Florida: Hydrology is Destiny (book review)

Some excerpts from The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, a book that covers the literally foundational element of transforming South Florida into a place where a substantial number of people could live. The initial assessment was unpromising:

The Spaniards had abandoned southern Florida after deeming it “liable to be overflowed, and of no use.”

The Seminole Indians, themselves recent migrants from the north, were an early obstacle to white settlement in Florida and the three decades of war in the swamp were America’s first military quagmire.

But the ink had barely dried [on an 1823 treaty] before white frontiersmen began seizing slaves from Seminoles, and famished Seminoles began plundering cattle from whites. The settlers began clamoring for the return of all blacks living with the Indians, even though the tribe had purchased many of them legally from the settlers. Florida’s legislative council also passed An Act to Prevent the Indians from Roaming at Large, sentencing any Seminole caught off the reservation to thirty-nine lashes. “We were promised justice, and we want to see it!” protested a tribal spokesman named Jumper. “We have submitted to one demand after another, in the hope that they would cease, but it seems that there will be no end to them, as long as we have anything left that the white people may want!” He was right. There were only 4,000 Seminoles in Florida, but that was 4,000 too many for Florida’s settlers. And the new president, one Andrew Jackson, intended to remove them.

The odds were not even:

[the whites] had superior manpower as well as firepower; 40,000 federal regulars and state militiamen would cycle through Florida, while the Seminoles had no way of reinforcing their original 1,000 warriors.

As in Vietnam, military officers were sometimes confused about the rationale for fighting:

Taylor’s exploits in Florida earned him the nickname “Old Rough and Ready,” and helped launch his path to the presidency, but he spoke for many military men when he mused that if the Seminoles wanted the Everglades, they should be allowed to keep it. “I would not trade one foot of Michigan or Ohio for a square mile of Florida swamp,” he wrote.

The author draws some direct parallels:

The Second Seminole War was America’s first Vietnam—a guerrilla war of attrition, fought on unfamiliar, unforgiving terrain, against an underestimated, highly motivated enemy who often retreated but never quit. Soldiers and generals hated it, and public opinion soured on it, but Washington politicians, worried that ending it would make America look weak and create a domino effect among other tribes, prolonged it for years before it sputtered to a stalemate. Of the eight commanding generals who cycled through Florida, Taylor was the only one whose reputation was enhanced, when he declared victory after a clash near Lake Okeechobee—a battle that achieved nothing except to confirm the lake’s existence.

Nature is a more fearsome enemy than the Seminoles:

Motte and his fellow medical men did not realize it, because they blamed tropical disease on “swamp miasmas” and the summer “sickly season,” but those mosquitoes spread malaria, dengue, and yellow fever. The U.S. troops also suffered from dysentery, tuberculosis, and a kind of collapse one officer described as a “general sinking of the system a regular cave-in of the constitution.” At one point, five battalions could not muster 100 men; after a two-month trek through Big Cypress, 600 out of 800 troops in one unit reported unfit for duty.

By the time the Seminole Wars ended (1858), South Florida was inhabited by just a handful of Seminoles and perhaps 50 whites. The first big drainage ideas, starting from northern Florida where farming had been successful, were put together in the 1880s and the land was being promoted even before it had been created:

Disston [the dredger] promoted his domain as America’s new winter playground and breadbasket, a frost-free, illness-free, bug-free paradise where 20 acres were worth 100 up north: “You secure a home in a garden spot of the country, in an equable and lovely climate, where merely to live is a pleasure, a luxury heretofore accessible only to millionaires.”

How would it work?

Disston’s drainage strategy was straightforward: Move the excess water in the Kissimmee valley down to Lake Okeechobee, then move the excess water in Lake Okeechobee out to sea. In the upper basin, his engineers proposed to link the Chain of Lakes with a series of canals and straighten the serpentine Kissimmee River. In the lower basin, they adopted Buckingham Smith’s plan to lower Lake Okeechobee: one canal east to the St. Lucie River and out to the Atlantic, one canal west to the Caloosahatchee River and out to the Gulf, and at least one canal south through the Everglades. “Okeechobee is the point to attack,” one Disston associate explained. The key to the plan was to make the outflow from the lake through the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie Canals “equal to or greater than the inflow from the Kissimmee valley, which is the source of all the evil.” By “evil,” of course, he meant “water.”

Of course, with the feeble equipment of the day the grand plan couldn’t be executed and what portions were executed quickly filled up with silt. What was working was Henry Flagler’s railroad down the coast.

At first, he had limited his interests to St. Augustine and Jacksonville. Then he had intended to stop at Daytona Beach. He had already spent ten times more than he had planned, and south Florida was still a blank space on the map. Flagler figured he would concentrate on north Florida. But after several chilly winters, Flagler realized that north Florida’s supposedly frost-free climate was not much warmer than the rest of the temperate South. When he took a trip to the real subtropics 200 miles south of Daytona, he became enthralled by a white-sand barrier island called Palm Beach: “I have found a veritable Paradise!” Flagler also noticed a tangle of scrublands on the mainland, directly across Lake Worth from his new enchanted isle, and West Palm Beach began taking shape in his mind’s eye: “In a few years, there will be a town over there as big as Jacksonville.”

The Royal Poinciana soon became the Gay Nineties winter hub for the Social Register’s exclusive “Four Hundred,” attracting Vanderbilts, Carnegies, Morgans, Astors, Fricks, and the rest of America’s industrial royalty. The guests enjoyed golf, fishing, yachting, and sunbathing—Flagler employed beach censors to make sure women covered their legs—along with haute cuisine, orchestras, and vaudeville. The guests were served by 1,400 staffers so attentive the resort was known as the Royal Pounce-on-them. Black employees whisked them around in bicycle-powered carriages known as Afromobiles, and entertained them with “cakewalks,” minstrel-style dance competitions whose winners got to “take the cake.” Suites cost $100 a night, about three months’ wages for a typical laborer.

Let’s try to adjust that suite cost to Bidies. $100 in 1895 (the hotel opened in 1894) is supposedly about $3,500 today (the BLS inflation calculator goes back only to 1913, but some other sources are available showing just a touch of inflation over the preceding two decades). The Royal Poinciana was demolished during the Great Depression, but the Breakers (rebuilt) is still with us. Suites are only about $3,000 per night right now (the shoulder season), but they no longer include three meals per day. So the price of a Palm Beach hotel room has remained almost constant in inflation-adjusted dollars for more than 125 years. If we adjust for attentiveness for the staff, though, the $100 fee in the 1890s was a much better deal.

Regarding Flagler’s cherished hope of draining the developing the slightly-inland swamp, the New York Times predicted that it would never be accomplished.

Were you thinking that we live in unprecedented times?

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the progressive movement emerged to try to rein in corporate America. The United States was now the richest country on earth, producing half the world’s oil and one-third of its iron and steel. Its citizens were consuming Campbell soup, Borden cheese, Post Grape-Nuts, and Hershey chocolate, while enjoying lightbulbs, telephones, automobiles, and airplanes. It was the dawn of the American century, a time of puffed-up national pride and confidence. But there was a growing feeling that average Americans were not sharing in the progress, that business interests controlled the government, and that the balance of power ought to be reversed. Progressivism was a gospel of science and reason; progressives believed the same pragmatic thinking that was solving great technological and engineering problems could be applied to social problems.

The only economic activity in the Everglades at the time was killing birds for their feathers, which would ultimately be used for women’s hats.

The feather trade also provided income for Seminoles, but they practiced an early kind of sustainable exploitation, refusing to wipe out entire rookeries. “The Indian leaves enough of the old birds to feed the young of the rookery,” one writer observed. “The white man kills the last plume bird he can find, leaving the young ones to die in their nests, then returns a few days later lest he might have overlooked a few birds.” This kill-them-all strategy took its toll. Roseate spoonbills, snowy egrets, great white herons, and short-tailed hawks nearly vanished from Florida. The wild flamingos that so enchanted Audubon—and inspired the name of the village at the tip of Cape Sable—did vanish from Florida. The lime-green-
and-carmine Carolina parakeet was hunted to extinction. There was only one pair of reddish egrets left on the peninsula, and only one rookery for brown pelicans, a clump of mangroves off Vero Beach called Pelican Island. “I

An Ivy League-educated professor tried to drain the swamp with a biological agent, the Australian melaleuca tree. John Gifford spread a handful of seeds near Miami and the tree is today considered a problematic invasive throughout the Everglades (immigrant humans are never illegal or “invasive”, of course, but immigrant plants should be eradicated with Roundup!).

This post is getting long, so I’m going to cover the post-1900 sections of The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise in a follow-up.