End Riff

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.