Florida Press Podcast

The environmental movement is such an integral part of our culture — and especially the culture of the Democratic Party — that we take its presence for granted. But as Dave Tegeder and Steve Noll explain in their book Ditch of Dreams, it has not always been so. The Democratic Party once endorsed grand schemes for economic development, the environmental consequences be damned (if they were even considered at all). And this book introduces us to the unexpected character of Richard Nixon, environmentalist. At its core, Ditch of Dreams: The Cross-Florida Barge Canal and the Struggle for Florida’s Future (University of Florida Press, 2009) tells the story of the transformation of twentieth-century American liberalism, the fracturing of the New Deal coalition, and the birth of the environmental movement. The Cross-Florida Barge Canal — an ambitious project to connect the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the Sunshine State with a man-made ditch — is the platform the authors use to explore these larger issues. Ditch of Dreams is not only highly readable, it’s still highly relevant as we struggle to balance the need for economic development with the imperative to preserve the natural world.

This is a very timely book, coming as it does in the midst of the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 — the war that gave birth to the maroon community of Prospect Bluff, Florida. In his book The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World (UP of Florida, 2013), Nathaniel Millett shows how an assortment of free African-Americans, escaped slaves, Africans, and Afro-Indians created a thriving, highly organized community in the shadow of the expanding slave empire of the southwestern United States. Inspired by the singular figure of Edward Nichols, and Irish-born British officer of staunch anti-slavery convictions, the men and women of Prospect Bluff forged a community that realized their deepest understandings of freedom in the midst of the era of Atlantic revolutions.

From the sounds of Samba to the spectacles of Carnival, Afro-Brazilian traditions are today seen as emblematic of Brazil and especially of Salvador de Bahia, the northeastern city where many Afro-Brazilian cultural traditions were first established. Salvador’s present status as the “Black Rome” of Brazil marks a shift from the early Twentieth Century, when Afro-Brazilian practices – particularly those associated with the religion Candomble – were denigrated as “primitive” and subject to repression in Bahia. Yet even as Afro-Brazilian culture is celebrated in Bahia and throughout Brazil, Afro-Brazilians themselves remain subject to discrimination, economic marginalization, and negative stereotypes, often directed at those same cultural traditions.

In African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil(University Press of Florida, 2013), Scott Ickes explores the emergence of this paradoxical modern attitude towards Afro-Brazilian culture during and after the rule of Getulio Vargas (1930-1945). Ickes describes how during the Vargas era, Afro-Brazilians who sought greater acceptance for their practices found an newly-receptive audience among the white Brazilian elite: progressive intellectuals and journalists who valued Afro-Brazilian culture as folklore; and politicians, both national and regional, who sought the support of the Afro-Brazilian working class. Through government initiatives and the media, these elites elevated certain Afro-Brazilian practices – the martial art Capoeira, Samba music, and Candomble-influenced festival celebrations – and in doing so provided a public cultural and political forum for Afro-Brazilians involved in those practices.

But as Ickes notes in every case, the new elite acceptance of Afro-Brazilian culture was limited and conditional. Only those Afro-Brazilian traditions deemed acceptable by elite intellectuals became accepted, and Afro-Brazilian culture never attained the prestige of European cultural traditions in Brazil. Thus, while the acceptance of Afro-Brazilian culture during the Vargas era had real benefits to Afro-Brazilians, it still allowed for Afro-Brazilians to remain marginalized into the modern day.

The story of the rise of Jim Crow in Jacksonville, Florida is in many ways illustrative of the challenges facing newly emancipated African Americans throughout the South with local officials erecting barriers to black participation; blacks building institutions to overcome those obstacles; then Southern bigots using the reaction of blacks as justification for both the initial barriers and further draconian measures.

This usually involved labeling black political action as in some way primitive, corrupt or unfairly self-interested. For example, many in the white establishment in Jacksonville resented that blacks voted for Republicans out of loyalty, yet they also attacked blacks for voting for ‘reform Democrats’ out of self -interest. So, the solution? Political education of some kind? Outreach perhaps? No, instead they implemented what was called the ‘Australian ballot’: a subway map style list of candidates with intersecting names and titles intended to either confuse or disqualify many black voters.

This hostility to black political agency extended to all aspects of public life in Jacksonville, with each reaction forcing blacks further from power and from view. Robert Cassanello’s To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville (University Press of Florida, 2013) explores this dynamic in rich detail, helping further our understanding of the post Civil War but pre- Civil Rights era in the South. Robert was kind enough to speak with me. I hope you enjoy.

Deservedly or not, the members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) are often portrayed as one of history’s Good Guys. The Society was the first organized religious group to condemn slavery on moral and religious grounds. In Quakers Living in the Lion’s Mouth: The Society of Friends in Northern Virginia, 1730-1865 (University Press of Florida, 2012), Glenn Crothers probes below that simple idea to study how Quakers in a slave society–a lion’s mouth –coped with the inevitable tensions. How did they deal with their slaveholding neighbors? How did those neighbors cope with Quakers who–while very nice, hardworking, and honest folk–also condemned slavery as a sin against God?

When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especially true with the modernists, in particular T.S. Eliot. After graduating from Harvard University in 1910, the young Eliot spent a year in Paris, a year that had a lasting and profound effect upon his work that has gone largely unexamined until now.

In her riveting intellectual biography, T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, Nancy Duvall Hargrove, the William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Mississippi State University, revisits that single year in the poet’s life to mine it for later influences.

While this period is often interpreted to be typical of the early 20th century post-graduate foreign study experience, Hargrove invites us view it as extra-ordinary. Linking Eliot’s work to the Ballets Russes, the music of Stravinsky and the intellectual tension ofLaNouvelle Revue Francaise, she demonstrates the rare coming together of an artist and the art of his time to form “un present parfait.”

It was a year that influenced not only his poetry but also his prose. As Hargrove writes, the theater Eliot encountered while in Paris “may have been the inspiration for the difficult dramatic goal which Eliot later set for himself: to write verse drama in an age conditioned to prose and to write of spiritual and moral concerns in an age largely devoid of and unsympathetic to them.”

But perhaps most impressive- especially to any lover of Paris- is Hargrove’s meticulous recreation of the city as it was then. Through chapters on sport, popular entertainment, transportation, etc., she elegantly situates the young poet amid a city so alive it seems to strain against the page. The end result is a book that leaves the reader longing for both the poetry and Paris.