by Willie Drye
“The State does not owe a dollar; it has no indebtedness, bonded or otherwise, and it has $4 million cash in the treasury,” the Journal said. “The State is on a cash basis and commits the crime against other States of attracting wealthy residents who nevertheless object to being robbed.”
The Journal then identified New York governor Al Smith—the Democratic nominee for president in the upcoming election—as a villain in the plot against Florida. Smith, the editorial said, was in favor of maintaining the federal tax on estates transferred at the owner’s death.
“Here is the true basis of a misrepresentation which may well be called hysterical, with, however, the proviso that there is method in such madness,” the Journal concluded.
Many Americans disagreed with the Journal’s reasoning about the hurricane relief. An editorial in the Grand Rapids Herald said the Journal’s editorial was “sick,” and sounded as though it had been “edited in a padded cell by a victim of delirium tremens.”
But the Journal’s editorials, coupled with misunderstanding and ignorance about the area where the hurricane had struck, were once again creating confusion and making it difficult for the Red Cross to reach its fund-raising goal of $5 million. Even some of the Red Cross’s own local leaders in other parts of the United States thought the damage reports were exaggerated.
J. B. Ellis, chairman of the Lincoln County chapter of the American Red Cross in Elsberry, Missouri, sent a clipping of a Wall Street Journal editorial to Red Cross officials in Washington, DC.
Referring to the editorial, Ellis said he thought the Red Cross should forget about spending money to help people in Florida and instead use it to help hurricane victims in the Caribbean. Florida didn’t need the Red Cross’s money, Ellis said.
“Is it not a fact that Palm Beach is practically owned by millionaires?” he asked.
Newspaper headlines such as one that appeared in the Montreal Gazette didn’t help either. A headline in the Canadian newspaper read “250 Dead In Tampa,” which had barely been touched by the hurricane.
Red Cross officials and Palm Beach County leaders decided to confront the problem directly. On September 28, a delegation from Palm Beach County met with newspaper reporters in New York City to explain what the hurricane had done. The Florida group included Howard Selby, chairman of the Palm Beach County Red Cross chapter; former Palm Beach mayor Cooper Lightbown; and W. A. Payne, business manager of the Palm Beach Post.
Wall Street Journal editors begrudgingly changed the tone of their editorials after the meeting.
On Monday, October 1, the Journal’s editorial page insisted the newspaper had done the right thing by telling readers that the hurricane had not been a disaster for the entire state of Florida, and repeated its absurd claim from two years earlier that damage reports of the 1926 Miami hurricane had been “preposterous.”
“But the damage to Palm Beach County is a matter so serious as to call for the generous assistance of the whole country,” the paper said.
Ten days after the editorial was published, the Red Cross announced that it had reached its $5 million fund-raising goal.
The Journal also acknowledged, for the first time, that the death toll from the storm had been very high, adding, however, that “about three-fourths were [N]egroes.”
The Journal’s backhanded acknowledgment of African-American deaths was only a hint of the suffering that the hurricane had inflicted on them in the Jim Crow–era South.
In the late summer of 1928, thousands of black migrant workers were coming to Lake Okeechobee from across the South, as well as from the Bahamas and the Caribbean. They lived in labor camps, shacks, and tents. Some simply slept in the open. They weren’t required to register. They were paid in cash and they moved on. There was no documentation of any sort to record their names or track their movements.
There was simply no way of knowing how many were killed because there is no way of knowing how many were there before the storm.
More than six hundred black victims of the storm were buried in a mass grave in downtown West Palm Beach and forgotten until 2002.
After the hurricane, blacks and whites were sent to separate refugee camps. Red Cross officials insisted that they did not treat black refugees any differently than white refugees in the segregated camps, and inspections by committees of prominent African-American advisors verified the Red Cross’s contention.
But it was a different story outside the Red Cross camps.
Red Cross documents in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, describe several ugly racial incidents in the days following the hurricane.
The worst incident happened on September 23, when Knowlton Crosby, a white twenty-year-old National Guard soldier, shot and killed Cootie Simpson, a thirty-five-year-old African American who was a World War I veteran with a wife and two children in West Palm Beach.
Accounts vary on exactly what happened, but what is certain is that it happened while National Guard troops were rounding up men to clear hurricane damage and bury the dead.
Public officials in hurricane-ravaged towns had imposed some harsh emergency regulations in the wake of the storm. In West Palm Beach and Stuart, men of both races who weren’t employed and working their normal jobs could be legally forced to work on hurricane cleanup and burial crews.
Crosby ordered Simpson to join a work detail and Simpson refused. Some accounts say he’d been working on such a detail for several days and was leaving to go home to his wife when Crosby shot him. Another account says Simpson said he would ask his boss for permission to join the work detail and walked away, and Crosby shot him. A third account said Simpson started to attack Crosby and the Guardsman killed him in self-defense.
Simpson’s wife, Juanita, asked the Red Cross for money to ship his body to Surrency, Georgia, where they’d lived before coming to Florida.
A coroner’s inquest on September 24 found that Crosby had been justified in shooting Simpson. A single sentence concluded that Simpson met his death “[b]y a rifle wound inflicted by Knowlton Crosby, a member of Company C, 114th Infantry, Florida National Guard, while in the lawful discharge of his duty.”
A few days after Simpson’s death, an organization called the Negro Workers Relief Committee in New York City announced that it had launched an “emergency” fund-raising effort to help African-American victims of the hurricane. In a story published in black-owned newspapers across the United States, the committee said it had started the effort because black refugees were being discriminated against by the Red Cross and other relief agencies.
The Negro Workers Relief Committee claimed many prominent African Americans among its advisors, including famed author and editor W. E. B. Du Bois.
But Du Bois, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, and other African-American leaders disavowed any connection with the Negro Workers Relief Committee. Bethune visited the hurricane area and said she “detected no discrimination whatever” in the Red Cross’s relief effort, “but rather an enthusiastic desire” to help everyone who needed help.
Du Bois wrote a letter to the Negro Workers Relief Committee telling them he did not support their fund-raising effort, and not to use his name for that effort. The Associated Negro Press later said the Negro Workers Relief Committee was affiliated with the American Communist Party.
In mid-October 1928, the Red Cross compiled statistics outlining the hurricane’s effect on Florida. More than 2,000 people had been killed by the hurricane, “with no possibility of accurate count,” the Red Cross concluded. The death toll was still being calculated seventy-five years later. In 2003, the National Weather Service raised the official number of deaths in the 1928 hurricane to “at least 2,500.” Still, NWS meteorologist Rusty Pfost said, “We all know we really don’t know what the answer is.”
There were other grim numbers: 95 percent of the buildings in Palm Beach County had been damaged, and 25 percent destroyed; the homes of 690 farmers had been destroyed; 15,000 people had been left homeless by the hu
rricane, which had “seriously” affected seven counties; 17,500 people were receiving help from the Red Cross, and 5,000 people were living in Red Cross refugee camps.
The year had begun with optimistic predictions for Florida’s future—the Tamiami Trail would open, real estate prices would stabilize, investors and money would return, and good times would resume.
But 1928 was drawing to a decidedly depressing close.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Dreamland After All
A FEW WEEKS BEFORE HIS MARCH 4, 1929, INAUGURATION, PRESIDENT-ELECT Herbert Hoover took a quick look at the small towns around Lake Okeechobee that had been ravaged by the hurricane five months earlier. It wasn’t the first time Hoover had seen the aftermath of a disaster. In the spring of 1927, he had coordinated the effort of local, state, and federal agencies to help victims after massive flooding along the Mississippi River had left 600,000 people homeless.
Preventing another flooding tragedy around Lake Okeechobee was a winning campaign issue in Florida in the 1928 election. Hoover, a Republican and a former engineer who had campaigned on improved flood control, easily carried Florida, with about 56 percent of the vote. In the governor’s race, Democrat Doyle Carlton made flood control part of his campaign, and he won more than 60 percent of the vote.
By contrast, former governor John Martin, who had tried and failed to enact a flood-control program, was soundly defeated by incumbent Park Trammell in the Democratic primary for one of Florida’s seats in the US Senate.
Although much of the area around the lake’s southern shore that had been hardest hit by the storm had made a remarkable recovery by the time Hoover toured the area in February 1929, there were grim reminders. A house remained in a canal, and a large pile of storm-driven debris remained by the road between Belle Glade and Pahokee. Many residents were still living in tents or hastily constructed shacks.
Many miles of road washed out by the flooding had been only partially repaired, and Hoover’s motorcade had to slow to a crawl in places.
Remains of storm victims still were being found, and that would continue for years.
The storm debris provided a stark contrast to the thriving crops of cabbages, beans, tomatoes, and sugarcane that had been replanted as soon as the floodwaters had drained off and evaporated.
Hoover made only one stop during his five-hour drive around Lake Okeechobee. In South Bay, where dozens of bodies had once been piled in the town’s main street after the storm, the president-elect was presented with a bouquet of flowers, and he posed for cameramen for a few moments.
Crowds awaited him in other towns, but his procession didn’t stop, only slowing down so he could wave at the disappointed onlookers.
Hoover attended a banquet in Clewiston that night, and the crowd made it clear that they wanted the federal government to pay the tab for almost $11 million—more than $157 million in twenty-first-century dollars—worth of draining and flood-control improvements to prevent a recurrence of the 1928 disaster.
But the president-elect stayed mum while other speakers addressed the crowd, and he slipped out of the gathering and went to bed early.
Still, work eventually started on a more substantial structure to protect the small lakeside towns. A sixty-six-mile levee, 175 feet thick at its base and 34 feet high, was completed on the lake’s southern shore in 1935. By the 1950s, the massive levee had been extended another eighty miles so that it encircled the lake. The structure was named after Hoover.
While Hoover toured the storm area, Miami newspapers were boasting of a booming tourist trade for the 1928–29 season.
“Facts and figures give indisputable evidence that even the most skeptical must accept as evidence that Greater Miami has returned to prosperity,” the Miami Daily News crowed in its edition of February 17, 1929. The city’s winter population was at least 15 percent higher than it had been during the 1927–28 season.
But the city also was looking over its shoulder, hoping to avoid a return of the “be-knickered tribe of speculators” that had descended on the city in 1925, the News said.
And the city would have preferred that some winter visitors had stayed away, especially when The New Yorker magazine noted in its edition of March 2, 1929, that Al Capone was spending another winter in Florida.
Miami Beach leaders had continued their determined effort to force Capone to leave town. The company insuring the Palm Island mansion had canceled the policy when they learned Capone lived at the property, but Capone had dug in for a legal battle to hold on to the house.
Organized-crime operatives, many of them drawn by Capone’s presence, were coming south to enjoy the state’s gentle winters and swank amenities. The rowdy, backwoods bootleggers and bank robbers of the Ashley Gang era were being replaced by a different type of criminal—clever, well-groomed, sophisticated, and often armed with attorneys instead of guns.
On March 7, 1929, gangland violence from New York and Chicago spilled over into Miami with deadly results. On that date, about twenty people were playing cards in a two-room suite on the fourteenth floor of the posh Miami Biltmore Hotel. Among the group of stylishly dressed men and women was Thomas “Fatty” Walsh, who enjoyed telling people that he’d been a bodyguard for the late kingpin of underworld gambling, Arnold Rothstein, who many thought had fixed the 1919 World Series.
Walsh had been questioned by police after Rothstein was mortally wounded three months earlier in New York’s Park Central Hotel.
Suddenly a door opened and a man stepped into the doorway and began shooting. Moments later, Walsh lay dead on the floor. Mobster Arthur Clark, who said he’d come to Miami to recover from the flu, was wounded.
Clark, who was willing to talk to detectives investigating the crime, said he didn’t think he was the target of the killer’s bullets and had been hit accidentally. But he was guarded by police while he recovered in a Miami hospital.
Miami cops who investigated the Biltmore shooting unraveled a thread that went all the way back to the slaying of gangster Frank Uale eight months earlier—the murder that had been linked to Al Capone and his Miami pal, Parker Henderson Jr., who had bought guns for the bootlegging king.
Police also found evidence that Walsh had been in Chicago a few weeks earlier when a slaughter that horrified the nation took place—the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, in which seven men were lined up against a wall and machine-gunned to death.
Walsh apparently had come to Miami to meet with Capone, police learned.
The afternoon after the shooting, Miami police rounded up fifteen men known to be connected with organized crime in New York and Chicago.
The gangland shooting in Miami’s most opulent hotel and subsequent roundup of underworld thugs was a reminder of how Capone’s presence was affecting the city’s image. It was also starting to affect property values and real estate sales. Potential buyers were having second thoughts about Miami Beach property because of Capone’s presence.
Still, Capone clung to the mansion, even after he was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to prison in 1931. He eventually died there after having a stroke in 1947.
In his “Today” column of March 1, 1929, Arthur Brisbane—who was now the largest individual taxpayer in Martin County—was still bullish about Florida’s future. He noted that the state had shipped 38,000 train carloads of winter fruits and vegetables north, and that this represented less than half of the season’s crop.
He also noted that Carl Fisher had reported the tourist crowds in Miami were the largest in the state’s history.
But up the coast, Martin County was facing serious problems.
The spectacular “ideal” developments that had been advertised with such grandeur in the South Florida Developer—Picture City, Port Mayaca, Okeechobee Shores—never materialized, nor did the deepwater harbor that would have been “the best south of Savannah.”
Instead of becoming an ideal city that exceeded even Coral Gables, Port Mayaca became better known for being the f
inal resting place for about 1,600 victims of the 1928 hurricane buried in a mass grave.
Indiantown’s dreams of becoming a thriving industrial giant—and perhaps being renamed to honor its benefactor—evaporated when Solomon Davies Warfield died. And Arthur Brisbane’s 10,000-acre “demonstration” farm was never built.
Had the Ashley Gang still been around, they would’ve had to go someplace other than Stuart to find a bank to rob. By March 1929, both of the town’s banks had closed their doors, and the money deposited there—representing income from businesses, government funds, and the life savings of hundreds of people—were gone forever.
The banks’ closings were only one of many economic problems for Martin County.
On March 19, the Stuart Daily News—now owned by Menninger—reported that the town was facing a financial crisis. Only about 34 percent of the tax payments due had been paid. And in less than sixty days, the town would have to come up with $40,000—more than $546,000 in twenty-first-century dollars—in payments due on bonds and other debt obligations.
Nor could the town pay its electric bill, and the streetlights were turned off.
Things were no better for the county government. County finances were so strapped that employees were laid off or had their pay drastically cut. The county’s agricultural extension agent took a pay cut, from $250 per month to $85 per month.
“People of larger financial resources were just recovering from the storms when the Seminole Bank closed in late February, and the Stuart Bank in early March,” Leora Field, executive secretary of the Martin County chapter of the Red Cross, wrote in one of her reports.
The Red Cross had even loaned the county money to pay one employee to make road repairs.
“Martin County is still suffering and mentally panic stricken by the financial depression,” Field wrote in April 1929.