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VOLUMES
WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY
Biography explores postwar governor’s failure to
keep up with the changing attitudes in Florida
BY JANIE GOULD
The name is mostly unknown to contemporary Floridians,
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but in the mid-20th century, Millard Fillmore
Caldwell stood as one of the state’s most powerful
politicians, serving not only as governor but also as a U.S.
congressman, member of the Florida House of Representatives
and chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court.
Like some other Southern politicians of a certain era
whose legacies have suffered because of their views on race,
Caldwell has received scrutiny recently, too, in a 2020 biography
by historian and author Gary Mormino.
The slim volume, Millard Fillmore Caldwell: Governing on
the Wrong Side of History, focuses on a pivotal period in the
Sunshine State’s history, the postwar era. As Mormino put it
in a previous book, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social
History of Modern Florida, population growth after World War
II transformed Florida from a rural backwater into a regional
powerhouse. The three state universities became co-ed, and
baseball spring training came to Vero Beach, among many
other changes wrought in the immediate postwar era.
Born in eastern Tennessee in 1897 to a prosperous landowning
family, Caldwell was named after his father, who was born
in 1856 and named after former President Millard Fillmore,
who was running for president that year as the candidate of
the American Know-Nothings, an anti-immigration party.
The Caldwells moved to North Florida where the younger
Caldwell, after serving in World War I, established himself as
a lawyer, plantation owner and staunch Democratic officeholder.
After serving as a state legislator and congressman, he
ran for governor in 1943 and succeeded Spessard Holland as
one of the state’s two wartime governors.
ONE TERM ONLY
Governors at that time couldn’t run for re-election. As
Mormino explains, the one-term rule grew out of hatred for
Reconstruction, which allowed African Americans to vote
and run for office. After Reconstruction ended, term limits
were written into Florida’s 1885 constitution to curb executive
power.
Mormino tells why the all-male, all-white University of
Florida and the all-female, all-white Florida State College
of Women became co-educational after the war. The latter
school became Florida State University. Caldwell signed
enabling legislation in 1947. It was a practical matter that had
to do with numbers and politics. The GI Bill of Rights made
college tuition free for veterans, but there were far more applicants
than available space. Old wartime barracks became
housing for married students, with one complex at FSU nicknamed
the Fertile Crescent.
Black students flocked to Florida A&M University in Tallahassee,
and the naming of a new president who had survived
a scandal at another school sparked outrage from African-
American writer Zora Neale Hurston of Fort Pierce.
“Zora Neale Hurston wrote Walter White, executive director
of the NAACP in November 1942, beginning her letter,
‘Well, the Negroes have been bitched again!’ ” Mormino
wrote. Hurston described the president as an “insignificant
squirt” and accused him and his wife of cheating young black
recruits at an Army Signal Corps facility at the other school.
Early in his term as governor, while the war was still going
on, Caldwell wired all 67 Florida sheriffs urging them to “use
their good offices to eliminate idleness” by enforcing work-
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MILLARD FILLMORE CALDWELL
Governing on the Wrong Side of History
By Gary R. Mormino
University Press of Florida
2020
185 pages