Welcome to Florida Sign by DonkeyHotey via Flickr available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Seminoles, Retirees and Florida Man

A Brief History of the Sunshine State

01.31.20

As most of America is bundled up in the dead of winter – we’re wearing our flip-flops, slathering on sunscreen, and basking in the history of the Sunshine State.

On this episode of BackStory, Joanne, Nathan and Brian learn about the social media phenomenon called “Florida Man,” explore the often overlooked story of the Seminoles, discover how the state became a mecca for retirees, and find out about the remarkable efforts of one woman to preserve Florida’s natural environment.

This episode and related resources are funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this podcast, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Seminoles, Retirees and Florida Man Lesson Set

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Florida is an important state for many reasons. As the third most populous state, it wields significant political power in national elections. It is the home of a sizable population of senior citizens who have relocated after retiring. It is also a hotbed for tourism, the former home of many relocated Native American tribes, and an important battleground for conservationists. Florida’s rapid changes in demographics throughout the 20th century make it a fascinating historical and sociological case study.

This lesson, and the corresponding BackStory episode, focus on how Florida has changed over the last two centuries. These shifts highlight historical collisions between different cultural groups, including:

Native Americans and United States settlers
Urban planners and environmentalists
Retired Americans and younger Florida natives

As a result, Florida has a unique and multifaceted identity that is representative of the entire United States.

Segments

Florida Man

In recent years, Florida has gained a reputation for being a little “different” than the other states. Brian sits down with Craig Pittman to discuss all the things that make Florida weird.

Craig is the author of Oh Florida! How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country. His most recent book is Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle to Save the Florida Panther.

Music:

Just Bouncing Around by Judson Lee

Florida; reputation

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers: Major funding for Backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Brian Balogh: From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory.

Nathan Connolly: Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: I’m Brian Balogh.

Joanne Freeman: I’m Joanne Freeman.

Brian Balogh: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians. Each week, along with our colleague Ed Ayers, we drill down to one topic in American history.

Reporter: Florida man. You know who he is, the guy who makes headlines for committing some unbelievable crimes.

Reporter: A man accused of destroying a liquor store in Okaloosa County told police he was in Alice in Wonderland.

Reporter: A Florida man discovers his Ferrari won’t float, and it’s all caught on camera.

Reporter: Two neighbors get into a violent confrontation in an Oakland Park neighborhood.

Reporter: What makes this one stand out is the weapon involved, one of the men brandishing a sword.

Reporter: Oh Florida man, you brought us such headlines over the years in Florida.

Reporter: You know what? Can’t beat those beaches.

Brian Balogh: Aha, yes, Florida, my home state, where I spent much of my childhood, a place that made me who I am today.

Nathan Connolly: You’re the reason Florida has a reputation for being a little different than every other state.

Brian Balogh: Very funny, Nathan. I actually was curious about this whole Florida is weird phenomenon. I reached out to Craig Pittman. He’s a native Floridian and longtime reporter with the Tampa Bay Times. Here’s his take on what makes Florida so weird.

Craig Pittman: There are a lot of reasons. One of the big ones is we’ve undergone a wrenching demographic change in just the last 50 or 60 years. In 1940 we were the least populated Southern state, and then in 2014 we passed New York to become the third most populous state.

Brian Balogh: Wow.

Craig Pittman: We’ve had 22 million people move here. We’ve got about 100 million tourists visiting every year. We’re not evenly spread over the whole peninsula. We’re crammed in that 30-mile-wide swath along the coast and along Interstate 4 where the theme parks are. You pack that many different people from that many different backgrounds and cultures into that small a space and they’re bound to start ramming into each other’s cars and chasing each other with machetes and arguing over whose dog pooped on whose lawn.

Brian Balogh: You didn’t mention alligators, and that seems to be a central theme of a lot of Florida stories.

Craig Pittman: In order to accommodate all that growth, we’ve had to build a lot of homes in wild animal habitat, like build in the alligator habitat, the panther habitat, the bear habitat. Then people are shocked when they see a bear show up and sit in their hot tub, like, “Hey, this is my place. I was here first.”

Brian Balogh: With all of that, what are the wackiest stories you’ve ever covered during your career?

Craig Pittman: Oh gosh. This was one of my top ones for the past year, where the police stopped a pickup truck that had made an illegal turn, and it turned out that the woman in the passenger seat had a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles backpack that had 41 illegally collected freshwater turtles in it. The officer, having found the turtles, said, “What else have you got?” She said, “Well,” and reached into her yoga pants and pulled out a one-foot alligator.

Brian Balogh: Oh, god! Alligators I told you always show up, but I didn’t see them coming out of yoga pants.

Craig Pittman: No, not out of … That’s the thing about Florida is these things can come from anywhere. You know about our iguanas, right?

Brian Balogh: I used to love iguanas when I was growing up.

Craig Pittman: We’ve got lots of iguanas here that are an invasive species, like pythons. There was a guy, he was driving along one winter day and happened to see about 40 of them lying on the side of the road, because they were stunned by the cold, because when the temperature dips to a certain level-

Brian Balogh: They’re a cold-blooded anima.

Craig Pittman: Right. They go into this stupor and actually fall out of trees. They actually warn people to look out for the iguanas falling out of the trees. This guy sees about 40 of them, 40 cold stone iguanas by the side of the road, he thinks, “Hey, barbecue.” He stops his car and collects them and puts them in the car and takes off. He forgot that he had his heater on in the car. The iguanas all wake up and start racing around. He wrecks the car and they all get away.

Brian Balogh: Now undoubtedly you’ve heard of this social media phenomenon called the Florida man. It’s become a meme. Why don’t you describe for our listeners what the Florida man meme is and more importantly how it came about.

Craig Pittman: In say 2013 there was a guy who started a Twitter account by that name. Florida Man: The World’s Worst Superhero was the subtitle, where he would highlight these stories about people doing wacky, goofy, and generally self-destructive things that turned up in police reports. Then there was the whole Florida Man Challenge last year where you were supposed to look up your date of birth and the words Florida man and see what Florida man stories pop up for that day. Here’s the thing is some of them … I looked up the one for my date of birth. It was horribly tragic. That’s the thing is a lot of times in Florida, tragedy wears the mask of comedy. You have to figure out where’s the line where you stop laughing, because one of the other things that you have to know about why Florida produces so much weird news is we’re generally ranked 49th in the nation in spending for mental health treatment.

Brian Balogh: Putting on your social cultural analyst hat, why did the Florida man meme take off in 2014 or so? Why’d it become so popular?

Craig Pittman: I think because, A, a lot of that stuff is just so weird and so funny that you couldn’t help but laugh, like the one about the burglar from Silver Shores who broke into a house and discovered that there were ashes there for human and for a dog and he snorted them, thinking they were drugs. See? See?

Brian Balogh: Stop it.

Craig Pittman: See, that’s a real story. You couldn’t make that up. I think some of that was that, and some of it is people kind of want to laugh at people they deem to be stupider than themselves. In a way it’s reassuring to let you know that maybe your life choices weren’t as bad as they seem in comparison.

Brian Balogh: You actually alluded to this. The Florida man meme’s actually drawn criticism for being mean-spirited, for laughing down at homeless people, people who struggle with drug addiction, mental illness. Where do you [crosstalk 00:06:57]?

Craig Pittman: I think if the people involved are homeless or if they’ve been Baker Acted, which means there’s some mental problem involved, then that’s not something I’ll laugh about or post on Twitter or whatever. You see a lot of these stories pop up where they talk about, “Oh, this couple had sex in public, ha ha ha,” then it turns out they’re homeless, so gee, where are they supposed to have sex? Those are the ones that just aren’t that funny. All sorts of bizarre phenomenon occurs here in Florida. We had one of the earliest cases of someone claiming they were abducted by a UFO, a guy who then built a replica of the UFO in front of his house, complete with lights.

Brian Balogh: Let me guess, it’s a tourist attraction now.

Craig Pittman: It’s not there anymore, unfortunately. It really weirded out all the drivers who came by at night, didn’t know what they were seeing, drive off the road.

Brian Balogh: This might drive us off the road, but I grew up going to the Parrot Jungle, the Serpentarium, the Monkey Jungle. How much did these bizarro tourist attractions contribute to the very thing we’re talking about today?

Craig Pittman: I think a lot. Plus the whole attitude of, “Hey, we got to do it for the tourists. We got to make them happy.” Remember in the 1980s our ad slogan was, “Florida, the rules are different here.”

Brian Balogh: Yeah, they certainly are.

Craig Pittman: Yeah, and so a lot of people thought there are no rules at all. It’s a whole you only live once kind of philosophy if you’re catering to tourists.

Brian Balogh: Let’s do a thought experiment here, because you work in Florida, you presumably commute in Florida, you shop at the grocery store in Florida, you get your car repaired. Seriously, how would you describe Florida to let’s say somebody in New Hampshire who’s thinking of moving down to Florida? What are they getting into, taking the whole Florida experience, because there’s so much in Florida that is no different than Georgia or Alabama or New Hampshire.

Craig Pittman: I would tell them that we have the most beautiful beaches in the world. We have an award-winning State Park system. We have absolutely glorious sunsets and sunrises. We have the most interesting police logs they’ve ever seen. I always tell people, if you want to live someplace where every day the news is the same, you open the paper and it’s the same stuff day after day, then go to one of those square states out West, go to Nebraska or someplace, but if you want to live in a place where every day you open the paper or turn on the news and there’s something really interesting going on, come to Florida. We are the most interesting state.

Nathan Connolly: Today on the show, as much as the country is bundled up in the dead of winter, we’re putting on our flip-flops and diving into the history of the Sunshine State.

Brian Balogh: We’ll hear how Florida became a mecca for senior citizens.

Nathan Connolly: We’ll find out how one woman’s activism helped save Florida’s natural environment.

“Those Who Camp at a Distance”

Ethnohistorian Patsy West sets the record straight about the origins of Florida’s indigenous peoples, known as the Seminoles. Then, Nathan talks with Andrew Frank about the diverse communities built by the Seminoles – which included both Native Americans and African Americans.

Music:

Heather by Blue Dot Sessions
The Album Clean by Podington Bear

Florida; Seminoles

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Patsy West: My name is Patsy West. I’m an ethno-historian and museum curator. I was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and my family has lived within 20 miles of there, where we homesteaded in 1888.

Nathan Connolly: For many years, Patsy has devoted her career to preserving the history of Florida’s Native American population.

Patsy West: Great-granddad was very close to the Miccosukee people on Little River. At that time everybody knew them only as Seminoles, because they’d been through the Seminole Wars and they really didn’t know their pedigree. He and great-grandma invited their friends, mostly Bird Clan people and Panther Clan and Big Towns Clan, to all the events at the family property. That was the focal point on Little River was my great-granddad’s house.

Nathan Connolly: Patsy says most information regarding the Seminoles is wrong, so she’s made it her mission to teach the public their real story.

Patsy West: They generally start out with something like the Seminoles were Creeks that were pushed into Florida during the Seminole Wars, and that’s absolutely incorrect.

Nathan Connolly: Who were the Seminoles? Patsy has traced the word back to the 18th century. She says that’s when Native Americans in Florida contracted epidemic diseases from the Spanish, which devastated their population.

Patsy West: There may have been a few people left. We don’t know how many. We don’t have any statistics about that. Generally speaking, it was a void. We do know that other tribes, Choctaw, Creek, Miccosukee, came into Florida, and the people that came in around 1740 were considered, quote unquote, Seminoles.

Nathan Connolly: In the wake of this devastation, the Seminoles built remarkable communities that included both Native Americans and African Americans. I wanted to learn more about this diverse pairing, so I turned to Andrew Frank. He’s one of the leading experts on the Seminoles. I started by asking a simple question. What does the word Seminole mean?

Andrew Frank: Traditionally we’ve always described Seminole as a derivative of the Spanish word cimarron, which is kind of wild domesticated animal, so wild cow. Seminoles historically have translated it somewhat differently, those who camp at a distance or those who camp at distant fire. One’s more poetic than the other. One would more be the version that enemies would give, you’re the runaway, you’re the wild person. I think both ideas give an image of the people who are in Florida, these indigenous folks, or folks who don’t want connections with say Creeks in Georgia, Alabama, Creek Indians, but they also don’t want connections sometimes with each other. We had these communities in Florida that some of them have real interactions with one another, but they set their villages up at really quite a distance even from each other. There was very little in the way of pan-Indian politics. There may be marriages and social ties and communal ties, but on a day-to-day or even monthly basis, these are really autonomous communities.

Nathan Connolly: In the 19th century, the United States, as part of its effort to incorporate the Florida territory within the territorial bounds of the country, part of that process actually includes using Seminole as a kind of blanket term to describe indigenous peoples in the territory. Just give me some sense about what actually is a Seminole in the eyes of U.S. government officials.

Andrew Frank: A Seminole in the eyes of the U.S. government is someone who is, and I guess maybe this is where the word wild really comes from, they are out of the control of a government that is not in alliance with the United States. There’s this one gentleman named [Nayamofla 00:14:14], Indian leader. He is widely seen as a Creek. He calls himself a Creek. Then at the start of the First Seminole War, he is asked to return a suspect for a murder who’s in his villages, and he says, “No.” This is actually in southern Georgia. The U.S. military comes in, they raise his village, and he moves into Florida, and the United States now calls him a Seminole. Then lo and behold, when removal comes, he moves to the Creek Nation in what is now Oklahoma.

Andrew Frank: For a long time the U.S. calls them Seminoles as a means of saying, “Okay, these are Seminoles, and Seminoles aren’t indigenous to Florida. Therefore they have no right or sovereignty to that land. There’s no one that we can actually treat with, and they are deserving of conquest.” This is the language that James Gadsden uses, that, “The Seminoles should be treated with conquest the same way that they conquered the people who were there beforehand.” It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that the United States uses the phrase Seminole to basically say that they are deserving of removal and deserving of no protection.

Nathan Connolly: Do we have any sense at all from source material at the time what these indigenous communities, small and potentially atomized, what they thought of themselves or how they identified themselves?

Andrew Frank: They identified themselves with village. In terms of family, they identified themselves with clan, these totems of normally a name for animals, bear and tiger and tiger or panther, but they really are village-oriented. Even in say the 1890s, long after the Seminole Wars, there are these five clusters of villages in Florida, and the Cow Creeks were very different than those folks who lived at say Big Cypress. They would identify themselves, “I’m a Cow Creek. I’m a Miccosukee from Big Cypress.” It’s really only a modern reality that they have found a way to really centralize.

Nathan Connolly: The big economic backdrop of all of these contests about village and personhood in the Florida territories, of course, the plantation economy of the 18th century. It may surprise some folks to learn that it wasn’t simply a case that people of African descent, in their attempts to escape slavery, fled North. They actually fled South, into Florida. How is it that these territories and these villages became part of the land that African Americans sought to escape to?

Andrew Frank: The Underground Railroad, if you will, heading South really is something that people done pay attention to. I think the first context I would say is there are these marooned communities, independent communities of African Americans who simply want to find freedom in the American South in various swamps and mountainous areas, where if they can find ways where natural geography can protect them or shield them. They exist in the great dismal swamp and they exist in the Appalachian Mountains. They’re often very small.

Andrew Frank: Florida’s slightly different in that a good chunk of Florida had been depopulated through the slave raids and through disease, and so there are these areas where they can set up rather large villages that really run much the same way that we would say Seminole villages run. They’re autonomous from one another. They’ll have trading ties. They may have social ties with their neighbors, but they can be out in the open because there are no enslavers nearby. The Spanish have no ability to get into the interior, and later the English have no ability to get into the interior. We can say the same thing for the United States. These villages set up often in full sight of the world outside them, which provides a unique story in the American South.

Nathan Connolly: Do we have any idea about how these villages responded with the arrival of African descended people?

Andrew Frank: I think they respond the same way they respond to the arrival of other indigenous people. Sometimes they are allowed to live on land nearby, and they are incorporated as daughter towns. Sometimes the villages are providing symbolic tribute, a percentage of whatever crops they grow. Sometimes there are marriages that connect elites within the communities. Sometimes they serve as advisors to one another. Sometimes they’re really completely independent from one another. It runs the gamut. Normally we see real alliances take place when they are both being attacked by the same enemy. We can see a lot more say coordination taking place during moments of war than in moments of peace. As slave raiders come in or the United States military comes in, we can see Native people and African Americans behaving in concert with one another.

Nathan Connolly: The 19th century, if it’s known at all in the Seminole story, it’s likely around the question of the Seminole Wars. Let’s bear down here a little bit and just tell us what interest the U.S. government had in staging military campaigns against the Seminole in the 19th century.

Andrew Frank: The United States has really two really large ambitions when it comes to Seminoles. One is that Seminoles provide safe harbor, or the perception is they provide safe harbor for runaway slaves, which makes the motives of white citizens support a war, at least white citizens in the American South support a war to prevent the runaway of slaves. Also the land that Seminoles occupy, especially for the First and Second Seminole Wars, are widely seen as this opportunity for the expansion of the cotton South. The Seminoles in North Florida were farmers, and they farmed corn. The idea of expanding slavery into North and Central Florida and turning Indian cornfields into cotton fields with un-free labor, that’s the dream. They referred to it as white gold. Florida’s this Caribbean hope that the climate was comparable, and if they can turn North Florida not into a better version of the Carolinas, where many of the migrants come from, but even better would be if we can turn this into a Caribbean island, where slave populations would be significantly higher than white populations, but they can extract cotton at just an exorbitant rate.

Nathan Connolly: As these military conflicts are sweeping up, they’re moving against villages and populations that have been going through this slow and steady process of incorporating African-descended peoples and having them intermarry with these indigenous groups. How would we describe, if at all, what the impact was of the military campaigns on the African Americans in these communities, and was there in any way a split along racial lines within these villages when the U.S. government showed up?

Andrew Frank: The United States, from the very beginning of the Seminole Wars, they recognized that there are preexisting divisions within Florida. One general calls it a Negro, not an Indian war. This is Colonel Jessup. Jessup calls it that, in part not to diminish the Native American component of it all, but to highlight the opportunities that the United States military had to divide and conquer.

Andrew Frank: His grand plan, and it’s pretty effective, was he offered a version of freedom to escaped runaways who were in Florida. He basically says, “If you are willing to put your guns down, stop fighting, we’ll provide passage with you to Indian Country, where you’ll be free.” Now that offer is made at the same time that thousands ultimately of Seminoles, they surrender as well. It’s not as if they’re turning their backs on their allies, but lots of people are looking for opportunities to get out of a war zone.

Andrew Frank: It’s romantic to imagine that everyone should’ve stayed and fought to the last man, but lots of Native people are surrendering as well, because the cost of fighting is really high. Hundreds of Africans put their guns down, and about 600 find their way on their way to Indian Territory. That becomes a means that the United States really disrupts this coalescing process.

Nathan Connolly: What happens to the Seminole identity, if such a thing is hard-formed by the time you get to the 1830s or ’40s, as a result of these gambits on the part of U.S. military officials?

Andrew Frank: The folks who are in Florida who are being called Seminole increasingly acknowledge that they are fighting a common cause. One example would be during the … When the United States first gets control over Florida, there’s a treaty that they sign in 1823. It’s signed with, I think the quote is, “The Indian Tribes of Florida.” The word Seminole is never used, and there is acknowledgement of a plurality. By the time these Seminoles or the Indians in Florida are signing treaties in the 1830s and ’40s, they’re referring to themselves as Seminoles, even if they acknowledge that that’s a façade. There is this collective identity that starts to form, at least in terms of its practicality.

Nathan Connolly: How would you describe the way that Florida creates this very distinct moment in Native history? Thinking specifically about Seminole peoples as largely being able to fight or push back against American military interests at multiple points over the course of the 19th century, is there any way that the distinctiveness of Florida as a legal space, as a simply geographic region, helps to account for the uniqueness of the Seminole experience there?

Andrew Frank: There are two major influences. One, the geographic topography of Florida is unique, especially the further south you go, but it’s unique in a way that the land increasingly becomes less desirable to perspective planters, but also significantly harder to traverse. Even the names of some of the vegetation in Florida says it all. The idea of going into sawgrass, it’s amazing. It’s also the thickets of either the Everglades or Paynes Prairie or the big Cypress Swamp. The large American horses didn’t go there nearly as well as the smaller ponies that the Seminoles used. The deep boats of the U.S. Navy were not quite equipped for the rapid shallowing and disappearing waters of the interior. The United States tries to adapt some of its technology to fight this war, but their desire to go there was significantly less. Then you add alligators and mosquitoes and all sorts of animals that the typical U.S. soldier had no interest in dealing with.

Andrew Frank: That’s part of it, but the other part of it is that when the Third Seminole War ends, there’s a few hundred Seminoles left in Florida, and when the United States sends a handful of missions to find out whether they’re willing to go West or to find out what their population is, they find a few hundred living in an area, that if it weren’t for Native Americans who live there welcoming them in and then walking them into their village, no one can get in there, but they always conclude things like, “There aren’t that many. They have no interest in going West, and man, would it be a lot of work to actually do it.” Geography and politics and economic motivation all combine to give them the space that most Native people don’t have.

Nathan Connolly: On that same score, the geography and the politics and maybe just the remoteness of Florida, is that at base for why the Seminole story isn’t more widely known than say the Sioux story or the Iroquois story in American history?

Andrew Frank: That may be true. I think part of the reason why we don’t tell the Seminole story is historically the Seminole story was not a glorious victory by the United States. The most notable moment in the Seminole Wars was the capture of Osceola. He was a Seminole leader, not a tremendously significant leader, but a leader. He’s captured with a bunch of other Seminoles under a white flag of diplomacy, and it becomes really controversial. It becomes a spark for the anti-slavery movement, because here it is, the United States waging a war to expand slavery into Florida, and what does it do, it corrupts our military to break our own code of conduct. He dies in prison. This is not a glorious moment in U.S. military history. The cost of the wars were astronomical for its time. Lots of generals went down there and lost their reputations.

Andrew Frank: Also Florida doesn’t fit in general in the U.S. story, in part because we as 21st century Americans have a hard time imagining Florida as really being the Confederacy or the South or the slave-holding South, even though for a good chunk of it it was. Florida suffers in general in its inclusion in the American story.

Andrew Frank: The other part of it is, for Seminoles when it comes to Native American history, they don’t fit that model either. I teach a lot of courses in Native American history, and all the textbooks have these rather large episodes in American history that are really important allotments, Red Power. Seminoles, they weren’t subject to allotment, and virtually none of their members were connected to Red Power, and so they exist outside of that narrative as well.

Nathan Connolly: Patsy West is an ethno-historian and a museum curator. Andrew Frank is a history professor at Florida State University. He’s also the author of Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami.

A Mirror of America: Retirees in the Sunshine State

About 20 percent of Florida’s population is people ages 65 and older– also known as senior citizens. Today, the Sunshine State is seen as the epicenter for retirees in the U.S., thanks in large part to a huge influx of senior citizens during the mid-20th century. Brian talks with scholar Gary Mormino about Florida before the retirees took over, and how senior citizens have shaped the social and political landscape of the state.

Music:
Symphony 40 in G Minor by The Sweet Hots
The Big Ten by Warmbody
Transmogrify by Podington Bear

Florida; aging; demography; retirement; state government

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Gary Mormino: Do you remember the classic Seinfeld episode, Jerry is visiting Boca Del Vista, and Morty says, “Hurry up, we have to go to a early bird special.” Jerry looks at his watch and said, “Who eats at 4:30?” Morty says, “Don’t worry, by the time we get served it’ll be 4:45.”

Brian Balogh: Today, about 20% of Florida’s population is 65 or older, also known as senior citizens. Gary Mormino is one of them. He’s lived there for decades and enjoyed a career teaching history and politics at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.

Gary Mormino: I was teaching in Florida and I stayed in Florida, so I’m not perfect example of a retiree. Lest listeners think I’m spoofing seniors, first of all, I am a senior, but secondly, I am in awe sometimes in studying senior life in Florida.

Brian Balogh: All right, folks. It’s time to roll up the tube socks, bust out the fanny pack, stock up on fiber, because we’re diving into senior life in the Sunshine State.

Gary Mormino: It’s a mirror of America today, retirement in Florida. There are gay senior citizen homes in Florida. There are retirement communities that are Republican and Democratic bastions. It’s an upside-down triangle. Historically societies had lots of kids and very few senior citizens. You have counties in Florida where there are more 75-year-olds and older than 18 and younger. That’s astonishing.

Brian Balogh: The city where I grew up was definitely one of those places Gary is talking about, where the old outnumber the young. I grew up in Coral Gables, outside of Miami. Let me tell you, it was overflowing with seniors. Everybody on my block was retired except my parents. This wasn’t always the case for Coral Gables or for Florida as a whole. Gary says that for a long time in American history, Florida was younger than the rest of the country and wasn’t a very desirable place to be. It was too remote and way too humid.

Gary Mormino: Florida was a place you came in the winter for a few weeks, but no one really took it very seriously, because it was so small. On the eve of World War Two, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Florida was the smallest state in the American South.

Brian Balogh: Even before World War Two, back in the 1920s, the tide in Florida started to change.

Gary Mormino: The ’20s was this magical decade when Florida comes of age. All the qualities we associate with Florida today, its zaniness, the ’20s is Florida makes a tremendous demographic leap, and for the first time in Florida history, the future is going to be tied not to the panhandle or North Florida, where cotton and the Black Belt had been, but Central and Southern Florida. Orlando, Miami Beach, Palm Beach, Boca Raton, St. Petersburg, eventually Naples will be the future load stars of Florida.

Brian Balogh: We know that Social Security started during the New Deal in 1935, really takes off in the ’40s, in the ’50s. I got to guess that had a lot to do with the changing fortunes, if you’ll excuse the pun, of elderly people.

Gary Mormino: The role of the federal government in shaping both Florida and the United States is extraordinary. You think about it now, Social Security has been so popular, I believe Barry Goldwater was the last presidential candidate to even consider getting rid of Social Security.

Brian Balogh: Now every politician should know that you don’t mess with senior citizens’ benefits, but that doesn’t mean every city in Florida has been the most welcoming to its older residents.

Gary Mormino: St. Petersburg, where I live, may be the most famous retirement community in America in the 20th century. In 1916 the city fathers installed green benches, this certain color of green. You have these old photographs of thousands of senior citizens reading their newspaper in the morning. The problem with this for St. Petersburg is by the 1960s those senior citizens had become poor. They even called a district around downtown a gerontopolis. The city fathers wanted a new hipper St. Petersburg, and they removed the green benches in 1967, figuring if we remove the green benches, the old folks will move away. It was a public relations disaster.

Brian Balogh: Besides removing those green benches, did St. Petersburg do anything else in a self-conscious way to change its image?

Gary Mormino: What they might have done is nothing, in terms of promoting St. Petersburg as a senior mecca. What’s interesting about it is also the culture of that life in St. Petersburg ’30s through the ’60s. Shuffleboard courts, cafeterias. Many of the seniors had come for the winter. Not everyone stayed year-round, in that age before air conditioning.

Brian Balogh: Tell me about air conditioning. What difference did that make?

Gary Mormino: If you had been in a Southern community before the 1950s, there would have been islands of air conditioning in the best movie theater in town if there was a department store in town, but air conditioning was simply too expensive. Almost no individual homes had air conditioning. The great breakthrough is the 1950s when the Carrier window unit is introduced. It was expensive by the relative cost of living in the ’50s, but it certainly was the grand ushering in of this revolution. The first U.S. Census to enumerate air conditioning is 1960. In 1960 only one in five homes in Florida had any air conditioning at all, so 20% is not exactly a revolution, but when the price dropped for window units, and more and more units were being installed with pole air conditioning, it took off in the ’60s. ’60s is really the decade of air conditioning.

Brian Balogh: What were the advertising slogans that lured so many people to the Sunshine State?

Gary Mormino: The senior citizens’ communities. By the way, we had to invent a whole new lexicon to describe this. Active retirement community. If someone had told you in 1920, “I’m going to move to an active retirement community,” you would’ve thought they were out of their mind. This was across Florida, not just in the South, Naples, Fort Meyers. I used to deliver newspapers on Sunday mornings. Those papers weighed about six pounds. They were hundreds and hundreds of real estate ads for people to move to Florida. Cape Coral may be the best example here. Cape Coral gave away homes on The Price Is Right and Truth and Consequences. If they saw you gawking in Miami Beach, they’d come up and say, “How’d you like a free helicopter ride or a plane ride and a steak dinner?” They’d fly over Cape Coral, which is in Lee County, on the Gulf Coast, and then they’d land and they’d put the husband and wife in an isolation booth. They had secret listening devices to find out who was holding out. They’d say, “Wouldn’t you love to retire here in 20 years for this kind of life?” “Yes, we would, but … ” “All you need, $10 down. $10 down, $10 a month.” They’d say, “I forgot my checkbook.” They had a vault with every blank check company in America, every blank bank.

Brian Balogh: Let me ask you about retirees and politics. We know that this is a very big force in Florida politics, probably other states as well by now. How would you sum up the emerging role of the elderly or the retired in Florida politics?

Gary Mormino: They vote early and often. No politician takes them lightly. They punch heavier than their weight. Let’s put it this way. I think the figure I just saw was, this was in the 1990s, the senior vote was around 28%, and their numbers were about 17 or 18%. They’re much more likely to vote than an 18 to 21-year-old. You could make an argument also, even though not every retiree is a Republican, but the modern Republican Party was built on retirees’ backs. It had began in St. Petersburg in the 1930s. Retirees from the Midwest would come with their Midwestern isolationism. I think it was the late ’30s, St. Petersburg and Pinellas County became a Republican bulwark. Then the first modern Republican Congressman was elected from St. Petersburg in 1954, Bill Kramer. They helped elect the first Republican governor in Florida in 1966, Claude Kirk. Seniors enjoy the political fray in Florida. Many of them vote also in New York and Florida. They just found out that the governor of Vermont was a registered voter in Florida.

Brian Balogh: Wow. Gary, besides growing up surrounded by the elderly people, the other thing I remember about growing up in South Florida was Castro and the influx of Cubans to Miami. I’d never really thought about what happens when those Cubans who came in the 1960s begin to retire.

Gary Mormino: 1959 is one of those watershed years in Florida history. January 1st, ’59, Fidel had taken over, and the first exodus begins. Almost all that crowd is young or middle-aged, classic immigration profiles, except when you’re fleeing a Communist state, some elderly did come, but if you think about it, those young Cubans who left in 1959, 1965, are now in their 60s and 70s. In the 1965 Immigration Act, a major piece of legislation, the most important piece of legislation since the Immigration Restriction Acts of the 1920s, had a revolutionary impact upon Hispanics and Asians coming to America in general, and Florida in particular. Cubans had their own most favorable nation legislation, which helped them particularly bring their grandparents to America. This is unusual in American history. There’s a golden law, grandparents don’t immigrate. It’s the young kids and the sons and daughters who immigrate, but not the grandparents. That changed in 1965.

Brian Balogh: Stepping back, how would you say that retirees have shaped Florida over the last 75 years?

Gary Mormino: In some ways Florida is a testing case, is a proving ground for the rest of America. The world and America will soon be Florida. Low birth rates, anti-immigration, Florida is a test case. No society has ever faced these demographic conditions, where you have a super abundance of senior people and relatively few kids. There’s not a historical lesson to be learned from the past on this, I think. It’s a mirror of society. If there’s one theme I’d like to lead with it’s that you’ve got Republican and you have Democratic seniors, you have liberal, conservative, you have gay seniors condos now. It’s a mirror of society.

Brian Balogh: Gary Mormino is Professor of History and Politics at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. He’s also the author of Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida.

Grandmother of the Glades

For most Americans, Marjory Stoneman Douglas is the name of the Parkland high school where there was a tragic shooting in 2018. But as Jack Davis tells Joanne, the real Marjory Stoneman Douglas was a remarkable woman, whose writing and activism changed how Floridians — and for that matter, Americans — saw their natural environment.

Music:

Wistful by Bluedot Sessions
Rapids by Bluedot Sessions
Scraper by Bluedot Sessions

Florida; Marjory Stoneman Douglas; activism; environmentalism

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View Transcript

Jack Davis: I read River of Grass for the first time lying on my back in a tent in the Everglades.

Joanne Freeman: That’s Jack Davis, a Professor of History at the University of Florida. The book he’s talking about is a landmark history of the Everglades. It was written in 1947 by a woman named Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

Jack Davis: It was, as far as I’m concerned, the ideal place to read it. It was the wintertime, which is one of the best times to be in the Everglades, because the bird life is so conspicuous and so alive. What I’m seeing outside my tent as I’m hiking around the Everglades are the very things that she was writing about in this book.

Joanne Freeman: For most Americans, Marjory Stoneman Douglas is the name of the Parkland high school where there was a tragic shooting in 2018, but Douglas was a remarkable woman whose writing and activism changed how Floridians and Americans saw their natural environment. I caught up recently with Jack to learn more about Douglas, who moved to Florida from New York in 1915 when she was 25 years old. She was fleeing a bad marriage and hoping to get a job at her father’s newspaper, the same one that would eventually become the Miami Herald. I started our conversation by asking Jack was Florida was like when Douglas arrived there in 1915.

Jack Davis: Florida was, Miami specifically, the population was around 11,000 permanent residents. It was already starting to become a tourist attraction or tourist city, because the railroad by that time was running all the way down the East Coast. It was not a terribly attractive place, physically, and in terms of the architecture and the layout of the city, was not appealing to her. When she stepped off the train, she immediately felt at home. It was because of the natural environment, particularly, as she referred to it, the white light of South Florida. In the 1920s it went through an urban land boom, and during the land boom era of Florida, which was really equivalent to the Gold Rush of the West. Miami continued to grow. It continued to evolve, as she did. She became very much a part of the community, as a newspaper writer and then a story-writer for fiction stories for story magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. Most of her stories, some 50 of them, were set in the South Florida region. She wrote about Florida, and South Florida in particular, throughout the 20th century, as it was growing leaps and bounds and changing on some levels socially and politically.

Joanne Freeman: She gets there in that changing environment and she’s working as a newspaper columnist for the Herald, her father’s paper. What did that experience do to contribute to what she accomplished later in her life?

Jack Davis: Here’s the interesting thing about writing that column, which she did for some three years in the 1920s. She was expected, even by her father, the editor, who was very progressive when it came to women’s rights and equality, but he expected her to write book reviews and poetry and maybe speak about women’s issues on occasion, but not to get into politics. Marjory Stoneman Douglas had her own mind. She’s very much an independent woman. She wrote about any damn thing she wanted to. When she was writing that column, she read a lot. She read widely. She read science texts. She read political tracts. She read biographies. She read the classics, which is something she did the rest of her life. Then she wrote about these things. She learned to, I think with that column, really to articulate her ideas quite clearly.

Joanne Freeman: Now I gather that part of what came from that newspaper work was I guess a push towards her interest in environmental activism. Is that the case?

Jack Davis: That is indeed the case, yes. She wrote on a wide range of subjects. She wrote on censorship. She wrote on prohibition, which she was adamantly opposed to. She wrote on woman’s suffrage. Actually before she was writing that column, she wrote on woman’s suffrage in the newspaper. She wrote on male and female relationships. She wrote on the environment too. She would not have regarded herself as an environmentalist, and certainly not someone of John Muir stature, but she could write beautifully. When she was writing the column, one of her biggest fans was a man by the name of Ernest Coe, who wanted to create a National Park in the Everglades. He came to her and asked her to join his campaign, to be their publicity person, to write about the Everglades and the idea of this National Park in national publications and also of course in the Miami Herald. That got her looking at the Everglades in a new way.

Joanne Freeman: Now in 1947 Douglas published The Everglades: River of Grass, and in your work you’ve described that as the green bible of Florida’s environmentalists. What was she hoping to accomplish when she wrote that book?

Jack Davis: I think that changed as she started writing it. She initially thought she was just going to write this history of the Everglades. It was part of the Rivers of America series. She was supposed to write about the Miami River, but the Miami River was, as she always said, only in short and not worthy enough of a book in itself, and so the book ended up being an environmental history of the Everglades. Ultimately she wanted to bring attention to the plight of the Everglades. The Everglades had been under pressure from development since the late 19th century. Even before then, there had been plans to drain the Everglades and turn it into productive farmlands. Some of that had happened. Agriculture had moved in. Cities were growing larger and expanding into the Everglades. She really wanted to bring an end to that. She recognized when she was researching her book, something that probably only one other person did, and that was a scientist she consulted with, that the Everglades was this very large system, interconnected system, that ranged from Orlando all the way down to Florida Bay at the tip of the peninsula. She called it a solar-powered system, and that she was the person who recognized that the Everglades is not this miasmic swamp, but indeed a river, a flowing river. That’s where the name River of Grass comes from. The water flows through not just sawgrass, but through various kinds of natural landscapes.

Joanne Freeman: One of the amazing things that I found in reading about her is she’s an activist, she’s aggressive, she’s writing, she’s very much in the public. At the point when she’s doing this, there are not that many women following in her footsteps. What do you think gave her that kind of strength and persistence to put herself out there?

Jack Davis: I think she had the strength and persistence to be out in the public for a number of reasons. One is because she could speak very well in public. She was also very well informed. She knew what she was talking about. When she knew she had the knowledge at hand, she was never afraid of speaking about it. She was also a single woman. She was divorced, had some bad relationships with men, and very much committed to women’s rights. She was always confident in herself as an individual, but at the same time she recognized that being out there in the public, that she was a woman being out there in the public. She believed there was no, and she writes about this, even using this language, that there should be no separation in the spheres of men and women, particularly within the public.

Joanne Freeman: Even her work itself was a kind of activism.

Jack Davis: Her work itself was a form of activism. That’s what her newspaper column in the 1920s was. Let me give you just a quick line. This is evidence both of humor but also her commitment to a particular cause. She’s writing about, this is right after women have won suffrage, and she’s speaking in her column on male-female relationships. Quote, “Even the most ardent suffragists cannot deny that in gaining the ballot, women have lost their most priceless prerogative, that of blaming the men for the whole works.”

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Jack Davis: I just love that. On politics she wrote, “There are two sound arguments against politics. The first is that they keep so many men running who were obviously built to walk, and the second is that they are politics.”

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Jack Davis: She was able to build up this confidence in writing her column, writing on these stories, starting to write books, to speak in public. Again, as I said, she was always very well informed.

Joanne Freeman: Now Florida, and particularly Miami, changed a lot during the time that she lived there. I think she was 108 when she died. Is that correct?

Jack Davis: She died at 108, yes.

Joanne Freeman: Amazing. That’s a long span of time to spend in this place that she so personally engaged with. As it changed, did her relationship with it change or did her work change?

Jack Davis: Her relationship changed with Florida over her lifetime, during the time that she lived in the state, from 1915 to 1998. That’s a long span of time. Florida went through three growth spurts, major growth spurts, during her lifetime. She started out talking like a regionalist. Early on she would talk about the necessity to preserve, to conserve, to embrace a natural Florida, the native plants, for instance, the native landscape, but all of her words fell on deaf ears and Florida just went about developing itself in the way anybody wanted to develop it. By near the end of her life, she was no longer talking about conservation, she said, “Because we have nothing left to conserve, and now we have to restore it.” That was particularly true with the Everglades. By the end of her life, one half of the Everglades had been lost, mainly because of a comprehensive water management plan on the part of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Joanne Freeman: We’re obviously in the middle of a climate crisis. What do you think Marjory Stoneman Douglas would say were she around today about the situation, about what’s happening, about what is or isn’t being done? What do you think she would have to say to us?

Jack Davis: I’m pretty sure I know what she would say, because she was saying the same thing since the 1940s when she wrote that book. Sea level rise impact on Florida is obviously a reality in many forms. One of those forms is not that it’ll take real estate away. The first thing that’ll go is the infrastructure. A part of that infrastructure is the stormwater systems, but also the freshwater supplies. Back in the ’40s when she was writing that book, scientists learned that the Municipal Wells of what is now Miami-Dade County were fouling with salt because the seawater was entering into the Biscayne Aquifer, which is recharged by the Everglades. The reason why that was happening is because we were draining the Everglades and taking water out of the aquifer, freshwater out, and allowing saltwater to come in. That’s what’s happening today all over Florida in the Floridan Aquifer. She would’ve been stumping, calling for the protection of the aquifer. She would’ve been calling for the restoration of the living shoreline, the mangrove forest, which so much of the Everglades is, or was, the coastal marshes and the seagrass beds and the oyster beds. They are our best defenses in Florida against sea level rise and for protecting the Floridan Aquifer, that and conservation of course, conservation in the use of water.

Jack Davis: I was at a golf and country club this weekend, on Saturday. This is a golf course that has embraced a green approach to living and recreation. They have reduced their water consumption from 40 million gallons a year to under one million gallons. It was not painful. It has been an economic benefit for them. It’s something that everybody celebrates. Douglas would’ve been out there talking about these sort of solutions, which are easy and economically sensible.

Joanne Freeman: Jack Davis teaches history at the University of Florida. He’s the author of An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century, and The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea, which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for History.

End Riff

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Joanne Freeman: Brian, Nathan, I get to do something today that I’ve wanted to do for a while, but now I officially get to do it, and that is, somehow or other, in getting to know both of you guys over the years, your Florida-ness has always been part of your identity, so I now get to ask you, what was it like growing up in Florida, and did it seem like a strange kind of place when you were growing up or is that something that we’ve imposed on Florida?

Nathan Connolly: I’m going to jump in here, because I basically came to understand America and what America meant through the television. America was a place where the seasons changed. America was a place where people had a sense of community and neighborhood. America was a place where the kids were allowed to go down the street to the park and play football, as they did on the Charlie Brown specials I watched coming up. None of that was my experience of being a Floridian. The seasons never changed. I actually remember my first sense of disconnect in my own mind about where I lived was the fact that Florida to me didn’t feel like America. It didn’t feel like the America in pop culture. Miami Vice was on television at the time, so that was the closest thing that I got that seemed … There is a way in which Florida always stood outside of whatever mainstream depictions were on offer about American life.

Brian Balogh: That’s so remarkable, Nathan, because I had exactly the opposite experience, not surprising. I think a lot of this is generational. Your question just reminded me, Joanne, that unless you’re as precocious as Nathan Connolly, you tend to think that where you are is, everything’s like that. There are a few reminders, or I should’ve been aware of, like when people … Nathan noticed the seasons on television. I only noticed that when I would have to entertain visitors who would visit my parents, and they would say things like, “Don’t you miss the seasons?” No, I don’t miss the seasons. I don’t know what the seasons-

Nathan Connolly: No frame of reference at all for you.

Brian Balogh: I don’t know what the seasons are. It was one more thing that did stand out. Again, in retrospect, I just assumed that everybody had places like the Monkey Jungle or the Serpentarium. They were all tourist things. They were all to lure tourists to see a bunch of primates do tricks. Then there was the Serpentarium, which was just kind of scary. It was a bunch of snakes. In retrospect, this is pretty weird stuff, but you don’t think it’s weird if that’s all you know.

Joanne Freeman: Now did either of you when you were there, did you consider yourself as being in, capital letters, the South? Did you experience Florida as being part of the South, just trying to fit it into an American narrative?

Nathan Connolly: Yeah. This is one of the classic struggles of being a Floridian is trying to figure out where one’s regional identity hangs, because as we know, the South as a region has such a history of self-identification going back to clearly the 19th century and the Civil War debates and the neo-Confederate imagery and all this stuff. I got to tell you, the way I oftentimes describe this is you have to drive north to get south, at least coming from South Florida.

Brian Balogh: I know exactly what Nathan means.

Nathan Connolly: There are pockets of the Old Confederacy in the further southern regions of the state, but there are very few. Then when you get north of Palm Beach, you realize you are actually in a different region. South Florida is kind of an extension of New York and New Jersey. It’s all Northern territory down there. Then you get up to the Central part of the state and then you are back in the Deep South. It has that feel. It has that look. The trees are different. Floridians spent a lot of time planting palm trees, that aren’t actually native to Florida, to give it a different feel. Once that planting stopped, then it’s this hanging moss, live oak, all that stuff is just hugely part of the landscape in that way. It, for me at least, never felt like I was part of the South. Again, I felt like I was on this frontier of something else that was just coming out of the heads of people who were imagining what Florida could be.

Brian Balogh: This is where chronology is so important, because I was born in 1953, so Miami, quote, “progressive Miami,” in the early 1960s, my school was integrated, but there were still literally the markers of public Jim Crow. The bus station had segregated bathrooms. I’m a white guy, but I was acutely aware of the markers of race, that they were literally marked out. Then I really became aware of that when I would venture to those Southern pockets. We called it the Everglades generally. There was a place called Everglades City and everything was segregated.

Nathan Connolly: It’s stunning again just to think about the fact that Brian actually saw the Colored Only signs that I’ve only seen in images or in the archive. It is that recent in the history of the state. It is also I think important to keep in mind, to your question earlier, Joanne, about the South and its identity, that it was Northerners who brought Jim Crow to South Florida. This was not anything other than a way to make sure that people felt comfortable spending their money and growing the economy down there. Again, even at the level of the Old South tradition, it was part of generating interest and foot traffic and consumers and tourism. The people who were owning these department stores were oftentimes transplants from, again, the Chicago area, St. Louis, the New York area, and they basically created these Jim Crow consumer spaces in these department stores, as Brian is talking about and so forth.

Nathan Connolly: One thing I love about Florida as a place to think with, is that because it has so many different identities and regional loyalties in these different pockets, that you really do get a chance to see how America gets made in a place like that, what are the decisions that are happening in the level of politics, what kinds of projections of mainstream America are coming out of Florida. Again, not just Walt Disney, but also thinking about the way that people are selling the tropics for Northern consumers. All of this has to be thought up. There are very few places that have such shallow roots and were so uninhabited for so long in the rich parts of the early republic in the mid-20th century. Florida just wasn’t that place. It was largely still empty deep into the late 19th century. All that stuff for the 20th century had to be created.

Joanne Freeman: Nathan, you’ve actually written about the indigenous people of Florida. My question for you is, how do they fit in to this diverse, yet sometimes not so diverse story that we’re telling?

Nathan Connolly: When I was a kid, my first encounter with the Native presence in Florida was actually my mom driving onto the reservation, which was right there off of 441, a main commercial drag. There was no wooden gate separating the reservation from everything else. She would buy cigarettes on the reservation. You can get the cheapest cartons of cigarettes from the Seminoles, or the Miccosukee villages they were sometimes called, or there was this riverboat tour, that one can still go to. In fact, as I understand it, it’s the largest or the most visited tourist attraction in Florida still, which is the Jungle Queen, which is a riverboat that basically paddles down the canals of Fort Lauderdale, and you look at all these incredible seasonal residences and yachts, these mansions and things, and then it ends with a, quote unquote, real Indian village, where you watch somebody wrestle an alligator for tips.

Nathan Connolly: The Seminole presence in the growth of Florida is really incredible, because again, these are not a timeless people. These are people who are actively cultivating the image of the frontier. There are these elaborate ceremonies that are being done, largely for white tourists, through the 1920s, where Native American people are getting married and charging admission to these events, where you have the conferral of land, oftentimes done illegally, to white developers, where the Seminole flag is being surrendered to the head of the Miami Chamber of Commerce in this elaborate replay of the Indian Wars. It’s right out of the Buffalo Bill style performance. The thing that the people sometimes are surprised to learn, when they get down to especially the southern parts of the state, is that the Seminoles are still major players in the tourist industry there. There is a massive compound, down where by mom used to buy her cigarettes, of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. They’re building, as we speak, a giant guitar-shaped hotel right there.

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Nathan Connolly: It’s the most Florida monstrosity you can imagine, because it’s just sitting out there in the middle of nowhere, this massive guitar jumping up out of the earth. Again, it’s an extraordinarily lucrative tourist destination. The Seminoles are making money hand over fist with their partners in the industry. They are doing quite well down there. This is not a place where one goes to find the timeless red man. It is a place where you get a really expensive hamburger and play the slots, and you make sure you pay the Seminoles their due and proper, for sure.

Joanne Freeman: Now in a sense, Florida is most in the news these days because of climate change. In a sense, Florida ends up acting like a frontier of weather. I wonder, what are your thoughts about both the incredible development and then the incredible vulnerability that comes alongside that?

Nathan Connolly: When the seasons change in Florida, it was basically hurricane season and dolphin season. Those are the seasonal changes that I remember as a kid. Hurricane season was real. It is real. It is real. You never quite knew when the, quote unquote, big one was going to come. That was part of the rhythm of living there. I know, having been down there as recently as the holiday season that just passed, that there is a way that Floridians shake their fists at Mother Nature. Watching the skyline in Miami, and again, I have this, as somebody who’s looked at archival photos of Miami since the ’20s right up until driving down I-95 a couple months ago, they don’t know anything but building down there. They’re going to keep building, no matter how many neighborhoods flood, no matter how many times there’s talk about the bottom half of the peninsula getting covered by sea level rise. It really does feel like the city of Atlanta is shaking its fists still.

Brian Balogh: Nathan, should we share a little secret with our non-Floridian friend? One of the reasons-

Joanne Freeman: Uh-oh.

Brian Balogh: … Floridians are somewhat blasé, I think, about climate change and the possibility of rising oceans, is they’ve been filling in the darn ocean for decades. Much of Miami is built on filled-in Biscayne Bay. Why would you worry about a little rise in ocean level when you’ve been building in the ocean, in essence?

Nathan Connolly: One thing I’ll say, Joanne and Brian, that’s been so rewarding, frankly, about studying Florida and growing up there, is that it’s the one place I feel very comfortable as a historian predicting the future. In this sense I’ve always gotten the feeling that Florida’s past is America’s future. What I mean by that is Florida has been this place that has been extraordinarily diverse, it has been this place that’s been grappling with climate change, and it’s this place where people are constantly reinventing themselves in response to one imagined crisis or another. The way that people have responded to this massive transformation in growth is in some ways a good indication of how we as a country will respond to, say, the continued influx of folks from Latin America or the problems of sea level rise. People are going to continue to try to build. There are going to be ways in which old forms of discrimination get mapped into new demographic landscapes. All of this is really strikingly evident in the way that Florida has dealt with the last 50 or 100 years. There isn’t a lot that people tend to think about when Florida comes to mind. It’s not about either the 25 electoral votes that are going to be in play in the next election, or again, where one goes to retire, but I do think if you bear down a little bit, there’s a lot you can learn about the country from that place.

Brian Balogh: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. Send us an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackstoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Joanne Freeman: Special thanks this week to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

Brian Balogh: Backstory is produced with Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, inclusions, or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Male: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.