Front page of the Boston Globe, June 10, 1953
Today is the 67th anniversary of the 1953 Worcester, Massachusetts, tornado. The deadliest tornado ever to hit New England, it stayed on the ground for 84 minutes, killing 94 people, injuring hundreds more, and destroying some 4,000 homes.
“Bodies were lying alongside the road,” reported the Boston Globe. “They had been thrown from cars or hurled against buildings.”
The casualty count was undoubtedly higher because the storm caught most people by surprise. Of 50 survivors interviewed for one government study, none received any official warning; 22 saw the tornado approaching but only 14 recognized it for what it was. Despite the fact that the Globe and other newspapers had run front-page stories that morning on a tornado that had killed more 100 people in Michigan and Ohio the day before, the possibility of a tornado in Massachusetts simply did not enter the minds of most residents.
Today, Worcester lives in the annals of meteorology as one of those places singled out by nature’s destructive forces. Each year, residents of the city still remember June 9 with online exhibits and other commemorations.
Tornadoes scar the American landscape but also hallow the ground they touch, much like the spots struck by lightning in ancient Greece. The Greeks believed that lightning, as Zeus’s divine form, marked a spot as abaton, inviolable or inaccessible, forever given over to Zeus Kataibates (“he who comes down”).
But in the aftermath of the Worcester disaster, Massachusetts residents were divided over whether God had come down in the form of a whirlwind.
Berkshire Eagle columnist Clarence Crandall, known as a religious freethinker, questioned what he called the “orthodox” theory that God sent the storm, suggesting instead that it was an “inherent part of a universe of energy and matter that has always existed,” quite apart from any deity.
Robert Whitman, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, Lenox, wrote a lengthy rebuttal bristling at the notion that the world is governed by purely material forces or that all Christians regard tornadoes as divine punishments. “However many unexplainable evils may exist in the world, through Jesus Christ [we] know that God is goodness and love and mercy,” he insisted.
The Catholic bishop of Worcester, meanwhile, urged a devotional resignation to divine providence. John Wright, who later became a curial cardinal, announced a day-long exposition of the Blessed Sacrament at the Cathedral of Saint Paul to show the diocese’s “complete submission to the will of God.”
The religious debate helped form the career of a young anthropologist, Anthony F. C. Wallace (1923-2015), whom the federal government commissioned to write the aforementioned study of individual and community behavior in the wake of the tornado. Wallace’s government report did not deal with religious questions, but 13 years later, he published a classic theoretical work, Religion: An Anthropological View (1966), in which he advanced a version of the evolutionary view of religion that had been current among anthropologists since the nineteenth century.
He predicted that scientific advances would eventually make supernatural explanations of natural phenomena so implausible that religion itself would become extinct unless it could develop “nontheistic” theology and rituals. Though Wallace recognized social value in ritual, he essentially echoed the Freudian and Marxist view that belief in God was an infantile projection—a personification of the forces of nature—that humanity would eventually outgrow.
But the debate over divine involvement in nature has never died. It resurfaces every time a tornado or other natural calamity marks a new spot on the American landscape.
The tale of those marked spots (recounted here) is a story of nature forcing Americans to reflect on their own vulnerability and to confront the same religious questions that have haunted people since ancient times.
© 2020 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved