The Swamp

Michael Grunwald “The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise”, Simon & Schuster 2006, 370 pgs. Plus extensive notes

I continue pursuing information concerning my new home—Florida.  This current book concentrates on the history of the southern part of Florida with particular attention on the Everglades. 

Author Michael Grunwald is now working at Time magazine.  He previously worked at The Washington Post and The Boston Globe and received several awards for journalism including the George Polk Award, the Worth Bingham Prize, the Society of Environmental Journalists award, and the David Brower Award from the Sierra Club.  He wrote The Swamp after doing a four-part series for the Washington Post in 2002. The book discusses the 500 year history of attempts to conquer the Everglades, and then the past 50 years efforts dedicated to draining the Everglades and then the recent work and plans to restore it, as the draining has proved to be an ecological disaster.

A Quick Summary of Florida history:

First, the Spanish had to kill everybody who was already in what we now call Florida. The Spanish wiped out the aboriginal Calusa Indians, the British then drove out the Spanish, then ceded the area back to Spain at the end of the Revolutionary War, whereupon the Americans bought it and immediately began to pursue the Seminoles, themselves refugees from that the Creek wars and Andrew Jackson. Once the industrial age began, the idea in South Florida was to drain the swamp for year-round farming. Hamilton Disston, the crosscut-saw heir from Philadelphia bought the rights to drain 12 million acres from Orlando to Miami and began the task of digging canals.  Disston became the first Florida scammer on a grand scale, marketing not-yet-drained "farmland" through real estate offices in England, Denmark, Sweden, Italy and the United States.  Disston's plans crashed, but a later push readied millions of acres for sugar cane. The Army Corps of Engineers set to work cutting canals and building levees to control the seasonal floods south of Lake Okeechobee.  (This draining separated the south wetlands and the Everglades began to burn). 

Henry Flagler, John D. Rockefeller's partner in Standard Oil, took his honeymoon with his second wife in St. Augustine and began building hotels and a railroad that extended down the east coast (later extended to Key West but was then wiped out by a Hurricane in 1935). He founded Palm Beach and Miami.

Then entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a former Miami Herald reporter, with her 1947 "The Everglades: River of Grass" (see my previous review of that book).  Marjory fought to rescue the Everglades from further destruction.  However, one of her disciples, the author of this book, leaves a parting message to keep the guns stacked and the powder dry for the next battle in the unending war for this swamp.

My Notes:

Pg. 20:  In 1989 archaeologists excavated Horr’s Island at the head of the Ten Thousand Islands and found evidence of centuries of permanent occupation by a complex society that inhabited the area around 8,000 B.C. (The Archaic period).  The fishing at the edge of the Everglades was so good that its residents did not need to leave in the off-season to find more food, so good that it forced the archaeology establishment to revise its assumptions about Archaic man.

Pg. 22:  At the time of European contact there were only about 20,000 natives in the Everglades.  It wasn’t necessarily an admirable lifestyle—Calusa chiefs performed human sacrifices, married their sisters, kidnapped additional wives from conquered villages, and murdered subjects who tried to snoop around their secret meetings with gods.  However, they left little impact on the environment.

Pg. 30:  In modern south Florida just about everyone comes from somewhere else.  Even the Native Americans are out-of-state transplants.  Today, the Seminole Indians and their Miccosukee relatives are known as the people of the Everglades.  But they didn’t start out anywhere near there.  They were driven there.  Seminoles began streaming into north Florida from Georgia and Alabama during the eighteenth century, just as the Calusa were dying out. By 1800 their villages were no further south than Tampa, although they did take hunting parties further south.

Pg. 31:  In 1818 Andrew Jackson led a scorched-earth march through north Florida designed to ‘chastise a savage foe, combined with a lawless band of Negro brigands.’  He seized their herds and razed their farms.  Secretary of State John Quincy Adams soon negotiated a treaty with Spain that ratified the facts on the ground that Jackson had created, transferring Florida to the U.S. for $5 million.  In 1821, Monroe appointed Jackson to be Florida’s first American governor.  By this time only 4,000 Seminoles remained in Florida; Jackson was intent on removing them as well.

Pg. 57:  In 1845, after Florida became a state, one of its legislature’s first acts was to urge Congress to ‘survey the Everglades, with a view to their reclamation.’  The resolution acknowledged that the Everglades had always been considered ‘wholly valueless,’ because draining it had always been considered impractical.  But attitudes had changed.

Pg. 82:  South Florida was virtually uninhabited until 1881, when Hamilton Disston signed contracts to drain as much as 12 million acres of the Everglades and buy 4 million acres outright.  He attracted a few newcomers to company towns such as Kissimmee and Fort Myers, but he didn’t drain the Everglades.  His dredges reclaimed some of this own land in the Kissimmee and Caloosahatchee basins, but they only began one canal south of Lake Okeechobee, and they never finished it.

Pg. 107:  Henry Flagler’s railroad sparked south Florida’s first boom, as tourists and pioneers rode his rails down the Atlantic coast to new cities like West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami.  Governor Broward then drew up plans to drain the Everglades with six canals from Lake Okeechobee—one east, one west, and four southeast through the ridge.  The dream of an Empire of the Everglades drew thousands of settlers to the region's wetlands. The canals were dredged between 1912 and 1926; the Tamiami Trail was completed in 1928.

Addenda:

 Flagler originally intended West Palm Beach to be the terminus of his railroad system, but in 1894 and 1895, severe freezes hit the area, causing Flagler to rethink his original decision. Sixty miles south, the town today known as Miami was reportedly unharmed by the freeze.

Flagler's second wife, the former Ida Alice Shourds, had been institutionalized for mental illness since 1895. In 1901, Flagler successfully persuaded the Florida Legislature to pass a law (House Bill 135) that made incurable insanity grounds for divorce, opening the way for Flagler to remarry. Judge Minor S. Jones of Florida's 7th Judicial Circuit presided over the divorce. Flagler was the only person to be divorced under the law he pushed through before it was repealed in 1905.

Many soldiers were billeted in Miami during the Spanish-American War and many of their reactions were reminiscent of Seminole War diarists, ‘If I owned both Miami and Hell, I’d rent out Miami and live in Hell,’ one complained.  But others decided to stay after the war, and the city’s population increased tenfold in five years.

The Central and Southern Florida (C&SF) Project, which was first authorized by Congress in 1948, is a multi-purpose project that provides flood control, water supply for municipal, industrial, and agricultural uses, prevention of saltwater intrusion, water supply for Everglades National Park, and protection of fish and wildlife resources. The primary system includes about 1,000 miles of levees, 720 miles of canals, and almost 200 water control structures. But the project has negatively affected the Everglades and the south Florida ecosystem.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District were called upon again. This time, to restore the Everglades ecosystem and meet South Florida's water needs for the next 50 years.  This plan is called the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP). The purpose of the Plan is to restore and preserve south Florida's natural ecosystems while enhancing water supplies and maintaining flood control. Implementation is expected to take more than 30 years to implement.

Pg. 130:  Napoleon Broward declared war on the swamp during his 1904 campaign for governor, unfurling giant multicolored maps of the Everglades, promising to bust a few holes in the costal ridge and create an instant Empire of the Everglades.  If the turbulent floods of the Nile and the Mississippi could be controlled by man, he demanded, then why not the comparatively gentle overflows of the Everglades” His mantra was: Water Will Run Downhill!

Pg. 150:  Flagler was wrong about Key West’s potential to become an important port as it was too small and too isolated to become anything more than a funky tourist attraction in the automotive age.  The overseas railway was a financial disaster, and in 1935, it would be destroyed by the most powerful hurricane in U.S. history.  It was rebuilt as the Overseas Highway (one of the bridges on this highway is 7 miles long).

Pg. 187:  The 1926 hurricane had gusts up to 140 miles per hour and storm surges as high as fifteen feet, killing 400 and creating 40,000 homeless.  The 1928 hurricane killed another 2,500 people, mostly poor blacks who drowned in the vegetable fields of the Everglades.  The Broward Era of trying to drain the swamp was over.  Now the engineers of the U.S. government took over the war against the Everglades.  From that point on, the primary objective of the war would no longer be drainage, but flood control, and the prevention of another disaster of 1928.

Pg. 200:  To prevent further flooding, the Hoover Dike was built around the lake.  South of the lake became an agricultural area of vegetable gardens and sugar plantations.  Now the Everglades was becoming a dust bowl.  Its fresh water table dropped like a boulder, allowing salt water to intrude further into its aquifers every year.  Dried-out wetlands were invaded by opportunistic nonnative trees, especially the melaleucas.  In 1939 a vast part of the southern end of Florida was on fire. 

Pg. 214:  In 1947 President Truman formally dedicated Everglades National Park.  Over the next few decades Florida conservationists would fight some of their toughest battles to save additional areas and include them within park boundaries—including Big Cypress National Preserve,, Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge, Biscayne National Park, and John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, as well as the Hole in the Donut and northeast Shark Slough, which would be added to Everglades National Park. 

Pg. 218:  In 1947, after more than a decade of drought, a summer of downpours followed by two fall hurricanes dropped an unheard-of 100 inches on south Florida.  Mother Nature was reasserting her authority, reclaiming the reclaimed Everglades, reflooding just about every wetland that had been drained or paved for agriculture or development. 

Pg. 248:  In 1967, two political earthquakes shook up Florida:

1.       The U.S. Supreme court decision ordering the reapportionment of the Florida state legislature, which had been so skewed in favor of small, rural counties that 18% of the population could have elected majorities in both houses.  With this decision, power shifted from north Florida’s good ol’ boys to south Florida’s northeastern and Midwestern transplants.  The legislature instantly became more urban, more reform-minded, and more environmentally conscious. 

2.      The ascension of Claude Roy Kirk Jr. became the first Republican governor since Reconstruction.  He became Florida’s first environmental governor. 

Pg. 281:  In the 1980s, Big Sugar joined Big Tobacco and Big Oil among the ranks of reviled American industries—a symbol of corporate welfare, backroom politics, and greed, attached in countless editorials about ‘sugar daddies’ and ‘sweet deals.’  Big Sugar received no direct subsidies 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; any cutter complaining was deported.  The recipients of all this largesse were not small farmers.  The agribusinesses U.S. Sugar and Flo-Sub controlled more than half the Everglades Agricultural Area’s 450,000 acres of cane fields, and raked in more than $100 million a year from Uncle Sam. 

Pg. 354:  On January 16, 2001, four days before Clinton left office, the administration announced its decision to reject the Homestead airport.

Pg. 355:  As the new millennium dawned, the Everglades was not yet saved.  But it was not yet doomed, either.  Millions of acres of the ecosystem remained in public ownership.  Water quality was improving.  And America was now formally committed to restoring the Everglades, with billions of dollars and the prestige of a nation on the line. 

Pg. 358:  By 2003, the Everglades Forever Act had reduced phosphorus levels from 200 to 30 ppb, and the spread of cattails from six to two acres of sugar fields into filter marshes in Phase One, but they had no plan for a Phase Two to achieve 10 ppb.  Sugar growers were afraid that once Florida missed its December 2006 cleanup deadline, there would be more lawsuits, and they would be forced to give up more land and cough up more money.