by Lee Sandlin
Finley accepted the deal, and it became the official (though never publicly declared) corps policy from then on. Warnings of “violent local storms” began to be issued, and the observers around the country got to know what that meant—even if the public didn’t. How useful they were, though, remained unclear. Finley’s positive success rate that summer remained steady at around 25 percent, but his warning areas were so broad that there was no way of knowing the risk for any specific location.
In any case, the arrangement in its original form only lasted a few months. By the end of the summer of 1885, Hazen had been obliged to send Finley on another and longer round of inspection tours. The commission was about to reconvene after the summer recess, and Hazen had learned that now it was going to focus specifically on working conditions at the Signal Corps, based on Finley’s revelations in his testimony.
At the commission’s public hearings that autumn, several ex-cadets and one current officer came forward to provide critical testimony concerning General Hazen and the corps. The officer, Lieutenant W. A. Glassford, gave a thorough analysis of the military organization of the corps and pointed out numerous technical and practical problems. He was particularly harsh about Fort Myer, which he described as “unmilitary and weakly controlled, perhaps corruptly.”
The cadets also talked about Fort Myer. They went into great detail on the miserable conditions there, and they described at length how they had been systematically overworked and mistreated. The drills were interminable; their duties, especially those of policing the fort grounds, were demeaning; the food was unwholesome; and they had to endure constant verbal and physical abuse from their instructors—particularly Lieutenant John Finley.
Some of the complaints would have sounded frivolous to older veterans, particularly those who’d served in the Civil War, but they were heard out by the commission in shocked solemnity. In part it was a reflection of the military culture of the Signal Corps. The corps was drawing its cadets from well-connected families and from elite colleges; these were young men of privilege who had rarely been treated harshly or critically by anyone in their lives. It was not surprising that Finley, a man who appeared to take seriously the traditional ideals of military conduct, would be portrayed in the commission testimony as a short-tempered tyrant, a martinet who had brutalized the cadets by shouting at them when they laughed or reprimanding them for getting distracted while at attention.
Other charges at the hearings were more substantial. The universal complaint was that the food at the camp was poor—not just unappetizing, but sometimes actively rotten. General Hazen was so concerned by this charge that he sent the camp medical officer before the commission to refute it. The officer testified that he had regularly inspected the food and found it wholesome. Unfortunately, he wasn’t prepared for the tough cross-examination he got from the commissioners. Under close questioning he admitted that there had been occasions when the meat served to the cadets was spoiled and even maggoty. He was asked if he had rejected it. He had to confess that he hadn’t. Why not? He stammered out an unfortunate defense: the cadets hadn’t been given a direct order to eat it, so if they found it not to their liking, they could have refused it.
General Hazen himself showed up to testify again soon after that. This time he was angry, and he was defiant, and compared with his affable demeanor the previous winter, he was plainly desperate. The criticisms made by Lieutenant Glassford had enraged him. “Mr. Glassford had never been fully in sympathy with our work,” he told the commissioners. “He has never yielded willing and able assistance to the methods of the office, but had always tended, in some degree, to insubordination. He has always been serious and fault-finding … He has never been fully efficient as an officer. He has been wilfully neglectful on many occasions.”
As for the complaints of the cadets that they’d had to police the camp: “Every soldier in the world has to do policing. I did it when I was at West Point … every man at West Point had to do it. Everybody in the whole Army has to do it. It is the same way in every camp.” About the food: “Now, with regards to the complaints of those men at Fort Myer respecting their rations, I want to say this. There never was a recruit in the world who did not complain about his rations. It is a sort of acknowledged privilege.”
About the cadets’ complaints of mistreatment by their instructors he was more conciliatory. It probably was true, he conceded, that the cadets could have been treated better, but that was because of a systemic flaw in the structure of the corps: it wasn’t military enough. Men were being promoted because of their scientific or technical abilities rather than their fitness for command. A man like Lieutenant John Finley, he said, might have been excellent at his meteorological duties but had no skill whatever at leading men in the field, and his unacceptable behavior at Fort Myer clearly showed it. Hazen admitted: “I have not had officers of proper experience and tact to put in charge of these men.”
All that said, however, there was no reason for the commission to contemplate taking away weather duties from the Signal Corps. “I here state, and I am ready to maintain it, that the work of the Signal Service is not only highly efficient and satisfactory everywhere with people and communities having interests in it, but that not a word has come from them to this Commission, so far as I have ever known, favoring this transfer.” The only people who wanted weather forecasting to be under civilian control, he said, were the scientific community, as represented by the recently founded National Academy of Sciences, “who appear to have always wanted to control it.” And, of course, there was one other faction: “my personal enemies, who wish to strike at me.”
The commission concluded its hearings soon afterward and issued its report with unusual speed. But its conclusions were no surprise. Short-term, the commissioners recommended the immediate closing of Fort Myer. They also recommended the immediate elimination of the Study Room as an unnecessary and impractical expense—as ever with the federal government, the need to appear hardheaded and realistic trumped the necessity of funding basic scientific research. Long-term, they recommended that the Weather Bureau be removed from the corps and transferred to a new civilian agency that should be created in some part of the government other than the War Department.
Lieutenant Finley had remained out of town as the commission finished its hearings and never testified again. He knew he was being kept out of trouble, but he found to his surprise that he liked the job he’d been given. He took well to his duties as an inspector of the weather stations. He was thorough and conscientious. He learned to act quickly to restore military discipline when he found the observers slacking off; in fact, even though he’d entered the corps strictly to do meteorology, he was increasingly finding everything about military life congenial. He also enjoyed the sheer oddity of what he found traveling around America. He arrived in one town to find the weather station empty of its gear: the observer, an inveterate gambler, had had to hock it all to pay his debts. The G Street office hadn’t suspected a thing, though, because the pawnbroker kept the gear in his storeroom and allowed the observer to take his readings and file his reports from there.
Finley also liked being an ambassador for the corps. He was a good public speaker, and he was always comfortable giving his standard talk about tornado preparedness. He told his audience about the latest ideas about tornado warnings: someone had proposed stringing telegraph wires around the outskirts of towns, for instance; when a tornado approached, it would break the wires, and a special signal would ring in the telegraph office. He also stressed the importance of digging storm shelters, which were generally known then as tornado caves. The most basic dirt cave, excavated in a yard or a field, deep and wide enough to hold several people, was the safest place to ride out a tornado or other violent weather. And he continued to enlist volunteer tornado spotters; when he returned to Washington City in the summer of 1886, he had accumulated almost two thousand spotters in his network.
But on his arrival he found himself without a j
ob. The first part of the commission’s recommendations had already been implemented: Fort Myer had been shut down, and the Study Room, without a home, had been dispersed. There was no question of Finley resuming his work on tornadoes and no indication of when, if ever, that would change.
General Hazen had not been defeated by the commission report. He had reconciled himself to the loss of Fort Myer and the Study Room and was already planning his counteroffensive. He knew he still had two powerful weapons on his side: his friendship with President Cleveland, and the inertia of the federal government. It could be years before any further action was taken on the commission’s recommendations. There was plenty of time for Hazen to work out a deal that would keep his corps in the weather-forecasting business, retain its elite status within the War Department, and prevent it from being merged back into the regular army.
His big goal in the autumn of 1886 was to obtain larger housing for the Signal Corps offices. This was a practical necessity, even without the closing of Fort Myer. The corps had expanded during his years as chief signal officer; the Weather Bureau in particular had long since overgrown the office on G Street. The corps had been refused space in the War Department’s own new office building and was instead occupying a series of makeshift rented and commandeered buildings scattered around the city. Hazen wasn’t the only one who found this situation intolerable. The archive of meteorological records was kept in a warehouse building notorious for its stench: the joke in the corps was that the prehistoric Washington City swamp was seeping up through the basement. Hazen wanted a large new headquarters built for the corps with fireproof rooms for its archival storage. Failing that, he wanted the War Department to rent or buy him an existing building that he could remodel for his long-term needs.
He spent that autumn charging around the city inspecting real estate. He assigned Finley to be his combined chauffeur, bodyguard, personal assistant, and caretaker. This was not a job Finley accepted with any enthusiasm. He knew by then how Hazen had thrown him to the wolves at the commission hearings. But this was another part of military discipline he had absorbed: neither then nor later would he ever publicly speak a word of criticism of his commanding officer. Besides, he didn’t have to spend much time in the general’s company to see why his help was urgently required. Hazen was dying.
Hazen was suffering from chronic nephritis, which was then usually called Bright’s disease. This was a progressive and untreatable form of kidney failure that caused severe back pains, testicular pains, and difficulty breathing. Hazen, it was more and more clear to Finley, was in daily agony and was finding it almost impossible to perform the simplest tasks, but he was refusing to reduce his workload. He wouldn’t even admit that he was sick.
In the meantime, he had found the perfect place for his new headquarters. It was a sprawling house at the corner of Twenty-Fourth and M Streets. In fact it was a mansion, one of the city’s showpieces—a mock-Spanish hacienda built around an open court and surrounded by forested grounds. It belonged to a prominent family who’d made a fortune mining in Mexico and who were now going back south to manage their investments. Hazen kept returning to the hacienda day after day and talking excitedly about how he’d remake the interiors and assign all the offices.
He and Finley paid their last visit to the mansion in late December. It was a bitterly cold and stormy day, and the empty building was unheated. Finley later wrote: “I protested with the General that our visit was a very dangerous exposure for him, in fact for both of us, but nevertheless we finished the inspection, in a very thorough manner, including the basement of the structure, as was customary with the General in the performance of all of his duties.”
The next day, Finley came down with a severe cold. When he next saw Hazen, he discovered him to be so sick he couldn’t get out of bed. He was alone, except for a body servant. His family happened to be spending the season in Europe; he had closed up his lavish mansion (actually his wife’s mansion—it was a gift to her from her father) and had taken rooms for himself near the G Street offices. Finley visited him there every day.
At New Year’s, Hazen roused himself to attend a formal reception at the White House. The weather was still wretched; that evening the city was hit by a major snowstorm. But Hazen still showed up at the reception in a resplendent full-dress uniform, which he had covered only with a fashionable cape. He was miserably sick. Finley kept worrying at him to take things easy and make an early evening of it. But Hazen, surrounded by the glittering pomp of Washington City society, felt wholly in his element and insisted on staying long past midnight. Finley offered to go back to Hazen’s rooms and at least fetch him a warm coat. Hazen told him to stop being so foolish.
At last the reception began to break up. Hazen gallantly insisted on helping several of the most glamorous women into their carriages. The storm was then at its height, and Finley was horrified to see Hazen standing in the midst of the fierce gusts of snow in nothing more than his uniform. He hadn’t even bothered to put on his cape. Finley immediately fetched it and tried to wrap it around him, but the winds were so strong that they kept the cape fluttering behind him like a pennant.
The next day, Hazen couldn’t bring himself to leave the apartment. The day after, he couldn’t get out of bed. The final decline took two weeks. Finley stayed with him, along with Hazen’s body servant. When Hazen’s death finally came, Finley wrote, it was “agonizing in the extreme.” There were times when Hazen was writhing around so violently that it took both Finley and the servant to hold him down.
13
How to Escape
General Hazen’s death was the beginning of the end for the Signal Corps’s Weather Bureau. Everybody knew that without him as the corps’s champion, the recommendations of the Allison Commission could not be staved off for much longer. There was nobody left who could maneuver within the federal bureaucracy as he could, nobody who was as well connected in Washington City society, nobody who was as certain of his own rectitude, and nobody who was as ruthless.
In the meantime, though, the daily work at the grand new Washington City office and the weather stations had to continue. Hazen’s successor as chief signal officer was Adolphus Greely—the commander of the doomed polar expedition. Greely had always been Hazen’s man and tried to rule the corps with Hazen’s style. (One of his first acts as chief was to take on the federal bureaucracy in order to ensure that the survivors and the relatives of the deceased from the Arctic expedition received full military benefits.) But nobody thought Greely was half the commander Hazen had been. Not only did he lack the connections and the fearsome reputation; he just didn’t have the heart for it. He was a man perpetually haunted by the sense that everyone was judging him unfairly. He was certain that he would never be free from what had happened on the Arctic expedition. Nobody ever asked him about it directly, but (as he revealed in his letters) he was certain that the dread word “cannibalism” was never far from their thoughts.
But then, Greely had been put in an impossible situation anyway. The Allison Commission had undermined in advance any standing he might have with Congress or the War Department. Sooner or later Congress would act on the commission’s central recommendation and remove the Weather Service to civilian control. In the meantime, the service was being whittled away. Year after year, Greely was faced with new rounds of budget cuts and demands that he do more with fewer resources.
But he continued to support his old mentor’s pet projects. That meant he did what he could for Lieutenant Finley. In the spring of 1887, he put Finley in charge of the new Meteorological Records Division. This essentially meant that Finley was spending most of his time checking incoming field reports for obvious errors, a job for which he was profoundly unsuited, but Greely also took the trouble to specify that the study of tornadoes was still included in his duties.
The problem was that the study had turned into a charade. There was no budget for Finley to do any field researches, and Greely wasn’t particularly interested in
the results anyway. In his first progress report for the new division, Finley complained that he was simply compiling the reports from his own spotters network. The reports were coming in from all over the central prairies and throughout the South, but he was doing nothing with the data.
At bottom, despite his gesture of support, Greely clearly considered tornado prediction to be a dead issue. In his report to Congress in the summer of 1887, he essentially dismissed Finley’s forecasting project as a failed experiment. The problem with forecasting tornadoes, he wrote, was that any prediction would surely result in a panic, and no prediction could be specific enough about the tornado’s likely path to serve as an effective warning. “It is believed,” Greely concluded, “that the harm done by such a prediction would eventually be greater than that which results from the tornado itself.”
Greely’s view was shared by the civilian scientific community. In May 1887, the meteorologist William Blasius gave a speech to the American Philosophical Society in which he savaged Finley’s work on tornado forecasting and mocked his warnings for “severe local storms.” Blasius asked, “Has the Signal Service saved a single life or any property by its tornado predictions?” To Blasius the answer was clearly no—and would remain so, probably forever. Tornado prediction, Blasius said, “can never be done with any certainty, except in so general a way as to be valueless.” In fact he considered the corps’s whole approach to the study of weather to be a waste of time: “What additions to meteorological science has it ever made? Is there even one valuable result in all its voluminous literature that cannot be found in the prior works of others? If so, where and what is it?”
Finley’s only response was to continue making public speeches about tornadoes and their dangers. He assembled a little book out of his talks and his papers and had it published in 1888. The title was Tornadoes: What They Are and How to Escape Them. It was a simple and straightforward guide to what was then known about tornadoes. There were nontechnical explanations of the various theories of tornado formation, descriptions of the local weather conditions favorable to tornadoes, and warning signs that a tornado was approaching. The longest and most fervently written section was a detailed plan for constructing a tornado cave, which Finley claimed would offer “absolute security to life and limb and nothing can replace it for that purpose.”