by Willie Drye
Boca Raton would be publicly advertised as a city with “every atom of beauty that human ingenuity can add to a land endowed by nature.” Privately, however, Addison Mizner and his cynical, witty, and shady brother, Wilson Mizner, would refer to Boca Raton as “a platinum sucker trap.” The company’s marketing strategy was simple and equally cynical: “Get the big snobs, and the little snobs will follow.”
Mizner’s connection with Singer enabled him to recruit an impressive group of supporters for Mizner Development Corporation that included Palm Beach Post publisher Donald H. Conkling, who had sold the South Florida Developer to Edwin Menninger. Conkling’s bank connections would help Mizner to secure generous loans for his projects.
Mizner’s backers also included US Senator T. Coleman du Pont and Wall Street speculator Jesse Livermore, who had already made, lost, and regained a fortune when he brought his family to Palm Beach in March 1925. He stayed at the Breakers, and his presence didn’t go unnoticed by some men who were determined to make a quick fortune without sinking any money into real estate.
Another guest was relaxing in a chair on the porch of the hotel when she overheard two men talking about Livermore and his family. They’d noticed that Livermore’s oldest son, Jesse Jr., was an active child who rambled around the hotel alone. It would be very easy to snatch the boy, and his father had the means to pay a huge ransom for his safe return.
The woman tried to get a look at the men, but, realizing they’d been overheard, they scurried away. She told Livermore what she’d overheard, and the Wall Street multimillionaire hired a bodyguard to protect his family.
A few tourists started leaving Florida in March, and one of those who departed was Reverend R. S. Wightman, a Presbyterian minister from New Jersey. He told his congregation that it would be difficult to find a place as morally “rotten” as Florida.
“The devil is certainly in certain parts of Florida with all his hosts,” the reverend said, “and if anyone wants to go to hell in a hurry, there are greased planks aplenty in Miami and Palm Beach.
“I can’t see how such a condition can last. The liquor traffic is conducted in a wide-open manner, and the State authorities seem to invite the Northern people to come and spend their money with the understanding that there are no restrictions.”
There was more going on that the minister did not write about, probably because he was unaware of it. Brothels operated openly with little interference from police. Jane Wood Reno, a Miami reporter whose young daughter Janet would become US attorney general, later wrote that it was “generally understood by everybody, including law enforcement folks, that they were needed to keep the tourist industry going.”
The madam of a downtown Miami brothel often brought her employees to a dress shop on Flagler Street after hours for outfitting, Reno wrote.
Reverend Wightman apparently was one of the few people who saw the city’s tolerance of vice as a problem, however. The usual end-of-the-season mass departure of tourists didn’t happen in 1925. The crowds just kept coming. The trains were filled with passengers, the Dixie Highway was jammed with cars, and hotels were packed.
An unnamed minister who’d lived in Florida for ten years told the New York Times that the masses coming to the state were being drawn by “some strong force . . . or, rather, it seems as if it were the effect of unleashing a force long bound.”
Now that people had discovered Florida’s climate “and the other charms of this coast,” they would keep coming, and the flow couldn’t be stopped. “No, this is no boom,” he said. “Florida is just coming into its own.”
Entrepreneurs found a way to take advantage of the overcrowding. Some manufacturers of concrete blocks were taking appalling shortcuts to keep up with the demand for new housing. To save money and speed up production, smaller portions of concrete were mixed with sand to make the blocks.
“Since houses were being rushed to sell during the boom period, these blocks were frequently built into the walls of houses before they had set, and the houses were built without any thought of wind pressure,” Kenneth Roberts wrote. “The people who built them had heard of hurricanes in a vague way, but probably thought of them—if at all—as something used by novelists to further the action of their stories.”
The weakness of the poorly made blocks was then compounded by unskilled builders. Contractors were hiring anyone who wanted a job, regardless of whether they knew what they were doing. The shoddy concrete blocks were being improperly laid so the walls of the new buildings had almost no strength, Roberts wrote.
“When a wall like this is given a brisk kick, it trembles violently; on receiving two or three more brisk kicks in the same place, it falls down,” he wrote.
The deadly danger caused by the shabbily built housing would be tragically revealed a year later.
Tourist camps for automobiles began appearing along the Dixie Highway. Instead of searching for a scarce—and probably expensive—hotel room, motorists could pull into a tourist camp and sleep in their cars. As word of these accommodations spread, some who made the trek to Florida towed homemade camping trailers to set up in the camps.
“Southern nights are cool and starlit,” the New York Times Magazine said. “There is a delight in sleeping out of doors that no hotel room can provide, and it is not predicated on wealth or the lack of it. Often the most expensive make of car will be seen parked alongside the least expensive at one of these tourist camps.”
A few people were trying—in their own ways—to hold the line against the decay of morals in Florida and elsewhere. The Ku Klux Klan was prospering amid the decadence of the 1920s, and was holding public meetings in Miami, Stuart, and other cities in Florida. Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans told a gathering of Klansmen in Kansas City that the organization’s members were “the salt of the earth,” and the future of civilization depended on them.
“History has proved and is proving daily that only Nordic and Anglo-Saxon people have reached a high level of intelligence,” Evans said. “The undesirable hordes from other lands are driving to our sides the millions who for one reason or another have been hesitating.”
William Jennings Bryan, who had been a delegate from Florida to the Democratic National Convention in 1924, had helped to defeat a motion to include a sentence denouncing the Klan in the Democrats’ national campaign platform.
Speaking at a fund-raiser for a new Temple Israel in Miami in early 1925, Bryan told the gathering that religion was under attack.
“The fight today is not to defend the Christian religion nor the Jewish religion, but to defend religion,” he said. “When you take away the belief in God you take away the comfort one finds in a Supreme Being, and when you take away religion you take away the belief in a living god. Religion is the one thing you can’t do without.”
A few months later, Bryan told a high school graduating class in Miami that while he was “an enthusiast about education,” religion was more important.
“Science gives us great things, but it takes more than education to make a man or woman,” he said.
Bryan’s remarks to the high school seniors set the stage for the first great clash between science and religion in the classroom. Earlier in the year, Bryan had made a quick trip to Nashville to urge the Tennessee state legislature to pass a law forbidding the teaching of “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”
Due in part to Bryan’s exhortations, the bill easily passed. But the American Civil Liberties Union wanted to challenge the law, and sought someone to serve as a defendant to test it.
Some business and political leaders in Dayton calculated that having a trial there would draw a large crowd and reporters from across the nation, and be an economic boon for the little eastern Tennessee hill town. They asked John Scopes, a young science and math teacher at Rhea County High School, to be the defendant that the ACLU sought. Scopes wasn’t eve
n certain that he’d actually taught Darwin’s theory in his classes, but some of his students were willing to testify that he had, and so the ACLU had its defendant.
Only a few weeks before Bryan spoke to the Miami high school graduates, Scopes had been charged with violating the law, and a trial was scheduled for July.
Bryan volunteered to join the prosecution’s attorneys at the trial. It would be his last appearance as an impassioned crusader for religious certainty versus scientific inquiry.
Meanwhile, Prohibition supporters, infuriated by the free flow of booze into Florida, introduced a bill that would take the Volstead Act a dramatic step further. Proponents of the bill wanted to make it illegal to “drink liquors as a beverage” in Florida, a measure that, if enforced, probably would have put most of the state’s population behind bars.
It was defeated.
Edwin Menninger was watching as trainloads of southbound paradise seekers passed through Stuart on the Florida East Coast Railway’s daily trains to Miami. And he was reading about the profusion of dazzling “perfect” cities in lavish, full-page ads in the newspaper of his former employer, the Palm Beach Post.
The “paradise” obsession was finding its way into the pages of the South Florida Developer. Soon, Menninger believed, Stuart would take its rightful place as one of Florida’s leading cities.
The Indian River—which actually is a long, placid lagoon separated from the Atlantic Ocean by barrier islands—was already getting attention for its natural beauty. Kenneth Roberts had seen it, and he was charmed.
“Northward from Palm Beach,” Roberts wrote, “one traverses the bank of the Indian River—a broad and endless stretch of blue water on which millions of wild ducks gabble and wag their tails in contented camaraderie, from which the mullet fling themselves in playful ecstasies, and in which serious-minded pelicans pursue their dinners with admirable patience, rising with machine-like unity from the glassy surface, wheeling with military precision, and hurling themselves passionately into the middle of a school of fish with all the grand manner of a heavily laden Gladstone bag falling into a bathtub from a height of ten feet.”
Ambitious developers were staking out their own versions of “perfect” cities in and around Stuart. Capitalizing on the spectacular beauty of the place where the St. Lucie River meets the Indian River and the Atlantic Ocean, developers were advertising Golden Gate. Full-page ads in the South Florida Developer touted the investment potential. “Millions will be made by those who buy and build at the mouth of the St. Lucie River,” the ads said.
Federal engineers had started a feasibility study to determine whether the inlet could be deepened for a harbor that Golden Gate developers boasted would become “the finest south of Savannah.”
“Miami’s wonderful rise to greatness will be repeated here,” readers were promised. “Those who profit most are those who buy today.”
Sales of real estate in Stuart were steadily climbing. During the second week of January 1925, sales topped $1 million.
Despite the extravagant promises and florid prose about Stuart real estate appearing in local newspapers, perhaps the best indicator of its value and future potential was the fact that Arthur Brisbane seemed very interested in it. His tour of Florida with Solomon Davies Warfield in early 1924 apparently had done what Warfield had hoped it would do. Brisbane had returned to Florida and seemed especially interested in land near Stuart—land that he’d looked at with Warfield during his tour the previous year.
Brisbane’s brief visit to Stuart in the company of two Seaboard Air Line Railroad executives on February 13 was the subject of front-page headlines in the South Florida Developer. The “highest-paid newspaperman in America” was “delighted” by the natural beauty around the St. Lucie River, said the Developer’s headlines.
“This is wonderful,” Brisbane told the Developer. “You are given by nature in Stuart what in Miami man is seeking to build with his own hands. Stuart has a magic location which will make it one of the great cities of Florida in the coming years.”
Then, accompanied by the Seaboard executives, Brisbane left Stuart to take a look at 160,000 acres that the railroad owned near Indiantown, twenty-two miles west of Stuart.
A week later, a bylined story written by Brisbane was the top story on the Developer’s front page.
To have a story written by the most familiar name in American journalism was a major event for Menninger’s newspaper. But Brisbane wasn’t simply doing a favor for a small-town editor. He had his own self-interest at heart.
Brisbane’s story was actually an editorial calling on the state of Florida to spend millions of tax dollars to build two cross-state canals. One should link Stuart on the state’s east coast with Fort Myers on the Gulf Coast. Part of that waterway had already been accomplished. The St. Lucie Canal linked the St. Lucie River near Stuart with Lake Okeechobee, and the Caloosahatchee River flowed from the lake to Fort Myers.
Brisbane also suggested that a second cross-state waterway was needed to connect Jacksonville and Tampa by linking the St. Johns River with a series of smaller lakes and waterways in the state’s interior.
Brisbane said the state’s new governor, John Martin, had told him that he intended to push for a shipping canal across the peninsula. Such a canal would cut two thousand miles off the journey of ships leaving Gulf Coast ports bound for the Atlantic, Brisbane said.
What the world’s highest-paid journalist failed to mention, however, was the fact that he was on the verge of buying thousands of acres of land on the St. Lucie Canal near Indiantown. He was, in short, using his byline, fame, and prestige to lobby for public works projects that would be of enormous financial benefit to whoever happened to own nearby property.
And he was about to buy a huge chunk of that himself.
Being an insider to the plans of men of great wealth and influence was having its effect on Edwin Menninger. He was beginning to believe that anything was possible in Florida, and he was getting annoyed at those who doubted Florida’s possibilities.
When R. C. Ogilvie, a physician in Superior, Wisconsin, spent three months in Florida and told his hometown newspaper that Florida was “a bubble that must soon bust,” Menninger was infuriated.
“The sentimental sob stuff that Mr. Ogilvie pulls about bursting bubbles is so much bunk,” the young editor wrote on the Developer’s editorial page. “Not having taken the pains to discover the difference between artificial and spontaneous growth of a new country, he talks as if he were a seer. . . . He does not know what he is talking about.”
It was the first of many fierce rebuttals to criticism of Florida.
A few weeks after Brisbane’s exclusive story for the Developer, Menninger published a story announcing that Warfield’s Seaboard Air Line Railroad had sold the timber rights on its huge tract of land near Indiantown to lumber tycoon E. T. Roux of Bartow. The Developer reported that Roux planned to build a sawmill there that would employ as many as 1,500 people.
“This is the first of several industries to be located at Indiantown by the Seaboard,” the Developer reported. “Plans are afoot to bring other manufacturing concerns to this location, with the aim of building at Indiantown a city of leading importance in South Florida.”
All of the new industry and property sales were bringing new tax revenue into Palm Beach County. But residents in and around Stuart in the northern part of the county felt they were being shortchanged by county government in West Palm Beach. A county bond election in March 1925 proved it.
Northern Palm Beach County voters helped pass a $6 million proposal to provide money for new roads and other improvements in the county. But when north county residents learned that only about $250,000 of the bond money would be used in their end of the county, they were furious. A month later, business leaders in Stuart started circulating a petition to carve out a new county from portions of northern Palm Beach and southern St. Lucie counties. They formed a special committee to push for the creation of the ne
w county, and they chose Edwin Menninger as chairman of this committee.
On April 9, they met with Representative M. S. McCracken, who represented Palm Beach County in the state legislature. McCracken told the group he’d introduce legislation to create the new county if the committee could get 2,500 signatures on the petition supporting it.
It was a tall order. McCracken had only received 1,690 votes when he was elected to office.
But led by the determined young newspaper editor, the committee collected more than 4,000 signatures. Still, the South Florida Developer reported stiff opposition to the new county in Tallahassee.
Then a member of the special committee had an idea: Offer to name the new county after Governor John Martin if he’d throw his political influence behind the effort.
It worked. On May 28, the state legislature passed the bill to create Martin County, and the county’s namesake signed the bill the following day. Stuart was designated the county seat.
The legislature also created another new county north of Martin County. Indian River County was formed, with Vero Beach as its county seat.
Around the same time, Arthur Brisbane made yet another visit to Stuart. This time he was the guest of real estate broker E. D. Mays, and he had a long visit with Edwin Menninger.
His presence again was front-page news for the South Florida Developer, and he had more praise for Stuart.
“Stuart’s growth in the past two years is little short of marvelous,” he told Menninger.
There were rumors that the great journalist was going to buy property, but a spokesman for the land company hosting his visit denied that.
“Mr. Brisbane has not said what he intends to do,” Mays said. “If he is planning to buy, I do not know of it, for he gave me no indication that that was his intention.”
This was a polite fiction. Brisbane bought ten thousand acres near the St. Lucie Canal—the same waterway on which he wanted the state of Florida to spend taxpayers’ money to improve. But there would not be a public comment about his purchase until 1926.