Make It Rain

State Control of the Atmosphere in Twentieth-Century America

Kristine C. Harper

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780226597928
  9780226437231
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226437378
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Weather control. Juxtaposing those two words is enough to raise eyebrows in a world where even the best weather models still fail to nail every forecast, and when the effects of climate change on sea level height, seasonal averages of weather phenomena, and biological behavior are being watched with interest by all, regardless of political or scientific persuasion. But between the late nineteenth century—when the United States first funded an attempt to "shock" rain out of clouds—and the late 1940s, rainmaking (as it had been known) became weather control. And then things got out of control.

In Make It Rain, Kristine C. Harper tells the long and somewhat ludicrous history of state-funded attempts to manage, manipulate, and deploy the weather in America. Harper shows that governments from the federal to the local became helplessly captivated by the idea that weather control could promote agriculture, health, industrial output, and economic growth at home, or even be used as a military weapon and diplomatic tool abroad. Clear fog for landing aircraft? There's a project for that. Gentle rain for strawberries? Let's do it! Enhanced snowpacks for hydroelectric utilities? Check. The heyday of these weather control programs came during the Cold War, as the atmosphere came to be seen as something to be defended, weaponized, and manipulated. Yet Harper demonstrates that today there are clear implications for our attempts to solve the problems of climate change.

* I *

Weather Control: Scientific Fringe to Scientific Mainstream (1890–1950)

There can be no full conquest of the earth, and no real satisfaction to humanity, if large portions of the earth remain beyond his highest control.

JOHN WIDTSOE, 19281

CONTROL (WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT)

Before diving into weather control in its early guises, let’s talk about control in general. As we have seen, by definition, the state controls territory and the people living within it. Expanding territory and population requires ever more complex control over time.

With its ofttime fellow traveler, technology, science is about control as well: the control of nature. And if the state and its people can use science and technology to control nature, then why not control the weather and thereby the production and distribution of water for the nation’s benefit? During the late nineteenth century, the United States was overrun by technological enthusiasm. Professional engineers and tinkerers alike were masters of innovation and invention, creating and producing new communications devices (telegraph, telephone); more efficient steam engines to power railroads, ships, and factories; and internal combustion engines that would power automobiles and, in a few short years, airplanes. These innovations brought people closer together as travel and communication became faster and easier.

Writing in Scientific American (1896), Edward W. Byrn called the patent-rich period following the Civil War “an epoch of invention and progress unique in the history of the world . . . a gigantic tidal wave of human ingenuity and resource.”2 Thomas Parke Hughes, the historian of technology, later agreed: “Interest in invention and inventors was a manifestation of the realization of the power of technology.”3 By the end of the century, many Americans thought technology “was a broader, generalized, man-made force that could be applied at will to a wide variety of problems as they arose. Technology could bring order out of chaos, provide boundless energy, support business enterprise, and win wars.”4 And so the idea of controlling the weather was not really out of touch with the times—despite a lack of underlying scientific theory. Indeed, it made perfect sense, taking its place among all of the other rational, efficient methods that were being used or being proposed to be used to control forests, fisheries, agricultural output, or water resources.

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA: PUTTING SCIENCE TO WORK FOR THE STATE

The market was driving innovation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and industry was striving to meet the demand.5 The combined synergistic effect of science-supporting universities, nascent scientific professionalism, early corporate research and development, the introduction of scientific elites to the political process, and the rise of philanthropic foundations that were funding scientific efforts heightened the success of all of these entities.6 As the state grew in tandem with the professionalization of science, academics began offering solutions to state problems. What the state did not do was provide funding for these scientific efforts. In the days of “small science,” philanthropic donations were sufficient to keep laboratory and fieldwork going. Indeed, as scientists were attempting to find solutions for societal problems, they took great pains to maintain their objective and disinterested status by not seeking federal funding. The role of federal funding for science would not come into play until after World War II.7

The drive for innovation was already well underway when the scientifically informed, reform-minded responses to Gilded Age excesses became focused during the Progressive Era (1890 to 1920, give or take a few years). In their “search for order,” as historian Robert Wiebe put it, reformers wanted to apply rational, that is, scientific and efficient, controls to the workings of government that would encourage more democratic participation while also putting a premium on the use of experts to find solutions to major problems.

At the same time, waves of new immigrants were pouring in from central and southern Europe, many of them Roman Catholic, Jewish, and peasants. But instead of walking off ships at Ellis Island and heading west to establish farms as earlier immigrants had done, these new arrivals settled in East Coast cities where they found opportunities to make their way in a new land. Faced with rapid population growth, big city governments had to provide them with basic services, including education, sanitation, transportation, safety, and housing, and jobs as they became part of the fabric of their municipalities. Bureaucracies grew to accommodate those needs, strengthening the state apparatus at all levels.8

Anti-urban ideas intensified as the population of dark-haired, dark-eyed, darker-skinned, non-Protestant people grew along with suffering and distress in big cities. Some politicians suggested mitigating this “immigration problem” by packing these folks up and sending them out West. Certainly there was plenty of land for homesteading, as earlier settlers had done when “out West” meant Ohio, not some dry, treeless expanse west of the Mississippi River. But it was dry out there, so expensive irrigation projects would be needed to extract value from the land. Considering that a worldwide agricultural depression was underway at the same time, investing huge amounts of money in irrigation projects did not make a lot of sense. What if, however, there were another way to bring water to the parched land? Enter rainmaking. New inventions were appearing every day, and there was definitely a need for cheap water. So why not pursue it? As journalist Walter Lippmann put it, “We shall use all science as a tool and a weapon.”9 Using science would bring progress to the twentieth-century American state.10

Similarly, state bureaucracies grew to provide rational control over natural resources. Gilded Age entrepreneurs had systematically exploited natural resources, including timber, water, minerals, and agricultural land, to advance their industrial and economic agendas. But the devastation they left behind fed fears of scarcity and deprivation, particularly in view of the millions of newcomers whose needs had to be met. In response, society moved from a position of wastefulness to one of centralized efficiency, and conservation took on new importance. Mind you, the conservation of the early twentieth century was not the preservation of wild lands that we think of today when discussing conservation, but the maximum sustainable use of the resource in question. To determine just how to get the maximum use from a resource without depleting it for future generations would require the input of scientific experts, who were standing by to provide it to the increasingly strong bureaucratic state.11

Bureaucratic development was most effective in the hands of strong agency heads, who assembled outstanding talent and built legitimacy, and thus their organizations’ reputations, as they capitalized on the authority accorded to scientific experts. The agencies that pulled off this feat—the US Department of Agriculture is the premier exemplar—were able to make social changes through the efforts of their in-house experts.12

DEVELOPING EXPERTS AND EXPERTISE

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scientific authority carried weight with the broader society, and its status remained undisputed until the 1950s.13 Liberal writers Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann associated scientific expertise and professionalism with being objective and disinterested, and hence scientists undertook their work in the best interests of both the state and its people. As esteemed solar astronomer George Ellery Hale argued in a 1923 National Research Council report, science was about truth and progress, and “its work for humanity has only just begun.” For Hale, his colleagues, and most middle-class Americans, science was “cumulative and ever progressing.”14

Hence, scientific experts were the ones best suited to solve complex problems for the state, and their authority as scientists was used to obtain administrative autonomy for the agencies that employed them. In addition, federal administrators often worked with professional associations on problems so that it did not appear as if the state were meddling directly in scientific issues. All of these experts came out of academic settings since for many disciplines basic research was undertaken in the new research universities.15 After World War I, relatively new scientific fields, including meteorology and geophysics, formed professional associations for the first time, and the interwar years proved important for professionalization in those and many other scientific disciplines.16 Indeed, this professionalization of the sciences fed into the technocracy movement, which called for the institutionalization of technological change for state purposes and argued that civilization’s progress was directly tied to scientific progress, and took root during the 1920s.17 However, elite scientific researchers, that is, those working at prestigious research universities, who were more than happy to weigh in on federal policy issues, avoided federal funding throughout the 1930s because they did not want the state to control their research agendas.18 They spent the decade creating institutional ties among science, universities, industry, and the state, which were then set into motion by World War II and its massive technoscience undertakings to create all kinds of military hardware, medical breakthroughs, and, of course, the atomic bomb. By the time the war was over, state funding of science was solidly in place, and scientific experts were firmly in service to the state.

ADVOCATING CONSERVATION, BUILDING BUREAUCRACIES: WASTE NOT, WANT NOT

And advance the ideas behind conservation they did, with a laser-like focus on scientific management. Conservation ideals arose from implications of science and technology in modern society, with professionals and experts using the results of applied science to provide input for federal policy decisions. State-sponsored science and scientists within cabinet agencies were solidly in place before World War I. As might be expected, the federal government was strongly involved with supporting agriculture, and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) became the premier scientific executive department, with research arms that extended throughout the country. Its subordinate services and bureaus were science-based, with the Forestry Service, for example, borrowing and implementing European techniques of forest management starting in the late nineteenth century, while other USDA offices started promoting insect and weed control to improve crop yields in the first half of the twentieth century.19

One of the USDA’s subordinate organizations, however, was not as scientifically solid: the US Weather Bureau (USWB). Established under the USDA in 1891, it consolidated earlier federal weather services provided by the US Army Signal Service. But unlike the USDA offices that dealt with agricultural sciences—which were staffed with personnel holding discipline-appropriate college degrees—USWB offices were filled by people who had learned weather forecasting on the job, often starting as observers when they were teenagers and then working their way up to higher positions. Why the difference? US colleges did not offer degrees in meteorology until the late 1920s when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set up a graduate program within its aeronautical engineering degree program to meet the requirements of US Navy officers needing advanced training. Indeed, the very idea of someone getting a degree in meteorology was something of a nonstarter. As Harvard climatologist Robert DeCourcy Ward put it, “Everyone thinks they are a meteorologist.” Why study something that you already know? Unlike in the agricultural field, there were no “expert” meteorologists. Consequently, any meteorological idea was seen to be just as good as any other. So while the Weather Bureau tried to provide services to keep people safe, it had very little credibility. It was, one physicist opined, a “guessing science.”20 And in the Progressive Era, that was not good enough. Expertise depended upon solid science, and meteorology was anything but solid. (We’ll return to the theme of expertise—who is an expert and who is not—later.)

Somewhat surprisingly, given John Wesley Powell’s famed report on the arid lands of the American West (completed in 1888 by the US Department of the Interior’s Geological Survey), Interior was lacking in scientific capacity. In 1888, the USGS had measured water supplies, located sites for reservoirs and canals, and mapped areas suitable for irrigation in the West. The federal government took that information and planned out a strategy for western irrigation to bring water to these dry lands because its presence was critical to the region’s development and political economy, and west...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• part i  Weather Control: Scientific Fringe to Scientific Mainstream (1890–1950)
• part ii  Coming to Grips with Weather Control (1950–1957)
• part iii  Weather Control as State Tool (1957–1980)
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index