I. Technological Wizardry
 Air conditioning, invented by Willis Haviland Carrier, changed Florida forever. |
In modern Florida, Isaiah’s prophecies came true: hot made cool, wet become dry, and the crooked bent straight. Nothing was impossible or improbable in the Sunshine State.
One the eve of Pearl Harbor, Florida was the smallest state in the South. Nearly seven decades later, Florida is a Sunbelt Megastate. Ponder which of the following fantasies would have been considered most zany:
- That Floridians might endure an August evening without sweating or swatting?
- That motorists could drive from Pensacola to Miami non-stop?
- That some day fans would enjoy baseball inside an air-conditioned dome in sleepy St. Petersburg?
- That sun-drenched Florida would be home to two NHL hockey teams!?
- That motorists someday could concentrate on rockets ascending heavenward and not worry about hitting earthbound cattle sleeping on Brevard County highways?
- That Cape Coral would become the largest city south of Tampa on the Gulf Coast, and that North Port would become the largest city in Sarasota County?
The fruits of World War II—the GI Bill, DDT, jet planes, military bases and airports, frozen concentrate, television, transistors, and freezers—laid the foundation for the Great Florida Post-war Boom.
Amid Cold War talks of peaceful coexistence, Floridians prepared for the worst. Sunday home sections featured stories on residents building bomb shelters. In 1958, Manatee County commissioners decided that if godless Russians selected Bradenton for nuclear annihilation, the village of Oneco would become the county seat.
No place felt the tremors of Cold War more than Brevard County. In 1940, its 16,000 inhabitants raised oranges and welcomed winter visitors. A 1946 reporter described Cape Canaveral, a place best known for its picturesque lighthouse as “a small community on the sparsely populated cape of a scrub-covered key.”
Rocket fever was contagious in the late 1940s, spreading to the most isolated spots in America. In 1949, officials selected Cape Canaveral as the center for its space program. One year later, Florida’s Space Age was launched in the form of a 14-ton, two-stage rocket incorporating German and American research.
Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, Brevard County became the fastest growing county in the fastest growing state in America. Sleepy old towns like Titusville and Melbourne, and instant towns like Palm Bay and Satellite Beach were part of the reason Brevard County is today home to almost 600,000 persons. Some of the state’s most important corporations—Harris, Martin Marietta, Honeywell—owe their presence to Cold War economics.
But no single technological leap affected ordinary Floridians’ lives more than clanking, whirring room air conditioners. Air conditioning not only cooled the air, it changed Floridians’ lives and living arrangements. A.C. transformed the architectural designs of homes, lowering ceilings, turning screened porches and Florida rooms into air-chilled TV/family rooms, all the while making transoms as obsolete as cisterns. Climate control also made possible year-round tourism, as well as retirement centers.
II. Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution
 Fidel Castro pictured in 1959 in Washington. |
On December 31, 1958, Cuban president Fulgencio Batista resigned. The event garnered few headlines in the New Year’s newspapers. Military coups were scarcely new in the Caribbean. But this was no ordinary coup, and Fidel Castro was no ordinary revolutionary.
So powerful are the shockwaves of the Cuban revolution fifty years later that words such as “revolution” and “upheaval” seem inadequate. To understand its impact upon Florida, consider speeded-up frames from a newsreel: Bay of Pigs, embargoes, Freedom Flights, Operation Pedro Pan, Little Havana, Domino Park, Mariel, Scarface, Radio Martí, Freedom Tower, the “English-Only” amendment, Elián González, and one million Cubans.
If words fail, numbers suggest the reality. In 1958, a few hundred Hispanics resided in Miami. Today, over one million Spanish-speaking immigrants and their children call South Florida home. Every other family in Miami/Dade County speaks a language other than English at home.
Cuban émigrés injected a caffeinated boost to Miami’s economy, creating one of the greatest immigrant success stories in American history. The first waves of Cubans consisted not of desperately poor rural workers but urban and well-educated, middle-and-upper-middle managerial and professional classes. Moreover, the U.S. government, eager to embarrass Communist Cuba, provided generous benefits. They may not have brought their capital with them, but they maintained their work ethic and family/kinship networks. More than a few who began operating six-seat Cuban cafes ended with construction companies, banks, and television stations.
Cubans flocked to Miami by sea and air. After the initial exodus of émigrés, 1959-1961, many Cuba watchers predicted the end of Cuban immigration. In September 1965, however, the unpredictable Fidel announced new rules. The so-called “Freedom Flights” between 1965 and 1973 brought another 300,000 Cubans to the U.S. In April 1980, once again Fidel tweaked the State Department by announcing that gusanos (worms, enemies of the state) could leave from the port city of Mariel. In a maritime stampede resembling Dunkirk, over 120,000 Cubans left the island. Unlike previous migrations, the Marielitos were more impoverished, blacker, younger, and less welcome.
The Marielitos profoundly shook Miami to its foundations. Miami leaders harshly criticized President Jimmy Carter; Miami/Dade schools were overwhelmed with new students; and African -American leaders screamed injustice at the mistreatment of the other “boat people,” the Haitians. Miami simmered and ultimately exploded in 1980. When a jury exonerated four policemen who beat to death Arthur McDuffie, a black man, Liberty City boiled over. For four days in May, rioting resulted in 18 deaths and $100 million in property losses. The most lasting image of Mariel may be the 1983 film, Scarface, which introduced Marielito Tony Montana, as played by Al Pacino.
Cuban emigration did not end with Mariel or Tony Montana. In the 1990s, the U.S. government instituted the controversial “Wet Foot/Dry Foot” policy, granting asylum to Cubans who can touch the Florida shoreline. The law speaks to the power of the Cuban lobby and freedom’s call.
Overall, the most significant trend in immigration has not been the steady increase in Cuban émigrés, but rather the explosive growth of non-Cuban Hispanics. The 2000 census confirmed what every building contractor knew: growing numbers of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians, and other Hispanic groups now outnumber Cubans. Even more noteworthy, Hispanics in Florida now surpass the number of African Americans, an extraordinary milestone considering that blacks constituted 41 percent of the population as late as 1910.
III. From Chickees to Casinos: Seminoles and Miccosukees
 A Seminole Indian |
If Cubans made an impact in part because of their sheer numbers, Florida’s Native Americans held no such advantage. In the 18th century, small bands of Alabama Creek Indians began migrating into Spanish and British Florida. Called Seminoles, they were in reality two distinct factions, each maintaining a separate language and tribal traditions. But three savage wars forced the Seminoles and Miccosukees deep into the Everglades and reduced their numbers to barely 100 on the eve of the Civil War.
Isolated but resourceful, Florida’s Indians managed to incorporate modernity while maintaining their identities. Throughout the 20th century, outside commentators predicted that the Seminoles would assimilate and become Americanized. A Fort Myers Press writer predicted in 1914, “The days of the Seminole canoe are numbered and with it comes a change in his mode of living.” A 1946 Miami Herald article, “White Man’s Ways Lure Seminoles,” typified such attitudes. Few Floridians could have imagined in 1958 just how well the Natives understood the white man’s ways—and weaknesses.
On 26 July 1959, in one of history’s more bizarre intersections, the new dictator of Cuba declared a national holiday to commemorate the six-month anniversary of the revolution. Throngs of Cubans crowded Havana. Invited guests included Communist comrades, Third World friends, and eleven Florida Miccosukee Indians.
In 1957, the federal government had officially recognized the Seminole Tribe of Florida. Impatient, Miccosukee leaders chose to ask a foreign power to recognize their tribal sovereignty. Buffalo Tiger presented Fidel with a manifesto written on buckskin praising Cuba’s “victory over tyranny and oppression.” The leader of Cuba took devilish delight in recognizing the Miccosukees before the U.S.
When recognition came in 1962, few realized its implications. In 1959, Seminoles and Miccosukees remained desperately poor. Members eked out existences selling trinkets on Tamiami Trail, raising cattle, and tribal tourism (alligator wrestling and air boat rides). To outsiders, alligator wrestling may have appeared to be culturally embarrassing, but to Natives, it provided at least a meager income and the satisfaction that they managed the enterprise on their terms, with their message of an unconquered people.
James Billie, more than any other single figure, embodied the new attitudes. Born on a chimp farm in Dania, a Viet Nam veteran, Billie was elected Seminole tribal chair in 1977. His predecessor, Howard Tommie, had introduced tax-free tobacco shops and the idea of high-stakes bingo. When in 1981 a judge upheld the tribe’s right to run high-stakes bingo, James Billie opened satellite bingo halls.
James Billie spent lavish amounts of money on personal jets and houses, but he also courted state legislators and congressmen. Politicians and judges listened. The Miccosukees followed the Seminoles into the gaming business. By the mid-1990s, four Seminole casinos (Tampa, Hollywood, Immokalee, and Brighton, as well as a Miccosukee operation in Miami) were taking in stunning revenues.
What futurist would dare have predicted that Florida’s biggest Y2K party was held December 31, 1999 at the Big Cypress Indian Reservation to cheer the rock band Phish! One needed a Geiger counter, not a calculator to keep track of Native investments and dividends. The first concrete block homes did not appear on reservations until the 1950s. From meager dividends of a thousand dollars per tribal member in the 1980s, the five gaming casinos in 2003 generated more than $300 million in profit, numbers spiraling upward. Experts believe that such success now guarantees every Florida Native an annual dividend of $100,000. The Seminoles’ billion dollar purchase of the Hard Rock Café punctured any doubt the new-century role to be played by the Seminoles. But as the Roman poet Juvenal warned, “Luxury can be more ruthless than war.”
A 2000 want ad graphically illustrated the new South Florida landscape. The Seminole Tribe placed an advertisement recruiting alligator wrestlers. Pay: $12 an hour.
IV. Triumph of the GOP
 U.S. Sen. Claude Pepper |
In 1947, U.S. Senator Claude Pepper paid a visit to the old Florida Capitol. The Florida Legislature that Pepper first saw as a freshman representative from Taylor County in 1929 had changed little. A sea of white male faces nodded to Pepper’s oratory. What was most striking about the legislature was its membership: no females, no Hispanics, no African Americans, and only a single Republican. Pepper joked that a single token Republican, Alex Akerman Jr. of Orange County, should be pickled and preserved—as an extinct species.
When military Reconstruction ended in 1876, Florida’s Democratic Party was hell bent upon marginalizing, humiliating, and burying the party that had waged war upon Dixie. A combination of tactics, ranging from revenge (“Vote as you shot!”) to religion (“When Hell goes wet, Florida will vote Republican”) to folk tales (“The He-Coon walks just before the dawn”) kept the GOP in the closet like the proverbial crazy aunt.
In the summer of 1958, the Sunshine State’s Republican Party stood on the threshold of change. Republican Ground Zero was Pinellas County. In 1954, a combination of Midwestern retirees, an “I Like Ike” president, and lackluster Democratic candidates helped elected William Cramer to the U.S. Congress, the first such Republican elected in Florida since the 1870s. The unseated Democrat, Courtney Campbell, blamed his defeat on the new medium of TV, especially impressionable female voters. Cramer is lovingly remembered today as “Mr. Republican.”
An improbable coalition of Ohio octogenarians, retired Detroit autoworkers, Cuban émigrés, and college students comprised Florida’s Republican Party. Blue Dog Democrats also energized the GOP. Blue Dog Democrats voted for Ronald Reagan and Bob Martinez because they had been choked blue by a national Democratic Party that seemed out of touch with Floridians. Amid the maelstrom of race riots and civil unrest, Floridians elected Republican Claude Kirk governor in 1966.
Winning an occasional election did not translate into a two-party competitive system, especially when Republicans such as Kirk was as zany as he was incapable. Democrats maintained a huge imbalance of party registrations over the GOP. The decade of the 1990s provided a tipping point. In 1992, the courts ordered the legislature to redraw districts more favorable to African- American and Hispanic candidates. The decision did indeed ensure the election of a handful of minority candidates at the state and national level. More importantly, however, the redrawn districts favored Republicans. Reenergized after a decade of Ronald Reagan and impressive voter registration gains, Florida’s GOP was poised to seize power.
By the end of the 1990s, the Republican Party commanded the Florida State Senate and House, a majority of state cabinet posts, and the governor’s mansion. Control of the state party proved critical when in 2000, Governor Jeb Bush rallied voters to nudge his brother over the top in the election of the century.
V. Silver Cities and Florida Dreams
Demographics is destiny. Silver-rinsed and gold-flecked, the elderly have been so visible since the 1950s that it is instructive to know that Florida was actually younger than the rest of the United States until the post-WWII years. The transformation of 20th-century Florida from one of America’s youngest state (average age 20.4 in 1900) to the oldest (38.4 average in 2000) represents one of the great storylines in American history.
Explaining what happened is simple, yet complex. In the short version, Americans lived longer than anyone expected, saved more than anyone predicted, and retired to Florida by the millions. But why would the elderly leave their families, churches, and communities for a retirement complex in Deltona or Coral Springs? Modern medicine and capitalism made it possible for Americans to survive well into their golden years, but first individuals had to redefine old age and retirement. Once they realized they could in H. Irwin Levy’s words put “years to their lives and lives to their years,” the Florida Dream awaited. On television and in Sunday newspaper supplements, developers lured them to sunshine and paradise through relentless salesmanship.
In 1958, an observer at the Sunshine State Welcome Center noticed that something remarkable was happening every single hour. Carload after carload of silver-haired seniors from New York and New Jersey, Ohio and Michigan, were pouring into Florida. They were headed toward familiar destinations, St. Petersburg and Miami Beach, cities that had developed special bonds with Illinois retirees and New York Jews for decades. But they were also pioneers, the first wave to settle new communities, such as Cape Coral, Lehigh Acres, and Sun City Center along the Gulf Coast, and Miramar, Plantation, and Palm Beach Gardens along the Gold Coast. In between, retired preachers found a heavenly heaven at Penney Farms while retired mailmen found a dogless paradise in Nalcrest.
Senior citizens shaped Florida in what they sought and bought. In St. Petersburg, inexpensive cafeterias, seasonal apartments, and green benches characterized the good life, while in Miami Beach, kosher restaurants, Yiddish accents, and condo commandos defined South Beach. Elsewhere, trailer parks, Sons of Italy Lodges, early bird specials followed.
Few individuals understood the eco-demographic revolution better than Frank Mackle. One of the three famous Mackle brothers whose signature developments— Marco Island, Spring Hill, and Port St. Lucie—defined postwar Florida, Frank explained in a 1959 interview what was happening: “We’ve got millions of customers. Everything works toward helping us. We’ve got the doctors trying to get people to live longer. We’ve got the unions trying to get people to retire quicker. We’ve got a tremendous growth of pension funds; social security is getting stronger.”
Life in modern Florida may be silver-rinsed, but it is also golden. If one counted the invisible but very visible mailbox industries (Social Security checks, government and private pensions, dividends ad portfolios), seniors bring to Florida more than $5 billion each year. Nearly two million military retirees call Florida home.
The dawn of Baby Boomer retirees represents the greatest hope and fear for Florida. How will the nearly 80 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 view Florida? Will they think the Sunshine State is as fuddy duddy as they remembered their grandparents’ neighbors in North Port and Palm Bay, or will they redefine old age in Florida and rock on like the Rolling Stones?
VI. New Urbanism
Florida was irresistible to post-1950s commentators. A magnet for senior citizens, the fastest-growing state in America, and home to the Space Coast, Florida was also home to instant towns that lacked an identifiable center, yawning sprawl, and non-descript sub-divisions. Developers argued that in a democracy, citizens vote with their pocket books, or in the case of Florida, exhaust fumes.
The automobile ruled Florida. The Florida Dream and the automobile seemed joined at the hip. In 1950, a scant 6 million tourists found their way to Florida; by 2000, that number had roared like a Delta 88 to 80 million, most of them via the crowded highways. For most of the last half century, the planets were in Florida’s alignment: cheap gas and land, Interstate Highways, cars that exuded freedom and individualism, and government bent upon the idea that growth would pay for itself.
To be fair, Florida had always attracted legions of critics who excoriated the state’s pell mell growth-at-any-cost. Robert Davis, son of a department store owner, did something about it.
Davis recalled childhood glories of untrammeled sand dunes and wood-framed beach cottages that dotted the panhandle’s Highway 30A. His father owned 80 acres in Walton County. Appalled at what was happening to the panhandle coast line, Davis acted. In the early 1980s, he hired two gifted Miami architects, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. First, they traveled across America, pointing out what they liked. They then began to create what then seemed revolutionary: create a beachfront community but leave the beach and sand dunes untouched. Strict design and building codes mandated building behind the dunes, so that everyone could take ownership of the beach.
Seaside was both futuristic and throw back, but it was revolutionary as the first example of “New Urbanism.” Designed and priced for the middle classes, Seaside was a new/old place where home, work, shopping, and relaxing on front porches came together without the automobile and within a community.
Critics and consumers fell in love with Seaside. Ironically, its very success undermined its originators’ ideals, but the idea of new urbanism has profoundly made Floridians think about community, home, work, cars and consumption. Today, half of the New Urban communities built and designed in America can be found in Florida. From Watercolor and Rosemary Beach to Baldwin Park and Celebration to Summerville and French Village, the New Urban imprint is dramatic.
VII. The Beach
 Miami Beach postcard circa 1935 |
Few 1950’s tourist brochures would be complete without obligatory photographs of families frolicking in the surf or palm trees swaying to gulf breezes. In 1958, what was perhaps the most striking feature of Florida was how little beachfront property had been developed. More than any other place in modern Florida, the beach defines the Sunshine State. Without salt water and sand dunes, Miami Beach is Little Rock with pretensions; without the beach, Florida is New Jersey with palm trees.
The beach would not remain undeveloped for long. Americans had fallen in love with the beach since the late 19th century. Beginning in the 1920s, the middle classes had been motoring to Sunshine State beaches, combining automobility and the good life. Post-war affluence and a leisure revolution made a beach vacation part of the American and Florida dreams.
The history of modern Florida has unfolded along the water’s edge. Rampant growth and the fact that nine of ten Floridians live an hour’s drive from salt water represents only the most obvious trends and themes that have shaped the state.
When we think of the civil rights movement, we typically conjure up images of 1960s sit-ins at downtown soda fountains and department stores. But another civil rights movement integrated the beaches, often years before integration was completed. Beaches not only defined, but they also divided Floridians. Aside from a handful of private and public black beaches, Florida’s public beaches were for “whites only.”
Black leaders and white businessmen understood the power of boycott and protest. Beach communities depended upon the good will and annual return of Northerners. Generally more racially tolerant than native Southerners, newcomers to Florida were more interested in low taxes, cheap housing, and warm winters than maintaining Jim Crow. They witnessed what had happened to cities like Little Rock and Birmingham, communities polarized and paralyzed by racial strife, and they wanted none of it. Black leaders courageously made their case. Thus, the beaches of Florida (with exceptions) witnessed peaceful integration earlier than other Southern states.
The beach has also been the epitome of sex and sensuality. Spring Break traces its evolution to Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach in the 1920s and 1930s. By the Fifties, the April sojourn was ritualized in Fort Lauderdale. Spring Break altered the trajectory of youth and Fort Lauderdale.
Time magazine sent a correspondent to cover the 1959 revelry. Amid 20,000 students who “grilled themselves medium-rare all day [and] beach-boozed all night,” a coed was asked perhaps the dumbest question in journalism history: “Why do you come here?” Her answer inspired a song and a movie genre: “This is where the boys are!” Spring Break was never the same. By 1961, over 50,000 raucous students descended upon Fort Lauderdale, in numbers and behavior that would later appear tame.
Spring Break was Big Business, but also a colossal headache for year-round residents. Fort Lauderdale quit the spring break business, an enterprise taken up by Daytona Beach and Panama City.
In once-isolated beach communities, sand dunes turned into gold as new residents crowded the shore line. Since the 1950s, Florida’s coastal counties have grown exponentially compared to the geometric increases of inland counties. Population swelled along the Gulf and Atlantic Ocean because of technological wizardry (DDT, sea walls, and finger canals) and timing (affluence, cheap real estate, and the lack of hurricanes), but mostly because the Florida Dream encapsulated the good life along the water’s edge.
In 1959 a Tampa Tribune headline trumpeted, “Waterfront Living for the Common Man.” But waterfront living has become more exclusive and privileged over time. Local, state, and federal governments have generously assisted coastal residents achieve their dreams. Beach renourishment is only one such benefit of living dangerously. Alas, hurricanes, shark attacks, and skin cancer have also become part of the Florida vocabulary.
VIII. Tourist Nation
Long before Lake Buena Vista anointed itself as “the happiest place on earth,” long before Shamu and SpaceMountian, Cypress Gardens was Florida’s best known and most-beloved tourist attraction. Nature was enough. Americans flocked to Florida to fish for bass on Lake Apopka, to swim and sun bathe at Panama Beach, and appreciate surging natural springs.
Every town seemingly had gardens where orchids, hibiscus, and frangipane—alien exotics—looked like they belonged, and besides, they were genuinely beautiful.
Cypress Gardens and Silver Springs, Weeki Wachee and Silver Springs reached their apogee in the Fifties and Sixties. Americans simply adored the natural wonderments and wholesome entertainment created or embellished by impresarios Dick Pope and Newt Perry. Pope had transformed Lake Eloise in Winter Haven into an enchanted world of bursting flowers, beautiful maidens in hooped skirts, and water acrobatics. Perry did not so much transform the nature’s wonder of Weeki Wachee as complement it with beautiful mermaids.
For those traveling salesmen and Schenectady accountants looking for a good time, Florida, too, catered to an adult clientele. Broward County’s gambling emporiums were notorious and popular, while Dade County featured race tracks by day and night club entertainment with raunchy comedians.
Real life Florida did not reflect the world seen through a Brownie camera at Sunken Gardens. Many hotels posted signs for “Restricted Clientele,” a polite way of saying “Gentiles Only.” African Americans needed no signs to understand that Florida was a Jim Crow state. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover openly worried about “gyp joints,” “tourist traps,” and “hot-sheets motor courts.”
But for all of the flaws and shortcomings, tourism was indispensable to the state’s economy, a pillar no less valuable than agriculture and citrus, a sector so critical that Florida’s first sales tax (three pennies in 1949) was passed only with the understanding that out-of-state tourists would pay a disproportionate share.
The opening of Walt Disney World in 1971 was the equivalent of tourism’s Big Bang. Dick Pope famously replied upon hearing the news of a Disney Land East, “Anyone who is going to spend $100 million nearby is good, and a good thing.”
Few soothsayers realized Disney World’s opening was the death knell for Six Gun Territory, Boardwalk and Baseball, and Pirate’s World, but also the Rare Bird, Midget City and Atomic Tunnel attractions. Today, an oligopoly rules the tourist industry, and the happiest place on earth is also the reason about 40 million visitors travel to Orlando annually.
No where on earth is Disney’s impact seen or felt more than Metro Orlando. In 1950, the population of pre-metro Orlando (Orange, Seminole, Lake, and Osceola counties) was 190,000, a figure rising to 345,000 on the eve of Cinderella’s castle. In 2008, Metro Orlando’s population reached an eye-popping 2 million inhabitants. Add to the combustible traffic and demographic mixture 40 additional tourists every year and one appreciates the meaning of future shock.
When at some moment in the 1950s tourism’s revenues reached the milestone of one billion dollars, industry officials were downright giddy. A half century later, tourism generated $50 billion in revenues and was responsible for 663,000 jobs. Yet success has created doubts and critics. An economy built upon a pyramid of minimum wage jobs is troubling. Metro Orlando “excels at little beyond being one of the world’s top tourist destinations, and it lags behind most comparably sized U.S. cities in virtually every category,” charged the Orlando Sentinel in 2001.Most distressing, tourist numbers are flat and the prospects of expensive plane fares and gasoline cause shivers throughout the industry.
IX. It’s the Environment, Stupid
Geography is destiny. Florida’s terrain may be bewitching and inspiring, but it also flat and malleable. Since 1958, Florida has been surveyed, dug, dredged, ditched, and leveled at a frightening pace. With enough financing, technology, and will (political and human), Florida can easily be transformed into everyman’s fantasy. The coastline can resemble a Venetian canal where gondolas plied gulf waters. Mangrove-hugging coastlines could be and were converted into exclusive beachfront and grassy yards. Cattle ranch can reappear as Cinderella’s Castle or Rocket City.
To simply list the greatest environmental catastrophes in Florida is to invite a debate, for there are so many of them.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tea Cake surveys the rich farmlands only recently wrenched from the Everglades and announces, “Dis game ain’t no game fuh pennies.” The destruction of the Everglades is a state and national tragedy. In 1947, President Truman dedicated the Everglades National Park. That same year, Marjory Stoneman Douglas published her magisterial book on the Everglades. But 1947 was also the wettest year of the century. Precisely at the moment the public applauded the preservation of the Glades, events conspired against that vision.
In 1947, Big Sugar was not very big. By the 1970s, it was huge. Castro’s seizure of Cuba, the American embargo, “sweetened” Congressional legislation, and savvy corporate leadership boosted the profiles of U.S. Sugar and Flo-Sun. By 2002, almost a half-million acres in South Florida were dedicated to the growing of sugar. But to blame Big Sugar for the Everglades’ woes is misleading. The rampant growth of Central Florida, fertilizers running off lawns and ranches, and coal-generating power plants added to the mess.
The straightening of the Kissimmee River ranks as one of the most destructive acts in American environmental history. Nature had created an almost perfect eco-system. Rain water flowed slowly downhill from Central Florida’s lakes. That, plus the winding Kissimmee River reached the shallow bowl of Lake Okeechobee, pouring over the rim and eventually reaching Florida Bay.
But it was not perfect enough. In the 1960s, Florida ranchers and planters wanted to eliminate the Kissimmee’s unpredictability and maximize their investments in range and field land. They persuaded Florida politicians who convinced the U.A. Army Corps of Engineers to spend ten years and $35 million to straighten the ancient river. Finished in 1971, the Kissimmee River became the C-38 canal, a drainage ditch that now funneled pollution into now-endangered Lake Okeechobee. Almost immediately, the project’s ruin could be measured and seen. To fix the mess, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to restore and “unstraighten” the river.
In the 1960s, the Dade County Port Authority proposed the construction of a regional jetport to be located in the Big Cypress area of the Everglades. To reach the 39-square mile jetport, hundreds of miles of roads and rails were planned. A crazy-quilt coalition of academics, Seminoles, Miccosukees, college students, writers, artists, judges, and politicians opposed the project. Most importantly, Marjory Stoneman Douglas led the successful crusade against the jetport, emerging as the voice of an emerging environmental movement.
In 1964, a blast of dynamite in Palatka signaled the formal beginning of one of the most ambitious and controversial projects. For hundreds of years, Spanish governors and Yellow Dog Democrats had dreamed and lobbied for a man-made canal across the peninsula, so ships might avoid the long trip around the Straits of Florida. Flush with political success, President Lyndon Johnson and a Democratic Congress saw the canal project part of the Great Society,
South Florida politicians and environmentalists expressed concerns over the wisdom and consequences of the canal. Most alarming was the fear that the canal would slice through the aquifer. Marjorie Harris Carr, a Gainesville housewife but also a trained biologist, led a movement to stop the canal. She succeeded, with the help of Republican Claude Kirk—who, in spite of his personal quirkiness, achieved a distinguished environment record—and advised President Richard Nixon to pull the plug on the canal fiasco. Kirk’s trusted advisor, Nathaniel Reed, also deserves credit for halting the hare-brained project.
Floridians face the same dilemma today as in 1958. How do you balance a dreamscape that drew so many tourists, migrants, and immigrants to its pristine beaches and unhurried lifestyle with the day-to-day necessities to sustain millions of people? Can a state, must a state that was built upon growth alter the consumer culture that created such prosperity and abundance?
X. So Many Big Events, So Little Time
On the tenth day, Florida rested.
Gary R. Mormino holds the Frank E. Duckwall Professorship in Florida Studies at the University of South Florida-St. Petersburg. He is the author of the 2005 book, "Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social history of Modern Florida" (University Press of Florida).