The History of Florida (106 page)

been the exclusive domain of the wealthy.

proof

The building of highways and roads to serve the automobile accelerated

the development of modern Florida. In 1906, when it had fewer than 300

automobiles, the state had only a handful of paved highways. As one travel

writer confessed 1918, “it was an exceedingly troublesome matter to get an

automobile down into the central part of the state.”3 Prior to 1916, road build-

ing in the United States was in the domain of county government. Given

the travail of distances and the inequitable capacities of counties to pay for

highway construction, road building in Florida in the nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries was a haphazard and many-splintered thing. During the

Progressive Era, a popular idea known as the Good Roads Movement swept

through the South: Good roads spelled progress, promise, and prosperity.

The crisis of World War I crystallized the national movement for efficient

transportation. The federal government now enlisted state participation in

road building, helping to subsidize state efforts. The famous Dixie Highway

linking Florida with Chicago stands as a testimonial to newfound resources

for road construction.

By the 1920s, Florida’s Good Roads Movement could point to real accom-

plishments. Road builders began laying asphalt and bricks that connected

the state’s cities and linked them with highways leading north. By 1925, a

Boom, Bust, and Uncertainty: A Social History of Modern Florida · 507

proof

A cabbage farm at Hastings in 1947. Florida’s second-ranked industry after tourism by

midcentury was agriculture, which in 1950 contributed $401 million to the state’s grow-

ing prosperity—an increase of 300 percent over 1935. The various soils of the peninsula

and Panhandle produced 104 different commercial crops, more than were grown in

any other state. Most farmers owned the farms they managed. Truck and vegetable

crops, harvested by resident and migratory workers, were shipped in ever-increasing

tonnage to northern winter markets. Sugarcane brought in $9 million in south Florida;

tobacco was a leading field and crop in the northern and western counties. Commer-

cial ornamental horticulture was a new and thriving agribusiness, producing chrysan-

themums, gladiolas, lilies, orchids, roses, cut green foliage, ferns, and potted foliage

plants for interior decoration of Florida’s and the nation’s profusion of new homes. By

the 1990s, agriculture would gross $6 billion a year.

half mil ion tourists were arriving annual y in Florida by automobile, and by

1930 Florida had more than 3,200 miles of paved highways. Even working-

class Americans, driving their Fords and Chevys down the Dixie Highway

or across the Tamiami Trail or (after 1938) along the Overseas Highway to

Key West, could take their families on a Florida vacation by the seashore.

As the state road department’s official magazine,
Florida
Highways,
noted

508 · Raymond A. Mohl and Gary R. Mormino

enthusiastical y in 1930, “Florida’s magnificent system of highways is creat-

ing a somewhat nomadic tribe of tourists” who were “now roaming all over

the state.”4 By 1950, over 1 million cars a year were entering Florida for tour-

ism and recreation. The bus and the truck also contributed in important

ways to stimulating tourist traffic and economic growth.

The construction of the Tamiami Trail il ustrates the impact of modern

transportation upon a region and culture. The dream of an east-west high-

way artery across southern Florida had existed for decades, but its imple-

mentation lay beyond the financial means of individual counties. Beginning

in the late teens, and aided by the geopolitical lobbying of land developer

Barron G. Collier and Miami business interests, the dream took hold. The

Tamiami Trail was an engineering marvel of the time. When it was fin-

ished in 1927, cars and trucks could travel on modern roads from Tampa

to Miami (hence the name Tamiami). Alas, progress wrought social costs.

The Seminole Indians, who prior to the 1920s had lived in semi-isolation,

now confronted modernity. Dugout canoes and subsistence living quickly

surrendered to airboats, Model As, and the invented tradition of alligator

wrestling. A tourist economy offered the Seminoles a new and different life-

style. Hunters enjoyed easy access to the bounties of Big Cypress country

and quickly depopulated the wildlife of the region. When Winchesters and

proof

Remingtons failed to kil , Fords and Chevrolets often added to the tol . The

Tamiami Trail proved ruinous to the Florida panther, unaccustomed to on-

beam prestolites, ironical y developed by Carl Fisher, the father of Miami

Beach.

Road building in the modern era has reconfigured transportation pat-

terns, population settlement, and political campaigning. The Sunshine State

Parkway (now called Florida’s Turnpike) in the 1950s and early 1960s and

the interstate highway system in the 1960s and after dramatical y enhanced

mobility in Florida. Interstate 95 on the East Coast linked Miami and south

Florida directly to northeastern states. Interstate 75 connected Tampa with

the Midsouth and the Midwest. Interstate 10 pushed across the northern tier

of the state from Jacksonville to Tal ahassee and Pensacola and beyond to

New Orleans. Interstate 4 traversed a theme-park corridor from Busch Gar-

dens in Tampa through the Disney landscape of Orlando to Daytona Beach

on the Atlantic coast. These new highways launched tourism to lofty new

levels and opened up areas of the state to business and residential develop-

ment. Typical y, a new stretch of I-75 between Tampa and Naples propelled

the incredible spurt of recent growth in southwest Florida, now the fast-

est-growing part of the state. Heavy truck traffic on the interstates further

Boom, Bust, and Uncertainty: A Social History of Modern Florida · 509

undermined the declining railroads, the technology that original y made

Florida accessible. Today, campaigning along the I-4 corridor has become

a new political ritual. Students of American politics contend that winning

the vote along the I-4 corridor, a microcosm of the state and nation, is tan-

tamount to election.

New expressways resulted in unintended and intended consequences.

The new interstate highways severed Florida’s major cities. Local and state

politicians believed that federal highway construction could be a hand-

maiden to local urban renewal. Urban expressways tore through estab-

lished neighborhoods and uprooted entire communities—especial y Afri-

can American communities. In Tampa, expressways bisected historic Latin

neighborhoods. Daily rush-hour traffic jams in Tampa, Orlando, and Mi-

ami made these highways less like expressways than slow-moving parking

lots. But the new auto arteries did trigger a rapid spatial reorganization of

urban populations, as white residents moved to the suburbs and African

Americans pushed out of redeveloped inner-city areas to newer, formerly

white, “second ghetto” neighborhoods.

The automobile had still other consequences. Some observers have noted

that new and dynamic business and commercial centers—configurations

of urban life cal ed “edge cities”—have sprouted distant from traditional

proof

downtowns. Miami, Orlando, and Tampa all have developed such edge cit-

ies, usual y at interstate highway interchanges or near large international

airports. In part, they evolved because the automobile promoted the decen-

tralization of urban business and the deconcentration of city people. Older

metropolitan areas such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco devel-

oped with mass transit, so their building and population patterns reflected

high levels of residential density. By contrast, Florida’s metropolitan areas

grew up in the automobile age and thus are settled out rather than up, re-

vealing relatively low-density rates as wel . Recent and expensive attempts

to persuade Floridians to give up their automobiles, notably in Miami and

Jacksonville, have not met with encouraging results. South Florida’s Tri-Rail

system, a commuter rail network linking West Palm Beach with Miami,

and Miami’s above-ground transit system known as Metrorail, attracted few

regular riders; most urban Floridians prefer the privacy and flexibility of

their own vehicles, even at the expense of daily traffic jams. The dream of

high-speed rail in Florida seemed assured with the 2008 election of Barack

Obama and the pledge to spend $2.4 billion in federal funds for the 85-mile

Tampa-to-Orlando link. But newly elected Florida Governor Rick Scott

rejected the transportation stimulus funds in 2011, kil ing the project. A

510 · Raymond A. Mohl and Gary R. Mormino

year later, private investors at Florida East Coast Industries concocted a

new high-speed rail plan, this time connecting Miami and Orlando, with

future extensions to Tampa and Jacksonville. Lacking billions in taxpayer

subsidies, the new plan seemed just another Florida pipe dream.

By the late twentieth century, commercial air transportation had come

to rival the automobile in importance. Indeed, aviation technology has had

a bigger impact on Florida than on most other states. During World War I,

U.S. naval air stations were established in Pensacola, Miami, and Key West.

Before the end of the decade, regularly scheduled air service carried passen-

gers from Key West, Miami, and Palm Beach to Cuba and the Bahamas. In

the 1920s, the U.S. Congress laid the foundations for the national air trans-

portation industry by subsidizing airmail service. Aviation entrepreneurs in

Florida quickly seized the opportunity, and soon three major airline com-

panies emerged in the state: Pan American Airways and Eastern Airlines

in Miami and National Airlines in St. Petersburg. By the 1930s, these and

other airlines, using the newly developed DC-3 airliner, were carrying tens

of thousands of passengers monthly to Florida from U.S. and Latin Ameri-

can cities. Increasingly after midcentury, commercial air travel supplanted

rail and auto transportation as a mainstay of Florida’s tourist economy.

The novelty and excitement of aviation had come to be an essential in-

proof

gredient in Florida’s national image by the 1930s. Beginning in 1929, Miami

provided the annual setting for the All American Air Races, seen by mil-

lions on newsreels at movie theaters. By the 1930s, the
Miami
Herald
was

carrying a regular aviation column called “Wings Over Miami.” Goodyear

blimps based in Miami became a common sight in the air over south Flor-

ida’s Atlantic coastal beaches during the 1930s and after. This consciousness

of aviation’s importance intensified during World War II, when the federal

government, seduced by powerful congressmen and induced by Florida’s

good year-round flying weather, located air training bases all over the state.

Thus, Florida entered the postwar era with a heightened sense of the im-

portance of air travel. Business and political leaders quickly came to realize

that aviation stimulated tourism, economic activity, and population growth.

The Miami International Airport emerged as one of the nation’s leading air-

ports in passengers and air freight, especial y as a gateway to Latin America.

Several airlines selected Miami as a center for aircraft overhaul and mainte-

nance operations, with important spil over effects: by 1960, Eastern Airlines,

with more than 7,000 workers, had become the leading employer in the Mi-

ami metropolitan area. By the 1980s, an estimated 160,000 workers, or about

Boom, Bust, and Uncertainty: A Social History of Modern Florida · 511

one-fifth of the Miami labor force, were directly or indirectly employed in

airport and aviation activities. Major new airport expansion and construc-

tion projects since the 1970s highlighted the degree to which airports have

become elaborate image-boosting entry points, much like the opulent ur-

ban railroad stations of the late nineteenth century.

Technology not only revolutionized the way we traveled, it affected pro-