The Longest Decade

The Longest Decade

How Florida navigated the turbulent, terrible 1930s

By Gary Mormino

On New Year’s Day of 1930, Floridians were whiplashed from the brutal ending of the wildest decade in the state’s history. Like a titanic roller coaster, the 1920s had brought unimaginable prosperity—and even worse loss—to their state.

And nowhere was that spree greater, gaudier—and greedier—than in Florida.

The state began the ’20s as the country’s last frontier, a sparsely populated place that a 19th-century Army officer described as “swampy, low, excessively hot, sickly and repulsive in all its features.” Yet between 1920 and 1925, developers managed to reinvent Florida as a tropical paradise where dream cities and lavish resorts were springing to life, and lot prices sometimes tripled in a single day. Millions of people, from wealthy industrialists and celebrities to office clerks and factory workers, poured into the state—2 ½ million in 1925 alone.

But by New Year’s Day 1930, the frenzied boom—and the fortunes of those who had fed it and fallen for it—had folded like a paper airplane. The state had been savaged by a real estate collapse and a massive loss of wealth in housing, the stock market crash of 1929, and several fierce hurricanes. And the new decade brought a new menace: the Mediterranean fruit fly threatened Florida’s vital citrus groves.

St. Petersburg provides a dramatic example of the roller-coaster ride. In 1925, bank deposits in the city crested at $46 million, along with $24 million in building permits. In 1932, St. Petersburg bank deposits plunged to $4.6 million and the value of building permits fell to $278,000.

In 1930 in nearby Tampa, the city’s largest employer, the Florida East Coast Railway, declared bankruptcy. Tourism dried up everywhere, with bookings at the ornate Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine dwindling to 10 percent of capacity. The economic wreckage leveled hundreds of Florida banks and corporations.

Jacksonville’s Welfare Federation reported in 1931 that 24,000 people in Duval County were “facing starvation.” The sheer numbers of desperate Floridians overwhelmed welfare institutions.

In the cities, steel skeletons, once a symbol of prosperity, were rusting. The Great Depression and a failed marriage devastated circus king John Ringling’s health and fortune. George Merrick, the developer of Coral Gables, lost everything. He would end up taking a job as a postmaster. Miami Beach developer Carl Fisher had a financial portfolio estimated at $25 million in 1925, but he also was left penniless after the crash.

In Highlands County, observed historian Jack Kirby, “Families survived in jerry-built shacks, raising and selling a few vegetables, hauling firewood in rusted cars with wooden seats and no tops, and hunting and fishing.”

The City of St. Petersburg erected billboards aimed at drifters and the homeless: “WARNING. DO NOT COME HERE SEEKING WORK.” South Florida officials maintained an infamous “Hobo Express,” rounding up undesirables and dropping them off at the next county line.

But examples of humanity and generosity occurred. Neighbors, churches and clubs did their best. In Tampa, the Spanish, Cuban and Italian associations maintained medical clinics and hospitals. In Lakeland, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters erected a retirement home for its members. But private efforts could not solve the massive public crisis.

HIGH ROLLERS  KEPT ROLLING

While most Floridians faced the new decade with dread and grim determination, a fortunate few continued to find Florida an irresistible winter playground.

In Miami, newspapers chronicled the social world of vacationing corporate executives, such as B.A. Massee, vice president of Chicago’s Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Company, relaxing aboard his yacht, The Margo, with his family. In February, Fort Myers welcomed the returning Old Cronies Club, an exclusive fraternity consisting of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone and President Herbert Hoover.

 In Mount Dora, former President Calvin Coolidge and First Lady Grace Coolidge presided over the hotel’s formal opening. “Silent Cal” caught an impressive large-mouth bass that wound up stuffed and occupying a spot above the hotel’s reception desk.

In Boca Grande, the Gasparilla Inn and the Hotel Boca Grande catered to an affluent clientele. Nearby Useppa Island attracted celebrities including Shirley Temple, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds.

Who was the most powerful person in 1930s Florida?  Baron Collier’s bulging portfolio included streetcar lines, hotels, and a telephone and steamship company. His Collier County covers a staggering 2,305 square miles, a landmass larger than Delaware.

The Sunshine State also welcomed Joseph Kennedy and his growing family. The Wall Street mogul and Hollywood executive purchased an Addison Mizner-designed home in Palm Beach in 1933 for $120,000. The home sold in 2024 for $70 million.

In a 1930 article, the New York Sun gauged the social-cultural-economic barometer of Florida, and despite the state’s woes, found the forecast excellent:

Absolutely unique among the 48 states. Crowded with curious and fascinating things. The only state in the Union favored by nature with an inexhaustible and dependable steam heating plant. Bigger than all New England with Massachusetts left out. For the historian and the antiquarian, rich in shrines and lore. Gilded idleness and the extremes of fashion exist almost side by side with the plodding industry of soil-stained farmers. A million sunseekers pour in
by railroad, steamship, motor car, airplane and even bicycle. . . [A] national winter playground.

But could the state, battered by the economic collapse, live up to its glowing promise? That was the challenge facing Floridians as the decade dawned.

CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS: FEW RESIDENTS—BUT POISED TO GROW

Florida was a vast state, yet in 1930 its population was small and scattered. The 1,468,211 residents comprised less than one percent of the U.S. population. But by the end of the decade, the population had grown to 1,897,444.

Florida’s ability to lure nearly half a million newcomers during some of its darkest years indicates that despite its economic woes, it had become America’s South Star. It was a magnet attracting tenant farmers and frozen artisans, Iowa preachers and wealthy businessmen to follow the sun and start afresh.

Images of 1930s Floridians and tourists toasting the new year and dancing the jitterbug and the Lucky Lindy include many senior citizens. An affordable state of balmy winters and no income tax, Florida was fast becoming America’s Fountain of Youth.

 In 1930, Floridians aged 65 and older constituted only 5 percent of the population, a figure rising to 7 percent 10 years later. The numbers of elderly would skyrocket after World War II.

Those seniors dancing on New Year’s Eve in 1940 also became the first generation of Americans to receive a monthly Social Security check—an average of $22 a month in 1939. They would also be the first generation to benefit from modern medicine—penicillin, Sulfa drugs and blood transfusions.

No city in America rivaled St. Petersburg’s relationship with senior citizens. In winter, the green benches of the “Sunshine City,” installed in 1908, served as a welcome mat for retirees from Keokuk and Kokomo. By 1940, one in five city residents was 65 or older, an extraordinary demographic inflection point.

The 1930s reinforced what everyone knew but every North Florida legislator wished to forget: The region was losing ground to Central and South Florida. In 1890 the residents of North Florida constituted two of every three Floridians; 50 years later that proportion had been reduced to about one in three. By 1940, Florida had become the South’s most urbanized state, with almost two out of three residents living in a city. Jacksonville, Miami, and Tampa topped the magical 100,000 plateau.

Urban life was not always urbane. American society in general, and Florida especially, were divided along class, racial and ethnic lines. Every city had pockets of grinding poverty and wretched conditions, identified with nicknames such as “the Scrub,” “Lincolnville,” “Colored Town,” “Gas Plant” and “French Town.” And though African Americans made up about a third of the state’s population, they were allotted a far smaller share of its resources.

Florida’s smaller cities displayed a rich tapestry of economic and social diversity. Many communities developed economic niches. Sanford crowned itself the “Celery Capital,” a distinction disputed by Sarasota. Plant City and Starke both claimed the title of “Winter Strawberry Capital.” Citrus labels advertised Frostproof oranges, Dunedin grapefruit, and Fort Myers lemons. Apalachicola oysters earned high marks, while Fernandina shrimp, Sanibel scallops, Okeechobee catfish, Mayport pogeys and Barron River stone crabs also acquired national reputations.

Most of all, Florida was a land of contrasts and contradictions. It alternated between an American Mediterranean; a rural backwater; a former paradise forfeited to avaricious phosphate and timber corporations; and a tourist trap baited with honky-tonk juke joints, alligator farms and shady land salesmen. Everywhere one found extremes. In Palm Beach, some of the world’s wealthiest families lived in Old World-style mansions and shopped on Worth Avenue. Just miles away, Black and Caribbean farmworkers toiled under the blazing sun in Reconstruction-like conditions. Like the Peter Paul Rubens paintings hanging in the new John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, it was a place of brilliant sunshine and dark shadows.

And no shadow was darker than the racism that prevailed throughout the state.

A CRUEL LEGACY

Regional class, racial and ethnic divisions defined and divided the way Floridians lived. The state’s history mirrored the Deep South: a legacy of unapologetic slavery and secession. In 1930, one newspaper noted that in the previous year, Florida had staged more lynchings than any other state. Lynchings continued throughout the 1930s. Even liberal politicians such as U.S. Senator Claude Pepper, bowing to public sentiment, voted against anti-lynching laws.

In 1940, not a single classroom was integrated. When Florida legislators posed for a group portrait in 1939, it was a sea of masculine white faces. No Hispanic, Black, Republican or female answered the roll call.

In 1930, about 44 percent of Black Floridians resided in rural areas. All across the South, in what came to be called The Great Migration, African Americans were leaving such rural poverty for Northern opportunities, and Florida was no exception. By 1940, 28 of the state’s 67 counties had lost Black population.

A particularly pernicious tool for preventing Black citizens was Florida’s White Primary, established in 1897 to bar from the Democratic Party anyone whose admission violated “the purity and integrity of the party.” Since the Democratic party was effectively the state’s only party, this rule, which persisted for the next four decades, meant, as the Tampa Morning Tribune noted in 1935, “[Blacks’] right of suffrage is only a name.”

The White Primary survived the Great Depression, as did the Ku Klux Klan, which terrorized Blacks throughout the 1930s. Almost a third of America’s Klansmen lived in Florida at the beginning of the decade, and they operated without opposition from governments or civic organizations.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy maintained the drumbeat of the Lost Cause by erecting monuments, cultivating politicians and lobbying to ensure that “sympathetic” textbooks presented their ideology to schoolchildren.

Few African Americans were found in the professional ranks in the 1930s. Census takers surveying the entire state enumerated one Black chemist, two veterinarians, three artists/art teachers, seven authors/reporters, nine lawyers, 24 pharmacists, 39 dentists, 45 professors, 85 physicians, and 979 clergymen. The 1940 census included 2,015 white engineers but no Black engineers, 365 white chemists but only a single Black chemist, and 2,652 white lawyers and nine African American attorneys. Black females faced even more daunting occupational prospects. In the prewar years, two-thirds were employed as “domestics,” and large numbers continued to work in agriculture.

Yet many Black citizens managed to achieve and succeed. Standing on the shoulders of such giants as writer and activist James Weldon Johnson, Jacksonville had an especially notable African American business community, and dozens of Black-owned newspapers flourished across the state.

Prejudice was not limited to race. Anti-Semitism was prevalent and unabashed. Posh hotels in Miami Beach posted signs reading, “Exclusive Gentile Clientele,” and signs on apartments warned, “GENTILES ONLY!” Some beachfront hotels proudly proclaimed, “Always a view, never a Jew!” Not until 1949 did the state ban religious discrimination in real estate.

A NEW DEAL FOR AMERICA—AND FLORIDA

One single individual shaped the turbulent 1930s more than any other: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Elected in 1932, he served as chief executive until his death in 1945. Critics on the right branded Roosevelt a starry-eyed socialist while the leftist fringe never forgave him for preserving capitalism. But FDR enjoyed unprecedented support, winning four presidential elections.

On March 4, 1933, President Roosevelt delivered the most awaited address in American history. A friend assured him that if he succeeded in restoring prosperity, he would be hailed as America’s most celebrated president. Roosevelt quipped, “And if I fail, I will be remembered as the last one.’

In 1935, he established the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which provided 8.5 million unemployed Americans work on more than 1.4 million infrastructure and cultural projects. Florida projects ranged from a fish hatchery in the 584-person rural town of Wewahitchka (the initial plans went awry when a cow ate the blueprints) to constructing the Overseas Highway to Key West, the third-largest WPA project in the nation, after the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The WPA Florida laundry list is stunning (and the WPA even constructed laundries!): airports for Pensacola, Miami, Tampa, Marianna, Melbourne and Sarasota; a Boy Scout camp in Bartow; a storm shelter for Belle Glade; shuffleboard courts in Fort Lauderdale; a new jail for Jefferson County; sewing rooms for the women of Arcadia; a mattress factory in Carrabelle; an oceanfront bandshell in Daytona Beach; a TB sanitarium in Woodsmere; a women’s dormitory at Rollins College—to name just a few. In addition, gifted photographers, writers and artists hired by the WPA, such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Gordon Parks, fanned out across the state to record and memorialize Depression-era scenes and people.

In another New Deal initiative, the Civilian Conservation Corps (C.C.C.) recruited young men between the ages of 17 and 23 to plant trees, build infrastructure and repair a bruised environment. C.C.C. projects also formed the nucleus of today’s beloved Florida state park system. Almost 50,000 young Floridians earned $30 a month—of which $25 was sent to their families.

Put simply, the New Deal ameliorated the worst excesses of the Great Depression and offered hope to many who had lost all faith in the American Way. Its innovative programs were designed to restore confidence and create jobs, while instilling a sense of pride and humanitarianism.

Eleanor Roosevelt was also a familiar face in Florida, reporting to the president from places he could not visit. She formed a close friendship with Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach. Bethune became a presidential advisor on African American issues. When Bethune visited the White House, Roosevelt would run down the driveway to greet her, and the two would join arms as they walked inside. “Few heads of state received such a welcome,” a White House usher observed.

Florida’s U.S. Senator Claude Pepper became such a zealous New Deal supporter that in 1938, he was on the cover of TIME magazine with the caption, “Roosevelt’s weathercock.” In 1934, Pepper, a Tallahassee lawyer, had challenged the incumbent senator, telling audiences, “I am with Franklin D. Roosevelt” and “The cornerstone of the New Deal is the welfare of the common man.” He lost in what was almost certainly a stolen election. But in 1936, both Pepper’s opponent and Florida’s other U.S. Senator died, and Pepper was appointed to the office.

Pepper brought home federally funded construction projects, farm subsidies, military bases and old-age benefits and was reelected in 1938.

CHARACTER STUDIES

Fifteen Doers, Dreamers And Schemers From The Decade
Illustrations By Regan Dunnick

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings A Northerner who fell in love with Cracker Florida, she wrote the 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Yearling, capturing the people, setting and soul of that place and time.

Al Capone The notorious Chicago gangster lived in Miami Beach from the late ‘20s until his death in 1947, spending some of those years incarcerated for tax evasion.

Barron Collier An entrepreneur with numerous businesses, he became a major Southwest Florida developer, owning 1.3 million acres—the most of anyone in the state.

Dick Pope The flashy dresser (turquoise suit edged in pink) and promoter (aka Mr. Florida) made tourism great with his theme park Cypress Gardens and its water ski shows.

Zora Neale Hurston An author and anthropologist prominent in the Harlem Renaissance, she mined her childhood in all-Black Eatonville in works that define the era’s Black female experience.

Joe Weiss Hungarian immigrant Weiss opened a Miami Beach diner that became Joe’s Stone Crabs after a scientist suggested he try cooking the previously scorned crustaceans.

Desi Arnaz The Cuban immigrant, who grew up in rat-infested Miami poverty, became a bandleader and popularized the conga line in the ‘30s, later achieving Hollywood success.

Totch Brown A fisherman, gator hunter and drug smuggler, the fourth-generation Cracker wrote an autobiography about the hardships—and freedom—of living in the Everglades.

Mary McLeod Bethune The first in her family born free, she became hugely influential—a champion of African American women, a noted educator, and Presidential advisor on civil rights.

Red Barber His deep-fried poetry (a dropped ball was “slicker than boiled okra”) calling Major League baseball and college football games made the courtly Southerner a star.

Ding Darling A Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, the passionate outdoorsman was appointed in 1934 to head the U.S. agency overseeing wildlife and conservation; he later founded Sanibel’s nature sanctuary.

Butterfly McQueen The Tampa native achieved fame as the foolish maid Prissy in “Gone with the Wind” and acted in other films and on TV, often in racially stereotyped roles she deplored.

Abraham Lincoln Lewis Florida’s first Black millionaire, the Jacksonville entrepreneur founded American Beach in 1935, giving Blacks banned from all-white beaches an oceanfront vacation spot.

Hortense Wells Wells, an avid suffragette, was the first Florida woman to run for the U.S. Senate, winning 4 percent of the vote as a Democratic candidate in a 1934 race.

Claude Pepper A progressive U.S. Senator who championed the New Deal but also believed political realities forced him to compromise his principles on racial equity.

THE WAY THEY LIVED

Peter Finley Dunne’s cartoon character, Mr. Dooley, complained that historians were only interested in what ancient Greece and Rome died of. He insisted, “I want to know what they lived of!” Even in turbulent times, people find a way to enjoy family and friends, go about their business and adapt to changing circumstances. Floridians in the 1930s were no different. Times were hard, but there was also a feeling of shared community and purpose.

In 1979, Angela Comescone remembered growing up in 1930s Ybor City, a sprawling Tampa neighborhood where Spaniards, white and Black Cubans, Sicilians and even a handful of Romanians, Russians and German Jews coexisted. “If someone was sick, all the neighbors came with different remedies,” she said. “In the evenings, our parents would take us walking. We all loved one another. We would sing as loud as we could, Italian, Spanish and American songs. Other children would sing back at us while doing their housework. It was beautiful then.” She added wistfully, “Nobody walks anymore. Nobody sings anymore.”

If money was scarce, simple pleasures were cheap. America’s most popular soft drink, a 6-ounce bottle of Coca Cola, cost only 5 cents. Quincy banker Pat Munroe appreciated the drink so much he persuaded his customers to purchase the soda company’s stock. So many did that in 1940, this city of 3,888 residents was the richest town per capita in the United States.

Summer heat was intense, but afternoon rainstorms were regular and refreshing, and the new-fangled “Florida room” enclosed in wire mesh admitted breezes and kept mosquitoes out. Even many poor homes had front porches, where people gathered in the evening to read the afternoon paper and welcome friends. “Twilight was the time for sitting on porches,” novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Huston wrote of growing up in the African-American community of Eatonville. “It was the time to hear things and talk.”

City residents appreciated the iceman, with his metal tongs and heavy apron, and drugstores and five-and-dime chains served cold ice cream sodas.

Fewer headed to refreshing ocean waters, since little of the state’s 825 miles of beaches had been developed. Only occasional cottages and a few small settlements dotted the pristine shoreline. In 1930, Destin, Naples, Flagler Beach, Jupiter and Boca Raton, respectively, boasted populations of 160, 391, 198, 198, 176 and 447 residents.

Beginning in the 1920s, air conditioning cooled patrons at some department stores and movies. One newspaper hailed the development: “Local Theater Manufactures Own Weather.” In 1935, the Atlantic Coast Line installed air conditioning on trains between New York and Florida and Chicago and Florida. And in 1936, the Tampa Morning Tribune crowed that a Davis Island house had become “the city’s first air-conditioned home.” Affordable window units wouldn’t appear until the 1950s.

The introduction of “talkies” ushered in a golden age of American cinema, and Floridians flocked to theaters. Most towns had one or more movie theaters, and many were architecturally striking, from Orlando’s grand Art Deco Roxy to Jacksonville’s neo-Georgian Imperial. Both seated nearly 1,000 patrons. African Americans, relegated to the balconies in segregated theaters, appreciated Miami’s famous Black movie palaces, the Harlem and the Ace.

By the 1930s, most urban residents enjoyed the comforts of electricity. But rural families lagged behind. In 1935, remembering the hardships his beloved mother faced on their farm, a young Lyndon Baines Johnson, head of the Texas National Youth Administration, helped pass the Rural Electrification Act, which would transform many of the 55,000 Florida farms still lacking electricity.

The internal combustion engine altered the Florida landscape. (Automobiles also led to an alternative film experience—the drive-in theater; Miami’s E.M. Loew Drive-In was Florida’s first, opening in 1938.) Cars, buses, tractors and trucks shortened distances, increased crop yields, made new markets accessible and sped small farmers and desperate tenants away to cities, offering them the promise of a better—or at least more interesting—life.

By 1940, the Ford Model T, Chevy roadster and Airstream trailer changed the face of Florida tourism. “Tin-Can Tourists” headed to previously ignored small towns, like Sebring, Orlando and Bradenton, where new municipal trailer parks welcomed visitors and their dollars. Fueled by New Deal investment, Florida enjoyed a flurry of road building, connecting previously isolated towns and introducing visitors to regional landscapes and beauty.

TROPICAL DECO

The developers who turned Miami Beach from a mangrove swamp to America’s fantasy vacationland built a remarkable collection of hotels during the 1930s. Inspired by the 1925 Paris Art Deco exposition, they gave the new sleek, glamorous architectural style an exuberant tropical flourish, with buildings painted in sunset pastels and boasting nautical details and curvy shapes evoking ocean liners. In 1976, the Miami Design Preservation League was founded to preserve these iconic landmarks, the largest concentration of Art Deco buildings in the world. Info: mdlp.org.

THE SPORTING LIFE

Sports, especially baseball, offered escape and excitement. Hundreds of teams competed in professional and semi-professional, high school, college and factory baseball leagues. Spectators cheered the Okeechobee Catfish, the Tampa Smokers and the Pompano Bean Pickers.

Major League Baseball devoted several months annually to spring training in the Sunshine State. During the ’30s, when the St. Louis Browns were “first in shoes, first in booze, and last in the American League,” the team hopped from Bradenton to Avon Park to Daytona Beach and St. Petersburg, while the Brooklyn Dodgers rotated between Clearwater, Miami and Orlando. Squads returned like swallows each spring to play in quaint wood and tin ballparks. Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics trained in Fort Myers, and the Detroit Tigers bonded with Lakeland.

Many players purchased homes and establishments in their adopted communities. Dizzy Dean owned a gas station in Bradenton, while Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert invested in a residential development called Ruppert Beach
in Pass-a-Grille. Dan Topping, the owner of the New York Yankees, retired at Golden Beach, near Miami.

Baseball offered a handful of white and Black Floridians a pathway out of poverty.  The grand hotels of Palm Beach and Miami recruited talented African American baseball players to perform menial duties, such as pulling rickshaws, called “Afro-mobiles.” In the afternoon, the Black players entertained guests, playing for tips.

Floridian Buck O’Neil became a star player in the new Negro American League, formed in 1937, and made history as the first Black coach of a Major League Baseball team, signing on with the Chicago Cubs in 1962. In 1994, Ken Burns highlighted O’Neil in his documentary mini-series, “Baseball.”

A shadier sporting passion was gaining in popularity: gambling. In 1931 the Florida Legislature, desperate for revenues, created a State Racing Commission and legalized pari-mutuel gambling, overriding the veto of Governor Doyle Carlton, a strict Southern Baptist. The commission introduced horse and dog tracks as well as jai alai frontons. South Florida’s Hialeah and Gulfstream racetracks soon attracted such high rollers as the Duke of Windsor, formerly British King Edward VIII.

Politician Kenneth “Buddy” McKay explained how gambling  became legal in such a conservative state:
“The compromise that had made gambling acceptable in rural, churchgoing North Florida was that although racetracks could only be situated in counties that had approved them by a subsequent vote, racetrack revenues were to be distributed equally among all counties.” When McKay inquired about the constitutionality of this practice, he was told, “This so-called 11th Commandment was said to be somewhere in the Old Testament.”

However it happened, gambling revenues helped buoy the state during the lean years.

Bolita, a numbers game introduced by Cuban immigrants, was illegal but flourished in Tampa, thanks to kickbacks to officials. Players purchased a ticket for a nickel or a dime and selected a number between 1 and 100. The weekend bolita throw, a dramatic event often held onstage with great ceremony, would reveal the winning number. One hundred gleaming ivory balls were imprinted with numbers and dropped into a black velvet bag, and the winning ball was drawn out and held high before the audience.

At its peak, as many as a thousand runners (boliteros) collected bids from customers. The government tolerated it because it funneled massive amounts of money to politicians and police. In a rare crackdown, a grand jury once indicted 22 bolita shops. A week later, they were all again conducting brisk business.

A REVIVING ECONOMY—AND LOOMING THREAT

By the late 1930s, Florida was beginning to climb out of the Depression. Statistics capture the economic upturn. In 1933, the Depression’s leanest year, Floridians earned a total of $423 million. In 1941, their income soared to $1.05 billion. Per capita earnings, a somber $272 in 1933, spiraled to $475 in 1940.

“The people of Florida are now eating high on the hog,” proclaimed Gov. Fred P. “Old Suwanee” Cone.

With war looming across the seas, the chief cause for optimism—but also anxiety—was military preparedness and an escalating defense budget. Defense contractors, truck farmers, cotton brokers, lumber mills, fish camps and hotels benefited from the buildup. President Roosevelt deftly orchestrated a policy bolstering the U.S. military and assisting Great Britain while avoiding conflict in the Pacific and preparing for war in Europe.

For centuries, America’s greatest defense against armed invasion was nature’s two vast oceans. But long-range bombers and aircraft carriers, radios and submarines shrank distances. Convinced that America would eventually have to enter the conflict, Roosevelt also understood that many Americans opposed fighting what they saw as Europe’s battle. As late as 1940, he assured American mothers, “I have said this before. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war.”

But that same year, assisted by a fiery speech by Florida Senator Claude Pepper, he managed to institute America’s first peacetime draft. Pepper, a military hawk, had been galvanized by a 1936 trip to Hitler’s Germany and warned: “It is not written in the holy writ of Americanism that America should be a spectator at Armageddon.”

Long lines formed at precinct election boards to register for the draft. The much-anticipated draft lottery was held on Oct. 29, 1940. George Thomas Michelle of Gulfport in Pinellas County, an upholsterer who dreamed of medical school, had his number, 158, drawn first. He enlisted in the Army on New Year’s Day 1941. His father also enlisted.

On Aug. 30, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland. The winds of war were sweeping through the United States and Florida, and all across the state, citizens stayed glued to radio broadcasts, snatched up the latest newspapers and debated and feared what the new decade might bring.

Few could imagine that on Dec. 7, 1941, the bombing of Pearl Harbor would burst across America like a comet, igniting a conflagration that would last almost five years, claim millions of lives and transform the United States into a colossus and Florida into one of the most favored places on the continent.

Gary R. Mormino is the Frank E. Duckwall professor emeritus in Florida history at The University of South Forida, St. Petersburg. His article, “Gridiron Glory,” which ran in the spring issue of 2024, won a first-place Charlie Award for best in-depth reporting from the Florida Magazine Association. He is working on a book about Florida in the 1930s and is a Florida Humanities Florida Talks speaker. To schedule his presentation, go to floridahumanities.org.