The first Floridian to serve in a presidential cabinet was Alan S. Boyd (b.1922), named the first secretary of transportation (1967–69) by President Lyndon Johnson. Florida also produced one of the major US military figures of World War II, General Joseph Warren Stilwell (1883–1946), dubbed "Vinegar Joe" for his strongly stated opinions. Graduated from West Point in 1904, he served in France during World War I. First posted to China in the 1920s, he became chief of staff to General Chiang Kai-shek and commander of US forces in the China-Burma-India theater during World War II. He was promoted to full general in 1944 but forced to leave China because of his criticism of the Chiang Kaishek regime. Janet Reno (b.1938), Attorney General of the United States in the Clinton administration, was born in Miami.
David Levy Yulee (b.St. Thomas, 1810–86) came to Florida in 1824 and, after serving in the US House of Representatives, was appointed one of the state's first two US senators in 1845, thereby becoming the first Jew to sit in the Senate. He resigned in 1861 to serve in the Confederate Congress. Yulee built the first cross-state railroad, from Fernandina to Cedar Key, in the late 1860s. Ruth Bryan Owen Rohde (b.Illinois, 1885–1954), a longtime Miami resident and member of the US House of Representatives (1929–33), in 1933 became the first woman to head a US diplomatic office abroad when she was named minister to Denmark.
Prominent governors of Florida include Richard Keith Call (b.Virginia, 1792–1862), who came to Florida with General Andrew Jackson in 1821 and remained to become governor of the territory in 1826–39 and 1841–44. In the summer of 1836, Call commanded the US campaign against the Seminole. Although a southerner and a slaveholder, he steadfastly opposed secession. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward (1857–1910) was, before becoming governor, a ship's pilot and owner of St. Johns River boats. He used one of these, The Three Friends, a powerful seagoing tug, to run guns and ammunition to Cuban rebels in 1896. As governor (1905–9), he was noted for a populist program that included railroad regulation, direct elections, state college reorganization and coordination, and drainage of the Everglades under state auspices. As governor in 1955–61, Thomas LeRoy Collins (1909–91), met the desegregation issue by advocating moderation and respect for the law, helping the state avoid violent confrontations. He served as chairman of both the southern and national governors' conferences, and he was named by President Johnson as the first director of the Community Relations Service under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Military figures who have played a major role in Florida's history include the Spanish conquistadors Juan Ponce de León (c.1460–1521), the European discoverer of Florida, and Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (1519–74), founder of the first permanent settlement, St. Augustine. Andrew Jackson (b.South Carolina, 1767–1845), a consistent advocate of US seizure of Florida, led military expeditions into the territory in 1814 and 1818 and, after US acquisition, served briefly in 1821 as Florida's military governor before leaving for Tennessee. During the Seminole War of 1835–42, one of the leading military tacticians was Osceola (c.1800–1838), who, although neither born a chief nor elected to that position, rose to the leadership of the badly divided Seminole by force of character and personality. He rallied them to fierce resistance to removal, making skillful use of guerrilla tactics. Captured under a flag of truce in 1837, he was imprisoned; already broken in health, he died in Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor. During the Civil War, General Edmund Kirby Smith (1824–93), a native of St. Augustine who graduated from West Point in 1845, served as commander (1863–65) of Confederate forces west of the Mississippi River. He surrendered the last of the southern forces at Galveston, Texas, on 26 May 1865.
Among the late-19th-century entrepreneurs who played significant roles in Florida's development, perhaps the most important was Henry Morrison Flagler (b.New York, 1830–1913). Flagler made a fortune in Ohio as an associate of John D. Rockefeller in the Standard Oil Co. and did not even visit Florida until he was in his fifties. However, in the 1880s he began to acquire and build railroads down the length of Florida's east coast and to develop tourist hotels at various points, including St. Augustine, Palm Beach, and Miami, helping to create one of the state's major present-day industries. Henry Bradley Plant (b.Connecticut, 1819–99) did for Florida's west coast what Flagler did for the east. Plant extended railroad service to Tampa in 1884, built a huge tourist hotel there, developed the port facilities, and established steamship lines.
Among Floridians prominent in science was Dr. John F. Gorrie (b.South Carolina, 1802–55), who migrated to Apalachicola in 1833 and became a socially and politically prominent physician, specializing in the treatment of fevers. He blew air over ice brought in by ship from the north to cool the air in sickrooms, and he independently developed a machine to manufacture ice, only to have two others beat him to the patent office by days.
The noted labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979) was a native of Crescent City. Mary McLeod Bethune (b.South Carolina, 1875–1955) was an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on minority affairs, became the first president (1935) of the National Council of Negro Women, and was a consultant at the 1945 San Francisco Conference that founded the UN. A prominent black educator, she opened a school for girls at Daytona Beach in 1904. The school merged with Cookman Institute in 1923 to become Bethune-Cookman College, which she headed until 1942 and again in 1946–47.
Prominent Florida authors include James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), perhaps best known for his 1912 novel Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. He was also the first black to be admitted to the Florida bar (1897) and was a founder and secretary of the NAACP. Marjory Stoneman Douglas (b.Minnesota, 1890–1998), who came to Miami in 1915, was the author of several works reflecting her concern for the environment, including The Everglades: River of Grass (first published in 1947), Hurricane (1958), and Florida: The Long Frontier (1967). Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (b.Washington, D.C., 1895–1953) came to Florida in 1928 to do creative writing. After her first novel, South Moon Under (1933), came the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Yearling (1938), the poignant story of a 12-year-old boy on the Florida frontier in the 1870s. Zora Neale Hurston (1901–60), born in poverty in the all-Negro town of Eatonville and a graduate of Barnard College, spent four years collecting folklore, which she published in Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938).
Entertainers born in Florida include Sidney Poitier (b.1927), Charles Eugene "Pat" Boone (b.1934), Faye Dunaway (b.1941), and Ben Vereen (b.1946).
Florida's most famous sports figure is Chris Evert Lloyd (Christine Marie Evert, b.1953), who became a dominant force in women's tennis in the mid-1970s. After turning pro in 1973, she won the Wimbledon singles title in 1974, 1976, and 1981, and the US Open from 1975 to 1978 and in 1980 and 1982. She retired from tennis in 1990.