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&#x92;m describing Hurricane Katrina, but I&#x92;m not. I&#x92;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&#x92;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&#x92;s watch list years later.The tragedy had one redeeming consequence: The public&#x92;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?