Last Train to Paradise (17 page)

22

Rolling On

One magazine writer of the day suggested that the completion of the railroad would mean the end of life as it had been known in the Keys:

And now their strange inhabitants, their white and shimmering silences broken only by the cries of gulls and the long roll of blue waves breaking on coral rock are to know the shriek of the locomotive and the roar of the passing trains. . . .

The novelists will have to move over to the West Indian islands or across the Caribbean to find homes for their smugglers, absconding cashiers, and the lone lovely daughter of the irascible, civilization-hating hermit. The whistle of the locomotive will be heard in the land and another queer corner of the earth will be put on the civilized map.

A dire prophecy indeed. But while the railroad did affect life in the Keys, it was not in the cosmic fashion suggested. That “queer corner of the earth” proved too tough, for one thing; and, for another, economics proved to be a science nearly as difficult to forecast as hurricanes.

Historians have made much of the fact that Flagler did not live to see the downturn in the fortunes of his Key West Extension, but that view seems to give the man little credit. Flagler was one of the cofounders of the most successful corporation in the world, after all, and was certainly savvy enough to know that despite all his stiff-upper-lip talk about controlling shipping traffic on the eastern seaboard and opening up whole new continents to trade, he could have invested the $20 million to $40 million expended on the extension in far more profitable ways. And certainly, over the year and more that passed following the opening of the Extension, he had ample opportunity to assess the direction that things were taking.

In July of 1912, for instance, William Krome passed along the disturbing news that a case of bubonic plague had been confirmed in Havana. Krome feared that the disease might be carried back to the United States by passengers on one of the company’s ships and wrote to FEC physician J. M. Jackson in Miami, seeking advice on how to detect signs of the illness and prevent its spread. Plague, however, was one scourge that the Key West Extension was spared.

Freight, a certain amount of it, was carried up and down the Keys, as were droves of awestruck passengers. The railroad’s presence also hastened the development of island communities that would likely have languished as forlorn outposts for decades, though whether that is necessarily a good thing remains an issue of hot debate in a region where natural resources are limited and the ecosystem is so fragile.

After the Volstead Act was passed in 1920, the
Havana Special
became a favorite of the sporting set. Key West then, as now, did not regard itself as fully beholden to a system of laws and regulations developed without input from the “Conch Republic.” The city’s bars were never closed, the rumrunners never stopped their trade between Key West and Cuba, and federal agents were known to beg off any posting to the wide-open “Southernmost City.”

In an interview with railroad historian Pat Parks, whose monograph
The Railroad That Died at Sea
was the first to tell the Extension’s story, former FEC baggage master Kingman Curry remembers many a massive steamer trunk labeled “Wearing Apparel” gurgling and sloshing merrily as he trundled it from ship to railroad car. According to Curry, an astonishing number of passengers who made the trip down to Cuba during Prohibition seemed to have died there.

“I never saw a death certificate on one of those coffins that gave any other cause of death but ‘alcoholism,’ ” Curry told Parks. “It’s possible some of them contained demijohns of rum. But it wasn’t my duty to open them. Trunks and coffins were all sealed by customs inspectors.”

The Casa Marina Hotel, which Flagler had always intended to be the crown jewel in his chain of pleasure palaces, finally opened its doors in 1922. The fortresslike building had walls nearly two feet thick at their base, and with its private beach, tennis courts, and lush landscaping, became an immediate hit with well-to-do travelers. Despite stints as a Navy barracks during World War II and an Army staging base during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the hotel has been restored to its original state and still lures the rich and famous through its doors.

Despite the worst fears of the railroad’s builders, no storm-battered passenger train ever plunged off one of the mighty bridges to disappear in a hissing sea, though there were a few minor collisions and accidents reported. One of the worst took place in 1927, when a freight engineer, apparently incapacitated by the flu, took his 110-car train up the line from Key West without bothering to check the water level in his boiler. As the train was laboring up the grade at Seven Mile Bridge, the overheated boiler exploded, raining pieces of the engine chassis into the waters. The unfortunate engineer was killed and his fireman badly injured, but no one else was hurt.

As for predictions that Key West, “America’s Gibraltar,” would become a burgeoning center of commerce, Trumbo’s difficulties in finding space for so much as one steamship dock should have been a tip-off. Even before the railroad came miraculously to town, Key West was decidedly overbuilt, and the infrastructure for expansion simply did not exist. There was no ready supply of fresh water, no highway in or out, and only a single railway line to service the projected flood of trade.

Instead of encouraging growth, there is evidence that the railroad’s arrival actually encouraged some Key West residents to leave the far-flung island. At last, significant numbers of immigrants who had come from Cuba and other Caribbean islands in search of a better life had ready access to a larger world—a Sunday round-trip ticket to Miami went for $2.50, and many who made it that far north simply made up their minds to stay on the mainland. As effects of the Great Depression swept as far southward as Key West, the trickle of those moving northward became a flood. By 1930, the U.S. Census revealed that Key West had actually
lost
more than seven thousand residents.

Other troubles followed in the wake of Flagler’s passing: his trusted manager Joseph Parrott, who took over direction of the company upon its founder’s death, would himself die scarcely five months later, of heart failure, amid growing complaints from pioneering growers up and down the Keys that they were being forced out of business by the importation of cheaper pineapples and tropical fruits being hauled up the FEC line from Cuba.

And Mary Lily’s life was hardly charmed thereafter. From 1913 on, she divided her time between Whitehall and New York, and in 1916 married an old friend, Robert Bingham, then an ambitious but struggling attorney in Louisville. Scarcely eight months later, Mary Lily died, shortly after amending a will that left her new husband $5 million of the $100 million Flagler’s estate had bequeathed her.

While fifty-year-old Mary Lily’s death was reported as heart failure, the timing led to whispers of her acute alcoholism and even laudanum abuse, a not-unheard-of practice among certain of the leisure class of the day. The fact that Bingham used his inheritance to pay off a significant number of debts and its remainder to buy the
Louisville Courier-Journal
and the
Louisville Times
fueled rumors that if Bingham hadn’t actually been involved in Mary Lily’s death, he did little to prevent it.

Writer David Chandler passed off Mary Lily’s death as an “apparent heart attack” in his Flagler biography of 1986 (subtitled “The Astonishing Life and Times of the Visionary Robber Baron Who Founded Florida”). But by 1987, he had changed his mind.
The Binghams of Louisville,
a biography coauthored with his wife Mary Voelz Chandler, argued that Bingham had clearly aided and abetted Mary Lily’s death. By 1991 three more Bingham family retrospectives were published, with the last in the series, Susan Tifft and Alex Jones’s
The Patriarch,
going so far as to charge that Mary Lily had died of cardiovascular syphilis, a disease most likely contracted from Henry Flagler himself.

Subsequent historians have dismissed such speculations as pure sensationalism, but it is a reminder that if Flagler truly had immortality in mind as he pressed ahead with the fight to complete the Key West Extension, he should have understood the costs of such status.

Even charges against the railroad sometimes grew to near-outlandish levels. In 1927 the British Isles, along with the rest of northeastern Europe, suffered through a particularly severe winter and subsequent summer marked by record low temperatures—which, along with powerful storms, resulted in deaths, property damage, and crop failures. Pre–El Niño–era scientists seeking some plausible explanation for the calamities pointed fingers all the way to the Florida Keys, where, it was suggested, the embankments and the bridges of the Key West Extension had caused a permanent divergence in the flow of the Gulf Stream, the steady flow of warm water that originates in the Caribbean and runs all the way to the coasts of France and England, greatly ameliorating what would otherwise be forbidding climates.

Despite their extreme nature, the complaints grew so shrill that the U.S. government was forced to commission a study to investigate the matter. No evidence was found that the Gulf Stream had been displaced, however, and by the following winter, things had returned to normal in the European weather pattern.

Part of the reason for various speculations about Flagler is undoubtedly his close-to-the-vest nature. As far as anyone knows, even the most traumatic events in his life produced no soul-searching confidences or outpourings of grief. Certainly no bundle of letters or heartfelt diary entries have surfaced to counter the image of a supremely stoic man.

A story was told by one of Flagler’s subordinates, who, having learned of a stunning reversal in the fortunes of Standard Oil, rushed into Flagler’s office to deliver the good news that a judge’s fine of $29 million levied earlier against the company had been reversed. Flagler had been greatly upset by levy of the fine; not only was the amount unprecedented, but he considered it a direct result of Roosevelt’s personal vendetta against him.

And yet, as his employee stood there, waiting for some momentous reaction, there was only this:

“For a moment, he looked as if he were going to say something. But he merely nodded and then said casually: ‘Mr. ———, do you happen to have those Whitehall plumbing bills handy?’ ”

Just as typical are the terse entries to be found in his 1909 diary, a year of many milestones for the Extension project:

For Saturday, January 2, 1909, Flagler’s birthday: “Began my 80th year. HMF”

For April 20, 1909, the day he lost his project supervisor: “J. C. Meredith died at 3
P.M.
in the hospital in Miami.”

For August 20, 1909, the momentous beginning of construction on the “impossible” Seven Mile Bridge: “First steel span on Knight’s Key Bridge was put in place at 3
P.M.”

For October 11, 1909, after receiving the devastating news of the previous day’s storm: “Hurricane passed over Florida causing great damage at Key West and on Key West extension. Tug Sybill and 13 of her crew drowned. Also Brown at Marathon.”

By 1910, Flagler had dispensed with any mention of his birthday. And as for the impact of the hurricane of 1910 on the Extension project or its leader, not a word was set down.

As Edwin Lefevre wrote in his 1910 piece for
Everybody’s,
“Flagler’s is not only an excessive modesty but a personality so elusive as to be unseizable. . . . He has no intimates.”

Toward the end of his time with Flagler, Lefevre admits to growing frustration with his subject:

“You don’t seem to care to talk about yourself,” he said to Flagler.

“I prefer to let what I have done speak for me,” Flagler replied.

“By their works ye shall know them,” Lefevre suggested.

“Yes; that’s it,” Flagler said—as eagerly as he had said anything, according to his interviewer.

During their final encounter, Lefevre made one last attempt to get to the core of the man who would have been the second richest in the world after his former partner John D. Rockefeller, had it not been for those Florida investments.

“All that day I had tried to catch a glimpse of this man’s soul—in vain . . . and now in the loggia of his palace, looking out to Lake Worth . . . I turned . . . and . . . I asked him, I fear impatiently:

‘Doesn’t this sky get into your soul? Doesn’t that glow light it . . . isn’t
this
the real reason why you do things here?’ ”

Flagler seemed to think about the question, says Lefevre. Then he turned slowly and said, “Sometimes, at the close of day, when I am fortunate enough to be alone, I come here. . . . I look at the water and at the trees yonder and at the sunset . . . [and] I often wonder if there is anything in the other world so beautiful as this.”

It was about as much of a straight answer to a personal question as anyone was to get from Henry Flagler.

By the time the Panama Canal was opened in 1914, much had changed in Key West. Most of the cigar factories had moved northward to Tampa, lured by subsidies dangled by local business leaders. A peaceful Caribbean political situation had led to a substantial decrease in size of the Navy base. And the conversion of many oceangoing steamships from coal to oil as a fuel meant that longer runs were possible without refueling.

The enactment of tough new trade tariffs would greatly reduce the imports of Cuban tobacco, sugar, and pineapples. New taxes levied on the FEC drove up prices, sending business to competitors sailing from New Orleans and elsewhere.

And yet, even without its visionary at the helm, the Key West Extension managed to roll on, struggling through good economic times and bad, occasionally assailed by critics, yet always a favorite of travelers drawn to the American tropics, to Key West, and beyond. By the 1930s a round-trip ticket from Miami to Havana cost as little as twenty-four dollars, and even through the early years of the Depression, daily service continued on the famed
Havana Special.