Abstract
During the past several years, the Florida sugar industry has been under the journalist’s microscope and scrutinized as no other agricultural enterprise in America. If we are to believe the evidence presented in Alec Wilkinson’s Big Sugar, or essays written over the past decade that appeared in Forbes, George, the Nation, and Florida Trend, one must conclude that Florida sugar interests are economically privileged and politically powerful, ruthlessly exploitative towards labor, and, to top it off, largely responsible for the environmental degradation of the Everglades.1 During the 1980s the focus of the attack centered on the industry’s use of imported temporary workers from the Caribbean, and the force of this critique peaked in 1989 with the publication of Wilkinson’s Big Sugar, portions of which were serialized in The New Yorker.
Recommended Citation
Heitmann, John A.
(1998)
"The Beginnings of Big Sugar in Florida, 1920-1945,"
Florida Historical Quarterly: Vol. 77:
No.
1, Article 4.
Available at:
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/fhq/vol77/iss1/4
