Isaac's Storm

The imagery of death, devastation, and decay Larson presents in the aftermath of the Galveston hurricane is horrifying. For the first rescue party, a prairie strewn with dead bodies and children's toys gives way to a sea riddled with corpses and a smell of putrefaction that emanates from the city for miles. While there are certainly many inside and outside the city who immediately set about providing relief to those who are injured and homeless, the physical decay is mirrored by instances of social decay. For example, in a previous section Larson commends Galveston for exhibiting "a rare harmony of spirit. Blacks, whites, Jews, and immigrants lived and worked side by side with an astonishing degree of mutual tolerance" (67). However, in the wake of the storm, some of that harmony dissipates—or perhaps it was always an illusion: “The city's racial harmony began to erode. Soldiers rounded up fifty black men at gunpoint and forced them onto the barge, promising whiskey to help make the task of loading, weighting, and dumping the bodies were tolerable" (239).

The city's black residents are also the target of grim and obscene rumors, spread in part by newspapers: “Black men were said to have begun looting bodies, chewing off fingers to gain access to diamond rings, then stuffing the fingers in their pockets. The nation's press took these stories as truth, then pumped them full of even more lurid details” (242). Such credulousness in the face of horrifying rumors extends to the newspaper industry's largely unquestioning acceptance of US Weather Bureau statements, both before and after the storm. Prior to the storm, a deference on the part of journalists toward Weather Bureau experts may be expected and even appropriate. 

Less appropriate is journalists' automatic parroting of Moore's talking points after the storm, which tell a story that veers dramatically from reality in details both big and small: “Most U.S. newspapers, unaware of the nuances of the bureau's performance and inclined in those days to be more accepting of official dogma, adopted Moore's view. The Boston Herald applauded the bureau for its 'excellent service.' The Buffalo, New York, Courier said the bureau's forecasts testified to its 'advanced efficiency'" (252). That newspapers are so attracted to sensationalist and scurrilous rumors when they're about black Americans but reluctant to confront the blatant lies of an official government source paints a dismal portrait of the news industry at the turn of the century.

In the final section of the book, Larson seems to suggest that America in the year 2000—the year of Isaac's Storm's publication—shares some qualities of America in 1900. Larson writes: 

In the narrow blue-bordered lands of Galveston, extravagant new homes rose on forests of stilts adjacent to blue evacuation signs that marked the island's only exit. Whenever a tropical storm threatened, residents converged on the city's gleaming Wal-Mart to buy batteries and flashlights and bottled water. Once, in a time long past when men believed they could part mountains, a very different building stood in the Wal-Mart's place, and behind its mist-clouded windows ninety-three children who did not know better happily awaited the coming of the sea (273).

By linking the past to the present, parallels between 1900 and 2000 are implicitly drawn—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 most famous of these was Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. In it, Fukuyama writes that world had reached "the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government" (Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. 1992.) 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 Afghanistan and Iraq. 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. Then, 2005 brought Hurricane Katrina, a storm that killed over 1800 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.

Of course, Larson doesn't know any of this as he writes Isaac's Storm from the year 2000. Yet his warnings about American hubris prove to be distressingly prescient.