For Sale —American Paradise Read Free

leader among staunch social conservatives who were determined to impose dramatic restrictions on Americans’ thoughts and behaviors. Bryan had worked for passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which forbade the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, and he had been a driving force behind an effort to forbid the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools.
    But while Bryan was a puritan, he had no qualms about helping Florida businessmen grab as much cash as they could from the ever- growing hordes flocking to the state to escape annoying restrictions—Prohibition, income taxes, speed limits—and frolic in a land of tropical excesses. He was happy to stand before these throngs of scofflaw hedonists and tell them they’d truly found Paradise.
    So as Bryan stepped up to the railing at Vero Beach and prepared to address the audience, he wasn’t talking to a group of celebrants. He was talking to thousands of potential voters. And for the first time in Bryan’s career, about half of those voters were women. The Nineteenth Amendment had given women the right to vote in 1920, and they had cast their first ballots in a presidential election in 1924.
    But the younger women in the Vero Beach crowd were a different creature from the women of Bryan’s Victorian youth. Many had their hair clipped very short and peered at Bryan from beneath the tiny brims of tightly fitting cloche hats pulled down almost to their eyebrows. The dresses they wore—thin, revealing, with hemlines at the knee—had horrified Albert A. Murphree, president of the University of Florida and a friend of Bryan’s. Murphree was convinced that such dresses were “born of the Devil and his angels, and are carrying the present and future generations to chaos and destruction.”
    To make matters worse—at least from Murphree’s standpoint—the modern woman wore makeup, and lots of it. When Murphree had been a young man in the nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries, makeup had been used only by prostitutes and actresses.
    In the mid-1920s, however, the fashion dictated a stark contrast between dark eye makeup, dark lipstick, and very pale skin. Two factors influenced this look—the discovery of the tomb of the ancient Egyptian king Tutankhamun in 1922, and the growing influence of the Hollywood film industry.
    Young women fascinated with the look of ancient Egypt laid on dark eye shadow and eyeliner. And they carefully applied lipstick to create the “Cupid’s lips” outline brought to the silver screen by actress Clara Bow.
    Some of the women even dared to light up cigarettes and apply their makeup in public. And they talked of getting drunk—referred to as “blotto”—and kissing lots of men.
    They were the epitome of the “flapper” look that had swept the country. The word may have originated as a slang term for English prostitutes, and it greatly annoyed T. Drew Branch, a member of the Florida state legislature who hailed from, of all places, Liberty County. Branch said that calling a woman by this name “offended the dignity” of the people of Florida. He had recently introduced a bill in Tallahassee that would make it illegal for newspapers or magazines to refer to any woman in the great state of Florida as a flapper. The proposal was defeated.
    Many younger men in the crowd were sporting the “Palm Beach” look, which consisted of a sports jacket worn with knickerbockers, known as “plus fours”—because they ended four inches below the knee—and knee socks. The ensemble was topped with a round, flat- brimmed straw hat called a “boater.” It was a look that was especially popular among real estate salesmen.
    As the men listened to earlier speakers and awaited Bryan’s speech, they did as men have done for as long as they’ve worn slacks—they dug their hands