South Florida: A House Divided In A Game Of Winners And Losers . . . We All Lose, Graham Says

February 3, 1985

Florida became a territory of the United States in 1821, and after that the territorial government divided the state up into a limited number of counties. One of those counties, which covered most of what is now South Florida, was Monroe County, named after the president who was in office at the time Florida was acquired from Spain.

The main business of the county seat of Monroe County, which was Key West, was wrecking. They would go out onto the reefs when a ship would wreck and salvage the goods. This became a very lucrative and competitive business, and part of the competition was that whoever got there first had first claim on the salvage rights of the ship.

Oftentimes, there were controversies as to who got there first, and so the county judge in Key West became the arbiter of who had the rights to salvage.

There was a group of these wreckers who felt that they were not getting a fair shake from the county judge. So they first decided that they would move from Key West about 75 or 100 miles north to what was then an unpopulated key called Indian Key, so they would be closer to where the reefs were and get there first.

So they did that. And that helped them for a little while. But they still had problems with that judge down in Key West, who they felt was giving ``home court advantage`` to the wreckers from Key West. So they got the idea that what they needed to do was to have their own county, so they could have their own county seat -- most importantly, have their own county judge who would then interpret who got there first to the wrecks.

It happened that at about the time this was going on, we were in the midst of the Seminole Indian war, and an officer by the name of Dade had just been massacred. So when the people of Indian Key went to the Legislature in the mid-1830s to suggest the creation of a new county, they received a positive response and the decision was to name this barren wilderness, hundreds of miles away from where the massacre had taken place, after Dade. A new county was born, and a county seat was established as we know it to be, at Indian Key, the center of the population of Dade County.

And things went pretty well down at Indian Key for about five years. They had their county seat; they had their county judge; they were getting good determinations on their salvage rights. The only thing that got in the way was that in 1841 they had a second Seminole Indian war, and the Indians decided that they wanted Indian Key -- I guess reclaiming their namesake -- and wiped out most of the population of Indian Key, causing the county seat to be relocated to Key Biscayne.

What`s the relevance of that story of the history of our region 150 years ago to what we are doing today? I think there are several significant things:

One is the sense of parochialism which drove the people to decide to divide up what had been a single governmental unit into two units.

Second, a sense of winners and losers; that if Key West won, Indian Key must lose; that the divisions of the geography into governmental units became divisions of psychology into winners and losers.

I am afraid that we still suffer from some of that Indian Key mentality -- a mentality that emphasizes those relatively ephemeral things which divide us, to the exclusion of those things which unite us. In a sense, that as we try for a unity of purpose and objectives, somebody has to win and somebody has to lose.

We are paying a high price for this regional attitude of division. I was in Southern California recently for economic development, talking to businesses we are interested in having come to this state. I spent a good part of a day with one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world, a company which has expressed a considerable interest in coming to Florida, a company that I have reason to believe will come to Florida in the near future. They looked at five sites in Florida before they narrowed it to one they are now specifically interested in. None of those sites was in South Florida.

I asked the vice president in charge of their site location why they didn`t have a site in South Florida on their list. Here`s a man who had told me at lunch that he wants to retire someplace between Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach, that he is an avid sailor and he thinks this is the greatest sailing area in the world. Why, with that kind of personal awareness and interest in Southeast Florida, had he not for his own company placed this on the list of sites that they were going to consider for a major plant location?

The answer he gave me was that he did not feel that they would be able to attract the engineers that they needed to a site in Southeast Florida, that a combination of the image of the area and what he saw to be the human institutions of the area were not sufficient to be the place that he felt would be attractive that they needed to make their business a success.

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