On the beach, Palm Beach, Fla., between 1900 and 1906. Source: Library of Congress

Shore Thing

A History of the Beach

03.15.19

Spring Break is here and BackStory has gone to the beach. Ed, Joanne, and Brian dip their toes into four tales from America’s shoreline. We’ll talk about race, health, and daringly provocative woolen swimsuits. And the hosts will add their own experiences of the beach as a weird, magical place.

beaches; leisure

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Segments

Making a Splash

In 1907, Australian competitive swimmer Annette Kellerman was arrested on an American beach for wearing a one-piece swimsuit that bared her legs. OR WAS SHE? Scholar Christine Schmidt tells us about Kellerman’s first six month long sojourn in the United States, and her attempts to popularize swimming.

Music:

Bliss by Podington Bear

Great Dark Spot by Jahzzar

Lift Off by Jahzzar

beaches; swimming; women’s history; women’s rights

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian Balogh: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Joanne Freeman: Welcome to BackStory, the American history podcast. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Brian Balogh: I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers: And I’m Ed Ayers.

Joanne Freeman: Well, I want to start with a really interesting article that I have right on hand here and I want to share it with you guys.

Ed Ayers: Okay.

Brian Balogh: Yeah. I’ve read it already.

Joanne Freeman: I doubt that, Brian. I do, I have to say.

Brian Balogh: Oh, come on. Have a little faith in me.

Joanne Freeman: Have you read the August 6th, 1905 edition of the Chicago Inter Ocean?

Brian Balogh: Well, you’ve got me there, Joanne. I can’t say I’ve read …

Ed Ayers: I’ve read the week before that one, but I missed that one.

Brian Balogh: Exactly. I read the synopsis.

Joanne Freeman: Oh, dang. Well, I did not think anyone would have read it. I’ve even found someone to do a dramatic reading of it for you.

Brian Balogh: You think of everything, Joanne.

Joanne Freeman: I do.

Speaker 6: Miss Annette Kellermann, the Australian swimmer who last week made an unsuccessful but nevertheless heroic attempt to swim across the English Channel, is receiving considerable attention. The so-called athletic American girls who are visiting her have given Miss Kellermann little rest. They are constantly asking her what they should and should not do to become great swimmers. Miss Kellermann’s replay invariably is, “Practice, practice, practice, and take good care of yourself.”

Joanne Freeman: Back in 1905, Australian swimmer Annette Kellermann was the first woman to attempt to swim the English Channel.

Christine S.: Swimming the Channel is very difficult, depending on the currents.

Joanne Freeman: This is historian Christine Schmidt. She says that Kellermann was in the water for 10 1/2 hours before the weather compelled her to quit. It would be 21 years before a woman, an American, would successfully complete the swim.

Christine S.: I can’t imagine what it would be like to swim the Channel without the knowledge that we have now of what you could expect from such a swim. Apparently, according to her memoirs, the men were allowed to swim naked and they were covered in seal fat but she actually had to wear a one-piece swimsuit, which apparently chafed and made it very difficult for her to swim as well.

Joanne Freeman: There’s something I should quickly clarify here, which is that, around the turn of the century, there was a difference between bathing and swimming.

Christine S.: Bathing was really very much about either for hygiene, for therapeutic reasons, or purely recreational, whereas swimming was actually about sport and the sort of self-propulsion of the body through water.

Joanne Freeman: There were women who were competitive swimmers, but they mostly competed in indoor pools, not outside.

Christine S.: The beaches were purely for recreation, and, in these public spaces, women were expected to be covered, full top to toe. It would have been like an overdress with bloomers, stockings, bathing cap. Sometimes, they also still wore corsets and even shoes into the water. These garments were all made out of either wool, cotton, or silk, but they were very, very heavy.

Joanne Freeman: As you already know, Kellermann was a competitive swimmer, not a competitive bather, so she wore a one-piece suit that a man would have worn. That one-piece bathing suit, along with her speed, endurance, and upbeat demeanor, attracted a lot of attention, and she became a real advocate for the sport.

Christine S.: She had this, from a very early period in her life, this really strong belief in the importance of physical health and wellbeing, and the important of being fit, being physically fit. She really believed that swimming was one of the best ways to achieve this form of fitness.

Joanne Freeman: At the London Hippodrome, Kellermann entertained audiences by demonstrating swimming strokes and diving into a huge tank. She eventually took her act to the United States.

Christine S.: She’d heard great things about Vaudeville and she knew that she represented novelty and spectacle, especially packaged in a wooly one-piece swimsuit.

Speaker 8: The New York Times, Wednesday, May 1st, 1907. Among the passengers was Miss Annette Kellermann, the Australian swimmer. She was the only one who found the delay of getting in rather tedious. About the time that the stern anchor chain of the ship was being loosened yesterday morning, she had found out about how far it was to the nearest land, which somebody told her was 18 miles. She promptly went to the captain and asked if she might be permitted to swim in. The request was refused, and with pouting lips, the good-looking swimmer spoke of her chagrin when she had reached the pier. “Why, I almost swam the English Channel once,” she said, “And you know what that is.”

Joanne Freeman: Kellermann was billed as the Australian mermaid, and she amazed audiences in New York and Chicago.

Speaker 9: Springfield Journal, Thursday, May 23rd, 1907.

Speaker 8: The Los Angeles Times, Sunday, June 16th, 1907.

Speaker 9: There are no mermaids now, except in variety shows and fairy stories, but Annette Kellermann, the champion woman swimmer of the world, comes pretty near being one. She is almost as much at home in the water as on dry land.

Speaker 8: Miss Kellermann’s fancy diving so absorbs the spectators that when, as a finale, Miss Kellermann plunges from her springboard and strikes the water in a sitting position, about two tubs of water are splashed out over the sides of the tank upon the people sitting in the front row, but they invariably take it good-naturedly.

Speaker 9: She is of practically perfect physique with tapering wrists and ankles, olive complexion, and gray eyes, which light up a winsome face.

Speaker 8: No complaint has been made to the management for the trick.

Christine S.: Even though, in Vaudeville, they would be used to seeing women in states of undress, this is very different. I think this is also an important part of Kellermann’s popularization of the swimsuit, is that it was really about physical health and wellbeing and the idea of wearing a piece of clothing that was purely functional and that would actually assist you in the process of physical activities such as swimming.

Speaker 11: Swimming hints by Annette Kellermann. Wednesday, June 26th, 1907. Any woman who can walk can learn to swim. Naturally, the matter of a costume arises first in the mind of a woman. The best costume is the cheap, ordinary stockinette suit, which clings close to the figure, and the closer the better. It should be sleeveless and there should be no skirts. Skirts carry water and retard the swimmer. They are very pretty and appropriate for the seaside, but not for the swimming pool. Stockings may be worn if they fit tightly, but under no circumstances should shoes be used.

Joanne Freeman: Eventually, she and her one-piece wool suit made their way to Boston, where, according to Kellermann, the reception was much chillier.

Christine S.: When she got there, the story goes that her manager, James Sullivan, decided that she might do a few swims along the coast to attract publicity for the upcoming events at the Wonderland Amusement Park. Apparently, she stripped down to a man’s one-piece bathing suit, which was essentially sleeveless, round neck, and would have come down to the mid-thigh, so therefore were baring her legs. Then, she was surrounded by a crowd of onlookers who were either titillated or shocked by such a daring exhibitionism of a woman on a public beach. Policeman appeared and yelled at her, demanding to know why she was in such a state of undress, and Kellermann explained that she was going to undertake a three mile swim along the beach. However, apparently she was arrested instead.

Brian Balogh: That’s really hard to believe.

Ed Ayers: Yes. I’d like to offer a personal apology on behalf of the people of the United States to the Kellermann family.

Joanne Freeman: Well, that’s really nice of you, Ed, but, according to Schmidt, the story is most likely not true.

Ed Ayers: Oh, knew it.

Christine S.: There’s nothing in the papers around this time that can sort of confirm this arrest, and you would think, if this had happened, it would have made the papers because it’s fairly scandalous. The earliest records of it are really sort of much … Decades later, and they’re in personal accounts by Kellermann herself.

Joanne Freeman: So far as we can tell, America on the whole had a really positive reaction to Annette Kellermann, but I think it’s really interesting that she remembers the American beach as kind of a backwards place.

Speaker 8: Buffalo Morning Express. Friday, November 8th, 1907. With au revoirs to friends who went to the pier to see her off, Miss Annette Kellermann, the young champion swimmer of the world, sailed on the Adriatic after six months’ sojourn in this country. As to American girls, the champion declared that she was surprised to find how few of them were given to swimming. Miss Kellermann deprecated this fact very much, adding that it would be a vast good to the public generally and to women in particular if the newspapers would more persistently advocate that swimming be taught in the public schools as a compulsory lesson.

Brian Balogh: I wonder what Annette Kellermann would think of American beaches now?

Joanne Freeman: Well, she would have had some trouble finding a wool bikini.

Brian Balogh: I know just the place, Joanne.

Joanne Freeman: Oh, gosh.

Free the Beaches

The State of Connecticut has 253 miles of coastline, but in the early 1970s just seven miles of it were accessible to the public. Andrew Kahrl’s new book “Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s most exclusive shoreline,” tells the story of the political battle to open up the state’s shoreline.

Music:

Two Days by Jahzzar

Connecticut; beaches; private property; public accomodations

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Ed Ayers: Today on BackStory, we’re taking a trip to the seaside. We’ll talk about the flood of European colonizers who came to the beaches of Florida and the indigenous people who lived there, we’ll visit American children recuperating in seaside hospitals, and we’ll talk about our own experiences of the beach as a weird, magical place.
The state of Connecticut has 253 miles of coastline but, in the early 1970s, just seven miles of it were accessible to the public. That start figure goes some way to explain why the state became the focus for a sometimes bitter political battle for access to a heavily restricted shoreline.

Speaker 12: The Greenwich Beach, restricted by local ordinance to residents and their guests, was invaded today by three dozen Hartford area ghetto children and a handful of adults who call themselves the Revitalization Corps. Armed with a Supreme Court ruling that all the nation’s beaches, from the low-water to the high-water mark, belong to everyone, the group staked its claim to a patch of sand. Its leader, Ned Cole, claims that, out of 250 miles of shoreline in Connecticut alone, only six miles are open to the public.

Ned Cole: It’s not just the Greenwich Beach you’re talking about, you’re talking about that whole shoreline, where a small percentage of wealthy people control that shoreline and the average factory worker gets on the highway and tries to go to a Connecticut state park on a Sunday afternoon and it closes very early, like on Fourth of July, and he can’t even bring his children in to use the shore. That’s wrong.

Speaker 12: Cole was issued a summons after some local residents [crosstalk 00:12:26].

Ed Ayers: Spearheading the protest was Ned Cole, a radical young activist whose campaign to free the beaches combined political theater with provocative direct action.
The tale is told in Andrew Kahrl’s new book, “Free the Beaches: the Story of Ned Cole and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline.” I asked Andrew how Connecticut’s beaches had become so inaccessible in the first place.

Andrew Kahrl: We began to see, in the early 20th century, up and down the shoreline, developers who were creating these private beach associations, which were sort of a kind of forerunner of the modern gated community. Groups of homeowners banded together and very much sort of restricted access to their beaches. They restricted membership on the basis of race and religion, they often were governed by a racially restrictive convenance, and they were very explicit, restricting access to their beaches to members only.
Now, combined with private beach associations, you had local town beaches that were really public in name only because many of these communities along the Connecticut coast restricted access to town beaches to residents only. These communities oftentimes had their own discriminatory housing policies.

Brian Balogh: What would happen, let’s say, if I wanted to just use the beach at a private beach association?

Andrew Kahrl: Well, as a white man, you might not have that big of a problem.

Brian Balogh: Uh-huh?

Andrew Kahrl: In fact, one of the things that I found throughout this history was that these laws were often selectively enforced. They were on the books and could be certainly used in situations when an undesirable person or group was seeking to access a beach. They oftentimes could be ignored if, say, a person sort of fit the profile of the desired segment of the public that would be welcomed there.

Brian Balogh: The protagonist of your story is Ned Cole. Tell me a little bit about Ned Cole and how he became involved with beaches.

Andrew Kahrl: Yeah. Ned Cole was a young Irish Catholic recent college grad who, in 1964, quit his job in an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut, his hometown, and founded what came to be known as Revitalization Corps. He described it as a domestic peace corps. He said that he was waging a war on apathy, and he thought that the emergence of these all white suburbs in places like East and West Hartford had a real damaging effect on white people. He understood, on an instinctual level, that the problem of racial inequality in America was a white person’s problem, many of whom saw themselves as open-minded, tolerant, racially liberal, yet, in their day to day lives, had very little contact with African-Americans, had a variety of structural barriers that sort of ensured that their communities would remain racially exclusionary.
In the summer of 1971, he and the group of African-American mothers who he worked alongside decided to lead a bus trip down to the state shoreline to provide children, most of whom had never seen the ocean, who had never sort of really sort of ventured outside of the city much at all, giving them an opportunity to enjoy what had become sort of a rite of childhood for most Americans, a day at the beach. When they got there, they discovered that there was nowhere they could go.

Brian Balogh: Was that a shock to them? Did they just assume? There was no planning in advance, they weren’t trying necessarily to disrupt things?

Andrew Kahrl: No, this did not originate as a protest. Ned kind of naively assumed initially that they would be welcomed there, that towns would, say, welcome a group of adorable young children with open arms who were seeking nothing more than to just enjoy a day at the beach, but that was certainly not the case.

Brian Balogh: What, in fact, happened when they arrived?

Andrew Kahrl: There was a great deal of hostility. Local police were summoned. Then, you also saw, after the fact, towns hastily met and tightened their beach access laws even further to ensure that this didn’t happen again.

Brian Balogh: Now, Cole goes on to capitalize on that reaction as a method of protest. Could you describe some of these protests?

Andrew Kahrl: He quickly began to engage in very inventive and high-profile forms of protest. One of the sort of most inventive protest tactics he used was amphibious invasions of these very elite country clubs and private beaches along the shore, commanding boats and coming ashore and playing on the wet sand portion of the beach, which was their legal right because, legally, the wet sand portion of the shoreline was public property.

Speaker 12: Cole was issued a summons after some local residents accused members of his group of trespassing on private property on their way to the beach. Many of the townspeople were angry and outraged.

Speaker 15: So what are you going to do? Every time it’s low tide, trudge in?

Speaker 16: Yeah, [crosstalk 00:17:14].

Ned Cole: We should have an access road to get to this beach that goes up to the high-tide land.

Speaker 16: Really? I feel sorry for the poor kids that you’ve dragged with you.

Speaker 15: You’ve got playing in the state parks. [crosstalk 00:17:21].

Ned Cole: The state parks up there are crowded.

Speaker 15: You’re just trying to get in because it’s private.

Ned Cole: No, that’s not it at all.

Speaker 15: You’ve got to make your little point.

Speaker 17: Here, the only people who have paid for the beaches are the citizens of Greenwich, so we feel that the beaches belong to the citizens of Greenwich.

Brian Balogh: Given the ferment of the 1970s, given the movement to get rid of Jim Crow in the South, where does this leave the beaches today in Connecticut?

Andrew Kahrl: A law student at Rutgers who, in 1995, was jogging along the shoreline of Greenwich, Connecticut, and was stopped at the guardhouse and told he couldn’t jog onto the beach, he sued the town of Greenwich. It was actually the first lawsuit filed against Greenwich over its resident-only beach ordinance. He won in 2001. The Connecticut Supreme Court struck down Greenwich’s resident-only beach law on the basis of free speech, saying that you cannot sort of have public spaces that are restricted to one segment of the public.
There are dozens of these beach associations and they’re as restrictive as ever. Public beaches remain, in a practical sense, very inaccessible. The one example I give, Greenwich actually … A non-resident can buy a beach pass but they have to drive to the other side of town and purchase it at a city office building that is only open from 9:00 to 5:00 on weekdays.

Brian Balogh: Was there anything particularly wise or stupid about picking beaches as one of the sites in which to carry this out?

Andrew Kahrl: We associate them with openness and freedom. These are sort of quintessentially public spaces, open to everyone, and yet, in practice, they have been some of the most exclusionary spaces in America and places that have been hotly contested. I think he identified the sort of contradictions there.

Ed Ayers: Andrew Kahrl is an associate professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Virginia. Earlier in this show, we heard from Christine Schmidt, a research fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

For the Kids

Brian talks to historian Meghan Crnic about “marine medication,” a healing method utilized at children’s seaside hospitals in the late 19th century.

Music:

Empty Trees by Ketsa

children; health; hospitals; medicine

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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In the second half of the 19th century, Atlantic City, New Jersey, became a popular destination for beach goers looking to escape the city. Many of these tourists came from nearby Philadelphia.

Meghan Crnic: They had noticed that, when they brought their children there, their children just seemed particularly healthy and happy and robust.

Ed Ayers: This is historian Meghan Crnic.

Meghan Crnic: They began to sort of think about how they could provide those same benefits to the many, many children who were sort of stuck in the city during the summer months.

Ed Ayers: As in the city’s poor and working class children who couldn’t afford a trip to the beach. One of these socially-conscious tourists came across a book by a French physician named Andre Brochard.

Speaker 19: Sea-Air and Sea-Bathing for Children and Invalids.

Ed Ayers: Brochard advocated for the healthful effects of ocean-side retreats for children.

Speaker 19: Seeing every day the little ones bathing, walking on the sands, fishing, or otherwise disporting themselves, breathing with delight the salt breezes which gave them strength and health, one thought more than once struck me vividly: there are physicians who have never seen the sea, living at the great distance from its shores. These are consequently ignorant of the resources which marine medication offers to the practitioner in the disorders of children.

Brian Balogh: Inspired by Dr. Brochard, philanthropists decided to build a hospital to serve the city’s poor and ailing children. The Children’s Seashore House opened in Atlantic City in 1872. Mothers often accompanied their children to the sea, where they could receive treatment at a low cost.

Meghan Crnic: If they were in the main hospital building, a lot of times, those children would have more chronic conditions such as what would be referred to as non-pulmonary tuberculosis or surgical tuberculosis. One of the peculiarities about children, when they contract tuberculosis, is that it doesn’t, generally speaking, manifest itself in the lungs, but rather in the bones and in the joints, in which case the children who would have tuberculosis would oftentimes have what they would refer to as sort of bone deformities. Children could be bent over, it could exist in their spines and in their hips.
Rickets was another one which, at the time, wasn’t fully understood in the same ways we understand it today, which would be a lack of vitamin D. They were oftentimes coming with what was politely called summer complaint, which is also known as diarrhea, and so it was children who had really bad gastrointestinal disorders. Those were really the children who were most vulnerable of dying during the summer months, when infant mortality in Philadelphia could reach upwards of about 25%.

Brian Balogh: Well, I’d love for you to pick a specific child and describe him or her to us and take us through his or her day.

Meghan Crnic: Sure. One of the few sources that I have that actually came directly from a parent was a woman who had written a thank you letter to this Philadelphia Inquirer for publishing an article about the Children’s Seashore House. She wrote about how she had been desperately seeking treatment for her daughter because her daughter had rickets and, despite being three years old, she said that she was no larger than a six-month-old at the time and was unable to walk because of the disease. Despite her best efforts, no physician had been able to really help her, and so she wrote to the Children’s Seashore House and asked for admission for her and her daughter, Amy. The physicians at the Seashore House told her to come down and she took the train from the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area.
During the day, for the most part, what would happen is they would wake up in the morning, there would be medical rounds where the physician would go around and visit the children and see how they were doing, after which they would then go out in the ocean and they would play. Depending upon the time period, there were more or less strict regiments about how frequently and how often children could sea-bathe. At least in the 1870s, they were very strict. They believed that being in the ocean for more than four minutes could result in horrible things happening to you. You could get headaches, you could faint, you could become profoundly dizzy, you could even die if you stayed in the ocean too long.

Brian Balogh: This is even if you’re healthy?

Meghan Crnic: Yes, even if you’re healthy. They had … Actually, in the book written by Brochard, he details it very specifically that there are three phases that swimmers and bathers go through, and you wanted to sort of remove yourself before that third phase, where you were sort of losing all the benefits. You wanted to remove yourself before that. At least at one point in time, they had some very strict regiments.
Those were eventually kind of loosened up, but it was almost always done … The sea-bathing was almost always done under the supervision of nurses to make sure the children were bathing properly. For children who weren’t able to walk themselves out into the ocean, they would actually have bathers who could carry the … They would be adult men who would carry the children out into the ocean, sometimes just in their arms, sometimes they would have specially-devised baskets or slings for children.

Brian Balogh: What were the specific benefits for children of these brief stints in the ocean?

Meghan Crnic: One of the things that they found was that open wounds that were associated with tuberculosis that they referred to as sinuses, those sinuses would actually close. This was a problem that physicians in urban hospitals were really trying to solve. They were coming up with all sorts of technological interventions and they just had a really hard time figuring out how to successfully treat those wounds. The conclusion ended up being that the benefits of sort of washing out those wounds with the saline water, the ocean water, really did help those wounds heal successfully.
The ocean also had the benefits of having children move more, so getting them physically active, getting them moving, which would in turn increase their metabolism, which was one of the sort of holistic benefits, really, of the time at the shore that people attributed not only to the sea-bathing but also to just the benefits of being in the ocean breezes.
Really, for the most part, they would be doing a lot of the things that would have looked familiar to tourists while they were there. They were flying kites, they were building sandcastles. There’s lots of images of just children playing on the beach that looked very, very similar to other activities that children would have been partaking in on either side of the institution.

Brian Balogh: As you’ve described it, certainly the Atlantic City hospital was funded by people who were tourists themselves, so obviously a large wave of tourism had already begun. Did this tourism, which only increased in volume, did it vie or did it sit in tension with the healthful purposes of these hospitals? Did they become competitors, if you will?

Meghan Crnic: There was some tension that existed. As more tourists came, the original hospital building in Atlantic City was very near the center of town and so buildings were being constructed around the hospital that were obstructing its breezes. The physician, just in a single sort of note, said that the tourists did not always appreciate having to view patients and sick patients on the beach while they were there on their vacations, and so they actually moved the hospital pretty far down the beach.
I actually think that the hospitals served an important role within these communities to help maintain those longer standing associations within leisure and health when there was very much this notion that maybe leisure wasn’t totally acceptable yet but health-seeking was. Physicians published a lot of medical journal articles, published from one another. They also published popular books that really detailed just how healthy the seascape was for people, which all stood very much in stark contrast to the urban environment from which most people were coming.

Brian Balogh: Yes.

Meghan Crnic: I think, within these places certainly like Atlantic City, which very much promoted itself as a family-friendly environment, that having something like a Seashore House where tourists could go and visit and remind themselves of those health practices that really underpinned their leisure practices was a beneficial reminder, in some ways.

Brian Balogh: Right. It was almost an excuse for relaxing, but one that was acceptable to society. Getting healthy would make you more productive in the long run.

Meghan Crnic: Absolutely. That’s exactly what this was about. Even for children, the idea was sort of to be able to build up these children’s bodies and strengths to be able to withstand the kind of forces of living in an urban city, with the idea that they were going to be the future workers of America.

Brian Balogh: There does seem to be a strong assumption that beaches are a healthy or healthful place, well into the 20th and 21st century. Would you agree with that? Do you think that has … If you do, you think that has anything to do with the seaside hospitals that you work on?

Meghan Crnic: I do. I think that a lot of these practices that really began in the 19th century remain with us as our sort of cultural traditions. Certainly, my family likes to tease me every time we go to the beach about how healthy they feel when they’re down there. I fully embrace that. I think that it’s one of those really fascinating things where I think people still feel it and people still sense it, but we’ve lost a medical language in which we can really describe the impacts that we’re feeling.
One of the things that I love and am intrigued by is that there is today, within medical practice and especially pediatrics, a re-emergence of attention to the myriad benefits that nature can provide. There are a lot of really great scientific studies that are coming out now about the benefits of being out in both green space and what some medical geographers refer to as blue space, which is being near an ocean. I think it’s coming back, in some ways.

Brian Balogh: Meghan Crnic is a historian at the University of Pennsylvania.

Shipwrecked

Peter Ferdinando’s research into the Ais people of Florida has complicated the story of the encounter between early colonizers and indigenous people in Florida. He explains to Brian how the Ais managed to grow their sphere of influence in the face of European arrivals.

Music:

Welcome by Jahzzar

Florida; colonization; indigenous people; ships

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Beaches were often the site of the first contact between indigenous people and European colonizers. When I was at the Organization of American Historians Conference, I interviewed Peter Ferdinando, who has studied a group who called themselves the Ais, spelled A-I-S. He says the Ais used the arrival of colonizers to grow their own sphere of control and, as he discovered, they weren’t the only group waiting when the Europeans arrived.

Peter F.: The founder of Saint Augustine, Pedro Menendez, when he was wrecked on the Florida coast in 1571, it was at dawn that the [u-li-may 00:31:53], an Ais-aligned group, came upon the shipwreck. Jonathan Dickinson, a Philadelphia merchant, he records at about 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning that the Jobe, another Ais-aligned group, came onto the wreck. They were well aware that, on one of the frequent thunderstorm days in Florida, there’d been ships driven ashore and you’d have to get there bright and early to control the scene, the early bird gets the worm sort of situation.

Brian Balogh: Now, did they do some of that wrecking intentionally?

Peter F.: That would be an interesting question that is not covered so much in the historical record but, when you get into the 1800s, with the presence of Anglo-Americans in places like Key West, there were always these stories about how they, shall we say, encouraged ships to come onto the reefs and then assisted them by lightening the load. That material never seemed to get back to the ship once they were off the reef.

Brian Balogh: In their daily checks of the shore, they must have come across some survivors, no?

Peter F.: Absolutely.

Brian Balogh: How did that go?

Peter F.: With any of these groups that are practicing, again, this indigenous wrecking process, one of the key things is controlling the scene. This meant that they would, either through actual violence or implied violence, stop the castaways from continuing to claim their own goods. The Native Americans were very concerned about what nation you were from. They asked the Dickinson castaways, “Are you English or Spanish?” They asked the French castaways, “Are you English?” When the French castaways said, “Oh, no, no. We’re French and we’re good friends with the Spaniards,” the Native Americans are fine. They could never figure out what these issues were with the English.
Well, English buccaneers based in the Bahamas are coming down to recover silver from a sunken ship in the Bahamas, and they are raiding the Florida coast to capture aquatically skilled Native Americans as captives to then force them to dive in the sunken Spanish treasure ship.

Brian Balogh: [crosstalk 00:34:01].

Peter F.: Then, a couple of years later, people who are aligned with the English in the Carolina colony are also raiding down to capture Native American slaves for the Carolina slave market, and so you end up with a clear dislike of the English. Even then, Dickinson survives his trip. Many of the other castaways from the wreck do, so their ferocious reputation as these man-eaters, as these cannibals, is very much just that. It’s the way they are able to control the scene.
There’s a whole … There’s an aspect in Dickinson where they surround the castaways. The Native Americans raise their, as Dickinson says, their large Spanish knives, and then they lower their large Spanish knives and say, “Can you please unlock all your containers and give us all your belongings?” Essentially, it’s a display to make sure that the castaways are going to be complaint. They do, they unlock their containers, they give over clothing and their money, and there we go.

Brian Balogh: What are some of the source you use to tell these truly fascinating stories?

Peter F.: I actually use a number of sources because my interest in the Ais crosses over the contact boundary. For Florida, it would be 1513 with Ponce de Leon, but the Ais’ story starts significantly earlier, and so aspects of the work use archeological artifacts. Essentially, I know more about shores and fish bones than you ever want to know.
Then, in the contact era, I continue to use archeology because I look at the distribution of those metal goods, especially.

Brian Balogh: You probably didn’t guess that I went to Ponce de Leon Junior High School in Coral Gables.

Peter F.: I [inaudible 00:35:49]. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brian Balogh: We were required to take Florida history, and I learned something about the Seminole Indians, but I never heard a word about the Ais. Why is that?

Peter F.: This work has kind of lain dormant because you have to look at the Spanish sources, the English sources, other Europeans, because you have to incorporate the archeology, and ultimately because you need an Atlantic focus to truly bring this into a story that shows us, again, how Native Americans were not just people of the landscape, not just people who were going to vanish. My work on the Ais in “Rich from the Sea” connects with a wider scope of what’s called Red Atlantic, the study of native peoples in that wider Atlantic world. This is something which has only been seen as something to study for historians in the last decade or two.

Brian Balogh: I confess that most of what I know about this topic comes from movies. What you’re describing to me sounds much, much more complex.

Peter F.: Oh, yes. The Ais domain of influence includes negotiation with your other native peoples in Florida, with the Spaniards in Saint Augustine, and with passing European ships. This is a great example of the maritime indigenous agency, a chance for Native Americans to be active within what has, in the past, been viewed as the European colonial world. Spanish Florida remained 80% indigenous Florida, whether it was Timucua missions along the north or the Calusa domain, especially in the southwest to the Florida Keys, or the Ais domain on the central east coast, where the Spaniards were off to the periphery. It’s a chance to reorientate our stories beyond ones of mere colonization, of conquest, of disappearance, of vanish, and rather focus on people who remained, who were active, and, ultimately, tell a far more interesting and engaging story.

Brian Balogh: Peter, thanks so much for joining us on BackStory.

Peter F.: Oh, thank you, Brian. I really appreciate it.

Brian Balogh: Peter Ferdinando is visiting lecturer at the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Life’s a Beach

Ed, Joanne & Brian talk about their childhood beach experience, and the strange magic the shoreline seems to possess.

beaches; childhood; happiness

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Joanne, we’ve heard a lot about the history of beaches, but I want to know about your personal history with beaches.

Joanne Freeman: Wow. My personal history of beaches, okay. Well, it’s kind of in two parts. The first part was the non-existent beach because I lived in Yorktown Heights, New York, in Westchester County and I don’t think we really ever went to the beach. I think I had a sense that beaches were magical places where you went and became amazingly suntanned and laid out on towels looking decadent, but we went to Sparkle Lake. That was where we went in the summer. Sparkle Lake …

Brian Balogh: I’m sorry, Joanne. That’s our next show.

Joanne Freeman: The Sparkle Lake, yes. It was just what it sounds like. It was a small lake.
Then, when I was, I don’t know, 14, 15, we moved to Los Angeles. Then, all of a sudden, beach sort of hit me in the face. LA beach culture is so powerful and so distinctive and, to someone coming in from the outside, from Yorktown Heights, New York, kind of strange, that … It didn’t become necessarily less of a weird and magical space, it just became a differently weird and magical space with big hair and big tans and big sports and all these sort of mellow people shuffling around and lots of tattoos.

Brian Balogh: Where exactly did you fit into that scene?

Joanne Freeman: Sitting on the sand with my friend with my eyes really big, staring all around, I think, was largely what I was doing.

Brian Balogh: Was it a native thing? Was this very much the local culture, or did people come from all over to go to these beaches, Venice Beach or whatever?

Joanne Freeman: Oh, good question. I think it was both. My sense when I was there was that it was mostly local people. I know for sure that, when I was in high school, a lot of people, somehow or other, ended up on the beach from high school. I think it was largely … Santa Monica beaches was really where we were going. It was a local area but it was very much, to me, a dramatic, big sandy beach of a sort that I don’t think I’d ever really seen before.

Brian Balogh: Then, of course, eastern Tennessee is famous for its beaches, so you want to recall some of your earliest memories and encounters with the beach?

Ed Ayers: Well, I wasn’t planning on being defensive, but I will have you know that we have lots of TVA lakes that have what might be called beaches. Those were good for water-skiing and things but, growing up, we were about five to seven hours from Myrtle Beach.

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Brian Balogh: Oh, yeah.

Ed Ayers: In my childhood, vacation and beach were the same thing. There was just no … That’s … Only place anybody would think of going on a vacation was to Myrtle Beach. The idea of going down to a motel and having actual seafood that had not been frozen was a huge deal. Of course, this is a generational thing. The idea was to get just as suntanned through as many intermediate stages of being burnt as you could in as short a period of time. You would actually lather up with this coconut butter and stuff to intensify the …

Joanne Freeman: Oil.

Ed Ayers: Yeah.

Brian Balogh: Yeah, yeah.

Ed Ayers: I would say that I was only marginally successful in ever gaining anything like a tan, but I was really good at the burning part.
Looking back on it, it was really the first generation of beach culture for the south. When I was younger, they had this great beach music in the pavilion there at Myrtle Beach. Do you folks remember the song, “I’m a Girl Watcher” by the O’Kaysons?

Brian Balogh: Absolutely.

Ed Ayers: Right.

Joanne Freeman: I do not.

Brian Balogh: I’m a girl watcher. I’m a girl watcher. Go ahead, Joanne. Pick up from there.

Ed Ayers: That’s pretty much … You … Watching the girls go by.

Brian Balogh: Those were the entire … Those were the entire lyrics, as I recall.

Ed Ayers: Yeah, exactly. That’s right.

Joanne Freeman: Wow. Wow.

Ed Ayers: That was an example of the beach music. I could … Wasn’t old enough to go inside, but I could stand outside and hear it. Archie Bell and the Drells, all this other great music. It was magic for me. It was magic for me.

Joanne Freeman: That same word, magic.

Brian Balogh: Yeah. It’s funny, in my childhood, I never went on a vacation to the beach. That’s because I lived near one. For me, the beach was a totally, totally different experience. It’s where we kind of went, half the time to laugh at these insane northerners, including people from Canada, who would come down and go swimming in February in South Florida. Who would possibly go into the water? It was freezing. To us, these folks were kind of freaks of nature. How could they possibly do this?
The great irony in all of this, and I do confess, I’ve spent a lot of time around beaches since living in Miami, I am now coming to you from Nova Scotia and I rowed out to a beach today. I rowed out to Sand Dollar Island and it was really interesting because, as we discussed on the show, Americans have tried to privatize beaches, Americans have segregated beaches, but here is a completely public island, yet it was the most private beach experience I’ve ever had.
My takeaway from my rowing trip and just thinking back on my experience with beaches is kind of beaches are us. Beaches are what we put into them and what we make of them, and, boy, do we make a wide range of things out of our beaches. It’s all a bunch of sand.

Joanne Freeman: It’s a meeting point of peoples.

Brian Balogh: Right.

Joanne Freeman: Right? It’s a meeting point of people coming by sea and by land, it’s a meeting point, or not a meeting point, of different kinds of peoples. It’s a meeting point of people from far away and locals, which we all kind of talked about. It’s a place where all kinds of people come for all kinds of reasons, and some of them are extreme. If it’s leisure, it’s really leisure. It’s people lying down for a long period of time. If it’s trade, it’s very aggressive. That’s the sort of point where trade comes in, profit is made or not made.

Brian Balogh: They’ll pull that beach chair right out from under you when your time is up.

Joanne Freeman: Exactly. Exactly.

Ed Ayers: Well, I don’t want to be the one to state the obvious and the embarrassing, but it’s also the place where people are as lightly clad as you are likely to confront people in any other setting.

Joanne Freeman: That is true.

Ed Ayers: I seem to have memories of that being an interesting aspect of going to the beach. It’s … Suddenly, not only is there this diversity of people there for a diversity of reasons, but suddenly they are shorn of a lot of the shielding that they have and the identity. You can’t really tell if somebody is from nearby or far away except maybe by their truck driver’s tan as we called it, just the white shoulders and tanned arms.

Brian Balogh: If they’re going in the water in February, they’re from far away in Miami.

Ed Ayers: Well, and in South Carolina, they would have been taken to the hospital for hypothermia.
I think it’s that combination of land meeting ocean, but also of people of all different backgrounds, without the usual markers firmly displayed. I think we used the word “magic” because we’re kind of optimistic, but it’s also kind of dangerous. You have to be … People were different degrees of comfort, of revealing themselves to all these strangers, and I think that adds a certain thrill to the moment, as well.

Brian Balogh: And the landscape itself is actually in transition. One of the things that we know about beaches is they’re constantly changing, as much as we’re trying to nail them down and wall them off and claim that they’re our private property, et cetera, beaches themselves are incredibly changing objects. We know. At high tide, they’re often not there at all.

Joanne Freeman: In modern times, people are going to the beach for either, whatever reason, for leisure. As Ed just said, they are largely scantily clad, and not only does that make it dangerous, but it’s sort of enforced intimacy. You’re suddenly seeing people in a way that you would never see them otherwise, and you’re closer up to them, if you’re all on the same beach, than you might be otherwise. It … Well, I guess it comes back to magical. It becomes a different kind of space than many other kinds of spaces.

Ed Ayers: Yeah, that’s a really good point, Joanne. Can you pass the tanning oil?

Joanne Freeman: Here you go, Ed.

Ed Ayers: 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. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an e-mail to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Brian Balogh: This episode of BackStory was produced by David [sten-house 00:48:06], Nina Ernest, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Milner is our technical director, Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Joey Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from [an-jal-i bish-osh 00:48:18], Sam [lum-steen 00:48:20], Hana Cho, Emma Greg, and Gabriel Hunter Chang. Our theme song was written by Nick [thor-burn 00:48:27]. Other music in this episode came from [ket-sa 00:48:31], Paddington Bear, and [ja-zar 00:48:33].

Ed Ayers: Special thanks this week to our voice actors from the Annette Kellermann segment, Jamal Milner, James Scales, Brendan Wolf, and Lydia Lang. Thanks, too, as always, to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

Joanne Freeman: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 21: 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 Windham for Virginia Humanities.

Speaker 22: [pan-a-blee 00:49:44]