Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Second post regarding The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, by Michael Grunwald. We’ll pick up the story at the dawn of the 20th century… (photos from Grassy Waters Preserve the other day)

NAPOLEON BROWARD declared war on the swamp during his 1904 campaign for governor, unfurling giant multicolored maps of the Everglades at campaign rallies, promising to bust a few holes in the coastal ridge and create an instant Empire of the Everglades. “It would indeed be a sad commentary on the intelligence and energy of the people of Florida to confess that so simple an engineering feat as the drainage of a body 21 feet above the level of the sea was beyond their power,” he taunted his audiences.

Broward has been vilified by modern environmentalists for his intense assault on the Everglades, but he was considered a staunch conservationist in his day. He supported strict laws to protect fish, game, birds, and oysters, and his top priority was the reclamation of a swamp for agriculture and development. Broward never stopped to think what draining the Everglades might do to the fish, game, birds, and oysters that lived there, but hardly anyone did. The conservationist John Gifford dedicated his book of Everglades essays to Broward, explaining that “the man who makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before is the proverbial public benefactor, but the man who inaugurates a movement to render 3,000,000 acres of waste land highly productive deserves endless commendation.”

When a canal-based drainage project did succeed, the projects could be substantial.

Swampland the state had sold to settlers for 25 cents an acre now produced harvests of $600 an acre for tomatoes, $1,000 for lettuce, $1,500 for celery. At a time when farmers were struggling to survive on 160-acre homesteads out west, the farmer Walter Waldin netted $3,400 on six acres in six months in the Everglades—after building a home and feeding a family of five.

One problem, however, was that the canals were temporary:

[James Wright, a former high school math teacher hired by the Feds to study the challenge] also ignored the high cost of maintaining canals, a problem exacerbated by the gentle gradient of the Everglades, which produced currents too slow for the canals to scour themselves out, and by the explosive proliferation of the water hyacinth, an attractive but invasive weed that had clogged almost all the state’s waterways since a well-intentioned gardener named Mrs. Fuller imported it to Florida in 1884.

The setting aside of swamp for parks began in 1916 with a 4,000-acre Royal Palm State Park that became the core of Everglades National Park. Meanwhile, humans were trashing the rest. Regarding the Miami area:

Meanwhile, 34,000 acres of the Everglades had been converted into farms, and much of the rest was parched by ditches, drought, and the Tamiami Trail. “The drying up of the Glades, due to the various canals, is playing havoc with the birds here,” one surveyor wrote. “The finer ones are fast disappearing. They lack feeding grounds.” The water table was dropping fast, drying out springs that once bubbled to the surface on Cape Sable and within Biscayne Bay, reducing the downward hydraulic pressure caused by the weight of fresh water—the “head”—that kept salt water from the region’s estuaries from intruding into its aquifers. By 1920, Miami’s overpumped well fields at the edge of the Everglades were turning salty. The declining water table was also fueling the fires that raged in overdrained Everglades wetlands. Broward had ridiculed the idea that a swamp could catch fire, and Randolph had predicted soil shrinkage of no more than eight inches, but some of the Everglades had already lost three to five feet of the black muck that had inspired so many pioneer dreams. This was not only the result of subterranean fires; it was also caused by “oxidation,” the exposure of historically flooded organic soils to the open air. The aeration of the muck breathed life into long-dormant microbes in the soil, which consumed organic material that had accumulated underwater over thousands of years. The soils then dried into powder and blew away on windy days, kicking up dust storms so violent that pioneers “could hardly get out of the house without wearing goggles.”

Charles Torrey Simpson, an early preservationist, very nearly wondered heretically whether at least some humans should be illegal:

“We shall proudly point someday to the Everglade country and say: Only a few years ago this was a worthless swamp; today it is an empire. But I wonder quite seriously if the world is any better off because we have destroyed the wilds and filled the land with countless human beings.”

Agriculture in the Florida swamp got a huge boost when the state’s research lab figured out that the Everglades soil was deficient in copper, manganese, and some other necessary trace elements.

The idea that the federal government should be in charge of all of the water in Florida got a huge boost from President Herbert Hoover, whose confidence was not shaken in the repeated failures of the Army Corps of Engineers to control the Mississippi. The dike that surrounds Lake Okeechobee is named after Hoover. The effects of the dike were not all positive…

The Depression years were drought years, and the combination of the new dike, which prevented water from the lake from reaching the Everglades, and the old ditches, which carried water from the sky away from the Everglades, left its wetlands desert dry. Its fresh water table dropped like a boulder, allowing salt water to intrude further into its aquifers every year, contaminating wells and ruining tomato farms along the Gold Coast. Meanwhile, soils that had been accumulating underwater for thousands of years were vanishing with exposure to the air; in Belle Glade—town motto: Her Soil Is Her Fortune—the ground was sinking so quickly that settlers had to add an extra doorstep every few years.

Failure and unintended consequences always motivated the experts to go bigger. The late 1940s:

The Army Corps plan for the Central and Southern Florida project called for the most elaborate water control system ever built, the largest earthmoving effort since the Panama Canal. It envisioned 2,000 miles of levees and canals, along with hundreds of spillways, floodgates, and pumps so powerful they would be cannibalized from nuclear submarines. The C&SF project was designed to control just about every drop of rain that landed on the region, in order to end the cycle of not-enough-water and too-much-water that had destabilized the frontier and stifled its growth…

The plan’s first big innovation was its strict separation of the usable Everglades from the unusable Everglades, a concept that first appeared in Captain Rose’s drainage proposal for Henry Flagler. The plan also adopted Rose’s call for piece-by-piece as opposed to all-at-once drainage. The work began with a 100-mile-long “perimeter levee” running more or less parallel to the coastal ridge, walling off the Gold Coast and a wide slice of the eastern Glades from the rest of the marsh. Next, the Corps encircled and reclaimed the rich soils of the upper Glades with more levees and drainage canals, creating an Everglades Agricultural Area the size of Rhode Island. The Corps then built more levees to divide a swath of the central Glades even larger than Rhode Island into three gargantuan “water conservation areas,” a more recent plan devised by the Belle Glade research station. The station’s scientists had suggested that “rewatering” the central Glades could restore the region’s hydraulic head and mimic the natural storage capacity of the Everglades, preventing salt intrusion, soil subsidence, muck fires, and water shortages all at once. The conservation areas would still look like the Everglades, but they would hold onto needed water for farms and cities during droughts, absorb excess water from farms and cities during storms, and recharge the region’s aquifers to keep salt out of its groundwater.

In the mid-1950s, the Army Corps made a movie about their plans and achievements, Waters of Destiny:

One the Corps was on the job, people felt confident that dry land was around the corner and, therefore, real estate could be purchased without much thought regarding whether it was buildable.

The Corps’s work did enrich some real estate speculators, but it impoverished the Everglades and the animals:

THE C&SF PROJECT did not extend the glories of flood control to southwest Florida, but that did not stop two Baltimore brothers named Leonard and Julius Rosen from selling nearly half a million acres of swampland there during the boom. The Rosens had gotten rich selling an anti-baldness tonic called Formula Number Nine, featuring the miracle ingredient of lanolin—and the immortal tagline, “Have you ever seen a bald sheep?” The brothers could see that shivering northerners yearned for a piece of Florida the way bald men yearned for hair. Their Gulf American Corporation offered “a rich man’s paradise, within the financial reach of everyone,” the ultimate miracle elixir. Gulf American’s most ambitious venture was Golden Gate Estates, where the Rosens platted the world’s largest subdivision in the middle of Big Cypress Swamp. … The Rosens sold tens of thousands of lots in Golden Gate, parlaying their $125,000 investment in Florida swampland into a $115 million payout, but only a few dozen homes were built there.

The Corps’s work did enrich some real estate speculators, but it impoverished the Everglades and the animals:

Marjory Stoneman Douglas had expected the C&SF project to save the Everglades, but it turned out to be an ecological menace. It did a terrific job of draining wetlands and promoting growth, but its expanded canals carried more water out of the Everglades at a time when south Florida’s expanding cities and farms were increasingly dependent on water in the Everglades. Its flood protection prompted additional development in the Everglades floodplain, which prompted demands for additional flood protection. And the Corps and its like-minded partners in the flood control district—often run by former Corps engineers—refused to release water to the park, except when it was already inundated. They manipulated water levels to accommodate irrigation schedules and development schemes, discombobulating the natural water regime to which flora and fauna had adapted over the millennia. “What a liar I turned out to be!” Douglas cried.

Nobody benefitted more from this than the sugar industry:

Big Sugar received no direct subsidies, as its army of spokesmen constantly pointed out, but it depended on federal import quotas, tariffs, and price supports that cost American consumers as much as $2 billion a year. Florida’s growers also relied on a federal program to import their labor pool of 10,000 impoverished West Indian cane-cutters; the industry was notorious for mistreating them, withholding their wages, and deporting any who dared complain. The growers also reaped the benefits of the C&SF project, which irrigated their fields in the dry season and drained their fields in the rainy season. They received more than half the project’s water releases, while paying less than one percent of the district’s taxes.

But that runoff [from sugar cane fields] wasn’t harmless to the Everglades, because the things that extra phosphorus made grow generally didn’t belong in the marsh. The Everglades was “phosphorus-limited,” with flora and fauna peculiarly adapted to a nutrient-starved environment, and ill-suited to compete when even minute amounts of phosphorus became available. And those thimbles added up; the agricultural area pumped 100 tons of phosphorus a year into the Loxahatchee refuge, fertilizing the march of the cattails.

President Nixon began to reverse some of the damage that the 1950s hubris had caused, with the help of Florida’s first Republican governor (voters in the former slave state had previously been loyal Democrats):

The other tectonic shift in Florida politics in 1967 was the ascension of Claude Roy Kirk Jr., a little-known insurance salesman who looked like a mob boss, partied like a frat boy, and stunned the state’s political establishment by becoming its first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Kirk only received the GOP

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.