‘Florida Man’ boasts frontier roots, says author
Once, a friend called veteran journalist Craig Pittman in an urgent search for “Fun Florida Facts” to use as icebreakers at a party. “Got a pen?” he replied as he reeled off a dozen doozies, starting with one from way back in 1845, when Florida became a state.
The first flag that flew over Florida’s state capital, he said, bore the words, “Let Us Alone.”
That’s pretty ironic in light of the Sunshine State’s constant call to new residents and visitors —118 million visitors in 2021. In a state that has been a tourist magnet since steamboats traveled the St. Johns River, Floridians simultaneously put out welcome signs and also tout slogans such as “We don’t care how you do it Up North.” Let Us Alone.
We get weary of being the Punchline State, as Pittman calls it. He’d rather think of Florida as the Most Interesting State (the capitalization is his).
For decades he’s chronicled both Florida’s wacky stories and tales of its natural beauty and threatened environment, as a Tampa Bay Times journalist and an author of several books. He’s written about manatees and the Florida panther. He tracked down a tale of orchid smuggling in “The Scent of Scandal,” which he quips is the only book ever classified in both the true crime and gardening categories.
His latest is “The State You’re In: Florida Men, Florida Women, and Other Wildlife.”
Wild and crazy heritage
It’s a state that has a “long history of being wild and crazy,” Pittman said during a recent talk at the Orange County Regional History Center; “900 new people move to Florida every day and have no idea what they’re getting into.”
The influx has made Florida the nation’s third most populous state, behind only California and Texas, with about 22 million, but it’s been a fast climb. In 1940, we were the least populated southern state, he noted, with a population of less than 2 million — the last eastern frontier state, and the last state to require that cattle be fenced, in 1949.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that one day, that last frontier would give rise to the “Florida Man” meme on social media. By the late 1940s, a Forbes magazine writer observed, it seemed almost as if there were something in Florida’s “humid, languorous air” that attracted “pirates, derelicts, remittance men, thieves, madams, gamblers,
blue-sky promoters, moneybags, exhausted noblemen, black-market operators, profiteers [and] all infections of Western life.”
Sure, plenty of solid citizens also moved to fast-growing Florida — especially after World War II — but Florida also continued to be a “sunny place for shady people,” in Pittman’s words — a place where the “crimes tend to be weirder and the scams bigger.”
Rogue’s paradise
Today’s Florida Man stereotype
also implies not being the brightest bulb on the string as well as a certain contrariness or obtuseness. Pittman traces it back to the “Leave Us Alone” times of the 19th century when, deservedly or not, observers often portrayed Florida as a rogue’s paradise.
You can see Florida Man parallels clearly in an 1895 Harper’s Magazine article by the famed Western artist Frederic Remington, reporting on a visit to Arcadia and Florida’s cow country, along with sketches of cow hunters.
For Remington, “cowboys are what gems and porcelain are to some others,” he wrote, but when it came to the cowboys he found in Florida — not so much. The first one he encountered up close “was two-thirds drunk, with brutal shifty eyes,” Remington wrote. Observing more, he concluded they “lack dash and are indifferent riders, but they are picturesque in their unkempt, almost unearthly wildness.”
“To me, that’s when the whole Florida Man stereotype started,” Pittman noted at his History Center talk. In the Florida cow hunters’ defense, their world was harsh, their cattle scrawny. Remington had his prejudices. But he was not alone, through the decades, in describing Florida as a
strange, wild place, full of “shifty” characters.
It’s also a wonderful place. “I love it here,” Pittman writes, and he strives to tell readers why Florida is both awful and awesome, “so darkly weird and wonderful at the same time.” One thing’s for sure, as Pittman notes: “To live in Florida is to live with change.”
To learn more
There’s much more about Craig Pittman’s work at his website, craigpittman.com, including the “Welcome to Florida” podcast he produces weekly with radio personality Chadd Scott, as they interview experts and talk about Florida’s history, people, politics, environment, animals and current events. Pittman and Scott have logged more than 90 weekly episodes on a wide variety of topics. Recent episodes ranged from early environmental leader May Mann Jennings to mystery author Raquel V. Reyes’ Miamibased cozy, “Mango, Mambo and Murder.”