The Storm of the Century

by Al Roker

  Both Cline brothers, however, found returning to work more difficult. Both were deeply shaken. Joseph had been injured during his escape with the children through the windows of the toppling house; his lymph glands had now become seriously swollen, and sometimes he couldn’t get out of bed.

  There was something deeper than physical injury, too. Joseph found himself emotionally shattered. He feared the effect might be permanent.

  Still he went into the office and ran it as best he could alone. Under Joseph’s direction, Blagden installed some temporary replacement instruments on the roof of the Levy Building. When telegraph service could be restored, the Galveston weather station office would be up and running and ready to report.

  Isaac Cline didn’t return to work for a week. Though he and Joseph had, nearly miraculously, saved all of his children, Isaac had lost Cora and their unborn child.

  And he knew, as did so many others, that Cora’s remains were somewhere in the pile. He expected they would be gathered up anonymously, carted, burned.

  It will never be clear how far Isaac Cline blamed himself during those first grim days of burning pyres and martial law for the disaster that had taken the lives of so many people, including that of his own wife. Building a seawall would have lessened the damage and saved many lives. That wall hadn’t been built, and it was Isaac Cline, chief U.S. meteorologist for Galveston and the whole Texas section, who had advised the city in no uncertain terms that constructing a seawall was entirely unnecessary. He’d called anyone fearing a hurricane in Galveston delusional.

  Such stark, overpowering evidence of his personal failure—and the failure of his knowledge, and that of his colleagues and superiors—lay all about him as far as the eye could see. His own dear wife was one of the victims of that failure. Nearly all of the fifty neighbors who had sought shelter in Cline’s home had died too. Isaac Cline’s professional certainty of the nature of hurricanes had caused pain that was entirely personal.

  Yet Cline continued to believe he’d done everything he could in the fulfillment of his duty. And it’s possible, given the beliefs of his day, and the orders of his chief—not to mention his chief’s blackout of all weather news from Cuba—that Cline had indeed done his best.

  By going around town on Saturday, warning people and urging them to evacuate, he directly violated Director Moore’s sole authority to issue such warnings. Cline felt the violation was necessary to save lives, and he believed it had in fact saved many. Without those warnings, he estimated the loss of life at twice what it was in fact.

  That may have been Cline’s wishful thinking. Even the claim that he gave personal warnings on the beach has been questioned. But he certainly did send the telegram to Moore in Washington, noting the presence, never seen before, of a high tide against the opposing wind. Cline himself, Dr. Young, and others took that condition as the sign of a potentially devastating storm.

  Joseph Cline, whose accounts of those days do not always perfectly match his brother’s, also said later that Isaac went to the beach to give warnings while Joseph went to the office. Isaac’s phone call late that stormy day, in which the elder brother dictated to the younger the contents of a final, desperate telegram to Washington, came from somewhere near the beach, according to Joseph.

  Director Moore, for his part, never publicly criticized Isaac Cline for any action taken in advance of the storm. Moore believed Cline had been right to breach protocol, to take it upon himself to make warnings. The director never suggested that the Galveston weatherman had been either too lax or too aggressive.

  Later, Moore even gave Isaac Cline credit for braving the tides and winds to phone in that final telegram from Galveston to Washington. Isaac made sure to correct the record. He placed credit for that feat where it belonged: with his brother Joseph.

  Another miracle came with the little girl that the Cline family had rescued from the water that night and carried on their makeshift set of debris-rafts. In the morning, they’d left her with the family who lived in the home where they’d at last found shelter. They assured the girl they would find a way to provide for her.

  The girl told them she lived in San Antonio and had been visiting her grandparents in Galveston with her mother. In a resonant coincidence, the girl had the name Cora—the name of Isaac’s lost wife. They wrote it down. They hoped to locate the grandparents.

  A few days later, Joseph was in a drugstore, seeking relief for his shaky nerves and swollen glands. He heard a grief-stricken man describing himself to the druggist as coming from San Antonio. Joseph had a feeling. He asked the man if he knew the child.

  The man turned to Joseph a face deeply lined with sorrow. “She is my daughter,” he said.

  Joseph soon brought father and daughter together.

  Others on the mainland with loved ones in Galveston were still desperate to get in. Dr. Joe Gilbert, engaged to the schoolteacher Daisy Thorne, was in Austin when he heard to his shock on Sunday about the Galveston disaster. He took the next train to Houston.

  Joe had to get into Galveston. He had to find Daisy.

  In Houston, Joe grabbed the first newspaper he saw and anxiously skimmed the list of the Galveston dead. In a quick, horrible moment his worst fears came alive. Daisy was on the list, with all of her family. Joe reeled. His life hit bottom.

  But Joe was saved from despair. Father Kirwin had arrived in Houston, and when Joe, stunned, ran into the priest, Kirwin told him the paper was wrong.

  Daisy was alive, miraculously enough, and so was the whole Thorne family. Kirwin had seen them.

  And it was on Monday morning, while still in Houston, that Dr. Joe began realizing with joy and awe just how miraculous Daisy’s survival really was. The full news had started coming in from Galveston now. The papers were packed with details of horror, both rumor and truth.

  Joe boarded a train heading south for the coast. On the car he found an old friend, also a doctor, traveling home to Galveston in hopes of lending medical help. As they rode, the friend asked Joe what he planned to do in Galveston.

  “Find Daisy,” Joe replied.

  “And marry her,” he added.

  The aspiring painter Boyer Gonzales, reluctant scion of the family business in Galveston, was outside Galveston too, having spent part of the summer studying color theory with Lansil in Boston. Then he’d traveled to Prouts Neck, Maine, for some idyllic weeks of work with his mentor and friend, the famous artist Winslow Homer. That’s what Boyer loved to do.

  And yet he’d begun this turn-of-the-century year in a state of desolation and loneliness. His relationship with the family business was based on a bleak sense of obligation to carry on something for which he had no love or knack. It meant sacrificing his ardent desire to grow and bloom as a painter.

  His bad stomach had worsened. He’d made one of his now-annual trips to Kellogg’s sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan.

  So at the end of summer, Boyer Gonzales remained in a state of conflict over his own ambitions and his obligation to Galveston and his family legacy there. It left him still emotionally paralyzed, distant, and in physical pain. And in his friendship with his frequent companion Nell Herford, he remained terminally noncommittal.

  In the first week of September, Boyer said good-bye to Winslow Homer and Prouts Neck and traveled unhappily back to Boston. He was facing the grim prospect of a return to work he increasingly detested.

  In Boston on Sunday, September 9, he received the shocking news that a monstrous hurricane had devastated his hometown, and all communication was out. Boyer wrote immediately from Boston to his younger brother, Alcie, who had been living in the Gonzales mansion on Avenue O.

  Boyer did not, characteristically enough, reach out to Nell. He did write to Nell’s brother-in-law Walter Beadles, with whom Nell lived, and with whom the Gonzalez family had long done business in the cotton trade.

  Nell, however, took it upon herself to answer his letter to Walter. She wanted to fill him in personally on the horrible conditions
in town.

  “My dear Mr. Gonzales,” Nell began her letter. She was addressing her escort in terms at once notably affectionate and perfectly formal. Such were the terms of their relationship.

  Nell let Boyer know that the Gonzales house had been badly damaged. She reassured him that Alcie, she, and many others he knew had survived without injury.

  Nell had always wanted to keep letters to her depressive friend cheery, upbeat, newsy. This one had to be, as she put it, “gruesome.” She said she would now gladly turn her back on Galveston forever.

  And Nell closed her letter by noting that if she were selfish, she’d want Mr. Gonzales to be there in Galveston. “But for your own sake,” she wrote, “I advise you not to come home if you can possibly help it.”

  But Boyer did come home.

  “I can begin life again, as I entered it.”

  That’s what the devastated young lawyer Clarence Howth said. That’s what he was trying to believe.

  Over the coming weeks, some people would show amazing guts and resilience. While some seemed on the verge of madness, others seemed able to consider rebuilding their ruined lives from nothing.

  They seemed capable of making new plans.

  But could the city of Galveston begin life again? This great, thriving Texan jewel in the gulf, where years earlier Jean Lafitte had planted an outlaw settlement, had gained national and even global prominence at dizzying speed. The New York of the Southwest had been on track to take its place as one of the first cities of the booming American nation, even as that nation assumed a leading role on the world stage in the twentieth century.

  All of that was gone. The busy wharves smashed, millionaires’ mansions and ordinary homes tumbled, the churches and banks and office buildings in ruins. At least a third of the city was demolished: more than 2,600 buildings entirely destroyed; an astronomical $20 million or more in property loss; a shipping fleet disabled.

  And martial law reigned. Government was in the hands of an ad hoc committee whose most important job was to get rotting flesh pulled out of miles of slime-covered wreckage, then burned day and night in pyres.

  To many—if they even looked up to consider matters beyond the grim tasks at hand—any prospect for Galveston’s future looked unutterably bleak. Many people were planning to leave town by boat as soon as communications were restored with the mainland. Nell Hertford, writing Boyer Gonzales, wasn’t alone in declaring herself ready to gladly turn her back on Galveston forever. She’d advised Boyer to stay away from home as long as possible.

  But would that desire to leave mean temporary withdrawal? Would people ever return to the city, ready to rebuild it, more or less from scratch?

  Or were the people of Galveston, once so cavalier, about to follow the example of those who had abandoned Indianola after the last great hurricane? Galvestonians now understood, in the most horrific terms, what a hurricane could really do to human society on their island. They knew Galveston wasn’t specially spared from disaster. They knew, too late.

  And even if the city could be rebuilt, who would ever invest any money there? How could such a city thrive?

  Galveston’s identity, its very existence, was tied up in its excellence as a port. The great rail and freight and cotton and shipping companies had suffered extraordinary property losses in this storm. Those companies’ directors would now know what a single storm could do to their investments.

  Rebuilding a great city on a sandbar, now proven vulnerable to devastating natural fury? That struck many as the height of foolishness.

  In the meantime, Galveston, once so proud, even sometimes superior, was losing its brave battle for mere survival. The committee and the citizens never stopped working. The city of Houston and the U.S. Army were doing their bit. But hunger, thirst, disease, grief, and isolation would win, unless Galveston got more help.

  CHAPTER 14

  “IN PITY’S NAME, IN AMERICA’S NAME”

  WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST WAS AT WAR WITH JOSEPH PULITZER. In 1900, both men were publishers with major newspapers in New York City. But Hearst had long been the upstart, and Pulitzer was still the man he had to beat.

  Even when he’d begun, back in San Francisco, as the young publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, William Hearst had placed the elder, better-established competitor in New York City in his sights. It was Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, who had pioneered the sensational pop-news style that Hearst brought to a high pitch of hysteria in the Examiner. Highbrows sneered at these cheap, popular news organs, “the yellow press,” but everybody wanted to read them.

  And like Hearst, Pulitzer had originally begun outside New York; he’d made the Post-Dispatch the most popular paper in St. Louis. Then in 1883 he bought the World, moved his operation east, and went all the way. Pulitzer was the first to cram a paper with pictures and games under shrieking headlines. He offered eight packed pages of thrilling content for only two cents.

  So Hearst was at once influenced by Pulitzer and hoping to best him. And young Hearst was lucky enough to have a family fortune behind his ventures. His father, George Hearst, a rough-and-tumble Western miner and prospector, had extracted vast silver ore from the Comstock Lode in Nevada and gold from many other mines. Young William had grown up rich, yet he’d always been fired by ambition to achieve his own spectacular success.

  He found it in his talent for the yellow press. “HUNGRY, FRANTIC FLAMES,” read one of Hearst’s most famous Examiner headlines, describing a fire in Monterey Bay: “Leaping Higher, Higher, Higher, With Desperate Desire. Running Madly Riotous Through Cornice, Archway and Facade.” That headline included a key reference to the newspaper itself: “The Examiner Sends a Special Train to Monterey to Gather Full Details of the Terrible Disaster.”

  That detail was telling. It was a yellow-feature trademark, pioneered by Pulitzer and imitated by Hearst, to make the papers themselves key parts of a story. The idea was to grow reader loyalty for the newspaper’s brand, not only by offering astonishing content but also by making the paper seem important and powerful.

  The paper must not passively report the news. The paper must seem to make news happen.

  So it was Pulitzer’s pioneering World that young Hearst was out to beat when he moved to New York and bought the New York Journal in 1895. Backed by a fortune, Hearst peddled the Journal to readers for only one cent. That forced Pulitzer to drop the price of the World to a penny as well. Their war raged back and forth, two papers constantly topping one another with wild headlines and stories that mingled startling fact with riveting fiction.

  The battle was fought hardest over the rivals’ desire to place their papers at the heart of the news—to seem to actually drive events. Hearst liked to boast that his reporters did the police detectives’ work for them. He even took credit for starting the Spanish-American War. After the bombing of the Maine and the U.S. invasion of Cuba, a Hearst headline crowed: “How Do You Like the Journal’s War?”

  And yet for all of the competitive sensationalism of the yellow press, and for all of its unabashed war-mongering, Hearst and Pulitzer were social reformers. Both Hearst’s Journal and Pulitzer’s World took up the cause of organized labor. The two papers were pro-immigrant. Both men were involved in Democratic Party politics.

  When the Galveston disaster came along, Hearst smelled the opportunity immediately. This might be big. And he knew just whom to send.

  Winifred Black was living in Denver in the fall of 1900, working there for Hearst’s pioneering news wire syndicate. On September 9, vague news of a disastrous storm in Galveston, Texas, arrived by telegraph and hit the Denver paper.

  Winifred had handled this kind of thing many times before. Go to the scene, do interviews, write down the situation—giving it, of course, her trademark emotional spin as “Annie Laurie,” her nom de plume—put it on the wire, and go home.

  So only an hour after the Galveston news arrived in Denver, Winifred was on the train to Houston. By now the veteran felt she’d seen
it all. This Galveston assignment looked routine, even dull.

  Her career to date had been anything but ordinary. She’d begun in hopes of becoming an actress. As a young woman, she’d appeared on the stage in road companies of tear-jerking, ripsnorting melodramas like The Two Orphans and The Wages of Sin. She’d lived in New York City then, having come far from her childhood origins, first in what were still the wild, big woods of Wisconsin, then on a farm in Illinois.

  New York City: that’s where theater boomed and the touring companies were cast. As a young hopeful, Winifred stood among the crowds on Broadway in the late afternoons, watching as the great sex symbol of the day, Lillian Russell, promenaded in a white feather boa and an ostrich-feather hat, with other celebrities and beauties, all the way from the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Twenty-Third Street up to Twenty-Ninth Street.

  Winifred’s acting career hadn’t taken off. But she’d often drawn upon her talent for dress-up, make-believe, and dramatic gesture. Having moved to San Francisco and taken a job with Hearst’s Examiner, she faked a faint in the streets of San Francisco. That was in order to write a blistering exposé of inefficiencies in the city’s hospital system. Homeless and poor women, Winifred revealed, were being treated horribly at the hospital. Next, she filed a series of heartrending stories from a Hawaiian leper colony.

  Soon Winifred was hustling and lying and sweet-talking her way into places where no women—and often no reporters at all—were welcome. She’d snuck onto a rowdy, smoke-filled train car where President Cleveland was traveling. When Winifred popped up from beneath a table, the president was charmed by her boldness. She scooped the competition with an exclusive presidential interview.

  At a time when proper ladies didn’t attend boxing matches, Winifred Black schmoozed with the prizefighters, interviewing gigantic men from Peter Jackson to Gentleman Jim Corbett to John L. Sullivan. She attended bullfights. She met the dapper gunfighter Bat Masterson, who had a notch on his gun for each man he’d killed.