The 1900 Galveston Hurricane | After the Storm | 4

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1:07On September 8, 1900, a ferocious hurricane leveled the island city of Galveston. In the aftermath, what had been the primary port in the western Gulf of Mexico looked like a war zone. Railroad and streetcar tracks destroyed, churches demolished, there were miles of wreckage, and the remains of human and animal corpses lay strewn all across the island. Between 6 ,000 to 8 ,000 people died in total. Nearly two-thirds of the city's properties were destroyed, telegraph, power, and electrical lines were down, and the bridges were gone. This hurricane remains one of the worst natural disasters in American history, an absolute catastrophe, but also a catalyst for resurrection and reform, according to today's guest, Dr.

1:52Patricia Bixle. She's a retired history professor from the Maine Maritime Academy. Bixle co-authored Galveston and the 1900 Storm, Catastrophe and Catalyst, with Elizabeth Hayes Turner. Our conversation is next.

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2:50Dr. Patricia Bixle, thanks so much for joining us on American History Tellers. Thanks for having me. So let's start with Galveston before the storm. At the turn of the century in 1900, the port had a population of about 38 ,000. It had a good natural harbor. Wharves moved cotton, food, and raw materials. It was a busy place. And you write that Galveston was vibrant and cosmopolitan. If we were to walk around the streets of the city during the first week of September 1900, what might we have seen? Well, you would have seen a very, very active port. Galveston is, of course, based on Galveston Island, which is a barrier island that parallels the Texas coast.

3:29It was the only natural harbor in the state at the time. So it was the major port of the area. At one point, something like 80 to 90 percent of anything coming into Texas came through Galveston. And you probably would either be hearing about or looking forward to the Labor Day Parade, which was a huge event in Galveston at the time. because of the economic importance of the port and all of the unions and all the men that worked in the port operations. There was always a massive Labor Day parade. Because of the port, you had the infrastructure, the financial infrastructure that goes with that. So you had banking and insurance.

4:03So it was a very wealthy community. The city itself was a mixture of very large, prominent stone and brick business buildings with large housing areas that reached toward the beach with the port on the sort of mainland side of the island and then the beach and those houses and those neighborhoods that stretched away from the port toward the beach. Galveston had a summer population that came for the beautiful weather and the beaches. It was also a port city, and port cities are different. Port cities, because people and goods and ships are coming and going all the time, tend to be very diverse.

4:40Galveston had a significant ethnic and racial diverse population. And you had the culture that went with the money that was there. So you had operas and symphonies and music and dance halls and bars and brothels and all the things that come with being a port city. So Galveston at the time was the major and most developed city in Texas. But it was vulnerable to flooding, and the people of Galveston knew that. Many built their houses on pilings. They still do. Yes, that's very true. I traveled to Galveston almost every year on vacation. But did Galveston's leaders ever consider protecting the city in some way?

5:17They did. Occasionally, people would bring to the city council the idea of some level of protection for the island. But by and large, it was just seen to be too expensive. For decades before the storm, there was always discussion about how to adapt to the flooding. Salt cedars were planted along the dunes and along the beach to try and help with that. There occasionally were discussions about looking to the state for some funding for a seawall or some sort of barricade. But this is a tricky thing because to do that, to say we need to protect the island, acknowledge the level of risk that was there.

5:52And if you acknowledge a level of risk, you also risk investors and development and economic growth. And so to say that the island was in this dangerous situation was seen as an economic killer. And so people whispered about it, but there was not a really serious discussion about major efforts to protect the island from a hurricane. So, of course, without any protection from a hurricane, it was inevitable that one would come and it sure did. The consequences were devastating. From your research, once people realized that this was no ordinary storm, what are some of the ways they tried to ride it out?

6:31Well, unfortunately, that didn't happen until the storm was well underway in a lot of cases. People would try and go to their neighbor's homes up on higher pilings. They would go down to the business district where the buildings were also more substantial and built of brick and stone. At that point, there was really no way off the island. So you would go up to the upper floors of your house. In some situations, people used axes to cut holes in their floors and open doors so that the water would come up and perhaps anchor the house rather than sweep it off its pilings. So to the extent that it was possible, people tried to get to higher ground or more substantial buildings.

7:11About the middle of the late evening, I want to say I believe it was around 8 or 9 o 'clock, there was all of a sudden this rush of water. And looking back on it, we know that that was probably the storm surge. And the storm surge was about 15 feet. And not only did you have the actual water that was coming from the Gulf of Mexico, You had all of the debris and all of the lumber and the stuff from the houses that had been destroyed that was being pushed by this water. And that in itself caused a lot of destruction. The other thing about Galveston and its location is you not only have the Gulf on one side, but you've got Galveston Bay on the other side.

7:46So you had water that sort of met in the middle of the island that was coming both from the Gulf side, from the Gulf of Mexico, and from Galveston Bay. But like I say, we know that this probably happened in mid to late evening that night, and then the waters began to recede. Now, this disaster was late enough so that there is photo documentation of the devastation, and your book includes some of these. When you look at the photos, what would we see? You see swept landscapes. We were very fortunate in that when we did the book, we've got access to photographic sources that hadn't been used before.

8:22So there's materials from the National Archives and from the University of Texas and some other holdings around the country that people hadn't seen before. But the ones that strike me are the ones that just show all of this lumber and all of these materials stacked up and then you just see sky. You see all of this wreckage, sometimes with bodies, sometimes with items and articles that you can recognize. But mostly it's just lumber and, you know, a destroyed town that's just lying there on the beach. The photo that both Liz and I liked the most is the cover photo of the book, which we found in the National Archives.

8:56And it's a woman who's standing there at the end of this tunnel of debris. There is immense amounts of debris on either side of her, and there are a group of children at the end of this walkway. And she's carrying what looks like laundry or a bundle of something, and she's walking down this tunnel of debris toward these children. And there are a couple of structures in the background, so you can tell there is some level of built environment around. But to us, this was like the perfect storm photo. This basically conveyed what we wanted to about this book and what the book was going to talk about.

9:32Well, one of the issues of the cleanup after the storm is the task of handling the corpses. What was the effort of clearing like? This is probably one of the most awful and horrific aspects of the cleanup because there were tremendous number of deaths. The death toll that has been settled on over the years is about 6 ,000. A lot of those were on the island. Bodies were collected within all of this debris and all these areas. Initially, they decided they were going to try and take them out to sea, basically do burials at sea. And so they would load the bodies on barges, wait them, and take them out.

10:08But unfortunately, they came back on the tide. They came back up onto the island of the tide. So that wasn't going to work. The other thing that I think it's good to note is that people realized immediately the sanitation issues were terribly threatening to the health of the population. So you had to do something about it. And the decision was made that, in fact, they were going to burn the bodies. So they started these immense funeral pyres on the beach. And this had the, I don't want to say double advantage, I guess, of being a reasonable way to dispose of the corpses so that they couldn't make anyone sick, and you burned a lot of the debris that way.

10:45And so for at least a month after the storm, funeral pyres were burning on the beaches. The smell was horrific. The work of gathering the corpses and taking them to the pyres was horrific. As recovery goes on, of course, you're discovering bodies for months, and eventually morgues were set up in some of the larger warehouses and brick buildings that were more in the business district and down on the street.

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13:18So in the wake of this devastation, all the bodies, debris, just wrecked lives and businesses everywhere. How did Galveston organize its disaster response? There was no federal agency. So what did recovery look like in the first days after the hurricane? The businessmen and most of the leadership of the city survived. They formed the Central Relief Committee was the name of it, the CRC. And they immediately, you know, assigned every person a committee. And there was a public health and there was a transportation and there was power and there was getting the services back, getting the water mains going.

13:53And they did that immediately. The bridge to the mainland, because Galveston is an island, the bridge to the mainland had been destroyed. So initially, two of the CRC members got on a boat and went to the mainland and picked up a rail car, one of the kinds that you pumped, and got to Houston and told people about the storm. And at that point, ships, boats began to come to the island. They evacuated a lot of women and children. No able-bodied men were allowed to leave because they needed help with the cleanup. Eventually, martial laws declared to provide for safety of the people remaining on the island, and they put out a call to Clara Barton and the Red Cross.

14:29There is no FEMA, as we are used to seeing and hearing about with disasters now. So it was a completely private relief effort. And the people of Houston were very helpful. The people in the region were helpful. But the bulk of the effort and the help came from the Red Cross. I'm glad you mentioned Clara Barton and the Red Cross. She was head of the Red Cross and went to Galveston to organize relief. Tell us about her efforts, because she ended up being kind of a mix between a booster and then also a reporter of the facts on the ground. Clara Barton and the Red Cross were central and absolutely essential to the recovery of Galveston for a number of different reasons.

15:06It's the last disaster that she attends in person. She has a special train that is put together for her to come to Galveston. And once she's there, she is really moved by what she's seeing and what the situation is on the island. And she writes back to one of her correspondents, Her reports went national. Later on, she writes, the conditions in Galveston had not been exaggerated. Devastation is terrible, she wrote. Millions of aid needed. The need here is tenfold greater than has yet to be reported. Clara Barton, with her connections to the Red Cross, had an entire network of groups and agencies across the country.

15:59And because of her credibility, because people knew Clara Barton, did legitimate disaster relief, and there was no scam, no fraud, this was the real deal, They believed her when she said Galveston and its population needed help. And so when she put the call out for aid, it came. It came from all over the country, anywhere from 25 cents to$1 ,000 and was enormously important. Secondly, Clara Barton knew what was required for relief. She knew not only did you need food and shelter for people in the immediate aftermath, you needed to plan for the winter that was coming. You needed to plan for the school's reopening.

16:36You needed sheets and pillowcases and medicines. And she even worked with, through the Central Relief Committee, she becomes a member of the Central Relief Committee, and worked with union labor there in Galveston to create housing for the upcoming winter. And you can still see these houses in Galveston. They were called commissary houses because you got them from the Red Cross. They were very simple and relatively small. but she managed to see that enough of these were built to help with sheltering the storm survivors for that coming winter. The island received tents from the army. There was the white tent city on the beach.

17:13The other very important thing that Clara Barton does, she's got her network of support that she gives. She knows what is needed for this recovery, but she also, for the women of Galveston, modeled a woman in power and a woman with access to power. With the Central Relief Committee, there was every ward in the city. The city was organized into wards. Every ward had a male sort of head of relief for that particular ward. But Clara Barton saw that there was a woman who was also appointed, that was the sort of boots on the ground in the individual wards that distributed relief. And this is going to be very important as the island recovers.

17:48She models for them a way in which women can participate in civic life. And they do this by forming a chapter of the Women's Health Protective Association. And this was a group that had a national network. There were WHPAs all over the country. And so Galveston women form this. And the first thing they do, of course, is help with the storm recovery. They become responsible in many ways for reburying the dead. They become responsible after the building of the seawall and the grade raising for revegetating the island. They take on issues of sanitation. They get sanitation improved in dairies and butcher shops and areas like that.

18:29Of course, the only way they can do this is by lobbying their male relatives, their husbands, their brothers, their uncles, and getting those men who can vote and who are involved in politics on the island to see it their way. But what eventually happens, of course, is that a lot of these women get involved in the suffragist movement. Some of them become leaders in the Texas state suffrage movement. And so there's a really direct line between storm recovery and the evolution of women and women's roles in cities and governments. You mentioned that Clara Barton had a reputation which engendered trust in her assessment of the disaster.

19:05That got me thinking about the press coverage of this disaster at the time. It remains the largest natural disaster in American history. So how was it received throughout the country? Well, there's a couple of different ways. One, a lot of the coverage of the storm was sensationalized. There were terrible stories told about looting and vandalism and the robbing of bodies and that sort of thing. There is a whole genre of literature that comes out about the storm. The local coverage by the press is more realistic and more authentic about exactly what was going on, as you might imagine. Clarence Owsley, who is one of the leaders in Galveston, eventually publishes an antidote to all the sensationalized press in order to raise money to reopen the schools.

19:49And this, at the time, becomes the best of the accounts out there. It takes a while for people to get there. I mean, it takes a while for people to actually get on the island. You have Clara Barton writing letters and describing what she's seeing, but it takes a while for the rest of the country's press to get a grasp on exactly what's been happening. So let's stay on the ground here during the relief effort. Clara Barton and the Red Cross are operating as fast as they can. How are they distributing relief to survivors of the hurricane? So there eventually developed warehouses down in the Strand District, in the Business District, and the warehouses would distribute goods and food and other necessary items to the individual wards.

20:33And then in the wards, the daily distribution would happen for people that came seeking goods and seeking food and things that they needed for their households. And what about the challenges faced day to day by the survivors who remained on the island? How did they go about rebuilding? Immediately, of course, it was finding food. It was finding people, their own friends and family that they were looking for. Of course, it was finding housing. You could go to the Red Cross and you could apply for a commissary house. You could see if they would build you a small house. Otherwise, they rebuilt as they could.

21:05You had what were called storm houses, which people took the lumber that had been from the destroyed houses, and they rebuilt sheds and shacks and houses for themselves on a temporary basis. Eventually, the water system gets put back online, and you can get fresh water. And the other thing coming onto the island at this time period is a whole bunch of building materials. And so new houses were constructed. Houses where they could be were repaired. There was an orphanage that was set up for children that were found whose parents had been killed. And the merchants got their businesses back up and going.

21:42I guess one of the, if you can say there was a good thing about this, the major mercantile area of the island, the downtown and where the grocery stores were and the merchants were, was left relatively intact. I mean, it was flooded, but the buildings remained. They had not been destroyed. This was the Strand area, which is near the port. And so as the wharves are rebuilt, then you can get in the materials that you need. You can get food coming in. You can develop at least a semblance of what was a normal life. So Galveston is famously known, other than the hurricane, as I guess the birthplace of Juneteenth.

22:18It was the last place where the Emancipation Proclamation was delivered. And so it is a city known for its race relations. How did racial divides appear in the relief and rebuilding efforts? Unfortunately, the race relations in Galveston probably got worse after the storm. The city beforehand had a very strong and very vibrant Black community with a strong Black middle class. There was a newspaper. There were schools. There were libraries. There was a professional class. And during the storm, everybody took care of everybody. Blacks and whites stayed and took refuge in the same places. They took care of each other.

22:59They saved each other. There's a Black gentleman that swims out and recovers and saves people out in the Gulf. And so during the storm itself, race is not a particular factor. After the storm, it does become somewhat problematic in that Black community does not receive the level of help from the relief efforts that the white community did. The Black Galvestonians were allowed to come to the wards in the afternoons, at which point they were given access to what was left. The Black community protests this. And interestingly enough, Clara Barton, also in her history as working with the Red Cross, there was also a very strong network of Black Red Cross units and Black Red Cross agencies and groups around the country.

23:43And those groups sent relief directly to Black Galvestonians. and they wanted to make sure that their donations went to the Black community and the Red Cross facilitated that. Clara Barton was very concerned about the even and equal distribution of relief goods and so to her utmost she did the best she could to see that there was equity in this. Of course we're talking about a southern city and so that time and place was not as perhaps just and equal as it should have been. The interesting thing about Galveston though given the city that it had been, the Black community, developed their own parallel system of relief in many cases for their own communities.