Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T23:29:05.089Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Race, Mobility, and Fantasy: Afromobiling in Tropical Florida

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2016

HENRY KNIGHT LOZANO
HENRY KNIGHT LOZANO*
Affiliation:
X Department, Northumbria University. Email: henry.knight-lozano@northumbria.ac.uk.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article explores a popular tourist vehicle in early twentieth-century Florida: the Afromobile. Beginning in the 1890s, Afromobiling referred to the white tourist experience in south Florida of travelling in a wheelchair propelled by an African American hotel employee. Most prominent in Palm Beach, these wheelchairs developed into a heavily promoted tourist activity in the region. Using promotional imagery and travel literature this paper traces the development of Afromobiling as a tourist vehicle that played upon south Florida's tropical environs. It argues that the vehicle's popularity related to its enactment of benign racial hierarchy and controlled black mobility. Moreover, the Afromobile infused US fantasies about south Florida as a tropical and “oriental” paradise for white leisure.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 805 - 831
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 James, Henry, The American Scene (London: Chapman and Hall, 1907), 449–50.Google Scholar

2 The vehicles were also known as Palm Beach chariots, Palm Beach wheelchairs, and “pushmobiles.” See Day, G. H., “Florida's City on Wheels,” Suniland, 3, 2 (Nov. 1925), 62–64 Google Scholar.

3 “Afromobiling at Palm Beach” photograph in Florida: Raymond-Whitcomb Tours to Florida and Cuba (Raymond-Whitcomb, 1920), 8Google Scholar. For a discussion of Afromobiles in Florida's resorts see Braden, Susan, The Architecture of Leisure: The Florida Resort Hotels of Henry Flagler and Henry Plant (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 96, 125–29Google Scholar. A local history that provides useful background material is Tuckwood, Jan and Kleinberg, Eliot, Pioneers in Paradise: West Palm Beach, the First 110 Years (Athens, GA: Longstreet Press, 1994)Google Scholar. The Palm Beach County History site provides contextual information, at www.pbchistoryonline.org/page/employment-opportunities, accessed 14 March 2016.

4 Souvenir of the Royal Poinciana, Palm Beach (New York: U. Grant Duffield, 1894)Google Scholar.

5 Roberts, Kenneth, Sun Hunting (Brooklyn: Braunworth & Co., 1922), 20–21 Google Scholar.

6 “How to Go to Our New Possessions,” Chicago Tribune, 13 Jan. 1899, 6. For US interest in and anxiety over these new tropical “possessions” and their inhabitants see Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 222–59Google Scholar.

7 With an antebellum history of cotton production and stronger ties to the “black belt,” northern Florida, by contrast, was often promoted using similar imagery and motifs to the rest of the Deep South. See Knight, Henry, Tropic of Hopes: California, Florida, and the Selling of American Paradise (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 67–68 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

9 See, for example, Beard, George, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1881), viCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Lears, 52. On “racial gifts” and tropical tourism in the Americas see Cocks, Catherine, Tropical Whites: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 7–8 Google Scholar.

11 Knight, 75–79.

12 Quotation in Xenia Daily Gazette (Xenia, Ohio), 22 Jan. 1937, 8.

13 Stanonis, Anthony, Faith in Bikinis: Politics and Leisure in the Coastal South since the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), 6Google Scholar. Other south Florida towns and Flagler resorts, like Miami, also had Afromobiles, but on a smaller scale to Palm Beach. See N. D. B. Connolly, “By Eminent Domain: Race and Capital in the Building of an American South Florida” (Ph.D. diss., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2008), 38–39.

14 “Modes and Manners of Prominent People,” Croonborg's Gazette of Fashions, 4, 8 (April 1917), 203Google Scholar.

15 Hillyer, Reiko, Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 6Google Scholar.

16 Knight, 1–16. Cocks, 1–14.

17 Cocks, 15–40.

18 Conforti, Michael, “Director's Foreword,” in Edwards, Holly, ed., Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, vii. Oleg Grabar, “Roots and Others,” in ibid., 3–10, 6. For the seminal work on European imperialists and “orientalism” see Said, Edward, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin Books, 1991)Google Scholar.

19 It is not clear which resort developed the wheelchair attraction first; however, as noted in this essay, Flagler was inspired by Japanese-style rickshaws, rather than any American version, when he introduced the vehicles to Florida.

20 Simon, Bryant, Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7–8, 19–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Ibid., 19.

22 See, for example, Hergesheimer, Joseph, Tropical Winter (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1932)Google Scholar.

23 The inner cover of the short-story collection featured a coloured illustration depicting two Afromobiles: Lardner, Ring W., “Gullible's Travels,” in Lardner, Gullible's Travels, Etc. (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1917), 79–156 Google Scholar.

24 Morrill, G. L., The Devil in Mexico (Minneapolis: Morrill, 1917), 3–4 Google Scholar.

25 “Palm Beach Ready for a Busy Season,” New York Tribune, 17 Dec. 1916, 23.

26 Harrison Rhodes, “Seeing America at Last,” Colliers, 26 Dec. 1914, 20-21, 26, 20.

27 Ibid., 21.

28 Franz, Kathleen, “‘The Open Road’: Automobility and Racial Uplift in the Interwar Years,” in Sinclair, Bruce, ed., Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004), 131–54, 132Google Scholar.

29 Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 564–612 Google Scholar.

30 Hale, Grace Elizabeth, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Random House, 1999), 20Google Scholar.

31 Vann Woodward, C., Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1977), 159–60, 351–52Google Scholar.

32 Litwack, Leon, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage, 1999), 13Google Scholar.

33 Ortiz, Paul, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), xxiGoogle Scholar.

34 Graham, Thomas, Mr. Flagler's St. Augustine (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 408–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Florida developed simultaneously a thriving industry in black convict labour, a controllable – and inexpensive – workforce that attracted northern investors considering the state's turpentine and agricultural industries. Drobney, Jeffrey A., “Where Palm and Pine Are Blowing: Convict Labor in the North Florida Turpentine Industry, 1877–1923,” Florida Historical Quarterly, 72, 4 (April 1994), 411–34Google Scholar. Miller, Vivien M. L., Hard Labor and Hard Time: Florida's “Sunshine Prison” and Chain Gangs (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 For the importance of Jim Crow in St. Augustine's tourism industry see Hillyer, Designing Dixie, 78.

36 Hale, 133.

37 Franz, 132.

38 Litwack, 235.

39 Ibid.

40 Hale, 137.

41 Franz, 132.

42 “Negro Automobile Line,” Little Rock Gazette, reprinted in Washington Post, 19 Oct. 1905, 6.

43 The Atlanta Constitution reported a story about a black driver who was tricked by rival white chauffeurs into driving off without his employer. The reporter depicted the black driver as childishly naive and frightened when he realized nobody was in the back seat. As a result, the driver lost his job and “the owner of the car is to be seen driving about the city with a Caucasian at the steering wheel.” Such accounts reflected not only how African Americans were viewed as ill-suited to automobile driving but also that, as the efforts of the white chauffeurs suggest, they posed a threat to the expected racial order. “Sleeping Negro Chauffeur Drove Home an Empty Car,” Atlanta Constitution, 21 April 1910, 4. Gilmore, Al-Tony, “Jack Johnson, the Man and His Times,” Journal of Popular Culture, 6, 3 (Winter 1972), 496–506, 502Google Scholar.

44 Seiler, Cotton, “‘So That We as a Race Might Have Something to Travel By’: African American Automobility and Cold-War Liberalism,” American Quarterly, 58, 4 (Dec. 2006), 1091–1117, 1093CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Winter, Nevin O., Florida, the Land of Enchantment (Boston: The Page Company, 1918), 248–49Google Scholar.

46 Mme. X, “News of Chicago Society: Florida Popular with Chicagoans on Pleasure Bent,” Chicago Tribune, 16 March 1924, 1.

47 Ibid.

48 The Story of a Pioneer: A Brief History of the Florida East Coast Railway (St. Augustine: The Record Company, 1936), 16Google Scholar.

49 Souvenir of the Royal Poinciana, Palm Beach (New York: U. Grant Duffield, 1894), 12Google Scholar.

50 Graham, Mr. Flagler's St. Augustine, 154. Hillyer, Designing Dixie, 45.

51 “Jacksonville to Palm Beach,” Lexington Morning Herald, 4 March 1900, 10.

52 “Wheel Chair Jungle Trail,” in Lake Worth: Photo Gravures (Palm Beach: J. F. Kirkton, n.d.), 49.

53 “The Land of Flowers,” New York Times, 4 Jan. 1903, 1.

54 The Hotel Magnolia: St. Augustine, Florida (Palmer & MacDowell, 1900)Google Scholar.

55 See, for example, Rev. Peery, R. B., The Gist of Japan: The Islands, Their People, and Missions (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1897), 244Google Scholar. Murdoch, W. G. Burn, From Edinburgh to India and Burmah (London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd, 1908), 222Google Scholar.

56 “Jinrikishas,” Vogue, 19 April 1906, ii.

57 Day, “Florida's City on Wheels.” See also the Palm Beach County Historical Society website at www.pbchistoryonline.org/page/employment-opportunities, accessed 14 March 2016.

58 “Jacksonville to Palm Beach,” 10.

59 Utz, Dora Doster, “West Palm Beach,” Tequesta, 33 (1973), 51–67 Google Scholar. Like rickshaws, Afromobiles were also used for conveying goods, such as ice, around Florida towns. “How Ice Is Carried in Florida,” Illustrated World, 18 Sept. 1918, 118. “Autos are Replacing Jinrikisha in Japan,” New York Times, 26 June 1927, 18.

60 By 1900, “Flagler's resort hotels at Palm Beach had replaced those in St. Augustine as the most fashionable destinations for leisure-class visitors.” Braden, The Architecture of Leisure, 113.

61 Interestingly, these all appear to be single-passenger wheelchairs, suggesting that the double-rider vehicles were introduced sometime after 1906. Photograph in New York Daily Tribune, 11 Nov. 1906, 2.

62 Xenia Daily Gazette, 22 Jan. 1937, 8. Thomas Tipton Reese Jr. quoted in Tuckwood and Kleinberg, Pioneers in Paradise, 54. Roberts, Sun Hunting, 19–20.

63 “Jacksonville to Palm Beach,” 10.

64 “Mustering the Army of Pleasure-Seekers,” The Appeal (Saint Paul, MN), 1 Dec. 1906, 1Google ScholarPubMed.

65 Tuckwood and Kleinberg, 45.

66 Curtis, Nancy C., Black Heritage Sites: The South (New York: The New Press, 1996), 90Google Scholar. By 1925, Palm Beach County was home to just over 13,000 blacks.

67 Alice E. Moore quoted in Tuckwood and Kleinberg, 62.

68 Research Atlantica Inc., Town of Palm Beach, Florida: 2010 Historic Sites Survey (Boca Raton: Research Atlantica Inc., 2010), 10Google Scholar.

69 Inez Peppers Lovett in Tuckwood and Kleinberg, 46.

70 Black mobility within the resort was similarly restricted in St. Augustine. See Hillyer, Designing Dixie, 70–72.

71 Unfortunately little evidence seems to exist of African Americans’ direct experience of Afromobiling as drivers.

72 United States Bureau of the Census, 1910: Florida Federal Population Census (Washington, DC: The Bureau of the Census, 1910), 954–1082 Google Scholar.

73 Ibid., 45. “Negro Life in the South,” New York Times, 17 July 1899, 3.

74 Notably, Utz, “West Palm Beach,” 56 compared the “French leave” taken by blacks who normally worked as servants in West Palm Beach to work as wheelchair drivers to “cotton picking time” elsewhere in the South.

75 Alice E. Moore quoted in Eliot Kleinberg, “Afromobile: An Offensive Coinage for the ‘Chariots’ of Palm Beach,” Palm Beach Post, 12 April 2000, 23.

76 “Among the Black Folks,” New York Tribune, 7 May 1905, 8.

77 Day, “Florida's City on Wheels,” 64.

78 Lardner, “Gullible's Travels,” 125–26.

79 Roberts, Sun Hunting, 20–21.

80 “Among the Black Folks,” 8.

81 Hale, Making Whiteness, 16.

82 Elizabeth R. Thomas, Tales of Palm Beach (n.p., 1910), 220.

83 Greene, Lorenzo J. and Woodson, Carter G., The Negro Wage Earner (Washington, DC: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc., 1930), 323Google Scholar.

84 Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed, 164.

85 Mabel Perez, “Lynching an Unspoken Part of County's Past,” Lakeland Ledger, 12 July 2005, 1-3.

86 Jackson, “Mob Keeps Players in Theatre Twelve Hours,” Baltimore Afro-American, 29 June 1923, 13. “Unknown Mob Hangs Negro,” St. Petersburg Independent, 7 June 1923, 5. “May Not Call Special Jury,” St. Petersburg Times, 7 June 1923, 12.

87 “Modes and Manners of Prominent People,” 203.

88 Souvenir of the Royal Poinciana, Palm Beach (New York: U. Grant Duffield, 1894)Google Scholar, unpaginated.

89 Grabar, “Roots and Others,” 9.

90 Lynn, Catherine, “Dream and Substance: Araby and the Planning of Opa-Locka,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, 23 (1998), 162–89, 163CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Nance, Susan, How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

91 Lynn, 163–64.

92 Braden, The Architecture of Leisure, 218.

93 Souvenir of the Royal Poinciana.

94 Mme. X, “News of Chicago Society.” Packard, Winthrop, Florida Trails as Seen from Jacksonville to Key West (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1910), 240CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 Mme X., 1.

96 Kramer, Paul A., The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 18Google Scholar. Halstead, Murat, Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions (Chicago: Our New Possessions Publishing Co., 1898), 16Google Scholar.

97 Kramer, 237–45.

98 Ibid., 237–38. Henry Grady, “Philippine Village,” Atlanta Constitution, 3 July 1904, 5.

99 Hillyer, Designing Dixie, 84, links the “Spanish” promotional imagery of St. Augustine to the “contemporary realization of U. S. aspirations for an overseas empire” achieved through the Spanish–American War.

100 Rhodes, “Seeing America at Last,” 21.

101 Cocks, Tropical Whites, 87–88.

102 Winter, Florida, the Land of Enchantment, 248–49.

103 “The Lenten Season at Palm Beach,” Vogue, 15 April 1913, 36.

104 Photograph of carriage-cycle (“Afromobile”), Palm Beach, Florida (n.d.), University of Florida Special Collections. Braden, The Architecture of Leisure, 116. For white women travelling on Afromobiles see, for example, “Trail through Garden of Eden” in Souvenir of the Palm Beaches, Florida, University of Florida Special Collections. Rhodes, Harrison and Dumont, Mary, Guide to Florida for Tourists, Sportsmen and Settlers (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1912), 166Google Scholar.

105 “Jacksonville to Palm Beach,” 10.

106 Franz, “‘The Open Road’,” 132.

107 Excerpt from Harrison Rhodes, “In Vacation America,” in St. Cloud Tribe, 11 Jan. 1917, 3.

108 Rhodes and Dumont, 166. Packard, Florida Trails, 236.

109 “Palm Beach Pleasures,” New York Times, 31 Jan. 1904, 9.

110 Day, “Florida's City on Wheels,” 63.

111 Mme X., “News of Chicago Society,” 1.

112 Day, 63.

113 Packard, 236–37.

114 Day, 62.

115 “Bathing Casino, Royal Poinciana and Breakers Hotels, Palm Beach, Fla.,” in Beautiful Florida: The Winter Playground of the Nation (Chicago: C. Teich & Co., 1922), 10Google Scholar. “Fame of New Town Spreads,” St. Petersburg Independent, 15 Jan. 1931, 3. A similar process occurred in Japan in the 1920s, where, as one journalist found in 1927, increasing “automobile traffic marks the decline of the jinrikisha.” “Autos are Replacing Jinrikisha in Japan,” New York Times, 26 June 1927, 18.

116 Greater Palm Beach (West Palm Beach: n.p., 1926)Google Scholar.

117 “Palm Beach ‘Afromobile’ Comes Back into Favor’, Washington Post, 14 Dec. 1930, A5.”

118 Day, 63.

119 “Afro-mobiles seen as Aid to Sports,” Palm Beach Post, 9 Jan. 1943, 8.

120 Emilie Keyes, “Slightly off the Record,” Palm Beach Post, 19 June 1955, 16.

121 “Looking Backward,” Palm Beach Post, 6 Jan. 1962, 4.

122 Palm Beach Faces and Places: Centennial 1911–2011 (West Palm Beach: StarGroup International, 2011), 50Google Scholar.

123 See Palm Beach County Historical Museum website at https://historicalsocietypbc.org/index.php?page=place-gallery, accessed 14 March 2016.

124 Palm Beach County History online, at www.pbchistoryonline.org/page/employment-opportunities, accessed 14 March 2016. Kleinberg, “Afromobile,” Palm Beach Post.

125 New York Daily Tribune, 11 Nov. 1906, 2.

126 Day, 64.