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In the broad context of the great speculative booms of history, we give special attention to the Florida land boom 1915 to 1925. I first became aware of the Florida boom during my childhood visits from Alabama, and later from early post-World War II observations of infrastructure and uncompleted 1920s developments which still lingered in the late 1940s.
Along the way to encountered asides to the Florida boom in books on the stock market crash of 1929, I gained considerable background in monetary and speculative matters. This included graduate study at Columbia University, work at Federal Reserve Banks, later study of the Bank of England and the Deutsche Bundesbank, and research for numerous books.
Having completed my Power and Ideas project in 1988, I started to inquire about sources of data and other details which would indicate the feasibility of the present work. At this time John Guthrie, then a graduate student in history, joined me to assist in an archival search that we began in earnest during the summer of 1988.
And, to be sure, it revealed better, unanalyzed data than I had been led to expect. It also revealed considerable misunderstanding of boom phenomena and banks among those who had attempted some overall assessments of Florida in the 1920s, and excessive reliance upon a two-part article in economics which was written in 1927.
The Florida Land Boom is in part about phenomena shared by the great booms since John Law's eighteenth century venture in Paris which extended to the land drained by the Mississippi River. It focuses upon Florida, where land speculation reached dazzling heights in the decade 1915 to 1925. Also, the work takes up features of the more ordinary phases of business conditions of the sort delineated by Milton Friedman and the Friedman connected National Bureau of Economic Research. Moreover, there are unique and non-repetitive factors, as in the Monetary History of The United States ( Friedman and Schwartz 1963), that appear especially in Florida in the era of its boom-time splendor.
The conditions begin most immediately with the onset of World War I, when the military presence in Florida burgeoned while America's industrial engendered "leisure class" began looking more to the United States than to Europe for a place in the sun. Over the course of the war, traffic on Florida's East Coast Railway and growth in bank reserves accelerated. Although the emerging boom subsided briefly during the national recession of 1920-1921, it reached feverish proportions in 1924 and 1925.
Only a few other writers have indicated this dating, which appears rather clearly in the data we present. Florida activist and environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas hints at the timing when she recalls her view of Miami in September of 1915 and then notes the dramatic change she saw upon returning from Europe in 1920. Douglas also mentioned "men who'd come back from the war, men who remembered how delightful it was down here in training camps."
Miami had in fact doubled in size and that, Douglas said, "was just the beginning of the energy that culminated in the great boom" . A later writer is a bit more direct. "The seeds of the great Florida land boom," Gene M. Burnett claims, "were probably planted earlier in the World War I era when Pres-o-lite millionaire Carl Fisher dredged up the golden sandbar, Miami Beach".