Working in the Magic City: Moral Economy in Early Twentieth-Century Miami

Miami is a hard place for working people. Second in the nation in income inequality, the Miami metro area also has the ninth-highest poverty rate in the nation. Employment tends to be seasonal and labor markets volatile. The largest sector, tourism, employs thousands of low-wage workers who must endure difficult working conditions while wearing a smile for outsiders on whose largesse they depend. Meanwhile, the political and social climate are both hostile to organized labor. Thomas A. Castillo's study of early twentieth-century Miami demonstrates that the city's workers have long dealt with these conditions and that, for an equally long period of time, they have demanded a political economy that would provide them a "competency . . . the right to a pleasurable life, with access to recreation and decent living conditions" (5). That Miami has seldom if ever made room for this vision, he concludes, is the result of the power of capitalists, not the failure of workers to challenge them.Across seven chapters, Castillo explores the labor history of Miami prior to World War II. Skillfully using a mix of obscure and scant sources to reconstruct a picture of Miami's early twentieth-century workers, he describes the matrix of class and race in the rapidly growing city. Elites, a group he largely leaves undetailed, envisioned a tropical paradise that simultaneously exploited white and Black workers and rendered them invisible or at least made them appear docile to wealthy tourists through significant social controls.Castillo demonstrates workers were anything but invisible or docile and pushed back against capitalist visions for Miami's development with their own. He focuses on three major struggles: control of the chauffeuring business, employers' demand for the open shop in construction, and access to jobs for local workers (as opposed to transient workers) during the Great Depression. In these cases, he argues, working-class Miamians, white and Black, spoke in the language of a "class-harmony discourse" that, recognizing the deleterious effects of labor strife for everyone involved in tourism and real estate, eschewed open conflict against the bosses (5). This lack of confrontation was rooted neither in an acceptance of the capitalist order nor in a lack of class identity, Castillo argues; instead it was a strategy for gaining leverage to create a moral economy for workers. That this strategy led workers to punch other workers instead of their bosses—and especially white workers to punch Black workers (and in one case to dynamite the Oddfellows Hall in what was then Colored Town)—was, according to Castillo, not evidence that they rejected class politics or of simple white working-class racism but the result of having to struggle in an economy of scarcity maintained by the city's elites. Pushed hard in an economy already segmented by Jim Crow, workers had little room for organizing across the color line or utopian politics if they hoped to maintain a livelihood. "The social democratic project of unionism often operated in the context of scarcity and competition," Castillo explains, "placing workers with difficult decisions and, sometimes, unfair outcomes" (8).Castillo is no doubt on to something with the reminder that the capitalist structure of Miami's political economy kept workers from making the world as they pleased. His final two chapters, both set in the era of the Great Depression and focused on the work of activist Perrine Palmer and the Dade County Unemployed Citizens' League, suggest that the changed circumstances of the 1930s opened the door for a broader, more-inclusive politics that culminated in the elimination of Florida's poll tax. Widespread scarcity, as well as a changing local and national political environment, made room for different approaches. The context, Castillo shows, matters.Of course, there is a difference between contextualizing and exonerating. White chauffeurs who terrorized Black chauffeurs to maintain a stranglehold on the market, whites-only building trades unions that embraced antiradicalism and racism to fight off the open shop, and local workers who sided with elites in their use of the "Hobo Express" to expel unhoused job seekers, lived in circumstances that were not of their making; nevertheless, they made choices that other workers (particularly Black workers) did not make. It would be a massive condescension for historians to judge them too much. But it would also be historical malpractice to explain away their actions as products of their own time.