A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes

While the people who forecast hurricanes have tended to be male, White, and highly educated, they do not typically belong to the demographic that is most affected by hurricane damage. Instead, hurricanes tend to destroy the lives of poor and non-White populations, who are less financially-equipped to protect themselves through evacuation or reinforcing their homes. Whereas for the privileged the hurricane could be a costly inconvenience, for the poor and unprotected it is more often the source that dispenses with their lives and livelihoods. Hemingway encapsulates the sad spectacle of already disadvantaged people becoming victims of a hurricane when he describes the corpses of shell-shocked and Depression-struck war veterans who were not sufficiently protected from the 1935 hurricane in the Florida Keys. He writes how the victims’ water-logged bodies “were beginning to be too big for their blue jeans and jackets that they could never fill when they were on the bum and hungry” (149). Here, these men who were underweight due to poverty perversely become the reverse when their drowned bodies swell from rising water-levels in the hurricane.

While Hemingway capitalized on Americans’ sentimentality for neglected war heroes in his article “Who Killed the Vets?”, the suffering that Black populations underwent during hurricanes remained largely undocumented and unacknowledged. The divisions of the Jim Crow laws of 1876-1965, which caused widespread segregation in the southern states and made Black Americans second-class citizens, were exacerbated in the aftermath of hurricanes. Black Americans were often forced at gunpoint to clear up dead bodies, while their own dead were anonymously piled into mass graves. Often recognition did not arrive until a much later date: For example, Black hurricane victims of a 1928 Floridian hurricane who were buried in a mass grave were not commemorated until 2001. Even after the Jim Crow era, Black Americans have tended to fare worse during hurricanes. This was evidenced in the disproportionate suffering faced by Black communities in the wake of Hurricane Katrina of 2005. Some, including the Hollywood actor Colin Farrell and the sociology professor Michael Eric Dyson, thought that racism was a key factor in the federal government’s slow and inadequate response to the hurricane. While Dolin sides with Barack Obama, who stated that the “man-made disaster” of the government’s response to Katrina was a result of “color-blind” ineptitude rather than racism, the accounts in his book suggests that the White authorities are at several removes from the lived experience of African Americans in hurricane zones (273).

While Dolin’s book does not show how women in particular are affected by hurricanes, it touches on the sexism of male weather forecasters’ predilections for feminizing hurricanes. To these men, hurricanes were as curvy, mesmerizing, and destructive as the femme fatales of popular culture. This trend was led by turn-of-the-20th-century English forecaster Clement Lindley Wragge who named storms after Tahitian girls, thereby taking the White male perspective that storms were an exotic Other. There was also the American novelist George Rippey Stewart, who compared storms to the women he had dated. In 1953, following Wragge and Stewart’s lead, the Weather Bureau started naming hurricanes after women. They also used the tropes like “bad girls” and “slut,” which were commonly associated with promiscuous women, to describe the hurricanes (209). In addition to gaining publicity around the controversy of these named storms, this was arguably a way for the men in the Weather Bureau to maintain an illusion of control over the unknowable and uncontrollable feminized Other that was the hurricane. It was also a vent for male insecurity regarding gender roles at a time when women were demanding more freedoms. Florida feminist Roxcy Bolton thought that naming storms after women was a destructive tendency, and she voiced the experience of many when she said that “women are human beings and deeply resent being arbitrarily associated with disaster” (209). While the practice of naming hurricanes continues as a means of generating publicity and demarcating the individuality of each storm, the current practice of alternate gender naming works against the trend of disproportionately associating disaster with women.