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Introduction
- University Press of Florida
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Tropic of Hopes 2 outside of—the tropics. (“Sub-tropical” was similarly defined as bordering the tropics). Such references proliferated in the titles of pamphlets promoting immigration , horticultural periodicals, and the marketing publications of land companies and in countless magazine articles, state guides, and exhibitions. In 1890, thousands of visitors to the National Farmers’ Alliance Convention in Ocala, Florida, attended the town’s promotional “Semi-Tropical Exposition,” while the Panama-California Exposition, which was held in San Diego in 1915, prompted the publication of Semi-Tropic California, a book that aimed to confirm “that here on the eastern shores of the Pacific Ocean is today the garden spot of the world.”3 At events and in publications, tropical ideas were used to sell the two states to settlers, tourists, and investors, recasting California and Florida from unwanted backwaters to renewing“tropics” that offered a range of hopes for incoming Americans. The book covers the period from 1869 to 1929, when both southern California and peninsular Florida were fundamentally transformed through promotion and development. In 1869, when the first transnational railroad was completed ,easterners dismissed remote and underpopulated southern California as part of the Great American Desert and many northern Californians saw that region of the state as the“cow counties” because of the vast cattle ranches that had covered the region since the days of the Spanish empire.4 Mining had also left a legacy of lawlessness that negatively influenced eastern perceptions of the state. As one migrant to San Francisco wrote, the state was often“looked upon as a place lawless in the extreme, without any security for life or property— without any civilized institutions; . . . in fact, it is believed to be a place as much to be shunned and avoided as the deserts of Africa, and about as soon to be thought of with any view to settlement and a future home.”5 That same year, Florida suffered also; northerners perceived it as a former Confederate state that had just been readmitted to the Union. The peninsula was also viewed as a swampy “wasteland.” As travel writer George Canning Hill wrote in 1888,“Of Florida the people of . . . the North really knew nothing until long after the close of the war of the sections.To the most of us it was as a forbidden land,” associated“in the common imagination” with the Everglades, the bloody Seminole wars, and “ever moist lowlands . . . heavy with the poisons of malaria.”6 In 1869, California and Florida,the southwestern and southeastern corners of the nation,appeared foreign, even“forbidden” zones to northeasterners. In the following decades, however, the two states underwent major transformations , eventually becoming leading destinations for American tourists, settlers,and investors.By the 1920s,southern California and south Florida were drawing many thousands of visitors each year and were experiencing real estate [54.175.120.161] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:50 GMT) Introduction 3 booms. This book explains how the selling of California and Florida as semitropical lands fostered these transformations as national tropes about imperiled notions of American society, identity, and republicanism were projected onto the two states.In their efforts to convert“foreign”environmental deterrents into enticements for white U.S.residents,including those who were alienated by the industrializing changes of the Gilded Age, state boosters disseminated images of California and Florida as homelands that were simultaneously tropical and republican. In both states, promoters evoked optimistic and exclusionary ideas of American renewal that clustered around two themes: health-restoring leisure and rewarding labor. In this process, boosters marginalized ethnic and racial minorities in both states; they sold California and Florida as special lands that could nurture the formation of reinvigorated Anglo-American societies. Promoters of California and Florida were invariably white—or “Anglo,” as they sometimes called themselves—people who wanted to associate themselves with “Anglo-Saxons” rather than with the southern and eastern Europeans who entered the United States in vast numbers in the late nineteenth century.7 Whites owned and controlled the major booster organizations in both states and wrote, edited, and published the promotional literature. The material in this book thus describes the motivations and ideals of white Americans.While ethnic and racial minorities were often the subjects of boosterist material, they were neither the authors nor the intended readers.Consequently,their presence was constantly manipulated in these texts and images, and their voices were silenced. During this period, Mexican, Chinese, and other ethnic minorities in California and African Americans and Native...