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

however; a Louisiana soldier described Miami as “a waste wilderness as can be conceived only in rare nightmares.”
    American military leaders thought Tampa would be a good place to assemble and train troops for an invasion of Cuba. The declaration of war on Spain and the call for 125,000 recruits had stirred patriotic passions in young American men, who flocked to recruiting stations. Soon they were pouring into Tampa, at the time a city of about twelve thousand.
    Commanding General of the Army Nelson Miles was dismayed by the conditions when he arrived in Tampa in June 1898. All was chaos. Miles pronounced the confusion “inextricable.” But eventually, American troops were ready to invade Cuba.
    William Jennings Bryan volunteered his services to the US Army, and in July, he arrived in Jacksonville as a colonel commanding a regiment of troops from Nebraska. The war moved quickly once American troops invaded Cuba in mid-June, so the conflict ended with Bryan still in the army camp in Jacksonville.
    Still, Bryan would not forget his first trip to Florida.
    Julia Tuttle died the same month the war ended, and about half the land in Miami went to her heirs. The executor of her will, Harry Tuttle, wasn’t as fussy about booze as his mother had been. In 1900, he sold a lot inside the city limits without the “no alcohol” clause.
    The new owner promptly opened a saloon.
    The railroads continued to bring wealthy visitors to Florida who liked what they saw and bought property. Louis Comfort Tiffany and William Luden, the cough drop millionaire, were among the super- rich who built huge houses in Miami.
    When Flagler sat down to talk with journalist James Barrow in 1907, he was only a few days past his seventy-seventh birthday, and had recently started his most ambitious—some would say craziest—project. In those long-ago days before labor unions, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, he was extending his railroad from Miami, 128 miles down the remote, ecologically fragile Florida Keys to Key West, the nation’s southernmost city.
    It was a Herculean undertaking that would require unheard- of feats of engineering.
    But Flagler didn’t intend to stop at Key West. The bustling maritime city of about twenty thousand—accessible only by boat, and about as much Caribbean as American—was only ninety miles from Havana, Cuba. Flagler intended to extend rail passenger and freight service to Cuba. Tourists could board a train in New York and ride to Key West, where the passenger cars would be loaded on a special ferry for the crossing to Havana. When the ferry arrived in the Cuban capital, departing passengers would board the passenger cars for the return trip to Key West and points north.
    The frugal minister’s son who had set off on his own as a teenager with a handful of coins in his pocket was worth somewhere around $60 million—about $1.5 billion in twenty-first-century dollars. Flagler recalled the early days when he was broke and in debt and trying to recover and learn from his mistakes.
    â€œI carried a lunch in my pocket until I was a rich man,” he told Barrow. “I trained myself in the school of self-control and self-denial.”
    Flagler acknowledged that the self- imposed frugality hadn’t been easy, but it was better than working for someone else.
    â€œIt was hard on [me], but I would rather be my own tyrant than have someone else tyrannize over me,” he said.
    His nineteenth-century upbringing as the son of a poor- but-honest preacher had had a dramatic influence on his attitude toward great wealth.
    â€œIf money is spent for personal uses, to promote idleness, luxury, and selfishness, it is a curse to the possessor and to society,” Flagler told Barrow. “Wealth brings obligation, moral and governmental. It has but one legitimate function, and that is its employment for the welfare