The History of Florida (73 page)

21 March 1949. Inside the venerable Capitol Theatre in downtown Miami,

technicians broadcast the first television signals from Florida.

Before the war, few Floridians had ever flown in an airplane. The war

ushered in an era of flight, and Florida benefited handsomely from the avia-

tion boom. Scores of New Deal and World War II–era air fields became

municipal airports. By 1947, the commentator John Gunther proclaimed

Miami “one of the great international airports of the world.”30 The conver-

sion of air fields to international airports il ustrated the conversion of hun-

dreds of World War II instal ations to civilian use. Civic leaders scrambled

proof

to hold on to their economic lifelines. “Crestview,” philosophized the editor

of the
Okaloosa
News
Journal,
“like all other small towns of around 2,500,

wil have to sink or swim after the war is finished. What wil we do af-

ter the war?” Crestview need not have worried. Congressman Bob Sikes

vowed to take care of his hometown like a He-Coon protects the defenseless

coons.31 Many small towns—Arcadia, Lake City, and Naples—did lose their

beloved military bases. Other communities found creative ways to utilize

abandoned barracks and aircraft runways. Sebring’s Hendricks Field had

welcomed crews learning to fly B-17 bombers. In 1950, the Sebring Grand

Prix was born. Marianna Air Field became a tuberculosis hospital. Dale

Mabry Field housed the first males to attend the Florida State College for

Women, which would soon become Florida State University. The Richmond

Naval Air Station exchanged blimps and seaplanes for tigers, lions, and the

Miami Metro Zoo. Lakeland’s Lodwick School of Aeronautics became the

new spring training home for the Detroit Tigers basebal team. The Vero

Beach Naval Air Station became the legendary “Dodgertown,” spring home

for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Perhaps most dramatical y, the romantic-sounding Banana River Naval

Air Station was closed and then reappeared as Patrick Air Field. Its new

350 · Gary R. Mormino

mission was to protect Cape Canaveral. For centuries, Cape Canaveral

stood as a lighthouse and geographic destination, and one of the most iso-

lated places in Florida. In 1946, a reporter had described the place: “Canav-

eral, a small community on the sparsely populated cape of a scrub-covered

key . . . has no port, and no commerce, nothing but a battered pier.”32 The

fol owing year, the Joint Chiefs of Staff identified 15,000 acres of Brevard

County as a site for the Joint Long Range Proving Ground. A vanguard of

scientists arrived in 1947.

America’s space race began there in 1949.

Notes

1.
Tal ahassee
Democrat,
9 December 1941.

2. “How Tough Is a Hero?”
Time
, 9 February 1942.

3. Hemphil ,
Aerial
Gunner
from
Virginia
, 9.

4. Helen Muir,
Miami
U.S.A.
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 205. For

an overview of the U-boat Atlantic campaign, see Michael Gannon,
Operation
Drumbeat

(New York: Harper and Row, 1990).

5. Robert Bil inger,
Hitler’s
Soldiers
in
the
Sunshine
Stat:
German
POWs
in
Florida
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000).

6. “The South Looks Up,”
Fortune
, July 1943, 95.

7. Gary R. Mormino,
Hil sborough
County
Goes
to
War:
The
Home
Front,
1940–1945

proof

(Tampa: Tampa Bay History Center, 2001), 51–58.

8. “Careful with DDT,”
Time
, 22 October 1945.

9.
Tampa
Morning
Tribune,
27 November 1942.

10. Chandler quoted in
Miami
Herald,
26 July 1943.

11. Harry Crews,
A
Childhood
(New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 128.

12.
Miami
Herald,
26 July 1943.

13. Nixon Smiley,
Knights
of
the
Fourth
Estate:
The
Story
of
the
Miami
Herald
(Miami: E. A. Seamann Publishing, 1974), 209; Gary R. Mormino, “Midas Returns: Miami Goes to

War,”
Tequesta
57 (1997):5–53.

14. “‘Welcome’ and ‘Keep Out’ Signs to Dot Florida Winter Scene,”
New
York
Times,

27 July 1941.

15. “Around Florida,”
Miami
Herald
, 26 July 1943.

16. Gary R. Mormino, “GI Joe Meets Jim Crow: Racial Violence and Reform in World

War II Florida,”
Florida
Historical
Quarterly
74 (July 1994):23–42.

17.
Fort
Myers
News-Press
, 18 August 1942.

18. State Defense Council, Record Group 191, Series 419, Box 5, p. 7, Florida State Ar-

chives, Tal ahassee.

19. Krensky memoir in
Miami
Herald
, 7 May 1985.

20. Mil ard F. Caldwell Papers, Florida State Archives, Tal ahassee.

21.
Daytona
Beach
Evening
News
, 5 October 1942.

22. “700 Women Work On County Farms,”
Tampa
Morning
Tribune
, 14 March 1943.

World War II · 351

23. “Lady Lumberjacks Work in Forests,”
Miami
Herald
, 22 August 1943.

24. Muir,
Miami
U.S.A.
, 211.

25. Ibid., 201.

26.
New
Republic
, 21 February 1944.

27. Philip Wylie, “True Greatness,”
Miami
Herald
, 5 December 1943.

28. “Lee Offers Base to Bomb Storms,”
Tampa
Daily
Times,
9 August 1945.

29.
Miami
Herald
, 1 June 1947.

30. John Gunther,
Inside
U.S.A.
(New York: Harper and Bros., 1947), p. 655.

31.
Okaloosa
News
Journal,
5 May 1944.

32. “Canaveral,”
Tampa
Morning
Tribune
, 17 February 1946.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Newspapers constitute an invaluable source for studying the war on the home front. Al-

most any town of significance published a newspaper during the industry’s golden age of

the 1940s. Two out-of-state newspapers, the
Pittsburgh
Courier
(Florida edition) and the

Atlanta
Daily
World
, offer valuable insights into race relations.

The P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History at the University of Florida and the State His-

torical Library and the State Archives in Tal ahassee provide the best holdings of primary

materials related to the home front. The Archives’ Mil ard Caldwell and Spessard Hol and

Papers are especial y interesting. The Claude Pepper Library houses the papers of a power-

proof

ful and influential Floridian and can be accessed at Florida State University.

Secondary Sources

Billinger, Robert D., Jr.
Hitler’s
Soldiers
in
the
Sunshine
State:
German
POWs
in
Florida.

Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.

Craft, Stephen G.
Embry-Riddle
at
War:
Aviation
Training
during
World
War
II.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009.

Davis, Jack. “‘Whitewash’ in Florida: The Lynching of Jesse James Payne and Its After-

math.”
Florida
Historical
Quarterly
68 (January 1990):277–90.

Freitus, Joseph, and Anne Freitus.
Florida:
The
War
Years
. Niceville, Fla.: Wind Canyon

Publishing, 1998.

Gannon, Michael.
Operation
Drumbeat:
The
Dramatic
True
Story
of
Germany’s
First
U-Boat
Attacks
along
the
Atlantic
Coast
in
World
War
II.
New York: Harper and Row, 1990.

George, Paul S. “Submarines and Soldiers: Fort Lauderdale and World War II.”
Broward

Legacy
14 (Winter-Spring 1991):2–14.

McGovern, James R.
The
Emergence
of
a
City
in
the
Modern
South:
Pensacola,
1900–1945.

DeLeon Springs, Fla.: E. O. Painter, 1976.

Mormino, Gary R. “G.I. Joe Meets Jim Crow: Racial Violence and Reform in World War

II Florida.
Florida
Historical
Quarterly
73 (July 1994):23–42.

352 · Gary R. Mormino

Rogers, Ben F. “Florida in World War II: Tourists and Citrus.”
Florida
Historical
Quarterly

39 (July 1960):34–41.

Patterson, Gordon. “Hurston Goes to War: The Army Signal Corps in Saint Augustine.”

Florida
Historical
Quarterly
74 (Fall 1995):166–83.

Shofner, Jerrell H. “Forced Labor in the Florida Forests.”
Journal
of
Forest
History
25 (January 1981):14–25.

Sikes, Bob.
He-Coon:
The
Bob
Sikes
Story.
Pensacola: Perdido Bay Press, 1984.

Taylor, Robert A. “The Frogmen in Florida: U.S. Navy Combat Demolition Training in

Fort Pierce, 1943–1946.”
Florida
Historical
Quarterly
75 (Winter 1997):289–302.

Waldek, Jacqueline Ashton. “How Boca Won the War.”
Boca
Raton
37 (Winter 1988):140–

47.

“War! How World War II Changed the Face of Florida.”
Forum:
The
Magazine
of
the
Florida
Humanities
Council
(Fall 1999):1–42.

Wynne, Lewis N., ed.,
Florida
at
War
. Saint Leo, Fla.: Saint Leo College Press, 1993.

proof

20

Florida by Nature

A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency

Jack E. Davis

The abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe is best known for her abiding

interest in the human condition. The foremost example of this sentiment

is
Uncle
Tom’s
Cabin
, her searing indictment of the American tolerance of

slavery. Two decades later, her
Palmetto
Leaves
fol owed familiar formula

by attending to the abject conditions of the formerly enslaved. Yet the state

of the nonhuman world moved Stowe, too.
Palmetto
Leaves
was inspired

proof

by winters she spent on Florida’s picturesque St. Johns River. A best seller

in its day, the book devotes considerable attention to the wildlife, wilder-

ness, water, and climate of her adopted state. “Nature,” Stowe wrote, “has

raptures and frenzies of growth, and conducts herself like a crazy, drunken,

but beautiful
bacchante
.1

Implicit in her statement is the idea of nature as an independent force.

That idea put her one conceptual step ahead of historians of more recent

times. It is hard to write about Florida without including a line or clause

about its natural aura. Any researcher experiencing the state firsthand en-

counters its visual, aural, and aromatic assertions. This is to say nothing

of his or her source material. A diary, letter, or postcard of the past would

be from another place if it failed to give due to colors at sunset, a flight of

shorebirds, a rush of fish, or the bellow of alligators. That said, historians

may paint the natural backdrop behind their human subjects or mention

civilization’s impact on the environment, but typical y they show little cu-

riosity in nature’s imposition in the human journey. They seldom reflect on

its historical agency.

Yet consider this: the geological character and the ecology of twenty-

first-century Florida is only around 2,500 years old. In the preceding age,

· 353 ·

354 · Jack E. Davis

Florida was the flip side of the sunshine state. It was cold, dry, and wind-

swept. Ten thousand years ago, the peninsula was twice as wide, expanding

as much as 100 miles into the Gulf of Mexico from the present-day coastline.

Imagine if Florida were still the same. Imagine if it had winters as cold as

Minnesota, a rocky shoreline similar to Maine’s, or a terra firma as parched

as the Arizona desert. The narrative of Florida’s past would be very different

from the one we read and write today. Marjory Stoneman Douglas put it

this way: Florida constitutes a “region in the greatest possible contrast to the

others of this continent. It has shaped uniquely the history of man within

it.”2

Florida has a history all its own in part because it has wild flora and fauna

and a climate found nowhere else in the country. It is the only continental

state that reaches below the temperate climate zone and supports the growth

of tropical plants, which have attracted tropical animals and tropical people.

It has white-sand beaches and warmth, and quantities of insistent sunshine