An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century

19 Land Booms

Like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, Douglas returned home from Europe wanting the “world to be . . . at a sort of moral attention.” But Florida, especially Miami, was in the midst of the sordid affairs of a great real estate boom. She wrote about it in fiction and nonfiction with “unaffected scorn.” In her “A Bird Dog in Hand,” published in 1925, at the height of the boom, the protagonist, George Henry, sermonizes to his female companion, “Can’t you see that all this buying and selling of land is wrong? Can’t you see that it is . . . making people think of nothing but money?” The inspiration for her character was Henry George, the real-life social critic who linked land speculation to the unequal distribution of wealth. Inverting the name was an astute calculation. George Henry ultimately forsakes his “deepest principles” against owning land “when there are others who can’t” and invests in real estate. Like speculating in the stock market, the prospect of getting rich quickly by buying Florida land dulled cautious instincts in spite of mounting publicity about too-good-to-be-true deals that indeed went bad. “Those were the days,” her narrator intones in another story, “when people suddenly began to act with a kind of madness, as if Florida earth were semiprecious, Land Booms [ c h a p t e r n i n e t e e n 258 ] part two more valuable than all the crops that could be raised on it.” Florida had forty-two million acres of land and water, and agents seemed to be trying to sell and resell each and every acre. Transactions succeeded not with the aid of science, official dictum, or even pictures but with overplayed elations and bloated promises—lies, in other words. Douglas was particularly indignant at the land agents’ wolfish and “dreadful” practices. “The realtors will get you,” she wrote in a 1922 poem, “if you don’t watch out.” For her, the boom was an event of the 1920s, one that “spread from Miami” to the Everglades. Actually, the opposite is true. It raged in the hinterland first, in the 1910s, sullied and rapacious. Even after the exposed shamelessness of the Wright report, the state’s distorted attempts at principled real estate promoting, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward’s ugly coziness with an unscrupulous land merchant, the lies, the lawsuits, and the foreclosures, the public retained a messianic faith in the possibility that “great riches and marvelous development” could be had in the Everglades . Land agents staked out thousands of geometric farm-and-home lots in the Everglades at a time when Americans were drifting away from the country’s agrarian roots. Florida’s subtropics offered a last shot at living the old America, which was located right next door to the new, the urbanizing coastline. But there could be no new without a “good back country,” insisted the Florida Grower, a not-altogether-impartial publication . By “good,” the agricultural magazine meant developed, vast, productive , and profitable. And before anything else, the backcountry had to be settled. The “bird dogging” Douglas witnessed in the city was only an imitation of the strategies of land-company admen, mythmakers all, who knew how to close a deal, one after another and another. Few did so better than the people who followed the orders of Richard J. Bolles. A smallish New Yorker, he was partial to wearing a big Stetson hat, conceivably intended to symbolize the size of the previous ventures in Colorado gold mines and Oregon farmland that made him rich. After completing his purchase of half a million acres of submerged Everglades territory from the state—under Governor Broward—in 1909, Bolles launched the Florida Fruit Lands Company and hired the former governor to help him sell the land for twenty-four dollars an acre, a 19. land booms [ 259 twenty-two-dollar profit. Bolles’s other salesmen crisscrossed the country , proclaiming the Everglades a paradise soon to be regained and offering a one-thousand-dollar-back guarantee if a buyer’s land failed to meet the company’s promises that it was the “richest land not under cultivation to-day” and no longer under water. The idea was to sell contracts for twelve thousand farm sites in various parcel sizes, most of them ten acres. Each buyer would also get a lot in the town of Progreso, the commercial, social, and...