My Major Label Debut: Blame it On the Rain

"Students will enjoy Lee's concise, conversational style and the quirky relationship she identifies between humans and the forces of nature."-School Library Journal

Blame it on the Rain came out in 2006, the same year as The Elvis Impersonation Kit. I was writing at quite the clip back then, it seems.

One of the great things about writing for a publisher like Harper Collins is that your work gets translated into dozens of languages and from time to time a small box of books in Japanese or Korean would arrive in my mailbox.  (A number of my other titles have been published overseas as well. I usually only learn about this reality by accident, say when a reporter from South America wants to interview me.)

The episode that inspired this book was the Battle of Barnet during the British Wars of the Roses in 1471. It was a civil war with many intrigues and shifting allegiances. The shortest version of this tale is this: in the deep fog the Marquess of Montagu mistook the emblem of the Earl of Oxford's men (a star with streams) for that of Edward IV (a sun with rays). Thinking Edward's cavalry was attacking him, he ordered his archers to open fire.  When Oxford's division found itself under attack by Montagu-- who was supposed to be an ally, their first assumption was that Montagu had changed loyalties mid-battle. The entire endeavor was thrown into utter confusion as no one knew for sure who was on their side and who was against them.

The episode, and the idea that history could pivot on the ability of soldiers to tell the difference between a sun with rays and a star with streams in a heavy fog, stuck with me.  So a number of years later, when a publisher (not Harper Collins) asked me to write a proposal for a book on the weather, I included a chapter on how weather influenced history in the outline. The publisher that originally asked me to send a weather book proposal passed on their own idea.  (This happens more often than you would think.)

I didn't want to let my work on the proposal go to waste, but I decided that there was only one part of it that really excited me-- the weather and history chapter.  I expanded that small part into a full proposal and the rest is history.

It was a challenging book to research. I had to read a lot of history in the hopes that I would come across references to the effects of weather.  Later The Weather Channel did a program that explored weather's impact on historical events.

Some of my favorite chapters in the book are the non-military examples, such as how the Little Ice Age might have created the sound of the Stradivarius violin, and how the dramatic sunsets in the wake of the Krakatoa volcano's eruption inspired the painting The Scream. I also found a couple of examples of things that didn't happen because of weather, for example, a planned slave revolt that was thwarted by torrential rain.

If you have a weather or history buff on your gift list, I hope you will consider purchasing an autographed copy. 

Does Weather Influence Elections?

On election eve, I will pause in my "Broke is Beautiful" musings and revisit a topic from one of my previous books Blame it on the Rain (Harper Collins).

Does weather impact voting?


It is one of the most famous photographs from American political history.  The new president elect Harry Truman grins triumphantly as he holds up a copy of the Chicago Tribune with the blazing headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”  Collectors of historic newspapers pay as much as $900 for this gem of failed forecasting.

Thomas Dewey, of course, did not defeat Harry Truman for the presidency.  The Chicago Tribune made the mistake of believing polling data.  If the polls were correct, there was little chance Truman could win.  The day before the election, Gallup predicted Dewey would get 49.5 percent of the vote and Truman 44.5 percent.  The Crossley poll came up with almost the same result.  The Elmo Roper poll showed an even more impressive 52.2 percent for Dewey and 37.1 percent for Truman.

How did the pollsters get it so wrong?  There were, of course, many factors which historians have discussed and debated for decades.  One of these was the weather in Illinois.

Weather and politics have a long history going back to the days when political office was won on the tip of a sword rather than at the ballot box.  The word “campaign” itself derives from a military term that can be traced back to the days when armies stood down during the freezing cold and ventured out into “the field” only when weather permitted.  The word for an open field in Latin is “campania” and this passed into 14th century English as champaign.  (The French wine, champagne was named for a region of open fields that derives its name from the same Latin root.)  Champaign evolved into campaign.  The word for the field was metaphorically used for the military taking of the field.  Eventually the military sense was expanded to include any attempt to mobilize a large number of people.

When people began to select their leaders through elections, the effect of the weather became less direct.  Yet inclement weather continued to play its role by keeping the less motivated people from the polls and by hindering campaign efforts.  When the race is very close, as it was in the case of Dewey vs. Truman  in 1948, a few people deciding not to venture into the elements, is enough to swing the election.

In 1948, splits within the Democratic party made a victory by Truman at the polls seem like a long shot.   Two spin-off parties were created, one on the left, and one on the right.  On the left was the Progressive Party, led by Henry Wallace.  Wallace and his followers were unhappy with Turman’s foreign policy.  They held him responsible for the Cold War with Russia.  Wallace favored negotiations to lessen those tensions.  The Progressive slogan was “one, two, three, four, we don’t want another war.”

On the right was South Carolina governor J. Strom Thurmond and the States’ Rights Democratic Party.  This party was created after Truman proposed a series of measures that would guarantee equal rights to African-Americans.  These proposals were controversial among the so-called “Dixiecrats,” the Democrats of the South.  When Truman announced his plan, thirty-five delegates walked out of the Democratic convention to form their own party.  The states rights delegation did not expect to win, but they hoped to get enough votes to throw the election to the House of Representatives where they could swing the ballot to a candidate who opposed civil rights legislation.

All this Democratic infighting was a boon to Republican Thomas Dewey.  The New York Post wrote:  “The party might as well immediately concede the election to Dewey and save the wear and tear of campaigning.”  Dewey was so confident in his assured win that he mounted a very subdued campaign.  Harry Truman, on the other hand, embarked on a 31,000-mile train trip across the nation and delivered hundreds of speeches.

Democrats have often said that the rain favors them because it presents more of a challenge to rural voters than to the urban voters who are most likely to pick a Democratic candidate.  On election day 1948 this was borne out.  A storm system in the lower Mississippi Valley spread rain across Illinois with especially heavy downpours in the South.   Not only was the rain more likely to muck up dirt roads than urban transport, the rain itself was concentrated over the rural section of the state, and it mostly spared Chicago and the industrial north.  Meanwhile, a Pacific storm brought heavy rain to California.  It fell in the predominantly Republican northern part of the state, while the Democratic southern part had sunshine.

A difference of 29,294 votes, or .28 of one percent of the electorate, in Illinois, California and Ohio could have changed the outcome.  The rain in Illinois and California may well have tipped the scales.  In the end Harry Truman captured 303 electoral votes, Thomas Dewey, 189 and Strom Thurmond, 39.

Weather Control by 2000?

In honor of the news that my book Blame it on the Rain, which discusses how weather changed history, is soon to be published in Polish…

Paleo-Future, a Web site devoted to past futurism, recently posted a clip from a 1966 program 2000 A.D. The clip predicts a 3 day work week by 2000.

From there it goes on to predict weather control: "My estimate is that we will start to work seriously to modify thunderclouds to reduce lightning. I think that we'll be able to have some sort of estimate of whether we can control tornadoes and such local severe storms."

Weather control is no mere whimsy. As I noted in Blame it on the Rain, scientists (and quite a few quacks) have been working on it for years. They're just not very good at it.

In the late 19th century the Weather Bureau and the Department of Agriculture funded various tests in which explosives were unleashed in the clouds to release their rain. Money that The Chicago Times believed would have been “less ridiculously employed if it were devoted to the attempted manufacture of whistles out of pig’s tails.”

One of the first successful attempts was in 1946 when a high school dropout named Vincent Schaefer, who was employed by General Electric, flew above the Schenectady, New York clouds and dropped six pounds of dry ice into them. The result was snow.

A year later, Schaefer and Irving Langmuir, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, tried to change the course of a hurricane threatening the Florida coast. They dumped almost 200 pounds of dry ice into its eye. As they predicted, the storm changed direction. The experiment would have been a complete success were it not for the fact that the new path put the storm on a collision course with Savannah, Georgia, where it did about $5 million in damage.

As early as 1957, a report of Eisenhower’s advisory committee noted that weather control could become a “more important weapon than the atom bomb.” In 1966, the U.S. got a chance to try it out. “Project Popeye” dispensed a rain-making agent into the clouds of Vietnam and extended the monsoon season in order to increase the mud on the Ho Chi Minh trail—the main enemy supply route to South Vietnam. Whether or not these attempts were successful depends on whose report you read.

Of course, American generals were not the only ones to think of this. In Soviet Russia scientists were looking for ways to modify weather using laser technology. Recently declassified documents in England reveal that a storm that dropped 9 inches of rain in only 21 hours in August of 1952 came after a secret rainmaking experiment in which the military seeded clouds with silver iodine powder. The storm created a flood that swept through the costal town of Lynmouth destroying bridges, buildings and roads. The flood killed 34 people.

Weather control seems, for the foreseeable future, to remain the stuff of science fiction.