Transcripts For CSPAN2 Christopher Knowlton Bubble In The Su

CSPAN2 Christopher Knowlton Bubble In The Sun July 13, 2024

Maybe not so beautiful tonight but if you dont lie we can in florida, wait five minutes. If anybody has a cellphone if you could put that in silence. We would appreciate it good tower webs, book book. Com. Give yours email address and well send you emails. I dont know if you have been down to Coconut Grove but we have a new story there we do events there as well. Another one worth mentioning at the adrian arts center we have on january 26th at 6 30, isabella yende and any number of wonderful events visit us here. We do farm to table dinners and podcasts with authors with our owner and founder so tune into that but only do that by accessing the web page. Were very with a to see with us mr. Christopher knowlton and bubble in the sun, the florida boom of the 1920s, and how it brought on the Great Depression. So its our fault, right . Okay. I thought there something Something Else involved. He is a former staff writer and lon down bureau chief no fort moon and spent 15 years in investment business. Give him a nice warm welcome, christopher knowlton. [applause] thank you, steve moss, he appreciate that. Good evening, everybody. Really appreciate your coming. Its nice to be back in coral gables. Seems like just yelled i was here researching the career of georgemer rick, the founder of girl gables gable coral gabl. The book is about the florida in the roaring 20s. More specifically, its about the florida land boom, which as you may know was the greatest land boom in American History, and as it happens, one of the most impactful because of the role it played in the events that led up to the Great Depression. At the moment, as a writer, im specializing in writing about these unusual speculative frenzies. My previous book, cattle kingdom, published in 2017, was about the open range cattle era after the civil war. Thats the cowboy era. And i discovered that it was really little more than an investment bubble, a lot like the do dotcom bubble of the 1990s instead of young enemy going to california to join tech companies, they went out to colorado and wyoming and montana to become cowboys. And join cattle ranches. And one of those was of course teddy roosevelt, who was one of that books protagonisms. When i back prospect fargo sequel to cattle kingdom, i quickly hit on the florida land boom of the 1920s, which was something i was familiar with. I grew up withgrandparents on both coasts of florida, both of whom had lived through the roaring 20s, and i also had a grandfather who was a Real Estate Developer greatgrandfather, a Real Estate Developer in westchester new york who loss everything in the Great Depression. So the subject matter spoke to me. And bubble in the sun i the second in what is likely to be a trilogy and a third will be about the uranium boom in the 1950s. The last american gold rush. So these frenzies make very good subjects for works of narrative nonfiction, which this is, because they have a natural builtin narrative arc. You have to emerging of the boom, which is in this case the building of the roads and the railroads and the arrival of the key figures in florida and the years leading up to the boom, and you have the giddiness of the frenzy itself. Which could be described as one gigantic party, and that of course is followed by the pain and tragedy of the bust; which is the hangover. I think theser very american stories. Every generation lives through one or two such booms and busts and everybody launches a few painful lessons from them. Really part and parcel of living in a Free Enterprise system with free market capitalism. But i like to think theres a more serious aspect to what im doing. Ive come to believe that we need to look under the proverbial hood of these frenzies to better understand why they arose, what went wrong, and who or what might be to blame because as the economist, John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote, quote, regulation that outlaws financial indecreed duality or mass euphoria is not a practical possibility. In other words, you cant legislateway human gullibility. So i think its up to books like these to explain how these events happened and hopefully to teach people to be a little more careful with their investments and not to be seduced by such speculative frenzies because they keep okeiring. These are cautionary tales. I soon discovered that there really hadnt been a definitive history of the florida land boom ever written. A couple of short volumes, but nothing that i would describe as definitive, nothing with thoroughly researched with end notes and a bib bib log grapha. There are very few histories of Real Estate Development orange real estate speculation ever written. And thats odd begin how many Great American fortunes have been made in real estate. I think odd, too given that real estate speculation dates back to the very earliest days of the republic. You can argue that Christopher Columbus was shopping for real estate for the spanish crown, for example, and the store of john jacob as store, expanding the fur trade into manhattan real estate. Saw an obvious opportunity here, and the more i looked into it, more fertile the territory began to appear. For one thing, it was obviously rich subject matter and a great chance could toe write to write about a fascinating period in American History because the 20s was an especially colorful decade, replete with jazz, flappers, prohibition, rum running, al capone, babe approval, radios, all of which i touch on in the book. This is the book resident description of al capone. Six feet tall and weighing 240pounds, the gangster drovessed immaccutely when he went out on the town. Favoring a dark blue, double breasted suit with a white linen pocket square and a matching polka dot necktie. Wore a gold and diamond studded watch chain and on one pitchingie finger four car carat ring. He one man a below as having dark id, thick lips, perfect teeth, big flabby paw and tainty man cured nails, unquote. Six inch scar from a knife fight in a bar ran down his left cheek. When the mobster pulled out a civic hap hinderer chef, will son got a whiff of his clone. Lily of the valley. Back to the conceiving of the book. It was yet another angle to this story, and as with my first book, cattle kingdom, there was an environmental story to be told. What happens standarding in he 1920s, to the everglades. Floridas primary aquifer. I dont need to tell you. Specifically the building of the tam tamiami caught the water flow to the southern evergrade with disastrous consequences for the wildlife and for the entire ecosystem. It was shortsight from an Economic Development statement standpoint, too. And that environmental story is an important component of this book because i firmly believe we knock longer separate economic wellbeing from environmental wellbeing. Theyre tied at the hip. British Prime Minister margaret thatcher, an unlikely spokesperson person for the environmental movement, may have put it best in andres the toe the royal sew an address to the Royal Society 30 years own when she said, and i quote, the health of the economy and the health of our environment are totally dependent upon each other. The World Wildlife fund elaborate when it noticed, quote, all Economic Activity depends on Services Provided by nature. In the book, florida razz aquifer is eviscerated in the name of progress and development. And yet later, a state will be heavily dependent on the availability of that water. You dont get much more shortsighted than that. Then once i got started on the research, i realized how significant the decade of the 20s was to American History as a whole. I think its no exaggeration to say that it was the decade that defined contemporary america, its popular culture, its norms and its preoccupations. For example, this is the decade when we became primarily a middle Class Society and a consumer driven society, our lives configured around the automobile and mass media for the first time. Initially of course it was radio but television was soon to follow. Predominantly urban and suburban in our focus for the first time. But definitely and deeply divided between urban and rural. This is the decade when we also became sports obsessed. You saw the rise of the nfl, for the first time can 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, new bil eh women appearing half clad and i tell the story of carl fisher, the developer of miami beach, using scantily clad young girls as cheesecake in the ads he ran on billboards in times square to advertise miami beach. And also we game debt driven for the first time. This is the decade when home mortgages and installment credit took hold. That would have profound implications for what happened during the Great Depression. And interestingly we have never been able to shake that addiction to debt ever since. Most people remained just as indebt coming out of the Great Depression as they were going in. That is, if they hadnt been wiped out like my greatgrandfather. And finally i would say that this is the age where business comes to the fore as the chief preoccupation of most americans. Next thing i discovered was that there were some wonderful characters to write pout. In particular the four great developerred of the era who are remarkably compelling people. I mentioned carl fisher at miami beach. You know about george marry wreck,ed a dissign at palm beach and coca rat don and dp davis in tampa and st. Augustine. To give you a flavor for these men, let me just read a quick description of unwhich is carl fisher and again this is from the book. Carl fisher was born into a middle class family in greensboro, indian in 1874. The oldest of three bodies, born with a stigma tim so severe he was baseballly able to read the blackboard at school. He dropped out at age 12. Despite impaired eyesight he was an avid reader, a gift athlete, and a gleeful showoff. The best ice skater in indianapolis, he could also walk on stilts that stood a full story high, stand on his head, tightrope walk and outrun most of his classmates rung backwards running backwards. One of his two wifes would recall he was nearly as nimble with hills feet as with his hands. Squat and slope shouldered, fisher would grow into a dimpled grinning boozer, avid poker player and unrepentant womanizer who peppered his talk with profanity. He chewed to tow back co, sometimes smoking a cigar at the same time after biting off swallowing the cigars tip. When he married his first wife, jane, in 1909 she was 24 and he was 35. But she was smitten. He was all speed, i found him so dazzling could hardly look at him. Each of these developers would make a gigantic fortune in the 1920s, equivalent to 600 million to 1. 3 billion today. And then enthralled to their success good on to lose every penny of it. Each of their stories is a real life morality tale about greed and hubris and power, much like greek tragedies. There was a fourth towering figure to emerge and theft the environmentalist, Marjory Stoneman douglas and would write a great book on the evergrades in 1947. When after years of devastation and drought, he everglades were on fire. And she serves in the book as a counterpoint to the developers and their shortsighted development activities. That ended of course in disaster. And she is really the conscience of this book. She outlives the developers, happily by 50 to 60 years. Living to be 108, and winning 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 boom or i really should say the bust, because the bursting 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. Now, ei dont want to oversimplify this and try not do in the book because im cognizant how complex our economy is, and even was back then. And that there likely is not one single cause of the Great Depression. But as i say in the book and i think this is true, the collapse of the florida boom 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 collapsed. The same was true in 2008, by the way. Real estate started to roll over in late 2006, and florida and california stock market didnt decline until mid2008. Because it takes a while for real estate collapse 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 to make a engaging book, and inherently interesting period of time, a dramatic set of events, good characters, and a novel theme which i think a pack like this should have. Really an argument, if you will. So that is the story behind the conception of 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 populism to mass marketing, from fiscal responsibility to a relians 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 let me just finish by giving you an overview of florida in 1926 and see if this doesnt echo with you as you look at the country today. Again, im quoting from the book here. In many ways the florida of the 1920s was to precursor of america 100 years later. In florida then as in the United States at the moment, two affluent coasts were separate by an impoverished and largely gregal entire. Inequitable wealth distribution, racial intolerance, seen grebe and rising nationalism, the kkk being the most blatant manifestation back then. These were combined with a dangerous overreliance on laissezfaire economics and governans structure where bankers and Business People wielded 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 uncanny and in the book i remind the reader it didnt end well back then. And that today the risk of history repeating is real. So, yes, the 20s was a glamorous, prosperous, fun decade, full of sports stars, celebrities, starlets, but it was also a reckless disruptive, money obsessed, scandalridden, and polarized decade, too. In short, an era, a by similar to the one were living through today. So i thank you for listening. I hope you read and enjoy the book. And im happy to take any questions. [applause] i read something rather i read that in the 1920s, unscrupulous Land Developers attached oranges to manage grove trees and marketed them as orange groves. Is that true or is there just a story. I heard the same story and i couldnt verify that. I would love to use the anecdote but i couldnt verify. The kind of thing that was possible. Lets put it that way. How do you think you would tell the story of george merrick. At first i was. Pressed what your founder accomplished here in coral gables and and i have to admit it came as something of a shock to me that he was not all he was purported to be, and i dont know how many of you know this but while he night have been a bona fide crook, when his business started to collapse in the 1920s, he it was out of desperation and what he did was he unloaded properties that he owned on to the new city of coral gables at high prices and at the same time he leveraged the city up with municipal debt in order to purchase those properties, that he later defaulted on or the city defaulted on and wasnt paid off until 1961 and got away with it because of some good lawyering and help of the statute of limitations because when real estate collapsed in florida, it collapsed everywhere, and it was such a bag backlog of lawsuit theyd didnt get to him. I think the shamed him a little bit but it was brushed under the covers. The irony is they went bust anyway. But thats the way things have been swept under the carpet of time and you can understand why. Who wants their founder to be a failed Real Estate Developer guilty of criminal actsespecially in this day and age. I think the truth came out in the en. And the story is told in this book and you might find it interesting. Anyone else . Thats great. I will be their sign copies and happy to chat or answer questions as die as i do so. Thank you again. [applause] thanks everybody. We have copies of the book for sale out there. Just ask that you buy four or five copies apiece. Thing to coronavirus impacts the country heres what the Publishing Industry is doing address the ongoing pandemic. Sever book Stores Including city lights in San Francisco si have asked for donations through the website go fund me. The stores raised to date 450,000 and 100,000 respectively. Book stores around the country continue to provide Remote Services for their customers through online sales and virtual awe their e, anne patchette described h. E. R. Book store has tried to adapt, saying we make our plans, we change our plans, we mike plans, this is the new world order. And Publi

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