August 15, 2025 • 27 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, before the beaches, theme parks, and high-rises, Florida was mostly swampland. In the 1950s, a wave of entrepreneurs arrived with a different vision. Jason Vuic, author of The Swamp Peddlers, explains how these ambitious salesmen helped reshape the state into one of the fastest-growing places in the country. With oversized promises and aggressive pitches, they turned mosquito-ridden plots into retirement gold.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the All American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
You get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Our country is filled with many different kinds of states,
filled with different kinds of people.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Some of our states are filled with people from other states.
Here to tell the.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Story of who sold Florida is Jason Viewick, author of
The Swamp Peddlers.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Take it Away, Jason, So.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
When I was growing up, people would go, hey, ah, Florida, boy,
you know what was the beachlight? Growing up? Kind of like,
I didn't grow up near the beach. I grew up
in this weirdly unfinished place. We just had roads to nowhere,
hundreds of thousands of lots that people up north and
all around the world owned but had never built bon
(01:08):
you know, we called these streets grasshult. People would go
out there to make out or race. We'd have parties
in high school, or people would just throw trash onto
these empty streets and these terrible roads. It looks like
those old videos of like Fallout City, you know, where
the Pentagon would drop h bombs on these fifties era,
mid century modern developments and see what happened. That's what
(01:31):
a lot of Florida looked like. So when I wrote
this book, I wanted to write about the Shenanigans of
these land sales companies. I wanted to write about Glengarry
glen Ross in Florida. From about fifty five to seventy five,
these installment land salers did about two billion in business.
(01:52):
And that's in nineteen seventies dollars, pre oil crises, wild inflation,
big big Bucks eight nine ten billion today maybe more.
Their companies, if not Fortune five hundred were you know,
were New York Stock Exchange listed. These companies collectively owned
a couple million acres. They built cities. They built free
(02:14):
standing cities, Port Saint Lucie, Palm Bay, Cape Coral. Two
million people live there. It'll be four million by the
end of our lifetime. Easy. These guys were empire builders.
This was not a tiny business than nineteen hundred. Florida
(02:34):
had the same population as Bultiple. Huge stretches of Florida
were swampy, unbuildable, uninhabitable, was filled with mosquitoes. People lived
along rivers. They lived in higher places. The beach property
wasn't of great value. We didn't have the sense of
relaxing in leisure time. For northern workers, you worked until
(02:55):
you died. You worked until you lived in a small
room behind your children house, and they were working until
they died. The people who came to Florida in nineteen
hundred to relax were the super elite on trains and
pullman cars and stay in these opulent hotels and go
tarpin fishing. Right, the average joe didn't come to Florida.
You need DDT, you need pesticides, better road buildings, you
(03:20):
need drainage, you need dredging and filling all these modern techniques,
and you need air conditioning to truly bring the masses
to Florida. But Florida really takes off after World War Two.
You know, millions of gis came home and they don't
want to live with their parents in tenement housing. My father,
you know, was the son of immigrants that came through
(03:40):
Ellis Island, and you know, he was a marine during
the Korean War. Didn't want to go back into a
gritty milltown. He wanted to be if not in the
suburbs and then somewhere else, somewhere out When we talk
about suburbs, we talk about Levittown. William Joseph Levitt was
a CEBE during World War Two. That's the construction brigade,
the guys in the Navy that would roll into Ewojima
(04:03):
a day after the battle was over when they're cleaning up,
and they would build huts and temporary housing for like
ten thousand men. Quickly that moved over into home building
after World War Two. You know, millions of gis came home.
And so these builders, using these post World War two
kind of mass production or prefab techniques, found ways to
(04:26):
you know, buy for example, a Levittown you know a
series of potato farms. I don't remember the acreage, but
thousands of acres. You buy by the acre, and you
sell by the foot, you divide by the foot, and
you build small suburban lots for these people to move into.
The idea was that you would drive into New York City,
drive into Philadelphia, drive into you know, Chicago from your
(04:48):
suburban development. Now, Florida had the same type of boom
after World War two, and it did have suburbs in Tampa,
in Orlando, in Miami, but Florida still didn't have a
lot of people. It had a lot of land, and
there were limits to suburban workers, white collar workers. You
know that I think of leave it to Beaver. There
were limits in Tampa and Miami. Florida didn't have a
(05:11):
lot of industry or modern service type industries. It was
still very rural and very agricultural, and builders were trying
to figure out how to sell this land to people
who can we bring here retirees, you know, not rich
Northerners that trying to attract bus drivers and teachers, break
(05:34):
the men from the railroad and former gis that want
to come to Florida on fixed incomes and live in
these small generally I say prefab. They weren't coming in
trucks and dropping off a house. I mean, you build
what you can off site and bring on or you
build using assembly line techniques. You lay the slab, and
(05:55):
then the crew lays another slab and another slab as
far as you can see into the horizon, and then
the framers come, and then the roofers come, and on
and on and on, and you do that as quickly
as possible, as cheaply as possible to get these retirees
in Florida to move down. And so we see after
World War Two in the late forties in Miami, three
(06:16):
developer brothers, the Mackle brothers, Frank, Robert and Elliott Mackle.
They were Southern blue bloods. Their father was a builder
from Atlanta who'd also built in Nashville and Birmingham. They
came from money, but they were I would say they
had solid middle class values. Their father was self made,
(06:36):
and I think their father knew boom and bust. Two
had served in World War Two. One was a construction
Brigade CB, so he also was similar to Levitt and Levittown,
New York. Another brother got a deferment to build houses
for the military, so they knew how to build small
houses and they knew the military. They knew what the
military needed, and they knew what the average man needed.
(06:59):
Their father had built for the average man. He built
big things, but he built tenements and housing apartment complexes
in Atlanta. So the Macals were the right guys in
the right place at the right time.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
And you're listening to Jason Viewick, author of The Swamp Peddlers,
telling you the story of the men who built Florida
turning it from mostly an agricultural and rural state into
a place a refuge for seniors and retirees. More of
this remarkable story here on Our American Story. Lie Hibibe
(07:32):
here the host of our American Stories. Every day on
this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country,
stories from our big cities and small towns. But we
truly can't do the show without you. If you love
what you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and
click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give it. And
(08:09):
we returned to our American Stories and the story of
how Florida was sold and built. When we last left off,
Jason Lewick, author of The Swamp Edlers, was telling us
about what Florida was like before World War Two. It
was swampy, hot, and had the same population as Baltimore.
It would take a group of enterprising building brothers, the
(08:32):
mackel Brothers to see it all to its full potential.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
Florida is what people want it to be. But definitely
we're talking about the weather, you're talking about the beaches,
and you're talking to northerners from crowded cities, people who
grew up in the depression, people who knew want And
it's got a lot of land, and it has a
government that is willing to shamelessly sell itself and sell
(08:59):
its life land at all times. So Florida always had
this this poll. And so we see after World War two,
in the late forties in Miami, three developer brothers, the
mackel brothers, they built and not small, sizable sometimes twelve
(09:20):
hundred houses here, thirteen hundred houses here. They built Port Charlotte,
they built another one, Port Saint Luci, Port Malabar, Deltona, Flora,
spring Hill, Florida. They were good at and they enjoyed
having three and four and five thousand acres and building,
essentially building a city. They like that. They found that
it was fun for them, They really did. They talked
(09:40):
about it as urban planners, taking, you know, a virgin
stretch of land, naming all of the streets. They built
communities with so many streets they had troubled finding names
for them all. They'd go through every northern state, every
northern city, every flower, every color, every month. Then they
name it for their kids, and they name it for
their workers' kids, and on and on and on. And
(10:00):
the macals were very good at using mass media. Madison
Avenue ad campaign I think of mad Men, you know,
that era very good and they weren't afraid to spend
the money to get their name out there, to get
their projects out there, not just locally, but nationally. The
maccls began advertising Florida Land and these communities they were
(10:22):
building in Life magazine, in Popular Mechanics, and Time in
you know, a Saturday evening post. They'd spend big money.
Some of the radio commercials were the maccls big radio commercials,
TV commercials, and one time that the story is they
were selling in a development on the East Coast. I
think it was at Pompado Beach somewhere, but not on
the beach, and they advertised it at you know, I
(10:45):
forget what it was, and they were getting letters, thousands
of letters. We'd love to come down, but we're in
our fifties and we still have ten years or so,
you know, we still have a while to make it
to social Security or a retirement. My husband is older
than me, but I still need to work. That kind
of stuff. Is there any way we could put land
on layaway? Is there any way you know, what can
we do to get a piece of the Florida Dream?
(11:06):
We know Land will go up. What can we do now?
Can we pay you some money? And they began to brainstorm,
and they're sitting around their shared office in Miami, the
Mackel company, and one of the brothers, I think it
was Elliott, said, well, we got to sell them something.
How about installments. How about we sell Land in installment
(11:27):
plans that we say you can have this lot for
ten dollars down and ten dollars a month over seven
or eight years, you know, lots for about eight hundred bucks,
nine hundred bucks, and we hook them that way, We'll
sell them the Florida Dream. And one of the slogans
was for the price of cigarette money, and that idea
took hold. And think, this is before Disney, This is
(11:50):
before all the Florida's steam parks, before modern Miami Beach
and the way we see it today, or the sports teams,
all the different reasons people go to Florida. And people
were so crazy for it that the story is the
Macals received bushels full of cash, bushels full of letters
with coupons from their ads. Cut this coupon out, send
(12:12):
us a check or a money order or ten dollars
ten one dollar bills, and we'll reserve your lot today.
And it was sighte unseen. David Development, for example, in
the middle of nowhere, two hundred thousand lots, fifty thousand
acres or so. Whatever they were building, they would divide
it and they would simply send a map of the
project with a gridiron of streets, many of which hadn't
(12:33):
been built yet, with an X, like a treasure map.
This is our lot. And so it seems so silly today.
You know, I always tell people if I came home
and told my wife I bought a lot in Wyoming
site unseen, she would probably punch me, idiot, Why would
you do that? But in nineteen fifty eight, imagine what
that meant to a bus driver in Albany, New York
(12:57):
who had put in thirty two years and he's just
won to make it till he's sixty two or sixty five.
And the you know, the wife is a secretariat at
a high school. They're just trying to make it. Kids
are out of the house. They're finally going to sell
their home that they've paid off, and they just want
their golden years in Florida, though they've probably never been,
or maybe once or twice. Buying this piece of the
(13:20):
Florida dream and installments was crazy, but it hint maybe
they weren't ever gonna come down. Maybe they were going
to build a home and rent it. Whatever they were doing,
people began buying land sight unseen in droves. These companies
would sell land from chios in bus terminals, kios in
some of the main train terminals in the Northeast. They
(13:43):
would have girls. There's a picture in Life magazine, girls
in bathing suits, not bikinis. Then you know, this is
still the fifties, with sand and playing volleyball and flirting
with guys gis and businessmen getting off the trains and
the sign says Port Charlotte ten dollars down and ten
dollars a month. And so the macals they weren't the
first to do installment land sales, but they were the
(14:06):
first to do it on a mass, mass scale, and
using kind of these Madison Avenue mad men advertising techniques,
and other people began realizing it's not rocket science. If
you've got the money, if you had the ability to
swing it. You can buy large stretches of land in Florida.
It's hard to do today, but in those days there
(14:26):
were large stretches, large ranches, defunct orange groves. They used
up the land and wanted to get rid of it.
Sometimes they didn't even pay taxes on it. And you
could buy land in the thirties off the tax rolls
for pennies an acre. But other people came down buying
five thousand here, ten thousand here, including two brothers from Baltimore.
(14:49):
And they were different. The Macals were blue bloods. They
were builders, They were Rotarians, Shriners, that kind of stuff,
you know. They were their community guys who came from
a family of builders. They prided themselves as being members
of the maccl company. We build things. The Rosans were
(15:10):
mail order guys. They were former carnival barkers, you know,
as kids in Baltimore step right up that kind of stuff.
And they were salesmen and they would sell stuff on
cod They would sell stuff in installments, you know, on
layaway television sets, refrigerators, things like that. You were brawlers.
They were tough Jewish kids who knew want, who had
(15:34):
made their way in the world. By hook or crook
and had built a successful business. And their business that
really made it was selling shampoo. It was called Formula
number nine. I remember Formula. I don't know how or why,
but this was a shampoo that you bought in magazines
that they sold you and they promised that it would
rejuvenate your hair. That it was, you know, Lanlin from
(15:56):
Sheep I read it was Lanelin mixed with hotel shampoo
and a bathub which they would bottle up and sell
for a dollar a bottle. They sold other things through
magazines and through some of the first infomercials after TV
would go off after the news in America, you know,
generally eleven thirty news would go off. TV would go off,
(16:19):
so you could buy thirty minutes and show whatever you
wanted in the middle of the night, and they would
press their sales teams that went around the eastern seaboards
selling things. You know, sell, sell, sell, and if you
weren't good, you were fired. I think of these guys
as straight out of Glengarry Glenn Ross, you know, the
famous movie on Land Sales with Jack Lemon and al
(16:39):
Pacino and Alahlic Bald And it was a stage play
you know, very intense salesmen. There are suckers everywhere, and
if you know, I'm paraphrasing. And one of the Rosen said,
if you're not willing to take them, then someone else
will take them. So get out, get out of here.
If you're not willing to take that sucker, that buyer,
to scam that buyer, I'll find someone who will. These
guys were so and so they came to Florida during
(17:03):
the boom in the fifties and they heard there's money there.
You know, they always had a nose for what was
going on and looked around and they thought, why are
we selling shampoo at a dollar a bottle when we
could be selling lots of a thousand a lot.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
And you've been listening to Jason Viewick, author of The
Swamp Peddlers, tell one heck of a story about how
Florida was built and sold. My goodness, what salesmen. These
guys were. These two families, the Rosens and the Macles,
the Macaels, sort of the blue blood construction guys. They'd
been doing construction forever, rotary guys, communitarians, real members of
(17:41):
the community. And here are the Rosans, hustlers guys who
sold mail order catalogs and did well, almost anything for
a buck. More of this remarkable story, the story of
how Florida was sold and built here on our American Stories,
(18:08):
and we returned to our American Stories and the final
portion of our story on who Sold and Built Florida
with Jason Buick, author of the Swamp Peddlers. When we
last left off, the mackell brothers had decided to start
selling empty lots.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
To northerners for the price of cigarette money.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
The concept was a hit, and soon other people were
interested in getting in on the game, including two former
Carnival barkers from Maryland, the Rosen Brothers.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
They came to Fort Myers, and there's a story of
them flying in. One of the brothers is flying in
a sessina, a small plane, and he looks down at
Redfish Point on the Colusahatchee River and he decides, that's
a perfect place for my future community, Cape Coral. He
had no knowledge of building, He never built anything. He
had no knowledge or how to sell land or how
to start a land sales commute. But once he got
(19:01):
the hang of it, he knew how to sell things.
Jack Rose and handled the books. Leonard Rose and handled
the sales, and so he kind of aped the macles.
He did what the macaels did with the national media,
but then he took it to another level. And so
you see, the Rosens have the first call centers in
the US, calling millions of people a year, thousands of
(19:22):
sales dinners randomly been chosen out of the phone book
and Gary, Indiana. You know, mister and missus Smith, you've
been cordially invited to a film and steak dinner at
the Holiday Inn and South Bend this Saturday, and you'd
go and you'd get worked over, right, They'd go door
to door, and then once you've been sold to, they'd
sell to your family. In Fort Myers, the Rosens extended
(19:45):
the airport at page Field and brought in real jets
and there were daily flights, one in the morning and
one in the evening to New York City. They began
bringing in television shows. Root sixty six comes through Southwest Florida.
He gives hope some sort of award, like the first
annual Great American Award. Then there's no second annual award, right,
(20:05):
he brings in you know, the American Stamp Club convention
and he brings in you know, if there had been
Beanie babies, then he would have had the Beanie Baby
Convention in Cape Coral, which he would then use this
event you know, chess tournaments and track and field there,
you know, you name it. He would bring it in
and then he would sell land through those. They were
just incredible salesmen, and they became in bitter, bitter rivals
(20:29):
to the Maccles. Now what the Rosans would do, though,
is they would skirt the line between reputable land dealers
and fraudulent peddlers of swaps. By law, if you're selling
land and installments, selling lots as residential property in Florida
in the fifties, you had to connect that lot to
a paved road. So you've got to bring in millions
(20:52):
of tons of dirt. You've got to dredge and fill,
you've got to dig ditches. So you're looking at an
incredible amount of heavy work using big machinery with engineers
who know what they're doing, grading the land over miles.
If you get behind on that, or prices rise or
inflation is off the hook, that ten dollars down, isn't
(21:13):
that good? A deal for you anymore. And so the
Rosans saw that they were on the hook. Sometime in
the sixties, and I forget the number now, but it
was like ninety million dollars. They were making big money.
They almost bought the franchise that became the Miami Dolphins.
They had the best art collection in all of Florida,
which was they called their company the Golf American Corporation,
(21:34):
And of course you would go see the Golf American
Collection in Miami, and then when you'd walk in the door,
a salesman would start selling you lots. They realized that
we're ninety million on the hook. So if we're spending
money and we're living freely and we're screwing around that
eventually the rubber's going to meet the road. We have
to provide what we promised or it's a crime, it's fraud.
So Leonard Rosen gets the idea, why don't we just
(21:58):
go out into real swamp land and sell people investment
property And I'm putting that word in quotes right, investment property.
Tell them that in the fine print, but also openly say,
you know, we're not promising you anything. We're not promising
you a road here. This is not a homestead. Let
our lawyers read this, put it all on the contracts,
and we'll sell land for two hundred and fifty dollars
(22:20):
five hundred dollars thousand dollars an acre as investment property.
And we'll let our salesmen lie through their team. You know,
this is a future suburb, this is a future city.
We're going to let our salesmen run with this, and
we're going to let people think what they want, make
people think this is the future when it's not. It's
just unusable land. And so this is where the Rosans
(22:41):
make a lot of money, but also get into trouble,
and where they tight they start to kind of destroy
the image of installment land sales. I tell people in
Port Charlotte, you know, maybe it wasn't the best community,
but no one ever got ripped off. They got what
they paid for. But when the Rosans are selling to
people who think, you know, they're uneducated. They've been worked
(23:04):
over through salesmen who almost like in a Darwinian process,
have been weeded out to be the best ones. And
oftentimes the best salesmen were the most unscrupulous ones. They
had the midas touch in the Golden Tongue, and they'd
work over these people, and seldom land that they thought
that they were going to move to and live on.
They take them on tours in the winter when there
(23:26):
was no rain, so you could go into Golden Gate
Estates and drive around and oh, someday, you know, Golden Gate,
the community in Naples back here, these are booming places,
you know, And in twenty years this five acres you
just purchased is going to be worth a lot of money,
which was patently untrue. And so this is where the
federal government starts to get involved. Northern politicians are already angry.
(23:49):
They're losing their old people to Florida. You know, Detroit
is paying out its pensions and it's not coming back
to Michigan ever. They're already tired to be salesmen, but
now they're formed. Residents are calling saying, hey, I got
ripped off, and they're using telephones and they're using the
mails to do it. So the federal government starts to
have hearings, and the Rosins come off as criminals, which
(24:13):
is arguable, but certainly they're doing unscrupulous things as opposed
to the Macles. The Macals are willing to testify, and
the Reps and senators praise them, and the Rosens are
unwilling to testify, and they come off as criminals. The
Rosen in the Macles. They didn't like each other, they
knew each other. The Macles and the Rosens belong to
(24:34):
the Florida Land Sales Board. It was a board that
was totally made up of five people that were supposed
to oversee how the advertisements were pitched before you put
it in Time magazine or in the New York Times,
to give you a check mark that you're not lying,
but they're really not going to look over it. It
had a small budget and all five members of the
board were land developers themselves. The tension there is between
(24:59):
the Macles and the Rosans over control of this board
because the Macals want to clean it up enough to
where they can do business and the Rosans want few,
if any restrictions at all so they can continue to
do business, and they essentially go to war. They go
to war, and they go to war in Tallahassee, specifically
trying to get a governor in place that will strengthen
(25:21):
the board and start to turn over evidence to District attorneys.
Eventually the Macals kind of won out. Claude Kirk was
the first Florida Republican governor since reconstruction, and Kirk wanted
to save the Florida environment, and that meant reining in
these installment land sales developers who were willing to build
(25:43):
on islands, for example. Eventually, the Rosans are kind of
run out of the business. The governor threatened to turn
over his records from the land sales Board to various
district attorneys, and so they were facing possibly thousands of
felonies and could have gone to prison, sold out to
another company in the early nineteen seventies and moved away
(26:03):
from Florida. One brother died, and I think the other
one moved to Las Vegas and began working in land
development out there. These guys are forgotten, the Rosens and
the Maccles, but they are every bit as important in
Florida history as people like Plant or Flaggler. The Maccles
should be right up there. I mean, they built entire cities,
(26:24):
entire cities from scratch. They employed tens of thousands of people,
and you know, created an entire new landscaping for the
state and brought probably hundreds, if not thousands, if not
millions of people to Florida and changed Florida's environment forever more.
I would say, and I have no way of quantifying this,
(26:45):
but who sold Florida?
Speaker 2 (26:47):
You know?
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Who sold Florida before Disney, before any of the tourism,
before the pro teams and all the people moving down
these companies did.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
And a terrific job on the production and storytelling by
Auntie Montgomery, And a special thanks to Jason Buick, author
of The Swamp Peddlers, And what a story we heard
the men who built and sold Florida, And my goodness,
two very different approaches, the hustlers, the Rosens, and the
solid guys, the maccles, trying to do it right.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
The battle on the board. I would have loved to
have been on those board meetings, the story of how
Florida was built and sold Here on our American story
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the All American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
You get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Our country is filled with many different kinds of states,
filled with different kinds of people.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Some of our states are filled with people from other states.
Here to tell the.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Story of who sold Florida is Jason Viewick, author of
The Swamp Peddlers.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Take it Away, Jason, So.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
When I was growing up, people would go, hey, ah, Florida, boy,
you know what was the beachlight? Growing up? Kind of like,
I didn't grow up near the beach. I grew up
in this weirdly unfinished place. We just had roads to nowhere,
hundreds of thousands of lots that people up north and
all around the world owned but had never built bon
(01:08):
you know, we called these streets grasshult. People would go
out there to make out or race. We'd have parties
in high school, or people would just throw trash onto
these empty streets and these terrible roads. It looks like
those old videos of like Fallout City, you know, where
the Pentagon would drop h bombs on these fifties era,
mid century modern developments and see what happened. That's what
(01:31):
a lot of Florida looked like. So when I wrote
this book, I wanted to write about the Shenanigans of
these land sales companies. I wanted to write about Glengarry
glen Ross in Florida. From about fifty five to seventy five,
these installment land salers did about two billion in business.
(01:52):
And that's in nineteen seventies dollars, pre oil crises, wild inflation,
big big Bucks eight nine ten billion today maybe more.
Their companies, if not Fortune five hundred were you know,
were New York Stock Exchange listed. These companies collectively owned
a couple million acres. They built cities. They built free
(02:14):
standing cities, Port Saint Lucie, Palm Bay, Cape Coral. Two
million people live there. It'll be four million by the
end of our lifetime. Easy. These guys were empire builders.
This was not a tiny business than nineteen hundred. Florida
(02:34):
had the same population as Bultiple. Huge stretches of Florida
were swampy, unbuildable, uninhabitable, was filled with mosquitoes. People lived
along rivers. They lived in higher places. The beach property
wasn't of great value. We didn't have the sense of
relaxing in leisure time. For northern workers, you worked until
(02:55):
you died. You worked until you lived in a small
room behind your children house, and they were working until
they died. The people who came to Florida in nineteen
hundred to relax were the super elite on trains and
pullman cars and stay in these opulent hotels and go
tarpin fishing. Right, the average joe didn't come to Florida.
You need DDT, you need pesticides, better road buildings, you
(03:20):
need drainage, you need dredging and filling all these modern techniques,
and you need air conditioning to truly bring the masses
to Florida. But Florida really takes off after World War Two.
You know, millions of gis came home and they don't
want to live with their parents in tenement housing. My father,
you know, was the son of immigrants that came through
(03:40):
Ellis Island, and you know, he was a marine during
the Korean War. Didn't want to go back into a
gritty milltown. He wanted to be if not in the
suburbs and then somewhere else, somewhere out When we talk
about suburbs, we talk about Levittown. William Joseph Levitt was
a CEBE during World War Two. That's the construction brigade,
the guys in the Navy that would roll into Ewojima
(04:03):
a day after the battle was over when they're cleaning up,
and they would build huts and temporary housing for like
ten thousand men. Quickly that moved over into home building
after World War Two. You know, millions of gis came home.
And so these builders, using these post World War two
kind of mass production or prefab techniques, found ways to
(04:26):
you know, buy for example, a Levittown you know a
series of potato farms. I don't remember the acreage, but
thousands of acres. You buy by the acre, and you
sell by the foot, you divide by the foot, and
you build small suburban lots for these people to move into.
The idea was that you would drive into New York City,
drive into Philadelphia, drive into you know, Chicago from your
(04:48):
suburban development. Now, Florida had the same type of boom
after World War two, and it did have suburbs in Tampa,
in Orlando, in Miami, but Florida still didn't have a
lot of people. It had a lot of land, and
there were limits to suburban workers, white collar workers. You
know that I think of leave it to Beaver. There
were limits in Tampa and Miami. Florida didn't have a
(05:11):
lot of industry or modern service type industries. It was
still very rural and very agricultural, and builders were trying
to figure out how to sell this land to people
who can we bring here retirees, you know, not rich
Northerners that trying to attract bus drivers and teachers, break
(05:34):
the men from the railroad and former gis that want
to come to Florida on fixed incomes and live in
these small generally I say prefab. They weren't coming in
trucks and dropping off a house. I mean, you build
what you can off site and bring on or you
build using assembly line techniques. You lay the slab, and
(05:55):
then the crew lays another slab and another slab as
far as you can see into the horizon, and then
the framers come, and then the roofers come, and on
and on and on, and you do that as quickly
as possible, as cheaply as possible to get these retirees
in Florida to move down. And so we see after
World War Two in the late forties in Miami, three
(06:16):
developer brothers, the Mackle brothers, Frank, Robert and Elliott Mackle.
They were Southern blue bloods. Their father was a builder
from Atlanta who'd also built in Nashville and Birmingham. They
came from money, but they were I would say they
had solid middle class values. Their father was self made,
(06:36):
and I think their father knew boom and bust. Two
had served in World War Two. One was a construction
Brigade CB, so he also was similar to Levitt and Levittown,
New York. Another brother got a deferment to build houses
for the military, so they knew how to build small
houses and they knew the military. They knew what the
military needed, and they knew what the average man needed.
(06:59):
Their father had built for the average man. He built
big things, but he built tenements and housing apartment complexes
in Atlanta. So the Macals were the right guys in
the right place at the right time.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
And you're listening to Jason Viewick, author of The Swamp Peddlers,
telling you the story of the men who built Florida
turning it from mostly an agricultural and rural state into
a place a refuge for seniors and retirees. More of
this remarkable story here on Our American Story. Lie Hibibe
(07:32):
here the host of our American Stories. Every day on
this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country,
stories from our big cities and small towns. But we
truly can't do the show without you. If you love
what you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and
click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give it. And
(08:09):
we returned to our American Stories and the story of
how Florida was sold and built. When we last left off,
Jason Lewick, author of The Swamp Edlers, was telling us
about what Florida was like before World War Two. It
was swampy, hot, and had the same population as Baltimore.
It would take a group of enterprising building brothers, the
(08:32):
mackel Brothers to see it all to its full potential.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
Florida is what people want it to be. But definitely
we're talking about the weather, you're talking about the beaches,
and you're talking to northerners from crowded cities, people who
grew up in the depression, people who knew want And
it's got a lot of land, and it has a
government that is willing to shamelessly sell itself and sell
(08:59):
its life land at all times. So Florida always had
this this poll. And so we see after World War two,
in the late forties in Miami, three developer brothers, the
mackel brothers, they built and not small, sizable sometimes twelve
(09:20):
hundred houses here, thirteen hundred houses here. They built Port Charlotte,
they built another one, Port Saint Luci, Port Malabar, Deltona, Flora,
spring Hill, Florida. They were good at and they enjoyed
having three and four and five thousand acres and building,
essentially building a city. They like that. They found that
it was fun for them, They really did. They talked
(09:40):
about it as urban planners, taking, you know, a virgin
stretch of land, naming all of the streets. They built
communities with so many streets they had troubled finding names
for them all. They'd go through every northern state, every
northern city, every flower, every color, every month. Then they
name it for their kids, and they name it for
their workers' kids, and on and on and on. And
(10:00):
the macals were very good at using mass media. Madison
Avenue ad campaign I think of mad Men, you know,
that era very good and they weren't afraid to spend
the money to get their name out there, to get
their projects out there, not just locally, but nationally. The
maccls began advertising Florida Land and these communities they were
(10:22):
building in Life magazine, in Popular Mechanics, and Time in
you know, a Saturday evening post. They'd spend big money.
Some of the radio commercials were the maccls big radio commercials,
TV commercials, and one time that the story is they
were selling in a development on the East Coast. I
think it was at Pompado Beach somewhere, but not on
the beach, and they advertised it at you know, I
(10:45):
forget what it was, and they were getting letters, thousands
of letters. We'd love to come down, but we're in
our fifties and we still have ten years or so,
you know, we still have a while to make it
to social Security or a retirement. My husband is older
than me, but I still need to work. That kind
of stuff. Is there any way we could put land
on layaway? Is there any way you know, what can
we do to get a piece of the Florida Dream?
(11:06):
We know Land will go up. What can we do now?
Can we pay you some money? And they began to brainstorm,
and they're sitting around their shared office in Miami, the
Mackel company, and one of the brothers, I think it
was Elliott, said, well, we got to sell them something.
How about installments. How about we sell Land in installment
(11:27):
plans that we say you can have this lot for
ten dollars down and ten dollars a month over seven
or eight years, you know, lots for about eight hundred bucks,
nine hundred bucks, and we hook them that way, We'll
sell them the Florida Dream. And one of the slogans
was for the price of cigarette money, and that idea
took hold. And think, this is before Disney, This is
(11:50):
before all the Florida's steam parks, before modern Miami Beach
and the way we see it today, or the sports teams,
all the different reasons people go to Florida. And people
were so crazy for it that the story is the
Macals received bushels full of cash, bushels full of letters
with coupons from their ads. Cut this coupon out, send
(12:12):
us a check or a money order or ten dollars
ten one dollar bills, and we'll reserve your lot today.
And it was sighte unseen. David Development, for example, in
the middle of nowhere, two hundred thousand lots, fifty thousand
acres or so. Whatever they were building, they would divide
it and they would simply send a map of the
project with a gridiron of streets, many of which hadn't
(12:33):
been built yet, with an X, like a treasure map.
This is our lot. And so it seems so silly today.
You know, I always tell people if I came home
and told my wife I bought a lot in Wyoming
site unseen, she would probably punch me, idiot, Why would
you do that? But in nineteen fifty eight, imagine what
that meant to a bus driver in Albany, New York
(12:57):
who had put in thirty two years and he's just
won to make it till he's sixty two or sixty five.
And the you know, the wife is a secretariat at
a high school. They're just trying to make it. Kids
are out of the house. They're finally going to sell
their home that they've paid off, and they just want
their golden years in Florida, though they've probably never been,
or maybe once or twice. Buying this piece of the
(13:20):
Florida dream and installments was crazy, but it hint maybe
they weren't ever gonna come down. Maybe they were going
to build a home and rent it. Whatever they were doing,
people began buying land sight unseen in droves. These companies
would sell land from chios in bus terminals, kios in
some of the main train terminals in the Northeast. They
(13:43):
would have girls. There's a picture in Life magazine, girls
in bathing suits, not bikinis. Then you know, this is
still the fifties, with sand and playing volleyball and flirting
with guys gis and businessmen getting off the trains and
the sign says Port Charlotte ten dollars down and ten
dollars a month. And so the macals they weren't the
first to do installment land sales, but they were the
(14:06):
first to do it on a mass, mass scale, and
using kind of these Madison Avenue mad men advertising techniques,
and other people began realizing it's not rocket science. If
you've got the money, if you had the ability to
swing it. You can buy large stretches of land in Florida.
It's hard to do today, but in those days there
(14:26):
were large stretches, large ranches, defunct orange groves. They used
up the land and wanted to get rid of it.
Sometimes they didn't even pay taxes on it. And you
could buy land in the thirties off the tax rolls
for pennies an acre. But other people came down buying
five thousand here, ten thousand here, including two brothers from Baltimore.
(14:49):
And they were different. The Macals were blue bloods. They
were builders, They were Rotarians, Shriners, that kind of stuff,
you know. They were their community guys who came from
a family of builders. They prided themselves as being members
of the maccl company. We build things. The Rosans were
(15:10):
mail order guys. They were former carnival barkers, you know,
as kids in Baltimore step right up that kind of stuff.
And they were salesmen and they would sell stuff on
cod They would sell stuff in installments, you know, on
layaway television sets, refrigerators, things like that. You were brawlers.
They were tough Jewish kids who knew want, who had
(15:34):
made their way in the world. By hook or crook
and had built a successful business. And their business that
really made it was selling shampoo. It was called Formula
number nine. I remember Formula. I don't know how or why,
but this was a shampoo that you bought in magazines
that they sold you and they promised that it would
rejuvenate your hair. That it was, you know, Lanlin from
(15:56):
Sheep I read it was Lanelin mixed with hotel shampoo
and a bathub which they would bottle up and sell
for a dollar a bottle. They sold other things through
magazines and through some of the first infomercials after TV
would go off after the news in America, you know,
generally eleven thirty news would go off. TV would go off,
(16:19):
so you could buy thirty minutes and show whatever you
wanted in the middle of the night, and they would
press their sales teams that went around the eastern seaboards
selling things. You know, sell, sell, sell, and if you
weren't good, you were fired. I think of these guys
as straight out of Glengarry Glenn Ross, you know, the
famous movie on Land Sales with Jack Lemon and al
(16:39):
Pacino and Alahlic Bald And it was a stage play
you know, very intense salesmen. There are suckers everywhere, and
if you know, I'm paraphrasing. And one of the Rosen said,
if you're not willing to take them, then someone else
will take them. So get out, get out of here.
If you're not willing to take that sucker, that buyer,
to scam that buyer, I'll find someone who will. These
guys were so and so they came to Florida during
(17:03):
the boom in the fifties and they heard there's money there.
You know, they always had a nose for what was
going on and looked around and they thought, why are
we selling shampoo at a dollar a bottle when we
could be selling lots of a thousand a lot.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
And you've been listening to Jason Viewick, author of The
Swamp Peddlers, tell one heck of a story about how
Florida was built and sold. My goodness, what salesmen. These
guys were. These two families, the Rosens and the Macles,
the Macaels, sort of the blue blood construction guys. They'd
been doing construction forever, rotary guys, communitarians, real members of
(17:41):
the community. And here are the Rosans, hustlers guys who
sold mail order catalogs and did well, almost anything for
a buck. More of this remarkable story, the story of
how Florida was sold and built here on our American Stories,
(18:08):
and we returned to our American Stories and the final
portion of our story on who Sold and Built Florida
with Jason Buick, author of the Swamp Peddlers. When we
last left off, the mackell brothers had decided to start
selling empty lots.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
To northerners for the price of cigarette money.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
The concept was a hit, and soon other people were
interested in getting in on the game, including two former
Carnival barkers from Maryland, the Rosen Brothers.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
They came to Fort Myers, and there's a story of
them flying in. One of the brothers is flying in
a sessina, a small plane, and he looks down at
Redfish Point on the Colusahatchee River and he decides, that's
a perfect place for my future community, Cape Coral. He
had no knowledge of building, He never built anything. He
had no knowledge or how to sell land or how
to start a land sales commute. But once he got
(19:01):
the hang of it, he knew how to sell things.
Jack Rose and handled the books. Leonard Rose and handled
the sales, and so he kind of aped the macles.
He did what the macaels did with the national media,
but then he took it to another level. And so
you see, the Rosens have the first call centers in
the US, calling millions of people a year, thousands of
(19:22):
sales dinners randomly been chosen out of the phone book
and Gary, Indiana. You know, mister and missus Smith, you've
been cordially invited to a film and steak dinner at
the Holiday Inn and South Bend this Saturday, and you'd
go and you'd get worked over, right, They'd go door
to door, and then once you've been sold to, they'd
sell to your family. In Fort Myers, the Rosens extended
(19:45):
the airport at page Field and brought in real jets
and there were daily flights, one in the morning and
one in the evening to New York City. They began
bringing in television shows. Root sixty six comes through Southwest Florida.
He gives hope some sort of award, like the first
annual Great American Award. Then there's no second annual award, right,
(20:05):
he brings in you know, the American Stamp Club convention
and he brings in you know, if there had been
Beanie babies, then he would have had the Beanie Baby
Convention in Cape Coral, which he would then use this
event you know, chess tournaments and track and field there,
you know, you name it. He would bring it in
and then he would sell land through those. They were
just incredible salesmen, and they became in bitter, bitter rivals
(20:29):
to the Maccles. Now what the Rosans would do, though,
is they would skirt the line between reputable land dealers
and fraudulent peddlers of swaps. By law, if you're selling
land and installments, selling lots as residential property in Florida
in the fifties, you had to connect that lot to
a paved road. So you've got to bring in millions
(20:52):
of tons of dirt. You've got to dredge and fill,
you've got to dig ditches. So you're looking at an
incredible amount of heavy work using big machinery with engineers
who know what they're doing, grading the land over miles.
If you get behind on that, or prices rise or
inflation is off the hook, that ten dollars down, isn't
(21:13):
that good? A deal for you anymore. And so the
Rosans saw that they were on the hook. Sometime in
the sixties, and I forget the number now, but it
was like ninety million dollars. They were making big money.
They almost bought the franchise that became the Miami Dolphins.
They had the best art collection in all of Florida,
which was they called their company the Golf American Corporation,
(21:34):
And of course you would go see the Golf American
Collection in Miami, and then when you'd walk in the door,
a salesman would start selling you lots. They realized that
we're ninety million on the hook. So if we're spending
money and we're living freely and we're screwing around that
eventually the rubber's going to meet the road. We have
to provide what we promised or it's a crime, it's fraud.
So Leonard Rosen gets the idea, why don't we just
(21:58):
go out into real swamp land and sell people investment
property And I'm putting that word in quotes right, investment property.
Tell them that in the fine print, but also openly say,
you know, we're not promising you anything. We're not promising
you a road here. This is not a homestead. Let
our lawyers read this, put it all on the contracts,
and we'll sell land for two hundred and fifty dollars
(22:20):
five hundred dollars thousand dollars an acre as investment property.
And we'll let our salesmen lie through their team. You know,
this is a future suburb, this is a future city.
We're going to let our salesmen run with this, and
we're going to let people think what they want, make
people think this is the future when it's not. It's
just unusable land. And so this is where the Rosans
(22:41):
make a lot of money, but also get into trouble,
and where they tight they start to kind of destroy
the image of installment land sales. I tell people in
Port Charlotte, you know, maybe it wasn't the best community,
but no one ever got ripped off. They got what
they paid for. But when the Rosans are selling to
people who think, you know, they're uneducated. They've been worked
(23:04):
over through salesmen who almost like in a Darwinian process,
have been weeded out to be the best ones. And
oftentimes the best salesmen were the most unscrupulous ones. They
had the midas touch in the Golden Tongue, and they'd
work over these people, and seldom land that they thought
that they were going to move to and live on.
They take them on tours in the winter when there
(23:26):
was no rain, so you could go into Golden Gate
Estates and drive around and oh, someday, you know, Golden Gate,
the community in Naples back here, these are booming places,
you know, And in twenty years this five acres you
just purchased is going to be worth a lot of money,
which was patently untrue. And so this is where the
federal government starts to get involved. Northern politicians are already angry.
(23:49):
They're losing their old people to Florida. You know, Detroit
is paying out its pensions and it's not coming back
to Michigan ever. They're already tired to be salesmen, but
now they're formed. Residents are calling saying, hey, I got
ripped off, and they're using telephones and they're using the
mails to do it. So the federal government starts to
have hearings, and the Rosins come off as criminals, which
(24:13):
is arguable, but certainly they're doing unscrupulous things as opposed
to the Macles. The Macals are willing to testify, and
the Reps and senators praise them, and the Rosens are
unwilling to testify, and they come off as criminals. The
Rosen in the Macles. They didn't like each other, they
knew each other. The Macles and the Rosens belong to
(24:34):
the Florida Land Sales Board. It was a board that
was totally made up of five people that were supposed
to oversee how the advertisements were pitched before you put
it in Time magazine or in the New York Times,
to give you a check mark that you're not lying,
but they're really not going to look over it. It
had a small budget and all five members of the
board were land developers themselves. The tension there is between
(24:59):
the Macles and the Rosans over control of this board
because the Macals want to clean it up enough to
where they can do business and the Rosans want few,
if any restrictions at all so they can continue to
do business, and they essentially go to war. They go
to war, and they go to war in Tallahassee, specifically
trying to get a governor in place that will strengthen
(25:21):
the board and start to turn over evidence to District attorneys.
Eventually the Macals kind of won out. Claude Kirk was
the first Florida Republican governor since reconstruction, and Kirk wanted
to save the Florida environment, and that meant reining in
these installment land sales developers who were willing to build
(25:43):
on islands, for example. Eventually, the Rosans are kind of
run out of the business. The governor threatened to turn
over his records from the land sales Board to various
district attorneys, and so they were facing possibly thousands of
felonies and could have gone to prison, sold out to
another company in the early nineteen seventies and moved away
(26:03):
from Florida. One brother died, and I think the other
one moved to Las Vegas and began working in land
development out there. These guys are forgotten, the Rosens and
the Maccles, but they are every bit as important in
Florida history as people like Plant or Flaggler. The Maccles
should be right up there. I mean, they built entire cities,
(26:24):
entire cities from scratch. They employed tens of thousands of people,
and you know, created an entire new landscaping for the
state and brought probably hundreds, if not thousands, if not
millions of people to Florida and changed Florida's environment forever more.
I would say, and I have no way of quantifying this,
(26:45):
but who sold Florida?
Speaker 2 (26:47):
You know?
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Who sold Florida before Disney, before any of the tourism,
before the pro teams and all the people moving down
these companies did.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
And a terrific job on the production and storytelling by
Auntie Montgomery, And a special thanks to Jason Buick, author
of The Swamp Peddlers, And what a story we heard
the men who built and sold Florida, And my goodness,
two very different approaches, the hustlers, the Rosens, and the
solid guys, the maccles, trying to do it right.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
The battle on the board. I would have loved to
have been on those board meetings, the story of how
Florida was built and sold Here on our American story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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