For Sale —American Paradise (35 page)

“All buildings erected by Fuller Co. came through hurricane in splendid shape structurally,” Philips reported.

He described relatively minor damage to the ten-story Olympia Theater and the fifteen-story First Trust & Savings Bank in downtown Miami.

The Fuller Company had also built the famous Roney Plaza Hotel overlooking the ocean on Miami Beach. In some ways, Philips's description of the damage the hurricane had inflicted on that building didn't vary too much from Reardon's description: “Roney Plaza roof blown off and most window glass out. Water damage to furniture, sea water rushed through ground floor.”

Still, to many people it would seem a bit of a stretch to describe a ten-story building that had lost its roof and most of its windows and been gutted by an eighteen-foot storm surge as being in “splendid” shape.

Reardon and Philips had different perceptions of what the hurricane had done to Miami and its surrounding communities. In the coming weeks, similar differences of perception about the destruction caused by the hurricane would erupt into a nasty national dispute between the American Red Cross and some of the country's most powerful business interests.

The public squabble between the Red Cross and businessmen who were deeply invested in Florida was perhaps the strangest saga to develop in the aftermath of the 1926 hurricane.

The American Red Cross, founded in 1881, had been sending help to the scenes of disasters for forty-five years before the 1926 hurricane. Red Cross workers had helped the survivors in Galveston, Texas, when a horrendous hurricane there killed at least nine thousand people in 1900. They had helped dazed San Francisco residents pick up the pieces of their lives after the earthquake of 1906 all but destroyed the city. And they had helped victims of countless other lesser-known disasters. Fires, tornadoes, floods—the Red Cross had dealt with them all.

To publicly challenge the Red Cross's analysis of a disaster was absurdly arrogant. But for more than two months, that's exactly what a handful of very powerful men did.

As night fell on South Florida on Monday, September 20, candles and kerosene lanterns flickered from the glassless windows of apartment buildings and homes that were still inhabitable. Elsewhere, campfires cast an eerie flickering light on the ruins of homes as their former occupants prepared to bed down again in the open air.

More than a thousand miles to the north of South Florida's hurricane-induced misery, a crowd bedecked in evening finery smiled and chuckled and howled with laughter as a leering Groucho Marx and his outrageous brothers romped through the first Washington, DC, performance of
The Cocoanuts
at the National Theater. The
Washington Post
's drama critic gushed with praise for the performance, noting that the comedy about maniacal greed and shady land dealings in Florida “roars like a hurricane” from beginning to end.

In the days when land speculation was booming and millions of dollars were changing hands every day, developers such as George Merrick had sent their own buses to cities in the Midwest and Northeast to bring prospective buyers to Florida. The trip was free if you bought real estate, and most of the passengers got a free trip.

Late in the day of Tuesday, September 21, some of the same buses that only a year earlier had brought new dreamers and schemers to Florida were hauling bedraggled and dispirited storm refugees to the Seaboard Air Line Railroad station in West Palm Beach. Seaboard, owned by Solomon Davies Warfield, was giving free train tickets to those who'd had enough of paradise and wanted to go home.

“Gone now the spirit of adventure and excitement that marked these faces during the days of the ‘great boom,'” Leo Reardon wrote. “In their stead tears, discouragement, and the wistful expression of homesickness. Tired women in bedraggled clothing alighted with puzzled children from the buses and slowly walked into the station where agents of the railroad companies and Red Cross workers distributed tickets and took down on official writing pads details of suffering and destitution in each case.”

In the previous two days, more than a thousand storm-
blown, soon-to-be-former residents of South Florida had made their way to West Palm Beach to board northbound trains. Most of the travelers were women, children, and older men. Younger men had stayed behind to help with the cleanup.

A locomotive pulling eleven passenger coaches slowly approached and glided to a stop at the station. The passengers who began shuffling toward the train reminded Reardon of refugees fleeing Belgium ahead of the German invasion in the early days of the Great War twelve years earlier.

“There was no rush to board the train, just a slow, steady movement of fatigued human beings, who dropped exhausted on the cushions, with a sigh and a gleam of hope in their eyes,” Reardon said. “They were going [to their former] home.”

An old man sitting alone at the rear of one coach began to pray aloud. Outside, the Florida sun was making its usual spectacular descent to the horizon. Someone—perhaps a local chamber of commerce—had stationed a small band at the station to play for the passengers. As the old man prayed and the train pulled slowly away, the band played “Valencia.”

The song had been recorded only a few months earlier by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, and would become one of the biggest hits of Whiteman's career. It was a familiar tune to passengers, and the doctors, nurses, and Red Cross workers who were helping them. As the song's stirring opening notes floated through the evening, its lyrics doubtless ran through the minds of some of those in the crowd. It was a song about orange blossoms and sea breezes, paradise and romance—exactly what many of them had been seeking when they had come to Florida.

Late the following day, some of the trains with Florida passengers began arriving in New York. Reporters were waiting at Penn Station. The passengers' descriptions of what they'd left behind varied some, but mostly they spoke of devastation and ruined lives.

Saul German, a former Bronx resident, told the
New York Times
that he'd lost everything he owned in the storm.

“The storm took the roof from our heads,” his wife said, “and we gathered an armful of clothes, took the baby, and ran in the dark.”

Burton Wilson, a student at Princeton University, had a different take. He told a
Times
reporter that most of the storm's damage had been done to buildings that were quickly and cheaply built. “Miami is not so badly off as people feared at first,” he said.

But H. P. Noonan, who'd gone to Florida to open an insurance business—and presumably knew something about evaluating damage—said Miami was a “total wreck.”

As the storm refugees' tales of woe were being published in newspapers, the Red Cross was getting a better idea of exactly what the hurricane had done to South Florida. By Wednesday, September 22, they knew that 135 people had been killed in Miami, 70 had died in Hollywood, and 75 in Fort Lauderdale.

At least 4,000 people had been injured in the storm, and about 1,000 of those injuries had been serious. About half of the serious injuries had been major fractures of arms and legs, as well as fractured skulls and broken necks. More than 1,300 were hospitalized.

In Fort Lauderdale, Red Cross inspectors had found twenty-
two wells con-
taining the bacteria that causes typhoid.

Five tons of lime had been shipped to Fort Lauderdale to neutralize the stench of decayed dead animals, and the Red Cross had started calculating a price tag on helping the storm survivors get back on their feet.

In Stuart, Edwin Menninger was mixing optimism and realism in his reporting of the storm in the
South Florida Developer
. He attributed a similar attitude to Governor John Martin, who had stopped in Stuart for lunch on September 22 after touring the area hit by the storm.

“It was evident [Martin] realized the gravity of the situation, but he seemed to be trying to make his remarks as optimistic as possible,” the
Developer
noted. “He said he thought the Miami people had the situation well in hand.”

Still, the
Developer
acknowledged that Miami had withstood a severe blow and needed outside help. Stuart's police chief and a group of businessmen had also just returned from Miami with “grave reports” of the conditions there. They were so moved by what they'd seen that they arranged for ice, medical supplies, and drinking water to be sent immediately to the stricken area and set up a committee to raise money and collect supplies.

By Thursday, September 23, letters from storm survivors still in Florida were being published in newspapers across the country. They continued to portray a grim public image of conditions in Miami and surrounding communities.

“I don't believe the papers can describe all that happened here,” Henry Zimmerman wrote in a letter to his parents that was published in the
Sheboygan Press
in Wisconsin. “Everything is ruined. There is no water, light, or gas. There is little to eat and less money. Our apartment house is a total wreck, and we have no home. It is my opinion that this finishes Miami.”

“Hurricane terrible,” William Diesbach hastily scrawled to his friend, John Yackle, in Hamilton, Ohio. His note was published in the
Hamilton Evening Journal
. “Many lives lost. Buildings have fallen in and wrecked. Miami in terrible shape.”

Helen Sweezy's letter to her parents in Middletown, New York, was published in the
Daily Herald
. “Very few of the houses have any roofs or windows
left, and most of them are flat on the ground,” she wrote. “Miami and Miami Beach are an awful sight.”

Others, however, looked at the same damage and made very different calculations. If the newspaper headlines saying thousands had died and Miami had been leveled were greatly overstated, the responses to the tragedy from some of the plutocrats heavily invested in Florida were disturbingly understated. Their acknowledgment of the death and destruction was terse and perfunctory, and they dismissed the reports of massive damage by saying it was simply impossible for a hurricane to generate the force necessary to cause such spectacular destruction.

On September 20, the
Miami Herald
reported that the storm had done about $11 million in damages to that city. The neighboring cities of Hialeah, Coral Gables, and Miami Beach had sustained an additional $2 million.

On Wednesday, September 22, the
Wall Street Journal
published an editorial expressing sympathy for storm victims and calling for a “brave and steady eye to the future.” But the newspaper's editorial board dismissed reports of the unearthly power of the hurricane, insisting that the top winds could not possibly have reached speeds above ninety-five miles an hour. The editorial characterized reports that Miami and other cities had been wiped out and would take years to rebuild as “pardonable hysterics.”

“All that has been wiped out is a certain class of building, that which lacked steel construction,” the
Journal
said. “It is a terrific loss, but it is measurable and can be met in months rather than years.”

Solomon Davies Warfield had just spent millions expanding his Seaboard Air Line Railroad in Florida, and he had huge plans for building a great industrial city in Martin County, west of Stuart. Now his railroad was hauling dazed storm refugees out of Florida by the trainload, free of charge. Nonetheless, on September 22, Warfield issued a public statement saying the hurricane's effects on Florida were being “exaggerated to an extent far beyond actual conditions.”

Although Warfield said the death toll was “unfortunate and regrettable,” he added that his railroad was operating on schedule. And like the
Wall Street Journal
, he dismissed reports of the hurricane's massive power.

“I doubt if there has been as much water in the streets of these several localities as there was in the streets of Jamaica, Long Island, two weeks ago, when automobiles were floating through the streets instead of running on their tires,” Warfield said.

Warfield could have been referring to any one of several severe thunderstorms that had hit New York City between early August and Labor Day. The most recent storm had struck the city on the afternoon of September 7, 1926, dumping torrential rainfall and adding to the chaos caused by thousands of people heading home after the Labor Day holiday. But Warfield's comparison of a bad thunderstorm to a monster hurricane that had pushed an eighteen-
foot storm surge across Miami Beach and pounded the area with hurricane-force
winds for twenty-
four hours was an absurd and utterly ill-informed interpretation of reality.