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Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935

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Willie Drye's "Storm of the Century" treads in the same footsteps as Erik Larsen's classic "Issac's Storm" from a couple of years ago. Both are historical and social accounts of deadly hurricanes the struck the United States and took a much larger toll on human life than they should have because of regrettable human mistakes. Larsen's book told the tale of the Glaveston Hurricane of 1900 that was the deadliest in U.S. history. Drye's account, meanwhile, is of the Labor Day storm of 1935 that struck the Florida Keys and is suspected of being the strongest hurricane to make landfall in U.S. history.

Drye does not content himself with merely retelling the story of the strom and the mayhem it caused. Instead he focuses on the lives of the islanders, most particularly on an unfortunate group of World War I veterans left destitute by the Great Depression and hired to build the highway that would eventually connect Key West with the mainland. A large number of the veterans were trapped on the low level island and drowned as a hapless rescue train sent to retrieve them was blown of the tracks. Their story and that of the bureaucratic bungling that left them to their fate is the book's most compelling part.

On the downside, Drye lacks the deft storytelling touch that helped make "Issac's Storm" so memorable. The book is a bit over long for its subject at over 300 pages, lengthened considerably by a deteailed account of the ultimately futile investigations of the officals responsible for the veteran's welfare. This part is not as compelling and at times displays a political bias against Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Overall, a decent historical account of a horrific weather releated disaster.

I grew up in South Florida and spent many weekends on Lower Matecumbe Key, ground zero for the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane. I went through Hurricane Donna and a few others in the early 1960s, and I don't care to do that again -- another reason why the 1935 disaster has long fascinated me. It is a story of heartbreaking human miscalculation in the face of an overwhelming natural event.

Drye writes well and moves the narrative along. When writing of factual matters and the experiences of those who endured the storm, the books succeeds pretty well. However, he buys into some of the political mythology surrounding the events of the storm -- e.g., that World War I veterans were sent to the Florida Keys by officials of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration to prevent them from re-staging the 1932 "Bonus March" that gave such a black eye to Herbert Hoover. As Drye notes, vets also were sent to other locations, their activities were still followed by the national media, and their absence from Washington didn't stop other veterans from pressing for payment of the bonus. Sending out-of-work veterans to the Florida Keys as a labor force for highway construction can also be interpreted as an act of New Deal good intentions -- perhaps shortsighted but hardly malicious.

The actions of federal and state officials in the hours before the hurricane struck also are open to some interpretation, but Drye chooses to create villains and heroes -- in particular, Ray Sheldon, the man who managed the three labor camps that housed the veterans. No doubt, Sheldon was largely responsible for failing to arrange the evacuation of the vets well before the storm struck. The more intriguing question, which really isn't addressed in the book, is WHY Sheldon -- who had experienced earlier Florida hurricanes -- didn't order an evacuation train until the storm was almost upon the Keys. Was it pure miscalculation, denial, or was there some bureaucratic purpose in his delay? Here, some informed speculation would have been welcome. Drye doesn't really address the question; he simply portrays Sheldon as indecisive and, post-hurricane, a liar. These he may have been but such a portrayal doesn't get much below the surface of the issue.

This leads to the most glaring deficiency in Drye's work: His book is devoid of footnotes, and the origin of much of his narrative is obscure. (To be fair, the decision to omit footnotes and a comprehensive bibliography may have been the publisher's, not Drye's.) He does acknowledge assistance from several people and lists a "selected bibliography," both of which indicate some of his sources of information; but he doesn't list any of the National Archives resources or other official documents he must have consulted, nor their locations. Nor does he give sources for certain opinionated passages, such as his explanation of how the chairman of the congressional inquiry into the Labor Day disaster rigged the hearings to exonerate Roosevelt's officials. This is a major failing of what should have been a much more useful study of this event. The book also could have used a more comprehensive index and perhaps a "cast of characters" that would provide a convenient reference to the dozens of people mentioned, especially the myriad of bureaucrats. And, particularly for demonstrating the degree of miscalculation and faulty judgment involved in this disaster, a timeline of events also would have been welcomed.

Stories about natural disasters can be approached in essentially three ways: (1) Bravery/survival in the face of adversity, (2) Managerial competence and ineptitude in the face of adversity, and (3) A cautionary tale for the future. Drye does all three, succeeding fairly well on (1), stumbling somewhat on (2), succeeding commendably on (3). If you're a relatively new resident to South Florida (especially the Keys) or know someone who's planning to move there -- of if you think riding out the eye of a hurricane would be a "neat" experience -- this book, with all its flaws, is worth a read. One of the contemporary emergency management officials for the Florida Keys, quoted by Drye, hits it on the head regarding the next big Keys hurricane: "It's not if. It's when." Hurricane Andrew, another "rapidly intensifying" storm, devastated my home town of Homestead in 1992; had the eye made landfall twenty miles further north, it would have flattened Miami. Hurricanes are the price one pays for living along the south Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and anyone contemplating residence and property ownership in those regions should know what happened on Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys on the evening of Sept. 2, 1935. This book is a good place to start learning how high that price can be. (...)

We all think the weather is enormously important, at least as a topic of conversation and complaint. Huge resources are at work to show us satellite pictures of storms; many of us can't get by without taking a regular look at the Weather Channel. Long before such technology was in place, in 1935, it was clear to forecasters on Labor Day weekend that a storm was coming somewhere around Florida, but none of them could have predicted its course accurately, and none would have known it would quickly build into the most powerful storm ever to hit the US. _Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935_ (National Geographic Press) by Willie Drye tells the story of the storm, the havoc it caused, the surprisingly political outcome, and the fascinating lack of lessons learned. It is as exciting a book as one about the weather can be.

The victims of the storm were largely veterans of WWI, "Forgotten Men" who were sent to the Florida Keys to build a highway linking the Keys and the mainland. (They were perhaps also sent there to keep them from protesting the effects of the depression on them.) The men reported to three oceanfront work camps, primitive plywood and canvass bivouacs where they did a lot of drinking and tried to outwit the mosquitoes. There were storm advisories for Labor Day; the Weather Bureau alerted the Keys to the possibility of danger, but no one could have predicted how much. Drye shows that the administrators of the veterans' program, through lack of experience with tropical weather, bad communication, and misplaced optimism, failed to take action until the storm was upon the camps and until the train sent to evacuate them was itself beaten off the tracks. That is only one of the horrors described here as the storm, and the surge of ocean that accompanied it, wrecked the islands and killed over 400 people. Politicians thereafter tried to pin blame on someone, but a clever congressional ally of Roosevelt kept the administration from being tarnished by tricky lawyerly tactics. It was nothing but an act of God.

Drye's epilogue is called "Next Time It'll Be Worse," and he demonstrates that this is certainly so. The Keys have not seen their last monster storm, and since the one of 1935, there has been built a highway linking them all, and there has been a population and property boom, and tourism brings thousands during hurricane season. Hurricanes, even tracked by satellite, are unpredictable, and no one could foresee a similar storm so rapidly growing from a weak tropical disturbance to a gigantic killer. In 1935, a few well timed evacuation trains could have emptied the Keys, but now all the residents getting in their cars to head to the mainland would result in just a long traffic jam. Feasibility studies for making the road a two-lane northbound-only route merely show that cars would run out of gas if tanker trucks could not get south to fill the gas stations. The next storm is coming, and books will record it. Until then, this memorable volume detailing not only the natural history but the social history of a great storm is exciting reading.

The story of the nameless 1935 hurricane is a real page-turner. Willie Drye expertly describes the down-and-out men who were sent to federal work camps in the Florida Keys and the terrible tragedy that befell them. Besides being one of the first histories I have found that discusses life in a depression-era work camp, the story of the hurricane, which was the strongest to ever hit the U.S., is terrifying. The hurricane literally swept everything in its path off the islands and is the most compelling description of a terrible storm that I have ever read. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in deadly storms, Florida history, and U.S. history.

I've lived through 5 hurricanes and in 4 of them the eye passed over my home. Reading this book made me feel I was in another only this time Ernest Hemingway was there as well. A great read for anyone who has been through a hurricane or wondered what one is like.

Starts off a little slow and gets a little boring in the middle, but all-in-all Willie Drye does a great job telling the story of the hurricane and the political nightmare surrounding it. The parallels to this disaster and it's lack of leadership to Katrina and the bumbling leaders involved in it (Nagin/Blanco) are uncanny.

This is the first book I have ever read on a natural disaster. It was a great story. It was rich in history and science, but not too overdone. I'm from the coast that does not have hurricanes and the description of the storm blew my socks off. Great props to the author even if you could tell what his political motivations were.

Reading this book just a few months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi gulf coast, and the subsequent political fallout that ensued there, is fascinating. Because in the 1935 hurricane that barreled through the Florida Keys with winds up to 200 mph (it's the most powerful hurricane to strike the US) we also have a set of "victims," accusations of governmental neglect, and finger-pointing and fudged reports that came with official investigations.

The 1935 hurricane (storms weren't named back then; this one occurred on Labor Day so is often referred to as the Labor Day hurricane) begins years before it actually formed off the Bahamas, and many miles to the north. The story really commences in Washington, DC, in 1932, when thousands of WW I veterans marched on the capital demanding the bonus money they were promised for fighting in the Great War. They set up camps in Washington, and, mainly because the Depression was affecting much of the population, were not very popular. When FDR became president, he decided to ship the vets off to Florida to help construct the road that was stretching from Florida's mainland across the Keys to Key West. Since 1912 the Florida East Coast Railroad ran tracks to Key West, but no road ran the full distance. (Interestingly, the storm killed the railroad for good along the Keys; the road and most other things were built or rebuilt.)

By early 1935, these veterans began arriving in the Keys and were lodged in work camps. Thus the "victims" were in place. Drye tells what life was like in the camps (much discontent, drunkeness, and violence), and how the men felt they were merely shuttled out of sight and forgotten.

The storm formed off the Bahamas late in August and was first predicted to hit Havana, Cuba. Hurricane tracking techniques were still pretty primitive in 1935, with most of the information coming in from ships at sea. The weather bureau, however, located the storm about 200 miles too far south, and its predictions for the Keys minimized the dangers at first. The first finger-pointing of blame after the tragedy was directed at the weather bureau.

Then the storm hit. It was compact and ferocious, destroying everything in its path. Drye relates first-hand experiences by those caught in it. Some survived, many did not (hundreds died). Many of the survivors - and victims - were the veterans who had not been taken off the Keys as they should have been. Here's where the governmental neglect charges come in. Apparently a train had been readied and was even on its way to take the men out, but delays in ordering it prevented it from getting to the camps in time. In fact, the train itself was blown off the tracks by the tremendous winds and the storm surge.

The first official report on the disaster said no one was to blame, it was just "an act of God." This outraged many people and additional hearings were held, but the results were the same. Drye includes some of the testimony taken during the hearings, and it's not surprising to see the half-truths, outright lies, and protect-my-own-rear-end declarations pile up.

Drye tells this story dramatically, informatively, and well. He refuses to cross over into melodrama where the temptation to do so is great (the first-hand accounts). He includes a few collateral and secondary events (the ordeal of the passenger ship "Dixie" on its way to NYC from Texas that got caught right in the middle of the hurricane, and some things about Ernest Hemingway who was at home in Key West at the time) that add to the interest of the book. And one can't help but draw comparisons to the Katrina disaster of 2005. An excellent book. Highly recommended.

This was an excellent story, meticulously researched by the author and presented as if he were actually there to witness it all. Awesome, suspenseful hurricane tale.

I was not even aware of the Hurricane of 1935 until I saw a recent special on television. I wanted to learn more, and this book filled the bill. Willie Drye laid the groundwork by telling about the residents of the Keys and what life was like then before the storm. He explained how isolated they became with one only road in and out and how the planned-for railroad would improve things immensely. The stories of the veterans who lived in the area to work on those railroads were well told. I found the book riveting and hard to put down until toward the end. Once the book turned to discussing the "blame game" and how the various agencies tried to save face in light of the deaths of so many veterans, it bogged down for me and lost a lot of its verve. Nevertheless, I would recommend STORM OF THE CENTURY as a fact-filled and interesting account of what was a horrific experience for people so ill prepared to survive it.