Raymond H. Wheeler: Climate, War, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

Compiled from the Foundation for the Study of Cycles archive (Cycles Magazine, vols. 1950–1957)

Who He Was

Unlike Brunt, Beveridge, or Playfair, the archive gives Wheeler a real institutional biography — he wasn't a distant authority the Foundation cited from published papers, he was an active correspondent and contributor, and clearly one of Edward Dewey's closest intellectual collaborators.

At different points across the archive he's described as:

• Professor of Psychology at the University of Kansas (his position at the time he did his core war-index work in 1943)

• Head of the Psychology and Philosophy Department, Babson Institute of Business Administration

• Chief of Staff, Climate Research Division, Weather Science Foundation, Crystal Lake, Illinois

That trajectory — psychology professor to climate researcher — matters, because Wheeler's whole project began as psychology and only became climatology by accident, as he explains himself (see below).

Verification note: as with the other entries, only what's explicitly stated in the magazine is included here. Any additional biographical detail (dates, other appointments) would need outside confirmation.

How the Project Started

Wheeler's own account of his research origins, reprinted from his 1943 Presidential Address to the Kansas Academy of Science ("The Effect of Climate on Human Behavior in History"), is worth quoting for how unplanned it was:

"It began over ten years ago, not as a problem in human ecology but as a study of fluctuations in human thought and attitude stumbled upon by accident and confined at first to fluctuations in points of view in the histories of psychology, biology, and philosophy."

He noticed that psychology, biology, and philosophy seemed to swing between opposing intellectual viewpoints in a synchronized way across history. A colleague, hearing him describe this pattern, suggested he compare his curve to the tree-ring records of A. E. Douglass and Ellsworth Huntington — researchers Wheeler says he had never previously consulted. The resemblance was immediate and, in his words, "chance could not possibly explain" it. That comparison redirected his entire research program toward climate.

The War Index: Basic Data Bulletin No. 1

Wheeler's best-documented contribution to the Foundation is a monumental data compilation: an index of international war and civil war intensity spanning 599 B.C. to 1943 A.D., published by the Foundation as Basic Data Bulletin No. 1.

His method, as described in the Foundation's introduction:

"Professor Wheeler prepared his indexes as follows: to a mild engagement he gave a value of one, to a moderately severe engagement he gave a value of two, and to a very exceptionally heavy engagement he gave a value of three."

He built two separate indexes — one for international battles, one for civil war battles — summing the severity-weighted values year by year across roughly 2,500 years of recorded history. The 1957 volume notes the practical scale of the effort: the underlying dataset drew on roughly 20,000 individual historical items (military records, monastery records, government records, tree-ring data, and more) used to reconstruct climate phases stretching back through history.

The Central Thesis: Climate Drives Conflict

Wheeler's core argument, laid out in his Presidential Address and reproduced at length in the Foundation's January 1951 report, is that climate governs the rise and fall of civilizations and the timing of war. His own summary chart is titled, memorably, the "Clock of Cold Droughts and Civil Wars" — captioned in the magazine as follows:

"The climate of the earth shifts from warmer to colder periods and back again, frequently in rhythms. History shows that nations are built on shifts from cold periods to warm, when the human energy level temporarily reaches a maximum. Nations crumble on the shift from warm to cold. International wars are mostly warm, civil wars cold. Each phase, warm and cold, begins wet and ends dry."

He also links political character to climate phase, arguing (in his own words from the address) that totalitarianism is typical of late-half warm periods while democracy is revived during cold times — a striking, and clearly speculative, extension of the climate thesis into political history.

Specific Cycle Lengths

Wheeler and the Foundation attribute several nested cycle lengths to his war and climate data:

• ~11.2 years — a shorter rhythm in international battle frequency

• ~22–23 years — the dominant cycle Dewey's team found in Wheeler's international battle index, described in the 1950 volume as the pattern of "10 or 12 years of relative freedom from international conflict followed by periods of 10 or 12 years" of frequent battles

• ~57 years

• ~142 years — proposed as possibly connected to slower physical climate proxies like tree-ring and sedimentary rock deposit thickness

• ~510 years — Wheeler's major long-cycle climate finding, discovered in 1943 and reported in the Foundation's January 1951 issue. The 1957 volume notes: "A cold period is due to come the latter part of the present century according to Dr. Wheeler" — a forecast made in the 1940s for the late 20th century.

• 17.73 years (or "17¾") — a cycle Dewey's team measured directly from Wheeler's combined war-battle dataset in later analysis, described as tentative due to interference from a nearby cycle of similar length

His Own Publications

The Foundation's library records (1951 volume) list a run of Wheeler's own bulletins, published through the Journal of Human Ecology (Weather Science Foundation, Crystal Lake, Illinois), donated to the Foundation directly by Wheeler:

1. Aims and Policies (Parts I & II)

2. Today an Old World is Dying and a New One is Taking its Place

3. The Seven-Year Rainfall Cycle in the U.S. in Relation to Business Trends

4. The 9-Year Cycle in Common Stock Prices in Relation to the Weather Trends

5. The 18.3-Year Cycle in Real Estate in Relation to Rainfall

6. Weather and Business Trends in the United States, 1794–1950 and Throughout History

This is a substantial and wide-ranging body of applied work — Wheeler wasn't only a historian of climate and conflict, he was actively trying to connect climate cycles to real-time economic indicators (stock prices, real estate) during his own lifetime.

A Telling Detail: Sunspots and Cold Snaps

Wheeler's address includes an observation connecting sunspot behavior to climate phase that's a nice complement to the Brunt/Beveridge/Anderson sunspot material already covered:

"From the continuous telescopic sunspot record that was commenced in 1755 it is evident that the single sunspot cycle of 11.3 years suddenly lengthens at the onset of a warm period, shortens at the onset of the cold phase. The cycle averages longer during warm than during cold times."

This ties Wheeler's climate-history work directly into the same sunspot literature that Brunt, Beveridge, and C. N. Anderson were independently working from — another point of convergence across researchers who don't otherwise seem to have been in close contact.

Why He Mattered to the Foundation

Wheeler stands apart from Brunt, Beveridge, Brückner, and the other figures covered so far because he wasn't just a data source the Foundation mined for corroboration — he was an active theorist whose central claim (climate governs history) gave Dewey's broader project its most ambitious possible payoff. If Wheeler was right, cycles research wasn't just about commodity prices and sunspot counts — it was a master key to understanding war, political upheaval, and the arc of civilizations themselves.

Suggested Forum Angle

Wheeler is a much bigger and more controversial figure than Brunt, Beveridge, or Playfair — his climate-determinism thesis (democracy during cold periods, totalitarianism during warm ones) is the kind of claim that invites real scrutiny and pushback, then and now. For your forum, he might work best framed not just as "another forgotten cycles researcher" but as the figure whose work raises the sharpest question the whole field has to answer: how much of human history can climate actually explain? He's also the only figure covered so far with a large, coherent, standalone body of published work outside the Foundation's own magazine, which may make him worth pursuing further if you can track down the Journal of Human Ecology bulletins directly.