For Sale —American Paradise (51 page)

The grim work was taking such an emotional toll on the men that Hoxie resorted to the drastic measures used by a Civil War commander to steel his soldiers for the grisly task of gathering and burying the dead after the Battle of Antietam. He issued whiskey to them before sending them out to perform their awful chore.

“It boils down to this,” he said. “If you send men out on a ‘dead detail,' they have to be half-drunk before they can go. If fifty men go on this detail today, only about twenty-five of them will be fit to go tomorrow.”

Hoxie said local doctors who “deem it necessary” were providing whiskey to fortify the Legionnaires for this ghastly work.

That same day, Governor John Martin had finally gotten a firsthand look at the worst of the storm damage, and he was appalled.

Around midnight, a weary and stunned Martin invited reporters into his room at the Hotel Monterey in downtown West Palm Beach. He sat down on his bed and for an hour he described what he'd seen.

“Today, in traveling six miles on the road between Pahokee and Belle Glade, I counted twenty-seven corpses floating in the water adjacent to the road or lying in the road,” the governor said.

At least one million acres around Lake Okeechobee had been flooded, and the skies were filled with carrion birds feasting on corpses, he said.

“It was the most horrible thing I ever saw,” Martin said.

That night, Martin sent a telegram to the mayors of all of the state's cities, asking them to urge residents to contribute to the Red Cross relief fund.

Still, despite the increasing clarity of the monumental disaster that had taken place in Florida, the
Wall Street Journal
's editorial page again insisted on Saturday, September 22, that the storm's effects were exaggerated, and any opinion to the contrary was hysteria.

The editorial followed the same formula as earlier ones had done: briefly acknowledge the tragedy in the opening paragraph, genuflect to the deaths, then
dispute any facts that contradicted the
Journal
's contention that the storm damage was exaggerated, and insult any and all who challenged the accuracy of the
Journal
's depiction of the event.

Newspapers other than the
Wall Street Journal
“are practically instructed to send sensational figures rather than properly sifted facts,” the editorial said. “In captions such a figure as a thousand deaths looks more impressive than 271 and is much less trouble to collect.”

Late Sunday evening, September 23, John Martin stopped again in Stuart. The
South Florida Developer
said the governor, still reeling from what he'd seen in the lakeside towns, “staggered into the Red Cross headquarters” in Stuart.

After spending two days in the “vast, rotting pool” of death and devastation around Lake Okeechobee, the governor apparently needed to unburden himself, and he decided that he was among friends in Martin County. He assembled the Red Cross workers and started talking.

“Just a few hours ago I saw the bodies of thirty-
two colored men stacked up on the canal bank, and this I mention only because it was the last horror upon which I have gazed,” Martin said. “I have seen death and suffering everywhere. But no human tongue or pen can describe it.”

He mentioned the awful discovery of bodies hopelessly ensnared in the sug-arcane fields. Some of the corpses were so tightly entangled that, after nearly a week, rescue workers still hadn't figured out how to remove them.

But even a clearly stunned governor's eyewitness account of the horror didn't alter the
Wall Street Journal
's relentless condescending and disparaging narrative on the hurricane's effect and Red Cross efforts to deal with the aftermath. On Monday, September 24, the
Journal
published its most sarcastic and cynical commentary yet on the catastrophe.

“There is a political reason for the apparently senseless exaggeration of any disaster which happens to the State of Florida,” a
Journal
editorial began. “That exaggeration has been repeated over and over again, and only a few newspapers like
The Wall Street Journal
, whose readers demand accuracy and know when they are getting it, have treated the recent hurricane on a sane basis.”

The
Journal
made the obligatory acknowledgment that people had been killed, but added that most of the deaths had been among “small [N]egro cultivators with minor casualties in the white population of the few towns in the immediate track of the storm.” The estimate of property damage by the storm was “absurdly exaggerated,” the editorial said.

The whole thing amounted to class warfare against the wealthy, the
Journal
said. The people who were portraying Florida's condition in such dire terms were furious that the state did not impose most of the taxes that were so common in other states. And Florida's enemies couldn't stand it that the state was fiscally sound without these taxes.

“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.