1,720,973 research outputs found
Review Essay:--Alfred I. du Pont: His Impact on Florida
Get PDFThrough the pages of this large and well-written book, Joseph Frazier Wall delivers all that the title promises and much more. Beginning with the origins of the du Pont family in the eighteenth century and ending with an epilogue about Ed Ball’s covetous management of the du Pont estate during the half century after Alfred’s death, Wall not only portrays the huge du Pont family through a half dozen generations, but also says a great deal about the growth of business, industry, technology, and finance in the context of the history of the United States from its revolutionary inception in the late eighteenth century. The emphasis is on Alfred I. du Pont who may have been the rebel of the family, but who, as the author demonstrates, certainly was not a black sheep. Wall shows how the powder factory on the Brandywine grew into an enormous manufacturing conglomerate, how the du Pont family also grew from a close-knit group into a sprawling network of cousins and in-laws that more closely resembled “Dynasty” than “Dallas,” and how the latter so forcefully and sometimes so disastrously influenced the former
Postscript To The Martin Tabert Case: Peonage As Usual In The Florida Turpentine Camps
Get PDFIn 1923 NAACP Secretary James Weldon Johnson wrote the editor of the New York World thanking him for the paper’s exposure of brutality in the Florida turpentine camps which had caused the state legislature to abolish the leasing of county convicts to private companies. Himself a product of the progressive era and a believer in man’s ability to reform his society through positive legislation, Johnson wrote that “ending this evil” was “a long step toward the ending of peonage.” The state had already been prohibited in 1919 from leasing its prisoners to private firms, but counties had continued the practice until the World published a series of articles recounting the horrible death of Martin Tabert, a white South Dakota youth, after brutal beatings inflicted by Walter Higginbotham, a prison guard in one of the Putnam Lumber Company’s turpentine camps. In the same progressive spirit as that embraced by Johnson, N. Gordon Carper recently wrote of the events leading to the legislature’s 1923 action and the sentencing of Higginbotham to twenty years in prison for second degree murder. Many who read Carper’s article generally accepted the premise that society was capable of improvement by the discovery of wrongs and by correcting them through improved legislation. So believing, it was natural to infer that James Weldon Johnson was correct and that in 1923 the legislature ended a long-standing abuse. But a brief look beyond the 1923 enactment reveals the difference between enactment of a law and its implementation. It further raises serious doubt about the effectiveness of positive law when it runs counter to established customs
Florida Courts and the Disputed Election of 1876
Get PDFWhen the election of November 7, 1876 failed to resolve the presidential contest between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden because of uncertain results in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, both national parties sent prominent representatives to the three southern capitals to observe and work for their partys’ interests. With Tilden only one electoral vote short of victory, the Republicans needed every one of the nineteen disputed votes. Because there had been less violence and corruption in Florida and because only a few votes separated the parties, many politicians believed it to be the crucial state. Under Florida law, a state canvassing board was empowered to exercise quasi-judicial authority in its examination of returns from the thirty-nine county canvassing boards. It could rule on the validity of those returns and decide whether or not to exclude them from the count. On the board there were two Republicans-Secretary of State Samuel B. McLin, a Southerner and long-time resident of Florida, and Comptroller Clayton A. Cowgill, an ex-Union army surgeon from Delaware and one Democrat, Attorney General William Archer Cocke, a Virginian who came to Florida in 1863
Mary Grace Quackenbos, A Visitor Florida Did Not Want
Get PDFBy the early twentieth century the Florida turpentine industry was at its zenith. Hundreds of thousands of pines were boxed for turpentine, and thousands of men in scores of isolated camps tended the trees for their employers. The operators of the camps in turn sold their products to naval stores marketing firms in Jacksonville, Savannah, or Tampa. These large factors then disposed of the turpentine and resin according to price quotations usually established by the Savannah market and followed by those of other cities. It was big business and heavily influenced by the harshest competitive practices of the day. Fierce competition between the large marketing firms often brough ruin to one while giving temporary advantage to the victor. With no alternative but to sell through the large factors, turpentine farmers were obliged to trim their costs to bare minimums. As was often the case, those at the lowest level of the industry bore the brunt of the sharp competition. The workers in the forests labored long and hard for bare subsistence wages, and in many camps it appears that they realized no gain at all. This was certainly true where state and county convicts were leased to turpentine operators when the practice was still legal. It was also the case for many others who were trapped by ignorance, abject want, and lack of alternatives. Workers often found themselves in perpetual debt and peonage. Employers who perpetuated this labor system felt that their well-being depended upon it, that it was a reasonable way to deal with black workers, and that anyone who criticized the system was an enemy to be dealt with swiftly and severely. When Mary Grace Quackenbos of New York City began trying to expose the system, turpentine farmers and their powerful allies and supporters in and out of goverment used all the methods at their disposal to quiet her
Florida and the Black Migration
Get PDFWhen the European war erupted in 1914 the flow of immigrants to the United States was greatly curtailed, depriving developing American industries of their traditional supply of new laborers. Northern railroad and manufacturing firms then turned to the native blacks of the South as potential workers to fill the unskilled jobs so necessary to their continued growth. Southern blacks had been migrating northward in small numbers since before the turn of the century, but when northern companies began sending recruiters into the South the numbers accelerated enormously. Beginning with the Pennsylvania Railroad’s recruiting of several hundred blacks from Jacksonville, Florida, in early 1916, the “great migration” took more than a half million Negroes out of the South to northern industrial cities. They came from the southern rural regions where there had always been a large labor surplus. Now the massive exodus began to alarm turpentine, lumber, and agricultural producers, and caused glaring contradictions in the attitudes of white Southerners toward their black neighbors
Murders at Kiss-Me-Quick: The Underside of International Affairs
Get PDFThe last weekend of November 1932 was exceptionally cold and unexceptionally dull at Cedar Key until flames began shooting from the city jail about four o’clock on Monday morning. The fire was the final act of one of the most senseless and brutal murders ever committed by a Florida law enforcement official and the beginning of an international dispute which enabled Mussolini’s fascist government to chastise the United States for its violation of civil rights and human decency
Sea Island Cotton in Ante-Bellum Florida
Get PDFIn the late 1850’s Florida surpassed Georgia and South Carolina in the production of Sea Island cotton. This development was made possible by three factors: climate, soil, and technological progress. While nature supplied the first two requisites, the latter factor was the result of inventive Floridians who designed and patented cotton gins that made the production of Sea Island cotton profitable. A combination of environment and mechanical development thus enabled Florida to supplant the traditional leaders and become the nation’s largest producer of long staple cotton
A Note on Governor George F. Drew
Get PDFFor the proponents of the legend of the “Lost Cause” George F. Drew ranks high in the galaxy of heroes as the “Redeemer,” whose election as governor in 1876 saved Florida from the “Radical” Republicans, and restored “home rule” to the native white population. Of course, many Floridians had known during the 1876 election campaign that Drew was a New Hampshire native, that he had been a Unionist in Georgia during the war years, and that he was only recently converted to the Conservative-Democratic cause, after supporting Ulysses S. Grant for President in 1868. Nor was it any secret that the United States Court of Claims had awarded him a cash settlement for cotton which had been confiscated by General Sherman’s army and that such claims were only paid to Unionists who could prove their unswerving loyalty to the United States between 1861-1865. All this was enough to convince Conservative-Democrat Edwin W. L’Engle that, even though Drew could probably be elected, he would not be much better than a “Radical.” The Republican Tallahassee Sentinel raged that “Mr. Drew was nominated for the Union flavor that his record might give the ‘Lost Cause’.
- …
