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

by Gary Krist

  Those who went north, moreover, now had a little money in their pockets to spend on entertainment. And spend they did, in numerous new clubs and theaters, some owned and operated by black entrepreneurs. In Northern cities, jazz could be performed with far less fear of police raids and reform efforts aimed at suppressing the music in the name of morality and white supremacy. The new sound, in fact, was exciting admiration even among certain white audiences. In 1917, a white ensemble called the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB)—made up of New Orleanians Nick LaRocca, Larry Shields, and some other players from Jack Laine’s old Reliance Brass Bands—made the first jazz recordings for Victor in New York. Some black musicians disparaged the work of these white interlopers, who were admittedly less skilled technically and who played virtually everything so fast that they drained all of the soul out of it. Sidney Bechet, for one, didn’t think white musicians could really play jazz. “I don’t care what you say,” he wrote in his autobiography, “it’s awful hard for a man who isn’t black to play a melody that’s come deep out of black people. It’s a question of feeling … Take a number like Livery Stable Blues. We’d played that before they could remember; it was something we knew about a long way back. But theirs, it was a burlesque of the blues. There wasn’t nothing serious in it anymore.”

  But for white audiences, the music of the ODJB was a sensation. Their recording of “Livery Stable Blues” became wildly popular. And soon many black bands were reaping the benefits of that success. Some black groups changed up the composition of their ensembles, eliminating the violin to emulate the ODJB lineup. They also adopted the neologism “jazz”—sometimes spelled “jass” or even “jasz” in these early years—for the music they had informally been calling “ragtime” for twenty years. Before long, black bands were recording as well, to wide popular acclaim. And 1917 was the turning point. As one historian put it: “By 1917 jazz, the Southern folk music, had emerged as jazz, the profitable commodity.” Whatever its reception among the elites of its place of birth, Bolden’s new sound now belonged to the world.

  IN New Orleans, however, the American entry into the war—and the simultaneous reinvigoration of local reform efforts against vice—was making the situation for local jazzmen increasingly dire. Not least of the troubles was the fact that many musicians now had to worry about being conscripted into the military. In July, the federal government instituted a draft lottery for all men twenty-one to thirty-one years of age. Louis Armstrong and some of the other rising players were still too young to worry, but most of the other musicians fit squarely into that age bracket, and few were enthusiastic about serving. One night, after a gig attended by Mayor Behrman’s secretary, Manuel Manetta asked him whether his and Ory’s band would have to be broken up. The secretary told him not to worry, that any band members who were married would be exempt from the draft. As Manetta later recalled: “A lot of these guys were running wild” at the time, neglecting their marriages. “Well,” Manetta admitted, “they [soon] made up with their wives.”

  The more serious problem was collateral damage from the other war—the one between reformers and the forces of vice in the city. Commissioner Newman’s moves to close the cribs, segregate Storyville, and enforce the requirements of Gay-Shattuck had taken their toll, forcing substantial layoffs of musicians, waiters, bartenders, and prostitutes. Emboldened by these successes (and by his growing approval among the reform element), Newman next turned his sights on a zealous enforcement of the Sunday Closing Law, ordering a detail of patrolmen to adopt plainclothes and visit saloons on the Sabbath to root out violators. For Mayor Behrman, this was going too far. Using plainclothes police to “spy on business people,” he announced, was contrary to good public policy, an inducement to distrust and an invitation to graft. Newman disagreed. “You might just as well telephone to a burglar that you are coming to arrest him as to expect policemen in uniform to catch violations of the Sunday law,” he insisted.

  But Behrman drew the line on this issue. The mayor instructed Superintendent Reynolds to discontinue the practice; Newman, who had nominal authority over the police force, issued orders for the practice to continue. After one Sunday when police had no idea whether to don their bluecoats or not, the conflict came to a head—and Behrman won. In a highly sanctimonious statement to the press, Newman announced his resignation as commissioner of public safety. “I do not believe I could have slept another night with this thing hanging over me,” he said. “It was a violation of all my principles and moral convictions.” But he warned the Ring that public sentiment had changed in the city: “The people of New Orleans have seen that the Sunday law can be enforced, and the brewery interests have made a bad move for themselves in this effort to reopen the city. The sentiment here is for law enforcement.”

  Reformers soon had the federal government behind them as well. The war effort had raised concerns nationwide about the fitness of the country’s fighting forces; the feds were now insisting on strict enforcement of all vice laws designed to keep soldiers and sailors away from the evils of indulgence. “Men must live straight to shoot straight,” as Navy secretary Josephus Daniels put it. That meant keeping temptation out of their path. “Keeping Fit to Fight,” a pamphlet written by the American Social Hygiene Association and distributed to all soldiers, put the matter in no uncertain terms: “The greatest menace to the vitality and fighting vigor of any army is venereal diseases (clap and syphilis)…[and] the escape from this danger is up to the patriotism and good sense of soldiers like yourself … WOMEN WHO SOLICIT SOLDIERS FOR IMMORAL PURPOSES ARE USUALLY DISEASE SPREADERS AND FRIENDS OF THE ENEMY.”

  While the War Department did stop short of some extreme measures of enforcing chastity (like that of one letter writer who proposed that they “shoot the lewd women as you would the worst German spy”), they did declare all tenderloin and other entertainment districts off-limits for members of the armed forces. But such edicts proved difficult to enforce, especially in New Orleans. Reports abounded of soldiers and sailors sneaking into Storyville—often in civilian clothing helpfully rented to them by District entrepreneurs. And if the soldiers couldn’t get to Storyville, Storyville obligingly came to them. One investigation of conditions around Camp Nicholls revealed that numerous women from the District were flocking to the vicinity and “accosting soldiers as they enter or leave camp grounds.” Makeshift houses of prostitution were set up along Bayou St. John near the camp, and “large numbers of girls 14 to 17 years old remain in City Park after nightfall visiting with guardsmen in secluded places.”

  On May 18, however, Congress took a decisive step, passing the Selective Service Act of 1917. Section 13 of the act, designed to prevent venereal disease among the troops, explicitly outlawed prostitution within a ten-mile radius of any military encampment; at the same time, it set a penalty of $1,000 or twelve months in jail for anyone guilty of selling alcohol to soldiers. DISTRICT OR TROOPS MUST GO ran the headline in the Daily Item of July 1, 1917. Unless Storyville was closed, the paper reported, “there could be no post, barracks, or cantonment in—nor even any movement of troops through—the city of New Orleans.”

  Even so, Mayor Behrman delayed taking any immediate action, and this did not go unnoticed. “Situation here not substantially improved,” one local reformer telegraphed to Raymond Fosdick, chairman of the Commission on Training Camp Activities. “Recent regulations largely disregarded. District frequented by men in uniform in spite of police orders to keep them out.” Other local reform groups, from the Citizens League and the Louisiana chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, also stepped up the pressure on Fosdick and other federal authorities: “Must the Louisiana boys be sacrificed to the brewers of the state while the mothers who have borne these sons, and reared them to young manhood, beg and implore the government to protect them?”

  Finally, in August, a representative of the Fosdick Commission showed up at City Hall, claiming to have orders to officially close the restricted district once and for all. Mayor
Behrman refused to comply, insisting that the man had no authority to issue the order and urging him to consult with local military commanders before doing anything. Then, in a hastily organized junket, the mayor took a train to Washington, DC, to put the matter before Secretary of War Newton Baker. In their face-to-face meeting, Behrman laid out the rationale for keeping Storyville open, pointing out that closing the District would merely scatter prostitution and vice around the city. The mayor also insisted that military and municipal police patrols could effectively keep the soldiers out of trouble. Secretary Baker, a former mayor of Cleveland, had his own opinions on the topic, but ultimately conceded that he “would not require anything to be done about [the] district unless [he] was told that soldiers were admitted to it, in which case it would have to be closed.” Behrman left DC convinced that he had saved Storyville, at least temporarily.

  But when local reformers got word of the mayor’s successful mission, they were outraged. Kate Gordon in particular railed against Behrman’s alleged high-handedness, accusing him of making secret deals on behalf of his powerful friends and playing politics in a time of war. Behrman vehemently denied the charges. “I am at a loss to know just how Miss Gordon acquired her knowledge of what occurred at an interview at which she was not present,” he remarked acidly. “How any sane person can attribute politics to anything connected with this whole matter is beyond me.”

  In the end, however, the old Ring warrior lost this battle. By late September, Navy Secretary Daniels had made the decision his superior would not. He sent a letter to Louisiana governor Ruffin G. Pleasant (and copied it to Mayor Behrman) expressing the secretary’s “intense desire that immediate action be taken” in the matter. Knowing he could delay no longer, Behrman quickly drafted an ordinance requiring that the Storyville District be shut down, effective midnight of November 12. “Our city government has believed that the [vice] situation could be administered more easily and satisfactorily by confining it within a prescribed area,” the mayor observed when presenting the ordinance. “Our experience has taught us that the reasons for this are unanswerable, but the Navy Department of the federal government has decided otherwise.”

  Even after unanimous passage of the ordinance by the city council, however, most people in Storyville believed that Tom Anderson would somehow save the day and keep the District open. And he certainly tried. In recent years, he had taken up with a madam named Gertrude Dix, a “witty, pretty, and natty” young transplant from Ohio who ran the brothel next door to the Annex at 209 Basin Street. Hoping to create a legal obstacle to the District’s closing, he persuaded Dix to file a writ of injunction against the city, citing her substantial investment in the Basin Street brothel, including a $3,000-a-year lease running until 1919. Dix’s attorney argued that the closing ordinance was not only unconstitutional and void, but that it would also subject his client to “irreparable injury and damage” by making it impossible for her to do business. Given the partial success of the Willie Piazza and Lulu White suits earlier that year, it was at least reasonable to think that Dix’s suit might give the District at least a few more months of life.

  Even so, desperation was setting in among the denizens of Storyville. In October, rumors began circulating that some of the Basin Street landlords were conspiring to burn their buildings to the ground in order to collect insurance on properties that were bound to lose much of their value should the ordinance be enforced. A police investigation found no evidence of any conspiracy; but insurance companies soon began canceling policies on properties within the District’s boundaries. As the November deadline approached, special police details were sent into Storyville to put down threatened riots and demonstrations by the affected residents, though none ever developed. All hope of saving the District, it seemed, was pinned on Tom Anderson and the Dix court challenge.

  On November 11, just one day before the scheduled closing, Judge F. D. King of the Civil District Court ruled that the city was within its rights in enforcing the new ordinance, and Dix’s request for an injunction was denied. A hasty appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court was likewise denied a few hours later. STORYVILLE DYING WITH FEW MOURNERS read the headline on a Daily Item story, which described how the atmosphere in all of the District’s establishments—even Tom Anderson’s—had become downright funereal in these last days: “Storyville was unusually quiet last night.… Men stood at the bars and discussed the situation in low voices. They told each other sad, sad stories, dolefully drank their drinks, and abjectly gazed out into the quiet streets.”

  As midnight approached on November 12, moving vans appeared on the streets of Storyville to start hauling furniture and bric-a-brac from the former pleasure palaces. Some secondhand dealers were looking to pick up a few bargains from the distressed prostitutes and madams. “Many were the eloquent arguments on why several occupants of huts should sell furniture worth $200 for $20,” the States reported. “Words were passed, but little furniture changed hands.” One exception was Willie Piazza’s legendary white piano. According to Storyville legend, the magnificent instrument—once played by the likes of Tony Jackson and Jelly Roll Morton—was sold under duress for the sum of $1.25.

  “As late as 11:30,” according to the States, “a stream of women, Negro maids, and porters [wended] their way toward Rampart Street with furniture and cut glass on their backs.” Louis Armstrong was there to witness the exodus. “It sure was a sad scene to watch the law run all those people out of Storyville,” he wrote years later. “They reminded me of refugees. Some of them had spent the best part of their lives there. Others had never known any other kind of life.”

  And thus did Storyville become history. According to an editorial in the next day’s States, New Orleans had finally “put itself in line with the enlightened moral sentiment of the country. The effect will not be to destroy the social evil. It will never be completely destroyed. But it has come to be against sound public policy to legally sanction the vice, and by enacting the [closing] law, New Orleans relieves herself of an advertisement which did her infinite harm abroad.”

  Certainly the States was right about one thing—prostitution would not end in New Orleans after the closing of the District. Despite federal efforts to keep an eye on the neighborhood, despite regular police raids to make sure the laws against prostitution were observed, despite even an attempt by local club women to create a program to retrain former prostitutes for worthier professions (a program for which, apparently, there were very few applicants), the practice of selling sex did not die in New Orleans. As Armstrong later observed: “After Storyville closed down—the people of that section spreaded out all over the city … so we turned out nice and reformed.”

  For Tom Anderson, however, the end of legalized prostitution in New Orleans was disastrous. Now almost sixty years old, a grandfather twice over, and suffering from high blood pressure, he was no longer the tireless empire builder he had been twenty years earlier, his young mistress notwithstanding. For a time after the District’s demise, he tried to keep his old empire of vice intact, but it just became harder and harder. In the summer of 1918, the Fosdick Commission, still concerned about the corruption of soldiers, forbade dancing and the playing of any kind of music in cabarets. The order was enforced with particular energy at the Annex. In July, Anderson wrote a letter of protest to the new superintendent of police, Frank T. Mooney, complaining that he was being singled out by law enforcement. “As a citizen and taxpayer, and the operator of a licensed legal business,” he wrote, “I do not intend to allow myself to be unfairly treated while the other fellow continues operating, and if necessary I will take the matter into the courts … I pay the largest license of any establishment in New Orleans. We have in every way complied with the law. Orders have been issued that no woman may eat in my place without an escort, and not even with an escort if she is a woman of questionable character. Yet she can go right next door or to any other restaurant in the city and eat. This is discrimination and can’t stand in law.
”

  The irony was humiliating. Tom Anderson, the man who in 1913 was seemingly exempt from legal restrictions imposed on other cabaret owners, was now the one hit hardest by them. Eventually, he turned the Annex over to his old lieutenant, Billy Struve, in order to focus on his Rampart Street place, the Arlington Restaurant. But even this establishment would soon be untenable as a business proposition. With Prohibition almost certain to pass in the near future, grand restaurants like the Arlington would face difficult times. By September, the Times-Picayune was gloating: “Tom Anderson’s place in Rampart Street may be turned into a coffeehouse when Uncle Sam puts the ban on other liquids next July,” the paper reported. The writer thought it might actually do better business as an ice-cream parlor.

  At least the erstwhile mayor of Storyville still had his legislative career in Baton Rouge to keep him busy, though now he had fewer vested interests to lobby for in the House. And his oil-company business, bolstered by the growing success of that industry in the Pelican State, was still thriving. So Tom Anderson was not quite out of the picture yet. He put day-to-day control of the Arlington into the hands of his son-in-law, George Delsa, and began spending much of his time with Gertrude Dix at his new summer home in Waveland, Mississippi. And who could tell what the future would bring? Perhaps after the war was over and the federal government got out of the purity business, there would be opportunities again in New Orleans. As the States had pointed out, the social evil could never be completely destroyed.