For Sale —American Paradise (21 page)

“The natives, realizing the value of advertising, have catered to the ball clubs in many ways,” noted a Midwestern newspaper. “There is no question but that Florida is realizing handsomely on its investment.”

The New York Yankees were training in St. Petersburg, and their temperamental superstar Babe Ruth was telling reporters he was broke, despite enjoying the highest salary in the big leagues. He was so incapable of managing his huge income that the Yankees were withholding one-
third of his pay to go into a savings account, and he was being sued for an unpaid horse-racing debt.

Still, he was amusing himself with many pastimes other than baseball. He was seen playing basketball at the local YMCA. And he hadn't kicked his fondness for the track.

“In Florida he would hang around a greyhound derby to late hours of the night when he should have been in bed getting his rest,” said
New York Evening Telegram
sports reporter John Foster.

The Bambino also was indifferent when it came to a healthy diet. A Yankees teammate told Foster that he'd seen Ruth wolf down six hot dogs, guzzle a pint of bicarbonate of soda, and then trot onto the diamond to play baseball.

Ring Lardner noticed another distraction for players coming to Florida for spring training in 1925.

“What ball players are not crippled by accident or food down south were crippled by Florida real estate,” Lardner wrote. “If the ocean rises six inches this summer and floods all of Florida, you can go to the ball grounds, not to see a ball game, but to see how many players you can count committing suicide.”

Some former players were doing quite well in real estate, however. The
Helena Daily Independent
reported that Joe Tinker, who had starred as a shortstop for the Chicago Cubs, was “one of the leading citizens” of Orlando, where he'd invested his life savings in real estate.

Tinker was “one of the leading realtors” in the South, the newspaper said.

So many players for the New York Giants were dabbling in real estate that manager John McGraw told Lardner that the stability of the Florida market could be a factor in his team's performance in the 1925 season. Lardner asked McGraw if the Giants would win their third straight National League pennant in the upcoming season.

McGraw replied, “If Florida real estate holds up, there is nothing can stop us.” However, if the real estate market flopped, the Giants would be doomed, he quipped.

About the same time that Gilda Gray started her extended performance at the Hollywood Golf and Country Club, developer George Merrick announced that William Jennings Bryan would be offering daily lectures at the beautiful Venetian Pool in Coral Gables. Merrick reportedly paid the Great Commoner $100,000 in cash and real estate—more than the salaries earned by Babe Ruth or President Coolidge—for his services.

The pool was an ingeniously repurposed quarry designed to resemble the Mediterranean city of Venice, Italy. Bryan's audience watched from a grandstand as he spoke to them while seated beneath a large parasol.

The contrast between the public images of the svelte, sexy shimmy queen at the Hollywood Golf and Country Club and the stern, moralistic William Jennings Bryan at Coral Gables was stark. Newspapers picked up on it and depicted it as a rivalry.

“They're here trying to see which can sell the most real estate to tourists, thereby taking their place in Miami's ranking winter industry,” said William Randolph Hearst's Universal News.

Bryan did not become famous for his sense of humor, but he knew how to use self-deprecating wit to win over an audience. His topic during his lectures was real estate opportunities in Florida. He explained his own experiences, portraying himself as a guileless speculator who'd still managed to make a few bucks, because you just couldn't lose buying Florida real estate.

He acknowledged that he'd bought and sold real estate and made a little money along the way, but the people he'd sold his property to had made more money than he had, he said.

Behind the low-key humor was Bryan's clear message that Florida—and especially Coral Gables—was a can't-miss investment opportunity, a place where even an amateur investor like him could own a piece of paradise and make money in the process. His message amounted to a politician's stump speech because he repeated it often and in many different settings, with slight variations of delivery.

Florida was a “durable asset,” Bryan said.

“Remember that gold mines are exhausted and that oil wells give out and even the soil is wasted by long, continued use,” he said, “but God's sunshine will be here thousands of years after we are dead, and the breezes will bear healing in their wings long after our names are forgotten.”

Dreamers live forever, Bryan said. “And so in the future years there will be streets, there will be towns, there will be counties, there will be localities that will bear the names of those dreamers, for their dreams are coming true in Coral Gables, in Miami, in Florida,” he said.

It was exactly what the crowd wanted to hear. The people who flocked to Coral Gables and other “ideal” cities in the winter of 1924–25 were caught up in a boom within a boom. The 1920s was a time of unparalleled prosperity. Some of the people who gathered to hear Bryan speak had come to Florida with wads of cash and letters of credit, but others had little more than a few dollars and the clothes they were wearing. They came because they'd heard that anyone could make a fortune in Florida. All you had to do, Bryan told them, was take off your hat, give it a careless fling, and buy the property where it came to rest.

The implication was that soon, inevitably, someone would come along and pay you three or four or ten or fifty times more for your property than what you'd paid for it. It was that easy and that predictable.

The people looking up expectantly at Bryan were suffused with this irresistible image and overcome with the desire to own a piece it. All it would take for them to disgorge their cash was a gentle nudge from someone they trusted. And to millions of Americans, William Jennings Bryan was the epitome of trust. When this sober, old-
fashioned, Bible-thumping puritan told them that Florida was the end of the rainbow, they were ready to find a salesman, throw their money at him, sign on the dotted line, and claim their slice of the good life.

One of Bryan's favorite quips when he was talking to visitors was that Florida was such an amazing place, it was impossible for a real estate salesman to tell a lie. “You can tell the biggest lie you can think of in the morning,” he'd say, “and by the evening it will have come true.”

Bryan denied that he was a wealthy man, noting that he'd had to sell his home, Villa Serena, because escalating real estate values had made it too expensive for his wife and him to live there. But the sharp-tongued journalist H. L. Mencken, who was not a fan of Bryan's, said he had become “a crimp for real estate speculators—the heroic foe of the unearned increment hauling it in with both hands.”

A judge from Nebraska who'd visited Bryan in Miami on his sixty-
fifth birthday declared that Miami's most famous citizen was indeed a millionaire.

On January 6, Bryan attended the inauguration of Florida's new governor, John Wellborn Martin, a Jacksonville businessman who'd served as that city's mayor before handily defeating his Republican opponent in the November election.

No festive occasion in 1925 would have been complete without a jazz orchestra, and George Merrick made sure the new governor would be properly serenaded by sending the Jan Garber Orchestra to Tallahassee for the occasion. The orchestra set up in the lobby of the capitol building. Among the songs it played that day was a tune the new governor had heard during a campaign tour of Florida—a sentimental ballad titled “Give Me One Rose to Remember.”

Martin was introduced by outgoing governor Cary Hardee, but before Hardee handed over the reins of government, he made a few comments about conditions in Florida in January 1925.

Among Martin's duties as the state's chief executive would be confronting any problems that might arise, and in many ways, Florida's problems were no different than those of the other forty-seven states, Hardee noted.

But Florida also had some problems that were unique, the outgoing governor said. People from across the nation were pouring in, drawn by the state's wonderful climate and abundant natural resources. They were bringing wealth and new ideas.

There was, however, a downside to all of this.

“While we appreciate the great contribution other states are making, we cannot minimize the problems which rapid and varied development necessarily produce,” he said. “Will our people lose themselves in a mad scramble for physical things? Will they embrace a materialism to the extent that the finer cultural things of life must be neglected?”

Hardee echoed Henry Flagler's beliefs about the responsibilities of great wealth.

“There are responsibilities in the possession of riches,” Hardee said. “There is an element of danger in the sudden acquisition of wealth. Let us hold fast to the first fundamental principles, [those] of religion, of patriotism, of honor, of respect for law and constituted authority, and in doing so the possession of material things, in combination with spiritual forces, will make us a great people.”

Hardee's remarks were insightful and prescient. As he spoke, thousands upon thousands of Americans were pouring into Florida. It would become one of the most remarkable migrations in the nation's history, and be likened to the gold rushes of California and Alaska.

Florida would officially become a national obsession in 1925.

Kenneth Roberts, writing for the
Saturday Evening Post
, described the traffic into Florida as “an endless serpent whose joints, composed entirely of automobiles, slipped easily over the ground in some spots and labored more violently in
others, but on the whole managed to wriggle forward at a rate of about thirty miles an hour.”

This “ever-flowing stream” was composed of jalopies and limousines, representing “every imaginable human combination,” Roberts wrote. Some carried luggage that was neatly packed, while others “bulged with tents and bedding and mattresses and parrot cages,” and containers of all sorts lashed to wherever the driver could find something to tie them to.

There were young men and women, families with children, elderly folks, mothers with kids who made faces from the rear windows at the drivers behind them, Roberts said.

Traffic from the Midwest and Northeast converged at Washington, DC, and then flowed southward through the cities and towns of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. And it simply did not let up for an entire year.

Still more came to Florida by rail, cramming aboard the passenger trains of the Florida East Coast Railway and the Seaboard Air Line Railroad and the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, filling the Pullman cars and coaches with humanity. At one point seventy-five to one hundred Pullman cars, each carrying dozens of passengers, were unloading every day in Miami.

British author T. H. Weigall was among the hordes who rode the train into Miami in 1925. Every few hours, he wrote, train carloads of “gullible northerners” would be unloaded into a crowd of real estate salesmen who “swarmed round the carriages like a hive of angry bees; most of them shouting, all of them sweating, all of them coatless and carrying great bundles of papers.”

The scene was more or less what Weigall expected, “but also in some subtle way infinitely more repulsive and less romantic,” he later wrote.

The newcomers to Florida were indeed finding more—and less—of what they expected. There seemed to be a price tag on everything, usually astonishingly high, and everyone expected to be paid. One anonymous wit wrote:

The palms, they say, of Florida
Unfold a sight bewitching
A palm you meet at every street
And every palm is itching.

But if everyone expected to be paid, it was only because there was so much money to go around for everyone—or so it seemed. Mass-circulation magazines such as the
Saturday Evening Post
,
Liberty
,
Harper's
,
Literary Digest
, and others were telling fantastic stories of instant riches in Florida.

In February,
Liberty
magazine published a story titled “Over-
Night Millionaires of Florida” in which readers learned about a speculator who'd started with two quarts of gin and eight months later had parlayed that into $75,000. This was only one example of spectacular riches in a state that was “gushing gold,”
Liberty
said.

An ad for the latest issue of
Liberty
asked the tantalizing question, “How many more fortunes will be made in Florida's amazing land rush?”

The stories of overnight wealth in Florida had a hypnotic effect on thousands of readers, Kenneth Roberts wrote.

“Their minds were so inflamed by tales of sudden riches that many of them lost all sense of proportion and came to believe that money could literally be plucked out of the air in Florida,” Roberts wrote.