The Florida Legislature, at DeSantis’s urging, is currently considering legislation to make it easier to decertify public sector unions and harder to collect dues. As governor he has taken aim at Florida’s teachers unions, one of the few bastions of organized working-class power in a “right to work” state with just 4.5 percent of the workforce unionized. The Tampa cigar workers would have scoffed at DeSantis’s anti-union, free-market populism as counterfeit liberty.Īs a US representative from 2013 to 2018, DeSantis voted to axe Medicare and Social Security spending, applauded lifting the retirement age to seventy, and helped found the social spending–phobic House Freedom Caucus. So what does freedom look like to DeSantis? A sort of pre–New Deal society with a weak welfare state, weak regulatory state, and, crucially, weak labor unions. He spoke in a similar register at his second inaugural address this year, using the words “freedom” or “free” fourteen times and “liberty” four, dwarfing even his favorite bête noire, “woke” (three). Early in his new book, The Courage to be Free, DeSantis declares that he’s animated by “blue-collar values,” unlike the “entrenched elites” that come out of places like Yale and Harvard Law (his two alma maters). They and other Florida Socialists of the era - tenant farmers in the cotton-growing North, timber workers in the Panhandle, trade unionists in and around Jacksonville - saw working-class solidarity as the lifeblood of freedom, and democracy in the factory and the fields as the solvent to petty tyrants.ĭeSantis, the son of two Rust Belt parents, cites his working-class background when explaining the origins of his crusading, freedom-focused philosophy. Many of the cigar workers sympathized with or were card-carrying members of the Socialist Party of America. While DeSantis frequently touts his working-class Italian roots, scorns well-connected elites, and drapes himself in the garb of freedom, the Tampa cigar workers would have scoffed at his anti-union, free-market populism as counterfeit liberty - a surefire way to press workers further under the thumb of swaggering employers. (University of South Florida historical photography collections via Wikimedia Commons)Įl lector could hardly be more alien to Ron DeSantis’s Florida. Cuban patriot Jose Marti poses with cigar-factory workers after giving a speech in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida in 1893. The workers would keep their reader, at least for the time being.
The explosion of mass solidarity forced management to relent. The business establishment’s attack on this totemic figure - which culminated in the violent deportation of the lector himself - sent cigar workers across greater Tampa into the streets, brandishing signs in Spanish and Italian. They - not the factory owners - chose what the lector would read: novels, the news, or, most enraging to management, radical material. They - not the factory owners - handpicked the lector. The lector was the very emblem of the Tampa-area cigar workers’ proud status as free, autonomous workers. Factory management had obstructed the cigar workers’ lector, or reader, who read to them as they crafted their highly coveted, hand-rolled product.
FREEDOM FACTORY DRIVERS
* Drivers list subject to change.On a fall day in 1902, in a working-class town not far from where Florida governor Ron DeSantis would grow up, West Tampa cigar workers walked off the job to protest what they viewed as an assault on their freedom. The race starts at 7pm ET on April 2, but the broadcast begins at 6pm ET.
FREEDOM FACTORY DRIVER
Each driver will pilot a nitrous-equipped Crown Vic for 100 laps around the Freedom Factory.
FREEDOM FACTORY FULL
It’s a Daytona-style race with a line up full of the best drivers from a variety of backgrounds–circle track, rally cross, drifting, and more. Your pass also gives you access to watch Cleetus and Cars the next day. Lock in your Pay-Per-View pass now for the event on April 2! The early bird rate is $14.95 through April 1.
FREEDOM FACTORY PRO
YouTube star Cleetus McFarland is bringing the Freedom 500 back to his Freedom Factory…and this time its chalk full of pro drivers! Will Cleetus win his own race this time? Will James Taal rage quit again? Is Adam LZ gonna get pinged in the helmet with a Mountain Dew?
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