Hemingway's Hurricane: The Great Florida Keys Storm of 1935
A powerful late summer hurricane is tracked for several days before it makes landfall on a southern U.S. coastline. Inexplicably, government officials fail to set an evacuation plan in motion until it is too late. Those who are able escape, but the have-nots are left behind. Roaring ashore with 200 mph winds and a 22-foot storm surge, the storm overwhelms low-lying areas. Hundreds die.You might think I’m describing Hurricane Katrina, but I’m not. I’m talking about the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 that struck the Florida Keys seventy years to the week before Katrina. More than 250 of the 400-plus victims of that earlier storm were World War I veterans who had been sent to the Keys by the Roosevelt administration to build a highway to Key West. A relief train stood by in Miami to evacuate the men in the event of a hurricane’s approach, but by the time government officials called for it, it was too late.Outraged by the needless deaths, novelist and Key West resident Ernest Hemingway initiated a public outcry that led ultimately to Congressional hearings, which were widely condemned as a whitewash. Hemingway published a vehement protest essay in New Masses, a communist journal, and it was one factor landing him on the FBI’s watch list years later.The tragedy had one redeeming consequence: The public’s revulsion over the abandonment of so many World War I veterans helped to build support for the GI Bill, which Roosevelt signed into law in 1944. Can any redemption be wrested from Katrina?