- [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- Right now on WEDU, we'll explore some recent Florida history and a decade that saw Florida explode into national prominence, including fierce battles over elections, the state being used as a training ground for terrorists, immigration showdowns, a change in the political old guard, a record number of hurricanes, and a cast of characters who are still making waves today.

We'll talk with one of Florida's top historians, Gary Mormino, about his new book "Dreams in the New Century" next on "Florida This Week".

(energetic theme music) Welcome back.

Our guest, Dr. Gary Mormino is a professor emeritus at USF St. Petersburg where he co-founded the Florida Studies Program.

He's written extensively about Florida's history.

His previous books include "The Immigrant World of Ybor City" and "Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams".

He's been a Fulbright scholar and was named the first humanist of the year by the Florida Humanities Council back in 2003, Florida was once considered a traditional Southern state, almost a backwater of no consequence with its small population and few of its politicians achieving national prominence.

It was a place where in the 1950s, a couple could retire and live comfortably on $40 a week.

In his latest book, he charged Florida's rise to the center of national attention and importance in the decade that began with the disputed 2000 election.

His latest book is "Dreams in the New Century" and Gary Mormino, welcome back.

Always great to see you.

- Thanks for having me.

This means a lot.

- Let me start with a quote from your book.

You say, "Florida of today," the Florida of today "is the America of tomorrow."

What do you mean by that?

- Well, Florida is everything to everyone.

I mean, it's an immigrant state.

It's a state for retirees.

Think of two of the flashpoint issues in the last 20 years, the Elian Gonzalez affair and the Terry Schiavo affair.

It's no accident that both were in Florida.

Florida matters.

- Well, I wanna talk about the 2000 election, but before we get there, Elian Gonzalez, he was a young Cuban boy who came over on a boat with his mom from Cuba to Southern Florida.

His mom died on that trip, he was rescued.

His dad was still in Cuba and his dad wanted him back and that caused a big controversy in 1999 and 2000.

- I have rarely seen such a hot button debate over this.

So you love your son so much you'd be willing to give him up for the freedom of America or I am so politicized I will do anything to keep my son.

I mean and it electrified, galvanized the Cuban community when President Clinton and Attorney General Reno repatriated him with his father and it cost Al Gore the election, there's no question, the historians looking at the vote.

- Because you think it changed the Cuban American vote?

- Well, the election was so close and we're talking about hundreds of thousands of votes in Miami-Dade, Cuban American votes.

It was almost a dress rehearsal for future Supreme Court justices.

Amy Barrett was there, three future Supreme Court justices worked on the side to try to keep Elian in Florida or the 2000 election.

- Well, let's talk about the 2000 election.

In 2000, we had that five weeks of controversy, Gore versus Bush.

Many people on the GOP side who we hear about today were part of the Republican effort to stop the recount.

And you mentioned about Amy Coney Barrett, and then Justice Brett Kavanaugh was involved in this, Justice John Roberts before they were on the Supreme Court and Roger Stone were involved.

- Roger Stone, who famously said Florida is a sunny state for dark people, I think, for shady people, rather.

And the famous Brooks Brothers riot, which you has been made into a made-for-TV movie, but he orchestrated that that shut down the Miami-Dade vote, effectively giving the election to Bush.

- How many votes were not counted as a result of the stopping of the recount?

- Well between it's probably incalculable.

You've got tens of thousands of votes that were thrown out because of the crazy Palm Beach ballot.

And then you have undercounts along.

By the way, during that election, Pam Iorio, the Hillsborough County election supervisor was a graduate student at USF kind of giving us, giving the students a day-by-day account of this.

So, I mean, looking back at it, it's still one of the more amazing sagas in Florida and American history.

- She was both the election supervisor and a student at USF.

- Yes, yes.

- So political moderation, you say in your book, was a casualty of that 2000 recount, how so?

- Well political moderates were thrown to the dogs, I mean, in both both parties.

Mel Martinez is the perfect example.

Mel Martinez in many ways is the American dream.

He's a Pedro Pan alum, meaning that when he was a young kid, I think at age 10, his mother and father gave him his freedom to come to Orlando.

And Mel becomes the darling of the Republican party, wins the 2004 Senate race against Betty Castor, former president at USF.

Mel helped pass the Immigration Bill and he was eaten alive by Republicans because of that.

And he gives up his seat.

You can make an argument, his decision to retire early in 2008 is the most substantive decision because it caused Charlie Crist to run for a different office.

It was just the dominoes fell because of that.

- Back in that 2000 election recount, you write in your book that Republicans played hardball and the Democrats kinda laid back and didn't challenge everything that was going on.

- You had Ted Cruz here advising.

By the way, everyone hated Ted Cruz, who always told people he was an Ivy League graduate.

They played a better game at this.

I'm still not sure who won the election.

I mean, you could debate this forever.

The Votamatic machine in Palm beach County was a disaster, the butterfly.

You could also place the blame on the people who were working at the elections offices screwing up, but the blame, it's like one of those things around a very large table.

- One of the weirdest things is Pat Buchanan, who was running as a third-party candidate got so many votes in the Jewish communities in South Florida.

- He never even campaigned in Palm Beach County.

Remember the, was it Roger Ailes, I think, announced to the crowd that Palm Beach County is now Pat Buchanan country.

(laughing) And you know, you're right.

We're talking about hundreds of votes, but would've tipped the election to George Bush.

- Because there were fears of Pat Buchanan had allies who were anti-Semitic and that was what was so strange about that moment.

- And the Democrats also made a lot of mistakes.

Bill Clinton was never asked to campaign.

Bill Clinton was still a very popular president.

- So I wanted, what happened, the shift from the 1990s through the latter part of the 2000s was really a shift from old guard Democrats being in power in Tallahassee and statewide to Republican dominance.

- The perfect example of this is the Georgian representative, help me, he was speaker of the house.

- [Rob] Newt Gingrich.

- Newt Gingrich.

You basically burn the enemy, you destroy the enemy.

The idea of having a moderate compromise is a betrayal to the party.

- Florida didn't have many people that rose to national prominence, but we did have people like Claude Pepper and Sam Gibbons who were up in Washington in the House kind of fighting for the New Deal, the New Frontier, fighting for Social Security and Medicare.

But they were on their way out.

This new generation, Jeb Bush and others, it was coming in.

- And a new generation of Democrats, as well.

The old North Florida was well known for the Democrats who had held power there forever.

They're replaced by Republicans.

The Ronald Reagan revolution reshaped the map in Florida.

Look at Tampa, Bob Martinez became a Republican.

He had been a lifelong Democrat.

- [Rob] And a labor leader, too.

- And a labor leader.

And a moderate, by the way, possibly the best environmental governor Florida ever had.

A Republican.

He was very attuned to the environment at a time at the national level, it was also a hot issue.

Several of my colleagues agree with me on this issue.

Bob Martinez.

Well, now Nat Reed.

Nat Reed, arguably the greatest environmental activist in Florida history, was a Republican from Martin County.

- So little bit less than a year after the recount is over, George Bush is president, we have 9/11 and many of the terrorists who were involved in the 9/11 attacks learned to fly here in Florida.

- And it's an interesting question.

Why would they choose to live in Florida?

We're a state of strangers.

No one bothers to ask why are you here?

You seem new here, could you introduce yourself?

It's also a more innocent era.

They were using library internet services.

Big brother is not looking down.

Plane service seemed like a different world.

You could come aboard with bolt cutters, are you kidding me?

- [Rob] Crazy.

- It's crazy and then flying will never be the same.

- They hung out in strip clubs, which was apparently against their faith.

- Yes, it's a compelling story and also a scary story.

The story of several not wanting to land, they only wanted to learn how to take off.

- So President Bush is in Florida, in Sarasota the day before 9/11 and on 9/11 and he stays at the Colony Beach Resort, if I remember right from your book, which is on Longboat key.

And you recount a story in your book that I don't think has been proved, but it's an interesting story that was reported by a local newspaper.

Tell us that story.

- President Bush, I think, was getting ready to jog.

He jogged that morning before he appeared at the Emma Booker Elementary School and a SUV appeared at the checkpoint and they said, "We're here to interview President Bush."

And the drivers and occupants were Arab looking according to the witnesses and they checked and there was no official schedule.

And the van simply left.

And everyone has always speculated, what if they had complied?

Was this an assassination attempt?

Admittedly, it seems iffy, but compared to 9/11, I mean, 9/11 is one of the most spectacular events in American history.

I mean, America changed on 9/12.

- And if this was a true story and it really hasn't, I don't think, has been checked out enough, but if it was true, it kind of mirrored the attack on the life of the Northern Alliance leader in Afghanistan, which took place just days before 9/11.

- Yeah, a very similar modus operandi.

- I started the show by saying that in the 1950s and I took this from your book, a magazine said a couple could retire comfortably in Florida on $40 a week.

- Florida was California on the cheap.

I mean, if you go back and look at real estate ads, real estate ads, property on the beach, it's extraordinary.

I calculated as late as about 1965, a school teacher earning a salary of about five or 6,000 a year could afford to live on the beach in Pinellas County.

That's how affordable.

Florida was also expanding.

It was a great place for poor to middling poor retirees living in a mobile home.

Florida until 2000 was the number one state for mobile homeowners.

It's now Tennessee, I believe, but you still had mobile home parks with waterfront views of the Gulf of Mexico and Hillsborough State Park and things like that.

- Okay, so that's the 1950s.

What happens in that decade, 2000 to 2010?

What happened to housing affordability?

- I mean, it almost looks nostalgic in comparison of the.

You had a real estate stampede, there's no question about it.

But if you look at the prices compared to 2022, a new verb entered the vocabulary, 'flipping'.

I wonder how many people knew what flipping meant.

And I interviewed several real estate journalists and asked 'em, for the chapter called "On the Brink".

So 2006, people were getting a little antsy and one said he was dating waitresses and school teachers in Sarasota and they were all millionaires.

They were flipping houses every week.

And that seemed to be dominating cocktail conversations.

Do you hear how much the house in Hyde Park went for last week?

And it's returned now, that's the scary part.

Except adjust the decimal point.

- But you say Florida's like a Ponzi scheme.

What does that mean?

- I was not very popular for this with the business community, but George Packer of "New Yorker Magazine" was doing a story on Florida and he asked me, I need a metaphor to describe Florida.

This is 2006.

I said, "It's a lot like a Ponzi scheme."

And we'll talk about the Ponzi schemers later, but the idea was everything is fine in Florida as long as a thousand newcomers came every day, They paid taxes, they bought sod.

The carpenters were, everyone, all the gears were working.

No one, I don't recall legislators ever saying what happens when they stop coming?

And we found out in 2008, the bottom simply dropped out.

- The effects of that housing crisis in 2008, those lingered in Florida for years, didn't they?

- And some of the saddest stories.

It amplifies.

It's not merely housing.

Homelessness became a front page issue, and what's the proper way to handle the homeless?

Do the homeless have a right to build a tent in a public park?

To urine?

I mean, so the debate and the number of foreclosures, I mean that's, no one ever thought about the word 'foreclosure', I think, before then.

- You tell a story about foreclosures in your book of families, the doorbell rings.

- The sheriffs had to post the notice.

And it's one of the saddest stories that a sheriff knocks on the door and a woman answers and he notices she's nervous and he said, "It's time."

And her husband from the other room said, "Honey, who is it?"

And there's a long pause and the sheriff said, "You didn't tell him, did you?"

I mean, oh man, it breaks your heart.

But it's a sad period, that period, 2008, 2010.

We're seeing the aftershock of that today.

The big investment corporations made a decision in 2007, 2008, we're gonna go in Florida and buy every undervalued house and then we're gonna rent them for several years, but with new guidelines.

You're in charge of the plumbing, pesticides, and then we're gonna sell them when the real estate goes up.

And boy, you see this today, the impact of big money manipulating the market.

- Those big companies are here like BlackRock and others and buying up homes for investment.

I wanna ask you about hurricanes.

This is the start of the hurricane season as we record this.

We always think about Katrina as the big incident between 2000, 2010, but Florida had eight hurricanes in a space of a year and a half?

- You have to put this in perspective.

The previous 20 years, except the big asterisks Andrew in 1992, it had been a relatively hurricane-free era.

And a lot of people, when they would get hurricane warnings said, it's kind of, they're yelling wolf, meteorologists.

And in a span of five weeks in 2004, Florida got walloped by four hurricanes: Charlie, Francis, Gene.

- [Rob] And Ivan?

- And Ivan, thank you.

Tampa Bay got off the hook.

Charlie was headed toward the mouth of Tampa Bay and at the last minute, it made a curve and hit Punta Gorda hard.

It would've dwarfed Katrina in terms of the financial losses.

Four towns, mostly Polk County, that area got hit three times by hurricanes, crisscrossed three times by hurricanes.

- I don't know how to put this, but in your book, you say that hurricanes essentially weren't all bad because they renewed some communities.

Although some of the, the federal hurricane aid was essential to rebuilding these communities.

- Oh, and the insurance.

I mean, so you had this flood of insurance money.

Remember also, 2004 is a presidential election.

Who's the governor of Florida?

Jeb Bush, whose brother is running for reelection in 2004.

So you can bet.

And who's the guy who was the disaster in Katrina?

Brownie?

- Yeah.

- Brownie performed very well in Florida.

- And Jeb Bush rose the prominence nationally because he was handling those hurricanes.

- Lucy Morgan, who is tough on politicians, said it was Jeb's finest hour.

Jeb was out there giving bilingual press conferences, handing out water.

Tampa Bay emerged relatively unscathed.

And to me, the most revealing part was that Pensacola Bay got hit really hard.

Within six months, property values were rising in Pensacola Bay.

- I think there were 127 deaths over that period of hurricanes, $29 billion in losses, but some communities were transformed for the better.

- Yes.

Sanibel, interestingly is a story.

It hit the rich and the poor communities.

Sanibel, one of the big crises there was what to do with Australian Pines, a non-native specie.

And you had these huge fights.

So there are all sorts of environmental implications there.

Remind me which communities, there's so much so many details in the book.

- There's a city right outside, I think, of Naples and Fort Myers that is essentially redeveloping-- - Oh, Punta Gorda.

I think Punta Gorda, which was hit by, it was the entry point for the first hurricane that hit that season, Charlie.

And some of you, some of the listeners may remember.

I think they called a FEMAville outside Interstate 75.

- With the blue tarps on the roofs.

- Blue tarps.

But Punta Gorda, the downtown was reimagined and redeveloped there.

- Donald Trump put in a claim for hurricane damage for Mar-a-Lago for this batch of hurricanes.

- Donald Trump is kind of like the Forrest Gump figure.

he's always reappearing.

In 2000, he's rumored as a presidential candidate, but as a Democrat who's going to select Oprah Winfrey as his running mate.

And he's a Democrat, pro-abortion.

But in Tampa, in 2005, they kinda sealed the deal for Trump Tower, which is gonna be on Ashley.

How'd that work out?

- But he puts in a claim for $17 million in damage and then two weeks later, what happens?

His son has a wedding at Mar-a-Lago.

- And the maintenance guy said there was almost no damage there whatsoever.

But Don, and then we had Donald Trump University, but.

- Gary, this may be an unfair question.

In 30 seconds, the most important figure in that decade from 2000 to 2010?

- Wow.

Probably Charlie Crist.

By the way, this period is the golden era for Tampa Bay politicians, starting with Bill McBride in 98, Alex Sink, Charlie Crist, Jim Davis.

Who am I leaving out?

I think I'm leaving out another candidate who ran for governor, but every single election.

And sometimes there's two Charlie Crist versus Jim Davis.

But Charlie Crist's decision to leave the Republican Party is a monumental to the dominoes falling because of that.

And he may return.

We may come back in six months.

- He'll be in your next book.

- Yes.

- Dr. Mormino, thanks a lot.

Great to see you again.

- Very fast paced.

Thank you.

- Well, thanks for joining us.

Please send us your comments at ftwwedu.org.

You can view this and past shows online at wedu.org on the PBS app.

And "Florida This Week" is now available as a podcast.

You can find it on our website or wherever you download your podcasts.

We leave you with one of Gary Mormino's favorite songs telling the tale of the first span, a revolutionary shortcut to cross Tampa Bay in the 1920s.

Stay safe and have a great weekend.

- [Man] This song from 1924 has gotta be about the worst song that's ever been written, but it celebrates Papa Gandy's bridge and he tried to convince folks they needed a bridge between Tampa and St. Pete back in 1916 and people thought he was some kind of heretic because the bridge was gonna have to be almost six miles long.

But in the 1920s, people seemed to thrive on doing things that were said to be impossible so Mr. Gandy set out to build a bridge himself.

In 1924, they had the ribbon cutting and the bands played.

And I suppose this song was sung and people got quiet to hear what Mr. Gandy was gonna say.

He said, "The bridge is built," and sat down.

They say nothing pleased Papa Gandy more than to sit out in the evening and watch the tolls roll in on his bridge.

And finally, the government decided that, yeah, it probably was a good idea to have a bridge between Tampa and St. Pete so they took his bridge away from him and they collected the tolls.

But two hips and a hooray for Papa Gandy who knew the last laugh rule is in effect.

(upbeat guitar music) ♪ Well, the greatest thing in the grand old South ♪ ♪ There's a brand new Gandy Bridge ♪ ♪ It spans the waters of Tampa Bay ♪ ♪ And we drive from ridge to ridge ♪ ♪ Birds, golden throats, more daily sing ♪ ♪ Stars brighter shine in glorious spring ♪ ♪ The wave salute you when you bring ♪ ♪ Your sweetheart to Gandy Bridge ♪ ♪ Listen, the mockingbirds are singing ♪ ♪ Gandy Bridge ♪ ♪ Waves softly whisper ♪ ♪ Stars are beamin' ♪ ♪ Gandy Bridge ♪ ♪ The silver and the smiling waves are sighin' ♪ ♪ Gandy Bridge ♪ ♪ Wildflowers sweetly perfume Gandy Bridge ♪ ♪ Oh, Gandy Bridge, we are all for you ♪ ♪ We love you more and more ♪ ♪ We praise you as we drive along ♪ ♪ And speed from shore to shore ♪ ♪ With stars so bright, the world seems right ♪ ♪ A balmy breeze, a lovely night ♪ ♪ Attunes world with one accord ♪ ♪ Shout welcome, all aboard ♪ - [Announcer] "Florida This Week" is a production of WEDU, who is solely responsible for its content.

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