Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [12]
Isaac was exhausted, lonely, thrilled. He took a cab to the hotel booked by General Hazen, and there spent the rest of the day indulging in a very uncharacteristic pursuit: doing nothing. Partly it was the fatigue. But mainly this young man who had trapped the night forests of Tennessee at the age of six was frightened. He had never been in a city this big before. He was afraid even to let the hotel out of his sight.
He might have been a lot more anxious if he had known of the controversy that swirled at that moment around the Signal Corps, and of the scandal that triggered it, a scandal whose shock waves would roll forward like a storm swell to shape the events of Saturday, September 8, 1900.
But that night the only thing swirling seemed to be the mosquitoes clouding the gas lamps on the street below.
THE CRIME ITSELF could have happened in any bureau of the government, the juxtaposition of money and men always a chancy thing. That it happened within the Signal Corps, however, gave it an incendiary power beyond expectation. It had the effect of undamming a reservoir of complaint.
The corps had grown accustomed to controversy ever since Congress designated it the mother agency for the nation’s first weather service. “Meteorology has ever been an apple of contention,” wrote Joseph Henry, the first director of the Smithsonian, “as if the violent commotions of the atmosphere induced a sympathetic effect on the minds of those who have attempted to study them.” Some critics argued men should not try to predict the weather, because it was God’s province; others that men could not predict the weather, because men were incompetent. Mark Twain, merciless as always, parodied the government’s efforts: “Probable northeast to southwest winds, varying to the southward and westward and eastward, and points between, high and low barometer swapping around from place to place, probably areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and lightning.”
But this new controversy was different. In 1881, police arrested Capt. Henry W. Howgate, chief financial manager of the Signal Corps, for embezzling nearly a quarter million dollars, this in an age when dinner at a nice restaurant cost thirty-five cents. He was arrested, convicted, and jailed. In the spring of 1882 prison authorities allowed Howgate to go home under guard to see his daughter, who was then visiting from Vassar. He escaped and was still at large when Isaac arrived in Washington.
For the weather service’s critics, the Howgate scandal was the last straw. Secretary of War Robert T. Lincoln launched an investigation of the Signal Corps with particular emphasis on the service. He found it had few financial controls, a very limited pool of experienced forecasters, and a training academy—Fort Myer—that spent a lot more time putting men through cavalry drills than teaching them to forecast the weather. General of the Army P. H. Sheridan, around whom the aura of Civil War heroism still glowed bright, declared Fort Myer a waste of money. The all-important Chicago Board of Trade filed a formal petition with Congress demanding reform. Complaints also rose from within the Signal Corps itself, where some veteran military officers, among them a Major H. H. C. Dunwoody, opposed a push by General Hazen to conduct primary research into the causes and character of weather. Dunwoody objected in particular to Hazen’s hiring of civilian scientists like Cleveland Abbe, easily the most prominent practicing meteorologist of the nineteenth century. The assault got personal when a Pennsylvania congressman accused General Hazen of cowardice in the Battle of Shiloh.
There were many