Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida (review)

In Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams, Gary Mormino, Duckwall Professor of History at the University of South Florida, charts the historic and spatial relationships between the forces of human culture—including imaginative geographies—and the unique environment of the state of Florida. His temporal boundaries mainly encompass the twentieth century, though forays into earlier times are found only when they add sequential depth to his modern map. Mormino's book, which took eight years to write, is now the center of an invaluable set of monographs produced for the Florida History and Culture Series initiated in 1997 through the University of Florida Press. The series includes critically acclaimed non-fiction books, each one focusing on a particular topic ranging from the Civil Rights Movement, Native Americans, Feminism to Florida Crackers. Land of Sunshine is a social history, vibrant with facts but never bedazzling. Mormino is perfectly charitable with twists of perspectives such as in the use of statistical analogies and similes that do not divert us from the intellectual destination of his book. His navigational technique makes for smooth sailing through the oceans of texts he has diligently sniggled from below the surface and combined into a thorough account of people and landscapes of modern Florida.

The nine substantive chapters present a collage of themes that have been distilled from a deep knowledge of Florida history and geography, and refined into appealing phases that speak to those most prominent economic, political, social, technological and natural forces that have most changed Florida and its inhabitants. Each chapter contains a number of tables and maps that simply show the locations of places mentioned.

The first chapter, "Look Away Dixie-land," proposes that new technology such as air conditioning, New Deal entitlements including Social Security, and the availability of relatively cheap land touched-off Florida's demographic 'Big Bang' of the 1950s. During the next five decades the state's population increased from around 2 million to 16 million people. Migrants came from all over the Western Hemisphere (but mostly from the Northeast and Midwest United States) to reshape Florida's cultural landscape into a mosaic of multicultural features that blend with con-urbanization, edge and walled cities, and shopping malls to create a new "urban megastate." Many parts of Florida now seem eons away from the cultural traditions and landscapes of vernacular "Dixie" to which it once aptly belonged.

Chapter 2, "Florida on the Installment Plan," focuses specifically on the marketing of land during Florida's ". . . third great land boom" which galvanized its population explosion. The availability of low interest credit increased the number of potential buyers of land and homes in the state. But before installment plans could be drawn, imaginative geographies of Florida, particularly those of northern retirees, would need to be refashioned, from dismal swamp to land of leisurely fun under the sun. Businessmen, inventors, bankers and celebrities who acquired large tracks of land for development created and promoted this new identity. Several short biographies of landscape coalesce into a brief who's who of Florida's residential development, both successes and failures.

Similar biographies in the next chapter help tell the story of the rise of modern Florida tourism. Moreover, the section radiates with accounts of old and new venues of entertainment and leisure and their ethnic, historic and regional significance. The Florida vacation soon became a defining signature of American life just like owning a house and car. Along with federal, state and local government policies, and new technology and transportation infrastructure, came the transformation of leisure into consumption in post-industrial capitalism. This "signature" carved into social and natural landscape of Florida has had both positive and negative impacts. Sadly, Florida's ecosystems have suffered mostly the latter. "Vacation," writes Mormino (p. 119), "is the antithesis of conservation."

The "gray wave" is the focus of chapter 4. Mormino explains in detail...