Spectacular Wickedness by Emily Epstein Landau

Author:Emily Epstein Landau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2013-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

The Last Stronghold of the Old Regime

It is well known that New Orleans is the Sodom of the South.

—Letter to Raymond Fosdick, chairman of the Commission on Training Camp Activities

Enforcing Boundaries within Storyville: Race and Reform

We have seen how most business leaders and councilmen wanted to confine vice to discrete (and discreet) locations; they desired to clear the streets for respectable persons and legitimate business concerns. As in all cities, however, some reformers continued to seek to eliminate the red-light district itself and put an end to prostitution. In New Orleans, such efforts often focused on interracial sex, race mixing, and “disorderly negroes” within the boundaries of Storyville. As early as the 1850s, Nativist politicians had linked their message of economic reform to a strong stance against illicit sex, particularly prostitution and interracial sex, in effect conflating vice, economic woe, non-white “others” (blacks and immigrants), and sex across the color line in their efforts to stem municipal corruption. In the 1890s and 1910s, reformers focused on race mixing and the perceived bad behavior of black people in Storyville to catalyze the reform of the red-light district. While they were unsuccessful, we may see in their efforts an elaboration of white supremacist ideology: they associated immorality with unruly people of color and sex across the color line—even within the red-light district—and so inscribed race in “reform.”

In Storyville, at first, the dance halls received more attention even than the brothels or cribs. As in the efforts to segregate vice before the opening of Storyville, prostitution per se was almost never questioned as a moral problem. After legislation brought Storyville into being, prostitution was still accepted as a fact of life in New Orleans; now it was the disorderliness of establishments in Storyville, ones that did not even purport to sell sex, that drew the ire of the moral reformers. Early objections to the district focused on the clubs in the district, located in an area that one newspaper called “the Mecca of bad Negroes” toward Robertson Street, the “rear” of the district (if Basin Street was the “front”), where several dance halls catered to a black clientele. Some of these clubs predated the ordinance, contributing to the neighborhood’s mixed character. Many people were afraid to go to the rear of the district, as “bloody fights in the area were commonplace.” And the three barrelhouses at Franklin and Customhouse were “scenes of drunkenness, vice, and disturbance at all hours of the day and night.”1 Reformers drew attention to this corner, claiming it was the meeting place for the “lowest class of cocaine fiends, petty thieves, and the general worthless blacks who work only enough to keep alive when ‘Grafts’ in their particular fields cannot be worked.” In fact, “the orgies and dances in these saloons were so indecent,” according to the Item, that the chief of police was forced to denounce them publicly.

Excluding the creation of the “uptown” or “black” Storyville, Chief of Police John Journée made the first of several attempts to separate white from black vice in 1902.

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