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.