Last Train to Paradise (6 page)

7

The Stage Is Set

As early as 1891, during that fateful conversation on the grounds of his rival’s hotel in Tampa, Flagler had insisted to Jefferson Browne, then president of the Florida state senate, that there was merit in building a rail line to Key West, especially if the Panama Canal were ever to become a reality. Flagler’s ensuing efforts to wrest the charter away from the groups who had already laid claim to the notion were more likely the actions of a good businessman who likes to keep his options open than a signal of immediate intent to build, but the culmination of the Spanish-American War reawakened interest in the matter.

In the treaty that concluded the war, Spain agreed to give up its authority over Cuba, virtually assuring that United States interests would prevail there, a point not lost on future historians who would speculate that the scuttling of the
Maine
was an inside job, the result of a conspiracy between the U.S. government and nefarious business interests.

Whether such claims are true or not, it is certain that then-president William McKinley, elected over populist candidate William Jennings Bryan, was no foe of business. McKinley had in fact accepted an invitation from Flagler the previous year to visit the railroad baron in what he called “my domain,” by which Flagler meant all of east-coast Florida, from Jacksonville to Miami.

Flagler, whose stated motivations never wavered from glowing predictions of profit, had nonetheless achieved the reputation of a fearless, frontier-busting visionary. As a report written by H. S. Duval for the Florida Internal Improvement Fund Trustees predicted, “It does not appear where the final terminus of this road is to be, but no doubt when the great capitalist learns that the Florida Keys are islands enclosed in a harbor made by natural submerged breakwater . . . and are therefore not really exposed to the violence of the outer sea . . . he may rise in a culminating spirit of enterprise and moor Key West to the mainland.”

With his railroad extended very nearly to the southern tip of Florida and Miami already growing into a city, it is inarguable that Flagler had reached another plateau of accomplishment in 1898. He was sixty-eight years old, and while his investments in Florida had not prospered to the degree that those in the oil business had, he was still one of the most wealthy and influential men in the United States. Despite his familiar jest—“I would have been a rich man if it hadn’t been for Florida”—he could have chosen that moment to retire and live out his years in luxury, basking all the while in the gratitude of an entire state citizenry, most of whom saw him as their champion.

But Flagler was not about to quit, not when he had come so close to the accomplishment of a goal that only a decade before had been dismissed as utter fancy. Flagler might have been in the twilight of his years, but he had spent less than a score of those years in the business of building railroads and creating cities.

Even in his late sixties, he was still a vigorous and powerful man, the white knight of an entire state of the union. He had spent considerable time and effort on the development of a deep-water port at Miami, but had encountered government resistance and had given up on that project.

He had great wealth and technical expertise at his disposal, and laid before him was an engineering task that had galvanized the minds of every professional in his field, even as its magnitude sobered the more practical-minded. As has been mentioned, it was a time in history when men were tempted no longer to regard themselves as at the mercy of the fates, but as masters of their environment. Even if such thinking would eventually prove as illusory as the philosophies that had preceded it, Flagler had no way of foreseeing it at the time.

To think of young rocket scientists at the middle of the twentieth century, staring up at the moon, equally inspired and awed at the prospect of someday reaching that destination, is not unlike a similar conjuring: a railroad engineer, fifty years before, stares out over the Straits of Florida toward Key West, filled with the same sense of wild surmise.

As Jefferson Browne wrote: “The hopes of the people of Key West are centered in Henry M. Flagler, whose financial genius and public spirit have opened up three hundred miles of the beautiful east coast of the state.”

Besides, Flagler now had his practical excuse. With Spain out of Cuba, there would be an increased opportunity for U.S. concerns to forge more extensive business arrangements in that new nation.

Flagler himself had visited the island on several occasions, and had purchased shares in several Cuban railroads. Furthermore, with Spain dislodged from the Caribbean, the last real political obstacle to the eventual building of the Panama Canal had been removed.

Flagler was confident that with Spain no longer there to meddle, trade with Cuba and other Caribbean nations would soon explode, and that a deep-water port in Key West would not only be its logical staging point, but would also become a necessary stopping-off place for the enormous amount of shipping traffic plying the new canal route.

In contrast to his other terminal destinations, Key West was no undiscovered hamlet. With more than twenty thousand residents, it was the largest city in Florida at the time, and had been for more than fifty years. In the 1850s, U.S. Senator Stephen S. Mallory had dubbed it “America’s Gibraltar,” referring to its strategic location at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico, and the island city had a well-developed economy based on its status as a naval port and fueling station, as well as upon cigar-making, fishing, sponge diving, shipbuilding, and salvage.

Even if the practical issues involved in linking the island to the mainland by rail were daunting, the benefits to be gained by actually doing so seemed clear-cut. Flagler would become a dominant presence in what was then a major commercial center. His new rail project would serve not merely to connect one pleasure palace to the next, but to forge economic links between the United States and virtually all other nations.

Some have theorized that Flagler was motivated in this final undertaking by an underlying feeling of inferiority to his former partner, John D. Rockefeller. Because the latter had continued his close association with the workings of the company the two had founded, Standard Oil came to seem more Rockefeller than Flagler in origin. Others have theorized that all of Flagler’s Florida undertakings were the result of a desire to “show off” for his new young bride, Ida Alice, even though most of what he accomplished there occurred after she had begun to lose touch with reality.

Still others speculate that it was the need to impress a third Flagler spouse, one Mary Lily Kenan, a woman he had first met in 1891, at one of the many social occasions arranged by Ida Alice during the early, halcyon days in St. Augustine. As Ida Alice’s condition worsened over the course of the decade, it did not escape the attention of those close to the situation that one of the world’s wealthiest men was spending an unusual amount of time in the company of his niece, Elizabeth Ashley, and her purported traveling companion, Mary Lily.

By the time Ida Alice was institutionalized for good, in 1897, the affair was a matter of speculation in gossip columns of the day, and Flagler, feeling pressure from Mary Lily’s family as well as from the public, decided to make an honest woman of her. There was one obstacle, however: Flagler was still a married man.

In typical fashion, Flagler went immediately to work on the problem. In 1899, three weeks after proposing to Mary Lily, Flagler announced that he was moving his legal residence from New York to Florida. He allowed another two months to pass, and then petitioned the Supreme Court of New York that Ida Alice Flagler be certified insane and thus incompetent, a matter that could scarcely be contested, as she had for more than two years been locked in a private asylum, carrying on a one-sided conversation with the tsar of Russia and other imaginary suitors.

New York’s divorce law was similar to that of Florida, however, in that divorce could only be granted where adultery could be proven. While Ida Alice had stated that she had indeed committed adultery on several occasions with the tsar, it was not the sort of contention that would hold up in court. So Flagler turned to more practical methods.

It took considerable doing, but on April 9, 1901, nearly two years after he had proposed to Mary Lily, a bill was introduced into the Florida legislature “to be entitled an act making incurable insanity a ground for divorce.” Before the month was out, the bill had sailed through both houses and had been signed into law by the governor. Florida newspapers had a field day at Flagler’s expense: it was rumored that it had cost him twenty thousand dollars in bribes to see the bill passed, and a number of “gifts” made by Flagler to Florida’s public universities were documented.

Undeterred, Flagler filed for divorce from Ida Alice in June of that year, a petition that was granted in Miami, in August. During the proceedings it was revealed that Flagler had placed some $2 million in stocks and securities in trust for Ida Alice, providing her with an income of approximately $120,000 a year. As the costs of her care in what was reported as a “rich person’s asylum” came to about twenty thousand dollars annually, some of the criticism of Flagler abated.

In 1988, biographer Edward N. Akin, in the first edition of his book
Flagler,
wrote that he had discovered notations in Flagler’s papers documenting a payment to Florida legislator George P. Raney of more than $100,000, a sum written off as “expenses.” It was a finding that seemed to lend credence to the notion that Flagler had paid enormous bribes to have his way.

In a later edition of his book, however, Akin admitted that he had overlooked a decimal point in the entry. The actual amount paid to the legislator, an attorney who often did work for Flagler, was slightly in excess of
one thousand dollars,
and in truth seemed to be reimbursement for various undertakings unrelated to the divorce bill. Akin added that while Flagler was entirely capable of bribery and had indeed made payoffs during his Standard Oil days, one thing was certain: he would never have thought it necessary to spend so much to sway a state legislator.

In any case, seven days after his filing, Flagler’s engagement to Mary Lily was announced in newspapers throughout the South. Flagler was seventy-one, Mary Lily Kenan was thirty-four, and the public and press reacted accordingly.

Flagler, however, was delighted with his good fortune. He and Mary Lily were married on August 24, with Flagler joined this time to a woman who was by all accounts his social and intellectual equal, and who would prove a faithful companion through the rest of his days.

Flagler spared no expense to make his new wife happy. As she had once remarked that she had always wanted “a marble palace,” Flagler built one for her: a mansion overlooking Lake Worth, which they named Whitehall, and which was to become a fabled center of the Palm Beach social scene. Among the many who joined the Flaglers’ gatherings there were Admiral George Dewey, John Astor, Henry Sloane, and Flagler’s longtime friend Elihu Root, secretary of war under Theodore Roosevelt.

It was Root, significantly enough, who had encouraged Flagler’s interest in Cuba and the Panama Canal early on. Root was convinced that U.S. interests in the Caribbean were about to undergo a dramatic upswing and that Flagler, with control of the sole rail link to the nearest U.S. port, would profit greatly.

Speculation about Flagler’s intentions had been rife for more than a dozen years. It had been reported by one Florida paper as early as 1895 that he had sent land agents into the Keys, where he had purchased as much as 50 percent of the northernmost island of Key Largo, using assumed names to avoid driving up prices.

Whether or not that is true, it is well documented that Flagler planned his actions carefully. Though he might appear to have acted in haste at times, as with his controversial divorce from Ida Alice and his marriage to Mary Lily, Flagler’s actions were generally undertaken as the culmination of a meticulous process of preparation on his part.

Thus, while some were quick to label his subsequent announcement—the decision to extend the Florida East Coast Railway to Key West—as capricious, ill-planned folly, nothing could have been further from the truth.

8

The Eighth Wonder of the World

Flagler’s official announcement that he intended to ride his own “iron” across the Straits of Florida to Key West did not come until July of 1905, but it seems clear that he had been destined to make the attempt from the midsummer of 1898, at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War. From that point forward, FEC documentation suggests that Flagler and his top-level managers had begun to study the proposal in a new light, going so far as to commission a number of preliminary engineering reports and feasibility surveys. The “railroad across the ocean” had at long last shed its pie-in-the-sky status, and was now being taken seriously by one of the most successful entrepreneurs in America.

Characteristically, Flagler attempted to keep his plans close to the vest, in order to avoid driving up the price of right-of-way acquisition, among other things. Though previously he had had the luxury of choosing a number of alternative routes in considering the exact location of his railroad-building projects, his options in the case of the Key West Extension were not nearly so broad. And experience had taught him what obstacles the avarice of local speculators might create.

In the 1890s, when Flagler had announced his intention to extend his line along the central coast to Palm Beach, a group of landowners from the then-prosperous town of Juno had formed a consortium, pooling their holdings in order to force up the price Flagler would have to pay for right-of-way. The group was certain that Flagler would have to meet their inflated price in order to avoid sending the line through a broad swath of marsh that would drive the cost of construction through the roof.

Presented with the consortium’s demands, Flagler ordered his railroad built exactly where his foes had assumed it could not be done. At tremendous expense, Flagler’s railroad went southward to Palm Beach, nonetheless, and the town of Juno, then the county seat of all South Florida, withered and died.

With this experience in mind, a glance at the topography of the Florida Keys made it clear to Flagler that the possibilities for locating his line were, literally, quite slender.

The Keys had been described by one writer of the day as “worthless, chaotic fragments of coral reef, limestone, and mangrove swamps . . . and have been aptly called the sweepings and debris which the Creator hurled out to sea after he had finished shaping Florida.”

Key Largo, northernmost of the Keys and nearly forty miles from tip to tip, is by far the largest in the chain, but even that island is a few hundred yards wide or less in many places. Farther south, the Keys shrink dramatically in size, some mere dots of “land” the width of a football field in spots, many of them separated by miles of open water.

As a consequence, Flagler spent a great deal of time and money investigating just what route his “impossible” railroad might take. And while he awaited word from his project managers, there had been plenty to attend to during the period from 1898 to 1905.

Though his activity in the company had diminished significantly, he was still a member of the board of directors of Standard Oil, the largest corporation in the world. And as the chief executive officer of the Florida East Coast Railway and its various subsidiaries, he was called upon to oversee a vast network of undertakings that stretched the entire length of Florida, including extensive freight and passenger operations, the management of a wide variety of hotels and resorts, the direction of a massive land sales and development operation, and much more. He had built a hotel in Nassau, for instance, calling it the Colonial, and had formed a shipping line—the Peninsular and Occidental Steamship Company—to service his offshore holdings, as well as provide freight and passenger service to Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean.

And, as usual, there was always the unexpected to deal with. In Miami, where Flagler’s three-year-old city was finally gathering steam, a yellow fever epidemic broke out in the fall of 1899, spread by infected ticks brought ashore on a cattle boat from Cuba. Hundreds fell ill and the entire city was quarantined, with all boat and train traffic halted immediately.

Once again Flagler was pressed into service as savior of his “domain.” Since the local economy was utterly dependent upon tourism and trade, Flagler poured his own money into an extensive program of public works, giving employment to a sizable labor force engaged in road and sidewalk building, port improvements, and the expansion of health-care facilities. By the spring of 1900 the epidemic had been controlled, and the quarantine lifted. Miami was on the road to a startling recovery: nearly written off by some observers at the beginning of the century, by 1910 “the city that Flagler built” would be hosting more than 125,000 visitors during its tourist season.

Meanwhile, with Spain removed from the equation, intricate U.S. diplomatic negotiations concerning the location of a canal linking the Caribbean and the Pacific had been moving forward, slowly but surely. In February of 1904 the United States Senate voted 66–14 to ratify the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, putting to an end the nearly thirty-five years of controversy and uncertainty surrounding the issue of where to build a canal joining East with West.

The bill secured the agreement of the newly formed government of Panama that the canal would be built across Panamanian soil by the United States, which, in exchange for a payment of $10 million, would hold virtual sovereignty over the ten-mile-wide “canal zone” in perpetuity.

The agreement also provided for a payment for French holdings in Panama amounting to $40 million, which was the largest real-estate transaction in all history. The fact that the government had paid more for the rights to build and control the Panama Canal than had been expended on the Louisiana Purchase, the Alaskan territory, and the Philippine Islands combined is some measure of the excitement generated by the culmination of the decades-long effort to forge an intracontinental connection between the world’s great oceans.

Adding to the intrigue was the fact that Theodore Roosevelt had secured such favorable terms for the deal only by agreeing to back Panama’s secession from Colombia. It was an arrangement typical of the egocentric Roosevelt, but one that did not sit well with his own cabinet.

“I took the Isthmus,” President Theodore Roosevelt was to declare often, pointing to the treaty as his most important action in office. It may have been Roosevelt’s most profound achievement, but it was scarcely without controversy.

As Elihu Root, Roosevelt’s secretary of war, observed, “You certainly have, Mr. President. You have shown that you were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.”

In any event, the Hay treaty gave Flagler the practical justification he needed to go forward. With the canal’s future assured, it seemed that Panama would become, in Simon Bolívar’s words, “the emporium of the universe,” and Henry Flagler would be poised to take advantage of it. He would build his railroad to Key West, where his planned deep-water port and storage facilities would replace Tampa as the closest deep-water port to the new canal, by more than three hundred miles.

In addition to servicing the veritable flood of shipping to and from the canal, Flagler contended that his new railroad would also provide a necessary link in an increased traffic—tourist and trade alike—with the liberated nation of Cuba. As it turns out, Flagler had met with Canadian railroad magnate Sir William Van Horne, and had come away impressed with Van Horne’s plans to deploy a wide-ranging network of freight lines to service the island’s pineapple-, sugar-, and tobacco-growing regions.

Furthermore, as the only naval station located on the Gulf and southern Atlantic coasts, and a mere ten miles distant from the main shipping channels, Key West was also ideally located as a coaling station for Navy ships patrolling the strategic waters of the Caribbean. In short, Flagler argued, Key West would become the foremost port on the Atlantic coast of the United States.

Whether Flagler believed his own rhetoric is debatable. By 1904 the Florida East Coast Railway had yet to turn a significant profit on any of its operations, with losses running anywhere from $100,000 to $400,000 in a given year. His string of hotels showed erratic returns, just about breaking even at best.

Though company records are often murky on the issue, it is certain that had Flagler been content simply to plow his dividends back into Standard Oil stock, his fortunes would have prospered exponentially. According to figures in his own statistical diaries, with upwards of thirty thousand shares in his name, Flagler’s income from dividends was as much as $150,000 a
month
during the first part of the decade.

But by this time Flagler was seventy-four years old, and was accustomed to his place as savior, if not outright ruler, of his domain. In his second career, he had inarguably left behind his status as an accumulator to become a builder, certainly the most prominent developer in the Florida frontier, and, according to some, the man who singlehandedly created it as a modern state.

He had husbanded Florida’s economy through at least two natural disasters, and had established every one of the glittering, world-famous beach resorts that ran the length of its eastern shores. By the time he had reached Miami, some might have assumed Flagler was at a natural stopping point.

He could retire at long last, one might have conjectured, there to join his new bride and—by all accounts—boon companion, Mary Lily, at their fabulous home in Palm Beach, where he could rest and enjoy the fruits of his storied labors.

Instead, he continued on.

That Flagler chose the latter path says more about the man than any other action undertaken in his lifetime. In choosing to build his railroad to Key West, Flagler was tackling a project that in some ways outdid the prospect of the Panama Canal. For at least in that instance there was general accord that such a giant ditch could indeed be dug, if one were to expend sufficient energy and manpower and money and materiel to see the job through. In the case of the railroad across the sea, however, few were as sanguine as that.