Sample Essay
On
the topic, “why did the Miami Boom of 1925-1926 collapse?”
The
collapse of the Great Miami Boom of 1925-1926, like most complicated historical
events, cannot be reduced to a single cause. Indeed, several factors, including
bad publicity, the arrival of the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, and a growing
sense of unease by the end of 1925, all contributed to the boom’s demise.
Still, although only one of many factors, the increasing sense of anxiety about
Miami’s future that plagued the town by late 1925 probably did the most to undo
Miami’s boom time prosperity.
There
can be no doubt that a spike of bad publicity in late 1925 played a role in
dooming the boom. By 1925, northern business leaders were becoming increasingly
concerned by the flood of money washing south into Florida real estate ventures, and the
northern press began to give voice to those fears. One newspaper editorialist,
for example, warned its readers in 1925 that “the boom has reached such
tremendous proportions that a terrific crash is inevitable.”1 Although
difficult to prove, bad press of this sort must have encouraged people to
invest their money outside of Miami,
thus depriving the boom of the cash it needed to survive.
The
Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 played an important role as well. In all, over
300 people died in the storm, and when city officials tallied up the damage
done to property during the storm, they were shocked to find that the repair
bill was equal to half the value of the city’s real estate. Worse yet, the
Great Miami Hurricane shattered the myth of pleasant tropical weather that the
city of Miami
had tried to cultivate. So did the hurricane kill the boom? Perhaps not:
according to Miami historian Kenneth Ballinger, the boom was already over by
the time the 1926 hurricane blew through Miami, undermining the argument that
the boom’s end can be linked to the 1926 storm. At the most, Ballinger argues,
the 1926 storm extinguished the embers of a fire that had already ceased to
burn.2
In
all, the most compelling explanation for the end of the boom was the growing
sense of unease that started in late 1925. The Miami Boom functioned much like
a pyramid scheme- as long as Miami
real estate agents found more and more investors willing to pay ever higher
prices for land, the people higher in the pyramid made millions. Over time,
however, the price of land rose to ridiculous levels, convincing many that the
boom could not possibly be sustained. What is more, the scale of proposed Miami building projects
began to grow absurd. One land developer went so far as to advocate digging out
all of Biscayne Bay and using the dredged material to construct a chain of
islands that would have stretched several miles into the Atlantic Ocean, each
topped with a hotel, palace, or casino built on a fantastic scale.3
In the face of such outlandish projects and such inflated land prices, would-be
investors into Miami became more cautious and more skeptical. The resulting
drop in land sales caused the pyramid of the boom to collapse.
Thus,
while bad press and bad weather may have helped matters along, the growing
skepticism of would-be investors played the central role in the demise of the
Great Miami Boom.
1Frank B. Sessa, “Anti-Florida Propaganda and Counter-Measures During
the 1920’s” Tequesta (1961), pp. 43-44
2Kenneth Ballinger, Miami Millions: the Dance of the Dollars in the Great Florida
Land Boom of 1925
(Miami, FL: Franklin Press, 1936), p. 6
3Benjamin Reilly, Tropical
Surge: A History of Ambition and Disaster on the Florida
Shore (Sarasota, FL:
Pineapple Press, 2005), p. 111