For Sale —American Paradise (38 page)

The next day, hundreds of Miami's terrified, hurricane-
weary residents gathered at the post office to watch those awful red-
and-black hurricane warning flags hauled down from the flagpole. They were so delighted that they broke into a spontaneous celebration.

“The sun is shining brightly in Miami and its inhabitants, after a night of anxiety, are busily engaged in their everyday tasks,” said a
Miami Daily News
editorial on Thursday afternoon, October 21. “Thursday's sunshine is emblematic of Miami's future, unmarred by threatening clouds.”

Red Cross officials, however, were assembling a glum forecast as the 1926–27 tourist season approached. A few days after the October hurricane scare, Henry Baker met with other Red Cross leaders in Atlanta to discuss the progress of the agency's work in Florida.

Despite such cheery public optimism as was expressed in the
Miami Daily News
, the Red Cross leaders were skeptical about the city's immediate future. Among the topics they discussed was a prediction that tourism revenues, which had totaled about $145 million during the 1925–26 season, would drop by as much as 40 percent during the 1926–27 season, which was just around the corner. That would be devastating to small-business owners and workers who depended on tourism to pay their bills.

Unemployment was still very high, and the steep drop in tourism would mean that it would stay high during the time that it usually eased. And in the
wake of the slide in real estate prices, many Florida residents were stuck with no equity in a house that was no longer worth the mortgages they were struggling to pay. In twenty-first-century parlance, their mortgages were “underwater.”

Some homeowners were burdened by as many as nine mortgages. When banks stopped making loans after a third mortgage, finance companies were stepping in to provide desperately needed cash—also escalating homeowners' debts.

And even worse for the Red Cross, Baker was certain that “influential local institutions”—meaning local and state boards of real estate brokers and the Miami Chamber of Commerce—would launch a well-funded, all-out publicity campaign against the Red Cross if the agency continued to try to tell the truth about conditions in Florida.

While Red Cross leaders tried to help those who needed it and fight the headwinds of misinformation, some powerful men continued their determined effort to distort economic conditions in Florida.

The November 1926 edition of the respected journal
Review of Reviews
published essays by four business leaders who were deeply invested in Florida. The essays, collected under the heading “Florida after the Storm,” were requested by the
Review of Reviews
editor, Albert Shaw, who said he'd asked the “leading men of affairs” in Florida to inform his readers of the “conditions and prospects” in the state.

The essays were written by Hamilton Holt, president of Rollins College in Orlando; Richard Hathaway Edmonds, editor of the
Manufacturers' Record
; Barron Collier, who had essentially been given his own county in 1923 by the Florida legislature after promising to complete the Tamiami Trail; and Peter O. Knight, the Tampa attorney who a few weeks earlier had taken to the pages of the
Wall Street Journal
and Arthur Brisbane's millions of readers to downplay the hurricane damage and disparage the Red Cross's efforts to raise money for storm victims.

All four writers repeated the misleading statement that the hurricane's impact on Florida had been minimal because it had affected only Miami and Moore Haven. But in reality, nearly one-
third of the money driving the Florida boom was in Miami banks, and the city was leading the nation in bank clearings—that is, checks being cashed or deposited. And the city had been called “the greatest market per capita in the world today” by
Literary Digest
. So to say that Florida was fine because the hurricane had only hit Miami was like saying that since a bullet had only pierced the heart, the rest of the body was unharmed.

And the
Review of Reviews
essayists added their own touches of misdirection.

Holt, the Rollins College president, noted that “thousands of dollars” had been contributed to the Red Cross to relieve suffering in Florida, but did not mention that the Red Cross had failed to reach its fund-
raising goal because of the determined campaign being waged by Warfield, Knight, and others.

Manufacturers' Record
editor Edmonds said Red Cross chairman Payne had misled the nation, and accused him of disparaging “the people of Florida who
went to work so vigorously, so cheerfully, and so optimistically” to rebuild after the hurricane.

Knight, the attorney who worked for Warfield, repeated his claim that damage from the storm would not exceed $25 million—even though the Miami Chamber of Commerce had publicly estimated damage at more than $100 million—and said that the only industry that had been harmed by the storm was the citrus industry. But the loss of so many citrus trees still had a silver lining because it would mean higher prices for the growers, he said.

“The tourist business . . . was not involved,” Knight wrote. “There will be more tourists in Florida this winter than ever before, and by January 1 every vestige of damage, so far as the tourist business is concerned, will have disappeared.”

Collier said he was moved by the “misfortune” of Miami and Moore Haven, but added: “I join Governor Martin in his just and strong condemnation of those who use the misfortunes of two cities to injure a whole commonwealth.”

As 1926 drew to a close, Red Cross officials summarized their efforts in Florida, issuing on Christmas Eve a news release saying that 16,000 families totaling 60,000 people had been helped by the Red Cross effort in Florida. The Red Cross was making “an award a minute” of financial aid, and had disbursed more than $3.4 million—about $45 million in twenty-first-century dollars. Meanwhile, two of the state's largest railroads were reporting good news to their stockholders. Both the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad and the Seaboard Air Line Railroad had set records for revenue in 1926. The Atlantic Coast Line had grossed $97 million, and the Seaboard had recorded $67 million for the year.

Warfield, Seaboard's owner, was pouring money and dreams into Florida. And he'd also told Edwin Menninger's
South Florida Developer
about plans to build repair shops in Indiantown for his railroad. That would add one thousand jobs to Martin County. And in anticipation of the completion of the Tamiami Trail linking Tampa and Miami, he had inaugurated train service to Naples and other cities on the Gulf Coast.

But the crown jewel of Warfield's Florida empire was the extension of his railroad from West Palm Beach to Miami. Thanks to the new extension, the Seaboard Air Line Railroad now would offer direct connections from New York to Miami.

At 6:25 p.m. on the evening of January 5, 1927, Warfield and hundreds of businessmen and bankers boarded a southbound Seaboard Air Line train at New York's Pennsylvania Station. It was the inaugural run of a train featuring amenities that would quickly make it a legend—the Orange Blossom Special.

Additional trains—also part of the Orange Blossom Special's inaugural run—joined the New York group in Philadelphia and Baltimore. The trains chuffed southward into the night through Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, carrying around six hundred well-
heeled passengers who controlled millions of dollars' worth of potential investments.

Florida governor John Martin and a group of Florida dignitaries that included Tampa attorney Knight joined the celebratory caravan. They were accompanied by dozens of reporters from Florida and national news services, such as the
New York Times
, the
Philadelphia Record
, the
Atlanta Constitution
, and others.

Once the Special reached Florida, it stopped at every town and hamlet along the way. Much of Florida dropped its daily routine and turned out to welcome the train.

“School children in white summer clothes were there, singing and waving flags; farmers came from miles around, traveling in motor cars or on foot, to greet Mr. Warfield and Governor Martin,” wrote a reporter for the
New York Times
. “At Fort Myers, the citizens arranged an elaborate reception, with brass bands and an automobile parade through decorated streets. There was a similar reception in Naples, which was welcoming a railroad for the first time in its history.”

The celebration continued on the state's east coast. Parades, local dignitaries, and attractive young women greeted the Special at every stop. Warfield, Martin, and Knight vied to see who could kiss the most girls at each station, and a reporter for the
Miami Daily News
declared Knight the winner.

As the four trains comprising the Special neared Miami, the celebrations became more complex. At Opa-
locka, developed around an Arabian theme by aviator Glenn Curtiss, the festivities included men dressed as Arabian warriors on horseback and women in harem costumes.

During the stop at Hollywood, the earthy, acerbic Knight entertained the crowd and reporters with pithy comments about the passengers from the large northern cities.

“I'm tired of that bunch of millionaires from the north who make up the first section of this train having all the glory at these receptions,” Knight said. “We of the third section are just Florida crackers, but we're proud of it, and if it hadn't been for us, the financiers up ahead would never have come to Florida at all.

“One thing is certain. Those hard-boiled, cold-blooded capitalists didn't come here just because they like us or wanted to be nice. It takes fourteen cocktails to make any one of that bunch germinate the first spark of sentiment.”

Reporters didn't ask Knight how he had managed to count the number of cocktails necessary to soften up a Yankee banker on a train supposedly prohibited from selling liquor.

The Orange Blossom Special arrived in Miami at dusk on January 8, hours late because of all of the celebrations along the way. Fireworks exploded as the trains rolled to a stop at a temporary Seaboard Air Line station at Seventh Street and Twentieth Avenue. At Royal Palm Park on the waterfront, the crowd was entertained by Arthur Pryor's Band. The band included more than two dozen musicians led by virtuoso trombonist Arthur Pryor, who had once so dazzled an audience of German soldiers that they had insisted on taking apart his instrument to see if it was real. The band had recorded the novelty song “The Whistler
and His Dog” in late 1925, and the catchy, lilting tune was still being hummed and whistled across the nation.

The Orange Blossom Special's arrival in Miami brought a renewed sense of optimism to the city's boosters, which included the
Miami Daily News
.

“Today Miami enters upon another era of progress,” the
Daily News
said in a front-
page editorial on January 9, 1927.

The new Seaboard Air Line service to Miami was an indication that the erratic boom-based economy of 1925–26 was being replaced by stable growth. “Booms frequently follow railroad expansion; but railroads do not follow booms,” the editorial continued.

Warfield's decision to invest heavily in South Florida was based on a careful cost-
benefit analysis. And the Seaboard's benefit from its Miami extension would be income from shipping fruits and vegetables grown on land reclaimed from the Everglades, the
Daily News
said. The
South Florida Developer
predicted that the farms also would be needed to feed the thousands of workers coming to Indiantown to work at the new sawmill and train repair shop.

“When expansion of the character Miami now witnesses is consummated, we may rest assured it is only after all the risks have been carefully weighed,” the
Miami Daily News
editorial said. “. . . Railroads open up undeveloped lands and create markets at the same time. That is Warfield's mission in Florida. It will be fulfilled.”

Despite the new optimism among Miami boosters, however, there were stubborn signs of problems in Paradise. A few weeks after the Orange Blossom Special merrymaking, Henry Baker, the chairman of the Red Cross's relief effort in Miami, reported to the agency's national headquarters that unemployment was becoming “more acute daily.”

In a January 27 report, Baker noted that families who had not needed help in the weeks immediately after the September hurricane now needed financial assistance.

“No one would expect that unemployment would be a serious problem here at this time of year,” Baker wrote.

A few days later, the
Miami Herald
—one of the early deniers of serious hurricane damage—published an editorial acknowledging that there was “a great deal of actual destitution in Miami.”

“Little children are actually suffering on account of lack of food,” the
Herald
editorial said. “Delicate women, scores of them, have insufficient food. Men are actually going hungry, looking for any small jobs that may turn up from the proceeds of which they may help their families.”