You end up hoping that perhaps they did make it through the storm. Ed and the others)who were building a highway across the islands. Scott introduces the reader to each of the men(Frenchy, Capt. However, he goes one step further by introducing the reader to many of the men who lived and died during the storm. In "Hemingway's Hurricane" Scott describes the historical aspect of what happened to the Florida Keys during the 1935 hurricane. "Hemingway's Hurricane brilliantly and compellingly captures the events surrounding the 1935 storm, showing how human factors compounded the awful force of sky and sea." But he found few survivors among the wreckage and bloated corpses, and his public cries of outrage bound him forever to the storm. took aim on their flimsy shacks, and the two men responsible for evacuating the veterans from harm's way waited too long.Īfter the storm, Ernest Hemingway took his boat from his home in Key West to aid the veterans in the Upper Keys. On Labor Day Weekend 1935, the most intense hurricane ever to strike the U.S. Six hundred of them were shuffled off to the Florida Keys to build a highway to Key West. Described by one journalist as "shell-shocked, Depression-shocked, and whiskey-shocked," they grasped for one last chance at redemption under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. They were the forgotten members of the Lost Generation, traumatized veterans of the Great War who had struggled for years to claw their way back into the American Dream. In Hemingway's Hurricane, the Depression, bureaucratic failure, the cast-aside soldiers of an earlier war, a great novelist, and a killing storm come together in an American tragedy. It was also a key factor in landing Hemingway on an FBI watch list, which contributed to his suicide twenty-six years later. And he reveals Hemingway's horror when the novelist arrived in his boat two days after the storm to aid the veterans, only to discover that more than 250 had died in the storm, some sand-blasted by fierce winds, others skewered by flying timbers, and many simply blown out to sea.Įrnest Hemingway's very public outrage over so many needless deaths spurred a congressional investigation that was widely dismissed as a whitewash. He also explores why the train promised from Miami arrived too late to evacuate the men, and why those who tried to escape in their own vehicles were turned back by the National Guard. From eyewitness accounts and depositions, he reconstructs the events in each camp as the hurricane made landfall-the terror, bravery, and sacrifices of men left to fend for themselves. In Hemingway's Hurricane, author Phil Scott chronicles the days of calamity when the low-lying Upper Florida Keys were stripped bare and submerged by the most powerful hurricane ever to hit the United States. And yet, through the long Labor Day Weekend of 1935, the superintendents of three government work camps in the Florida Keys, which housed more than 600 World War I veterans building a highway across the islands, did virtually nothing to evacuate the men in their charge. In Key West, Ernest Hemingway secured his stone house and his 38-foot boat Pilar against the oncoming storm. Atlantic tarpon raced between the Keys to the relative safety of the Gulf of Mexico. Keys residents boarded up their shacks under an ominous sky and sank their skiffs in the mangroves. Charlestown, R.I., lost a bit more: 160 out of 200 homes were annihilated.Everyone knew it was coming: The Weather Bureau broadcast hurricane warnings. Westerly, a bastion of quiet old wealth, never quite regained its prestige after the Great 1938 Hurricane. There the family stepped back on to land and back into their lives. In all, 10 people clung to that bit of floor as it hurtled across the Sound to land in Connecticut. “We were on the water with the waves crashing over us, and part of the house still attached, one of the walls still attached to this piece of floor, and it almost acted as a sail.” “Next thing I knew, we were floating,” Moore recalled. Finally, the waves overwhelmed their own house, lifting it off its foundation. The family moved first to the second floor and finally to the third floor to stay above the storm surge, watching as house after house succumbed and neighbors were washed away. As the ocean waves began surging into the house, Catherine Moore recalls her father bracing against the front door literally trying to hold back the ocean. As the storm grew stronger, the family tried to evacuate their beachfront home, but could not. Perhaps the most astounding story of the storm comes from the Moore family of Westerly, R.I.
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