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Review
| Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida, by Gary R. Mormino. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005. 457 pages. $34.95, cloth.
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| The sociologist of the South, John Shelton Reed, explained that "Florida is not unique in the United States. Its just unique in the South." The north of the state is southern, the south is northern, and the southernmost peninsula is Caribbean, much closer culturally to Havana and Nassau than to Tallahassee or Pensacola. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the transformation of the state from a place not that unlike Georgia or Alabama to an entity that is sui generis. In 1950 Florida's population of 2.7 million was predominantly white, Protestant, and southern-born, with a small number of immigrants more likely from Canada and Great Britain than Latin America. The rural state was a strict Jim Crow citadel with the highest lynching rate in the South from 1890 to 1930. By the 1960s the state was rapidly reinventing itself and from that decade on the Sunshine State has been distinctly different from its Dixie neighbors, indeed from any other state. |
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By 2000 the state's 16 million inhabitants made it the fourth most populous state and it was fast closing in on New York for third place. The state had become one of the most urban and diverse in the country. Two thirds of Floridians were nonnatives, and the median age moved from younger than the national average to one of the oldest in the country. In this timeframe, concrete, condos, shopping malls, and "boomburgs" replaced mangrove swamps, orange groves, and farm land. DDT, air conditioning, and irrigation reshaped the environment; and a new kind of tourism dictated the landscape. Florida became a "megastate". One commentator reflected that modern Florida was an interplay of Margaritaville and Future Shock. Another opined that the Florida of today is America of tomorrow or "In the end, all the world will be Florida." Is this progress or dystopia? |
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Mormino's book, the latest in the more than thirty volumes in the Florida History and Culture series, is a compendium of the hundreds of aspects of this meteoric remolding. The cofounder of the Florida Studies program at the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg offers a quite different mode of state history—breezy, eclectic, and expansive rather than chronological and analytical. Representative examples of the nine chapters provide some insight: "Tourists Empires and the Invention of Florida: B.D. (Before Disney) to A.D. (After Disney)," "Old Folks at Home: The Graying of Florida," "Wondrous Fruit, Bountiful Land: From Farms to Agribusiness," and "Machines in Paradise: Techno Florida." The author writes with verve and a colorful turn of phrase, but the style is often too cute. |
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Mormino states that he consciously eschews legislators, governors, and politics to focus upon ordinary people dealing with the extraordinary social and cultural flux surrounding them. However, it is impossible to treat the remarkable changes without dealing with the political debates and decisions. Florida politics are a cultural phenomenon, and the brief snippets on the subject are inadequate. The other disappointments are the minuscule treatment given to the Black civil rights movement in the state and to the explosion of the Florida college and university system from a backwater entity to one of the premier state systems in America. The author also overlooks the impact of college athletics, especially football. The Sunshine State is the hotbed of "skill position athletes," the place coaches across the country scour for speedy receivers and running and defensive backs. This is most appropriate since everything about Florida is characterized by rapidity. The high profile of professional sports in the state also receives only a passing note. |
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For me, the prevailing tone of the book is nostalgia. Drive-ins, silver Airstream trailers, myriad tourist traps and small amusement parks, orange groves, cattle ranches and dairy farmers, family-owned motels, Cyprus Gardens, the shabby old ballparks of major league baseball spring training, Arthur Godfrey's and Jackie Gleason's Miami Beach, and "The City Beautiful" Orlando before "The Mouse that Roared." A sadness resonates about the way that Disney's sacred rodent spawned Central Florida's glutted theme park, chain motel, fast food commercial blight. |
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For Florida college classrooms, the explosion of facts and factoids, a cornucopia of miscellany that touches every point in the state, has utility and appeal. For the rest of us, with some trepidation about the "all the world will be Florida" prognostication, we maintain smug satisfaction that the experience of "The Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams" is still more unique than normative. I came away from the book with a sense of exhaustion from hyperbolic overkill and a hungering for greater analysis and calm perspective. |
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| Converse College |
Joe P. Dunn |
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