For Sale —American Paradise (23 page)

“Miami's wonderful rise to greatness will be repeated here,” readers were promised. “Those who profit most are those who buy today.”

Sales of real estate in Stuart were steadily climbing. During the second week of January 1925, sales topped $1 million.

Despite the extravagant promises and florid prose about Stuart real estate appearing in local newspapers, perhaps the best indicator of its value and future potential was the fact that Arthur Brisbane seemed very interested in it. His tour of Florida with Solomon Davies Warfield in early 1924 apparently had done what Warfield had hoped it would do. Brisbane had returned to Florida and seemed especially interested in land near Stuart—land that he'd looked at with Warfield during his tour the previous year.

Brisbane's brief visit to Stuart in the company of two Seaboard Air Line Railroad executives on February 13 was the subject of front-
page headlines in the
South Florida Developer
. The “highest-paid newspaperman in America” was “delighted” by the natural beauty around the St. Lucie River, said the
Developer
's headlines.

“This is wonderful,” Brisbane told the
Developer
. “You are given by nature in Stuart what in Miami man is seeking to build with his own hands. Stuart has a magic location which will make it one of the great cities of Florida in the coming years.”

Then, accompanied by the Seaboard executives, Brisbane left Stuart to take a look at 160,000 acres that the railroad owned near Indiantown, twenty-
two
miles west of Stuart.

A week later, a bylined story written by Brisbane was the top story on the
Developer
's front page.

To have a story written by the most familiar name in American journalism was a major event for Menninger's newspaper. But Brisbane wasn't simply doing a favor for a small-town editor. He had his own self-interest at heart.

Brisbane's story was actually an editorial calling on the state of Florida to spend millions of tax dollars to build two cross-state canals. One should link Stuart on the state's east coast with Fort Myers on the Gulf Coast. Part of that waterway had already been accomplished. The St. Lucie Canal linked the St. Lucie River near Stuart with Lake Okeechobee, and the Caloosahatchee River flowed from the lake to Fort Myers.

Brisbane also suggested that a second cross-state waterway was needed to connect Jacksonville and Tampa by linking the St. Johns River with a series of smaller lakes and waterways in the state's interior.

Brisbane said the state's new governor, John Martin, had told him that he intended to push for a shipping canal across the peninsula. Such a canal would cut two thousand miles off the journey of ships leaving Gulf Coast ports bound for the Atlantic, Brisbane said.

What the world's highest-paid journalist failed to mention, however, was the fact that he was on the verge of buying thousands of acres of land on the St. Lucie Canal near Indiantown. He was, in short, using his byline, fame, and prestige to lobby for public works projects that would be of enormous financial benefit to whoever happened to own nearby property.

And he was about to buy a huge chunk of that himself.

Being an insider to the plans of men of great wealth and influence was having its effect on Edwin Menninger. He was beginning to believe that anything was possible in Florida, and he was getting annoyed at those who doubted Florida's possibilities.

When R. C. Ogilvie, a physician in Superior, Wisconsin, spent three months in Florida and told his hometown newspaper that Florida was “a bubble that must soon bust,” Menninger was infuriated.

“The sentimental sob stuff that Mr. Ogilvie pulls about bursting bubbles is so much bunk,” the young editor wrote on the
Developer
's editorial page. “Not having taken the pains to discover the difference between artificial and spontaneous growth of a new country, he talks as if he were a seer. . . . He does not know what he is talking about.”

It was the first of many fierce rebuttals to criticism of Florida.

A few weeks after Brisbane's exclusive story for the
Developer
, Menninger published a story announcing that Warfield's Seaboard Air Line Railroad had sold the timber rights on its huge tract of land near Indiantown to lumber tycoon E. T. Roux of Bartow. The
Developer
reported that Roux planned to build a sawmill there that would employ as many as 1,500 people.

“This is the first of several industries to be located at Indiantown by the Seaboard,” the
Developer
reported. “Plans are afoot to bring other manufacturing concerns to this location, with the aim of building at Indiantown a city of leading importance in South Florida.”

All of the new industry and property sales were bringing new tax revenue into Palm Beach County. But residents in and around Stuart in the northern part of the county felt they were being shortchanged by county government in West Palm Beach. A county bond election in March 1925 proved it.

Northern Palm Beach County voters helped pass a $6 million proposal to provide money for new roads and other improvements in the county. But when north county residents learned that only about $250,000 of the bond money would be used in their end of the county, they were furious. A month later, business leaders in Stuart started circulating a petition to carve out a new county from portions of northern Palm Beach and southern St. Lucie counties. They formed a special committee to push for the creation of the new county, and they chose Edwin Menninger as chairman of this committee.

On April 9, they met with Representative M. S. McCracken, who represented Palm Beach County in the state legislature. McCracken told the group he'd introduce legislation to create the new county if the committee could get 2,500 signatures on the petition supporting it.

It was a tall order. McCracken had only received 1,690 votes when he was elected to office.

But led by the determined young newspaper editor, the committee collected more than 4,000 signatures. Still, the
South Florida Developer
reported stiff opposition to the new county in Tallahassee.

Then a member of the special committee had an idea: Offer to name the new county after Governor John Martin if he'd throw his political influence behind the effort.

It worked. On May 28, the state legislature passed the bill to create Martin County, and the county's namesake signed the bill the following day. Stuart was designated the county seat.

The legislature also created another new county north of Martin County. Indian River County was formed, with Vero Beach as its county seat.

Around the same time, Arthur Brisbane made yet another visit to Stuart. This time he was the guest of real estate broker E. D. Mays, and he had a long visit with Edwin Menninger.

His presence again was front-page news for the
South Florida Developer
, and he had more praise for Stuart.

“Stuart's growth in the past two years is little short of marvelous,” he told Menninger.

There were rumors that the great journalist was going to buy property, but a spokesman for the land company hosting his visit denied that.

“Mr. Brisbane has not said what he intends to do,” Mays said. “If he is planning to buy, I do not know of it, for he gave me no indication that that was his intention.”

This was a polite fiction. Brisbane bought ten thousand acres near the St. Lucie Canal—the same waterway on which he wanted the state of Florida to spend taxpayers' money to improve. But there would not be a public comment about his purchase until 1926.

State lawmakers were also taking notice of Stuart's potential. A couple of days after Brisbane left Stuart, the lawmakers approved issuing $250,000 worth of bonds—about $3.3 million in twenty-first-century dollars—to deepen and improve the harbor.

The town's boosters dreamed of the day when deepwater oceangoing ships would be sailing through the St. Lucie Inlet.

Tourists always left Miami ahead of the steamy South Florida summer, but that didn't happen in 1925. Crowds continued to pour into the city, and the real estate mania was attracting a new type of speculator.

During the spring and summer, ambitious young men—and a few young women—from the large cities of the urban Northeast, streamed into Miami. They'd figured out a way to make a quick fortune by gaming the gullibility of the hordes of eager fortune seekers, the availability of easy credit, and Miami's overwhelmed city bureaucracy. They became known as “binder boys” because of their manipulation of the laws governing real estate transactions at the time.

In the summer of 1925, thousands of them prowled the city's streets, hawking real estate like beer vendors at a baseball game. They bought binders on a piece of property by putting up only a small portion of the cash price, usually 10 percent. This binder held the property in the name of the purchaser until the first substantial payment on the property was due, which usually was thirty days later.

But the binder boys seldom had any intention of keeping the property that long. Instead, they quickly sold their binders for a much higher price than what
they'd paid for the original down payment. Whoever bought the binder then became responsible for the bigger payment due later.

The new purchaser could—and often did—resell the same binder at a higher price. By the time some documents finally made it to the overworked registrar of deeds' office, they often had changed hands many times before the first payment came due.

Wearing a sort of informal uniform of golf knickers—known as “plus fours,” because they extended four inches below the knee—or white “Palm Beach” suits, the binder boys turned downtown Miami into an open-air real estate market.
And the sales never stopped. At night, some of the more successful binder boys would hire a few musicians to play jazz softly as they peddled acreage on Flagler Street.

As long as real estate prices kept skyrocketing, the binder boys raked in huge profits selling what essentially were fantasies.

“The binder boys worked right on the street, holding the receipt books and pencil in hand, calling off the acreage and the amount of binder required, obtaining the deposits from people who bought lots without having any idea how far in the woods of Florida they might be,” recalled A. J. Manning, who'd been a very successful real estate broker in Miami in 1925. “Lots at $5 or $10 down and so much a month sold like hotcakes, the buyer not even caring where they were or how much the total selling price. They'd have a map and make an ‘X' in various places where plans were made to construct the city hall, public utilities building, and so on.”

Historians have blamed the binder boys for the wild escalation of Miami real estate prices in 1925.

The potent mixture of hopes, dreams, naked greed, vast sums of easy cash, and plenty of bootleg whiskey created an intoxicating, anything-goes atmosphere.

“The people were, like, wild,” Manning said. “The money went to their heads; they thought it would continue forever, and [they] became reckless and extravagant. Money galore was spent in nightclubs. Couples who were perfectly happy and contented with each other became careless in their morals, husbands holding other men's wives in their arms and vice versa.”

And their eagerness to snatch a piece of the Florida dream was spiraling out of control. Later in the summer, sales of lots in the Miami Shores development nearly caused a riot. Frantic buyers literally threw money at real estate brokers. The development was sold out in three hours, and the brokers collected $33 million—more than $440 million, or almost half a billion dollars, in twenty-
first-
century dollars.