Hemingway and Gellhorn Page 4
MacArthur grandly claimed that he saved the republic from insurrection, and President Hoover refused to rebuke his general. He issued a terse statement that “a challenge to the authority of the United States Government has been met, swiftly and firmly.”
But the public saw things differently. “The Bonus Army episode,” David Kennedy observed, “came to symbolize Hoover’s supposed insensitivity to the plight of the unemployed.”
* * *
Franklin Delano Roosevelt rose from bed in his pajamas the next morning at Hyde Park. “There would hardly be any need to campaign against the incumbent president once readers saw the news,” he remarked to Eleanor. His assessment was prescient as he swept to victory in November. After his inauguration in 1933, his advisers diverted a returning caravan of homeless veterans beyond the Potomac River to an isolated military camp in Virginia, where First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt placated them with a visit.
“Hoover sent the army,” said one veteran. “Roosevelt sent his wife.”
Roosevelt enjoyed his victory throughout his first one hundred days in office, but the lingering plight of the veterans posed a problem as the depression deepened. The patience of unemployed Americans wore thin as the vets pressed the government for special benefits while the rest of the nation plunged deeper into despair. “Opposition to the bonus,” historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled, “was one of the virtuous issues of the day.” Roosevelt read the shifting polls and did an about-face. He spoke before a giant American Legion convention in October 1933 and announced that he would reject any payout for World War I veterans as fiscally irresponsible and unfair to the rest of the nation.
“No person because he wore a uniform must therefore be placed in a special class of beneficiaries,” he told the legionnaires.
When both houses of Congress passed a new bonus bill in 1935, Roosevelt delivered his veto personally to a joint session of Congress for the first time in history. By a narrow margin, the Senate upheld the president’s veto. Roosevelt and his advisors then devised a plan to relocate the “veteran problem” far away from Washington, D.C. Any place would do as long as it was remote and off the beaten track, away from the cameras and microphones of nosy reporters. Roosevelt would set up work camps in the Florida Keys, just up along the spit of land from where Ernest lived, and enlist the vets in a jobs program modeled on the WPA, or Works Progress Administration.
Early that year, federal administrators began the removal of seven hundred bonus marchers into Veterans Rehabilitation Camps south of Miami, where road crews were building a highway to connect the Keys all the way through to the Island of Bones. Time magazine latched onto the story and labeled the work camps “playgrounds for derelicts.” The New York Times embarked on a campaign to shut them down, branding the grizzled veterans “shellshocked, whisky-shocked and depression-shocked.”
The federal government erected a total of eleven work camps in Florida, three of them in the Keys. Camp I was put up on Upper Windley Key, the first one to be built. Camp 3 was situated on the lower end of Lower Matecumbe Key, the place from which the unfinished highway would continue. The third work camp, Camp 5, was located on the upper end of Lower Matecumbe Key. The veterans who moved there were a cross-section of America at the time—aging war-torn vets, many of them alcoholics; roustabouts; tradesmen when they had any work at all; poison gas victims; others with serious wounds; some not incapacitated at all. They were a miserable lot, depressed, battered, and hungry for any work they could get, including building a road for a dollar a day along a godforsaken stretch of sand hundreds of miles off the mainland. They posed a stark contrast to the wealthy tourists flocking down to Key West to check out the sunsets and test their skills hauling giant fish from the surrounding waters.
* * *
Game fishing had its cultish mystique just like any major sport, and Ernest quickly graduated into the big leagues when he learned the rules of the game. A small circle of men who lusted to land the greatest fish that prowled the ocean depths held sway within the ranks of the truly initiated. Billfish came in several varieties— sailfish, swordfish, and various species of marlin. And the giant blue marlin was the biggest catch of all. The giant blue marlin was more than the big leagues; it was the World Series and the Super Bowl combined. Those who discovered it hunted it to the exclusion of every other fish that lived. One aficionado called fishing for giant blue marlin “an expensive form of mental illness.” The tarpon Ernest had caught when he first went out with Charlie Thompson were one thing, but giant blue marlins were an entirely different dimension of aquatic life. Ernest quickly became addicted.
His birthday fell on July 21, and on that special day in 1935 he landed a 540-pound marlin in the waters off Cuba, the largest fish he had ever caught. After posing for photographs alongside his giant catch on the dock in Havana, Ernest gave the meat away to the locals.
“Killing fish for no useful purpose, or allowing their meat to waste wantonly, should be an offense punishable by law,” Ernest wrote in one of his articles for Esquire.
A few weeks later, Ernest crossed the Gulf Stream from Cuba in his new boat, which he named Pilar. Pilar had been Pauline’s code name when he conducted an affair with her in Paris while still married to his first wife Hadley. The hull of the boat was painted pirate-black with its name emblazoned in bright white letters on the stern. The crossing to Key West took twenty-six hours in calm seas and near-perfect weather. The mood on board was celebratory with Ernest and his crew whooping it up, enjoying the lingering glow of a fishing season that had gone well so far, better than expected by all accounts. The rum and wine flowed freely, the Conch chowder was fragrant and spicy, and the men were no worse for wear as they maneuvered Pilar into the Navy yard marina in Key West.
Ernest planned to spend a short time answering mail and dashing another article off for Esquire before making a return trip to Cuba for the rest of the fishing season. But Pilar had developed some problems during the crossing from Cuba. The boat was burning too much oil and needed to have its piston rings replaced. As luck would have it, the replacement rings were en route somewhere between Detroit and Key West, and when they finally did arrive the local mechanic was on vacation. By the time he returned a storm took shape out in the Atlantic, churning the sea into a milky gray cauldron as it chugged westward. The rest of the Cuban fishing season was now a lost cause, so Ernest settled in for the duration planning to get back to some serious work. On August 20 an advisory reached Key West, warning that the tropical storm was now roiling the ocean just east of Bermuda. The lines of communication were fragile back then, relying on wireless reports from shipping stations scattered throughout the islands. The news was getting worse by the hour, and as the Labor Day weekend approached, the tropical storm had evolved into a full-scale hurricane making a serious run toward the Florida Keys—even though the Miami Herald still identified it as a “tropical disturbance.”
Ernest studied his charts showing the paths of forty September hurricanes since the turn of the century. Always the meticulous researcher and chronicler of important data—including daily readings on his weight, temperature, and blood pressure— Ernest estimated that the hurricane would roar into Key West around noon on Monday. On Monday morning Ernest walked over to the marina at the Navy base where he kept Pilar, only to find a line of boat-owners ahead of him waiting to have their own boats hauled out of the water onto dry dock. He had to settle for a heavy hawser to secure Pilar in an area that he thought would provide the greatest safety during the storm. He returned home to bring in outdoor furniture and board up the windows on his house, then went back to the boatyard where he discovered that the Coast Guard had tied up a confiscated “rum boat” with contraband booze right next to Pilar.
“For Christ’s sake!” he yelled at the sailor on duty. “You know those lousy ringbolts will pull out of her stem and then she’ll come down on us. What’s the use of letting a piece of junk like that sink a good boat?”
The marina—the
entire town—was in chaos, with people rushing in all directions to secure their boats, their homes, and everything that wasn’t nailed down from the encroaching hurricane. Ernest double-checked his barometer reading and recalculated that the hurricane would strike at midnight. Sleep was out of the question as he prepared himself, Pauline, and their staff to gear up for the worst. By midnight the barometric reading had dropped to 29.50 and was sinking rapidly. Ernest figured the lights would blow as the wind picked up. Soon it was rattling the windows, the shutters, the very walls and foundation of his house. Ernest was sick to his stomach thinking about Pilar and the rum boat berthed next to it. He dressed and went outside to get in his car and drive to the marina, but the engine wires were saturated by the windblown rain whipping in hard off the water. He had no choice but to push his way through the howling tempest and go down on foot. On the way the batteries in his flashlight shorted out and he was forced to fight his way against the wind in zero visibility. Sure enough, his worst fears materialized when he reached the Navy yard and saw the rum boat rocking wildly with the ringbolts pulled out. But this time he was lucky. Before it could slam into his boat, a Spanish sailor named Jose Rodriguez had stepped aboard and maneuvered the rum boat away from Pilar. Ernest never loved the Spanish and the Cubans more than he did at that moment.
“You feel like hell,” he wrote later. “You figure if we get the hurricane from there…you will lose the boat and you will never have enough money to get another.”
And then a miracle took place. At two in the morning the wind subsided, the rain let up, and the worst of the hurricane passed. Three hours later the barometer held steady and the pressure began to rise. The hurricane, bad as it was, had struck Key West only a glancing blow. When Ernest returned to his house later in the morning he noticed only minimal damage. Some branches had fallen and trees were uprooted in his yard, but the house was intact. Ernest, Pilar, and Key West had made it through one of the most powerful hurricanes to slam the Island of Bones in its long turbulent history.
“We got only the outside edge,” Ernest wrote in a letter to his editor Max Perkins on September 7. “It was due for midnight and I went to bed at ten to get a couple of hours sleep if possible having made everything as safe as possible with the boat. Went with the barometer on a chair by the bed and a flashlight to use when the lights should go. At midnight the barometer had fallen to 29.50 and the wind was coming very high and in gusts of great strength tearing down trees, branches etc. Car drowned out and got down to boat afoot and stood by until 5 a.m. when the wind shifting into the west we knew the storm had crossed to the north and was going away.”
Chapter Six
The Keys further east were not nearly as lucky. The hurricane was small in size, only ten miles across the eye at the center, but it was the most violent one ever to hit the Keys with wind gusts soaring to two hundred and fifty miles an hour. The barometric reading on Windley and Matecumbe Keys, where the vets were housed in their flimsy work camps, plummeted to 26.35, the lowest ever recorded. The hurricane made a direct hit on the work camps, pushing a wall of water eighteen feet high across the narrow strip of sand. The vets and Conchs had nowhere to go, nothing to hang onto.
The government had ample warning that the work camps in the Keys were a disaster waiting to happen. Five months earlier, Fred Ghent, who was in charge of the Florida camps, wrote to FERA in Washington saying, “This area is subject to hurricanes and it is our duty…to furnish a safe refuge during a storm.” He specifically recommended building a solid two-story warehouse where the vets could congregate when a hurricane was imminent.
He received no reply.
When the monster storm struck, a seventeen-year-old fisherman named Bernard Russell, no relation to Josie, felt his sister’s hand pull out of his grip in the pitch-black night as the ferocious winds and towering waves pummeled their bodies.
“You went wherever the waves pushed you and wherever the winds pushed you,” he said after the storm. “It was so dark you couldn’t see what was going on and maybe that was good.”
He never saw his sister again, nor his mother and two other sisters. They were somewhere out there, lost in the sea. He survived when he was tossed on top of a trash pile. “There were sixty-one in the Russell family and fifty of them died that night,” he said. The official death toll came to four hundred and twenty-three, two hundred and fifty-nine of them veterans whose camps had been torn away and flung out into the Gulf as though they never existed.
“There were so many dead people and no place to take them,” Russell elaborated. “They stacked them up and burned them.” The ones they could find in the horrific aftermath that is.
Another survivor recalled that “there was a big wall of water—fifteen feet high, twenty maybe. It swept over those shacks and messed them up like they were match boxes.”
Someone else remembered that the roof of the canteen was ripped away. “We all started away in the same direction and the roof came down on us. It must have hit every one of us. After the roof fell all I could hear was the grunting and groaning of the boys. I never saw any of them after that.”
“Bodies were lying all over the roadway and lumber piled on them and some of them had holes in their heads,” read another account. “I saw bodies with tree stumps smashed through their chests—heads blown off—twisted arms and legs torn off by flying timber that cut like big knives.”
The 1935 storm was a Category Five hurricane, the first of two to hammer the United States since the government started to keep records. It took out thirty-five miles of Henry Flagler’s railroad and wiped every tree and every structure off Windley and Matecumbe Keys. With Pilar now seaworthy once again, Ernest set out a couple of days later to survey the carnage.
“All the next day the winds were too high to get out and there was no communication with the keys,” he wrote to Max Perkins. “Telephone, cable and telegraph all down, too rough for boats to leave. The next day we got across and found things in a terrible shape…The foliage absolutely stripped as though by fire for forty miles and the land looking like the abandoned bed of a river. Not a building of any sort standing…Max, you can’t imagine it, two women, naked, tossed up into trees by the water, swollen and stinking, their breasts as big as balloons, flies between their legs. Then, by figuring, you locate where it is and recognize them as the two very nice girls who ran a sandwich place and a filling station three miles from the ferry…Harry Hopkins and Roosevelt who sent those poor bonus march guys down here to get rid of them got rid of them all right.”
Up to this point Ernest had not been overtly political. His politics, such as he had thought about politics at all, could best be described as passively anarchistic. He distrusted authority of any sort and was instinctively individualistic. He wanted to be left alone to do his writing the way he saw fit and not have his language censored by bureaucrats always on the hunt for obscenities. And he preferred to keep most of the money he earned and not turn big chunks of it over to tax collectors. But the plight of the vets on the Keys pushed him into a more revolutionary frame of mind. He was no fan of the New Deal and viewed the intrusions of civil authorities as a misguided attempt to improve the lot of working people. Leave people alone and they will find a way to make things better on their own, he believed. In some ways he wandered further to the left of New Deal administrators, but a later generation might have put him further to the right of traditional conservatives into the realm of individual anarchism. Ernest had become a rebel. He was so infuriated by the death of the vets that he took time out from his regular writing to pen a diatribe, which he called “Who Murdered the Vets?” The New Masses, a publication of the American Communist Party, asked him to write his version of what happened. Ernest had no use for communists or their literature, but he was happy to have an outlet for his fury. The article was published on September 17, 1935.
“Whom did they annoy and to whom was their possible presence a political danger?” he wrote. “Who sent them down to the
Florida Keys and left them there in hurricane months? Who is responsible for their deaths?” Ernest answered his own questions at the end of the piece and put the blame squarely in the lap of the Roosevelt administration.
“Who sent them down there? I hope he reads this—and how does he feel? He will die too, himself, perhaps even without a hurricane warning, but maybe it will be an easy death, that’s the best you get, so that you do not have to hang onto something until you can’t hang on, until your fingers won’t hang on, and it is dark…You’re dead now, brother, but who left you there in the hurricane months on the Keys where a thousand men died before you when they were building the road that’s now washed out? Who left you there? And what’s the punishment for manslaughter now?”
* * *
The vets who survived descended on the Island of Bones like a plague of locusts, a horde of hollow-eyed warriors with little left to live for except to scavenge drinks in waterfront bars and take their anger out on fellow vets when they drank too much. They discovered Sloppy Joe’s and other bars scattered like weeds along the waterfront. A crowd of them were in Sloppy Joe’s one night, men in dungarees, some bareheaded and others in caps, all of them pressed three-deep around the bar, jamming the place out to the sidewalk. As Ernest walked in, two men flew out through the doorway, one on top of the other. The one on top grabbed the other guy’s hair and banged his head against the cement. The town sheriff pulled up in his car and pried the two of them apart.