For Sale —American Paradise (46 page)

State engineers did what they could to lower the lake level after the August 1928 hurricane. Thousands of gallons of water per second were pouring through the gates of the St. Lucie Canal, and a state engineer charged with monitoring the lake level said there was no danger that the dikes would give way. But William Griffis, editor of the
Okeechobee News
, disputed him. The Kissimmee and the two creeks were pouring water into the lake faster than the canal could drain it off, Griffis said.

By August 16, however, the Kissimmee had crested and the water level was falling, and Lake Okeechobee's rise had stopped. Residents living near the lake relaxed a little and waited for the ground to dry out so they could return to tending their crops.

Many of the people who lived in those little lakeside farming towns—Clewiston, Belle Glade, Pahokee, Moore Haven, Canal Point, and South Bay—were drawn there by the prospect of working the dark, fertile soil around Lake Okeechobee. But they were a very different breed than the newcomers who had flocked to the stylish beach towns during the peak of the real estate speculation a few years earlier. Davida Gates, who grew up in Belle Glade in the 1920s and had become a schoolteacher, later wrote in her autobiography that the Glades people were “rough, tough, domineering, good-hearted men with uncomplaining, God-fearing wives and graceless, half-civilized, hardy children.”

They were joined by thousands of migrant workers, most of them black, many of them Haitians and other natives of the Caribbean who spoke little or
no English. They came to plant and harvest green beans, sugarcane, and other crops.

In her classic novel,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, author Zora Neale Hurston described the scene around Lake Okeechobee during the waning days of the summer of 1928. Every day, “hordes of workers poured in,” she wrote.

“They came in wagons from way up in Georgia, and they came in truck loads from east, west, north and south,” Hurston wrote. “Permanent transients with no attachments and tired looking men with their families and dogs in flivvers. All night, all day, hurrying in to pick beans. Skillets, beds, patched up spare inner tubes all hanging and dangling from the ancient cars on the outside and hopeful humanity, herded and hovered on the inside, chugging on to the muck. People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.”

So many migrants were coming to the towns around Lake Okeechobee in the late summer of 1928 that there was no place for them to sleep. Landowners started building nightly bonfires, and men slept on the ground near the fires. “But they had to pay the man whose land they slept on,” Hurston wrote. “He ran the fire just like his boarding place—for pay.”

Money had not poured into the Glades towns the way it had in Miami, Stuart, West Palm Beach, St. Petersburg, and other towns on the coast. Still, as the autumn of 1928 approached, community leaders in the lakeside towns were echoing the optimism that Herbert Hoover voiced when he accepted the Republican nomination for president on August 11 in California.

Hoover, a taciturn engineer who'd become a politician, told a crowd of 75,000 in the Stanford University football stadium that the United States was on the verge of accomplishing one of the most noble of human aspirations.

“We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land,” Hoover said. “The poorhouse is vanishing from among us.”

Glades residents weren't expecting to eliminate poverty, but better times did seem to be at hand.

“Almost as great a boom as the east coast of Florida had in 1925 is the development that is now under way in the upper Everglades,” the
Canal Point News
said in early September 1928. The weekly newspaper noted that two railroads were laying new track near the lake and new highways were being built by the state. Florida Power and Light Company was putting up new electrical lines from Pahokee to South Bay, a big new sugar mill was being built in Clewiston, and hundreds of acres of land were being cleared to plant sugarcane.

On September 10, an Associated Press story predicted that the same coastal towns that had been roughed up by the August hurricane were preparing for “the best winter season ever experienced” in Florida. The story even found a silver lining to the hurricane. Its destruction had been a stimulant to business because of all the building and repair that followed it.

The story closed on a reassuring note. “Meteorologists say the storm season virtually closes in September,” the story concluded.

There was no doubt in Edwin Menninger's mind that happy days were about to return to Florida. His
South Florida Developer
of Friday, September 14, was brimming with optimism.

“Florida looks forward today to one of the best and most prosperous winters that the state has ever known,” the
Developer
predicted. “Every sign points to a banner season. The number of advance tourists, indicated by the foreign license tags you see daily on the streets now, foreshadows an influx a month or two months from now that will tax our resources of accommodation.”

“One thing is certain, the situation in Florida is improving,” the
Developer
said. “We have been on bedrock, and the next change will be upward and for the better.”

When events don't unfold as expected, that's irony. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche noted that while irony's purpose is to humble and shame, it can be useful when it is applied to teach a lesson that leads to a good resolution and teaches people to show honor and gratitude.

When irony is not used for that purpose, it is rude and vulgar, Nietzsche said.

As Florida's hopeful businessmen found reasons to be optimistic about the return of good times, a massive dose of irony was headed their way. But it would not lead to a good resolution.

Hurricanes draw their power from warm seawater, and by the first week of September, a stretch of the Atlantic Ocean between the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa and the Caribbean Sea had been heated by the summer sun until it had become a prime spawning ground for hurricanes. The windy thunderstorms—known as tropical depressions—that roll off Africa's west coast at this time of year often pick up a counterclockwise circulation imparted by the spin of the earth, draw power from this warm seawater, and become tropical storms.

For all of their power, however, hurricanes are delicate, and even small changes in conditions—cooler water or upper-
level winds that impede their circulation and disrupt their momentum—can cause a storm to weaken and even dissipate.

Every so often, though, one of these late-
summer storms encounters exactly perfect conditions as it rumbles past the Cape Verdes and continues westward across the Atlantic. Sometimes, there is nothing to impede its development. Some of history's worst hurricanes have been born from these conditions at this time of year. Those storms became so infamous that meteorologists gave them a special designation—Cape Verde hurricanes.

On September 6, a tropical depression found those perfect conditions just off the African west coast and quickly strengthened into a tropical storm as it
moved south of the Cape Verde Islands. By September 10—when the Associated Press was predicting the greatest tourist season in Florida's history and telling readers that hurricane season “virtually closes in September”—the storm had grown into a hurricane with maximum winds of about seventy-five miles an hour.

That same morning the SS
Commack
, an American freighter bound from Brazil to Philadelphia with a load of bananas, ran into a surprisingly strong storm about 1,600 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands. The ship's captain, Samuel Kruppe, radioed the hurricane's position.

It was the farthest east that a hurricane had ever been documented. Clearly, there was something sinister about this storm.

About 280 miles southwest of the
Commack
, the captain of the SS
Clearwater
was encountering the same rough weather. A rapidly falling barometer indicates that a bad storm is nearby. The captain of the
Clearwater
had been closely watching his barometer for about two hours. During that time, the reading had dropped one-tenth of an inch. That doesn't sound like much of a change to a landlubber, but it's an alarming drop to a sailor whose ship is being pounded by a bad storm thousands of miles from the nearest land.

By September 12, the storm had traveled 2,500 miles across warm summer seawater. As the hurricane approached the ring of islands marking the eastern boundary of the Caribbean, it was a bona fide monster, with maximum winds of around 145 miles an hour. It tore into the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe with savage fury. And it started killing people.

When a hurricane's barometric pressure falls below 28 inches, it's a very intense storm. Hurricane Charley, which carved a path of destruction across the Florida peninsula in 2004, had a barometric pressure reading of 27.79 just before it made landfall near Port Charlotte on Florida's Gulf Coast. That storm's maximum sustained winds reached at least 145 miles per hour.

A meteorologist in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, recorded a reading of 27.76 inches on September 12, 1928, as the hurricane passed over the island.

Alexander Hamilton, who was born in the British West Indies and later became the first US secretary of the treasury, was about fifteen years old and living on Guadeloupe in August 1772 when a very powerful hurricane crossed the island. He was astonished and deeply moved by the power he witnessed.

“It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place,” he later wrote in a letter to his father. “The roaring of the sea and wind—fiery meteors flying about in the air—the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning—the crash of the falling houses—and the ear-
piercing shrieks of the distressed, were sufficient to strike astonishment into Angels.”

The hurricane that crossed Guadeloupe in September 1928 was similar in power to the 1772 storm, and the island had been caught unprepared. As many as 1,200 people may have died as the hurricane thrashed across the island and entered the northeastern Caribbean Sea. The storm turned slightly to the northwest and gathered even more strength as it bore down on Puerto Rico.

Other islands in the hurricane's path had a little more warning than Guadeloupe. At ten p.m. on September 12, a cannon boomed from the ramparts of Fort Christiansvaern on St. Croix. It was a warning to residents that they should come immediately to the ancient eighteenth-century citadel for protection from the approaching storm.

In Puerto Rico, ships were weighing anchor and leaving ports to avoid the storm. Police went door-to-door, warning residents to prepare for a very bad blow. The hurricane's winds began to tear at Puerto Rico's southeastern coast around four a.m. on September 13, 1928.

During its short, 320-mile run from Guadeloupe to Puerto Rico, the storm had feasted on the warm Caribbean waters. The hurricane's eye reached Guayama on the southeast coast of the island around 2:30 p.m. The storm's arrival happened to coincide with the Catholic Church's celebration of the feast of Saint Philip, or San Felipe. It was the second time in Puerto Rico's history that a hurricane had struck the island on that saint's feast day. So the hurricane that pounded Puerto Rico on Thursday, September 13, 1928, came to be known as San Felipe Segundo, or Saint Philip the Second.

As the eye passed over Guayama, winds in San Juan, about 30 miles to the north, reached 160 miles an hour before the instruments measuring wind speed were blown away.

The
San Lorenzo
, a Puerto Rican passenger liner with British passengers aboard, was riding out the hurricane in the San Juan harbor.

“We could see whole houses hurtle past, and tall trees swept along by the wind,” passenger Estelle Rice later told
The Times
of London.

The noise from the storm was so loud that the passengers aboard the
San Lorenzo
did not hear an ammonia plant blow up during the hurricane, even though it was only a few hundred feet from where they were anchored.

And it may have been worse at Guayama, which was closer to the eye. Mete-orologists with the US Weather Bureau thought winds there may have reached 200 miles per hour.