So you have this very similar thing going on in Chicago and other cities where the reformers want to make government into something scientific. And the subject of experts, who would be trained in political science and who can solve every problem using reason and science. And then you have the machines, which did a much better job of delivering public services to their constituents. This was an era long before government was providing job counseling and a social safety net.

So if you were somebody who lost your job, the machine politician, the local ward healer, is gonna arrange for you to find a job until you can get one on your own. They’re gonna take care of your family. Meanwhile, the reformers weren’t doing anything for those people. And that’s why the reformers were always amazed, “We’ve revealed how the machine is totally corrupt and yet people keep electing them.” Well, that was why they kept electing them because they were actually doing something for the constituents.

So there was this huge middle category in New Orleans called Creoles of color. And they had a lot of rights that other African Americans did not have, like the former slaves did not have certain rights. And they had a thriving culture in New Orleans in the latter half of the 19th Century. They were often in skilled trades like cigar making or shoemaking or things like that. And all that ended. All of that ended when it was decided that this was disruptive. We have to make New Orleans more like Atlanta. We have to make it more like the rest of the South.

So this is—the 30-year war that I talk about in the book is basically this attempt to normalize New Orleans, to make it—to take it from its extraordinary, unusual state where it had a certain amount of racial fluidity, which was totally unheard of in the South, and to make it more like a traditional southern city.

And this is when you saw the rise of Jim Crow. It started in New Orleans and it really basically erased this whole middle class middle African American category. And you either became—you were either black or white. And if you were black you were out of luck. And so this was really going backwards. It’s one of those times in history where maybe the ark of history bends towards justice but this was one period where it really bent backwards for good couple decades, more than a couple decades, really.

[Crosstalk]

But it was all part of this general effort to we’ve got to get our house in order. We’ve got to make this city more like Atlanta because Atlanta is beating us. They are eating our lunch. So New Orleans was falling behind economically while places like Atlanta were surging ahead. And I think this was all part of the effort to we’ve got to make New Orleans a more normal, more businesslike place.

So they said, “Let’s come up with this idea.” This was one—an Alderman named Sidney Story, he came up with this idea of creating a segregated district and he designated an 18-block area that was somewhat isolated. And he wrote an ordinance that basically made prostitution illegal everywhere in the city except that one area.

So he didn’t explicitly legalize prostitution in that area, which made the ordinance much less susceptible to challenge in the courts, but it really was something that hadn’t been—there had been plenty of unofficially tolerated vice districts in cities all around the United States. But this was really the first officially tolerated district and they thought that it would lower visibility of prostitution. They would say, “Oh, we’ll have it all in this one out of the way area where respectable people don’t have to come into contact with it, where we can sort of hide it from those northern bankers that we want to invest in our city.

But unfortunately for them, the district was wildly popular. It became wildly successful and was soon known as the most shameless red light district in the country. So their intentions were to lower the visibility but it ended up making New Orleans world famous as a den of sin.

He was also—I mean, he was elected for 20 years to represent the ward that Storyville was in in the Louisiana state legislature, so he had a certain amount of power in the legitimate world. But they say—it’s hard to check these things, but they say that they were hardly any business deals that went down in Storyville that he didn’t have a piece of, so he was really a dominant figure and actually a nice guy, from what—everybody seemed to like him, even his enemies. He just was a very agreeable character.

But one connection between these two issues of kind of the vice district and the race issue is jazz. Right?

You know, whether jazz would have developed without New Orleans, I think it would have. But I think New Orleans was there first.

And pretty soon he was creating this sound that when you read all of the oral histories of the early jazzmen, they say that everybody was listening to it and just getting very excited about it. And all of the Creoles of color who were trained musicians trained in a more classical way, they were starting to play more like Bolden. And so, they were bringing a more trained sound to what was developing in jazz.

And anyway, it was this time of incredible ferment and all bands were trying to play like Bolden and then they were trying to distinguish themselves from Bolden. So there was a lot going on and this is basically how jazz began.

And so, a lot of the early cabarets and jazz clubs would open up a taco stand or something like that and say, “Look, we’re a restaurant so we can serve both black and white people together, and we can play music because we serve food.” But yeah it was sort of a rear guard effort after Storyville started becoming so successful. They first tried to clamp down on it in this way. It wasn’t working. They were just finding ways around it, and they wanted to finally close down the district entirely.

And for years they were trying to do this and couldn’t do it. Finally, it was the federal government who stepped in at the beginning of our part of World War I in 1917. Basically, there was a big naval camp in New Orleans and they were worried about VD and things like that weakening the soldiers. So they passed a law that said you can’t have prostitution anywhere within five miles or ten miles of a naval base or a military base. And so, finally then it was the US Federal Government that came in and shut down Storyville.

Basically, this guy was run down later that evening by police and he ended up shooting two policemen dead later that evening. And then he disappeared and for days they could not find him. And this was a source of great outrage in the city and it—there were white mobs going through the streets just beating up any African American people that could be found because they were frustrated that they couldn’t find this guy who had killed two cops and wounded a number of others.

Ultimately, they isolated it to these 11 guys that they claimed were part of a conspiracy, a mafia conspiracy, to kill the police chief. And it went to trial, and the jury actually acquitted everyone. Well, there was a mistrial in some cases, but they acquitted everyone. And basically, the reform element, the well-healed white establishment of New Orleans could not accept this.

And so, Parkerson and his Young Men’s Democratic Association turned into basically a vigilante mob. They held a meeting the next day and even though these Italians were acquitted of any crime, this mob stormed the parish prison and basically lynched 11 people.

Of course, the whole thing created an international incident because the Italian government had something to say about this. And tensions got pretty intense between Italy and the United States. Finally, the federal government agreed to pay reparations for these 11 deaths and the crisis passed. But in terms of anyone being punished, no.

The Italians had been subdued to a certain extent because of these violent overreactions to crime. And by 1920, the reformers actually captured both the—at the state level and at the municipal level in New Orleans, they captured power. They got the machine out. Of course, it didn’t last very long. It only lasted for about four years before the machine came back in, but they finally ousted the political machine, the so called ring.

So there really was a sense—there was even an article that I quote from the Times [inaudible] [00:38:40] Newspaper that says there’s a feeling of virtue in the air or something like that. Because there was really a sense that we got rid of Storyville. We got the ring out of office. We got our racial house in order, so now we can thrive. But of course, they didn’t thrive. I mean, New Orleans actually did poorly in the 1920s compared to a lot of American cities, which did very well indeed in the ’20s.

So I do think that there was a triumph of reform that—in 1920 and that’s why I chose to end the story there. But it was clearly only a temporary victory. And eventually, New Orleans realized that we shouldn’t be suppressing our reputation as a den of sin. We should be promoting it because that’s what brings a lot of tourists here. And that’s basically what—that realizing came to them like in the ’40s and ’50s. And they said, “Let’s make ourselves like Las Vegas, the Las Vegas of the South.”

Corner groceries were often fronts for Black Hand and organized crime activity. So that maybe the explanation. The guy I like as the perpetrator—

And so, police started investigating this guy and they compared his prison records with when the ax man was active. And they discovered that most of the time that—when he was in prison there were no ax man crimes. And when he was out of prison suddenly the ax man crimes started happening again. So they had this whole theory that it was this guy, and—that’s my phone. I’m sorry.

Those issues were actually in the teens in Los Angeles and a few more elements. I seem to be—even though I told myself after doing this book I want a more focused book next time. I want a smaller book next time. I’m doing the same thing again. I’m gonna weave together a number of different strands and cover 30 years of Los Angeles history, so I’m in for another long haul, I think.