by Al Roker
And that’s how Galveston, Texas, was lifted up.
There had been talk at first of a mass exodus from the island. Yet many survivors of the night of horrors, stunned and exhausted on that first Sunday morning, seemingly beyond repair, would live in the rebuilt and revived city for many years to come.
Some, like Daisy Thorne, had of course been planning to leave anyway. Daisy would live a full life with Dr. Joe Gilbert, who would enjoy a long career at the University of Texas Hospital in Austin.
Among those who stayed in Galveston, Arnold Wolfram became fast friends for life with the boy he’d saved from the whirlpooling storm drain, and who had then accompanied him through the treacherous floodwaters. Cassie Bristol did rebuild her family’s life at the boardinghouse. Little Louise Bristol grew up there during the long uplifting of Galveston.
Louise left school after seventh grade to help her mother at the boardinghouse. Later, as a young woman, Louise worked for the Santa Fe Railroad in Galveston, married one of the city’s most successful electrical contractors, and had a daughter of her own.
She traveled to all fifty states, taking an airplane for the first time in her eighties. By then, people had long been flocking around Louise to hear stories of the great Galveston flood; she was a well-regarded raconteur, a living historian in the schools.
Louise lived to experience nearly all of the amazing advances of the American Century: interstate automobile highways, jet travel, television, the moonshot. Yet she never forgot her terrifying experience, as a seven-year-old, of what nature can do to all that human aspiration.
Rabbi Cohen too went on living in Galveston for many years, continuing to serve at Congregation B’nai Israel until his retirement in 1949. Cohen’s focus remained on helping others. For years he offered a familiar sight around town on his bicycle as he organized clothing and food drives. He lobbied the legislature of Texas successfully on a multitude of reforms, from raising the age of female consent to eighteen (it had been ten) to improving prison conditions.
But the rabbi became best known for spearheading what came to be called the Galveston Movement. The idea was to bring European Jews into the United States via Galveston and the Gulf Coast, instead of the more familiar—and far more crowded—ports like New York and Philadelphia. The rabbi and his organization helped immigrants settle throughout Texas and the American West. This, they hoped, would ease social tensions surrounding immigration while building up strong Jewish communities in the West.
Cohen had found a home in Galveston, and he’d then helped it survive disaster. Now he was making his island city a doorway to new homes for more than 10,000 Jewish immigrants who passed through Galveston in the early part of the twentieth century.
Henry Cohen died in 1952. He would be remembered in Galveston for many generations to come.
Winifred Black, the intrepid Hearst reporter (briefly turned Houston hospital executive), went back to San Francisco for the Big Chief in 1906 to report on the earthquake there. Later, she brought her emotional style to a fine point when covering what became known, partly thanks to Winifred herself, as “the trial of the century.” The case was as lurid as can be: Harry Thaw, cocaine-addicted son of a Pittsburgh multimillionaire, gunned down the famous New York City architect Stanford White over White’s long affair with the sex symbol Evelyn Nesbit, whom Thaw had stalked and then married.
The melodrama was tailor-made for Annie Laurie’s tear-jerking style. Because of that and other big, popular stories of human tragedy and venality, Winifred and other “lady reporters” soon became known in the newspaper business as “sob sisters.”
But Winifred always said the rest of the sob sisters seemed more like “sap sisters” to her. Few other reporters of any kind could have gotten into Galveston when it was under martial law; probably no other reporter could have whipped up a Houston hospital for the Galveston refugees and made it work.
Annie Laurie’s popularity, however, was for sob-sister stories, and thanks to those articles, in the early decades of the new century Winifred became one of America’s first celebrity journalists. When she died in 1936 at the age of seventy-three, she was still publishing daily; her funeral in San Francisco brought out the mayor, other dignitaries, and thousands of adoring fans. Winifred Black pioneered a certain crusading, emotional, personal style in modern national reporting—“human interest” it was called, combined with muckraking social reform—that influenced print and broadcast journalism throughout the century to come and into the next. Her trademark relentlessness was never so important as in the relief and recovery of Galveston in 1900.
Clara Barton retired from leadership of the Red Cross in 1904. Her trip to Galveston had played a critical role not only in bringing the city back from disaster but also in improving both racial and sexual equality there. And Miss Barton had proved to all detractors that she was capable of a final trip to a disaster scene. In some ways, the Galveston hurricane, which brought a great career to a climax, outdid all the other disasters Clara Barton had ever encountered.
Boyer Gonzales, having received Nell’s letter advising him to stay away, came home to Galveston immediately after the storm. And yet that frustrated painter, so long bowed down by family-business cares, lacked the determined romantic certainty of a Dr. Joe Gilbert, who had known right away what he had to do: “find Daisy and marry her.” When it came to Nell, Boyer remained for a time at once a steady and a non-committal date.
But Nell hung on. The storm had shaken her deeply. She always said there was no way to adequately describe either the storm itself or the condition of the city immediately following it. Yet she didn’t leave Galveston, and somehow she remained hopeful.
For something seemed to have happened to Boyer. That October of 1900, he dedicated himself to helping his brother, Alcie, get the Gonzalez mansion repaired. Then suddenly, without any warning or much discussion, Boyer sold the family business.
He stayed on as a bookkeeper—but he was done, at last, with the management pressure his hard-driving Mexican father, Thomas, had placed on him for so long, lately from beyond the grave. Boyer Gonzales had a plan now. He wanted to become a full-time painter.
With this new and dedicated approach, Boyer began meeting with success, limited at first. Some of his marine paintings—influenced by his friend Winslow Homer, though more and more in his own style—began selling not only in Galveston but also in Boston.
In 1904 he was invited to show his work in the Texas Pavilion at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Meanwhile, Boyer and Nell carried on their long companionship. And yet the artist continued to live alone in Galveston, and he continued to struggle with depression.
Then Nell took a vacation to the Catskill and Adirondack Mountains in New York State. Left abruptly alone in Galveston, Boyer came to a sudden realization.
He followed Nell northward. He met her and her sister in New York City. Out of the blue, after all those years, he asked Nell to marry him.
She quickly accepted, and the two were married in New York at the famous Little Church around the Corner at Twenty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue on September 21, 1907. And that’s when things took off. The very day he married Nell, Boyer was accepted by the prestigious Art Students League of New York in Woodstock. Soon he and Nell were traveling in Europe, even living for a time in Florence while Boyer studied with great painters.
Returning to Galveston, the couple began spending winters in Texas and summers in Woodstock. In 1909, he and Nell had a son. Soon Boyer Gonzales became known as one of America’s great painters of seascapes and marine light.
Isaac Cline spent the first weeks after the storm coming to terms with the fact that Cora was lost to him and the children. As the dead gangs carted the corpses to the pyres and the bodies slowly burned, the Cline girls still could not believe their mother was dead. They kept waiting for her to come home.
Identifying loved ones’ remains, however, had quickly become a luxury none could afford. For the Galvestonian survivors, includ
ing Isaac, there was immense pain but little closure.
Yet amazingly enough, on September 30, Cora’s body was found. As a gang unearthed a trove of corpses near the site of what had been Isaac Cline’s house, a dead woman was found nearly intact, wearing a dress.
Her diamond engagement ring was distinctive. Cline was on the scene; he recognized and identified it.
Out of respect for the meteorologist, the workers moved the body not to a pyre but to the Lakeview Cemetery. Cora was one of the few victims of the hurricane to given burial.
Isaac Cline continued his career in the U.S. Weather Bureau. But the main weather station for the Gulf Coast was soon moved off Galveston to New Orleans, and Cline went with it. There he headed up a huge district that included the entire Gulf Coast and much of the Southwest.
In New Orleans, he predicted with his usual accuracy the Gulf Coast flooding of 1912 and 1915. He also predicted the great Mississippi flood of 1927. He wrote further articles: in some of them, he updated his understanding of hurricane behavior, based on the events that had caught him unawares in Galveston in 1900.
Joseph Cline, for his part, was transferred to Puerto Rico soon after the Galveston storm. He set up meteorological stations in remote mountains there. Later he served the bureau in the Midwest and then, moving back to Texas, in Dallas. Both Cline brothers remain well-regarded figures in the history of American weather science.
And Willis Moore, the bureau director, who did so much in 1900 to deny the reality—first the existence, and then the path—of the most destructive hurricane ever to arrive in the United States, and did so much to prevent Galvestonians from learning about it in advance, continued his career too. As director, Moore oversaw such changes in weather technology as the use of airplanes for upper atmospheric research, wireless telegraphy of weather observations to and from ships at sea, and free-rising balloon observation.
In 1913, however, Willis Moore’s vaunting ambition, always powerful, got the better of him. He began waging a secret campaign to persuade President Woodrow Wilson to appoint him secretary of agriculture.
In that process, Moore used his office to browbeat subordinates into supporting his efforts. Far from subtle, the campaign only irritated and offended Wilson. Instead of being promoted into the cabinet, Moore got fired.
Only days after the hurricane hit Galveston, the U.S. War Department in Cuba responded to the terrible reality of destruction there. The department rescinded the cable ban, which Director Moore and his man in Havana, Colonel Dunwoody, had placed on weather reporting from Cuba to the United States.
Had Father Gangoite’s and Julio Jover’s hurricane forecasts been allowed to leave Cuba for the Gulf Coast, there’s no telling how many lives could have been saved. So the War Department acted too late. But it acted.
Willis Moore, far from rethinking the virtues of his Cuban cable ban, far from acknowledging that the ban had contributed to a disastrous experience for the people of Galveston and the whole United States, responded with wounded outrage to the department’s decision to lift his ban. He asked the secretary of agriculture for permission to fight back. He wanted to punish Cuba by withholding any future U.S. Weather Bureau hurricane warnings from the people of that island.
That response to the hurricane stands in stark contrast to the response of the people of Galveston. They were shocked in 1900 out of a long fog of denial and bravado. Their awful experience of loss devastated and saddened them; it might have seemed at first to ruin them. But the hurricane also toughened them.
It took a horrible tragedy—one enhanced by the arrogance of the Weather Bureau—to make Galvestonians face up to the fearful reality of their vulnerability to nature. When they did grasp that reality, they took bold, powerful, optimistic, and highly demanding steps, involving real sacrifice and inconvenience, to meet the challenges they’d finally been forced to acknowledge. With the whole people of the United States, who came together to help, Galveston worked hard every day, in the worst imaginable conditions, to bring itself back, to survive, and finally to thrive. Galveston lifted itself up both literally and figuratively. It faced head-on both the Gulf of Mexico and the new world portended by the dawn of the century.
So denial can be overcome. Galveston proves that.
But denial can also run chillingly deep.
In Havana, only one week after the hurricane, the Cuban weatherman Julio Jover went to see Willis Moore’s man there, Colonel Dunwoody. Outraged by the deadly effects of the cable ban, Jover wanted to have it out with Dunwoody. Maybe in light of what had happened to Galveston, he could get the colonel to see reason.
For one thing, Jover told Dunwoody, it’s just plain wrong to censor citizens’ communication, about weather or anything else. Dunwoody said he couldn’t disagree, but he also asked, “Can’t the government do what it pleases?” That’s the kind of reasoning the Cuban was letting himself in for.
And when it came to forecasting hurricanes, Dunwoody defended his long-standing belief that, despite Cuban practices, hurricane forecasts simply can’t be made. His evidence was simple. “A cyclone has just occurred in Galveston,” Dunwoody declared, “which no meteorologist predicted.”
It was hard to know what to say to this. Both Jover himself and Father Gangoite had indeed predicted the hurricane’s arrival in Galveston, and Dunwoody had kept that information from the people there.
Jover could only state the obvious.
“That cyclone is the same one which passed over Cuba,” he reminded the Colonel.
But no. Dunwoody knew better. It couldn’t have been the same storm.
“No cyclone,” Dunwoody told Jover, “can ever move from Florida to Galveston.”
Annie McCullough lived the rest of her life in Galveston. Newly wed to Ed McCullough when the storm hit in 1900, Annie went on to become the matriarch of a large family. In 1972, when she was ninety-five, some of her younger relations interviewed her on tape. They were especially eager to get Annie on the record about her experiences of the great Galveston hurricane of 1900.
By then, Annie’s sight and hearing were poor, but her memories were sharp and clear. “I got good sense,” she told her interviewers. “I’m telling you the truth.”
Annie told them her story. She recalled getting her roses in tubs, watching the high surf, the escape on the dray, crossing a river on Broadway. She told them what happened at the school. And as she began going over each awful moment, and thinking of the many people she knew who had died that night, it all came rushing back to her. She found herself reliving the whole event.
“I know all those people!” she said. “I’d—you’d get tired of hearing me tell it.”
The family reassured her. They wanted to hear it all.
As if speaking for everybody living Galveston in September of 1900, Annie McCullough said, “The Lord knows I’m telling the truth. There ain’t nobody can dispute me that went through it.”
And she put the Galveston hurricane of 1900 this way: “There’s no tongue,” Annie McCullough said. “No tongue can tell.”
PHOTO SECTION
The first brick building in Texas and the original “palace” on Broadway: Galveston’s Ashton Villa. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Galveston’s deluxe beach hotel, a big tourist draw in the 1890s and a landmark of America’s emerging Gilded Age metropolis on the Gulf of Mexico.
Modern Galveston before the storm: An electric streetcar comes up Market Street. COURTESY OF THE ROSENBERG LIBRARY, GALVESTON, TEXAS
Bird’s-eye view toward the gulf, 1894. COURTESY OF THE ROSENBERG LIBRARY, GALVESTON, TEXAS
“Not a hurricane”: Willis Moore, director of the U.S. Weather Bureau. NOAA
Portrait of the meteorologist as a young man: Isaac Cline. NATIONAL ARCHIVES
One of the oldest weather instruments, measuring wind speed. NOAA
A basic hygrometer: Relative humidity is measured by “dew point.”
State of the art: A late-nineteenth-century U.S. Signal Corps ba
rometer, made in England. LoC
Storm tracking: For the actual path of the storm of the century, see line 1. NOAA
A hurricane “eyewall.” NOAA
Eye and eyewall. NOAA
“Galveston’s Awful Calamity”: Large chromolithographs dramatized disaster for an eager public. LoC
After the storm. LoC
Tracks on Avenue A, near Twelfth Street. LoC
“The wreckage had created a new landscape. . . . There seemed to be no city left at all.” LoC
“The ship seemed to have been tossed out of the bay.” LoC
On the pile. LoC
Seeking bodies. LoC
“Lying about the vast desert of wreckage was a multitude of corpses.” LoC
The white city on the beach: U.S. Army tents as homeless shelters. LoC
Joseph Pulitzer’s evening “yellow press” paper, fighting its headline war with William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. LoC
Posing on the wreckage—a symbol of hope and resilience. LoC
Charting the devastation. COURTESY OF THE ROSENBERG LIBRARY, GALVESTON, TEXAS
Seawall under construction. LoC