position above the Arctic Circle. But the first relief mission, in the summer of 1882, had only partially succeeded (it had left the supplies in an unmanned depot hundreds of miles south of the weather station), and the second relief mission the following year had been a calamity: one of the ships had gone down in an ice field, and the second had turned back. Greely and his team of twenty-four men had been left alone, with no supplies, their circumstances and condition a mystery.
The news of the second relief mission’s failure put Hazen into a frenzy. He wanted its commander court-martialed and a new mission mounted immediately. He was overruled by his superior, Secretary of War Robert Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln. The Arctic summer was ending; the ice was closing in; a second expedition, Lincoln believed, would doubtless meet a worse fate than the first. He decided not to risk any more men.
Hazen was outraged. He immediately had his staff at G Street compile at top speed two special reports: one excoriating the failure of the second relief mission, the other blasting Secretary Lincoln’s refusal to send a third. The reports contained minute analyses of nautical charts and weather records, together with interviews with ships’ captains familiar with the polar seas, all to demonstrate that the second mission had been incompetently commanded and that the third would surely have succeeded. Hazen included both reports in his annual message to Congress.
It was not a wise move. General Hazen was one of the best-connected men in Washington; Secretary Lincoln was one of the few who trumped him. Robert Lincoln was true American royalty—a homegrown Prince of Wales, a shoo-in for the presidency whenever he wanted it. In fact, since his father had been called “the Rail-Splitter,” he was generally known around town as the Prince of Rails. It was not a joke he found funny.
General Hazen wasn’t intimidated by Lincoln. In fact he openly despised him; in Hazen’s eyes the secretary was a weakling, a coward, a civilian who knew nothing about the military and had no business commanding soldiers. But the secretary did have something Hazen didn’t: the confidence of the president. That was no longer James Garfield, Hazen’s childhood friend, who had been assassinated soon after taking office; it was Garfield’s successor, Chester Alan Arthur—an old-school party hack from the New York Tammany Hall political machine.
President Arthur was a man who loved his pleasures, which among other things included gourmet dining, fine clothes, and luxurious accommodations. One of his first moves as president had been to have the antique furniture of the White House carted away and replaced by the latest from Tiffany. His intellectual curiosity was low, and his enthusiasm for science nonexistent. He took Secretary Lincoln’s word on anything technical and was never going to overrule him in a matter like the polar expedition. “It is well known,” one of Hazen’s colleagues wrote later, “that the President felt no interest in Arctic matters, and that he would not have crumpled a single rose-leaf upon his couch, if by turning his body he could have discovered the North Pole.”
But General Hazen was not the man to back away from a fight. His conflict with Secretary Lincoln came to a head in the summer of 1884, just as Finley was conducting his tornado forecasts. That was when the news came from the north that survivors of the polar expedition had been found.
Twenty-five men had set out for the Arctic; six had returned alive, including Captain Greely. The story of their rescue drew reporters from all over the world. Secretary Lincoln and his deputies in the War Department acted immediately to close off the survivors to any public scrutiny. The press was also denied any glimpse of the recovered dead bodies. The rumor spread that the bodies all too obviously displayed the marks of cannibalism.
Over the next several months, Secretary Lincoln systematically shut down any public discussion about what had happened to the expedition. Several review boards were held, each closely managed by Lincoln and each coming to the same conclusion: Nobody was at fault. The failure of the 1883 relief mission was unavoidable. The lack of a follow-up expedition was justified given the circumstances. Most important, the conduct of the Greely party during their long years in the Arctic was above reproach. General Hazen watched all this happen with mounting disgust. He told a reporter that the rumor of cannibalism was not a serious matter: What else were men trapped in the Arctic supposed to do? As far as Hazen was concerned, the real reason Lincoln was drawing a veil of circumspection over the whole matter was that he didn’t want his own decision making questioned. If only Lincoln had sent that second expedition, Hazen insinuated, Captain Greely’s whole team could have been saved.
What Hazen hinted at in public he declared explicitly in private. He sent the secretary a long confidential letter dismissing the review boards as a sham and accusing Lincoln of direct responsibility for the nineteen deaths among Greely’s team. The letter ended:
While the action of the Secretary of War was dictated by his sincere convictions of public duty, I believe it can be established beyond question that such action made certain that final disaster to Lieutenant Greely’s Arctic party which the violation of their orders by Lieutenant Garlington and Commander Wildes [the officers commanding the failed relief mission] had rendered highly probable.
I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant …
Secretary Lincoln was livid. But he was not one to strike back wildly. His bureaucratic counterblow against Hazen was slow, cunningly devised, and inexorable. It began when Congress came back in session in the autumn of 1884. A select commission opened hearings in Washington City. There were a lot of governmental commissions holding hearings in those days; nothing about this one seemed unusual. In fact its full name was a clear promise of tedium: the Joint Commission to Consider the Present Organizations of the Signal Service, Geological Survey, Coast and Geodetic Survey, and the Hydrographic Offi
ce of the Navy Department, with a View to Secure Greater Efficiency and Economy of Administration of the Public Service in Said Bureaus. The commission consisted of three senators and three representatives; its chairman was Senator William Boyd Allison of Iowa, and so it was called, by the few observers who took note of its existence, the Allison Commission.
Its first several days of hearings were routine. Witnesses offered a careful bureaucratic review of several government agencies tasked with scientific projects. The first witness was John Powell, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey. Powell spoke ably, at length, and in copious detail about the survey’s work—in particular, the creation of a set of topographical maps that would cover the entire nation. This was an enormous venture; years had been put into it already, and decades more might pass before it was complete. Powell went out on a limb and estimated that within three years they might be done with Massachusetts. The commission’s questioning was cautious and sympathetic. The project, they all agreed, was of enormous value to the nation and needed the full backing of Congress.
The next witness was J. E. Hilgard, the supervisor of the Coast Survey. He also spoke at length about the difficulties and challenges of his task. Mapping the coastline was an extraordinarily complex, torturous process; the work was so open-ended that Hilgard couldn’t even begin to guess when it might be completed. The senators and representatives were quick to congratulate Hilgard and his team on their work and to assure him of their ongoing support.
The following week, Secretary Lincoln arrived at the Senate conference room and took the witness chair. He apologized for not speaking first; that would only have been proper, since, as he made plain, the commission had largely been his doing. But the press of business had prevented him. The recent presidential election meant a change of administration, and he had many duties that needed to be finished before he could turn over his office to his successor.
Then he turned to his purpose. He barely acknowledged the Geological Survey, the Coast Survey, and the Hydrographic Office. His only concern was with the Signal Corps. In his years as secretary, he told the commission, he had become increasingly convinced that the Signal Corps was suffering from what he called “radical defects.” It was poorly run, and its fundamental mission had become hopelessly confused. He believed that it had been a grave mistake for the corps to take on the job of weather prediction at all; it had proved to be wholly unsuited for the job. The Weather Bureau needed to be transferred at once to a new civilian agency, preferably one somewhere other than in the Department of War, and the corps needed to be reintegrated into the regular army.
Lincoln’s speech might have been seen for what it was, a broadside attack on Hazen, if anybody had been paying any attention. But nobody was. The opening hearings had barely been attended, and anyway reporters were not inclined to write up in detail the testimony of a cabinet officer about the fine points of departmental bureaucracy. After the holiday recess, when Cleveland Abbe, the corps’s chief civilian forecaster and John Finley’s mentor, appeared before the commission, he clearly had no idea what he was in for.
Abbe arrived at the hearing room prepared to give testimony similar to that of the earlier witnesses on the importance of the corps’s work for the American people, with accounts of its ongoing research projects. The commission allowed him to do so, more or less—except that he was continually interrupted with questions about the military structure of the Weather Bureau and whether it would be possible to change it into a strictly civilian agency. Abbe was flummoxed. He replied in generalities about the heavy burden of work the corps had taken on and how that burden was only going to increase. He predicted that sooner or later every American would want a personalized weather forecast delivered each day by telegram. The commissioners pressed him again about the logistics of transferring weather service to civilian control. All he could say was, “You are asking me a question in military matters that I am hardly fit to answer.”
If Hazen hadn’t been aware before that the commission was specifically gunning for the Signal Corps, he knew it then. A few days later, Abbe requested an opportunity to provide additional testimony before the commission. He delivered a long, carefully prepared speech on the excellence of the Signal Corps, the absolute necessity of continuing it in its present form, the eminent practicality of employing both civilians and military officers, and the wholly admirable administration of General Hazen. Hazen himself appeared the next day and gave a relaxed and amiable statement about how successful the Signal Corps was, how harmonious and pleasant the working conditions were, and how well he himself got along with his superiors in the War Department.
Hazen then arranged for several of the officers in the Washington City office to appear before the commission. All dutifully repeated the gist of Abbe’s and Hazen’s testimonies. The goal was obviously to wear the commission members down and get them to produce the sort of vague and noncommittal report that usually came out of federal hearings. The plan might even have succeeded, too, if it hadn’t been for John Finley.
By the time the commission got to Finley, it was growing increasingly somnolent. Representative Robert Lowry, taking Finley’s testimony, was almost listless: “Lieutenant Finley, you are connected with the Signal Service, I believe?”
“I am,” Finley answered.
“In what department?”
“In the Signal Corps proper. I am now stationed at Fort Myer, Virginia.”
“You have some particular information upon the subject of tornadoes, their origin and characteristics?”
“Yes, sir; I have devoted some study to that subject.”
“You may give the Commission, if you please, such information upon that subject as may be within your possession.”
“That information is rather extended and diverse,” Finley answered. “I could not give in brief, perhaps, a very comprehensive statement; but I will say that I have been studying the subject for about five years specially.” He then summarized briefly his fieldwork and his study of the Enigma Outbreak.
The representative heard him out and rephrased his question, with the first hint of impatience: “It has been suggested to us by the Chief Signal Officer that you might give us the result of your investigations upon that class of storms.”
“I can submit my papers upon the subject,” Finley answered.
“You allude now to the full reports you have made?”
“The special papers,” Finley fussily corrected. “There are three professional papers and one Signal Service note.”
The representative held up the copies of the papers that Hazen had already forwarded to the commission. He plainly felt that this thick wad of technical analysis was too much to expect anyone in Congress to read. “What would be the practicability,” he asked, “of your giving us an epitome of these documents in such form as to be incorporated in the testimony?”
Finley considered. “I dare say I might do that in a short note. I would prefer, however, to prepare anything of that nature at my desk rather than to attempt to present the matter without deliberation.”
Lowry was probably surprised by Finley’s reluctance to fulfill such a routine request. Witnesses were expected to arrive with these sorts of epitomes already prepared, and if not, to supply them soon afterward for incorporation into the record (which, it was understood, nobody was going to read anyway). Lowry said, “I will suggest to the Commission the propriety of having that epitome rather than these documents embodied in the record.”
Senator Eugene Hale then spoke up. He clearly wanted to avoid any imputation that the commission was criticizing Finley in any way. “I think if Lieutenant Finley could prepare a paper of that kind,” he said, “showing the method of his investigation, and showing also the results and the application of them which could be made throughout the country by our different industries generally, that it would be very valuable.”
Lowry was ready to wrap up and move on. He asked Finley, “How soon could you prepare such a summary?�
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Finley had been chafing under this apparently innocuous line of questioning, and he burst out: “I can hardly say. My duties are such that I have not a moment of spare time. For the past three months I have been working about seventeen hours a day, and I do not see how I can prepare such a paper as Senator Hale suggests without being relieved from some of my present duties.”
That woke the whole panel up. Senator George Pendleton asked, with a certain cautious alertness, “Will you describe, if you please, the occupation or occupations that keep you engaged for seventeen hours a day, as I think you said?”
Finley was only too happy to oblige. “About that many hours. The whole time here indicated is devoted to the course of instruction at Fort Myer, the performance of my duties at the office of the Chief Signal Officer, and the pursuit of special studies in connection with tornado work. The course of instruction at Fort Myer embraces the performance of military duties, instruction in tactics, electricity, military signaling, international signals, military surveying, the construction and practical operation of telegraph lines, telegraph practice with the key in sending and receiving messages, and practical work in topographical sketching. If you desire such a statement I could give you one to cover minutely every moment of time devoted to the performance of my duties.”
Pendleton mildly observed, “Seventeen hours a day is a very heavy strain.”
“I know it is,” Finley replied, “but I think that I can give you a statement to cover every moment of that time.”
“That is not necessary,” Pendleton murmured. “You have answered sufficiently.”
Lowry then asked, with great sympathy, “Are your duties likely to continue so arduous as to require that expenditure of time?”