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.
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.
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.[A] 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.