by Gary Krist
Faced with this barrage of attacks, that octopus could do little else but distance itself from its newly noxious tentacle. Anderson was thus dropped as the Ring candidate for a sixth term in the House (causing him to rail against his former friends’ “ingratitude” in private conversations). Even so, the barrage of anti-Andersonism went on unabated.
The Times-Picayune, firmly in the anti-Ring camp, did its part by running a series of exposé articles in early January, on the eve of national Prohibition (and just before the state primaries). The series, under the title “New Orleans Nights,” depicted the adventures of a young couple just looking to have a little naughty fun in the city’s demimonde. What they find, however, is an increasingly ugly world of dissipation and lawlessness, of aggressive prostitutes, addicted gamblers, and paid-off cops looking the other way. The series—which of course included a late-night visit to Anderson’s Arlington cabaret—culminated in an editorial diatribe against the notorious political machine that continued to let this filth thrive. “Under 20 YEARS OF RING RULE,” the paper complained, “this crawling, fetid, contaminating monster of the UNDERWORLD has grown and grown, poisoning and corrupting all it touches.” Every word published in “New Orleans Nights,” the paper insisted, was true. “Our prayer is for you mothers and fathers and decent people of New Orleans, that the TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.”
For Stubbs and the rest of the Ring-backed candidates, this was the coup de grace. When the Democratic primary was held just a few days later, John M. Parker—the reformer who in his youth had been part of the mob of worthies who perpetrated the Orleans Parish Prison lynchings—defeated his opponent Stubbs by some 12,000 votes and went on to become governor. He vowed that this was not the end: “We are going to finish the destruction of the New Orleans Ring,” he told supporters at a rally in Lafayette Square, “[with] a final, smashing, knockout blow in the municipal campaign in September!”
For Tom Anderson, meanwhile, the news just kept getting worse. Despite protracted efforts by his lawyers to have the federal charges against him dismissed, the case in US District Court did go forward. At 11:51 A.M. on Tuesday, February 3, 1920, Judge Foster called to order what the Times-Picayune called “the case which has probably attracted more attention than any other cause lodged in federal courts here in many years.” The official charge against Anderson was for “knowingly conducting an immoral resort within 10 miles of a military camp.” That word “knowingly” was going to be the key to the entire case. Given the evidence, no jury could possibly doubt that immoral liaisons were initiated at the Arlington; Anderson’s conscious involvement in those activities, however, would be harder to prove.
The first witness called was William Edler, the public health officer whose testimony in the first trial had been so damaging to Anderson’s cause. Here again he described the experience of his and Harold Wilson’s visit to the Arlington in June (much of which, according to the reporter from the Item, “was of such a character that it cannot be admitted to print”). Anderson’s lawyers raised objections of all kinds to this testimony, and the exchanges between the defense and the prosecutors became rather heated. But Anderson himself just sat impassively behind his “screen of lawyers.” “Not one single strand of his thinning, iron-gray hair was out of place,” the Item reported, “and the only evidence of mental disturbance or agitation that could be remarked in his appearance was that he sat with his lower jaw sagging just a trifle, so that his mouth was open.”
This aura of equanimity was ruffled only once, with the testimony of the next witness, Sergeant Pierce, the undercover Army officer. Pierce had actually been within earshot of Anderson at the bar, and had witnessed the café owner’s order to have everyone in the place behave themselves. According to the Item, “As the witness recounted this, Mr. Anderson’s habitually flushed face turned a few shades redder, and he muttered something under his breath and into his carefully cropped white mustache.” As well he might, for Pierce, it would seem, had just provided the evidence required to prove that Anderson had been fully aware of what was going on in his restaurant every night.
On the second day of the trial, Anderson himself was called to testify. Maintaining a cool, unruffled, and affable demeanor, he categorically denied the charges against him. “I was never aware of any women visiting my place for immoral purposes,” he said (under oath). “I simply operated a saloon and restaurant. There is no doubt that some sporting women went there, but it was for eating and drinking only. They were never authorized to solicit and, so far as I know, there was no soliciting in any way, shape, or manner.”
Too bad for Anderson, then, that his testimony was blatantly contradicted by that of Captain Wilson, who arrived in New Orleans from Washington that morning. Wilson testified next, and his account of his night at the Arlington cabaret was even more lurid than in the first trial. In vivid strokes, he described the “vamping” intruder at his table, and the women sitting around with their skirts hiked up to their knees, “rolling their eyes about, smiling at the men” at other tables. “The orchestra was playing what is commonly called jazz music,” the bespectacled captain observed, using a term that by now had become a watchword for dissipation to some New Orleanians. “The women were going from table to table, speaking to men.… Many of them were smoking. All of them were contorting their bodies and keeping time to the music with their breasts.”
This last image was not one that a jury was likely to forget. And when testimony was finally closed and the jurors were sent into deliberation, the outlook for Tom Anderson seemed grim. But as the minutes and then hours passed without a verdict, his situation began to look more hopeful. Could it be that the mayor of Storyville would escape yet again? And when the jury finally returned on Thursday, the news for Anderson was good. “If it please the court,” the foreman announced, “we have failed to reach an agreement.”
It did not, in fact, please the court. But after some discussion about whether a unanimous verdict might possibly be reached with further deliberation, Judge Foster was finally forced to declare a mistrial. The unshakable vote of the jurors stood at seven for acquittal and five for conviction.
“I am more glad than I can say,” a relieved Tom Anderson told reporters after leaving the courtroom. “The prosecution—and the persecution, for it has been that, too—has been very hard for an old man, for that is what I am. But I feel that it is a vindication that a majority of the jury felt I should be acquitted, and I am doubly glad for the sake of my daughter and my grandchildren.”
His principal lawyer was less gracious. “It looks like somebody was trying to frame up on Mr. Anderson,” Charles Byne told the press. “It looks like somebody wanted to get him at all costs.… Doesn’t this look like a deliberate attempt at a frame-up?”
Frame-up or not, the federal government eventually declined to retry Tom Anderson on the charges in the indictment. Local reformers and the newspapers were livid at this outcome; the Times-Picayune sarcastically noted that Anderson “must be [one] of those who see no evil, hear no evil, and believe no evil” if he really didn’t know of prostitution at the Arlington. Still determined to punish the vice lord, reformers subsequently tried to snare him on other charges—of voter fraud and violations of the Injunction and Abatement Act—all to no avail. But although Anderson had escaped a prison term, he was all but dead as a politician in Louisiana. The Tom Anderson name, in fact, was now poison—a weapon that could be used against all of his old Ring friends, including Martin Behrman himself.
That weapon was used freely in the municipal elections that fall. “The Tom Andersons, the cabaret keepers, the pimps, the panders of the city—these are the supporters of Behrman and his organization,” ran a typical campaign diatribe. Reformers, along with some disaffected members of the Ring, were united under the banner of the Orleans Democratic Association (ODA), and they were determined to consolidate their recent successes and take back the city once and for all. In rally after rally, they pounded away at the four-term mayor, dec
rying his underworld associations, his repeated failures to reform the police department, his support of vice, and his now-notorious trip to Washington, DC, to try to save the restricted district. At times, their crusade took on an almost apocalyptic tone: “Our city is at a parting of the ways,” one ODA spokesman said at a large rally shortly before the primary. “It is for our people to decide which way they will go. One way—the way of the Ring—leads to death, to political, financial, moral, and civic death. But the other way—the way against the Ring—leads to life; to a prosperous future for our city; to a successful business administration; to political freedom; to civic decency; to a higher and more honorable public service; and to a better citizenship for all of our people. It is for our people to choose, for them to decide whether they will remain in bonds or whether they will become free.”
In the end, the people of New Orleans decided to become free, at least by the reformers’ definition. The election was closely fought, but Behrman’s efforts were hampered by an illness that kept him convalescing in Biloxi for much of the campaign. In a close race, he lost by a mere 1,450 votes to reformer Andrew McShane; the ODA slate also captured four of the five seats on the city council. THE RING IS SMASHED! the Times-Picayune exalted. “Ring’s Control of Orleans Is Utterly Shattered All Down Line.”
It was the final victory in the thirty-year war for the soul of the Crescent City. For the first time in a generation, New Orleans’ city government was in the hands of the reformers.
AND so the city of New Orleans entered the new decade of the 1920s a very different—and, in many ways, a much less colorful—place than it had been just thirty years earlier. The city’s unique atmosphere of open, legally sanctioned vice was now a thing of the past, eviscerated not just by local reform efforts but by national measures as well. Prohibition and female suffrage—both of which, according to moral crusaders like Jean Gordon, would usher in a time of greater virtue and political accountability—were the law of the land by 1920. Jim Crow, now as firmly established in New Orleans as in the rest of the South, would ensure the maintenance of white privilege for decades to come. And while crime would remain a problem in the city, the old days of the Black Hand and the so-called Mafia vendettas were definitely past.
The age of Tom Anderson, in other words, was over, symbolized by the decline of Anderson himself. Out of his job in the statehouse after twenty years of dominance over the Fourth Ward, he would soon be out of the vice business as well. By 1921, he would divest himself of the last major holding of his vice empire, selling the Arlington on Rampart Street to his son-in-law, George Delsa, the longtime manager of the place. Anderson would still be a rich man; his Liberty Oil Company had done quite well over the years, and it was to this legitimate business that he would devote the rest of his life. But he would never again be a force in the New Orleans underworld he had ruled for so long.
The Times-Picayune took note of the salubrious atmosphere in the city in July 1921. Reporting on an initiative by New Orleans’ new police superintendent, Guy Maloney, the paper described the police department’s unprecedented resolve to control vice with beefed-up police patrols and more stringent arrest and parole protocols: “The police, it is said, recognize gamblers, lottery shop operators, and proprietors of immoral houses as organized law violators, and are determined to keep so hot behind them that their illegal trade will become unprofitable.” The results so far had been promising indeed. “You could shoot a cannonball down Royal or North Rampart Streets,” one police captain told the paper, “and you wouldn’t have hit [a single] undesirable.”
How different from the heyday years of vice in New Orleans, when that same projectile would have winged any number of pimps, prostitutes, cardsharps, and other miscreants. It may have taken thirty years, but reformers finally had the cleaned-up city they wanted. “Gambling and immorality,” the paper concluded, were now “on their way to the high timbers.”
But they would not stay there for long.
THERE ARE NO LAST CHAPTERS IN HISTORY, AND THE triumph of reform in New Orleans at the end of 1920—while it may have warmed the hearts of the city’s long-suffering “better half”—did not spell the end of vice and lawlessness in this irrepressibly unruly place. For no matter what the Times-Picayune might have liked to think, New Orleans had not really been cleaned up. The vice that had been practiced openly in the city in the early 1900s had merely gone underground with the advent of the 1920s, festering in speakeasies, illegal gambling dens, and secret assignation houses. As in other cities around the country, a visitor to New Orleans would now have to look slightly harder for a drink, a woman, or a poker game—and deal with the legal consequences if caught in the act.
The “normalization” of the city’s racial atmosphere was also more theoretical than actual. True, interracial contacts of all kinds were now strictly controlled, and the racial ambiguities of the city’s past had been eliminated (at least legally) by the rigid two-tiered system of Jim Crow. But Creoles of Color and octoroons did not suddenly change their racial identity. And what went on between the races behind closed doors was controllable only to the extent that policemen were diligent and above taking bribes.
Still, for better or worse, the thirty-year reform effort had been at least a partial success, papering over some of the Crescent City’s flagrant sinfulness and creating a more businesslike, temperate, and racially regimented urban environment like that of the other large cities of the South. Meanwhile, reformers—often acting in cooperation with machine politicians like Martin Behrman and, yes, even Thomas C. Anderson—had made substantial strides in improving the city’s infrastructure and its educational and public health facilities. These changes were unambiguously positive (even if the benefits accrued unevenly to whites, blacks, and immigrants). So the New Orleans of the 1920s was not the backward, unhealthy, and openly sinful place it had been at the end of the nineteenth century, and city officials were eager to make the world aware of that fact. Even local tourism officials started changing their strategies in the ’20s and ’30s, aiming their pitches at conventioneers and businessmen rather than leisure travelers seeking nightlife, sexual adventure, and a romantic “foreign” experience. As one historian has put it, “The Crescent City, according to the ad campaign organizers [of the ’20s], was an economic powerhouse devoted to prosperity, not frivolity. Industrial and commercial interests were paramount.” Emblematic of this more serious and practical image was the city’s response to the burning of its beloved French Opera House in 1919. After a decade of debate, it was decided that what a modern metropolis needed was not an opera house but a convention center. The result was the new Municipal Auditorium, inaugurated with great ceremony in 1930—“as a monument to the business community.”
And certainly most of the main players of the city’s legendary underworlds were gone now—either dead, moved away, out of the business, or else merely operating in the shadows. Many prostitutes and madams simply left town—such as Emma Johnson, who decamped shortly after the closing of Storyville, taking her sexual circus with her. Others, like Countess Willie Piazza, appear to have left the demimonde entirely and entered legitimate businesses. Although Storyville legend has her moving to Europe, marrying a French nobleman, and spending the rest of her life in a luxurious villa on the Riviera, her fate was actually far more mundane. Piazza merely remained at her former brothel at 317 North Basin Street, buying and selling real estate and other property (including at least one yacht). Her business acumen seems to have translated well to her new endeavors; when she died in 1932, she left behind a substantial estate, including two properties on Basin Street, an impressive collection of jewelry, and a deluxe 1926 Chrysler touring car—an astonishing accomplishment for an unmarried non-white woman in 1930s New Orleans.
Lulu White, on the other hand, had no such happy ending. She also continued living in her old Basin Street brothel, but kept it operating as a clandestine house of prostitution. She tried to pass off the new establishment as a transien
t hotel, but no one was fooled, and her place was subjected to numerous raids by the McShane administration’s newly conscientious police department. “I could not do anything wrong [even] if I wanted to,” she later complained to a judge. “The police would come in and wake up the boarders and ask them their names and where they came from; Captain Johnson gave his men instructions to go into my house every five minutes, and if the door was not opened right away, to break open the door.”
Despite her protestations of innocence, she was arrested no fewer than eleven times for violations of the ordinance that had abolished Storyville. One arrest in 1919 on federal prostitution charges, however, proved more serious. Found guilty, she actually was sent away to the federal penitentiary in Oklahoma to serve a term of a year and a day. Lawyers petitioned for an early release because of her ill health, but were unsuccessful. Finally, she herself wrote a letter to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in Washington: “I am suffering dearly every day,” she wrote. “I am full of fistroyer [fistula], rheumatism, and the doctor says I have two or three tumors in my abdomen—[I] can hardly walk and it is a matter of a short time I believe I will die. For God sake do not let me die in this place!”
Palmer proved surprisingly sympathetic, and he passed her letter on to President Woodrow Wilson. He—perhaps just as surprisingly—agreed to commute White’s sentence. She was released on June 16, 1919, after serving just three and a half months.
Her health now apparently improved, she turned Mahogany Hall over to a real estate agent on a ten-year lease and moved into the saloon next door, which she had bought in 1912. Here she opened up an alleged soft-drink company—but of course it was just another brothel. She was arrested again in November 1920 for operating a house of prostitution, and four more times during the 1920s for possessing and selling alcohol. Her last arrest came in February 1931, for running a disorderly house on North Franklin Street. By now, she truly was in ill health; she had grown to “Amazon proportions” and was reduced to panhandling on the street. Lulu White died just before her case came to trial—on August 20, 1931, the year that so many of the old Storyville figures would end up passing from the scene.
