Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [105]
A month later, Joseph, in a letter that dripped reluctance, wrote to Moore that he was now ready to go. “I believe that I have fully recovered from injuries of glands and blood vessels in [my] left leg, and as it is the wishes of the Bureau that I proceed on to Porto Rico, I will do so with pleasure.” He asked Moore, however, to reconsider his transfer if “the climate there proves adverse.”
Joseph did go to Puerto Rico, and in the August 1901 issue of the Monthly Weather Review, wrote, “The climate is not so oppressive as one might expect in the Tropics. A cool, very pleasant, and most welcome breeze generally blows across the island, particularly in the afternoon and at night, which adds much to the comfort of the inhabitants.”
By then, however, he was already back in the United States. He had been back for months. In the spring of 1901, Moore at last had acknowledged Joseph’s concerns and on April 5 wrote to the secretary of agriculture recommending that Joseph be returned to the United States on account of his “feeble” health. Moore demoted Joseph to his old rank of observer and cut his salary by $200 a year.
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