In the first half of the 20th century, tornadoes were all over the United States, destroying whole towns, screaming through the papers, tearing up the newsreels, and whipping Dorothy from Kansas to Oz. However, there was one place you wouldn’t find them: the weather report. From 1887 until 1950, American weather forecasters were forbidden from attempting to predict tornadoes; even mentioning them was considered career suicide. During that time, Roger Edwards of the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center said that tornadoes were considered "dark and mysterious menaces of unfathomable power, fast-striking monsters from the sky capable of sudden and unpredictable acts of death and devastation.” Less than confident in their own ability to predict tornadoes and fearful of the responses of a panicky public, forecasters replaced the word “tornado” with euphemisms like “severe local storms.” General Adolphus Greely, who helped organize the U.S. Weather Bureau, wrote to Congress: “It is believed that the harm done by such predictions would eventually be greater than that which results from the tornado itself.” Finally, in 1950, the U.S. Weather Bureau lifted the ban on using the word “tornado", believing that it was better to give the public time to prepare than to keep them in the dark and possibly cause a loss of lives.
