Stjr. Here is a great kind of impression of the political environment in and around the time:
I was looking up references to the Dignans after whom the park system was originally named and I came across this highly interesting doctoral thesis describing the immediate background of the change from "Dignan" Park to "Confederate" Park.
Apparently there was a fresh wave of domestic terror with the Catholics.
Not terror BY the Catholics mind you, but OF them.
After nuns in St Augustine were proven to be deliberately teaching Negroes at the school in 1911, a firestorm of demands for security and stronger laws was pretty much unleashed.
The Governor an anti Catholic crusader was running against Nathan P. Bryan for Senator. Bryan had appointed an incredibly respected member of the Dignan Family as Postmaster General of Jacksonville and came under heavy criticism for potentially dealing with the terrorists as a result.
The controversy lasted until 1916 and the new elections.
Anyways, this is a fascinating look into the politics and motivations of the times: (this part of the story picks up about page 164)
“True womanhood,” for numerous white Protestant Southerners, implied a special devotion to religion, prohibition, and/or the Lost Cause. On the latter effort, female devotees preserved their “true history” by erecting monuments, delivering speeches, and promoting Confederate organizations.
Southern white Jews frequently heralded a binary value of civic service and religious unity. As one rabbi asserted, the “true religion” of Judaism was “patriotic,” “spiritual,” and devoted to social betterment.
Southern white Catholics also cast themselves as “true” Americans. However, in the unfinished South, scores of non-Catholics remained unwilling to recognize the validity of this Catholic patriotism. This chapter is both about institutional religion and civil religion. Matters pertaining to religious doctrine appeared in nativist and Catholic exchanges. Underlying this rhetoric were concerns regarding social unity, peace, and prosperity.
Nativists claimed that Catholics threatened to unravel America’s social fabric. Catholics objected, countering that the actions of nativists ran contrary to constitutional guarantees regarding religious freedom. Both assumed that they were the “true” Americans, and that their opposition was not.
Catholics were a numerical minority in the unfinished South, but their presence influenced how many non-Catholics perceived their good society during the 1910s. This was a new era of nativism in the South and nation. Nativists, wrote historian Dan T. Knobel, “believed that they knew best who was really ‘American.’” He explained that the nativist movement became powerful enough to “mobilize a significant portion of the American electorate for political action and actually achieve many of its goals.” To do this, nativists created a “perception of world, of self, and of symbols separating participants from outsiders.” During the 1910s, nativists made Catholics into social “outsiders.” They feared that Catholics were loyal to Rome and Rome alone. Nativists subsequently worried that followers of the faith would, if left unchecked, negatively change the character of America.
The “perception of the world” created by Southern nativists determined that Catholics were inherently “un-American.” Behind this reasoning was a rather circuitous and ironic history of the American South’'s immigration efforts. After Reconstruction, a number of Southern white progressives conjectured that European immigrants could contribute to the region’s financial growth, while also eliminating the need for black labor. As we recall, material progress became an important social value for many Southern whites after Reconstruction. Railroads, agriculture, industry, and the like came to symbolize, for this population, the coming of a better age.
White supremacy was also a prized value for many white Southerners. For the South to remain unified, peaceful, and prosperous, whites averred, their race needed to dominate. In 1904 and 1905, Southern railroad companies brought an Italian ambassador to the United States for a tour of the existing Italian communities. Mississippi and Arkansas had relative success with Italian laborers in the cotton fields. In 1906, a Mississippi newspaper commended Louisiana for introducing foreign labor. In addition to the economic benefits, the paper supposed the racial situation had improved. “The influx of Italians between 1890 and 1900,” the paper positively proclaimed, had made Louisiana a white state.” The journalist assumed what many other Southern whites did – that is, their good society was white and materially prosperous.
Despite the optimism of some, the push for foreign immigration was largely unsuccessful. As historian Leon Litwack summarized, Southern white planters sustained a belief “that blacks would perform labor and submit to treatment self-respecting whites would refuse to tolerate.”
In other words, planters believed that black laborers would willingly perform duties that white immigrants would not. Immigration, then, was not the labor panacea that some Southern white progressives wanted. By the 1910s, nativism swept the nation and the American South. All the while, white Southerners continued to question the wisdom of importing immigrant labor. One Memphis newspaper asserted that the South’s “race question” had to be “solved on the old line of Anglo-Saxon and African. We do not want the ignorance and vice of Europe to complicate it.”
In 1913, a New Orleans newspaper warned, “Safety first for our native stock should be the watchword of the South in dealing with immigration. Material progress had better slacken than be furthered at the sacrifice of the higher good.”9 In 1915, Methodist minister Alfred L. Woodward in Tallahassee implored legislators to confront the “urgent” and “pressing” matter of white immigration.” While perhaps helpful for the region’s prosperity, Woodward worried about the potential “moral retrograde” that, for example, Germans and their “breweries and beer” would bring.
Our previous discussions of material progress have shown that Southern whites frequently placed limitations on what they were, and were not, willing to accept for the sake of progress.
Maintaining the “higher good” for these speakers meant precluding immigrants from entering the South. Similar to the rest of the former Confederacy, the immigrant population in the unfinished South grew rapidly after Reconstruction. Florida had a small but vocal collective supporting the importation of foreign labor in the late nineteenth century. In 1877, the state’s Bureau of Immigration distributed pamphlets in Europe entitled the Florida Settler and Florida Immigrant.
When the native population began voicing opposition to the effort, the governmental push for foreign labor ceased. This did not stop the flow of immigrants to the state, however. Instead, Florida’s foreign population grew from 1900 to 1920, unlike its neighboring states where the rates stayed consistent.
As more immigrants came to Florida, the state’s Catholic presence grew and became strongest in urban centers along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. 13 By the 1910s, this fact caught the eye of the state’s nativist legislators. In 1913, Florida passed a law banning the instruction of whites by blacks, and blacks by whites. The law had no overt markers of anti-Catholicism. But during the years 1909-1910, 337 black students attended Catholic schools staffed by white nuns.
Also in 1913, a pamphlet entitled “Knights of Columbus Oath, Extract 4th Degree” appeared in Florida’s congressional records. While fake, the pamphlet spoke directly to nativist fears. The fictitious inductee pledged to “defend His doctrine and His Holiness’s right and custom against all usurpers of the heretical or Protestant authority.” The imagined knight then promised to wage relentless war” against Protestant “heretics” and “hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous heretics, rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush their infants’ heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race.” Vowing to vote for Catholics, the invented inductee also promised to “place Catholic girls in Protestant families [so] that a weekly report may be made of the inner movements of the heretics.”
For the nativist Floridians, Catholics were an organized band of religious fanatics who planned to overthrow the nation’s Protestant authorities. The nativist good society, then, lacked a Catholic presence. So pervasive was this fear that legislators created laws aimed at limiting Catholic freedom. In the unfinished South, some believed that this brand of legislative anti-Catholicism was supremely disordered. In Saint Augustine, Bishop Michael J. Curley called the 1913 bill banning interracial instruction evidence of Florida’s “wave of anti-Catholic hysteria.”
In the following years, Curley continued fighting the religious “hysteria” of his state. In 1915, when speaking at a reception in Jacksonville, the bishop again commented on what he believed were the wrongheaded prejudices of the region. “Patriotism of the highest order,” Curley proclaimed, “flows from the very essence of Catholicism.” For Curley, members of his faith. In Florida, some non-Catholics shared Curley’s religiously inclusive perception of the good society.
However, if elections were any indication, many others did not. Catholicism became a point of heated debate during Florida’s 1916 election season. A candidate’s position regarding the Catholic place in public life frequently determined his electoral success or failure.
Park Trammell and the “True Patriotic People”
Bishop Curley’s perception of the good society made Catholics viable patriots in a land where many non-Catholics firmly disagreed. By the 1910s, Southern white nativists made anti-Catholicism part of Florida’s legal makeup, partially, by banning interracial instruction. In April 1916, Governor Park Trammell received a petition claiming that white nuns teaching at the Saint Joseph’s convent in Saint Augustine were teaching black students.16 He contacted the sheriff, confirmed the claim, and ordered the nuns’ arrests.17 In his public statement, Trammell maintained that he enforced “a good law.” Racial distinctions, not religious ones, were at stake for the governor. “I do not think we should encourage anything which would tend to make the negro believe he is on social equality with the white people.” The nuns, he relayed, received a warning, but “they claimed it was not a violation of the law.” Thus, Trammell declared that he completed his “plain duty,” attesting again that that race motivated his actions, not religion.
Catholic newspapers, the governor lamented, “are unfair and try to mislead and deceive the people of Florida.” Offering assurance, Trammell reaffirmed that he had “absolutely no religious prejudice” and wanted all Floridians “to enjoy their own religion.”18 Not everyone agreed that Trammell’s actions lacked an anti-Catholic component. Commenting on the affair, one Jacksonville journalist lauded the “good sisters” for their “educational work.” The citizens of Jacksonville, the article speculated, had expressed “much indignation” over the affair, believing it “deplorable that any law should be countenanced which has for its object the prevention of gratuitous education of the colored boys and girls of the state by white teachers.”
Trammell insisted that his actions were not products of religious prejudice, yet letters flooding his office commended the governor for just this. For many Southern white Protestants, the good society was both free from Catholics and dominated by whites. Trammell became their patriotic” standard-bearer.
From Ft. Lauderdale, one supporter wrote approvingly of Trammell’s handling of “the nigger teacher question.” The author worried that “some of our courts will upset every thing when it comes to Catholics and the law,” because “they seem to have a different opinion.”
H. Witaker of Muscogee applauded Trammell’s “stand . . . on the side of the patriotic people” of Florida and “against Rome.”
From Okeechobee, J.L. Crewsexpressed pleasure that Trammell “[advocated] one of the best” laws in existence, which he believed would contain “[this] Roman Catholicism.” The author worried that if “something isn’t done shortly that we the Protestant People” would have “some fight on our hands.”
Post-Master and Justice of the Peace in Tropic Indian River, George Ensey, thanked Trammell for his prompt, fearless action” against “the powerful Catholic Hierarchy.” Ensey wrote that the “so-called Church’” had become “the most powerful political machine in the world.”
Giving a word of warning, J.B. George of Morristo wrote, “Be on your guard as I think the Catholics are going to try to turn a trick on you. I have been told that the Catholics of South Florida are claiming that they are supporting you.”
For this group of Trammell supporters, Catholics were deceitful, conniving, and harmful to the social order. The governor’s actions promised them that the “political machine” of Catholicism would not overrun Florida.
For Florida’s nativists, Catholics were neither “true” Americans, nor socially benign. In the wake of the Saint Augustine affair, Trammell claimed he held no malice toward Catholics. Yet for his supporters, the governor’s actions made him an exemplary “patriot.” Some Trammell admirers gave more attention to the event’s racial implications. In one correspondence, R.C. Hodges, a former Confederate, proclaimed that Trammell’s position “against Negro Equality” would assure “all the old soldiers” would vote for him.25 “
I take sides with you commonly speaking,” wrote Y.J. Holder. “I don’t think white and black should class up with one another anyway. They think themselves on equality with white people. I hope you will get that law in force [so] that white teachers shall not teach in negro schools.”
A.C. Pierce of DeLand, wrote to assure Trammell “that 'as long as you stand as you do against the whites teaching negro schools you will have the People of the South for you.”'
The “People of the South,” for this letter writer, were clearly the white people of Florida.
Trammell himself continually asserted that his actions had intended to preserve the line separating the races. This imagined line was, for the governor and his admirers, necessary for social stability.
facebook and 
twitter.
