Dream State: (Florida)

Diane Roberts, “Dream State: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, and Other Florida Wildlife,”  Free Press, 2004, 340 pp

Another book in my pursuit of knowledge about my new state of residence.  Author Diane Roberts is professor of literature and writing at Florida State University and a visiting fellow in creative writing at the University of North Umbria in England, specializing in Southern United States culture.  She has been a commentator for NPR and the BBC, among other things.  She is that rare specimen: an actual native Floridian.  She used her eight generation family history in Florida (her family has been in Florida since 1799) to carry the story in this book through the decades.  Gonzo journalism at its best.  She is related to numerous famous Floridians including Florida’s 19th Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward and L. Clayton Roberts who was director of Florida’s Division of Elections during the controversial 2000 US presidential election.

We read about Florida’s first inhabitants as well as the recent botched, but entertaining, presidential election of 2000.  She exposes the real people in the books by my favorite Florida fiction writers: Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard.   

My Notes:

Pg. 4:  You cannot blame the country feeling disillusioned in 2000 when the presidency, the very keystone of the Great Republic, was coming unglued in a state where people march around in black-felt mouse ears, a state that boasts the world’s only professional clown school, a state where a good percentage of the population confuse dirty glass in Clearwater with the Virgin Mary and a small Cuban boy in Miami with Jesus Christ, Where’s the grandeur of democracy?  The clarity of the Common Law?  The majesty of the Bill of Rights?  Hell, where’s the beach?

Pg. 75:  By 1875 there were only about six thousand Seminoles living in Florida.  Seven years later there were only three hundred.  Over four thousand were captured and deported to Arkansas.  The others were killed.  Thought the Second Seminole War officially ended in 1842, the Seminoles never surrendered.  Instead, they went underground and the US government just sort of gave up.  The last of the cimarrones, led by chiefs Sam Jones and Billy Bowlegs, holed up in the Big Cypress Swamp (by today’s Naples), a thick-aired, gator-plagued bog in the southwest of the territory or else over by the Atlantic, where the soil was useless, nothing but sand.

Pg. 83:  In 1845 the US Congress admitted Florida to the Union.  The population was nearly 58,000, split almost evenly between whites and blacks.  The first governor was William Dunn Moseley.

Pg. 213:  God meant for Americans to be rich.  God meant for them to have a second home in Florida (Acts 8:26, and angel of the Lord says: “Rise and go toward the south.”).  …Even Al Capone moved to Miami Beach in 1928, tired of the cops messing with his speakeasies and his whorehouses, tired of those murderous Chicago winters.  He bought a house on Palm Island. 

Pg. 219:  In 1924 the state of Florida amended its constitution to outlaw income tax.  Even better the constitution also prohibited inheritance taxes.  If you had it, Florida would let you keep it. 

Pg. 268:  Since the late 1960s, official Florida has pretended that it’s not part of the South, that it belongs to, say, some mythic golf course nation stretching from Fort Lauderdale to San Diego, gerrymandered to take in only the condos and resorts in between, populated by old people in pink pants armed with nine-irons.