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Miami having hotels stands out to me because it’s not exactly close to anything else in the States so everyone there I would assume is on a longer vacation - basically wintering. Europe in 1920 I assume people who summered in Europe would bounce around cities.
This gets to something I would say is related to the paradox of choice. When people have a lot of people around them it can be more difficult to make friends. No one quite knows who to invest their time and energy into. But if it’s a 100 room Miami hotel in 1920 where the rich people are staying for 1-3 months then it feels like it’s worth meeting the other guest in the hotel.
I remember in Band of Brothers Nixon towards the end of the war said the South Beach clubs and hotels were packed again. Obviously he’s rich so perhaps he’s in the class of people who would know people that would go for months, but maybe by 1944 technology had changed enough to allow more people that experience. Though it still feels 20-ish year off to me before the upper middle class has those types of trips.
In every major war there are a class of people who make a lot of money even if overall people are poorer and indeed even if overall inequality declines (usually due to market crashes or broader asset price declines). War involves many government contracts, price fixing, import and export controls, sometimes currency controls, and all these things create huge room for profiteering and arbitrage.
The Miami of today is full of people who got rich in shady business in Latin America or in crypto. The Miami of 1944 already had plenty of the former but a lot of people who had done well off the war, too.
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