The History of Florida (105 page)

Security, improved pension plans, and air-conditioning. Inflated housing

values in the Midwest and Northeast provided retirement capital for those

who packed up for the move to Florida. The pattern first became apparent

by the 1940s and 1950s as tens of thousands of Jews from the Northeast

502 · Raymond A. Mohl and Gary R. Mormino

retired to Miami and Miami Beach, while midwesterners chose St. Peters-

burg. Postcards of senior citizens lounging on green benches identified

St. Petersburg as America’s “Sunshine City,” a positive image of old age in

America.

Geography is not destiny. There was nothing inevitable about bean fields

and cattle ranches becoming Century Vil age and Sun City Center. Develop-

ers provided new housing for retirees on a massive scale—high-rise, ocean-

front condominiums and gated golf-course communities for the wealthy,

sprawling tract houses for the middle classes, and enormous apartment

complexes and mobile-home parks for the less wel -to-do. Retirees often

lived in age-restricted communities with names like Leisure City, Leisure-

ville, Leisure Lakes, Golf Vil age, and Serenity.

The graying of Florida has come swiftly and dramatical y. In 1880, Florida

was a frontier state populated by predominantly young people; the median

age of Floridians stood at eighteen. By 1990, the state’s median age was

thirty-six, the nation’s highest, climbing to 40.7 in the 2010 census. Most

striking, in 1890, about 2 percent of Floridians were older than sixty-five; by

2010 the figure was 17 percent. Today, Flagler, Charlotte, Highlands, Her-

nando, Martin, Sumter, Citrus, and Sarasota Counties rank among the old-

est counties in America, each having a median age of fifty and older. The

proof

image of Florida as a relaxing, sunshine-fil ed paradise for retirees was a

powerful one. Throughout the five and a half decades after 1950, a thousand

retirees were moving to Florida each week, representing a staggering trans-

fer of financial capital and emotional commitment. The state’s over-sixty-

five population increased 70 percent during the 1970s and 40 percent during

the 1980s. Florida’s invisible economy rests on a pil ar of Social Security and

pension checks. The aging of the now-middle-aged baby-boom generation

will have a powerful impact on Florida’s future, as the first wave of that de-

mographic cohort reached sixty-five in 2011.

The history of modern Florida can be viewed as a dizzying set of migra-

tions involving individuals, families, and groups over time. White and black

Georgians sought fresh starts during Reconstruction, the 1920s boom, and

the flush times of World War II. Emigrants from the West Indies worked as

spongers in Key West, laborers in Miami, and cigar makers in Ybor City.

During World War II, temporary workers from Jamaica, Barbados, and the

Bahamas picked tomatoes in Bel e Glade, harvested potatoes at Hastings,

and cut sugarcane at Okeechobee. In the postwar era, countless GIs who had

trained at bases in Florida returned to pursue their tropical dreams. Huge

numbers of northeastern Jews and Italian Americans trekked to Florida in

Boom, Bust, and Uncertainty: A Social History of Modern Florida · 503

the decades after depression and war. New migrations of Cubans, Haitians,

and Nicaraguans have revolutionized the demographic profile of Miami-

Dade County in the past three decades, with spil over effects on nearby

Monroe, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties. Annual y thousands of Finns

make the winter trek from the northern Midwest and Canada to Lake

Worth. Since the 1950s, Canadians have been wintering in Florida in as-

tounding numbers. In 2010, 3 million Canadians visited the Sunshine State,

a figure comprising almost 10 percent of the Great White North’s entire pop-

ulation! The presence of the Maple Leaf flag and sounds of Canadian accents

alter the dynamics of Dunedin and Hol ywood. These multiple and ongo-

ing migrations contribute to the difficult task of comprehending a common

history in the peopling of Florida. Ironical y, the diverse migration stories

provide a unifying theme in their history.

The migrations have contributed to a firestorm of social change in Flor-

ida. Such population growth over a compressed period of time is unparal-

leled in the American South. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Florida’s popula-

tion of 1.9 mil ion ranked it the least-populated state in the South. Since

1940, Florida’s population has grown more than ninefold. Between 1970 and

1990, as the nation’s population grew by 21 percent, the South’s population

soared by 40 percent, much of that growth the result of surging gains in

proof

Texas and Florida. One can only imagine what Florida wil be like in the

year 2050, when, according to one projection, the state’s population will hit

47 million!

The dazzling pace of population growth has produced cataclysmic and

catalytic change in modern Florida. The ecological relationship of man and

land, between human groups and the geographical environment, has be-

come increasingly unbalanced and destructive. Over time, man and ma-

chine, relentless growth and development, have taken their tol , transform-

ing Florida, altering and reshaping the landscape, and reconfiguring the

ways Floridians lived and live. In 1845, Florida’s sylvan forests, lush lands,

and superabundant waters must have seemed limitless. More than 30,000

lakes, rivers, and springs graced the state. The last century has witnessed

a concerted private/public effort to dredge, ditch, dike, and dam the wa-

ters. Curiously, for a state where visionaries often invoked the metaphor of

Florida as a land of dreams, the evidence suggests that most developers and

dream makers sought to transform the land into something else. Florida

beaches became seawall fortresses. Lagoons became Venetian canals, com-

plete with gondoliers.

The diverse ecosystem known as Florida was often found to be too hot,

504 · Raymond A. Mohl and Gary R. Mormino

For nearly five decades, since the publication of her 1947 classic
The
Everglades:
River

of
Grass
, Marjory Stoneman Douglas (
left
), shown in her Coconut Grove home, was the

most eloquent and enduring defender of the Everglades, Florida’s last frontier, and

the greatest roadless wilderness in the United States. In 1993, in recognition of her

environmental activism, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Mar-

jorie Carr of Gainesville (
right
) founded Florida Defenders of the Environment in 1969

proof

to oppose construction of the Cross-Florida Barge Canal, which, Carr argued, would

both destroy a large part of the scenic and sensitive Ocklawaha River and threaten the

underground freshwater aquifer. As a result of her efforts, on 17 December 1976, the

Florida cabinet formally recommended to Congress that canal construction be halted,

and that subsequently was done.

too wet, and too inaccessible. Developers and politicians dreamed no small

dreams when it came to improving nature. A favorite parlor game asks Flo-

ridians to name the most ill-conceived, harebrained project in state history.

Choices include the drainage of the Everglades, the planned Jet Port along

the Tamiami Trail, the efforts to make Old Tampa Bay a freshwater lake, the

straightening of the Kissimmee River, and the Cross State Barge Canal.

An examination of a map of the Florida peninsula explains the irresist-

ible appeal of a cross-state canal. Napoleon Bonaparte, who appreciated the

significance of distances, once asserted that Italy was too long to be a coun-

try. Likewise, Florida is a long state; as wel , it is the largest state east of the

Mississippi, boasting 65,758 square miles of landmass and 3,800 miles of

tidal shoreline. The state capital, Tal ahassee, lies only 20 miles from the

Boom, Bust, and Uncertainty: A Social History of Modern Florida · 505

Georgia border but 500 miles from Miami. The creation of modern Florida

has been in large measure a struggle to overcome the tyranny of distance.

Indeed, Florida has been transformed by new technologies that short-

ened distances, speeded development, and promoted tourism. In 1845,

anyone wishing to traverse the peninsula faced daunting and general y un-

comfortable options. One might travel by horseback or stagecoach in some

areas, by canoe or sailboat in others, primitive means untouched by the

transportation revolution unfolding in the northern states. By the time of

the Civil War, steamboats were plying the Apalachicola and St. Johns Rivers,

but Florida had only 400 miles of railroad track in place and remained last

among the Confederate states in railroad mileage.

By the end of the century, however, railroads crisscrossed the peninsula,

reaching Pensacola and even distant Miami. Beginning in 1880, a great surge

in railroad construction began to open up new areas for settlement, tourism,

and economic development. Total railroad mileage in Florida surpassed

3,500 in 1900, and it nearly doubled to about 6,000 miles by 1930. Great rail-

road magnates such as Henry M. Flagler and Henry B. Plant pushed Florida

into the twentieth century. Flagler’s transportation and hotel empires even-

tual y extended from St. Augustine to Key West, leaving in its wake the new

or rejuvenated cities of Daytona Beach, Palm Beach, West Palm Beach, and

proof

Miami. Before his death in 1913, Flagler pushed his railroad all the way to

Key West, an engineering marvel of the time.

On Florida’s west coast, the iron messiah made and unmade cities. Cedar

Keys, in 1880 one of Florida’s most promising cities, was connected by rail to

Fernandina on the East Coast and was blessed with rich nearby cedar for-

ests, as well as lumber mil s, fine wharfs, and steamship connections to New

Orleans and Key West. Yet it was devastated by hurricanes and Henry Plant’s

decision to select Tampa as a rail hub for his growing empire. A vil age of

only 720 residents in 1880, Tampa prospered with the coming of the railroad

in 1884. Now linked by rail to Jacksonvil e, Tampa was becoming part of

a complex modern economic and transportation system. Cigar manufac-

turers in Tampa, lumber companies in the Panhandle, commercial fisher-

men in Fernandina, cattlemen on the open range, orange growers in Polk

County, and truck farmers in Dade County all connected to an expanding

integrated system of railroads and steamships, markets and schedules. Pom-

pano from Boca Ciega Bay could now be rushed to New York City’s Fulton

fish market, while refrigerated rail cars brought freshly slaughtered pork

and beef quarters from the Chicago stockyards.

506 · Raymond A. Mohl and Gary R. Mormino

Technology pierced the Florida interior. The steamboat and then the rail-

road opened markets and spurred the growth of specialty exports: Sanford

celery, Frostproof oranges, Zel wood corn, Apopka green beans, and Plant

City strawberries. Yet technology could be capricious. Just as new develop-

ments such as the railroad and cotton processing doomed the once thriving

seaports of Apalachicola and St. Marks, so new technologies such as electri-

fication and the internal combustion engine threatened the primacy of the

railroad. Where once cities relied upon “natural advantages”—a seaport,

river, or crossroads—electrical generating plants with their spinoff technol-

ogies (streetcars and telephones) reorganized and reshaped American cities.

Above al , the automobile brought a flurry of big changes to the Sunshine

State. The motorcar altered the roadside landscape, introducing the familiar

trinity of the gasoline station, diner, and motel. Introduced by Henry Ford

in 1908, the Model T helped reduce distances, social y and geographical y,

between rural and urban Florida. Farmers and rural families drove to town

on Saturdays, accentuating the importance of downtowns with their atten-

dant attractions of department stores, movie theaters, and chain stores. The

automobile also democratized tourism in the 1920s, enabling middle-class

“tin can tourists” to share Sunshine State attractions and amenities that had