Paradise for Sale

by Nick Wynne

  When the stock market imploded in October 1929, any hope for a recovery in Florida died. The same problems—speculation, unsecured lending, wild and reckless buying and selling—that plagued the Florida boom played out on the national scene. Millionaires found themselves penniless overnight, workers discovered that their jobs were gone as factories closed and did not reopen, public employees—teachers and professional employees—were reduced to accepting scrip as payment for wages or having no wages at all and thousands lined up for free food at soup kitchens. There was little assistance forthcoming from any governmental agency.

  Cities that had issued bonds to fund new projects defaulted on payments. Some cities that had expanded their boundaries to include new developments repealed their annexations because there was simply no money to pay for city services. Ad valorem tax assessments provided no relief because most of the levies went unpaid. The State of Florida offered little assistance. In a rush to aid new investments in the state during the height of the boom, an amendment prohibiting the collection of income taxes forever had been added to the state’s constitution, and this single act, still in force, greatly hampered the state’s efforts to aid in any organized recovery. Only the seven cents a gallon tax on gasoline provided any significant income, and by law, that income had to be shared with counties. Many African Americans, who had provided much of the agricultural labor and the manual labor on development projects, were unable to find any work at all and began to leave the state in large numbers, headed north. In a few months’ time, the Depression ended their hopes of finding work there as well.

  Florida’s population, however, continued to grow during the decade of the 1930s by slightly more than 400,000 new residents. The number of cities with populations in excess of 2,500 people went from fifty-eight in 1930 to seventy in 1940, an increase of almost 300,000 urban dwellers. The number of persons residing in the countryside also increased, although by only 50,000. Overall, the 1930 census marked the first time the state’s urban population (51.7 percent) outnumbered the rural population (48.3 percent), a trend that continues today.

  Herbert Hoover, fresh from a highly effective job heading the relief effort for the Mississippi River flood of 1927, was elected president. Based on his experience, he was expected to solve immediately the economic woes of the nation. His task, difficult enough with the collapse of the Florida boom and the resulting failures of southern banks, soon became even more onerous when the stock market also collapsed. Hamstrung by its conservative economic philosophy, the Hoover administration provided little in the way of aid for individuals or governments. At first, Hoover called on Americans to embrace volunteerism as a way to pull themselves out of what was now called the Depression. While his call might have sounded good, the reality was that no coherent plan for such action emerged from Washington. Finally, Congress attempted to impose some order on the chaotic banking scene when it created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1932 and set aside $2 billion for assistance to state and local governments, banks, farm mortgage associations and other businesses. Unfortunately, he appointed former vice president Charles Dawes to head the agency and soon (as could have been predicted based on Dawes’s Florida history) the agency was awash with scandals involving insider deals and political considerations. It failed miserably but continued in existence and was revamped into a more effective agency under Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  Hoover, who had been praised as the “great humanitarian” for his relief work, further damaged his reputation when General Douglas MacArthur used the army to attack and destroy the camp of veterans seeking a quick payout of a promised bonus. Although he had not given the order to do so and MacArthur acted on his own, Herbert Hoover was condemned for the action. He went from “great humanitarian” to the “most hated man in America” overnight. Although he ran for reelection in 1932, he lost the election by a lopsided electoral vote of 472 to 59.

  However, hope springs eternal in the human breast, and with Roosevelt’s election, all Americans—particularly Floridians—looked forward to improved conditions. In reality, Roosevelt’s New Deal program continued many of the policies toward business of the Hoover administration, but his creation of make-work programs provided the bulk of the population with at least some small modicum of income. The “alphabet” agencies—CCC, WPA, PWA, NYA—provided work for thousands of workers and students. The creation of the Social Security Administration meant that additional thousands of older workers would also be withdrawn from the pool of workers seeking employment. Roosevelt’s “banking holiday,” which shut down banks with the promise that they would not be reopened unless they were stable, and the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 went a long way to assure Americans that it was safe to put their money in banks.

  Did the New Deal work? This is a large question that has been vigorously debated by historians and economists for decades. Certainly, it appeared to work for Florida. In 1937, Frank P. Stockbridge and John H. Perry, who published Florida in the Making in 1926, wrote a new book, So This Is Florida, which detailed a new real estate boom:

  The pressure of the growing population upon housing facilities had become so great by the middle of 1937 that Florida was beginning to experience another real estate boom, of proportions almost comparable to that which reached its climax in the winter of 1924–25 and collapsed the following year.

  But they assured their readers, “The new real estate boom is, however, of a different order…The present real estate boom in Florida is based upon an actual pressing demand for the people who are coming to Florida faster than Florida is prepared to house them.” It was a far cry from the earlier boom that had “degenerated into frantic, speculative gambling in land without regard to values, as speculative as the stock-trading on margin which ended with the market crash of 1929.”

  Of course, any pronouncement by Stockbridge and Perry was suspect since these were the men who, in 1926, had pronounced the boom as being as solid as the stock market itself. Interestingly, Florida in the Making had included an appendix with a detailed analysis of the economic situation in Florida in 1926, while So This Is Florida had a single appendix entitled “A Guide to Florida Fishing.”

  It took World War II to lift Florida out of the doldrums. Between 1940 and 1950, Florida’s population grew by 46.1 percent, of which 66.1 percent came from people moving into the state. Much of this was due to the location of more than sixty training bases in the Sunshine State, particularly bases for training air corps and naval pilots. Some three million soldiers and sailors received training at Florida installations during the years 1941–45. In addition, the U.S. government located a number of POW camps in the state, while Tampa and Jacksonville were heavily involved in producing ships for the navy and merchant marine. So many new jobs were created by war industries and military bases that the resident population was unable to fill them. Labor recruiters went as far north as West Virginia and as far west as Arkansas to find needed workers. This demand for workers ended the Depression in the state, and the accompanying housing shortage for service personnel and workers depleted the surplus of housing that had existed since 1927. When the war ended in 1945, some of the larger bases remained open and continued to provide jobs. What the war did for Florida, it did for most of the remainder of the United States.

  One of the benefits Florida gained from having so many military personnel stationed in the state was a considerable increase in the number of tourists who came to visit them. In 1940, about 2.3 million tourists visited the state, and with the outbreak of war, that number continued to grow each year until it reached about 3 million by 1945 and 4.2 million by 1950. By 1960, the total number of annual visitors exceeded 11 million. Some of these tourists had been formerly stationed in the Sunshine State, liked what they saw and returned with their families for a visit. Still more contributed to the rapid growth in the permanent population of the state when they returned to make Florida their home.

&nb
sp; Just as had happened at the end of World War I, Florida was primed for a new boom.

  Epilogue

  What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

  It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.

  There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.

  —Ecclesiastes 1:11, Bible (New International Version)

  Just as technological developments—airplanes, the internal combustion engine, the Good Roads Movement—had altered the Florida landscape after World War I, so, too, did the technological developments of World War II alter the Sunshine State. Chief among these was the widespread use of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) to control mosquitoes and other biting insects that lived in the swamps and marshes along Florida’s beaches and in the interior. Although first synthesized in 1874, the application of this pesticide as a method of controlling insects was discovered in 1939. By 1945, DDT was in common use, and “mosquito control” boards in all counties and municipalities sprayed generous amounts into the environment on a regular basis. While DDT did not kill all of the biting bugs, it did weaken their populations to such an extent that they no longer presented obstacles to developing new subdivisions. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, questioned the indiscriminate use of pesticides, examining its effects on both the environment and humans, and in 1972, DDT was banned in the United States. Although its long-term effects included severe damage to the ecology of the Sunshine State, its short-term use made the state more habitable for humans.

  Air conditioning, which had its origins with Dr. John Gorrie in Apalachicola, Florida, in 1851, had gradually evolved as a viable way to control heat and humidity in buildings. First used in factories, theatres and department stores, cooling systems were adapted to passenger cars on railroads and even automobiles by the 1930s. Willis Haviland Carrier experimented with air conditioning for homes as well, and by 1929, he had managed to create a system that was easily installed and maintained. The onslaught of the Great Depression prevented its widespread adoption by American homeowners, but here and there, air conditioning was added to existing homes. The first residential system in Florida was installed in Cocoa in 1935 when architect Richard Rummell touted the benefits of a York system as a palliative for the chronic bronchitis suffered by his client’s son, John V. D’Albora. Within ten years after the end of the war, window air conditioning units, developed by the De La Vergne Company in 1935, became staples in most new homes in Florida, and even older homes were equipped with them as well. By the mid-1960s, central air systems were demanded by home purchasers. The highly negative publicity about hot summers in the Sunshine State bowed to the power of refrigerated air and no longer shaped the travel plans of tourists. For the first time in its history, the Sunshine State offered a year-round vacation experience.

  Jet planes and pressurized cabins were also products of World War II innovation, and with the introduction of the de Havilland Comet in 1949, air travel became the most popular way to reach Florida. The Boeing Corporation soon followed this British innovation with its “Dash 80” model and the more popular 707. Throughout the Sunshine State, cities converted the long runways of abandoned military installations to jet travel and settled in to wait for the hordes of tourists they were sure would follow. Cities with no airport quickly began the construction of one.

  In 1950, Florida’s population exceeded two million residents for the first time and approached the three million mark. Between 1940 and 1980, increasing numbers of older people came to the state, leading some pundits to remark on “the graying of Florida.” In 1940, 6.9 percent of the population was sixty-five and older, and by 1980, that figure had reached 17.3 percent. Warm weather twelve months a year, portable pensions and Social Security checks, no state income tax and a plethora of unfinished subdivisions provided the main attractions to lure them south. Some cities catered to the senior citizens. St. Petersburg became a mecca for them, and the main streets of the city were lined with the famous “green benches” where thousands met daily to talk with friends or simply to watch the activities on the street. Small hotels and boardinghouses, previously patronized by seasonal tourists, were overrun by seniors. One wag referred to the city as “a great lobby where people went to wait for death.” In the short run, older new residents provided a boon to local hotel owners, but gradually government authorities realized that this was more than offset by growing demands for city services—fire, medical, transportation—and by increases in welfare programs needed to stretch static incomes. Miami Beach became a favorite retirement venue for thousands of northerners, particularly Jews, and by 1960, the city built by Carl Fisher was 80 percent Jewish. By the early 1970s, civic leaders tried to dispel the idea of Florida as a haven for the elderly. St. Petersburg removed its green benches, and Miami Beach was reclaimed by society’s trendsetters.

  The postwar explosion in Florida’s population soon attracted individuals and companies eager to exploit the market they created for housing. Arthur Vining Davis, the founder of the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), sensed opportunity in the Sunshine State. In 1948, he left Pittsburgh and settled in Miami, bringing his massive fortune with him. Through the Arvida Corporation (ARthur VIning DAvis), his real estate company, he began to invest heavily in raw land and in the purchase of several landmarks of the Florida boom. In 1956, he paid $22.5 million for Addison Mizner’s Boca Raton Hotel and Club and $13.5 million for Sarasota’s Ringling Isles. Much like his predecessor in Miami, George Merrick, he envisioned the creation of complete towns with shopping districts, schools, churches, banks and government buildings, all financed, built and serviced by the Arvida Corporation or one of its subsidiaries. When Arvida stock was offered on the market, it was instantly sold out—just in time for the collapse of 1959.

  The Mackle brothers—Elliot, Robert and Frank Jr.—created the General Development Corporation in 1954 with assets of about $125 million. They bought huge swaths of undeveloped land and immediately began the process of transforming raw acreage into cities. Port Malabar (now Palm Bay, the largest city in Brevard County), Port St. Lucie (the largest city in St. Lucie County), Key Biscayne, Port St. John, North Port, Deltona and Sebastian Highlands were carved out of pasture and wetlands, but Port Charlotte on the west coast was their masterpiece. Designed to encompass more land and houses than Detroit, the company spent millions turning scrubland into neatly sectioned blocks.

  The success of the General Development Corporation generated a great deal of competition. Coral Ridge Properties, Del Webb, Gulf American Land Company and several other development companies entered the market. Some of these companies, like the Gulf American Land Company owned by Jack and Leonard Rosen, dealt primarily in raw land sales, which they marketed through radio, television, newspapers and magazine campaigns. These rivaled the earlier campaigns of Fisher and Merrick in Miami. Others built modestly priced bungalows aimed at capturing the growing number of middle-class buyers. Utilizing the “a little down, small monthly payments” approach to sell their property, promoters realized astronomical profits. Jim Walters took to the airwaves and used Jim and Jesse McReynolds and the Virginia Boys, a bluegrass band, to promote his shell homes. The Jim Walters Corporation would put in the foundation and erect the exterior and roof of the home; the interior was left for the buyer to finish. “A dollar and a deed is all you need” went the slogan, and it brought in millions for the company.

  The Sunshine State was in the midst of another boom, and 3,000 new residents each week gave credence to the claims of promoters that this one would last. When Florida promoters took their companies to Wall Street, they became the hottest-selling stocks in the market. Values doubled, then tripled and even quadrupled as investors clamored to be part of the boom. Florida’s population, which had been 2,771,000 in 1950, reached 4,951,000. All of these new residents needed a place to live, didn’t they? Then, dis
aster struck.

  The U.S. economy went into a mild recession in 1959, and many of those who had purchased land or homes on the installment plan could not continue to make the small monthly payments and walked away from their purchases. The rate of foreclosures shot up. Promoters, like their counterparts in the 1920s, had counted these long-term contracts when valuing their companies and now faced ruin when subcontractors demanded payment for work on their developments.

  To add to the misery of the land promoters, the rainy season that year was one of the wettest on record. For sixty consecutive days and nights, it rained incessantly. Hastily cleared land, even acreage with new drainage canals in place, flooded. It really didn’t matter that a property was in a one-hundred-year flood plain; the reality was that 1959 was a flood year and there was no guarantee that 1960 would not be a repeat performance. Nature operated on its own schedule, not according to some arbitrary calendar imposed by man. Another bust?

  Perhaps—however, not as bad as that of 1927. On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, in a speech to Congress, delivered some relief when he said:

  I believe this Nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.