by Willie Drye
Even when the group was almost within sight of their Gulf Coast objective, they couldn’t find a path through the final stretch of the Glades. They could see distant waterspouts that occasionally formed over the Gulf of Mexico, but could not find a way out. They were weak and disoriented from hunger, and King began to wonder if they’d make it.
Finally, on March 14, a telegram arrived from Key West for J. F. Jaudon in Miami. The three missing men had made it to the mouth of the Shark River on the Gulf Coast, near the southwest tip of the peninsula. There, they’d come across a small processing operation owned by the Manetto Company, which extracted tannic acid from palmetto trees. The company’s superintendent had taken them by boat to Key West—the closest town—so they could tell the world that they were safe.
Suddenly the Miami Herald’s prediction about pushing a road through a couple hundred miles or so of the Everglades in eighteen months seemed a little optimistic.
John Ashley was back to his old tricks at the Florida State Prison in Raiford. He was behaving like a prisoner who sincerely wanted to mend his ways and hasten his return as a productive member of society. Prison officials noticed his exemplary behavior, and soon he was rewarded. In March 1918 he was transferred from Raiford to a prison work camp in Milligan, in the western Florida Panhandle, about fifty miles east of Pensacola.
Ashley was assigned to a chain gang. Every day, he and other prisoners, wearing pants with broad, alternating black-and-white horizontal stripes, climbed into what essentially was a cage on wheels and were taken to a site where they did manual labor on roads.
For three months, Ashley did his job, swinging picks and pushing shovels. But summers in the Florida Panhandle can be stunningly hot. And he was getting homesick again. He decided he’d had enough, and on July 11, 1918, he and another prisoner slipped away from the chain gang.
The western Panhandle was a long way from Ashley’s home, but somehow, he made it back to his familiar haunts down on the peninsula south of Stuart, and soon he was again spending most of his time in the Everglades. He found a new occupation: He and his father were operating three moonshine stills in the Glades.
And there was romance in John Ashley’s life.
Laura Upthegrove was not a delicate, feminine beauty. Author Hix C. Stuart described her as an “Amazon” who never left home without her .38 caliber revolver.
“There was nothing striking in Laura’s appearance to which might be attributed John’s devotion,” Stuart wrote. “Dark, unkempt hair, a tawny weather-beaten complexion, prominent cheekbones, squinting yet sharp black eyes, and generally untidy in appearance; there was nothing attractive about Laura,” Stuart wrote.
Yet Laura and John had magic moments together. An undated photo of the two shows a happy couple obviously in love and posing cheek to cheek for the camera against the backdrop of the Florida wilderness. Ashley, a few inches taller, stands behind Laura, his arms wrapped around her neck and shoulders. He’s wearing a white shirt, dark slacks, and what appears to be an army garrison cap. Laura, buxom and beaming at the camera, is dressed in women’s outdoor clothing of the late 1910s—a drab dark long coat and calf-length skirt, high-top shoes, and dark leggings. She’s holding on to John’s forearms.
Taken out of context, they appear to be merely a young couple very much in love instead of two desperadoes who would spend the rest of their brief lives on the run.
While dreamers were telling themselves that spanning the Everglades with a highway would be no big deal, and lawmen in southern Florida were spending a lot of their time seeking members of the Ashley clan in that vast swamp, world events were inexorably dragging the United States into the war raging in Europe.
Americans’ ire had been roused in May 1915 when a German submarine torpedoed the British passenger liner Lusitania, killing 1,198 people, including Americans. Germany, however, had realized what a potent weapon its undersea boats were, and was reluctant to curtail its attacks on Allied ships, regardless of whether they were warships. Even the Lusitania had been carrying war supplies along with its passengers, making it a legitimate target of war as far as Germany was concerned.
In March 1916, a German sub torpedoed a French passenger liner in the English Channel. No one was killed, but among the injured were a few Americans.
President Wilson warned Germany that the United States would cut its diplomatic ties with Germany if they continued to attack civilian shipping, and Germany responded by saying its submarines would not sink merchant ships without warning and would allow passengers and crew to abandon ship before sinking it.
President Wilson continued his efforts to mediate a peace between the Allies and the Central Powers, but German leaders had little interest in the negotiations because they thought they could eventually win the war outright rather than settle for a negotiated peace. Even the threat of American intervention didn’t concern them because they thought they could win the war before American troops were ready for combat.
In January 1917, Germany announced that it was lifting the restrictions it had imposed on its U-boats and would resume “unrestricted submarine warfare.” The United States severed diplomatic ties with Germany, and in March 1917 German subs sank five American merchant ships.
Then came the ultimate German insult to the United States. British intelligence agents intercepted a message circulating among some German officials suggesting that if America declared war on Germany, Germany should seek an alliance with Mexico. The inducement for Mexico to form this alliance would be the opportunity to recover the territory it had lost in its war with the United States from 1846 to 1848—territory that had become the states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
President Wilson released the message to American newspapers, and the nation was infuriated.
Former secretary of state William Jennings Bryan was in Miami in the months leading up to the US entry into the war. He was horrified that the United States was being dragged into a conflict that, he would later say, was caused by the same science that “manufactured poisonous gasses to suffocate soldiers” and was preaching “that man has a brute ancestry,” and eliminated “the miraculous and the supernatural from the Bible.”
Bryan rushed to Washington, DC, hoping to head off the move to war. But there was nothing he could do. On April 4, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. Bryan had lost his bid to preserve peace, but he promptly sent a note to President Wilson telling him that he would do whatever he could to help the war effort.
Congress approved a draft that eventually would require all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five to register for military service. Before World War I ended, about 2.8 million American men had been drafted.
One forty-five-year-old man who didn’t have to worry about the draft was an out-of-work architect named Addison Mizner. Suffering from a leg injury that wouldn’t heal, Mizner was shivering through the winter of 1917–18 in Port Washington, New York, overlooking Manhasset Bay on Long Island’s North Shore. The winter was made more miserable by a coal miners’ strike, leaving heating fuel very scarce.
Through a mutual friend, Mizner happened to meet Paris Singer, heir to a portion of the Singer Sewing Machine Company fortune that had been amassed by his father, Isaac Singer.
Paris Singer and Mizner quickly became friends, and Singer’s personal nurse suggested that Mizner’s leg would benefit from warmth and sunshine. So in January 1918 Mizner, Singer, and the nurse boarded a southbound Florida East Coast Railway train in New York City.
Mizner’s good health returned in the warm Florida winter, and he started designing a hospital that Singer wanted to build in Palm Beach for convalescing American soldiers returning from World War I. Soon, the jobless architect who had been shivering and suffering from a gimpy leg in a chilly Long Island apartment would become the toast of Palm Beach. The Roaring Twenties were just around the corner, and nowhere would they roar louder than in Florida.
CHAPTER FOUR
Leave Your Brain at
Home
WHEN THE BLOODY GREAT WAR ENDED IN NOVEMBER 1918, THE WORLD’S psyche had been dramatically altered. More than fifteen million people were dead, and the comfortable Victorian fantasy that Western civilization was steadily moving the world toward a time of universal peace and prosperity had been shredded by four awful years of systematic, mechanized slaughter. Self-denial and sacrifice suddenly seemed silly and pointless; it was better to surround yourself with luxuries and enjoy life to the utmost while you could.
“There was an immense, all-pervading disillusionment,” Bruce Catton later wrote in American Heritage magazine. “The nation’s highest ideals had been appealed to during the war, so that to win the war seemed the holiest of causes; the war had been won, but it was hard to see that anything worth winning had been gained; the idealism had been used up, and people had an uneasy feeling that they had been had.”
So, with traditional beliefs shattered, “lots of people became materialists,” Catton wrote.
“It was easier, indeed, it was almost necessary, to center one’s attention on the material things that were going on in this country,” he wrote.
And yet, there was a subconscious longing—part memory, part fantasy—for a past that seemed simpler and safer. People wanted desperately to escape the harsh, frightening new realities that confronted them. In his book Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, Frederick Lewis Allen noted that Americans yearned for a place where they could escape “into the easy-going life and beauty of the European past, into some never-never land which combined American sport and comfort with Latin glamour—a Venice equipped with bathtubs and electric ice boxes, a Seville provided with three eighteen-hole golf courses.”
The Florida that emerged during the 1920s would, in many ways, resemble these fantasies—for a few years, at least.
Although Florida had been part of the United States since 1845, it was still very much a work in progress as a state in 1920. It had frontiers that were every bit as untamed, undeveloped, and unexplored as the American West of the nineteenth century.
The changes wrought in American society and the world by the Great War would not be noticed immediately. Still, the transition would be steady, and it would unfold over the coming decade. During this seminal ten years, many comfortable beliefs, social mores, and public attitudes would be peeled away until the fading vestiges of the nineteenth century were gone.
A denizen of the twenty-first century transported back to the United States of 1925 would, of course, be struck by many differences. Automobiles would not be sleek and aerodynamically designed computers on wheels. They would resemble the boxy horse-drawn carriages and buggies they were replacing. Telephones, on the other hand, would be stylishly designed, but they would be attached to a wire. Any reference to “wireless” would be referring to radios.
Still, there would be much that would be familiar to modern sensibilities. Automobiles, though boxy and primitive in appearance, would exist. Their numbers were steadily increasing, and their profound influence on society was becoming apparent. Henry Ford was perfecting a manufacturing technique that would lower the cost of automobiles so that even people of modest means could afford a family flivver. They would reshape American society.
Telephones and radios were primitive by modern standards, but they were bringing instant communications to the masses. Popular culture, influenced by radio and the growth of the motion picture industry, was steadily changing the way Americans thought, spoke, dressed, and behaved. And Americans were buying the postwar era’s new technological marvels without paying for them with cash on the barrelhead, a practice that would have appalled their Victorian grandparents.
The visitor from the future also would see the often bitter conflict between progressive and conservative social forces so familiar to the early twenty-first century.
When Wyoming became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment in January 1919, the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages would become illegal a year later. The Ku Klux Klan would be railing against immigrants, and the Klan’s membership would steadily increase through the 1920s. Conservative Christians—including William Jennings Bryan, whose politics were a sometimes bewildering mix of progressivism and conservatism—would be insisting that Darwin’s theory of evolution not be taught in public schools.
But at the same time, progressive forces were moving the country away from other traditional restrictions, and among the most obvious changes were new freedoms for women. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment—also supported by Bryan—gave women the right to vote beginning in 1921, and they were demanding and seizing freedoms their grandmothers wouldn’t have dreamed of asking for.
When the decade began, however, only 644 people lived in Miami Beach—which had changed its name from Ocean Beach when it was incorporated in 1915—and Carl Fisher was wondering whether his vision for the island as a playground would ever materialize. Miami’s population was about 30,000, and George Merrick was still a year away from selling his first lot in Coral Gables. Florida’s national banks held just over $88 million in deposits and had loans totaling almost $67 million.
The state’s population was just over 968,000.
All of those figures would change dramatically in just a few years.
It took a while for the US economy to readjust after the Great War ended, and the nation endured a brief economic slump in 1920. Still, more people were coming to Florida, despite the downturn.
When Republican Warren Harding was elected president in November 1920, Americans figured that prosperity would follow. In his inaugural address in March 1921, Harding sounded a theme that he was sure would be well received. With the Great War behind them, Americans were ready for a return to normalcy.
“I would like to acclaim an era of good feeling amid dependable prosperity and all the blessings which attend,” Harding said.
The prewar “normalcy” that Harding wanted to restore was gone, however, blasted away by the carnage on the European battlefields. “Dependable prosperity” might be at hand, but the attendant “good feeling” might be a bit more elusive, since Prohibition loomed.
On November 23, 1921, a group of real estate brokers gathered in Miami heard Gordon Nye, editor of the Florida Real Estate Journal, tell them that Florida was not being properly sold to the nation, and that its efforts to grow and develop were being seriously hampered by derogatory stories about the state being published in out-of-state newspapers and magazines.
“We are not doing anything to combat this propaganda except issuing Chamber of Commerce booklets once a year and letting it end there,” he said.
There was no mention in the Miami Daily Metropolis of whether George Merrick attended this meeting, and he was known to avoid public functions. But Merrick was about to launch a pro-Florida selling campaign that would far exceed anything Nye had in mind.
In November 1921, Merrick had added several thousand acres to his father’s citrus farm, and accumulated $500,000 in capital. He was ready to start building his carefully planned city. Eventually, Coral Gables would be acclaimed as a landmark accomplishment in urban planning.
But when Merrick—who had what a novelist might describe as a “broad, honest face”—sold his first lots for $600 each on November 27, 1921, there were more doubters than believers in his ambitious undertaking.
Kenneth Roberts, who wrote a series of articles about Florida for the Saturday Evening Post in the mid-1920s, said knowledgeable people thought Merrick’s plans were doomed to failure. Coral Gables was too far from the water—too far from anything, in fact. The doubters “could understand paying almost any price for waterfront property—even as much as $5,000 for a lot, or $10,000 even. But not $600 for a lot six miles from anywhere!”
Merrick had great difficulty raising additional capital, Roberts said.
“Merrick, for a time, was avoided as though he had a touch of the plague when he attempted to raise money to carry out his building schemes for Cor
al Gables,” Roberts wrote. “Forward-thinking financiers would stare mournfully at one another after Merrick had attempted to wrench a little money from them, and express a moderate amount of near-sympathy for the wretched individual who might eventually decide to take a chance with him.”
Still, Merrick worked his carefully crafted plan. All the money that came in from sales went back into the development of Coral Gables. Streets were widened and a few houses were built. Because of the improvements, the price of lots went up the following year. Most were sold for $1,200 each, but a few brought $2,500.
Merrick continued building wide streets and added meticulous landscaping touches such as oak and royal palm trees.
But again, the money that came in was plowed back into the development. And Merrick continued to seek investors.
Finally, the Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company of Greensboro, North Carolina, was willing to invest in Coral Gables. It was a lifeline for Merrick. As work progressed, Jefferson Standard was satisfied enough with the results to put more money into the project. Eventually Jefferson Standard’s confidence prompted the Missouri State Life Insurance Company to make an investment, and then the Mortgage and Securities Company of New Orleans came on board.
“It then began to be fairly apparent to the more astute financiers that Merrick was not, as they had first supposed, in need of the gentle attention of a corps of alienists,” Roberts wryly noted.
Like Merrick, Carl Fisher struggled at first to get Miami Beach under way.
In 1915, Roberts wrote, Fisher’s property “consisted of a desolate-looking sand-spit.”
Like Merrick, many observers questioned Fisher’s judgment as he pushed ahead with his project, using a dredge to pile up sand from Biscayne Bay and actually create real estate where none had existed before. And although his cash flow had improved, all of the money Fisher brought in was going back into his development.