by Willie Drye
“Although [Florida’s] development has been extraordinarily rapid, necessitating an immense expenditure of money, it has no bonded indebtedness,” he wrote. “It does not owe a dollar.”
That was true about Florida’s state government, but Knight was a lawyer, and like any good attorney, he was presenting only the facts that supported his client’s case, excluding anything that might harm that case. The “immense expenditure of money” spent during Florida’s rapid development had to come from somewhere. The growing cities had not turned to the state to pay for the sewer capacity and roads and streetlights and other infrastructure needed to serve populations that were increasing by the day. Riding the crest of what seemed like endless good times, they had issued municipal bonds that were purchased by investors who expected to make money. The bonds had to be repaid with interest, however, and that repayment with interest was a debt.
Soon, towns and cities across Florida would be struggling mightily to make payments on those bonds. But, as Knight and the Wall Street Journal would so stridently point out, Florida’s state government would remain free of such obligations. And they would fail to mention the crippling debt being carried by many of the state’s municipal governments.
St. Petersburg was already beginning to see the effects of the slowing of real estate sales and a consequent slowdown in building. About six thousand mechanics and their families had left the city.
“The outskirts were filled with abandoned houses,” said Walter Fuller, who only a year or so earlier was making more money than he had time to count. “People made precarious livings stealing sidewalk tile from abandoned subdivisions.”
By late spring, even Edwin Menninger was acknowledging that times were changing. On May 14, he announced that the South Florida Developer would reduce its publication schedule from twice a week to once a week.
Menninger said he’d gone to twice-weekly publication two years earlier when he was getting more advertising than he could possibly publish in just one issue per week. But he’d never expected that the Developer would remain a semi-weekly, and he hadn’t raised subscription prices for that reason.
“We felt that a depression must come in Florida sooner or later, and the present stagnant market justifies our belief,” he wrote on the Developer’s editorial page.
He also noted that the advertising that had paid for two issues a week wasn’t there anymore. Advertisers who had believed more than a year earlier that good times would continue and had signed long contracts now couldn’t afford the space they’d bought.
The advertisers who had signed those extended contracts were released from that obligation, Menninger wrote.
In the same issue of the Developer, Menninger also wrote a long, thoughtful, and analytical article urging readers to “put the brakes on speculation.” The days of fast, easy money from fat real estate profits were gone, he said.
“The balloon is blooey,” he wrote. “You have had all the soft pickings that you are going to get. In the future you can expect to get dollars only in exchange for work.”
Menninger’s opinion that Florida’s boom days were over infuriated some people, including Stuart city commissioner Cornelius Van Anglen.
Not long after his lengthy story in the Developer, Menninger slipped quietly into an afternoon meeting of the board of commissioners and sat down on a stool to watch.
Van Anglen halted the meeting, announcing that there was “a traitor” in the room, and made a motion that Menninger be removed from the meeting.
Mayor Harry Dyer conferred briefly with the town attorney about the legality of such a motion, then announced that he would not allow it. Van Anglen angrily left the meeting.
Still, Arthur Brisbane certainly was doing what he could to keep things humming in Stuart. On April 4, Solomon Davies Warfield decided the time was right to announce that Brisbane had bought ten thousand acres in Florida.
Brisbane paid $800,000 for his land, adjacent to the St. Lucie Canal, where the tracks for Warfield’s Seaboard Air Line Railroad crossed the canal. It also adjoined land owned by Seaboard’s “Development Department.”
Brisbane planned to use his land as a farm to demonstrate Florida’s “extraordinary fertility” and the advantages of its climate for farming.
Because of its proximity to the canal and Seaboard’s tracks, nearby Indian-town would become a divisional headquarters for the railroad, with repair and maintenance shops for its locomotives and rolling stock, Warfield said.
Brisbane was back on the front page of the South Florida Developer on June 11. Edwin Menninger’s lead story for that edition reported that Brisbane was about to start work on his farm west of Stuart. Brisbane wrote a self-serving sidebar for the Developer, again urging the state to build a cross-state waterway and make improvements to the St. Lucie Canal.
Brisbane called on the collective wisdom of the people of Florida to urge the state to take on the construction projects.
Reporter Marie D. Peffer, a former employee of Brisbane’s, interviewed him at the fourteenth annual Indianapolis 500 on May 31, 1926. The story was published in the South Florida Developer’s edition of June 18, 1926.
“You may quote me as saying that I consider Stuart to be one of the coming largest cities in Florida,” Brisbane told Peffer.
Powerful hurricanes don’t usually form in the Atlantic Basin in July. But occasionally the waters of the Caribbean Sea have become warm enough in the early summer to sustain a major hurricane, and that’s what happened in late July 1926.
The storm began on July 22 as a tropical depression just east of the Leeward Islands near the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea. The storm became a hurricane as it moved northwestward across the Caribbean, but it did not become an especially powerful storm until after it had crossed the Dominican Republic and entered the Bahamas.
Then it quickly intensified into a monster storm with winds of around 140 miles an hour as it approached Nassau.
The hurricane struck that city on the evening of Sunday, July 25. Nassau residents at first thought the hurricane would miss their city, but by nightfall it was clear that it was headed their way.
“There was little sleep that night for anyone on the island, just listening to this merciless crashing and tearing and roaring, and wondering what would be the outcome,” the Nassau Guardian reported.
The outcome was very bad. The storm continued to rage at dawn, and the light “revealed a town lashed unceasingly by a pitiless wind intent on demolishing everything in its track, and driving rain as fine as smoke,” the Guardian said.
The hurricane weakened some as it reached the northwest edge of the Bahamas, but it still had winds of perhaps 120 miles an hour, and its northwestward track put it on a course for Miami.
But the storm turned slightly more northward, and its most powerful winds stayed offshore and missed Miami. The hurricane’s eye came ashore at Cape Canaveral, about 175 miles up the coast from Miami.
The worst that Miami saw was winds of 80 miles an hour. Still, the storm downed trees and power lines as it passed through the city. F. A. Lancaster, a line-man, was electrocuted while repairing power lines in Miami Beach.
It was the first hurricane for many of Miami’s newcomers, and they thought they’d seen the worst that nature could throw at them.
While the hurricane of July 1926 was not powerful enough to inflict catastrophic damage in Florida, it created an image problem for the Florida Association of Real Estate Boards. In the heady, go-go days of the real estate boom, optimistic developers had erected grand entrances to their “ideal cities.” In many cases, those grandiose entrances were all that was built.
Now, neglected for months, they were becoming shabby, and the hurricane’s winds had been powerful enough to knock many of them askew. In abandoned developments where grandiose entrances had been built—often of nothing more than chicken wire and plaster—and streets had been laid out, the entrances were shredded, street signs were leaning, and other signs had been bat
tered by the winds.
It was a reminder that some dreams had not materialized. The Florida Association of Real Estate Boards wanted these embarrassing eyesores removed. It wasn’t good for business.
Florida was getting a lot of drive-by scrutiny from national publications, and the messages were mixed. In August, Forbes magazine said Florida was financially sound despite the unfair treatment it was receiving in the national press. The state’s banking troubles were being exaggerated, and the problems that did exist were being caused by a weak chain of banks in Georgia.
The Forbes story quoted Peter Knight, who again had statistics at hand to prove that Florida was just fine. The state had had 28 banks fail in the past six years, compared to 173 banks in Montana that had failed, 160 in Oklahoma, and 153 in Iowa.
World’s Work, another highly respected publication, agreed with the Forbes analysis of Florida, saying “it is difficult to visualize anything but further progress” in the state.
The National Park Bank of New York concurred. “What has happened in Florida has been precisely the sort of readjustment which was inevitable under the circumstances,” the bank said in its regular bulletin in September.
Florida governor John Martin no doubt was aware of his state’s banking situation, but on September 14, he was dealing with quite a different issue. Putnam County Sheriff R. J. Hancock and F. S. Waymer, mayor of the county seat of Palatka, had brought a chilling problem to the governor.
Palatka and Putnam County—which had so charmed journalist Edward King in 1873—was being terrorized by a mob of vigilantes determined to enforce a strict moral code in the county. The mob was dispensing its harsh justice on Saturday nights, flogging offenders for crimes such as bootlegging and prostitution. Two people had been killed, and sixty-three had been whipped in the past year, Hancock and Waymer told the governor.
The mob members were not identified as belonging to the Ku Klux Klan, but they did wear masks when they meted out their punishment.
Martin told reporters in Tallahassee that he’d received many letters from Putnam County residents, asking him to end the terrorism.
It was a serious and embarrassing problem for the chief executive of a state that was as image-conscious as Florida. The governor didn’t know it, but while he was hearing pleas for help from Putnam County, a more serious problem was heading his way. Another tropical storm had formed. It would become one of the most powerful storms on record. And it would not, as the others had done, weaken and veer away from Florida at the last minute.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Many Die; Cities Razed”
FOR A WHILE, A BRISK BREEZE COMING OFF BISCAYNE BAY MADE THE EVENING of Friday, September 17, 1926, more pleasant for couples dancing in the rooftop gardens of the American Legion hall that overlooked the bay. The Miami Legionnaires were in the middle of a three-day Mardi Gras–themed festival to raise money to send the post’s drum and bugle team to the upcoming national convention in Philadelphia.
By eleven p.m., however, the rising wind was no longer adding to the tropical ambience. It was becoming quite a nuisance.
Someone called the local US Weather Bureau office. There was a storm off-shore. The wind and rain would be increasing. The disappointed partyers decided to call it a night.
The blow wouldn’t be much, they told each other. Nothing more than a windy rainstorm, like that hurricane back in July. They’d be back at the Legion hall the following day to continue their merriment.
But they were about as wrong as they could possibly be. The rising wind that chased the Legionnaires indoors was the outer edge of a fierce hurricane that had been pounding its way across the Atlantic Ocean for several days.
The Weather Bureau had been following the storm and issuing advisories since September 14. On the morning of Wednesday, September 15, as the hurricane passed just north of the Virgin Islands, the Weather Bureau advisory tersely noted, “This storm has already attained considerable intensity.”
That was a calculated understatement. The hurricane unleashed that “considerable intensity” Thursday afternoon as it plowed west-northwestward across the Turks and Caicos Islands.
“At 1:55 the storm had reached such intensity as to indicate that everything would be demolished,” meteorologist George Goodwin later wrote. Roofs were ripped off and hurled far from the buildings they’d once covered, and Goodwin estimated the wind speed at 150 miles per hour. And the hurricane’s storm surge made it seem as though the islands were sinking into the ocean.
“The sea swell at times was well above the windowsills, and before it could recede was caught by the next swell, the sea reaching inland for about three-quarters of a mile,” he wrote.
The hurricane lost little of its intensity as it moved on and gave the Bahamas a severe beating Thursday night and early Friday morning, September 17.
In Miami, Weather Bureau meteorologist Richard Gray knew a bad hurricane was closing in on Florida, but Gray and the Weather Bureau meteorologists in Washington, DC, who issued the advisories didn’t know exactly where the storm was, or where it was headed. In those days before weather satellites and hurricane-hunter aircraft, pinpointing the exact position of a hurricane was largely guesswork, unless a ship at sea crossed paths with the storm’s eye and radioed its position before the winds carried away its antenna.
With one tragic exception, ships were managing to avoid this storm and weren’t providing Gray with much help in locating it. The unlucky ship was the British freighter, Loyal Citizen. Early Tuesday afternoon, the Independent Wireless Telegraph Company—a Long Island company that relayed radio traffic to and from ships at sea—picked up an SOS from the Loyal Citizen. The ship gave its position as “400 miles off the coast of Florida.”
A few hours later, a second SOS said the ship was sinking and the crew was about to launch lifeboats. Nothing more was heard from the stricken freighter.
But the following day, a Danish tanker searching for the Loyal Citizen found only an overturned lifeboat floating on an empty, storm-tossed sea. The hurricane—wherever it was—had claimed the freighter and all thirty of its crew.
Although Richard Gray didn’t know exactly where the storm’s center was, by Friday morning he was certain that South Florida was in for a bad blow. At 10:20 a.m., he relayed the official storm advisory from Washington, saying that “destructive winds” would be raking the Florida east coast from Jupiter Inlet south to Miami—a stretch of about eighty-five miles—by Saturday morning.
And just so there could be no doubt about the danger posed by this hurricane, the official advisory included this warning: “This is a very severe storm.”
The storm warning was published in the Friday-afternoon newspapers, and broadcast by radio as well. The storm warning also was telegraphed to state offices, and throughout the afternoon, Weather Bureau staff answered telephone calls from people wanting information on the storm.
Still, lots of South Florida residents didn’t see any reason to worry. They recalled the July hurricane that had done little more than rustle tree limbs, and they thought that storm was the worst that nature could throw at them.
What they didn’t know, however, was that they’d been very, very lucky in July. Besides rain and winds, the storm had delivered a false message—especially to newcomers—about what a hurricane could do.
One of the Weather Bureau’s warning telegrams went to Fred Flanders in Moore Haven, a little town on the southwest shore of Lake Okeechobee, about ninety miles inland from Miami. Flanders, a state engineer, didn’t know what to make of the warning.
“I showed it to a number of people whose reaction, like my own, was more or less negative,” Flanders said. “None of us knew what to expect.”
But the storm warning still made Flanders and his neighbors uneasy. They knew that a tropical storm could cause havoc in their little lakeside town.
The effect of powerful winds on Lake Okeechobee has been described as similar to a person filling a shallow saucer with water and
then blowing across the water. And September 1926 was not a good time for a storm to be blowing across the giant, shallow saucer that is Lake Okeechobee. Rainfall had been unusually heavy, and the lake was brimming with water. A simple mud dike stretching for several miles along the southern rim of the lake was Moore Haven’s only protection from storm-driven flooding.
As the phone continually rang at the Weather Bureau office in Miami, Gray studied the sparse information being reported by Weather Bureau offices in other Florida cities. He was especially interested in barometric pressure readings.
At sea level, a barometer’s needle doesn’t drop below 29.92 inches unless a bad storm such as a hurricane is nearby. As the storm approaches, the needle will begin a slow, steady descent and continue to fall as the hurricane’s eye nears. The needle will not start rising until the storm center has passed and is moving away. Very intense hurricanes will cause the needle to fall very low. For example, Hurricane Camille had a barometric pressure reading of 26.84 inches when it struck Mississippi in 1969. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew had a reading of 27.23 inches when it came ashore at Homestead, Florida.
The information Gray was receiving wasn’t very helpful when it came to figuring out where the center of the storm was.
Around four p.m. on Friday, Leo F. Reardon, a construction contractor in Coral Gables, left his office to play golf with a friend who was visiting from Boston. On the way to the course, the men picked up a copy of the afternoon Miami Tribune. A headline across the top of the front page read “Miami Warned of Tropical Storm.”
Reardon and his golf partner shrugged off the Tribune story and headed for the first tee. Reardon lost the match to his guest, and then the men went to Reardon’s home in Coral Gables, where his wife was cooking dinner for them and two other guests.
There were, however, clear indications that something awful was headed toward South Florida. At the observance of the Jewish holy holiday of Yom Kippur at Temple Israel, a white dove flew through the window, perched on the altar, and stayed there. It would not move from its perch after the services ended.