Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

by Christopher Knowlton

Did any of these people know what they were doing—could any of them see even an inch beyond their own affairs, or realize what hopelessly inconspicuous, enormously unimportant atoms they were in that great surging sea that was modern America? —T. H. WEIGALL, Boom in Paradise

the newspaper had set a world record when it published a 504-page edition in twenty sections, loaded with real estate ads and weighing 7.5 pounds—requiring

“My first impression, as I wandered out into the blazing sunlight of that bedlam that was Miami, was of utter confusion,”

Theyre Hamilton Weigall, a twenty-four-year-old Australian-born, London-based journalist who arrived in Florida by train at the peak of the boom and stood stunned among the screeching motor horns and the deafening cacophony of rivet guns, drills,

“Hatless, coatless men rushed about the blazing streets, their arms full of papers, perspiration p...

“Every shop seemed to be combined with a real estate office; at every doorway, crowds of young men were shouting and speech-making, thrusting forward papers and proclaiming to heaven the unsurpassed chances they were offering...

Building projects in the Greater Miami region totaled $103 million in 1925 ($1.5 billion in today’s mone...

One enterprising businessman tried to smuggle in a railcar full of building bricks under a layer of ice, in the guise of a shipment of lettuce.

Land sales caused small riots where crowds literally threw checks at the developers—in such numbers that they had to be collected in barrels.

Barrels of checks for land.

“the uncrowned kings” of real estate: Carl Fisher in Miami Beach, Addison Mizner in Palm Beach and Boca Raton, George Merrick in Coral Gables, and David Paul “D.P.” Davis in Tampa and St. Augustine.

the Gilded Age oil tycoon Henry Flagler.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas, daughter of the editor in chief of the Miami Herald,

THE PHARAOH OF FLORIDA

Henry Morrison Flagler and Mary Harkness Flagler,

St. Augustine, the oldest city in the country, was reputed to boast Old World Spanish charm,

A few tiny fishing villages had sprung up along the sandy coasts, but the vast interior was largely unexplored—a land of watery saw grass and shallow lakes and jungle hammocks where the bay laurel and myrtle competed with the oaks and the palmettos, and where bromeliads, or air plants, sprouted from the tree branches.

The largest town was Key West, with its population of ten thousand, situated at the far end of a string of coral reef islands off the southern tip of the peninsula.

Flagler had become stupendously wealthy.

a new occupation and career—and it would lead to one of the most extraordinary second acts in American business history.

Henry Flagler was born in upstate New York in 1830, the son of a rural Presbyterian minister of German Palatine stock.

Impatient to make more, he rolled his entire stake into a salt manufacturing business in Saginaw, Michigan, hoping to take advantage of the Civil War boom in salt as a food preservative. Unfortunately, he and his partner entered the business too late and ran into ferocious competition in an industry that had overexpanded.

His new colleague’s name was John D. Rockefeller.

the three formed the partnership of Rockefeller, Andrews, and Flagler.

He and his partners quickly consolidated the nascent Ohio kerosene and oil refining business, with a view to better controlling both price and supply.

Theirs would remain, Flagler acknowledged, “a friendship founded on business rather than a business founded on friendship.”

other large corporations. It was this last decision, implemented by the firm’s clever attorney, Samuel C. T. Dodd, that gave birth to the Standard Oil Trust, the greatest wealth creator the world had seen

When asked during testimony before Congress if it was his idea to form the oil trust, Rockefeller replied, “No, sir, I wish I’d had the brains to think of it. It was Henry M. Flagler.” As he admitted freely to others over the years, “The key to our success was Henry Flagler.”

He clearly wanted to have more fun, too. A new woman in his life would make that possible. Her name was Ida Alice Shourds. She was pretty and blue eyed and possessed a profusion of red hair as well as a notoriously hot temper. A failed stage actress, she previously had been one of the caregivers for Flagler’s wife. Alice was also eighteen years his junior, socially ambitious, and not averse to spending his money.

For the first time in his adult life, Flagler went out to restaurants and to the theater. He rode horseback on his thirty-acre estate in Mamaroneck, New York, and raced trotters against his Standard Oil friends and colleagues. He even joined the Larchmont and New York Yacht Clubs and bought his first yacht, a fifty-foot sloop. As he told a companion in 1886, “For about fourteen or fifteen years, I have devoted my time exclusively to business, and now I am pleasing myself.”

the class of men, remarked Flagler, “one might encounter in the great watering places of Europe.”

He in turn recruited workers from as far north as New York City, with offers to pay their $12 rail fare down to Florida and daily wages of $1.25, which was 25 cents above the norm of the time.

“I just got wonderful news from my real estate agent in Florida. They found land on my property.”

But as Ballinger observed later, “Virtually no one of that Florida delegation would have dreamed the boom in Florida would be as dead as a salted mackerel three months later.”

Four days later, Jesse Livermore, who chaired the finance committee, and two others, Louis H. Bean and stockbroker Hollyday S. Meeds Jr., also quit the company’s board of directors; Matthew C. Brush, president of the insurance company American International Corporation, resigned from the finance committee.

On February 19, 1926, Addison Mizner gave an interview to the Miami Daily News in which he somewhat bitterly defended the real estate boom and attempted to exude an air of confidence: “Where are these Florida critics we hear so much about? Maybe I haven’t seen them because I do not often visit zoos, or menageries. But if any of them are at large without a keeper, let them rave. All they need is a little rope. They will hang themselves.”

In March 1928 the upmarket publisher William Helburn released Florida Architecture of Addison Mizner. The work was a triumph, a lovely depiction of and appraisal of Mizner’s work.

In the wake of the boom, abandoned developments striped both Florida coasts and checkerboarded the inland areas, many reduced to bare wasteland. Wilson Mizner, on a rare return visit to Florida a few years after the bust, recalled a memorable drive down the east coast of the state, passing vast, deserted subdivisions, one after another, their ornate stone and stucco gates now sagging or collapsed.

The classics that followed included among others, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949), Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1951) and Silent Spring (1962), Wallace Stegner’s “Wilderness Letter” (1960), Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf (1963), and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968).

They found land on my property”: Milton Berle, quoted in Gary R. Mormino, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida, 44.