For Sale —American Paradise Read online

  So as Bryan stepped up to the railing at Vero Beach and prepared to address the audience, he wasn’t talking to a group of celebrants. He was talking to thousands of potential voters. And for the first time in Bryan’s career, about half of those voters were women. The Nineteenth Amendment had given women the right to vote in 1920, and they had cast their first ballots in a presidential election in 1924.

  But the younger women in the Vero Beach crowd were a different creature from the women of Bryan’s Victorian youth. Many had their hair clipped very short and peered at Bryan from beneath the tiny brims of tightly fitting cloche hats pulled down almost to their eyebrows. The dresses they wore—thin, revealing, with hemlines at the knee—had horrified Albert A. Murphree, president of the University of Florida and a friend of Bryan’s. Murphree was convinced that such dresses were “born of the Devil and his angels, and are carrying the present and future generations to chaos and destruction.”

  To make matters worse—at least from Murphree’s standpoint—the modern woman wore makeup, and lots of it. When Murphree had been a young man in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, makeup had been used only by prostitutes and actresses.

  In the mid-1920s, however, the fashion dictated a stark contrast between dark eye makeup, dark lipstick, and very pale skin. Two factors influenced this look—the discovery of the tomb of the ancient Egyptian king Tutankhamun in 1922, and the growing influence of the Hollywood film industry.

  Young women fascinated with the look of ancient Egypt laid on dark eye shadow and eyeliner. And they carefully applied lipstick to create the “Cupid’s lips” outline brought to the silver screen by actress Clara Bow.

  Some of the women even dared to light up cigarettes and apply their makeup in public. And they talked of getting drunk—referred to as “blotto”—and kissing lots of men.

  They were the epitome of the “flapper” look that had swept the country. The word may have originated as a slang term for English prostitutes, and it greatly annoyed T. Drew Branch, a member of the Florida state legislature who hailed from, of all places, Liberty County. Branch said that calling a woman by this name “offended the dignity” of the people of Florida. He had recently introduced a bill in Tallahassee that would make it illegal for newspapers or magazines to refer to any woman in the great state of Florida as a flapper. The proposal was defeated.

  Many younger men in the crowd were sporting the “Palm Beach” look, which consisted of a sports jacket worn with knickerbockers, known as “plus fours”—because they ended four inches below the knee—and knee socks. The ensemble was topped with a round, flat-brimmed straw hat called a “boater.” It was a look that was especially popular among real estate salesmen.

  As the men listened to earlier speakers and awaited Bryan’s speech, they did as men have done for as long as they’ve worn slacks—they dug their hands into their pants pockets and jingled their loose change. But the coins they fingered on that day in 1925 were quite different from those of today. There were fewer coins with presidents, for starters—no Jefferson nickel or Roosevelt dime or Washington quarter. Lincoln was on the penny, but he’d only been there since 1910, so there were still lots of pennies with the profile of an Indian chief on them.

  Instead, the men jingled nickels with an Indian head and a buffalo on them, and everything else—quarters, half-dollars, and dollars, all made of silver—showed Lady Liberty in some form.

  The silver dollars—heavy, and nearly the same diameter as a golf ball—were magnificent coins, and in 1925 one of them had the purchasing power of more than $12 in twenty-first-century dollars.

  The crowd greeted Bryan with generous, prolonged applause, and as he waited for it to subside he looked out over the faces gazing expectantly up at him. In his somber dark suit, floppy bow tie, and gleaming black shoes, Bryan was the embodiment of the stern nineteenth-century morals that still tugged at the sleeve of American society in the 1920s.

  Edwin Menninger, who was editor of the South Florida Developer in nearby Stuart, had been breathlessly chronicling Florida’s roaring boom in the pages of his newspaper, and he’d been a leader in Stuart’s successful effort to create a new county on the St. Lucie Inlet. The turnout and festivities in Vero Beach impressed Menninger, but he felt certain that Stuart would outdo this gathering in January when the town hosted the celebration for the creation of Martin County, named after Florida governor John Martin. As bright and promising as Indian River County’s future seemed, Martin County’s was even brighter, as far as Menninger was concerned. People and money were pouring into Stuart, and plans were being laid that would propel the little town to greatness.

  The applause faded, and Bryan began to speak. He started with a self-deprecating quip about his futile campaigns for the White House. He noted that the previous speaker, T. J. Campbell, had been introduced as the next state senator from Indian River County. “I hope the prediction of the man who introduced Mr. Campbell is more reliable than were those of the men who introduced me as ‘the next president,’” he said.

  When the chuckling subsided, Bryan told his listeners that he’d learned a lot about Florida during his campaign to become a delegate to the 1924 Democratic National Convention. He expected to learn more about the state in the coming months, and promised to tell as many people as he could what a wonderful place it was. “This year I am going to every tourist city in which they will let me speak and tell the tourists who are there that Florida is the greatest opportunity of this generation,” he said.

  Bryan then began preaching his now-familiar gospel of the glittering future that lay ahead for Florida. It was a classic Bryan oration, full of noble, uplifting ideals and flowery phrases.

  “We are sometimes asked, ‘When will Florida’s prosperity fail?’” Bryan said. “My answer is, ‘Not until the sunshine fails and the ocean breezes cease to carry healing in their wings.’”

  But Bryan also wanted residents of his adopted state to use its gifts for more than just enriching themselves. “I want us to make Florida the nation’s leading state in material wealth and prosperity and also first politically, intellectually, and morally,” he said. “God has blessed the state of Florida as he has blessed no other state in the union, and for this reason, if for no other, we should remember Him in all that we do.”

  As Bryan mingled with the crowd after his speech and waited for his helping of barbecue, Edwin Menninger walked up and introduced himself. The eager young editor quickly outlined some of the wonderful things happening a few miles down the road in Stuart, and invited Bryan to speak at Martin County’s upcoming official birthday party.

  Bryan gratefully accepted the invitation. “I would feel lost if I were not there on that occasion,” Bryan said. “Helping start new counties is one of my specialties.”

  Sixty years after Menninger chatted with the loquacious American icon, his friends gathered in Stuart to honor him for the role he’d played in helping to realize the grandiose prophecies of the 1920s. The beautiful county where they lived had become one of the wealthiest counties in the nation, and Florida had become synonymous with the fulfillment of dreams and fantasies. Miami was now a glitzy international city that spoke three or four languages and moved much faster than the posted speed limits.

  But as the smiling old man took in the outpouring of love and respect at his ninetieth birthday party, he could have told you that Florida’s path to prosperity had taken some bizarre and brutal turns in the months after he shook hands with William Jennings Bryan.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Railroad to Dreamland

  THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, FRIGHTENED PEOPLE SPENT MANY WINTER NIGHTS shivering and staring fearfully into the cold darkness beyond the fires at the entrances of dank, smoky caves that were their homes. Surely, they thought, there must be a place somewhere beyond the firelight where life is easier—a warm, idyllic place of lush year-round vegetation, where food is abundant and clothing is optional, where they wouldn’t have to spend all of their wa
king hours just trying to keep their bellies filled and worrying about when they would die.

  And so in some way approximating this, the human dream of finding a paradise was formed. That dream became as essential to human existence as air and water: Life shouldn’t be this hard; there must be a better place somewhere, and one day I’ll find it.

  The vision of paradise in this life or beyond eventually became enshrined in the world’s major religions. Its usual depiction was a lush garden where there was no toil, no struggle, no death, and no worry, only perpetual peace and contentment.

  As civilizations developed, the longing for a paradise spanned eras and cultures. The immortal Greek warrior Alexander the Great is said to have sought the gates of Paradise in the fourth century BC. Medieval European Christians longed to find the legendary kingdom of Prester John, said to contain a fountain whose waters made people young again.

  Tales of a fountain in a land somewhere to the north whose waters restored youth circulated among pre-Columbian residents of Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. Adventurers determined to find this wondrous fountain set out in small canoes. When they didn’t return, the friends they’d left behind assumed they’d found the fountain and did not want to leave the land of eternal youth.

  In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Renaissance explorers crossed unknown seas and traveled thousands of miles from the comfort and familiarity of their homes because they thought they would find a place where living was easier.

  Juan Ponce de León went in search of such a place in 1513. He’d lost a political power struggle to a well-connected rival and had been unseated as the Spanish governor of Puerto Rico, so he set out with three ships and a band of conquistadores to find a better place.

  In early April 1513, Ponce de León landed in a lush, subtropical world. It’s doubtful that he was the first explorer to set foot in this land, but he claimed naming rights for Spain. It was the Easter season, called Pascua Florida, or “Festival of Flowers” by the Spanish. So to honor the season, Ponce de León named his landing place La Florida—Place of Flowers. The explorer is thought to have landed near present-day Cape Canaveral, where, more than four centuries later, a new breed of explorers would ride fireballs into the heavens.

  Ponce de León went ashore for a few days; then, thinking that La Florida was an island, he sailed southward, intending to circumnavigate it.

  For about two months, Ponce de León’s ships hugged the coast of the peninsula. Legend has it that along the way he sailed into the mouth of the present-day St. Lucie River, about one hundred miles south of Cape Canaveral in present-day Martin County. He is said to have dropped a stone cross into the St. Lucie to claim the area for Spain.

  Ponce de León’s name is inextricably linked with his alleged search for a mystical fountain whose waters would restore youth to anyone who drank from it. But historians generally think that, like most Europeans who came to the New World four hundred or five hundred years ago, he was more interested in finding gold, slaves, and converts to Christianity.

  Ponce de León and his three ships continued their explorations in the waters around Florida into the summer of 1513. Then, leaving one ship to continue exploring, Ponce de León returned to Puerto Rico.

  He led another expedition to Florida in 1521, this time intent on establishing a Spanish colony. Ponce de León and about two hundred would-be colonists landed on the southwest coast of Florida, probably near present-day Charlotte Harbor. The Calusa Indians, however, wanted nothing to do with European settlers. They attacked the Spaniards and drove them off. Ponce de León received a nasty wound to the thigh from an arrow that may have been dipped in poison.

  The conquistador and his ships left Florida and sailed for Havana. But Ponce de León’s wound would not heal. Eventually infection set in. There was nothing Spanish doctors could do, and he died soon after arriving in Havana.

  Juan Ponce de León would not be the last person to come to Florida seeking a better life and be bitterly disappointed.

  In the summer of 1559, Spain sent another expedition to Florida, this time under the conquistador Tristán de Luna y Arellano, who led a company of men intent on planting a colony at what is now Pensacola, at the western tip of the Florida Panhandle. But it was a rough summer on the Gulf of Mexico. On September 19, 1559, a powerful hurricane swept in from the Gulf and devastated the settlement.

  The colonists hung on for a while after the hurricane, but when a Spanish ship arrived a year later and offered passage to Cuba to anyone who wanted to leave, most of the colonists left. The Spanish government soon abandoned the colony.

  A hurricane would deposit more visitors on a Florida beach in 1696. Jonathan Dickinson had been a planter in Jamaica until he converted to the Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers.

  Dickinson and his family left Jamaica in August 1696. Accompanying him were Robert Barrow, an elderly leader of the Friends, and Dickinson’s slaves. They sailed on the Reformation for Philadelphia to join William Penn’s experiment in religious freedom in the colony of Pennsylvania.

  On the night of September 23, 1696, a hurricane tossed the Reformation aground on what is now Jupiter Island, in present-day Martin County.

  About two dozen castaways, including Dickinson’s party and the crew of the Reformation, were shipwrecked in a strange and savage land. Their impression of Florida was quite different from that of Juan Ponce de León’s Place of Flowers.

  Dickinson later wrote that “the wilderness country looked very dismal, having no trees, but only sand hills covered with shrubbery palmetto, the stalks of which were prickly, there was no walking among them.”

  The nearest outpost of European civilization was the Spanish settlement at St. Augustine, about 250 miles up the coast. Today the trip from Jupiter Island to St. Augustine can be driven in about four hours. In 1696, it was weeks away on foot.

  Nevertheless, Dickinson and his party trudged northward up the beach. Along the way they were alternately helped and harassed by Indians. They were terrified when they saw the tracks of large animals in the sand. Aggressive, stinging insects constantly buzzed around them.

  “We had little comfort,” Dickinson wryly noted later.

  Despite the fears and discomforts and the deaths of two members of their party along the way, Dickinson and his group maintained a resolute faith that God would see them safely through their perilous journey. Six weeks later they tramped wearily into St. Augustine. In April 1697, they finally reached Philadelphia.

  In the early nineteenth century, Dr. Jacob Motte, a US Army surgeon, was another reluctant visitor to Florida. The United States had acquired La Florida from Spain in 1821, and it became the US Territory of Florida.

  The Seminole Indians caused problems with American efforts to settle Florida, and the US government wanted to kick them out of their home. In 1832, Seminole chiefs signed an agreement to leave Florida and move west, but a few Seminole leaders refused to comply with the treaty and disappeared into the trackless Everglades.

  Motte, who was Harvard-educated and accustomed to the comforts and refinements of civilization, accompanied US Army troops sent to Florida in 1837 to drive out the stubborn Seminoles. He later wrote about his experience in Journey into Wilderness, in which he articulately explained his fascination and disgust with the strange land of Florida.

  Florida, Motte wrote, “is certainly the poorest country that ever two people quarreled for.” The climate was impossibly uncomfortable, too warm even in winter and impossibly hot in the summer.

  It was “a most hideous region,” and the only creatures who could live in such a setting were Indians, alligators, snakes, and “every other kind of loathsome reptile.”

  Common sense seemed to dictate that the Seminoles should keep Florida, Motte said.

  But at times, Motte, the weary, miserable soldier far removed from his customary comforts, was dazzled by Florida’s wild tropical beauty.

  In late January 1838, Motte’s unit moved from
Fort Pierce a few miles down the coast to the headwaters of the St. Lucie River in present-day Martin County. The landscape enchanted him, and he wrote about it in gushing prose. Instead of a nasty swamp fit only for Seminoles and snakes, Motte saw “picturesque clumps of cypress trees and willows, ornamentally clothed with long hanging moss, gracefully and fantastically disposed in festoons, forming fairy-looking islets reposing in verdant loveliness on the bosom of the water.”

  Instead of a lair for loathsome reptiles, it was the habitat “for the genii of those unearthly regions, which come nearest the description of that fabulous place, that we read of, which was neither land, water, nor air,” Motte wrote.

  The deeper the soldiers went into the wilderness, the more rhapsodic Motte’s descriptions became. “Nothing, however, can be imagined more lovely and picturesque than the thousand little isolated spots, scattered in all directions over the surface of this immense sheet of water, which seemed like a placid inland sea shining under a bright sun,” he wrote. “Every possible variety of shape, colour, contour, and size were exhibited in the arrangement of the trees and moss upon these islets, which, reflected from the limpid and sunny depths of the transparent water overshadowed by them, brought home to the imagination all the enchanting visions of Oriental description.”

  Motte “felt the most intense admiration, and gazed with a mingled emotion of delight and awe” at the ethereal landscape.

  Florida became the twenty-seventh state in March 1845. It is a quirky state geographically, simultaneously the southernmost continental state and yet, in some ways, it was only marginally a part of the antebellum Old South that bordered it to the north. It is the only state that both touches the Atlantic Ocean and sprawls across two time zones. Its easternmost city, Palm Beach, overlooks the Atlantic, but if you head due north from Florida’s westernmost city, Pensacola, you will eventually arrive in Chicago. It’s a 540-mile trip down the state’s eastern coastline from Fernandina Beach near the Georgia border to Key West, only ninety miles from Havana, Cuba.