Florida's changing fortunes

I've just come back... I was going to say the South, but it would be more accurate and not in the least pedantic to say I've been in Florida which, if you go down to the Keys, is certainly as far south as you can go in the United States. It occurs to me that that's not true either. If you want to be really exact, Brownsville, Texas, to the west on the mainland, is actually the southernmost point.

Anyway, the point I wish to make is that while Florida is south of the states of the Deep South – Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi – it is 'in' but not 'of' the South. It's practically a displaced northern state hitched on to the Deep South because the vast majority of the people who live there came in late and came from the north and the Midwest. Unless you go into the back country and come on very old people who've been citrus farming there for two or three generations, you won't hear anything easily recognisable as Southern speech in shops, stores, restaurants, airports, hotels, everywhere. You might, judging from the speech of the people you encounter, you might be in California or Michigan. Certainly not in Texas, not anywhere between the Carolinas and the Gulf of Mexico.

This is a very odd thing. It's as if you started from London and went through the Midlands, through Crewe and noticed the speech getting more northern every mile till you were well into Lancashire and then, as you crossed over into what used to be Cumberland, came on everybody speaking Cockney. Well, the reason, as I've hinted, is not far to seek. The population statistics are staggering in growth, unlike anything in the other 49 states.

The records of such things go back to 1790. As you'd expect, Massachusetts, being the earliest of the New England settlements, had 378,000 people. Florida had no record. It was a vast swamp and there must have been some uncounted Seminole Indians. Florida doesn't come on to the census records till 1830 with 34,000 people and, by then, Massachusetts had nearly 20 times as many people. Move on quickly to 1950. By then Florida had two and three-quarter million people and Massachusetts just over five million. Thirty years later, in 1980 – the last count – Massachusetts has five and three-quarter million and Florida just under ten million. In other words, Florida nearly quadrupled its population in 30 years and the movement has quickened and may still be quickening.

The most mind-boggling statistic of all is this. In the past ten years only, Massachusetts has added 40,000 people. Florida has added three million. What is the big deal, the irresistible appeal? Well, you could say, you used to be able to say with confidence, that up to the Second War, the natives of Florida grew oranges and lemons and made cigars and the greatly swollen winter population came for the sun and the games. There'd been a long, steady influx of permanent winter residents in retired old folks, farmers from the middle west most of all.

After the Second War, it was still citrus and tourism, with a very lively beef cattle industry developing and a continuing dribble or patter of retired people of all classes, but in the Fifties and Sixties, that's when younger people went there – and Puerto Ricans and Cubans and the astronauts. Today, you look at those ten million and you wonder what they do and you find that the main industries are services, trade, tourism.

The word 'services' used to be a benevolent word attesting to the courtesies of selling things and to the compassionate concern of caring for the sick, the old, the dependent, the disabled and so on. Services now covers everything from nursing to hair styling and from punching out social security cheques, to running automobile licensing bureaux and insurance statistics bureaux and hospitals claims bureaux and environmental protection bureaux and the staffing of labour union headquarters and widows compensation offices and bureaux and bureaux and bureaux.

The welfare state has, at last, seen to it that nobody starves and that, especially if you're very poor, you can have free medical care, but the growth and spreading of bureaux and the secretaries and the office staffs and filing clerks and checkers has ballooned the numbers of Americans who, when they have to define their work, come under the general heading of services. I suppose it's much the same in most democratic countries and even more so in thorough going Communist countries.

By now, anyway, in the United States, more than half the working population is in services. It's the chronic headache of anybody in government who has to do something about the economy. Certainly, most of these services have come to be essential and, as old George Herbert said three centuries ago, 'Who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine.'

Well, it may be a service to God but it's also a fearful drag on the national exchequer. Put it bluntly, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts it routinely, and say that more than half the population is not growing anything or making anything or inventing anything, is, in a word, non-productive. So unemployment in Florida – 30 years ago it barely existed – is compounded by several problems which attack other states singly.

Every state is suffering from the lay-offs of skilled workers whose skills, in steel and automobile production most of all, has been supplanted by the skills of foreign countries. Florida now has fewer tourists since there's less money around and so has to lay off waiters, bath attendants, laundresses and the like. Its huge Puerto Rican and Cuban and now Haitian immigrant populations, which burgeoned in the past few years, are coming into a land which has little use for their services, least of all for their farming abilities, since more oranges and lemons and limes can be grown on fewer acres than ever before and the general acceptance of citrus concentrate, where one part orange juice is bottled with four parts water, actually depresses the need for oranges in bulk.

All this you can see to the general distress if you go into the basements of the big hotels, wander around the empty condominiums on which work has stopped and see the long, polyglot lines outside the labour exchanges.

Well, it's one of the... it's one of the nuisances of being a reporter that you become temperamentally unable to live the sunny, high, theatrical life without wanting to go and poke around behind the scenes. If you're a normal tourist and, therefore, have the means to be one, you will not notice any of these things. The ocean is there glittering blue-green, the hotels are seemingly packed with carefree bodies tanning away with the intentness and the concentrated frown of people stretched out on a rack. The cocktail bars tinkle and chatter, the nightclub shows flash thighs and rows of teeth as determinedly as ever, the golf courses gleam very green in the blinding sun and the carts containing greying or balding old men pour relentlessly over the little hills like a motorised battalion advancing in mufti.

But I seem to recall that the Singapore Country Club was relaxing with its usual amenities, a nine-hole round, a gentle gin and It, one day before the Japanese overran it.

I have to say that I had an otherwise heartless and happy week sitting, when I was not swinging – in a technical sense – in a beautiful Spanish courtyard that might have been in Seville, surveying the bougainvillea and smelling the wonderful mixed scent of the orange trees and the wafting Australian pines. But in Palm Beach, at any rate, there is one overwhelming smell. It is the smell of money and I hope it's not snobbish to say that about a week of it is enough.

It was good to wing back from 75 degrees and brilliant sunshine to New York in 15 degrees and brilliant sunshine and zero in the suburbs, whereupon the papers all carried pictures of people muffled up to their eyeballs and captions saying, 'Winter Here At Last.' Half the United States would have been grimly amused. The winter arrived with a howl and a bang and the usual blizzards two months ago to the Sierra and the Rockies and all of the mid-continent. Which reminds me of a slightly hilarious postscript I have to offer to my talk of a couple of weeks ago.

For those of you who cut class, let me briefly recount the plot up to now. I told how we had with us for Christmas with my daughter in Vermont a big bearded friend who is one of the top art directors of Hollywood. He was up there, surely, as a friend of the family, but also on business. He'd been going up to Vermont for a couple of months to do the reconnaissance on a movie he's making with Walter Matthau. It's a comedy about getting through the Arctic Vermont winter. It's to be called, appropriately, 'The Survivors'.

Well, shooting, filming, that is, was set for 7 January. At Christmas time there wasn't a flake of snow in sight – a disastrous freak of nature that was to cost the state of Vermont a $125 million loss on its skiing industry. The sets had been designed and constructed, the trailers for the cast and crew, the locations cleared, all the enormous lighting and electrical paraphernalia, over a hundred unemployed Vermonters hired as extras. Eventually the cast and the crew arrived, in all 150 of them. No snow. The days went by, the loss in salaries and unused union time mounting and mounting. So they set a deadline for Friday 14 January.

In the meantime, my art director friend was flying off to other pastures to make other arrangements. No snow. So they paid off the extras and arranged the transportation for the cast and crew for Monday 16. Everything was packed and ready for the long flight to California to Lake Tahoe in the High Sierra.

On Saturday 14, it started. By Monday morning, 24 inches had fallen and the huge caravan of players and labourers had a frightful time making it to the airport. They were practically snowbound. They flew off. They landed in San Francisco and flew on to Tahoe. The temperature was a freakish 48 there. It was raining.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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