Hemingway, after the hurricane

The 2024 hurricane season was particularly catastrophic, causing casualties and widespread damage from flooding and robust winds in cities like Cedar Key, Floridaremember one other historic hurricane, the Labor Day hurricane of 1935.

As one in all the editors of “The Letters of Ernest Hemingway Volume 6 (1934-1936)“With Sandra Spanier and Miriam B. Mandel, I remember the eyewitness account that the creator, then living in Key West, Florida, gave of the catastrophic storm that leveled Upper Matecumbe Key and Lower Matecumbe Key and people who Lives were claimed by greater than 400 people, including many veterans of the First World War.

Then as now, the implications of a natural disaster included political blame.

Today, the debates are about how Federal Emergency Management Agency resources might be distributed or how climate change contributes to the intensity of storms.

At the time, Hemingway was having one other dispute with the federal government, blaming the deaths of a whole bunch of World War I veterans for the failure to evacuate Upper Matecumbe Key and Lower Matecumbe Key before the storm.

The calm before the storm

Hemingway was no stranger to hurricanes.

As a serious offshore angler fishing the waters off Florida, he kept a watch on the weather conditions. Hurricane season was an expected, if feared, annual event.

“Now the bad hurricanes are starting,” he wrote to his friends Jane and Grant Mason in June 1934. “I wish we had a lot of easterly wind and current… and then a nice July and August without hurricanes.” Knowing that these conditions were unlikely, he jokingly asked the Masons, “So what do Mr. and Mrs. Mason want for Christmas?” “

In a letter dated September 30, 1934, he wrote to his friends Gerald and Sara Murphy with the hope that he would get through the remaining of the hurricane season without incident: “No hurricanes yet […] if we can do the next 20 [days] are fine,” and he was glad that he “can fish without having to tie up [the boat] somewhere up by a stream.”

The next day he wrote to a different author John Dos Passos“Hurricane months are fine when there is no hurricane.”

“No building of any kind is standing.”

But the subsequent yr, when the hurricanes got here, things weren't good.

On September 2nd and third, 1935, a hurricane hit the Florida Keys. The Labor Day hurricane, because it is often called, occurred in the times before storms got names the primary recorded Category 5 hurricane within the USA

With air pressure dropping to 892 millibars and wind gusts of greater than 200 miles per hour, it stays the third strongest storm within the Atlantic basin. Much of the damage was brought on by the storm surge. and the Overseas Railroadwhich was accomplished in 1912 and connected the Florida Keys to the mainland, was destroyed and couldn’t be rebuilt.

After the storm, Hemingway wrote to his editor: Maxwell Perkinsdescribes its consequences.

Although communications were disrupted and the island was cut off from the mainland, Key West suffered relatively little damage.

However, Upper Matecumbe Key and Lower Matecumbe Key were a distinct story.

“Imagine reading about it in the newspaper, but nothing could give a sense of the destruction,” Hemingway writes. “For forty miles the foliage was completely stripped as if it had fallen victim to fire, and the land looked like the deserted riverbed. No building of any kind stands. Over thirty miles of railroad were washed away and blown away.”

The human losses were even worse: he notes that the last time he saw so many dead in a single place was in Europe within the First World War as an ambulance driver for the Red Crossadding: “We made five trips to different places with provisions for the survivors and nothing but dead men to eat the food with.”

Many of the victims were veterans who worked at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration work on it the Overseas Highway Construction project. Outraged by the federal government's failure to send a train to evacuate the employees in a timely manner, Hemingway tells Perkins that the veterans were “virtually murdered.”

He adds that the feds “had all Sunday and all Monday to get these vets out and never did it.” If that they had taken half the precautions we took with our boat, there could be none just one was lost.”

The letter comprises graphic descriptions of the a whole bunch of bodies rapidly decomposing within the Florida sun as they waited to be transported to Arlington, Virginia, for burial.

“That smell you thought you'd never smell again”

Hemingway repeated a lot of these details in an article published within the September 17, 1935 issue of the left-wing magazine The recent masses.

The article that Hemingway titled “Who Killed These Men?” and which the editors renamed “Who Killed These Men?”Who murdered the vets?“, criticized the federal government for not evacuating the employees.

“Who sent nearly a thousand war veterans to live in wooden shacks in the Florida Keys during the hurricane months?” Hemingway asks.

Hemingway, no stranger to the sight and smell of the dead from his experiences during World War I, felt disgust not only on the “swollen and smelly” bodies, but in addition at what brought the veterans to the labor camps in the primary place.

Hemingway was skeptical of the assorted government programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and saw the Federal Emergency Relief Administration's labor camps as a way for Washington to conveniently rid itself of a whole bunch of unlucky people, a lot of whom were experiencing what we’d today call post-traumatic term stress disorder.

“I'd wish to get whoever sent them there to hold only one out through the mangroves, or turn over one which was lying within the sun along the embankment, or tie five together in order that they don't float out, or smell the smell of that “With any luck I would never smell again,” Hemingway writes.

This passionate response to the disaster of 1935 still resonates. Hemingway recognized that while storms are inevitable, mass casualties wouldn’t have to be the case. The government cannot control the weatherbut it could possibly fulfill an obligation to guard probably the most vulnerable within the storm's path.