Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

by Christopher Knowlton

Overview

Christopher Knowlton, author of Cattle Kingdom and former Fortune writer, takes an in-depth look at the spectacular Florida land boom of the 1920s and shows how it led directly to the Great Depression.

The 1920s in Florida was a time of incredible excess, immense wealth, and precipitous collapse. The decade there produced the largest human migration in American history, far exceeding the settlement of the West, as millions flocked to the grand hotels and the new cities that rose rapidly from the teeming wetlands. The boom spawned a new subdivision civilization—and the most egregious large-scale assault on the environment in the name of “progress.” Nowhere was the glitz and froth of the Roaring Twenties more excessive than in Florida. Here was Vegas before there was a Vegas: gambling was condoned and so was drinking, since prohibition was not enforced. Tycoons, crooks, and celebrities arrived en masse to promote or exploit this new and dazzling American frontier in the sunshine. Yet, the import and deep impact of these historical events have never been explored thoroughly until now.

In Bubble in the Sun Christopher Knowlton examines the grand artistic and entrepreneurial visions behind Coral Gables, Boca Raton, Miami Beach, and other storied sites, as well as the darker side of the frenzy. For while giant fortunes were being made and lost and the nightlife raged more raucously than anywhere else, the pure beauty of the Everglades suffered wanton ruination and the workers, mostly black, who built and maintained the boom, endured grievous abuses.

Knowlton breathes dynamic life into the forces that made and wrecked Florida during the decade: the real estate moguls Carl Fisher, George Merrick, and Addison Mizner, and the once-in-a-century hurricane whose aftermath triggered the stock market crash. This essential account is a revelatory—and riveting—history of an era that still affects our country today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982128388
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	149,307
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Christopher Knowlton is the author of Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression. He is a former staff writer and London bureau chief for Fortune magazine. He also spent fifteen years in the investment business. His previous book was Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

1 The Last Frontier

1 The Pharaoh of Florida 3

2 A Railroad Goes to Sea 13

3 New Arrivals 27

4 Ballyhoo 43

2 Grand Plans

5 A Spanish Dreamscape 61

6 Merrick's Ideal City 70

7 Great Migrations 77

8 A Writer's Education 91

9 Trail Blazers 99

10 Habitual Intemperance 109

3 Tropical Fever

11 Miznerland 125

12 Weigall Whoops It Up 143

13 A House in Coconut Grove 154

14 Crime Waves 159

15 "A Parade of Pink Elephants and Green Monkeys" 172

16 Pirates of Promotion 183

17 Lull Before the Storm 196

4 Graveyard of Dreams

18 Hurricanes 225

19 Speculative Dementia 247

20 The Death of Ballyhoo and Hokum 266

21 "I Used to Make Dreams Come True" 274

22 A Legacy of Greed and Folly 288

Afterword 299

Acknowledgments 305

Bibliography 309

Notes 335

Image Credits 387

Index 391

Editorial Reviews

…[Bubble in the Sun] offer[s] a story that, though often told before, is worth the spirited retelling Knowlton brings to it. His characters are a writer's dream.

The New York Times Book Review - Daniel Okrent

11/11/2019

Former Fortune writer Knowlton (Cattle Kingdom) charts the 1920s Florida real estate market’s plummet from boom to bust in this vivid narrative. Arguing that Florida’s 1927 real estate market collapse helped to cause the Great Depression, Knowlton describes the post-WWI transformation of South Florida as “dramatic” and “lunatic.” He profiles ambitious developers and architects including Carl Fisher, who turned his family’s grapefruit plantation into the planned community of Coral Gables, and Addison Mizner, who popularized the Spanish Colonial aesthetic, and documents the efforts of marketers and Wall Street investors to convince people to move to Florida. Knowlton credits writer and environmental philanthropist Marjory Stoneman Douglas for documenting the loss of bird populations and natural flood protection as stuccoed subdivisions were carved out of the Everglades swampland. Displaced black Floridians, he notes, were welcome in new mansions as servants but forced to live outside of all-white towns in inferior conditions. Overvaluation and a lack of oversight eventually caused a market crash that “spread like an infection,” Knowlton writes, drawing a comparison to Florida’s role in the 2008 financial crisis. Knowlton successfully captures the vibrancy and mixed legacy of Florida’s boom years and makes a convincing, if familiar, case for the state as an economic bellwether. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"The story of the 1920s real estate bubble in Florida has been told before, but Knowlton brings to it a vivid, spirited style and a colorful cast of characters who made quick fortunes and lost them just as quickly." – New York Times

"A lucid account of the human and economic factors that drove a notorious land rush.” – Kirkus Review

"Knowlton delivers a vibrant, eminently readable cautionary tale about business and cultural history." – Booklist

"Knowlton successfully captures the vibrancy and mixed legacy of Florida’s boom years and makes a convincing...case for the state as an economic bellwether." – Publishers Weekly

“Knowlton...brings expertise, deep research and a brisk style to the book. It’s a dauntingly complex slice of history, but he examines it with clarity and insight, not to mention lots of juicy dish about the personal lives of some of the high rollers.”–Tampa Bay Times

“Knowlton delivers a captivating story, bubbling with colorful anecdotes and surprising research. As the triumphs and follies unfold, the narrative takes on a Canterbury Tales quality, drawing us into the turbulent lives of the real estate kings, crime bosses, cynical hucksters, and romantic visionaries who laid the foundation of modern Florida....[Knowlton] does vividly remind us that the metabolism of regional real-estate markets can affect the health of the overall economy. That timely lesson, one we forget at our peril, has rarely been taught with such panache.” – AIR MAIL

“It is difficult to go wrong when writing of questionable behavior and wretched excess in Florida, a fact that is borne out yet again in Christopher Knowlton’s colorful Bubble in the Sun, a wide-ranging treatment of the ill-fated South Florida land boom of the 1920s.” – The Wall Street Journal

“Knowlton...has produced a lively and entertaining chronicle of the visionaries, rascals and hucksters who transformed Florida.” – Washington Post

From the Publisher

11/01/2019

In the early 20th century, south Florida saw one of the biggest building booms in American history. Lightly populated before the construction of late 19th-century railroads, Florida became the latest "last frontier" in America, with residents and investors pouring into the state. Knowlton (Cattle Kingdom) traces the history of the developers, architects, and publicists who helped build and promote cities including Miami Beach, Palm Beach, and Coral Gables. Colorful stories of outrageous ambition and excess are tempered by brief discussions of the environmental consequences of development, especially in the Everglades. The focus, however, remains primarily on the developers and their wealthy clients. The economic argument suggested by the subtitle is saved for the end, in which Knowlton draws a convincing comparison between 1920s Florida and the early 2000s surge in real estate speculation. VERDICT Recommended for readers interested in the history of Florida and those who enjoy stories of the rich and glamorous in the 1920s.—Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Library Journal

2019-10-07
A well-told history of the 1920s Florida land rush, the developers who fueled it, and an environmentalist who saw its dangers.

Writers like Erik Larson and Gary Krist have found a sturdy formula for enlivening history: Take a neglected or misunderstood era or incident, ferret out its colorful heroes and scoundrels, and show not just their successes or failures, but the social forces that shaped their lives. Former Fortune magazine London bureau chief Knowlton (Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West, 2017, etc.) uses the method to fine effect in his story of a land-buying frenzy that led one observer to note, "All of America's gold rushes, all her oil booms, and all her free-land stampedes dwindled by comparison with the torrent of migration pouring into Florida." The author begins with Henry Flagler (1830-1913), the patriarch of Florida resort development, but moves on quickly to the architects and developers who drove the 1920s rush, including Addison Mizner in Palm Beach, George Merrick in Coral Gables, and David Paul "D.P." Davis in Tampa. Perhaps no man was more flamboyant or controversial than Carl Fisher, who dredged Biscayne Bay for the sand needed to build Miami Beach and whose razzle-dazzle publicity efforts fed the boom and its collapse, owing to factors that included rampant overleveraging and the hurricanes of 1926 and 1928. Fisher had a small elephant who caddied for visiting President Warren G. Harding and hired black laborers who couldn't live in his subdivisions: "The so-called Caucasian clause in the deeds prohibited anyone but a white person from buying a parcel of land on the island." The writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas saw the injustices to blacks and the environmental risks of overdevelopment and later wrote the nature classic The Everglades: The River of Grass (1947). In an especially strong chapter, Knowlton argues cogently that while the collapse of the bubble alone didn't cause the Great Depression, "the Sunshine State did provide both the dynamite and the detonator."

A lucid account of the human and economic factors that drove a notorious land rush.

Kirkus Reviews