For Sale —American Paradise by Willie Drye Read Free Book Online

convention,” the Newark (Ohio) Daily Advocate reported. “Roar upon roar, crash upon crash of fierce, delirious applause.”
    The delegates stood on their chairs, threw hats into the air, and waved handkerchiefs, “tossing like whitecaps on the winter sea,” the Advocate said.
    â€œThe orator was literally whirled off his feet and borne on by the struggling masses of his frantic friends,” the Advocate said. “From that hour, Hon. Wm. J. Bryan was as good as nominated for President, despite the efforts of leaders and friends of other candidates to stop the tremendous tide.”
    Bryan would lose the election to Republican William McKinley, and he would lose two other attempts at the White House in 1900 and 1908. But three attempts at the presidency would establish Bryan as a staunch advocate and spokesman for the common man, make his name a household word, and lay the groundwork for a profitable career in Florida real estate a few decades later.
    Bryan paid his first visit to Florida in 1898, when unrest in Cuba finally brought Spain and the United States to war. Cuban rebels who wanted independence from Spain had been clashing with loyalists for years. And some, including Cuban poet and patriot José Martí, had been planning and organizing their efforts against Spain in Cuban communities in Tampa and Key West.
    In January 1898, rioting erupted in Havana. On January 24, the United States dispatched the powerful battleship USS Maine from Key West to Havana, hoping that a show of force would cool passions.
    On the evening of February 15, about half an hour after a US Marine bugler had blown the mournful notes of “Taps” aboard the Maine , there was a muted explosion in or near the battleship. Then came a second explosion, powerful enough to lift the ship’s bow out of the water and toss the massive turret of one of its ten-inch guns off the deck.
    More than 260 American sailors were killed. Historians are still arguing about whether the explosion was caused by a bomb planted by Spanish loyalists hoping to provoke a war with the United States or by volatile gases that ignited in the battleship’s coal bunker. But after an investigation, American officials decided the deadly blast had been caused by a bomb planted by Spanish saboteurs.
    Goaded on by sensationalistic newspaper stories about the explosion of the Maine and Spanish atrocities in Cuba, the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898.
    The US Navy immediately took the war to the Pacific Ocean. On May 1, an American fleet under Commodore George Dewey destroyed a Spanish fleet of warships in Manila Bay in the Philippines.
    But the US Army was much slower to gear up for war. The United States had not had a major mobilization of troops since the end of the Civil War. When war on Spain was declared, the US Army had only about twenty-eight thousand men under arms. It would take time to field a force against Spain. And because of Florida’s proximity to Cuba, it was a logical place for the army to prepare 125,000 new soldiers for battle.
    It made sense to train troops in Jacksonville and Tampa, two cities with excellent harbors where troops and war matériel could easily be moved in and out. It made less sense to station troops in Miami, which, even with Flagler’s railroad, was still little more than a settlement and did not have a harbor comparable to Tampa, Jacksonville, and Key West.
    An army inspector filed two reports saying that Miami was not a good place to put soldiers, but Miami residents believed their frontier town would be a target for Spanish ships, and Flagler thought it would be good for his railroad to have an army base there.
    So troops were sent to Miami.
    The city was still a frontier village with a few hundred residents in April 1898. The town started changing, however, when the troops came. Money and people poured in. Many soldiers weren’t impressed with South Florida in the summer,