Historian and journalist Robert Fieseler’s first book “Tinder Box: The Untold Story of the Upstairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation” won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. His newest book, “American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives” uncovers the little-known history of the Florida Legislative Investigative Committee, which, in the 1950s and early 1960s, created a surveillance state in Florida as its investigators used tax dollars to purse what it deemed subversives in the sunshine state, including Civil Rights activists, Communists, and queers. I recently talked with Fieseler about this history and the process of researching the book.
JP: The book opens with an epigram from the poem “The Wild Iris” by Louise Glück. “Whatever/ returns from oblivion returns / to find a voice.” Why these lines?
RF: I thought a lot about the concept of returning from oblivion in writing and researching this book. As it turns out, central aspects of the American past in the 20th century have been censored, sealed, not made available to the public. I thought about the way that the queer folk who were attacked in isolated rooms and dark basements were not even allowed the opportunity ever to tell their story. Some of them were so ashamed they never wanted to tell their own story. And then I thought about the countless civil rights leaders who took tremendous stands in places like Saint Augustine, in places like Tallahassee, whose names have receded from the history books because people are not taught the Civil Rights movement, which was unquestionably the most important social movement of the 20th century.
What does it mean when you don’t even know your own country. You’re patriotic because you’ve been taught a certain kind of mythic, saccharine, beautiful piece of American propaganda as exemplified in a textbook I read in high school called The American Pageant. We don’t tangle with the very complex and morally frayed and difficult questions about the realities of American nationhood and the realities of citizenship and participation in a nation that aspires to great ideals, but oftentimes has not lived up to them.
James R Polchin: How did you become aware of what was officially called The Florida Legislative Investigative Committee, and then became known as Johns Committee.
Robert Fieseler: Well, I was feeling disoriented around 2018 when Tinderbox came out. I felt like I was a person who thought he understood American history, and that American history was a good way to chart the arc of the American future. I had seen in the election of Barrack Obama, where the 21st century was going to go. But then suddenly I was flailing and I thought there must be something very important that I’m not seeing. Maybe in the post-World War II era, when the United States emerges as a superpower, something happened that points to white dominion, the end of segregation, the expansion of the national security state, and the development of the American homosexual identity.
I thought maybe there’s something there that I could explore. Then my mentor from Columbia, Journalism School, Sam Freedman, reached out to me about a queer Miami exhibit at the Miami History Center. He said, “You got to go down there.”
My mind was blown as I walked into the exhibit. There was one corner with a couple different video screens devoted to this thing I’d never heard of called the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee. It was like this Red Scare Committee that not only went after queer people, but also civil rights activists too. There I met Stacy Braukman, who was clearly the expert on this subject. She said something like, “I don’t think anyone remembers the Florida Johns Committee today at all.” And I was hooked.
The more I delved into the committee’s work, the more I saw that this was the book. And the lessons of this book demonstrated for me this concept that I didn’t have yet in my own mind, which was how did “Florida-zation” occur? How did Florida politics and Tallahassee politics—which are some of the nastiest politics ever created in the history of the United States—how did those politics become our national politics? And how did Florida become a kingmaker?
“[H]ow did those politics become our national politics? And how did Florida become a kingmaker?”The meanness and the tactics all seem to come from a legacy of these people, and this guy, Charlie Johns. From the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties he held the residents of the State of Florida ransomed to an extra judicial committee that could declare anyone an enemy of the state, especially blacks trying to integrate schools, and queer people just trying to live quietly and teach in a classroom. [The Johns Committee] could do anything. It could abduct you from a public or private place, it could hold you for hours in a random, isolated cell, interrogate you at length, edit your testimony, get you to confess to something you never could have done, and use that as reason to ruin your reputation. It could get you fired. It could even access your medical records and your mental health records. This was a true story of American tyranny that had ripples to today. And I thought that researching this story will help me regain a foundation for what it means to be an American in the 21st century. It has a lot to do with what white segregationists did mid-20th century that left cracks in the foundation of America that we are still dealing with now.
JP: You write how the committee’s work sat at an intersection of concerns about Communism, segregation, and homosexuality, right? But it started out as a committee authorized and funded by the Florida legislature to go after Communists or subversives and to address desegregation efforts.
RF: It was established to end the Tallahassee bus boycott which was at the legislature’s door. They didn’t want another black bus boycott to succeed, leading to bus integration, especially in the capital city. Communism and the term Communist were the sort of hot button words that they figured out they could throw around such as the word “terrorist” in the early aughts or the term “Venezuelan gang member” we use now to get someone to be immediately considered subversive and counter to the values of our nation—dangerous, socially suspect. They tried to create this extrajudicial committee modeled off the House Un-American Activities Committee and also what Senator Joseph McCarthy perpetrated in the U.S. Senate. They tried to do it in Florida several times before and it didn’t work until the integrationists were knocking at the door of the state capitol building. Then they found the funds and the whole purpose of [the Johns Committee] was to try to make sure that this bus boycott ended in ignominy and disaster, and embarrassment for the local NAACP leaders. And to make sure that this wasn’t treated as—or viewed as—a model victory that would lead to future victories for integrationists throughout the rest of the state. The dominant faction of the very racist southern Democratic Party in Florida really enjoyed their financial and political power since they brought down Reconstruction and established the apartheid system. And they did not want to let it go.
JP: So who was Charlie Johns, and why does he figure so important to this committee and to the work it did.
RF: He was a longstanding Florida State Senator aligned with the Dixiecrat segregationists. In his private life he had been a railroad conductor on segregated train cars, and he’d also, in the midst of his legislative career, founded an insurance agency through which he sold policies to state agencies. This is the era of personal spoils, which was standard in Florida State politics at the time.
Johns’ name was technically Charles Johns, but he used the childhood diminutive Charlie his whole life because he liked that people instantly felt like they were his friends when they used it. He was chummy, calculating, a parliamentary genius, and an astounding reader of social situations. He was a winsome guy who could have an elephantine memory, who could remember anyone upon first introduction, including the name of your wife, the name of your children, and where you’re from. People thought he was uneducated, but he really just fronted a bumpkin persona whenever it helped him get rural votes to do so. He benefited from a very radical form of gerrymandering. Two tiny, rural counties elected him to his office every time. Often he would run uncontested. He succeeded with his own voters, but he really had never won a statewide Democratic election.
He was astoundingly successful running on a white populism message, which was really just about giving whites more access to the Jim Crow system. He was known to hook up friends. He was a guy who never confronted a framework or a situation, or a person that made him ever consider that he’d had any unearned advantage.
Similar to J. Edgar Hoover, Johns wanted to carve out a power position for himself within State government, using the legislature that would give him an extra judicial control to basically have as much or even more power than being the governor and without ever having to run for it. And he did so, using the Red Scare, which, as Southerners understood it, Communists wanted to end Jim Crow and wanted to integrate schools and wanted your white daughter dating a black boy. So he harnessed those fears to then give himself a committee and then earned himself chairmanship of this committee. Because he became so central to the activity of the committee, it gained the nickname the “Johns Committee.”
JP: The power that Johns had through this committee in a compelling part of the book. And, as you said, it was an extrajudicial committee, investigating subversives, particularly, around integration. But then it shifted to investigating students, faculty, and staff at the University of Florida. Can you talk about their tactics.
RF: They eventually got gummed up in the court system by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which had some of the finest attorneys and appellate attorneys of the 20th century arguing their cases. The Johns’ Committee was hamstrung, and they needed something to do with their money and time to justify their existence. So they turned to the University of Florida, because, in the midst of the Congressional Red Scare, several University of Florida professors had testified at committees where they were accused of either being Communist or experimenting with Communism, or reading a Communist book while they were in grad school, or what have you. Several of the University of Florida professors testified before Congress, and were fired as a result. But those individuals continued to live in Gainesville, near the University of Florida campus. So initially, the Johns Committee went there. But they had neither the expertise, nor the competencies, nor the patience, nor the capacity to unearth Soviet spies. They realized pretty quickly they were bumblers.
So these investigators started following friends of the people that had formerly testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Congress. Some of these friends were into the art scene in Gainesville, and they were into opera, and they were into things like that because they were college intellectuals. The Johns Committee continued to spy on these people and then followed them to their local watering holes, to their local theater troupe rehearsals, and they figured out that some of these people were homosexuals. And then they’d read some document somewhere that said that the goal of Communism was also to make everybody gay. So they thought, this is part of the Communist plank. We don’t have the integration thing here, but we’ve got a lot of people who seem to be gentlemen who like other gentlemen, and women who like other women. They started to find professors and lecturers, and in some cases tenured professors, department heads, deans of the University of Florida, who were living secret sexual lives. In many cases, the men and women were married and fronting a traditional heteronormative life to public. Committee investigators decided they could get a lot of press and political traction if they started to go after these individuals who were not only homosexual but also teaching kids.
They would typically utilize scare tactics. They would pull professors out of their classes in the midst of lecture. They would come in as law enforcement entities, though they never had a warrant or anything like that. They’d be all dressed up, have guns holstered. They would demand the presence of a person, pull them out in front of others to embarrass them, and also create shock and an atmosphere of tension on campus. Then they would drag the person to an isolated, usually basement room that was soundproof and present some sort of specious evidence against them that says someone accused them of being a homosexual, or of being at an event where there were homosexuals. They would keep them in this room, not allow them water or food, not allow them access to a bathroom. Investigators would do whatever they had to do until eventually people broke down and said, “What can I do?”
Essentially, a lot of these students and professors had never considered themselves to be separate from the system. They thought they were Florida professors. They were part and parcel of the Florida system. They had oftentimes fronted a heteronormative life. These were people who understood homosexuality at the time within the Southern milieu, meaning they were in complete denial about what their sex play with other men meant. In some cases, it didn’t mean anything. It was a form of physical release they liked to have outside of their other life that was very loving. In other cases, it was a hidden identity or something they preferred. Some were developing a sort of gay ethos. But a lot of it was very febrile. So imagine a person who hadn’t settled for themselves what this activity meant, was then being confronted with it by state authorities in a very scary way. They were told it’s legally significant, put under oath and told, anything you lie about, you can be liable, and you could be charged with perjury.
It created a complete psychological breakdown. In many cases these people just broke and wanted to prove to authorities that they were not separate from the system. Many thought, “If I give these people what they want. Maybe they’ll believe me that I’m normal again.”
JP: The fact that this committee and these investigators had this kind of power was really stunning to see. You recount some the conversations that they were having in these interrogations, and how explicit and accusatory they were. It seemed like these investigators were just wanting the answers they were looking for. As you remind us in the book, there were no Miranda Rights at this point, and so these individuals were pulled from their classrooms or pulled from their homes without a lawyer, without any representations. They were on their own being accused of crimes that were serious crimes in the State of Florida, with little evidence. These interrogations rested mostly on hearsay.
RF: Eventually the investigators got closer and closer to the real queer watering holes, through confessions. They would create these little panic zones that they would create where they would put someone in the hot seat and get them to name all the names. Eventually they figured out where some real gay sex was going on regularly. The greatest cruising zone, basically a queer Times Square of Gainesville in 1958, was, ironically, the basement to the county courthouse. Everyone knew this. If you walked down into this basement and walked into this room, you entered a queer wonderland. There were graffiti murals galore, showing positions and scenarios that you couldn’t have imagined in your deepest dreams. These people were so pent up.
The greatest cruising zone, basically a queer Times Square of Gainesville in 1958, was, ironically, the basement to the county courthouse.So the state authorities eventually caught wind of this in the basement courthouse bathroom, and then they started to surveil. They sent in agents to entrap people in the midst of sex acts. It was even fishier than hearsay. Because of course you know, the circumstances of entrapment are also very difficult, and in some cases it’s not clear whether or not the law enforcement agents accepted the corporeal benefits of the entrapment before they arrested the people. But through this surveillance, investigators broke into the homosexual underworld of this university town. There weren’t open bars and clubs, so the place homosexuals would meet were in clandestine zones like this courthouse bathroom, and the Johns Committee took full advantage of that.
JP: The courthouse basement bathroom was a fascinating detail here. And of course surveillance and entrapment was not unique to Florida at the time. The FBI was training local police around the country on how to do such surveillance. But it took on a particular urgency with the Johns Committee, partly because, as you show, they wanted to justify their existence. They had to keep justifying their existence because over time they weren’t really achieving much toward their initial mandates.
RF: They were losing most of their integration battles. So they needed something that was more concrete, and they could win in public sentiment by firing intellectuals in the college, in the college system. They could target these people teaching their kids and so it became almost like a game to them to entrap a tenured professor or a dean. No matter what they’ve done in their academic careers, their participation in this gay crime by the moral codes of Florida and the Johns Committee, they were frauds, they were dangerous chameleons, and they needed to be exposed and destroyed.
JP: There was a paradox that eventually emerged. The investigation increasingly seemed to become a double-edged sword for those who participated, particularly for the President of the University of Florida. He had ambitions to expand the University as part of this changing image of post-war Florida in general. You write, for example, about Cape Canaveral, and the money and prestige that it was attracting to the state. Florida was transforming itself in those years from a morally dubious vacation land, to a more professional, middle-class, family-oriented culture. On the one hand, the university president needed the money from the state legislature to enact his vision of expansion. On the other hand, he didn’t want the public image of the university to be a place run amok with homosexuals.
RF: Well, it’s tricky. Charlie Johns was simultaneously on the Appropriations Committees while he was chairing the Johns Committee. The president of University of Florida, who was an economist, a practical guy with a business oriented mind. He had aspirations to make the university something more. He also understood that in order to get these aspirations realized, he would need the support of Charlie Johns, not just on the Appropriations Committee, but also in the work of the Johns Committee. So he knew that there was no way he could refuse, or make some sort of grandstanding gesture and expel state agents from his campus and also get the financial cooperation that he needed from the legislature. So basically, he had to play the realpolitik in order to preserve the reputation of his school and also elevate it to the caliber he wanted. He wanted hospitals. He wanted more technology and science-oriented research. That would not occur unless he gave a little bit of meat to the lions. He decided that if throwing a few closeted queers to the lions over at FLIC got him the money he needed, that was just the trade-off that was required.
JP: You write so well about many of these individuals and how their careers were destroyed through these investigations. But it wasn’t contained to the University of Florida.
RF: No. They’d go wreak havoc on one campus, do their damage, and then go somewhere new to ply their trade. They did it at Florida State. They did it at the University of South Florida. But some of their biggest successes were at smaller junior colleges, and in high schools, where you see some of the most brutal and sad stories. It’s totally heartbreaking to see these cases, because the individuals had no lawyer, didn’t know that they didn’t have to testify, and they were basically guided into the pit. And they stepped in.
JP: What struck me, too, was how for little over a decade public opinion supported the Johns Committee. You relate how people wrote really supportive letters to the committee.
RF: Many people wrote the committee to offer help. They would ask, “I’ve always suspected my neighbor of something. Should I spy on behalf of you?” And oftentimes the Johns Committee would write back and say yes. It created this East Germany spying situation, with neighbor turning on neighbor to defend the great state of Charlie Johns.
JP: What ultimately brought down this committee?
RF: Two things. The segregationists fought and clung so hard to this old model of gerrymandering they had in the state of Florida called malapportionment, which meant that you could be elected with unequal numbers of votes in their districts. Through the Civil Rights court cases, the state constitution was quashed, and they had to create a new constitution in the late sixties and basically rebuild the State and its political structure. The lead up to the end of that system of electoral manipulation that allowed the white segregationists power had an impact. Once that electoral system went down, the Johns Committee was just sort of a bulldog of that older system. By the late 1960s the legislature had changed.
The second thing occurred in 1962, when the state lost a case called Neal v. Bryant that had to do with their ability to interrogate homosexuals in isolated rooms. The plaintiff, William James Neal, was a gay, black professor at a junior college who was interrogated, confessed to a gay crime that he never could have committed, was subsequently fired, and his teaching certificate was removed. He sued the State of Florida as a gay, black man. The case went all the way to the Florida Supreme Court and he won. And what’s interesting, he won by making the case always about homosexuality, never about his race. I could not find one single court case or court document that addressed the fact that Neal was a black man who sued segregated Florida over gay issues and won in the early sixties. But that shut down the gay investigations effectively, and the investigators capacity to execute their prior tactics.
JP: But the committee was not exactly going down quietly, right?
RF: Since they couldn’t do investigations anymore, committee members decided to take all the knowledge they had learned about homosexuality and put it all in one document and give it to citizens to shock them. They published in a pamphlet called “Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida.” It was meant to serve as a big warning about the dangers of homosexuality. They were so desensitized by then to gay imagery and even gay terminology, that they put it all in to this report to inform the public, and it ended up being declared pornographic and obscene. They included pornographic images, that even now are a little steamy. For back then, they were just unheard of.
The report gained the nickname the “Purple Pamphlet.” It became a notorious document and public sentiment turned almost immediately against the committee using the State Steal of Florida and tax dollars to distribute a pornographic document. The “Purple Pamphlet” was considered so hot for its time that gay erotica presses, such as Guild Press in Washington, DC., got a copy of it and reprinted it for gay audiences and distributed around the country.
So once the “Purple Pamphlet” was published, the committee basically petered out. And people forgot about it quite quickly. People involved knew that there was going to be a lot of spicy materials in the committee’s investigative reports that they didn’t want subsequent administrations to look at. So they declared it all to be executive privilege, sealed all the reports for the next several decades. The documentation disappeared.
JP: You write about the legacy of the Johns Committee through the 1970s with Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign, and how you can’t really understand that effort to rescind non-discrimination laws against LGBTQ citizens in South Florida until you understand this history as well.
RF: Big, big surprise. None of Anita Bryant’s ideas were original. She’d heard them other places. She was living in Florida in the sixties. She attended Baptist churches—and Charlie Johns was a Baptist—where she was hearing this sort of ethos of the evils of homosexuality, and how homosexuals were a threat to children, which was why they needed to fire them, get them out of classrooms. Through the late 1960s, she was quite popular among the American homosexual community. She was also considered apolitical. In 1968, she performed at both the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention. She was considered a very safe, sure thing as a celebrity who took no hard stances. And then, in the mid- to late-seventies she finally found her political calling. It was a detriment to all the gay men who had bought her records over the years, and even cheered her on at the Miss America Pageant. But her rise and then rapid fall can only be understood in the socio-political context of a state. Many people make the mistake of thinking the anti-queer sentiment and the anti-queer apparatus of Florida politics begins with Anita Bryant, and that’s not true at all. She was riding a wave actually.
JP: The last thing I want to ask you about is the research, because the research is its own story. You start this book by writing about acquiring boxes of material from the Johns Committee, filling the trunk of your car as your drive out of the state. Talk about the hurdles you had in getting this research.
RF: Well, I knew I wanted to tell this story. Even as I sold the idea to my publisher, I was thinking the research was going to be a little harder than the research for my first book. I thought I’ll just go to the state archives in Tallahassee. I got to the archives and the documents related to the Johns Committee showed the most severe and sloppy redaction efforts that I’d ever seen, and I became so incensed. I went through more than twenty boxes of redacted materials, and I wondered how the heck I was going to ever make any use of these files.
So I didn’t know how I was going do this. I couldn’t make heads or tails of some of this stuff. Then I found a scholar who had written the first master’s thesis on the Florida Johns Committee published in 1985. She was a master’s student at University of South Florida, named Bonnie Stark. She had gotten interviews with many of the major Johns Committee players before they died. We bonded really quickly. It turns out she was a paralegal at a law firm in Tallahassee. She told me in our first Zoom meeting, “I have the secret second set of all the Florida Johns Committee records, and I want to give them to you.” I cried. Couldn’t believe it.
Bonnie could also tell me a lot about the process of the redactions, and the document releases from the early 1990s that I didn’t know about. And then I got this secret second set where basically no document was redacted the same way. And so I started to note redaction mistakes between the duplicates that Bonnie gave me, and all the copies of the documents still in the state of Florida’s possession that I researched, and I started to decipher the documents. Who’s talking? Where? Where was this person? Oh, that’s their birthday! Oh, that’s the street they live on in this year. Oh, that was their high school, and that’s their graduating year. Oh, and their name is 6 letters. There’s an ascending letter here, and a descending letter here. Eventually I started to piece together who was talking, and then that got really fun. It was like putting together a puzzle or solving a riddle. I felt like Sherlock Holmes.
JP: As you noted, so many people’s lives were upended in these interrogations. But the in the end, after nine years, very little was accomplished by the Johns Committee?
RF: No one person arrested or charged, except for one journalist who had been following the Johns Committee beat. They entrapped that guy with a lesbian, who had been arrested for other crimes, and agreed to take money to pretend to be committing adultery with him. He was eventually convicted for this. So the only prosecution was a beat reporter, who had been covering the Johns Committee the entire time. He ended up divorced, his family life fell apart.
He lost his job.
I would want the State of Florida to say sorry. There already is a perfectly good apology resolution that is symbolically introduced, and then swatted down so cruelly every year. I hope there’s more publicity and more attention, because the state of Florida willfully will not apologize for what it perpetrated.
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