The Storm of the Century

by Al Roker

  They all moved into the white family’s house. They began fixing the house up, and they would live there until they could get to Annie’s mother’s family on the Texas mainland.

  Annie would always remember that white man. She would always recall the bright spot he represented in what, amid disaster, were becoming newly strained race relations in Galveston.

  And yet Lloyd Fayling’s men came for Fleming Smizer. The troops arrived where Ed, Annie, and the family were staying. They began searching the house for able-bodied men.

  Ed was out at that moment. The armed men forced Annie’s father out of the house. He had no choice but to go with them.

  “I’m a government man,” Smizer protested. “I worked in the Custom House.” But Galveston’s African American men were being rounded up and pressed into service.

  Beginning with the horrible task of burying the putrefying corpses at sea, Major Fayling’s troops began going around town, with guns pointed, stopping black men at random and demanding that they come down to the wharf and begin loading corpses onto a large barge. If the men objected, Fayling’s order was “Load with ball cartridge, take aim!” Rifles were raised and aimed, and not surprisingly, compliance in the sickening task was total.

  This singling out of men that white Galvestonians routinely referred to in public as “Negroes” marked another eerie effect of the hurricane. There had, of course, never been racial equality in the city. While African Americans had long played important roles in civic life, while the docks had seen the progress of the Negro Longshoreman’s Union, and while all kinds of people mingled in the city streets, much of Galveston’s social and political life had long involved rigid racial segregation. And the most menial and unpleasant kinds of labor had long been presumed to be a natural province of black men and women.

  The prevailing white idea in 1900 was that “the Negro” was naturally less affected by the rigors of hard labor; less sensitive to assaults of bad smells and disgusting textures; and inured, through long generations, to submission. That philosophy prevailed more or less openly, not only in Galveston but throughout Texas and the American South, and indeed throughout the rest of the booming country as well. Even under normal circumstances, the most advanced and polite white Protestants routinely referred to anyone non-white and non-Protestant by race and religion first. Somebody would be called “a Negro,” “a Jew,” “a Greek,” “a Roman Catholic” before anything else. Only a fellow white Protestant did not require such definition.

  Even when approving of black people’s or Jews’ behavior, the terms were patronizing. Major Fayling, having stationed his African American servant Ed Hearde with a rifle to guard a group of thieves—who were also black—called Hearde “the bravest and most faithful Negro I have ever known.” Weeks later, Fayling was in Houston arranging further relief, and he was met officially by Louis J. Tuffy, mayor pro-tem of that city. Fayling referred to Tuffy not by name or by title but as “a fleshy Hebrew gentleman.”

  Major Fayling’s snarky bigotry may have been extreme, even for his day. Rabbi Henry Cohen was serving, without objection and with utter respect, on the Central Relief Committee, as was the Catholic Father Kirwin. Jews had high standing in Galveston’s elite, and a wealthy Mexican, Thomas Gonzales, had been among the city’s leading citizens.

  The hardest lines, though, had always been drawn between those in the city who defined themselves as white, and the descendants of those who had been enslaved. Now, in the immediate aftermath of the storm, with martial law declared in Galveston and troops dispatched to enforce it, something even grimmer was turning up in the city’s racial culture.

  With death everywhere, both visible and in the stench of the air itself, new fears arose among many white citizens, fears of a violent and criminal element, whom they took to be black, not white.

  The stories had begun flying on the first day. Those “ghouls” who were looting the dead bodies on the pile and robbing the empty buildings? They were Negroes, white people reported. So savage were these black ghouls, it was said, that they cut fingers and ears off corpses to get at rings.

  Rumor topped rumor: the ghouls actually chewed dead fingers off by the handful and filled their pockets with them. “The Negro,” though supposedly used to submission, was also somehow apt to become bizarrely and inhumanly savage.

  Looting did in fact occur. There may even have been lopping off of fingers. But that crime was a racially integrated activity. Major Fayling himself, along with many others, reported that fact. “I am sorry to say that white men are side by side [with the Negroes] in their damnable work,” one white visitor described.

  “The ghouls are composed of Negroes and foreigners,” another man reported confidently.

  So despite the obvious presence of white looters, many white people—including the nearly all-powerful Major Fayling and his troops—referred routinely to the looters as Negroes, joined, they were sometimes willing to admit, by less-desirable whites. The emergence in Galveston of a criminality so shockingly selfish, heedless, and low simply had to be associated, by many white citizens, with a race they considered inherently “other.”

  For Fleming Smizer, a descendent of one of Galveston’s oldest families, so recently reunited with his wife and daughter, and for so many others, there would be no deferment and no quarter. White soldiers forced black men at gunpoint to the front lines of the most horrifying labor that any city could ever face.

  That first Monday afternoon, citizens stood about the wreckage watching a horrible kind of parade. Carts and wagons kept arriving at the wharf on the bay side. They were piled with bodies.

  All afternoon, fifty African American Galvestonians, sweating in the sun, fighting off their nausea, lifted about 700 dead bodies of all races and ages from those carts onto the barge. The men threw the corpses into the hold at random. People watched from the waterside, stunned and fascinated.

  Major Fayling did feel bad for the workers on the barge. He knew this job was an awful one. He ordered whiskey served to the men throughout the day.

  When the barge was fully loaded, it was attached to a tugboat. The tug towed the barge—with the corpses, the workers, and some of Fayling’s troops—out of the bay and around the end of the island.

  The tug steamed eighteen miles into the Gulf of Mexico. Here is where the committee had decided the bodies would go under.

  But it was dark now—too late to complete the task. The barge anchored. The living had to spend that night on the water with the dead.

  When the sun rose on the gulf, the next phase of work began. Lifting the bodies out of the hold, the men lashed a weight to each one so that it would sink. They used a random assortment of weights: pieces of storm-broken iron, window-sash weights, anything heavy enough to send a body down and keep it there.

  Then the men lifted the hundreds of weighted bodies. They dumped them all into the gulf. That was Tuesday morning.

  Tuesday afternoon, the bodies came back. They arrived with the tide on Galveston’s beaches. Soon corpses littered the sand.

  The gulf had spoken. It denied Galveston’s dead burial at sea. It denied the survivors any hope, however gruesome, for a quick end to their living nightmare.

  CHAPTER 13

  “I CAN BEGIN LIFE AGAIN, AS I ENTERED IT”

  AMID ALL THIS FAILED CIVIC EFFORT TO COPE WITH AN UNIMAGINABLE public horror, each surviving citizen in Galveston tried to sort things out. In those first days, people on the mainland who had loved ones in Galveston were still trying to get in; people in Galveston were trying to clean up, help others, get systems working. All of that took place under a pall of horrified amazement at what they were seeing, overwhelmed by total loss.

  One of the things that everybody—whether stuck on the nightmarish island, or outside trying to get in—had to cope with was a daily listing of the dead. One of the earliest civic institutions to get up and running after the storm was the press. The Galveston Daily News was first, followed by the Galveston Tribune. Lat
e on that first stunning Sunday, the very first day after the storm, the News was published.

  It was only a small single sheet. All it offered was a stark list: the names of the dead, as reported by grieving survivors.

  For some time, lists were the main thing the News offered. And the list entitled “Dead” lengthened horribly day after day.

  The body count was still provisional. Really, it always would be. But the first hopeful estimates—that only a few hundred people might have died on Saturday night—succumbed quickly to a staggering reality.

  Five hundred had once seemed a hysterical, outsized exaggeration. It soon became clear that the death toll of the Galveston hurricane numbered in the many thousands. With decomposition setting in, there was no time or stomach for careful counting. The most conservative estimates would place the count at 5,000. Others would suggest it came near 15,000. Some split the difference, and around 10,000 seems a fair guess.

  The News soon started running a second list, entitled “Not Dead.” That list was unfortunately short but critically important. As people were found alive, the paper took their names off the “Dead” list and filed them under “Not Dead.”

  Nell Hertford, frequently escorted by the morose Boyer Gonzales, found that life in the ruined city had taken on an eerie calm.

  To others, people seemed on the brink of madness. Not only were so many bodies being unearthed from the pile: new stories of that night of horrors kept coming up too. The terrible stories made the terror seem to go on and on.

  Of the children who had sung for help to the Queen of the Waves, those orphans of St. Mary’s, only three had survived. All of the other orphans—along with Sister Elizabeth Ryan, Mother Camillus Tracy, and all of the nuns and other adults who cared for the children—died in the water.

  The three survivors were boys in their early teens: Albert Campbell, Will Murney, and Francis Bolenick. Older kids, they probably hadn’t been roped to the adults. Swept through the wreckage by the powerful currents, all three had managed to grab the same uprooted treetop.

  The tree was stuck precariously in the gulf between the masts of a wrecked schooner. The boys clung to the treetop together and held their bodies against the raging tide for long hours.

  At one point Albert, weakening, shouted that he was drowning. Will grabbed a piece of rope from the schooner wreckage. He tied Albert to the treetop, and they all kept fighting the water.

  Then the schooner masts broke, and the tree was abruptly released to the sea. Still the trio managed to stay with the tree as it flowed back toward shore.

  The next morning, the three orphans found themselves on the gulf beach. Littering the sand were the dead bodies of everyone they knew.

  Strange stories of light pierced the darkness. Arnold Wolfram and the ten-year-old Western Union boy made it across that plank at the last minute and got onto Wolfram’s friend’s upper porch. Having fought their way through town together, the man and the boy survived together. The next day, Wolfram restored the kid to his grateful family and rejoined his own.

  The Delzes—a family living on the west end, near Daisy Thorne’s apartment house—were trying to come to grips with a terrible loss. Sixteen-year-old Anna Delz had been washed into the gulf by the storm.

  And yet when Anna’s father was finally able to communicate with his sister, who lived on the mainland, he learned that Anna was alive. She’d been swept from the gulf back onto the island, then across the entire island, and then out into the bay, and then all the way over to the mainland coast.

  There the exhausted girl slept on a pile of lumber just above water level. At daybreak Sunday, she walked—naked, since the storm had taken her clothing—until she found a house and asked where she was. Learning she was in the town of La Marque, Texas, Anna found the aunt she knew lived there. Soon Anna was restored to her family in Galveston.

  As the tales of Saturday night were told, the ruined island city took on a new and eerie strangeness. Open cremation fires, strategically sited among the wreckage, scorched through the days and lit up the nights.

  Burial at sea had failed. The stench was more powerful every hour.

  This was the Central Relief Committee’s new plan. All bodies were be dug out of the pile and burned. Night and day, the dead would go up in huge bonfires until they were all gone. To the reek of putrefaction was added the stench of burning flesh. And because the burning went on day and night, a foul, ashy smoke now always hung thickly over the island.

  The project was so massive that the crews who cleared the wreckage, turned up bodies, gathered them at the pyres, and threw them on the fire had to be massive too. While African Americans were always the first choice for such awful work, Major Fayling realized he had to stop discriminating so rigidly on the basis of race. At one point his troops roved the foot of Tremont Street, forcing every able-bodied man they saw into service at bayonet point. The major was on standing orders from the committee to shoot not only looters but also any man refusing to work on the “dead gangs,” as people started calling these crews. He passed those orders on to his deputies.

  Again, Fayling was careful to give the clear impression that he would gun down, without compunction, anybody refusing to obey orders. That attitude turned out to be enough.

  Unlimited free whiskey remained the only way he knew of trying to ameliorate the physical and mental anguish of the dead gangs. Troops served booze in goblets to the workers. The men drank the whiskey steadily, but Fayling never saw any man drunk. They worked thirty-minute shifts, then took a break. Fayling knew that was all anyone could stand.

  And so the labor went on, and a grisly rhythm took over. Digging was a daytime activity: crews went about the slow, tedious removal of tons of random wreckage—punctuated by abrupt, horrific discoveries of bodies and body parts, badly decaying now. Remains had to be handled, even as they decomposed in the workers’ hands. Flesh was removed to carts and wheeled to the pyres.

  Burning was a twenty-four-hour job. There were fires everywhere, all the time. It wasn’t only smells and smoke that nobody in town could avoid: it was the sight of those bonfires, and of the bodies burning on them. These weren’t crematorium furnaces: bodies burned with agonizing slowness on the pyres. Children of 1900 Galveston would grow old with those sights still vivid in their memories.

  Little Louise Bristol wasn’t allowed to go outside. Her older brothers were pressed into service, but through those long, strange weeks, Cassie kept the little girl inside the ruined boardinghouse. Louise smelled the stench but never saw the fires.

  When the young lawyer Clarence Howth was thrown by the ocean waves, blasting through a window into his attic, far from his wife Marie and their newborn baby, his father-in-law and brother-in-law were swept away too. Clarence had tried, as he went underwater, to welcome his own end.

  He hoped to meet his beloved wife in heaven. He opened his mouth to speed the drowning. But he couldn’t do it. Trapped in turbulent water and rubble, his body fought for survival against his will. There was no sound. Fastened under his wrecked house, he began losing his unwilling fight to live.

  And then he wasn’t losing. The ruins released him; he swam to the top. Then Clarence, like so many others, was swept out to sea. For ten hours he fought waters that pushed him off down the beach to the southwest and then out into the gulf. His only float was a broken window frame.

  When the waters receded, Clarence found himself back in town. He was badly bruised and cut up, shivering, naked, alive. He lay down on a pile of wreckage and cried.

  And in the ensuing days, dazed by emotional turmoil, he knew that his wife and baby were getting piled into carts with thousands of others and slowly burned in pyres. For days he couldn’t even walk. He had nothing left. No family. No home.

  He wrote to his brother in New York. “All is gone!” Clarence told his brother in a howl of sheer despair. The despair was for both himself and all of Galveston. “Martial law, consternation, ruin, and starvation prevail,” he reported.<
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  And yet Clarence also reported that he was being well cared for. “My limbs are left and my mind only slightly impaired,” he told his brother.

  In the midst of deep anguish over total loss, something still stirred within the bereft young man. He summoned courage from somewhere. “I can begin life again,” he said, “as I entered it.”

  Isaac and Joseph Cline, battered and bereft like many of their fellow citizens, spent the first few days after the storm trying to master grief and exhaustion. Isaac didn’t pick his way through ruin to the Levy Building. Joseph went, but he couldn’t get much done.

  The Levy Building was still standing. After Joseph had left on that awful Saturday evening, the Weather Bureau office was manned only by the young assistant, John Blagden. And all that night, the building had rocked and rolled with the unbelievable winds.

  Blagden held his post all night. The only instrument he had to work with was a barometer. The wind had snatched from the roof not only the storm-warning flag but also the anemometer and the rain gauge.

  All night as the building quaked, Blagden watched the barometer fall and felt the wind pick up. With winds now blowing at speeds well in excess of what weathermen believed possible, the barometer plummeted, that evening, to depths that Blagden—along with the Clines, Director Moore, and all other American weather scientists—had never seen before.

  The barometer stopped falling at 28.48. That reading became the bureau’s new record low. Scientists later determined that the real barometric pressure in Galveston that night was 27.50, an even more shocking number. The real wind speed was later estimated at more than 120 miles per hour.

  Blagden must have thought the Apocalypse had come. Nothing could hold out against a low-pressure zone like that. The wind meanwhile removed the entire fourth floor from the Moody Bank, just down the street from the Levy Building.

  But John Blagden survived, along with the building. And while Galveston remained for a time cut off from the bureau in Washington, Blagden was able to return to work nearly as soon as the storm was over.