The History of Florida (104 page)

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Boom, Bust, and Uncertainty

A Social History of Modern Florida

Raymond A. Mohl and Gary R. Mormino

In an astonishingly brief span of 175 years, Florida has passed from Old

South to New South to Sunbelt South. In the process, the state has experi-

enced momentous changes. The population has grown dramatical y, shifting

markedly in composition and character along the way. Changing patterns of

race and ethnicity, and of migration and immigration, have created a new

multiracial and multicultural Florida. Small towns, barrier islands, orange

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groves, and farmland have sprouted into great cities, towering at the cen-

ter and sprawling at the edges. Technology and development have wrought

enormous transformations upon the land, reshaping and reordering the way

Floridians live, work, and play. An economy formerly based almost exclu-

sively on agriculture and tourism has crossed over into the postindustrial

age; agriculture and tourism remain important, but Florida has also devel-

oped a highly diversified service economy. Once perceived by Americans

as a balmy, dreamlike, semitropical paradise, Florida’s newest image has

projected fears stimulated by race riots, massive immigration, environmen-

tal destruction, and high crime rates. In virtual y every aspect of life, vast

changes in the post–World War II era have transformed the old Florida,

creating a powerful new Sunbelt juggernaut.

Perhaps more than anything else, relentless growth has served as a cata-

lyst for the emergence of modern Florida. When admitted to the Union in

1845, Florida boasted a population of only 69,000 residents. By contrast,

Florida’s population in 2013 approaches 20 million inhabitants. The fourth-

largest state in the Union will soon succeed New York as the third-largest

state. To put this growth in perspective, on a busy weekend, Orlando’s Magic

Kingdom now attracts more tourists than the number of people who resided

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498 · Raymond A. Mohl and Gary R. Mormino

in the entire state a century and a half ago. During some decades, popula-

tion growth was simply spectacular: over 51 percent during the boom years

of the 1920s, over 78 percent during a second boom period in the 1950s, and

over 43 percent during the 1970s. And throughout the twentieth century,

Florida’s population has grown at a rate considerably faster than the rate of

growth for the nation as a whole, usual y two, three, or four times as rapidly.

When Floridians cheered the coming of statehood in 1845, few residents

south of Tal ahassee heard the huzzahs. If a metaphor could describe the

state of the mid-nineteenth-century state, it would be as a frontier. For

Florida, the term
frontier
meant both place and process: geographical y,

vast portions of the peninsula lay remote, forbidding, inaccessible, and un-

settled; experiential y, the frontier mind-set typified by Indian wars, open

ranges, environmental disregard, and rampant individualism has endured

into the twenty-first century. In many respects, as late as the 1920s, Florida

remained the last great frontier in the eastern continental United States.

Until the 1920s, almost half of the state’s small population resided in the

northern tier of counties stretching from Jacksonville to Pensacola. South

Florida—broadly defined as the vast area south of an imaginary line drawn

between Tampa and Melbourne—remained virtual y uninhabited. On the

eve of the Civil War, only about 7,000 people had settled in south Florida

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(Key West excepted). Dade County, which then included also the future

megacounties of Broward and Palm Beach, numbered a scant 83 persons in

1860. Even as late as 1900, less than 5 percent of the state’s total population

resided in south Florida. Despite rapid population growth in the first half of

the twentieth century, not until the 1950s did Florida achieve a population

density (51.1 persons per square mile) that exceeded that of the nation at

large (50.7). So the image of Florida as a frontier, with vast open spaces and

a violent gun culture, matches the reality of the state’s settlement patterns

well into the twentieth century.

The peopling of Florida necessitated dramatic shifts to the south from

population centers in the Panhandle and northern Florida. As late as 1880,

three of every four residents still resided in the northern tier of the state,

chiefly middle Florida, the region between the Apalachicola and Suwan-

nee Rivers. The 1920s saw the inexorable population movement of new set-

tlers southward. In 1930, following the Florida boom, six in ten Floridians

resided in central and south Florida. Since World War II, the population

buildup of the Gold and Gulf Coasts, and the space in between, has been

supercharged.

Boom, Bust, and Uncertainty: A Social History of Modern Florida · 499

On the eve of statehood, a handful of sparsely populated towns had taken

hold in Florida. While smal in population and periodical y wracked by

virulent epidemics of yel ow fever, antebel um port cities served as vital cen-

ters of commerce, communications, and culture. Size was disproportionate

to influence, but visitors were not always impressed by Florida’s future ur-

ban prospects. Writing about Florida in the mid-1850s, for example, British

traveler James Stirling observed in
Letters
from
the
Slave
States
that “here,

in this poor Slave State, all is silence and stagnation; no cities are rising on

the riverbanks.”1

There was little in Florida’s history up to 1880 that hinted at the state’s

future as one of the most populous and heavily urbanized regions in the

nation. Only 10 percent of Floridians were urban dwellers in 1880. With its

population buoyed by an influx of Bahamian “Conchs” and Cubans, refu-

gees of the Cuban Ten Years War, Key West with 9,890 inhabitants stood as

Florida’s largest city. Only Jacksonville and Pensacola boasted populations

greater than 3,000 persons in 1880.

A century later, Florida’s status as one of America’s most urbanized states

was well entrenched, with ful y 90 percent of Floridians classified as urban

dwellers. Miami, Tampa, and Jacksonville dominated Florida’s urban profile

for most of the twentieth century, but during the 1980s and after, cities such

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as Fort Pierce, Fort Myers, Bradenton, Sarasota, and Naples soared in popu-

lation. During the 1980s, ten of America’s twenty fastest-growing metro-

politan areas were found in the Sunshine State—a number that offers some

measure of the dramatic development of Florida since 1945. Growth contin-

ues to cluster along the coasts; only two of the fast-track metro areas—Or-

lando and Ocala—are located in the state’s interior. Naples and Palm Coast,

in particular, merit attention as new Florida boomtowns. Naples, one of

Florida’s most isolated locales, exploded in the 1980s as a new retirement

haven and tourist center, coming a long way since it was described in 1929 in

the
Florida
Highways
magazine as “only a hamlet with two hotels.”2 Flagler

County had long vied for the distinction of being the state’s least-populated

county. In 1920, Flagler boasted fewer than 2,500 residents. In 2010, Flagler

approached 100,000 residents, three-quarters of them in the new town of

Palm Coast. The relentless march of urbanization has had a tremendous im-

pact on the creation of contemporary Florida, full of excitement, diversity,

and danger.

No less dramatic than the sheer record of urban growth has been change

in the composition of Florida’s population. In temperament and profile,

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Florida was a slave state in 1845. In every census taken between 1845 and

1880, African Americans comprised nearly half of the state’s population.

Not until the 1920s did the proportion of black residents fal below one-

third. Historical y, the greatest concentration of African Americans was in

the Black Belt, or middle Florida. In Leon, Jefferson, Madison, and other

northern counties, blacks outnumbered whites. Today, Gadsden remains

the state’s last black majority county.

The urbanization of south Florida dramatical y altered the racial and

demographic profile of the state. The decades fol owing World War I are

critical to understanding the roots of modern Florida. The “Great Migra-

tion” of African Americans affected Florida but in ways different from the

rest of the South. An exodus, principal y from the Black Belt, carried thou-

sands of African Americans from Florida to more promising urban cen-

ters in the North. But unlike the South, which witnessed a hemorrhage of

blacks and whites for the next half century, Florida actual y attracted new

black and white migrants. Whereas the number of blacks in Georgia and

Alabama failed to increase between 1910 and 1950, in Florida the African

American population actual y doubled over the same forty-year period.

During this sustained migration, African Americans from north Florida,

Alabama, and especial y Georgia sought new opportunities in the growing

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cities of Miami, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Jacksonville, and Orlando. During

every decade between 1880 and 1960, Florida was the main destination of

blacks migrating from Georgia. This migration has been largely unnoticed

because of the overwhelming numbers of white migrants arriving in Florida

simultaneously.

Adding to the ethnic and cultural diversity of a growing black popula-

tion, substantial migration of blacks from the Bahamas to Key West and

Miami occurred between the 1880s and 1930. In 1920, for instance, Miami’s

population of 29,500 included about 5,000 black immigrants from the Ba-

hamas. Ironical y, given the city’s later immigration experience, the black

islanders made up over 65 percent of Miami’s foreign-born population. In

1920 and 1930, New York was the only American city with a larger popula-

tion of black immigrants than Miami.

While black migration and immigration made Florida more cultural y di-

verse, demographic changes were redefining modern Florida in other ways,

ironical y making it the least southern state in the Deep South. Changes

came swiftly in the twentieth century. Today, Florida is often described as

a state where everyone is from some other place. Such was not the case a

century ago. In 1880, an astonishing two-thirds of the state’s population was

Boom, Bust, and Uncertainty: A Social History of Modern Florida · 501

born in Florida. Large numbers of transplanted Georgians and Alabamians

also resided in Florida, giving the state a southern demographic profile.

A half century later, the great demographic transition was under way. By

1930, half of Florida’s residents were born somewhere else, an indication of

the large migration of new residents from the Midwest and Northeast. The

proportion of population native to Florida continued to dwindle, so that by

1980 only about one-third of Floridians claimed native status, a proportion

that rose to 43 percent in 2010. In Naples, Bonita Springs, and Palm Coast,

nativity ranges from 14 to 20 to 24 percent. The inclusion of 1 million “snow-

birds”—who, according to the U.S. Census, are “non-permanent residents”

who spend winters in sunshine—adds further to the demographic divide

between native and transplant. But some of the interior rural counties of

south Florida, such as Hardee, Hendry, Glades, and DeSoto, retain high

proportions of Florida-born residents and thus differ markedly from their

urbanized neighbors.

Florida’s exploding growth in the twentieth century stemmed almost en-

tirely from wave after new waves of migrants, not from high birth rates.

Whereas a century earlier Florida’s new births matched the high rates of

other southern states, since the 1920s the state has registered the lowest birth

rate of any southern state. Beginning after World War II, and especial y

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in the century’s last decades, commentators noted a salient theme in the

demographic profiles of several counties, including Pinel as, Citrus, Sara-

sota, Charlotte, Hernando, and Flagler: annual y, more deaths than births

were being recorded. According to the 1990 census, the number of residents

in Charlotte County aged zero to sixteen equaled those residents seventy-

five and over. The aging of the Sunshine State has become one of modern

Florida’s most pronounced social trends. From Johnny Carson, who pitched

Coral Springs real estate, to Jerry Seinfeld and Del Boca Vista, comics lam-

pooned Florida as “God’s Waiting Room.”

Ironical y, Florida’s state song, written by Stephen Foster in the nine-

teenth century, is “Old Folks at Home.” But the phenomenon of growing old

in America is a recent trend. Relatively few Americans lived to enjoy retire-

ment prior to the twentieth century. Florida’s status as a haven and heaven

for elderly residents stemmed from several political, social, and economic

developments: improved medical care, a national Medicare program, Social