When Robert Mugge, an immigrant boy from Germany, stepped ashore in New York City in September 1870 he began a career that only “a land of opportunity” can provide. Selling liquor as his launching pad, Mugge, shown here, is credited with developing the city of Tampa, Florida, while authoring a political treatise that has been termed “part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.”
Mugge was born in January 1852 in Lauterberg, Harz, Germany, the son of Louis and Louisa Manzel Mugge. At seventeen, an age when many adventurous German youths emigrated to the U.S. to seek their fortune, Robert boarded the steamship, SS Hansa, likely in Bremen, and headed west. He first settled in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he had relatives. A watchmaker and jeweler by trade, Mugge had an Indiana cousin, George Mugge, who was a distiller. George may have taught him some of the rudiments of making whiskey.
At the age of 22, Mugge married an Indiana girl, Alice McCullough, who may have been as young as 15 at their nuptials. She would bear him three sons. A lifelong asthma suffer, Robert apparently thought a sea voyage would be therapeutic and with his brother-in-law, William Mahn, in 1886 boarded a schooner in Mobile, Alabama, to take them to Cuba. When the ship stopped in Tampa for several days to unload cargo, Mugge had chance to look around.
After the Civil War, Tampa, a former Confederate military post, had become a poor, isolated fishing village with fewer than 1,000 residents and little industry outside of its port. Yellow fever, borne by mosquitoes from nearby swamps, broke out several times during the 1860s and 1870s, causing many deaths and convincing more people to leave. Remaining residents in an apparent act of economic desperation in 1876 voted to abolish the city government. Nevertheless, Mugge saw potential in Tampa and with Mahn moved there in 1877.
While their families in Indiana waited for them to get established, the brothers-in-law opened a grocery and general merchandise store, buying a lot at Marion and Jackson Streets for $50. They erected a two-story building with the business on the ground floor and rooms for rent above. Eventually joined by their families, they housed them in a building at the rear.
Mugge’s early days in Tampa were not without heartache. In February 1879 his wife Alice and all three sons died during a yellow fever epidemic. After some months passed Robert may have remembered a young friend from his youth in Germany and began to correspond with her. She was Caroline Rautenstrauch who lived in Goslar, Hanover. Eventually agreeing to marry, Caroline came to America and the couple were wed in Florida in October 1882. She was 21; Robert, 29. The couple would have nine children, two of whom died in infancy. Caroline is shown here with two of their girls.
His marriage to Caroline and ever-increasing familial responsibilities seem to have spurred Mugge to even greater energy in business and civic activities. While continuing to work as a jeweler and maintaining the general store, he established an industrial complex along Tampa’s Central Avenue, shown here in an insurance drawing. It included an electric generating works, an ice plant and Florida’s first distillery, opened about 1901. The plant included a still, a U.S. bonded warehouse and outbuildings, indicating that Mugge was abiding by the federal Bottled-in-Bond Act. Government records show Mugge’s distilling activities extending well into the 1900s.
The German immigrant began advertising himself as a whiskey wholesaler, merchandising the products of his distillery in ceramic jugs of half-gallon, gallon and larger sizes to the many saloons that dotted the Tampa landscape. Among them were several drinking establishments that Mugge himself owned, including a saloon shown below in Ybor City, a commercial district located just northeast of downtown Tampa. Note the sign for Anheuser-Busch beer. Mugge operated a plant that exclusively bottled beer from the St. Louis brewery. He was also making a line of soft drinks including lemon, strawberry, sarsaparilla and sparkling soda water.
Beginning in 1896 Mugge operated a beachfront amusement park in partnership with a local Spanish cigar manufacturer and wine merchant. Located outside the city limits in the eastern part of Tampa, it was known as DeSoto Park. The oceanfront venue, shown below, featured a bath house, bowling alleys, a dance pavilion, and — of course — an expansive bar. Attractions included circus acts and balloon ascensions. With burgeoning profits from his liquor and other enterprises, Mugge also constructed a number of brick buildings in Tampa, including the ten-story Bay View Hotel downtown, shown right.
At the same time Mugge was civicly active, providing electric power virtually at cost to the city and erecting street lighting in some neighborhoods out of his own pocket. When an 1886 fire destroyed an entire business block in Tampa, partially because of a woefully equipped fire department, Mugge donated a “hand pumper” costing $600 to the city, known to all as the “Mugge pumper.” When a new Tampa Fire Company was organized later that year, he was elected secretary. Said one biographer: “Robert Mugge devoted his life to the building of Tampa which he loved so well. He would invest every dollar he made in Tampa back into the Tampa economy, thereby giving employment to thousands of breadwinners.”
Mugge was to find that although he was a hero in Tampa some people in nearby Kissimmee were prepared to attest that he was not “a law abiding citizen of good character.” The accusations grew out of his efforts to buy a saloon in that city only to find local prohibitionists strongly opposed. They brandished an affidavit from a police official alleging that Mugge once had been guilty of violating a Kissimmee city ordinance. After a well-publicized battle, however, county commissioners granted his license. Mugge lost no time in advertising his Kissimmee Eagle Saloon.
The Kissimmee incident and the growing tide of prohibition in Florida and elsewhere likely were the impetus that turned Robert Mugge, liquor purveyor, into a political theorist. Over the next several years he evolved a concept of the ideal American society in a 52-page monograph he entitled “Practical Humanity.” Issued initially in 1909, it has been reprinted through the years, most recently by a publisher who claims: “Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public.” Mugge would be proud.
Mugge’s preface signals his utopian outlook: “Good Old Mother Nature can be made to produce an abundance to supply every human being on earth, with all the necessities of life, all the comforts and not a few of the luxuries. Read this little book and learn how.” He then proceeds to lay out a vision for society that primarily aimed at reforming America into a kind of altruistic corporate state.
Although Mugge explicitly disavows any identification with socialism, his ideas might be characterized as “Karl Marx meets Mr. Rogers.” Marx thought the state would “wither away.” Mugge suggested that in his system state and local governments gradually would collapse in favor of directing everything from a national center from which one or more individuals make all the rules for numerous “colonies” across America in which the residents would enjoy a small town “agrarian” lifestyle.
Marx called organized religion “the opiate of the people.” Mugge banned all churches from his colonies but people would be free to go elsewhere to worship. Marx advocated “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Under Mugge’s proposal poverty and crime would be abolished along with capitalistic greed. This harmony somehow would be accomplished by largely abolishing paper money.
Mugge devoted more than one-third of his treatise on “The Liquor Question.” Given his background, he not surprisingly created plenty of room for alcoholic spirits in his utopia. “We might just as well give up the idea of founding these colonies at all as to establish them under a hypocritical prohibition law and expect them to be a success.”
How Mugge’s ideas were received in his lifetime is unclear. He continued to be an active participant in his business ventures, including those involving whiskey and beer. Meanwhile he was watching prohibitionary forces, working under local option laws, gradually turn Florida “dry.” He never saw Nation Prohibition imposed, however, dying on December 17, 1915 at the age of 63. Shown here is a portrait of Mugge in his older years. After a funeral described as “one of the largest ever held in Tampa,” he was buried in the city’s Woodlawn Cemetery, the gravesite shown below.
As a last word on this extraordinary individual, a quote from his obituary in the Tampa Tribune under the headline “A Great Man Gone,” deserves repeating: “Robert Mugge was an old citizen of Tampa but not an old man, and was a remarkable character. A man of intelligence and business acumen. One of the most enterprising of our citizens. A man of energy; he fought the battles for fortune unsurpassed though afflicted physically. This was a "great" man, though few people knew it, nor did he.”
Note: Much of information and some of the images used for this post come from "Robert Mugge, Pioneer Tampan,” by Margaret Regener Hunter, Mugge’s granddaughter, appearing in the Sunland Tribune, Journal of the Tampa Historical Society, Vol. 15, Nov. 1989, and the writings of Robert E. Mugge, a great-grandson. Robert the Pioneer apparently pronounced his name “mew-ge,” while his descendents prefer “mug-ge.” The quote that opens this post is from the publisher blurb on "Practical Humanity."
No comments:
Post a Comment