Kevin McCarthy, Big Sugar, and the Everglades
Yesterday former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy uploaded what he certainly considered to be a heroic speech he gave at a black tie event in which he claimed that the United States never asked for land after a war except to bury the dead.
McCarthy’s speech was rightly lampooned both on and off twitter, with people pointing out that the entirety of the country is built on seized Indigenous land, and that the United States aquired territory after the Mexican War (large swaths of the Southwest), the Spanish-American War (Puerto Rico, Guam, the Phillippines for a time), and Second Samoan Civil War (American Samoa).
Let us not forget about the illegal annexation of the Kingdom of Hawai’i in 1898 that was protested by the kingdom’s populace. No, in this case, the United States did not declare military war, but practiced an economic overthrow of Native Hawaiian sovereignty. Violence and warfare come in a lot of different forms (more on that in a bit).
It’s hard to know if McCarthy is a liar, mistaken, or just plaid stupid. My guess in this regard is probably a combination of all three. The man still has SpeakerMcCarthy as his twitter handle, so it’s easy to see how he might he might get confused. But perhaps he was just playing to the crowd, which seems was the intention. None of this is forgivable. Part of the American story is that much, if not all of its lands came via violent warfare on Indigenous people or the very real threat of that violence. By refusing to acknowledge that past people engage in a process historian Jean M. O’Brien calls “firsting” in which Indigenous people are written out of existence in place of settlers, who claim lands and history for themselves.
The point here is not to make you feel bad. History is useless unless we learn from it and act upon it. Part of creating a better future for the people we care about is coming to terms with that past. When I taught this to my students I would tell it like this: I don’t want you to feel guilty. You didn’t do these things. But you are responsible. And by that I mean you are responsible to learn from them and make a better place in the world. And the former Speaker is practicing a willful ignorance in this.
But I want, if I can, to talk to you about another sort of land grab that is going on in Florida right now and it affects every single one of us. Now this ties in to McCarthy’s ignorance so let me see if I can explain.
Here’s a super fast history of Florida over the past two hundred years: Throughout the 19th century the United States fought a series of wars against Native Floridians and their African-descended allies to wrest control of the peninsula. Many of the survivors’ descendants can now be found among the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, and a non-federally recognized group with varying ties to the other tribes. These wars technically ended with the conclusion of fighting in 1858. But shortly afterwards, American entrepreneurs and the state and federal government began to radically transform the state with aims to increase its agricultural output.
For the longest time, the Everglades, a massive extremely slow moving body of water (not actually a swamp; it’s technically a river) was seen as the enemy of progress. If only they could be drained to give planters access to the deep black soils underneath. Sugar companies especially coveted the lands directly south of Lake Okeechobee for their crops.
There’s one small problem. The Everglades are really unique. As in, the only wetlands like them in the world. And they serve really important functions. In addition to hosting bounties of marine, mammal, insect, and bird life, Everglades plant life works to filter water as it moves from the Kissimmee River to Lake Okeechobee and then down to Florida Bay, where it pours clean water into an estuary for manatees, dolphins, sea turtles, and more fish and birds than you can imagine.
But that didn’t stop the United States Army Corps of Engineers, who dredged canals and built dikes and dams throughout the region, and somehow straightened the Kissimmee River in the 20th century. All of this had the desired effect of creating really ideal sugarcane lands while at the same time devastating the Everglades itself. The agricultural runoff combined with intermittent allowances of when and where to send water through the Glades hammered the ecosystem and the people who call it home.
Now this is where things start, well, continue getting tricky. In 2000, Congress passed a bipartisan package designed to restore the Everglades. It’s called the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan and it’s the largest hydrologic restoration plan in world history, spanning decades and costing billions. Because the Everglades is America’s River of Grass, everyone chips in. Taxpayers from Oklahoma do. So do people in Seattle. So does the state of Florida, which went halfsies with the federal government to foot the bill.
But do you know who does not like this plan? Big Sugar, specifically the two family owned companies (US Sugar, Florida Crystals) and a cooperative (Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida) that dominate the region and vis-a-vis their lobbying efforts, Tallahassee. Rick Scott’s board of the South Florida Water Management District was so deep in the pocket of Big Sugar that it was sadly a running joke in the state. Ron DeSantis fired them all immediately upon his ascendancy to the governorship, one of the actual good things he’s done in Florida. Essentially their plans have been to either stymie restoration plans altogether or to mutate existing plans to restore the ecosystem into their own private watersheds that would see their plantations get the water that the Glades badly needs. In March, Big Sugar lost a ruling over the use of the Everglades Agricultural Area but are in the process of fighting that decision. The nonprofit group Captains for Clean Water has a great writeup here: https://captainsforcleanwater.org/big-sugars-attempt-to-sue-army-corps-over-use-of-eaa-reservoir-denied/
And this is my point. What we have in Florida is really an attempt by Big Sugar to essentially steal taxpayer dollars and taxpayer-held lands for themselves. And right now, the battles are not being fought with soldiers and guns, but by lawyers and pens. I’ll post more on this as this continues to develop, as well as links below.
For further reading
Marjorie Stoneman Douglass, The Everglades: River of Grass
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
Jack E. Davis, The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea
Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England
https://www.sfwmd.gov/our-work/cerp-project-planning/eaa-reservoir
https://www.saj.usace.army.mil/CEPPEAA/
https://www.everglades.org/eaa-reservoir/
And he’s from California, a giant spoil of war!
(PS, pls change word “plaid” to “plain”)