by Willie Drye
State lawmakers were also taking notice of Stuart’s potential. A couple of days after Brisbane left Stuart, the lawmakers approved issuing $250,000 worth of bonds—about $3.3 million in twenty-first-century dollars—to deepen and improve the harbor.
The town’s boosters dreamed of the day when deepwater oceangoing ships would be sailing through the St. Lucie Inlet.
Tourists always left Miami ahead of the steamy South Florida summer, but that didn’t happen in 1925. Crowds continued to pour into the city, and the real estate mania was attracting a new type of speculator.
During the spring and summer, ambitious young men—and a few young women—from the large cities of the urban Northeast, streamed into Miami. They’d figured out a way to make a quick fortune by gaming the gullibility of the hordes of eager fortune seekers, the availability of easy credit, and Miami’s overwhelmed city bureaucracy. They became known as “binder boys” because of their manipulation of the laws governing real estate transactions at the time.
In the summer of 1925, thousands of them prowled the city’s streets, hawking real estate like beer vendors at a baseball game. They bought binders on a piece of property by putting up only a small portion of the cash price, usually 10 percent. This binder held the property in the name of the purchaser until the first substantial payment on the property was due, which usually was thirty days later.
But the binder boys seldom had any intention of keeping the property that long. Instead, they quickly sold their binders for a much higher price than what they’d paid for the original down payment. Whoever bought the binder then became responsible for the bigger payment due later.
The new purchaser could—and often did—resell the same binder at a higher price. By the time some documents finally made it to the overworked registrar of deeds’ office, they often had changed hands many times before the first payment came due.
Wearing a sort of informal uniform of golf knickers—known as “plus fours,” because they extended four inches below the knee—or white “Palm Beach” suits, the binder boys turned downtown Miami into an open-air real estate market. And the sales never stopped. At night, some of the more successful binder boys would hire a few musicians to play jazz softly as they peddled acreage on Flagler Street.
As long as real estate prices kept skyrocketing, the binder boys raked in huge profits selling what essentially were fantasies.
“The binder boys worked right on the street, holding the receipt books and pencil in hand, calling off the acreage and the amount of binder required, obtaining the deposits from people who bought lots without having any idea how far in the woods of Florida they might be,” recalled A. J. Manning, who’d been a very successful real estate broker in Miami in 1925. “Lots at $5 or $10 down and so much a month sold like hotcakes, the buyer not even caring where they were or how much the total selling price. They’d have a map and make an ‘X’ in various places where plans were made to construct the city hall, public utilities building, and so on.”
Historians have blamed the binder boys for the wild escalation of Miami real estate prices in 1925.
The potent mixture of hopes, dreams, naked greed, vast sums of easy cash, and plenty of bootleg whiskey created an intoxicating, anything-goes atmosphere.
“The people were, like, wild,” Manning said. “The money went to their heads; they thought it would continue forever, and [they] became reckless and extravagant. Money galore was spent in nightclubs. Couples who were perfectly happy and contented with each other became careless in their morals, husbands holding other men’s wives in their arms and vice versa.”
And their eagerness to snatch a piece of the Florida dream was spiraling out of control. Later in the summer, sales of lots in the Miami Shores development nearly caused a riot. Frantic buyers literally threw money at real estate brokers. The development was sold out in three hours, and the brokers collected $33 million—more than $440 million, or almost half a billion dollars, in twenty-first-century dollars.
On June 25, Edwin Menninger traveled up the coast to Vero Beach to attend a celebration of the creation of Indian River County. The featured speaker was Florida’s most famous booster, William Jennings Bryan.
The great orator sprinkled his remarks with a few references to local dignitaries and events, then launched into his familiar speech about the wonders of Florida. He told a slightly different version of his joke about Florida’s marvelous growth than the one he’d used in Coral Gables, but the message was the same.
“Florida is the sanitarium for the rich and the playground for the well,” Bryan told the crowd of about 3,500. “While not wishing to place one class above another, I must admit that our real estate men are less likely to lie than those of any other state. That is because truth is stranger than fiction. If a Florida real estate man should start out in the morning to lie about the country, the truth would catch up with him before night.”
After Bryan’s remarks, Menninger approached him and invited him to speak at a similar gathering in January to celebrate the creation of Martin County. Bryan gladly accepted.
As bright as Indian River County’s future seemed, Menninger was convinced that Martin County’s future would far exceed it. More new developments, backed by more men of great wealth and influence, were being planned for Martin County, and they were buying lavish advertising spreads in the South Florida Developer.
On the shores of Lake Okeechobee in western Martin County, Selznick Studios of Hollywood, California—owned by David O. Selznick—had bought land in a new development called Lake Okeechobee Shores. Menninger’s Developer reported that a $6 million studio for producing motion pictures was in the works.
At the other end of the county, producer Lewis J. Selznick—David’s father—had bought sixteen square miles of property that included the wilds where, less than a year earlier, the Ashley Gang had made moonshine and hid from sheriff’s posses. The elder Selznick planned a development called Picture City. The Developer reported that Selznick intended to build a “mammoth motion picture studio” there.
A promotional brochure for Picture City described the planned development in effusive prose, saying that the Dixie Highway, which ran through the planned development, was about to become “the Fifth Avenue of Florida.”
“The entire territory is ablaze with development,” the brochure said. “There must be one continuous Riviera of the World between Stuart and Miami. The opening up of the territory between Stuart and Palm Beach has just begun.”
The land that Picture City would be built on “is the finest in all of Florida, if not in the entire world,” the brochure boasted.
William Jennings Bryan arrived in Dayton, Tennessee, for the trial of high school teacher John Scopes on July 6, 1925. He stepped from the train wearing a dark suit and bow tie, a tight-lipped smile, and an odd choice of headgear—a pith helmet typically identified with British explorers in a tropical climate.
Dayton, a mining and mill town about 140 miles east of Nashville, was sweltering in the July heat. The locals who gathered at one of the town’s social centers, F. E. Robinson’s Rexall Drugstore, were still debating the merits of Tennessee’s anti-evolution law. The drugstore was just down Market Street—which had a twelve-mile-an-hour speed limit—from the stately Rhea County Courthouse, where the trial would be held.
One thing all the regulars at Robinson’s agreed on was that the trial was shining an intense spotlight on their little town.
H. L. Mencken, the Baltimore Sun writer who so disliked Bryan, was there, as was W. O. McGeehan, who was covering the trial for Harper’s.
Even more extraordinary from the locals’ perspective were the newsreel cameramen who would bring the proceedings to movie theaters across the land.
And there also was the famous lawyer for the defense, Clarence Darrow, who had first met Bryan at the Democratic National Convention of 1896, when the great orator had held the delegates spellbound with his passionate praise of the common man.
Da
rrow also had been a staunch defender of the working man and shared many of Bryan’s political beliefs. But on the question of humanity’s origins, they were bitter enemies, and they knew there would be a dramatic showdown before the jury brought in its inevitable verdict that John Scopes was guilty of violating Tennessee’s law against teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Nearly a thousand people crammed into the courtroom when the trial began on July 10, and uncounted others were able to follow the proceedings, thanks to loudspeakers set up outside the courthouse. A four-year-old boy patriotically named Thomas Jefferson Brewer was lifted up onto the judge’s desk and drew the names of jurors from a hat.
Bryan, coatless, tieless, and clutching a fan advertising Robinson’s Rexall Drugstore, sat grim-faced in the inferno of the courtroom as the trial proceeded. Students who’d attended Scopes’s class testified that he had indeed taught that humans were descended from a single-cell organism and were mammals, just like monkeys.
The jury also heard from eminent scientists.
The man at the center of the trial was not called as a witness, however.
On July 20, Judge John T. Raulston moved the trial outside to the shade of the trees on the courthouse lawn so that more people could see and hear the trial. Finally the showdown that the nation had been awaiting occurred—Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, debating the question of how it all began.
Darrow walked Bryan through the biblical story of Creation, asking him if he believed in the literal truth of the Bible—that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, and that Eve was made from Adam’s rib.
Bryan answered that he did.
“Does the statement, ‘The morning and the evening were the first day,’ and ‘The morning and the evening were the second day,’ mean anything to you?” Darrow asked.
“I do not think it necessarily means a twenty-four-hour day,” Bryan answered.
Darrow got Bryan to repeat his statement—that a biblical day was not necessarily twenty-four hours—and Bryan elaborated. It would be just as easy, he said, “for the kind of God we believe in to make the earth in six days as in six years or in 6 million years or in 600 million years. I do not think it important whether we believe one or the other.”
It was a puzzling answer from a man who’d spent his public life insisting that the Bible should be the only textbook used to explain how humanity came into being.
The jury took only nine minutes to convict John Scopes of violating Tennessee state law, and he was fined $100. But it was not a resounding victory for Bryan and his cause.
Bryan decided to stay on in Dayton for a few days after the trial. On July 26, he ate lunch and lay down for a nap.
He never awakened.
Thousands of mourners lined the tracks along the route of the special Southern Railway train that took his remains to Arlington National Cemetery for burial. When the train stopped briefly in Knoxville, a huge crowd gathered around the car containing Bryan’s coffin.
Edwin Menninger paid tribute to Bryan in the August 4 edition of the Developer, recalling that he had met Bryan at Vero Beach, and that Bryan had been eager to speak at the Martin County celebration coming up in January.
“In his lifetime he was known personally by more Americans, I suspect, than any other man of our day,” Menninger wrote. “Some of his notions were queer, to be sure, but so are some of yours and some of mine.”
The nation’s mania with Florida continued after the death of the state’s most famous spokesman.
Arthur Brisbane was taking up some of the slack created by Bryan’s departure. Around the climax of the Scopes trial in Tennessee, Brisbane praised Seaboard Air Line Railroad president Solomon Davies Warfield in his “Today” column for expanding his railroad in Florida. The new tracks would bring more visitors—and presumably more money—into the state, and help relieve the congestion of freight shipments that were starting to back up in rail yards and sidetracks leading into Florida.
And Edwin Menninger continued his cheerleading for the Florida miracle. In August, he took some time off for a visit to his native Kansas, but he didn’t stop promoting his new home. His topic for a speech to the Kiwanis Club of Topeka was “The Wonders of Stuart, Florida.” He handed out two crates of pineapples grown in Martin County and wrote a column for the Topeka State Journal about his new hometown.
He also noted that the Florida East Coast Railway was now running a dozen daily trains into Florida, double the number from the previous summer.
Menninger invited attention to himself during his travels in the Midwest by wearing white plus fours. The knickers had become closely identified with Florida real estate salesmen, and he was frequently approached by people who were curious about what was happening there.
Menninger admitted to his questioners that he didn’t know how long Florida’s remarkable growth would continue, but he thought it would be at least ten years.
Others asked him why Florida had become such an obsession.
“Florida has been there all the time,” one man said to Menninger. “Why should there be a sudden panic to reach Florida?”
“So was the gold in the California hills all the time prior to 1849,” he answered.
He saw unmistakable evidence of the nation’s fascination as he was about to board his train back to Florida.
“I walked into Union Station in Kansas City when I started my return trip to find probably three hundred [people] jammed around the gate leading to the Florida train,” Menninger said. “All the other forty gates were practically deserted.”
The thousands of people coming into Florida were going to their hometown banks before they left and withdrawing millions of dollars. So much money was being withdrawn that bankers outside Florida were getting uneasy.
Withdrawals from member banks of the Massachusetts Savings Bank League had increased at an especially alarming rate, and the league’s officers realized how deeply the Florida mania had penetrated their customers’ psyches. People who put their money into savings banks usually couldn’t afford to gamble on real estate investments. Small-time real estate speculators were withdrawing about $2,000 a day from a Boston bank, and another bank there was losing about $10,000 a week.
The manager of the league of savings banks estimated that about $20 million from his members’ banks had gone into Florida real estate.
The league felt obligated to warn its depositors about the risks of such speculation. Bankers in other states were also becoming alarmed. In Ohio, bankers were so worried that they took out full-page ads in larger newspapers warning against speculating in Florida real estate. The ads’ bottom-line message was that sooner or later, real estate prices would tumble.
Similar warnings were issued by the Minnesota Department of Conservation.
Edwin Menninger was one of many Florida newspaper editors who were upset by the organized advertising campaign against Florida. He continued to insist that Florida, and especially Stuart, were safe investments.
“Land is not worth a certain figure: it sells for that figure,” Menninger said in the September 8 edition of the Developer. “Next week it sells for a bigger figure. Worth had nothing to do with the change. It is a settled conviction among us Floridians that we have established a new school of economics in which price has displaced value as a measure of a man’s fortune.”
A few days later, Menninger responded to a story in an Omaha, Nebraska, newspaper in which a local man warned that real estate bargains in Florida were gone and that living costs in the state were sky-high.
“The fact of the matter is that most of these people who knock Florida are unable to comprehend the size or the significance of our present development,” Menninger wrote. “Seeking to bolster their stories of the ‘awful’ conditions in this busiest and most prosperous State in the Union, they resort to all manner of exaggeration and display astonishing ignorance of the subject they pretend to understand.”
Menninger also used some reverse psychology to counte
ract the anti-Florida campaign.
“If these attacks succeed in slowing down the influx of tourists to Florida just a little, it would help Florida wonderfully,” he wrote in the Developer. “We don’t want as many people as we are getting because we cannot accommodate them.”
Still, the momentum of Florida’s stunning rise was about to shift.
The shift started when the Florida East Coast Railway had to halt freight shipments to its overcrowded yards in Miami. There simply wasn’t any more room, and its equipment was nearly worn out from constant use.
Miami’s harbor also was packed with ships forced to wait days to unload their cargoes.
The halt in the flow of building materials was a disaster for Florida’s boom-ers. Without lumber, tile, nails, and concrete, they couldn’t even build the shoddy housing that was allowing them to reap quick fortunes from the newcomers.
Out-of-work carpenters added to the problem by leaving town to search for work elsewhere.
The speculators—especially Miami’s ubiquitous binder boys—who had made fortunes from real estate took a hit when the Bureau of Internal Revenue decided to take a closer look at the profits of some especially successful speculators. The investigators made a ruling that was disastrous for real estate speculators: Those who sold real estate would have to declare the full price of the sale as income, rather than only the amount of the down payment.
This meant that if a binder boy sold a lot valued at $10,000 but received only $1,000 as a down payment, he still had to pay taxes on the full sale price, rather than merely the deposit.
Suddenly, Florida’s brisk real estate sales slowed.
And yet, people continued to pour into Miami, and they all needed a place to sleep. Enterprising residents were renting their porches as bedrooms for $25 a night—more than $330 in twenty-first-century dollars. Other newcomers were simply bedding down in public parks. As the winter of 1925 approached, the New York Times reported that roads into Florida were still clogged with southbound traffic, and that 600,000 people in the state were sleeping in tents.