Every February for the past three years, my partner Göran and I have taken refuge from the bitterest stretch of the Minnesota winter in southern Florida with my friend Judene. We stay with her brother Val at his lovely Ft. Lauderdale beach condo. By night Judene and I reminisce about the bad old days when she and I were literally killing ourselves as Mormons, and by day we swim in the ocean, hike in some of the most beautiful public parks in America, and just let our bodies relax and rejoice in the climate human beings were actually created for. Judene's idea of a perfect vacation would be an incessant round of hiking, roller-blading, biking, snorkeling, kayaking, and every other physical outdoor activity devised for man (and woman). Göran, of course, lives up to his gay heritage by insisting on high-fashion shopping and fine dining. I am mostly content to sleep, write, lounge on the beach, and swim in the ocean. So between the three of us, we usually achieve some triune, mystical balance.
Our last two visits have involved outtings to the Florida Keys, which have charms to match all three of our yearnings. Being a history junky, I am never able to spend much time in a place without learning something about its past, so this last visit I bought John Viele's 3 volume history of the Florida Keys.1 I recommend this honest, lovingly written, down-to-earth history to anyone. In it, I found a fascinating microcosm of American civilization, the history of our nation painted in extremes, the good, the bad and the ugly. Mostly the ugly.
Not that the author, a retired Navy officer and former submarine commander who lives in the Keys, approaches his subject matter with any lack of sympathy. Indeed, the whole history is suffused with a deep respect for those who braved incredible hardships in order to eke out a living on the islands. Even the villains of the story he describes with a grudging respect, for they too had their role, if a less than admirable one. But the bottom line is this: for 5,000 years, by the estimates of most historians, Native Americans occupied the Florida Keys, living successfully off land and sea with a combination of fishing, hunting and harvesting. For at least the last 1,400 years of that history prior to European contact, the Keys supported a self-sufficient population of as many as a thousand inhabitants. This stable, successful society was completely annihilated by Europeans in the 18th century, to be replaced by a society mostly notable for its lack of stability, its lack of self-sufficiency, and its never-ending chain of economic disasters brought on by efforts to establish economies of exploitation rather than sustenance. What could be more American?
Each chapter is a litany of failures. Failed salvage empires crafted from lies, bribes, and political chicanery. Failed pineapple farming. A railroad empire wiped out first by hurricanes, then by bankruptcy. Sponge-farming schemes destroyed by a combination of poaching and greed. Every place name left by white men in the Keys is a testament to some brilliant entrepreneur whose grand visions went down in flames, or went bankrupt, or withered and then faded into non-existence. Settlements came and went in rapid succession. The majority of "pioneers" gave up and fled in disgust after enduring surprisingly few years. Even "the bats didn't come to Sugarloaf," when a desperate entrepreneur built a bat-tower to try to ward off the clouds of mosquitos. The longest-term inhabitants were hermits who came to the Keys to drown themselves in isolation or alcohol, or both. For most of the American history of the Keys, and despite Federal grants that gave land away to whomever could improve it, the population outside of Key West didn't top a few hundred, sometimes plummeting to almost nothing, belying the white myth that Indians "wasted" the land while white men could make it "blossom like the rose."
Key West, the notable exception to the rule, was literally built on the wreckage of others' dreams. Its economy was fueled by the "wrecking" industry -- the salvaging of ships that foundered on treacherous, invisible coral reefs surrounding the Keys. Much of the permanent economy in the rural keys catered to the wealthy wreckers of Key West -- black Bahamian woodcutters and charcoal makers whose labor kept wealthy white families warm at night; black Bahamian farmers and fishers who provided them fresh vegetables and "the fruit of the sea."2 Even the Key West exploitation economy eventually came to naught. By the 1930s as the wrecking industry declined and the Great Depression killed what was left of the economy, 80% of the 11,000 inhabitants of Key West were living on public assistance and the city went bankrupt.
American civilization did not truly come to the Keys until -- you guessed it -- the building of the highway and the arrival of The Tourist.3 This is precisely where Mr. Viele's history ends because it is the beginning of the Florida Keys we know and love today: a haven for wealthy northern vacationers, and those who fleece them. But the success of the tourist industry only casts into greater relief the true contours of American civilization: its unsustainability. White people in the Keys and everywhere from Sea to Shining Sea have not yet achieved what the Native Americans we displaced achieved: an economy and a society that will be sustainable not for a few hundred but for thousands and even millions of years. Our genius is exploitation entrepreneurialism that manages to eke great wealth out for the few at the expense of the many, and that lasts for a few years until the whole thing collapses under its own weight. Our society, for all its genius, can't seem to prosper without permanent expansion, ever thirstier for oil and other energy sources to fuel the expansion, and now wars of agression to slake our thirst. What we haven't seemed to figure out is that nothing expands forever, and there are limits to what this island we call Earth can support.
One might argue that the Keys are an extreme example, and an unfair basis on which to judge the American experience as a whole. After all, there were the extreme conditions, the hurricanes that brought even the best laid plans to naught. But that is precisely the point. The people who lived there for thousands of years before us had hurricanes too. They learned to live through the hurricanes. They built a civilization that didn't depend on lack of hurricanes in order to survive. The only catastrophe their society couldn't survive was us; and that is most likely the catastrophe that we won't survive either. Now I know why, whenever I go to Florida, as I walk through neighborhoods where people live in run-down shacks, on my way to flamingo pink high rises for the super wealthy, as I feel the insecurity that only fabulous wealth surrounded by abysmal poverty can create, I cannot help but be haunted by the conviction that All This Can't Possibly Last.
Notes
1. John Viele, The Florida Keys: A History of the Pioneers (Sarasota, Florida: Pineapple Press, Inc., 1996); The Florida Keys Volume 2: True Stories of the Perilous Straits (1999); The Florida Keys Volume 3: The Wreckers (2001).
2. It's worth noting that though the author remarks in several places that for most of its history the majority of rural Keys settlers were of African descent, the bulk of the narrative focuses on a handful of white settlers. The author does not seem uninterested in the history of people of color. His bibliography provides a number of references on Indian history and black history in Florida. He does not shy away from the unglamorous aspects of American civilization in the Keys: the disease, alcohol, forced relocations and wars that literally annihilated the Indian population there; and, of course, slavery and segregation. He does note that "few of the Keys pioneers knew how to read or write, or, if they did, never had the time to pen diaries or letters. Most of what we know about them comes from more educated travelers who visited the Keys, from government reports and records, and from a few oral histories." ("Introduction," p. xi.) It seems likely that the lacunae in the narrative are reflective of lacunae in the sources, not the author's bias.
3. I'm of course interested not only in how Key West became a tourist mecca, but a gay tourist mecca. If you're interested in that aspect of Keys history, keep looking. There's no information on the most fabulous residents of the Florida Keys. I was intrigued, however, by the story of Harry Geiger, "the Lower Keys' first entrepreneur." Geiger never married, but he lived for twenty years or so with Robert Allen, a free black. They made a living together by selling vegetables and firewood to the merchants of Key West, until Allen "died or left" in the 1860s. The relationship was notable for being one of the few egalitarian relationships between a white man and a black man in the Keys, all the more remarkable considering that most other white residents of the Keys were careful to maintain a respectable distance between themselves and the islands' black residents. If the author suspected, as I do, that there may have been more to their friendship than just business, he does not ask or tell.
I was also intrigued by the "Happy Band," a group of "happy-go-lucky men who wandered all over the Keys." Precisely how "happy" they were, the author does not speculate either. But if anyone ever writes a gay history of the Keys, the stories of Geiger and Allen and the "Happy Band" might be worth investigating further, if that is possible.
In general it is worth noting that for most of its history as a U.S. territory, the Keys was a "frontier" culture, which meant a disproportionate number of single men. It is reasonable to expect that some of the dynamics evident in other single-sex cultures would have been in play there. The importance of gay culture in Key West today is probably largely explained by Key West's importance as a harbor and naval base. If I had to guess (I am only guessing at this point), an overtly gay culture probably began to emerge there in the 1940s, around the same time it did in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, and other World War II U.S. ports of call, and, in the case of Key West, at the same time as tourism became the islands' main source of income.