The Politics of Trust: Reubin Askew and Florida in the 1970s

By Gordon E. Harvey

Florida governor Reubin Askew memorably characterized a leader as “someone who cares enough to tell the people not merely what they want to hear, but what they need to know.” It was a surprising statement for a contemporary politician to make, and, more surprising still, it worked. In The Politics of Trust: Reubin Askew and Florida in the 1970s, Gordon E. Harvey traces the life and career of the man whose public service many still recall as “the Golden Age” of Florida politics.
 
Askew rose to power on a wave of “New South” leadership that hoped to advance the Democratic Party beyond the intransigent torpor of southern politics since the Civil War. He hoped to replace appeals to white supremacy with a vision of a more diverse and inclusive party. Following his election in Florida, other New South leaders such as Georgia’s Jimmy Carter, Arkansas’s Dale Bumpers, and South Carolina’s John C. West all came to power.
 
Audacious and gifted, Askew was one of six children raised by a single mother in Pensacola. As he worked his way up through the ranks of the state legislature, few in Florida except his constituents knew his name when he challenged Republic incumbent Claude R. Kirk Jr. on a populist platform promising higher corporate taxes. When he won, he inaugurated a series of reforms, including a new 5 percent corporate income tax; lower consumer, property, and school taxes; a review of penal statutes; environmental protections; higher welfare benefits; and workers’ compensation to previously uncovered migrant laborers.
 
Touting honesty, candor, and transparency, Askew dubbed his administration “government in the sunshine.” Harvey demonstrates that Askew’s success was not in spite of his penchant for bold, sometimes unpopular stances, but rather because his mix of unvarnished candor, sober ethics, and religious faith won the trust of the diverse peoples of his state.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817388881

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THE POLITICS OF TRUST

THE POLITICS OF TRUST

Reubin Askew and Florida in the 1970s

GORDON E. HARVEY

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Caslon and Ariel

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover photograph: Senator Reubin Askew making a speech in Highlands County, Florida, during his campaign for governor, 1970; courtesy of Florida Memory, State Library and Archives of Florida (www.floridamemory.com)

Cover design: Todd Lape/Lape Designs

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harvey, Gordon E. (Gordon Earl), 1967–

The politics of trust : Reubin Askew and Florida in the 1970s / Gordon E. Harvey.

pages cm. — (The Modern South)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1882-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8888-1 (ebook) 1. Askew, Reubin O’D., 1928–2014. 2. Florida—Politics and government—1951– 3. Political culture—Florida—History—20th century. 4. Governors—Florida—Biography.

I. Title.

F316.23.A75H37 2015

975.9’063092—dc23

[B]

2015011893

Contents

Preface

1. Reubin Who?

2. The Nut with a Huey Long Outlook

3. Rube’s Funny Notions

4. Ignorance Is the Midwife of Demagoguery and Oppression

5. We Must Free Ourselves . . . from the Tattered Fetters of the Booster Mentality

6. Reubin, You Promised

7. A Public Office Is a Public Trust

8. Unbought, Unbossed—and Unelected

9. A Presbyterian Lyndon Johnson

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

My earliest memory of southern politics dates to 1970. I was three and my father had taken me to the parking lot of the Liberty Grocery Store in Roebuck, Alabama, just northeast of Birmingham. I sat atop his shoulders as we listened to an energetic man give a speech. I do not remember what he said or what he looked like. I remember that the parking lot was crowded and the people there seemed happy to see the man. After the speech, my father took me to the flat-top truck trailer upon which the speaker stood and raised me up to shake his hand. It was not until years later, while reading a book about George Corley Wallace, that I realized that the man whose hand I had shaken was none other than Wallace—the Fightin’ Little Judge himself. I still have Dad’s Wallace pins on my office wall, along with assorted Wallace buttons in my collection.

My father supported Wallace in each of his gubernatorial and presidential campaigns, believing, as he explained later, that Wallace stood for the little man, the people who worked hard to provide for their families and who enjoyed the simple pleasures of life, like fishing and camping and playing ball with their sons. A member of the United Mine Workers and the Organization of Chemical and Atomic Workers (his own father was a journeyman machinist), Dad exhibited populist political tendencies. To Dad, political affiliation was less important than whether or not you were a good man. But like many white southerners, Dad was not a vocal supporter of racial equality. His views of Wallace reflected the mood of most white Alabamians of the day.

When recruited in the 1950s for membership in the Klan, Dad refused. He explained to me later that while he, like a lot of white southerners, did not oppose segregation, he certainly was not foolish enough to join the Klan: he found those people scary, and extremism unsettled him. He merely wanted to support candidates who seemed to look out for his interests. Like most white southerners, my father transitioned from being a southern Democrat to an enthusiastic Wallace supporter to a solid Republican voter.

While I would like to write that my parking lot encounter with history was the beginning of a lifelong study of southern politics, alas, I cannot. Video games, science fiction, model airplanes, sports, and girls dominated my interests for the next couple of decades. It was not until graduate school that I was struck by an even greater symmetry between that 1970 parking lot speech and my chosen vocation. I wrote a book entitled A Question of Justice about the education reform policies of three New South governors: John C. West, Reubin Askew, and Albert Brewer.

An aside here: some reviewers of that book asserted that Brewer was most certainly not a New South governor since he had, for example, opposed busing. But I included him in that category because for Alabama, Brewer was most certainly new in his outlook. Thanks to Wallace’s pervasive grip on Alabama politics, Albert Brewer was as new as Alabama’s New South was going to get in the 1970s.

While I was researching the Brewer section of that study, it dawned on me that the event that my dad had taken me to was during the 1970 Democratic gubernatorial primary and that Wallace’s opponent that year had been none other than Albert Brewer, who had served as governor since Gov. Lurleen Wallace’s death in 1968 to cancer. That campaign, which I wrote about years later, remains the nastiest in state history, ended Alabama’s tragically brief flirtation with moderation, and reinstalled George Wallace as Alabama’s governor, while further stunting the state’s political maturation.

My brush with Wallace fame also weighed heavily on my mind when I researched the Askew chapters in A Question of Justice. During his 1972 presidential campaign, Wallace won the Florida Democratic presidential primary. On the ballot that day was a nonbinding referendum on amending the US Constitution to prohibit busing. Wallace supported the measure, while Askew took the highly unpopular position of speaking out for busing as the only real (if flawed) means of school integration. This campaign brought in sharp relief the crossroads that the South faced in the early 1970s. Would it seek to correct past racial transgressions, as Askew advocated? Or would the South follow Wallace and try to maintain, or at least pay homage to, some element of a system that had been ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court and scores of lower-level federal judges?

There was something about Askew, his honesty, his ideals, and his squeaky-clean closet, that at once fascinated me and struck me as odd. I was seven when Richard Nixon resigned from office and Gerald Ford assumed the presidency. Corruption in politics was a given to many of us who actually thought about it, as it is with many who have even a glancing interest in the political process. My generation (the founding members of Generation X) became apolitical; few of my high school and college classmates cared about politics. We could identify the president (Carter, then Reagan), but beyond that there was, frankly, little to admire in politicians and the system they had created. We gravitated toward Luke Skywalker, not the Great Communicator.

As I researched the education policies of Reubin Askew, however, I found an honest politician. I had never seen a real one before. Like sighting a rare bird or finding a nearly extinct animal, I had found a politician who inspired people, who spoke honestly and firmly to citizens, who spoke his conscience even if it meant political defeat, and who took positions that he believed were right and proper and not merely politically expedient. To be honest, I came to admire Askew. While not agreeing with every issue position he took, I thought he showed honesty and leadership. The rarity of principled actions by politicians made him appear striking. So I confess a particular affinity for my subject. While we historians freely admit that we strive for and cherish objectivity and dispassionate analysis, we also know that true objectivity—like the Holy Grail of Arthurian legend—is nigh unattainable. We have concluded, then, that if we can be honest and open about our particular biases, then we can write better and more objective histories. And so, I attempt to do that here. I like Reubin Askew and wish there were more Askews around today. But I have done my utmost to not let my bias cloud my analysis or my conclusions. And it is my sincere hope that this is self-evident in the coming pages.

This book has been some time in the making. It is not easy to research and write while teaching three and sometimes four courses per semester at a teaching-focused institution. I found myself sneaking away from my family on holidays and summer vacations to Florida and spending time in Florida state archives. I also had to continually reacquaint myself with my subject after long periods of inactivity because of the demands of my university service and teaching obligations. Then I was offered an administrative position at another university. My family relocated and I became mired in the day-to-day chaos of chairing a department. The accepted manuscript sat and collected dust for several more years.

In my experience over the years, the State Archives of Florida has been a model of efficiency. The staff there has been invaluable. David Cole, before he left for a teaching position, was full of good humor helping a researcher get through long days going through archival boxes. Miriam Gan-Spalding took up where David left off.

I express my deepest gratitude to the many readers of all or parts of this book as it was presented at conferences and published in journals or essay collections: David Goldfield, Wayne Flynt, Jack Davis, Tim Silver, Doug Flamming, Bryant Simon, Jane Dailey, Lance deHaven-Smith, Julian Pleasants, Richard Starnes, and Kari Frederickson. And I appreciate the astute reading and constructive criticism of the anonymous readers who evaluated this manuscript for the University of Alabama Press; their comments and suggestions made this a much stronger book. Julian Pleasants, who knows Askew better than anyone, gave me his valuable time and provided insights that were crucial to understanding the governor.

Of course, I continue to draw inspiration and advice from Wayne Flynt, Donna Bohanan, Joe Kicklighter, Dan Szechi, Sam Webb, Jim Tent, Tennant McWilliams, Robin Fabel, Larry Gerber, Steve McFarland, and Bill Trimble, all of whom have moved from being professors and mentors to friends. I cherish my relationship with these first-rate individuals. Dear friends Richard Starnes, Brooks Blevins, Dan Pierce, and Craig Pascoe have helped me to see the lighter side of our field. A good laugh always helps overcome bad writing days. My colleagues in the History & Foreign Languages Department at Jacksonville State University are a fine bunch of scholars. I am honored to be their chair.

I want to thank the University of Alabama Press for publishing my first book, A Question of Justice. Its discussion of education and race informed my thinking and research in developing this book. Thanks also to Nick Wynne and the Florida Historical Society for allowing me to take my article on the corporate income tax that appeared in the Florida Historical Quarterly and reprint an expanded revised version here. And to the University Press of Florida, thanks for allowing me to take my chapter on the Big Cypress National Preserve that appeared in the wonderful essay collection edited by Jack Davis and Ray Arsenault, Paradise Lost? The Environmental History of Florida. It was an honor to be included in that project and I am eternally grateful to them for asking me to take part in it.

And to the University of Alabama Press, especially Dan Waterman, I give my warmest thoughts and expressions of gratitude. This book has a long and interesting history and I won’t lengthen these pages with the details. Suffice it to say, Dan welcomed this manuscript to the press at a time when I was ready to box it up and forget about it for good. Reviving this project has reminded me why I wanted to write it in the first place. Administrative appointments, new jobs, family relocations, and teenage sons can distract a person’s focus and energy. Thanks to Dan and the editorial board at the press for offering this book a home. If it were not for Donna Bohanan, who bought me lunch one summer day in 2013 and convinced me to make one last run at getting this thing in print, it would have remained in boxes in my closet.

And finally, without my family none of what I have accomplished as a teacher and scholar would have been possible. My wife and sons have supported me without question for so long. This book is dedicated to my father, Gordon, and my sons, Preston and Hudson. Dad taught me how to be a father. And my sons make my world worth living in. The older I get, the more I appreciate just how wonderful a father my dad was to me. If I can be half the father to my boys that my dad was to me, I will have done very well.

1

Reubin Who?

In May 1988 Reubin Askew did what he had done often in his political career—he surprised his state and his supporters with a decision so contrary to conventional wisdom as to invite criticism and complaint even from his most ardent followers. Earlier that year, under pressure from friends and supporters, he had agreed to run for Florida’s US Senate seat, vacated by the equally surprising retirement of Lawton Chiles. Askew enjoyed a comfortable lead in the polls and faced primary and general elections that appeared to be mere formalities before taking office. If any election result was a given, this would be it. But in May, Askew suddenly withdrew from the race. He cited his disgust at the pace and frequency of fund-raising required by modern campaigns, which increasingly took him away from voters and toward monied interests, and the prospect of relocating his family to Washington, DC. His decision brought criticism from supporters, donors, colleagues, and friends, all of whom felt that he had let them and their party down. Askew’s candidacy most assuredly would have kept Florida Democrats in control of Chiles’s US Senate seat at a time when the state and the region had started trending Republican. But those who best knew Askew realized that this act, like so many others in his more than three decades of public service, was not wholly inconsistent with his political style. It was, however, an inglorious end to one of the most remarkable and noteworthy political careers in Florida and southern history.

Reubin Askew followed one fundamental vision throughout his public and private life—liberty of conscience. He acted in such a manner in order to pursue what he saw as right for his state and his constituents. His guiding political philosophy was to seek justice, especially for those who could not seek it for themselves. And he did this often at tremendous political risk. In 1972, in the middle of a heated campaign against a statewide referendum on busing, Askew explained why he took positions that were contrary to the dictates of modern political conventional wisdom: When I leave the governor’s office, I want to be able to walk down any street in Florida and say in good conscience that I kept the faith, that I kept the faith with my principles and with myself.¹

A devout man, Askew exhibited a strong faith in God. Yet he refused to wield his religiosity as a political weapon. He rarely mentioned his faith in political speeches, although his spiritual side was well known to many. This devotion guided all his actions, public and private, but he did not use it as an instrument for stirring voters’ passions and fears. One of the few times he mentioned his faith directly was in 1979 in his farewell address at the end of his tenure as governor. I thank the Lord for sustaining us during these eight years, he said, which were certainly among the best years of my life. Years before, in an interview with a Presbyterian radio program early in his first term, Askew had elaborated on his religious beliefs: While our faith, if it is to be meaningful, has to be demonstrated in works, it is also a source of joy and renewal, you know, as you set about doing it.²

Those who knew Askew from his early years in Pensacola and who worshipped with him at First Presbyterian Church remember a serious man, capable of big belly laughs but also in possession of a consistency of character. Askew developed his moral compass long before he entered public service. Fellow Pensacolans knew something about him was different. For example, most politicians of that period, especially in the South, did business over cocktails. A proud teetotaler, Askew conducted his affairs over coffee, often at the Coffee Cup on Cervantes Street. He was also a youth leader, a choir member, and an elder in his church alongside his close friend Harvey Cotton, who later raised money for and helped run his campaigns, especially the successful 1970 race for governor.

The church and Askew were a perfect fit. First Presbyterian in Pensacola had liberal tendencies in the 1960s, especially on race—the session voted to allow African Americans to worship there if they wished. The social conscience of the First Presbyterian congregants was rare among southern churches of that time. Part of it was fueled by its ministers, such as Herb Miller, but also by the influx of new Pensacola residents who taught at the University of West Florida. Many congregants were outspoken about the need for racial reconciliation, and some went on to work in Askew’s political campaigns.

Few were surprised at his zeal in serving the public. One friend recalled John Calvin’s teachings on the role of the magistrate in Institutes of the Christian Religion, namely that civil authority is the most sacred and by far the most honorable of all callings in the whole life of mortal men, that the magistrate had a higher calling than the teacher or minister because of the office’s inherent power to do good or do bad. That passage, said Askew’s friend, described Askew’s motivation perfectly—to young Reubin, no calling was higher than serving his fellow Floridians.³

The criticism and surprise that accompanied Askew’s Senate race withdrawal has long given way to a broader appreciation of his gubernatorial leadership in the 1970s—a decade that saw Florida, and the rest of the South, emerge from the turbulent 1960s to pursue a path of progressivism. Even today, it is rare not to see a major Florida newspaper invoke Askew’s legacy in the midst of some contemporary crisis, election, or reform cause. He has become Florida’s wise old solon, a symbol of Florida’s greatest political era. Often, Florida editorialists will follow a sort of What would Reubin do? theme in their analyses of current issues in Florida. His legacy is strong. From equal rights to environmental protection, tax reform to transparency in state government, and education reform to equal opportunity for education, Florida underwent tremendous change during the 1970s, instituting reforms that required reconciliation both with the state’s past and with the reform impetus created by new nonsouthern residents.

Askew grew up in and served a dynamic, ever-changing state—one fractured by geography, as the historian David Colburn once described it. Florida exhibits a peculiar schizophrenia, with five politically distinct regions. The counties between Pensacola and Jacksonville most resemble Florida’s neighboring states and, as Colburn writes, draw their political traditions from Dixie. The Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Palm Beach megalopolis tends to exhibit strong Democratic tendencies, imported from various northeastern states. The lower Gulf Coast displays a midwestern Republican conservativism, while the state’s midsection—the I-4 corridor that links Tampa/St. Petersburg with Orlando and Daytona Beach—is a fast-growing area that remains Democratic by the narrowest of margins. And last is what the longtime Florida journalist Tom Fiedler calls the forgotten Florida, the central Florida interior north and west of Lake Okeechobee. This area has seen little of the tremendous growth and is dominated by farming and mining economically and conservative Democrats politically. As Fielder once observed, The farther North you go from Miami, the farther South you get. Geographically, Pensacola is closer to Chicago than Miami, while Miami is closer to Cuba than Pensacola. Such geographical and attitudinal divergence leaves the state with no sense of collective purpose or even a collective history, fostering an every man for himself character, as V. O. Key Jr. observed.⁴

No southern state has undergone, or continues to experience, the scope and scale of change that Florida has seen. Such change, like the rest of Florida’s history and life, is inextricably linked to the state’s ever-changing population. Through the 1960s Florida resembled its southern counterparts in many ways, not least its racial condition. Segregation dominated Florida’s social structure, as it did Georgia’s and Alabama’s. And, as in the rest of the South, few schools in Florida were integrated during the 1950s and 1960s. Although historians of the South and of Florida debate the extent of Florida’s southernness, until the late 1960s and early 1970s Florida was like any other southern state in terms of economy, social structure, race relations, and political mannerisms. Before 1920 Florida’s identity was marked by its involvement in and reaction to the Civil War. That experience, write Colburn and Lance deHaven-Smith, seared Florida’s southern identity into the soul of its citizens and into the state’s place in the nation for the next hundred years. Reconstruction also contributed to the state’s fragmented state government, which until recently featured an elected state cabinet of six members who, at times, held power equal to that of the governor in their respective executive departments. Until 1920 Florida remained a rural state, with most of its population residing near the Georgia border. But the rise of Wall Street and a leisure and middle class resulted in a population and land boom that transformed the state for a short while, until 1926, when the state entered a speculation-induced depression, caused in large part by its inability to control rampant land speculation and the failure of local municipalities to control their spending and debt accumulation. The bust resulted in political divisions between North and South Florida. Northern Florida counties with smaller debts bristled at tax increases designed to help pay off oppressive debts in many South Florida counties. This tension and mistrust became a hallmark of Florida politics for the rest of the century.⁵

But Florida saw the beginning of an overwhelming period of transformation after 1950. It was, as Gary Mormino has written, the start of Florida’s Big Bang, a tremendous change in the nature and size of Florida’s population that directly affected its social, political, and economic fortunes. Since the 1950s, Florida has undergone several transformations to the point that Mormino concluded that reinventing Florida is a cottage industry. The firestorm of change that created a new Florida included air conditioning, DDT, bulldozers, interstate highways, millions of tourists, and millions of new residents. After 1960 Florida grew more distant from the rest of the South culturally, leading to debate among historians about the extent to which the state remains southern, if at all. In 1959 only 2.7 million people lived in Florida, which meant that it had only the third-highest population of the six Deep South states; Georgia and Alabama were then more populous than Florida, while Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina were less. During the next several decades, Florida’s population grew in leaps and bounds: by 35 percent in the 1960s and by 76 percent between 1970 and 1990, when the national average was 21 percent and the booming southern average was 40 percent. From 1950 to 1990, Florida’s population growth was exceeded only by that of California and Texas.⁶

Florida’s segregationist past and the maintenance of Jim Crow into the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s was directly threatened by the influx of nonsouthern residents, and brought on what Colburn and deHaven-Smith described as the collision of the Old South and the New. Nothing illustrates this condition better than the arrival of northeastern and midwestern business émigrés in Florida; as Colburn writes, they had no desire to see their interests jeopardized by a commitment to a long-dead southern past. The beginning of the end of the Old South in Florida came in 1940 with the massive influx of military personnel and the construction of military establishments, transforming it into a garrison state. World War II ended the Depression throughout the United States, created economic opportunity for African Americans, and renewed national interest in Florida as a tourist destination. The ensuing battle over reapportionment in the mid-1950s was perhaps the most important political and legal battle the state ever witnessed. It put at odds new, nonsouthern South Florida residents and native-born North Florida legislators, who in the face of this new challenge banded together to form the infamous Pork Chop Gang, which was more interested in appropriations and consolidation of power than serving in legislative districts more proportionate to the state’s shifting and growing population. Their unity blocked reapportionment as they developed into an extremely powerful force in southern politics.⁷

As Florida’s population grew and its malapportioned districts persisted, this gang of northern and rural legislators found themselves representing fewer and fewer people in the state. As late as the 1950s only 13.6 percent of the state’s population elected most state senators and 18 percent elected the bulk of state representatives. But the Pork Choppers persisted in defeating every reapportionment bill put forth through the 1950s and into the late 1960s. The nexus of race and political power that created Pork Chopper domination continued through the administrations of LeRoy Collins (who unsuccessfully proposed reapportionment in every legislative session of his governorship), Farris Bryant, and Haydon Burns, and through the infamous communist- and gay-hunting Johns Committee and the battle for St. Augustine—two of Florida’s darkest periods in race relations.⁸

Because the population growth in South Florida was a new phenomenon, the Pork Choppers were able to maintain power longer than their raw numbers would have suggested. For many years the new residents in the southernmost region of the state were concerned mostly with local rather than statewide issues; it took a period of time before political power in Florida shifted southward in the late 1960s. Governor (and later Senator) Bob Graham called this the Cincinnati Factor. New residents from northern and midwestern cities like Cincinnati may have moved to South Florida and cared about their local communities but for all practical purposes remained Cincinnatians, paying relatively little attention to statewide issues.⁹

But as Florida’s attractiveness for business grew—aided by the lack of a personal income tax and a token corporate profits tax—more and more businesses moved to the state and insisted upon stability, according to Colburn. Businesses and corporations such as the Walt Disney Company insisted that before they would consider relocating to or building in Florida, the state had to figure out how to avoid the violent unrest and confrontations seen in other southern states. Disney and the other businesses in Florida stopped short of calling for full racial integration, but they demanded that the state not follow the massive resistance that characterized Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. It would hurt tourism and the state’s economy. By 1965, however, the question became moot, when the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act removed the last obstacles to segregation and disfranchisement and opened wide the door for reapportionment in Florida.¹⁰

The destruction of the Pork Chop Gang and the end of its long influence over Florida politics began in the mid-1960s with several landmark US Supreme Court decisions. In 1962 Baker v. Carr established that state constitutions that did not codify one man, one vote were in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Five years later in Swann v. Adams, the court ruled that Florida, which had done little since 1962 to correct those provisions of the state constitution that violated Baker, must hold new elections with districts reapportioned according to one person, one vote.¹¹ By 1972, the year reapportionment became a reality, rural and conservative legislators no longer dominated the legislature; that body now more accurately reflected the makeup and location of the bulk of its population: urban, younger, more progressive in ideology. Reapportionment also shifted the lines of political battle. The fundamental division in the legislature followed not only geographic lines—urban versus rural, North Florida versus South Florida—but also party affiliation.¹²

Another wave in the political sea change taking place in Florida was constitutional revision. Ratified in November 1968, the new Florida constitution was a grand departure from its previous incarnation. It now protected basic civil liberties, reconfirmed Florida as a right-to-work state, reorganized and consolidated state agencies, gave the governor the right to serve two terms, and re-created the office of lieutenant governor. In terms of future reform efforts, the 1968 constitution gave the legislature the power to enact environmental protection laws and instituted a basic, if quite vague, requirement of financial disclosure for all public officials. Citizens would also now have a tool for amending the constitution without going through the legislature. Initiative petitions allowed citizens to place a proposed amendment on the ballot by collecting signatures equal to 8 percent of voters who had voted in the last presidential election from at least half of the state’s congressional districts. Under the 1969 Legislative Reorganization Act, the legislature would now meet annually.¹³

Such developments transformed Florida’s political parties. As throughout the South from Reconstruction through the 1950s, all statewide elections were contested within the Democratic Party. But Florida’s voters exhibited an independent streak that departed from regional norms, and race was a major reason for that independence. Because the state’s African American population was smaller than that in neighboring states, the racial rhetoric that often escalated political tensions elsewhere was not as omnipresent. This allowed white Floridians to vote occasionally for someone other than a Democrat. In 1928 the state supported Herbert Hoover for president; in 1966 Claude Kirk won the governor’s office; and in 1968 Floridians sent its first Republican, Ed Gurney, to the US Senate—Gurney beat a former governor, the Democrat LeRoy Collins. The elections of Kirk and Gurney, writes Colburn, revealed that Floridians saw these men as the more conservative candidates and therefore more apt to preserve the political and social traditions of the past. But voters, Colburn adds, quickly dumped both men once they realized that these traditions could not be retained, and they did not turn back to the Republican Party until the 1980s.¹⁴

Kirk especially hurt GOP efforts because he was seen as a political buffoon who reinforced the traditional view that Republicans in Florida were political mediocrities, writes Colburn. The GOP’s strength traditionally was located in South Florida, while North Florida remained Democratic. While Kirk and Gurney did little to affect this situation, everything changed in the 1980s as the Republican Party became powerful in statewide politics and overtook traditional Democratic areas, especially in North Florida.¹⁵

As Florida was changing politically, so were the men occupying the statehouse. Larry Sabato and Richard Scher have both written about the transformation of the southern statehouses and state chief executives into capable, professional, and progressive governors. It was a remarkable change from the less-than-stellar early twentieth-century southern governors, from Florida’s Fred Cone to Louisiana’s Jimmy Davis, who were known as passive leaders, and at various times were described by observers as machine dupes, political pipsqueaks, or flowery old courthouse politicians. Several factors contributed to this transformation. First, the changing nature of southern politics was paramount in opening up elections from complete one-party control to more open and honest elections that invited better men, and later women, to run for statewide office. But the competition for federal largesse and the need to sell their states to industry was another consideration. By the mid-1970s, national political observers raved about the nation’s governors, particularly those from the South. Political columnist David Broder concluded in 1976 that there was probably no finer a collection of state governors than the fifty who held office in that year. Something had changed. And the governors who took office in the South, in the wake of laughable governors of past years (those who vastly outnumbered the more capable ones), took advantage of this newfound respect and perhaps trust to reform their states to better meet the changing nature of state governors, state economies, and regional needs.¹⁶

It was in this political and social atmosphere that Reubin Askew ran for and won election as governor in 1970. A year earlier, when Askew first decided to run, he met with a handful of friends in the Pensacola