The tropical depression was less than two days old when it became a Category 5 hurricane, one of only two instances when a storm that severe has struck the United States. By the time it found the Florida Keys on Labor Day, 1935, it was a monstrous combination of two hundred mile-per-hour winds and hammering rain whipping around a tight eight-mile-wide eye. It remains the most powerful hurricane ever recorded.[1]
Among those in the storm's path was a sizeable group of World War I veterans employed under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, a New Deal work relief program. Encamped on Windley, Upper Matecumbe, and Lower Matecumbe Keys, they were building the Overseas Highway, a road following the route of the railroad that connected the Keys to the mainland. As the storm took only forty-eight hours to develop, authorities struggled with paperwork and fought the clock to put together a rescue train for the veterans and residents. By the time a locomotive arrived at Islamorada, the storm surge was already thundering up from the sea, shoving a wall of water twenty feet high across landmasses that were barely above sea level. The train, except for the engine, was heaved a hundred yards from the tracks. More than two hundred fifty veterans and almost two hundred residents simply disappeared into the raging sea.
Seeking both to embarrass the Roosevelt Administration for its putative negligence and to portray the failed rescue as simply another manifestation of heartless capitalism, editors of the New Masses, a Communist weekly in New York, invited Ernest Hemingway to write an exposé of the event. The result was a blistering article entitled “Who Murdered the Vets?” in which Hemingway accused the wealthy of insensitivity and the government of inexcusable ignorance. “You're dead now, brother,” he lamented while asking, “but who left you there in the hurricane months on the Keys where a thousand men died before you in the hurricane months when they were building the road that's now washed out?”[2] Hemingway would later incorporate his contempt for wealthy tourists and unfeeling bureaucrats in his fiction, using it as a central incident in the Harry Morgan story “The Tradesman’s Return,” which became the second part of his Key West novel To Have and Have Not.[3]
By the time of these events, Hemingway had known Key West for seven years and had become a sometime resident. Fearful he was losing touch with America and to oblige his second wife’s desire to have their first child born in the country, he returned to the United States by way of Havana in 1928, stopping at Key West on the advice of John Dos Passos. The deep-sea fishing enchanted him and soon became his newest and as it happened most enduring passion. He took to some of the residents as well, most notably Charles Thompson, who would accompany him on his African safari in 1934. In the years to come, Hemingway summoned friends, a group he dubbed the “Mob”, from other parts of the country for Caribbean revelries. He also observed personalities to use in his fiction, strewing real people through stories with little attempt to disguise them.
By the spring of 1931, he was settling into an eighty-year-old Spanish colonial house on Whitehead Street and was developing a near obsession for marlin hunting. He commissioned a New York boatyard to build a 38-ft. motor yacht and cruised it down in the spring of 1935 from Miami. He named her Pilar, an early nickname for his wife, Pauline, and spent many happy days fishing for marlin. He was inclined to take the boat out in all weathers, in part for the bracing effect of cruising in a blow and in part because he was thus able to flee his marriage, which was deteriorating, The troubles with wealthy Pauline Pfeiffer had been quick in coming, beginning with Hemingway’s belated but nagging guilt over their affair, conducted as an unorthodox courtship, that broke up his marriage to Hadley Richardson. Pauline had wanted to have their first child born in the United States, hence their return to the country in 1928, but she expected to return to Paris afterward, not take up residence in Key West. Tensions between the two were already evident by 1931, but her pregnancy in that year and the birth of their second child did not so much bring matters to a breaking point as they led to a gradual estrangement. Pauline’s pathetic attempts to counteract Hemingway’s disaffection included major exertions such as trying to be an avid sportswoman and small, sad gestures such as dyeing her hair blonde. She also dieted, met his dark moods with strained cheerfulness, and dangled her family’s money before him. It was all to no avail, though, and Martha Gellhorn’s entrance into Hemingway’s life in December 1936 more accelerated than caused the dissolution of a marriage already in trouble. It ended in divorce in 1939. [4]
Unike Hemingway's marriage, Key West was beginning to thrive. The decaying village Hemingway found so quaintly charming in 1928 had suffered terribly in the Depression. By 1934, unemployment among its dwindling population of 12,000 was rife and the few businesses that had been the mainstay of the island's economy were shut down. Even its Navy base was all but abandoned. The city found itself in receivership, and only the state government’s persuading the New Deal to come to the rescue saved it. Under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), bureaucrat Julius F. Stone Jr. initiated a work relief project with the aim of promoting tourism. For a village virtually devoid of modern conveniences -- Hemingway was among the few residents who had an indoor bathroom -- it was an ambitious undertaking. Modernizing Key West’s infrastructure was only one of the program’s goals. A tourist pamphlet hoped to lure Havana-bound tourists to linger in Key West by poignantly listing thirty-four attractions; Hemingway's home was number eighteen. Although he joked about not being higher on the list, these changes bothered him. He complained about tourists intruding on his privacy. He did not focus his resentment exclusively on FERA. Key West had become a village of “freeloaders,” he railed, who were on the dole. The place had become a “FERA Jew administered phony of a town.” He told Arnold Gingrich that he preferred Spain, or its close approximation in Cuba.[5] In fact, Hemingway began to spend more time in Cuba.
He was at home on Whitehead Street, however, in September 1935 when a storm warning was posted for the Keys. The Saturday before Labor Day, he saw in his evening paper that a tropical disturbance was brewing near the Bahamas and was possibly headed for Key West. Later Hemingway described his activities: consulting a storm chart that plotted the course of forty September hurricanes for the past thirty-five years, he calculated the earliest approximate time this storm would arrive in the Keys was noon on Monday. He spent Sunday tending to Pilar, docked at the submarine base, where he tried to get her hauled out, but there was a queue. He bought a length of heavy hawser for $52 (more money than one of the vets made in a month) and moved her to a safer place in the harbor. He turned his attention on Monday to the house on Whitehead Street, nailing its shutters and clearing the porches and gardens of loose items. Others were doing the same as the barometer fell and hurricane flags snapped in the freshening wind. As night fell and the wind howled and torrential rain fell, Hemingway returned to Pilar and complained about a “booze boat” the Coast Guard had captured and docked next to his. He was sure that the boat’s stern ringbolts would rip out in the wind and send it crashing into Pilar.[6] He returned home for a couple hours of sleep, a barometer and flashlight next to his bed, and awakened at midnight sensing that the storm was as its peak. He tried to drive back to the Navy Yard but the rain drowned his car engine, requiring him to walk several blocks in a howling gale with branches crashing around him. His flashlight winked out, and he trudged in the dark to watch over Pilar, fearful they he would lose her and would “never get enough money to get another.”[7]
Despite its seeming fury, the hurricane had actually missed Key West. Instead, the people on Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys were under the real whip of the storm. By the time Hemingway had returned to his boat, these islands had already suffered the monstrous storm surge that pushed over the rescue train and swept away its hundreds of victims. Down in Key West, Hemingway at 2:00 a.m. reckoned that the wind had shifted, indicating the storm had done its worst. Pilar had been spared, and the house on Whitehead Street was unscathed, except for a large sapodilla tree pushed down in the front yard.
On Wednesday, as the hurricane headed northwest, Hemingway accompanied two Key West natives “Bra” Saunders and “Sully” Sullivan north in rough seas to survey the damage and deliver aid.[8] What they found was unnerving. Arriving at Lower Matecumbe Key, they saw bodies floating in a ferry slip and began counting the corpses as they surveyed the blasted landscape. Hemingway wrote to Max Perkins that it resembled “the abandoned bed of a river.” He also drew some conclusions about who was responsible for the great loss of life. “The veterans in those camps were practically murdered,” he said, adding that “the people in charge of the veterans and the weather bureau can split the responsibility between them.”[9]
This rash charge of “murder” would remain a private one, for Hemingway would rely on the more ambiguous term “manslaughter” when he framed his thoughts for public consumption. Yet his indictment of the Weather Bureau was unfair. Seven years earlier, a hurricane had hit Lake Okeechobee and killed almost 2,000 people. Many blamed that high toll on the lack of timely warnings from the Weather Bureau, and forecasters became much more alert. That the Labor Day Hurricane moved through this increased vigilance undetected is therefore a tribute to its stealth and speed, not a reason to condemn the Weather Bureau. The problem in 1935 was -- as it was in 1928 and remains to some extent to this day -- the inability to gather large amounts of coherent and reliable information. As if by cunning deception, the 1935 storm took shape in a gap between reporting stations at Nassau and Cuba and by virtue of its small size avoided other stations as it flew toward the Keys. Although during hurricane season, ships at sea reported at least four times a day, no ships reported this weather. As late as Monday, meteorologists in Jacksonville remained under the impression that the storm was at most a borderline tropical depression tending to weak hurricane strength. In short, forecasters worked under the burdens of insufficient information and at best a marginal understanding of how upper atmospheric currents could rapidly escalate the power of a storm and shove it in unexpected directions.[10]
Yet Hemingway’s sentiment that somebody was to blame for what happened to the veterans sadly was not unique. Eventually a diverse assemblage of critics that included the Veterans of Foreign Wars, members of Congress, as well as activists on the far Left began asking disturbing questions. Although the questions similarly sought to fasten blame for the calamity on human agencies, the motives were clearly different. The VFW was obviously representing its constituency, especially the pathetic remnants of the 1932 Bonus Marchers who found themselves in the Keys in 1935. Almost every writer has depicted these poor souls as hapless casualties whose afflictions were long and unrelenting, stretching back to the horrors of the Argonne. When the Depression threw veterans out of work, they had sought to collect a bonus promised by the government in 1924, despite the fact that the bonus was not actually due until 1945.[11] By 1932, thousands of veterans, many with their families, were encamped in shabby tarpaper shacks erected on Anacostia Flats in Washington, D.C. An increasingly tense confrontation with the authorities finally ended with the government applying unseemly force that seemed to point to everything that was wrong with Herbert Hoover’s approach to the economic crisis. American soldiers breaking up the veterans’ camp with teargas was a public relations disaster that helped elect Franklin Roosevelt. New Deal promises lured the most hopeless of the 1932 Bonus Marchers back to Washington about the time of Roosevelt’s inauguration, their goal the same as the earlier, larger group. They discovered, however, that Franklin Roosevelt was no more agreeable to an early payment of the bonus than Herbert Hoover had been. Roosevelt, however, did not intend to make the same political blunder as his predecessor in removing the potentially unruly veterans from Washington. Rather than resorting to bayonets and teargas, Roosevelt resorted to federal relief. On 11 May 1933, he signed Executive Order 6129 that removed all age and marital restrictions from service in the Civilian Conservation Corps and allowed for Spanish-American and World War veterans to participate separately in the program. The veterans were sent to work relief projects in Florida to repair Fort Jefferson on Dry Tortugas and to labor on the formidable construction project of the Overseas Highway to Key West, a road following the line of Henry Flagler’s old East Coast Railway.[12]
The prospect of increased tourism in heretofore-isolated Key West upset Hemingway, and he dismissed the Federal Emergency Relief Association’s work in the town itself as glorified Rotarianism. He watched with growing annoyance the approach of the Overseas Highway that would facilitate transit to and from his remote island haven. He drank with the men building the road in the saloons of Key West, but his treatment of them in the third Harry Morgan story of To Have and Have Not is hardly sympathetic. To Hemingway, they were human detritus.[13]
Hemingway was always ambivalent about the New Deal and the Progressive roots that had nourished it, and the disaster that befell the veterans was for him symptomatic of the inadequacies of well-intentioned but misguided liberalism. In the act of rejecting almost everything of his Oak Park, Illinois, childhood, he apparently also rejected its intrinsic Republicanism that had been leavened with healthy doses of Progressivism.[14] Progressivism saw all social problems as eminently correctable. Progressives, in fact, sought to improve the dreamy optimism of 19th century romantics by adopting the surety of science in resolving social problems. A fetish for experts invigorated Progressivism as it took on everything from prohibition to urban renewal to family planning. Yet, Leftists regarded Progressivism as neither sufficiently scientific nor suitably ruthless in its commitment to social improvement, and they increasingly dismissed Progressives as wistful utopians. The years after the First World War accelerated this disenchantment, and writers such as Lincoln Steffens and Max Eastman actually condemned Progressivism as an opiate no less objectionable than religion, in that it papered over the worst excesses of capitalism while leaving uncorrected its most insidious abuses. Intellectuals’ leftward drift toward doctrinaire socialism and communism in the Twenties and Thirties was a consequence of such thinking.
Hemingway became part of the trend, if only in an osmotic way, for he was remarkably indifferent to politics, which he little understood. Yet in the 1930s, his political indifference gave way to a strange enthusiasm for Leftist causes. Why this happened is hard to say. Hemingway moved in circles that a later generation would describe as dazzled by the allure of radical chic. In the course of Hemingway's associations, his political awareness became more extensive if not more mature.[15] He might have voted for Socialist Eugene Debs in 1932.[16] By 1935, he was openly flirting with Communism and was convinced that only it could resist the Fascist menace. The Left had long criticized him for not addressing pressing social concerns in his fiction -- reviews in New Masses had been especially biting -- but during the 1930s he worked hard to remedy the political deficiency. As a self-ordained Writer for the People, wielding his pen with a vengeful if not always coherent conscience, he became a popular figure with intellectuals on the Left.[17] Beginning in the year of the hurricane, he commenced a four-year political odyssey that saw him traveling to war-torn Spain as a fervent apologist for the so-called Republicans and their Soviet sponsors. He wrote a play, The Fifth Column, emphasizing the nobility of the Communist cause in the Spanish Civil War, addressed a Communist-backed Writers Congress in New York with an embarrassingly servile tribute to the decency of the Spanish Left, and wrote the script for the propaganda film The Spanish Earth, replacing Orson Welles as its narrator for the final print. Before all this, though, he wrote the brief article about the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935.
The standard account of how Hemingway came to the task is that Joseph North, an editor for the Communist weekly New Masses based in New York City, invited Hemingway to write the article because North had seen an advance copy of Green Hills of Africa in which Hemingway disparaged the New Deal.[18] In any case, Hemingway quickly wrote an essay about the hurricane that he titled “Panic.” It appeared in the 17 September 1935 issue. The editors were apparently responsible for changing Hemingway’s title to the provocative “Who Murdered the Vets?” but he did not complain.[19]
Hemingway indulged an egocentric habit characteristic of all of his writing by taking nearly one-third of the essay to describe his preparations for the storm and his actions during it.[20] Although he opened with a paragraph that denounced as despicable the preoccupation of the wealthy with property over people, Hemingway did not talk about people as he detailed his own response to the approaching hurricane. Instead and interestingly, he talked about property, specifically his property. He took pains to protect Pilar and his house but took no interest in any people. Even after he got around to talking about the hurricane’s victims, he was selective in doing so, dismissing the fate of residents because “they were on the Keys of their own free will.”[21] Abruptly ending his extended description of how the hurricane had affected him, he launched into what the editors at New Masses wanted, a lurid description of the victimization of the veterans by the callously cynical political establishment. The last two-thirds of the essay became a stunning and rambling indictment of the government that first coiled and then released a great surge of invective in a stream of raging bitterness. In addition to rebuking the government, the diatribe ranged to find other targets of opportunity. He denounced a writer who had been in Miami “to see a hurricane because you needed it in your next novel,” railing that he “would like to lead you by the seat of your well-worn-by-writing-into-the-literary-columns pants” to the mangroves on Lower Matecumbe Key to see a couple of women dead and bloated. “And you could make a note of it for your next novel,” he continued, “and how is your next novel coming, brother writer, comrade shit?” [22]
It is too easy to dismiss this article as merely Communist agitprop, the product of someone haplessly falling into the role of a “useful idiot” for manipulative Communist agitators. Perhaps because of that, some have seen the article as a literary embarrassment. To be sure, at the time it quickened pulses and prompted peculiar praise from the Left.[23] Others have been simply bewildered. “The acknowledged master of controlled prose,” wrote one admiring biographer, “for once . . . completely dropped his literary guard.”[24] In truth, the article was likely a first and only draft, submitted to a magazine more interested in printing provocative propaganda than carefully framed prose. Some observers have offered the charitable assessment that Hemingway was so moved by the terrible devastation and death that he tried to convey that anguish.[25] One has the sensation, however, that Hemingway was drunk when he wrote “Who Murdered the Vets?” Although most biographers agree that he had not yet begun to mix work and alcohol as a routine, drinking -- and drinking a great deal -- was already his daily custom.
As social commentary, Hemingway’s sophomoric and reckless description of ugly motives and unwitting criminality in the Labor Day tragedy was both immature and irresponsible. Those in charge of the veterans were not callous, they were cautious, ever the mark of prudent bureaucrats. After underestimating the danger for too long, they were too late in summoning the only means of evacuation, the ill fated train. It was Labor Day, and meeting such an extraordinary request took longer than the extra time it would have taken in any case. The train was late, and many people perished. The men who coped with this tragic series of events described them as an “act of God,” but many criticized them for contriving a self-serving rationale to conceal their own neglect. [26]
Compassion requires a careful assessment of the unfortunate veterans, for the fate awaiting them in the Florida Keys amounted to a tragedy worthy of Aeschylus. These people, seeming fit only for charitable work relief, had truly reached the end of the road, ironically the one they happened to be building. They were frequently drunk and disorderly, alarming residents and squandering paychecks on booze and worse. Hemingway in To Have and Have Not depicted them as a raucous bunch of moochers panhandling for drinks at Sloppy Joe's and knocking each other about, fight-club fashion. They were federal relief workers because there was no other place for them to fit, just as they were in Florida because there was no other place for them to go. It is unfair to say, as Hemingway did, that they were in Florida because nobody cared about them. The United States govenrment sent the veterans to Florida in part to avoid the potential for political embarrassment, but that it had through ignorance, neglect, or willful inaction left them there to die was a rash and malicious charge. Hemingway railed that “the clearing of Ancostia Flats is going to seem an act of kindness compared to the clearing of Upper and Lower Matecumbe.”[27]
People made colossal mistakes in this awful episode, a fact clearly revealed in hindsight. The presumed intrigues of cynical bureacrats, however, were inventions. A considered response, rather than a reflexive one, would have made that plain, and from his writing, we know that Hemingway was capable of such subtlety. His powerful and occasionally profound fiction centered on sad characters striving to do right but almost always failing. Oddly, he could forgive failings in his characters that he could not forgive in his wives, his friends, his country, or finally on the bleak road that ultimately led to that Sunday morning in Ketchum, himself. Mixed with this paradox was the contradiction of Hemingway’s life during the 1930s, difficult years that saw the world struggling with economic crises and lurching toward global war. Though he saw himself as a "man of the people," Hemingway thoughtlessly belittled the difficulties the Depression visited on his neighbors. He sneered at other people's materialism while he ran with the idle rich and enjoyed costly pleasures. He fretted about his boat the night of the hurricane, not the living victims whose fate hung in its lethal wind. While such contradictions informed his best work, they also stalked the darker hours of his life, doing so quite relentlessly in this event. With the ghosts of the hurricane's victims fresh in his mind, he could have written something memorable to memorialize them all, but he failed. Perhaps he failed because of the beckoning allure of causes he was romanticizing and comrades he was intent upon misjudging. In time, he would grow disillusioned with both, a fact revealed in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Before the seeds of that disillusionment germinated, though, there was the toxic, desolate ground of his 1935 article for a small Communist weekly that cared for victims only as symbols and was eager to raise a violent, leveling wind of its own.
[1] The most detailed narrative of the Labor Day Hurricane is Willie Drye, Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2002).
[2] Ernest Hemingway, “Who Murdered the Vets? (A First-hand Report on the Florida Hurricane)”, New Masses, 17 September 1935, pp. 9-10. The essay is reprinted in New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties, edited with a Prologue by Joseph North, Introduction by Maxwell Geismar (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 181-187. Hereafter cited as WMV. Page numbers in this paper refer to the reprint, and the quotation above appears on p. 187.
[3] Ernest Hemingway, “The Tradesman’s Return,” Esquire (February 1936): pp. 27, 193-96; Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not (New York: Scribner Trade Paperback Edition, 2003), pp. 67-87.
[4] Hemingway’s biographers—including principally Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969); Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1985); Michael Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (New York: Oxford, 1986) and Hemingway: The 1930s (New York: Norton, 1997)—all chronicle the course of the marriage in similar fashion, though Reynolds maintains that the Hemingways were happy for several years beyond the time when most observers saw a noticeable decline in Hemingway’s affection for Pauline.
[5] James McLendon, Papa: Hemingway in Key West (Miami: FL: Seeman Publishing, Inc., 1972), p. 17; Lynn, Hemingway, p. 419; Hemingway to Arnold Gingrinch, 15 July 1935, Carlos Baker, ed., Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961 (New York: Macmillan, 1989), p. 410.
[6] The booze boat likely is the inspiration for Harry Morgan’s captured vessel in “The Tradesman's Return.”
[7] WMV, p. 183.
[8] Carlos Baker says that Hemingway paid Saunders to take him and Sullivan to the scene of devastation and that the seas were “still heavy.” See Baker, Hemingway, p. 279. Michael Reynolds, however, says that the sea was “calm, almost smooth in the light breeze.” See Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s, p. 209.
[9] Hemingway to Perkins, 7 Sept 1935, Baker, Selected Letters, 421.
[10] Dr. Bob Shields and Jack Williams, Hurricane Watch: Forecasting the Deadliest Storms on Earth (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 85-89.
[11] The story of the bonus for World War I veterans is a complicated one. It primarily resulted from the sense that veterans in general were entitled to adjusted compensation similar to that for wounded veterans secured by the American Legion and administered by the Federal Veterans Bureau. Intense lobbying efforts brought about the Bonus Bill that would award $1 for each day of domestic service and $1.25 for each day of service abroad. After years of debate, Congress passed the Adjustment Act in 1924. Congress overrode Calvin Coolidge’s veto, and the plan was put into effect. Any payment over $50 was issued as life insurance certificates that accrued compound interest, underwent adjustments, and were due for lump sum payout in 1945. Some fifteen thousand Bonus Marchers wanted this money in 1932 and a smaller number, remnants of the original “Bonus Expeditionary Force,” appeared in Washington in 1933 with the same demand. On 24 January 1936, Congress authorized, over Roosevelt’s veto, the immediate redemption of the Bonus Certificates, a direct result of the reaction to the Labor Day catastrophe the previous September.
[12] Jennifer T. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) provides an evocative description of these events.
[13] See, for example, Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, pp. 200-208.
[14] In 1904, Oak Park had voted overwhelmingly for Theodore Roosevelt, the most celebrated standard bearer of Progressivism, and had parted ways with the Republican Party in 1912 for Roosevelt's progressive Bull Moose ticket.
[15] While covering international conferences in the 1920s, Hemingway met ideologues as well as fellow journalists. Carlos Baker recounts the influence on Hemingway of the South African William Bolitho Ryall, whose analyses were framed in such terms as “the malady of power,” an association that Baker claims began Hemingway’s political education in international affairs. See Baker, Hemingway, p. 102.
[16] Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 156. Michael Reynolds does not necessarily dispute this, but does remark that if Hemingway voted in the 1932 election, he never mentioned it. See Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s, p. 103.
[17] Lynn, Hemingway, 449. Michael Reynolds, however, persistently takes Hemingway at his word about being apolitical during the period. See Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s, pp. 98, 164, 261. He does note, though, that New Masses along with other Left wing publications lavished unstinting praise on To Have and Have Not. See p. 281.
[18] Lynn, Hemingway, p. 454.
[19] Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s, p. 211.
[20] Some of the essay is foreshadowed in a letter to Max Perkins that Hemingway wrote shortly after visiting Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys the Wednesday after Labor day. See Hemingway to Perkins, 7 September 1935, Baker, Selected Letters, pp. 421-24.
[21] WMV, 183.
[22] Ibid., 185
[23] Baker, Hemingway, p. 280. “Would Hemingway write better books if he wrote on different themes?” Granville Hicks mused in 1936, concluding that “‘Who Murdered the Vets?’ suggests he would.” Quoted in Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s, p. 230.
[24] McLendon, Hemingway in Key West, p. 137.
[25] Michael Reynolds says Hemingway was not politically motivated to write the article “but his anger [over the tragedy] got the better of his judgment.” See Hemingway:The 1930s, p. 211.
[26] “During the war,” he wrote, “troops and sometimes individual soldiers who incurred the displeasure of their superior officers, were sometimes sent into positions of extreme danger and kept there repeatedly until they were no longer problems.” After leveling this appalling charge at officers in the First World War, he disingenuously concluded that he did “not believe anyone, knowingly, would send U.S. war veterans into any such position in time of peace” but added that “ignorance has never been accepted as an excuse for murder or manslaughter.” See WMV, p. 184. The observations are typical of the strange and contrived technique of explication in the essay. If he did not believe that the veterans were deliberately placed in harm’s way, he should not have planted the seed by implication that they might have been.
[27] Ibid., 184.