Working in the Magic City

Abstract

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.