by Nick Wynne
Several important factors explain the emergence of the large middle class in the United States, and without all of them being present in a short time frame, American society would not have changed much. Each of these factors contributed to the explosion in land sales that made up the Florida boom of the early 1920s.
First, American industry, unlike its European counterpart, quickly accepted the idea of mass production, sacrificing the idea of skilled workmen starting and finishing the same project for the process whereby many different people worked on an assembly line, creating a finished product made out of interchangeable parts. Mass production was the brainchild of American inventor Eli Whitney, who applied the technique to manufacture guns in antebellum America. Although the technique was slow to catch on, the urgent demand for millions of units of the same items created by the Civil War ensured its triumph in industry. In the post–Civil War period, techniques for mass production were refined as a growing population demanded more goods and services. It was Henry Ford, however, who popularized the method in his factories in Detroit. He was so successful that Ford cars dominated the American market.
Ford was also responsible for boosting the status of laborers in the United States when he offered to pay his factory workers five dollars a day. This was unheard of when he inaugurated his pay scale, but he argued that his workers were also his customers and that he wanted to pay them enough to be able to buy a Ford car, which cost about $250 before World War I. Once Ford had implemented his revolutionary wage program, other manufacturers in all industries felt forced to go along. American workers were the highest-paid workers in the world.
Second, the “trust busting” efforts of President Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party during the first decade of the 1900s had broken up into smaller companies the large monopolies that dominated American business. With the breakup, the level of competition grew as smaller companies entered the marketplace. As a corollary to business expansion, the number of midlevel managers and business professionals grew, and the American middle class expanded. In a few colleges in the United States, small business schools emerged to teach the “scientific” principles of management.
Third, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, the installment plan became the favorite American way to purchase goods, including automobiles. Although a variation of this had been in place for several decades, the earlier version required purchasers to make small payments until the item was fully paid for before taking possession of it. The new version allowed the consumer to get the item and use it while payments were made. As long as the installment payments were made on time, the consumer could claim ownership. If payments were missed, however, the original seller/lender repossessed and resold the item. By using a variation of the “dollar-a-week” plan, American society became a consumer society—once again taking a different path than European societies. For the first time in American history, everyone—from the poorest farmer to the wealthiest Wall Street magnate—had a stake in the wave of prosperity that swept over the United States in the early 1920s. The increasing popularity of the automobile made it possible for virtually every class in society to pick up and move. Funded through “installment” plans created by banks and manufacturers, just about every American could acquire items that had previously been available only to the wealthiest—cars, appliances and consumer goods of all sorts. Henry Ford took advantage of this new method of financing, and by producing the reliable and inexpensive “flivver,” he is credited with creating the “car culture” in the United States.
The installment plan became so prominent in American business that few areas of economic activity escaped. During the boom of the 1920s, most speculative purchases of Florida land were bought with a “little down and small weekly or monthly payments.” With a small down payment, usually 5 or 10 percent of the total selling price, purchasers gained control of the property in question and, although state law forbade the resale of the property until the title change had been duly recorded, would quickly resell it for an increased price. Frequently, a property would change hands several times in the course of a day or a week. For purchasers of homes, the installment plan worked as well. A small down payment and monthly payments for twenty or so years were enough to secure a permanent or seasonal domicile in paradise.
Another important factor in paving the way for the real estate bonanza that dominated the Sunshine State in the 1920s was the tremendous wave of prosperity for American industry that accompanied World War I. The United States entered the war in 1917, three years after the first fighting broke out in Europe. The sale of war materiel to the countries united against Germany injected tremendous amounts of money into the U.S. economy, which grew exponentially when America finally entered the war. Labor shortages due to the draft of more than one million American youths created increasing demands for more labor, which produced a corresponding increase in wages paid to workers.
When the war ended on November 11, 1918, the war-weary Europeans faced the tasks of restructuring destroyed industries and paying off the enormous debts accrued to finance the war effort. Germany, judged the sole country responsible for starting the war by the victorious powers, faced heavy reparations. Its industry, which had rivaled that of the United States prior to the outbreak, faced severe restrictions on the items that it was allowed to produce, accelerated inflation that made German currency worthless and a severe shortage of manpower because of the 1.5 million deaths (roughly 15.3 percent of its male population) it suffered. France, Russia, Belgium, Great Britain and other countries suffered similar losses and faced many of the same problems.
The United States’ casualties for the eighteen-month period of its involvement numbered 115,000. While relatively small when compared to European countries, the number of men permanently removed from the workforce created problems for manufacturers. The large number of men who came back from the war and sought time to decompress from the rigors of warfare further exacerbated the situation. War-weary veterans, tired of calls for duty and addicted to the adrenalin rush of battle, looked for new forms of excitement in their lives that could replace the dangers of warfare.
World War I also proved the superiority of machines over animal power. Many a doughboy who had grown up in rural America gained his first exposure to the widespread use of machines powered by the internal combustion engine—tanks, automobiles and airplanes. With the end of the war, large quantities of surplus government equipment flooded the American marketplace at prices that made it possible for the public to acquire these items at prices well below the cost of new ones. As a result, Americans hit the road using surplus government automobiles, equipped with surplus tents, camp stoves and tools, seeking to explore the last frontiers of North America. They joined a growing group of automobile tourists, commonly referred to as the “tin canners.”
In the immediate postwar period, thousands of tin canners took to American roads, with many using surplus military tents and vehicles. Florida, particularly the large and wild areas in the center of the state, was a popular destination. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.
Although railroads and steamboats in the late 1800s opened the east and west coasts of the peninsula to visitors, the center of the state experienced little in the way of tourism or large-scale settlement. No single area was as representative of frontier America as the Sunshine State. For decades, Florida slept tranquilly under the hot tropical sun, occasionally aroused by seasonal influxes of tourists but generally left to its own devices. Large areas of uninhabited land in the interior of the peninsula provided a frontier atmosphere where scraggly cattle, herded by dangerous-looking cowhands, were the most likely sights a visitor would see. For every Ormond Beach, Tampa, Palm Beach or Miami that offered a destination for the wealthy, there were hundreds of small towns, surrounded by tropical hammocks and open plains, that were important only to their residents.
The automobile freed visitors from the straight lines of railroads and the often unfav
orable locations of rivers, and as a result of these freewheeling explorers, vast sections of the Florida interior were opened to tourism. Life as a tin canner meant few hotels, fewer service centers and even fewer tourist attractions. Not bound by roads or reason, these original “off-roaders” carved new destinations for tourists in Florida. Because few amenities were in place, early auto tourists carried extra gasoline, tires, repair kits, tents and food with them. “They came to Florida with $10 and an extra pair of underwear, and when they left six weeks later they had changed neither,” went a popular joke of the period. They all shared this common experience, and in 1919, a group met in de Soto Park in Tampa to form the Tin Can Tourists of the World, a social group that still exists today.
The automobile also offered Americans a new sense of privacy. No longer bound by the fixed routes of railroads—where newspapers in towns along the routes frequently published the names and business of new arrivals—automobile tourists came and went as they pleased without having to meet the schedules of other people. The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act in 1919 ushered in the Prohibition era in the United States, which many Americans interpreted as a direct assault on their individual rights and an invasion of their privacy. Florida’s proximity to Bimini, Cuba and Bermuda guaranteed the supply of illicit liquor for rumrunners, while the tacit consent of revenue agents allowed its availability to clubs and restaurants in the state—reinforcing the growing perception of the state as a play land. While Europe was still rebuilding from the destruction of World War I, the United States entered into a fast-paced, hedonistic era known as the Jazz Age. Fueled by new and available technology—radio, telephones, airplanes, movies and electricity—and serenaded by the formerly forbidden music of Negro brothels in New Orleans and St. Louis, America was on the move, ready to see new places and do new things. The craving for unusual experiences sparked a new society that rejected the old and staid values of the nineteenth century and advocated “change for change’s sake.”
The success of the Good Roads Movement, originally started in the 1880s as a movement to create new and better roads for bicyclists, gained momentum in the years immediately before the war. In 1913, Carl Fisher, who would become the Sunshine State’s wealthiest land promoter in the 1920s, sought to create a coast-to-coast highway across the United States. Although not an immediate success, the proposed Lincoln Highway generated a great deal of favorable publicity and the support of hundreds of cities and towns that hoped for the economic stimulus such a road would bring. In 1915, Fisher and other Good Road advocates created the Montreal-to-Miami highway, which opened to great fanfare. While crude in its construction, the road nevertheless made it possible to drive from Canada to Miami in a few days. For several years, the Dixie Highway, as it was popularly known, was the major automobile route into Florida. During the Great War, the federal government quickly realized the need for a complex system of good highways in order to accommodate the movement of men and equipment for military purposes. Within a few years, the United States was crisscrossed by a network of passable roads.
The ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment and the passage of the Volstead Act ushered in the Prohibition era in the United States. Americans quickly turned to bootlegging and rumrunning. Florida’s proximity to Bimini, Cuba and Bermuda made it an ideal base for rumrunners. Courtesy of the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library.
Floridians quickly noted the influx of tin canners into the state as another potential source of tourist revenues and just as quickly developed roadside attractions to lure them to particular destinations. Alligators, ostriches, giant trees and natural springs, as well as the natural flora and fauna of the Sunshine State, became the focus of roadside advertisements. Mom and pop fruit stands and general stores, some selling gasoline or offering tire repairs or the services of mechanics, provided pleasant stops along the roads. St. Augustine, drawing on its Spanish heritage, became a tourist mecca, where the nation’s oldest surviving house attracted as much attention as Ponce de León’s mythical Fountain of Youth (which moved several times). Seminole villages, deep in the Everglades, were largely inaccessible, so the Indians moved them closer to the roads.
The popularity of bicycling in the United States and the need for better transportation routes for industry and travel led to the Good Roads Movement. Courtesy of the Tampa-Hillsborough County Library System.
Tourist homes—small inns dedicated to the touring public—operated in most small towns and cities. Small hotels also expanded their offerings, and for the first time, the pleasures and destinations of America’s rich were available—in a slightly limited fashion—to scads of middle-class citizens. Sports like golf, tennis and croquet, long considered the domain of the very wealthy, were democratized as hoteliers began marketing their hotels specifically to the middle class. Although the number of extremely rich Americans grew rapidly during the second half of the nineteenth century, their numbers were small when compared to those of the middle class. If Florida promoters could attract this newly affluent group of Americans to the Sunshine State, they could use the sheer numbers of the middle class, who spent less money overall, to more than make up for the extravagant expenditures of the fewer numbers of the fabulously wealthy.
As the automobile tourists flooded into Florida, enterprising residents developed a variety of small attractions to get them to stop and spend money. This is an alligator farm in north Florida, near St. Augustine. Florida State Photographic Archives.
Mom and pop fruit stands and general stores provided weary automobile travelers with pleasant places to stop, rest and, of course, spend money. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.
The small villages of Florida’s Seminole Indians, located in the Everglades, were favorite places to visit for tourists in the 1920s. For the Seminoles, tourists provided an extra source of income. Courtesy of the Moorhead Collection.
Finally, the large numbers of service personnel who trained in military bases around the state during the war carried the message of how exciting life in the Sunshine State could be to thousands of friends and relatives back home when the war was over. Their enthusiasm for Florida was no different from that of servicemen who had come south in other wars and who would train in Florida in future wars. They carried the message of perpetual sunshine, open spaces and year-round warm weather—which had been and would continue to be the message of advertisements for the state—to northern residents, tired of cold winters, increasing populations and urban sprawl. Once again, the pump was being primed.
CHAPTER 4
The Truth about Florida Is a Lie!
At a meeting of Florida advertising men, trying to formulate a program for presenting the facts about the state to the outside world, a few years ago, suggestion after suggestion was rejected because it was felt that the contemplated statement, though true, would not be accepted as truth. Finally one of the group summed up the matter in a phrase that has become historic: “Gentlemen,” he said, “the truth about Florida is a lie!”
—Frank Parker Stockbridge and John Holliday Perry,
Florida in the Making, 1926
The Florida land boom of the 1920s funneled thousands of additional people into the Sunshine State. This time, however, they came with a different purpose—not to settle permanently but to capitalize on the real estate boom. A second wave of industrialists, flush with the profits of wartime manufacturing, looked for new places to build second and third homes. The first generation of middle-class managers, similarly flush with extra money, sought to emulate their “betters” and cast about for new ways and new places to flaunt their newly gotten wealth. While Europe had served as a prewar haven for the wealthy and the wannabes, the war, with its violence and destruction, made the continent less than desirable. Florida, with its endless beaches, perpetual sunshine and exotic locales, beckoned. The open spaces and cheap land made it an attractive clean slate where the nouveau riche and established moneyed families could bring their wildest dre
ams into reality. For those who simply wanted to belong and whose imagination was limited, hundreds of architects and thousands of builders were willing to design and build houses that rivaled the best Europe had to offer.
When the end of World War I sent the American economy on an upward surge that would last throughout the decade of the 1920s, Florida was among the first beneficiaries of the new prosperity. Immediately after the end of hostilities, Americans began to flock to the Sunshine State, enticed by the advertising departments of the great railroads that skimmed both coasts and by the excitement through firsthand experiences by the automobile tourists who plunged headlong into the vast and largely unexplored wilderness of the central peninsula.
The economic descendants of Henry Flagler and Henry Plant, now concerned with recovering the tremendous expenses of running railroads the length of the state, saw the exploitation of large tracts of land as the best chance of bolstering the fortunes of the Florida East Coast Railroad and the Plant System. The railroads controlled large blocks of land, awarded as compensation for railroad construction by the state and federal governments and the key to continued prosperity for these entities. Other companies and individuals eagerly sought to ride on the shoulders of the railroads and purchased huge acreages, ready to take a chance on whatever the future brought—and what the ’20s brought to Florida was people and more people!