The History of Florida (72 page)

County. Jesse Payne, a black sharecropper, was lynched following a dispute

with a white farmer. The spectacle brought ignominious attention to Florida

since it was America’s only lynching in 1945. A black army corporal wrote

Governor Mil ard Caldwell: “I had no idea that I would hear of similar acts

of Fascism upon return to our great arsenal of democracy, America.”20

But the war also offered real hope and the promise of change. On the eve

of World War II, the NAACP had launched an attack upon the pil ars of

segregation and inequality. Counsel Thurgood Marshal , representing the

NAACP and black teachers, won several court cases in Florida, awarding

World War II · 345

African American teachers salaries equal to those of their white counter-

parts. By war’s end, black men served on juries in Escambia and Pinel as

Counties, while cities such as Miami and Tampa hired black policemen.

On 3 April 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the white primary

in
Smith
v.
Al wright.
By 1946, African Americans in Florida—or at least

those who lived in urban counties—broke the political color line in Florida,

registered as Democrats, and voted in primaries.

African Americans, long denied the right to enjoy white beaches, en-

visioned a new day in the sun. In May 1945, Miami’s Colored Ministerial

Alliance orchestrated a “swim-in.” The target was Baker’s Haulover Beach,

a county white beach. Chagrined city and county leaders responded by of-

fering blacks a separate beach at Virginia Key. The seeds of the modern civil

rights movement had been sown.

World War II served as a great watershed for American women. The most

visible and powerful symbol of the war’s impact on the home front was

the presence of women in the workplace. The
Daytona
Beach
Evening
News

wrote: “Womanpower is available everywhere. Women are eager to give it

whenever and wherever they can. Why does not the government take steps

to organize, recognize, and use this valuable asset?”21

The
Tampa
Morning
Tribune
saw the war as a harbinger. “It may hurt the

proof

masculine pride a little to think that a woman can handle a man’s job, but

pretty soon a lot of Tampa women may be working at the benches and docks

where men used to be.” The
Tribune
might have expanded the list to include

groves, welding shops, shipyards, and aircraft hangars.

Across America, the number of working women rose from 14.6 million

in 1941 to 20 million in 1944. By war’s end, married women outnumbered

single women in the workplace, a landmark event. Florida newspapers ex-

pressed wonderment over the novelty and substance of change. And change

could be seen everywhere. One official estimated that at least one-quarter of

the state’s farmworkers were women. “Women are doing virtual y all of the

cultivating and harvesting,” observed the
Tampa
Morning
Tribune
, noting

that 700 of Hil sborough County’s farmworkers were females.22 In Miami,

milkmaids replaced milkmen at Southern Dairy, while women took jobs as

pole painters at Florida Power & Light and as clerks and elevator operators

at area hotels. Tal ahassee hired Elizabeth McLean as the city’s first police-

woman. Women replaced men as transit workers in St. Petersburg. “Lum-

berjills [have] invaded Florida,” announced the
Miami
Herald.
“They are

doing practical y every job in the saw mill today, and they are even felling

trees in the woods with a soprano “Timber!”23

346 · Gary R. Mormino

The war effort relied heavily upon civic volunteerism, a field historical y

dominated by women. The day after Pearl Harbor, the
Tampa
Morning
Tri-

bune
pleaded for “Tampa girls . . . to attend dances for soldiers.” In Miami

Beach, 18,000 volunteers refurbished and staffed the Minskie Pier, a favorite

recreational destination for soldiers. In St. Petersburg, hundreds of young

women volunteered as “Bomb-a-Dears,” while the more matronly Grey La-

dies distributed cigars and postcards at the Bay Pines Veterans Hospital.

In the 1943 Florida Legislature, a single woman took her place among the

solons. State Representative Mary Lou Baker introduced a measure popu-

larly known as the “Women’s Emancipation Bil .” Passed after a spirited de-

bate, the law strengthened the rights of married women to manage their

separate estates and to sue and be sued independently of their husbands.

A bill to ensure the rights of women to serve on juries failed. The measure

would be passed in 1949.

Historians continue to debate the sheer impact of World War II upon

American women. One school of thought argues that, for al their indi-

vidual efforts outside the home, and for al of the wartime service within

and outside the military, American women returned to the “traditional”

home roles of mother and housewife when the war ended. Other scholars

contend that one can directly trace the beginnings of a feminist revolution

proof

and the modern women’s movement to the war, that the conflict profoundly

changed the participants
and
the home front, and that, while many women

did return to their homes, their expectations and experiences were incor-

porated into a changing American culture.

Headlines depict Florida as consumed with alarming questions about

morality and the sins (and afflictions) of the flesh. The war, with its super-

charged atmosphere of patriotism and sacrifice, strained the swirling world

of gender and sexual relationships. Newspapers conveniently blamed the

problem on “Victory Girls,” “VD Girls,” and “Khaki Wackies.” Certainly it

is difficult to stereotype wartime conduct or assign labels of “victim” and

“vil ain.”

The reality is that prostitution posed a serious problem around military

bases and in large cities. In 1944, Pensacola’s “VD Control Officer” estimated

that Escambia County’s population included 11,000 syphilitics. In Miami

and Tampa, the military pressured city officials to eliminate red-light dis-

tricts. The urges and demands for illicit sex spawned new opportunities in

new places. Helen Muir remarked that “Miami teenagers turned prostitute

in Bayfront Park. . . . Early park closings and extra police failed to stop

this mass prostitution until al shrubbery was ordered trimmed.”24 Some

World War II · 347

military commanders, such as Col. Edmund Gaines at Tal ahassee’s Dale

Mabry Field, threatened to declare infected cities “off limits” to soldiers.

The 1943 Florida Legislature passed a State Quarantine Bil , converting four

CCC camps at Miami, Ocala, Wakul a, and Jacksonville into VD hospitals.

Thousands of wives, sweethearts, and children fol owed servicemen to

Florida, hoping to reconstitute war-torn families or simply to be closer to

loved ones. Florida, they learned, could be a cold place. Finding a home

or apartment in crowded cities proved to be frustrating and often heart-

breaking. Many called it a disgrace that servicemen and small children were

turned away from homes and apartments. An “irate Navy wife” complained

to a newspaper in 1944 that housing seemed to be for tourists only.

A mood of Spartan sacrifice overtook Florida. The military imposed a

ban on deep-sea fishing. Armed guards patrol ed the beaches, imposing

a ban on bonfires. St. Petersburg canceled its Festival of States Parade “for

the duration.” Minor-league baseball leagues canceled their schedules. The

crosshairs of a home-front war soon found new targets. Total war, with its

obligatory strictures against waste and fol y, demanded old-fashioned vir-

tues of patriotism, community, and deferred gratification. Florida’s tropical

casinos and tourist centers appealed to a new taste of leisure, individualism,

and conspicuous consumption.

proof

Florida tourism, like American basebal , proved resilient even in war-

time. Appeals to help revive the state’s flagging tourist industry began.
Flor-

ida
Highways
reminded readers in New Jersey and Il inois that “sunshine

was
not
being rationed.” The Daytona Beach Chamber of Commerce ran

a brochure in New York newspapers with the tempting message, “Like a

soldier, YOU need a civilian furlough.” Florida press agents unleashed a

“blitzkrieg of joy” campaign on civilian morale. The owners of Tal ahassee’s

Cherokee Hotel offered soap bars in red, white, and blue wrappers. In St.

Petersburg, the Lakewood Country Club provided an electric shuttle service

between downtown hotels and the golf course. Horse and dog racing tracks

encouraged winning bettors to purchase war bonds.

The image of Florida at Play clashed sharply with the image of America at

War. So many tourists arrived in January 1944 (the first winter season Gold

Coast hotels had been reconverted to civilian use) that passengers simply

overwhelmed the transportation system. In Fort Lauderdale, a journalist

noted, every day resembled a “Christmas weekend.” Governor Hol and ap-

pealed to the Office of Defense to add more railcars. The FBI’s sensational

arrests of sixteen Miami hotel operators and ticket agents only reinforced

J. Edgar Hoover’s opinion of Miami as “a lodestar for criminals, gangsters,

348 · Gary R. Mormino

racketeers and federal fugitives from justice during the winter season.”

Helen Muir wrote, “Miami Beach never had it so gay as titled European

refugees, wartime manufacturers, and government bigwigs crowded the

nightspots, attended the horse races, and brunched at cabanas.”25

Philip Wylie, a trenchant critic and keen observer, expressed outrage over

the juxtaposition of the idle rich and the deserving poor in Miami. “Women

and children walk the street,” he complained in the
New
Republic
. “The men

who have sacrificed most meet in Miami those who have sacrificed the

least.”26 But Wylie desperately wanted Miami to soar to new heights after

the war and bristled when sunshine patriots attacked his hometown. In an

extraordinary 1943 essay in the
Miami
Herald
, he defended the charge that

“Greater Miami is a third-rate city, garish, vulgar and trivial.” He wrote at

war’s end, Miami “can seize the gigantic opportunities at hand and develop

this unique region into a new heart of the new world—or we can go on be-

ing a tropical Coney Island.”27

News of the Japanese surrender ending the war swept across the pen-

insula and panhandle on 14 August 1945. Col ectively and spontaneously,

V-J Day was the most deliriously happy day in Florida history. Floridians

were tired of war and sacrifice, ready for peace and homecoming. In Key

West, ten long blasts alerted the Conchs; in Clewiston, locomotive whistles

proof

at the U.S. Sugar Company heralded the message; while in Quincy, “Big

Jim,” the giant whistle at the Fuller’s Earth plant, thundered the news. No

city escaped V-J Day’s pandemonium. Gainesville’s
Daily
Sun
described the

scene at University Avenue and First Street: “Automobiles, motorcycles,

trucks and anything else with wheels jammed the streets for a mile or so,

while occupants of the vehicles sounded horns, screamed, rang cow bel s,

and hysterical y expressed joy.” On Biscayne Bay, one observer thought Mi-

ami “looked like Rio at Carnival.” In Tampa, the
Tribune
reported gingerly,

“Young and old joined in the kissing contests. Acquaintance was not neces-

sary although some girls insisted on kissing only sailors and some service-

men preferred blondes.”

V-J Day was especial y poignant for the inhabitants of 1716 SW Twelfth

Avenue in Miami. The parents of pilot Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets Jr. resided there,

and after August 14, Enola Gay Tibbets (after whom Paul’s atomic bomber

was named) was the most famous woman in America. At the dawn of the

nuclear age, technology seemed both terrifying and liberating. Just hours

after Hiroshima’s destruction, Lee County commissioners offered the gov-

ernment a 7,500-acre tract of land “as a base for the atomic bombing of

hurricanes.”28 Understandably, Floridians had understood the war as a

World War II · 349

triumph of technology, and there was little reason to believe America could

not harness atomic power. The war had also introduced the wonder drug

penicillin. Daily C-46 flights were saturating Florida cities with DDT spray.

Year-round living on Gulf beaches would soon be possible. By 1947, Florid-

ians were all too eager to read new stories of technology’s leap. “Now’s the

time for comfort lovers to order one-room air conditioners,” announced the

Miami
Herald.
29

At the end of the war, Floridians still relied upon radio and newspapers

for their news. Daily, newsboys still delivered a morning and afternoon pa-

per. Evening rituals included chatting with neighbors and reading the day’s

papers on the front porch. Still another revolution began on the evening of