Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression
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The 1920s in Florida was a time of incredible excess, immense wealth, and precipitous collapse. The decade there produced the largest human migration in American history, far exceeding the settlement of the West, as millions flocked to the grand hotels and the new cities that rose rapidly from the teeming wetlands. The boom spawned a new subdivision civilization—and the most egregious large-scale assault on the environment in the name of “progress.” Nowhere was the glitz and froth of the Roaring Twenties more excessive than in Florida. Here was Vegas before there was a Vegas: gambling was condoned and so was drinking, since prohibition was not enforced. Tycoons, crooks, and celebrities arrived en masse to promote or exploit this new and dazzling American frontier in the sunshine. Yet, the import and deep impact of these historical events have never been explored thoroughly until now.
In Bubble in the Sun Christopher Knowlton examines the grand artistic and entrepreneurial visions behind Coral Gables, Boca Raton, Miami Beach, and other storied sites, as well as the darker side of the frenzy. For while giant fortunes were being made and lost and the nightlife raged more raucously than anywhere else, the pure beauty of the Everglades suffered wanton ruination and the workers, mostly black, who built and maintained the boom, endured grievous abuses.
Knowlton breathes dynamic life into the forces that made and wrecked Florida during the decade: the real estate moguls Carl Fisher, George Merrick, and Addison Mizner, and the once-in-a-century hurricane whose aftermath triggered the stock market crash. This essential account is a revelatory—and riveting—history of an era that still affects our country today.
Christopher Knowlton
Christopher Knowlton is the author of Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression. He is a former staff writer and London bureau chief for Fortune magazine. He also spent fifteen years in the investment business. His previous book was Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West.
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Reviews for Bubble in the Sun
22 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All in all, this history of Florida in the 1920s met all my expectations, and a little bit more. Mind you, I'd been aware of this episode of real estate speculation gone mad for years, but Knowlton does the reader a favor by connecting the dots of making a strong argument that the excesses of the 1920s in Florida have a lot in common with the real estates bubble that contributed to the "Great Recession" of 2008. Besides that, you have the cast of characters who made Florida their theater, starting with Henry Flagler, Rockefeller's one-time business partner, and the man who pioneered the commercial building industry in the state with his grand hotels, and whose railroad construction made possible what came after.From there, this is mostly the story of three men. There was the already successful businessman Carl Fisher (one of the original owners of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway), who mostly created Miami Beach. The architect Addison Mizner, who wanted great things, and who is mostly associated with Palm Beach. Finally, there was ambitious local son George Merrick, who turned the family citrus farm into Coral Gables. These men had a spirit of empire-building and they ascended to great heights, and arguably made Florida what it now is, before their excesses brought them down. As a foil, Knowlton offers the example of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who was something of a misfit until she found her place as a journalist and a writer, and a naturalist who was a great defender of the Everglades.Highly recommended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Babbitt Writ in SOLID CAPS
Sinclair Lewis created a fictional character, George Babbitt, to flog the ballyhoo and boosterism that was just shifting into gear at the start of the Roaring Twenties. But George, also a real estate man, could not hold a candle to the crowd that flocked to Florida, razed its natural beauty, and erected cities, towns, shopping districts, vacation spots, and highways on natural and manufactured land, nor to their exaggeration, and dubious, as well as outright illegal, finances. The Twenties did Roar and they appeared to have Roared loudest in Florida.
Christopher Knowlton has written quite a snappy history of the Florida boom and bust. He focuses primarily on four fascinating, driven, smart, and fatally flawed entrepreneurs of the era: Addison Mizner, who created the boom’s architectural and design palette; George Merrick, a man of great vision who envisioned a complete planned city, Coral Gables; Carl Fisher, perhaps the most daring and resourceful of the bunch, race car and boat competitor, inventor, and builder, who literally burned through life; and D. P. Davis, another man who thought and created on a grand scale only to vanish at sea. Then there was the person who worked in counterbalance to land forming, Margery Stoneman Douglas, the environmentalist and author, who set out to save the Everglades, and who outlived not only the men but that era and a couple more, dying at 108. But he starts at the beginning with Henry Flagler, a founder of Standard Oil, who through development of St. Augustine and his famous railroad laid the foundation for what was to follow. Readers will find each and every page of this history fascinating and crammed with information and facts they may not have been aware of. As an example,
“And in sheer numbers, the flow of people to Florida in the mid-1920s would exceed any of the great land rushes of the past: the 300,000 or so to California from 1848 to 1852, for instance, or the 50,000 to Oklahoma in 1889. By 1925, it would be conservatively estimated that 4,000 people were entering Florida daily by car, an additional 3,000 by train, and a hundred more by ship. In total, some 2.5 million entered the state that year alone.” The facts, all quite astounding, keep coming page after page.
History offers up lessons for those who follow, if they are willing to read and listen. Naturally, everyday people and leaders either don’t or deny the facts in favor of expediency of the moment. Those in Florida should have known a bust was coming, that in some ways the whole adventure was a bit like a Charles Ponzi, con man of the day, concoction. But when the money is rolling in, it seems it will roll forever, and even if you think it might end. And, well, who wants to be the sucker who pulls up stakes too soon? Knowlton, a past financial executive and writer, contends that the Florida real estate bust was a major contributor to the Great Depression. Further, he draws striking parallels to the recent Great Recession. For many interested in busts and learning from them, these chapters, “Speculative Dementia” and “A Legacy of Greed and Folly,” may prove to be of most interest. Drawing on viewpoints of various economists in the monetarist and macroeconomic camps, he marshals strong support for his contention. As an example, from the latter chapter comes this that at the very least makes one aware that history in fact repeats time and again:
“In many ways, the Florida of the 1920s was a precursor of America one hundred years later. In Florida then, as in the United States at the moment, two affluent coasts were separated by an often impoverished, largely agricultural interior. Inequitable wealth distribution, racial intolerance, xenophobia, and rising nationalism—the KKK being the most blatant manifestation back then—were combined with a dangerous over reliance on laissez-fare economics and a governance structure where bankers and businesspeople wielded inordinate influence on policy. To complete the analogy, the political leadership of day displayed profound indifference to the fate of the environment and to society’s less fortunate. It didn’t end well then, which portends a dismal future for us now unless we change course.”
So not only is Bubble in the Sun a terrific read regarding ballyhoo and boosterism, of business run amok, of government corruption, and of gigantic personalities, but it also serves up a helping of history that pointed to our fate in 2008 and perhaps one not too far in our 20s future. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It all started with Standard Oil money. Henry Flagler, Rockefeller’s partner (who John D. called the brains of the Standard Oil Trust) retired from the company and discovered the new frontier – Florida. Like a Jeff Bezos pushing into outer space, Flagler spent what today would be billions developing land in Florida and building a railway to and through it. This opened the state to freight and passengers, and the madness of the bubble began. Where mere mortals saw swamps, clouds of mosquitos and impenetrable jungles, Flagler saw a potential wonderland.In Christopher Knowlton’s excellent Bubble in the Sun, the young billionaires of the era flocked to the state, making it a high end, luxury destination for them and their kind. The book examines the excesses they went to, and how they built new fortunes selling their dreams (and their partying) to the rest of the country.Over the (Roaring) 1920s, they would buy up raw land, subdivide it and put it on the market. Like bees to honey, people literally threw money at brokers to own their own piece. Knowlton relates how new records were set every time a development came to market, with millions committed on the first day of sales alone. At one point, he says, people were literally throwing checks at brokers, which had to be collected in a barrel because they couldn’t fill out the contracts fast enough. By the height of it all, there developed a shortage of police, because so many quit to become real estate agents.The book thoroughly profiles the highflyers of the bubble, in all their anachronistic and anarchistic character. William Jennings Bryan, who got dragged into it as a shill, admitted “Coral Gables is the only city in the world where you can tell a lie at breakfast that will come true by evening.” My own favorites are the Mizner brothers, the architect and the grifter, who rose to national fame on the back of the bubble. I treasure my first edition of Alva Johnston’s profile of them (The Legendary Mizners, 1952), and Knowlton gives him credit as he digs into the lives of all these hustlers from across the country and a couple from Europe too. They made billions in a short time, then lost it all and more even faster. One was a bicycle racer who made his first fortune repairing bicycles in Indianapolis. Bikes had recently replaced the unworkable penny-farthings and become all the rage. He turned out to be quite the showman. After building the Indianapolis 500 Speedway, he took on Florida, where among other things, he developed cheesecake – the photos of young women in bathing suits that made the rest of the country wonder what they were missing. Like all of them, the bubble’s instability escaped him, and he died essentially penniless. Another megastar ended as a failing real estate agent, another became a beggar, and at least one committed suicide. Several blew their massive inheritances trying to make their own fortunes. These were people who until recently had fleets of buses and limousines circulating all over the southeast, bringing prospects to see for themselves. One employed an elephant as a golf caddy. They built world class marketing organizations so their projects were always in the newspapers all over the country. Prohibition was openly laughed off. Parties were everything.The signs of a bubble were there, but everyone carried on regardless. Then a series of hurricanes wiped out almost everything they had built, and scared off new prospects. Even Flagler’s railway to the Florida Keys was torn to shreds, and no one raised their hand to restore it. Land prices plunged, banks closed, lending ceased, investors vaporized. The stock market crash of 1929 was the final nail, plunging the whole country into a depression the likes of which had never been seen in America. Nobody wanted to buy anything in that atmosphere. Nobody gave Florida another thought.A new generation of billionaires scooped up the remains at bargain prices and the cycle has of course repeated. Today, it’s rising seas and more violent hurricanes that are the primary threats, but that has stopped nothing in the way of land development. As long as prices are rising, everyone is happy to dive right in.There are three things that make Bubble in the Sun outstanding, besides the characters, who wrote themselves for Knowlton. He is careful to put things in perspective, because we take so much for granted. He explains the rolling daisy-chain effects of the depression so readers can see how it deepened and took Florida down. He explains the monetary policy of the era, banking policy as it was then, and always tells readers what a dollar amount would mean in today’s money. All this keeps the book from being just a flat history that today’s readers could not relate to. This adds tremendous value.Knowlton also seems to have tapped everyone in the world for their takes on the players and the era. He assembled everyone’s contributions into an easy-reading, engaging and often exciting tale that is seamless where it could easily have been disjointed. A tremendous amount of work went into Bubble in the Sun, and it wears well.Finally, he is very clear on the racism of the builders. Communities had in their very contacts that no one could sell to a non-white. Blacks could work in construction or service (after protests by a megarich doyenne to the state about her need for servants), but lived in shantytowns far away. That this was normal for the times is no excuse. These innovative builders missed a huge opportunity to make a real difference. But the difference they were after was who died with the most toys.I was particularly taken with Knowlton’s emphasis on Marjory Stoneman Douglas, born and raised in the Miami area – the only one. She started out in journalism because her father ran the paper, but developed into a national storyteller for the Saturday Evening Post. She lived alone, appreciating more and more the nature she grew up with as the developers made it disappear. She became a rabid environmentalist, attempting to stanch the destruction of the Everglades, the main source of freshwater in the state. As Frank Barbour said in 1944: “It was an easy state for man to ruin and he ruined it with ruthless efficiency.” She outlived all of the other characters, getting a Congressional Medal of Honor from the president at the age of 103. She was a product of the bubble, one that turned out far better because of it, and far better than all the celebrity developers combined. Knowlton acknowledges her outsized contribution to there being more to life than making billions destroying a state.David Wineberg
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Really a clear description of the 1920's and the land boom in Florida. Good detail of the various people responsible. i live (born here) in Florida and have always had an interest in the history. Especially Flagler as I knew a man years ago who worked building the railroads and he had such interesting stories to tell.
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Bubble in the Sun - Christopher Knowlton
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Bubble in the Sun by Christopher Knowlton, Simon & SchusterTo Pippa and to the memory of my grandmother Ruth Bull Rathbone, who gave me Florida.
Did any of these people know what they were doing—could any of them see even an inch beyond their own affairs, or realize what hopelessly inconspicuous, enormously unimportant atoms they were in that great surging sea that was modern America?
—T. H. WEIGALL, Boom in Paradise
INTRODUCTION
At high tide on the clear morning of January 10, 1926, to the squalling of circling gulls, the Prinz Valdemar, a five-masted steel-hulled barkentine, weighed anchor. With the help of two tugboats, she prepared to navigate the narrow channel known as Government Cut that led into the turning basin of Miami Harbor. Her captain and crew of eighty were understandably impatient: they had waited ten days for their turn to be towed into the crowded harbor. Many of the crew stood at ease at her deck railings and watched the tugs at work. As they knew well, the Prinz Valdemar was a dinosaur of the great age of sailing ships and, at 241 feet long, likely the largest vessel ever to enter the channel. Built in Denmark in 1891, she had weathered many transatlantic crossings and countless storms at sea until the outbreak of World War I, when the German navy deployed her as a blockade runner. In a later incarnation, she had hauled sacks of coconuts up from Nicaragua. The plan now was to convert her into a floating hundred-room hotel to help meet the acute housing shortage in Miami, which, like the rest of Florida, was in the midst of an epic building boom.
Thirty-six other ships, mostly steamships and schooners, already jammed the inner harbor, vying for berths and wharf space to unload their cargos of building supplies. The steamers were tied up three deep at the city piers. An additional thirty-one ships lay at anchor outside the harbor, awaiting their turn to enter, loaded with enormous amounts of lumber—millions of feet, by one estimate—to say nothing of the wallboard, plumbing fixtures, and roofing materials destined for various construction projects up and down the coast.
Precluded from entering the port, passenger ships arriving from Havana, New York, and as far away as San Francisco had resorted to anchoring off the coast and ferrying their passengers ashore on launches and tenders. At night, with their rigging lit, the forest of masts and rows of bright portholes suggested an ethereal, glittering city bobbing on the horizon.
But nothing seemed more fantastical than what was actually happening onshore. From the deck of the Valdemar, the crew could see the skeletons of a dozen new steel and concrete skyscrapers sheathed in scaffolding and jutting into the sky, creating a new urban skyline where only one multistory structure had existed just eighteen months before. Three tall hotels along the bay-front area of downtown Miami—the Columbus, the Watson, and the Everglades—were framed in steel girders but remained unfinished. Behind them rose the Meyer-Kiser Bank Building on Flagler Street, also still under construction, and the three-towered McAllister Hotel. Tallest of them all was the recently completed Miami Daily News Building a few blocks north. The year before, the newspaper had set a world record when it published a 504-page edition in twenty sections, loaded with real estate ads and weighing 7.5 pounds—requiring fifty railcars full of newsprint to produce. To celebrate its unprecedented success, the paper had built this twenty-six-story skyscraper and crowned it with an elaborate tiered bell tower modeled on the Giralda tower that sits atop Seville Cathedral in southern Spain.
Pandemonium raged on Miami’s city streets—and on the streets of all the new cities and towns that had sprung up along both coasts of Florida during that decade. My first impression, as I wandered out into the blazing sunlight of that bedlam that was Miami, was of utter confusion,
remembered Theyre Hamilton Weigall, a twenty-four-year-old Australian-born, London-based journalist who arrived in Florida by train at the peak of the boom and stood stunned among the screeching motor horns and the deafening cacophony of rivet guns, drills, and hammers. Hatless, coatless men rushed about the blazing streets, their arms full of papers, perspiration pouring from their foreheads,
he recalled. Every shop seemed to be combined with a real estate office; at every doorway, crowds of young men were shouting and speech-making, thrusting forward papers and proclaiming to heaven the unsurpassed chances they were offering to make a fortune.… Everybody in Miami was real estate mad.
Building projects in the Greater Miami region totaled $103 million in 1925 ($1.5 billion in today’s money), a huge figure for the day. But an embargo imposed by the Florida railroads in September 1925 had compounded the chaos and overcrowding in the harbor and on the city’s streets. Lacking the requisite warehousing, logistics, and labor, the railroads had been overwhelmed by the avalanche of building materials pouring into the state. Until order could be restored, the tracks repaired, and new warehouses built, all cargo into Florida was now banned, except fuel and perishables. A milk bottle shortage emerged; ice had to be rationed; local cows, deprived of feed, began to starve. By year-end 1925, thousands of railroad cars were backed up in Jacksonville and other gateways to the state.
One enterprising businessman tried to smuggle in a railcar full of building bricks under a layer of ice, in the guise of a shipment of lettuce. Others tried to move their supplies in by steamship and schooner, and when that didn’t work, by truck, clogging the highways in and out of the state—highways still rough and already jammed with automobiles, all bound for the new promised land of Florida, dubbed the last American frontier. Adding to the chaos at the piers and railroad stations were the endless stacks of crates, the beginnings of what would be a record citrus crop bound for northern markets—but at the moment, going nowhere. The Miami dockworkers seized on the demand for their services to strike for better wages—60 cents per hour, up from 45 cents. Soon thereafter 1,800 telegraphers went on strike, too, hampering communications.
Nowhere was the speculation as feverish as it was along the waterfront of Dade County, where prices for bare plots of land were doubling and tripling, seemingly overnight, including those that had yet to be dredged from the bays. As property values exploded, the speculation extended to the selling and reselling, numerous times in a day, of paper options on these parcels. Land sales caused small riots where crowds literally threw checks at the developers—in such numbers that they had to be collected in barrels. Seminole Beach was bought for $3 million one day, then sold three days later for $7.6 million. One Miami real estate office sold $34 million worth of real estate in a single morning.
But the construction boom in Florida was by no means limited to the coasts. Countless inland communities were under development as well. In addition to the celebrated subdivisions of Miami Beach, Coral Gables, Boca Raton, and Davis Islands were literally hundreds of others—by one estimate, 970—of varying sizes around the state with names that evoked garden-like settings or tropical Spanish paradises, such as Jungle Terrace, Altos del Mar, Opa-Locka, and Rio Vista Isles.
Many of these developments were being built around golf courses that were a major selling point in every resort’s lavish brochure. In fact, the state was on its way to boasting the world’s largest concentration of golf courses, a distinction it holds to this day. In all likelihood, some twenty million lots were for sale across Florida. As Willard A. Barrett, a writer for the financial publication Barron’s, noted, to occupy them all would require a Florida population of sixty million—or roughly half the existing population of the United States at that time. Problematically, Florida, by the late 1920s, had only one and a half million residents, although that was up 50 percent from the start of the decade. Nevertheless, that didn’t discourage outsiders from spending more than $1 million per day to buy up Florida property in 1925. By then, the Florida land boom had evolved into a historic investment frenzy. Barron G. Collier, who had purchased more than a million acres in southwestern Florida—a parcel larger than the state of Rhode Island—very likely became the nation’s first billionaire, at least on paper, when the value of his Florida holdings spiked during this period. Something is taking place in Florida to which the history of developments, booms, inrushes, speculation, and investment yields no parallel,
reported the New York Times in March 1925.
As the Prinz Valdemar entered Government Cut, the Clyde Line ship George Washington, loaded with one hundred impatient passengers bound for New York, began to sound its ship’s whistle, announcing its intention to depart the harbor the moment the Prinz Valdemar had cleared the channel. At that moment, an accident occurred that seemed foreordained. Someone ignored a command, or missed a signal, or a gust of wind blew in from offshore, or the tide shifted—no one could be entirely sure which of these factors was most responsible for the mishap that followed.
The huge gray-hulled sailing ship bumped up against a sandbar, swung sideways, and wedged itself across the mouth of the eighteen-foot-deep channel. As the tide began to recede, the weight of the outgoing seawater swung the giant keel out from under the vessel so that her cargo of supplies shifted. The old ship, her iron sides grinding, groaning, and creaking, capsized in a slow-motion pantomime that took an agonizing four minutes to play out, allowing her crew ample time to leap overboard into the lukewarm, blue-green waters of Biscayne Bay. As her five masts gradually genuflected, water rushed over her gunwales until she came to rest on her side, half submerged, so that she stoppered the channel like a cork in a bottle, preventing all but the smallest boats from passing in and out of the harbor.
Frantic efforts were made to right the great ship. Thick ropes called hawsers were cleated to her decks and hauled by the tugboats to try to pull her upright. When these efforts failed, a pair of dredging vessels were assigned to carve out an eighty-foot-wide temporary channel that could bypass around her. Both dredgers struck coral and broke down. A second vessel, the steamer Lakevort, tried to squeeze past the wreck only to run aground herself, further complicating the salvage operation.
Meanwhile, on board the George Washington, now trapped in the harbor, hysteria mounted. The governor’s office in Tallahassee was flooded with telephone calls and telegraphs demanding that Governor John Martin fire the harbormaster. Overnight all the frantic building construction up and down the East Coast was forced into a near-complete standstill. By now, the state’s entire transportation system—its rails, its roads, and its seaports; the infrastructure that built and sustained the great boom—was either clogged, stalled, or broken.
This forced recess gave developers a chance to review their projects. One by one, in offices across the state, they pulled out their drawings and their blueprints, their contracts and their budgets, and spread them out on their drafting tables to reconsider every nuance of their ambitious plans. A few of them, after doing so, decided that the prudent course of action was to pull back a little. In Wall Street parlance, they opted to take some of the risk off the table; but they would be the exceptions.
The 1920s are best remembered as the era of the flapper, jazz, the automobile, radio, Prohibition, and rum-running. But in isolation, perhaps nothing reflects better the spirit of this rollicking decade than the remarkable sequence of events that transpired in Florida. Impressive skyscrapers had been built before, and a few suburbs had been drawn up in places such as Shaker Heights, Ohio, but not on the colossal scale of what occurred in Florida during the twenties. Up and down both coasts, entire cities were mapped out, or platted, from scratch, with much of the land somehow dredged up out of swampland or sand, and sold, seemingly overnight, to the property-famished public.
The great Florida land boom would prompt the country’s greatest migration of people, dwarfing every previous westward exodus, as laid-off factory workers, failing farmers, disaffected office clerks—anyone unemployed or seeking a better quality of life—boarded southbound trains or climbed into their Tin Lizzies and made their way to this emerging land of opportunity, touted as a tropical paradise. Six million people flowed into the state in three years. In 1925 alone, an estimated two and a half million people arrived looking for jobs and careers, and, for a time, found them in the building trades. As one observer wrote: All of America’s gold rushes, all her oil booms, and all her free-land stampedes dwindled by comparison with the torrent of migration pouring into Florida.
Florida, which began the decade as America’s last frontier, would end the decade as the country’s most celebrated playground—and its favorite retirement destination. Furthermore, it quickly became the bellwether for every important social and economic development of the period, and has remained a bellwether ever since.
And yet historians and economists have largely overlooked the boom’s larger significance, specifically its direct impact on the severity and duration of the Great Depression that followed. Most cite the stock market crash of 1929 as the event that heralded the Depression. In fact, the bursting of the great Florida land bubble was the more pivotal event—the one that truly, if tragically, triggered the nationwide economic and social trauma that followed, and the one that helps explain why it lasted so long and was so devastating. The land boom, not the stock market, was the true catalyst for the disasters that befell the nation as overvalued housing and property prices everywhere began to collapse in the wake of the Florida debacle. The eroding economic fundamentals and collapsing consumer confidence finally reached Wall Street and pulled down the stock market, bringing an end to the frantic nationwide party so aptly named the Roaring Twenties.
In short, the great Florida land boom was one of the most consequential financial manias in US history, and yet to this day, it has never received the attention it deserves. One reason for this has been the paucity of economic data to fully explain the event—in particular, limited government statistics from the era relating to home prices, household wealth, and foreclosures. Another reason is that the significance of the boom has not been understood in a broad enough historical and business context. One goal of this book is to remedy those omissions and oversights. Another goal is to tell the story through the experiences of the characters who led the boom and were most responsible for its magnitude and repercussions.
The stars of the story are the handful of daring men who, eager for fame and wealth, took enormous risks to open up Florida for real estate development and then chased the boom to its ruinous conclusion. (Other than one rich widow on each coast, Florida’s developers at the time were all men.) Chief among these are the uncrowned kings
of real estate: Carl Fisher in Miami Beach, Addison Mizner in Palm Beach and Boca Raton, George Merrick in Coral Gables, and David Paul D.P.
Davis in Tampa and St. Augustine.
Fisher, a former bicycle racer still addicted to speed and excitement, chain-smoked cigars, often chewing off their butts and swallowing them. Sloppy, crude, and profane, he was also terrifically clever, with a genius for promotional gimmicks and publicity stunts. Mizner, the son of a diplomat, had previously prospected for Klondike gold in the Yukon and fought as a heavyweight boxer in Australia. An affable and eccentric bon vivant and raconteur, he collected Spanish religious relics and surrounded himself with a coterie of friends and animals—including a pair of Chows and a monkey that he carried around on his shoulder named Johnnie Brown. Merrick, by contrast, was an idealistic, ruggedly handsome part-time poet and churchgoing workaholic. For years, he had planned how to convert his father’s grapefruit orchards into an ideal city. And finally, the dapper, pencil-thin Davis was a former newsboy and shoe salesman. He had worked on the Panama Canal and operated a lucrative ferry concession in Jacksonville before becoming a real estate broker. Blindly driven, arrogant, and wildly overconfident, he appeared to possess the Midas touch.
All four of these men were daring gamblers, bold promoters, and consummate showmen. Each had grown exceptionally rich during the decade, accruing fortunes of between $50 million to $100 million, equivalent to $690 million to $1.38 billion in today’s dollars. But before long, each would find himself physically taxed and morally challenged. By the decade’s end, they would write the script for how flamboyant and hyperbolic real estate developers and promoters should, or could, behave.
One earlier player’s importance is such that he cannot be omitted from this narrative: the Gilded Age oil tycoon Henry Flagler. By creating the state’s first empire of railroads and resort hotels, he built the infrastructure backbone and provided the template for all of the madcap development that followed. Our story will begin with him, in St. Augustine, a few decades before the boom.
Nor is the historical record complete without mentioning the men and women who stood up for the preservation of Florida’s environment, which found itself under siege by dredgers, road builders, and property developers. Among these, none is more important than the author Marjory Stoneman Douglas, daughter of the editor in chief of the Miami Herald, who, during the twenties, came of age, built her house, and found her cause. She spent much of her long career doing everything in her power to protect Florida’s one-of-a-kind ecosystem and, in particular, its Everglades. The evolving understanding of the ecology of tropical wetlands during this period—of just how much environmental change these mangrove swamps, salt marshes, and wet grasslands could endure—is an integral aspect of Florida’s land boom, relevant today in light of the threats presented by global warming and rising sea levels that have put so much of the state’s wetlands, wildlife, and valuable real estate in peril.
The epic Florida land boom and its collapse—replete with its greed, excess, corruption, and comeuppance—also provides useful lessons for us today. In particular, it throws light on the threats posed by rampant speculation and overleveraging. But the boom’s underlying causes also merit study. Contributing mightily to the calamity at the end of the twenties were the loose lending standards across the country. Such lending was used in conjunction with two relatively new and suddenly popular financial instruments: home mortgages, which more than tripled in volume during the decade, and installment credit loans for the purchase of cars and home appliances, which more than doubled. They fueled the boom and pushed personal indebtedness to unsustainable levels. Corruption and fraud, too, would play their parts, especially in Florida, which quickly became the epicenter of the era’s property speculation, attracting gangsters, crooks, and double-dealing bankers. Finally, the story has import because the Great Depression was the most traumatic social and economic calamity in the nation’s history. Its staggering dimensions and devastating worldwide impact make it all the more vital that we understand its origins, if we are to avoid repeating our mistakes.
Back in Miami Harbor, it would take twenty-five days to dredge and dynamite a new channel and a full forty-two days to remove the Prinz Valdemar’s masts, pump out her hold, extract her $200,000 worth of ruined and water-soaked cargo, and then right her and refloat her. But when the ship was finally towed ashore and the channel cleared, the character of the boom had changed. Unbeknownst to the millions of Americans participating in the frenzy, the entire teetering, speculative housing house of cards in Florida and across the nation as a whole—much like the capsizing Prinz Valdemar—had begun to topple.
1
THE LAST FRONTIER
1
THE PHARAOH OF FLORIDA
One afternoon in early January 1878, a well-dressed middle-aged man with a walrus mustache and a handsome square head of graying hair stepped off the train in St. Augustine, Florida. His seven-year-old son, his twenty-two-year-old daughter, her husband, and his sickly wife stepped down after him. The family had made their ninety-hour journey from New York to Florida on doctor’s orders, looking for sunshine, warmth, and clean air to help the wife recuperate from tuberculosis. They had stopped for one night en route in Savannah, Georgia, to break up the long trip.
It was couple’s first holiday in many years, and the farthest they had ever been from Cleveland, where they had spent most of their married life, or from New York City, to which they had recently moved. They were Henry Morrison Flagler and Mary Harkness Flagler, and, thanks to Mary’s incurable illness, they lived a socially monastic existence: they rarely went out and never entertained. In the prior seventeen years, they had spent only two nights apart. Most nights, the Flaglers would sit at home, and he would read to her; or if she slept, he would sit up late, reading in a chair positioned just outside her bedroom so that he could hear her if she called out to him.
St. Augustine, the oldest city in the country, was reputed to boast Old World Spanish charm, which it did, but the best hotel there—really, the only adequate hotel—was noisy and ramshackle. Worse, it was filled with coughing consumptives, many of them confined to wicker wheelchairs. The couple found the accommodations disappointing and depressing. The establishment’s food, which consisted of canned meats and canned vegetables accompanied by an assortment of tarts and meringues, was virtually inedible. The young people in the party found nothing to do. The Flagler family stayed for only one night.
Apart from the northernmost counties that bordered Georgia and the nearly adjacent northern towns of Jacksonville and St. Augustine, Florida in the 1870s remained a largely unsettled and undeveloped wilderness of dense pinewoods, impassable palmetto jungle, and tangled mangrove swamps. Scraggly beards of gray Spanish moss hung from huge cypress trees and live oaks along the riverbanks. The farther south you went, the swampier the state became. A few tiny fishing villages had sprung up along the sandy coasts, but the vast interior was largely unexplored—a land of watery saw grass and shallow lakes and jungle hammocks where the bay laurel and myrtle competed with the oaks and the palmettos, and where bromeliads, or air plants, sprouted from the tree branches. The state could accurately be described at the time as America’s last frontier. Roads were virtually nonexistent. Stern-wheelers lazily plied the inland waterway between St. Augustine and Jupiter. The largest town was Key West, with its population of ten thousand, situated at the far end of a string of coral reef islands off the southern tip of the peninsula. Local industry consisted of a few lumber mills in the north, some early phosphate mines, and a smattering of citrus groves. A pair of failed coconut plantations had left a line of nonnative coconut palms swaying over the beaches along a stretch of the central coast.
Four years would pass before Henry Flagler returned to St. Augustine. When he did, it would be his turn to be ill and in need of recuperation. Fifty-two years old and widowed, he was recovering from a liver ailment that had hospitalized him in New York City the month before. During the intervening years, a number of changes had occurred in his life. Mary had died of her tuberculosis in May 1881. His son, Harry, eleven, was now being raised by an aunt back in New York. Flagler himself was semiretired from running the world’s largest and most profitable business enterprise, the monopoly known throughout the world as the Standard Oil Trust. Thanks to his founding stake in the business, Flagler had become stupendously wealthy.
Freed from caring for an invalid wife, freed from the obligations of parenthood, and freed from the burdens of running a vast and vilified enterprise, he was looking for something new to do with his free time and his giant fortune. He was about to find what he was looking for in St. Augustine—a new occupation and career—and it would lead to one of the most extraordinary second acts in American business history.
Henry Flagler was born in upstate New York in 1830, the son of a rural Presbyterian minister of German Palatine stock. At fourteen, he left home to join his older half brother, who was working at a general store run by a maternal uncle in Republic, Ohio. Quiet, shrewd, dutiful, and keenly attentive to detail, Henry showed a natural aptitude for business. By age thirty-one, married with one daughter, he had made the substantial sum of $50,000 ($1.1 million in today’s dollars) trading grain and selling alcohol. Impatient to make more, he rolled his entire stake into a salt manufacturing business in Saginaw, Michigan, hoping to take advantage of the Civil War boom in salt as a food preservative. Unfortunately, he and his partner entered the business too late and ran into ferocious competition in an industry that had overexpanded. When demand for salt evaporated at the end of the war, their company collapsed. Flagler lost his entire $50,000 and another $50,000 that he had borrowed from his in-laws, the Harkness family. He was forced to return to trading grain.
Two years later, his debts paid off, he entered the kerosene refining business, teaming up with an equally meticulous and ambitious young neighbor, eight years his junior, whom he knew from his early grain trading days. His new colleague’s name was John D. Rockefeller. Together with a third partner, an Englishman named Samuel Andrews, who was an expert in kerosene refining, the three formed the partnership of Rockefeller, Andrews, and Flagler. Once again, the Harkness family staked their son-in-law in the business, doubling their initial investment to $100,000. This time he did not disappoint them. He and his partners quickly consolidated the nascent Ohio kerosene and oil refining business, with a view to better controlling both price and supply. For the next fifteen years, Flagler and Rockefeller, who soon lived a few doors down from each other on fashionable Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, walked to and from work together, side by side, dressed in their silk top hats, long coats, and gloves, two well-heeled Victorian gentlemen intently discussing their shared enterprise. Theirs would remain, Flagler acknowledged, a friendship founded on business rather than a business founded on friendship.
When the company relocated to New York City, Rockefeller and Flagler continued to live around the corner from each other on East Fifty-Fourth Street in Manhattan.
Today the business is understood to have been Rockefeller’s creation, and Flagler’s formative contribution has been largely forgotten. But it was Henry’s idea to consolidate the industry by buying up all of their small competitors, thus avoiding the fate that befell his salt venture. It was also his idea to secretly demand price concessions from the railroads (10 percent to 15 percent rebates in the early years, more in later years), in return for guaranteed shipments. These concessions allowed the partners to undercut their competition on price, forcing most out of business or into merger agreements with the fast-growing firm. And finally, it was his idea to create the secret trust structure that would allow the company to expand across state borders and combine with other large corporations. It was this last decision, implemented by the firm’s clever attorney, Samuel C. T. Dodd, that gave birth to the Standard Oil Trust, the greatest wealth creator the world had seen since the best days of the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Flagler’s innovations were easily the most significant contributions to the organization’s historic success—and Rockefeller knew it. When asked during testimony before Congress if it was his idea to form the oil trust, Rockefeller replied, No, sir, I wish I’d had the brains to think of it. It was Henry M. Flagler.
As he admitted freely to others over the years, The key to our success was Henry Flagler.
By the time Flagler stepped back from the business in his early fifties to pursue other ventures—ones where he could have complete control—the Standard Oil Trust had a market capitalization of $154 million, or $4.1 billion in today’s money, and reigned as the world’s largest industrial enterprise. But its exponential growth had only just begun. When John D. Rockefeller, who stayed on in the business, finally retired from the company in 1918, the Standard Oil companies had paid him hundreds of millions in dividends and distributions. His stock holdings in the company made him the world’s richest man.
But even as early as the 1880s, controversy engulfed Standard Oil. The public judged it to be a tyrannical monopoly, ruthless and destructive; its management team, greedy and predatory. The muckraking reporter Ida M. Tarbell, whose father’s refinery had been steamrolled by the company, wrote a long and scathing exposé for McClure’s magazine, later published as a book in 1904 called The History of the Standard Oil Company that prompted several investigations, which in turn led Congress to pass the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
The question that nagged at the government and the general public was a simple one: How corrupt were the Standard Oil founders? When examined under oath, they chose a campaign of silence and obfuscation, which only exacerbated their public relations problem. In one exchange in 1882, when advised by an investigating committee’s attorney that there was a rising tide of sentiment against the company, Flagler lost his composure:
It suits me to go elsewhere for advice, particularly as I am not paying you for it!
The government’s attorney was ready with a riposte.
I am not paying you to rob the community, I am trying to expose your robbery.
Robbery might have been an exaggeration, but collusion, skullduggery, and kickbacks were not. A few years later, documents revealed that in order to keep politicians in line and supportive of their enterprise, Standard Oil lent them money and made other investments
in their careers. Let’s call these what they were: bribes. Such behavior was not unusual at this time, when everyday business practices, particularly those west of the more refined cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, resembled a bare-knuckle brawl. Businessmen did what they felt was necessary to survive. Meanwhile, politicians were famously receptive to the largesse that came their way.
It is unlikely that Flagler felt any remorse for the actions he had taken at Standard Oil. Yet it must have been a relief for him to escape the press scrutiny and the controversy that enveloped the oil company. He clearly wanted to have more fun, too. A new woman in his life would make that possible. Her name was Ida Alice Shourds. She was pretty and blue eyed and possessed a profusion of red hair as well as a notoriously hot temper. A failed stage actress, she previously had been one of the caregivers for Flagler’s wife. Alice was also eighteen years his junior, socially ambitious, and not averse to spending his money.
For the first time in his adult life, Flagler went out to restaurants and to the theater. He rode horseback on his thirty-acre estate in Mamaroneck, New York, and raced trotters against his Standard Oil friends and colleagues. He even joined the Larchmont and New York Yacht Clubs and bought his first yacht, a fifty-foot sloop. As he told a companion in 1886, For about fourteen or fifteen years, I have devoted my time exclusively to business, and now I am pleasing myself.
St. Augustine in 1882 during Flagler’s second visit was no longer a town filled with consumptives. In fact, it had begun to attract society types, the class of men, remarked Flagler, one might encounter in the great watering places of Europe.
However, there was still very little to do. Flagler found himself taking daily walks down narrow St. George Street, where the old colonial buildings on both sides featured crooked second-story balconies. He would continue around the Plaza de la Constitucion, and perhaps over to Castillo de San Marcos, the old Spanish fort on the waterfront, and then back to the hotel, passing along the route other gentlemen who were staying at his hotel, equally at a loss as to what to do with themselves.
Flagler would return to St. Augustine the following December, this time on his honeymoon, newly married to Alice. And he returned again the year after that. I liked the place and the climate, and it occurred to me very strongly that someone with sufficient means ought to provide accommodations for that class of people who are not sick, who come to enjoy the climate, have plenty of money, but could find no satisfactory way of spending it.
As it happened, he was just such a person. In the prior years, Flagler had discovered how much he enjoyed developing real estate. He had overseen the construction of Standard Oil’s first office tower in New York City: a handsome ten-story, eighty-six-foot-wide structure at 26 Broadway in Lower Manhattan (once the home address of Alexander Hamilton). He had also rebuilt his Mamaroneck estate on Long Island Sound in 1882, adding extensions and redecorating the forty-room frame house with, among other fixtures, massive brass and crystal chandeliers of his own design that weighed nearly one thousand pounds. He went so far as to construct a two-hundred-foot breakwater, importing sand to convert the rocky shoreline into his own private beach.
Now he had the architectural drawings for a massive world-class hotel that would offer state-of-the-art amenities. In keeping with the Spanish influence still evident in St. Augustine, the structure would be mostly Moorish in design. If all went well, Flagler would build the grandest resort hotel in the country, surpassing even Potter Palmer’s 1875 Palmer House Hotel in Chicago. His larger goal, he told a friend, was to turn St. Augustine into the Newport, Rhode Island, of the South.
He hired two young architects for the project: Thomas S. Hastings (the son of a close friend) and Hastings’s partner, Brazilian-born John Merven Carrère, both of whom had studied at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and worked for the esteemed firm of McKim, Mead & White in New York. It was to be Carrère and Hastings’s first major commission. Later in life, Carrère recounted the young partners’ jubilation when Hastings returned from a meeting with the news that they had been awarded the plum assignment. Hastings burst into the office and began throwing things at Carrère: ‘We are going to Florida! We’ve got a million-dollar hotel to build there!’ Then we simply proceeded to smash everything we could lay our hands on, our office boy ably assisting us. Of course, we didn’t know anything about hotels.
Thanks to the start that Flagler gave them, the young firm would go on to become one of the most celebrated architectural practices of the day, renowned for works in the Beaux Arts style and for such iconic commissions as the New York Public Library, the Frick Collection’s building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, DC.
Excavation began on December 1, 1885. It would take two years and $2.5 million to construct the hotel on a site that had once been a mosquito-infested swamp. Lumber was cut in the Palatka region of Florida and shipped to the site by barge and rail. The carved and dressed oak that would adorn the interior was made in New York and shipped down by coastal schooners. Coquina gravel was sourced from the neighboring island of Anastasia, mixed with concrete, and then poured to create walls four feet thick.
Rising four stories high, topped by a pair of medieval turrets that jutted even higher, the Hotel Ponce de León towered over the Spanish colonial town of St. Augustine. Flagler, who oversaw every element of the design, surrounded the structure, which sprawled over five acres, with a tropical palm garden and a fragrant orange grove. The building was built to last. It still stands today as the imposing main campus building of Flagler College.
Dolphin fountains flowed at the east and west entrances. Over the main entryway, carved mermaids supported a shield bearing the hotel’s name. Vine-covered verandahs and loggias lined with spiraling terra-cotta columns opened into a dome-covered rotunda, its floor laid with brightly colored Moroccan mosaics. Carved figurines and naval ornaments recalled the era of the sixteenth-century Spanish discoverer Ponce de León. The dining room seated seven hundred and featured soaring stained-glass windows designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Flagler furnished the 450 rooms and suites of varying sizes with Flemish carpets, silk draperies, and furniture made of rosewood, walnut, and mahogany. Steam heat and electric lights, both considered novelties at the time, became important new amenities. Initially, the bathrooms were not en suite, but as tastes changed, Flagler added them.
When the furniture arrived by steamship in late 1887, the tycoon himself was down at the pier to meet the shipment. Removing his topcoat, he helped the workers transport the new furnishings to the hotel. The grand opening of the Ponce de León was on January 10, 1888. It garnered immediate acclaim despite its high prices: $35 per night ($899 in today’s dollars) for a suite and full board. Despite the cost, wealthy visitors from the North would soon fill the hotel to capacity, and it quickly earned a sterling reputation for its food and service—and for its clientele. Charles A. Dana, the editor of the New York Sun, an art connoisseur, and one of a long list of prominent figures who arrived for a stay, told the Florida Times-Union, The Ponce de León had more pretty girls in it than any hotel I ever saw in my life.
Florida’s reputation as a premier resort destination was born.
The resort hotel was largely a nineteenth-century innovation, one whose rapid adoption around the world would be spurred by the arrival of the railroad. Luxury urban hotels, per se, were not new; they had evolved from the coaching inns of medieval Europe. One of the earliest in Europe was London’s Mivart’s Hotel, which opened in 1812 and today is known as Claridge’s. The early railway hotels, such as the Victoria and the Adelaide at London’s Euston Station, followed soon after in 1839, the product of growing urban populations and industrialization. At first, these were little more than glorified dormitories. The Swiss would put their stamp on this new class of accommodation for the wealthy by offering exceptional service at hotels like the Schweizerhof (1845) on the Lake of Lucerne and the two hotels in Zurich built by Johannes Baur : the Baur en Ville (1836) and the Baur au Lac (1844). It wasn’t long before neglected palaces—and in some cases monasteries—in German spa towns, along the French Riviera, and in the Italian Lake District were being retrofitted into palatial hotels.
In the United States, the Tremont House in Boston, completed in 1829, was the first to offer indoor plumbing and running water and what was to become the design standard: rows of private rooms with locking doors arrayed along long interior corridors. Each room sported a jug of water, a bowl, and a bar of soap. It wasn’t until Ellsworth Statler built the Hotel Statler in Buffalo in 1907 that a bathroom with a shower or a tub became a standard feature in every room. Still, the Tremont kicked off a competition among US cities and hoteliers to build the largest, swankest, most comfortable hostelry available, fronted by the most elaborately ornamented facade the developer could afford.
By the 1880s, large resort hotels along the railroads were being built as vacation destinations for those who could afford them, but especially for America’s burgeoning class of well-to-do entrepreneurs, bankers, and industrialists, few of whom yet owned second homes. And for the country’s Gilded Age titans, these grand resort hotels—ostentatious, luxurious, and potentially highly profitable—quickly became trophy assets that offered a way to diversify one’s wealth away from the source of one’s fortune and into more financially stable real estate. They also added to one’s social status and prestige. The practice continues to this day, with many billionaires owning highly visible resort properties as integral parts of their investment portfolios, and for their own amusement.
However, no one had ever assembled a collection of resort hotels on the colossal scale that Flagler would do in the last years of the nineteenth century.
2
A RAILROAD GOES TO SEA
Even before the Ponce de León was finished in 1888, Flagler began work on a second ambitious hotel directly across the street. The giant Alcazar was intended for a slightly less affluent clientele. A square-shaped hotel built around a central courtyard, it would boast a bathing casino, which is to say a swimming pavilion replete with steam baths (single bath: $1.50), massage rooms (massage at bath: $1; outside: $2), and gym equipment. The 120-foot indoor pool was fed by an artesian well (exercise and plunge: 50 cents). Other facilities included a 15,000-square-foot dance floor lit with five hundred incandescent lights, ship shuffleboard, and tenpin and candlepin bowling, while a colonnade at the front of the building housed an array of luxury boutiques. The hotel’s facade paid homage to the Alcázar palace in Seville, Spain. The Hotel Alcazar initially slept 250; 40 more rooms were added later when a fourth floor was built. The hotel cost Flagler $1 million to build, equivalent to $26.6 million in current dollars. Today it houses municipal offices, shops that cater to tourists, and the Lightner Museum, which is devoted primarily to Gilded Age antiquities. A cafe occupies the sloping floor of the empty indoor swimming pool.
Railroads would necessarily play a starring role in Flagler’s growing empire. Fortunately, he already possessed a solid understanding of this business. The financing and building of the railroads had been the great business story of his youth, impossible to ignore. And for years, he had negotiated freight rates with the midwestern railroads on behalf of Standard Oil. Starting in late 1885, he began to buy up and combine the small East Coast railroads in the north of Florida.
Flagler soon acquired the Jacksonville, St. Augustine, and Halifax River Railroad, followed by the St. Augustine and Palatka Railroad, and finally the St. John’s Railroad. Collectively, these became known as the Florida East Coast Railway, or the FEC, on being chartered in 1895. To make the distinct pieces work together, he removed all the narrow-gauge tracks that had been built using light rails and replaced them with the more standard sixty-pound rails and 4-foot-8.5-inch gauge tracks (gauge denotes the distance between the two rails). He replaced the steam locomotives with five new McQueen engines that had a top speed of sixty miles an hour. He also constructed his first bridge, over the St. Johns River.
The railroads gave Flagler enormous power and leverage within the state, as each company was an unregulated monopoly. They also came with a bonus: he could avail himself of massive land grants available only to the railroads. In 1899, for example, the Florida legislature would set aside ten million acres of land to be awarded to anyone willing to build new railroads that enhanced the state’s nascent infrastructure. Flagler took full advantage. Claiming eight thousand acres for every mile of track that he laid, he temporarily seized control of two million acres of land at no additional cost. When the federal government contested this deal, Flagler took actual possession of far less, but a still-substantial 210,000 acres. He then added vastly to this acreage through deals with other Florida companies and outright purchases of land.
To cultivate, develop, or simply sell off all the land that he now owned, he founded the Model Land Company and its various subsidiaries. He would use the land company to promote agricultural projects of various kinds—orange and pineapple groves being chief among them—draining and then selling land to farmers and plantation operators at prices that initially ranged from $1.50 to $5.00 an acre, payable in three or four yearly installments at 8 percent interest. In other cases, he went into the construction business, erecting single-family homes, which sold for $1,500 each. The company even planned and promoted colonies along the east coast of the state designed specifically for Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Japanese immigrants to the United States. By now, Flagler had morphed from a hotelier into a full-fledged real