For Sale —American Paradise

by Willie Drye

  “It is true Florida is the playground of the wealthy, but at the time of the disaster it was flooded with thousands of people of moderate means who had invested all they had in small homes,” the news release said. “Through a stretch of several hundred miles centering around Miami, thousands of families have nothing today but a mass of twisted, splintered timber and wreckage.”

  Another Red Cross news release was aimed squarely at Miami mayor Edward Romfh’s open letter saying that conditions in Miami weren’t as bad as the press was portraying them.

  Citing a report by Worth M. Tippy, an investigator sent to Florida by the Federal Council of Churches, the Red Cross said hurricane damage was greater than the nation realized.

  “Reports which have gone out from some sources in Miami through false civic pride, [saying] that outside aid is not needed, are erroneous and should be counteracted in every possible way,” Tippy said.

  The investigator said he’d talked with pastors and visited many homes and aid stations. “Damage is much greater than the rest of the country thinks,” Tippy said. “Five million dollars is really inadequate, and much below what the nation should do.”

  A few Florida newspapers were starting to pick up on the effort to downplay the damage.

  “There seems to be no doubt in the minds of many that there is an organized attempt on the part of certain interests in Miami to minimize the effects of the storm for reasons probably best known to themselves,” a newspaper in DeLand reported. “A letter broadcast throughout the country purporting to be from Mayor Romfh of Miami would surely lead the world to believe that practically all has been done for relief of the various districts affected.”

  Romfh’s description was disputed by members of a National Guard unit based in DeLand that had been sent to South Florida to keep order during the relief effort, the newspaper said.

  And Red Cross officials were becoming grimly aware of the task that lay before them. While they didn’t dispute that well-constructed buildings, such as steel-framed office buildings and the homes of the wealthy, had, for the most part, withstood the ferocious blast of the hurricane, the vast majority of residents in and around Miami—including many of those cheery workers described by Romfh that were rebuilding the city—did not live in such structures.

  “Thousands of three- and four- and five-room cottages are now only a pile of splintered wood,” W. B. Taylor, a Red Cross official in Washington, said in a telegram to Douglas Griesmer in Miami. “The Red Cross has the heaviest responsibility it has ever shouldered in a disaster-relief operation in this country.”

  The war of public perception escalated on October 1, when Red Cross chairman Payne and Arthur Brisbane, the Hearst Newspapers columnist who loved being known as the world’s highest-paid journalist, exchanged broadsides.

  In a news release from Washington, Payne said the Red Cross’s fund-raising to help 18,000 families “impoverished” by the storm was being hampered by real estate interests in Florida.

  “The officials of Florida from the Governor down and the real estate operators have seriously handicapped the American National Red Cross in its efforts to provide relief for those who suffered in the hurricane that swept southern Florida on September 18 by minimizing the loss,” Payne said. “The poor people who suffered are regarded as of less consequence than the hotel and tourist business in Florida.”

  Payne noted that the mayor of Richmond, Virginia, had heard so much about the supposedly exaggerated damage claims that he’d nearly recalled a check for $10,000 that his city had raised for the Red Cross effort.

  That same day, Brisbane praised Warfield’s outrageously misleading statements about hurricane damage in Florida.

  Brisbane had bought ten thousand acres in Martin County, praised Warfield in an earlier column for extending his railroad in Florida, and used his prestige and fame to urge Florida officials to use public money to build a new canal that would greatly enhance the value of his holdings near Stuart. Now he praised Warfield for doing a public service by speaking the truth about what had happened in the hurricane. He urged his millions of readers not to take hurricanes too seriously, quoting the King James Version of the Bible and disparagingly referring to the powerful storm as a “tornado.”

  “If you are interested in Florida, do not be disturbed by that tornado any more than you would have been by the recent tornado in Denmark had you thought of moving there,” he wrote. “‘The wind bloweth where it [pleases],’ and the earth shakes more or less everywhere. It will take more than one big wind to discourage Florida.”

  The war of words reached a nasty apex on Saturday, October 2, when the Miami Tribune accused the Red Cross of incompetency and of playing politics with its fund-raising effort.

  “Through blundering officials of the American Red Cross, both locally and nationally, and because of the political ambitions and whims of certain people, a controversy criticizing Governor Martin and Mayor Romfh is raging in the newspapers,” a Tribune editorial thundered. “The American Red Cross is being used as a tool, the sacred trust of every American to aid the distressed is being used as a political football, and Miami is being made the goat.”

  A national appeal for money for hurricane assistance was unnecessary and never should have been made, the Tribune said. “Get the money, fair or foul, rule or ruin, is the slogan of the entire nasty mess,” the editorial continued.

  “The public has been grossly misinformed by horrible stories, some of which this newspaper has called to the public attention,” the Tribune concluded.

  The Red Cross fired back the next day. Vice chairman James Fieser said he was deeply concerned about the “misunderstanding” regarding the need for money to help hurricane victims, noting that this was the first time a Red Cross effort to help disaster victims had been slowed by “confusion.”

  “As we study the situation with more care than was possible in the first days after the hurricane, we realize that Hialeah and Fort Lauderdale each present the problems of a major disaster in themselves, and that in Dade County alone there are probably families of 2,000 truck farmers in the rural sections who must have assistance,” Fieser said.

  That same day, Henry Baker, the Red Cross medical director in Miami, made an appeal for donations over radio station WRNY in New York City. The money was needed, he said, to help “the average man and woman and child in their communities—the small home owner, the workman, the farmer, the backbone of our civilization, who live in self-respecting self-support, but without financial reserve and bank account. The citadels of industry and business may have withstood the storm, but not so the modest homes of these people.”

  Baker said the hurricane “is a disaster bigger than any since the great Ohio Valley flood and the San Francisco disaster.”

  “America has never failed in such an emergency,” he reminded listeners in closing. “Your generous gift is an important link in this bond of brotherhood.”

  By Tuesday, October 5, the public dispute between Florida business interests and the Red Cross had made its way onto the editorial pages of newspapers across the United States. Included in the comments was a cartoon that appeared on editorial pages of large newspapers across the nation. It showed a distraught woman standing atop a pile of rubble and calling for help, with a scolding businessman beside her, saying, “Shhh! Not so loud! It’ll hurt business!”

  On October 8, the Wall Street Journal jumped back into the fracas, publishing a statement by Peter O. Knight, the attorney whose clients included Warfield’s Seaboard Air Line Railroad.

  Knight said he “exceedingly” regretted that a controversy had arisen between the Red Cross and Florida “authorities.” Because of his long residency in Florida and knowledge of the situation caused by a hurricane “in a small portion of southern Florida,” Knight thought it his duty clear up the differences of opinion.

  Knight then proceeded in a lawyerly fashion to essentially understate damage estimates, dispute the Red Cross’s carefully compiled statisti
cs about the number of people affected, and blame the victims for their own plight.

  Knight said that as many as 18,000 people—misrepresenting the Red Cross estimate of 18,000 families—were homeless and needed help from the Red Cross. But, he added, their homelessness “was due to the fact that during the so-called boom thousands of people from all portions of the United States flocked to southern Florida, most of them with nothing, many of them with very little. They knew nothing about Florida conditions; purchased land indiscriminately on the installment plan; constructed thereon small cheap houses and buildings, such ones as an ordinary rainstorm would seriously damage; therefore it can be expected that with a hurricane all of them would be demolished.”

  Knight said the Red Cross tabulation of 18,000 families that needed assistance was “absolutely unfounded and untrue,” because this would mean 90,000 people out of a state population of about 1.25 million. He added that the estimate of $100 million in damages was “simply absurd,” and that the total “temporary” damage would not exceed $25 million.

  A week after one of the nation’s most influential newspapers allowed Knight to use its editorial page as a megaphone for what essentially was propaganda, Knight’s employer, Solomon Davies Warfield, dropped a bombshell on the Red Cross effort in Florida. Warfield paid for a full-page advertisement in newspapers across the United States headlined “The Truth About Storm Damage In Florida.” The ad was in the form of a personal letter to the public from Warfield as president of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad.

  The letter began with Warfield’s assertion that a railroad was obligated to provide information about its service area to its customers. “No agency is better qualified to gather the facts and ascertain conditions within its territory than the organization of a railroad,” the letter said.

  Warfield said the “good faith” of some of Florida’s public officials had been questioned “by a high official of the American Red Cross because of their statements limiting the storm damage to actual conditions.”

  Only about 18,000 people of the “poorer classes” were left homeless by the storm, and most of these were “transients” living in flimsy campgrounds, he said.

  “Polo, golf, tennis, and other amusement grounds will be ready for the coming season, including the Hialeah and other race tracks,” Warfield assured readers.

  Warfield closed his letter with a cheery, optimistic promise similar to the one Mayor Romfh of Miami had made earlier.

  “Florida—the world’s winter playground—with its unmatched climate, its fertile soil which has no superior, the length of the seasons, its freedom from the rigors of winters, all will continue to prosper and grow, and the area affected by this storm will take on a new aspect, profiting by the experience gained,” he said.

  The powerful blast from Warfield had a demoralizing effect on Red Cross officials trying to cope with this massive disaster. After seeing Warfield’s full-page ad in the Washington Post on October 16, vice chairman James Fieser sat down and wrote a memo to Henry Baker, the Red Cross medical director in Miami. He was discouraged.

  “The educational campaign minimizing the disaster seems to be spreading rather than diminishing,” he wrote. Red Cross workers in Florida were “working in an unfriendly atmosphere,” and Red Cross officials were forced to deal with “a barrage of unfavorable comment and advertising.”

  Fieser said he was hearing suggestions every day that the Red Cross should respond to the bad publicity, but taking the time to do so would divert them from their mission and not gain them anything.

  Fieser had reached a reluctant conclusion about the Red Cross’s work helping the victims of what has come to be known as the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926.

  “The quicker we do our work, demobilize our staff, and get out of Florida, the better,” he said.

  Despite the outrageous verbal assaults on their organization, however, Red Cross workers would still be in Florida helping people who needed it well into 1927. Red Cross files in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, show that caseworkers eventually helped 16,000 families, totaling 60,000 people. They spent about $3.45 million (more than $44 million today) on that effort. But the barrage of propaganda unleased by Romfh, Knight, and Warfield had cost the Red Cross nearly one-third of the budget they’d intended to spend on helping hurricane victims.

  Like thousands of other Florida residents, Edwin Menninger was deeply invested emotionally in the belief that he was living in a paradise where prosperity was permanent. But he was unwilling to publish wild distortions about the devastation of the hurricane or scurrilous and unfounded speculation about the motives of those who were trying to help clean up the mess.

  Menninger tried to buck up his readers’ morale—and perhaps his own—with an editorial in the Developer titled “Florida Will Carry On.”

  Menninger cited disasters that had befallen other American cities—the hurricane that killed 9,000 people in Galveston, Texas, in 1900; a flood that had inundated Dayton, Ohio, in 1913; a fire that had destroyed downtown Baltimore in 1904; and the awful San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

  As bad as these disasters were, they had led to better things for all of the cities that had been hit, Menninger said. The hurricane in Miami would do the same, he predicted.

  “There will be born as there was in Baltimore and in other cities a new spirit of cooperation and initiative, and energy and will come to the front to a greater extent than in the past, and Florida will go forward in its mighty march of progress and prosperity,” Menninger wrote.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Hope from the Swamp

  IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING THE HURRICANE, MIAMI RESIDENTS WERE DAZED AND edgy as they sifted through the ruins of their city, buried the dead, and tried to put their lives back together. The last thing they needed to hear was that another deadly storm was on the horizon.

  But that’s exactly what they heard when prankster Charles Haines went dashing through hotel lobbies shouting that another hurricane was coming.

  Men panicked. Women fainted. And Charley Haines got ninety days on the chain gang.

  Haines was less than a month into his sentence, however, when the real thing—another extremely powerful hurricane capable of inflicting catastrophic damage—ripped across western Cuba, turned right, and headed straight for South Florida.

  The storm began on October 14, 1926, as a tropical depression off the coast of Nicaragua in the southwestern corner of the Caribbean Sea. As the windy rainstorm was slowly meandering northward and gradually gaining strength, Henry Baker, who was in charge of the Red Cross’s relief effort in Miami, told the New York Times that, for the first time in its history, it had failed to meet its fund-raising goals to help victims of a disaster.

  “Reports from all sections of the country showed that donations had practically ceased,” he said.

  Baker would not explain why the Red Cross had fallen short of its goals. But a memo from Red Cross national chairman John Barton Payne laid the blame at the feet of Florida governor John Martin and businessmen who had understated the losses and downplayed the damage of the September hurricane.

  Meanwhile, despite the arrest of rumormongers and pranksters such as Charles Haines, hurricane panic was spreading in Miami. The word on the street was that another hurricane was going to strike Miami on Tuesday, October 19.

  Hundreds of people boarded northbound trains and cranked up their tin lizzies and headed for the Dixie Highway to get out of town ahead of the storm.

  “Women have been coming to my office in hysterics as the result of these rumors, and I know that many have left the city,” US Weather Bureau meteorolo-gist Richard Gray told the New York Times.

  Gray said such reports were foolish, and he blamed “patent medicine almanacs” for publishing wildly inaccurate forecasts.

  Those almanac forecasts were indeed off, but, as chance would have it, not by much.

  On the evening of October 19, the tropical depression that had been browsing aimlessly
across the Caribbean found a deep current of very warm water, and it did what meteorologists today refer to as “bombing out.”

  Feasting on the warm waters, the storm’s peak winds rapidly intensified, zooming from about 90 miles an hour to 140 miles an hour in only about eighteen hours. By the morning of October 20, as its eye entered the Gulf of Batabano off the southwestern coast of Cuba, its peak winds were screaming at around 150 miles an hour.

  The hurricane struck Havana around 10:45 that morning. As the vicious storm pounded its way across the ancient Cuban capital, “fishing boats floated down streets, dead cows dropped on rooftops, and houses flew overhead like birds,” a survivor recalled.

  Around 650 people were killed, and more than 10,000 were injured.

  By early afternoon, the storm’s eye had left the island. But instead of continuing its northward trek into the Gulf of Mexico, it made a sharp turn to the northeast into the Straits of Florida, the narrow waterway that separates Cuba from the Florida Keys and the Bahamas. And although the hurricane lost a little of its strength as it slowed to make its turn, its peak winds were still clocking a devastating 125 miles an hour as it settled into a northeast track. On that course, if the storm’s eye wobbled even slightly to the north, its strongest winds could cross Miami. And winds of 125 miles an hour would have inflicted massive new damage on the city, undone much of what had been repaired, and been a devastating blow to boomers’ efforts to rehabilitate Miami’s image.

  For the second time in barely a month, a pair of square black-on-red flags was raised over lighthouses, Weather Bureau offices, and post offices to signal that hurricane-force winds were expected. And again, only four days after Solomon Davies Warfield’s full-page ads in newspapers across the country had assured readers that the dangers of hurricanes in Florida had been greatly exaggerated, page-one headlines in some of those same papers announced that another deadly tropical cyclone was headed for Florida.