Nature in mass marketing of Miami

E.P. Thompson viewed religion as a weapon used by employers to discipline the working classes. But in Miami during the early decades of the twentieth century, mass consumption was sometimes conflated with the supernatural.

For instance, Sunday school picnics featuring William Jennings Bryan helped to attract thousands of Southern Baptists to the “Magic City.” Bryan’s Bible-thumping oratorical powers could reportedly “paint a word picture that had buyers seeking lots in great stampedes.” He was so unrepentantly effusive in his descriptions of South Florida that he boasted that Miami was “the only city in the world” where a person could “tell a lie at breakfast” that would “come true by evening.”

He attributed Miami's supernatural qualities and real estate values not to boosterism or seductive advertising, but rather to the fact that Miami had a superabundance of “what the people must have… God's sunshine.” South Florida was, in short, often depicted by the likes of Bryan and myriad ads as a supernatural site of social transcendence.

Note how this postcard of William Jennings Bryan (at left) delivering a Sunday afternoon sermon in the bandshell on the lawn of Henry Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel exhibits an overwhelming majority of men in the audience who seem to holistically blend into the swaying palm trees adjacent to the bandshell. Especially note the drab clothing, colors, and modesty of men in contrast to the depiction of women in chapter four of this study. This is one of the few images marketing Miami that depict white men (who tend to personify urbanity) as one with nature. Women are most often depicted as synonymous with nature. Pictorial Centre Publishing, Image Courtesy of Florida International University Digital Collection, vintage postcard collection, circa 1910 – 1923, Image number FI05112117.

Before Miami’s incorporation in 1896, the area around Biscayne Bay was a tiny village adjacent to Fort Dallas, which was built by the federal government during the Second Seminole War in 1836, and was used primarily as a supply station and refuge.

A half-century later, the frontier was largely unchanged by human hands. In 1882, for example, a newspaper editor described South Florida as “a region mysterious, unknown, beautiful — a terra incognita — of which as little is known as the center of the Dark Continent (Africa).” In 1889, adventurer James Davidson published his “Guide for Florida Tourists and Settlers,” in which he likewise described South Florida as a place where “there can be nothing but insects, vermin, mud, malaria, Indians, desolation, abomination, discomfort, disease, black death, and poverty where nothing will grow but comptie and mangroves, and where nobody lives.”

A year later, the United States census recorded fewer than 400,000 people in all of Florida and no more than 2,400 on the peninsula south of Lake Okeechobee. In 1892, a tourist guide described Dade County as a “wild and uninhabitable district, in the main inaccessible to the ordinary tourist, and unopened to the average settler.” As late as 1894, when the Florida East Coast Railway first steamed into West Palm Beach, 70-miles north of what would later become Miami, Fort Dallas served primarily as a trading post for Seminole Indians and the Brickell family, who lived on the south bank of the Miami River.

But from 1896 through the 1920s, Miami was seemingly miraculously carved from wilderness and integrated into the modern American commercial empire and economy through massive public works projects, such as the making of the Port of Miami, and the manufacturing of real estate markets around railways, canals, and roads leading in and out of South Florida.

The development of travel technology together with communication technology such as the ads examined in this study synergistically facilitated the transformation of Miami from frontier to a tourism and real estate Mecca, which ultimately laid the foundation for a new urban and consumerist order in South Florida’s soil and identity, which was sometimes depicted in ads to be preternatural, which helped shape Miami’s image as the “Magic City.”

This brochure, which advertises hotels along Florida’s east coast, has a caption at the bottom center of the page that reads, “The East Coast of Florida is Paradise Regained,” which especially demonstrates that Florida was being defined as a preternatural place in mass marketing. Note how a kind of divine light is bringing the east coast of Florida, much of which was frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, into the light of capitalism. The notion of “paradise regained,” which was often used to market Florida’s east coast in the early decades of the twentieth century, speaks to the notion of paradise lost associated with the urbanization of cities such as New York, Chicago, and Cleveland. Also note how Cuba, Miami, and other southern cities are made into a transnational tourism market linking the New South with the Caribbean at the very moment the U.S. was emerging as a global commercial empire. Florida East Coast Railway and Hotels, 1902, Florida Historical Society Archive, Cocoa, Florida, PAM Collection, box 12, folder 4.

Note the locomotive piercing the frontier at the center, surrounded by luxury hotels (property values). Also note the synergy between the commodification of nature, agriculture, and vacationing with the train, which is a symbol of urbanization, industrialization, and modernity. “Florida East Coast Railway and Hotels,” 1902, Florida Historical Society Archive, Cocoa, Florida, PAM Collection, box 12, folder 6.

Note the iconic News Tower (at top right of the postcard) and the smoke stacks of factories (at top left). This postcard is particularly instructive because it depicts Miami as a natural wonder yet also industrialized. The image, in fact, speaks to the centrality of mythology to early marketing of Miami, considering Miami had no smokestacks to match South Florida’s superabundance of nature. Miami’s urban-industrial development was fostered by consumerism rather than the kind of industrial production associated with smoking chimneys of factories in places like New York, Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago. “The Causeway connecting Miami and Miami Beach, Florida” postcard (J.N. Chamberlain and Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation, Miami Beach, Fla., 1926); aerial view of the causeway looking west, Historical Association of South Florida, Stan Cooper Collection, 1870 to 1938; series 4, subseries 1: postcards, box 1, folder: “Miami Beach.”

Even when marketers of Miami sought to establish the city as a growing metropolis, nature was a central aspect of ads. This postcard does a particularly good job of illuminating how Miami was a concocted spectacle as much as a city. Here, the city’s skyline is depicted as an impressionistic (nineteenth-century French movement) painting, juxtaposing skyscrapers with sailboats. Impressionism was, in part, a commodification of nostalgia for a nature that seemed to be disappearing due to industrialism and urbanization. Miami was, conversely, depicted as a suburban oasis. “Skyscraper hotels on Miami's waterfront - Miami, Florida,” (Gulf Stream Card & Distribution Co., 1920s, Miami), postcard collection, folder: Miami, Florida State Archives, Tallahassee, Florida.

Miami’s growth, development, and very existence was product of the Gilded Age/Progressive Era — a time when cities were increasingly constructed around notions of profits and social progress. But the Progressive Era is also somewhat paradoxically associated with an admiration for nature, which seemed to be vanishing as a result of the rapacious nature of Gilded Age capitalism, most notably the exploitation associated with industrialization and urbanization.

The Progressive Era helped foster the establishment of the National Park System (1916), which was designed to protect the wilderness from the rampant exploitation of nature associated with the Gilded Age. Marketers of Miami ironically cashed in on the preservation craze deeply associated with anxiety towards industrialization and urbanization to industrialize and urbanize South Florida.

Commercial entrepreneurs in South Florida, and throughout the New South during the Progressive Era, much like the industrialists in William Cronon’s Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great Midwest, often saw the world in terms of markets, commodities, profit margins, investments, debts, and efficiency. As such, a natural resource particularly vital and valuable in South Florida was millions of square miles of undeveloped property, lots of which lay in swampland.

Real estate developers throughout South Florida — most notably Henry Flagler — quietly acquired options on huge expanses of land surrounding their prospective ventures, incorporated land and development companies, sold stock to raise money to purchase optioned land, advertised their burgeoning enterprises, and staked out imaginary streets, carving land into potential profits.

Ads conspicuously depicting South Florida as a natural oasis ripe for exploitation were ultimately meant to imbue value in the region’s burgeoning real estate industry, which was made possible by travel technology (such as Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway) and communication technology (such as the primary sources examined in this study).

The Progressive Era, which rail and real estate baron Henry Flagler and northern industrialists precipitated, and of which Populists such as William Jennings Bryan and also Florida Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward (1905 – 1909) were likewise products of, was partly defined by notions that society could be holistically transformed to, like a corporation, work as efficiently as possible.

The Pensacola Journal, for instance, supported government intervention in reclamation of the Everglades because “tens of millions of acres of the most fertile lands imaginable” would be transformed “from dismal and pestilential swamps and useless bogs” into highly prosperous homes, to become the “garden spots of the nation.” Populists such as Broward, who hoped to attract disgruntled northern factory workers to farms in Florida, likewise believed that taming the Everglades for yeoman could potentially offset the travails commonly associated with urbanization and industrialization.

There were even popular tunes written in the interest of exploiting South Florida swamps with choruses such as “Down in the Everglades, I’ve got a little love for you,” that helped transform the idea of South Florida from frontier wasteland into “black gold” and respite from the social despair and degradation commonly associated with northern cities during the Progressive Era.

Modern mass marketing and pop culture, including songs such as this, helped to rebrand the Everglades from pestilential wilderness to “black gold” waiting to be exploited by intrepid yeoman. “Down in the Everglade,” Van Alstyne Egbert, 1906, New York City, Duke University Special Collections, Sheet Music Collection, 1900 – 1909.

What was originally seen to be a detriment — the fact that Miami was a frontier and very difficult to get to by land and sea — was often commonly depicted to be by early advertisers of South Florida as what actually made the region such an attractive destination compared to soul stealing factory work and tenement housing commonly associated with cities such as New York City, Chicago, Cleveland, and Boston.

The mass marketing of Miami through the 1920s, in fact, betrays American anxiety regarding the vanishing of nature and the changing of the nation’s collective identity from rural and agrarian to urban and consumerist as a result of rapid industrialization and immigration. It is therefore not as ironic as it might initially seem that Miami’s urbanization was, in part, the result of its image as a natural utopia, anecdote to and antithesis of northern urbanization.

Ads such as those depicting Miami as a natural wonder and oasis from the perceived social despair and degradation associated with life in urban-industrial centers throughout the Atlantic World paid quick dividends. By October of 1911 — just fifteen years after Miami’s incorporation — The Metropolis, Miami’s most popular newspaper at the time, reported that Miami’s suburbs, which were wedged against the Everglades and Atlantic Ocean, were booming with new construction.

And the more ads depicted South Florida as virgin nature aching for exploitation, the more people actually arrived. And the more people arrived, the more value South Florida real estate markets actually had. Image, in other words, helped define the reality of Miami’s urbanization.

By-and-by, despite how underdeveloped, remote, and dangerous the frontier of South Florida remained into the second decade of the twentieth century, Miami was, in fact, emerging into something akin to the real estate market and world-renowned resort city venture capitalists such as Henry Flagler had only dared to dream of a generation earlier.