Pensacola Independent News

OUTTAKES | Vol. 11, No. 41, November 5, 2009
(Standing For Something)
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Outtakes

by Rick Outzen

BACK TO THE FUTURE The mayor stood in front of 40 Pensacola businessmen. He acknowledged the City was divided over the issues of progress and change. He regretted that in the past he himself had been uncertain, but he could now be counted as a firm ally of progress and prosperity. The mayor got a standing ovation.

The Pensacola mayor wasn't Mike Wiggins. It was W.E. Anderson who was speaking at the annual meeting of Pensacola's Chamber of Commerce in 1897, according to James McGovern in his book, "The Emergence of A City in the Modern South: Pensacola 1900-1945."

DEAD ONES City leaders were fighting to make Pensacola a part of the New South. They pointed to the successes of Atlanta, Mobile and New Orleans and said that Pensacola, too, could be a great city.

At the turn of the century, progressive businessmen came to see the investments in infrastructure and improvements in the City as demonstrations of faith.

Frank Mayes, editor and owner of the Pensacola Journal, one of the town's daily newspapers, championed this belief that Pensacola should invest in itself. To chastise the enemies of progress, Mayes wrote an editorial titled, "Wanteda Few First Class Funerals."

According to Mayes, the "dead ones" were still making the decisions. If all these defenders of "Old Pensacola" were really to die at once, Mayes declared the City could afford to erect a monument for them.

INVESTING IN THE CITY The Pensacola of the early 1900s even had its own version of a public-private development, the San Carlos Hotel. The City had been embarrassed about its poor hotel accommodations.

The San Carlos Hotel was the project of local businessmen James Muldon and F. F. Bingham. Citizens raised $152,000 of $500,000 need to build the hotel by buying stock in it under the name Pensacola Hotel Company. The City issued $200,000 in bonds and George Harvey, the lessee and hotel manager, put in $100,000 of his money for the furnishings.

The San Carlos Hotel opened in 1910. The Pensacola Journal hailed it as "the culmination of an expression of progress by the citizenship of Pensacola."

SAME BATTLES A hundred years later we are still fighting the same battles. The citizens of Pensacola want to be a part of the economic prosperity of other Southern cities, such as Charleston and Savannah.

There is a newspaper editor and publisher taking on the "dead ones" and unabashedly pushing city leaders to look to the future. I haven't called for any funerals, but I do admire Mayes' flair for the dramatic.

And we have the Community Maritime Park, a public-private project that will show the world that Pensacola will invest itself. The waterfront park can be the same "embodiment of an expression of progress."

Pensacola will always have those who prefer nothing to something, who sit on the sidelines rooting for projects and people to fail and who never offer anything to help improve the quality of life of all the citizens.

Pensacola will always have people distort the truth and create "Fear & Smear" campaigns to deflate and divide the community spirit. They see the worse in their fellow man and are never disappointed when they find it. They, in fact, relish it.

Pensacola will always have people who cowardly hide behind anonymous flyers, letters and now blog posts to attack the character, good works and family members of those they despise.

We can either let them define the City of Pensacola or we can ignore them and continue to invest in ourselves. The decision is ours, not theirs.

rick@inweekly.net

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