by Lee Sandlin
As for the raison d’être of Finley’s whole tornado project, the issuing of tornado warnings, Hazen had been and remained thoroughly skeptical. He thought Finley had in fact done about as well at it as could be expected, given the current state of knowledge about tornadoes. The problem was that there were simply too many fundamental questions about tornadoes that were still wholly unknown. Specifically, Hazen wondered about the conditions within the upper altitudes of severe storms. He thought that the only way tornado prediction would ever become a reality was by penetrating the hidden reaches of thunderstorms. He pressed his superiors at the bureau for permission to make high-altitude balloon ascensions in order to take readings. They did agree to that, and in the first years of the civilian bureau he arranged for a few flights, one of them above ten thousand feet. But his initial results were inconclusive, and the flights were soon discontinued. (Their only lasting effect was to confirm Hazen’s own lifelong enthusiasm for ballooning; he began working on a grand scheme for mounting the first transatlantic balloon flight.)
Despite there being so many unknowns, Hazen did have several practical proposals to make about tornado safety. He described them in detail in his lectures, articles, and press interviews. He urged that communities in the Midwest adopt them, because “as the so-called cyclone belt becomes more thickly populated, disasters from this cause will grow more frequent.” His solutions, he said, were simple, cheap, and sensible.
The first was to plant trees. Hazen shared the general belief that the rise in the number of tornadoes was due to deforestation. Logically, therefore, tornadoes must be unable to cut through forests. So if cities and towns would only cultivate dense thickets of trees on their southwestern perimeter, the majority of tornadoes would be stopped in their tracks. Alternatively, since, as Hazen believed, tornadoes were primarily an electrical phenomenon, it should be possible to disrupt approaching tornadoes by means of barrier walls of electrified wiring. But he believed his best and most practical method of tornado defense was what he called a tornado trap. He proposed building a line of lookout stations along a town’s western boundary, each connected by wire with caches of dynamite. “On seeing a funnel cloud approaching,” Hazen explained, “the operator would simply wait until it got near enough and then touch off the cartridge which would blow it to smithereens.” In fifty years, he predicted, “not a big town in the southwest will be without a tornado trap.”
Professor Hazen’s public career as a tornado expert did not last long. The end came at roughly five o’clock in the afternoon on May 27, 1896, when a large thunderstorm crossed over St. Louis, Missouri. The storm was a spectacular apparition. The banks and towers of black and green clouds were so vast that many witnesses described them as the most impressive thing they’d ever seen. It spawned a gigantic tornado funnel that touched down on the hilltop grounds of a hospital complex near the southwestern city limits. In the twenty minutes that followed, the funnel blasted through several of the most densely occupied neighborhoods in the city, skimmed across the Mississippi River, and wrecked the industrial and freight railroad districts of East St. Louis on the Illinois shore. At least 250 people were killed, probably more; the exact number was impossible to estimate because of the number of unrecorded boats sunk when the tornado raked across the riverfront.
In the days after the disaster, Hazen gave several interviews in which he expressed his sorrow over the deaths and his regret that his plans for tornado traps had not been adopted. He said that every one of the casualties could have been prevented if only he’d been listened to.
Shortly afterward, the Weather Bureau issued a public statement: “Certain interviews with Prof. H. A. Hazen, U.S. Weather Bureau, have recently appeared in the public press, in which the planting of forests on the southwestern edge of cities and the discharge of dynamite bombs have been advocated as a protection against tornadoes. It should be clearly understood that the Weather Bureau—using that term as expressing the collective thought of its Chief and members of the scientific staff, Professor Hazen alone excepted—does not endorse the theories set forth in the interviews above referred to. The opinions expressed and the methods of executing them are Professor Hazen’s, and he alone is responsible for them.”
Chief Willis Moore, who had just been put in charge of the bureau after Harrington’s departure, worried that this press release didn’t go far enough. He was in fact immediately determined to put an end to Professor Hazen’s public career. He followed up the press release with a letter to every newspaper that had published interviews with Hazen or had even quoted his remarks. It read: “I have to inform you that these statements were not authorized by the Weather Bureau, and that the theories advanced are not held by scientific men generally. The interview came from Professor Hazen as a private individual, and not in his capacity as an official of this Bureau. From personal observation of the havoc wrought by several tornadoes, I am fully convinced that any attempt to destroy them by the means suggested will be a failure.”
After that, Professor Hazen gave no more interviews on tornadoes. Moore made plain to him that he was no longer the bureau’s tornado expert. Hazen was to stick to his principal job: forecaster. While the bureau had been de-emphasizing the importance of the forecasts, it still issued them daily. There were now four forecasters at the Washington City office preparing the forecasts for the whole country. Hazen was reassigned to the night shift.
He didn’t seem to mind all that much. He took to his nightly duties with amiable good humor. He became an avid bicyclist—there was a great vogue for bicycles in the late 1890s, shortly before the advent of the automobile—and he grew to be a familiar figure around his neighborhood in Washington City, barreling to and from the bureau offices sometime after sunset and just before dawn. He maintained his air of diffidence with the bureau staff. At the Trans-Mississippi convention, his only contribution was a lighthearted paper making fun of the idea that meteorologists would ever be able to make long-term forecasts.
15
The Book of Failure
In the summer of 1899, a man named Lyman Baum sat in the basement den of his house in Chicago, writing the book that he thought would make his fortune. Baum was in his forties then, and he’d already chased after several fortunes. He’d managed theater companies back east, where he was originally from. He’d taken his family into the West, to the town of Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he’d opened up a store called Baum’s Bazaar that sold Native American glassware, assorted lamps, wicker baskets, children’s toys, novelties from Japan, and “Gunther’s Celebrated Chicago Candies.” He’d run a newspaper in Aberdeen for a couple of years. He’d moved to Chicago, where he worked as a commercial traveler in fine china and glassware. He also did freelance reporting for several local newspapers. He kept a private notebook of ideas for stories that had been rejected, which he labeled “The Book of Failure.”
For a while he ran a trade magazine called The Store Window, which was a practical business guide to the latest ideas in retail displays. This was in fact the subject of the book he was writing that summer: its working title was “The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors.” But Baum had never been able to make a go of anything without also jumping at five other ideas at the same time. So as he accumulated the pages of his business guide, he was also trying his hand at a children’s book.
This was not on the face of it a promising venture. He had no special knack for writing for children. He wasn’t even especially imaginative. But children’s books had recently become an extremely popular genre, after the worldwide success of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland books. Baum thought he could cash in. He had published two children’s books already, under the name L. Frank Baum (Lyman, a name he’d never liked, seemed all wrong for a children’s author)—one called Father Goose and another called A New Wonderland. Neither one was successful, and the titles are a fair indication of the originality of the contents.
Nor was this new one intended to break fresh ground. Its fir
st pages sketched in the scene as quickly as possible: a young girl on a Kansas farm is carried off to wonderland by a tornado. For the name of the young girl, Baum recalled a grotesque detail from newspaper reports of the famous double tornado that had destroyed the town of Irving, Kansas, in 1879 (the town that had been the subject of John Finley’s first field report): the name of one of the victims, who had been found buried head down in a mud puddle, was Dorothy Gale. And as for the name of the wonderland, he got that by looking around his basement den. His gaze fell on his filing cabinet, where there were two drawers. One was labeled A–N, and the other, O–Z.
Baum was not a strong prose writer, and his book can be a tough slog for readers now. The best, and virtually the only, stretch of vivid writing occurs right up front, in his description of the harshness and dreariness of the Kansas prairies. This was something that Baum had known well in his years in the Dakotas:
Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.
(This description may have led the makers of the movie, forty years later, to shoot the Kansas scenes in black and white.)
As for the rest of the scene? It’s a blur of generic prose. The worst is the tornado itself. Baum mentions that “it was very dark, and the wind howled horribly.” Then the tornado appears: “The north and south winds met where the house stood, and made it the exact center of the cyclone. In the middle of a cyclone the air is generally still, but the great pressure of the wind on every side of the house raised it up higher and higher, until it was at the very top of the cyclone; and there it remained and was carried miles and miles away as easily as you could carry a feather.”
This passage suggests that Baum may have been following the ongoing controversies about the nature of tornadoes, particularly the competing theories of Lieutenant Finley and Professor Hazen, without really understanding much of the science. What it does not suggest is that Baum had any idea what a tornado looked like or how it behaved. If he wrote about the prairie from firsthand experience, he wrote about the “cyclone” without ever having seen one.
But that was typical for writers then. Tornadoes were growing in the public consciousness—partly because of great disasters like Louisville and St. Louis, and partly because of widespread newspaper coverage of the appearances of Finley and Professor Hazen. Tornadoes were becoming part of the humorous folklore of the plains states; residents talked with a certain whimsical pride about Texas twisters and Kansas cyclones as though they were personal property. The hero of a comic novel from 1895, The Adventures of Jones by Hayden Carruth, travels around the Midwest in a “globular cyclone-house”—a large metal sphere that is bounced from place to place by tornadoes like a soccer ball. Another novel, A Ride on a Cyclone by William Ballou, is about an Idaho tycoon who is mysteriously carried by a tornado across the whole country in the course of a single night and is deposited in Manhattan at dawn. The tornado is nowhere described, nobody witnesses it, it leaves no damage behind, but nobody regards its astonishing continental passage with the slightest surprise or interest. It’s just the sort of thing that happens out there in the plains.
Today there would no doubt be spokesmen available from the National Weather Service to explain exactly what these authors got wrong about tornadoes; no one bothered then. That was not exactly because the Weather Bureau experts were inclined to be indulgent; it’s because the bureau no longer had any tornado experts.
A few days after the start of the new century, a small item appeared in The New York Times. Its headline read: “Weather Forecaster Succumbs to Injuries Received in Bicycle Collision with a Negro.” Professor Henry Hazen had been careening through the streets on his bicycle as usual, on his way to work, when he’d hit a pedestrian (The New York Times apparently thought Negro pedestrians were a menace) and been flipped to the pavement. He died the next day without recovering consciousness.
The obituary notice by Cleveland Abbe of the bureau appeared shortly afterward in the Monthly Weather Review. Abbe recalled Hazen’s pride in his family—“which includes very many distinguished names in theology, literature, commerce, and military matters”—and identified the Hazen family traits as “great tenacity of purpose, independence of character, boldness in the defence of personal convictions and energy of execution.” He also praised Hazen’s original contributions to the design of meteorological instrumentation. And he thought Hazen was quite forward-looking in his attitude toward ballooning and upper-altitude exploration, which Abbe thought would be major factors in the future development of weather forecasting.
About other questions, particularly—though Abbe didn’t say so—tornadoes, it was harder to be just. “It must be confessed,” Abbe wrote, “that a peculiar temperament sometimes led him to beliefs and statements in scientific matters entirely untenable at the present day, but to which he adhered with such pertinacity that to some he occasionally appeared obstinate and headstrong. This was simply a result of the intense earnestness of his own convictions which so completely absorbed his mind that there was no place for further considerations.”
After Hazen’s death the bureau essentially closed out its interest in severe weather altogether.
The bureau in those years was intent on fulfilling what it saw as its main mission: providing weather information to the nation’s farmers. The regional weather stations kept lists of local farmers and mailed them overnight forecasts. In areas wired for telephone service, the switchboard operators would call subscribers with the forecasts each morning. By the second decade of the twentieth century, a few hundred newspapers around the country had begun running daily weather maps. By modern standards the forecasts were only the vaguest of generalities: “warmer,” “colder,” “stationary temperatures,” “dry,” “rain,” “snow”—that was about as far as they went. They didn’t bother to specify highs and lows in Fahrenheit degrees. There was only one type of emergency warning the bureau ever issued: for a cold snap that might seriously endanger a crop.
As for tornadoes—into the new century, no records of tornadoes, not even raw counts of tornado occurrences, were kept by the bureau. No attempts were made to predict tornadoes; the old ban against using the word in forecasts remained the fixed policy. No research of any kind was financed or conducted on tornadoes. A standard reference book on the Weather Bureau published in 1922 (The Weather Bureau: Its History, Activities, and Organization) did not mention the existence of tornadoes. A textbook on meteorology published at around the same time, written by one of the bureau’s own meteorologists (Physics of the Air, by W. J. Humphreys), devoted three sketchy pages to tornadoes in its general chapter on atmospheric circulation. There was only one suggestion for further reading: John Finley’s book on tornadoes, which had been published almost forty years earlier.
In 1892, when John Finley departed the bureau, he joined the Ninth Brigade of the regular army. The brigade was shipped to the Philippines early in the Spanish-American War, and Finley served there as a regimental officer until he was invalided home with severe dysentery. (This was a common fate for American soldiers in that war.) When he had recovered sufficiently stateside, he was reassigned to the army recruitment office. He spent the next several years traveling around America making speeches about the success of the Philippine campaign. He returned to the Philippines in 1903, as part of the ongoing American occupation, and there he was appointed military governor of the island of Mindanao.
Mindanao was a large, complex, crowded place. The landscape was a tangle of green mountain ranges, lush plateaus, and dense lowland swamps. The population was a jumble of antagonistic cultures and languages�
�Christian, Muslim, and pagan, with a heavy Spanish Catholic influence. There was also a new revolutionary insurgency spawned by the American invasion. Finley was stationed in Zamboanga, the largest city on the island. He made frequent travels inland to try to broker peace treaties among the various tribes, who were continually skirmishing with the Americans and with each other. He became a familiar and grudgingly respected figure in the villages of the deep jungle. He was notorious not only because of his peculiar appearance—the fat pale old white man wearing his full uniform in the hottest weather—but also for his fervent sincerity and his casual willingness to trust his life to people who plainly meant him no good. He often traveled alone and unarmed in the jungle, and he would stay overnight in any village that would give him welcome.
Finley approached colonial administration almost exactly as he had his tornado research. He didn’t want small incremental successes; he hungered after the big all-encompassing solution. After he’d been there a year, he thought he’d found it. He called a meeting to lay out his proposal. He invited the religious and political authorities from all the settled towns on the island, along with all the tribal chiefs he could reach inland. Their delegations arrived in Zamboanga in a gorgeous parade—thousands of people in armadas of native boats, all draped and festooned in flowers and fabric streamers. They were greeted by crowds blasting away at the agongs and kulintangans and lantakas—the clangorous native drums and weird bell-like trumpets and rocketing cannons. The scene, Finley later wrote, was an “indescribable din” that had a “matchless barbaric splendor.”