For Sale —American Paradise (13 page)

Rader pushed his plane to an altitude of 14,000 feet—a record for that time—partly to add a margin of safety in case he encountered a sudden down-draft, partly so that he and his passenger could see a bigger expanse of land. They saw a few people moving through the Glades, but they turned out to be search parties.

King and his two young companions were indeed having a rough time. The story of their trek through the Glades became the subject of an eight-part series by writer W. Livingston Larned that was published in 1918 in
Forest and Stream
magazine, a popular mass-
circulation magazine that included among its contributors former president Theodore Roosevelt.

The elder King badly miscalculated what it would take to cross the formidable Everglades. He was “fairly familiar” with the outer edge of the Glades, and had not expected any major problems, Larned wrote.

But the interior of the great swamp was far different from what King had anticipated—impassable in some places, bewildering in others, and always eerily quiet, despite the obvious presence of so much wildlife.

“It seems past belief that, almost within hearing of Miami's church bells, we should thus face absolute helplessness,” King wrote in the diary that formed the basis for Larned's stories. “My faith in my own knowledge of the area is beginning to weaken.”

The story of the men lost in the Everglades made national headlines, and raised such concern for their safety that a group of Miami spiritualists offered their assistance in finding the lost exploration party. And J. F. Jaudon, for whom King was doing the exploration, seriously considered taking them up on their offer.

Even when the group was almost within sight of their Gulf Coast objective, they couldn't find a path through the final stretch of the Glades. They could see distant waterspouts that occasionally formed over the Gulf of Mexico, but could not find a way out. They were weak and disoriented from hunger, and King began to wonder if they'd make it.

Finally, on March 14, a telegram arrived from Key West for J. F. Jaudon in Miami. The three missing men had made it to the mouth of the Shark River on the Gulf Coast, near the southwest tip of the peninsula. There, they'd come across a small processing operation owned by the Manetto Company, which extracted tannic acid from palmetto trees. The company's superintendent had taken them by boat to Key West—the closest town—so they could tell the world that they were safe.

Suddenly the
Miami Herald
's prediction about pushing a road through a couple hundred miles or so of the Everglades in eighteen months seemed a little optimistic.

John Ashley was back to his old tricks at the Florida State Prison in Raiford. He was behaving like a prisoner who sincerely wanted to mend his ways and hasten his return as a productive member of society. Prison officials noticed his exemplary behavior, and soon he was rewarded. In March 1918 he was transferred from Raiford to a prison work camp in Milligan, in the western Florida Panhandle, about fifty miles east of Pensacola.

Ashley was assigned to a chain gang. Every day, he and other prisoners, wearing pants with broad, alternating black-
and-white horizontal stripes, climbed into what essentially was a cage on wheels and were taken to a site where they did manual labor on roads.

For three months, Ashley did his job, swinging picks and pushing shovels. But summers in the Florida Panhandle can be stunningly hot. And he was getting homesick again. He decided he'd had enough, and on July 11, 1918, he and another prisoner slipped away from the chain gang.

The western Panhandle was a long way from Ashley's home, but somehow, he made it back to his familiar haunts down on the peninsula south of Stuart, and soon he was again spending most of his time in the Everglades. He found a new occupation: He and his father were operating three moonshine stills in the Glades.

And there was romance in John Ashley's life.

Laura Upthegrove was not a delicate, feminine beauty. Author Hix C. Stuart described her as an “Amazon” who never left home without her .38 caliber revolver.

“There was nothing striking in Laura's appearance to which might be attributed John's devotion,” Stuart wrote. “Dark, unkempt hair, a tawny weather-
beaten complexion, prominent cheekbones, squinting yet sharp black eyes, and generally untidy in appearance; there was nothing attractive about Laura,” Stuart wrote.

Yet Laura and John had magic moments together. An undated photo of the two shows a happy couple obviously in love and posing cheek to cheek for the camera against the backdrop of the Florida wilderness. Ashley, a few inches taller, stands behind Laura, his arms wrapped around her neck and shoulders.
He's wearing a white shirt, dark slacks, and what appears to be an army garrison cap. Laura, buxom and beaming at the camera, is dressed in women's outdoor clothing of the late 1910s—a drab dark long coat and calf-
length skirt, high-
top
shoes, and dark leggings. She's holding on to John's forearms.

Taken out of context, they appear to be merely a young couple very much in love instead of two desperadoes who would spend the rest of their brief lives on the run.

While dreamers were telling themselves that spanning the Everglades with a highway would be no big deal, and lawmen in southern Florida were spending a lot of their time seeking members of the Ashley clan in that vast swamp, world events were inexorably dragging the United States into the war raging in Europe.

Americans' ire had been roused in May 1915 when a German submarine torpedoed the British passenger liner
Lusitania
, killing 1,198 people, including Americans. Germany, however, had realized what a potent weapon its undersea boats were, and was reluctant to curtail its attacks on Allied ships, regardless of whether they were warships. Even the
Lusitania
had been carrying war supplies along with its passengers, making it a legitimate target of war as far as Germany was concerned.

In March 1916, a German sub torpedoed a French passenger liner in the English Channel. No one was killed, but among the injured were a few Americans.

President Wilson warned Germany that the United States would cut its diplomatic ties with Germany if they continued to attack civilian shipping, and Germany responded by saying its submarines would not sink merchant ships without warning and would allow passengers and crew to abandon ship before sinking it.

President Wilson continued his efforts to mediate a peace between the Allies and the Central Powers, but German leaders had little interest in the negotiations because they thought they could eventually win the war outright rather than settle for a negotiated peace. Even the threat of American intervention didn't concern them because they thought they could win the war before American troops were ready for combat.

In January 1917, Germany announced that it was lifting the restrictions it had imposed on its U-boats and would resume “unrestricted submarine warfare.” The United States severed diplomatic ties with Germany, and in March 1917 German subs sank five American merchant ships.

Then came the ultimate German insult to the United States. British intelligence agents intercepted a message circulating among some German officials suggesting that if America declared war on Germany, Germany should seek an alliance with Mexico. The inducement for Mexico to form this alliance would be the opportunity to recover the territory it had lost in its war with the United States from 1846 to 1848—territory that had become the states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

President Wilson released the message to American newspapers, and the nation was infuriated.

Former secretary of state William Jennings Bryan was in Miami in the months leading up to the US entry into the war. He was horrified that the United States was being dragged into a conflict that, he would later say, was caused by the same science that “manufactured poisonous gasses to suffocate soldiers” and was preaching “that man has a brute ancestry,” and eliminated “the miraculous and the supernatural from the Bible.”

Bryan rushed to Washington, DC, hoping to head off the move to war. But there was nothing he could do. On April 4, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. Bryan had lost his bid to preserve peace, but he promptly sent a note to President Wilson telling him that he would do whatever he could to help the war effort.

Congress approved a draft that eventually would require all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five to register for military service. Before World War I ended, about 2.8 million American men had been drafted.

One forty-five-
year-old man who didn't have to worry about the draft was an out-of-work architect named Addison Mizner. Suffering from a leg injury that wouldn't heal, Mizner was shivering through the winter of 1917–18 in Port Washington, New York, overlooking Manhasset Bay on Long Island's North Shore. The winter was made more miserable by a coal miners' strike, leaving heating fuel very scarce.

Through a mutual friend, Mizner happened to meet Paris Singer, heir to a portion of the Singer Sewing Machine Company fortune that had been amassed by his father, Isaac Singer.

Paris Singer and Mizner quickly became friends, and Singer's personal nurse suggested that Mizner's leg would benefit from warmth and sunshine. So in January 1918 Mizner, Singer, and the nurse boarded a southbound Florida East Coast Railway train in New York City.

Mizner's good health returned in the warm Florida winter, and he started designing a hospital that Singer wanted to build in Palm Beach for convalescing American soldiers returning from World War I. Soon, the jobless architect who had been shivering and suffering from a gimpy leg in a chilly Long Island apartment would become the toast of Palm Beach. The Roaring Twenties were just around the corner, and nowhere would they roar louder than in Florida.

CHAPTER FOUR

W
HEN THE BLOODY
G
REAT
W
AR ENDED IN
N
OVEMBER
1918,
THE WORLD'S
psyche had been dramatically altered. More than fifteen million people were dead, and the comfortable Victorian fantasy that Western civilization was steadily moving the world toward a time of universal peace and prosperity had been shredded by four awful years of systematic, mechanized slaughter. Self-denial and sacrifice suddenly seemed silly and pointless; it was better to surround yourself with luxuries and enjoy life to the utmost while you could.

“There was an immense, all-
pervading disillusionment,” Bruce Catton later wrote in
American Heritage
magazine. “The nation's highest ideals had been appealed to during the war, so that to win the war seemed the holiest of causes; the war had been won, but it was hard to see that anything worth winning had been gained; the idealism had been used up, and people had an uneasy feeling that they had been had.”

So, with traditional beliefs shattered, “lots of people became materialists,” Catton wrote.

“It was easier, indeed, it was almost necessary, to center one's attention on the material things that were going on in this country,” he wrote.

And yet, there was a subconscious longing—part memory, part fantasy—for a past that seemed simpler and safer. People wanted desperately to escape the harsh, frightening new realities that confronted them. In his book
Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s
, Frederick Lewis Allen noted that Americans yearned for a place where they could escape “into the easy-
going
life and beauty of the European past, into some never-
never land which combined American sport and comfort with Latin glamour—a Venice equipped with bathtubs and electric ice boxes, a Seville provided with three eighteen-hole golf courses.”