For Sale —American Paradise (24 page)

On June 25, Edwin Menninger traveled up the coast to Vero Beach to attend a celebration of the creation of Indian River County. The featured speaker was Florida's most famous booster, William Jennings Bryan.

The great orator sprinkled his remarks with a few references to local dignitaries and events, then launched into his familiar speech about the wonders of Florida. He told a slightly different version of his joke about Florida's marvelous growth than the one he'd used in Coral Gables, but the message was the same.

“Florida is the sanitarium for the rich and the playground for the well,” Bryan told the crowd of about 3,500. “While not wishing to place one class above another, I must admit that our real estate men are less likely to lie than those of any other state. That is because truth is stranger than fiction. If a Florida real estate man should start out in the morning to lie about the country, the truth would catch up with him before night.”

After Bryan's remarks, Menninger approached him and invited him to speak at a similar gathering in January to celebrate the creation of Martin County. Bryan gladly accepted.

As bright as Indian River County's future seemed, Menninger was convinced that Martin County's future would far exceed it. More new developments, backed by more men of great wealth and influence, were being planned for Martin County, and they were buying lavish advertising spreads in the
South Florida Developer
.

On the shores of Lake Okeechobee in western Martin County, Selznick Studios of Hollywood, California—owned by David O. Selznick—had bought land in a new development called Lake Okeechobee Shores. Menninger's
Developer
reported that a $6 million studio for producing motion pictures was in the works.

At the other end of the county, producer Lewis J. Selznick—David's father—had bought sixteen square miles of property that included the wilds where, less than a year earlier, the Ashley Gang had made moonshine and hid from sheriff's posses. The elder Selznick planned a development called Picture City. The
Developer
reported that Selznick intended to build a “mammoth motion picture studio” there.

A promotional brochure for Picture City described the planned development in effusive prose, saying that the Dixie Highway, which ran through the planned development, was about to become “the Fifth Avenue of Florida.”

“The entire territory is ablaze with development,” the brochure said. “There must be one continuous Riviera of the World between Stuart and Miami. The opening up of the territory between Stuart and Palm Beach has just begun.”

The land that Picture City would be built on “is the finest in all of Florida, if not in the entire world,” the brochure boasted.

William Jennings Bryan arrived in Dayton, Tennessee, for the trial of high school teacher John Scopes on July 6, 1925. He stepped from the train wearing a dark suit and bow tie, a tight-lipped smile, and an odd choice of headgear—a pith helmet typically identified with British explorers in a tropical climate.

Dayton, a mining and mill town about 140 miles east of Nashville, was sweltering in the July heat. The locals who gathered at one of the town's social centers, F. E. Robinson's Rexall Drugstore, were still debating the merits of Tennessee's anti-evolution law. The drugstore was just down Market Street—which had a twelve-
mile-
an-hour speed limit—from the stately Rhea County Courthouse, where the trial would be held.

One thing all the regulars at Robinson's agreed on was that the trial was shining an intense spotlight on their little town.

H. L. Mencken, the
Baltimore Sun
writer who so disliked Bryan, was there, as was W. O. McGeehan, who was covering the trial for
Harper's
.

Even more extraordinary from the locals' perspective were the newsreel cameramen who would bring the proceedings to movie theaters across the land.

And there also was the famous lawyer for the defense, Clarence Darrow, who had first met Bryan at the Democratic National Convention of 1896, when the great orator had held the delegates spellbound with his passionate praise of the common man.

Darrow also had been a staunch defender of the working man and shared many of Bryan's political beliefs. But on the question of humanity's origins, they were bitter enemies, and they knew there would be a dramatic showdown before the jury brought in its inevitable verdict that John Scopes was guilty of violating Tennessee's law against teaching Darwin's theory of evolution.

Nearly a thousand people crammed into the courtroom when the trial began on July 10, and uncounted others were able to follow the proceedings, thanks to loudspeakers set up outside the courthouse. A four-
year-old boy patriotically named Thomas Jefferson Brewer was lifted up onto the judge's desk and drew the names of jurors from a hat.

Bryan, coatless, tieless, and clutching a fan advertising Robinson's Rexall Drugstore, sat grim-faced in the inferno of the courtroom as the trial proceeded. Students who'd attended Scopes's class testified that he had indeed taught that humans were descended from a single-cell organism and were mammals, just like monkeys.

The jury also heard from eminent scientists.

The man at the center of the trial was not called as a witness, however.

On July 20, Judge John T. Raulston moved the trial outside to the shade of the trees on the courthouse lawn so that more people could see and hear the trial. Finally the showdown that the nation had been awaiting occurred—Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, debating the question of how it all began.

Darrow walked Bryan through the biblical story of Creation, asking him if he believed in the literal truth of the Bible—that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, and that Eve was made from Adam's rib.

Bryan answered that he did.

“Does the statement, ‘The morning and the evening were the first day,' and ‘The morning and the evening were the second day,' mean anything to you?” Darrow asked.

“I do not think it necessarily means a twenty-four-hour day,” Bryan answered.

Darrow got Bryan to repeat his statement—that a biblical day was not necessarily twenty-four hours—and Bryan elaborated. It would be just as easy, he said, “for the kind of God we believe in to make the earth in six days as in six years or in 6 million years or in 600 million years. I do not think it important whether we believe one or the other.”

It was a puzzling answer from a man who'd spent his public life insisting that the Bible should be the only textbook used to explain how humanity came into being.

The jury took only nine minutes to convict John Scopes of violating Tennessee state law, and he was fined $100. But it was not a resounding victory for Bryan and his cause.

Bryan decided to stay on in Dayton for a few days after the trial. On July 26, he ate lunch and lay down for a nap.

He never awakened.

Thousands of mourners lined the tracks along the route of the special Southern Railway train that took his remains to Arlington National Cemetery for burial. When the train stopped briefly in Knoxville, a huge crowd gathered around the car containing Bryan's coffin.

Edwin Menninger paid tribute to Bryan in the August 4 edition of the
Developer
, recalling that he had met Bryan at Vero Beach, and that Bryan had been eager to speak at the Martin County celebration coming up in January.

“In his lifetime he was known personally by more Americans, I suspect, than any other man of our day,” Menninger wrote. “Some of his notions were queer, to be sure, but so are some of yours and some of mine.”

The nation's mania with Florida continued after the death of the state's most famous spokesman.

Arthur Brisbane was taking up some of the slack created by Bryan's departure. Around the climax of the Scopes trial in Tennessee, Brisbane praised Seaboard Air Line Railroad president Solomon Davies Warfield in his “Today” column for expanding his railroad in Florida. The new tracks would bring more visitors—and presumably more money—into the state, and help relieve the congestion of freight shipments that were starting to back up in rail yards and sidetracks leading into Florida.

And Edwin Menninger continued his cheerleading for the Florida miracle. In August, he took some time off for a visit to his native Kansas, but he didn't stop promoting his new home. His topic for a speech to the Kiwanis Club of Topeka was “The Wonders of Stuart, Florida.” He handed out two crates of pineapples grown in Martin County and wrote a column for the
Topeka State Journal
about his new hometown.

He also noted that the Florida East Coast Railway was now running a dozen daily trains into Florida, double the number from the previous summer.

Menninger invited attention to himself during his travels in the Midwest by wearing white plus fours. The knickers had become closely identified with Florida real estate salesmen, and he was frequently approached by people who were curious about what was happening there.

Menninger admitted to his questioners that he didn't know how long Florida's remarkable growth would continue, but he thought it would be at least ten years.

Others asked him why Florida had become such an obsession.

“Florida has been there all the time,” one man said to Menninger. “Why should there be a sudden panic to reach Florida?”

“So was the gold in the California hills all the time prior to 1849,” he answered.

He saw unmistakable evidence of the nation's fascination as he was about to board his train back to Florida.

“I walked into Union Station in Kansas City when I started my return trip to find probably three hundred [people] jammed around the gate leading to the Florida train,” Menninger said. “All the other forty gates were practically deserted.”

The thousands of people coming into Florida were going to their hometown banks before they left and withdrawing millions of dollars. So much money was being withdrawn that bankers outside Florida were getting uneasy.

Withdrawals from member banks of the Massachusetts Savings Bank League had increased at an especially alarming rate, and the league's officers realized how deeply the Florida mania had penetrated their customers' psyches. People who put their money into savings banks usually couldn't afford to gamble on real estate investments. Small-
time real estate speculators were withdrawing about $2,000 a day from a Boston bank, and another bank there was losing about $10,000 a week.

The manager of the league of savings banks estimated that about $20 million from his members' banks had gone into Florida real estate.

The league felt obligated to warn its depositors about the risks of such speculation. Bankers in other states were also becoming alarmed. In Ohio, bankers were so worried that they took out full-
page ads in larger newspapers warning against speculating in Florida real estate. The ads' bottom-line message was that sooner or later, real estate prices would tumble.

Similar warnings were issued by the Minnesota Department of Conservation.

Edwin Menninger was one of many Florida newspaper editors who were upset by the organized advertising campaign against Florida. He continued to insist that Florida, and especially Stuart, were safe investments.

“Land is not worth a certain figure: it sells for that figure,” Menninger said in the September 8 edition of the
Developer
. “Next week it sells for a bigger figure. Worth had nothing to do with the change. It is a settled conviction among us Floridians that we have established a new school of economics in which price has displaced value as a measure of a man's fortune.”

A few days later, Menninger responded to a story in an Omaha, Nebraska, newspaper in which a local man warned that real estate bargains in Florida were gone and that living costs in the state were sky-high.

“The fact of the matter is that most of these people who knock Florida are unable to comprehend the size or the significance of our present development,” Menninger wrote. “Seeking to bolster their stories of the ‘awful' conditions in this busiest and most prosperous State in the Union, they resort to all manner of exaggeration and display astonishing ignorance of the subject they pretend to understand.”