Working in the Magic City: Moral Economy in Early Twentieth-Century Miami (Working Class in American History)

This book reveals the working-class history of Miami in the early twentieth century. The expansion of Miami from a small town to a big city resulted from the effort of thousands of workers to build, maintain, and foster a viable community. The city’s labor history reveals persistent class struggle even though it was not marked by large, prolonged labor strikes and violence. The book demonstrates how class struggle occurred along the axis of class harmony discourse. One end represented a drive toward a conservative framing of class hierarchy with docile or recalcitrant workers at the bottom and benevolent, wise businessmen at the top. The other end embraced a cooperative vision of class relations driven by moral economy that accepted class hierarchy yet prioritized fairness and the dignity of the worker. The book’s focus is workers: their migration to a growing city far down the Florida peninsula; their economic struggle amid a seasonal tourist economy with endemic irregular work; and how their effort to organize for their economic well-being—whether for Black economic rights, unionization, or the unemployment movement—revealed a continuous process of community formation. Workers helped establish a home labor ethic that put an emphasis on hiring local workers. Black activists (labor and civil), labor unions, and the unemployment movement show how the drive for moral economy defined Miami’s working-class history. In the early twentieth century, Miami cultivated an image of itself as a destination for leisure and sunshine free from labor strife. Thomas A. Castillo unpacks this idea of class harmony and the language that articulated its presence by delving into the conflicts, repression, and progressive grassroots politics of the time. Castillo pays particular attention to how class and race relations reflected and reinforced the nature of power in Miami. Class harmony argued against the existence of labor conflict, but in reality obscured how workers struggled within the city's service-oriented seasonal economy. Castillo shows how and why such an ideal thrived in Miami's atmosphere of growth and boosterism and amidst the political economy of tourism. His analysis also presents class harmony as a theoretical framework that broadens our definitions of class conflict and class consciousness.| Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Working-Class Community 1. Class and Race in the Interwar Years 2. Driving and Chauffeuring in Miami 3. Fighting the Open Shop 4. Winter Playground Blues: Unemployment, Home Labor, and the Hobo Express 5. Appeals to Harmony: Perrine Palmer and Transcending Scarcity 6. Fighting for Social Harmony: Relief, New Deals, and the Unemployed 7. Labor Marches: Class Struggle and the Marginalization of Class Epilogue Appendix: Miami Occupation Distribution Notes Index Back cover |"The implications of Working in the Magic City reach far beyond Miami itself. . . . Castillo punctures the spaces between vagrancy and vacation, transient and resident, service and survival. The strength of Working in the Magic City is its analysis of a seemingly innocuous emphasis in localism." — H-Net "The superficial sheen of Miami as a purely seasonal 'winter playground' for the well-to-do obscures the city's rich and long-standing quotidian working-class history dating back to the early twentieth century. Few scholars have done more than Castillo to pull back the curtain on the lives and aspirations of the multiracial class of chauffeurs, construction workers, transient laborers, and care and service workers who helped make Miami what it was—and what it is today. Based on an unprecedented mining of long-neglected archives and local newspapers from the first half of the last century, Working in the Magic City offers a major exposure of the deep layers—and fault lines—of labor and urban history of one of the most poorly understood and understudied transnational urban conglomerations in the contemporary world. What once seemed Miami's anomaly—an urban economy based primarily on low-wage service work and seasonal precarity—now appears to define capitalist modernity."—Alex Lichtenstein, author of Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South "Thomas Castillo has rendered one of America's premier cities of leisure a city of labor. Contradicting more than a century of booster propaganda, Working in the Magic City reveals Miami's rich and complex history of class conflict. Even more impressively, it arms today's readers with a powerful parable about the frailty and preciousness of interracial, working-class organizing, dare one dream, class harmony."—N. D. B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida | Thomas A. Castillo is an assistant professor of history at Coastal Carolina University.