There have been 48 governors of Florida, but only this one lived on the Emerald Coast – and was the only third-party candidate to be elected Governor.
Sure, there have been other major party candidates.
And Thomas Brown – a Whig party member from Virginia – was the second elected governor of the state from 1849 to 1853. His claim to fame was that he invented the post office letter box.
But he was elected when the Whigs were one of the two big parties – the other being the Democratic Republicans.
No the only third-party governor to win the job in Florida was Sidney Johnston Catts.
Catts served as governor from 1917 to 1921 and was a member of the Prohibition Party. He was the only person in the 90 years between reconstruction and the late 60s to win the governor’s race who was not a Democrat.
Several factors got together to make this very unlikely event to take place to make the DeFuniak Springs resident Governor. Ill explain – after I tell you about this dude.
Catts was born in Alabama and is not one of the 18 governors to have been born in the sunshine state, hated catholics as much as he hated alcohol.
He was born in in Alabama in 1863 to a confederate captain in the Civil War.
Just after the South lost, in 1866, the three-year-old Catts was stabbed in the eye by his nurse… accidentally.
He graduated from law school, became a minister, lost a race to become a Democratic congressman from Alabama. After the losshe moved to Florida in 1910.
He showed up in DeFuniak Springs and served as the minister of the First Baptist Church for a very short amount of time before he realized the pay wasn’t going to cut it for him.
He decided to switch vocations – from preaching to selling insurance before he decided to run as a huge underdog for the Florida Governorship in 1916.
In 1914 – Catts decided he would run governor. His election in 1916 meant the populist sentiment sweeping through the south would get its hold in Florida, too.
But no one really gave him a chance – even though he initially decided to run as a democrat. He was expected to finish a distant third in the Democratic Primary – which essentially served as the general election in Florida at that time.
The frontrunners were Ion Farns, a progressive democrat from Jacksonville, and the state’s comptroller – W.V. Knott.
Knott was the golden child – kind of like a modern day Adam Putnam if you are into Florida Politics – or Jeb Bush if you are more familiar with national politics. All the political insiders thought he was gonna win and that it was almost a moot point. But they ran some of the worst campaigns ever and would eventually get beat.
Catts made some smart moves, was the beneficiary of an ice-cold campaign from Knotts who thought he had it in the bag, and some demographic issues that broke in his favor.
Sidney Catts did something no one else had up to that point in Florida politics – he drove everywhere. Thanks to his Model T, he was able to get to all of the small towns and hamlets where most of the state’s population lived. You see, Florida was VERY rural back in the first world war. In total, less than a million people lived in the state – making it the smallest by population in the south. Now, it’s the biggest.
Texas isn’t the South, it’s Texas. Don’t @ me.
So, Catts made his move to rally all of the rural votes by actually showing up and asking them to vote for him.
He also made it clear that he hated Catholics a lot and believed that they were conspiring to overthrow the American government.
He went so far as to claim that a cathedral in Tampa (there wasn’t one there at the time) was a secret arsenal for Catholics who were just waiting for the signal from the Pope to take over. A newspaper in Havana, Cuba would report that Catts believed the Pope hoped to overthrown the American Republic and begin a theocracy centered in the town of St. Antonio, Florida.
A majority-catholic town in Florida of 262 people in 1920 – and the home of a monastery and what would become St. Leo university. Less than three percent of Florida’s one million residents were Catholic at this point. Roughly one in five of Florida’s 23 million residents today are Catholic.
– and denounced President Woodrow Wilson for hiring a Catholic to be his secretary.
Future governor Fuller Warren was quoted as saying that Catts “hanged the pope in every oak tree in West Florida,” during the campaign.
In addition – Catts went everywhere with two revolvers on his hips. Why? Naturally, he feared that people wanted to assassinate him.
He claimed he had to speak quote “with both hands on my pistols, which were loaded in every chamber [and prominently displayed]. Often, I would have to show them to men in the audience and tell them that I would not hesitate to use them, before they would let me alone.”
Most of the newspapers and political class in Florida would choose Knotts as their guy as the June primary election approached for the democratic primary.
Despite riding a way of anti-alcohol, anti-catholicism, and those revolvers, Catts would lose the primary to Knott.
But the system was a bit unusual, and he has a valid claim that he might not have lost it at all.
You see, back in the day, Florida’s Democratic Primary had ranked choice voting. It was new for the election, so a lot of the election officials had no idea, and little training on how it worked. So, many of them just didn’t count the second-preference vote.
When voters went to the polls on June 6, 1916 they had no idea what was in store for them on the other end of the day.
At the end of the day, Catts said that he won by a 300ish vote margin. More than 66 thousand white men turned out to vote (Blacks and women did not have the vote, effectively, at that point).
there was a big fight between Catts and Knott over who actually won, and both men accused the other of fraud.
The Florida Supreme Court would get involved, and in August, they ruled that Knott had won by 21 votes in a 67,000-vote contest.
Catts vowed he’d run against Knott in the general election no matter what.
In the aftermath of the primary, before the Florida Supreme Court ruled in Knott’s favor – the Prohibition Party got together and nominated Catts as their candidate at the end of June.
Catts message didn’t change much. He’d claim that a group of Catholics in Apilachicola tried to assassinate him while he was passing through during the summer after the primary. He’d also claim that the Catholic Church provided the money needed for the recount efforts in the Democratic Primary.
He also took the time to bash young people’s immorality – saying the girls cut their dresses too low at the top and too high at the bottom. Nothing about the boys though, which is interesting. Also, it’s hot in Florida in the summer.
The media started to turn in his favor too. Newspapers began to rescind their endorsements of Knott and endorse Catts. The Sanford Herald, a paper that supported another Democrat in the primary entirely, came out in favor of Catts and said the election had been stolen from him.
But Knott’s people weren’t screwing around after the close call in the Primary. They began to do opposition research and political hit jobs on Catts and his allies. In one instance, a Knott organizer would claim that one of Catts’ key supporters was a socialist. They also claimed Catts told his supporters that if he lost in the general election he and 10,000 men with rifles would march on the capital and take the governor’s office by force.
Catts would criss cross the state several more times on a shoestring budget. According to Wayne Flint’s paper on the election of 1916, he’d pass around a hat at each of his campaign stops to get money to make it to the next campaign stop.
Many of his surrogates were former Knott men that thought Catts had won the primary. They set out to work – especially in West Florida – to convert the masses to Catts.
Catts would win with a plurality of votes in the general election. His 39,000 were still significantly more than Knott’s 30,000.
At his inauguration, Catts told the gathered crowd that his victory was “the triumph ‘of the everyday masses of cracker people’ over political rings, corporations and railroads, the state press, Negro voters, the state judiciary, and the power of the Catholic heirarchy.”
He told the audience he would ban money for religious schools, he would not allow anyone who “owes his allegiance to a foreign naitonal potentate or foreign ecclesiastical power” to take office and would work to end the sale of alcohol in the state.
He also promised a cleaning out of the state bureacracy and their replacement with loyalists to the new regime, along with more equal taxing and inspections of ‘closed’ religious institutions like convents and monestaries by the police on a regular basis.
Catts fired most of the existing bureaucracy and filled more than 1,800 state positions with his boys. He removed the local sheriffs in South Florida, citing their toleration of prostitution and fired other state employees accused of graft.
But the Democratic-held state legislature stalled him in most of his goals for 1916 and 1917. That same legislature saw William Mapoles get a bill through to create Okaloosa County from parts of Walton and Santa Rosa Counties, though.
They also passed resolutions to pay for the salaries of people fired by Catts and to get rid of that steamer that enforced the restrictinos on fishermen of the Gulf Coast.
But he was able to get a couple of big items through the state legislature and onto his desk. Though some historians would argue that he didn’t have much to do with that at all.
He ended the inhumane program of convict leasing in Florida – which had replaced slavery as the main for a inexpensive labor for farms, turpentine stills and other private labor intensive businesses. Instead the convict labor accumulated by the state went to improving road infrastructure throughout the state.
His administration also launched the university extension program that still is in use today – with the goal to reduce illiteracy and improve the skills of the workforce in the state.
Florida also made school compulsory for every child between the ages of six and sixteen – this increased enrollment in schools by more than 50,000 students in a short time.
Catts would go on to challenge the incredibly popular senator for the state of Florida, Duncan Fletcher.
He lost. By a lot.
He’d leave office in 1921 trailed by accusations of bribery and counterfeiting. It didn’t help that his acerbic personality pushed away allies throughout his term. By the end, he threatened to shoot an ally in south florida with a shotgun over a disagreement over a state attorney appointment.
Catts’ biographer XXX Flynt would say quote “Sydney Catts was a visceral man who lived by the emoiton of the moment, and many a temper tantrum would be followed by a remorseful apology.”
Catts would attempt to regain his office as Florida governor in 1924 and 1928 but lost both times in the democratic primaries.
He’d die in 1936 at his home, Sun Bright, a three story Victorian home on Lake Defuniak in DeFuniak Springs – which is still around and you can still visit and is on the national register of historic places.
Pro Communi Bono
St. Francis De Sales, Ora Pro Nobis!
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