The History of Florida (64 page)

reason that there is no bubble.”6

The truth was that in 1925 and 1926 numerous Floridians went from

riches to rags, and sometimes not even rags were left. As 1925 ended, even

Comptrol er Amos grew glum and admonished state banks to maintain

Fortune and Misfortune: The Paradoxical 1920s · 305

strong cash positions. He wanted “plenty of leeway” between deposits and

loans.7 The directive was academic. It was already too late. Inflation was at

its peak. Although the average state bank had a comfortable cash reserve

in 1925, the new year was a different story. Money flowed out and depos-

its dropped as previously stable banks had difficulty obtaining call money.

Emergency meetings produced some funds but not enough to meet needs,

and banks saw their cash reserves melt away.

Bank heads and state officials met to discuss a crisis they could not solve.

Unable to maintain cash reserves, more banks failed in the last months of

1926. A stoical Amos appealed for calm. One newspaper warned against

rumors and innuendoes: “The whisperer who talks about banks is a good

deal like the purveyor of backstairs gossip about a good woman. They are

proof

On the night of 18 September 1926, a hurricane packing winds of 130 to 150 miles per

hour caught the boomtime population of Dade County unaware. Ninety-two coast-

al residents were killed by the storm, the first in the region since 1910; another 300

were drowned at Moore Haven in the interior. More than 600 persons were injured

and 18,000 made homeless. From Miami (see downtown damage,
above
) to Fort Lau-

derdale, 5,000 homes were destroyed and 9,000 were damaged. Boomtime tent cities

and tourist camps were leveled. Two years later, almost to the day (16 September), a

hurricane of equal strength hit the Florida shoreline at Palm Beach and caused Lake

Okeechobee to overflow, deluging surrounding communities. Nearly 2,000 persons

drowned, three-quarters of them black farmworkers.

306 · William W. Rogers

equal y dangerous members of society.”8 An additional serious problem re-

sulted from various Florida cities floating large bond issues, which caused a

slump in the bond market.

Despite a reeling economy, Floridians partly regained their optimism in

1927 and 1928 as tourism rebounded and real estate made a comeback. The

two years proved only a prelude, though, to the stock market crash of 1929.

During this period, even national banks were hard pressed to hold their

own. It was probably just as wel that Florida’s citizens could not foresee

coming afflictions.

With some exceptions, state banks suffered crippling declines in depos-

its, loans, and cash reserves. In 1927, many were unable to meet depositors’

demands, and failures became daily headlines. Amos was indicted in 1927

on charges of permitting two insolvent banks to remain open, but the state

supreme court ruled in his favor. Unchastened and undaunted, he was re-

elected in 1928, carrying every county and receiving more votes than any

candidate for state office. Other questionable activities earned the comp-

trol er additional charges in 1930, but again the court dismissed the case.

One cynical observer was prompted to declare that Florida needed “more

bankers in Raiford [prison], and more leadership in Tal ahassee.”9

The state’s malaise would soon be repeated national y. A restoration of

proof

public confidence in Florida’s banking institutions was needed, but confer-

ences of state leaders failed to restore morale. Few doubted that the boom

was over. Walter Ful er, a candid land developer in St. Petersburg, wrote:

“We just ran out of suckers. That’s al . We got all their money, then started

trading with ourselves. . . . That isn’t quite correct. We became the suckers.”10

A requiem from the
Nation
declared, “Like a mad, bad dream the real-estate

delirium passed.” The phenomenon “vanished like a soap bubble.”11

If hope sprang eternal, it was blown away by a series of tropical distur-

bances fol owed by a devastating hurricane in the fal of 1928. Floridians had

learned something from their 1926 experience, but they could do nothing

about a storm that contained wind gusts of 130 miles per hour. Striking first

at Palm Beach, the hurricane caused Lake Okeechobee to flood nearby com-

munities. An estimated 2,000 lives were lost. Even that figure may have been

low because emergency burials in mass graves proved necessary to avoid the

possibility of epidemics. Most of the casualties were black seasonal workers,

some of them from the Bahamas.

For some Floridians, Doyle Carlton’s election as governor in 1928 sig-

naled better times, but no one realistical y expected a return to the halcyon

days of the first half of the 1920s. Others expected national leadership to

Fortune and Misfortune: The Paradoxical 1920s · 307

revive the state, but President Hoover’s administration was crippled by the

beginning of the Great Depression. An accumulation of events and circum-

stances caused the nation’s economic col apse: high tariff wal s and an in-

sistence on debt repayment in gold effected a drastic decline in the export

market; a worldwide glut of raw materials and agricultural products sent

prices plummeting; the cost of consumer goods exceeded the range of most

Americans’ buying power, causing overproduction and rising inventories;

and there was a serious maldistribution of the nation’s wealth—a few people

had too much money, and too many people had too little.

Historians and economists usual y date the Great Depression from the

panic that hit the Wal Street stock market in late October 1929. Frenzied liq-

uidation ended an unprecedented bull market that had lasted for six years.

The col apse in values halted the optimistic and speculative enthusiasm that

had permeated American society. Making money had seemed simple and

automatic. Now, in October 1929, the country had a bear market, and things

were dismal y different.

Hoover moved to offset the panic by obtaining promises from man-

agement to sustain production and wages and from organized labor not

to strike or seek pay increases. Even so, matters grew increasingly worse,

while distress of Old Testament proportions continued in much of Florida.

proof

In April 1929, the Mediterranean fruit fly was found at a grapefruit grove in

Orlando. From there it spread across the state, requiring quarantines and

embargoes on the shipment of fruit and agricultural products. The destruc-

tion wrought by the insect (the “Medfly” resembled an ordinary house fly

but was slightly smal er and had yel ow and black wings) forced the destruc-

tion of citrus groves and temporarily devastated the industry.

Economic and fruit fly problems notwithstanding, agriculture remained

Florida’s predominant source of wealth. The number of farms had increased

from 54,005 in 1920 to 58,906 in 1930; 5,244 farmers had traded in their

mules and horses for tractors; 3,525 farm families had telephones, and 7,559

had water piped into their homes. In 1930, the state’s 300,000 acres of fruit

and truck products represented 10 percent of the total value of such crops

in the country. By contrast, Florida’s traditional field crops, such as corn

and cotton, had declined in value from well over $27 million to about $10.2

million.

The number and worth of livestock increased during the decade. The

costly presence of ticks had hampered the cattle industry, but in 1923 a com-

pulsory statewide eradication plan was enacted. The difficulty of rounding

up free-ranging livestock caused opposition from some cattlemen, but a

308 · William W. Rogers

tick quarantine was put in place. Some ranchers sold their herds rather than

comply, but corrals and dipping vats became commonplace, and the pro-

gram succeeded. Significant and permanent upgrading occurred but was

hampered by the lack of a fence law—an acrimonious economic and politi-

cal issue involving public safety that was not resolved until 1949.

As the 1920s came to a close, the large number of bank failures was at-

tributed to an excess of localities dependent on a single industry or crop,

too few restrictions on banks, and “too many unknown rascals and bad

management.”12 Banking scholar Raymond B. Vickers contends that many

banks failed through the machinations of grasping men who were outright

crooks. In 1929, the wily Amos told a state bankers’ convention that Flor-

ida had “new blood and new money” and was “on the road to a safe and

sound banking system.”13 With strong public backing, Governor Carlton

demanded banking legislation. The legislature responded with a major stat-

ute that changed capitalization requirements, tightened loan limitations,

limited dividends, raised requirements, and increased bank directors’ and

stockholders’ obligations. Failure continued, but in the fal of 1929 some

banks reopened and a few new ones were established.

Many prominent officials, including Senator Fletcher and Governor

Carlton, attempted to quiet fears by treating the Depression as if it could

proof

be talked away or written off with positive thinking. In January 1930, one

paper noted: “The state is enjoying its best tourist season. . . . Almost every

city and county has pledged itself to its greatest effort this year in construc-

tion work. The outlook is indeed bright.”14 Those were hollow words to the

person whose property had been lost or whose savings had disappeared. In

1930, Florida’s bank failures were still as ubiquitous as mosquitoes.

Looking back over the era, objective Floridians saw a mixed record of ac-

complishments. Women began entering the work force in greater numbers,

but their entrance and acceptance in the professions was slow. In the field

of penal reform, Florida abolished the inhuman convict lease system with

its lash and sweatbox that had been in place since 1877. Convict leasing by

the state was prohibited in 1919 and at the county level in 1923. The latter

action resulted from a scandal involving the beating death at a lumber camp

of Martin Tabert, a young white man from South Dakota who had been ar-

rested for vagrancy.

Although public education remained rigidly segregated, the state could

claim “progress.” In 1920, Florida’s school-age population (six to twenty-

one years) was 292,199; there were 193,302 whites and 98,898 blacks. Of

those, 64 percent of the eligible whites attended school and 47 percent of

Fortune and Misfortune: The Paradoxical 1920s · 309

the blacks. Teaching was one of the few professions in which women were

dominant: 5,077 white female teachers as opposed to 902 white males and

1,444 black women teachers contrasted to 196 black men. The doctrine of

“separate but equal” as enunciated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 was

only half-fulfilled in Florida: separate, yes; equal, no. The average monthly

wage in 1920 for a white male teacher was $143.06; his black male coun-

terpart received $71.51. The monthly salaries for white and black women

teachers were $99.96 and $51.08, respectively. Total school expenditure for

white schools was $8,262,903; for black schools, $643,701. Whites were more

numerous than blacks, but the lopsided funding indicates a pronounced

bias for whites.

Yet there were persons of good faith, such as State Superintendent of

Public Instruction W. S. Cawthon, who reported, “While our progress has

been slow [in funding education for blacks], still we are getting more defi-

nite and tangible results accomplished and under way.”15 No major edu-

cational changes were implemented by 1930, although improvements had

been made. The number of white and black teachers, their salaries, and the

physical plants where they taught reflected the existing Jim Crow society.

The average length of the school year for blacks was 132 days; for whites, it

was 160 days. In higher education, the state provided three public institu-

proof

tions: Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes and Florida

State College for Women, both at Tal ahassee, and the University of Florida,

for white males, at Gainesvil e. A number of private institutions existed,