This Florida Scene

The Future of the Everglades State and Its Great Development Possibilities

THEODORE DREISER

EDITOR'S NOTE:—Long before the planters came to Virginia or the Pilgrims hopped out on Plymouth Rock, the Spaniards were in Florida and Ponce de Leon hunted there for the Fountain of Youth. Yet to our forefathers it was a mystery of Seminoles and cypress. Now it produces citrus fruit and building sites, and thither have been going the pilgrims once more, this time in their Fords, a sudden wave of migration exceeding any other colonization in our history. The first becomes the last again, and Mr. Dreiser sees and ponders on the American scene. This is the final article in the series on Florida, especially written for Vanity Fair by the author of An American Tragedy

WHEN the rush of 1925—which was some ten years of pioneer work—began, Florida still had but two one-track railroads leading south from Jacksonville to Miami and Tampa; no harbour facilities worthy of the name; no automobile roads suited to the weight and crush of the traffic that was about to descend upon it. In truth it could be said to have had no adequate equipment of any kind, and to this hour has not —at least, equipment not suited to the hordes of sightseers and prospective settlers and jobseekers whom it proceeded to bawl into this "paradise of the tropics". In fact, only when they were present in shoals and hundreds of thousands more of them en route, was it discovered that there were practically no hotels (apart from the expensive Flagler system), no stores or shops beyond those that had served the pioneer population; no stocks or crops of any kind; and far, far away from any adequate railroad, express, telegraph, telephone or post office facilities.

Result: inextricable confusion and discomfort for everybody—those resident and those entering. Hungry mouths and sleepy heads and no suitable accommodations for them. (The wretched, wretched rooms and cots rented for two, three, four, five, six—up to eight—or ten dollars a night!) And the overcharges for gas, automobile repairs, food, clothing! For by then the local supplies were beginning to be depicted. (And the oncomers not too well supplied with money in many instances, yet believing in this as the Promised Land). (The merry advertiser and land shark!) And then, in the face of this great crisis, the railroads themselves—the one true resource of the state —breaking down under the strain. They lacked men, rolling stock, yards, side tracks. Even the road beds themselves began to give way, under freight loads and freight lengths that tested the rail ties to the spreading point.

AGAIN, result: embargoes declared on inand outbound freight—express—perishable as well as durable materials—and even passengers,—so that the residents as well as the tourists found themselves on the verge of restriction in regard to even the necessaries of an endurable existence. Fifty carloads of unsorted and undistributed mail stalled at Jacksonville at one time and no men to sort it. Long waiting lines, for instance, before every post office, telegraph office, ticket office, barber shop, lunch counter, grocery, bank, drug counter or soda fountain. And with hotels and rooming houses over-crowded and exhausted—tents being put in yards and along the two main highways.

And to top all this, the fantastic nature of the realty values! For—although at this very time—and for the next year or five or ten —there were, are and will be—20,000,000 acres of farming land and town sites yet to be charted and roads of any kind driven into them. Still the hotels and homes and roadside tent cities were crowded to capacity, and it was really not at all surprising that under those circumstances those whose shouts concerning the wonder and prospects of the state had brought this throng here, should say to themselves: "Are we going to let this golden harvest go by without reaping fortunes for ourselves?" "We are not". Result: Overnight almost—but more particularly in the vicinity of Palm Beach and Miami than elsewhere—land values beginning to soar beyond the wildest dreams of the wildest speculators. For here, according to the boomers, was the true center of that semi-tropic perfection which the northerner was or would be seeking—all-the-year-round sea bathing, the cocoanut and the Royal palm, the hibiscus and water hyacinth, pineapples, bananas, figs, the pomegranate, to say nothing of fewer days of frost and cold than elsewhere in the state. Besides, had not Henry M. Flagler and after him the silver-tongued Bryan been emphasizing the qualities of this region for years?

IN consequence, lots 50 x 120 that had been selling for as low as $100 but a few months before—no more—suddenly rising to little less than $1200 for the cheaper lots, $30,000 to $50,000 for some of the choice beach lots, and $300,000 to $3,000,000 for "hotel sites", as they are called, in some of the favoured regions on the sea and bay adjacent to and north and south of Miami. And with the remainder of the state taking its cue from this and assuming that all property in Florida in any prepared residential section must be worth not less than a thousand dollars a lot, and lots with bay frontage, from five to fifteen thousand dollars each.

Then it was that the realtors, deciding that all the world was most certainly deciding to move to Florida, conceived the most astounding dreams in regard to the problematic future value of this land. Indeed, one must believe them to have become self-hypnotized by their own Munchausenesque yarns into an orgy of speculation, for in September 1925, tract as well as lot prices suddenly disappeared into the blue. And even among the realtors and speculators themselves there ensued a mad, wild, stock exchange scramble in the parlours of the leading hotels in Miami for tracts—not lots. Millions bellowed about and written down upon slips of paper, as might be twentydollar checks at other times. A thousand tracts gobbled in a night—and each and every one laid out in imagination, as well as soon thereafter in the papers, as Boca del Paradisos, Oranganicos, Vista del Porpoises, or what not, until it looked, on paper, as though all the state was to be sold in 50 x 120 foot lots, at from three to twenty thousand dollars apiece.

But what now of those thousands and thousands of the none too "slick" or "sharky" who came with visions of securing a delectable bit of paradise for a reasonable sum which they could later re-sell at a good round profit? Naturally, finding land and house values risen almost over-night to the prohibitive stage, men, women and children, in their Fords, Buicks, etc., etc., having gone as far south as Palm Beach and horrified at the cost of land and living, turned their cars northward, many of them tagged with signs reading: "Don't go to Florida!" "Don't be robbed!" etc., etc.

AND then, of course in a month, or two or thrree, a slump—even while I was there in December and January of 1925-6. Workingmen employed in the construction of new buildings leaving the state by the thousands, the embargo on materials making it impossible for them to continue with their work—and they could not starve. And others, back home, scared off by what the returning hordes wrote or telegraphed or told.

And then—and not until then—the realtor and the boomer and the grafter and the gougcr beginning to scratch his head and look dubiously about him. Was it possible that this glorious, glorious Florida—in every fantastic imagining concerning which he himself had come or was coming to believe—was not going to sell as wildly or as pricelcssly as he had imagined? Could there have been anything wrong with his pipe dream? A cerebro-spinnl chill passing over the state. Yells for new railroad lines, new ship lines, new motor trucks and aeroplane lines. Where was Henry Ford? Page him! Why didn't the government step in and manage and develop the railroads? Why didn't the merchants and tract-developers organize to get ploughs, horses, steam shovels, lumber, lime, cement, stone, coal, from up north by boat and try and catch up with the demand? Wasn't Florida entirely surrounded by the tropic seas? And didn't it have harbours? Weren't the realtors of Miami insisting that its harbour was as great and good as that of New York itself? Why not use it?

Result: an inquiry commission from Washington. And later a test of Miami harbour. Some fifty-one shiploads of lumber ordered and all the ships arriving at once, and laden to the bulwarks, in a harbour, by the way, suitable, possibly, for some twenty or thirty ten-thousand ton ships. And this suddenly clogged and bottled up with the lumber ships lying outside. And then—worse luck—a ten-thousand ton freighter turns on its side in the inside harbour channel and, behold you, the harbour is blocked and the fifty ships lying outside unable to get in! And with carrying and holding charges at as little as $500 per day per ship.

Once more gloom! Once more a kind of terror—and this time well-founded indeed. For ships laden and not able to unload constitute no small financial problem for a state holding only 1,300,000 people—all, for the most part, engaged in the honest pursuit of a living. And no hope from the railroads, the freight and express embargo holding to this hour. And rumours— rumours—that a bad day was setting in. "We have been going too fast. Land prices are too high. Accommodations are too few. We must pause and take stock. Write off some of these high prices. Write off some of our paper profits and losses. Florida is all right, but it can't be sold all at once. Suppose we slow up and catch up—if we can—give the public a little more for its money."

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And so now—once more tracts— inland, it is true—but still tracts— with lots priced at from $100 up. And the two railroads toiling to double-track and extend their lines. And the state and counties agreeing on enlarged road improvement plans. And long and earnest editorials on every hand explaining and insisting that Florida is to be all right yet— and why. Hasn't it the climate? Won't it always have it? And I agree. For, if it could have been killed, it would most certainly be dead by now. What between the Jesse James real estaters and the patio and the dansant boys, they have had the thing about all in. And yet I, for one, still think it will go, and go big, eventually. And I will tell you why.

The state is actually within thirty to thirty-six hours of sixty million people, most of whom would enjoy a few days of sunshine and flowers between January and April first. Better yet, despite the lies concerning no frost or cold days, completed luxury which does not exist, etc., etc., it actually has a sub-tropic, if not exactly tropic, quality which may yet be turned to pleasing, if not actually sybaritic, account by millions and millions who are yet to go there. Those beautiful skies. Those perfect days— truly perfect at times—shell-like, dream-like. You will be riding along through an absolute dank marsh land (where, none-the-less, are signs posted every few yards reading: Moro del Gold Fish), and you will turn a corner and lo! over in a quiet patch of woods, at the edge of a shallow pool, under a cloudless sky, you may see a beautiful crested blue heron, standing there upon his long reed-like legs, his head high, his powerful telescopic eye quietly contemplating you —or life. And you will say: "Oh, that bird! Oh, the tropics! How beautiful! Where else in America will I see a bird like this?" And you begin to speculate nervously as to how soon all this program of luxury and land selling and building is to spell his doom. For, after all, he is better than all that—to me at least.

Or, again, you may be riding along the Indian River between Daytona and St. Lucie, let us say. That is a stretch some two hundred miles in length. The Indian River is a wide inland water way—not fresh but salt —no true river at all but an estuary which parallels the eastern ocean beach on the land side for all of that distance and more. (To get to an ocean beach in Florida you will always have to cross an estuary on what they call a causeway or long bridge—always toll, by the way.) This Indian River is so very wide and so very tropic— sluggish and warm looking. Over it fly constantly flocks and flocks of gulls, wild ducks, mud hens, pelicans, with their short bodies and long bills, white and blue cranes. And in the water will be schools of porpoises rolling and playing along in procession, and thousands of flying fish that leap out of the water. And there will be sunlight—precious sunlight—on many days. And again, palms. And on the roadside, hibiscus.

Or you may be canoeing on the beautiful and quaint little New River at Fort Lauderdale. (New River got its name from the Seminole Indians who claimed that it appeared in the night. When they went to sleep, no river was there, but when they awoke in the morning it was flowing peacefully along. And so they called it New River.) Or it may be the St. Lucie River at Stewart, where you will be surrounded by floating hyacinths in bloom while you gaze at what appears to be age-old fastnesses of live oak with their mosses, or dank and cluttered palms and thick vines of which you know not the name and in which lurk what? Alligators? I told you I saw one. The blue heron. Deer? Bear? They assert that they exist. I saw none.

But is there not enough here from which a semi-tropic, if not a tropic, paradise might be made if enough— not millionaires exactly but merely substantial citizens of some taste— could be induced to come and do the work necessary to make of this a residence paradise? I'll say!

Better yet, even, from the human and practical point of view at least— in practically every county in the extreme or actual north, I saw beans, peas, corn, tomatoes, peppers, egg plant, onions, beets and potatoes, all growing luxuriously in January. In Broward and Dade and Okeechobee counties at the extreme south, I saw the more tropical wonders—bananas, pineapples, figs, in groves. And when you pick up nuggets of the soil anywhere—turned up by the plough or dredge—and note that it is nothing less than crumbled roots and leaves of centuries past, that the sky above is blue, the air light and balmy in January, and that at or near the surface is always that precious thing—water —(which in California and Arizona must be led in flumes for hundreds of miles)—and that for from ten to twelve months in the year anything— anything—planted will grow—that from two to three crops may be easily garnered—and that at this hour literally millions of acres of this land— 20,000,000 to be exact—still stand covered with palmetto or beggar weed or live oak and poisonous vines—the strange and mysterious vines and plants of the sub-tropics—well, one need not be a realtor or a speculator to know that such soil as this must one day spell enormous prosperity for millions. Is not the average farmer the world over glad to get one crop —and by no means a highly bountiful one either?

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What if the summers are hot? I hear that in spite of the alleged cooling breezes of the realtors that there are baking, sweating days from May to November, and that mosquitoes and flies are pests. Even so. Has the husbandman from the Klondike to the Horn, lured by the profits of a truly yielding soil, ever hesitated at either the cold or the heat? Consider the Congo today. Egypt or Mesopotamia in the ancient days; Sweden and Norway; or the farmers of central and northern South America even now. And Florida is not Brazil or the Congo.

It is indeed, after a fashion, a most fortunate state. Not as diversified, and, hence, perhaps not as romantic to the eye at first, as Italy or the Riviera or California. Still it has possibilities and probabilities which by taste and artistic cultivation can be turned into scenes too exquisite for mere prose, I am sure. The gardens one sees—the estates, the sea, the streams. Not as refreshing and invigorating, perhaps, as any of the colder northern states. Yet, still a state of distinction and rare individuality. Unlike anything I have ever sensed upon any of the portions of the earth that I have ever trod—here the days and nights are of a somewhat different texture. I think if I might venture upon a characterization that haunted me at St. Augustine, at Daytona, at Tampa, Okeechobee, Palm Beach and Miami, they were (at their very best) of a warm, sensuous, pearly texture, suggesting in their look, as well as their feel, the pearly, pinky, glossiness and warmth of the interior of an exquisite conch. And one marveled at times, truly, to see against a morning or evening sky (delicate, velvety, pearly, because of the presence of a faint trace of moisture, perhaps), a sail ship, all sails spread, breasting a turquoise sea. Or, through a grove of tall serpentine cocoanut palms, the blue inland waters of a lagoon or a lake across the background of which might wing a white or a blue crane or the giant and to me almost fabulous blue heron.

It is this something of genuine tropic richness and colour in winter— and I presume even more so in summer—coupled with this amazing fertility of the soil—that convinces me that however vulgarly and stupidly and ignorantly it is being handled now, the State of Florida at some time or other will right itself and prove one of the richest and in many respects one of the. most intriguing of all of those in our national galaxy.