For Sale —American Paradise (22 page)

“At the bottom of the great 1925 rush to Florida was the same impelling force that has been at the bottom of all migrations—the desire to better one's condition as speedily as possible,” he wrote.

So although the prices astonished some newcomers, many of them were still eager, even desperate to buy a piece of the Florida dream. A new development called Miami Shores sold $2.5 million worth of property the first day lots went on sale. George Merrick was selling around $4 million worth of property in Coral Gables every month, and had opened a sales office on Forty-Second Street in New York. On the first day of sales for a new section of his “perfect city,” his salesmen raked in an astonishing $21 million.

Merrick was shaping Coral Gables into a dreamlike place of unearthly beauty that gleamed and glimmered for the winter-
weary visitors from New
York and Chicago and other distant, snowy cities. The dream sighed to them from the palm trees whose fronds were gently roused by the warm ocean breezes, and it glistened at them from the sparkling water that always seemed to be nearby to catch and reflect the light, and twice a day—once at sunrise, again at sunset—the dream was bathed in a soft, gorgeous glow of pink, vermilion, and ochre.

Despite the huge sums of money coming into his project, however, Merrick was being financially cautious. The money was going back into the development of Coral Gables. And in Miami Beach, Carl Fisher was tightening financial requirements for buying property even though money was being thrown about freely all around him.

A few miles up the coast, Addison Mizner, who had been shivering in a cold Long Island apartment only a few years earlier, was becoming the toast of Palm Beach society and planning his own ideal city between West Palm Beach and Miami.

The hospital for returning World War I veterans he'd designed for his wealthy friend, Paris Singer, had instead become the iconic Everglades Club in Palm Beach. Now he was planning his own perfect city, Boca Raton, a city that would be “old in romance, restful in atmosphere, poised in buildings, orderly in plan and in every feature beautiful.” More succinctly, it would be “a monument to American money.”

Boca Raton would be publicly advertised as a city with “every atom of beauty that human ingenuity can add to a land endowed by nature.” Privately, however, Addison Mizner and his cynical, witty, and shady brother, Wilson Mizner, would
refer to Boca Raton as “a platinum sucker trap.” The company's marketing strategy was simple and equally cynical: “Get the big snobs, and the little snobs will follow.”

Mizner's connection with Singer enabled him to recruit an impressive group of supporters for Mizner Development Corporation that included
Palm Beach Post
publisher Donald H. Conkling, who had sold the
South Florida Developer
to Edwin Menninger. Conkling's bank connections would help Mizner to secure generous loans for his projects.

Mizner's backers also included US Senator T. Coleman du Pont and Wall Street speculator Jesse Livermore, who had already made, lost, and regained a fortune when he brought his family to Palm Beach in March 1925. He stayed at the Breakers, and his presence didn't go unnoticed by some men who were determined to make a quick fortune without sinking any money into real estate.

Another guest was relaxing in a chair on the porch of the hotel when she overheard two men talking about Livermore and his family. They'd noticed that Livermore's oldest son, Jesse Jr., was an active child who rambled around the hotel alone. It would be very easy to snatch the boy, and his father had the means to pay a huge ransom for his safe return.

The woman tried to get a look at the men, but, realizing they'd been overheard, they scurried away. She told Livermore what she'd overheard, and the Wall Street multimillionaire hired a bodyguard to protect his family.

A few tourists started leaving Florida in March, and one of those who departed was Reverend R. S. Wightman, a Presbyterian minister from New Jersey. He told his congregation that it would be difficult to find a place as morally “rotten” as Florida.

“The devil is certainly in certain parts of Florida with all his hosts,” the reverend said, “and if anyone wants to go to hell in a hurry, there are greased planks aplenty in Miami and Palm Beach.

“I can't see how such a condition can last. The liquor traffic is conducted in a wide-
open manner, and the State authorities seem to invite the Northern people to come and spend their money with the understanding that there are no restrictions.”

There was more going on that the minister did not write about, probably because he was unaware of it. Brothels operated openly with little interference from police. Jane Wood Reno, a Miami reporter whose young daughter Janet would become US attorney general, later wrote that it was “generally understood by everybody, including law enforcement folks, that they were needed to keep the tourist industry going.”

The madam of a downtown Miami brothel often brought her employees to a dress shop on Flagler Street after hours for outfitting, Reno wrote.

Reverend Wightman apparently was one of the few people who saw the city's tolerance of vice as a problem, however. The usual end-of-the-season mass departure of tourists didn't happen in 1925. The crowds just kept coming. The
trains were filled with passengers, the Dixie Highway was jammed with cars, and hotels were packed.

An unnamed minister who'd lived in Florida for ten years told the
New York Times
that the masses coming to the state were being drawn by “some strong force . . . or, rather, it seems as if it were the effect of unleashing a force long bound.”

Now that people had discovered Florida's climate “and the other charms of this coast,” they would keep coming, and the flow couldn't be stopped. “No, this is no boom,” he said. “Florida is just coming into its own.”

Entrepreneurs found a way to take advantage of the overcrowding. Some manufacturers of concrete blocks were taking appalling shortcuts to keep up with the demand for new housing. To save money and speed up production, smaller portions of concrete were mixed with sand to make the blocks.

“Since houses were being rushed to sell during the boom period, these blocks were frequently built into the walls of houses before they had set, and the houses were built without any thought of wind pressure,” Kenneth Roberts wrote. “The people who built them had heard of hurricanes in a vague way, but probably thought of them—if at all—as something used by novelists to further the action of their stories.”

The weakness of the poorly made blocks was then compounded by unskilled builders. Contractors were hiring anyone who wanted a job, regardless of whether they knew what they were doing. The shoddy concrete blocks were being improperly laid so the walls of the new buildings had almost no strength, Roberts wrote.

“When a wall like this is given a brisk kick, it trembles violently; on receiving two or three more brisk kicks in the same place, it falls down,” he wrote.

The deadly danger caused by the shabbily built housing would be tragically revealed a year later.

Tourist camps for automobiles began appearing along the Dixie Highway. Instead of searching for a scarce—and probably expensive—hotel room, motorists could pull into a tourist camp and sleep in their cars. As word of these accommodations spread, some who made the trek to Florida towed homemade camping trailers to set up in the camps.

“Southern nights are cool and starlit,” the
New York Times Magazine
said. “There is a delight in sleeping out of doors that no hotel room can provide, and it is not predicated on wealth or the lack of it. Often the most expensive make of car will be seen parked alongside the least expensive at one of these tourist camps.”

A few people were trying—in their own ways—to hold the line against the decay of morals in Florida and elsewhere. The Ku Klux Klan was prospering amid the decadence of the 1920s, and was holding public meetings in Miami, Stuart, and other cities in Florida. Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans told a gathering of Klansmen in Kansas City that the organization's members were “the salt of the earth,” and the future of civilization depended on them.

“History has proved and is proving daily that only Nordic and Anglo-
Saxon people have reached a high level of intelligence,” Evans said. “The undesirable hordes from other lands are driving to our sides the millions who for one reason or another have been hesitating.”

William Jennings Bryan, who had been a delegate from Florida to the Democratic National Convention in 1924, had helped to defeat a motion to include a sentence denouncing the Klan in the Democrats' national campaign platform.

Speaking at a fund-raiser for a new Temple Israel in Miami in early 1925, Bryan told the gathering that religion was under attack.

“The fight today is not to defend the Christian religion nor the Jewish religion, but to defend religion,” he said. “When you take away the belief in God you take away the comfort one finds in a Supreme Being, and when you take away religion you take away the belief in a living god. Religion is the one thing you can't do without.”

A few months later, Bryan told a high school graduating class in Miami that while he was “an enthusiast about education,” religion was more important.

“Science gives us great things, but it takes more than education to make a man or woman,” he said.

Bryan's remarks to the high school seniors set the stage for the first great clash between science and religion in the classroom. Earlier in the year, Bryan had made a quick trip to Nashville to urge the Tennessee state legislature to pass a law forbidding the teaching of “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”

Due in part to Bryan's exhortations, the bill easily passed. But the American Civil Liberties Union wanted to challenge the law, and sought someone to serve as a defendant to test it.

Some business and political leaders in Dayton calculated that having a trial there would draw a large crowd and reporters from across the nation, and be an economic boon for the little eastern Tennessee hill town. They asked John Scopes, a young science and math teacher at Rhea County High School, to be the defendant that the ACLU sought. Scopes wasn't even certain that he'd actually taught Darwin's theory in his classes, but some of his students were willing to testify that he had, and so the ACLU had its defendant.

Only a few weeks before Bryan spoke to the Miami high school graduates, Scopes had been charged with violating the law, and a trial was scheduled for July.

Bryan volunteered to join the prosecution's attorneys at the trial. It would be his last appearance as an impassioned crusader for religious certainty versus scientific inquiry.

Meanwhile, Prohibition supporters, infuriated by the free flow of booze into Florida, introduced a bill that would take the Volstead Act a dramatic step further. Proponents of the bill wanted to make it illegal to “drink liquors as a
beverage” in Florida, a measure that, if enforced, probably would have put most of the state's population behind bars.

It was defeated.

Edwin Menninger was watching as trainloads of southbound paradise seekers passed through Stuart on the Florida East Coast Railway's daily trains to Miami. And he was reading about the profusion of dazzling “perfect” cities in lavish, full-
page ads in the newspaper of his former employer, the
Palm Beach Post
.

The “paradise” obsession was finding its way into the pages of the
South Florida Developer
. Soon, Menninger believed, Stuart would take its rightful place as one of Florida's leading cities.

The Indian River—which actually is a long, placid lagoon separated from the Atlantic Ocean by barrier islands—was already getting attention for its natural beauty. Kenneth Roberts had seen it, and he was charmed.

“Northward from Palm Beach,” Roberts wrote, “one traverses the bank of the Indian River—a broad and endless stretch of blue water on which millions of wild ducks gabble and wag their tails in contented camaraderie, from which the mullet fling themselves in playful ecstasies, and in which serious-
minded pelicans pursue their dinners with admirable patience, rising with machine-like unity from the glassy surface, wheeling with military precision, and hurling themselves passionately into the middle of a school of fish with all the grand manner of a heavily laden Gladstone bag falling into a bathtub from a height of ten feet.”

Ambitious developers were staking out their own versions of “perfect” cities in and around Stuart. Capitalizing on the spectacular beauty of the place where the St. Lucie River meets the Indian River and the Atlantic Ocean, developers were advertising Golden Gate. Full-page ads in the
South Florida Developer
touted the investment potential. “Millions will be made by those who buy and build at the mouth of the St. Lucie River,” the ads said.

Federal engineers had started a feasibility study to determine whether the inlet could be deepened for a harbor that Golden Gate developers boasted would become “the finest south of Savannah.”