For Sale —American Paradise (17 page)

The following day, the committee voted to reopen its hearings on the bill so that Collier could make a statement to the panel.

Late that evening, it appeared that Collier, the public relations genius, was turning the legislature his way. Legislator S. Watt Lawler Jr. telegraphed Collier opponents in Fort Myers: “Collier forces very active. Things are getting complicated. Additional hearing this afternoon. We need reinforcements.”

On Friday, April 27, the
Press
was practically foaming at the mouth at Collier's “monarchistic” plans and the new developments in Tallahassee that seemed to be going in Collier's favor.

Who will build schools for the new county, the
Press
asked, and who will support them? What might happen if, God forbid, Barron Collier were to die soon after the new county was formed? Would the promised development happen then? And how would the Tamiami Trail be completed?

Even Fort Myers ministers got involved in the fight, sending a letter to Governor Cary Hardee saying they had “grave concerns” that the creation of the county would imperil the “moral welfare” of all citizens of southwest Florida. The preachers didn't say it outright in the telegram, but there had been rumors circulating that Collier intended to open gambling casinos once he got his county, and since he would be boss of his domain, who knew what other sinful pleasures he might bring to his fiefdom?

The fight dragged on into May, when two giants of American industry came out strongly against the creation of the county. Thomas Edison, the wizard of science who'd been wintering in Fort Myers since 1885, joined his winter neighbor, Henry Ford, in hiring lobbyists to go to Tallahassee to try to convince the legislature to turn down Collier's request.

The
Press
reported that neither Edison nor Ford thought there were enough people or development prospects to justify forming a new county. But even the opposition of these two titans couldn't sway the Florida legislature. On Thursday, May 3, 1923, both houses approved the creation of Collier County by wide margins. The new county would come into existence on July 9, 1923. The small town of Everglade, renamed Everglades, would become the county seat.

Collier immediately started transforming the isolated, backwater hamlet into a modern town, building docks, laying out streets, providing electricity and phone lines. Eventually, he built a school, a movie theater, a fire department, and a courthouse, among other amenities.

After the legislature voted, Collier granted his first interview to one of his most bitter opponents, the
Press
. He told the reporter that he didn't think he'd been fairly treated by newspapers on the Gulf Coast, but he didn't hold a grudge against anyone who had opposed the creation of the new county.

He wanted the new county created because he thought he could accomplish more with a group of county administrators who were friendly to his efforts rather than administrators who were more concerned with Fort Myers's interests.

Collier went through a list of improvements he planned to make. He pledged to start a steamboat connecting Collier County with Miami and to improve railroad connections in the county as well. He also promised to add telephone lines.

And he vowed to buy new machinery and work it around the clock to complete the Tamiami Trail through Collier County to the Dade County line.

“I do not blame the people of Fort Myers and the rest of Lee County for the attitude they have taken,” Collier told the
Press
,
“but want to assure them that the development that will be made in Collier County will help all of the West Coast of Florida; and I believe that I have relieved the rest of Lee County of a section that they might not have been able to do as much with as I can.”

After his life-changing accident in the chemistry lab at Washburn College in 1915, Edwin Menninger moved to New York, studied journalism at Columbia University, and went to work for the
New York Tribune
. But during the winter of 1921–22, he came down with a severe case of the flu. His doctor told him that the only way he'd recover was to get out of the bitter New York winter and go to Florida.

Menninger went to West Palm Beach and was hired as the night city editor at the
Palm Beach Post
.

After a few months on his new job, Menninger learned that the
Post
published a weekly newspaper called the
South Florida Developer
. The
Developer
had been launched two years earlier as a public relations tool for the Model Land Company, which had been formed by Henry Flagler in 1896 as he extended his railroad down Florida's east coast.

To launch the
Developer
, the land company paid for ten thousand subscriptions for its customers, but after a couple of years the company stopped paying, and the subscriptions had dwindled to about 1,200.

Learning about the
Developer
stirred Menninger's boyhood memories of his well-managed newspaper routes and rekindled his ambition to own his own newspaper. So he talked to Donald H. Conkling, who published the
Developer
for the
Palm Beach Post
.

After some discussion, Conkling essentially gave the
Developer
to Menninger. The deal was finalized on January 1, 1923. No cash actually changed hands in the transaction, although Menninger agreed to pay Conkling $500 for the
Developer
's list of subscribers and another $500 for an old printing press. Conkling told Menninger he could pay off that debt by printing the
Palm Beach Post
for him.

Menninger moved to Stuart in August 1923, borrowed $400 from one of his brothers, put $200 down on a linotype machine, and was in business as the publisher of the
South Florida Developer
.

Menninger, the former newspaper delivery boy who had run his routes with such precocious efficiency, had an unusual combination of talents, being both a savvy journalist and a shrewd businessman.

Florida was about to undergo a dramatic transformation from a rowdy frontier to a stylish national fad. Edwin Menninger, an ambitious young journalist, would become a chronicler of, a participant in, and a commentator on an outlandish and colorful episode of unfettered American capitalism in all its grandeur and delusion. He would become caught up in the mania and hysteria of the wild real estate speculation that was about to engulf Florida, yet he would also display his down-to-earth Kansas common sense. Occasionally, he would step back from the dreams and chaos swirling around him and, like the classic Greek chorus, make insightful comments in the
South Florida Developer
. And like a character in a novel, he would evolve as he watched events unfold.

When it was over, he would realize the harsh lesson that he and others had learned as they'd watched what they thought was a permanent paradise plunge into bottomless ruin.

But in the late summer of 1923, he was a young man only twenty-
seven years old, about to embark on the adventure of running his own newspaper.

Apparently there wasn't a jail in Florida that could hold John Ashley.

After his arrest in Wauchula for transporting whiskey, he had been sent to a state prison in Holmes County in the western Florida Panhandle between Tallahassee and Pensacola. On September 27, 1923, Ashley and another convict, a US Navy deserter who was doing time for grand larceny, found a few loose bars in a jail cell. They forced the bars out and climbed through.

Once again, John Ashley was free. He vowed never to see the inside of a jail again, and his reasons likely went beyond merely not wanting to be confined.

The prison work camps run by the state of Florida in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were quite different from a county jail where friends and family lived nearby. The work camps were hellholes in which prisoners were treated like slave labor.

The same year Ashley escaped the prison in Holmes County, the state's prison system was engulfed in scandal when Martin Tabert, a twenty-
two-
year-
old North Dakota farm-boy who was traveling through Florida, ran out of money in Tallahassee. He was arrested for vagrancy. His parents sent him money, but by the time it reached Tallahassee, the young man had been sent to a prison work farm for a sixty-day sentence.

He died from a whipping administered by a prison guard. In 1923, flogging prisoners was legal in Florida.

So Ashley's life may well have been as much in danger at the hands of wardens and guards in the prison as it was from sheriffs and police officers on the outside.

Ashley worked his way across the Panhandle and down the peninsula, and soon he was back in his familiar hideout in the wilds of Palm Beach County. He was reunited with his partners in crime. It was just like old times again.

“Automobiles were stolen, burglaries committed, and general terror reigned in the territory in which they operated,” author Hix Stuart wrote.

They also continued making moonshine and making runs to the Bahamas to bootleg whiskey from West End. And they resumed their highly profitable piracy of other bootleggers in the waters between Florida and the Bahamas.

They were always a few steps ahead of the law, and the Everglades was always nearby when lawmen got too close. But by late 1923, as more and more winter visitors were coming to Florida, cops and sheriffs in southern Florida were becoming more determined to stop their crimes, one way or the other.

President-
elect Warren Harding's visit to Miami Beach in February 1921 and a persistent shortage of coal during two subsequent winters helped start a flow of cold-
weather visitors to Florida that would turn into a torrent in a few years.

Beginning in November 1922 and continuing into the winter months of 1923–24, many smaller newspapers—especially in the Midwest—ran a story with the headline “Running Away from Winter.”

It read more like an advertisement than a news story: “With cold weather and the coal shortage, the greatest pilgrimage to the southland known in years has begun. Southern Atlantic seaports report a steady stream of yachts moving southward, indicative of an unusually heavy season. Southern resort managers say, however, the pilgrimage will not be confined to what is commonly known as America's smart set, but will include as many if not more persons of moderate means.”

The story, which did not carry a byline, was accompanied by a spread of enticing photos—several young women in skimpy (for the time) bathing suits climbing a palm tree, and two more sitting by a pool, mounted polo players, and President Harding on a Miami Beach golf course.

The layout of the story was identical in every newspaper. Neither the copy nor the photos were removed or altered. The story obviously was aimed at enticing chilly Midwesterners to climb into their Fords and spend a few weeks in the warm Florida sunshine.

The writer, undoubtedly a crafty press agent, acknowledged “it is society that gets the greatest notoriety at winter resorts.”

“Yet those whose names do not appear in the society columns are there in just as great numbers and have just as much fun, or more, than those who dress for dinner every evening and worry about beach capes and pretty polo coats,” the story said.