Marketing the Magic City: Miami and the Making of Modern America, 1896 - 1920s

1848 Publishing presents Shem Fleenor’s first book-length research study. In this sleek and elegant reader, Fleenor analyzes the cultural meaning and social importance of advertisements that depict South Florida in the early decades of the twentieth century. Miami, which has always been a product as much as an actual place, is, as Fleenor’s analysis of the ads in the monograph illuminate, sometimes simultaneously depicted as a natural oasis, southern yet Eurocentric, as a white man’s utopia, and as a bastion of consumer capitalism. Utopian ads for Miami were ultimately designed to seduce consumers and investors to South Florida by any means necessary. These seductive depictions of Miami as a harbor for anxious white men, Fleenor argues, collectively betray a great deal of American anxiety towards industrialization and urbanization that manifested itself in an adoration of a mythic nature that seemed to be increasingly imperiled, but also manifested itself in racism, sexism, nationalism, and the belief that consumer capitalism - especially in a supposedly utopian resort city such as Miami - was a panacea for class conflict. But these ads, Fleenor concludes, were not merely helping to make Miami. Miami and the ads that made it were also remaking America into an urban and industrial nation concomitant to making Americans into a people who first considered their personal and national identities in the realm of consumerism, rather than the work they did or class or race to which they belonged.