Mandatory Americanism vs. Communism classes in Florida after Castro takes office

Guevara, Castro (r)
1961

By Jane Feehan

With a wary eye cast south to Fidel Castro’s communist encampment in Cuba, Florida’s state legislature passed a law in 1961 that made it mandatory for public schools to teach an anti-communist course. The course, “Americanism versus Communism,” was taught to high school seniors beginning in 1962.

Florida law stated:

The course shall lay particular emphasis upon the dangers of communism, the ways to fight communism, the evils of communism, the fallacies of communism, and the false doctrines of communism.

Also:

The course … shall emphasize the free enterprise – competitive economy of the United States of America as the one which produces higher wages, higher standards of living, greater personal freedom and liberty than any other system of the economies on earth.

A new course subject brought the usual questions about textbooks, but administrators were also concerned about who would serve as authoritative sources. They worked through the uncertainties and published a 62-page teacher’s guide that dictated the points to be covered as well as a list of 50 publications for outside reading.

Teachers didn’t protest but there was keen national interest in the law because never had a state legislature spelled out exactly what should be taught in schools. The 800-pound guerilla in teacher’s lounges was the possibility that governments could be just as explicit in the teaching of American history, economics and more.

We all survived. I remember taking the course in school via the Educational TV station broadcasting out of Miami. Florida repealed the law mandating the anti-communist course in 1983 and replaced it with a requirement for an economics class. Times have changed and fear has strangely evaporated about the state dictating school curriculum. 

Given today's hard left turn by a growing number of young people, and a few U.S. city mayors, perhaps it's time* to bring this class back or the highly useful course about how our government works, civics.

* Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill June 22, 2021 to introduce a similar course curriculum to Florida schools.

Copyright © 2020, 2021. 

Sources:

Miami News, Mar 18, 1962

Miami News, April 15, 1983

Tags: Florida history, Florida in the 1960s, Florida legislature 1960s, Castro and Florida, Florida schools in the 60s, film industry researcher

A tunnel under Fort Lauderdale's Intracoastal at Las Olas, a short-lived idea ... until

Proposed tunnel under the Intracoastal at Las Olas 1950
Florida State Archives

By Jane Feehan

Many know about Fort Lauderdale’s Henry E. Kinney Tunnel* along US Highway 1 (Federal Highway), under the New River. A controversial subject for two decades, it was finally completed in 1960. But not many know – or remember – that a second tunnel was proposed for the city in 1951.

A  proposal for a second tunnel, one to go under the Intracoastal off East Las Oas Boulevard, had been toyed with once before and was cast aside. But estimated revenues from the proposed New River project revived thoughts about the second tunnel as part of the Broward County traffic improvement program. Traffic was becoming a monumental problem in growing Fort Lauderdale during the 1950s. 

Looking east on Las Olas

State Representatives John Burwell and Ted David from Broward County were probably influential in turning down that plan. They were more focused on starting work on the bridge at SE 17^th Street.

It would be hard to imagine Fort Lauderdale without the beautiful vista of the waterway provided by the Las Olas Bridge today.  

Meanwhile, the tunnel built by  Boring Co. has problems in Las Vegas:

https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musks-las-vegas-loop-tunnel-concerns-riders-afraid-getting-trapped-underground-1667164

Sun-Sentinel:

Update: Oct. 31, 2021: The Boring Co. submits a 29-page report on the proposed tunnel project: 

Update: July 7, 2021 The city of Fort Lauderdale approves bid from Elon Musk's Boring Company for a tunnel from downtown to A1A: 

Update: April 11, 2021 - Elon Musk is in talks with the city to make such a tunnel a reality - by 2022.

Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. Jane Feehan.

*See index for more on the Henry E. Kinney Tunnel.

Source:   Miami Daily News, Dec. 20, 1951

    

                                                                               

Tags: Fort Lauderdale history, Fort Lauderdale tunnel, Fort Lauderdale in the 1950s, film researcher

This hurricane remains the most intense to hit US; it's not Camille, Andrew or ...

Searching for bodies in
Upper Matecumbe Key, 1935
Florida State Archives

By Jane Feehan

For many today, Hurricane Katrina established a reference point, a certain consciousness about extremes in weather. With all its notoriety, Katrina holds top place on the list of hurricanes recorded since 1851 in one National Hurricane Center category*: the costliest to hit the U.S. with recovery expenses surpassing $120 billion.

The most intense storm to make U.S. landfall is the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. With a pressure of 892 mbar, this storm's winds were recorded as high as 200 mph in pockets. A 2012 recalculation officially upped winds from 160 mph to 185 mph at landfall, close to those estimated of Hurricane Camille (900-909 mbar); winds were estimated because recording equipment was destroyed.  (Hurricane Dorian in 2019 hit the Bahamas with a low pressure of 913 mbar.)

Weather observers in Miami and Havana tracked a storm nearing Andros Island in the Bahamas on Sunday, September 1, 1935. Forecasters did not expect it to strengthen above 75 miles mph on a path between Cuba and Key West. Weather predicting was a primitive science then. 

The next day it developed into a vicious Category 5 and headed for the middle Keys, the Matecumbes, where hundreds of World War I vets were encamped in flimsy tents and shacks. They were building the Overseas Highway to Key West as part of a work program during the Depression. Because of the holiday, many laborers were already gone but about 200 remained. 

Warnings went out about 2:30 p.m. September 2, but there was little anyone could do except send a rescue train owned by the Florida East Coast railroad. The train, Engine 447, driven by a very brave J.J. Haycraft reached the camps at about 8 p.m., the height of the storm. Frightened men, women and children struggled to board in the dark.  Within minutes after all were safely inside, a wave reaching an estimated 18-20 feet swept over the train, knocking it off tracks and filling coaches with water. Most thought they were about to die.

Train overturned by 20-ft wave
State of Florida Archives

Miraculously, no one was seriously hurt on Engine 447 but 414 vets and residents living in the Matecumbes lost their lives that day. Some say the death toll was closer to 600. Writer Ernest Hemmingway, living in Key West at the time, was a member of the first rescue party; his description of the hurricane’s aftermath is graphic, sickening. 

A very small storm, the eye of the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane was estimated to be eight miles in diameter with bands extending 30 miles across. Barometric pressure, the measure of intensity, was recorded at 26.35 inches or 892 millibars after it hit land. Hurricane Camille’s (1969) pressure was 26.84 inches or 909 millibars when it struck Mississippi. Katrina ranks just below Camille with a pressure of 27.17 or 920 millibars. 

Wilma in 2005 dropped to 882 mb, lowest recorded in the Atlantic Basin, but before reaching land its pressure rose giving it a Cat 3 status. Other storms may have had lower pressure scores but also while at sea before land fall.  

Also of interest: The 1935 storm, as did Hurricane Andrew in 1992, occurred in a year of below-average activity. Andrew’s official  pressure was 27.23 inches or 922 millibars.

The deadliest storm to hit the U.S. was the Galveston hurricane of 1900 that took about 8,000 lives.

* NHC categorizes deadliest, costliest and most intense (strongest). See report below.
Copyright © 2012, 2020. All rights reserved. Jane Feehan. 

______ 

Sources:

NOAA. The Deadliest, Costliest, and Most Intense United States Tropical Cyclones From 1851 TO 2010 (and other Frequently Requested Hurricane Facts) at:  http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/nws-nhc-6.pdf

Standiford, Les. The Last Train to Paradise. New York: Crown Publishers (2002)

Miami News, Sept. 3, 1935

Miami News, Sept. 4, 1935

Tags: Florida hurricanes, most intense hurricane, strongest hurricane, hurricane history, the 1935 Labor Day hurricane, Overseas Highway, category 5 hurricane, film researcher

Governors Club opens in 1937 setting Fort Lauderdale hospitality standards and legal precedent

 

Governors Club circa 1940 Florida State Archives

By Jane Feehan

The Governors Club, located on Las Olas Boulevard, was built by Robert Hayes Gore, Sr., owner of the Fort Lauderdale News. For decades after its 1937 opening, the hotel was a Fort Lauderdale landmark and gathering place for politicians, socialites and national notables.  

Gore (RHG) bought the Wilmar Hotel, an unfinished eight-floor steel skeleton in 1936 for $20,000. The original owner, William H. Marshall, first mayor of Fort Lauderdale, stopped work on the building during the 1920s when he ran out of money. Gore hired an architect and construction firm to resume the project and opened it as the Governor’s Club in December, 1937. (Gore was once governor of Puerto Rico.) 

A Fort Lauderdale News story lauded its "eight floors of sheer beauty and convenience." Furnishings of the building afforded guests "facilities on par with any in the United States." Charles Haight of Carson, Pirie, Scott & Co. in Chicago planned the interior of the hotel. Its lobby was decorated in soft blue and Van Gogh yellow with modern paintings and blue leather furniture. Each floor presented a different color scheme.

The Governors (the apostrophe was deleted) Club operated from Thanksgiving until Easter each year until 1947 when it was opened year round.  

In its early days, the hotel hosted singer Kate Smith, broadcaster Lowell Thomas, film maker D.W. Griffith and other celebrities who enjoyed its privacy. The Governors Club also became a popular spot for holiday dining, special occasions, and as refuge during hurricanes. State politicians often chose it as a site from where their key speeches were delivered.

The hotel faded over the years as competition for rooms shifted to the beach.  For more than a decade, the Governors Club lay vacant until it was demolished in 1995. A bid to preserve the hotel as a historical landmark failed.

Of legal note about the Governors Club is a Florida law holding builders responsible for their work. RHG successfully sued builder Fred Howland, Inc., shortly after construction began on the hotel, for shoddy workmanship (leaking windows and joints during storms), providing precedent for a Florida law. Copyright © 2011, 2020 All rights reserved. Jane Feehan.

License  1938-1939 (apostrophe removed ...)

Sources:
Burghard, August and Weidling, Philip A. Checkered Sunshine. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966

Fort Lauderdale News, June 30, 1937

Broward County Historical Commission

Tags: Fort Lauderdale history, Fort Lauderdale hotel history, Robert H. Gore, Sr.

Drilling for oil in South Florida during the 1920s

Oil drill blaster in the Everglades - 1924
Florida State Archives/Florida Memory

By Jane Feehan

The advertisement below from the Fort Lauderdale Herald (January, 1922) touted the possibility of oil riches lying near Miami.  Capitalized with $100,000, the Miami Petroleum Syndicate was trying to sell shares for $100.  Ads – and news – dropped off about attempts to either raise funds or find oil under the Magic City within a year.

Oil fever also struck Fort Lauderdale.

In 1928, when Fort Lauderdale was in the throes of a land bust, methane and ethane gases were thought to be rising from the New River.  A lease was obtained to drill and a rig went up in Croissant Park.  The city was so enthusiastic about it and the possibility of climbing out of economic stress that tax bills went out briefly bearing an image of an oil well. Attempts to find liquid "gold" were abandoned at 3,000 feet when funds were depleted. After World War II, the well was exploded.

Advertisement 1922

Other sources:

Weidling, Philip J., and Burghard, August. Checkered Sunshine. Gainesville: University of Florida Press (1966).

Fort Lauderdale Herald, February, 1922

Tags: Florida history, Fort Lauderdale history, South Florida history, oil in Miami, oil in Fort Lauderdale,film research 

Sheriff Walter Clark, Broward gambling and ... the take down (1931-1950)

 

Walter Clark , 1933 

By Jane Feehan

Illegal gambling flourished in Broward County in the 1930s and 40s, thanks to the hands-off policies of Broward County Sheriff Walter Reid Clark.

Claiming to be one of the first children in the county to be born of a founding family, Clark believed the people of South Florida wanted gambling. Clark ignored mob betting activities at the Plantation Resort, Colonial Inn (not to be confused with the hotel of the same name in Miami), the It Club, and other establishments. He also operated, along with his brother Deputy Sheriff Robert Clark, the Broward Novelty Company, a bolita and slot machine enterprise that netted $750,000 in operations from 1945 to 1947.

Tables were turned on Clark by U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN). The crusading senator, a presidential hopeful, presided over hearings in 1950 on national crime. Some of those hearings held in Miami in July that year highlighted activities and shady affiliations of Walter Clark (Meyer Lansky, Jake Lansky, Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo).  A few days after the proceedings, Florida Governor Fuller Warren suspended the Broward sheriff who, to this day, holds the longest tenure of any sheriff of the county (1931-1939, 1941-1950).

Clark, his brother, and others in Broward were indicted but never convicted. The sheriff died a few months after the trial (April 1951) from leukemia. The curtain dropped on open gambling in Broward County by 1951 but not before it made the Clark brothers wealthy and earned millions for organized crime. Copyright © 2012, 2020. All rights reserved. Jane Feehan.

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Sources:

Miami News, Aug. 19, 1950 p. 17.

Miami News, July 22, 1950 p. 26.

Burghard, August  and Weidling, Philip. Checkered Sunshine,  Gainesville: University of Florida Press,1966.
Gillis, Susan. Fort Lauderdale, The Venice of America. Charleston:  Arcadia Publishing, 2004.

Tags: Fort Lauderdale history, Broward history, gambling in South Florida in the 1940s, gambling in Broward County during the 1940s, organized crime in South Florida,
film researcher 

Telling "Truth about Florida" and the land boom ... until the 1926 hurricane calamity

 

Aftermath: Miami garage damage Sept. 18, 1926
Florida State Archives/Nulton (1906-1999)

By Jane Feehan

Florida’s land boom made Northern bankers nervous during the early 1920s. Their banks were being drained of millions of dollars to fund Florida dreams. Bankers banded together to pay for ads in the New York Times and other newspapers warning about the dangers of speculation and likelihood of a bust.

Anxious to keep the money spigot open in 1925,  Florida Governor John W. Martin (1884-1958)  brought a group of respected businessmen to New York to downplay notions about speculation in a “Truth about Florida” meeting at the Waldorf Astoria with media and bankers.

Afterward, Florida businessmen established “Truth about Florida” committees to raise money to pay for advertisements in northern newspapers to counter bad publicity about the boom.

George E. Merrick (1886-1942), developer of Coral Gables, one of the first planned communities in the United States, announced in June, 1926 that his city would raise $1,000,000 “to get the message across to 110,000,000 people of the U.S.* that they should be informed of the real truth about Florida.”   He also suggested that the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce raise $1.5 million for the same cause. 

By the end of 1926, northern bankers ceased their ad campaign but the Truth about Florida committees could not claim success. Two hurricanes filled the Everglades with water, dampening dreams about development there and along the coast. The boom quickly receded like the seas before a dangerous tidal wave, taking with it the Truth about Florida campaign.

* Merrick also paid William Jennings Bryan $100, 000 to sell Coral Gables land. See:
https://janeshistorynook.blogspot.com/2020/08/silver-tongued-orator-william-jennings.html

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. Jane Feehan

 

Sources

Burnett, Gene M. Florida’s Past: People and events that shaped the state. Sarasota: Pineapple Press (1997), p. 160.

Miami News, Nov. 13, 1925

Miami News, June 9, 1926

Wikipedia.org

Tags: South Florida in the 1920s, Florida history, South Florida real estate boom, George E. Merrick, Gov. John W. Martin, Jane Feehan, film researcher