“Snet,” Our Man in Miami: Urban Tourism,Illegal Gambling,and the Challenge of a Sinful Southern City,1941-1944

Abstract

South Florida developed as an urban gambling resort center that posed both cultural and political challenges to the traditional southern values that animated the state’s approach to regulating vice. This article examines the conflicts over vice tourism in South Florida by focusing on the relationship between Governor Spessard Holland and former Miami Beach Mayor Louis “Snet” Snedigar. Snedigar became Holland’s undercover informant when the governor cracked down on illegal gambling as part of his effort to fund the state’s old-age pension program by taxing bets placed at horse tracks in South Florida. By exploring the entanglement between a conservative southern state and a “liberal” urban outpost, this article illustrates how the southern approach to urban development forestalled the emergence of South Florida as a recreational gambling resort comparable to Las Vegas.