Last Train to Paradise (10 page)

In the aftermath of the storm’s passage, in waters that were still raging, the Austro-Hungarian steamer
Jenny
spotted a lone survivor clinging to a chunk of debris and managed to haul him on board. When the man tried to explain what had happened, he found that none of his saviors could speak English. The
Jenny
was about to continue on its course when someone found a fireman deep in the hold who understood enough English to understand that there were hundreds of others lost in the storm-tossed seas.

The fireman relayed the news to the
Jenny
’s captain, who ordered the ship into a full-fledged search. By one-thirty the following morning, the
Jenny
had pulled forty-nine men from the water and delivered them to safety in Key West.

A British steamer, the
Alton,
picked up twenty-four more survivors clinging to a makeshift raft and brought them to port in Savannah. Other survivors were picked up in widely scattered spots; one man was delivered by a freighter docking in Mobile; another was carried to port in Liverpool. More turned up in Galveston, New York, London, and Buenos Aires.

Other workmen and other boats suffered less fortunate fates. Some survivors told the story of a cement barge tender named Mullin, who refused to leave his craft when it was blown away from its anchorage. There was a generator on board, and Mullin valiantly kept his boiler stoked and his lights ablaze for hours “like a Coney Island steamboat,” until the waves finally pulled the barge under and Mullin was drowned.

Another man, swept out to sea on one of the barges used to ferry water to various points along the right-of-way, managed to grab a wrench and loosen the bolts that held one of the big cypress water tanks to the deck of his disintegrating craft. He jumped into the tank, pulled its lid tight above him, and rode out the storm like a bug inside a hollow cork. Several days later the tank washed up near Nassau, its occupant badly dehydrated, but alive.

A pair of mechanics named Kelly and Kennedy were clinging to the deck of another floundering quartersboat when an unmanned barge floated by. According to one of the other men on the houseboat, Kelly shouted to his friend, “I like the looks of that barge, don’t you?”

Kennedy must have liked its looks as well, for the two of them jumped from the houseboat to the deck of the barge. Moments later the pair disappeared in the boiling seas and were presumed lost. A week later they were discovered far out in the shipping channels, nearly dead from lack of food and water. The two recovered, though, and returned to work on the Extension.

There were many bizarre tales told following the disaster. One pair of men tossed into the sea from Quartersboat No. 4 was a father-son team. As they floundered about in the water, they caught sight of a trunk floating nearby and swam desperately to it. They held tight to the makeshift life preserver for a time, but eventually the pounding of the waves and the wind exhausted them. First the seas washed the father away, and soon after, the son felt the trunk torn away from his hands as well.

The son was fortunate enough to grab hold of a plank, though, and managed to keep himself afloat until he was rescued the following day. When he was finally delivered to safety, the son told a railroad official the heart-wrenching story of the loss of his father.

“Tell me your name again, son,” said his listener.

The son did so.

The official smiled then, and clapped the young man on the shoulder. “You can relax. Your father’s safe. He told the same story when he was brought in a couple of hours ago.”

The tale was a heartening one, but in all more than 125 men died, and because record-keeping of the day was so slipshod, the toll was rumored to be as high as two hundred. When Joseph Meredith arrived to survey the devastation, he was understandably shaken, but his public statements reflected the resolve that had won him the position of project manager to begin with.

“No man has any business connected with this work who can’t stand grief,” he said, vowing to go forward.

Flagler’s response to Meredith’s insistence was just as terse: “Go ahead,” was the word sent down from St. Augustine.

13

Duly Noted

Despite Meredith’s public proclamation, the death toll produced by the storm was staggering. Although a certain amount of risk accompanies any heavy construction project, even to this day, the loss of a fellow worker is a major blow to any labor team, especially one such as that working the Overseas Railroad, where camaraderie was underscored by the relative isolation, long hours, and clear sense of purpose reflected by their employers. Imagine, then, the loss of not one, or two, or several compatriots, but 125 fellow workers—nearly 5 percent of all those hard at work when the storm swept ashore—all of them vanished overnight, and many of the bodies disappeared forever beneath the featureless seas.

If any man had harbored doubts about the wisdom of sticking with the job until now, he needed no further persuasion. With most of the nearly three-thousand-man workforce idled for almost twelve months while the storm damage was surveyed, and the basic supply and staging infrastructure reassembled and repaired, the rate of defections skyrocketed.

To make matters worse, those fleeing back northward carried with them grim tales that newspapers and eager labor prosecutors were quick to embroider. “Some of the boys came down here evidently to get their passage paid without any intention of working for the company,” one official complained to a reporter for the
Brooklyn Eagle.
“A number got employment in Miami with local concerns and we are out the cost of their passage. It is these fellows that often stop men at the railroad station and on their way to the works and fill their ears with all sorts of false stories.”

But when affidavits were filed by some former workers alleging that railway security officials locked the dock gates at the port of Miami, preventing their return to the U.S. mainland, public outrage reached a crescendo: in March of 1907, a federal grand jury in New York issued its initial indictment charging the Florida East Coast Railway, including Meredith and Krome, along with its New York labor agents, under “slave labor” statutes.

Stung by the charges and frustrated by the setbacks to his project, Flagler mounted a counterattack. Photographs of the Miami docks and rail terminal facilities were circulated in an attempt to show that the claims of workers being “denied re-entry to United States soil” were patently ludicrous. Flagler’s attorneys also managed to solicit an affidavit from a Catholic priest who had toured the Keys during the pre-hurricane construction phase, stating that he had seen no signs of forced-labor operations.

Flagler would also issue a detailed statement defending the railroad’s labor-management practices, one intended to reassure the world at large that the FEC was indeed a benevolent employer. While the document might have intended to present the company’s practices in a favorable light, given the attitudes of the time, reading it today offers a telling insight into Flagler’s pragmatic nature:

The white laborers were recruited in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and other northern cities, and while most of it was of a class not used to the rough kind of work needed in railroad construction, and included a large portion of undesirable types, it was thought they could be educated up to our requirements. . . . the Negroes who remained or who came in later, were of a much better grade than the first recruits, and for the clearing of the heavy jungle along the right of way the Negro was far superior to the whites.

The most satisfactory results were secured through the letting of contract work, the contracts being let to individuals who would hire ten or twenty men to help them, the price being fixed in advance for the work to be done. The contractors seldom failed to make good wages and a profit on the work. The station men . . . however, particularly the Negroes, seldom kept their earning very long owing to their tendency to gamble and spend their money in liquor. . . . During a part of 1907, Spanish laborers from Cuba, attracted by the high scale of wages paid on the concrete construction at Long Key Viaduct, began to enlist and since then have formed a considerable element of the labor force, and these men have been a generally satisfactory type of laborer. . . . They are “stayers” and hoard their earnings carefully, seldom leaving the work for “layoffs” or junketing trips.

Such comments are fairly compelling evidence that whatever racial attitudes Flagler may have held in his heart of hearts, he was principally concerned with one issue: getting this particular job done. In an earlier letter to Joseph Parrott, Flagler had expressed his concerns that his men be well treated on the job. He had read a
New York Herald
interview with a member of the Panama Canal Commission outlining certain aspects of care of a labor force under tropical conditions, and wanted to send Parrott a heads-up: “While we have no condition such as exists on the Isthmus, it occurs to me that whoever is in charge of that work should look carefully into the question of everything pertaining to the health and proper care of the force we employ.”

And in an aside during his defense of the FEC’s hiring practices, he grumbled about another of his pet bugaboos: “There were strict rules prohibiting the introduction of liquors into the camps, but it was undoubtedly brought in by the men themselves. There was this noticeable difference, however: the Negroes were regular, but moderate drinkers while the whites who drank would get on a spree of several days before returning to work.”

Despite Flagler’s attempts to elicit a more sympathetic response from the public, newspapers outside the realm of his influence were skeptical. When a flare-up of a nagging liver condition put Flagler back in the hospital during the summer of 1907, the
New York Journal
declared him on his deathbed, the dream of an Overseas Railroad slipping away as well:

It was the “railroad that goes to sea,” and it has been Mr. Flagler’s ambition for years to leave that to posterity as a monument to himself. He had personally supervised all of its workings; but when success seemed most sure, when hundreds of miles of the great railroad that was to connect Miami with Key West, and make the latter virtually a land city, the project had to be abandoned—temporarily, say his friends; probably for all time, say those engineers. . . . Since early spring, not a wheel has turned in the railroad’s construction, not a boatload of concrete or iron been taken South, and the thousands of men who were employed in the work have sadly packed their kit and drifted back to New York, leaving the half-built giant railroad practically deserted. . . . Broken in spirit and badly weakened from overwork and worry incident to the strain of raising funds, Mr. Flagler took to his bed in St. Augustine last April. He did not mend rapidly and his physician advised his removal to a cooler climate. Early in the summer he was taken to his summer home in Mamaroneck . . . but was later removed to Bretton Woods, N.H., when symptoms of a general nervous breakdown asserted themselves.

However, reports of Flagler’s demise were greatly exaggerated, as the saying goes. Even as the
Journal
account was being published, crews were back at work, rebuilding work camps and replacing roadbed and rails that had been washed out by the storm.

By October of 1907, 2,500 men were back on the job, and work camps had been established as far south as Knight’s Key, at MM 41, more than halfway to the final destination. As the process continued, one major change was implemented: as a result of the tragedy involving Quartersboat No. 4, there would be no more floating dormitories. All the camp buildings would be constructed to meet hurricane-resistant standards, and all would have secure foundations on dry land.

A reporter for the
Chicago Daily News
made a tour of the post-hurricane camps and offered a perspective that heartened Flagler and his managers: “I doubt if there could be found better conditions for the common laborer in any engineering work that exists along this extension,” wrote F. S. Spofford. “I spent two days in these camps, mingled with the men, ate their food, inspected their quarters, and I must say that on every hand were evidences of the greatest consideration for their welfare.” After a detailed rendering of the typical camp menu, Spofford concluded his dispatch with a reprise of the often-cited FEC assertion that the percentage of illness among workers had been much lower than that experienced by members of the U.S. Army.

In response to charges that men had been prevented from leaving the camps, or had been prevented from passing company gates on the pier into Miami until they had paid back their transportation debts, William Krome issued a statement that insisted, “All Resident Engineers . . . were clearly instructed that no difference how a man’s account stood in regards to his indebtedness to the Company, that if he wished to leave, no effort could be made to detain him, the only detention being that he was required to pay $1.50 return fare to Miami.”

Press reports of the day continued to bat back and forth the issue of Flagler as a modern-day slavemaster, however, and federal prosecutors were as resolute in moving their case against the FEC forward through the New York district courts as Flagler was in extending his railroad southward. When the case, based on an 1866 slavery law, finally went to trial in November of 1908, things went badly for the prosecution, its efforts undermined largely by the presentation of a series of distinctly unreliable witnesses. Inside of a week, Flagler’s lawyers petitioned for, and were awarded, a directed verdict of acquittal by the trial judge.

Flagler, though pleased, reiterated his suspicions that the entire matter had been part of a government conspiracy, engendered by various frustrations over the years in making antitrust charges stick against Standard Oil. (As early as 1878, lawsuits seeking to break the company’s stranglehold on the oil business were being filed, and Flagler, who had arranged most of the company’s contracts, found increasing amounts of his time devoted to such rearguard actions, duty which he found loathsome. Though a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1911 would finally mandate the dissolution of the intricate network of the Standard Oil Trust, the effects were negligible. Subsidiary stocks remained in the hands of Rockefeller, Flagler, and others who had controlled the company, and less than a year later it was estimated that the $663-million value of the former Standard Oil of New Jersey had actually skyrocketed an additional $222 million.)

Flagler attributed much of the government’s animosity to a personal vendetta being carried out against him by President Theodore Roosevelt, whom he had once supported in a bid for the governorship of New York. Once elected to that post, however, Roosevelt had moved quickly to pass legislation taxing corporate franchises, an act that Flagler deemed a personal betrayal. In the years that followed, Flagler’s disdain for Roosevelt grew to gargantuan proportions, as his private correspondence bears out. “I have no command of the English language that enables me to express my feelings regarding Mr. Roosevelt,” Flagler says in one letter unearthed by biographer David Leon Chandler. “He is shit.”

Despite the lingering venom, the court victory had given Flagler’s plans a significant boost. On November 25, 1908, just five days after the government had its case quashed, Flagler wrote to Elihu Root, “I have today decided to resume work on the Key West Extension. We will have trains running to Key West on January 1, 1910.”