For Sale —American Paradise (36 page)

Warfield's statement, published by the
New York Times
and other newspapers, and the
Wall Street Journal
editorial were the opening salvos of a publicity counterattack by those with huge financial interests in Florida. Nothing could be done to stop the stunned hurricane survivors who were leaving Florida by the thousands with no intention of ever coming back. But Warfield and others who knew nothing of huddling in terror in a disintegrating house being torn apart by 150-mile-an-hour winds were determined that those who had not actually witnessed the hurricane's unearthly power would not be dissuaded from coming to Florida and spending money. And while it was understandable that they would want to protect their investments and minimize their losses, their determined campaign of misinformation was a serious impediment to the Red Cross's efforts to raise money for the thousands of people who badly needed help.

Perhaps taking his cue from Warfield's public statements, Miami mayor Edward C. Romfh—who also was founder and president of Miami's First National Bank—issued a public statement two days later, saying news reports of the hurricane's damage were inaccurate.

“From the thousands of telegrams pouring into Miami, hundreds of which are addressed to the mayor of the city, I am convinced a very much exaggerated idea of Miami's real condition has been created,” Romfh said.

His Honor acknowledged that the hurricane “was by far the most severe and destructive storm that ever touched the mainland of the United States.” Far from being severely damaged, however, Miami had withstood the storm very well. Most of the damage had been done to cheaply constructed buildings and houseboats, he said.

“It is remarkable that a city of 160,000 or more people should have gone through such a severe storm with comparatively so small a number of dead and injured,” Romfh continued. “That is accounted for by the fact that this city has the largest percentage of concrete buildings of any city in the United States.”

Miami had made an “amazing” comeback in the six days since the hurricane struck, Romfh said. He ended with a cheery promise: “I want to give positive assurance that our friends will find Miami this winter the same enjoyable, hospitable, comfortable vacation city it has always been.

“I predict that Miami will make a world-record comeback. The people here have the enthusiasm, the will to do, an unshaken faith in the future of this great city. It is the same people who have created the fastest-growing city in America who are now turning their energies and enthusiasm to the work of reconstruction in Miami.”

Edwin Menninger had doubtless read Warfield's statement in the
Wall Street Journal
before the September 24 edition of the
South Florida Developer
was published. His reporting on the storm's impact on Miami was cautious, but as accurate as he could make it.

Meanwhile, out in Moore Haven, rescue workers and survivors crazed with grief were hauling in decomposing bodies, many of them partially consumed by buzzards. Some of the bodies had been carried many miles from town by the wind and surging floodwaters.

The rescue workers begged the survivors to leave and let them deal with collecting the corpses. Shelter, dry beds, clean clothes, and food were available in nearby towns such as Sebring, where camps had been set up for storm survivors. Some gave in and left, but so many stayed that Governor John Martin finally had to order the National Guard to force them to leave.

At the end of the week,
Time
magazine's issue of September 27 hit the newsstands and mailboxes. Millions of Americans opened the magazine's pages to read a tale of irony-laden tragedy about the hurricane that had hit Miami.

“People of the ‘Magic City' boasted that its indolent sun-
kissed shores had never been touched by a hurricane; that Miami was, in fact, well outside the hurricane belt,” the story began.

“Last week, as everyone knows, the rain and wind gods conspired with Neptune, wiped the ‘Magic City' from the map.”

Time
's story continued, its trademark inverted, compressed sentences—stripped of conjunctions and articles—crisply implying that maybe Miami deserved the thrashing it had received: “No more would sport coats and plumed hats stroll at Hialea[h] Race [T]rack. It was gone. No more would dandies strut and women preen in Carl Fisher's fashionable Flamingo Hotel. It was wrecked. Five hundred bodies soaked in the streets, some wretchedly askew under logs, others stretched out peacefully by the Chamber of Commerce. Where had been one mammoth mansion sat a lone bathtub. And ghouls peered about, tampered with corpses.

“The [United States] was amazed, flabbergasted. It could not comprehend. Money loss was reported to be ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred millions of dollars. Thirty-eight thousand souls were homeless. There was no food; what there had been was water-
soaked. People lacked water, light, clothing. Great trees, torn up like matchsticks, lay across the roads. Here sagged houses without roofs, there tilted roofs without houses. Ships nestled in once busy streets while homes floated crazily atop a panting ocean. Miami was a damned, insane region from the Ancient Mariner, and the gods were as mad as Coleridge.”

Other publications were more direct in their moralizing about the harsh lessons that the Almighty had inflicted on Florida and the nation with the hurricane.

“God permitted the hurricane to strike Florida because that State's quick prosperity turned her head,” the weekly
Living Church
newspaper, published in Milwaukee, editorialized. “It is the divine verdict on such lavish, quick prosperity as turns one's head. Not Florida alone, but America, is pictured vividly in the parable.”

On the heels of the
Time
story, the Red Cross announced that it was mounting its greatest relief effort since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
Compiling the reports of dozens of Red Cross workers in Florida, a news release said 15,700 families—as many as 47,000 people—needed help.

“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.”