Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

by Gary Krist

  This last may have been the most shocking thing Mrs. Nation heard in Storyville on that Saturday night. But she found a more suitably repentant audience at her second stop in the District—at Josie Arlington’s palace on Basin Street. Here the ladies of the house listened respectfully as Nation roundly rebuked them and urged them to repent their ways, falling onto her knees at one point to pray for their salvation. Josie Arlington, whose thoughts of late had been turning in precisely this direction, proved to be a particularly receptive auditor. With some emotion, the queen of the demimonde promised the great reformer that she would heed the call to return to a more respectable way of life. Josie claimed that she would retire soon and use her fortune—now totaling some $60,000, as she pointedly confided—to build a home for fallen women, so that they would not have to turn to prostitution to survive. She would do this, Josie said, just “as soon as [I get] a little richer.”

  Perhaps frustrated by the conspicuous lack of any instant converts to her cause in Storyville, Nation arrived at her last stop of the night, Tom Anderson’s Annex, with her usual pugnacity—and her ax, apparently—on full display. According to one story, Anderson had heard beforehand that she was on her way, and so had cleared the long bar of all but the cheapest whiskey. When Nation and her entourage entered the Annex, Anderson was there to greet her, dressed in his finest evening clothes. “Welcome, Mrs. Nation,” he said, giving her a deferential bow. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  She was not impressed. After snatching a cigarette from the mouth of one of the customers hovering around her, she allegedly walked over to the bar with her ax and smashed several of the whiskey glasses standing on it. Then she turned to Anderson and said, “Want to make something of it?”

  Unruffled as always, Anderson bowed again. “Mrs. Nation,” he oozed, “the pleasure is all mine.”

  It was to be her toughest audience of the night. Provided with a crate to stand on, Nation addressed the crowd of men in the bar, urging them to shun the saloons, the gambling houses, and the brothels and instead to “be men.” Numerous times she was interrupted by drunken hecklers, but she was undeterred. She talked, in fact, for almost a full hour—until manager Billy Struve, concerned about the Sunday Closing Law, forcefully brought the proceedings to a close at a few minutes before twelve. By the stroke of midnight, Nation and her audience were all out on the banquette in front of the Annex. She then rode home from her evening of slumming in Storyville, according to the Daily Picayune, “none the worse for her lively experience.”

  By the time Mrs. Nation left the city the next day, however, she was looking noticeably pale and worn out. After giving a lecture to an audience of eight hundred at the local YMCA (a lecture that reportedly included such lurid descriptions of the goings-on in Storyville that even the Picayune was scandalized on behalf of the women present), she returned to City Hall to pay her respects to the mayor. At their meeting, she asked Behrman to promise that he would stamp out the horrible practices she had witnessed in the District. The mayor’s response is unrecorded, but most likely he demurred. And with that, Carrie Nation moved on. She was, by her own admission, old and tired now, and maybe New Orleans really was too tough a place for her. That evening, after three days in the belly of the beast, she quietly boarded a ship bound for Florida, where, one can presume, the resident sinners weren’t quite so recalcitrant.

  TO say that Carrie Nation’s visit in late 1907 galvanized the city’s slumbering moral reformers would perhaps be an exaggeration. But her appearance did coincide with the beginning of renewed efforts to take control of New Orleans’ persistent sin problem, and to do so in a rather less accommodative way. Tolerance and segregation of vice had been tried, and this is what had resulted—rich madams, contented whores, booming business in saloons and gambling halls, and a nightly tableau of debauchery in the District that was all too reminiscent of a painting by Brueghel the Younger. The sheer complacency and matter-of-factness of sin in the Crescent City—captured vividly in a series of Storyville portraits executed around this time by a white Creole photographer named E. J. Bellocq—indicated to many that a different approach was needed, and that the whole idea of Storyville had outlived its usefulness. In any case, Victorian attitudes toward prostitution were changing. No longer was it viewed as a distasteful but necessary safeguard for respectable women—as a safety valve of sorts for the release of male sexual energy. With the rise of the Social Hygiene and other Progressive Era movements, prostitution was increasingly being seen as a threat, a conduit by which ills like syphilis and gonorrhea could invade the sanctity of the home. As such, it was not enough just to tuck it away in its own district. Rather, it had to be stamped out entirely. And as Carrie Nation’s sermons had made clear, the new spirit of prohibition was nothing if not comprehensive, targeting not just prostitution and alcohol but gambling, dancing, tobacco use, and—in New Orleans, at least—the lingering affront to decency of interracial fraternization, represented most visibly by the so-called octoroon houses of Basin Street.

  One big new problem with Storyville—in the reformers’ eyes—was that the supposedly isolated vice district was no longer so isolated. On June 1, 1908, a new union railroad terminal opened for business right at the intersection of Basin Street and Canal. This new “Frisco depot,” designed by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, was a gorgeous neoclassical pile with high ceilings and sweeping architectural lines that would have been a credit to any city. But the terminal’s location forced arriving trains to come directly down the middle of Basin Street, passing every one of that street’s luxury brothels on the way. Within weeks of the station’s opening, reports were already flooding in—of naked prostitutes waving to passengers from brothel windows, of so-called lighthouses (usually young boys) waiting in the terminal to lead willing male arrivals to the nearby District, and even of unsuspecting young women wandering off into the streets of Storyville in search of their hotels. For those trying to improve the city’s reputation as a serious center for business and commerce, the situation was a disaster.

  First to respond to this new embarrassment was the Travelers Aid Society, a women’s organization founded by New Orleans’ reformist ERA Club to prevent young girls from being recruited by the city’s brothels. By August of 1908, they were already agitating to move the Basin Street houses from their current location and convert the buildings to workers’ housing. “We have no doubt that every person and organization of good moral and civic principles in the city will join us in what we have undertaken,” the society’s spokesperson, Mary Werlein, told reporters. “The restricted district was already unfortunately located, on almost every ground imaginable, but now that several railroads are emptying thousands of new people at its very doors, it seems to us [that] we can not properly allow such an entry into our city to be maintained. First impressions are the strongest, and we can imagine no more undesirable first impression of New Orleans than this.”

  But the true leader of this new offensive against Storyville was Mary Werlein’s nephew Philip, scion of the venerable Werlein family that had been doing business in New Orleans since 1853. The Werlein Music Store on Canal Street—founded by Philip’s grandfather, a Bavarian pianist and composer—had been the local bastion of traditional music for decades. True, the store was the source of many of the instruments played by the city’s jazzmen (it’s where Kid Ory bought the trombone that led to his 1905 encounter with Buddy Bolden), but the company was proudest of its distinction as the original publisher of the classic Southern anthem “Dixie.”

  Like Joseph Shakspeare, W. S. Parkerson, Sidney Story, and many of the other reform leaders who preceded him, Philip Werlein was a blue-blood through and through. President of the Pickwick, Boston, and New Orleans Country Clubs; director of the Interstate Bank; sponsor of the French Opera House; and now president of the New Orleans Progressive Union, he was the perfect embodiment of the wealthy white establishment that had been actively trying to reform the city for two decades now. In 1909, Werlein an
d the Progressive Union proposed an alternative solution to the problem of the Basin Street depot. Instead of moving the street’s brothels as his aunt suggested, Werlein proposed to erect a wooden screen that would essentially put a wall between the depot and the Storyville side of Basin Street. This proposal, silly as it sounds, actually got as far as the city council, but the aldermen ended up defeating it soundly, seeing it as entirely impracticable. Undeterred, both Werleins vowed to fight on.

  Other reform efforts on the state level were making better progress. In 1908, the Louisiana legislature passed the so-called Gay-Shattuck Bill. Pushed through mainly by conservative elements in the northern parishes of the state, the measure was a comprehensive law that attacked the vice problem on virtually every front—addressing the issues of wine, women, and song. Besides dramatically raising the license fees for selling alcohol statewide, it banned women from patronizing or working in any place where liquor was sold. The law also prohibited the serving of blacks and whites in the same establishment, and made musical performances illegal in all saloons. The only exception to these rules was one made for restaurants and hotels where meals were served. But for the vast majority of businesses in Storyville, the law’s implications were dire: No more jazz combos at the Arlington Annex (which had no kitchen), no more Champagne at Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall, no more interracial fraternization at the dance halls on Franklin Street if alcohol was being served. In fact, the Daily Item predicted that fully one-half of the barrooms in New Orleans would be forced into bankruptcy once the law took effect in early 1909.

  And indeed, Gay-Shattuck did “put the lid down in the Tenderloin,” as the newspapers liked to say—at least at first. In January, when the new rules were implemented, the Daily Picayune noted with satisfaction that “the saloon-men and divekeepers raised a howl which vibrated from one end of the District to the other. The old familiar blast of the trombone and cornet, and the accompanying shriek of the clarionet [sic], were not among the attractions to lure the slummer into the saloons and dance halls.”

  But the denizens of Storyville were nothing if not resourceful. Noting the exception in the law for places serving meals, the establishments of the District were soon styling themselves as restaurants. One saloon set up a makeshift tamale stand next to its front door, while many another club owner or saloonkeeper unearthed some “antique sandwich” that could be passed around the room indefinitely as proof of the establishment’s culinary bona fides. Exploitation of this loophole—combined with a general lack of enforcement by Mayor Behrman’s eminently persuadable police force—meant that it was soon business-as-usual for most places in the District, at least while no one in authority was watching.

  FOR the mayor of Storyville, now in his early fifties and graying into an ever-more distinguished-looking middle age, the depredations of the city’s reformers were still taking a relatively minor toll on the operations of his empire of sin. The first decade of the District’s existence had proved lucrative indeed for him, and Tom Anderson now found himself a very rich man. Growing profits from his various Tenderloin businesses were only part of the bounty; his legitimate oil interests had also thrived, allowing him to sell his old Record Oil Company and start a new enterprise—Liberty Oil—that promised to be an even greater success. Vice and hydrocarbons had proved to be the twin engines of New Orleans’ prosperity, and Tom Anderson had a hand in both.

  But there were indications that Anderson’s charmed life might be entering a more difficult phase. It had begun with a personal tragedy. Sometime in mid-1907, Olive Anderson had become sick. The exact nature of her illness remains unclear, but she probably developed some form of cancer. She underwent two surgeries that fall, and although her doctors were at first optimistic, complications had set in. By December, it was clear that she would not survive. Tom would later claim that he and Ollie had married in June of 1898 (which seems unlikely, given that his divorce from Catherine Turnbull did not become official until the following year), but they had another ceremony performed at her deathbed in the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital. Ollie, the former prostitute, had recently converted to Catholicism and wanted a priest to officiate. But since the Church did not recognize Anderson’s divorce from his second wife, this proved impossible. And so a judge had done the deed—in Ollie’s hospital room, with a nurse as witness—a few days before Christmas. Ollie died on December 26. Two days later, the funeral was held at the home of Tom’s daughter, Irene—now Mrs. George Delsa. Attending were some of the Andersons’ closest friends, including Mayor Behrman, former police chief John Journée, Billy Struve, W. J. O’Connor (the man who had been with David Hennessy on the night of his assassination), and, of course, Josie Arlington, aka Mrs. Tom Brady.

  His wife’s death seemed to change Tom Anderson’s luck. It was just a few months later that reformers began their assault on sin in the Crescent City, and much of the onslaught seemed to be targeted primarily at the mayor of Storyville himself. In March of 1908, the reverends E. L. Collins and S. A. Smith, superintendents of the Kentucky and Louisiana Anti-Saloon Leagues, came to New Orleans to carry out an investigation of conditions in Storyville. What they found was—predictably—shocking: “If an absolutely truthful man had sworn on the witness stand that things were as bad as they are, I would never have believed them,” Reverend Collins told the press. “For shame to flaunt itself so openly and brazenly right on the streets is something that I have never seen in my life.” Dr. Smith, however, offered some hope: “Tom Anderson and such cattle,” he said, “want everything stopped but dirtiness and evil. But public opinion is rising against them, bless your hearts, and their course will be stayed.”

  Largely in response to appeals like this, the Gay-Shattuck Law was passed shortly thereafter. But since Anderson and the other proprietors of the District proved so adept at getting around its provisions, the most effective attacks on Anderson County came via Tom’s old nemesis—the Sunday Closing Law. Anderson had already been inconvenienced several times on this issue, but in the renewed spirit of reform heralded by Gay-Shattuck, the attempts at Sabbath-day entrapment became more frequent. One case against Anderson in September of 1909 actually came to trial. The charges were eventually dropped, however, when it was discovered that the two arresting officers—intentionally or otherwise—had failed to secure any evidence of the violation.

  But Anderson soon found a more formidable foe in the person of Rev. J. Benjamin Lawrence, pastor of the First Baptist Church. Lawrence, a leader of the city’s temperance movement, began conducting his own undercover investigation of the city’s demimonde in June of 1910. He, along with a young man named Alvin Callendar and a third man, entered the Arlington Restaurant on a Sunday. Lawrence ordered a bottle of whiskey, Callendar ordered a beer, and the third man requested a pack of cigarettes. All were served—and this time, the evidence was retained and turned over to the police waiting outside. Tom Anderson and his bartender were promptly arrested and charged with three counts of violating the Sunday Closing Law and one count of selling alcohol to a minor (since Callendar turned out to be just seventeen years old).

  The case, which took months to work its way through the courts, created a furor in the city far out of proportion to the relatively minor transgressions that had generated it. Reformers were determined to punish Tom Anderson, while the mayor of Storyville himself, backed by powerful wholesale alcohol interests, was equally determined to make the case go away. And so Anderson’s lawyers made prosecution of the case as difficult for officials as possible. At first, no judge or prosecutor—for reasons known only to themselves—seemed willing to try the case at all. After repeated continuances, the matter was finally brought to court, only to be thrown out on a technicality: no proof could be obtained that Tom Anderson even owned the Arlington Restaurant on Rampart Street (despite the fact—pointed out by the exasperated Daily Item—that a large sign outside the establishment had prominently displayed his name as proprietor for more than fifteen years). When the district attorney ordered
a new trial, the proceedings were again delayed when the new affidavits drawn up for trial proved defective, lacking a valid address for the saloon in which the infractions had allegedly taken place. Outraged, the Item insisted that this nonsense be stopped and that the case be resolved. “No good excuse can be offered for permitting this case to lie in the files until the witnesses die or move to Montana,” the paper fulminated in an editorial. “The defendant may need a vacation, the weather may be uncomfortably warm, or the barroom cat may have the mumps—but the case of the State of Louisiana against Thomas C. Anderson should be prosecuted promptly.”

  Ultimately, the unstoppable force and the immovable object came to terms. Anderson agreed to plead guilty to one count of selling whiskey on a Sunday if the other charges were dropped. The prosecution agreed, and so Tom Anderson paid a $25 fine (plus another $50 for selling to a minor—a matter resolved separately in Juvenile Court). Reverend Lawrence, of course, claimed victory. But Tom Anderson knew better. The $75 was just a minor cost of doing business. And although he and his backers had probably paid far more than that in legal fees, their point had been made: you could fight the mayor of Storyville and perhaps even win a round or two, but the price would be exceedingly high.