American Elite

The Atlantic is a perfect place for a this.

I’m a native Floridian, an ever-rarer species in a state where most people come from somewhere else. My family goes back eight generations, to a farm boy who fought for the colonists in the Revolutionary War, then abandoned his newly free country for Spanish East Florida. King Charles IV was giving away large tracts of land—already, proto-Floridians loved a good real-estate deal. I grew up in Florida’s capital, 25 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico, a kind of anti-Miami—luxuriously empty, with red clay hills and forests full of oak, magnolia, and pine trees—and on what is now called the Forgotten Coast, long stretches of beach without condominium towers or resorts or pastel mansions.