It is Labor Day, 1935.
A hurricane is sweeping the Florida Keys.
It will kill more than 400 people.
Most of the dead are unemployed veterans of World War I.
They had taken jobs with a New Deal program to build the Overseas Highway, carrying US Route 1 through the Florida Keys to Key West.
The men lived in labor camps which were swept away in the storm.
The US Weather Bureau was aware of the Atlantic disturbance.
But they botched the storm forecast.
At first, the Bureau said it was a small storm.
Then, they said the storm would pass through the Florida Straits and into the Gulf of Mexico.
‘It might brush Cuba but not the Keys,’ they said.
By the time the Bureau realized its mistakes, it was too late.
A train sent from Miami to evacuate the veterans from their work camp
derailed before reaching them.
The storm turned out to be a Category 5 hurricane.
It carved a 40-mile-wide path of devastation.
Government agencies and private citizens
began evacuating survivors two days later.
Among those helping was Ernest Hemingway, then a resident of Key West.
He felt an affinity with these veterans.
Hemingway had served as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I.
Collection, identification and proper disposal of the dead was difficult.
And two weeks later, Hemingway wrote a scathing article
blaming the Roosevelt administration for the veterans’ deaths
and describing the somber task of recovering their bodies.1
From his article:
“The biggest bunch of the dead were in the tangled, always green but now brown mangroves behind the [railroad] tank cars and the water towers.
They hung on there, in shelter, until the wind and the rising water carried them away.
They didn’t all let go at once but only when they couldn’t hold on no longer.
Then further on you found them high in the trees where the water had swept them.
You found them everywhere and in the sun
all of them were beginning to be too big for their blue jeans and jackets
that they could never fill when they were on the bum and hungry.”
Many veteran’s bodies were cremated.
Others were buried near where they were found,
as had been the practice in the war in which they had served.
Eight piers which the veterans built for the Overseas Highway
remain visible on US Route 1.
They were abandoned after the storm.
Two years after the hurricane, FDR invited Hemingway to the White House
for a private dinner and a screening of Hemingway’s new film
about the ongoing Spanish Civil War.
Eleanor Roosevelt praised the film in her daily newspaper column a few days later.
Was Hemingway’s harsh criticism of FDR’s hurricane response discussed?
I don’t know.
But his article was journalism at its finest.
Factual, based on first-hand information.
Merciless in its criticism.
No “both sides.”
And none were suggested.
Fearless journalism: Where have you gone?
*******************************
I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
Hemingway’s article was published in the September 17, 1935, issue of the magazine “The New Masses.”
Share this post