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From 1880 to 1930, life on Earth was reshaped in ways previously inconceivable. Nowhere was this transformation more total than in Florida. In a single generation, a peninsula hardly charted since the days of Ponce de Leon was molded into a testing ground for new modes of living and capital accumulation. This episode of Gladio Free Europe drains the marshy mysteries of time to understand how Florida, once the most foreign of all the contiguous territories, became perhaps the most fundamentally American state of all.

Jackson (@GraceCathedralPark) returns to the show for a deep exploration of modern Florida history, running from the noble failures of Reconstruction up through the reassertion of Confederate control and the establishment of a new society, a unique and twisted marriage of northern venality with southern barbarity. Gilded Age robber-barons like Henry Flagler took to the waters for pleasure and for profit, turning the remote Sunshine State into a secret garden for the idle rich. Railroads soon connected Florida to the American mainland north and south, bringing both well-heeled investors and threadbare farmers down the peninsula. Poor whites in particular saw Florida as a beacon of the New South, where a man could make his fortune in land sales or the orange boom. But these newcomers had little interest in sharing their wealth with the African American residents of Florida, some of whose ancestors had been working the swampy soil since the Spanish era.

Florida after Reconstruction experienced some of the worst racial terror anywhere in the United States, with an exceptionally high rate of lynchings and episodes of mass violence at Ocoee and Rosewood, where white mobs ransacked black neighborhoods and murdered dozens upon dozens. Then the swamps, once a refuge for escaped slaves and Seminole Indians, were drained out to the sea, paved over to make room for America's newest feat of social engineering: the suburb.

By the Roaring '20s, Florida's economy primarily revolved around real estate and tourism. Middle-class Americans flocked to the new neighborhoods that sprawled across the ruined wetlands, many of which were designed for cars rather than people, and most of which were racially segregated. Meanwhile significant numbers of Cuban immigarnts migrated to the Gulf port of Tampa, turning a small fishing town into a cigar city that rivaled Havana.

Transformations along these lines happened across the United States, particularly in other Sun Belt regions such as Arizona and Southern California. But nowhere else were these changes so extreme, so rapid, and so destructive... not only to the natural landscape upon which these plains were laid, but on the residents pushed aside to built this petty-bourgeois fantasy. The state has been a theme park since decades before the Mouse spread his ears. In many ways, Florida is its own kind of twisted intentional community, and perhaps America's most successful utopian experiment.