I of the Storm
Living in Galveston meant having a personal relationship with the Gulf—and with the many hurricanes that changed the course of the city’s history. To say nothing of my own.
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No American city changed so much in a single day. San Francisco recovered from its earthquake, Chicago from its fire, Atlanta from its sacking by Sherman, but Galveston would never be the same. Its inland rival, perfidious Houston, seized on Galveston’s vulnerability to get authorization from Congress for a deepwater channel to be dredged in Galveston Bay that would bring oceangoing vessels to a safer harbor. Still, it is remarkable that Galveston recovered at all.
The first step was to dispose of the dead. Workers balked at handling the bodies, so it was decided to ply them with alcohol. Some seven hundred corpses were loaded on barges with weights affixed for burial at sea, but, as one citizen wrote, the plan went awry: “The sea as though it could never be satisfied with its gruesome work washed these bodies back upon the shore.” Instead, the corpses were piled—like cordwood, according to one worker—and burned, a process that took two months.
The biggest task was ensuring the safety of the city. This was accomplished by two engineering feats: the building of a seawall, financed by bonds issued by the city, and the raising of the grade level of the Island to meet the top of the seawall. Galveston became “a city on stilts”; the entire town—homes, office buildings, underground pipes, streetcar tracks—had to be lifted to the new grade level and supported with wooden pilings. A canal was constructed into the heart of the Island, and dredges brought sand from the Gulf to pump into the city. The only way to get around on foot was on elevated wooden catwalks above the reeking muck. Ten years after the storm, Galveston returned to normal.
BUT WHAT WAS NORMAL? The physical damage of the storm had been overcome; the wharves had plenty of business and the beaches teemed with tourists. The city was safer. The top of the seawall was seventeen feet above mean low tide, more than a foot above the highest level achieved by the storm surge. But the psychological damage remained. Galveston no longer believed in its own destiny. The diversified economy that had existed before the storm, including some manufacturing, was gone, never to return. Financial leadership passed to Dallas and Houston. Traffic at the wharves was almost entirely agricultural staples for export. Imports barely moved the needle. From the viewpoint of 1910, it must have seemed as if the storm had robbed Galveston of its birthright, and I accepted that notion for many years. But, terrible as the storm was, the city’s fate was sealed not by nature but by the railroad. Houston was on the main route; Galveston was at the end of the line.
The external wreckage of the hurricane had been repaired, but not the internal damage. The storm raged on in the minds of Galvestonians, battering their faith in their city into rubble. Even the leading citizens signaled their doubts; William Moody Jr., the wealthiest of surviving Galvestonians, declined to buy securities for the seawall, “threatening the entire bond issue,” according to one historian, who added that Moody waited to purchase some bonds “until risk passed.” Nothing changed after the hurricane of 1915, even though the seawall proved that it could protect the city against a major storm. Like a character out of a Tennessee Williams play—more Blanche DuBois than Brick Pollitt, I’d say—the town could not come to terms with its own faded glory.
By the twenties Galveston was content to slip into sweet decadence. It was overrun by tourists and run by mobsters. The town hated the former and loved the latter. Of the thousands who drove from Houston to spend a day at the beach, it was said, “They come down with a dirty shirt on their backs and a five-dollar bill in their pockets and don’t change either one.” (One thing the storm didn’t change was the Galveston attitude that Houston was one step removed from savagery.) But the mobsters, the Maceo family, were embraced by all, because they made Galveston matter again, even if it was through crime—shamelessly wide-open but thoroughly illegal gambling. The Maceos pioneered the formula that would be perfected by Las Vegas: good food, great action, and national-class entertainment. Their hangouts, the Balinese Room and the Hollywood Dinner Club, attracted Houston’s nouveau riche oil crowd, some of whom arrived with a police escort. Galveston was desperate to lose itself in the present, to forget its past.
The Maceo brothers, Rose and Sam, died in the fifties, and the Texas Rangers shut down the remnants of their empire. I was old enough by then to have an inkling that my hometown was a peculiar place. I listened to the radio while a candidate for mayor campaigned for open gambling and open prostitution. He won, of course. I noticed that nothing ever changed: no new buildings, no new coats of paint on old buildings, no new families to challenge the leadership of the Moodys, Kempners, and Sealys (who, though their line had been extinguished, commanded influence from the grave through their bank and their hospital), not even any new jokes. (Playing off of Galveston’s “half-streets,” which separated alphabetical avenues—R, R and a half, S—the jest was that if you lived on Avenue O, you had to go two blocks to P.) Everything seemed destined to fail. A minor league baseball team came and went. A bridge was built across Galveston Bay to nearby Pelican Island, in the hope of attracting industry. None came. My great-grandparents’ home, a handsome if weatherworn Victorian on Broadway that had survived the 1900 storm behind the wall of debris, became vacant when the last living offspring moved to Houston; no one wanted it. After a couple of years, it was demolished.
Most peculiar of all was the absence of any evidence that the 1900 storm had occurred. No museum told its story. No public monument commemorated the deaths of six thousand people. No historical marker recognized the event, and none would do so for another twenty years. Finally, in 1975, a marker took notice of the original seawall and the reason for its existence. The last sentence reads, “Freed from the threat of further destruction, Galveston has grown into a modern and prosperous city.” Neither half of the sentence, sad to say, is quite accurate.
THE TRUTH IS, Galveston did not want to be reminded about the 1900 storm. It had all the reminders it needed every time a storm developed in the Atlantic Basin. Television didn’t make such a fuss over hurricanes in those days, so Galvestonians anxiously followed their progress in the Daily News or filled in their tracks on hurricane charts. Like most families in Galveston, we were ready for the worst. Our home, some three hundred yards from the Gulf of Mexico, was a treasure trove of hurricane preparedness. A closet under the stairs was stocked with nonperishable food and a large jug of distilled water. Every room except the formal living room had a flashlight in plain sight and batteries nearby. The kitchen and every bedroom had a portable radio. Extra dishpans were located in bedroom closets, in the kitchen, and in the attic, in case the roof had a leak—or worse, a hole. Various drawers contained piles of candles, several boxes of matches, and more batteries. The linen closet had enough towels to serve a bathhouse. I looked at this inventory and knew its significance: If a storm headed for Galveston, we weren’t leaving. It was a matter of loyalty; to leave was to confess a lack of faith in Galveston.
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