For Sale —American Paradise (18 page)

Whoever wrote the story also emphasized that Florida was not that far away by train.

“To the man up north who has been shoveling coal into a voracious furnace that threatens to eat up the meagre supply, a sudden view next day of pretty bathing girls in one-
piece suits disporting themselves on a sunny beach holds a thrill that is likely to be remembered,” the story said.

President Harding's post-election visit to Miami Beach had been an invaluable publicity coup for Carl Fisher, but Fisher and other ambitious developers were still regarded with some suspicion when the 1922–23 winter season arrived.
Saturday Evening Post
writer Kenneth Roberts noted that in 1923, Florida developers who were standing in the middle of pine trees and palmettoes, picking sandspurs off their socks and talking to developers about their plans to spend millions of dollars on hotels, casinos, and golf courses, often were regarded as “addicts to the potent loco-weed.”

Still, construction statistics for four Florida cities in early 1923 were impressive. In February, building permits issued for Miami Beach, Miami,
and Tampa totaled more than $995,000, dwarfing even the combined totals of Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina. In fact, Miami Beach's total alone surpassed those of Savannah and Charleston, which were much larger cities.

The
Miami Herald
also predicted that 1923 would be a year of exceptional industrial growth for the city, noting that demand was increasing for products manufactured in Miami.

There were other indicators of rapid economic growth. In February 1923, Burdines, a leading department store, reported sales were up 34 percent from the same time in 1922, and sales for the following month increased by more than 32 percent from March 1922.

There were about 8,700 telephones in Miami in December 1923, and Southern Bell expected to add another 1,500 in the following two months. The telephone company had had to add more than $500,000 worth of new equipment to keep up with telephone-service demands in 1923, and expected to spend at least that much in 1924.

Still, as the “Running Away from Winter” story noted, Miami and Miami Beach also had become the winter home of more captains of American industry, including cough drop producer William Luden; tire tycoon Harvey Firestone; William K. Vanderbilt II, heir to the great Vanderbilt fortune; and T. Coleman du Pont, a retired general and a US senator representing Delaware. And there were others, including J. C. Penney, owner of the department stores, and automobile manufacturer William Durant.

The presence of the upper strata of society also attracted some lawbreakers with far more finesse and skill than the homegrown Ashley Gang. In late January and early February 1923, sophisticated and skilled jewel thieves made off with hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of jewelry from the homes of wealthy winter residents in Dade County.

On January 31, about $250,000 worth of jewelry was stolen from the Brick-ell Avenue mansion of Chicago millionaire David Joyce. A neighbor's chauffeur who hastily departed Miami for Boston was detained for questioning, but he did not have any of the jewelry in his luggage, and police confirmed his explanation that he'd left in a hurry because his father-in-law was dying.

Five days later, second-
story thieves broke into the Miami Beach mansion of automobile parts manufacturer Robert H. Hassler and made off with thousands of dollars' worth of gold and diamond jewelry.

Miami's continuing struggles with Prohibition made huge headlines in the
Miami Daily Metropolis
at the same time the jewel thieves were hauling away their loot. On February 2, three federal agents raided the Plantation Inn, a road-house just west of Miami.

But the raid turned into a fierce fistfight when proprietor Wilbur Phelps punched an agent in the face so hard that he went tumbling down a flight of steps. Another agent started fighting Phelps. Waiters brandishing liquor bottles
started to come to Phelps's aid, but the third agent pulled a gun and backed
them off.

Phelps finally was subdued and handcuffed. He was charged with possession of liquor, maintaining a nuisance, and resisting arrest.

The following day, a Dade County deputy sheriff served arrest warrants on the federal agents who had raided the Plantation Inn. They were charged with assault with intent to kill Wilbur Phelps.

That same day, Miami reporters got a few minutes to chat with Georgia governor Thomas Hardwick, who passed through the city after a fishing trip in the Florida Keys. Hardwick said he thought laws “modifying” Prohibition would eventually be passed, and pointed out that the only people who seemed to support the Volstead Act were hard-line moralists and the bootleggers who were getting rich from it.

“As long as there is so much public sentiment against the federal act, there is little hope to remedy conditions because juries will not convict violators even though evidence is produced,” Hardwick said.

His comments were prophetic.

A grand jury indicted Wilbur Phelps on charges of violating the Volstead Act, and that indictment nullified the assault charges against the federal agents who had raided the Plantation Inn.

But on April 23, a jury decided that Phelps was not guilty of the possession and sale of whiskey. The
Miami Daily Metropolis
reported that Phelps was one of three defendants found not guilty that day of violating the Volstead Act.

At times, it did seem as though bootleggers were running Miami, Miami Beach, and the other rapidly growing cities on Florida's southeast coast. A man who reported bootleggers to cops was beaten up by those bootleggers in broad daylight on the street.

The
Chicago Daily News
reported that booze purchases in Nassau, the Bahamas, had increased from about 37,000 gallons a year in 1917 to more than 1.3 million gallons in 1922, and that anyone could easily buy whiskey in Miami for $5 a quart.

“Any Prohibition enforcement agent that didn't have lead in his shoes and a daub of mud in both eyes . . . could easily get the goods on twenty or thirty Miami bootleggers in a day,” Kenneth Roberts wrote for the
Saturday Evening Post
.

Crime or no crime, President Harding had become a fan of Miami Beach. The chief executive came back for another visit in March 1923. As the houseboat transporting the president from Jacksonville chugged slowly into Biscayne Bay on the morning of March 14, Carl Fisher's speedy yacht, the
Shadow VI
, raced across the bay to meet Harding.

The president, eager to get on the golf course, gratefully climbed aboard, and the yacht zipped back across the bay at thirty miles an hour. In just a few minutes, Harding had stepped up to the first tee and whacked a respectable drive of about 180 yards down the fairway.

The
Miami Daily Metropolis
noted that Harding “looked a little greyer, a little heavier, a little older” than in February 1921, when he'd made his first visit to Miami Beach. But once again, he'd put Miami Beach into newspapers across the United States.

While Miami and Miami Beach were receiving an increasing flow of visitors and evolving into modern cities, Edwin Menninger—who moved from West Palm Beach to Stuart in August 1923—was taking stock of his new home. In some ways, the small town, at the time one of the northernmost communities in Palm Beach County, still retained vestiges of the nineteenth century.

The only time the town's electric plant operated during the day was on Tuesday afternoons, so housewives could iron their hand-washed laundry. Otherwise, the plant didn't crank up until five p.m. So in order to run his printing press and linotype machine, Menninger had to buy his own generator, a diesel-
powered
unit.

Stuart did not have an ice plant in 1923. An ice maker in West Palm Beach sent a freight train car filled with ice to Stuart every other day, where it was parked on a railroad siding. Customers bought their ice in chunks from a bespectacled clerk.

The town had one plumber, a hotel or two, a couple of banks, a lumberyard, a movie theater, a hardware store, a grocery store, a gasoline station, and a weekly newspaper.

Menninger had made determined adjustments, learning to function without his right eye and with a mangled left hand. He'd learned to type using only his right hand, and he was able to use what remained of his left hand to operate the “shift” key of a typewriter or typesetting machine. He'd become remarkably adept at rapid typing with one hand.

Still, Menninger steadfastly refused to talk about his disabilities, and when he posed for photos, he always held his left hand behind him.

His even temperament and excellent memory for names served him well as he was trying to get a foothold in Stuart for the
South Florida Developer
. He defied the stereotype of the irascible journalist, soon becoming known as a good employer who seldom showed anger.

Menninger quickly fell under the spell of Florida, but one thing about his surroundings continually annoyed him. The only color he saw was green. The monotony of the landscape bothered him.

As part of his promotion of the
Developer
, Menninger started giving away packets of zinnia seeds to anyone who would promise to plant them. Then he held a contest to choose the best bouquets. Soon he became too busy with his growing business to continue the contests, but giving away seeds was the start of a lifelong passion for bright tropical flowers.

As summer gave way to fall in 1923, a combination of factors was aligning that would soon make Florida a national obsession. Modern advertising deployed in mass-circulation publications described Florida in florid prose as an ethereal
paradise. Henry Ford's perfection of the assembly line in Detroit had steadily lowered the price of a Ford until just about anyone with a decent job could afford one.

Thanks to Carl Fisher and other visionaries, the Dixie Highway and other road construction was making it easier for more people to climb into their new Fords and chug off to Florida for a few weeks. The state's political leaders, realizing they had an opportunity to craft a more substantial image of Florida as an unusual place where ordinary rules didn't apply, passed legislation doing away with state income and inheritance taxes, and soon would raise the state's maximum speed limit to forty-five miles per hour—an unheard-of liberty at the time. Slick marketers were using large publications to paint a picture of Florida as a tropical paradise.

President Harding, who had helped to focus Americans' attention on Florida, died suddenly of a heart attack in August 1923. He would be succeeded by Vice President Calvin Coolidge, who thought that “the chief business of the American people is business.”

At the time of Harding's death, enthusiastic visitors were spreading the word about Florida's playgrounds in less-
conventional ways. At the base of picturesque Chimney Rock in the mountains of North Carolina, someone had turned several huge boulders into advertising. They had written, in fiery red letters, “Come to Miami Beach, Fla.”; “Oh, you Miami Beach, we're waiting for you”; and “Miami Beach, the playground of the world.”

But as visitors began to assemble in Miami, Miami Beach, Palm Beach, and other resort towns for the 1923–24 season, the pesky Ashley Gang was still at work. And they were plying their craft only a few miles from where young women were lounging on beaches, wealthy and influential men were playing golf and watching polo matches, and potential investors were pondering whether or not to buy some real estate.

Palm Beach County Sheriff Robert Baker and his deputies were infuriated when they heard that a man had been robbed on the Dixie Highway by John Ashley on Christmas Day of 1923. About two weeks later, Ashley and a few other gang members held up the train station at Salerno, a small town just south of Stuart. They only got $16 for their trouble, but Palm Beach County lawmen had had enough. They were determined to put an end to the gang.

Baker had finally gotten the information he needed. He'd learned the location of one of the Ashleys' hideouts in the Everglades, and he'd gotten a tip that Ashley was hiding there after the robbery of the Salerno train station.

Before daybreak on Wednesday, January 9, Baker and four deputies crept through the swamp approaching the gang's hideout. As the sun rose over the Florida Everglades on that long-
ago January morning, John Ashley, Laura Upthegrove, Joe Ashley, another gang member or two, and a few of Joe Ashley's daughters were in the camp.

Their compound was a few miles back from the Dixie Highway in the Everglades, on a spot of high ground above the soggy prairie of the Glades. There were three tents. Two were used for dwellings, and the third was used for storage.

There also was a hundred-gallon moonshine still, probably one of the largest in the state.

The lawmen had finally caught Joe Ashley and his notorious family by surprise. As the sun came up on that January morning, a brief, fierce, and deadly battle was about to take place.

There are at least two versions of how that gunfight unfolded. Newspapers across the country reported one version of the battle. John Ashley, who would somehow survive the hail of bullets aimed at him, gave a slightly different account.