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American History October 2015

America’s Worst Disasters

Disaster leaves a mark—on the land, on the people who survive and in our collective
memory. We can’t prevent the winds, the rains, the tectonic shifts and volcanic eruptions.
But can history teach us how to mitigate nature’s effect on us—and our effect on nature?

28

About the cover A high-precipitation supercell thunderstorm, 5 to 10 miles in diameter, photographed near Glasgow,
Mont., July 28, 2010. These supercells are characterized by heavy rains and flash flooding and can spawn tornadoes.
COVER IMAGE: © SEAN R. HEAVEY
 FEATURES DEPARTMENTS
42
4 Letters
28 Galveston
Hurricane, 1900 8 American Mosaic
An epic storm and Hermione sails
officials’ arrogance again; prayer bells
collide in a Texas- spark dispute; V-J
sized calamity Day remembered
by Al Roker
16 Encounter
38 Johnstown Dorothy Thompson
Flood, 1889 underestimates
A failed dam Adolf Hitler
drowns a city
by Christine M. 18 Interview
Kreiser 22 68 David McCullough
TOP TO BOTTOM, LEFT TO RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; DIAMOND IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES; © KEN HOWARD/ALAMY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2); ROOM AGENCY/ALAMY; OPPOSITE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

gets uplifted by the

42 San Francisco Wright Brothers
Earthquake,
1906 20 Cameo
The City by the Mountaineer
Bay is knocked and activist
down but not out Fanny Bullock
by Sarah Richardson Workman

48 Tri-State 22 Game On
Tornado, 1925 Ed and Steve Sabol
Missouri, Illinois and changed the way
Indiana are torn apart we watch sports
by Christine M.
Kreiser 38 24 Déjà Vu
Are the U.S. and
52 Great Blizzard, Cuba too close
1888 for comfort?
A snowstorm
remakes New York 27 Editor’s Note
by Richard You can’t fool
Ernsberger Jr. Mother Nature

58 Dust Bowl, 67 Reviews

1930s
Prolonged drought 20 48 Bretton Woods
economic summit;
plus bad farming Mrs. Thomas
equals catastrophe Jefferson; mapping
by Sarah Richardson early America

62 Novarupta 72 Top Bid

Volcano, 1912 Rockwell Kent’s
Ash falls like Polar Expedition
snow in Alaska (1944)
by Roger L. Vance
 Letters

All About Ike

Eisenhower was at the top of the World War II command structure and
I was very near the bottom, but we both had some service ribbons to
wear. I got mine wrong for a Saturday morning review and spent the
rest of that weekend on KP. But mine were much more correct than the
ones shown in your August 2015 cover picture of General Eisenhower.
Did none of his staff see this messed up bowl of fruit salad? I got a day
and a half with pots and pans for my mistake, but I don’t recall having
Ike beside me in the kitchen!
Nade Peters
St. Louis, Mo. >

> Colonel Jerry Morelock, USA-Ret., author of
Generals of the Bulge: Leadership in the U.S.
Army’s Greatest Battle, says, “Ribbons are supposed
to be arranged top to bottom and left to right from
highest precedence to lowest precedence, and it
appears Ike made several ‘order of precedence’
mistakes in this photo.” The photo is dated 1943, so
we’ll chalk it up to the general having other things
on his mind.
The caption on the Table of Contents in the Au-
gust issue may be in error. It looks as though Eisen-
hower was a commissioned officer, not a West Point
cadet, when the photo was taken. Note the hat insig-
nia, hat strap and “U.S.” on his collar. A cadet would
have had USMA insignia, certainly on his hat.
R.L. Stinson, Colonel, USA-Ret.
Front Royal, Va.
You are correct. According to the Eisenhower
Presidential Library, the photo was taken in 1916,
the year after Ike graduated from the military
academy with a second lieutenant’s commission.
American History
19300 Promenade David A. Nichols wrote that the 1957 civil rights
Drive, Leesburg, VA bill “was not Johnson’s triumph; it was Eisenhower’s.”
20176-6500 It’s true that Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson
americanhistory@ knew there were not enough votes to pass the bill
historynet.com without an amendment prohibiting enforcement of
school desegregation. Johnson had not “forced Eisen-
hower to capitulate or face the prospect of passing
no bill at all.” Ike himself met with Richard Russell,
the leading Southern senator, and agreed to “clarify-
ing amendments.” Both Ike and Johnson knew that
even a weak bill would set a precedent for further
civil rights legislation. Nichols claims that Johnson’s
“backroom dealing” did not save the bill. But one of
Johnson’s maneuvers was to convince several South-
ern senators that if they allowed the bill to pass, he
could later be elected president and would then sup-
port their causes.
Jim Bartos
Brooklyn Park, Minn.
David Nichols responds: Lyndon Johnson crafted
historic civil rights legislation in 1964-65, but 1964
was not 1957. To accept that LBJ supported a weak
bill in 1957 in order to be elected president later is
to distort the facts. Eisenhower proposed strong
legislation in 1957; Johnson spearheaded the gutting
of its enforcement provisions. JFK and LBJ did
not actively embrace civil rights until 1963—after
Eisenhower’s civil rights coalition had cleared the
way by terminating the legislative stranglehold that
segregationist senators had exercised. The final
Senate vote of approval included 37 Republicans and
23 Democrats (not 27, my typo). Johnson provided
dynamic leadership in 1964-65. Let us not try to
make him better than he was in 1957.
How can you have a whole magazine devoted to
Ike and not mention Kay Summersby? She was an im-
portant part of his life even it did not add to his legacy.
Martin T. Feeney
Greenwood, Ind.
Speculation about the nature of Eisenhower’s
relationship with his wartime driver has been
rampant for decades but, as you point out, it
has little bearing on Ike’s legacy as commander

4 AMERICAN HISTORY
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and president. Did they or didn’t they?
Only they know for sure, and they’re
MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER
not talking. DIONISIO LUCCHESI PRESIDENT
WILLIAM KONEVAL ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER
Eagle Eye
The shoulder insignia for the 101st EDITOR IN CHIEF ROGER L. VANCE
Airborne Division on page 44 of the Au-
gust issue really confused me. I am very
familiar with the Screaming Eagle patch,
but I have never seen it facing to the
right. I don’t know how you did it, but
the only conclusion I can come to is you
blew it. Fess up!
Karl T. Weber Jr., USN-Ret.
Hixson, Tenn. ROGER L. VANCE EDITOR
CHRISTINE M. KREISER MANAGING EDITOR
The right-facing eagle was identified by PEYTON MCMANN ART DIRECTOR
101st historian Mark Bando as one of RICHARD ERNSBERGER SENIOR EDITOR
17 variations of the World War II–era SARAH RICHARDSON SENIOR EDITOR
Screaming Eagle patch. According to ELIZABETH G. HOWARD COPY EDITOR
his research, it was a short-lived version PATTY KELLY PHOTO EDITOR
likely issued to combat veterans, circa
DIGITAL
1945, for wear on the right shoulder.
BRIAN KING DIRECTOR
GERALD SWICK EDITOR
Mission Man BARBARA JUSTICE SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER
“Junipero Serra: Saint or Sinner?”
(American Mosaic, August 2015) was a
CORPORATE
disgrace to your magazine. It is a myth
PAUL ZIMMY EVP DIGITAL
that Serra instituted “harsh discipline
GREG FERRIS EVP STRATEGY
and forced labor” at the missions. Prior DAVID STEINHAFEL OPERATIONS & FINANCE
to the arrival of the Spanish, native STEPHEN KAMIFUJI CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Californians subsisted by hunting and KAREN G. JOHNSON BUSINESS DIRECTOR
gathering; the missions were attrac- ROB WILKINS MILITARY AMBASSADOR & PARTNERSHIP MARKETING DIRECTOR
tive to them because they could feed GEORGE CLARK SINGLE COPY SALES DIRECTOR
themselves in relative safety from other
marauding bands of Indians and un- ADVERTISING
scrupulous whites. It is none of your RICHARD E. VINCENT National Sales Manager RVincent@historynet.com
KIM GODDARD National Sales Manager KGoddard@historynet.com
business whom the Catholic Church de-
RICK GOWER Georgia rick@rickgower.com
cides to convey sainthood upon. That
TERRY JENKINS TENN., KY., MISS., ALA., FLA., MASS. TJenkins@historynet.com
is a religious right, not a right of liberal, KURT GARDNER Creative Services Director
revisionist historians with an animus to
the Catholic faith.
Jeffrey J. Hill DIRECT RESPONSE ADVERTISING
Tucson, Ariz. RUSSELL JOHNS ASSOCIATES 800-649-9800 AVH@russelljohns.com

American History has no position © 2015 WORLD HISTORY GROUP, LLC

on the canonization of Father Serra.
The magazine was reporting a news
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wholly negative.

6 AMERICAN HISTORY
 OR
D
TO ER
RE B
CE Y
S
BY IVE EP
VE YO T
TE U EM
RA R C B
NS ER E
DA TIF R
Y. IC 7,
AT 20
E 1 5

it’s not just a brick.

it’s their story.
WITH A BRICK AT THE NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM, you can create a lasting tribute to loved ones who served
their country. These fathers and grandfathers, sons and daughters, friends and neighbors overcame a once-in-a-generation
challenge, and they deserve a memorial that will last for generations to come. To learn more, visit www.ww2brick2.org.
American History
BRICK TEXT

(Please Print Clearly) 18 characters per line including spaces

Mrs. Mr. Ms. ___________________________________________________________________________________

Address _______________________________________________________________________________________
City ______________________________________ State ________________ Zip ______________________
Telephone (Day) _________________________ (Evening) __________________________________
PLEASE RESERVE MY PERSONALIZED BRICK(S)
Number of Victory Bricks _______ at $200 each. Number of Campaigns Bricks _______ at $500 each.
Add a Tribute Book at $50 each ____________ Total $__________
Please make check or money order payable to: The National WWII Museum.
Card # ________________________________________________ Exp. _________________ Signature ______________________________________________________________
Check/Money Order MasterCard VISA Discover AMEX
Forms must be received on or before 09/07/15. Fax orders to 504-527-6088 or mail to:
The National WWII Museum, Road to Victory Brick Program, 945 Magazine Street, New Orleans, LA 70130.

877-813-3329 x 500 bricks@nationalww2museum.org

The brick program at The National World War II Museum celebrates the American Spirit as well as the shared appreciation for the Allied effort during WWII. The Museum reserves the right to refuse to engrave any messages or material it
deems inappropriate, such as personal contact information, political statements, suggestive wording, and messages that might be considered offensive to those who served and sacrificed during the WWII era. Bricks will be installed late 2016.
Lafayette’s Hermione to the Rescue
“Cur non?” (“Why not?”) was the
young Marquis de Lafayette’s motto,
which sums up his decision to support
the American revolutionaries. Today a
group of French and American sponsors
has embraced Lafayette’s can-do spirit.

Working since 1997, they managed to fund,

build and sail a gorgeous, historically accurate
replica of Hermione, the sleek tall ship that brought
Lafayette to the United States in 1781. After a 30-day
voyage, the replica arrived in Yorktown, Va., on June
5, and made 10 stops along the Atlantic Coast before
heading back to France on July 18.
Hermione’s voyage commemorates the
critical aid the French supplied during the Siege of
Yorktown on the Chesapeake Bay in September and
October 1781. Two dozen French ships, including the

LEFT: AP; RIGHT: MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE TOP: STEPHEN SAVOIA, AP; BOTTOM: ©AMANDA HALL/ROBERT HARDING WORLD IMAGERY/CORBIS
Hermione, opposed a British fleet of similar size and
barred any escape of General Cornwallis’ troops by
sea. Some 7,000 French troops participated in the
land battle, and on October 14, Lafayette himself
headed a unit of 400 Americans that helped break
the last British defenses. On October 19, Cornwallis
surrendered. Yorktown was the last major land battle
of the Revolution and sealed the Crown’s defeat.
For details about the Hermione’s tour, visit
hermione2015.com. In conjunction with the replica’s
journey, the New-York Historical Society opened a
new exhibit, “Lafayette’s Return: The ‘Boy General,’
the American Revolution, and the Hermione.” It will
be on view until August 16.

Hermione’s hull
was fashioned
from 400,000 hand-
sculpted pieces
of oak. The ship
arrives in Yorktown,
June 5 (right).

8 AMERICAN HISTORY
 american Mosaic
compiled by Sarah Richardson

Prayer Bells Fuel

Synagogue Dispute
In the mid 1700s, the gifted Jewish silversmith and na-
tive New Yorker Myer Myers became the first to create cer-
emonial objects for Jews in colonial America, and his filigreed
style looks nothing like the starkly simple works of his better-
known contemporary, silversmith Paul Revere of Boston.

Today a set of bells called rimonim that Myers crafted for Touro Synagogue
in Newport, R.I., is at the heart of a dispute between two historically prominent
Jewish congregations. Founded in 1765, Touro is the nation’s oldest extant
synagogue, and lays claim to the famous 1790 exchange between congregation
head Moses Seixas and the new nation’s president, George Washington. In
agreeing that the United States would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution
no assistance,” the two perfectly described America’s commitment to religious
freedom. Shearith Israel in New York City says it is the nation’s oldest Jewish
congregation, dating to 1623 and sharing ancestry with founding members of the
Touro Synagogue. The roots of both synagogues stretch deep into colonial history
when Sephardic Jews fled Spain and Portugal and settled in the New World.
The dispute today is over who owns the rimonim. The bells have always been
part of the Touro Synagogue, but when it fell into disuse around 1881, Touro was
bought by Shearith Israel and later leased for $1 a year to a congregation of Jews
from Central and Eastern Europe who chose to observe the Orthodox Judaic
tradition with the rituals of the Sephardic branch. Since then Shearith Israel has
provided little other support. When the Touro congregation tried in 2012 to sell
the bells to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for $7.4 million to improve the
synagogue’s poor fiscal health, the New York congregation protested. Meanwhile,
the museum has withdrawn its offer, and the dispute will go before a judge in July.

The Torah finial bells

(above) crafted by
Myer Myers found
a home at Touro
Synagogue (left).

History for the Long Haul

Can’t see the forest for the trees? Brown professor Jo Guldi and Harvard
professor David Armitage contend that recent scholarly myopia has hastened
the decline of public interest—and competence—in history. In The History
Manifesto (Oxford University Press), Guldi and Armitage decry the decades-long
trend toward “micro-history”—detailed descriptions of relatively short spans of
time—over more substantive narratives devoted to a lengthier arc. Looking at
dissertations written between 1880 and today, they find that around 1900 the
average length of time covered in a dissertation was 75 years. By 1975 it had
dropped to 30 years. Only in the 21st century has the trend reversed.
The professors argue that studying longer arcs
of history is especially important today, given the
wealth of materials available from other disciplines
that address broad topics such as climate change,
human evolution, capitalism and economic
conditions. If historians do not adopt a long and
broad view of events, say Guldi and Armitage, they
risk becoming viewed as irrelevant to public debates.
For more, go to historymanifesto.cambridge.org.

OCTOBER 2015 9
 american Mosaic

Did Austerity Eisenhower (center)

Measures Squeeze with Israeli prime

minister David Ben-
Gurion (left), 1960.
America Into
Revolution? Bostonians tar
and feather a tax
collector to protest
the 1765 Stamp Act.

How Details of the project

were evident some two

Israel years before the CIA

confirmed it, making
it an embarrassing
Got the intelligence failure.
Had the Israeli
Bomb program and its
potential for building
a crude atomic bomb
been detected earlier,
Everyone knows the authors of the
Israel has nuclear Security Archive
Yale historian Steve Pincus argues that British efforts capability—currently report contend, the
estimated at 100 to 300 United States may have
to curb immigration and trade drove American patriots to warheads—but Israel pressured Israel to cease
revolution. He made the case in a provocative May 20 post has never acknowledged construction. Over the
that it possesses years, however, the U.S.
at The New York Review of Books website: www.nybooks.

LEFT: AMERICAN SCHOOL/PRIVATE COLLECTION/PETER NEWARK PICTURES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; RIGHT: AP

nuclear weapons. The government has turned
com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/may/20. National Security a blind eye, classifying
Archive at George any documents related
By 1763 the Seven Years War between Britain and France over their Washington University to Israel’s clandestine
New World colonies had pushed Britain’s national debt to more than recently posted on its nuclear program.
150 percent of gross domestic product. The Crown’s solution was to institute website supporting With this report—the
austerity measures, a reversal of previous policies that supported settling documents that reveal result of a Freedom of
and subsidizing the colonies as a way of expanding Britain’s prosperity. how Israel, with the Information Act request
American colonists were banned from trading with countries other than help of Norway, dating from 2012—
Britain or creating new currency. Subsidies for immigration were halted, and France and the United Israel’s open secret is
in 1765 the Stamp Act increased the enforcement of customs duties. Among Kingdom, managed to secret no more. For
the act’s onerous provisions was a limit on land sales in the colonies. acquire materials to more information, visit
According to Pincus, Americans felt squeezed just when they wanted build a secret nuclear nsarchive.gwu.edu/
investment in roads, harbors and ships to promote trade. The Declaration reactor in 1959. At the nukevault/ebb510/
of Independence in 1776 would deliver their complaints and envision a new time, the Eisenhower
government. That same year, Adam Smith, for one, sided with the patriots administration was
in protesting austerity in his book The Wealth of Nations. Pincus concludes: promoting its Atoms
“Had George III and his ministers not adopted austerity measures in the for Peace program,
1760s and 1770s, had they chosen…policies of economic stimulus, America’s to which Israel was
founders might not have needed to declare their independence at all.” the second signatory.

10 AMERICAN HISTORY
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Studying Slavery’s Global Reach

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History, Culture and

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1564 and 1870, some (PDF maps available for some of these locations)
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Mississippi (1912) to the renovated structure Pemberton, one of a series of cotton bale
Thomas Jefferson, which housed Fountain’s Big Busy Store, a fortifications placed to stop Federal boats
according to The Delta legend for half-a-century. from making their way down the Delta’s river
Guardian. The estate’s network to Vicksburg in 1863. Deep in the
slave cabins, including Grand Boulevard Tallahatchie’s muddy bottom are the remains
Sally Hemings’ home, Walk or drive across the 1925 Keesler Bridge of the steamship Star of the West, fired on at
and enjoy a mile of century-old oaks lin- Fort Sumter in 1861.
have been renovated;
ing this wide road from the Yazoo to the
the landscaping that Tallahatchie. Laid out across a cottonfield Come visit Greenwood, the perfect place for
previously screened in the early years of the 20th century, Grand all your historical Delta adventures.
the main house from

More his tory per mile

the slave cabins along
Mulberry Row has been
removed; and the upper
floor of the main house
has been furnished and
opened to visitors. A than any other place in Mississippi.
$10 million gift in 2013
from philanthropist #playtime
David Rubenstein to
restore Monticello’s
original appearance
and to “learn the good
and bad of American
history” funded the
renovations. At the #pasttime
May event, Rubenstein
announced another See for yourself the varied and significant sites in this Delta river town:
$10 million donation
the store where the Emmett Till tragedy began; the gravesite of
to further the effort,
known as the bluesman Robert Johnson; Fort Pemberton, a Civil War skirmish site;
Mountaintop Project. and the Museum of the Mississippi Delta, where you’ll find everything
An app, Slavery at from mastodon teeth and Native American trade beads to artifacts from
Monticello: Life & Work Malmaison, home of Choctaw Chief Greenwood Leflore.
on Mulberry Row, was
also released for iOS
and Android devices.
visitgreenwood.com • #travelgreenwood
662-453-9197 • 1-800-748-9064
This project is partially funded by

OCTOBER 2015 13
 american Mosaic

Victory Over Japan: August 15, 1945

On August 14, 1945, just days after the
United States had dropped atom bombs
News of the surrender
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and shortly made GIs in Paris
after the Soviet Union had begun its at- particularly happy.
Now the war was
tack on Manchuria, Emperor Hirohito—
truly over, and they
ruler of an island nation never before wouldn’t be sent to
invaded or defeated—cabled his surren- fight in the Pacific.
der to the United States.

He announced his decision to his subjects on

August 15, acknowledging that continued warfare
with the “new and most cruel bomb” would “result
in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the
Japanese nation” and “lead to the total extinction
of human civilization.” When President Harry
Truman delivered the news of Japan’s surrender to
Americans in a radio address, the country erupted
in celebration. Nearly two weeks later, on September
2, representatives from Japan and the Allied
powers—the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet
Union, China, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and
the Netherlands—met onboard the USS Missouri
in Tokyo Bay to sign the final surrender document.
World War II was officially over.
The war had claimed casualties around the
world, combatants and civilians alike, from the
Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 to the Battle of
Manchuria in 1945. An estimated 50 million people
died during the six-year conflict—about as many
as were killed in the 1918 flu pandemic. The global
war also precipitated the United States’ headlong
rush to become an industrial powerhouse; sparked
unprecedented innovation in weapons systems,
most spectacularly the atom bomb; redefined job
opportunities for women and blacks; and hastened
integration. Topping it all off, the United States,
which had been reluctant to enter a war fought on
distant soils, emerged a global superpower.
BOTH IMAGES: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Americans in New
York’s Little Italy
neighborhood
celebrate Allied
victory.

14 AMERICAN HISTORY
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Dorothy Thompson
Underestimates Hitler

by Peter Carlson

“When I walked into Adolph Hitler’s salon in the Kaiserhof hotel, I was convinced
that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany,” Dorothy Thompson wrote in 1931. “In
something like fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not. It took just about that time to
measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.” >
> When she met Hitler—and wrote that spectacularly wrongheaded assess- cians and Nazi supporters, watching Hitler’s speeches
ment—Thompson was one of America’s most respected foreign correspondents. and reading Mein Kampf, the screed he’d written in
She’d covered European politics for a decade, becoming Berlin bureau chief of the prison. She recognized that he was a “magnificent
New York Post and the Philadelphia Ledger in 1925, the first American woman to propagandist” and “an orator with the tongue of the
run a foreign news bureau. She was also married to novelist Sinclair Lewis, who late [William Jennings] Bryan.” She understood his
had won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1930. political beliefs and described them, accurately, as “a
Thompson was a savvy reporter with a keen eye and a crisp style, and she’d mixture of fascism, racialist philosophy that teaches
been angling for an interview with Hitler since 1923, when he was arrested trying that ‘Aryans’ and especially ‘Nordics’ are created to
STEPHEN KRONINGER

to seize power in the failed “Beer Hall Putsch.” For years, Hitler had shown little rule the earth, anti-semitism and muddled social-
interest in talking to foreign reporters. But in late 1931, when he was widely seen ism.” Thompson was well prepared for the interview,
as Germany’s next leader, he finally agreed to meet with Thompson. but she wasn’t prepared for the man she met, who
The American journalist did her homework, interviewing German politi- seemed so…pathetic.

16 AMERICAN HISTORY

“He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a
caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without
bones,” she wrote. “He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure.
He is the very prototype of the Little Man. A lock of lank hair falls over
an insignificant and slightly retreating forehead. . . .The nose is large, but
badly shaped and without character. His movements are awkward, al-
most undignified and most un-martial. . . .The eyes alone are notable.
Dark gray and hyperthyroid—they have the peculiar shine which often
distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.”
To that unflattering description, she added: “There is something
irritatingly refined about him. I bet he crooks his little finger when he
drinks a cup of tea.”
Thompson looked at Hitler and saw a nonentity, a mere rabble-
rouser incapable of leading a great nation. He didn’t carry himself like
a powerful politician, and he certainly didn’t seem capable of becoming
what many people feared—a future dictator of Germany. He didn’t even
possess the political skill necessary to charm an interviewer.
“The interview was difficult, because
one cannot carry on a conversation with
Adolph Hitler,” she wrote. “He speaks al- ‘I will get into power
ways as though he were addressing a mass
meeting. In personal intercourse he is shy,
legally,’ said Hitler.
almost embarrassed. In every question, ‘I will abolish this
he seeks for a theme that will set him off.
Then his eyes focus in some far corner of
parliament and the
the room; a hysterical note creeps into his Weimar constitution’
voice, which rises sometimes almost to a
scream. He gives the impression of a man
in a trance. He bangs the table.”
His answers were so long-winded that she managed to ask only
three questions. But one of them elicited a candid and frightening reply.
“When you come to power,” she asked, “will you abolish the consti-
tution of the German Republic?”
“I will get into power legally,” he said. “I will abolish this parliament and the
Weimar constitution afterward. I will found an authority-state, from the lowest
cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority
above, discipline and obedience below.”
He was admitting that he planned to create a dictatorship, and she believed he
was telling the truth. But she couldn’t believe that this “Little Man” could actually
succeed in that grandiose goal. “Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade
a sovereign people to vote away their rights.” That idea seemed preposterous to her.
She handicapped his chances in the upcoming election: The possibility that
Hitler’s party would win a majority of seats in the Reichstag was, she said, “un-
likely.” But if no party received a majority, it was “quite possible” that the Nazis
could win enough seats to bring Hitler to power in a coalition with centrist parties.
“But it is highly improbable that in this case he will succeed in putting through
any of his more radical plans.”
As she interviewed Hitler, she pictured him trying to outmaneuver the skilled
politicians who would be part of his ruling coalition. “Oh, Adolph! Adolph!” she
thought. “You will be out of luck!”
Hitler is a mere “drummer boy,” she wrote, and “Hitler in a coalition with the
Center will be working with statesmen who are not drummer boys but experi-
enced realists. And it is a great deal easier to organize revolts than it is to rule. I
predict that Hitler will be extinguished.”
ENCOUNTER
Thompson’s article—“I Saw Hitler!”—appeared
in the March 1932 issue of Cosmopolitan, which was
then a serious magazine, not a purveyor of sex tips
for young women. The article was quickly reprinted
in a short book with the same title. Readers of either
version came away thinking that the much-hyped
demagogue was too peculiar to be a threat to Ger-
many, much less to the United States.
Obviously, Thompson had badly underestimat-
ed Hitler. Within a year of her
article’s publication, he’d taken
power and begun to crush his
opponents, persecute Jews and
build a war machine. Recogniz-
ing that she’d made an egregious
error, Thompson wrote article
after article exposing Hitler’s
brutality. “It must be said, it
must be re-iterated,” she wrote,
“that there has been and still is
a widespread terror, which extends throughout the
whole of Germany.”
One day in the summer of 1934, Thompson was
in her room in Berlin’s Adlon Hotel, when she re-
ceived a call from the front desk: “Madam, there is a
gentleman here from the state secret police.”
“Send him up,” Thompson said.
The policeman handed her an order command-
ing her to leave Germany within 48 hours. It was Hit-
ler’s first expulsion of a foreign reporter and it made
front-page news around the world.
“Nearly the entire corps of American and British
correspondents went to the railroad station to see her
off,” the New York Times reported. “They gave her a
bunch of American Beauty roses as a token of their
affection and esteem.”
Thompson framed Hitler’s expulsion order and
displayed it proudly in her office. The expulsion
made her a media superstar. The New York Herald
Tribune hired her to write a thrice-weekly column
that was syndicated to more than 100 newspapers.
She also wrote a monthly column for Ladies’ Home
Journal and appeared regularly on NBC radio. In
every medium, she denounced the Nazis, demanded
that America open its borders to German refugees
and supported the creation of a Jewish state in Pales-
tine. In 1939 Time magazine published a cover story
on Thompson, proclaiming that the journalist and
first lady Eleanor Roosevelt “are undoubtedly the
most influential women in the U.S.” +
OCTOBER 2015 17
Aviation pioneers
Wilbur (left) and
Orville Wright
and their most
recent biographer,
David McCullough
(below).

Author David McCullough has produced some

of the most celebrated biographies in recent history.
For half a century, he’s brought the past to life, intro-
ducing readers to topics that range from the Ameri-
can Revolution to the Johnstown Flood to Harry
Truman. In his latest book, The Wright Brothers
(Simon & Schuster), McCullough offers an elegant-
ly crafted portrait of the two men at the forefront
of human flight. The Pulitzer Prize–winning biog-
rapher combed through a thousand pages of letters
and diaries, and traveled from Ohio to Kitty Hawk,
N.C., to Le Mans, France, to show readers the real
Orville and Wilbur Wright and relate what their
story can teach us about faith and determination.

The Wright Stuff What was it about the Wright brothers that attracted you as a writer?
This year, it’ll be 50 years since I began work on my first book, The Johnstown
Flood. It received a positive reaction from readers, and I was immediately ap-
by Michael G. Williams proached by two different publishers who wanted me to write about the Chicago
fire and the San Francisco earthquake.
Well, I thought to myself, I’m being typecast already, and I’ve only written
one book. I didn’t want to be “Bad News McCullough.” So I decided that my next
book would focus on a symbol of affirmation.
One day while out to lunch with a few friends, the discussion turned to the
challenges [Washington] Roebling faced in building the Brooklyn Bridge. I said,

18 AMERICAN HISTORY

“That’s it! That’s my next book.” Ever since, all of my
books have been about affirmation, about hardship
overcome through determination and strength of
character.
The Wright brothers had character in abun-
dance. Wilbur was unquestionably a genius, and Or-
ville was a brilliant innovator. They worked hard as
hell. Theirs is the kind of story I love to tell.
Their strength of character certainly comes
through in the book.
They were incredibly determined and possessed
a will to succeed. They had no formal training, no
financial backers, no inside connections. Their
achievements were the product of pure grit and hard
work. This started with their upbringing, which is
something I believe has tremendous influence over
how a person turns out. The home environment that
the Wright brothers enjoyed is part of the bedrock
of their story and their success. Their father’s insis-
tence that they read, that they learn the values of
honesty, modesty and determination, and his un-
dying faith in their ability to succeed had a hand in
their accomplishment.
Did you come across anything in your re-
search that surprised you?
Yes, I was impressed by how superbly educated
they were in the liberal arts even though they never
finished high school. Their range in reading and
their ability to use the English language creatively
and effectively were remarkable.
There was a wonderful interview that Orville
once did. The reporter asked him if he agreed with
so many Americans who felt that he and his brother
were ideal examples of how far an American could
rise without having any advantages in childhood.
Orville was a little put out by that statement and re-
plied that it wasn’t true. He told the reporter that he
and his brother had the greatest advantage that any-
one could hope for in childhood: They grew up in a
family that encouraged intellectual curiosity.
OPPOSITE TOP: © MYLAM/ALAMY, BOTTOM: WILLIAM B. MCCULLOUGH; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
They lived in a house that had no running
water, no electricity and no telephone, but they had
an ample supply of books—and good books, at that.
Books that weren’t easy to read.
Wilbur and Orville were very sophisticated,
highly cultivated.
Speaking of cultivation, the hockey stick inci-
dent was a remarkable twist of fate in Wilbur’s life
and, as it turned out, for the world, too.
Isn’t that incredible? In each of my books, I’ve
discovered something that wasn’t known previously.
The thrill that goes with something like that is hard
to put into words. It really lifts you out of your chair.
As a teenager, Wilbur was struck in the face with
interview
a hockey stick and badly injured. He became something of a recluse after that,
and certainly it put an end to any talk of him going to Yale. Instead, he stayed
home and read constantly, voraciously, most importantly, about flight. That was
the seed that would ultimately become the airplane.
Reading in [their father’s] diary about who was wielding the hockey stick—a
troubled man named Oliver Haugh—was a big break in the detective work.
What seemed to be one of the worst things to ever happen to any of the Wrights
The first flight at
Kitty Hawk, N.C.,
December 17,
1903, was piloted
by Orville Wright,
lying prone on the
plane’s lower wing.
caused a swerve in their lives that was immensely beneficial to the world. It’s a
marvelous example of how truth can be both stranger than fiction and at times
more powerful in its effect. History is made of chance encounters and lucky breaks.
What might have become of the brothers had this not occurred?
My guess is Wilbur would have gone to Yale and then on to become a dis-
tinguished professor of art history or architecture. He hints at that in his letters
to his father, speaking of how an intellectual life in education was his inevitable
destiny. When he was in France for flight demonstrations, he often visited the
cathedrals and the Louvre. As his letters illustrate, he was very insightful in his
perception and interpretation of art. He was incredibly sophisticated, and yet for
years, people have dismissed him as a simple bicycle mechanic.
And Orville?
Orville would have done well at just about anything. He may have done
something with automobiles, which he loved, or any number of other fields where
his mechanical abilities would have shone.
What do you hope readers will take away from this story?
Reassurance that there is a spirit of innovation and accomplishment in
America that will and must continue. If you ever think you don’t have sufficient
advantages to make the most of your life, look to the Wright brothers. They’re
infinitely inspiring not just in their work ethic, but also their great modesty in the
wake of such momentous accomplishments.
This is a great American story. It’s a great human story. +
OCTOBER 2015 19
 Adventurer, author
and advocate for
suffrage: Fanny
Bullock Workman,
circa 1900.

Peak Pioneer
by Sarah Richardson

“How I hated that leap in the dark across the four or five feet of invisible space,
but it had to be done, so taking the plunge I landed on the ice-slant where the
guide stood,” wrote Fanny Bullock Workman in 1910 about climbing in the Hima-
layas. Workman and her husband, William, were an indefatigable, adventuring
power couple and the first Americans to break into the European-dominated sport
of mountain climbing. >
> Inherited wealth allowed them to bike and in the Eastern Himalayas, the 47-year-old Fanny
climb their way across Europe, and they eventu- climbed the 22,735-foot Pinnacle Peak, setting
ally found themselves enthralled with the Himala- a record for a woman’s ascent that would not be
yas, then as now among the most remote regions broken until 1934. Throughout her travels, she
on Earth. The couple alternated responsibilities noted the poor treatment of women; a memora-
each year: One planned logistics, the other han- ble photograph shows her atop Silver Throne Pla-
dled the recordkeeping and observations. Fanny teau in the Himalayas in 1913 holding a newspaper
proved a remarkable adventurer in her own right. with the headline VOTES FOR WOMEN. In 1912 the
BOTH IMAGES: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

She climbed in woolen skirts and was intent on
improving scientific documentation of altitudes
and terrains. Her slow, deliberate style proved
an unexpected advantage because it allowed her
to acclimate fully to higher elevations and avoid
altitude sickness. In 1906, when the Workmans
became the first Westerners to explore a region
Workmans turned to lecturing and writing. Fanny
long nurtured an interest in women’s education
and ancient cultures. When she died in 1925 she
left a bequest to four women’s colleges including
Bryn Mawr, which to this day offers a Fanny Bull-
ock Workman Travel Fellowship for doctoral stu-
dents in archaeology or art history. +

20 AMERICAN HISTORY
 Cameo

At 21,000 feet
Workman touts
women’s rights in a
photo from her book
Two Summers in the
Ice-Wilds of Eastern
Karakoram.
Hallelujah
Franco Harris’ “Immaculate Reception”
of a pass led to the winning touchdown
for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 1972
divisional championship game.

America’s
Game: A Clash
of Titans and
the Voice of God
by Allen Barra

NFL Films, the world’s most influential sports

film production company, got its start on a cold
winter day. On December 30, 1962, an overcoat
salesman from Philadelphia named Ed Sabol and a
handful of crew members, including his 20-year-old
son, Steve, hauled a few film cameras onto the fro-
zen tundra of Yankee Stadium. They were there to
record the National Football League championship
game between the Green Bay Packers and the New
York Giants—and make a highlight film. >

Steve Sabol (left) and
his father, Ed, prep
for Super Bowl XXV in
Tampa, Fla., 1991.
> Sabol had bid $3,000 to acquire the right for his company, Blair Motion Pic-
tures, to film the game. (He had to put up an additional $2,000 to cover produc-
tion costs.) His audition tape for NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle had been a prep
school game featuring his son, recorded on a hand-held Bell and Howell camera.
Against the odds, Rozelle was impressed. Sabol had zeroed in on the action and
captured the human drama of the game, from the anxious looks of parents to the
eagerness in the eyes of players. That uncanny instinct for drama would serve
the Sabols well in the years ahead—and their timing could not have been better:
In 1962 the NFL was on the verge of becoming the most popular TV attraction in
American sports.
Fifty years later, in spring 2012, the Sabols recalled their first professional
game and the resulting film, The Longest Day. The film was never one of Ed’s

22 AMERICAN HISTORY
 GAME ON
favorites. It was “too crude,” he said. “We were feeling our way.” But Rozelle liked
what he saw. He envisioned highlight films as a way to promote the NFL and
asked each team to invest $20,000 in Blair Motion Pictures. And with that, the
company that in 1964 would become NFL Films was born.
Today, NFL Films is a multibillion dollar operation, according to Inc. maga-
zine, with swanky corporate headquarters in Mt. Laurel, N.J. Actual games, live Roger the
and televised, drive the business of professional football—but NFL Films creates Dodger
and guards the sport’s legacy. The Sabols introduced millions of people to a game Hall of Fame
they’d never watched before and, in doing so, established an American tradition. quarterback
The company films every NFL game for a variety of broadcast products: high- Roger Staubach
light films for every team, highlight segments for NFL.com and the NFL Network, won two Super
a special edition of the Super Bowl and specialized programs such as team his- Bowls with the
tories and player biographies. In addition, NFL Films produces weekly series such Dallas Cowboys.
as Hard Knocks, about team training camps. The objective, as Steve Sabol once
said, is “to bring a new understanding and perspective to something that’s already
been seen.” The company’s 200,000-square-foot climate-controlled facilities ar-
chive more than 100 million feet of film, covering every game played since 1962.
The Sabols thought of themselves not just as cameramen but as storytellers.
Anyone who has watched one of their game replays knows the company’s dis-
tinctively compelling approach—the majestic tone of the narration, the close-up
emotions of players and coaches, the slow-motion beauty of collisions, and key
plays shown from different angles, all accompanied by the throbbing urgency of
orchestral music. The films turn mere game highlights into a gladiatorial contest.
The company has collected nearly 120 Emmy Awards for writing, producing, cin-
ematography and editing—Steve alone won 35—and sports production compa-
nies all over the world now emulate the NFL Films style.
Ed Sabol was raised in West Philadelphia and attended Blair Academy in
Blairstown, N.J., where he lettered in football, track and swimming. Sports was Sky High
one of the two great loves of his life; the other was show business. At age 20 he San Francisco
won a small role in a Ritz Brothers stage show and then a part in Oscar Hammer- 49ers wide
stein’s Where Do We Go From Here? on Broadway. Two days after the Japanese receiver Dwight
bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, he volunteered for the Army. He missed the Nor- Clark makes “The
mandy invasion but saw action later in the campaign. By the late 1950s, Ed was Catch,” the key
married, with a family, and selling overcoats to support it. to victory over the
Steve graduated from the prestigious Haverford School and won a football Dallas Cowboys
scholarship to Colorado College after inventing a past for himself. He told local in 1982.
sportswriters he was from the town of Possum Trot, Miss., where he was known
as “Sudden Death” Sabol. “I didn’t think they would take me seriously as a football
player if they knew I was a Jewish kid from the Philadelphia area,” he said. But he Dwight Clark’s fingertip snare of a Joe Montana pass
contracted hepatitis as a sophomore, and his football career was over. in the 1982 NFC championship game was simply
He returned home in time to play a significant role in his father’s new com- described as “The Catch.” It was Sabol who dubbed
pany, which had been jumpstarted by the film of Steve’s prep school game. The Green Bay’s dramatic victory over Dallas in subzero
Sabols’ best move may have been hiring a Philadelphia news anchor named John temperatures in the 1967 NFL championship game
Facenda to narrate their films. His portentous baritone, combined with the visual as the “Ice Bowl.” And Sabol was the first to call the
OPPOSITE, BOTH IMAGES: AP; LEFT: AP; RIGHT: DIAMOND IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES

effects, quickly made the NFL Films replays a must-see. Morgan Freeman, Brad
Pitt and other actors have narrated weekly highlights and biographies of great
players such as Johnny Unitas and Dick Butkus, but it was Facenda’s “voice of
God,” as one pundit dubbed it, that helped to establish the identity of NFL Films.
So, of course, did Steve Sabol, the do-everything man who served as NFL
Films president from 1972 until his death in 2012. For nearly 35 years he wrote
many of the scripts. His prose style—Rudyard Kipling by way of Grantland Rice
with a nod to Hemingway—shaped our perceptions of pro football’s golden age.
Of legendary Packer coach Vince Lombardi, Sabol wrote: “A certain magic still
lingers in the very name. It speaks of duels in the snow, in the cold November
mud.” Of Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach: “His passion was foot-
ball. His obsession was winning. A championship was his destiny.”
Sabol also helped to define pro football’s most famous plays and memorable
games. He dubbed Franco Harris’ grab of a deflected pass and run for a touch-
down in the 1972 AFC divisional championship the “Immaculate Reception.”
Dallas Cowboys “America’s Team.”
In 2011 Ed was inducted into the Pro Football
Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. He attended the cere-
mony in a motorized wheelchair. Steve Sabol, under
treatment for a brain tumor, introduced him with a
video he had made with his father—it was their last
film. Steve passed away the next year at age 69. Ed
died this past February at age 98. The company and
the sport they left behind continue to flourish. Broad-
caster Bob Costas, a longtime friend of the Sabols,
summed up their achievement: “In half a century,
pro football went from just another game to Ameri-
ca’s game. [The NFL] can thank Ed and Steve Sabol
for showing us how to watch it, understand it, appre-
ciate it—and love it.” +

OCTOBER 2015 23
Are the
United States
and Cuba
Too Close
for Comfort?
by Richard Brookhiser
In April President Obama shook hands with Raul Castro, president of communist
Cuba, at the Summit of the Americas in Panama. The two later sat down for a discus-
sion—the first such meeting between American and Cuban leaders since the revolution
led by Raul’s older brother Fidel in 1959. Days after the Panama summit, the White House
announced that the State Department would remove Cuba from its list of state sponsors
of terrorism. >
> President Obama explained that he was trying to surmount a troubled past.
“I’m not interested in having battles that, frankly, started before I was born,” he
said. Obama might not be interested in them, but battles over Cuba have run
through American history for almost 200 years. For most of that time the United
States favored Cuban independence, so long as Cuba was stable and friendly. Yet
numerous invasions of Cuba have been launched from American soil—by private
adventurers, disgruntled Cubans and the U.S. government itself—and Cuba has
been occupied several times by American troops. Cuba, the closest Caribbean is-
land to the United States, may be too close for comfort.
24 AMERICAN HISTORY
Cuba pleads with
Uncle Sam to stay in
the country in 1899,
promising abundant
trade goods in return
for U.S. protection.
Columbus claimed Cuba in 1492, the first building
block of Spain’s New World empire. But by the early
1820s most of Spain’s possessions had won their in-
dependence. What would become of Cuba? In a letter
to President James Monroe in 1823, Thomas Jefferson
said he considered the island “the most interesting
addition which could ever be made to our system of
States.” Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Ad-
ams, agreed: “There are laws of political as well as of

physical gravitation. . . .Disjoined from its own unnatural connection with
Spain, [Cuba] can gravitate only towards the North American Union.”
These early designs on Cuba became entangled with the politics
of slavery. Southerners coveted Cuba as a potential slave state. Some
Cuban sugar planters, fearful that a weak Spain might succumb to abo-
litionist pressure from Britain, were willing to be annexed by a stronger
slaveholding power. But the U.S. government was worried about vio-
lent upheaval in Cuba—in the chaos of a pro-American revolution or
an invasion, local slaves might rise up as they had in Haiti in 1791—so
Democratic presidents from Polk to Buchanan tried instead to buy it,
offering Spain as much as $130 million.
Reckless souls in both the United States and Cuba nevertheless
hoped to settle Cuba’s future by force. Narciso Lopez, a rebellious
Spanish general, plotted a private invasion of the island by Cuban
and American adventurers—an action known in the early 19th centu-
ry as filibustering. (The meaning of “filibuster” as a long, obstructive
speech is a later one.) Lopez offered the command to three veterans
of the Mexican War: Robert E. Lee, Mississippi sen-
ator Jefferson Davis and Mississippi governor John
Quitman. When they refused, he led the operation
himself. In 1851 loyal Spaniards captured him west
of Havana, and he was executed. All that remains of
his efforts is the flag he designed—a visual riff on Old
Glory with a white star in a red triangle, and blue and
white stripes—which flies over Cuba to this day.
The United States remained interested in Cuba
after the Civil War. Cuban patriots, backed by exiles in New York,
launched a war of independence in 1868. President Ulysses Grant of-
fered to pay Spain $100 million to let Cuba go free; Spain countered
by asking for $125 million. Nothing came of the negotiation because
American sympathies were mixed: Both sides in the war were committing atroci-
ties, and the Cuban rebels had no clear policy on slavery (some were abolitionists,
others were slave owners). Grant was also distracted by a vain effort to annex the
Dominican Republic as a home for American freedmen. The Cuban war dragged
on until 1878 and ended with Spain still in charge.
Cuban patriots rebelled again in 1895, supported by exiles in New York and
Tampa. Slavery was no longer an issue; Spain had abolished it in 1886. The new
rebels were welcomed by a new breed of American expansionist led by Senator
Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts; Lodge’s former teacher, the historian Hen-
ry Adams; and Theodore Roosevelt, who became assistant secretary of the Navy
in 1896. The expansionists wanted secure approaches to a Central American ca-
nal. That, they believed, meant ending incompetent and despotic Spanish rule in
Cuba. “Our own direct interests” in Cuba “were great,” as Roosevelt put it. “But
even greater were our interests from the standpoint of humanity.” President Wil-
liam McKinley tried, like Grant, to buy Cuba’s freedom, offering as much as $300
OPPOSITE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; © MICROSTOCK EUROPE/ALAMY
million. But in February 1898 the USS Maine blew up in Havana Harbor, killing
more than 260 sailors. Blaming the explosion on Spanish sabotage (a 1974 Navy
study concluded that the explosion was accidental), an enraged America declared
war in April; Cuba was conquered by August.
The United States did not intend to stay. Its declaration of war had been ac-
companied by an amendment promising self-rule to Cuba, and American troops
left in 1902. But it also wanted self-rule to be orderly—and, given the nature of
Cuban politics, that seemed to require frequent intervention. Theodore Roosevelt,
DÉjÀ vu
now president, sent troops back to Cuba after a 1906
revolution. His cousin Franklin, president in 1933,
foreswore big-stick diplomacy, promising instead to
be a good neighbor to Cuba and other Latin American
countries. Yet even FDR’s ambassadors massaged a
series of Cuban revolutions until a government ac-
ceptable to the United States came to power.
Cuban politics stabilized around two dictators.
Fulgencio Batista, a leader of the military coup that
deposed the government in 1933, was in and out of
office until 1959. Batista was first elected with the
support of Cuba’s Communist Party,
though he soon became pro-Ameri-
can. Fidel Castro was a radical ac-
tivist who drove Batista from power.
Castro initially denied that he was
anti-American or a communist, but
a year after coming to power, he
gave Anastas Mikoyan, deputy pre-
mier of the Soviet Union, a hero’s
welcome in Havana. President Dwight Eisenhow-
er authorized a CIA plan to train Cuban exiles, and
in 1961 the CIA landed 1,400 of them at Cuba’s Bay
of Pigs. The United States did not give these green
troops air cover, however, and Castro’s army mopped
them up. Cuban-American relations for the next 30
years were subsumed in the Cold War.
And now? The Cold War ended with the fall of the
Soviet Union in 1991, but the Castro regime marches
on. In 2008, 81-year-old Fidel was succeeded as presi-
dent by his younger brother Raul. Among modern po-
litical dynasties, only the Kim family of North Korea
has ruled longer, and they span three generations.
Obama has opened a new chapter in Cuban-
American relations, but not necessarily the final one.
As has been true since the days of Narciso Lopez, the
government of Cuba has powerful American critics.
Three senators who blasted Obama’s rapproche-
ment—Robert Menendez, D-N.J.; Marco Rubio, R-Fla.;
and Ted Cruz, R-Texas—have Cuban roots: Menen-
dez’s and Rubio’s parents and Cruz’s father all fled
Cuba for the United States in the 1950s. Both Rubio
and Cruz hope to succeed Obama in the White House.
John Quincy Adams was right: The North Ameri-
can Union exerts a powerful pull on its island neigh-
bor. But the goals of Cuban independence and
stability as the United States defines them do not
always align. America intervenes in Cuban affairs,
often ham-handedly, which provokes Cuban resent-
ment—virulent in the case of the Castro brothers.
Solid Cuban-American friendship seems as elusive
as Cuban freedom. ★
OCTOBER 2015 25
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 editor’s note

Who’ll Stop
the Rain?
M other Nature has a way to let us all know who is really in charge. Humankind has
managed to harness natural elements to create cataclysmic weapons that can lay waste to a city in the
blink of an eye, and has ignorantly befouled the global environment on such a grand scale as to threaten
our existence—but nature still trumps all when it comes to unleashing disasters.
Warnings about climate change are approaching critical mass and the recent scientific-religious
nexus provided by Pope Francis in his explosive June encyclical, which declared “the poor and the
Earth are shouting” for “urgent action,” may spell doom for any residual credibility of the deniers. The
precise connection between manmade climate change and specific weather events remains unclear, but
it is widely believed the frequency and severity of extreme weather will be heightened with rising global
temperatures. The International Energy Agency has set a minimum goal of keeping warming to no
more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But the agency recently reported that current
pledges by nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions would fail to meet that standard. Beyond
that threshold, scientists believe the impact of climate change could become
increasingly severe.
While national policies can affect climate change, no amount of
superpower might can divert a tropical depression, halt the earth’s
plates from shifting, fend off a blizzard, calm the fiery bowels of volcanic
mountains, start—or stop—the rain. Disaster happens. In the course of its
history, the United States has had its share of catastrophes.
In this Great Disaster issue, we focus on the worst of the worst. The
single deadliest natural disaster in American history was the Galveston
hurricane of 1900. As meteorologist and Today show host Al Roker
explains in an excerpt from his new book The Storm of the Century, the
epically powerful storm was made even more deadly by human error
Hurricane Rita, the and chauvinistic arrogance. In the survey of disasters that follows, eyewitness accounts bring the
strongest storm human drama to the fore, from the blizzard that buried New York in 1888 and the flood that wiped out
ever recorded in Johnstown in 1889 to San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, the 20th-century’s most explosive volcanic
the Gulf of Mexico, eruption in 1912 and the drought-induced Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
struck the Texas- The silver lining to be found in the dark clouds of disaster is the scientific innovations that have
Louisiana border on greatly enhanced our knowledge of nature’s ways, leading to better monitoring and predictive abilities
September 24, 2005. and architectural standards that have saved, and will continue to save, countless lives of people caught
in the path of nature’s wrath.
—Roger L. Vance
© WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE/ALAMY

OCTOBER 2015 27
The world turned
upside down in
Galveston, Texas,
when a Category 4
hurricane struck on
September 8, 1900.

28 AMERICAN HISTORY
 Blown
In 1900 a monster hurricane
Away
devastated Galveston, Texas, but as
meteorologist Al Roker reveals in his
new book, politics and ego at the national
Weather Bureau helped make the storm
the deadliest in American history

From the forthcoming book The Storm of the Century: Tragedy, Heroism,
Survival, and the Epic True Story of America’s Deadliest Disaster, the Great
Gulf Hurricane of 1900, by Al Roker. © 2015 by Al Roker. To be published
August 11, 2015, by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Reprinted by permission.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
L Comfort?
ocated on a narrow island that separates Galveston Bay from the Gulf
of Mexico, Galveston, Texas, in 1900 was a prosperous port of 37,000. Residents had
bragging rights to a number of Texas firsts: the first medical college in the state, the first
electric lights and streetcars and the first public library all belonged to their city. Its
illustrious past seemed to bode well for its future—until the deadliest hurricane in U.S.
history changed things forever. >
> On Wednesday, September 5, 1900, the Galves- least 10,000 lives. The unnamed storm is still the
ton Daily News ran a tiny, 27-word squib in its weather deadliest in American history.
section: A tropical disturbance was moving over west- Accurate long-range tracking of hurricanes was
The 220-foot-tall bell ern Cuba and heading for the south Florida coast. The hard to come by in 1900. But Moore’s notice was so
tower of St. Patrick’s notice was datelined “Washington, D.C.,” September 4. wrong—about the nature of the storm and its direc-
Catholic Church It was simply signed “Moore.” That was Willis Moore, tion—that it seems to suggest both meteorology and
collapsed during the director of the United States Weather Bureau. international communications remained in a primi-
storm, destroying the Three days later, with no official warning, a Cat- tive state. Nobody, one might assume, knew anything
building. egory 4 hurricane leveled Galveston and claimed at in advance about the hurricane’s strength or track.

30 AMERICAN HISTORY
 But that’s far from the truth. As early as Mon- Stunned survivors
day, September 3, the storm was being observed by search the wreckage
meteorologists in Cuba. They were perhaps the best of their homes for
in the world at assessing and predicting the tracks of anything the storm
hurricanes, and they knew the storm had grown into left behind.
an unmistakably violent one headed for the Texas
Gulf Coast. Why didn’t the U.S. Weather Bureau know
that? The grim answer to that question had to do with
a highly problematic relationship between the United
States and Cuba following the Spanish-American War.
Cuban revolutionaries, assisted by the United
States, had won independence from Spain in 1898.
Yet in September 1900, the U.S. government still ad-
ministered the island, and within the U.S. Weather
Bureau, which had stations in the Caribbean, resent-
ment and disdain for Cuban forecasting had become
entrenched.
Meteorology, like much other science in Cuba,
was the province of Jesuit priests. The Belen Obser-
vatory, founded by Father Benito Viñes in Havana in
1858, was perhaps the most advanced in the world.
An extension of a Jesuit preparatory school, the ob-
servatory benefited from the long Jesuitical tradition
of inquiry, experimentation, publishing and teaching.
There couldn’t have been a better place to learn
how to forecast bad weather than Havana. Its tropi-
cal vegetation, wrought-iron balconies and painted
stucco houses were routinely subjected to torrential
downpours and violent wind. One year, a hurricane
removed the observatory’s entire zinc roof.
Father Viñes hoped not only to advance meteoro-
logical science but also to aid humankind. He soon
made the small Havana observatory the hub of a fore-
casting network for the entire Caribbean Sea. He filled But not all forms of cirrostratus cloud signal the approach of a distant hur-
a storm notebook with descriptions of clouds, cross- ricane. The clouds must come in plumiform shape; that is, they appear to spread
referenced to instrument readings. He jotted down across the sky, fanning upward in plumes that seem to be reaching out from a
snippets of conversations with ship captains. He central point. The bottoms of these elongations, Viñes further deduced, point di-
brought in telegraph reports and newspaper clippings. rectly at the eye of the hurricane that produces them.
From these data, Viñes created a system for So now you also know the direction from which the hurricane is coming.
understanding storm formation and making pre- Using those theories, Father Viñes built a model by which meteorologists
dictions. He published it all in newspapers so that or- could accurately ascertain that a hurricane had formed, calculate roughly how
dinary people could understand and respond. But his far away it was, gauge how fast it was moving and even closely track its path.
real genius lay in interpreting the meaning of cloud Soon he had a telegraphic network of storm observers working the entire Ca-
formations and how they related to hurricanes: cirro- ribbean, integrating reports from every kind of colonial and independent gov-
stratus clouds and their plumiform type in particular. ernment: Spanish, British, French, Danish, Dutch, Dominican, Venezuelan and
Cirrostratus are high, gauzy clouds composed of American. Everything about Caribbean weather went through Father Viñes in
ice crystals. They give a kind of cover through which Havana and traveled through telegraph weather networks in which the United
a haloed moon may be seen or from which hazy sun- States also participated.
shine emanates. Viñes realized that hurricanes tend

A
to produce these cirrostratus clouds—but only on the
outer edges of a system. He began to suspect that those
clouds are created by winds flowing off a hurricane
system miles high. So if you were to see cirrostratus t the U.S. Weather Bureau in Washington, D.C., director Willis Moore
clouds in the tropics, Father Viñes deduced, you might made squelching Cuban forecasting one of the most important reforms he brought
BOTH IMAGES: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

really be seeing the farthest outer edge of a hurricane,
which you wouldn’t otherwise have any idea was out
there. Because hurricanes are so massive—hundreds
of miles across—the far outer edge may lie many days’
travel away from the storm’s deadly eye.
You know a hurricane is coming. And you still
have time to act.
to the office. The bureau had been established as part of the U.S. Army’s Signal
Corps in 1870; when Moore took it over in 1895, he was determined to make it
a model of efficiency. Perhaps most important, he tightened the rules concern-
ing local forecasting—especially regarding storm warnings. Moore believed local
weathermen had been over-warning the public. There was a tendency to sow
panic. It created an unhappy impression that the bureau was not fully in control.
From now on, all storm warnings would come from Moore at his hub in Washing-

OCTOBER 2015 31
 >
N
PROJECTED
HURRICANE
PATH

New Orleans
Galveston
AT L A N T IC
OCEAN

Miami
GULF OF
MEXICO
Havana

Galveston
Bay CUBA
High
Island
GALVESTON Texas Bolivar
COUNTY City Peninsula

ENTRANCE TO
GALVESTON BAY CARIBBEAN
SEA
Galveston
0 250 500
mil es mil e s

GREAT
GALVESTON TROPICAL TROPICAL CATEGORY CATEGORY CATEGORY CATEGORY CATEGORY
1 2 3 4 5
HURRICANE DEPRESSION
<39 MPH
STORM
39-73 MPH 74-95 MPH 96-110 MPH 111-130 MPH 131-155 MPH 156+ MPH

On September 6 the ton. The local weathermen would cable regular tem-
storm passed through perature, atmosphere and wind condition reports to
the Florida Straits the central office, where clerks aggregated the morn-
and into the Gulf of ing data into a national weather map, which was then
Mexico. The warm telegraphed back to each station. It was for Washing-
Gulf water fed the ton, not for local weathermen, to determine what was
storm as it steadily going on locally.
intensified into the And for fear of panicking local populations,
Category 4 monster Moore banned certain words from all official weather
that struck Galveston reports: “Tornado.” And “cyclone.” And “hurricane.”
on September 8. Moore also assigned Colonel Henry Harrison
Chase Dunwoody, an officer in the old Signal Corps,
to the bureau’s Caribbean weather station. Colonel
Dunwoody had made his name by scoffing at the
value of meteorological science in making predic-
tions, especially when it came to hurricanes. The
source, progress and ultimate course of a hurricane
might as well be, according to Dunwoody, “a matter
of divination.” To the Americans, Cuban forecasts
seemed hysterical, despite their extraordinary his-
tory of accuracy. The superstitious lore of a back-
ward people, the bureau believed, lacked the Yankee
grit and know-how that was making America a great
leader on the world stage.
So Moore and Dunwoody appointed one of their
own to assert a big, strong, guiding American presence
in Cuban forecasting: William B. Stockman, a veter-
an of the bureau going back to the Signal Corps days.
Stockman set up shop in Havana and took charge of
all the U.S. weather stations in the region. In one of his
early reports, Stockman simply eradicated the entire
history of the Cuban weather networks. He told Moore
that Cubans had never heard of forecasting. The locals
were “very very conservative,” Stockman reported,
“and forecasting the approach of storms…was a most
radical change.” It was especially important, Stockman
advised, that the bureau not be guilty of causing “un-
necessary alarm among the natives.”
And there was yet another problem with the
Cuban weathermen. The Havana observatory, Stock-
man claimed, had been secretly piggybacking on U.S.
reports. Agents in the bureau’s New Orleans station
nabbed copies of the daily weather maps coming out
of Washington, then sent the U.S. maps by undersea
telegraph to Havana. Such shifty shenanigans al-
lowed the Cubans, as Dunwoody put it, “to compete
with this service.”
In other words, the Cubans never got things

32 AMERICAN HISTORY
 right, but when they did, it was because they stole
U.S. data. Having pinched good reports, the Cuban
forecasters whipped a silly, uneducated, overemo- Willis Moore (left)
tional population into frenzy with overblown warn- publicly maintained
ings of monster storms. that his Weather
Bureau had accurately

I
predicted the course
of the 1900 storm and
issued appropriate
n late August 1900, Moore decided to deal once warnings. “Dead
and for all with the Cuban annoyances. Hurricane gangs” (below) found
season was well underway. This was the perfect time, far too many bodies
Moore calculated, to shut down all communication be- to bury. Funeral
tween Cuban weathermen and the people of the Unit- pyres blazed across
ed States. It would take some string pulling. Fortunately Galveston for weeks.
for Moore, the U.S. War Department controlled all of
Cuba’s government-owned telegraph lines. Those were
the same lines over which Father Viñes had established
his fabled hurricane-warning system for the entire re-
gion. The War Department responded quickly to the a big halo around the moon. The halo did not dissipate. At dawn, the sky turned
Weather Bureau’s request to formally ban from those red—deep red—and “cirrus clouds,” Gangoite said later, “were moving from the
lines all messages referring to weather. west by north and northwest by north, with a focus on those same points.” To him
But Moore went further and banned direct com- that meant the storm had transformed drastically: It had gained intensity; it had
munication between the U.S. Weather Bureau’s office gained structure; and prevailing winds were pushing it northwest. Following Fa-
in Havana and the office in New Orleans. Havana ther Viñes’ model, Father Gangoite thought he could tell exactly where the storm
would report directly to Washington, and Washington was going: the Texas Gulf Coast.
would decide what information to give New Orleans There was nothing Father Gangoite could do. Willis Moore had blocked the
and the rest of the Gulf Coast. forecast. But he couldn’t stop the hurricane.
Moore even reached out to Western
Union, the commercial telegraph company.
He couldn’t demand that Western Union
censor private weather-related messages,
but he could ask the company to manage
what a later age would call bandwidth. He
requested first priority for U.S. Weather
Bureau transmissions. Next would come
any non-weather-related messages. Cuban
weather messages were to get the lowest
priority. Western Union showed a patriotic
willingness to cooperate. Any private tele-
grams from Cuba to the United States re-
garding weather would be slowed, bumped
or, Moore hoped, discarded. His blackout of
Cuba was almost total.
On Monday, September 3, Father Lo-
renzo Gangoite, who had succeeded Father
Viñes in Havana, observed a new storm.
He saw that it was changing fast, twirling
on its own axis as it zoomed across the
TOP: NOAA PHOTO LIBRARY, BOTTOM: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

spinning Earth—yet it hadn’t formed that

perfect, and perfectly deadly, spiral that we
associate with a hurricane. There wasn’t yet
an eye of low pressure at the system’s cen-
ter. Its winds, while hard and rough, still did
not reach above 60 mph.
The storm nevertheless already had
the power to knock down buildings and
wash away train tracks on Cuba and
other islands. Late Wednesday night,
September 5, Father Gangoite observed
‘First news from Galveston just
received by train, which could
get no closer to the bay shore
than six miles. . . .Large steamer
stranded two miles inland’
—G.L. Vaughan, Western Union manager
at Houston, September 10, 1900

Two-thirds of
Galveston’s buildings
were destroyed, and
the rest were badly
damaged. Cleanup
and recovery efforts
continued for months.
 A t 6 a.m. Thursday, September 6, the peo-
ple of Galveston, Texas, were looking forward to the
weekend and hoping for relief from the heat. Every-
thing certainly looked fine—if still and humid—when
Joseph Cline, the Weather Bureau’s chief Galveston
observer, took the morning readings from the top of
the five-story Levy Building downtown. Barometric
pressure within the normal range. Light winds. Tem-
perature already 80 degrees—hot, but slightly cooler
than it had been. The huge sky over the Levy Build-
ing and out to the calm Gulf was as clear and blue as
could be.
At 8 a.m. the bureau confirmed the prediction it
had telegraphed to Galveston the day before regard-
ing a disturbance coming out of Cuba. “Not a hurri-
cane,” Moore called it. (Evidently, you could use the
word as long as you put “not” in front of it.) The course
of this non-hurricane would not affect Galveston.
The storm would instead go into a classic “recurve.”
According to the bureau, storms exiting the Caribbe-
an on a northerly trajectory could not continue on a
northwestern track. A storm thundering out of Cuba
over the Florida Straits must turn toward Florida,
where it would sweep across the peninsula. Broken
coastline on the Florida side of the Gulf would pre-
vent the storm from hitting any landmass head-on,
and it would lose what little power it had. The sys-
tem, said the bureau, was “attended only by heavy
rains and winds of moderate force” that could dam-
age moored ships and shoreline property along the
Florida coast. The storm would then move northeast,
weakening as it went, and probably would “be felt as
far northward as Norfolk by Thursday night and is
likely to extend over the middle Atlantic and South
New England states by Friday.” After that, the storm
was expected to exit into the Atlantic somewhere in
or above New England.
Weather stations at New Orleans and points east
were authorized to hang the red-and-black storm-
warning flags, letting ship captains know of moder-
ately disturbed seas. But any residual action in the
Gulf would quickly dissipate. And no warnings were
in order west of New Orleans. Some fishermen on the
New Jersey shore, having received the national re-
port, cabled Moore for advice. Never one to hesitate,
Moore cabled right back. “Not safe to leave nets in
after tonight,” he warned them. A rough storm was
headed their way, Moore was certain.
Moore was correct in believing that many hur-
ricanes do “recurve.” But there also happened to be,
at that moment in September 1900, a big zone of high
PICTURE HISTORY/IMAGE WORKS
pressure bordering the Florida Keys—that string of
narrow islands curving from the tip of the state’s long
peninsula—well to the east of the storm. This high-
pressure zone caused an exception to the rule of
hurricane recurve that Willis Moore thought was im-
mutable. A recurve would have drawn the hurricane
seven Deadliest U.S.
Hurricanes Since 1900
7 MIAMI, September 1926,
Category 4, 372 dead
South Florida’s red-hot real estate market had already begun to cool
by the time this storm devastated beachfront development. But the
University of Miami, which welcomed its first students in October 1926,
soon adopted “Hurricanes” as its nickname.
6 LABOR DAY STORM, FLORIDA KEYS, September 1935,
Category 5, 408 confirmed dead
One of only three Category 5 storms to strike the U.S. mainland,
this hurricane inundated the Florida Keys with a storm surge of 15
to 20 feet. The National Hurricane Center determined in 2014 that the
Labor Day Hurricane was the most intense storm in U.S. history, with
sustained winds of 185 mph.
5 HURRICANE AUDREY, TEXAS and LOUISIANA,
June 1957, Category 4, 416 confirmed dead
Storm surges of up to 12 feet pushed some 25 miles inland over low-
lying Louisiana, causing most of the deaths associated with this storm.
Wind and rain damage were recorded as far north as Canada, and
“Audrey” was retired from the official list of hurricane names.
4 LONG ISLAND EXPRESS, NEW YORK and
NEW ENGLAND, September 1938, Category 3,
approximately 700 dead
Taking the Northeast by surprise, this storm hit the coast with such
ferocity that its impact was picked up by seismographs in Alaska. It
devastated coastal fishing and downed an estimated 2 billion trees.
Ten new inlets were created on Long Island, and 50-foot waves were
recorded at Gloucester, Mass.
3 HURRICANE KATRINA, LOUISIANA and MISSISSIPPI,
August 2005, Category 3, at least 1,200 dead
The costliest disaster in American history—ranked in 2013 by the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at $108 billion—
Katrina displaced more than 1 million people, nearly destroyed New
Orleans and called into question the ability of federal and state
governments to deal with catastrophic events.
2 LAKE OKEECHOBEE, FLORIDA, September 1928,
Category 4, at least 2,500 dead
The hurricane that made landfall near West Palm Beach quickly moved
inland toward a freshwater lake that measures 29 miles wide but only
9 feet deep. As Zora Neale Hurston wrote in Their Eyes Were Watching
God, it “woke up old Okeechobee and the monster began to roll.” When
Lake Okeechobee spilled over its banks, it swallowed up thousands of
people, mostly poor migrant farmworkers who lived nearby.
1 GALVESTON, TEXAS, August 1900,
Category 4, at least 10,000 dead
After the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history, Galveston began
building a seawall and raising the level of the city. Those efforts paid
off in August 1915 when another Category 4 storm struck. While the
destruction was considerable, the death toll was 275.
* As determined by the National Weather Service. NWS began giving female names
to hurricanes in 1953. Male names were added in 1978.
 Hope among the
ruins—a rare smiling
face in the aftermath
of catastrophe.
east toward Florida, but high pressure at the Keys
pushed it away. Winds blowing from east to west off
the Keys added to the pushback.
Drawing new energy constantly from the hot
sea below, pulling those waves high upward, throw-
ing wind in every direction as it circled, unleash-
ing monstrous thunderclaps and streaks of jagged
lightning and pouring hard rain, this complex of
storms was also drawn west-northwest by low pres-
sure there. Spinning counterclockwise, it had be-
come a fully organized system of destruction turning
around a large, roughly circular eye, some 30 miles
in diameter.
At 1:59 p.m. Cline received a telegraphed report
from Washington. The storm that had drenched Cuba
was now, as expected, centered over southern Flori-
da. That evening, in Galveston, Cline took the last
readings for the day. It was hotter now—just over 90
degrees. The wind was out of the north. The barom-
36 AMERICAN HISTORY
eter was down—but just barely. There were scattered clouds. Cline reported all of
that to Washington and went home to bed.
Friday morning, September 7, everything stopped making sense. The Weather
Bureau abruptly reversed its forecast, and Cline was ordered to raise the storm-
warning flag. What Cline didn’t know was this: The weathermen in Washington
had been getting surprising reports from local stations on the East Coast. The
stormy weather predicted there had entirely failed to arrive. The winds that bat-
tered Key West did not start blowing in central Florida after all. Savannah and
Charleston were not being drenched. Those fishermen in Long Branch, N.J., wor-
rying about their nets had nothing to fear. There was only one conclusion. The
men in Washington finally drew it. The storm that had left Cuba on Wednesday
must still be in the Gulf of Mexico.
In Galveston Friday afternoon, a heavy swell formed southeast of the long Gulf
beach. And it arrived with an ominous roar. The clouds, meanwhile, were coming
from the northeast. Obviously, a severe storm was on the way. Thanks to the storm-
warning flag, as well as to the crashing surf on the beach, the Weather Bureau office
on the third floor of the Levy Building had become a scene of constantly ringing
phones and people crowding in with questions. Ship captains, the harbormaster,
businessmen and concerned citizens, official and civilian alike, wanted answers.
While officials in Washington had recognized they were wrong about the storm’s
track, on one point Moore remained insistent: This couldn’t be a hurricane.
All day Isaac Cline and his brother, Joseph, tried to fend off confusion and
worry. They took turns dealing with the phones and the crowds and collecting
weather data on the roof. The clouds had thickened. The day that had started
clear was now cloudy. From out in the Gulf, the swells kept coming. By Friday
night, rain had started falling steadily and Joseph Cline had a sense of impending
disaster. He’d received reports from New Orleans, the weather station nearest to
the center of the storm. It was southwest of the city and moving west.
Joseph knew that meant it was heading straight for Galveston.
About midnight, Joseph quickly created a new weather map based on the
reports he was receiving by cable. He took the map to the post office to await the
first train over the railroad bridge from Galveston Island to the Texas mainland.
Then he went home to the house he shared with Isaac about three blocks from the
beach and tried to sleep. Visions of hurricanes kept invading his dreams.
At 4 a.m. Saturday, September 8, he awoke with a start. He had a sudden,
clear impression that Gulf water had flowed all the way into the yard. Joseph got
up. From a south window, he peered down.
It wasn’t a dream. The yard really was under water. The Gulf was in town. ★
Epilogue: Defying the ban on local storm warnings, Isaac Cline sprang into
action, urging beach residents and business owners to head for higher ground.
But the highest point in Galveston was 8.7 feet above sea level, and the island
was about to be engulfed by a 15-foot storm surge. At 3:30 Saturday afternoon, the
Clines sent a cable to Moore in Washington. “Gulf rising rapidly,” it read. “Half the
city now under water.”
Fifty people sought refuge in Cline’s stout brick house, which was knocked off
its foundation Saturday night. All but 18, Cline wrote later, “were hurled into eter-
nity,” among them his wife, Clara, pregnant with the couple’s fourth child. (The
Clines’ three other daughters survived.) Across Galveston, the devastation was
unimaginable: an estimated 6,000 dead in the city and another 4,000 to 6,000 on
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; OPPOSITE: © AMERICAN/ALAMY
Galveston Island and the adjacent mainland. Property damage at the time was
estimated to be $30 million; in today’s dollars, that’s more than $700 million.
Willis Moore suffered no professional consequences for his decisions. On Sep-
tember 28, 1900, he commended the Clines and their assistant, John Blagden, for
“heroic devotion to duty. . . .Through [your] efficient service…in the dissemination
of warnings, thousands of people were enabled to move…and were thus saved.”
The Weather Bureau slowly adopted hurricane-forecasting techniques in the com-
ing years (though tornado warnings were officially banned until 1938). Moore was
fired from the Weather Bureau in 1913 after charges of improper conduct in his
campaign to secure a Cabinet post were referred to the Justice Department.
 ‘Prosperity will soon again
smile on the city. . . .Before
many days a new city will rise
on the storm-swept ruins’
—Texas governor Joseph Sayers,
September 18, 1900

A bronze sculpture
honoring the storm’s
victims and survivors
was installed on
Galveston’s seawall in
2000, the centennial
anniversary of the
hurricane.
Wave of
Destruction
The dam disaster that
destroyed Johnstown
by Christine M. Kreiser

The Allegheny Mountains roll on like

swells on a deep green sea. In a narrow val-
ley of southwestern Pennsylvania, the city
of Johnstown nestles up against the Little
Conemaugh and Stonycreek rivers, which
drain more than 600 square miles of some
of the state’s highest elevations into the
Conemaugh River. The Conemaugh emp-
Houses, trees and
ties into the Allegheny and, eventually, railroad cars were
the mighty Ohio at Pittsburgh. > all thrown together
by the force of the
floodwaters that
raged through
Johnstown in 1889.

38 AMERICAN HISTORY
© BETTMANN/CORBIS
 > High above Johnstown, about 14 miles up the
Little Conemaugh on South Fork Creek, a dam had
been built in the 1840s to provide a feeder reservoir
for the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal. The South Fork
dam had proved troublesome from the beginning. It
failed in 1847 and again in 1862, but damage down-
stream was minimal. After the canal went out of busi-
ness, there was little incentive to maintain the dam,
and in 1875 the cast-iron sluice pipes at its base were
removed and sold for scrap. With no way to drain the
reservoir for much-needed repairs, a few make-do
patches were made, and the South Fork Fishing and
Hunting Club bought the dam and reservoir in 1879.
The membership roll of the private club was a
Pittsburgh who’s who, including Andrew Carnegie,
Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon. The industri-
alists and their families enjoyed cool summers sailing
and fishing on the reservoir, which they named Lake
Conemaugh. The Johnstown Tribune reported in 1881
that a thousand black bass had been brought from
Lake Erie on a special rail car equipped with oxygen
tanks to ensure that the fish arrived in good condi-
tion. To keep the stock from escaping downstream,
screens were placed over the dam’s spillway. The
crest of the dam was lowered in order to accommo-
date a bridge over it. But little was done to address
the maintenance backlog.
On May 30 and 31, 1889, torrential rains fell
across the Conemaugh Valley. As the rivers rose,
Johnstown residents prepared for high water as they
had done countless times before. Nuisance floods
were a fact of life, especially since town waste and
refuse from the valley’s iron industry choked local
A view of the
aftermath, looking
toward Kernville, Pa.,
which was flooded
by backwash up the
Stonycreek River.
waterways. But on the morning of the 31st, the biggest threat was upstream, as
the reservoir rose steadily toward the crest of the dam, which stood 72 feet high
and more than 900 feet across. Debris clogged the spillway screens. Day laborers
hired by the club frantically dug a trench with picks and shovels to channel water
away from the dam, and they tried to shore up its center, which had been sagging
for years. But the water kept rising, and by noon it was spilling over the crest.
About 3 p.m., the dam finally gave way. Within an hour, 20 million tons of
water—3.6 billion gallons—crashed down the mountainside, obliterating several
villages and heading straight for Johnstown. A wave 35 to 40 feet high hit the city
at 40 miles an hour. The Rev. Dr. David Beale had taken refuge with his family
in the third-floor attic of the Presbyterian parsonage about three blocks from the
Little Conemaugh. He watched in horror as a wall of water “rushed down upon
us, bearing on its bosom houses, barns, freight cars, city passenger cars, locomo-
tives, tenders, iron bridges…lumber, animals and human beings, dead and alive…
pitching, tossing, banging and smashing to pieces in one indiscriminate mass.”
The debris—later estimated to cover 30 acres—slammed against a seven-arch
stone railroad bridge that spanned the Conemaugh River and acted as a dam,
sending water back through the town and flooding the Stonycreek River.
The devastation was almost incomprehensible: 2,209 confirmed dead, 1,600
homes lost, four square miles of Johnstown completely destroyed, $17 million in
property damage. The response from outside the flood zone was immediate. Clara
Barton and workers from the American Red Cross arrived within days to assist
with the cleanup and rebuilding. Barton had founded the Red Cross during the
Civil War, but she’d long believed the organization could be useful in times of
natural disaster. Johnstown was its first major peacetime relief effort.
The press quickly descended on the Conemaugh Valley, and the Great John-
stown Flood made headlines around the world. More than $3 million in dona-
tions poured in from the United States and 18 foreign countries. But reporters also
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; OPPOSITE: AP
picked up on a growing resentment—in Johnstown and across the country—of
the wealthy men whose summer playground had caused such a calamity. After
two decades of nationwide financial panics, the growth of trusts and the ever-
widening gap between the haves and have-nots, Johnstown symbolized the
misuse of wealth and power. The residents of the valley, in the words of a con-
temporaneous poem, had suffered “All the horrors that hell could wish / Such
was the price that was paid for—fish!” But neither the South Fork Fishing and

“If it keeps on
rainin’, levee’s
goin’ to break,
And all these Hunting Club nor any of its members were held le-
people have no gally responsible. Despite years of neglect and mis-
place to stay management of the dam, some of which predated the
club’s ownership, the courts eventually ruled that the
Cryin’ won’t flood was an act of God.
help you,
prayin’ won’t While the South Fork dam will always be re-
do no good, membered for its catastrophic failure, it’s worth not-
ing that it was conceived as part of a plan to spur
When the levee Pennsylvania’s 19th-century economic growth. Dams
breaks, mama, are still vital to the national infrastructure, providing
you got to move” hydropower, drinking water and even flood control.
But they require regular maintenance and repair. The
“When the Levee
Breaks,” blues 2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, issued
song by Kansas by the American Society of Civil Engineers, gave
Joe McCoy and U.S. dams a D grade. Of 84,000 dams, almost 14,000
Memphis Minnie, were considered high-hazard, meaning a failure
1929 would likely result in the loss of life. And the num-
ber of high-hazard dams continues to rise because of
downstream development. The average lifespan of a
dam is 50 years; by 2020, 70 percent of U.S. dams will
be more than 50 years old. More than 80 percent of
dams are regulated by widely varying state, not fed-
eral, laws, and more than half are privately owned. +
The Mississippi Delta
town of Greenville,
18 miles south of
the Mounds Landing
levee, was inundated
in April 1927.
MISSISSIPPI RIVER
FLOOD—1927
Still considered one of the worst natural
disasters in U.S. history for its widespread
and prolonged effects, the flood of 1927 had
direct impact on 16 million acres of land in
seven states—some 27,000 square miles. At
least a half million people were left homeless;
death toll estimates range from 200 to
1,000. Record rainfall overwhelmed the levee
system that residents along the Mississippi
had counted on, in one form or another, to
control flooding since the 1720s. A major
levee break at Mounds Landing, Miss.,
submerged the Delta in 10 feet of water. As
a result of the flood the federal government
took greater responsibility for flood control
projects; the Flood Control Act of 1928
authorized $325 million to be spent on flood
control, the largest public-works expenditure
to that time.
OCTOBER 2015 41
42 AMERICAN HISTORY
PHOTO CREDIT GOES HERE THEY USE WHERE THE DOES MORE
 Soldiers patrol
the rubble-strewn
intersection of Third
and Market streets as
San Francisco’s first
skyscraper, the Call
Building, burns.

San Francisco was knocked

down—but not out—by the
massive 1906 earthquake

SHAKEN TO
THE CORE
by Sarah Richardson

© WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE/ALAMY

Remnants of the
city’s distinctive
Victorian architecture
on Howard Street.

“I was within a stone’s throw of that city hall when the hand of an avenging God fell
upon San Francisco. The ground rose and fell like an ocean at ebb tide. Then came the
crash. Tons upon tons of that mighty pile slid away from the steel framework and destruc-
tiveness of that effort was terrific,” wrote San Francisco Examiner reporter Fred J. Hewitt
in 1906. “It is impossible to judge the length of that shock. To me it seemed an eternity. I
was thrown…on my back and the pavement pulsated like a living thing. Around me the
huge buildings, looming up more terrible because of the queer dance they were perform-
ing, wobbled and veered. Crash followed crash and resounded on all sides. Screeches
rent the air as terrified humanity streamed out into the open in agony of despair. >

> “Affrighted horses dashed headlong into ruins as they raced away in their
abject fear.
“Then there was a lull.
“The most terrible was yet to come.
“The first portion of that shock was just a mild forerunning of what was to
follow. The pause in the action of the earth’s surface couldn’t have been more
than a fraction of a second. It was sufficient, however, to allow me to collect my-
self. In the center of two streets [I] rose to my feet. Then came the second and
more terrific crash.
“The street beds heaved in frightful fashion. The earth rocked and then came
the blow that wrecked San Francisco from the bay shore to the Ocean Beach and
from the Golden Gate to the end of the peninsula.
“As if in sympathy for its immediate neighbor the old Supreme Court build-
ing [on Larkin Street] danced a frivolous dance and then tumbled into the street.

44 AMERICAN HISTORY
 Beneath that ruin of stone and brick were buried the
two blue coated guardians of the police to whom I
had been talking a few minutes before. That few min-
utes, however, seemed to me a century.
“That second upheaval was heartrending. It
made me think of the loved ones in different por-
tions of the country. It turned my stomach, gave
me a heartache that I will never forget and caused
me to sink upon my knees and pray to the Almighty Cable car tracks were
God that me and mine should escape the awful fate I shifted by the force
knew was coming to so many thousands.” of the 1906 quake.
The two quakes that struck San Francisco on
April 18, 1906, are considered the deadliest seismic
event in U.S. history, killing approximately 3,000
people. The shaking earth brought down buildings,
disrupted gas lines and ignited fires that burned for
three days over four square miles. “The night was as
light as day, and the roar of the conflagration, the
crash of falling walls, and the continuous explo-
sions made a pandemonium simply indescribable,”
recalled Frederick Funston, U.S. Army commanding
officer at the Presidio who oversaw keeping order.
The tremblers were recorded at the nation’s first
permanently staffed seismological laboratory, the
Lick Observatory on a mountain near San Jose, and at
eight other pioneering labs around the world. Based
on what was recorded that day, the major quake ap-
pears to have registered a magnitude of at least 7.8.
(By one approximation a magnitude-7 earthquake re-
leases 480 kilotons of explosive force; an 8 releases
15 megatons.)
Yet the 1906 event was not the biggest quake in
North America—the 1964 earthquake in Alaska holds
that record. Nor did it cover the most territory; the
New Madrid earthquake along the Mississippi River
near St. Louis in 1811-12 did. But it was by far the most dents, and more than half became refugees. The ruptures on the earth’s surface
devastating. San Francisco in 1906 had 400,000 resi- extended 290 miles, and the earthquake zone, including the area offshore where
it originated, encompassed 375,000 square miles.
San Francisco was no stranger to earthquakes; after being damaged in previ-
ous quakes, it had adopted the emblem of a phoenix rising from the ashes. But
the extent of the 1906 quake produced figurative aftershocks that changed the
development of the entire U.S. economy as well as the history of earth science.
The least recognized yet most far-reaching consequence of the earthquake
was for the nation’s financial system. Immediately after the quake, A.P. Gianni-
ni of the Bank of Italy extended credit to earthquake survivors, which helped
him build the business that became Bank of America. British insurers dominated
the market in San Francisco, and the claims from structural damage and fire so
OPPOSITE: © KIRN VINTAGE STOCK/CORBIS; TOP: © CORBIS; BOTTOM: AP

drained British gold reserves that lending to the American market was reined in.
According to a 2008 study by economists Kerry Odell and Marc Weidenmier,
that retraction triggered the severe recession and bank run known as the Panic
of 1907. In response to the crisis, Congress passed a bill in 1908 empowering the
government to issue emergency currency and soon recommended the formation
of a central bank. In 1913 the Federal Reserve System was founded.

Amadeo Pietro
Giannini, a native of
San Jose, opened San
Francisco’s Bank of
Italy to give “the little
man” a place to do
business.
OCTOBER 2015 45
 San Francisco’s major
earthquakes include
the 6.9-magnitude
Loma Prieta quake in
1989, which collapsed
the top deck of the
Bay Bridge.

The Seismological Society of America was formed in the aftermath of the

1906 quake, and the disaster sparked discussion of the first regulations regarding
earthquake-resistant buildings, although no real progress would be made for at
least two decades. Research over the years has yielded better understanding—
and measurement—of the quakes themselves. Charles Richter developed the first
method for measuring quakes in 1935, and a deeper grasp of the global dimen-
sion of earthquakes was born in the 1970s with the science of plate tectonics—the
shifting plates of the earth’s surface. Today earthquake scientists can gauge the
intensity of the vibrations—even of underwater quakes to predict tsunamis—and
where they are most likely to occur, though still not when. Nonetheless, a recent
report on earthquake hazards forecasts that 28 million Americans in the conti-
nental United States will experience a strong shaking in their lifetime. Where will
the greatest building losses occur? Washington, Oregon and California.
But not all quakes stem from natural causes: Recent studies have confirmed
an uptick in seismic activity near areas subjected to hydraulic fracturing or
“fracking”—a method of extracting oil or gas from rock by injecting it with a high-
pressure mix of water and chemicals. +

The Marina District of

San Francisco suffered
some of the worst
damage from the
Loma Prieta quake.

46 AMERICAN HISTORY
 Anchorage, Alaska,
after the March 1964
earthquake dropped
Fourth Street 20 feet
below normal level.

San Francisco, 1906

EXTENT: 375,000 square miles, half offshore,
stretching from southern California to
southern Oregon and east to Nevada
MAGNITUDE: 8.3, estimated
DURATION: 45 seconds, followed by
aftershock
DAMAGE (1906 DOLLARS): $400 million
quake and fire damage; $80 million due to
earthquake damage alone
DEATHS: 3,000, estimated

Alaska, 1964
The nation’s biggest quake, registering above
FIVE Deadliest U.S. 9.2, it was also world’s second-largest ever
recorded. Relatively few were killed or injured
EARTHQUAKEs because it happened during the day on a holiday
when many were not at work or in school.
Oregon Coast, 1700
EXTENT: damage extended 50,000 square
Native American accounts had told of a large tidal wave sweeping into miles, but effects spanned 500,000 square
shore. Scientists later found physical evidence of this mighty wave, which miles
was triggered by an earthquake offshore of the Pacific Northwest, in
tree-ring studies and the presence of drowned coastal marshlands and MAGNITUDE: 9.2
forests. The seismic risk remains great, and signs for tsunami evacuation DURATION: 4 minutes, with aftershocks
dot the coastal highways of Oregon and Washington. Further scholarship continuing for a year
has linked this quake to a devastating tsunami that rolled into Japan that DOLLAR DAMAGE: $300-$400 million
year and killed 1,000 people. It had been known in Japan as the “Orphan (1964 dollars)
Tsunami” because no one had felt an earthquake.
DEATHS: 131
EXTENT: from what is now northern California to southern British
Columbia Long Beach, 1933
MAGNITUDE: 9, estimated The damage from this offshore earthquake was
DURATION: unknown particularly severe for buildings on landfill and
DEATHS: 1,000 deaths in Japan; no data for North America resulted in stricter California building regulations.
(The first steps toward earthquake-resistant
OPPOSITE TOP: GEORGE NIKITIN, AP; BOTTOM: © ROGER RESSMEYER/CORBIS; © BETTMANN/CORBIS

design had come a few years earlier following a

New Madrid, 1811-1812 1925 quake in Santa Barbara. That damage was
The most extensive earthquake to strike North America occurred in the so great in the commercial district—also built on
Mississippi Valley, at a site near St. Louis called New Madrid. Although landfill—that when rebuilding began the town
the region was then sparsely populated, a number of eyewitness accounts instituted a new stricter design code that also
survive noting the displacement of the Mississippi River and deformations favored Spanish Mission style structures, which
in the land. Seismologists have inferred the intensity of the quake from created the distinctive feel of Santa Barbara
changes to the land and toppled or cracked cemetery headstones, and today.)
estimate the quake to have reached magnitude 7 or 8. Although the
EXTENT: primarily in 10 southern
Mississippi Valley is not what most people think of as earthquake country,
counties of California
it is home to a 150-mile-long fault and has a history of major earthquakes
over the past 4,500 years. MAGNITUDE: 6.4
DURATION: 15 seconds
EXTENT: at least 4 major earthquakes affecting almost 2 million
square miles DEATHS: 120
MAGNITUDE: more than 7
DURATION: December 1811 through February 1812 with aftershocks in
between; shocks lasted up to a minute or more
DEATHS: Unknown

OCTOBER 2015 47
 ILL WINDS
The 1925 Tri-State Tornado left a 200-mile-long path of destruction
by Christine M. Kreiser

48 AMERICAN HISTORY
 The U.S. Weather Bureau’s forecast for the Central Midwest on
March 18, 1925, was hardly unusual. “Rains and strong shifting winds”
were typical of springtime. Then, about 1 p.m., a tornado touched down
northwest of Ellington, Mo., in the foothills of the Ozarks. Over the
next three and a half hours, the storm barreled across Missouri, Illinois
and Indiana at an average speed of 62 miles an hour, leaving a trail of
utter devastation 219 miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide. >
> Meteorologists have long debated whether the Winnis Jones was just a boy shooting marbles with
Tri-State event was caused by a single tornado or a friends when threatening skies over Princeton, Ind.,
series of related storms. The distinction wouldn’t forced him to run home ahead of the storm. As the
have mattered to those left to pick up the pieces. family scrambled to take shelter, the west wall of the

The small town

of Griffin, Ind.,
was virtually wiped
off the map by the
Tri-State Tornado
in March 1925.

© BETTMANN/CORBIS
Tornadoes can strike
anywhere in the
world, but 75 percent
of them occur in
the United States,
particularly in the
South and Midwest.
kitchen blew in, pinning Jones to a table that had
collapsed on the floor. After the storm passed, Jones
told writer Peter Felknor in 1992, “I could not speak,
scream, or make any noise because I knew if I did, I
would be dead. I had just one breath, and the weight
of the wall was so heavy, if I released it I would be
dead. My dad in searching for me walked up on the
wall. That almost did it for me. He finally saw part of
my leg sticking out and he started to pry and lift the
wall off of me. It was a really close call.”
50 AMERICAN HISTORY
The March 20, 1925, edition of the St. Louis Post-
Dispatch was filled with terrifying reports from the
disaster zone. Michael Kiley, an engineer on a Mobile
& Ohio passenger train, watched from his cab as the
storm tore apart Murphysboro, Ill. “The air was full of
wreckage,” he said. “The train was so bombarded by
heavy planks from the debris that I was afraid some
of them would pierce the engine boiler. . . .A big grain
TOP: © ROOM THE AGENCY/ALAMY; BOTTOM: A.T. WILLETT/ALAMY; OPPOSITE: COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
elevator caved in on the track and we couldn’t get out
of the tornado’s path.” Stuck there for several hours,
Kiley said, he and his crew “were forced to fight hard
to keep the train from catching fire from blazes that
broke out in piles of debris along the tracks.”
DeSoto, Ill., was “virtually annihilated,” said Il-
linois Central freight agent M.J. Mulconnery. “Men
and women, muddy, sobbing and half clothed,
thronged the houseless streets seeking their dead
and injured. Fire engines were on hand, but they
were helpless. There was no water and fires provided
the only lights.”
The Great Tri-State Tornado remains the dead-
liest in U.S. history, with an official toll of 695. Some
2,000 people were injured and 15,000 homes de-
stroyed. Modern estimates categorize the tornado
as an F5—the most destructive—with wind speeds
at times exceeding 300 miles an hour. There was
no satellite or radar imagery to track the monster
in 1925; long-distance communication by telephone
or radio was in its infancy. And the Weather Bureau
 Dr. Ted Fujita, who
thought of himself as
a tornado detective,
studied the deadly
storms with the help
of this simulator.

specifically barred local observers from issuing tornado warnings for fear of
creating panic.
After 1925, however, something changed. Though the Weather Bureau ban
on warnings remained in place until 1938, a study by the National Severe Storms
Laboratory in 1999 theorized that the Tri-State disaster “made it clear to the na-
tion that spreading the word about a long-track tornado could have a positive MR. TORNADO
impact on the populace in the storm’s path.” As communication technology im-
proved through the 1930s and ’40s, tornado deaths declined. In 1971 University of Chicago
But the ban on forecasting tornadoes remained until two U.S. Air Force me- mesometeorologist Dr. T. Theodore
teorologists, Major Ernest Fawbush and Captain Robert Miller, proved that such Fujita—“Mr. Tornado”—introduced
forecasts were both possible and useful. On March 20, 1948, a tornado touched the Fujita Scale as a way to measure
down at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, destroying 32 military planes worth a tornado’s destructive force. The
millions of dollars. Five days later, Fawbush and Miller observed weather pat- F-scale rates tornadoes from 0 (least
terns strikingly similar to those of the 20th and forecast that another tornado was destructive) to 5 (most destructive)
likely between 4 and 6 p.m. The base activated its tornado safety plan, moving based on surveys of storm damage.
planes into hangars and securing other objects. When a twister struck at about While studying the aftermath of the April
6 o’clock, the damage was considerable, but far less than it would have been with-
1974 Super Outbreak—when more than
out the warning. With an expanding network of trained storm-spotters and rap-
idly developing radar technology, the Weather Bureau finally rescinded the ban
140 tornadoes ripped a 2,600-mile path
on tornado forecasting in July 1950. from the Gulf states to the Great Lakes
Statistics kept by the U.S. Weather Bureau (now the National Weather Ser- in 16 hours—Fujita noticed something
vice) since 1950 indicate that while overall tornado activity has increased in the unusual. “Unlike the swirling patterns
past three decades, the number of violent storms has actually decreased. Scien- of fallen trees, commonly seen…in the
tists generally agree that climate change can increase the potential for severe wake of tornadoes,” he wrote in 1985,
weather, but there is no consensus on how it affects tornadoes in particular. For “hundreds of trees were blown outward
all the advances in technology and public awareness, tornadoes remain a mysti- in a starburst pattern.”
fying—and unstoppable—force of nature. + Fujita had observed similar patterns
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki shortly after
atomic bombs were dropped there at the
end of World War II. He concluded that
TEN DEADLIEST TORNADOES small downdrafts of air during a storm
IN U.S. HISTORY could produce just such an explosive
effect at ground level, a phenomenon he
10 Flint, Mich.......................................June 8, 1953 .................. 116 dead termed a “microburst.” Critics scoffed
when Fujita attributed the deadly crash
9 New Richmond, Wis. .................June 12, 1899 ................ 117 dead of a Boeing 727 at Kennedy International
8 Amite, La./Purvis, Miss...........April 24, 1908 .............. 143 dead Airport in 1975 to a microburst, but
7 Joplin, Mo. .......................................May 22, 2011 ................. 158 dead years of subsequent observation and
documentation proved his theory.
6 Woodward, Okla...........................April 9, 1947 ................. 181 dead In the 1990s, the Federal Aviation
5 Gainesville, Ga. .............................April 6, 1936................. 203 dead Administration installed sophisticated
4 Tupelo, Miss...................................April 5, 1936 ................. 216 dead Doppler radars at major U.S. airports to
monitor storm activity and help prevent
3 St. Louis, Mo. .................................May 27, 1896 ................ 255 dead accidents.
2 Natchez, Miss. ...............................May 6, 1840 .................. 317 dead
1 Tri-State (Mo., Ill., Ind.) ...........March 18, 1925 ............ 695 dead

OCTOBER 2015 51
The Cataclysm
That Changed
New York
How the Blizzard of 1888 Scared a Great
City Into Modernizing Its Infrastructure
by Richard Ernsberger Jr.

On Monday, March 11, 1888, the New York Herald published a poem
by its staff poet, Walt Whitman, touting the coming change of seasons:
“The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face,” read one line.
Whitman’s timing was unfortunate. While the weather had been un-
seasonably mild, what New Yorkers faced that Monday morning bore
no resemblance to spring or moderate weather of any kind.
© CORBIS

52 AMERICAN HISTORY
New Yorkers
struggle to make
their way along
26th Street during
the 1888 blizzard.
T he night before, arctic winds had blown in from Canada and
mixed with warm air sweeping up from the Atlantic Ocean. Temperatures
plunged and it began raining heavily—and then after midnight the rain turned
to snow. By morning New York City and all of the northeastern United States,
from Washington to Maine, was caught in a ferocious blizzard that would pum-
mel the region with 80-mile-an-hour winds, dump three to five feet of snow over
the next 36 hours, sink ships along the East Coast, paralyze transportation and
communications networks—isolating New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Wash-
ington for days—and kill more than 400 people. “The great white hurricane,” as
the storm was called, so completely hobbled New York City that, in the aftermath,
civic leaders renewed calls to build an underground transportation system and to
bury all electrical lines. That’s a big reason why experts consider the 1888 blizzard
one of the most consequential storms in American history.
In the late 19th century New Yorkers believed that neither man nor nature
could slow their booming metropolis. That March morning, before the storm’s
full impact became apparent, many braved the pelting snow and bitter wind to
go to work. Within hours everybody was stranded. Massive snowdrifts, icy rails
and no visibility shut down the city’s elevated train system and knocked over
horse-drawn trolleys. Thousands of people got stuck on platforms and on trains
and were forced to make their way home on foot. Scores escaped Brooklyn by
walking over frozen stretches of the East River—a
rare occurrence.
Many people did not make it to safety, getting
lost or disoriented and freezing to death in the tem-
pest. Half the deaths from the storm were in New
York City. A NIGHT OF DEVASTATION! read a head-
line in the Herald. PERISHING MEN AND WOMEN:
WANDERERS FOUND DEAD IN SNOWDRIFTS. The New
York Times called it “the worst storm the city has
ever known.” Roscoe Conkling, a former U.S. senator
from New York, collapsed in his hotel residence on
Madison Square after making a three-hour trek from
his Wall Street law office. He died five weeks later of
complications from exposure.
Apart from dangers, the storm had plenty of

A tangle of icy
telephone, telegraph
and electrical wires
hangs over New York
after the storm.

1888
Blizzard
in Brief
Type of storm:
Classic nor’easter
Snowfall: 30 to
60 inches from
Chesapeake to Maine
Winds: Upwards
of 80 mph
Snowdrifts: As high
as 50 feet
Deaths: More than
400, about half in
New York City
Property damage
from fire: Estimated
$25 million

54 AMERICAN HISTORY
 Workers clear a path
beneath the elevated
train tracks.

what the Times rather naively called “the most an-

noying and detrimental” effects. Women struggled The ‘great white hurricane’
to walk through the snow in their cumbersome
clothes, prompting a New York Sun reporter to in-
veigh: “Never, perhaps, in the history of petticoats
led to renewed calls to
was the imbecility of their designer better illustrated.”
Taverns and hotels were jammed with people seek- build an underground
ing shelter. One newspaper found humor in the fact
that “all night the lodging house dormitories were
crowded with snow-bound dandies who scratched
transportation system and
and grumbled and tossed about on the hard pallets
in the ill smelling cubbyholes.” Mark Twain, holed up
bury all electrical lines
in the Murray Hill Hotel, wrote a letter home, com-
plaining that he was “out of wife, out of children, out
of line, out of cigars and out of every blamed thing
in the world that I’ve any use for.” The New York Sun
related the unnerving prospect of a Monday morning
BOTH IMAGES © CORBIS

with “no milk carts, no butcher wagons, no basket-

laden grocer boys, no bakers’ carriers.” And no finan-
cial trading: Wall Street closed for three days.
New York’s electrical, telegraph, gas and phone

OCTOBER 2015 55
 The 112th Engineers,
Ohio National Guard,
come to Cleveland’s
rescue after the Great
Appalachian Storm.

A rescue party bound

together by rope
searches for little
ones lost during the
Children’s Blizzard.

56 AMERICAN HISTORY

TOP BLIZZARDS
CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD: January 12, 1888
This storm, also known as the Schoolhouse Blizzard, hit Nebraska and
the Dakota Territory three months before the Great White Hurricane
hammered the Northeast. The temperature was near freezing to start
the day but plunged to minus 40 with the wind chill by early afternoon
when arctic air swept in from Canada. Few people were dressed for
whiteout conditions and bitter cold—and rural schoolteachers made
the mistake of sending their students home. Most of the 235 people
who died were kids who couldn’t make it back to their farms and
succumbed to hypothermia, hence the storm’s tragic names.
GREAT LAKES STORM: November 7-10, 1913
The deadliest disaster ever in the Great Lakes region, this extra-tropical
cyclone was caused by the convergence of two major storm fronts—a
blizzard and a hurricane. Fueled by the warm waters of the Great Lakes,
the storm caused massive waves, 60-to-90-mph winds and whiteout
conditions that lasted more than 16 hours. The “Big Blow” killed more
than 260 people—nearly all of them watermen. Forty-three sailors on
Lake Superior were killed, along with 199 on Lake Huron.
KNICKERBOCKER STORM: January 27-28, 1922
A slow-moving Category 4 cyclone dumped two to three feet of wet,
heavy snow on Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia—and most notably
collapsed the flat roof of the Knickerbocker Theater in Washington
D.C., one of the district’s biggest and most popular movie venues.
OPPOSITE TOP: AP, BOTTOM: GRANGER, NYC; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Scores of patrons were buried under snow and rubble when the roof
and one wall caved in just after 9 p.m. Despite the efforts of hundreds
of rescuers, 98 people in the theater lost their lives. The theater’s
architect and owner later committed suicide.
GREAT APPALACHIAN STORM: November 24-30, 1950
This storm was one of only 16 Category 5 cyclones (or nor’easters) in
U.S. history. It swept through 22 states, with winds of up to 160 miles
an hour recorded in some places. The storm, which also brought
all-time record lows to some Southern states, killed more than 360
people, caused a reported $67 million of damage and left more than
1 million people without power.
Washington’s
Knickerbocker
Theater caved in
when several feet
of wet, heavy snow
collapsed its roof.
lines, along with water mains, were all above
ground—above the streets were webs of wires. The
storm blew down many of the poles and wires, start-
ing fires that spread to apartment buildings, trap-
ping residents or forcing them into the streets. Fires
caused an estimated $25 million in damage through-
out the Northeast.
Perhaps more unexpected than the deaths and
property damage, the storm briefly dented the brash
confidence of America’s premier city. “The most
amazing thing to the residents of this great city must
be the ease with which the elements were able to
overcome the boasted triumph of civilization…and
our superior means of intercommunication,” wrote
the Times on March 13. “It is hard to believe in this
last quarter of the 19th century that for even one day
New York could be so completely isolated from the
rest of the world, as if Manhattan Island was in the
middle of the South Sea.” A Hartford Courant edi-
torial expressed the same unease: “It is the boasting
and progressive Nineteenth Century that is para-
lyzed while the slowgoing Eighteenth would have
taken such an experience without a ruffle.”
There could be only one response to Mother
Nature’s outburst: a stronger infrastructure, more
progress. Nobody wanted to suffer such hardships
again. “Had it not been for the blizzard,” the Times
noted, “the people of the city might have gone on for
an indefinite time enduring the nuisance of electric
wires dangling from poles; of slow trains running on
trestlework. . . .Now, two things are tolerably certain—
that a system of a really rapid transit which cannot
be made inoperative by storms must be straightaway
devised and as speedily as possible constructed, and
that all the electric wires…must be put underground
without delay.”
Alas, in fact it took several years for New York to
devise plans for underground wiring and a subway
system. When construction began in 1900, North
America’s first subway tunnel—in Boston—was al-
ready three years old. While the Blizzard of ’88 wasn’t
the only reason New York built modern transporta-
tion, power and communications networks, safe
from the vagaries of nature, it certainly spurred their
development. It was a cataclysm turned catalyst. +
OCTOBER 2015 57
 The Land
Blew Away
Prolonged drought and
poor farming practices
created an environmental
nightmare
by Sarah Richardson

58 AMERICAN HISTORY
 “With the gales came the dust. Sometimes it was so thick that it
completely hid the sun. Visibility ranged from nothing to fifty feet, the
former when the eyes were filled with dirt which could not be avoided,
even with goggles,” wrote Lawrence Svobida in his memoir of farming
wheat in Kansas during the Dust Bowl years. >
> “At other times a cloud is seen to be approach- earth. Instead of being slow to change its form, it ap-
ing from a distance of many miles. Already it has the pears to be rolling on itself from the crest downward.
banked appearance of a cumulus cloud, but it is black As it sweeps onward, the landscape is progressively
instead of white, and it hangs low, seeming to hug the blotted out. Birds fly in terror before the storm, and

Clouds of dust turn

the sky black in the
Texas Panhandle,
March 1936.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A Kansas farmhouse
is swallowed by dust
as its residents flee,
September 1939.
only those that are strong of wing may escape. The
smaller birds fly until they are exhausted, then fall to
the ground, to share the fate of the thousands of jack
rabbits which perish from suffocation.”
Another witness, Avis D. Carlson, writing in the
New Republic, recalled, “The impact is like a shovel-
ful of fine sand flung against the face. People caught
in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come
to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate
that swirling murk. . . .The nightmare is deepest dur-
ing the storms. But on the occasional bright day and
the usual gray day we cannot shake from it. We live
with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us
of possessions and the hope of possessions. It is be-
coming Real. The poetic uplift of spring fades into
a phantom of the storied past. The nightmare is be-
coming life.”
The period of drought and dust storms that rav-
aged a swath of land stretching over 50 million acres
from western Kansas to eastern Nevada lives in the
American memory as the Dust Bowl. Proven now to
be the most severe drought in the nation’s recorded
history, the Dust Bowl resulted from unusually pro-
Dust threatens the
small southeastern
Colorado town of
Springfield, 1935.
60 AMERICAN HISTORY
longed dryness and heat, coupled with a surge in farming on suboptimal land,
using techniques based on a poor understanding of soil ecology. Farmers worked
the soil as they had land farther east, believing that “rain follows the plow”: More
intensive cultivation and tree planting would increase precipitation.
If farmers thought they could be rainmakers, they were worse than wrong.
Intensive farming with disc plows that pulverized already poor soils eventually
disrupted the thin layer of fertile topsoil that agriculture depends on. When dry,
hot conditions settled in, this parched “skin” of the earth simply blew away, in
terrifying, drifting “black blizzards.”
The droughts that created the Dust Bowl began in 1930 and occurred inter-
mittently until 1939. During the worst year, 1934, drought afflicted about 75 per-
cent of the country, and 27 states were severely affected. Many farmers and their
families were forced to flee west, a migration memorably recounted in John Stein-
beck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. An estimated 2.5 million people left the Plains
region, and many migrated to California’s Central Valley to labor as farm workers.
Meanwhile, the disaster of the Dust Bowl forced attention from the federal
government. More than a billion dollars in aid ($13 billion in 2013 dollars) was
distributed, and federal advisers instituted soil conservation practices. Crop in-
surance policies, underwritten by the federal government to reimburse farmers
for losses they suffered or to pay them not to plant crops, also made their debut
in this period.
Just as the Dust Bowl transformed farming practices on the Plains, another
transformation was occurring in California. Much of the Golden State is natu-
rally too dry for farming, but in the 1930s extensive water-redistributing systems
dramatically boosted the Central Valley’s agricultural potential. And water drawn
from the Owens Valley (in east-central California) and the Colorado River (on the
Arizona border) helped supply semi-arid Southern California, which could not
 1930s Dust
Bowl
Extent of damage:
50 million acres
Intensity: drought
coupled with high heat
Duration: 1930s
Federal aid: $1 billion,
estimated, 1930s
dollars
otherwise support a dense population. The system worked well for nearly a cen-
tury, even through an exceptional drought of 1976-77, which the state weathered
when its population was just 60 percent of today’s total.
California’s current drought—now in its fourth year—is not the Dust Bowl,
but it spells potentially even greater transformation, given the state’s far higher
population density and its more extensive and diversified economic develop-
ment. The unusual intensity and length of the drought has drawn down reser-
voirs, and because of little snow and high heat, the Sierra Mountains are bare of
the snowpack that normally supplies through melt-off more than half the region’s
water. Groundwater reserves, which normally supply the other half, are being de-
pleted at an alarming rate, with wells being drilled to make up for the lack of sur-
OPPOSITE, BOTH IMAGES: © CORBIS; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
face water. According to the Los Angeles Times, in some parts of the San Joaquin
Valley in central California the groundwater table has dropped 150 feet over the
past 15 years and the land is sinking a foot a year. Already an estimated 12 million
trees have died, taking with them the moisture they would have contributed to
the air as well as creating fuel for fires.
In 2014 the state launched a program to curtail water use, which included the
first-ever restrictions on groundwater use, and in June 2015 water was withheld
from senior rights-holders for the first time ever. Efforts to monitor and forecast
drought conditions have been stepped up, but drought is a gradual process. It can
be evaluated for intensity once it occurs based on precipitation, temperature, soil
moisture and stream flow, but it defies prediction in the conventional sense.
Dust Bowl refugees
on Highway 99 near
Bakersfield, Calif.,
November 1936.
As Californians learn to conserve, climate sci-
entists are trying to figure out if an unusually long-
lasting high-pressure ridge that blocked the arrival of
rains from the Pacific was related to global warming.
The jury is still out. Already researchers are play-
ing out scenarios of continuing water shortage. One
study recently calculated that if the Colorado River,
which contributes just more than half the water used
in Southern California, ran dry for a year—with no
other water available—the West could lose 16 million
jobs, 7 million in California alone. A longer-range
forecast, incorporating projections based on warm-
ing due to climate change, concluded that California
and the Central Plains would likely face droughts
lasting decades or more in the last half of the 21st
century.
That could make the Dust Bowl seem like a brief
dry spell. +
OCTOBER 2015 61
Smoke and ash
pour out of
Mount St. Helens
in southwestern
Washington state,
May 18, 1980.

The
62 AMERICAN HISTORY
 America’s greatest
volcano eruptions
by Roger L. Vance

Fire Below
© CORBIS
 I n the past 10,000 years calamitous volcanic eruptions have
shaped much of the American landscape. According to the United
States Geological Survey only Indonesia and Japan surpass the United
States in the number of historically active volcanoes—those that have
written accounts of their eruptions. >
> Most of the 160 volcanoes in the United States
are among the approximately 450 volcanoes situated
along a 25,000 mile arc—the Ring of Fire—that
stretches from New Zealand through Japan, across
the Bering Strait and down the west coast of North
America to the southern tip of South America. The
majority of U.S. volcanoes are in rugged wilderness
in Alaska and the Cascade Range of the Pacific
Northwest, relatively far from major population cen-
ters. But population growth over the past half-centu-
A month after the ry now encroaches on the Cascades. Washington’s
Novarupta eruption, Mount Rainier, which last erupted more than a thou-
a grave in the Katmai sand years ago, now has some 2.5 million people liv-
Village Cemetery is ing within 100 miles of its 14,410-foot peak. Rainier’s
still covered in ash. 26 glaciers contain five times as much snow and ice
as all the other Cascade volcanoes combined. A major
eruption could produce volcanic ash, lava flows and
pyroclastic flows—avalanches of intensely hot rock
and volcanic gases. Torrents of water from melting
ice and snow could send slurries of mud and boul-
ders toward the major population centers of Puyallup
and Tacoma.
The world’s greatest 20th-century volcanic
eruption occurred in June 1912 on the Alaska Penin-
sula, about 300 miles southwest of Anchorage. No-
varupta spewed an estimated 3 cubic miles of magma
and ash into the air and left 3,000 square miles blan-
keted by more than a foot of ash. Although modern
volcano monitoring did not exist at the time, ances-
tral knowledge handed down through generations
informed native inhabitants of looming danger. Most
of the villagers living in the shadow of nearby Katmai
Mountain evacuated the area as severe earthquakes
in May and early June grew more intense.
Harry Kaiakokonok was 6
years old and fishing with his
family at Kaflia Bay, 32 miles east
and directly downwind of Novar-
upta when it erupted. Decades
later he recalled, “We start to run
as hard as we can…up the side of
high hill. . . .We get to top of hill
and see sky get black all over…full
of lightnings. . . .Then our parents
start hollering for us to come to
our barabaras [sod huts], and we
run back down the hill. . . .Start-
ed snowing like that fine pumice
coming down. Make a lot of noise,
the size of rice, some of it, some of
it smaller, and some of it bigger,
and some of it was as big as a ket-
tle or pot. Kaflia Bay…used to be
blue, flat calm, no wind; and start-
ed to get white. . . .Pretty soon…
dark came…[then] pitch black. So
black even if you put your hand
 two or three inches from your face outside you can’t Almost 300 miles
see it cause it was so dark. from Mount St.
“It get hot in those barabaras. We pull off all our Helens, the Ephrata,
clothes. We soak them in water and put them over our Wash., airport is
face. . . .After a while we open the door and try to see smothered by ash,
out. All black, everywhere. A little bird fly into baraba- May 19, 1980.
ra. He can’t see where he go. We childrens wash his
eyes with water and he stay in barabara with us.”
Also at the Kaflia fishing camp was 18-year-old
George Kosbruk, who described his first glimpse of
the post-eruption world: “Light is coming. Oh boy,
just like snow. Can’t see nothing. No kind of tree. All
white to mountain. No kind of beach. No bluff. Noth-
ing. All white, the big river. Filled up. No running, the
water. Just like cement.”
The bay was choked with dead porpoises, birds
and fish floating on ash and pumice several feet deep.
There was no drinking water and little to eat. In that
first light, the elders chose nine young men, Kosbruk
among them, to paddle kayaks across Shelikof Strait
to Kodiak for help. Several days later the U.S. Coast
Guard arrived to ferry survivors to Kodiak.
The devastation from the 1912 Novarupta erup-
tion was widespread, but no deaths were reported.
The villagers who abandoned their homes never re-
turned. It was estimated that all areas occupied prior
to the eruption might have been habitable within two
decades, but in 1918 President Woodrow Wilson es-
tablished Katmai National Monument, which even-
tually grew into Katmai National Park and Preserve.
Sixty-eight years later, after two months of ac- scorching hot and impossible to breathe. . . .I felt I was being burned, thought even
tivity that included 10,000 earthquakes, Washington’s I was being covered by lava. I was being cremated, the pain unbearable.
Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980. Within “After a minute I got up, my back to a searing, painful heat. . . .All the trees were
15 minutes of the 8:32 a.m. blast a column of dust and down, except a few small ones standing as eerie silhouettes. Everything was drab
ash reached 15 miles high and soon drifted east, plung- gray and covered in a foot of ash. The trees had blown down northwestward but
ing Spokane into complete darkness and spreading as none fell on us. My clothes didn’t burn, but my skin had badly burned through my
far as Oklahoma. When Mount St. Helens’ magma clothes—arms, legs, back, chest, and the inside of my mouth burned.”
bulge gave way, it triggered the largest landslide in After eight hours of wandering through a devastated landscape, seriously in-
recorded history, unleashing hot gas, steam and rock jured and losing hope, the loggers were rescued by National Guard helicopters.
debris, and melting snow and ice that inundated river The last significant eruption of Mount St. Helens had occurred in 1857, and
valleys spreading from the volcano. Even though the the 1980 calamity was an awesome demonstration of the danger lurking deep
eruption was much anticipated and intensely moni- inside some of America’s most majestic mountains. Soon after, the USGS estab-
tored, 57 people in the blast zone perished. lished the Cascades Volcano Observatory, in Vancouver, Wash., joining the other
Among those who survived were loggers James U.S. monitoring centers in Hawaii, Alaska, California and Yellowstone. The USGS
Scymanky and Jose Dias y Miranda, about 12 miles Volcano Hazards Program budget for 2015 is about $25 million. +
away in the Hoffstadt Valley. “I heard screeching or
screaming. I shut off the saw thinking one of my com-
panions was hurt,” remembered Scymanky in Richard HOW VOLCANOES ARE MEASURED
OPPOSITE: DR. ROBERT F. GRIGGS/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE; AP

Waitt’s In the Path of Destruction: Eyewitness Chron-

icles of Mount St. Helens. “[Dias] came running down In an effort to provide a relative measure of volcanic eruptions, the 0-8
through the trees, hurtling over a fallen one, waving volcanic explosivity index (VEI) was created in 1982. Explosivity value is
based on volume of material—tephra—ejected, height of the eruption
his arms and shouting ‘El volcán esta explotando!’…
cloud and qualitative observations. A magnitude 8 represents a “mega-
Rocks zinged through the woods, bouncing off trees, colossal” volcano with an ejection of 240 cubic miles of tephra and a
then the tops of trees snapped off. . . .Ten seconds 31-mile-tall cloud column. The 1912 Novarupta eruption has been classified
later a horrible snapping, crashing, crunching, grind- a magnitude 6, Mount St. Helens a 5. Above a magnitude 2, each VEI
ing came down through the forest from the south- interval represents a tenfold increase in observed ejecta criteria.
east. It grew louder, like a gigantic locomotive, or like
ocean waves but very loud. I hurled my saw away and
scrambled down into the jumble of trees we’d cut.
Suddenly I could see nothing. I’d been knocked down
and my hard hat blown off. It got hot right away, then

OCTOBER 2015 65
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Creating a New Global Economy

The Summit: Bretton Woods, 1944, by Ed Conway, Pegasus

In July 1944, a few weeks after the Allied D-Day invasion of Europe, 44 inter- Briton Keynes (left)
and American
national delegations gathered at the Mount Washington resort in New Hampshire
White discuss a
to talk about economics, not war. They were in Carroll, N.H., officially, but the coal new world order at
magnate who’d built the hotel had given the railroad station and post office the the Bretton Woods
summit, 1944.
name Bretton Woods, and that would be the name associated with the ground-
breaking, three-week parley. Its purpose, as Ed Conway writes in his surprisingly
colorful book The Summit: Bretton Woods, 1944, was “to replace the mangled global
monetary system responsible for the Great Depression (and, by extension, for the
war) with something that worked.” >

> As Conway notes, no one had ever before

successfully modified the international monetary
system, which had “evolved incrementally—from the
early days of mercantilism to the British Empire–
dominated gold standard which collapsed in 1914,
through to the flimsy system of currencies and rules
erected after the Great Depression in the 1930s.”
To avoid a repeat of the post–World War I turmoil
that had sparked World War II, experts agreed that
a more interventionist model was needed, but few
people had much idea how it should function.
It fell to two government officials to find a
solution. One was Britain’s John Maynard Keynes,
the celebrated, Cambridge-educated economist,
and the other was Harry Dexter White, a senior
U.S. Treasury official who’d later be accused of
passing secrets to the Soviet Union. As Conway
notes, Keynes and White were the “odd couple”
of international economics. Keynes was tall and
patrician, and a member of the House of Lords.
White was a short, shy, self-made man from a
rough side of Boston who earned a Ph.D. from
Harvard. Their relationship was “rocky, caustic and
occasionally aggressive; the pair would shout at each
other in meetings, bully each other in an attempt to
get their ways, and, afterward, abuse their rival to Bretton Woods instituted a fixed exchange-
LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

friends.” But they respected each other—and the two
men pieced together the framework of a new system
that, to a large extent, reflected America’s new
standing as the world’s economic powerhouse.
rate system designed to constrain international
cash flows by keeping the currencies of the major
nations stable and convertible. It would, through
regulation, prevent extreme trade imbalances
and inflation from creating social upheaval. The
U.S. dollar became the world’s reserve currency.
Currency devaluations would be policed by the
new International Monetary Fund while the

OCTOBER 2015 67
 reviews

International Bank of
Reconstruction and
Development (later the
World Bank) would
make loans to war-
impoverished nations.
The U.S. Marshall
Plan of postwar aid to
Europe eclipsed Bretton
Woods for a time, and
neither Keynes nor
White saw the fruit of
their visions. Keynes
failed to persuade the
United States to give
cash-poor Britain a
massive grant. He
secured a large loan
instead, and died in
April 1946. President
Franklin Roosevelt’s
death ended White’s
influence at the Treasury
Department, and
Whittaker Chambers
and other Americans
who’d admitted to
spying for the Soviet Martha Jefferson: An Intimate Life With Thomas Jefferson
Union subsequently
By William G. Hyland Jr., Rowman & Littlefield
implicated him as part
of their network. White
denied the charges
during testimony before
the House Committee
One is taught not to judge a book by its cover, but the cover art for William
on Un-American G. Hyland’s Martha Jefferson: An Intimate Life With Thomas Jefferson raises
Activities on August 13, immediate questions about the historical accuracy of its content. It is a picture
1948. Three days later, at
age 55, he overdosed on
of the East entrance to the second version of Monticello—conceived by Jeffer-
digitalis and died from a son after his wife’s death, and thus one she never saw much less inhabited. >
heart attack at his New
Hampshire farm. > That miscue sets the tone for the rest of Fact is, very little is known about Martha
The Bretton Woods the book. Hyland, a practicing attorney and Wayles. She was the daughter of English immigrant
system promoted sometime author (his previous book challenged turned planter John Wayles and his first wife, Martha
steady international assertions that Jefferson fathered children with Eppes, who died during the younger Martha’s birth.
growth that lasted until his slave Sally Hemings), aims to dramatically Growing up on a tobacco plantation in Charles City
the early 1970s, when and authoritatively expand our knowledge of County, Va., Martha was raised primarily by her
today’s more volatile Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. But his book enslaved mammy, Betty Hemings. (Two stepmothers
floating exchange rate is too filled with errors and historical fiction to both died by the time Martha was 13.)
was adopted. But the have much scholarly legitimacy. For example, A small, comely woman with auburn hair and
name Bretton Woods he opens with a poignant account of 33-year-old hazel eyes, Martha learned at an early age how
still invokes a period Martha’s final moments. As she “slipped away in to manage the planation’s accounts and handle
of order and discipline, death,” Hyland writes, a distraught Jefferson was chores like brewing beer and making soap. She
and that is a credit to the at her side. It is moving, but wrong: According loved to read and ride and was an accomplished
contrarian economists to Martha Jefferson’s account of her mother’s musician—passions she shared with Jefferson.
© KEN HOWARD/ALAMY

who created it out of the death, Jefferson was not in his wife’s bedroom At 18 she married attorney Bathurst Skelton and
tumult of World War II. when she died. then, 22 months later, found herself a widow
—Richard Ernsberger Jr. with a 10-month-old son. Several suitors sought
Martha’s hand, seeing her as a propertied, fecund

68 AMERICAN HISTORY
Thomas and Martha
Jefferson lived in this two-
room cottage—now the
South Pavilion—while the
first version of Monticello
was under construction.

woman. Jefferson won it. They

were married on January 1,
1772, six months after Martha’s
son Jack died, and four years
before Jefferson would write the
Declaration of Independence.
The two shared a decade of
“unchequered happiness,”
according to Jefferson, though
he was busy being a legislator,
governor of Virginia and delegate
to the Second Continental
Congress during their marriage
and wasn’t home much. Martha
endured six more pregnancies, the
final one draining the remainder
of her strength and ultimately
causing her death in 1782.
Hyland claims to have taken
advantage of “the explosion of
research in recent years that has
enriched our understanding of both History
Jeffersons.” However, most of what
he considers new material is merely
speculation based on period social
practices and established historical
Repeats
Now available for your iPad.®

information about Jefferson Just visit the website address below

himself. “Jefferson’s dislike of to subscribe online now.
slavery (and probably Martha’s
too)” is typical of the way Hyland
reveals information about Martha
Jefferson. His description of the Experience the Civil War
couple’s courtship is derived not in Jacksonville
from actual accounts but from, as
Hyland puts it, “a reasonable degree Visit the Museum of Military History
of historical probability based on and discover weapons and artifacts
eighteenth-century customs and used during the Civil War. Then relive
habits in addition to what we know one of Arkansas’ first stands before the
about Jefferson’s behavior.”
Union Army captured Little Rock with
The book contains some
this year's reenactment at the Reed’s
entertaining snippets about
plantation life in pre-revolutionary Bridge Battle site on October 17th.
Virginia, but there are too many
inconsistencies, and too much
questionable material, to be a
credible biography of a woman we www.americanhistorymag.com/
all wish we knew better. subscribe
—Mary Burruss www.jacksonvillesoars.com
 reviews

Britain’s Pyrrhic victory

at Bunker Hill, June 17,
EYE CANDY 1775, as drawn by a
British officer severely
wounded in the fight.

at Willamette University.
Green examines three
key periods of U.S.
history—the Puritan
founding, the American
Revolution and the
early years of the 19th
century—to shed light
on the veracity of the
Christian claims and
the reasons why they
endure.

The Marquis:
Lafayette
Reconsidered
by Laura Auricchio
(Knopf)
Revolution: Mapping the Road to WE ALSO Auricchio, a specialist
in 18th-century
American Independence, 1755-1783 LIKE French history and
by Richard H. Brown and Paul E. Cohen, W.W. Norton The Constitution: dean of the School of
An Introduction Undergraduate Studies
by Michael Stokes at The New School for
Some of the most valuable artifacts of U.S. history are maps—specifically, hand- Paulsen and Luke Public Engagement,
drawn manuscript maps showing how the nation evolved before, during and Paulsen (Basic Books) explains the personal
after the American Revolution. This impressive collection of 60 maps shows struggles, social
This is not a scholarly
territorial claims and military campaigns starting with the French and Indian War quandaries and idealistic
tome but rather a
visions of the 19-year-
(1755-63), by which the British solidified their hold on North America, to the lively and sufficiently
old who volunteered
Revolutionary War, by which they lost that prize possession and America gained comprehensive history
to fight under George
its independence 20 years later. of the Constitution
Washington.
Produced on both sides of the Atlantic, many of these maps were the and its interpretation,
complete with the
chief means by which people followed the wars. The authors selected maps Their Last Full
colorful personalities,
from a variety of sources, including the Library of Congress, the King George III Measure: The Final
historical events and
Collection at the British Library and the Lord Percy Collection at Alnwick Castle Days of the Civil War
controversies that have
in Northumberland, as well as maps owned by British general William Clinton by Joseph Wheelan
shaped the text.
(now at the University of Michigan) and by the Marquis de Lafayette. (Da Capo)
The book opens with A New and Accurate Map of the English Empire in Inventing a A fast-paced account
North America, produced in 1755 for the Society of Anti-Gallicans (a British Christian America: of soldiers, armies,
group opposed to French interests). At a time when French and English The Myth of the political leaders and
Religious Founding ordinary people trying
cartographers claimed large overlapping territories on the continent, this
by Steven K. Green to survive the war’s
“masterpiece of propaganda,” write Brown and Cohen, “had no match in its
(Oxford University wreckage during its last
effectiveness to draw Britain and France into war.” John Mitchell’s A Map of the five months, from the
Press)
British Colonies in North America, “the template map of America” from 1755 capture of Fort Fisher to
to 1785, is also in the oversize book, which concludes with a map of the Battle The notion that the
Lincoln’s assassination.
United States was
of Yorktown produced by American military engineer Major Sebastian Bauman.
founded on strictly
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Accompanying essays offer historical context and details on the mapmakers.

Christian principles is
Write Brown and Cohen: “Most historians seek out maps to illustrate and widely accepted—and
support their narratives. Our narratives support the maps.” Early America has a also untrue, writes
rich cartographic heritage, and much of it can be seen in this book. Green, a law professor

70 AMERICAN HISTORY
 Back
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Rockwell Kent’s Polar Expedition (1944) sold at Heritage Auctions in Dallas for more than double
the expected price. Commissioned for a 1945 Encyclopedia Britannica article for young readers,
the painting reflects Kent’s own adventures in Greenland. Raised in a privileged artistic family
in Tarrytown, N.Y., Kent was drawn to exploration—both in the physical and political realms.
He traveled widely, often supporting himself by working on docks and oil rigs, and became
sympathetic to the ideals of communism. When the State Department refused to issue him a
visa to travel to Helsinki for a peace conference in 1955, Kent took the case to the Supreme Court
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and won. In 1957 Kent gave many of his works to Soviet museums and was awarded the Lenin
Peace Prize in 1967. Among his travels were three lengthy visits to Greenland, where he lived and
traveled as the Inuit did, clad in windproof sealskin suits and dog-fur socks. About this painting
of Greenland, Kent wrote, ‘On fair days and under good conditions a trip of fifty to seventy-five
miles, with dogs drawing a laden sledge, is easily accomplished. North Greenland in spring, the
country and its life, are an experience in happiness never to be forgotten.’ ”

72 AMERICAN HISTORY
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