For Sale —American Paradise (2 page)

In the summer of 1925, however, it didn't take a politician's promise to guarantee Florida's prosperity. The state was immersed in a mad, frenzied boom in real estate speculation, and money was everywhere, almost as though the ubiquitous palm trees were sprouting dollar bills instead of coconuts. The frantic land sales in Florida amounted to a boom within a boom. Americans had more discretionary income than ever before, and they were looking for places to spend it. Millions of dollars were pouring into Florida banks in a ceaseless flow from all across the United States.

So much cash had been stuffed into South Florida banks that a pack of backwoods bandits known as the Ashley Gang had, until recently, been hauling away sacks of greenbacks and vanishing into the eerie, trackless Everglades. Their spree had ended only six months earlier a few miles up the road from Vero Beach. Sheriff's deputies had killed leader John Ashley and three gang members after stopping them at the Sebastian River bridge. The deputies claimed the gang members tried to grab their concealed weapons, but tales were circulating that the cops put handcuffs on the robbers and then shot them in cold blood.

Rumor had it that John Ashley had hidden more than $110,000—about $1.5 million in twenty-first-century dollars—somewhere around the gang's hideout, and a few adventurous souls were braving the damp, deadly wilds of the Glades, looking for the loot.

It seemed likely that a dredge operator would find the treasure. Developers were boldly talking of draining the alligator-infested Everglades and building elegant, perfect cities where life would be lived as it had never been lived on this Earth. At times their plans seemed to be the fevered dreams of lunatics, but the developers really did have reason to believe that they could, in effect, sell land by the gallon. Every day, trains were bringing as many as seventy-five Pullman cars full of would-
be millionaires into Miami, where the population had exploded from about 29,000 in 1920 to 175,000 in the summer of 1925.

Thousands more were pouring into Florida on the recently opened Dixie Highway, which brought winter-
weary Midwesterners to the land of perpetual sunshine. Everybody came with wads of cash and letters of credit, and they were eager to buy land—any land anywhere, even if it was soaking wet. With all the
dredging, draining, filling, and landscaping going on, land that was under a foot of black swamp water today would be high and dry in a few weeks and selling for eight or ten times the original price.

This swarm of eager buyers was driving up land prices so fast that accountants were working as hard as the dredge operators. “It was easy to lie to a prospect in those days,” said Walter Fuller, who was making so much money selling real estate in St. Petersburg that he claimed he didn't have time to count it. “The typical prospect already had his cupidity whetted to a point his tongue was hanging out. Any old story would be accepted.”

The speculation mania had spread like a tropical fever to smaller towns such as Vero Beach, Sarasota, Fort Myers, Stuart, and throughout the state. Men of great wealth and vision—the kind of men that Americans loved to idolize in the 1920s—were buying great chunks of land in Florida and promising spectacular things—an end to poverty, plenty of work for everybody, a long and healthful life in the sun, and permanent wealth for anyone willing to invest a few bucks for a plot of land.

Famed Hearst Newspapers columnist Arthur Brisbane—whose nationally syndicated “Today” column was read by millions daily—had visited Stuart three times in less than a year, and local business boosters were fervently hoping he would buy land there.

Jesse Livermore, the legendary stock market manipulator and peerless profiteer, was interested in Stuart, and everyone knew a man like Livermore wouldn't buy anything unless he was dead certain it would soon be worth many, many times more than he paid for it.

In neighboring Palm Beach County, architect Addison Mizner and his madcap brother Wilson were selling $2 million worth of property every week in Boca Raton. Publicly, Addison touted his development as a city with “every atom of beauty that human ingenuity can add to a land endowed by nature,” and his inspired vision for the city had buyers waiting in line to purchase his beautiful Spanish Mediterranean homes.

But the rowdy roaring vortex of the speculation madness was in Miami, where even William Jennings Bryan, the Bible-
thumping, teetotaling advocate for the rights of the common man, was caught up in the mania. He'd moved from Nebraska to Miami in 1912, and he loved pontificating about the wonders of his adopted state. Miami developer George Merrick was paying Bryan $100,000 a year in cash and property—more than President Calvin Coolidge or even baseball superstar Babe Ruth was earning—to tell people what a wonderful place Coral Gables was.

At Coral Gables, Bryan looked out at hundreds of eager fortune seekers gathered around the beautiful Venetian Pool to hear him speak. They came from all over the United States, lured by countless stories in newspapers about ordinary people who'd come to Florida, made modest investments in real estate, and quickly resold their property for staggering profits.

Highly respected mass-circulation magazines such as the
Saturday Evening Post
, the
New Yorker
,
Harper's
, and
Literary Digest
also were publishing stories about Florida in nearly every issue.

The lure of quick, easy riches was bringing thousands of newcomers into Florida every day, and Menninger and Bryan, among others, were doing their part to fuel the expectations of instant wealth.

As incredible as Bryan's claims seemed, there was a grain of truth to them. In the summer of 1925, sales of property in Coral Gables were averaging $4 million a month—more than $53 million in today's dollars—and when Merrick started selling lots in the new Sylvania Heights section of Coral Gables, he raked in an astonishing $21 million in a single business day.

Bryan believed that Florida had a limitless future, and he professed this faith with the same zealous certainty he attached to his belief in the literal truth of the Bible's scriptures. His appearance in Vero Beach was another opportunity for him to preach the gospel of Florida prosperity. Crowds were as important to him as home cooking—perhaps more so, because William Jennings Bryan had a compulsive need to be the center of attention. “I never see a crowd of people that I do not wish to address them,” he'd once said.

But Bryan gave something back to his listeners in return for their attention. Somehow, he could connect at a primal level with his audience, sensing their fears and confusions, their frustrations, dreams, hopes, and joys. He absorbed and synthesized this inarticulate mass of human emotions and returned it to his listeners in the form of beautiful, flowing oration that ennobled their dreary lives of struggle and toil. His great, mystical gift was the ability to make ordinary people who lived ordinary lives in insignificant places—wheat farmers in Kansas, silver miners in Nevada, tobacco farmers in Virginia, mill hands in North Carolina—feel important, dignified, and hopeful.

He'd been doing it since 1896, when he had stepped up to the podium at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and delivered a speech that turned a debate on the merits of a silver-backed monetary system versus one backed by gold into a stunning, stirring, impassioned hymn to the common man. When he finished, the twenty thousand delegates didn't simply applaud—they nearly started a riot. The cheering “came like a burst of artillery,” one reporter wrote. They were “demented,” another journalist observed, tearing off their coats and vests and flinging them into the air.

The speech propelled Bryan, at the age of just thirty-
six, to the Democrats' nomination for president of the United States. He became the standard-bearer not only for his party's political hopes, but also for a way of life and a system of beliefs. He became the champion for millions of Americans who fervently believed in a simple, moral universe ruled by an omnipotent Christian God that unfailingly rewarded good and punished evil. He also fought loudly and diligently for the rights of the underprivileged, and in the process he became known as “The Great Commoner.”

But Bryan failed three times in his quest for the White House. After a brief stint as secretary of state under President Woodrow Wilson, Bryan returned to his beautiful Mediterranean-style home in Miami and busied himself with speaking engagements and real estate investments. The urge to make the world a better place and the lust for political power still burned fiercely within him, however. A few years earlier Bryan had toured Florida, campaigning to become a state delegate to the 1924 Democratic National Convention. But the canny old political warhorse also had seriously contemplated a run for one of Florida's seats in the US Senate, and he was sizing up the way the state's voters responded to him. When Arthur Brisbane and his boss, William Randolph Hearst, visited Bryan in Miami in February 1924, Brisbane reported in “Today” that Bryan's political ambitions were stirring again. “It will please all to know that Mr. Bryan has the old fire in his eye,” Brisbane wrote. “He can smell the battle afar off.”

By the summer of 1925, Bryan had maneuvered himself into the unusual position of exerting great influence within two groups in Florida, with dramatically different values and agendas. Although Bryan lived among relentless sinners in Miami, he was a leader among staunch social conservatives who were determined to impose dramatic restrictions on Americans' thoughts and behaviors. Bryan had worked for passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which forbade the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, and he had been a driving force behind an effort to forbid the teaching of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in public schools.

But while Bryan was a puritan, he had no qualms about helping Florida businessmen grab as much cash as they could from the ever-
growing hordes flocking to the state to escape annoying restrictions—Prohibition, income taxes, speed limits—and frolic in a land of tropical excesses. He was happy to stand before these throngs of scofflaw hedonists and tell them they'd truly found Paradise.

So as Bryan stepped up to the railing at Vero Beach and prepared to address the audience, he wasn't talking to a group of celebrants. He was talking to thousands of potential voters. And for the first time in Bryan's career, about half of those voters were women. The Nineteenth Amendment had given women the right to vote in 1920, and they had cast their first ballots in a presidential election in 1924.

But the younger women in the Vero Beach crowd were a different creature from the women of Bryan's Victorian youth. Many had their hair clipped very short and peered at Bryan from beneath the tiny brims of tightly fitting cloche hats pulled down almost to their eyebrows. The dresses they wore—thin, revealing, with hemlines at the knee—had horrified Albert A. Murphree, president of the University of Florida and a friend of Bryan's. Murphree was convinced that such dresses were “born of the Devil and his angels, and are carrying the present and future generations to chaos and destruction.”

To make matters worse—at least from Murphree's standpoint—the modern woman wore makeup, and lots of it. When Murphree had been a young man in the nineteenth and early-
twentieth centuries, makeup had been used only by prostitutes and actresses.

In the mid-1920s, however, the fashion dictated a stark contrast between dark eye makeup, dark lipstick, and very pale skin. Two factors influenced this look—the discovery of the tomb of the ancient Egyptian king Tutankhamun in 1922, and the growing influence of the Hollywood film industry.

Young women fascinated with the look of ancient Egypt laid on dark eye shadow and eyeliner. And they carefully applied lipstick to create the “Cupid's lips” outline brought to the silver screen by actress Clara Bow.

Some of the women even dared to light up cigarettes and apply their makeup in public. And they talked of getting drunk—referred to as “blotto”—and kissing lots of men.

They were the epitome of the “flapper” look that had swept the country. The word may have originated as a slang term for English prostitutes, and it greatly annoyed T. Drew Branch, a member of the Florida state legislature who hailed from, of all places, Liberty County. Branch said that calling a woman by this name “offended the dignity” of the people of Florida. He had recently introduced a bill in Tallahassee that would make it illegal for newspapers or magazines to refer to any woman in the great state of Florida as a flapper. The proposal was defeated.

Many younger men in the crowd were sporting the “Palm Beach” look, which consisted of a sports jacket worn with knickerbockers, known as “plus fours”—because they ended four inches below the knee—and knee socks. The ensemble was topped with a round, flat-
brimmed straw hat called a “boater.” It was a look that was especially popular among real estate salesmen.

As the men listened to earlier speakers and awaited Bryan's speech, they did as men have done for as long as they've worn slacks—they dug their hands into their pants pockets and jingled their loose change. But the coins they fingered on that day in 1925 were quite different from those of today. There were fewer coins with presidents, for starters—no Jefferson nickel or Roosevelt dime or Washington quarter. Lincoln was on the penny, but he'd only been there since 1910, so there were still lots of pennies with the profile of an Indian chief on them.