14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Review from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, July 20, 2004
This review is from: The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans 1865-1920 (Hardcover)
In 1903, a guidebook promoting New Orleans’s Storyville red-light district provided a directory of elite prostitutes. Entitled the Storyville 400, the guide offered practical information for those in search of such services. Many of the guidebook’s readers may have also chuckled at the sly parody of the “First Four Hundred”--the famous roster of New Yorkers prominent enough to be invited to parties thrown by socialite Lina Astor. Astor’s ballroom, it was said, could only accommodate 400 people. A list of prostitutes that lampooned Fifth Avenue snobbery must have been a matter of some hilarity for the “sporting men” and tourists who frequented New Orleans bordellos. But while the guidebooks spoofed Americans’ turn of the century obsession with respectability, the men who frequented Storyville also willingly paid a premium to visit brothels that affected Victorian refinement.
In The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectablity in New Orleans, 1865-1920, Alecia Long vividly recreates the tempestuous Storyville-era when increasingly conservative national values collided with New Orleans’s decadent culture. For Long, colorful and conflicted women like Mary Anne Deubler epitomized this period. A former prostitute, Deubler went on to become one of Storyville’s most successful madams. Her success was, in part, due to her ability to combine the trappings of high society with the lascivious entertainment of bordello culture. Her Basin Street brothel--the Chateau Lobrano d’Arlington—mimicked the elegance that typified Victorian domesticity. But while the oak paneling, heavily draped windows, and fine furniture might have resembled the drawing rooms of Garden District mansions, many “gentlemen of taste” preferred the services of Deubler’s “cultivated” girls to the respectable company of their wives. Long argues convincingly that madams like Deubler “sagely manipulated the idea of respectability that permeated American culture” and, by so doing, amassed impressive fortunes. Yet, even Deubler grew embarrassed by the source of her wealth and longed for entrance into polite society. In an effort to reinvent herself as a Victorian lady, she purchased a splendid residence on Esplanade Avenue, toured Europe, wore the latest fashions, and summered in Pass Christian and Covington.
Although Deubler may have craved respectability, Long argues aptly that unlike many other cities in the United States, New Orleans never fully embraced the Victorian ethos. While the city had prominent and outspoken reformers such as Philip Werlein who pressured officials to stamp out vice, lawmakers responded with conflicting or half-hearted measures. Officials did move against the concert saloons on Royal Street where bawdy burlesque and minstrel performers entertained working-class crowds. Those boisterous saloons were, after all, only a short distance from some of the city’s most respectable dining and shopping venues. And even politicians who frequented the saloons felt obligated to respond after notorious incidents such as bar owner Otto Schoenhausen’s conviction for drugging and robbing one of his own patrons.
In another effort to appease reformers, in 1897 councilman Sidney Story (for whom Storyville would be nicknamed) introduced his famous ordinance that created an officially sanctioned red-light district on the edge of the French Quarter. Because the ordinance banned prostitution in most of the city, Story could claim to be a reformer without shutting down the sex trade that drew thousands of visitors to New Orleans each year. Story’s ordinance, Long argues, made the city unique and notorious. Although other cities had de facto vice districts, New Orleans was alone in “the frank and direct way the city’s leaders chose to delineate its vice district through municipal ordinance.” In 1897, Long writes, “in an extremely direct and decidedly non-Protestant fashion, New Orleans city officials, acknowledging their belief that sins of the flesh were inevitable, looked Satan in the eye, cut a deal, and gave him his own address.”
For the next twenty years, men like Mayor Martin Behrman protected Storyville from those who railed against it, particularly evangelical reformers from the northern part of the state. Behrman viewed himself as a realist. “You can,” he said, “make prostitution illegal in Louisiana but you can’t make it unpopular.” To be sure, some prominent businessmen and local politicians hoped New Orleans would, instead, emulate “New South” cities such as Atlanta that emphasized manufacturing, banking, and commerce. But as long as Storyville flourished economically, others were happy to promote the city as a bastion of decadence and difference.
Intertwined with this struggle between sex and respectability were equally contentious matters of race that arose, Long contends, because some of New Orleans prostitutes were women of color. New Orleans had had a long history of tolerating relationships “across the color line.” The system of placąge that flourished during the antebellum era clearly set New Orleans apart from the rest of the South. And many men and women of different races fell in love, had children, and lived together out of wedlock. Although these relationships faced significant social and legal constraints, they remained prevalent throughout the nineteenth century. During Reconstruction, interracial marriage was even briefly made legal. As the forces of white supremacy gained ground after 1877, however, race relations grew far more rigid, even in the Crescent City.
For Long, it is no coincidence that the ordinance that created Storyville in 1897 came on the heels of the United States Supreme Court’s infamous 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that sanctioned legal segregation. Although Sidney Story’s ordinance did not prohibit white men from visiting black or mixed-race prostitutes, it did move those activities into what had been a predominately African-American neighborhood and out of the eye of respectable white society.
Some pragmatic Storyville madams, Long notes, managed to use these increasingly rigid racial mores to their advantage. Self-described “octaroons” like Willie Piazza and Lulu White marketed their brothels as exotic destinations where white men could find light-skinned mixed-race women who were refined but “skilled” in ways more prudish white women were not. Since romantic relationships “across the color line” were no longer as acceptable as they were in the antebellum era, commercialized interracial sex became highly profitable in New Orleans. By allowing men to violate a central taboo of the Jim Crow South, Long contends, Storyville brothels served as a “safety valve” where southerners came to “escape racial, religious, and behavioral strictures.”
Storyville’s heyday was short-lived. By 1909, Louisiana conservatives from Shreveport and other northern outposts, successfully urged the state legislature to target prostitution. New state laws banned musical instruments in saloons, prohibited blacks and whites from drinking together, and barred women from establishments that sold liquor and not food. To circumvent these laws, some brothels added tamale carts and other food concessions to their dance halls. But other restrictive measures soon followed and in 1917, as America mobilized to fight World War I, Storyville suffered a fatal blow. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, convinced that the district posed a threat to troops stationed nearby, ordered a reluctant Mayor Behrman to close the district down. Although some brothels survived Daniel’s assault, Storyville’s boom years were over. By the mid-1940s, the district had fallen on hard times and the city razed most of its buildings to make way for the Iberville Housing Project.
In The Great Southern Babylon, Alecia Long provides a dazzling account of the cultural forces that created and destroyed the infamous Storyville district. She also provides a skillful and thought-provoking analysis of the lasting impact the district has had on the city. She argues convincingly that Storyville helped New Orleans to resist the homogenization that most of the nation embraced. Story’s ordinance gave the city a unique “reputation for tolerating, even encouraging, indulgence of all varieties.” Although this reputation may have been in place long before the advent of Storyville, the creation of a legal authorized tenderloin district marked the moment when civic leaders began to exploit New Orleans’ decadent image “in order to profit from it and draw people to the city.”
Since its demise, Storyville has become part of New Orleans lore. The unpleasant and degrading aspects of prostitution have been filtered from collective memory and replaced by images of Jelly Roll Morton, the early days of Jazz, and smoke-filled nights nights in ornate bordellos populated by colorful characters. “More than a century after Storyville was established, and more than eighty years after it was abolished,” Long concludes, “the city’s reputation for sexual liberality, sensual tourism, and laissez-faire morality remains intact. It also remains indebted, at least in part, to the romanticized mythology that has developed about Storyville.”
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