For Sale —American Paradise

by Willie Drye

  As the storm spun northward, an announcer on WDBO radio in Orlando was summarizing the hurricane’s effects on that city. Speaking from the station’s broadcast studios in the Fort Gatlin Hotel, the announcer told his listeners that “little, if any damage” had been done in Orlando.

  Outside, the storm’s winds whipped through the hotel’s street-level arcade. Unlike Tampa, however, Orlando was on the strong side of the hurricane and the winds were considerably stronger.

  A few minutes after telling listeners that Orlando had suffered little damage, the WDBO announcer was back. The radio station would be off the air for a while, he said. The hurricane had just ripped the ceramic tile roof off the chic, Spanish Mission–style hotel.

  As soon as the winds had died down enough to allow people to emerge from their shelters, Florida’s larger newspapers in Miami, St. Petersburg, and West Palm Beach sent out reporters to try to find their way to Lake Okeechobee. But it was slow going. Roads were flooded and piled high with debris and downed trees.

  On Tuesday, September 18, a few details of the death and damage caused by the hurricane were published in newspapers. The Palm Beach Post said the Red Cross was estimating that fifty people had been killed in Palm Beach County. The Post also reported that dikes along Lake Okeechobee’s southern shore had broken, and there had been some flooding in Belle Glade.

  Telephone service was restored to parts of the lake area Tuesday night, and a few more details were reported. Those details were published in newspapers on Wednesday, September 19.

  The St. Petersburg Times reported that thirty bodies, most of them African Americans, lay in an improvised morgue in Belle Glade. The Palm Beach Post reported that N. B. Jones, a Post employee, had been among the rescue workers who had left West Palm Beach late Monday night. He returned the following day driving an ambulance with the bodies of thirteen African Americans.

  Arthur Brisbane’s “Today” column for Tuesday, September 18, 1928, included a breezy comment on the hurricane.

  “If you have made any winter plans about Florida, don’t let any news reports, accurate or exaggerated, influence you,” he wrote. “There are no tornadoes in Florida in winter. Information about ‘terrible tornado in Florida’ comes in this dispatch from Peter O. Knight, one of the ablest lawyers in Florida.”

  Brisbane then reprinted Knight’s telegram of the previous day, dismissing the hurricane’s damage as “negligible.”

  But President Calvin Coolidge was getting a different perception of the hurricane’s wrath in Florida and Puerto Rico from the Red Cross and the US Weather Bureau. Coolidge, far better informed than Brisbane and Knight, understood the magnitude of the catastrophe and wanted the federal government to do whatever it could to help.

  In Tallahassee, Governor John Martin also was following the scraps of news about the hurricane’s impact. He later told the Stuart News that he got the first indication of the seriousness of the hurricane’s damage in messages he received from several wireless radio operators.

  On September 18 Martin began preparing for a long drive from Tallahassee to West Palm Beach with Florida attorney general Fred Davis. Before he left Tallahassee, he contacted US secretary of war Dwight Davis and asked for immediate help from the federal government for West Palm Beach. The secretary immediately granted Martin’s request, and Florida’s governor and attorney general set out on their long trek eastward across the Florida Panhandle and then down the peninsula.

  Around 1:45 a.m. on Tuesday, September 19, Red Cross vice chairman James Fieser received a radio message from the National Guard troops that had been dispatched to the hurricane area. There were at least 400 dead in Palm Beach County, and the situation around Lake Okeechobee was “very serious.” Around 6,000 people were in refugee camps. In keeping with the Jim Crow practices of the day, whites were gathered in a camp in Miami, while African Americans were sent to a camp in Pompano Beach.

  Property damage in Palm Beach County was estimated at $30 million, or more than $403 million in twenty-first-century dollars.

  But the editorial page in that day’s edition of the Tampa Morning Tribune—whose board of directors included Peter Knight—downplayed the hurricane’s damage.

  An editorial briefly acknowledged that people were killed—to be fair, no one had any idea yet of the true death toll—but suggested that the greatest loss caused by the storm seemed to be in the state’s citrus crop.

  “Compared with the wholesale destruction in Porto Rico [sic] and other islands, the storm seems to have become moderate before touching Florida,” the Tribune said. “There have been more terrific storms in many other parts of the country this summer, and there will be worse blizzards next winter.”

  That same day, the Wall Street Journal echoed Knight’s sentiments and the Tribune editorial. Just as it had done after Miami had been wrecked by a hurricane two years earlier, the Journal scorned any talk of an unmeasurable catastrophe in Florida and dismissed the storm’s damage as superficial.

  “Cyclone or hurricane damage is essentially surface damage,” the Journal said. “It has every element of the spectacular and it always looks several times as bad as it really is.”

  The Journal called the hurricane deaths “deplorable,” but added that death “happens any day of the year from causes other than hurricanes.”

  “When the Florida winter season opens at Christmas there will be no evidence of wreckage that the Northern tourist can recognize,” the Journal predicted.

  Miami Daily News readers got a jarring look at San Felipe’s work on Wednesday, September 20, when the newspaper published photos from Belle Glade taken by reporter Cecil Warren. In addition to wrecked buildings and flooded landscapes, Warren photographed corpses. Among them was a shot of four rescue workers, hands on hips, helplessly looking at the bodies of three or four victims about to be loaded onto a truck for removal to West Palm Beach.

  “This may seem like it is exaggerated to those who have not visited the drowned lands, where bodies lie lodged against palmetto bushes, caught in drifts and prone by highways, exposed to plain view,” Warren later wrote. But, he said, the photos did not exaggerate conditions in and around Belle Glade.

  Warren said an unnamed deputy sheriff told him that photos were forbidden in Belle Glade. Warren, the skeptical newsman, asked National Guard officers if photography was prohibited. Other men gathered around Warren and the Guardsmen as they talked. The officers said photography was not forbidden.

  One of the men who’d overheard the conversation spoke to Warren in a steely tone.

  “Boy,” the man said, “you take all the pictures you want, of whatever you want. Snapshot these bodies and homes, show the world in full what has happened. We want everyone to know the truth.”

  By now, a small crowd had assembled around the Daily News reporter. If anyone tried to stop Warren from taking photos, the man assured the reporter, he and others “[would] attend to that little matter.”

  “Show me the man who tried to keep you from it,” the man said.

  The man told Warren that he’d lost his home but had been lucky enough not to lose his family. Nonetheless, he understood the grief of those who’d lost loved ones.

  “If I was one of those standing here on the bank of this canal and saw the body of my wife and three children brought up, when I saw them the first thing I would do would be to grab my shotgun and go to Tallahassee after the man who is responsible,” he said.

  “I will say that he named the man he thought was responsible,” Warren wrote, “but I will not, because there is no man who, in full knowledge of the consequences, would have brought about such destruction as exists in the Everglades—one vast, rotting pool, filled with the bodies of men, women, and little children, their hopes and belongings.”

  Other larger Florida newspapers published stories about conditions at Lake Okeechobee on Thursday, September 21.

  Cecelia Copeland, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, described her trip into the Glades with a res
cue crew. She filed her story from Clewiston, where storm damage had been less severe and a refugee camp had been established.

  “Families have been cruelly separated,” Copeland wrote. “Crying but lovable little tots are harbored here but are totally unidentified. Rapidly graying mothers ply through the crowds of refugees, eagerly scanning their faces in hope of finding relatives.”

  Being surrounded by misery and destruction was having an effect on Copeland.

  “I have seen sights in this section that I hope never to see again,” she wrote. “This is no place for sightseers and curious people.”

  That same day, Red Cross officials and others started responding to charges that storm damage was being exaggerated.

  Howard Selby, the Red Cross chairman for Palm Beach County, sent a telegram to Peter Knight telling him that he’d acted irresponsibly in claiming to speak for the entire state and saying the hurricane’s damage had been “negligible.”

  Citing the growing death toll and the thousands that were homeless, Selby urged Knight to retract his comments.

  “Known dead over 700; homeless 15,000; without clothing 8,000; property damage $20 million,” Selby said in the telegram. “These facts are given after deliberate and careful survey, and other authorities have stated these estimates [as] too conservative.”

  Selby ended with a challenge to Knight: “If you are to serve as spokesman for [an] entire state, won’t you kindly make personal visit here? We are distressed and need the help of the nation.”

  By nightfall Thursday, Florida governor Martin and attorney general Davis had reached Stuart in the governor’s namesake county. The two high-ranking state officials stopped there and talked with Edwin Menninger’s South Florida Developer.

  “I could not see my own county suffer,” Martin said. “I think more of Martin County than any other county in the state. . . . I will not let the people of Martin County suffer.”

  Martin had not yet seen the devastation on the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee.

  In Tampa, Peter Knight tried to deflect harsh criticism of his earlier comments and spin his hasty assessment that hurricane damage had been “negligible.” The St. Petersburg Times of Friday, September 21, printed a follow-up letter that Knight had written to Arthur Brisbane.

  Knight acknowledged that the storm had caused “great damage at Palm Beach and immediate vicinity,” and “some damage” to the north and south of West Palm Beach, but said his “negligible” comment had referred to the entire state.

  He made a passing acknowledgment of the deaths, but added “no reference can be made to the loss of life. That is too sacred. It cannot be measured in dollars and cents. We have to deal simply with the monetary loss.”

  And then he dismissed even the monetary loss in the small farming towns that had been nearly wiped out by the hurricane.

  “The little settlements around Lake Okeechobee were composed of houses of a very cheap character, ranging all the way from tents up,” Knight wrote. Those losses “could not exceed $100,000,” he said.

  Knight said he’d sent the telegram to Brisbane “for the protection of the state.”

  “I was correct when I stated that the damage to the entire state was negligible, because such is the case,” he said.

  The Tampa Morning Tribune, Knight’s hometown newspaper, tried to straddle the fence about the controversy surrounding one of its directors.

  “The storm did serious damage to a small section of the peninsula, and thus indirectly hurt the whole state . . . ,” the Tribune said on its editorial page.

  But the newspaper also scolded Brisbane for his cavalier ignorance. “This was a severe hurricane,” the Tribune said. “Brisbane and others should learn that it was not a tornado any more than it was a waterspout.”

  And the Tribune indirectly criticized Knight. “The fact that the storm effects were confined to a comparatively small section of Florida does not mean that it was by any means negligible,” the editorial said. “It was heartbreaking to thousands.”

  That night, A. L. Shafer, who was directing Red Cross relief operations in Florida, sent a telegram to his headquarters in Washington, updating his bosses. His note included a horrifying preliminary estimate of the death toll.

  “Conditions Lake Okeechobee region simply terrible,” Shafer wrote. “Many bodies not recovered and sanitary conditions bad. We have received reports that 1,500 are dead in this region but will hold my estimate to 450 until such numbers are confirmed.”

  There were more grim statistics: 15,000 families registered for Red Cross assistance; 95 percent of homes destroyed in West Palm Beach; 5,500 being fed in West Palm Beach every day.

  To make matters worse, sanitary conditions around the lake were getting worse. Bodies were surfacing in the lake every day and, of necessity, were being buried without identification as quickly as possible. There was talk of moving every single person, including rescue workers, away from the lake and using airplanes to spray the entire area with lime to prevent the growth of bacteria on the corpses and to reduce the awful odor of decaying bodies.

  “General condition absolute destitution,” Shafer tersely concluded.

  Paul Hoxie, commander of the American Legion post in St. Petersburg, explained how those conditions were affecting rescue workers in a report to the Red Cross on September 24. Nearly one thousand Legionnaires were working between Pahokee and South Bay, looking for corpses.

  The grim work was taking such an emotional toll on the men that Hoxie resorted to the drastic measures used by a Civil War commander to steel his soldiers for the grisly task of gathering and burying the dead after the Battle of Antietam. He issued whiskey to them before sending them out to perform their awful chore.

  “It boils down to this,” he said. “If you send men out on a ‘dead detail,’ they have to be half-drunk before they can go. If fifty men go on this detail today, only about twenty-five of them will be fit to go tomorrow.”

  Hoxie said local doctors who “deem it necessary” were providing whiskey to fortify the Legionnaires for this ghastly work.

  That same day, Governor John Martin had finally gotten a firsthand look at the worst of the storm damage, and he was appalled.

  Around midnight, a weary and stunned Martin invited reporters into his room at the Hotel Monterey in downtown West Palm Beach. He sat down on his bed and for an hour he described what he’d seen.

  “Today, in traveling six miles on the road between Pahokee and Belle Glade, I counted twenty-seven corpses floating in the water adjacent to the road or lying in the road,” the governor said.

  At least one million acres around Lake Okeechobee had been flooded, and the skies were filled with carrion birds feasting on corpses, he said.

  “It was the most horrible thing I ever saw,” Martin said.

  That night, Martin sent a telegram to the mayors of all of the state’s cities, asking them to urge residents to contribute to the Red Cross relief fund.

  Still, despite the increasing clarity of the monumental disaster that had taken place in Florida, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page again insisted on Saturday, September 22, that the storm’s effects were exaggerated, and any opinion to the contrary was hysteria.

  The editorial followed the same formula as earlier ones had done: briefly acknowledge the tragedy in the opening paragraph, genuflect to the deaths, then dispute any facts that contradicted the Journal’s contention that the storm damage was exaggerated, and insult any and all who challenged the accuracy of the Journal’s depiction of the event.

  Newspapers other than the Wall Street Journal “are practically instructed to send sensational figures rather than properly sifted facts,” the editorial said. “In captions such a figure as a thousand deaths looks more impressive than 271 and is much less trouble to collect.”

  Late Sunday evening, September 23, John Martin stopped again in Stuart. The South Florida Developer said the governor, still reeling from what he’d seen in the lakeside towns, “sta
ggered into the Red Cross headquarters” in Stuart.

  After spending two days in the “vast, rotting pool” of death and devastation around Lake Okeechobee, the governor apparently needed to unburden himself, and he decided that he was among friends in Martin County. He assembled the Red Cross workers and started talking.

  “Just a few hours ago I saw the bodies of thirty-two colored men stacked up on the canal bank, and this I mention only because it was the last horror upon which I have gazed,” Martin said. “I have seen death and suffering everywhere. But no human tongue or pen can describe it.”

  He mentioned the awful discovery of bodies hopelessly ensnared in the sug-arcane fields. Some of the corpses were so tightly entangled that, after nearly a week, rescue workers still hadn’t figured out how to remove them.

  But even a clearly stunned governor’s eyewitness account of the horror didn’t alter the Wall Street Journal’s relentless condescending and disparaging narrative on the hurricane’s effect and Red Cross efforts to deal with the aftermath. On Monday, September 24, the Journal published its most sarcastic and cynical commentary yet on the catastrophe.

  “There is a political reason for the apparently senseless exaggeration of any disaster which happens to the State of Florida,” a Journal editorial began. “That exaggeration has been repeated over and over again, and only a few newspapers like The Wall Street Journal, whose readers demand accuracy and know when they are getting it, have treated the recent hurricane on a sane basis.”

  The Journal made the obligatory acknowledgment that people had been killed, but added that most of the deaths had been among “small [N]egro cultivators with minor casualties in the white population of the few towns in the immediate track of the storm.” The estimate of property damage by the storm was “absurdly exaggerated,” the editorial said.

  The whole thing amounted to class warfare against the wealthy, the Journal said. The people who were portraying Florida’s condition in such dire terms were furious that the state did not impose most of the taxes that were so common in other states. And Florida’s enemies couldn’t stand it that the state was fiscally sound without these taxes.