During the Florida Land Boom of the 1920s, entrepreneurs and real estate developers deployed creative tactics to woo potential clients […] to invest in Florida land. […] At Miami Beach, where Indianapolis-based entrepreneur Carl Fisher invested millions in resort development during the 1920s, tourists encountered a surprising attraction: elephants. Two elephants were brought to Miami Beach. They were named Carl II (named after Fisher himself) and Rosie […]. Seeing the elephants’ work at Miami Beach positions these more-than-human actors in the histories of leisure in South Florida, as they signal the uncomfortable degree to which work and leisure were deeply entangled in this place. […]
Carl II, came to Miami Beach from Peoria, Illinois, in February of 1921. According to the Miami Daily Metropolis, [E.B.], who owned several circuses in the Midwest, gifted the elephant to Carl Fisher […]. “I am going to get a million dollars’ worth of advertising out of this elephant.” […] Carl II also carried advertisements on boards hung over a saddle. […] Infantilizing Carl II, as reporters often did in the Miami newspapers, seems to have […] helped uphold his value as a toy of sorts, which supported the idea of Miami Beach as a “playground,” as it was called at the time. […] [A]rticles stressed, however, that the elephant’s education would involve more than “play.” The Miami Daily Metropolis reported that “Carl, the elephant will be put to work.” This is coupled with language that strikes a disciplinary tone; the reporter stated that “he must earn his keep.” […] Such work ranged from moving portable houses on the beach to pulling presses on the polo field. Carl also cleared mangrove swamps to make land suited for residential development […].
Like other resorts that pandered to a growing middle-class market for leisure in the roaring 1920s, Fisher’s venture on Miami Beach was carefully curated as a “playground to the World.”
Just as Henry Flagler had separated “work” from “leisure” by building Palm Beach separate from West Palm Beach in the 1890s, Fisher kept his beach workers’ labor largely invisible - except when it enhanced the tourist experience of its middle- and upper-middle class clientele, as when the elephants caddied on the golf course or stomped divots on the polo field. Fisher’s plan was to attract visitors to Miami Beach to come back year after year […] [and] to prompt permanent settlement in his island subdivisions. These subdivisions, like his hotels, were meant to be exclusive. […]
And while this landscape depended on an African American workforce, the city enacted Ordinance 457 in 1936, requiring the more than 5,000 service workers at the time to “register.” In addition to being photographed and fingerprinted, Black workers had to carry identification with them. […]
In March of 1921, Carl II lived at the local fairgrounds […]. An article in the Miami Daily Metropolis that celebrated Carl II’s presence there also noted that “the fair doors are not open to the colored population this year.” […]
Part attraction and part workhorse, Carl II moved across spaces dividing work and leisure, non-human and human, and Black and white on which Miami Beach’s status as a “tropical paradise” for the white leisured classes depended. […] Carl II was shipped off to the Circus in 1926, the same year that a devastating hurricane struck the beach and brought the “boom” years to an end. His companion, Rosie, eventually met the same fate. […] While Miami Beach was developed as a playground for the white leisure class, its success was inextricably bound with the labor force that built and sustained it.
Images, captions, and all text above by: Anna Andrzejewski, “Work, Play, and Elephants in South Florida’s Leisure Landscape,” Edge Effects (27 April 2023). Published at: edgeeffects. net/miami-beach-elephants/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Images and captions are unaltered. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]
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