The circus was packing up when the dark clouds appeared.
The Gollmar Brothers—cousins to the Ringlings—had just performed in New Richmond, Wisconsin, a tiny town where, in 1899, “the appearance of billowing white tops on a meadow near the edge of town signaled as well-established a holiday as Christmas or the Fourth of July,” one historian writes. The Gollmars were a traveling troupe of musicians, snake charmers, acrobats, and clowns. They traveled by wagon and pitched their tents on farmland. Their performance featured an elephant, tropical birds, and a “monster menagerie and museum.”
On June 12, 1899, throngs of spectators traveled from nearby towns and gathered at the Gollmar Brothers’ tent. It began to rain, so people stayed in the tent for thirty minutes after the performance ended, happily chatting. Finally, the rain let up. Families began to make their way home.
That’s when people noticed the sky. One witness described seeing a “dancing” cloud that seemed to be “boiling or tumbling rapidly within itself.”
It was a tornado.
The roads and fields of New Richmond, usually near-empty, were filled with circus spectators when the tornado dropped down out of the sky. People thought “the end of the world had come,” Mary Sather writes in They Built Their City Twice.
The tornado began leveling a thousand-foot-wide path of destruction through the town. There was nowhere to run. Some people tried to hide in the cellar of a dry goods store. It became “a real death trap,” Sather writes, when the tornado sucked up the brick walls of the store “and hurled [them] back down on the crowd in the cellar.”
It would be remembered as “the Circus Day tornado”—to this day, the ninth-deadliest tornado in American history. One hundred and seventeen people were killed and over a hundred more were injured. The town of New Richmond was wiped out.
It was a tragedy made sharper by a nesting doll of ironies, one inside the other—that the circus brought people together in shared joy, guaranteeing a higher death count; that the places people rushed to hide became their coffins; and—strangest of all—that the tornado took the town by surprise 12 years after the government banned the word “tornado” from weather forecasts.
A Promising Innovation
The Gilded Age, the period in the United States from the late 1870s to the late 1890s, was a time of rapid technological innovation and rampant political corruption—twins, light and dark, that defined the era.
The telephone, typewriter, Kodak camera, and Heinz Ketchup were all invented during the Gilded Age and showcased at expos. Railroads criss-crossed through the country, connecting farmlands to cities and opening up new opportunities for trade, travel, and the pursuit of knowledge. At the same time, the government was beset by conmen and hucksters who took advantage of the period of change and optimism.
This was the strange environment in which a man named J.P. Finley was working furiously to develop a system of tornado forecasting.
John Park Finley was the son of a Michigan farmer. He was a giant—six-foot-three and over 200 lbs.—who was obsessed with new developments in meteorology. In 1877, he enlisted in the Army Signal Corps, which ran national weather forecasting until the Weather Bureau was created in 1890.
The government was worried about Finley’s tornado forecasting.
By all accounts, Finley was a fanatic about taking accurate weather readings and analyzing data. He quickly focused on tornadoes—specifically, how to predict where they’d land. Tornadoes were devastating in the Gilded Age: They came without warning, tore down homes and towns, and left people traumatized, hurt, or dead. They were common in certain central states, including Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Kansas.
Finley began collecting and compiling hundreds of tornado reports, looking for patterns in weather conditions right before tornadoes touched down. If he could figure out which conditions created tornadoes, he could build a warning system so people could take cover.
Finley’s obsession with tornado forecasting bordered on unhealthy: At one point he found himself in an Army hospital, suffering from exhaustion. (“He is doing too much brain work,” the attending physician wrote. “He very decidedly needs rest.”)
1883 was a particularly bad year for tornadoes: 270 Americans died, underscoring the urgency of Finley’s project.
By 1884, Finley was operating out of Washington, DC, with almost a thousand “spotters” working for him in regions where tornadoes were more likely. He developed a list of rules about tornado-friendly conditions and began issuing experimental forecasts about where tornadoes would appear next.
Finley’s forecasts were not perfect: Sometimes a normal storm appeared where he had forecast a tornado. But in 1885, “tornadoes appeared fifteen of the nineteen times he had predicted them,” historian Marlene Bradford reports. One of Finley’s supporters, Edward S. Holden, started devising a way to use telegraph lines to alert homes about tornado conditions, in combination with a bell system and a cannon. Meanwhile, Finley “urged citizens in tornado-prone areas to become their own tornado forecasters by paying particular attention to the development of peculiar clouds on the western horizon on sultry, oppressive days from April 1 through the end of September,” Bradford writes.
The Government Ban
The government was worried about Finley’s tornado forecasting.
If people panicked because they heard a tornado was coming, the government would be blamed for any damages or lost business caused by the panic—especially if it turned out to be a false alarm, Finley’s bosses reasoned.
So in 1887, the Signal Corps abruptly banned the word “tornado” in public forecasts.
“[I]t is believed that the harm done by such a prediction would eventually be greater than that which results from the tornado itself,” the chief signal officer wrote in a report. When the U.S. Weather Bureau was created three years later, it made the ban on tornado forecasting official.
The ban on tornado forecasting would remain in place for 60 years.
A politically connected meteorologist named Cleveland Abbe—called “the Father of the Weather Bureau” for his early propagandizing for the agency—loudly defended the tornado ban. In 1899, the year 117 people died at the Circus Day Tornado, Abbe wrote, “There is no material advantage to be derived from any, even the most perfect, system of forewarnings and attempts at protection.”
For the government, uncertainty and fear over tornadoes could be solved by censorship. A blanket ban on tornado warnings would keep people in the dark, just as they’d been before Finley started his forecasts. The concern that something would go wrong stopped the government from doing anything at all. Even as Gilded Age innovations pushed other scientific fields forward, the study of tornadoes would be paused.
As for Finley: His meteorological career was long over by the time of the Circus Day Tornado. A few years after the government banned tornado forecasting, Finley asked permission to join his regiment and focus on military duties. Not only had his government superiors derailed his forecasting; they’d also criticized his passion for his work. (Finley “is not successful with his subordinates,” one report read, “as he is apt to be unreasonable in his demands upon their time, expecting from all the same intense application he himself displays.”)
Finley’s drive to push America into a new stage of learning and innovation—using scientific discovery, trial and error, and voluntary collaboration to save lives—led to him being pushed out of the government, with the doors to progress slammed shut behind him.
The ban on tornado forecasting would remain in place for 60 years.
Lesson Learned?
Finley’s ill-fated tornado forecasting is a cautionary tale about government.
A historic innovation—from one of the government’s own experts!—was shut down for 60 years because of officials’ short-sighted risk calculations and fears. Finley’s superiors were more worried about public reaction to the forecasts than about what the forecasts might prevent.
It was only much later during World War II, when the government needed to protect its own munitions and airfields, that officials realized how helpful a tornado warning system would be and developed it—for the military. Civilian communities around military bases soon learned how to recognize and pass the warnings on. They started clamoring for civilian tornado warnings.
The government removed the ban on public tornado forecasts in 1950.
Alerts, of course, proved effective: Tornadoes are no longer inevitably catastrophic when people have warning. Despite America’s population rapidly climbing, tornado deaths declined. Today the National Weather Service sends emergency warnings through mobile carriers to everyone in range of a possible tornado. J.P. Finley would be thrilled.
But the government didn’t learn its lesson: It’s still quick to use bans and censorship as an easy fix for its own fears about how the public might handle something.
In 2013, for example, Florida shut down internet cafes because it worried people would use them for internet gambling. San Francisco recently banned “algorithmic devices” in setting rental prices, worried it would “destabilize” the rental market. Michigan banned the use of drones in hunting, even just to recover downed game. (PLF helped drone entrepreneur Mike Yoder sue.) Seattle banned landlords from asking prospective tenants about their criminal histories. (PLF helped several landlords sue and is currently working on an appeal to the Ninth Circuit.)
Bans and censorship like this are a cheap elixir—and they’re motivated by the government’s misunderstanding of its own purpose. When the government sees itself as a short-term protector of public order rather than the people’s own mechanism for defending their lives, liberty, and property, it fails. Even a public servant like J.P. Finley—energized to save lives—won’t be able to push progress forward if the system of government stands immovable against him.
