What would early 20th century Tampa cigar workers think about Ron DeSantis’s “working class roots”?

As Shawn Gude writes at Jacobin: “May Day is not a holiday for Florida governor Ron DeSantis, much as he might pose as a working-class champion. For a more robust vision of freedom, we can look to the Florida Socialists and Tampa cigar workers of Eugene Debs’s day.”

Here is a taste of his piece, “The Florida Socialists Who Knew Working-Class Solidarity Was the Foundation of Freedom”:

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. Factory management had obstructed the cigar workers’ lector, or reader, who read to them as they crafted their highly coveted, hand-rolled product.

This was no minor affront.

The lector was the very emblem of the Tampa-area cigar workers’ proud status as free, autonomous workers. They — not the factory owners — handpicked the lector. They — not the factory owners — chose what the lector would read: novels, the news, or, most enraging to management, radical material.

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. The explosion of mass solidarity forced management to relent. The workers would keep their reader, at least for the time being.

El lector could hardly be more alien to Ron DeSantis’s Florida. 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.

Many of the cigar workers sympathized with or were card-carrying members of the Socialist Party of America. 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.

DeSantis, the son of two Rust Belt parents, cites his working-class background when explaining the origins of his crusading, freedom-focused philosophy. 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). 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).

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.

As 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. 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 Florida Legislature, at DeSantis’s urging, is currently considering legislation to make it easier to decertify public sector unions and harder to collect dues.

To DeSantis, freedom’s nemeses are “woke” media outlets, bureaucrats, and corporations — not because, say, companies constantly stomp on workers’ right to organize, but because some businesses now feel compelled to use anti-racist language. Likewise, being part of “the elite” doesn’t mean having a flush bank account or exercising direct control over workers’ livelihoods, but instead betraying a dash of social liberalism. As DeSantis writes in his latest book, Clarence Thomas is not a member of the ruling class, and “some who acquire great wealth, be it an oilman from Texas or an automobile dealer from Florida, are also part of the ‘outs’ because they do not subscribe to the prevailing outlook and philosophical preferences of the ruling class.”

Read the rest here.