by Lee Sandlin
The morale within the corps grew steadily worse. The staff at the Washington City office was grossly overworked and undertrained. Observers were being sent out into the field knowing only the barest basics of meteorology. Instead of the relentless schooling earlier cadets had undergone at Fort Myer, new graduates were simply handed a copy of Loomis’s old introductory textbook on meteorology (now rapidly growing out of date) and told to pick up the subject on the job.
The regional forecasts came out twice rather than three times daily. They covered larger areas and were noticeably vaguer. And, what was more to the point, they were more often wrong. Several newspaper editorials reported a new trend: farmers were giving up on the corps’s predictions and returning to the traditional almanacs to get their weather news.
Public criticism of the bureau was becoming routine. “There is of late,” William Blasius wrote in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, “a growing impression in the public mind that the Signal Service Bureau is degenerating, and is less effective than during its earlier days.” Blasius, as it happened, didn’t agree—but only because he had never believed the corps’s weather predictions were worth anything anyway. An editorialist for Philadelphia’s Public Ledger was more concerned. Not only was the corps doing nothing to alert people to dangerous tornadoes, but it had recently failed to predict a major Atlantic storm, which the editorialist said was the kind of mistake it would never have made in the old days. (Not true; the corps had never had much luck forecasting Atlantic weather.) The bureau, the editorialist wrote, might be made a useful service again if only it could be “restored to its former ‘probability.’ ” But nothing would improve unless attention was first given “to failures of somebody at the Washington office to do as good work there as the service is capable of doing, or has heretofore been done.”
It was in the midst of this public unhappiness that Congress at last took up the recommendations of the Allison Commission. Four years had passed since the report had been issued. The current president, Benjamin Harrison, had already called repeatedly for its recommendations to be adopted and for the bureau to be transferred out of the military altogether. In the 1890 session, the legislation was finally approved. At the end of the following year, the Weather Bureau would be removed from the Signal Corps and placed with the Department of Agriculture, which had recently been elevated to cabinet level.
Where did that leave the military meteorologists of the corps? In limbo. They essentially had two choices. They could remain in the U.S. Signal Service, which was now resuming its original specialties of tactical telegraphy and battlefield communications, or they could go with the new Weather Bureau, which would require them to resign their commissions and become civilian meteorologists.
Lieutenant Finley wanted to remain a meteorologist and had no desire to leave the army. But there was a third option: according to the final congressional legislation, the bureau could retain on its staff four officers as meteorologists with their traditional military rank preserved. Finley was determined to be one of those four officers. He applied to the War Department—only to be torpedoed by his superior officer Greely.
Greely’s required annual evaluation of Finley for that year was highly critical. Greely wrote that Finley only had “moderate ability in discussing weather data and to somewhat less degree in weather forecasting.” This was manifestly absurd and suggests that Greely was still taking cues from Professor Hazen. Another criticism was more just: Finley, Greely wrote, “is unsuited for any duty involving the control or handling of any large number of men, as he is lacking in administrative work which demands clear, unbiased judgment and breadth of thought.” His final judgment was in fact a fairly shrewd assessment of Finley’s strengths and weaknesses: “Cannot organize, but is himself one of the most indefatigable workers the Chief Signal Officer has ever known. Fair education; indomitable energy; excellent habits; and will always be a most valuable subordinate officer. Is not successful with his subordinates, as he is apt to be unreasonable in his demands upon their time, expecting from all the same intense application he himself displays.”
Finley considered this evaluation to be a personal affront. He was immediately determined to get it overturned. Not only did he have “indomitable energy” on his side; he also had his wife, Julia, who had her own connections in high Washington City circles. On his return from San Francisco, with Julia doing the introductions, Finley privately met with a number of the most influential people in town in order to press his case. His gist was that Greely didn’t really know him and in his negative assessments was simply parroting the foolish and unfair things that General Hazen had said in the commission hearing.
This backdoor campaign worked. Over the next year, Finley was granted several new opportunities by the War Department for reviews and appeals of his case. In the end Greely’s evaluation of him was tossed. Finley was promoted to first lieutenant over Greely’s objections, and the new civilian Weather Bureau formally accepted him as one of their four assigned military officers.
At the end of 1891, the Signal Corps officially went out of the weather-forecasting business. It returned to its original mandate as the army’s communication service. Greely stayed on as its commanding officer. It did well under his guidance. During the Spanish-American War, the corps constructed and operated thousands of miles of telegraph wire in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. Later Greely was highly praised for setting up and running an emergency military command in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. Greely was perennially successful, but he never lost the sense that his career should have gone better. He was still convinced that everyone he met regarded him with suspicion and distaste. After his retirement, he turned to writing and became a popular author of light history specializing in books about Arctic exploration—without any awkward autobiographical admissions. Shortly before his death in 1935, he was not particularly assuaged by receiving the Medal of Honor.
It did not take long for Lieutenant Finley to realize that his decision to stay on with the civilian weather service was a terrible mistake. The new culture of the place made him instantly uncomfortable. The problems came in with the first civilian chief, Mark Harrington, who had been a professor at the University of Michigan. Harrington had taught astronomy and mathematics, but he also knew meteorology well: he’d founded The American Meteorological Journal and was a close friend of Cleveland Abbe’s. But he was not an ideal administrator. He was hot-tempered and paranoid, quick to antagonize both his superiors and his staff. He was also intensely suspicious of the military holdovers from the Signal Corps. His particular nemesis was his nominal assistant, Major H. H. C. Dunwoody, one of the oldest survivors of the Signal Corps era (he had been with the corps even before Finley). Harrington was convinced that Dunwoody wanted to depose him and return the bureau to the corps. Soon Harrington was writing a stream of letters to his superiors in the Department of Agriculture like the following: “Dunwoody is a selfish intriguer and a source of discord in the Weather Bureau. I request that the President recall him. We do not need military control of the Weather Bureau.”
Harrington didn’t like Lieutenant Finley, either. In this case, though, his objections took a more theoretical form. While Harrington himself was a solid and expert meteorologist, he disapproved of the kind of meteorology that Finley had been practicing. He had no interest in tornadoes or other forms of violent weather. In fact, he thought the whole focus of the Signal Corps on short-term forecasting had been a mistake. After all, who really benefited from the prediction of the weather? As far as Harrington was concerned, it was the farmer, and only the farmer. But to the farmer, Harrington wrote, “the problems of the climate have a permanent, while those of the weather predictions have only a passing, interest … It is the average weather or climate which determines the agricultural capacity of a region.” In other words, it hardly mattered to the farmer whether on one particular day it was going to rain or be sunny; what did matter were the long-term climate
trends. As long as Harrington was in charge, that was going to be the principal focus of the new Weather Bureau.
Finley lasted with Harrington’s bureau for less than a year. Then he put in for a transfer. But he didn’t ask to be sent back to Greely and the Signal Corps—what was the point, after he’d fallen out with Greely so spectacularly? Instead, he requested duties in the regular army. He received the transfer in October 1892, and his career as a government meteorologist was at an end.
14
The Desert Is No More
The great Trans-Mississippi Exposition of 1898 was built at the outskirts of Omaha, Nebraska, between a decaying industrial district and the open prairie. The entrance was a triumphal arch sixty feet high, topped by a group of warriors and goddesses holding aloft the American shield. Beyond was an enormous white promenade. Down its center ran a glittering canal two thousand feet long, spanned halfway down by an ornate bridge and dominated at its far end by an intricate Renaissance fountain. On either side were gigantic exhibit halls, mock-Ionic and Romanesque and Palladian, ornamented everywhere by pseudo-classical statuary and elaborate friezes. There were swans clustering and squawking on the waters of the canal and a fleet of Venetian gondolas, each with a gondolier who spoke with an ostentatious Italian accent and sang Mediterranean folk songs. At night the canal, the fountain, and the pavilions were illuminated by thousands of brilliantly colored incandescent bulbs, as though the exposition grounds were sketched in lines of light.
The exposition was always crowded. There were more than two million visitors over the course of that summer. The visitors swarmed the colonnades and the Midway Plaisance, stood in long lines at the restaurants, exclaimed at the fireworks shows, roared their approval of the frequent patriotic parades. That was during the crisis of the Spanish-American War, and its great provocation—the destruction of the American frigate Maine in the harbor of Havana—was recalled by a regular small-scale re-creation of the disaster on the canal near the fountain. At the conclusion of every speech, as the crowd furiously waved small American flags on sticks (for sale throughout the exposition grounds), the thunderous cry would go up: “Remember the Maine.” On the Fourth of July, when the speeches and parades went on from dawn to midnight, breathless messengers would run up to the podium and interrupt the speakers with an urgent dispatch: news of a great victory in Cuba. The roar of the crowd could be heard throughout the whole city.
But the great message of the exposition was development, trade, and peace. Exhibit hall after exhibit hall—the Mines and Mining Building, the Fine Arts Building, the Liberal Arts Building, more than a hundred of them in all—told the same story: the heartland now meant spectacular economic growth, inexhaustible natural resources, and a burgeoning civilization. The Machinery and Electricity Building was a continuous roar of motors and turbines, of flashing lightbulbs and popping circuits. There were six hundred exhibits of cultivated fruits, flowers, and grains in the Horticulture Building; the Nebraska exhibit alone took up two thousand square feet. Railroad cars of fresh melons were shipped in by the Texas exhibit and given away to visitors. The Manufacturers Building had seventy thousand square feet of exhibit space and included working factories that made hats, saddles, and bridles; there were bakeries selling their goods out of the oven and a chocolate maker giving away free samples fresh from its vats. At the center of the hall was an electric refrigerator, thirty feet high with double-paned glass sides, displaying dozens of kinds of dressed meats. The Agriculture Building was a labyrinth of garish color; every pillar and arch was hung with riotously colored wreaths and scrolls and festoons and banners made out of grasses and grains. Spears of wheat, oats, corn, barley, and rye were woven into liberty bells, candelabra, cornucopias, hourglasses, and spinning tops. There was an enormous American flag woven of cornstalks. The Great Seal of Nebraska was worked out in thousands of seeds.
On a separate stretch of the exposition grounds was the Indian Congress. “This unique exhibit,” the fair’s official historian later wrote, “enabled thousands of visitors to see what the government had done for the benefit and welfare of the aborigines.” The encampment was around four acres, and over the course of the summer several hundred Native Americans stayed there. They were employed to stage mock battles and hold imaginary tribal councils. On special occasions they re-created the Ghost Dances—the religious rite that had swept through the plains earlier in the 1890s, by which the surviving nations had sought to summon the ancestral spirits of their greatest warriors and drive the whites back to wherever they’d come from. The crowds gathered around the barricades to watch the Native Americans solemnly admit defeat.
As the exposition’s president, Gurdon Wattles, proclaimed during his speech of welcome on opening day: “The Great American Desert is no more.”
Among the side events held on the exposition grounds, and spilling out through the hotels and meeting halls of Omaha, were conventions. The Retail Grocers Association and the Association of Theatrical Stage Employees, the Association of Railway Telegraph Superintendents and the National Convocation of Bohemian Turners, the Beekeepers and the Scottish Rite Masons, the Pure Food Congress and the National Road Parliament—there were around a hundred conventions, a new crowd of delegates arriving almost every day through the late spring and summer, to talk business and to see the fair. The last convention, as the great events were over and the exposition itself was beginning to break up, was the first annual meeting of Weather Bureau officials.
As everyone at the convention knew, the early years of the civilian bureau had been tumultuous. The first chief, Mark Harrington, had always been difficult, and he had eventually become impossible. He had recently been fired by the secretary of agriculture, and in his place had come Willis Moore, a career meteorologist who had been an observer in the Midwest since the early Signal Corps days—well liked, a competent meteorologist, and a good bureaucrat. He opened the Omaha convention with welcome words: “There are no dissensions at the Central Office of the Weather Bureau. There is harmony there, and that means much to the rest of you.” The applause was deafening.
Moore was followed on the speaker’s podium by Cleveland Abbe. Abbe seconded everything the chief said about the new harmony in the central office, and he added that the bureau’s relations with the Agriculture Department were excellent. He attributed this (with much applause) to Moore himself. He then asked for a cheer to be given for Major Dunwoody, Chief Harrington’s old nemesis, who after so many years of service in the central office had returned to the Signal Corps and was now serving in the Philippines. (Harrington himself, showing signs of severe mental instability, had abandoned his family and disappeared soon after he was fired; years later he would be found working at a lumber camp in the Pacific Northwest. He spent his last years in a mental asylum.)
Then the business of the convention began. For the next three days the officials heard and debated papers on improving relations between the Weather Bureau and the public; on issuing weather warnings for the benefit of transportation companies; on the effects of forest clearing on the climate; on whether the bureau’s signal flags were the optimal shape; on issuing warnings for lake storms, flash floods, and cold snaps; and on the question “Are changes in the present forms (1053 and 1054) for reporting weekly climate and crop conditions advisable?”
So they went on, as the Trans-Mississippi Exposition closed and the workmen began disassembling the great ephemeral city of plaster all around them and as, day and night, the shoreless sky of Nebraska endlessly filled and emptied with clouds—and not once, in any prepared paper, or in any of the question-and-answer sessions, or in any of the open discussions, did anyone mention tornadoes.
After John Finley’s departure to the regular army, the only person left at the Weather Bureau who had gone on taking an active interest in tornadoes was Professor Hazen. Hazen was still, despite the transfer of power and the restructuring of the bureau, the designated tornado expert. He took the job seriously. In the early 1890s he began tra
veling around the country as Finley had, lecturing business groups and town meetings on the practicalities of tornado preparedness. While his boss, Chief Harrington, had already made plain his lack of interest in tornado research and would have preferred that Hazen do something else (he particularly wanted Hazen to work on technical problems of instrumentation and measurement), the tours were officially tolerated, because Hazen’s attitude toward tornadoes proved to be an excellent fit with the new bureau policy. Hazen wasn’t an alarmist, the way Finley had been. He reassured his audiences that tornadoes were not a serious problem in the Midwest. He was especially disdainful of Finley’s endless propagandizing for tornado caves. Hazen thought this was nonsensical at best and corrupt at worst; he insinuated, and sometimes said outright, that Finley had been seduced by the insurance industry, which was deliberately cultivating public anxiety about tornadoes in order to drum up business.
Hazen meanwhile had inherited Finley’s enormous tornado archive. In his idle moments at the Washington City offices he was working his way through it. He didn’t think much of it. He was particularly contemptuous of the reports from the spotters network (which were still coming in, even after Finley’s departure)—hundreds upon hundreds of tornado sightings and, as far as Hazen was concerned, all useless, because neither Finley nor his informants had made the slightest effort to distinguish major tornadoes, minor tornadoes, and harmless funnel clouds that hadn’t reached the ground. Hazen thought that some kind of classification system was the essential first step to the serious study of tornadoes. Since tornadoes were so elusive, he concluded that the only sensible criterion should be the amount of destruction they left behind. It was an idea several decades ahead of its time, but when Hazen proposed it to his superiors, they dismissed it with barely a shrug and told him that if he had a problem with the spotters network, he should simply discontinue it.