In historical perspective, "Flagler built his tourist empire — and modern Florida — by exploiting two brutal labor systems that blanketed the South for 50 years after the Civil War: convict leasing and debt peonage. Created to preserve the white supremacist racial order and to address the South’s labor shortages, these systems targeted African Americans, stealing their labor and entrapping them in state-sanctioned forms of involuntary servitude... Some 4,000 workers, including many as young as 15, became slaves in all but name." When an investigative journalist and the U.S. Justice Department uncovered the practices, Flagler and his allies successfully mobilized to whitewash the findings in Congress and white-owned Florida newspapers, some directly controlled by Flagler himself.