For Sale —American Paradise (37 page)

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 statistics 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

I
N THE DAYS FOLLOWING THE HURRICANE
, M
IAMI 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.

News of the powerful storm was telegraphed to the
Miami Daily News
from Belen Observatory in Havana.

Miami mayor Edward Romfh had been among those who, only a few weeks earlier, had accused the Red Cross of overstating hurricane damage to his city. His comments had inflicted serious damage on the Red Cross's effort to raise money to help storm victims, and had contributed to the failure to meet its
fund-raising goals. But with another ruinous storm at his doorstep, Romfh asked Red Cross officials to take over his city's preparations for the storm and set up shelters in the city.

The Red Cross set up aid stations throughout Miami.

The exodus from Miami escalated as hundreds of residents decided they simply could not stand the emotional strain of enduring another terrible storm. They boarded northbound trains to get as far away from the city as possible, and the Dixie Highway was clogged with northbound cars carrying women and children out of the city.

Schools and businesses closed.

“Miami Prepares to Meet Storm,” headlined the afternoon
Miami Daily News
edition of Wednesday, October 20, 1926.

The evening of Wednesday, October 20, 1926, began in a frighteningly similar fashion to the awful night a month earlier. As darkness fell, winds steadily increased and rain fell in torrents.

This time, however, Miami got lucky. Although Key West, about 150 miles southwest of Miami, was lashed with 100-mile-an-hour winds as the eye passed near that city of 20,000 residents, the hurricane's eye—and its most powerful winds—stayed offshore. The outer edge of the storm still brought rain, high winds, and terrifying reminders of the earlier hurricane to Miami residents. Trees came down and fell across power lines and knocked out electricity, but fortunately, that was the worst of it.