Local independent bookstore. Beautiful downtown coral gables. Maybe not so beautiful tonight but if you dont like the weather in florida, wait five minutes. We appreciate you being here, if anyone has a cell phone thats ringing please put that on silent. Also dont forget to go to a webpage. We will send you emails about everything that goes on at this location and other locations. I dont know if you been to Coconut Grove recently but we have a new story there. Another one with mentioning done at the adrian arst center we have on january 26 at 6 30 p. M. Isabel allende will be joining us you can buy tickets online at the our center. Org. Any number of wonderful events you can visit us here we do farm to table dinners, podcasts with a lot of others with our owner and founder you can only do that by accessing the webpage. We are very happy to see Christopher Knowlton with us, bubble in the sun the florida boom of the 1920s and hook braid on the Great Depression. So its our fault, right. I thought there was Something Else about. Christopher knowlton is a former staff writer for fortune magazine. It is also spent 15 years in the investment business. His previous book was cattle kingdom the Hidden History of the cowboy west. Please give him a nice warm welcome, Christopher Knowlton. [applause] thank you. Good evening everybody. I really appreciate your time. It seems like just yesterday i was here researching the career of George Merrick the founder of coral gables and was for this book bubble in the sun. The book is about the florida in the roaring 20s, more specifically about the florida land boom which you may know was the greatest land boom in American History and that as it happens one of the most influential because of the role it played in the events that led up to the Great Depression. At the moment as a writer and specializing in writing about these unusual speculative frenzies. My previous book cattle kingdom published in 2017, about the open range cattle era after the civil war the cowboy era. I discovered that there was a really little more than an investment bubble. Instead of young men going out to california to join tech companies, they went out to colorado and wyoming and montana to become cowboys join cattle ranches. One of these was of course Teddy Roosevelt who was one of that books protagonists. When i began prospecting for sql to cattle kingdom i quickly hit on the florida land boom of the 1920s which was something i was familiar with, i grew up with grandparents on both coasts of florida, both of whom had lived in near the roaring 20s and i also had a grandfather who was a Real Estate Developer, a great grandfather who was a Real Estate Developer in westchester new york who lost everything in the Great Depression. Bubble in the sun looks like it will be the second of what is likely to be a trilogy and the third i think will be about the uranium boom in the 1950s, which was the last american gold rush. These frenzies make very good subjects for works of narrative nonfiction, which this is, because they have a natural builtin narrative arc. You have the emerging of the boom, which is in this case the building of the roads and the railroads had the arrival of key figures in florida in the years leading up to the boom. And you have giddiness of the frenzy itself, which could be described as one gigantic party. That of course is followed by the pain and tragedy of the best, which is the hangover. I think these are very american stories. As every generation lives through one or two such booms and busts and virtually everyone learns a few painful lessons from them. Its really part and parcel of living in a Free Enterprise system. Freemarket capitalism. But i like to think that there is a more serious aspect to what im doing i come to believe that we need not look under the proverbial hood of these frenzies to understand why they arose, what went wrong and who or what might be to blame. Because of the economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote regulation that outlaws financial incredulity or mass euphoria is not a practical possibility in other words, you cant legislate a way human gullibility. I think its up to books like these to explain how the events happen and hopefully teach people to be a little more careful with their investments and not be seduced by such speculative frenzies because they do keep occurring. These are cautionary tales. I soon discovered that they really hadnt been a definitive history of the florida land boom ever written a couple of short volumes but nothing i would describe as definitive. Nothing that would thoroughly research with endnotes and bibliography. They had really been very few histories of Real Estate Development or real estate speculation ever written. Thats odd given how many Great American fortunes in real estate and odd too given that real estate speculation dates back to the very earliest days of the republic. You could argue that Christopher Columbus was shopping for real estate for the spanish crown for example. In the story of John Jacob Astor expanding the first traded to manhattan real estate. I saw an obvious opportunity here and the more i looked into it the more fertile territory appeared. For one thing, it was obviously rich subject matter and a great chance to write about a fascinating period in American History. Because the 20s was an especially colorful decade. Here, for instance, is the Book Description of al capone. Six feet tall and weighing 240 pounds the gangster dressed immaculately when they went out on the town. Favoring a dark blue doublebreasted suit adorned with a white linen pocket square and a matching polkadot necktie he wore a gold diamond studded watch chain he had a habit of fiddling with and on one pinky finger 4 i diamond ring and a platinum setting. Frank j wilson the United States secret Service Agent who finally brought him down by convicting him for tax evasion recalled big al having dark eyes, thick lips, perfect teeth a big fluffy pot njt manicured nails. Specifically the building of the tamiami trail during that decade was cut off much of the water flow to the southern end with disastrous consequences for the wildlife and for the entire ecosystem. It was shortsighted from Economic Development standpoint to. That environmental story is an important component to this book because i firmly believe we can no longer separate economic wellbeing from environmental wellbeing. We are tied at the hip. British Prime MinisterMargaret Thatcher and unlikely spokesperson for the Environmental Movement put it best in address to the Royal Society some 30 years ago when she said and that quote the health of the economy and the health of our environment are totally dependent upon each other. The World Wildlife fund elaborated on this sentiment when it noted quote all Economic Activity depends on Services Provided by nature. Now in the book floridas aquifer is eviscerated in the name of progress and development. And yet later this day will be heavily dependent on the availability of that water. You dont get much more shortsighted than that. Once i got started on the research i realized how significant the decade of the 20s was to American History as a whole and i think its no exaggeration to say that it would e. A decade to define contemporary america its popular culture, its norms and its preoccupations. For example this is the decade when we became primarily a middleclass society and the consumer driven society are lies configured around the automobile and mass media for the first time. Initially of course it was radio and television was soon to follow. Predominantly urban and suburban and our focus for the first time but definitely deeply divided between urban and rural. This is the decade when we also became sports reduce the rise of the nfl the first time as well as professional golf and tennis and to a similar extent id say we became sex obsessed for the first time at least overtly with young nubile women appearing half clad advertisements as never before and i tell the story in the book of carl fischer, the developer of miami beach using scantilyclad young girls as cheesecake any ads ran on no ports boards in times square to advertise miami beach. And also we became debt driven for the first time. This is the decade went home mortgages and installment credit to cold and that would have profound implications for what happened during the Great Depression. Interestingly we have never been able to shake that addiction to debt ever since. Most people will remain just as indebted coming out of the Great Depression as they were going in that is if they havent been wiped out like my greatgrandfather. And finally it would say that this is the age where business comes to the floor as the chief occupation and preoccupation of most americans. The next thing i discovered was that there were some wonderful characters to write about in particular the four Great Developers of the era who are remarkably compelling people. I mentioned carl fischer and miami beach you know about George Merrick here in corbel tables. Agnessa meisner and palm beach and boca raton and e. B. Davis who was in tampa and saint augustine. Now to give you a flavor for these men let me just read a quick description of just one which is carl fischer and again this is from the book. Carl Graham Fischer was born into a middleclass family in greensboro indiana 1874. The oldest of three boys he was born with a stigmatism so severe that he was barely able to read the black ward at school. He dropped out at age 12. Despite impaired eyesight he was an avid reader, gifted athlete in the way the best iceskater in indianapolis. He could also walk on stilts that stood the full story high, stand on his head, tie rope walk and a run most of his classmates running backwards. In fact one of his two wives would recall that he was nearly as nimble with his feet as with his hands. Squat and slope shouldered fisher would grow into a grinning loser in avid poker player and an unrepentant womanizer who peppers talk with profanity. He would chew tobacco, sometimes smoking a cigar at the same time after biting off and swelling the cigar tip. When he married his first wife jane in 1909 she was 24 and he was 35 but she was smitten. He was full speed. I found it so dazzling i could hardly look at him. Each of these developers would make a gigantic origin in the 1920s equivalent to 600 million to 1. 3 billion today. Then in thrall to their success losing every penny of it. Each of their stories is a reallife morality tale about greed and hubris and power much like the greek tragedies. There was a fourth towering figure to emerge from this era and thats the environmental is Marjory Stoneman douglas she would later go on to write the great oak on the everglades which you have probably heard of that was in 1947 when after years of devastation and drought the everglades were on fire. She serves in the book as a counterpoint to the developers and their shortsighted development activities. That ended of course a disaster. She is really the conscience of this book and she outlives the developers happily by 50 to 60 years living to be 108 and planning a president ial medal of honor. As i got deeper into the Actual Research of this book i began to suspect there was more to the story than met the eye, that economists and historians had overlooked the real significance of the bust because the first of the land boom was very likely the event that triggered the Great Depression. Just as it was real estate and not the stock market that triggered the Great Recession in 2008. So real estate, not the stock market, was the villain leading up to the 1930s. I dont want to oversimplify this and i try not to in the book but im cognizant of how complex our economy is and even was back then. And that there likely is not one single cause of the Great Depression. As they say in the book and i think this is true the collapse of the florida is what provided the dynamite and the detonator and thats even though there was a lag time of a couple of years between when Florida Real Estate collapsed and when the National Economy a cult collapsed. The same was true in 2008 by the way. Real estate started to roll over in late 2006. In florida and california. The stock market didnt decline until mid2008. It takes a while for a real estate collapsed to play out. So for me that was the final piece of the literary puzzle as far as i was concerned. I had what i needed for an engaging book and inherently interesting period of time a dramatic set of events, good characters and a novel theme which i think a book like this should have, really important if you will. That is the story behind the book the story of how it came to be written and in the broadest terms i would say the book is the story of the watershed decade where we as a nation went from mom and popism to mass marketing, from fiscal responsibility to a reliance on Consumer Debt and above all from rural naivete and innocence to urban maturity and sophistication as a nation although we had to go through the Great Depression to get there. So let me finish by just giving you an overview of florida in 1926 and see if this doesnt echo with you as you look at the country today and again im quoting from the book here. In many ways the florida of the 1920s was a precursor of america 100 years later. In florida then as in the United States at the moment to affluent coasts were separated by an impoverished and largely agricultural interior. In equitable wealth distribution, intolerance, xenophobia and rising nationalism, the kkk being the most blatant back then. These were combined with a dangerous overreliance on laissezfaire economics and a government structure where bankers and Business People wielded an inordinate influence on policy. To complete the analogy the Political Leadership of the day displayed profound indifference to the fate of the environment and to societys less fortunate. Now i find these parallels are uncanny and in the book i remind the reader that it didnt end well back then and that today the risk of history repeating israel. So yes the 20s was a glamorous prosperous fun decade full of sports stars, celebrities, starlets but it was also a list disrupt the money scandalridden and polarized decade. In short, an era remarkably similar to the one we are living through today. So i thank you for listening. I hope youve read and enjoyed the book and im happy to take any questions. [applause] i read something and id like to ask a question and you are the person to provide the answer. I read that in 1920 Land Developers attached oranges to mangroves and marketed them as orange groves. Is that true or is it just a story . I couldnt verify that. Its seemed rather apocryphal to me. The kind of thing that was possible, lets put it that way. Its so im curious how do we think we should tell the story of george merris today . Im glad you asked that question. I wont comment about George Merrick. At first i was very impressed to what merrick had accomplished here. I have to admit that it came up something of a shock to me that he was not as he was reported to be and i dont know if any of you know this but on the night that a his business started to collapse in the 1920s out of desperation and what he did was he unloaded properties onto the new city of coral gables. At the same time you leverage the city up in order to purchase those properties. He later defaulted on them or the city defaulted on them. He got away with it. He got away with it to he had the help of the statute of limitations when the real estate collapsed in florida collapsed early and there were such a backlog of lawsuits they didnt get to it. He was investigated and i think they shamed him a little bit but it was brushed under the covers. Thats the way things have been swept under the carpet of time and i think you can understand why. A failed real estate [inaudible] but i think the truth comes out in the end and the story is told in this book and you might find it interesting. Anyone else . Thats great. I will be here to sign copies and happy to chat or answer questions as they do so. Thank you again. [applause] we do have copies of the book for sale out there. [applause] as i talked about the Second Bush Administration i need to debunk another big myth one which is commonly held by all kinds of people which is the cheney change. Cheney was this nice moderate guy in the Ford Administration and works well inside, while he did work well but he was a nice moderate guy in the george h. W. Bush administration. And this is not just kind of street myth raid this was a myth propagated by people like Brent Scowcroft and at rack for years. He sa