88 pages • 2 hours read
Isaac's Storm
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American Hubris at the Turn of the Century
Larson's central thesis in Isaac's Storm is that at the turn of the century, America was filled to the brim with a false and dangerous sense of overconfidence, even to the point where people believed they could control the weather. To be sure, there were several reasons for Americans—specifically white American men—to feel confident about their nation's future in 1900. The Western frontier, along with the American Indians who long inhabited it, had largely been conquered. In terms of foreign affairs, the Spanish-American War was extraordinarily popular, as it gave American men from the North and South the first opportunity to fight alongside one another since the Civil War.
The war ended with a US victory in less than 100 days, and 289 Americans perished in the conflict. America had also grown into an industrial and technological force to be reckoned with on the global stage. Thanks to the efforts of Andrew Carnegie and countless workers, America had become the world's largest steel producer. Following a halt in production during the Civil War, the country had regained its position as one of the world's top producers of raw cotton. Meanwhile, three of the most transformative technological inventions of the previous century—Samuel Morse's telegraph, Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, and Thomas Edison's light bulb—all came from the minds of Americans (or, in Bell's case, a Scotsman who long ago chose America as his adopted country).
While this collective sense of confidence in America may have been well-earned in some respects, it also requires a measure of self-delusion to maintain, specifically in respect to man's illusory sense of control over the weather. While the Age of Reason in America, guided by intellectual leaders like Thomas Jefferson, brought with it dazzling technological feats, it also gave man a false sense of having finally conquered God and nature. This attitude is most clearly represented in the book by Isaac. Even though Isaac possessed as much knowledge of meteorological phenomena and their history as any American alive, he is extremely selective and biased about processing this knowledge in respect to forecasts surrounding Galveston's susceptibility to hurricanes. In his infamous 1891 article in the Galveston News, Isaac dismisses two hurricanes that recently struck the Texas coast in 1875 and 1886 as anomalies that can furthermore be dismissed because they caused little in the way of property damage. While Larson points out that Isaac's stated lack of anxiety around hurricanes is in part a result of boosterism for his city in its ongoing competition with Houston, his unwarranted confidence in the face of nature's most devastation phenomena is well in keeping with American attitudes at the turn of the century.
At the end of the book, Larson links the past to the present, drawing implicit parallels between 1900 and 2000—parallels that only seem more pronounced in retrospect. Like 1900, 2000 capped off a decade in which American hubris reached similar heights. The end of the Cold War in 1991 spawned several political treatises arguing that the American form of liberal Western democracy would never again be challenged. The 1990s did little to erode America's confidence. In The Atlantic, economist Joseph Stiglitz writes, "At the height of the 1990s economic boom—a period of unprecedented growth—capitalism American-style seemed triumphant" (Stiglitz, Joseph. "The Roaring Nineties." The Atlantic. Oct. 2002.) Combined with the technology boom on the US West Coast and the startling innovations coming out of that sector, many Americans felt assured of their future prosperity and security going into the next decade.
Of course in retrospect, that unbridled confidence reveals itself to be as misplaced and dripping with hubris as the American attitudes Larson identifies in 1900. For the United States, the 2000s began with the bursting of the tech bubble, followed shortly by the September 11 attacks and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While these weren't natural disasters, they struck significant blows to the sense of safety and stability many Americans felt at the end of the 20th century. Although Larson doesn't know any of this as he writes Isaac's Storm from the year 2000, his warnings about American hubris prove to be distressingly prescient.
The Effect of Politics on Severe Weather
Throughout Isaac's Storm, Larson reckons with the reality that the wages of natural disasters are closely linked to politics. As established previously, the Weather Bureau in 1900 finds itself in a precarious position with respect to the American public: “Some critics argued men should not try to predict the weather, because it was God's province; others that men could not predict the weather, because men were incompetent" (31). With keen awareness of the controversy surrounding the Weather Bureau's mission and efficacy, chief Moore goes to great lengths to preserve the public reputation of the agency, even when doing so contradicts the scientific facts or experts on the ground. His reluctance to issue hurricane warnings that could save lives stems both from a fear of embarrassing the Bureau through false alarms and from an obsessive personal need for control.
This theme of weather as a phenomenon whose consequences are subject to the whims and quirks of politicians is one that strongly resonates in the 21st century. According to NASA, 97 percent of climate scientists agree that "climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities." ("Scientific Consensus: Earth's Climate is Warming." NASA.gov, https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/.). While there is a range of legitimate opinions about the severity of the outcomes stemming from climate change, scientists and policy experts agree that severe social and economic damage will come as a result of climate change, some believe as early as 2040.
Yet climate change has become one of the most politically-charged issues in the United States. The debate has become so polarizing that the American Meteorology recommends avoiding the term "climate change" all together when warning of intense storms and other phenomena scientists believe are exacerbated by warming temperatures. Meteorologists fear that by using the term, they risk alienating climate naysayers or outright deniers who will dismiss legitimate storm warnings upon hearing the politically-charged phrase. In a way, this strategy is like akin to Moore's refusal to use the word "tornadoes" or to issue hurricane warnings in only the most dire of circumstances.
Moore's refusal to acknowledge legitimate hurricane forecasts intersects with another politically-charged issue in 21st-century America: race. Despite the expertise and inherited knowledge of hurricanes possessed by Cuba's meteorologists, Moore and his lieutenants in Havana work to undermine the forecasts issued by Cuba's distinguished Belen Observatory. William B. Stockman, the man Moore puts in charge of the West Indies branch of the US Weather Bureau "saw the people of Cuba and the Indies as a naive, aboriginal race in need of American stewardship" (103). Stockman's racial prejudices toward the Cuban people are a significant factor in his tendency to dismiss legitimate warnings issued by the Belen Observatory, including one about the hurricane that hits Galveston: “Like Moore, Stockman worried about the damage likely to occur through the issuance of unwarranted storm alerts. […] Restraint was the white weatherman's burden. It was paramount, he wrote, that the service avoid causing 'unnecessary alarm among the natives'" (104). It is a distressing reality of the era that in 1900 racism is so pervasive that it even affects the weather.
Some argue race continues to play a role in how the United States responds to natural disasters. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina killed over 1,800 people in New Orleans. Like the Galveston hurricane, casualties were exacerbated by political and human factors. Just as Galveston did not have a proper seawall in place in 1900, Katrina's levees and other flood-control systems were found by multiple investigations to be poorly designed by the US Army Corps of Engineers. While the National Weather Service—unlike its predecessor the Weather Bureau during the Galveston storm—drew praise for its accurate and timely storm warnings, the federal government's relief response was deemed by many to be slow and insufficient, compounding the loss of life. According to a 2015 survey conducted by the Public Policy Research Lab at Louisiana State University, 60% of New Orleans's black population believes that the government's slow response was because the storm's primary victims were people of color. (Robertson, Campbell. "Racially Disparate Views of New Orleans's Recovery After Hurricane Katrina." The New York Times. 24 Aug. 2015.)
Interrogating the Great Man Theory of History
From Isaac's perspective—at least the one he later shares in public—he performs valiantly in the hours leading up to the storm: “Later Isaac took personal credit for inciting six thousand people to leave the beach and its adjacent neighborhoods. If not for him, he claimed later, the death toll would have been far higher. Perhaps even double" (140). While it would be easy for Larson to accept Isaac's version of events at face value, thus making him an irresistible hero in a story of resisting bureaucratic stupidity and the tyranny of conventional wisdom, Larson refuses to do so. He highlights specific facts—from what Hix is told at the Weather Bureau to the lack of independent eyewitness reports confirming Isaac's claims—to interrogate Isaac's version of events and, in the process interrogate the Great Man theory of history itself. According to this theory, attributed to the 19th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, history is best explained by the impact of a few great heroes and leaders on whose actions the wheel of history turns.
In the endnotes of Isaac's Storm, Larson says he isn't interested in writing Great Man history: "It is one thing to write Great Man history, quite another to explore the lives of history's little men" (273). At least in Larson's telling, Isaac—for all his expertise and accomplishments before and after the Galveston storm—is among history's little men, one who fails to rise to the occasion when called upon to do so. These failures, to be clear, are less a consequence of innate character flaws and more a product of both the bureaucratic system in which Isaac operates, and the broader social atmosphere of hubris and overconfidence Larson returns to throughout the book. This is in line with what the English philosopher Herbert Spencer believed about Carlyle's theory—that while great men do exist and often alter the course of history, they are products of their social environment rather than beneficiaries of great intellect and vision bestowed at birth. In examining Isaac's behavior at his own key moment in history, the same could be said of not-so-great men—that their failings are largely a consequence of extrinsic pressures, not innate personal failings.
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