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A Brief Compendium of the Florida Imagination, or, Notes Based on a Catalogue of Books for Holiday Giving
Florida 1890-1965 or thereabouts represents one of those triumphs of the human imagination that deserves to be memorialized more adequately than it has been. Both the sleazier and the mainstream destinies of the state post-1965 have been not quite adequately, but at least amply recorded, but the sheer immensity and improbability of the three-quarters of a century preceding the past forty years ought to be incorporated into a novel, or into a work of scholarship at least as unlikely.
The individual stories have all been told more often than we need to repeat:
How a state that was still so much a subtropical frontier at the time of its 1845 admission to statehood that Northern editorial fantasists twenty years later could propose that it be returned to territorial status—how that state was subsequently transformed by a quarter-century of relentless Northern economic colonization into the upscale winter tourist destination par excellence, accompanied by agricultural development by such improbable characters as Henry Shelton Sanford, Lincoln’s minister to Belgium who tried to secure a stake in King Leopold’s Congo fiefdom and who tried to create a central Florida citrus empire by importing Swedish laborers. (His inheritors later deposited the remnants of his personal library and Egyptian artifacts in a library in the Florida town he named after himself, thus allowing an alienated fourteen-year-old to write papers on the 1861-1865 opinions of the Illustrated London News on the American situation.)
How that state developed a distinctive fantasy-filled architecture, beginning with the misplaced Victorian verandas of the 1890s luxury hotels ( a style still faintly visible, last time I checked, in such outliers as the hotel in the town of Cassadega, founded as the winter camp of upstate New York’s Spiritualist community). How thereafter the misguided replication of Northern architecture was supplanted by the pseudo-Spanish designs devised by Addison Mizner, in turn supplanted by the Tropical Deco hotels and public buildings that were largely limited to Miami Beach by Depression economics; how Morris Lapidus re-invented luxury for the upper middle classes in that same Miami with hotels that encompassed the glitziest dreams of the prosperous 1950s. (And less well known, how architects such as Norman Giller developed the look of Miami Modernism.)
All of which was taking place while much of the state remained rural and agricultural, and the civil rights movement strove to establish basic security for farm laborers in an economy that was still dependent on the whims of Northern commodity brokers and the capacity of California to out-compete the fickle yield of Florida harvests; in a state still flavored by men and women who remembered the frontier of fifty or sixty years before.
Throw in the arrival of ex-Nazi scientists and V-2 rockets and the part of the postwar economy fueled by the race for space, and you have, of course, one of the great postwar commonplaces. It is all too well known to be worth recounting, but the raw surreality of the overall history has seldom been tackled by more than schlock novelists, and even they have largely risen to prominence since the place became the home of a downscale drug trade and the arrival of a Disneyfied global tourism.
So it came as a pleasant surprise to discover, in yesterday’s mail, a holiday catalogue from the University Press of Florida (so named, I assume, because it subsumed the individual efforts of the state’s several universities). The cultural-studies scholars have been busy, and anyone inclined to do a crash course in matters Floridian could accomplish the task with no other resources, there being only a few topics that seem to be completely missing from the inventory.
I was originally taken with the discovery that at least some of the greatest works of imagination of the 1930s and 1940s had been individually documented. (I assume that the rest of the spectacles for popular consumption are at least referenced in Selling the Sunshine State: A Celebration of Florida Tourist Advertising.)
Actually, I’m surprised that there aren’t yet volumes devoted to Marineland’s art deco aquarium and dolphin show, or to Fairchild Tropical Garden, the quite scholarly precursor to all the postwar effusions of floral exotica. But there are studies of the work of the photographer who made the charms of Silver Springs famous, and of the history of Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids.
Now, the history of Florida tourism is bound up with the larger social history of the American imagination, and of the exploitation of same from Holland, Michigan to…well, carry the geography to all corners of America and you find the bizarre wonders designed to exploit the already existing dreams and expectations of the traveling public. And you will not find that larger context here, though scholars have begun to write about it.
I assume, though I don’t know, that there is no linkage between the subaquatic vistas of Salvador Dali’s Dream of Venus at the New York World’s Fair (elegantly documented in its own right) and the idea of hiring female swimmers to put on mermaid costumes and present wholesome underwater performances while sipping delicately every so often from air hoses.
But the whole business in its heyday involved the innocent eroticism of a 1950s America that saw no problem in presenting exotic fish and attractive young women, in their respective corners of Florida, in more or less identical viewing circumstances. (And in an appropriately feminist twist, it was the performers and former performers who safeguarded their livelihoods in recent years by establishing the city government of the town of Weeki Wachee and assuming management of the tourist attraction—a classic example of control being taken by the workers.)
So we have a state that has always thrived on fantasies and psychic projections (spiritualist or otherwise), and the University Press of Florida offers ample scholarly overviews such as Land of Sunshine, Land of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida. But it also offers the same basic segment of history in the more memorably titled Dream State: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, and Other Florida Wildlife, a book by NPR commentator Diane Roberts.
And there are ample studies of at least some of the individual purveyors of the dream state, an economically oneiric state of systematic somnolence of which neither Carl Jung nor Walter Benjamin could have ever, uh, dreamed. If there was a buck to be made off of popular visions, somebody in Florida tried to make it.
Thus it is that we have here a 500-illustration guide to Florida’s Golden Age of Souvenirs, 1890-1930, a volume that might prove illuminating to those of us whose knowledge of Sunshine State bric-a-brac begins with the little palm trees and swimmer figurines stamped “Made in Occupied Japan.” But the Press also provides two books on the Highwaymen, a 1950s collective of young African-American artists whose paintings of flame trees and tropic beaches helped to solidify a generation’s popular image of Florida, even as they themselves remained little recognized until folk-art scholarship turned them into icons worthy of their own analytical volumes.
Wow. Or, whew.
I haven’t so much as mentioned such resources as the anthology Frolicking Bears, Wet Vultures, and Other Oddities: A New York City Journalist in Nineteenth-Century Florida or the UPF book that has gotten the most national attention, David Rieff’s Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists and Refugees in the New America. (I should add that there were insightful national reviews of Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr, which describes a Florida that is very distant but well within living memory.)
I also haven’t said much at all about the histories of Key West, the surveys of environmental issues, the guides to subtropic landscaping, or the studies of such novelists as the notorious Harry Crews. (Which leads us into all the books on Cracker Culture that I have skipped over for reasons of your patience.)
But it would be unthinkable to end this typically interminable blog post (for which, by the way, I have received no compensation whatsoever, unless you count the 25-page throwaway catalogue) without reporting that by some remarkable subterfuge, the Press acquired the two titles that ought to have safeguarded, for generations to come, their financial ability to produce more scholarly works .
They are MoonPie: Biography of an Out-of-This-World Snack and Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut. Much as the thought makes me cringe, I’m sure these titles have been stocking stuffers for true enthusiasts and master ironists alike.
Their presumptive status as cash cows probably has made possible such books as Hitler’s Soldiers in the Sunshine State: German POWs in Florida, which recounts a history I had never really known existed. I dimly recall that somewhere (perhaps in Florida) there was an issue of what to do with murals created by German POW artists, but I don’t recall the murals’ location. (Which reminds me, by process of association regarding once-forgotten history: Zora Neale Hurston appears to be the turf of other publishers. UPF carries out its mission of looking at the overlooked by dealing with other Florida authors including the once far more popular writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.)
This is about as far as I am going to go with revisiting my home state’s cultural history. Yesterday I was researching the amazon.com summaries and “Look Inside!” sample pages of recent publications in globalization from Duke University Press, and I am left exhausted after no more than a brief mental tour from a new book on Johannesburg to an older book on contemporaneity by Paul Rabinow and the originally-searched conversations of Rabinow and George E. Marcus, Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, plus two anthologies on global issues, Andreas Huyssen’s Other Cities, Other Worlds and Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee’s Antinomies of Art and Culture.
From Johannesburg 2008 to the mermaids of Weeki Wachee by way of the assorted architects of the American popular imagination: this is how we roll.
And Duke doesn’t even send me catalogues any longer; the ads in the holiday New York Review of Books are sufficiently murderous in reminding one of the many mainstream cultural and intellectual issues one isn’t confronting adequately any longer.
But I still wish there were someone who could synthesize all that Florida material into one grand and glorious overview. You can leave out the MoonPies (which I always thought was written as two words) and the glazed doughnuts. But do start with Florida’s People During the Last Ice Age—I omit the obvious joke—and Florida’s Lost Tribes, and work in a reference to Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley: African Princess, Florida Slave, Plantation Slaveowner.
Florida 1890-1965 or thereabouts represents one of those triumphs of the human imagination that deserves to be memorialized more adequately than it has been. Both the sleazier and the mainstream destinies of the state post-1965 have been not quite adequately, but at least amply recorded, but the sheer immensity and improbability of the three-quarters of a century preceding the past forty years ought to be incorporated into a novel, or into a work of scholarship at least as unlikely.
The individual stories have all been told more often than we need to repeat:
How a state that was still so much a subtropical frontier at the time of its 1845 admission to statehood that Northern editorial fantasists twenty years later could propose that it be returned to territorial status—how that state was subsequently transformed by a quarter-century of relentless Northern economic colonization into the upscale winter tourist destination par excellence, accompanied by agricultural development by such improbable characters as Henry Shelton Sanford, Lincoln’s minister to Belgium who tried to secure a stake in King Leopold’s Congo fiefdom and who tried to create a central Florida citrus empire by importing Swedish laborers. (His inheritors later deposited the remnants of his personal library and Egyptian artifacts in a library in the Florida town he named after himself, thus allowing an alienated fourteen-year-old to write papers on the 1861-1865 opinions of the Illustrated London News on the American situation.)
How that state developed a distinctive fantasy-filled architecture, beginning with the misplaced Victorian verandas of the 1890s luxury hotels ( a style still faintly visible, last time I checked, in such outliers as the hotel in the town of Cassadega, founded as the winter camp of upstate New York’s Spiritualist community). How thereafter the misguided replication of Northern architecture was supplanted by the pseudo-Spanish designs devised by Addison Mizner, in turn supplanted by the Tropical Deco hotels and public buildings that were largely limited to Miami Beach by Depression economics; how Morris Lapidus re-invented luxury for the upper middle classes in that same Miami with hotels that encompassed the glitziest dreams of the prosperous 1950s. (And less well known, how architects such as Norman Giller developed the look of Miami Modernism.)
All of which was taking place while much of the state remained rural and agricultural, and the civil rights movement strove to establish basic security for farm laborers in an economy that was still dependent on the whims of Northern commodity brokers and the capacity of California to out-compete the fickle yield of Florida harvests; in a state still flavored by men and women who remembered the frontier of fifty or sixty years before.
Throw in the arrival of ex-Nazi scientists and V-2 rockets and the part of the postwar economy fueled by the race for space, and you have, of course, one of the great postwar commonplaces. It is all too well known to be worth recounting, but the raw surreality of the overall history has seldom been tackled by more than schlock novelists, and even they have largely risen to prominence since the place became the home of a downscale drug trade and the arrival of a Disneyfied global tourism.
So it came as a pleasant surprise to discover, in yesterday’s mail, a holiday catalogue from the University Press of Florida (so named, I assume, because it subsumed the individual efforts of the state’s several universities). The cultural-studies scholars have been busy, and anyone inclined to do a crash course in matters Floridian could accomplish the task with no other resources, there being only a few topics that seem to be completely missing from the inventory.
I was originally taken with the discovery that at least some of the greatest works of imagination of the 1930s and 1940s had been individually documented. (I assume that the rest of the spectacles for popular consumption are at least referenced in Selling the Sunshine State: A Celebration of Florida Tourist Advertising.)
Actually, I’m surprised that there aren’t yet volumes devoted to Marineland’s art deco aquarium and dolphin show, or to Fairchild Tropical Garden, the quite scholarly precursor to all the postwar effusions of floral exotica. But there are studies of the work of the photographer who made the charms of Silver Springs famous, and of the history of Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids.
Now, the history of Florida tourism is bound up with the larger social history of the American imagination, and of the exploitation of same from Holland, Michigan to…well, carry the geography to all corners of America and you find the bizarre wonders designed to exploit the already existing dreams and expectations of the traveling public. And you will not find that larger context here, though scholars have begun to write about it.
I assume, though I don’t know, that there is no linkage between the subaquatic vistas of Salvador Dali’s Dream of Venus at the New York World’s Fair (elegantly documented in its own right) and the idea of hiring female swimmers to put on mermaid costumes and present wholesome underwater performances while sipping delicately every so often from air hoses.
But the whole business in its heyday involved the innocent eroticism of a 1950s America that saw no problem in presenting exotic fish and attractive young women, in their respective corners of Florida, in more or less identical viewing circumstances. (And in an appropriately feminist twist, it was the performers and former performers who safeguarded their livelihoods in recent years by establishing the city government of the town of Weeki Wachee and assuming management of the tourist attraction—a classic example of control being taken by the workers.)
So we have a state that has always thrived on fantasies and psychic projections (spiritualist or otherwise), and the University Press of Florida offers ample scholarly overviews such as Land of Sunshine, Land of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida. But it also offers the same basic segment of history in the more memorably titled Dream State: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, and Other Florida Wildlife, a book by NPR commentator Diane Roberts.
And there are ample studies of at least some of the individual purveyors of the dream state, an economically oneiric state of systematic somnolence of which neither Carl Jung nor Walter Benjamin could have ever, uh, dreamed. If there was a buck to be made off of popular visions, somebody in Florida tried to make it.
Thus it is that we have here a 500-illustration guide to Florida’s Golden Age of Souvenirs, 1890-1930, a volume that might prove illuminating to those of us whose knowledge of Sunshine State bric-a-brac begins with the little palm trees and swimmer figurines stamped “Made in Occupied Japan.” But the Press also provides two books on the Highwaymen, a 1950s collective of young African-American artists whose paintings of flame trees and tropic beaches helped to solidify a generation’s popular image of Florida, even as they themselves remained little recognized until folk-art scholarship turned them into icons worthy of their own analytical volumes.
Wow. Or, whew.
I haven’t so much as mentioned such resources as the anthology Frolicking Bears, Wet Vultures, and Other Oddities: A New York City Journalist in Nineteenth-Century Florida or the UPF book that has gotten the most national attention, David Rieff’s Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists and Refugees in the New America. (I should add that there were insightful national reviews of Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr, which describes a Florida that is very distant but well within living memory.)
I also haven’t said much at all about the histories of Key West, the surveys of environmental issues, the guides to subtropic landscaping, or the studies of such novelists as the notorious Harry Crews. (Which leads us into all the books on Cracker Culture that I have skipped over for reasons of your patience.)
But it would be unthinkable to end this typically interminable blog post (for which, by the way, I have received no compensation whatsoever, unless you count the 25-page throwaway catalogue) without reporting that by some remarkable subterfuge, the Press acquired the two titles that ought to have safeguarded, for generations to come, their financial ability to produce more scholarly works .
They are MoonPie: Biography of an Out-of-This-World Snack and Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut. Much as the thought makes me cringe, I’m sure these titles have been stocking stuffers for true enthusiasts and master ironists alike.
Their presumptive status as cash cows probably has made possible such books as Hitler’s Soldiers in the Sunshine State: German POWs in Florida, which recounts a history I had never really known existed. I dimly recall that somewhere (perhaps in Florida) there was an issue of what to do with murals created by German POW artists, but I don’t recall the murals’ location. (Which reminds me, by process of association regarding once-forgotten history: Zora Neale Hurston appears to be the turf of other publishers. UPF carries out its mission of looking at the overlooked by dealing with other Florida authors including the once far more popular writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.)
This is about as far as I am going to go with revisiting my home state’s cultural history. Yesterday I was researching the amazon.com summaries and “Look Inside!” sample pages of recent publications in globalization from Duke University Press, and I am left exhausted after no more than a brief mental tour from a new book on Johannesburg to an older book on contemporaneity by Paul Rabinow and the originally-searched conversations of Rabinow and George E. Marcus, Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, plus two anthologies on global issues, Andreas Huyssen’s Other Cities, Other Worlds and Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee’s Antinomies of Art and Culture.
From Johannesburg 2008 to the mermaids of Weeki Wachee by way of the assorted architects of the American popular imagination: this is how we roll.
And Duke doesn’t even send me catalogues any longer; the ads in the holiday New York Review of Books are sufficiently murderous in reminding one of the many mainstream cultural and intellectual issues one isn’t confronting adequately any longer.
But I still wish there were someone who could synthesize all that Florida material into one grand and glorious overview. You can leave out the MoonPies (which I always thought was written as two words) and the glazed doughnuts. But do start with Florida’s People During the Last Ice Age—I omit the obvious joke—and Florida’s Lost Tribes, and work in a reference to Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley: African Princess, Florida Slave, Plantation Slaveowner.
