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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Christopher Knowlton is the author of Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How I t 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 .
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.)
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Memories of the real-estate collapse of 2008 may stoke interest in Knowlton's (Cattle Kingdom, 2017) entertaining account of a similar boom-and-bust in 1920s Florida, during which Palm Beach, Boca Raton, Miami Beach, and Coral Gables were created. Knowlton profiles each location's primary investor and promoter, skillfully presenting their personalities as they amassed fortunes, only to end as paupers. Carl Fisher was an attention-seeking automotive baron who arrived in Florida in 1911, and bought most of an island he renamed Miami Beach. The same year, George Merrick arrived to run his family's grapefruit plantation; a decade later, he developed it into a planned city for the middle class, Coral Gables. The wealthy gravitated to Palm Beach, where in 1918 a bon vivant architect named Addison Mizner took residence and designed dozens of mansions. With these and other characters in place, including writer Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, Knowlton tracks a dizzying inflation of real-estate prices that peaked in 1925, followed by the bubble bursting a year or so later. Knowlton delivers a vibrant, eminently readable cautionary tale about business and cultural history.--Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2019 Booklist
Choice Review
Knowlton, a former staff writer and London bureau chief for Fortune magazine, examines the ambitions, greed, and rise and fall of the major real estate moguls involved in the 1920s real estate boom and bust in Florida. Though his argument that the bursting of the Florida land bubble in 1926 was more pivotal than the stock market crash of 1929 in bringing about the Great Depression is not original, he provides detailed analysis and in-depth perspective of the Florida experience and its influence on the coming of the Depression. Knowlton's descriptions of Florida society and his biographies of the major players in its early-20th-century real estate development offer valuable context for understanding the period. His writing style brings characters to life. Among those individuals are architect/developer Addison Mizner, developers George Merrick and Carl Fisher, and environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas. The book should appeal to general audiences as well as those studying Florida history, the 1920s, and the Depression era. It is well researched and the bibliography is impressive; however, the method Knowlton uses for citations is awkward and makes scholarly referencing difficult. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --June Melby Benowitz, emerita, University of South Florida, Sarasota-Manatee
