From the Palm Beach Post, 30 January 1918
General Smedley Butler may not have had them in mind when he declared that "war is a racket" for the benefit of capitalists, but in January 1918 a few Palm Beach County landowners hoped they might be able to cash in from the Great War. Like all good Florida real estate men, though, they offered a vision and a bargain to draw interest and obscure their baser goal of turning their Florida scrub lands into profits. Their offer: free land to the government for a training base on their land near Jupiter.
As it grew to 2 million in early 1918 (4 million would serve by the end of the war), the American military scrambled to find enough places to train its new soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. Existing bases expanded, but with so few permanent bases there was need to build new ones. While there were bases everywhere, many were placed in the South. The presence of large numbers of federal troops was a touchy subject for many white southerners who had been steeped in the mythology of the Lost Cause, but they tamed many of these by naming them for leading Confederates: Camp Gordon (Ga.); Camp Beauregard (La.); Ft. Benning (Ga.); Ft. Bragg (N.C.). (The army, which had been racially segregated since the Civil War, continued this practice and maintained segregation on these bases; the navy and Marine Corps did not accept African Americans during the war.)
Only a few bases opened or expanded in Florida. Navy pilots trained at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, Army quartermasters trained at Camp Joseph E. Johnston (another Confederate!) in Jacksonville, while army pilots attended flight schools in Arcadia and Miami. (1)
The Jupiter investors hoped they might be able to benefit from a little prop noise, too, or the sound of Reveille at daybreak. "What this would mean to Jupiter may be easily conjectured," E.O. Kelso, one of the landowners explained, "as the installation of any government project...is bound to...create higher values, and stimulate all kinds of business." To secure this, they offered the land free for as long as the government needed it. And, they promised, it was not swamp land they offered:
(1) "Floridians Who Fought Over There," Florida Memory, https://www.floridamemory.com/exhibits/wwi/there/
(newspapers.com)
General Smedley Butler may not have had them in mind when he declared that "war is a racket" for the benefit of capitalists, but in January 1918 a few Palm Beach County landowners hoped they might be able to cash in from the Great War. Like all good Florida real estate men, though, they offered a vision and a bargain to draw interest and obscure their baser goal of turning their Florida scrub lands into profits. Their offer: free land to the government for a training base on their land near Jupiter.
As it grew to 2 million in early 1918 (4 million would serve by the end of the war), the American military scrambled to find enough places to train its new soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. Existing bases expanded, but with so few permanent bases there was need to build new ones. While there were bases everywhere, many were placed in the South. The presence of large numbers of federal troops was a touchy subject for many white southerners who had been steeped in the mythology of the Lost Cause, but they tamed many of these by naming them for leading Confederates: Camp Gordon (Ga.); Camp Beauregard (La.); Ft. Benning (Ga.); Ft. Bragg (N.C.). (The army, which had been racially segregated since the Civil War, continued this practice and maintained segregation on these bases; the navy and Marine Corps did not accept African Americans during the war.)
Only a few bases opened or expanded in Florida. Navy pilots trained at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, Army quartermasters trained at Camp Joseph E. Johnston (another Confederate!) in Jacksonville, while army pilots attended flight schools in Arcadia and Miami. (1)
Carlstrom Field, Arcadia
(Florida Memory)
The Jupiter investors hoped they might be able to benefit from a little prop noise, too, or the sound of Reveille at daybreak. "What this would mean to Jupiter may be easily conjectured," E.O. Kelso, one of the landowners explained, "as the installation of any government project...is bound to...create higher values, and stimulate all kinds of business." To secure this, they offered the land free for as long as the government needed it. And, they promised, it was not swamp land they offered:
"Close to the ocean, available by water and rail, high above the probability of any ravages of disease, blessed with good water and a climate that is unexcelled, convenient to the great Dixie Highway, the proposition at Jupiter presents unexcelled claims to some project of some sort."It sounded like a binder boy's sales pitch because it was one. Florida's real estate developers had been working on this pitch for more than decade by the time the war came, and they would perfect it in the decade to come during the Land Boom of the 20s. The military didn't bite in 1918, but they would the next time Americans entered a world war.
(1) "Floridians Who Fought Over There," Florida Memory, https://www.floridamemory.com/exhibits/wwi/there/
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