Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans

by Garvey, John B.

  Notable Confederate figures commemorated on Jefferson Davis Parkway: Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy; General Albert Pike, Confederate general; Father Abram J. Ryan, poet-priest; Colonel Charles Didier Dreux, first Confederate officer from Louisiana to be killed.

  According to the Congressional Act of 1867, Louisiana was occupied by Federal troops under General Philip Sheridan, who interpreted the terms of the act so strictly that half of the white citizens could not vote at all, but all adult male blacks could vote. The Constitution of 1868 enfranchised the black population and gave them full equality of the races in public schools and on common carriers.

  In the state election of 1868, Henry Clay Warmoth of Illinois, a carpetbagger, and his lieutenant governor, P. B. S. Pinchback, a mulatto, were elected.

  In 1872, William Pitt Kellogg and Caesar Carpetier Antoine (another mulatto) replaced Warmoth and Pinchback as governor and lieutenant governor, respectively.

  President Grant used Federal troops to install the new officials and to put his Republican supporters in control of the legislature. For the next four years, Louisiana had two governors and two legislatures.

  In the presidential election of 1876, both the Republicans (Rutherford B. Hayes) and the Democrats (Samuel J. Tilden) claimed victory. Four states—Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, and Oregon—had submitted two sets of electoral returns, one by the Democrats and one by the Republicans. The Electoral College gave the disputed votes to Hayes, making him the winner. The Democrats cried fraud and challenged the decision.

  In January 1877, a fifteen-man Electoral Commission was appointed by Congress to make the final decision. In a private meeting, representatives from Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida agreed not to oppose the decision of the Electoral Commission (which would be to name Hayes the winner) if in exchange, the states could be permitted to elect their own governors with no federal interference and if all Federal troops would be removed. As a result of this meeting, Hayes became president, ex-Confederate Francis T. Nicholls became governor of Louisiana, and the Federal troops were removed. After fourteen years as an occupied city, New Orleans was at last free again.

  CHAPTER IX

  Rebirth and Resurgence: 1865-1930

  The years of Reconstruction were the darkest in the history of New Orleans. It was a time of violence, lawlessness, and corruption. Confederate soldiers, returning from war, found Unionists in charge of all civic affairs. Blacks, not knowing what to do with their liberties, crowded in the city under the protective wing of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Carpetbaggers from the North came in droves to take possession of commerce and politics to whatever the extent it was possible.

  The Southerners tried hard, in spite of poverty, to regain their position in the city. Unionists feared that the Southerners might return to power, and Carpetbaggers feared that they might be thrown out. Their efforts to seat blacks in the legislature brought about the Massacre of 1866 at the Mechanics Institute on Dryades Street (now University Place), when 44 blacks and 4 white men were killed and 160 others wounded.

  During the administration of Governor Warmoth, control of New Orleans was taken from the Democrats by a new form of city government, in which the governor appointed the mayor and seven administrators. New Orleans was virtually in the grip of a dictator. Warmoth appointed local police, registrars, and a returning board for the city.

  Results of any election could be altered by Warmoth’s returning board, which had the power to review the results and throw out whatever votes they chose. In fact, voting became dangerous. Fights broke out, and fatalities occurred at every election. Saloons were wide open, gambling thrived, and robbery and violence were the order of the day.

  The Battle of Liberty Place

  The Crescent City White League was formed in 1874 for the defense of the rights of white citizens against the radical state government. On the morning of September 14, 1875, the White Leaguers met at the Clay Statue on Canal Street to make plans to take possession of the city and the state governments, thus breaking the power of the Metropolitan Police. Reassembling at Camp and Poydras in the afternoon, armed for an encounter, they advanced down the levee at four o’clock. The Metropolitan Police had been stationed at several points throughout the city, the main body under General Badger at Canal Street and the river. The General saw the men of the White League coming and opened fire. The White Leaguers had no artillery, but they charged into the police and cleared the street. They drove the police back to Jackson Square, where both armies remained through the night. In the morning, the police surrendered the State House, the Arsenal, and Jackson Square. In the fray, a total of thirty-one had been killed and seventy-nine wounded.

  Victory was short lived. The White Leaguers installed Lieutenant-Governor Penn in the State House on September 15, 1874, but President Grant immediately sent reinforcements and demanded the reinstatement of Governor Kellogg without delay. The city was to remain in the grip of a Republican governor for three more years.

  After the compromise in which President Hayes was elected, General Nicholls, the Confederate patriot, served as Louisiana governor from 1878 to 1880 and returned in 1888 for a four-year term. He had lost his left arm in combat at Winchester and his left leg at Chancellorsville. (One cannot help but wonder what he was doing at the Battle of Chancellorsville without an arm in the first place.) In placing his name in the nomination, Tay Goode of Terrebonne Parish said, “I give you all that is left of Francis Nicholls, because all that is left of him is right.”

  The Lousiana Lottery

  In 1868, an institution known as the Louisiana Lottery Company was born in a corrupt era. From the state legislature, its founder, Charles T. Howard, managed to obtain a twenty-five-year charter, which enabled the Lottery to keep control of city, state, and even national politicians who were on its payroll. To mask its vice, the Lottery made regular contributions to charitable causes such as the Charity Hospital and the French Opera House and was always ready with cash in times of hurricanes and floods.

  New Orleanians loved the Lottery. For 25¢, they could purchase a ticket and a dream of leisure and luxury. Tickets were sold in denominations as high as $40, for which the prize was $600,000. More than two hundred shops dotted the city, and there were branch offices in many other major cities. Drawings were held each day in public, and throngs gathered to watch as two Confederate heroes hired to give respectability to the proceedings, P. G. T. Beauregard and Jubal Early, drew the numbers.

  The Lottery supported and was supported by many Republicans and Democrats. It was the subject of political debates for twenty-five years. Its charter was set to expire January 1, 1894. The United States Supreme Court spelled out the beginning of the end of the Louisiana Lottery when it affirmed the right of Congress to prohibit the Lottery’s use of the mail in advertising. The Company continued in the state until it expired in 1894, but its back had been broken. The New Orleans Delta declared, “The Lottery is now like a postage stamp . . . licked and put in a corner.” It was out of business by 1895.

  New Orleans had reached its lowest period as a municipality in the early 1880s. It had surrendered all its franchises, duties, and privileges to private individuals or corporations. The only thing it still controlled was the police force, which was in the hands of the mayor, who administered it so that it was overrun with politics and filled with corruption.

  A State Lottery was begun again in 1992.

  Mayor Joseph A. Shakspeare

  Joseph A. Shakspeare served as mayor from 1880 to 1882 and returned again to serve in 1888. Shakspeare, knowing that the blackmail and corruption in the city had grown out of the gambling business, introduced the Shakspeare Plan, which was nothing less than a payoff to his office for police protection for gamblers. The amazing thing was that it succeeded. Gambling had always been rampant in the city. Statutes against it were impossible to enforce and gave the police an opportunity to collect graft. The mayor could not license it, since it was against the state consti
tution. Therefore, for a small monthly payment, Shakspeare, as Chief of Police, agreed not to allow his officers to arrest gamblers. The money thus collected was used to establish the Shakspeare Almshouse and to support other charities. It was ultimately abused, needless to say, and the Shakspeare fund disappeared from the revenues of the city.

  Shakspeare was defeated in 1892 by John Fitzpatrick, a candidate of the Regular Democratic Organization. Ever since the 1870s, municipal elections in New Orleans had been battles fought between the Regular Democratic Organization, which held power most of the time, and a reform movement, whose purpose it was to wipe out the RDO or keep its candidates out of office. The first of these reform candidates was, surprisingly enough, Shakspeare himself. Another reform mayor, Walter Flower, took office in 1896.

  The Seventeen Years of Mayor Martin Behrman

  In between the terms of Shakspeare and Flower, John Fitzpatrick of the RDO held office. His protégé was a young man named Martin Behrman, who was orphaned at an early age and ended his formal education at St. Philip School, when Warren Easton was still the principal there. Living in Algiers, Behrman had worked in a family grocery store until he was married at the age of twenty-two. Then, he became a clerk in the district assessor’s office but lost his job when Shakspeare’s reform administration replaced all RDO men with reform followers. When Fitzpatrick of the RDO defeated Shakspeare, Behrman was appointed clerk to three city council committees and elected delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1898 and state auditor in 1904. Later in 1904, he was nominated for mayor and won in a landslide.

  Behrman was reelected in 1908, 1912, and 1916. The RDO (or Choctaw Club, as it was called) was the New Orleans version of New York’s Tammany Hall, a political machine that was seemingly invincible.

  As early as 1907, the Behrman organization was referred to as the Behrman Ring, and “Ring politics” grew stronger as Behrman won election after election. The anti-Ring leaders formed the “Good Government League,” nicknamed the “Goo-Goos,” who supported Luther E. Hall for governor in the hope that he would replace the New Orleans mayor and council’s manic form of government with a commission form, which they thought would reduce Behrman’s powers and eventually his popularity. Hall was elected and the change of government was made as promised in 1912, but to the great disappointment of the “Goo-Goos,” Hall’s administration was under the control of the Behrmanites, who adopted the commission council form of government as their own.

  John M. Parker, another reform candidate, was elected governor in 1920 and launched a movement to oust Martin Behrman, who had been asked by the Old Regulars to run for mayor for a fifth term. Behrman lost the election to Andre McShane in 1920 but was reelected in 1925. His supporters changed their campaign rallying cry from “Papa’s Coming Home” to “Papa’s Back.” Behrman died in office a year later, having served as mayor for seventeen years, the only man in the city’s history to have been elected five times as mayor.

  On this period in the city’s political history, T. Harry Williams, in his biography Huey Long (1981), wrote:

  Louisiana (and hence, New Orleans), politics, w[ere] speculative, devious, personal and exuberant, and highly professional. The objectives w[ere] to win, and in no other state were the devices employed to win—stratagems, deals and oratory—so studied and admired by the populace.

  Louisiana’s people are accused of having a tolerance of corruption found no place else in the United States. This tolerance is described as “a Latin enclave of immorality set down in a country of Anglo-Saxon righteousness.”

  But in spite of occasional riots, labor unrest, and corruption in local government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people managed to affect a resurgence in the economy. The American Sector became a modern city with burgeoning commerce, and mansions mushroomed all along the main thoroughfares. People had time to turn their minds to a bit of leisure at one of the new amusement parks that were now available for their enjoyment.

  Recreation and Amusement

  West End Amusement Park offered swimming, picnicking, amusement rides, and outdoor movies, some of the first movies seen in the city. New Orleanians took the barges along the New Basin Canal to the site of the present Southern Yacht Club as early as 1838. Then, after 1876, when the New Orleans City and Lake Railroad started running trains to the lake, they traveled by train. At that time, a large wooden platform was constructed over the water, and a hotel, restaurant, and structures to house amusements arose. It was called New Lake End until 1880, when it was rechristened West End Park, and for the next thirty years, it remained a popular lake resort. In 1909, the city constructed a seawall five hundred feet out in the lake and filled in the space between it and the old embankment to form the present thirty-acre West End Park.

  West End Amusement Park, a gathering place for pleasure-seekers at the turn of the century. (Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

  Another lakefront amusement center populated in the period was Spanish Fort, which grew up around the site of the old colonial fort originally built by the French in 1701 at the mouth of Bayou St. John. Because it was rebuilt by the Spanish in 1779, it was called Spanish Fort. The fort never saw warfare but was used as an observation point in the War of 1812. The area around Spanish Fort was sold in 1823 to Harvey Elkins, who built the Pontchartrain Hotel there. In 1874, the hotel was rebuilt around the same time that a railroad was constructed to connect the resort to downtown New Orleans. In 1878, Moses Schwartz bought Spanish Fort. He built a casino with a restaurant offering meals for $1 and a theater featuring light opera and band concerts. In 1880, Otto Touché opened the “Over the Rhine” Bar and Restaurant, which could be reached by a winged footbridge across the bayou from Spanish Fort.

  Old Shell Road ran alongside the New Basin Canal to the West End Amusement Park, a lovely ride at the turn of the century. (Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

  Spanish Fort became the site of an amusement park in 1883. It was abandoned for a time in 1903, when railroad service to the site was suspended, and its buildings burned down in 1906. The property was acquired in 1909 by the New Orleans Railway and Light Company, who rebuilt and reopened an amusement center that included a Ferris wheel and other rides, picnic pavilion, restaurant, and bathing facilities. Ownership of the property later reverted to the city. Plans were drawn in 1928 to develop the lakefront from West End to the airport, concluding the final chapter to Spanish Fort as an amusement center.

  In 1928, the amusement park was relocated at the lake end of Bayou St. John on land already “filled” and its name changed to Pontchartrain Beach. Eventually, the Levee Board decided to establish a permanent site for an amusement park several miles farther east and to grant a twenty-year lease. The Batt family (headed by Harry Batt Sr., president) acquired control in 1934, and in 1939, the new Pontchartrain Beach opened at the end of Elysian Fields Avenue. The Zephyr was the park’s symbol. World War II created a boom for the park, bringing servicemen in droves to enjoy recreation. The park closed in 1983.

  Another delightful outing at the turn of the century was a drive on Old Shell Road, which ran along the Metairie side of the New Basin Canal. The drive went past the New Orleans Country Club on Pontchartrain Boulevard and the new Metairie Cemetery on a trail lined with palms and oleanders and a view of pleasure boats on the water.

  The Second Renaissance of the Vieux Carré: The Vieux Carré Commission

  Baroness Pontalba is credited with the first rebirth of the Vieux Carré in the mid-nineteenth century, at a time when the trend was to move out of the old part of town and build a mansion on St. Charles Avenue. Her beautiful apartments flanking the Place d’Armes served as a catalyst, stirring up renewed interest in the French Quarter and pride in its history.

  In the decades following the Civil War, there was a sharp decline in the commercial importance of the city, and New Orleans remained impoverished. There was no money for expensive renovations, and once again, the French Quarter began to deterio
rate. Families who could afford to move migrated to the newer parts of town. Jackson Square, at the turn of the twentieth century, was once again seedy. The Pontalba Buildings were derelicts with vagrants for tenants, and the whole neighborhood was fast becoming a slum.

  In the year 1908, an entire block of the finest buildings in the Quarter was destroyed to build the Civil Courts Building. The Old St. Louis Exchange Hotel with its majestic dome, once the pride of the Vieux Carré and the site of the State Capitol in 1874, fell into decay; badly damaged in the 1915 hurricane, it was eventually demolished.

  New Orleanians who cared about preserving their historic treasures began to take note in the 1920s and 1930s that, unless some-thing was done to protect what remained of the Quarter, it would

  The Cotton Exchange Building on the corner of Gravier Street and Carondelet Street, built 1882-83. Demolished in 1920. Statues on the third floor were moved to City Park for a brief period of time. The two caryatids on the ground floor now stand on City Park Avenue.

  St. Charles Hotel, viewed from Canal Street circa 1925. This is the third structure on this site, demolished in 1974. Currently, it is the Place St. Charles.

  soon disappear and be lost forever. The Vieux Carré Commission was therefore established in 1921, and, by state constitutional amendment in 1936, was given the power to regulate architecture through control of building permits. Its purpose was to renovate, restore, and remodel the old buildings and put them to new uses so that they might pay their own way. Thus began the second renaissance of the Vieux Carré.