ral schizophrenia. As a political historian, writing in the middle 1970s, pointed out, there were really two or more Floridas. One, North Florida, characterized by old-stock Southern Protestantism, social and racial conservatism and rural small towns, resembles northern Louisiana. The growing cities and heavy Jewish and Latin influx of south Florida set a different tone:
While south Florida was not noted for political liberalism, its citizenry possessed a social toleration that was foreign to the northern part of the state, and the racial issue contributed along with other factors to a growing divorce between rural-oriented, socially conservative north Florida and predominately metropolitan, socially heterogeneous south Florida.
The condition of political flux that was typical of these contrasts was incapable of supporting the boss system; indeed, in most cases, politicians could not be expected to carry their home counties. State voters were quite capable of such anomalies as the election of U.S. Senator Claude Pepper, "a man tending leftward," and Attorney General Tom Watson, "a labor baiter of the first order."
This situation contrasted with a stereotypical view of a typical pre-1960 Southern state which included several expected features: an elite hierarchy that controlled political and economic relationships in tandem, an agrarian economy, an overwhelmingly Democratic electorate and a power structure that rested upon the disenfranchisement of blacks in favor of whites. Working-class whites were subordinate to the propertied class but supported a power structure that put them on top of working class blacks.
Like other Southern states of the time, Florida was segregated and voted Democratic. But, unlike other Southern states, its economy was based on real estate, tourism and development of boom crops like citrus, and its orientation was toward growth, development and the acquisition of new residents.
Througho...