CHAPTER ELEVEN

Blown Away

THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE THAT DELAYED PARKER HENDERSON JR.’S RETURN to Miami tore into Stuart and Fort Pierce with surprising fierceness on the morning of August 8, 1928. Electric wires and telegraph lines went down almost immediately, so newspapers from West Palm Beach to Vero Beach could not run their presses.

But Edwin Menninger, now publisher of both the South Florida Developer and the Stuart Daily News, was determined to get the story of the hurricane’s fury to the outside world—even if it meant risking his life.

As the storm still raged, Menninger got into his car and started a perilous journey north. Buffeted and rocked by high winds and slammed by driving rain, he pushed through the storm seeking a town where he could get his story to the Associated Press.

Along the way, he took note of the storm’s damage.

Menninger found electricity and phone service in Melbourne, about seventy miles up the coast from Stuart. He filed his story to the AP there.

The winds in the hurricane’s eye wall were around 90 miles an hour when it made landfall, Menninger said. Around midnight, the storm’s calm eye arrived, and all was quiet for an hour or so. But then the back side of the eye wall arrived, and the winds resumed with greater fury than before. Menninger later reported that the winds reached about 110 miles an hour after the eye passed. On the modern Saffir-Simpson scale—which rates hurricanes by wind speed and destructive potential—a hurricane with peak winds of 111 miles an hour is considered major.

Hundreds of homes and businesses from Stuart to Vero Beach were heavily damaged, and many had their roofs blown off, Menninger said. “Signboards, awnings, timbers, and parts of buildings lay all over the streets,” he wrote. “Broken tile, plate glass, and strips of felt and metal roofing covered the sidewalks.”

The winds had denuded tens of thousands of citrus trees and covered the ground with ripening grapefruit and oranges. “Citrus groves along the East coast [of Florida] looked like a winter scene in the North,” Menninger said.

Even in the middle of a story about destruction, however, Menninger found an opportunity for promotion. When he mentioned the storm’s damage to Stuart, he noted that the town was “famed for its fishing and great natural harbor.”

No deaths were reported from the storm. Still, one sad death during the storm was discovered later. The body of the thirty-five-year-old, unmarried postmaster at Olympia was found on August 9. He was sitting in a chair in his home. Police learned that he’d been deeply disappointed when a recent love affair had been broken off. So as the hurricane raged around him, the postmaster sat down in an easy chair, pondered his unhappiness, put a pistol to his head, and pulled the trigger.

In his story for the Associated Press, Menninger reported that the storm had inflicted several million dollars’ worth of damage from Stuart to Vero Beach. But the hurricane’s worst effects wouldn’t become evident for a while. The storm dumped more than a foot of rain in some places in South Florida, and most of that water soon made its way to Lake Okeechobee.

Florida boosters are fond of pointing out that the lake is the nation’s second largest, if you exclude the four Great Lakes with shorelines that touch both the United States and Canada. The lake covers about 750 square miles and is about half the size of the state of Rhode Island.

The deepest part of Lake Okeechobee is at sea level. The shallow saucer-like lake’s average depth is about nine feet, so the saucer is pretty much filled when the surface of the water is fourteen or fifteen feet above sea level. Because the lake is so shallow, winds blowing across it can pile up water against shorelines and dikes.

In the days following the hurricane, water poured into Lake Okeechobee. Most of it was dumped into the lake by the Kissimmee River, which drains about 3,000 square miles as it flows southeasterly for about 130 miles down the center of the Florida peninsula to the lake’s northern shore. Two smaller creeks—Taylor Creek and Fisheating Creek—also emptied more water into the lake.

There was more water than the Kissimmee could handle, and it spilled over the river’s banks and spread out miles on both sides of the river. On August 14, the Palm Beach Post reported that the Kissimmee had reached the highest level since record-keeping had started.

And Lake Okeechobee was steadily rising. By mid-August it exceeded seventeen feet above sea level, approaching the eighteen-foot level that was considered dangerous. People living near the lake nervously watched the dikes and recalled what had happened only two years earlier when the hurricane that devastated Miami also sent water spilling over a dike, flooded Moore Haven, and killed hundreds of people.

One of those dikes near the town of Okeechobee on the lake’s northern shore gave way on August 14, flooding about 1,200 acres. It was a reminder to Glades residents that state politicians seemed incapable of solving a problem that had long bedeviled them.

Controlling the lake’s water level and eliminating flooding had been discussed in Tallahassee for decades, but the discussions had always broken down over how such a program would be administered. South Florida residents wanted to control how decisions would be made about a drainage program in their region. But opponents didn’t want to give up control of a program funded by residents of the entire state that would benefit only residents of one region.

When John W. Martin ran for governor in 1924, he had promised voters that if they elected him, he would do all he could to improve drainage around Lake Okeechobee and stop the frequent flooding.

But in early July 1928, near the end of his four-year term as governor and now running for the US Senate, Martin had thrown up his hands in frustration after Florida commissioner of agriculture Nathan Mayo refused to sign a bond issue that had been overwhelmingly approved by the state legislature. The bond would have provided $20 million—about $270 million in twenty-first-century dollars—for drainage improvements around Lake Okeechobee.

Mayo, whose signature was required along with those of the state treasurer, the state comptroller, and the state attorney general, said he wouldn’t sign the documents because a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the bond issue hadn’t been decided by the US Supreme Court. It didn’t matter to Mayo that the Florida Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of the plan that the legislature had approved.

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.

Despite the ferocity of the storm, the advance warnings saved lives in Puerto Rico. In Coamo, only about eighteen miles northwest of where the storm came ashore, Felicia Cartegena, a telephone operator, stayed at her switchboard while the hurricane roared around her. She sent warnings to other parts of the islands and dispatched help for those who’d been injured.

She paid for her bravery with her life.

In Cayey, ten miles north of Guayama, a mother tucked a child under each arm and tried desperately to find shelter. She and her children were nearly cut in two when the storm sent pieces of a roof whirling through the air. Not far away, a merchant who opened his door to admit a man seeking shelter battled the winds to try to close the door. Suddenly the wind snatched him up, hurled him through a window, and into a river, where he drowned.

And there was one more unusual death. Franz Romer, a twenty-nine-year-old German-born veteran of World War I, had launched a sail-powered kayak into the Atlantic at Lisbon, Portugal, on March 31, 1928, planning to sail the tiny craft, just over twenty-one feet long, across the Atlantic to Miami.

By early September, an exhausted Romer had reached Puerto Rico. After recuperating for several days in San Juan, he set out again. About an hour after he left, the first hurricane warning reached San Juan.

Romer was never seen again, and no trace of him or his tiny boat was found.

More than 300 people were killed in Puerto Rico before San Felipe was finished with its deadly work. Red Cross officials later estimated that the hurricane had left half of the island’s population—perhaps 600,000 people—homeless.

The Palm Beach Post of Friday, September 14, 1928, had a front-page story saying that Florida was not threatened by the hurricane that had devastated Puerto Rico.

“While weather bureau officials emphasized there is no cause for alarm on the Florida coast, as the hurricane may deviate from its present course or dissipate itself at sea, they said it was undoubtedly the worst this year, and may be of the proportions of the hurricane which swept Miami in 1926,” the Post story said.

Actually, San Felipe was a little more powerful than the 1926 hurricane. And it was approaching Florida at a very bad time. Heavy rain had resumed again in late August and early September, and Lake Okeechobee had begun to rise again.

The rains continued during the first two weeks of September, when as much as another foot fell in some places. By mid-month, Lake Okeechobee was frighteningly high, and once again lakeside residents were nervously eyeing the water lapping at the low mud dikes.

On Saturday, September 15, the front page of the Palm Beach Post was dominated by a blaring headline: “Florida May Feel Storm’s Wrath.” It must have been jarring to Post readers who just the day before had been told there was “no cause for alarm” about the hurricane.

“Giving ironclad forecasts upon the hurricane is practically impossible,” the Post story admitted. “Possibilities were apparent last night that the storm might veer to the right and travel northward, which would head it again to sea,” the story continued. “Again, it may continue to the Florida coast and strike at a point which it is now too early to determine.”

San Felipe had lost some of its fierceness since it had devastated Puerto Rico, but it was still a very powerful, dangerous, and deadly storm. Around three p.m. Saturday, the eye of the storm passed over the German steamer August Leon-hardt near the southeastern tip of the Bahamas, about 450 miles east-southeast of West Palm Beach.

A ship’s officer on the August Leonhardt struggled to describe San Felipe’s power.

“The force of the wind, if more or less, could only be judged by the noise made by the storm, which reminded me of the New York subway going full speed passing switches,” the officer later wrote.

At eleven p.m. Saturday night, the US Weather Bureau in Washington, DC, issued a statement saying that winds on the southern Florida peninsula could exceed fifty miles an hour. “There was no indication last night that Miami or vicinity will be in the path of dangerous winds,” the statement said. “Indications were that when the storm reaches a position due east of Miami Sunday morning it will be 170 miles to sea and winds during the day should shift to the north and diminish as the storm moves up the coast.”

The Weather Bureau’s forecast wasn’t entirely wrong. Miami would get little more than a windy rainstorm from the hurricane. And Arthur Brisbane apparently was keeping an eye on the forecasts. The Palm Beach Post’s edition for Sunday, September 16, published the optimistic forecast and Brisbane’s “Today” column on the front page.

Brisbane was detached and flippant about the powerful storm that was bearing down on Florida, noting that at about the same time the hurricane was devastating Puerto Rico, a tornado was killing eleven people in South Dakota and Nebraska.

“But science can foresee a day when high winds will be under man’s control,” Brisbane wrote. One day, “in the days far off, perhaps 50,000 years or 500,000 years hence,” humans would control the earth’s temperature and transfer “surplus heat” from the equator to the poles. The winds that caused such destruction today would blow “where man says it shall blow, and at a speed prescribed by him,” he wrote. “There is nothing fanciful about that.”

That same morning, American Red Cross vice chairman James Fieser read the forecasts for Florida and had a very different reaction than Brisbane. He was alarmed. He picked up his phone and ordered experienced disaster workers to go to Jacksonville and wait for the storm to pass. He called local Red Cross chapters in southern Florida counties and told them to prepare for a disaster. And he sent a telegram to Florida governor John Martin, advising him that the Red Cross was alerting its relief workers to prepare to deal with a tragedy.

On his small farm near Belle Glade, Jack Zuber was getting ready for “a hard wind.”

“I nailed boards over the windows and reinforced my garage doors with heavy timbers,” Zuber said. “We felt comparatively safe after that.”

Zuber was optimistic. He had ridden out the hurricane two years earlier in the same house. The water had only gotten a couple of feet deep and his house had withstood the blow, so he figured it would withstand this storm.

It seemed like a safe assumption.

At 10:30 Sunday morning, the US Weather Bureau in Washington, DC, ordered hurricane warnings to be hoisted from Miami to Daytona Beach. “This hurricane is of wide extent and great severity,” the Weather Bureau advisory read. “Every precaution should be taken against destructive winds and high tides on Florida east coast, especially West Palm Beach to Daytona.”

By early Sunday afternoon, San Felipe’s outer winds were raking the Florida coast. Attorney Everett Muskoff Jr. and his wife were driving north from Miami and reached West Palm Beach shortly after noon.

“A brisk wind was blowing,” Muskoff recalled. “We were looking at the skies when suddenly a roof of a building went hurtling by. We went to the first hotel we could find. When we got out of the car we could hardly walk, so strong was the wind.”

The hotel lobby was already crowded. “The crowd stood about, looking out the doors,” Muskoff said. “By this time a drenching rain had set in. There could be heard crashes and rumblings. The tiles of the hotel roof clanked off to the pavement at irregular intervals. It sort of got on one’s nerves.”

Around the same time, Frances Ball left the Hotel Pennsylvania in West Palm Beach with a friend named Jimmy to get some lunch. Then they went to visit a friend whose office was in the Harvey Building, a fourteen-story skyscraper that was the tallest building in downtown West Palm Beach. It was around 1:30 p.m.

“The gale was blowing so strong at the time that we could just barely make headway against it,” she later wrote in a letter to her parents. “Half the time we [were] just pawing the air.”

The electricity to the Harvey Building had already been cut, so Ball and her friend had to walk up fourteen stories to their friend’s office. “The whole top was swaying enough to make you seasick,” Ball told her parents. “We left immediately for the ground floor but in that short time the wind and rain had increased so that you couldn’t stand up. Naturally we stayed in that building.”

About forty miles inland from West Palm Beach, fifteen-year-old Vernon Boots and his young friends were enjoying the windy day. The winds weren’t yet as fierce as those that were already slashing at West Palm Beach.

“Us boys, we were having a big time,” Boots recalled in 1988.

Boots and his friends were making propellers by nailing a piece of a shingle to a stick and holding it up to the wind.

“And actually, the wind got to blowing so hard, the prop would turn so fast, it would burn a hole right through [the propeller],” Boots said.

Boots and his family lived on a farm on the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee, where they grew beans, potatoes, tomatoes, and other produce. Vernon’s father, William Boots, also worked for the state highway department.

They had no idea that the wind was a harbinger of disaster. “Of course, we were enjoying it, you know, not having sense enough to know something bad was about to take place.”

Around 2:30 p.m., downtown West Palm Beach was being drenched by rain and raked by steadily increasing winds when Margaret Best started writing her thoughts into a letter to her sister in Lowell, Massachusetts. She and her husband, Amos, were riding out the storm in the downtown cafeteria they operated. With them were their son and two of their daughters.

Amos Best and his family had spent the day trying to prepare for the hurricane, bracing doors, protecting plate-glass windows, gathering candles. Now all they could do was wait and listen to San Felipe’s howling arrival.

“The wind is blowing a mile a minute, believe me, and overhead there is a rumble like thunder,” Margaret Best wrote. “The rain is sweeping the street in sheets.”

Margaret was already wondering whether their building would withstand the storm, and she and her husband were discussing whether to move to the cellar of a friend who lived nearby.

“We have candles all ready,” she wrote. “The lights are all out and there is no power in the store. Dave came by about an hour ago with the latest reports of this being the worst storm ever here. . . . It is only 2:30 now and it is not expected to strike until 7 o’clock. It will be a wonder if there is anything left of us by then, it is so bad now.”

Contemplating the roaring hurricane outside and the uncertainty of her fate, Margaret jotted a note on the back of the envelope containing the letter to her sister. “Someone Please Mail,” she wrote.

At the Harvey Building, Frances Ball and her friend Jimmy were riding out the storm with other refugees.

“There were about 12 of us shut up in there,” Ball wrote. “The water was pouring in through the doors and windows. All of a sudden, crack—then a second of silence—then a deafening, crashing, splintering of plate-glass windows! You should have heard the air scream through the transoms and around the corners.”

Among the businesses in the building was a pharmacy on the ground floor, “all glass, too, and lighted by skylights,” Ball said.

“The first thing we know one of the skylights came crashing down and it was pandemonium let loose inside there,” she said. “The owner had some expensive stuff that must not get wet so he and two others dashed in to get it.”

Moments later came another deafening crash, and the three terrified men raced out of the pharmacy. The roof and shelves lining the walls had collapsed. The stench of spilled chemicals followed the fleeing men.

“By that time the entire building was swaying and trembling in a manner to strike terror to your heart,” Ball wrote.

And the worst part of the hurricane was still several hours away.

By five p.m. Margaret and Amos Best and their children had moved to the neighbor’s cellar.

Margaret added a few hasty notes to her letter: “Storm terrific. One awning on store blown away. House rocking. Have our bags packed and blankets ready to leave if possible. Big piece of roofing blown off house. Wires down all around.”

And nightfall was coming early.

“It is getting dark which adds to our fear,” Best wrote. “Part of house blown away. We are going to try to be brave. Love.”

The residents of the farming communities around Lake Okeechobee also were getting pummeled by the hurricane. By five p.m., the winds were just starting to arrive. At Canal Point, the wind was clocked at about forty miles an hour.

Nineteen people had gathered at the home of Pat Burke near the southern shore of the big lake. Burke’s small one-story house was in the tiny farming community of Chosen, just outside Belle Glade. Residents had taken the name from biblical references to “a chosen place.”

Burke’s stepdaughter, Helen McCormick, was among the group that had assembled to ride out the storm. Her mother had discussed leaving the lake area with her husband, but they’d decided against it because it was a fifty-mile drive to the town of Okeechobee on the northern shore of the lake.

“We all had a big day with a big dinner, and the children playing and all,” McCormick recalled, “and that night we was gathered in the front room and everyone was talking about where they’d go if they had to leave the house.”

In Belle Glade, seventeen-year-old Jabo Tryon was tired and hungry. He’d gotten up at four o’clock that morning to go to work at his job at the local ice plant, and had worked more than twelve hours delivering ice with only a cup of coffee for sustenance. Storm or no storm, he was determined to get something to eat. He went to a restaurant in Belle Glade’s small business district.

“So I went in there and ordered me a cup of coffee and a piece of pie,” Tryon recalled in 1988. “She had some mighty fine pie.”

Shortly before six p.m. the eye of San Felipe was just offshore from the oceanfront mansions of Palm Beach, and its winds were ripping away at downtown West Palm Beach on the other side of Lake Worth. Forty miles away on the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee, the intensifying winds were piling up water against the flimsy mud dikes.

Jack Zuber noticed that the water in a nearby canal had been steadily rising since around four p.m., and that made his wife Celia nervous.

“So was I,” Zuber admitted. But they had two children: a son, Robert, and an infant. They were trying not to show their nervousness because of their kids.

San Felipe’s eye touched land at Palm Beach around seven p.m. Its barometric pressure reading was 27.43 inches—even more intense than the hurricane that had hit Miami only two years earlier. At the time, it was the most intense hurricane on record to make landfall in the United States.

And then, suddenly, stillness. The eye of the storm had reached West Palm Beach.

“A little after seven the lull came and it was just about as terrifying as the storm,” Frances Ball wrote in the letter to her parents. “Several people went reconnoitering but we stayed put.”

As the winds died to a whisper, more storm refugees scurried into the Harvey Building seeking shelter.

“Mothers with tiny new babies,” Ball wrote. “Women with canaries and dogs, fathers and youngsters—oh! It was pitiful. The lobby was jam full of women and children.”

And then, after about a thirty-minute lull, bedlam returned.

“All of a sudden the wind changed,” Ball said. “The lull was over and back she came in full fury. And one of the men had the bright idea that the glass might blow in because the wind had changed. So he had everybody move up to the second story and on up to the fifth.

“Now I’m not exaggerating one little bit when I say that he had no more got everybody out of the lobby, off the first stairway, when there came the most bloodcurdling bang crash ! The steel girders were bent and twisted, and the lobby and stairway one mass of wall, tile, brick, and timber. Jimmy and I had been sitting on the next-to-the-bottom stair.

“We hadn’t been gone five minutes before that whole thing caved in,” Ball said. “It was pitch dark, and you should have heard the women and children scream! There simply are no words adequate to describe the terror of those few minutes. The air was full of chipped walls, plaster, sand, and glass.”

The Miami Daily News later reported that the destruction had been caused when a heavy chimney gave way to the winds and crashed through the entire fourteen floors of the Harvey Building.

Ball and her friend Jimmy sat down on a stairwell on the third floor and leaned against a wall.

“As we were leaning there we could hear things go thudding down behind the walls of the stairway,” Ball wrote. “It sounded awful and nearly petrified me, but we never breathed a word for fear of creating a panic.”

But the winds seemed to be easing a bit.

“A little lull would come, then a new rush of wind and a series of crashes and dull thuds,” Ball said. “The whole stairway would quiver and sway. Lord! It was awful.”

Forty miles inland, the counterclockwise circulation of San Felipe’s outer winds were starting to work on Lake Okeechobee, piling water higher and higher along the dikes on the southern shore.

“So it was just a little bit before dark that the water began to get right to the top of the dike, which was simply a muck dike, probably four, five feet high,” said Vernon Boots. “So the water elevation was a good bit higher than the houses.”

A hurricane’s powerful winds move water even when it’s far out to sea, crossing deep ocean waters. But in deep water, the effect is reduced because the deep water absorbs the wind’s energy, and not as much water is piled up by the winds.

When a hurricane blows across shallow water, however, the wind’s effects are far greater because the water’s depth cannot absorb the wind’s energy. So the water piles up.

Zora Neale Hurston eloquently described how the 1928 hurricane affected the lake.

“It woke up old Okeechobee and the monster began to roll in his bed,” she wrote in Their Eyes Were Watching God. “Began to roll and complain like a peevish world on the grumble.”

The lake became steadily more raucous as the hurricane moved inland and its eye passed West Palm Beach and started across the Everglades.

Hurricanes inevitably lose their power when they move over land. The land disrupts the storm’s circulation, slows its momentum, and diminishes its winds. The deterioration usually happens quickly.

It’s about forty miles from West Palm Beach to the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee. Usually, a hurricane has lost at least some of its intensity after traveling that far inland, but during the wet summer of 1928, the downpour from the August hurricane and the rains that had fallen almost continuously since early September had made the Everglades wetter than usual. San Felipe, in effect, was still over water as it roared inland toward Lake Okeechobee. And that probably allowed it to retain most of its monstrous power.

In Belle Glade, Jabo Tryon was digging into his pie. Outside, the winds were steadily increasing.

“And I’m setting there, when she set my coffee down and the pie, I took a bite of pie,” Tryon recalled. “But the building was rocking so that my coffee was slopping out of the cup.”

Tryon and another man sitting beside him at the counter were the only customers in the restaurant at the time. Tryon looked at the man and said, “This building ain’t going to stand much of this. Look at my coffee cup, how it’s rocking.”

The winds began to claw away pieces of the building. “I guess I took one sip of my coffee, and the plaster began to fall out of the ceiling, into my pie and coffee,” Tryon said.

Chunks of a false front over the entrance of the building began to tumble into the street. Two women who worked in the restaurant screamed and ran for the door, but Tryon and the other man persuaded them to wait until the pieces of the false front had stopped falling.

When the shower of debris ended, Tryon and the other man helped the women cross the alley to the Tedder Hotel, where other refugees had gathered. They joined the crowd in the hotel.

The winds increased with stunning quickness. A few minutes before eight p.m., the barometric pressure reading in nearby Canal Point was 28.54, and winds were blowing at sixty miles per hour. Only fifteen minutes later, the pressure had dropped to 28.25 and the winds were clocked at seventy-five.

Jack Zuber walked into the kitchen of his house and looked through a window in the back door. “It was jet dark, but every once in a while lightning gave me a glimpse of things.”

Zuber guessed that he stood at the door staring into the storm for at least an hour.

At nine p.m., the barometer at Canal Point was reading 27.97, and winds were blowing at 150 miles an hour or more. And the barometer was still falling, which meant that the worst of the hurricane was still to come.

“Water was lapping up over the porch, I remember, when an exceptionally hard gust of wind came,” Zuber said. “It just seemed that the house was going to pieces.”

Zuber checked on his family. His wife was restraining her fear as she held their children.

“I went back into the kitchen again and as I looked through the window, lightning flashed just in time to show me the garage as it went over on its side, balanced there for a second, then crashed into a tree and was demolished,” he said.

Celia cried out in terror. Zuber sat down beside her and took her hand. “I could feel that she was shaking all over,” he said.

In the Tedder Hotel in Belle Glade, Jabo Tryon realized something bad had happened. Water was rushing under the hotel door.

“Well,” Tryon said to a man standing next to him, “the dike’s broke.”

“Hush,” the man said. “You want to start people screamin’ and hollerin,’ make ’em have fits?” the man said.

“You ain’t gonna keep that a secret,” the teenager retorted. “It’s coming.”

Soon the water was knee-deep in the hotel. “I could feel the muck come down my breeches leg, the muck that was floating in that rushing water. And that was muck that come off the plowed fields.”

In the labor camps where migrant workers were huddling in their shacks for protection from the storm, chaos had been unleashed when the dikes gave way.

At Jack Zuber’s farm, the water had risen to more than a foot deep in his living room.

“Suddenly there seemed to come a kind of wave, and the water must have risen about a foot all at once,” Zuber said. “Celia jumped up, still holding both children. I took Robert from her.”

“Things happened fast after that,” Zuber said.

The building lurched, nearly throwing them off their feet. Another lurch sent Celia to the floor and Jack flying across the room. He decided he had to get his family out of the house. But then the house started coming apart.

“It seemed to me I was being washed miles and miles, then I felt the weight off and found myself on top of the water,” he said.

Zuber was floating atop a wall that had been part of his house. “I looked around for Celia, and I just glimpsed her as she passed out of sight,” he said. “She just kind of faded away in the water.”

Zuber’s raft of wreckage was swept on by the storm for what seemed an endless time. Finally the wall lodged firmly between two trees. Then Zuber passed out.

San Felipe’s winds had driven more and more water against the dikes until they finally gave way and freed the beast of Lake Okeechobee, Hurston wrote. The raging water was pushing the disintegrating dikes ahead of it, and the muddy wall slammed into the migrants’ shacks and “uprooted them like grass,” Hurston wrote.

The workers fled for their lives, dodging flying debris as they went.

“They had to fight to keep from being pushed the wrong way and to hold together,” Hurston wrote. “They saw other people like themselves struggling along. A house down, here and there, frightened cattle. But above all the drive of the wind and the water. And the lake. Under its multiplied roar could be heard a mighty sound of grinding rock and timber and a wail. They looked back. Saw people trying to run in raging waters and screaming when they found they couldn’t. A huge barrier of the makings of the dike to which the cabins had been added was rolling and tumbling forward. Ten feet higher than and as far as they could see the muttering wall advanced before the braced-up waters like a road crusher on a cosmic scale.”

All along the southern shore, water was tumbling out of Lake Okeechobee and driving everything before it. It was slamming into cottages, filling ground-floor living rooms, tearing infants from their mothers’ arms, pushing still-occupied homes off their foundations, and carrying their occupants on a horrifying, deadly ride.

Water began filling the house where nineteen people, including Helen McCormick, had enjoyed a wonderful Sunday lunch only a few hours before.

“Everyone wanted to go to the roof, so they cut a hole through the roof,” McCormick recalled. “When they got it cut through, the water was up around my waist.”

A piano became a stairway through the hole to the roof. Once they were on the roof, McCormick’s mother was holding her baby brother, and an older brother kept calling to their mother to make sure she was safe. For a while, McCormick heard her mother answering the calls. Then the answering voice went silent. The wind and water were capsizing the house.

“The next thing I knew I was in the water,” McCormick said. “I felt myself slipping and I was under the water with things falling around me. My stepfather had told us earlier that if we was underwater it wouldn’t hurt us as bad as if we was above it, so I just stayed submerged.”

McCormick stayed underwater as long as she could, then surfaced. She struggled through the water to get back to her house, which was now upside down. She found her stepfather—the only other person alive. McCormick and her stepfather clung to the house, hoping the water would recede.

Elsewhere, terrified people ran blindly screaming into the night. Some of them were near the fields of sugarcane, where the ripening stalks, towering ten or twelve feet above them, were being whipped into a wild, flailing frenzy by the roaring winds that may have briefly reached 160 miles an hour.

The wind hurled some of the luckless refugees into the cane fields. Others were swept into the cane by the surging, relentless water. The stalks closed around them, weaving a lattice-like trap, pinning arms and legs, holding them helpless. Then more water followed, deeper and deeper until it covered them.

There was no escape.

As the storm started rising, Vernon Boots and his family decided to go to the house of a game warden. Eventually, more than sixty people, both African-American and white, had gathered there. It was one of the few places where both blacks and whites gathered to ride out the storm.

As the water started rising, they climbed into the attic.

“After a bit the black folks are praying, and singing and praying,” Boots recalled. “The white folks were, I don’t know why, very quiet, never said a word.”

But the winds and surging waters pushed the house off its foundation. The house floated a short distance and then started breaking up, spilling its occupants into the water.

The wind and water scattered everyone and carried Boots and his brothers miles into the Everglades. They clung to a section of roof.

Back in Belle Glade, rain and water were pouring through the Tedder Hotel, but the building was somehow withstanding the pounding. Jabo Tryon was exhausted. He climbed the stairs to the hotel’s upper floor, found a dry corner, and soon was fast asleep. He spent the rest of the night there undisturbed.

In Martin County, vicious winds were whipping off the eastern shore of the lake. In Indiantown, a blast of wind lifted a small building and dropped it on Ki Wilson, an African-American man who worked for L. L. Mayo, a logging contractor.

Both of Wilson’s legs were broken. Mayo was afraid to move Wilson, but he realized the man had to have medical attention as quickly as possible. So the white contractor and four other men, all black, piled into Wilson’s car and set out into the storm to fetch a doctor from Stuart.

The four men with Mayo rode along to remove downed trees and debris that might be blocking the road between Indiantown and Stuart. Mayo sped along until he came to a section of the road that had been washed out. Mayo slammed on the brakes, but his car skidded and overturned in water about fifteen feet deep.

Two men managed to escape the wreck, but Mayo and three others were trapped and drowned.

In West Palm Beach, the hurricane’s winds started to diminish shortly after midnight. Frances Ball and her companions picked their way down debris-strewn stairs to stand at the smashed-in front door of the Harvey Building. Outside, the wind was still shrieking.

A group of American Legionnaires appeared and offered to guide the refugees in the Harvey Building to a hotel that had thrown open its doors. They left the building and followed the Legionnaires down windswept Datura Street.

“The wind was so driving and the rain so strong that in three blocks I managed to catch my breath three times,” Ball wrote to her parents.

“And such a sight as met our eyes!” she continued. “The street was piled full of cars heaped up on each other. Wires were down across the way and a building [was] sitting in the street. Of course all these things were just dim shapes and we didn’t see the wires.

“A huge gust of wind whipped me down the street and a tight wire cut me a mean clip under the chin that sent me back about five feet.”

Ball regained her balance and the group continued. “We scrambled around in the mud and wire until we finally got clear and then started for an alley,” Ball wrote. “We climbed over a roof or two, some mashed-in walls, and missed a couple of wrecked cars and fell into the cellar of this hotel, where a bunch of Negro porters got us started up the stairs.”

They joined dozens of others who had taken shelter in the Pennsylvania Hotel.

“It was going on one a.m. when we got here and the halls were lined with refugees rolled up in blankets—just like the war scenes in movies!” Ball wrote.

Ball and her group were given blankets. “There I spent the night with four men!” Ball told her parents. “I lay awake and prayed while the walls quivered and shook from the impact of the storm.”

At about the same time Frances Ball went to bed, Margaret Best finished her letter to her sister in Massachusetts.

When the eye reached West Palm Beach, Best and her family had taken refuge in a neighbor’s cellar with more than two dozen other people.

“I’ll write again tomorrow,” Best concluded. “We sure are weary.”

Frances Ball, still picking bits of plaster and glass from her hair, finished her letter to her parents the following day.

“The ambulances have been tearing about all day,” she wrote. “The dining room here is an impromptu operating room and the lobby is the hospital. Two babies were born here during the nite [sic] to add to all the rest of the confusion.”

“PS,” she concluded, “my hair isn’t even gray yet! But I sure hate to hear people drop things with a thud. I wonder which wall has gone now!”

As gray daylight crept into the Everglades on Monday, September 17, low, dark clouds to the north marked San Felipe’s departure. The storm quickly lost its ferocious intensity after its eye moved north of the lake, but it was still packing destructive winds and heavy rainfall.

Vernon Boots and his brothers began slogging through the Everglades, hoping to find their way back to where they had last seen their family.

“We were back in undeveloped land,” Boots recalled. “The woods [were] full of snakes and turtles and alligators and anything, birds and all type of life, where the animals had died in the bushes.”

The brothers hadn’t gone far when they heard someone shouting. It was one of their friends, a young boy named Mutt Thomas, who also had survived being swept into the Glades. The youngster joined the older boys, and they continued their journey across the ruined watery landscape.

It looked as though a giant hand had upended Lake Okeechobee and spilled its water across miles of the southern shore.

“Water, knee-deep, covered all the land,” wrote author Lawrence Will, who survived the awful storm and later wrote about it in his book, Okeechobee Hurricane: Killer Storms in the Everglades. “Projecting dismally above the flood were fragments of roofs and floors, bed posts, and trunks, uprooted custard apple trees, wrecked automobiles. From limbs and snags high above the ground hung festoons of hyacinths, and rags that had been clothing. The eye searched in vain for familiar buildings. Instead it was confused by strange houses, leaning crazily, where none had been before.”

And there were corpses, flung into trees, floating in the water, or simply lying cold and stiff and still on the higher ground that occasionally rose above the floodwater.

In Belle Glade, “tight-packed wreckage filled the streets,” Will wrote. “Figures of men began to appear, staring about in amazement. I joined them,” he said.

The men splashed through the water, stunned at what they were seeing. They found the bodies of a young boy and his little sister. A poolroom that was still partially standing became a morgue, and they laid the children’s bodies on a pool table.

Jack Zuber, still unconscious on the raft that had been a side of his house, felt something warm in his mouth and slowly roused himself to consciousness. He had been found, and someone was trying to force warm coffee into his mouth.

Eight days later, Zuber still had no word about the fate of his wife and children.

Other than the unlucky people around the lake, the public didn’t have any idea what had happened on the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee. But the Red Cross was getting alarming reports early Monday morning from J. Denham Bird, its local chairman in the town of Okeechobee on the lake’s northern shore.

“Conditions serious here,” Bird telegraphed Red Cross headquarters in Washington, DC, “We would appreciate help. Imperative. Reported many drowned and homeless.”

Red Cross officials also were getting their first reports about conditions in West Palm Beach. In Jacksonville, Red Cross officials received a message from an amateur radio operator. Three-fourths of the homes in West Palm Beach were damaged, and nearly every business was heavily damaged, he said.

But somehow, Florida governor John Martin wasn’t yet in the loop about hurricane damage. He could be forgiven for not being aware of the horror in the little towns on the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee. Cut off by flooded roads and isolated by downed telegraph and electrical lines, it would be days before the gruesome details of San Felipe’s slaughter emerged. But Martin seemed to dismiss the severe damage the storm had done to West Palm Beach, one of the state’s larger and better-known cities. When the commander of Florida’s National Guard asked Martin to send troops to the area where the hurricane had done its worst, the governor hesitated.

“If necessary, of course, I will act on the request,” Martin said.

Around eight a.m. on Monday, September 17, the storm’s eye made its closest approach to Tampa, coming to about thirty miles east-southeast of the city.

But the hurricane had weakened considerably since wreaking havoc from West Palm Beach to Lake Okeechobee. Its strongest winds, blowing at about 100 miles an hour, were well to the east of Tampa, where peak winds reached only about 30 mph.

Still, that was all the irrepressible Tampa attorney Peter Knight needed to make up his mind about the effects of this hurricane.

Without waiting for details of the Lake Okeechobee horror to emerge, and taking it upon himself to speak for the entire state of Florida, Knight dispatched a telegram to Arthur Brisbane.

“News dispatches sent out from Florida concerning so-called hurricane positively malicious and criminal,” Knight seethed. “The velocity of wind in Tampa has not exceeded thirty miles per hour. No damage here. Damage to entire state negligible. Please give this publicity.”

Negligible.

In Knight’s estimation, the most powerful hurricane in US history at that time had been nothing more than a windy, rainy day in Florida. Knight’s irresponsible and wildly inaccurate telegram to Brisbane was the first shot in another publicity duel between Florida business interests and the American Red Cross.

As the storm spun northward, an announcer on WDBO radio in Orlando was summarizing the hurricane’s effects on that city. Speaking from the station’s broadcast studios in the Fort Gatlin Hotel, the announcer told his listeners that “little, if any damage” had been done in Orlando.

Outside, the storm’s winds whipped through the hotel’s street-level arcade. Unlike Tampa, however, Orlando was on the strong side of the hurricane and the winds were considerably stronger.

A few minutes after telling listeners that Orlando had suffered little damage, the WDBO announcer was back. The radio station would be off the air for a while, he said. The hurricane had just ripped the ceramic tile roof off the chic, Spanish Mission–style hotel.

As soon as the winds had died down enough to allow people to emerge from their shelters, Florida’s larger newspapers in Miami, St. Petersburg, and West Palm Beach sent out reporters to try to find their way to Lake Okeechobee. But it was slow going. Roads were flooded and piled high with debris and downed trees.

On Tuesday, September 18, a few details of the death and damage caused by the hurricane were published in newspapers. The Palm Beach Post said the Red Cross was estimating that fifty people had been killed in Palm Beach County. The Post also reported that dikes along Lake Okeechobee’s southern shore had broken, and there had been some flooding in Belle Glade.

Telephone service was restored to parts of the lake area Tuesday night, and a few more details were reported. Those details were published in newspapers on Wednesday, September 19.

The St. Petersburg Times reported that thirty bodies, most of them African Americans, lay in an improvised morgue in Belle Glade. The Palm Beach Post reported that N. B. Jones, a Post employee, had been among the rescue workers who had left West Palm Beach late Monday night. He returned the following day driving an ambulance with the bodies of thirteen African Americans.

Arthur Brisbane’s “Today” column for Tuesday, September 18, 1928, included a breezy comment on the hurricane.

“If you have made any winter plans about Florida, don’t let any news reports, accurate or exaggerated, influence you,” he wrote. “There are no tornadoes in Florida in winter. Information about ‘terrible tornado in Florida’ comes in this dispatch from Peter O. Knight, one of the ablest lawyers in Florida.”

Brisbane then reprinted Knight’s telegram of the previous day, dismissing the hurricane’s damage as “negligible.”

But President Calvin Coolidge was getting a different perception of the hurricane’s wrath in Florida and Puerto Rico from the Red Cross and the US Weather Bureau. Coolidge, far better informed than Brisbane and Knight, understood the magnitude of the catastrophe and wanted the federal government to do whatever it could to help.

In Tallahassee, Governor John Martin also was following the scraps of news about the hurricane’s impact. He later told the Stuart News that he got the first indication of the seriousness of the hurricane’s damage in messages he received from several wireless radio operators.

On September 18 Martin began preparing for a long drive from Tallahassee to West Palm Beach with Florida attorney general Fred Davis. Before he left Tallahassee, he contacted US secretary of war Dwight Davis and asked for immediate help from the federal government for West Palm Beach. The secretary immediately granted Martin’s request, and Florida’s governor and attorney general set out on their long trek eastward across the Florida Panhandle and then down the peninsula.

Around 1:45 a.m. on Tuesday, September 19, Red Cross vice chairman James Fieser received a radio message from the National Guard troops that had been dispatched to the hurricane area. There were at least 400 dead in Palm Beach County, and the situation around Lake Okeechobee was “very serious.” Around 6,000 people were in refugee camps. In keeping with the Jim Crow practices of the day, whites were gathered in a camp in Miami, while African Americans were sent to a camp in Pompano Beach.

Property damage in Palm Beach County was estimated at $30 million, or more than $403 million in twenty-first-century dollars.

But the editorial page in that day’s edition of the Tampa Morning Tribune—whose board of directors included Peter Knight—downplayed the hurricane’s damage.

An editorial briefly acknowledged that people were killed—to be fair, no one had any idea yet of the true death toll—but suggested that the greatest loss caused by the storm seemed to be in the state’s citrus crop.

“Compared with the wholesale destruction in Porto Rico [sic] and other islands, the storm seems to have become moderate before touching Florida,” the Tribune said. “There have been more terrific storms in many other parts of the country this summer, and there will be worse blizzards next winter.”

That same day, the Wall Street Journal echoed Knight’s sentiments and the Tribune editorial. Just as it had done after Miami had been wrecked by a hurricane two years earlier, the Journal scorned any talk of an unmeasurable catastrophe in Florida and dismissed the storm’s damage as superficial.

“Cyclone or hurricane damage is essentially surface damage,” the Journal said. “It has every element of the spectacular and it always looks several times as bad as it really is.”

The Journal called the hurricane deaths “deplorable,” but added that death “happens any day of the year from causes other than hurricanes.”

“When the Florida winter season opens at Christmas there will be no evidence of wreckage that the Northern tourist can recognize,” the Journal predicted.

Miami Daily News readers got a jarring look at San Felipe’s work on Wednesday, September 20, when the newspaper published photos from Belle Glade taken by reporter Cecil Warren. In addition to wrecked buildings and flooded landscapes, Warren photographed corpses. Among them was a shot of four rescue workers, hands on hips, helplessly looking at the bodies of three or four victims about to be loaded onto a truck for removal to West Palm Beach.

“This may seem like it is exaggerated to those who have not visited the drowned lands, where bodies lie lodged against palmetto bushes, caught in drifts and prone by highways, exposed to plain view,” Warren later wrote. But, he said, the photos did not exaggerate conditions in and around Belle Glade.

Warren said an unnamed deputy sheriff told him that photos were forbidden in Belle Glade. Warren, the skeptical newsman, asked National Guard officers if photography was prohibited. Other men gathered around Warren and the Guardsmen as they talked. The officers said photography was not forbidden.

One of the men who’d overheard the conversation spoke to Warren in a steely tone.

“Boy,” the man said, “you take all the pictures you want, of whatever you want. Snapshot these bodies and homes, show the world in full what has happened. We want everyone to know the truth.”

By now, a small crowd had assembled around the Daily News reporter. If anyone tried to stop Warren from taking photos, the man assured the reporter, he and others “[would] attend to that little matter.”

“Show me the man who tried to keep you from it,” the man said.

The man told Warren that he’d lost his home but had been lucky enough not to lose his family. Nonetheless, he understood the grief of those who’d lost loved ones.

“If I was one of those standing here on the bank of this canal and saw the body of my wife and three children brought up, when I saw them the first thing I would do would be to grab my shotgun and go to Tallahassee after the man who is responsible,” he said.

“I will say that he named the man he thought was responsible,” Warren wrote, “but I will not, because there is no man who, in full knowledge of the consequences, would have brought about such destruction as exists in the Everglades—one vast, rotting pool, filled with the bodies of men, women, and little children, their hopes and belongings.”

Other larger Florida newspapers published stories about conditions at Lake Okeechobee on Thursday, September 21.

Cecelia Copeland, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, described her trip into the Glades with a rescue crew. She filed her story from Clewiston, where storm damage had been less severe and a refugee camp had been established.

“Families have been cruelly separated,” Copeland wrote. “Crying but lovable little tots are harbored here but are totally unidentified. Rapidly graying mothers ply through the crowds of refugees, eagerly scanning their faces in hope of finding relatives.”

Being surrounded by misery and destruction was having an effect on Copeland.

“I have seen sights in this section that I hope never to see again,” she wrote. “This is no place for sightseers and curious people.”

That same day, Red Cross officials and others started responding to charges that storm damage was being exaggerated.

Howard Selby, the Red Cross chairman for Palm Beach County, sent a telegram to Peter Knight telling him that he’d acted irresponsibly in claiming to speak for the entire state and saying the hurricane’s damage had been “negligible.”

Citing the growing death toll and the thousands that were homeless, Selby urged Knight to retract his comments.

“Known dead over 700; homeless 15,000; without clothing 8,000; property damage $20 million,” Selby said in the telegram. “These facts are given after deliberate and careful survey, and other authorities have stated these estimates [as] too conservative.”

Selby ended with a challenge to Knight: “If you are to serve as spokesman for [an] entire state, won’t you kindly make personal visit here? We are distressed and need the help of the nation.”

By nightfall Thursday, Florida governor Martin and attorney general Davis had reached Stuart in the governor’s namesake county. The two high-ranking state officials stopped there and talked with Edwin Menninger’s South Florida Developer.

“I could not see my own county suffer,” Martin said. “I think more of Martin County than any other county in the state. . . . I will not let the people of Martin County suffer.”

Martin had not yet seen the devastation on the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee.

In Tampa, Peter Knight tried to deflect harsh criticism of his earlier comments and spin his hasty assessment that hurricane damage had been “negligible.” The St. Petersburg Times of Friday, September 21, printed a follow-up letter that Knight had written to Arthur Brisbane.

Knight acknowledged that the storm had caused “great damage at Palm Beach and immediate vicinity,” and “some damage” to the north and south of West Palm Beach, but said his “negligible” comment had referred to the entire state.

He made a passing acknowledgment of the deaths, but added “no reference can be made to the loss of life. That is too sacred. It cannot be measured in dollars and cents. We have to deal simply with the monetary loss.”

And then he dismissed even the monetary loss in the small farming towns that had been nearly wiped out by the hurricane.

“The little settlements around Lake Okeechobee were composed of houses of a very cheap character, ranging all the way from tents up,” Knight wrote. Those losses “could not exceed $100,000,” he said.

Knight said he’d sent the telegram to Brisbane “for the protection of the state.”

“I was correct when I stated that the damage to the entire state was negligible, because such is the case,” he said.

The Tampa Morning Tribune, Knight’s hometown newspaper, tried to straddle the fence about the controversy surrounding one of its directors.

“The storm did serious damage to a small section of the peninsula, and thus indirectly hurt the whole state . . . ,” the Tribune said on its editorial page.

But the newspaper also scolded Brisbane for his cavalier ignorance. “This was a severe hurricane,” the Tribune said. “Brisbane and others should learn that it was not a tornado any more than it was a waterspout.”

And the Tribune indirectly criticized Knight. “The fact that the storm effects were confined to a comparatively small section of Florida does not mean that it was by any means negligible,” the editorial said. “It was heartbreaking to thousands.”

That night, A. L. Shafer, who was directing Red Cross relief operations in Florida, sent a telegram to his headquarters in Washington, updating his bosses. His note included a horrifying preliminary estimate of the death toll.

“Conditions Lake Okeechobee region simply terrible,” Shafer wrote. “Many bodies not recovered and sanitary conditions bad. We have received reports that 1,500 are dead in this region but will hold my estimate to 450 until such numbers are confirmed.”

There were more grim statistics: 15,000 families registered for Red Cross assistance; 95 percent of homes destroyed in West Palm Beach; 5,500 being fed in West Palm Beach every day.

To make matters worse, sanitary conditions around the lake were getting worse. Bodies were surfacing in the lake every day and, of necessity, were being buried without identification as quickly as possible. There was talk of moving every single person, including rescue workers, away from the lake and using airplanes to spray the entire area with lime to prevent the growth of bacteria on the corpses and to reduce the awful odor of decaying bodies.

“General condition absolute destitution,” Shafer tersely concluded.

Paul Hoxie, commander of the American Legion post in St. Petersburg, explained how those conditions were affecting rescue workers in a report to the Red Cross on September 24. Nearly one thousand Legionnaires were working between Pahokee and South Bay, looking for corpses.

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.

In mid-October 1928, the Red Cross compiled statistics outlining the hurricane’s effect on Florida. More than 2,000 people had been killed by the hurricane, “with no possibility of accurate count,” the Red Cross concluded. The death toll was still being calculated seventy-five years later. In 2003, the National Weather Service raised the official number of deaths in the 1928 hurricane to “at least 2,500.” Still, NWS meteorologist Rusty Pfost said, “We all know we really don’t know what the answer is.”

There were other grim numbers: 95 percent of the buildings in Palm Beach County had been damaged, and 25 percent destroyed; the homes of 690 farmers had been destroyed; 15,000 people had been left homeless by the hurricane, which had “seriously” affected seven counties; 17,500 people were receiving help from the Red Cross, and 5,000 people were living in Red Cross refugee camps.

The year had begun with optimistic predictions for Florida’s future—the Tamiami Trail would open, real estate prices would stabilize, investors and money would return, and good times would resume.

But 1928 was drawing to a decidedly depressing close.