OF ONE-PIECE AND TWO-FIFTHS-PIECE BATHING SUITS—OF THE HONORABLE WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN AND HIS ACTIVITIES—OF BOOTLEGGERS—OF THE SANCTIMONIOUS HAIG AND HAIG BOYS—AND OF RUM IN GENERAL.
MIAMI and Miami Beach are now connected by a curving concrete causeway three and a half miles long. New and spacious as it is, it is often too small to accommodate the thousands of automobiles that hasten out to Miami Beach on hot Sunday afternoons in mid-winter in order that their occupants may obtain an eyeful, as the saying goes of the bathing crowds. The prudish element hasn’t yet been able to make its influence felt at Miami Beach to any noticeable extent. The one-piece bathing suit is heavily displayed by engaging young women, and there are also large numbers of bathing suits which appear to be one-half-piece or even two-fifths-piece. The latter variety of bathing suit is never worn with stockings; for no stockings—so far as is known—have yet been made long enough to reach to the hips. A striking effect is frequently obtained by the wearers of these two-fifths-piece bathing suits when they stroll out on the beach in short, hip-length capes which hang open negligently at the throat. One sees nothing below the cape but several square yards of flesh, and nothing above the cape but several square feet of flesh. It is a sight that gives one pause. When one sees it for the first time, he feels that he ought to hunt up a life-saver sometime later in the day and ask him to go and speak to the young woman and tell her that she has come out without her two-fifths-piece bathing suit. But one soon becomes accustomed to seeing such things—so accustomed, in fact, that one feels disappointed if he doesn’t see them.
The Honorable William Jennings Bryan has a home in Miami, and was devoting most of his time during the winter of 1922 to assuring his large and enthusiastic audiences that the doctrine of evolution, hitherto accepted as proved by every reputable scientist because of the overwhelming mass of supporting evidence, is no more worthy of credence than the story of Cinderella and the little Glass Slipper; that, in fact, it is as harmful to the young and impressionable as an unexpurgated set of Burton’s Arabian Nights. The citizens of Miami Beach were highly delighted with Mr. Bryan’s anti-evolution activities—not because they have anything against evolution, but because they like to see Mr. Bryan interested in something that will keep him from trying to make his neighbors conform to his ideas of right, and, by so doing, spoiling the bathing-hour. In fact, a committee of Miami Beachers was thinking of waiting on Mr. Bryan when he had finished shooting holes in Darwin, Huxley, Wallace, Herbert Spencer and other distinguished scientists, and urging him to attack the disgusting and contemptible theory that the earth is a globe or sphere, and to come out strong for a flat earth.
The site of the Flamingo Hotel, Miami Beach (at top) in 1912; (in middle) in 1917; and (at bottom) in 1922.
The Miami Beach Aquarium.
There are no wheel-chairs in Miami Beach, as there are in Palm Beach. The hotels tried to interest their guests in wheel-chairs, but the guests would have none of them. They are successful at Palm Beach because the Palm Beachers find them useful things in which to kill time. But at Miami Beach one has no time for time-killing. There is something doing every minute. There is golf and tennis and polo and bathing and dancing and seeing the bootlegger, or rushing over to town to see a movie or an orange grove or another bootlegger or something, and if one tried to get around in a wheel-chair, he’d come down with nervous prostration in a couple of days.
The bootleggers are very active in Miami; and the Miami bootlegger is a very superior sort of bootlegger. He comes around to his patrons each day with long lists of wet goods and the prices, and gives the names of prominent bankers as references for his reliability. The prices seem pleasingly low to northerners who have been paying one hundred and twenty dollars a case for stuff that is only fit for cleaning the nicotine out of pipe stems. The bootleggers get their wares in Bimini, which is a small island only a few miles off the Florida coast. It is a British island, but the British officials evidently haven’t any idea of assisting the United States to enforce her laws. One of the leading Scotch distillers stated contemptuously when I was in Scotland a little over a year ago that it would allow none of its product to be sold to a nation of hypocrites—meaning America. A good percentage of the stuff in Bimini, however, is Haig & Haig, and it was the Haig & Haig people that made the pleasant observation about the nation of hypocrites.
The past record of all distillers has proved conclusively that they would sell to anybody that had the price—hypocrite, murderer, wife-beater, degenerate or sot; and Haig & Haig are no better than the rest of them.
All this Haig & Haig comes over to Florida, where it is not esteemed very highly because it was apparently turned out of the distillery in a hurry for the American trade. The Miami bootleggers recommend Lawson Scotch to their friends rather than Haig & Haig; for they say that the Haig & Haig is too green—whatever that means. The universal bootlegging price for Scotch whisky in Miami is fifty dollars a case. The bootleggers buy it for twenty-four dollars a case in Bimini. The taxicab men at the big hotels retail the stuff to the hotel guests at ten dollars a bottle or one hundred and twenty dollars a case, which makes a very nice profit for them. Gin can be bought—from the bootleggers, not from the taxicab agents—for thirty dollars and forty dollars a case; while the most expensive liquid refreshment is absinthe, which comes as high as sixty-five dollars a case.
Tourists who plan to bring back a wee nip of Scotch with them from Florida should be very careful to carry the bottles in their hand luggage. Many trunks are opened on the way up, evidently by members of the train crews, and all alcoholic stimulants carefully abstracted. Nothing else is touched. A friend of mine took three metal hot-water bottles to Florida with him so that he could bring Scotch back in them. These bottles were encased in pretty pink flannel wrappers. He filled them with Scotch as planned; but when he reached Washington again, he found that his trunk had been opened and the bottles removed. The pink flannel wrappers were left behind, and nothing else had been touched.
There seems to be an idea in the North that rum-running from Bimini and Cuba to the Florida coast can be easily stopped by Prohibition agents. This is a mistaken idea; for the rum-runner has several hundred miles of uninhabited coastline and keys on which to land his cargo. It was among these keys that the most notorious pirates of the early days concealed their vessels and their treasure, and eluded pursuit for years. It would be as easy to catch a rum-runner among the Florida keys as to locate a red ant in the Hippodrome.
Any Prohibition enforcement agent that didn’t have lead in his shoes and a daub of mud in both eyes, however, could easily get the goods on twenty or thirty Miami bootleggers in a day.
One good result of comparatively cheap whisky in Miami is the apparently total disappearance of beer-making and other home-brewing activities. There seems to be no market for hops, malt, prunes, raisins or wash-boilers—which would seem to make Miami an unusually healthy city in which to live.