Florida’s Development In The 1920s

"New South" promoters offer non-Southerners their own little slice of paradise
“New South” promoters offer non-Southerners their own little slice of paradise

Florida

Here’s an excerpt from Michael Gannon’s The History of Florida on the settlement of South and Central Florida during the land boom the 1920s:

“Near legendary figures of Florida’s development included John Collins, who created Miami Beach from mangrove swamps and salt marshes in the 1920s. His efforts were furthered by Carl G. Fisher, an Indiana native. Nearby to the south, George E. Merrick promoted Coral Gables, a planned community featuring Mediterranean architecture and distinguished by an artful blending of exotic landscaping and canals. Northward lay Hollywood, another designed community founded in 1921 by Joseph W. Young and his California associates. Even farther north, Addison Mizner, an extraordinary promoter architect, designed homes for the wealthy at Palm Beach. His Mediterranean style was enhanced by the use of pastel colors – utilitarian in combating the sun’s rays and aesthetic in their soft-hued variety. Backed by eastern millionaires, Mizner’s most ambitious project was Boca Raton. Unfortunately, he feel victim to the collapse of the land boom, and his corporation failed in 1926.

Elsewhere, other projects transformed the state. the distance between Tampa and St. Petersburg was more than halved by George S. Gandy’s toll bridge, erected with financial assistance from St. Petersburg promoter Eugene M. Elliott. In Tampa, D.P. “Doc” Davis converted three land spits into the lucrative Davis Islands network, but another Davis effort failed at St. Augustine with the end of the land boom. Orlando’s growth resulted from the early work of H. Carl Dann.”

John S. Collins, a Quaker from New Jersey, founded Miami Beach in 1915. His efforts were furthered by Carl G. Fisher, a Yankee from Indiana, who PBS labeled “Mr. Miami Beach.” Henry Flagler, a railroad baron from New York, founded Palm Beach in 1909. Julia Tuttle, a Yankee from Ohio, founded Miami in 1896.

George E. Merrick of Pennsylvania was the promoter and founder of Coral Gables in 1925. Addison Mizner of California founded Boca Raton in 1926 and was the developer of much of Florida’s “Gold Coast.” Joseph Young of California founded Hollywood during the Florida Land Boom in 1921. John A. Williams, a Yankee from Michigan, founded St. Petersburg in 1888. “General” Henry Sanford, a Yankee from Connecticut, founded Sanford in 1877. Hamilton Disston, a Yankee from Pennsylvania, drained the swampland and was the founder of Kissimmee in 1883.

Tampa and Orlando were sleepy villages during the antebellum era. Their commercial development was also driven by Yankees and foreigners – in Tampa, the Cuban cigar manufacturer Vicente Ybor and the Yankee railroad baron Henry Bradley Plant; in Orlando, no one had a greater impact on the area than Walt Disney of California whose brother opened Walt Disney World in 1971.

In 1960, Florida was 82 percent White, but this figure masks the phenomenon we are calling “Southern Demographic Displacement,” which was well underway by the 1870s and 1880s. In particular, the real estate industry, the tourism industry, and the citrus and winter vegetable industries – key drivers of changing demographics – were well established in Florida long before the Immigration Act of 1965.

In Florida, the “New South” philosophy of promoting economic growth at all costs – a regional worldview which was hardly unique to Florida, and which is more associated with Atlanta’s promoter Henry W. Grady – collided with a unique of set of circumstances which set Florida on the course it has traveled down to the present day.

After the War Between the States, Florida’s peninsula was still a sparsely populated frontier zone. It was developed by Northern capitalists in pretty much the same way that the American West was opened to settlement by the railroads. The State of Florida fostered this intense development by Northern capitalists too by making sure that Florida didn’t have an inheritance tax or an income tax.

Unlike other Southern states, Florida has 1,350 miles of coastline. It has a semi-tropical climate that is nearly frost free in much of the state. Starting in the 1870s and 1880s, Florida’s boosters went out of their way to promote their state’s sunshine and balmy climate to winter-weary Northerners in the hope of exploiting tourism dollars as just another “crop.” The Dixie Highway was built in between 1915 and 1927 to connect Florida with Chicago and the Midwest.

“Southern Demographic Displacement” in Florida owes more to this sort of Chamberpot-of-Commerceism run amok than almost anything … almost anything else, with the notable exception of US immigration and refugee policies.

About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

12 Comments

  1. Flagler, Tuttle, Collins and Fischer. There sure were a lot goys involved in creating Miami. I used to live on Collins in Miami Beach. In Back to Blood, Tom Wolfe implies Fischer Island is home to the last surviving remnants of
    Miami’s goy elite. Fischer Island is also mentioned in Season 1 of Mad Men. It’s implied that New York’s Anglo elites maintained homes on Fischer.

    Tolkien believed that names say a lot about the history of a place. It’s interesting how many major thoroughfares and places in Miami have goyish names, but it’s no longer a goyish place and hasn’t been for a long time. That’s how race replacement works. The race replacement happens, and then the cultural transformation takes place. But the place names often stay the same, at least for awhile. It’s how you end up with cosmopolitan, multi-racial shitholes spearheading the destruction of the West but with names taken from the Duke of York and George Washington. Florida is an Indian name, and there are almost no Indians left in Florida. Demographics is destiny. It can’t be said often enough.

    Florida and Miami are microcosms for America in terms of the intersection of very culturally different whites in a single territory over decades with an overlay of rapid race replacement. White people in the rest of the country better get their heads out of their asses and start waking the fuck up.

  2. Re: ‘winter-weary Northerners’:

    Winter is good. It destroys and limits all kinds of pests and diseases, preserves soil fertility and has many other benefits.

    Those winter escapers are not true northerners, but mostly ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. They’re just as summer weary as they are winter weary. Without the air conditioning, they’ll move on.

  3. Actually, Florida is not an Indian name. It’s Spanish. From the Latin, “Flora” for vegetation, the name means something like “Too much vegetation”. At least that’s how a native Spanish speaker explained it to me.

  4. HW- I’m missing the point.

    Are you saying that Florida’s current mess, is due to Yankee’s seeking a buck at any and all costs, and the Deicides merely ‘slipped’ into a land where their kosher dream of not having to work, while the goyim do it for them becomes THEIR ‘paradise,’ while the White Man’s is destroyed?

    Or are you saying that, at a certain point, too many people in any land, destroy the land- the Malthusian argument?

    “…how unchecked population growth is exponential (1?2?4?8) while the growth of the food supply was expected to be arithmetical (1?2?3?4). Malthus believed there were two types of “checks” that could then reduce the population, returning it to a more sustainable level. He believed there were “preventive” checks such as moral restraints (abstinence, delayed marriage until finances become balanced), and restricting marriage against persons suffering poverty and/or defects. Malthus believed in “positive checks”, which lead to ‘premature’ death: disease, starvation, war, resulting in what is called a Malthusian catastrophe. The catastrophe would return population to a lower, more “sustainable”, level.”

    And that the exponential growth of the USA finally caught up with the American Dream, and destroyed it, aided and abetted (of course) by allowing the wrong ‘kinds’ of racial growth?

  5. I’m not blaming Northerners so much as “New South” boosterism. Can you blame Yankees for moving to Florida when the state was distributing propaganda telling them to move there and buy their “own little slice of paradise?”

  6. Well, your earlier column noted the ‘Southern’ nature of Florida, which (as you pointed out) ended around the 1960’s, and Walt Disney’s “World” being started there, more or less. Just trying to get a handle on what you were talking about.

  7. Interesting stuff.

    Have you considered assembling your historical articles about the South into a single book, perhaps to be sold via Amazon? It would make for a fascinating account.

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