For Sale —American Paradise Read Free Page B

things happening a few miles down the road in Stuart, and invited Bryan to speak at Martin County’s upcoming official birthday party.
    Bryan gratefully accepted the invitation. “I would feel lost if I were not there on that occasion,” Bryan said. “Helping start new counties is one of my specialties.”
    Sixty years after Menninger chatted with the loquacious American icon, his friends gathered in Stuart to honor him for the role he’d played in helping to realize the grandiose prophecies of the 1920s. The beautiful county where they lived had become one of the wealthiest counties in the nation, and Florida had become synonymous with the fulfillment of dreams and fantasies. Miami was now a glitzy international city that spoke three or four languages and moved much faster than the posted speed limits.
    But as the smiling old man took in the outpouring of love and respect at his ninetieth birthday party, he could have told you that Florida’s path to prosperity had taken some bizarre and brutal turns in the months after he shook hands with William Jennings Bryan.

CHAPTER TWO
Railroad to Dreamland
    T HOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, FRIGHTENED PEOPLE SPENT MANY WINTER NIGHTS shivering and staring fearfully into the cold darkness beyond the fires at the entrances of dank, smoky caves that were their homes. Surely, they thought, there must be a place somewhere beyond the firelight where life is easier—a warm, idyllic place of lush year- round vegetation, where food is abundant and clothing is optional, where they wouldn’t have to spend all of their waking hours just trying to keep their bellies filled and worrying about when they would die.
    And so in some way approximating this, the human dream of finding a paradise was formed. That dream became as essential to human existence as air and water: Life shouldn’t be this hard; there must be a better place somewhere, and one day I’ll find it.
    The vision of paradise in this life or beyond eventually became enshrined in the world’s major religions. Its usual depiction was a lush garden where there was no toil, no struggle, no death, and no worry, only perpetual peace and contentment.
    As civilizations developed, the longing for a paradise spanned eras and cultures. The immortal Greek warrior Alexander the Great is said to have sought the gates of Paradise in the fourth century BC. Medieval European Christians longed to find the legendary kingdom of Prester John, said to contain a fountain whose waters made people young again.
    Tales of a fountain in a land somewhere to the north whose waters restored youth circulated among pre-Columbian residents of Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. Adventurers determined to find this wondrous fountain set out in small canoes. When they didn’t return, the friends they’d left behind assumed they’d found the fountain and did not want to leave the land of eternal youth.
    In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Renaissance explorers crossed unknown seas and traveled thousands of miles from the comfort and familiarity of their homes because they thought they would find a place where living was easier.
    Juan Ponce de León went in search of such a place in 1513. He’d lost a political power struggle to a well-connected rival and had been unseated as the Spanish governor of Puerto Rico, so he set out with three ships and a band of conquistadores to find a better place.
    In early April 1513, Ponce de León landed in a lush, subtropical world. It’s doubtful that he was the first explorer to set foot in this land, but he claimed naming rights for Spain. It was the Easter season, called Pascua Florida, or “Festival of Flowers” by the Spanish. So to honor the season, Ponce de León named his landing place La Florida—Place of Flowers. The explorer is thought to have landed near present-day Cape Canaveral, where, more than four centuries later, a new breed of explorers would