Category: Florida

Lauren “Totch” Brown’s autobiography Totch: A Life in the Everglades provides a fascinating insight into the daily lives of those on the periphery of the network of capitalist relations in South West Florida near the beginning of the 20^th century. In this frontier region the settlers extracted value from the plant and animal life of the region – be it in hides, fish – and small distillery operations in order to self-reproduce and to enter the network of capitalist relations.

Totch describes this particular situatedness and his father’s guidance as instilling within him a distinct ethos that does not kill indiscriminately, but only does so based upon the need for food or the accumulation of capital. The rational behind this is simple: recognition that capacity to sustain life is intimately tied to the living beings there. Totch claims that only once did he violate this ethical position. This belief system is vastly divergent from the urban one and is more proximate to the Seminole values – a fact that explains in part his admiration for them. However, though Totch and the Seminoles may be neighbors on the ethical/locational level, there is still quite a large divide between the two.

This divergence is evident not only in Totch’s participation in the hides trade, wherein he would let animal meats waste due to their low to nonexistent exchange value, and in the form of goods he would trade for the capital he’d accumulated. Natives would primarily traded for goods of symbolic or consumptive value, whereas Totch purchased items of a primarily utilitarian use-value, such as guns, boats, motors, etc. that assisted in greater extraction of capital in the form of animals within his immediate surroundings.

As it was a financially unviable for Sears-Roebuck to showcase physical goods in such a small town, their catalog served as a means for transitioning the capital accumulated by trappers and fishers like Totch into commodities. This presents an irony unrecognized or unacknowledged by Totch. While he may declaim the closing of the region to limited hunting periods by the Federal government, construed of as outsiders, it was the logic of those businesses outside the Everglades that incentivized the massive culling of wildlife that led to the subsequent calls to preserve them.

The freedom within this regulatory periphery that Totch enjoyed diverged little from the once similarly lawless Alaskan fisheries and Appalachian still regions. Fishing grounds are not regulated by the permit or catch allotment but instead by personal initiative, i.e. showing up first in a place, local tradition and if need be capacity to mobilize a superior display or enactment of violence. This is evident when Totch and several of his employees travel south to the region and then, facing contestation of his extraction from the fishery, much shows off with a group of local fisherman. Limited regulatory capacity, in the form of small numbers of topographically knowledgeable park agents, is contested by frontier entrepreneurship that takes various forms. First it is in the alligator hides trade that soon enough, like the alligators, dies off and then it is in the marijuana trade. Once the Everglades region and the fisheries around it become regulated to the point of near or real prohibition for anything other than chartering or high-capital intensive fishing, Totch and others in the Everglades City community are able to capitalize on their social capital and investments in boats in order to become marijuana smugglers and stevedores.

The Enduring Seminoles by Patsy West explains the manner in which the Seminoles were able to economically reproduce following the seizure of much of their traditional lands, the collapse of Glades rookeries from over-hunting and the decline in demand for pelts caused by World War I. Their transition to traditional-craft produced goods, spectacular attractions such as dances, alligator wrestling and tribal ceremonies along with environmentally oriented tourism helped unify different clans and tribes traditionally separated into a single, evolving political unit. As a result of this unity it was possible for the Council, the ruling body of the Seminoles, to prevent individuals from signing away certain land rights, as other native peoples to the west had done, and they were able to consolidate their holding rights and capital to such a degree that they were able to financially flourish despite the Miccosukee and Seminoles pursuit of divergent paths – which was perhaps an inevitability considering their different tribal customs and language.

As the Seminoles still sought to trade within the cash nexus, new conditions of the late 19th and early 20th century meant that new forms of labor were required of them. While seasonal agricultural work was still an option pursued by some, the majority of the Seminoles instead accelerated the production of traditional goods for sale at their reservations that had a dual function as exhibition grounds. At these places simulacra of traditional ceremonies and life was on display for tourists paying to see the “unconquered Tribe” that after three wars with Uncle Sam would still make bellicose claims.

The completion of the Tamiami Trail in the late 1920s reinforced the identity creation that had previously been more regionalized while also causing disruption of the traditional methods of movement for the Seminoles. Because of the conditions which the road created, it also provided them with a means for expanding their economic reach and a setting in which concentrated habitation patterns helped lead them to gain an increased sense of identity. Whereas previously the Indian campgrounds were in competition with each other and organized by clan, with the only outsiders being “the husbands who came to live at the matrilocal residence,” the trail helped instill a Seminole consciousness (28). With so many settlements of various types within miles of each other organized around the exchange of money and people, now occurring at an increased pace, leaders within the tribes realized that their interests and capital were better used if pooled together and combined with a united political front. The Seminoles were thus able to exploit the lessons from other tribes in the Plains region that had been dispossessed by deferring to legal council in their actions and presuming sovereignty.

Despite this being a good source of income for them, their roles here were contrary to the ones conceptualized by many of the whites working for the New Deal government. Their productionist orientation saw this mode of economy both as demeaning and contrary to their goals reorganize the land for agriculture, and had the finances which were to support these efforts later subsumed to the wishes of the Seminoles (103).

Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’ book The Everglades River of Grass is a compelling and poetic account of the geological, biological and social development of the Everglades region. By starting with a deep analysis of the first two of these conditions, she is able to show the great degree to which the Everglades itself determined human growth on the region. Early boosters for developing the region appeared to be willfully unaware of the problems presented by the complexities of the environment, the raw power of the intermittent storms that exposed claims of unrelenting progress to be hubris and the disdain that the original inhabitants had for the settlers which sought to transform the region into an image of their own making rather than adjusting to life as it was.

Opening with great detail on the type of ecosystem that forms the Glades provides the setting for the development of the region. Douglas’ gives an extended description of the hard oolithic limestone, the qualities of the diverse and abundant of plant, animal and insect life. All of these favored nature’s power over a pre-industrial cultures capacity. Human’s initial inability to impose their own conception of order made it the primary determinant of the culture and social relations, at least until the colonizers came and technology reached the point where they are able to increasingly do so. The Mayaimi, Tekesta and Jaega, the people of the Glades settled in what is now called South Florida adapted in various manners to their environment. Religious celebrations were based upon seasonal patterns, an animistic religion guided their relationship to nature and, while reluctant to agree with Douglas’ conception of the division of labor initially existent as a “sort of caste system,” tasks required for reproduction and social health were divided amongst the people based upon qualities such as strength, intelligence, cunning and leadership capacity (76). Given the tribal nature of society social mobility was limited, but from the records that Douglas and others have cited they were content and preferred the social relations in to which they were born rather than that of the colonizers.

These newly arrived colonial powers, first from Spain then from England, France, The Confederacy and the United States were interested in exploiting the clearly fecund soil and using their natural harbors as locations from which to stock and rescue trade ships. Their colonial capacity to exploit it, however, were at first highly limited to small tracks of land and their antagonistic relationship with the Glades tribes which neighbored their settlements. The colonizers attempted converting them to Christianity in order to pacify their hatred for the dispossession of their lands, but the natives viewed this as the importation of a foreign God that literally had no relationship to the cycles of life on the Glades. The acts and tales of cruelties by these men far outweighed the few who were truly peaceful and thus conflict continued amongst them. At times adherence was feigned, but usually in order to obtain goods. Peaceful relations were broken up at times by intermittent conflict, but the colonizers were always limited in their capacity to overwhelm the people that had so sturdily adapted themselves to every aspect of their environment. This did not, however, mean social stasis.

Recognizing that the unique qualities of the Everglades and other coastal islands and estuaries was helpful to illicit trade and piracy, small coastal settlements formed. Other native tribes such as the Creeks, that once populated regions to the north and west recognized that they were unable to push back western expansion and forced their way south. Their new holdings were fertilized with the blood of previous occupants. Additionally playing a factor in the composition of Florida’s population were former slaves. They were aware of the conflict and the egalitarian values of the Glades people and often sought refuge amongst them. This was pre-text for greater conflict between them and the slave-owning society that abutted them.

The end of the American Civil War marked the beginning of an epoch that would accelerate the transformation of the socio-environmental landscape of Florida. Veterans and their families settled into peacetime occupations in the under-developed region of northern Florida and along the eastern coast. To facilitate growth the Federal government established mail routes and encouraged the transplanting of plant life. Intermittent conflict that erupted into prolonged campaigns to pacify the Seminoles or move them on to reservations continued, but so too did relatively peaceful trade relations between them and northern Florida Crackers and southern traders. Exchange of foodstuffs for coin, high-use or subjective value manufactured goods, such as guns and beads, as well as alcohol increased. Soon, however, a new item was prized: bird feathers. The northeastern hat-feather market was exploding and Seminoles labored to fulfill the near limitless demand for them. The demand for aigrettes was so strong that within four years the rookeries were destroyed. Recognizing the need to protect wild birds from the capitalist nexus between north and south, the Florida Legislature passed a law to protect the birds. Enforcement, however, was minimal to non-existent.

The technological capacity of the colonizers progressed and two major forces came to bear upon the environment: trains and drainage. Shrinking the limits to growth and the speed of exchange, these two rapidly expanded the facilitation of capitalist relations in the area in and around the Glades. Plant and Flager’s importation of these capacities led to the increased in foreign settlement. While initial harvests were small due to a lack of knowledge of soil conditions, this would later be fixed via the application of the science to the dirt. High capital investment would first presented a barrier, however later land companies were able to appeal to local and state governments for funds to create flood barriers, canals and military forces to push the Seminoles further to the interior while also encouraging greater assimilation through schooling. Unseasonable frosts encouraged farmers to move operation further south.

A state of regional anarchy best categorized the manner of housing and agricultural development while industrial development was limited due to the semi-tropical environment and lack of air-conditioning. Agriculture and tourism were the primary industries in the region surrounding the Glades and were increasingly at odds with one another as developments spread out rather than up. Former native combatants in the Seminole wars largely reconciled themselves to a peripheral place in the new productive regime in order to maintain their cultural peculiarities but still fought to prevent large techno-political projects from touching there habitation. Whether they were aware of similar battles over issues such as the salination of fresh water canals due to poor planning is not touched upon, but it’s clear that an increasing sense of the fragility of the environment was an increasing concern.

Douglas is not optimistic of the capacity for sensible land-use policies to be pursued by the government that has taken control from those that once wholly adapted themselves to the region. Given the history that she has written this is understandable. Following the arrival of colonialists her history is largely a depiction of a hubristic faith in progress, defined as increased technological manipulation of nature and man to further capitalist exploitation, that is able to correct any problems that occur. This despite the willfully suppressed recognition that the canals had caused soil depletion, industry has poisoned soil and that locks and drainage are frames for a holistic region that can be subdivided at the cost of huge and potentially irreversible environmental impact. As such the tension found in the initial written history of the region is one that continues – to adjust as people or to adjust the land around us.

The historical essays contained in Making Waves: Female Activists in Twentieth-Century Florida illustrate a wide variety of female political praxis. While it is not until the final essay by Giardina that the phrase “the personal is the political” makes an appearance, all of the essays within show how the reconceptualization of the arena of women’s activity as a result of the Women’s Voting Act and changing social mores helped to alter Florida’s environment, polis and oikos in various ways. Working class women engaged in unionization activities, benefitted from paternalistic education while more financially secure middle-class women facilitated the growth of clubs that would provide skills and networks valuable for political leadership. Nominally independent women, such as the Marjories, were able to use their career paths as a position from which to advocate reform or the conservation of nature that would be lost due to short term logic of capitalist development.

One essay which addresses the role of working-class women is Rieff’s article Home Demonstration and Rural Reform. The author shows how it is that the federal government sought to demonstrate better practices of home economics through extension classes and minimal investments in canning machinery, to thus allow the continuation of existent capitalist practices by increasing the capacity for workers to reproduce. Class was, as always, informed by race and the ever-marginalized black population didn’t receive equivalent amounts of government funding. In the account of Tampa cigar industry workers, female retirees fighting against Air Pollution in areas affected by extractive and refining industries and Civil Rights Activists in northern Florida there is also evidence of the extension of the “women’s sphere” into the larger body politics. Women’s lacking access to land struck so that their pay would be of such a level that they were not forced into relationships with men simply to be able to live and in order to obtain increased power in the housing and food market.

They sought the restriction of industry such that their housing investments wouldn’t be destroyed by industry externalization, that their rights following the nullification of the separate but equal ruling would be enforced and that the inheritance of slum-conditions be ameliorated to better black communities. As the essays show, women resisted the limitation of their roles within the nexus of increased market exchange by striking, pleaing to local, state and national government and, if their council was not sufficiently listened to, entering into legally protagonistic relationships with them as well. As the cases of Elizabeth Virrick and Ruth Owen shows, once mobilized and able to find a constituency that was able to financially and morally support them, the women were subject to judicial contests. Owen was able to be seated as Florida’s first Congresswomen and Virrick was able to effect slum clearance, however this was not accomplished without entrance into the legal areana.

David Colburn’s From Yellow Dog Democrats to Red State Republicans: Florida and Its Politics since 1940 narrates the political transition of Florida from party monopoly to a limited competition electoral regime. As Colburn points out on page 13, “From 1900 to 1950, Florida voted for a Republican only once, and that was to support Republican presidential candidate Herbert Hover against Al Smith… (who) represented everything they opposed” (13-14). Prior to this voters consistently, powerfully and successfully resisted the attempts of urban oriented politicians to enact new legislation and thus were oriented to rural, segregationist politics. The increased mobilization of under-represented groups, migration to the state by people living in regions associated with Republican party policies, the limited capacity of the state Democratic party to maintain discipline resulted and growing dissatisfaction with their national party created an atmosphere of increased political polarization and transformation of state voting patterns.

Governor Collins was a prime example of politicians caught within the turbulence of the times. While a gradualist in his approach to dismantling Jim Crow policies, accusations of being a progressive and of kowtowing to federal rather than state influence tempered his elected capacities. The conflict throughout the state found reflection in the blood-letting of the Democratic primaries and shifting of voting patters. The former issue of intra-party polarization caused subsequent gubernatorial candidate Carlton to refrain from getting Collins endorsement until late in the campaign, a mistake repeated later by Al Gore, causing him to lose to Bryant, who represented the parties segregationist wing. As the new governor’s ability to substantively shape racial policies was limited by the Federal government, the vote for Bryan’s segregationist rhetoric was more symbolic than substantive –this didn’t prevent the Republicans from capitalizing upon the division and general discontent.

On issues of policy, the discourse surrounding busing and the legal framework created by the Brown I and II rulings came into effect, how both parties responded lead to shifts in voting patterns. Though the state was now mandated to institutionalize the equality of blacks on a time schedule determined by the external political actors, local resistance to it continued via economic and community-oriented arguments. Whites held that the quality of social investment instilled via the school system would be degraded by the introduction of black students and teachers while blacks held that the community-oriented institutions that they had developed would now be dissolved. State Republicans were able to capture more votes as a result of this issue due to the fact that the party imposing this at the national level was the Democrats and compounded this advantage by advocating for a low property tax. Another nationa-oriented concern being felt at the polls was via the new Cuban vote, who largely rejected the velvet glove approach of Democrats to Castro. As Republicans found competent candidates with name recognition and their power to mobilize the “Cincinnati” electorate increased, the Democrats individualist approach candidate primaries and increasingly right of center policies lead to party flight evidenced by the last three governors.

The essays edited by Irvin D. S. Winsboro and collected in Old South, New South, or Down South?: Florida and the Modern Civil Rights Movement illustrate the trajectories of various civil rights battles held in the streets, schools, stores, public spaces, churches and courtrooms of Florida. In various ways the authors depict a series of status based contestations. Blacks were no longer going to “stay in their place,” as evidence via battles won in several Supreme Court Rulings, nor leave it at a pace dictated by the local whites.

The collection suggestions that the nature of African-American struggle changed as the primary mode of economic reproduction shifted from agricultural to service oriented work. As they transitioned from farming towns with small population density to larger towns and cities, the greater concentration of people with similar experiences or disenfranchisement caused a number of a qualitative shifts. First was the abandonment of the gradualist approach to social uplift exemplified in the yeomanry ethic of Booker T. Washington. As most of those in these regions were no longer agricultural producers but were wage laborers such a ideology was no longer as applicable to their experiences in the cities. Instead a number of ideologies were formed that were the beginnings of various forms of black power. Based upon this increasingly militant class-consciousness, a number of groups formed to place demands upon the state that approximated struggles occurring in other locales. Due to Florida’s heterogeneous composition of industry, previous settlement and migration patterns, the intensity of open political conflict varied from country to county. The response to these contests was, however, largely the same. Institutional violence, token desegregation, electoral dispossession through districting that gave more electoral power to rural, racist bastions over those areas more open to accelerated integration, and the legal tactics of delay that would have likely made the wording in of the Brown ruling “with all deliberate speed” mean never were the responses to these collective contestations.

The articles in Winsboro cite a number of local civil society organizations that worked on their own and in conjunction with national groups and branches of the Federal Government to overturn the laws and help reshape the attitudes that maintained the Jim Crow regime. While there is a dearth of information on the actual composition, charters, membership numbers and structures of the organizations themselves, the story which emerges is that these grass-roots militants connected to activist churches spread across the state were sufficient to remake the laws which had chained them down to an inferior caste. Despite these gains, however, institutional discrimination persisted. Though KKK rallies were no longer considered socially acceptable, group membership persisted and maintained a degree of control via their entry into police forces. Thus while the legal standing of racial status was eventually changed, purposive targeting continued. Additionally, commensurate economic gains were not accomplished due to their being categorized such as communism, which was deemed a crime greater than being born black.

On page ten of Melanie Shell-Weiss’s Coming to Miami: A Social History, the author state her intent to broaden the regions historical latinization by broadening the epoch to show the tensions which existed prior to their migration, and to develop that history with concern to extra-regional developments (those things impacting Miami but not necessarily originating there) as well as the role of race, labor and sexual relations. The net effect of such a process is the progressive unfolding of how it was that capitalist social relations developed and underdeveloped Miami and how it was that various communities attempted to resist such exploitation.

Shortly prior to Miami’s incorporation, Malthusian pressures encouraged a number of Bahamians to leave the islands and make their way to Miami. Initially the Bahamian population benefitted from their education within the British colonial system, greater capacity to obtain investment capital and familiarity with natural conditions that initially made them invaluable in the assistance of the burgeoning agricultural industry. These boons, which had the effect of making them the small business owners in the non-white neighborhood and a somewhat decreased capacity for Floridian police to used naked force against them put them at odds with the African Americans already living there. Racial alliances were tenuous and at moments when they did exist, as in the UNIA, there were disconnections between leaders and the rank and file which even when attempted to be corrected highlighted the middle class nature of the movement – a position most often held by the Bahamians.

These tensions within the highly qualified “black community” was slight compared to those that existed with between the African Americans and whites of Western European descent. Thought they literally made the structures of Miami and Miami Beach, they were prohibited from owning land these, visiting if not working and were generally placed within a system of etiquette where violations could result in gross bodily harm. Lacking the capacity to earn from land speculation and paid barely above the level of self-reproduction the infrastructure of the areas allotted to them were of much lower quality than those found in the white areas. Beachfront mansions were thus predicated on unpaved streets and shotgun housing with ad-hoc sewage facilities. The poverty that existed in these communities was a rare sight to visitors, who normally stayed in the white-capital created tourist facilities.

Organized attempts at correcting this took the form of civic and church associations rather than through economic groups such as unions as following such attempts accusations of communism could be made with their implicit threat of American Legion, KKK or police violence. With the increase of first Jewish and then Hispanic migration there were additionally considerations that complicated that already highly pressurized communities. While these two groups also faced discrimination, they were to become seen as if not allies than as preferable partners with which to exploit for labor. The transition to civil rights discourse and with its increased solidarity-oriented political consciousness changed this to a degree, but the damage done due to the previous physical isolation of these communities and their political marginalization made the effort a largely uphill battle.