Today marks the remembrance of a very important Southern man who fought an important, and largely Southern battle: the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  While certainly everyone knows the struggle for civil rights that King spearheaded, probably few know the controversial history of this holiday.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ronald Reagan officially signed the bill making MLK Day a holiday in 1983, even though he was vocally against the creation of a holiday honoring King.  In fact, even when announcing he would sign the bill, his resignation at doing so is clearly evident:

Since they seem bent on making it a national holiday, I believe the symbolism of that day is important enough that I would—I’ll sign that legislation when it reaches my desk.

And Reagan wasn’t the only one to fight the passage of this historic national holiday.  Sen. Jesse Helms of South Carolina mounted a filibuster against the bill, and also impugned King’s character by calling him a “Marxist.”  And don’t forget another notable Senator who fought the passage of a national King holiday: a certain Arizonan Senator by the name of John McCain.  McCain even defended the rescinding of the holiday by then Arizona governor Evan Mecham.

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This is the second in a series of articles about the economic history of the south. Read the first post here

(quick note-this entry is currently longer than the dissertation chapter I’m working on)

The second period of Southern Economic History, at least where I am arbitrarily cutting it up, starts with the rise of the Constitution in the 1790s. One of the most debated historical topics concerns the Constitution and whether it was written by altruistic statesmen, or opportunistic rich white men. That debate underpins the south’s role in the growing national economy, but I’m not really qualified to waste an hour of your time explaining it.

Suffice to say that although southern statesmen signed the Constitution, there were some issues with the document that would have long term effects on the South’s ability to influence national politics. The structure of the legislative branch would eventually decrease the south’s importance (the Northwest and Southwest Ordinances meant that the South would never have a Senate majority, and the agreement on counting slaves as 3/5 of a person was the only factor that kept southern states competitive in the House). At the same time, while Southerners kept control of the Executive Branch during the so-called “Era of Good Feelings” (the Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe administrations outside of the War of 1812), the Federalist Marshall Court also chipped away at the “Democratic-Republican” ideals of these Southerners.

Who had two thumbs and was a southerner who highly valued independent yeoman farmers? This guy.

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In this post, I am going to earn my keep as the in-house historian and look at how history has shaped the region.  Jeff has already talked extensively about the social aspects of what the Panhandle is, and I’m sure Brian will follow suit.

After the Seven Years War ended in 1763, Britain took over the Florida territory from Spain and split it into two parts.  One of these was West Florida, an expanse of land that reached from the Chattahoochee River to the Mississippi River (except for the port of New Orleans), going all the way north to a straight line that included roughly the bottom third of the current states of Alabama and Mississippi.

After the Revolutionary War, Spain returned to power in Florida, as allies of the colonists against the British, but Americans balked at this northern expansion in Western Florida.  In 1795, the treaty of San Lorenzo returned the West Florida border to the northern position recognizable today at the 31st parallel.  Americans and British poured into the area, and in 1810, British settlers established the short lived independent Republic of West Florida, which included everything between the Perdido and Mississippi Rivers, and south of that 31st parallel—which for those of you keeping track, doesn’t include any of current day Florida.

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My name is Lawrence, and I grew up in Panama City, FL, on the Gulf Coast halfway between Pensacola and Tallahassee. The reason my family ended up in Panama City was the same as many new, transplanted families in the central and western Panhandle—the United States military. My father enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1963 and remained in the service for 23 years as a Master Diver

He and my mother came to Panama City for the first time in 1978. They bought the house that my father still lives in, only 3 miles or so from the dive school at the Navy Base. In 1982, we moved to Virginia Beach where my mother gave birth to my younger brother. In 1986, my father announced his retirement and we moved back to Panama City. My father, a native of Texas and Kansas, I believe felt most comfortable in that part of the country compared to other places he lived as an adult. My mother agreed, even though her childhood was spent in Washington D.C. A growing economy and opportunities for people with his skill set also factored prominently in my parents’ decision to raise my brother and I in that small city.

I attended Northside Elementary School (Go Vikings), Jinks Middle School (Go Hornets), then Bay High School (Go Tornadoes), in what I can only describe as a typical educational experience, with the occasional atypical events and a number of fast friends that made that life more exciting. I’m sure that deeper analysis of our youth and primary educational experiences (and, perhaps, embarrassments) will be a common sight here at The Panhandler’s Guide.

In 2000 I graduated from Bay High School and started at the New College of Florida, in southwest Florida, where after flirting with Mathematics, I pursued a degree in History/Economics. It was during pre-orientation my first year that I met Jeff Lundy, a Nicevillian. Our friendship grew, in no small part, out of this “fish out of water” position we held. Non-Floridians did not quite understand what made us any different from the rest of the Floridians on campus. Those from in state, though, clearly espoused a distinction between people from Florida and people from LA, Lower Alabama.

During our third year, a first year, whose popularity and potential was boundless, came to our attention. We became fast friends with Live Oak’s favorite son, Brian Cody. Brian and Jeff were both training as sociologists, but our academic paths often crossed. We shared interests, and New College is in a minority of institutions that houses History in the Social Sciences, so our curricula had some overlap as well.

After Jeff and I graduated in 2004, we both accepted graduate associate positions; he in the Sociology department at UC San Diego, and I took one in the History department at The Ohio State University. Two years later, despite our greatest efforts to dissuade him, Brian joined us in graduate school, taking a position in the Sociology department at the University of Chicago.

It is in our graduate work, and the fact that the location of that graduate work removed us from our roots by hundreds of miles, that we became more able to really analyze what we always took as truth. That the Florida Panhandle enjoys a particular brand of uniqueness, while remaining hegemonic with certain aspects of the American South, the Sunbelt, and political changes dating from at least the Great Depression. Hopefully, our conversations will enlighten and humor you at least half as effectively as they do for us. We welcome you and your comments to The Panhandler’s Guide

When I meet new people here in Chicago where I live, I often feel like I’m in an AA meeting: “Hi. My name is Brian, and I’m a Panhandler. I’ve been southern for 25 years now.” As the supporting yet slightly pitying looks dart back and forth and the polite applause dies down, I have to ask myself, “Will I ever NOT be a southerner?”

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t want to be southern. I ask this question as a start to understanding what it means to be southern, what other people seem to know about me when they divine that I’m from the Panhandle of Florida and NOT from Miami, and to discover what it is that is perceived to be so different about the South compared to the rest of the country. 

Thus The Panhandler’s Guide. Through this blog my two partners in intellectual me-search and I will try to expose what it means to be from, and to be in, the Panhandle and the South. We want to tackle this challenge through a mixture of empirical data and good old fashioned unsubstantiated anecdotes from our own lives to help get that “rich description” anthropologists are always going on about. 

You may at this point be wondering about my credentials. Am I the quintessential image of a grits eating, pick-up truck driving, overalls wearing, church going, tobacco picking, banjo playing good old boy? Well, no. But I’m not the opposite, either. In the South I’m not quite Southern enough, but in the rest of the country I’m enough Southern to be typecast as such.

I was born in the Florida Panhandle. My parents moved out of Miami in the late 1970s as refugees from the race riots (like the Arthur McDuffie Riots) towards a more picturesque and simple life, in the fashion of “The Waltons” or “Little House on the Prairie.” They stopped in Tallahassee for a few years before purchasing land in the small town of Live Oak in Suwannee County. In 1980, Suwannee county had 22,287 residents (we’re in the data section now, by the way) and ranked as 46 out of 67 counties by population – meaning 21 counties had even fewer residents. This, dear reader, is a rural area: 33 people per square mile, which is 36 times less dense than Miami and 386 times less dense than the city of Chicago.

My mother was a nurse, and my father began as a school teacher and then ventured into running a series of his own businesses beginning with weaning calves and selling them as mature cows, and then operated a mobile sawmill (jobs which, by the way, were wildly unpleasant for me at the time but great icebreaking stories now). Both enterprises failed to gain fiscal traction, and so we relied almost exclusively on a nurse’s salary until I was finishing high-school, remaining in the mobile home that was originally meant to be temporary. I mention this to allow the reader to place me in class terms: I, unlike seemingly every undecided voter in America, could only aspire to be middle class, and this economic identity colors my view of the world as I work on my Ph.D. at the upper-class private University of Chicago.

And, for any readers who were misled by the title of this blog, the focus of this site is the Florida Panhandle and is about neither the culinary instrument nor destitute beggars.

Not yet, anyway.