The History of Florida (69 page)

The Great Depression · 329

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings came to Florida from Rochester, New York, in 1928. Living in

the sparsely settled scrub at Cross Creek south of Gainesville, she divided her time be-

proof

tween growing oranges and writing fiction. In several notable books, which included

South
Moon
Under
(1933);
The
Yearling
(1938), which won a Pulitzer Prize; and the au-tobiographical
Cross
Creek
(1942), she took as her subjects the proud taciturn Crackers

who eked out a bare subsistence from the fields, woods, and lakes of Florida’s half-wild

interior. In a fitting tribute, her friend and attorney Philip S. May, of Jacksonville, wrote

her in 1947: “Ponce de León discovered Florida in 1513, but he had found only the physi-

cal and material Florida. Then, more than 400 years later, you came to discover the

heart and spirit of Florida and revealed them to the world in writings of rare beauty

and sensitiveness.”

New Deal programs did not solve unemployment in Florida, nor did

they end the Great Depression. World War II did that. Yet they galvanized

Floridians and reversed the slide of economic decline. Without question the

New Deal supplied desperately needed funds, and Roosevelt’s leadership

gave Florida citizens a powerful psychological boost. The 1930s were a mas-

sive lesson in overcoming adversity. During the decade the state’s physical

contours, urban and rural, changed. A new concept of state government

responsibilities emerged, and the necessary agencies to fulfil the obligations

became fact.

330 · William W. Rogers

The Miami Beach Lions Club exhibits its optimism in the midst of the Great Depression.

Floridians sought ways to lift themselves out of their misery (hence the

popularity of Margaret Mitchel ’s novel
Gone
with
the
Wind
and the movie

that followed). Unable to afford membership in a country club, they seized

on miniature golf as a leisure-time substitute. In numerous inspiring ways

proof

they discovered that they possessed reservoirs of fortitude, strength, and

good humor. As one writer noted, the title song of Walt Disney’s cartoon

“Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” became a metaphor for their struggle

against the Great Depression.

Notes

1.
Tal ahassee
Daily
Democrat,
18 April 1931.

2.
Annual
Report
Banking
Department
[Florida],
30 June 1931, p. 5, hereafter cited as
ARBD.

3.
Tal ahassee
Daily
Democrat,
2 February 1933.

4. Lyn Rainard, “Ready Cash on Easy Terms: Local Responses to the Depression in Lee

County,” p. 297.

5.
Jacksonvil e
Florida
Times
Union,
10 March 1933.

6.
ARBD,
30 June 1933, p. 6.

7.
Tampa
Tribune,
6 April 1936.

The Great Depression · 331

Bibliography

Buchanan, Patricia. “Miami’s Bootleg Boom.”
Tequesta
30 (1970):13–31.

Cox, Merlin G. “David Sholtz: New Deal Governor of Florida.”
Florida
Historical
Quarterly

43, no. 2 (October 1964):142–52.

Dunn, James Wil iam. “The New Deal and Florida Politics.” Ph.D. dissertation, Florida

State University, 1971.

Ginzl, David J. “The Politics of Patronage Florida Republicans during the Hoover Admin-

istration.”
Florida
Historical
Quarterly
61, no. 1 (July 1982):1–19.

Hughes, Melvin Edward, Jr. “Wil iam J. Howey and His Florida Dreams.”
Florida
Historical

Quarterly
66, no. 3 (January 1988):243–64.

Kersey, Harry A., Jr.
The
Florida
Seminoles
and
the
New
Deal,
1933–1942.
Boca Raton: Florida Atlantic University Press, 1989.

La Godna, Martin M. “Greens, Grist and Guernseys: Development of the Florida State Ag-

ricultural Marketing System.”
Florida
Historical
Quarterly
53, no. 2 (October 1974):146–

63.

Loftin, Bernadette K. “A Woman Liberated: Lil ian C. West, Editor.”
Florida
Historical

Quarterly
52, no. 4 (April 1974):396–403.

Long, Durward. “Key West and the New Deal, 1934–1936.”
Florida
Historical
Quarterly
46,

no. 3 (January 1968):209–18.

Lowry, Charles B. “The PWA in Tampa: A Case Study.”
Florida
Historical
Quarterly
52, no.

4 (April 1974):363–80.

Mardis, John. “Federal Theatre in Florida.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 1972.

Rainard, R. Lyn. “Ready Cash on Easy Terms: Local Responses to the Depression in Lee

proof

County.”
Florida
Historical
Quarterly
64, no. 3 (January 1986):284–300.

Sewel , J. Richard. “Cross-Florida Barge Canal, 1927–1968.”
Florida
Historical
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no. 4 (April 1968):369–83.

Shofner, Jerrell H. “Roosevelt’s ‘Tree Army’: The Civilian Conservation Corps in Florida.”

Florida
Historical
Quarterly
65, no. 4 (April 1987):433–56.

Snyder, Robert E. “Marion Post and the Farm Security Administration in Florida.”
Florida

Historical
Quarterly
65, no. 4 (April 1987):457–79.

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University of North Carolina, 1965.

19

World War II

Gary R. Mormino

For a state that trafficked in hyperbole, Florida had ample reasons to wel-

come the first Sunday in December 1941. Not since the giddy days of the

mid-1920s had residents of the Sunshine State expressed such optimism.

Symbolical y, the first Sunday of December marked the official beginning

of Florida’s tourism season, but by the Sunday afternoon of December 7,

news of Pearl Harbor shattered the expectations of beaches filled with free-

spending tourists.

On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Floridians, like most Americans, were deeply

proof

divided over the questions of isolationism, neutrality, and intervention. But

as the
Tal ahassee
Democrat
editorialized: “Japan has done one thing for us.

The cowardly attack . . . has united the nation as nothing else could have

done.”1 A surge of patriotism swept the state. In Pensacola and Quincy, civic

clubs pledged cash prizes to the first aviator to drop a bomb on Tokyo or the

first Florida boy to kill a Japanese soldier.

The realities of war quickly hit home. In the weeks after Pearl Harbor, at

a time when Allied hopes were dimmed by Japanese and German successes,

two Floridians offered hope. Alexander Ramsey “Sandy” Nininger Jr., a Fort

Lauderdale resident and graduate of West Point, was killed on 12 January

1942 in the Philippines. For his gal antry, he was awarded the first Medal of

Honor of the war.2 Arguably the war’s first American hero was a twenty-six-

year-old north Florida farm boy. For the duration, editorial writers and war

bond promoters summoned Americans to cherish the name and deeds of

Colin Purdie Kel y Jr. A West Point graduate, Kel y stirred American spir-

its when newspaper reports recorded that, after the Japanese attacked the

Philippines, Kel y saved his air crew and then sank an enemy battleship by

ramming it with his crippled B-17 bomber. Later reports revised the narra-

tive. Today, Four Freedoms Park in Madison honors Kel y.

· 332 ·

World War II · 333

The explosive growth of military establishments represented the most

tangible evidence of war. Florida, once the Campground State, had become

a citadel. Home to a handful of military instal ations before 1939, Florida

soon bristled with 172 military instal ations, ranging from megacomplexes

at the U.S. Army’s Camp Blanding and Eglin Army Air Field to fledgling

facilities such as the Sopchoppy Bombing Range and the Naples Army Air

Field.

Year-round sunshine, sandy beaches, and a jungle-like terrain made

Florida especial y attractive for military training. Pork-barrel politics, mas-

terful y practiced by U.S. Senator Claude Pepper and Congressman Rob-

ert “He-Coon” Sikes, also contributed to Florida’s makeover. The evolution

of northwest Florida graphical y il ustrates the success of Sikes. Elected to

Congress in 1940, he procured nine military bases before his retirement in

the 1970s.

Camp Blanding also represented the transforming wand of federal lar-

gess. Conceived in 1939 as a summer camp for the Florida National Guard,

Blanding was carved from a 27,000-acre preserve in rural Clay County.

With the coming of war, construction companies employed 21,000 carpen-

ters and laborers to expand the base. So many migrants flocked to the site

that the Florida Welfare Board distributed food to the needy. To relieve the

proof

congested roads, a special train carried more than one thousand workers

between Jacksonville and Starke. In a February 16, 1942, article in the
New

York
Sun,
reporter Ward Morehouse captured the frantic mood:

Starke is gauche. In its present incarnation it is a town created and

spoiled by defense dol ars. With its over-lighted facades, its blazing

interiors, its fluorescent tubing, its while-u-wait photo studios, its

hel -red neons, its cheap jewelry displays and its gaudy movie pal-

aces . . . Starke had gone from a population of 1,500 (Home of the

Sweetest Strawberries This Side of Heaven) to a population of nobody

knows what. Starke, an overnight gold-rush town as a result of the

national emergency, is as fantastic a spot as America now presents.

The urgency of mobilization imposed limits on future Camp Blandings.

An expedient solution was found in an unlikely setting: Florida’s resort

beach hotels. Humorists initial y spoofed the notion of raw recruits sleeping

in the splendorous Don CeSar or Ponce de Leon Hotels, but Undersecretary

of War Robert Patterson disarmed critics by insisting that “the best hotel

room is none too good for the American soldier.” Florida’s hoteliers, ex-

pecting a banner 1942 season, initial y balked at the proposal, but traveling

334 · Gary R. Mormino

Army Air Forces trainees march to their classroom in Miami Beach. The Air Forces occu-

pied 70,000 hotel rooms on the beach, where one-fourth of all air officers and one-fifth

of all air enlisted men received basic training. The largest ground army basic training

center in the state was Camp Blanding, near Starke. At its peak during World War II,

Blanding was Florida’s fourth-largest city (after Jacksonville, Miami, and Tampa).

proof

restrictions, the presence of German U-boats, and appeals to patriotism and

pocketbook persuaded the industry to turn over the keys to the military.

Every major hotel but the Suwannee in St. Petersburg was transformed into

a training facility. By February 1942, the first wave of ninety-day wonders ar-

rived in Miami. By fal , almost 300 hotels in Miami and Miami Beach hosted

78,000 military “guests.” The government purchased some of the elegant