For Sale —American Paradise (26 page)

A group of bankers angrily told reporters that they'd guarantee a bond of up to $1 million if Coad was arrested. But the cops couldn't find clear evidence of who actually owned the liquor, so no one was arrested.

Pinellas County Sheriff Roy Booth later said he'd received “certain information” about the booze at the hotel and had obtained a search warrant. That “certain information” may well have come from someone still angry at Coad for derogatory public remarks he'd made about Jews in St. Petersburg a year earlier.

The bankers left the city on December 11, but instead of departing with sunny enthusiasm for the Sunshine City, they left with memories of a gloomy week and an unpleasant spat with local cops. It was a setback for the city's hopes
for attracting new business and investors, and a serious blow to Florida's image. The crack in the boom's foundation opened a little wider.

Shortly after the bankers departed St. Petersburg, an eyebrow-
raising warning was issued by J. H. Tregoe, an investment banker and executive manager of the National Association of Credit Men. Tregoe, who said he'd just returned from Florida, said lenders should be careful about extending credit in Florida. The state will never prosper if its only objective is to become a playground for the wealthy, he told the
New York Times
.

“Persons without means will find it difficult under these conditions to live in Florida,” Tregoe said. “Only the rich can find a real welcome.”

Tregoe's colleagues in Florida's banking industry were livid. The Jacksonville Association of Credit Men said Tregoe's comments were “absolutely unwarranted and unfair,” and wanted him removed as the association's executive manager.

“We do not consider the man responsible or to be suitable as an executive manager of the National Association,” the Jacksonville group told the
New York
Times
.

Other members, however, said they supported Tregoe and would not remove him.

Edwin Menninger was continuing his staunch defense of all things Florida in the
South Florida Developer
. And he was clearly enjoying the chance to occasionally rub shoulders with some of the most famous names in American capitalism.

In October, Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, sunburned and windblown from riding in an open convertible, dropped in on Menninger at the
Developer
's office.

Vanderbilt, who had written for the
New York Herald
and other publications under the byline of “Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.,” had unexpectedly spent some time in Stuart about a year earlier when his train was delayed by flooding. He'd chatted with Menninger then. Now, he wanted to quiz the young editor about how things were going in Stuart.

“It looks like a live place to me,” Vanderbilt told Menninger.

And the town was “live,” in Menninger's opinion. Soon, he told the
Developer
's readers, Stuart's harbor would be deepened to allow oceangoing ships, and the harbor would become “the finest in the South.”

“It will mark the beginning of the development on the [Florida] East Coast of a port that will rank with Tampa on the West,” he wrote.

Within ten years, Menninger predicted, Martin County would have a population of 200,000, and business lots in Stuart would be selling for $10,000 a square foot. The county's interior between the Atlantic and Lake Okeechobee would be “one great fruit and vegetable farm,” shipping “thousands” of train-car loads of winter produce to northern markets.

And two more great cities would be rising on the lake shores, Menninger predicted.

That same issue of the
Developer
included an advertisement offering twenty-five acres of land for sale at $1,000 an acre, and readers were advised to contact Edwin A. Menninger for more information.

As the usual post-Thanksgiving migration to Florida started,
The
New York Times Magazine
reported that highways into the state were “thronged with cars, from limousines with liveried chauffeurs to flivvers with shirt-sleeved drivers, all headed for the land of De Leon and De Soto.”

But the
New York Times
also reported that new residents who'd come to Florida seeking a better life were having financial problems because everything was so expensive. A head waiter at a restaurant told the paper that while he was making more money than he'd ever made, he still couldn't make ends meet because everything was so costly.

Author Theodore Dreiser was among the thousands who came to Florida in late December 1925. Dreiser and his wife made the trip to avoid reading reviews of his just-
published novel,
An American Tragedy
. Dreiser wrote his off-
the-cuff impressions of Florida in letters to his friend and fellow writer, H. L. Mencken, in Baltimore, and made notes in his diary. The letters and the diary notes would form the basis for articles about Florida in
Vanity Fair
magazine in the summer of 1926.

The Dreisers arrived in St. Augustine on Christmas Day, and the writer was immediately struck by “real estate schemes everywhere.” As they traveled down the peninsula, Dreiser learned that booze was plentiful in Daytona at $12 a quart—before Prohibition you could buy a case of twelve quarts for that price—and he found a DeLand hotel “vile”; although it had no heat and no private bath, he still had to pay $5 a night.

As the season shifted into high gear after Christmas, famous athletes and celebrities started showing up. Babe Ruth was seen among other celebrities at a hotel opening in St. Petersburg, and newspaper sports pages announced that Stanford University football star Ernie Nevers would play in an all-
star football game in Florida. Nevers would be paid $50,000—more than $657,000 in twenty-first-century dollars.

Helen Wainwright, a champion amateur swimmer, was training in Florida for her attempt to swim the English Channel later in the year. Golfer Bobby Jones—still an amateur at the time—was playing in St. Augustine, and a real estate company was offering $15,000 to tennis stars Bill Tilden and Vincent Richards if they'd play tennis at their development for a few months.

Boxers Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey were training in Florida, and Dempsey told sportswriter Ring Lardner that he might “dabble” in real estate.

As the federal officer in charge of enforcing the Volstead Act, General Lincoln C. Andrews certainly qualified as a celebrity when he came to Miami in January 1926, but he was not there to relax and rub elbows with winter vacationers. He was there to see how well the Coast Guard was doing in its effort to keep booze out of Miami.

Notorious bootlegger Duncan “Red” Shannon picked that day to make a run from the Bahamas. As his speedy little rumrunner, the
Goose
, entered Miami Harbor, Shannon spied a small launch conveying Andrews to a Coast Guard cutter anchored at the harbor entrance.

Shannon recognized Andrews, but instead of turning away from his sworn enemies, Shannon turned toward the boat carrying the general. As he raced past Andrews's launch he thumbed his nose at the nation's top Prohibition officer before racing away in his boat, which could easily outrun the Coast Guard vessel.

Andrews was infuriated, and the Coast Guard crewmen were mortified by Shannon's ridicule. They would not forget that embarrassment.

Movie star Gloria Swanson arrived in Miami Beach around the same time of Shannon's display of contempt for Andrews. Wearing silk and mink, she appeared with an entourage at a jai alai match in Hialeah. It was, she told the
Miami Daily News
, the only place other than Havana where she could watch one of her favorite sports.

Swanson was staying at the Flamingo Hotel, as was movie star Bebe Daniels.

United News sportswriter Frank Getty reported that Major League baseball managers were concerned about how the real estate mania might affect their players during spring training.

“They have visions of a heavy hitter rounding the bases on the heels of a three-base hit suddenly shooting off at a tangent into deep left field to sell a possible prospect a choice lot or two,” Getty wrote.

And there would be other “dazzling distractions,” such as casinos, attractive young women in skimpy bathing suits, blue lagoons, and iced drinks, Getty wrote.

Will Rogers was back in Florida and dispatching his quips to newspapers across the country. He talked to John McGraw, noting that Sarasota was where “McGraw [had trained] his Giants every year till last year, when they sold real estate instead of training.”

Rogers also reported that McGraw's good friend John Ringling was building “a little bungalow” in Sarasota that was “patterned after the Vatican in Rome, only improved on.”

The managers' fears about the distractions of real estate investments were justified. As the teams finished up their preparations for the 1926 season and got ready to move north, there were news reports that several members of the Brooklyn Dodgers had lost heavily from faulty real estate investments.

The conflict baseball players experienced between focusing on the game and the lure of earning a fortune in real estate became the subject of a movie starring Thomas Meighan, one of Hollywood's best-known leading men at the time. Meighan went to Florida to film
The New Klondike
, a tale written by Ring Lard-ner about a baseball player forced to go into real estate sales after being fired by his jealous manager during spring training.

When real estate brokers learned that Meighan was making the rounds at spring training camps to prepare for his role, he was swarmed with requests for his endorsements of “ideal” cities being built. One company offered him 160 acres in a new development if he'd only allow the developers to use his name.

Meighan finally disconnected the phone in his hotel room.

Edwin Menninger realized that despite the dreamy advertising for the ubiquitous ideal cities, things weren't roaring along quite the way they had during the previous winter season. But he saw that as a good sign. In early January, he published a letter he'd written to a friend in New Hampshire who'd been an editor in West Palm Beach.

“Nobody here is alarmed, or even particularly distressed about the lull in real estate business in October and November,” Menninger wrote. “Florida is going through a period of readjustment in which there will be less frantic trading and more sound business carried on.”

Menninger said he thought 1926 would be as “spectacular” as 1925, but the real estate market would be more stable because people would be buying for themselves rather than with the idea of selling it for a huge profit.

But the lavish promises of quick profits continued, and Menninger published some of the most spectacular in the
South Florida Developer
.

In early January 1926, the
Developer
reported that a city called Port Mayaca would be built on the Martin County shore of Lake Okeechobee. Nothing like it had ever been attempted in South Florida, the
Developer
said.

“The men behind the enterprise are not giving out anything for publication,” the
Developer
reported, “but others in a position to know quote figures staggering in scope when they speak of the contemplated program of city building.

“It is hinted that unlimited capital is behind the project, and when the visitor asks if it runs into millions, the answer is likely to be: ‘Billions, rather,' and the remark is almost sure to follow: ‘Coral Gables will be nothing to this.'”

Theodore Dreiser and his wife visited Martin County and Lake Okeechobee around the same time as the
Developer
's story about Port Mayaca. The writer happened to stand on the shore of the giant lake around sundown, and he was impressed. In his diary, he noted “the shell-like beauty” of the lake, the sunset, and the “profusion” of waterfowl.

He also had passed through southern Martin County, where the lushly advertised Picture City was supposed to be built. “Picture City,” he noted in his diary. “Nothing there.”