Rising Tide. Part 12

Meanwhile, the water from Mounds Landing was roaring inland. E. M. Barry recalled: "[T]he water was leaping, it looked like, in rapids thirty feet high. And right in front of the break was the old Moore plantation house, a big mule barn, and two big, enormous trees. And when we came back by there [a few hours later] everything was gone."

For three miles inland from Mounds Landing the river scoured out the land-today a large, deep lake still remains as a legacy-but even as the mountain of water flattened, spread out, and slowed, its force remained terrifying. It tore out trees, made splinters out of thousands of thin sharecropper cabins, crushed or undermined and then swept away houses and barns.

Cora Walker, a black woman, lived a few miles south of the break. Her home lay beside the toe of the levee. "An airplane kept flying over, real low, backwards and forwards,...told us we better get to the levee. A lady was coming to the levee, had a bundle of clothes on her head and a rope around her waist leading a cow." Suddenly, the water arrived, tearing south. "She and the cow both drowned.... Just as we got to the levee we turned back and saw our house turned over. We could see our own place tumbling, hear our things falling down, and the grinding sound. And here come another house floating by. The water was stacked. The waves were standing high, real high. If they hit anything, they got it. Every time the waves came, the levee would shake like you were in a rocking chair."

One planter a few more miles inland stood on his veranda and watched along the rim of the horizon "the flood water approach in the form of a tan colored wall seven feet high, and with a roar as of a mighty wind."

In Leland, twenty-five miles from the creva.s.se, Mrs. D. S. Flanagan watched the flood come "in waves five or six feet deep and just rolling and rolling. I never had seen it come like that, so dangerous looking, in all the floods I had been in. There was a Negro standing on the railroad track below the oil mill, and, when the water hit that track, it just washed out all the way under the track, the Negro into it, and he was never seen again."

The water rolled over and over itself, lifting trees, mules, roofs, dogs, cows, and bodies, rolling forward, the water filthy, liquid mud, churning, spitting brown foam and froth. Sam Huggins recalled: "When that levee broke, the water just come whoos.h.i.+ng, you could just see it coming, just see big waves of it coming. It was coming so fast till you just get excited, because you didn't have time to do nothing, nothing but knock a hole in your ceiling and try to get through if you could.... It was rising so fast till peoples didn't get a chance to get nothing.... People and dogs and everything like that on top of houses. You'd see cows and hogs trying to get somewhere where people would rescue them.... Cows just bellowing and swimming.... A lot of those farmhouses didn't have no ceiling that would hold n.o.body."

Newman Bolls said that the water moved with such force that behind one large tree the ground was dry-the current broke around it. In that s.p.a.ce a cow and its calf stood bellowing with a deep, plaintive sound. Later, when the current lessened, water filled the sanctuary; the animals drowned. They were joined by others. In the quiet of the new sea, animals by the hundreds were floating.

Those who understood the river's power abandoned their homes and left their doors and windows open to let the water flow through and lessen resistance; closed doors forced buildings to bear the full current. In Winterville, several families gathered together in what seemed a st.u.r.dy house. The current swirled around it, scoured out a hole 25 feet deep underneath it, and the house collapsed. The a.s.sociated Press reported, "23 white women and children, marooned, in one house...were drowned in the Mississippi flood, says a report made public today by [Seguine] Allen.... Urgent warnings to all people living between here and Vicksburg nearly 100 miles...were issued by Maj. Allen. 'Wall of water going south is very dangerous and unless people move to levees quickly, they will be drowned.'"

The superintendent of the Illinois Central in Greenville had scattered dozens of boxcars on Delta sidings for emergency shelter. Fred Chaney, outside Greenville, had been getting phone reports of the advance of the creva.s.se water and moved into a boxcar. "At 9:00, we could hear the rustle of waters in the woods a mile north of our box car haven. It sounded not unlike the first gust of wind before an on-coming storm and a s.h.i.+ver shot up and down my spine as the rustling noise grew louder and its true significance plumbed the depths of my mind."

It took three days for the water to reach L. T. Wade, deep within the Delta. But when it arrived, it covered the horizon. And it still came in force: "The water just came in waves, just like a big breaker in the ocean, coming over this land. It was a really frightening thing to see something like that. It didn't follow the... It just came right on over and rolled over."

"The situation is far worse than can possibly be imagined from the outside," stated General Green from Greenville. "It is the greatest disaster ever to come to this section and we need help from the federal government to prevent the worst kind of suffering."

FOR G G.o.d'S S SAKE, SEND U US B BOATS! was the headline blared across page 1 of the New Orleans Times-Picayune New Orleans Times-Picayune, quoting a plea from Mississippi Governor Dennis Murphree: "For G.o.d's sake send us boats. It would be impossible to overestimate the distress of the stricken sections of the state. Back from the levees, where the land is flooded by backwaters, people are living on housetops, clinging to trees, and barely existing in circ.u.mstances of indescribable horror. The only way we can get them out of there is by boat and we haven't the boats at present. Please try to make the people of New Orleans realize how urgent this is."

In fact, it was nearly indescribable. Mounds Landing was the greatest single creva.s.se ever to occur anywhere on the Mississippi River. It would flood an area 50 miles wide and 100 miles long with up to 20 feet of water. It would put water over the tops of houses 75 miles away in Yazoo City. A total of 185,459 people lived in the region that would be flooded by it. Virtually all of them would be forced out of their homes; 69,574 would live in refugee camps, some for as long as five months. The Red Cross would feed an additional 87,668 outside the refugee camps-jammed into shelters ranging from elegant hotels to boxcars. Most of the remaining 30,000 would flee the Delta.

There would be many other creva.s.ses to come, devastating hundreds of thousands more people downriver.

GREENVILLE SEEMED SAFE. The river levee protected the city from the Mississippi, and a rear protection levee protected it from water that came from a creva.s.se such as this one. Even before the Mounds Landing break, the city had actually pulled hundreds of black men off the river levee and put them to work raising the protection levee. But people were afraid. Within three hours after the creva.s.se special trains began carrying people out of town.

All that day police rounded up hundreds more black men and carried them to the protection levee. Levee board engineers a.s.sured citizens it would hold, a.s.sured them the city itself would not be flooded.

Waiting, the city seethed with anxiety and activity. LeRoy Percy spent the day as he had spent the preceding several days, at the levee board office on the phone. He had called planters who had refused to send their sharecroppers to the levee and demanded that they do so. He had spoken with Lewis Pierson, president of both the Irving Trust Company in New York and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce about organizing a national campaign for legislation to settle the river problem once and for all. He had involved his peers in New Orleans, bankers and lawyers with whom he hunted and played cards at the Boston Club, about the same issues. He had once again a.s.sured nervous bankers in New York and St. Louis that any money advanced for sandbags, lumber, and wages-blacks on the levee were paid 75 cents a day, less than they got to pick cotton-would be repaid. He had spoken to executives of the Illinois Central, arranging for supplies and more empty boxcars to use for shelter in case of the worst. His son had helped him in all this.

Now the levee board headquarters became even more a beehive, the National Guard headquarters a great Army camp preparing for war. Large Army tents were going up on the levee and giant kitchens were being built to feed thousands of refugees and workers. Trucks rattled through the streets carrying laborers and supplies. Hammers were pounding boats together in the lumber mills. Police and guardsmen impressed every black male they saw and sent them to the protection levee.

The creva.s.se water first encountered the Greenville protection levee deep into the night. "The water was just rolling, like an ocean wave," said Levye Chapple, a leader of the black community who was sacking the protection levee. It struck the way the sea strikes against rocks, with violence, roaring, shooting up waves 12 and 15 feet high, jumping over the levee, sweeping away sandbags, backing up and rising higher. Within moments the water had climbed to a depth of 8 feet-the same as the levee-while oceanlike swells rolled over it. Still deeper water was coming. Most workers ran. Chapple-along with dozens of others-had guns pointed at him and stayed, working as the swells washed over him, washed the sandbags away, washed over the levee. Finally, as the levee gave way, he shouted, "Everybody run for your life!"

At 3:10 A.M. A.M. the fire whistles and church bells in Greenville sounded, and suddenly the streets were thick with people running to churches, to city hall, to the courthouse, to commercial buildings, and to the only dry land left-the river levee itself. the fire whistles and church bells in Greenville sounded, and suddenly the streets were thick with people running to churches, to city hall, to the courthouse, to commercial buildings, and to the only dry land left-the river levee itself.

In the city streets the water initially retained the same ferocity as outside the city. Huge oil tanks from the Standard Oil storage facility in the northern part of the city came rolling down the street. Lamar Britton, a black woman, recalls, "You could see waves coming in big as you, five-, six-feet-high surf, rolling over, like the ocean, rolling chicken coops, mules, cows mixed up in it."

Britton's neighborhood-the bottomlands, the black section-soon had 15 feet of angry roiling water. The buildings acted like breakwaters. A few blocks away, Mrs. Henry Ransom, a white woman, saw a still-violent but calmer scene: "The water was coming in just in a whirling fas.h.i.+on, and there were plenty cows, and it was a bale of cotton...on the bales of cotton there was chickens...there was horses and mules coming down the street in this water...this current...the water was just spreading."

Up to 10 feet of water inundated downtown. For weeks the current through the heart of the city, at the intersections of Broadway with Main, Nelson, and Was.h.i.+ngton Streets, would remain violent and deadly; like crisscrossing rapids, currents collided in spray, capsizing boats, drowning several people.

In the best neighborhoods, on the highest ground, the water came gently. It snaked up streets, running first in the gutters, filling them, spilling into the street, rising steadily, climbing steps and porches, but often stopping at the door. The highest ground in the city had only a foot of water.

WHEN THE FIRE WHISTLE BLEW, the Percys knew what it meant. Everyone in Greenville knew what it meant.

In the darkness of early morning, in his vast quiet house, LeRoy Percy had to face the great disaster he had always feared and fought to prevent. Now it had come. It threatened to end the life he had known, end the life he had tried to build, not only for himself, but for all of the Delta. The river was seizing the Delta back. LeRoy was sixty-seven years old, but he would concede nothing yet, not even to the river. At whatever cost, he was determined to preserve what he had built.

Meanwhile, the river rolled South.

AS GREAT AS THE DISASTER of Mounds Landing was, the flood had not even begun to exhaust itself. All the water flooding the Delta would be funneled by hills back into the Mississippi River at Vicksburg, a hundred miles south. From there, reenergized, the flood would continue downriver, shouldering levees aside. of Mounds Landing was, the flood had not even begun to exhaust itself. All the water flooding the Delta would be funneled by hills back into the Mississippi River at Vicksburg, a hundred miles south. From there, reenergized, the flood would continue downriver, shouldering levees aside.

The Memphis Commercial-Appeal Memphis Commercial-Appeal warned: "Louisiana waits with fear and foreboding.... In St. Bernard Parish, below New Orleans, the section in which the creva.s.se of 1922 occurred, levees were being patrolled by guards armed with shotguns and all strangers were halted." The guards were fur trappers who trusted no one and would not hesitate to use their shotguns. They had already shot at least four men who had come too near the levee. warned: "Louisiana waits with fear and foreboding.... In St. Bernard Parish, below New Orleans, the section in which the creva.s.se of 1922 occurred, levees were being patrolled by guards armed with shotguns and all strangers were halted." The guards were fur trappers who trusted no one and would not hesitate to use their shotguns. They had already shot at least four men who had come too near the levee.

But the men who ran New Orleans-indeed, ran the entire state of Louisiana, or at least what they cared about in it-did not now contemplate anything so unsophisticated as sabotage. They had power, and, like LeRoy Percy, they intended to exercise it to protect their interests.

On the day that newspapers from Portland, Maine, to San Diego, California, put the Delta's plight on page 1, in New Orleans the headline of the Morning Tribune Morning Tribune read, "Coolidge in Conference on Spillway." The story made no reference to the meeting a few years before, when the head of the Corps of Engineers had advised that New Orleans businessmen should, instead of building a spillway, simply dynamite the levee in an emergency. But the men of consequence in New Orleans recalled that advice. One site long considered for a spillway, of course, was in St. Bernard. read, "Coolidge in Conference on Spillway." The story made no reference to the meeting a few years before, when the head of the Corps of Engineers had advised that New Orleans businessmen should, instead of building a spillway, simply dynamite the levee in an emergency. But the men of consequence in New Orleans recalled that advice. One site long considered for a spillway, of course, was in St. Bernard.

The struggle against the river had begun as one of man against nature. It was becoming one of man against man.

Part Four

THE CLUB.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

IN N NEW O ORLEANS each lamppost on Ca.n.a.l Street, which local boosters claimed was the widest street in the world, bore a plaque engraved each lamppost on Ca.n.a.l Street, which local boosters claimed was the widest street in the world, bore a plaque engraved FRENCH DOMINATION, 1718-1769, SPANISH DOMINATION, 1769-1803, CONFEDERATE DOMINATION, 1861-1865, AMERICAN DOMINATION FRENCH DOMINATION, 1718-1769, SPANISH DOMINATION, 1769-1803, CONFEDERATE DOMINATION, 1861-1865, AMERICAN DOMINATION, 1803-1861, 1865-. The inscription suggested something secret about the city, that New Orleans was willing to yield on its surface, but that the real city lay deeper, that from behind a mask it had seen everything, and that it intended to survive.

No American city resembled it. The river gave it both wealth and a sinuous mystery. It was an interior city, an impenetrable city, a city of fronts. Outsiders lost themselves in its subtleties and intrigues, in a maze of shadow and light and wrong turns. Houses were built with faux stone fronts facing the street; the faux stone did not extend to the sides. Modern poker, the most secretive of games, was invented there. New Orleans had not only whites and blacks but French and Spanish and Cajuns and Americans (the white Protestants) and Creoles and Creoles of color (enough to organize their own symphony orchestra in 1838) and quadroons and octaroons.

Each group lived an apparently separate existence. In the mid-1920s, the Vieux Carre, or French Quarter, was mostly a gritty working-cla.s.s slum where people spoke French as often as English. Women lowered baskets to the street to grocers who loaded them with food and added a pint of gin. Artists and writers had taken to the area, seduced by its cheap rents. Oliver Lafarge wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning Laughing Boy Laughing Boy there; Faulkner began writing there, encouraged by Sherwood Anderson, who entertained visitors like Theodore Dreiser, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, and Bertrand Russell. One of Anderson's friends even wrote a book about Paris without ever having visited it, instead using New Orleans as his model; Parisians read it, Anderson reported, with "delight." The smells of the docks hung over the whole area: sickly sweet rotting bananas-the United Fruit Company was the single largest user of the port-and the more intimate smell of the dozens of bakeries making bread. The finest restaurants-Antoine's, Galatoire's, Arnaud's, Broussard's-were there, and so were working-cla.s.s cafes. In Jackson Square at Billy Cabildo's, for 50 cents one got an enormous bowl of homemade soup, boiled beef, an entree, dessert, and coffee. The square itself was surrounded by hedges where prost.i.tutes took clients. there; Faulkner began writing there, encouraged by Sherwood Anderson, who entertained visitors like Theodore Dreiser, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, and Bertrand Russell. One of Anderson's friends even wrote a book about Paris without ever having visited it, instead using New Orleans as his model; Parisians read it, Anderson reported, with "delight." The smells of the docks hung over the whole area: sickly sweet rotting bananas-the United Fruit Company was the single largest user of the port-and the more intimate smell of the dozens of bakeries making bread. The finest restaurants-Antoine's, Galatoire's, Arnaud's, Broussard's-were there, and so were working-cla.s.s cafes. In Jackson Square at Billy Cabildo's, for 50 cents one got an enormous bowl of homemade soup, boiled beef, an entree, dessert, and coffee. The square itself was surrounded by hedges where prost.i.tutes took clients.

Downriver from the French Quarter lived working-cla.s.s whites. They made their living from the port, from sugar and timber mills, from great slaughterhouses.

The social elite, those with whom LeRoy Percy hunted and played poker, lived upriver in the great homes on St. Charles and in the Garden District. There maids waxed the grand ballrooms by sitting on towels and sliding across the floor. Chauffeurs picked up teenaged girls for lavish parties where a black jazz band-one included Sweet Emma-entertained. Fine young men took young ladies to Furst & Kramer's downtown; it had a pastry counter, a candy counter, a soda fountain, a marble fountain in the middle of the room, cages of songbirds everywhere, and every box of candy carried the slogan "Happiness in every box." On Ca.n.a.l Street at Katz & Besthoff drugstore, soda jerks delivered ice-cream sodas to cars parked on the street. Well-dressed doormen at Maison Blanche and Holmes department stores knew all the chauffeurs and called for them by name as their employers came out.

But underneath this perfect order lay a drumbeat. It was heavy and sensual. Most streets, even uptown, were graveled, not paved. The ice man sang and sweated delivering blocks of ice. Wagons rolled past the houses selling fruits and vegetables, sometimes three men on a cart creating a melodic, contrapuntal effect. Louis Armstrong said: "Yeah, music all around you. The pie man and the waffle man, they all had a little hustle to attract people.... The junk man had one of them long tin horns they celebrate with at Christmas-could play the blues and everything on it."

Only recently, jazz had been born from deep in the bowels of the city, its beat emerging from the African jungle into Congo Square, then spreading to the wh.o.r.ehouses of Storyville, where Jelly Roll Morton and the Spasm band, possibly the original jazz combination, and a little later Louis Armstrong, played. At its peak, Storyville had had two newspapers and its own Carnival ball, and the best houses had advertising brochures. One claimed to be "without a doubt, one of the most elegant places in this or any other country.... Miss Lulu stands foremost, having made a lifelong study of music and literature." There were also one-dollar "cribs" that were less than elegant, and women who threw mattresses down in doorways less elegant still. It had closed in 1917 by order of the Secretary of the Navy, exercising wartime authority, but its legacy still lingered, only spreading the women and houses and music into other neighborhoods. "Jazz is all the same-not anything new," said Armstrong. "At one time they was calling it levee camp music, then in my day it was ragtime. When I got up north, I commenced to hear about Jazz, Chicago Style, Dixieland, Swing-all refinements of what we played in New Orleans. I always think of them fine old cats way down in New Orleans-Joe and Bunk and Tio and Buddy Bolden-and when I play my music, that's what I'm listening to.... You want to feel the smell-the color-the great 'OH MY' feeling of the jazzmen and stomp around in the smoke and musk of the joints."

One joint in particular was called the Frenchman's, where musicians gathered after work, usually not until 3 A.M. A.M. Jelly Roll Morton recalled, "It was only a back room, but it was where all the greatest pianists frequented.... The millionaires would come to listen to their favorite piano players.... People came from all over the country and most times you couldn't get in." Across the street a drugstore sold cocaine; newsboys sold three marijuana cigarettes for a dime. Jelly Roll Morton recalled, "It was only a back room, but it was where all the greatest pianists frequented.... The millionaires would come to listen to their favorite piano players.... People came from all over the country and most times you couldn't get in." Across the street a drugstore sold cocaine; newsboys sold three marijuana cigarettes for a dime.

If all these societies seemed separate, they were not. Personal, social, political, and financial histories ran deep, connecting everyone. And perhaps more than any other city in America, New Orleans was run by a cabal of insiders, and everything from politics to the money the jazz musicians made depended upon them. Looking on as if from behind a two-way mirror, these insiders watched and judged and decided.

THERE WERE LAYERS of insiders, and folds within layers, with position largely defined by Mardi Gras. "Mardi Gras runs New Orleans," said one socialite. "It separates people." of insiders, and folds within layers, with position largely defined by Mardi Gras. "Mardi Gras runs New Orleans," said one socialite. "It separates people."

The celebration itself-the b.a.l.l.s, masking, street partying-began in the 1700s. In 1857 men of the finest families organized the first pageant of Comus. By the 1920s the city's Christian male elite belonged to at least one, usually more, of the exclusive "krewes"-Comus, Rex, Momus, the Atlanteans, and Proteus.

The commoners, those not inside, had only the parades. Even in the 1920s, several hundred thousand people lined the parade routes, and the krewes marched at night except for Zulu, the black parade, which marched Mardi Gras morning, and Rex, which followed later in the day. The night parades were led by a cadre of flambeau carriers, black men carrying torches burning oil, dripping fire on the streets. Then came hors.e.m.e.n all masked, then float after float, each an elaborate creation in line with that year's theme; the krewe members on the floats, all men, pa.s.sed by high above the crowds, looking down at a horde of screaming people seeking attention and favor, elbowing for position, stretching out their hands in supplication, begging to be thrown a trifle. For the moment the krewe members truly felt like royalty.

Not every krewe paraded, but each gave a Carnival ball. They were the peak of the social season and doubled as debutante b.a.l.l.s. Men planned every aspect of them, and they suffocated differences. One Carnival historian wrote, "There is perhaps no other city in America where men are social arbiters.... The most prominent gentlemen of the city abandon their urgent business obligations to spend their hours considering who shall be invited to their ball. Demand for these invitations surpa.s.ses all bonds of reason, and throws the commercial and professional life of the city into chaos.... No qualities whatever are of any force unless an invitation is requested [by a krewe member] and issued through regular channels, and there are no other channels. This strict care in the list of guests may find occasional resentment, but no injustice is done. Any request that is refused was already in doubt beforehand. If a member's request is not granted, he knows the reason and seldom has cause to be dissatisfied when he learns it.... Carnival is generous but in its social aspects protects its own. Wealth is no consideration, nor is ancestry unless supported by becoming character.... Instead of listening to the voice of scandal, Carnival hushes it, even where scandal looks to the masquerades for pabulum."

Carnival mattered. National Book Award winner Walker Percy, a Greenville Percy and Boston Club member, would later observe, "[Carnival] queens are chosen by the all-male krewes at sessions which can be as fierce as a GM proxy fight. New Orleanians may joke about politics and war, heaven and h.e.l.l, but they don't joke about society." One prominent New Orleans attorney speaks of a friend who was president of the Louisiana bar, president of the Chamber of Commerce, and president of the Dock Board, which runs the port of New Orleans, "Yet he values most that his daughter was queen of Comus."

Rex, nominally "King of Carnival," was the public face of Mardi Gras; his ident.i.ty was announced. But the real king was Comus, whose ident.i.ty was secret; at midnight Mardi Gras day, Rex and his court left their own ball to attend that of Comus. Secrecy added to the cachet. The queen of one important ball notes, "Often the men don't even tell their wives who is what."

The motto of Rex is Pro bono publico- Pro bono publico-"For the good of the public." The motto of Comus is Sic volo, sic iubeo- Sic volo, sic iubeo-"As I wish, thus I command."

John Parker was Comus. Every Rex since 1888 has belonged to the Boston Club.

AS EXCLUSIVE as the Carnival b.a.l.l.s were, members.h.i.+p in the clubs of New Orleans marked the real insiders, for the krewes had a larger members.h.i.+p than the clubs. The city's first club was formed in 1832, four years before New York's Union Club. In 1842 the Boston Club, named after a card game, was founded, and several men, including Louisiana Senators John Slidell and Judah P. Benjamin, subsequently a Confederate cabinet officer and then adviser to Queen Victoria, belonged to both the Boston and Union Clubs. Then came the Pickwick Club and the Louisiana Club. All were exclusive, but the Louisiana Club has been called the most exclusive club in the country; only members were allowed within its walls. In 1905, President Teddy Roosevelt visited New Orleans during a yellow fever epidemic. It was an act of heroism that won the city's heart-in the preceding century, the disease had killed 175,000 people in Louisiana alone-and the Louisiana Club gave a luncheon in his honor. But before even the president, himself from one of the nation's grandest families, could enter the club, he had first to be made an honorary member. The club president at the time was Edward Dougla.s.s White, then a justice and later chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. as the Carnival b.a.l.l.s were, members.h.i.+p in the clubs of New Orleans marked the real insiders, for the krewes had a larger members.h.i.+p than the clubs. The city's first club was formed in 1832, four years before New York's Union Club. In 1842 the Boston Club, named after a card game, was founded, and several men, including Louisiana Senators John Slidell and Judah P. Benjamin, subsequently a Confederate cabinet officer and then adviser to Queen Victoria, belonged to both the Boston and Union Clubs. Then came the Pickwick Club and the Louisiana Club. All were exclusive, but the Louisiana Club has been called the most exclusive club in the country; only members were allowed within its walls. In 1905, President Teddy Roosevelt visited New Orleans during a yellow fever epidemic. It was an act of heroism that won the city's heart-in the preceding century, the disease had killed 175,000 people in Louisiana alone-and the Louisiana Club gave a luncheon in his honor. But before even the president, himself from one of the nation's grandest families, could enter the club, he had first to be made an honorary member. The club president at the time was Edward Dougla.s.s White, then a justice and later chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

From the beginning the clubs mixed power and society. In 1874 an organized army of Confederate veterans, including White, defeated the largely black city police force in a pitched battle and overthrew the Reconstruction government. (Federal troops later restored it to power.) Of the Pickwick Club's 161 members, 116 fought in the battle, and the plans for the uprising "were largely formulated under the roof, within the walls, and by members of the Boston Club, screened from the public eye by the sanct.i.ty of the club walls," according to the New Orleans Times-Democrat New Orleans Times-Democrat, which added, "The Boston Club [is] composed of gentlemen who know what's what...and stands today, as it has always stood, at the forefront of the social system of New Orleans."

Half a century later the only thing that had changed was the role of the Jews. The first Rex, in 1872, was Jewish. Jews belonged to the Country Club and the Southern Yacht Club, the second oldest in the country. The most socially prominent law firms and banks had Jewish partners and board members, and Jews and gentiles socialized.

Yet Jews occupied a complex never-never land in New Orleans society. By the 1920s the clubs and Carnival excluded Jews, except for a few token members of Rex (but Jews were never in the royal court). The exclusion was gradual, beginning in the late 1800s and early 1900s as immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, including Hasidic Jews, seemed to threaten the nation's ethnic and racial ident.i.ty. New Orleans, despite its Catholic heritage, showed a violent bias against Italian immigrants. Immigrant Jews were far more foreign; even native New Orleans Jews discriminated against them. Immigrant Sam Zemurray became president of the United Fruit Company and built one of the greatest mansions on St. Charles Avenue but was never accepted into the elite all-Jewish Harmony Club because, says the daughter of one of the city's oldest and wealthiest Jewish families, "he spoke with an accent."

Carnival snubbed even elite Jews. One prominent Jewish woman recalls, "Mother used to get invitations to all the b.a.l.l.s but it just stopped." The exclusion was punctuated with an insult. Rex stopped along his parade route for a toast at suitably important places. These stops had always included the Harmony Club. But one year, probably 1913 or 1914, with a crowd of Harmony members waiting in the street and a waiter holding a tray of gla.s.ses, Rex went right on by. The Jews would never wait for him again, and Rex would never stop again. Later, Baron de Rothschild was in New Orleans during Carnival, and society ladies prostrated themselves before him. While he was Jewish, he had been received in all the real courts of Europe. In New Orleans he was invited neither to any club nor to any ball of Carnival royalty. Jews continued as partners and intimate friends with men who were Rex and Comus and president of the Boston Club. But a line had been drawn. Jewish members of the elite resented it bitterly, although to avoid embarra.s.sment on both sides they routinely vacationed outside the city during Carnival.

Jews had been among the Boston Club's founders-Judah Benjamin was Jewish-and one served as club vice president as late as 1904. But by the 1920s the Boston Club had no Jewish members (nor did it in 1996). One Boston Club member bragged of his club's "spirit of n.o.blesse oblige." But he also spoke of a harder racial edge: "Your club man must have a sense of the fitness of things. A club in its members.h.i.+p must follow Darwin's law of natural selection. In club life as in all other activities only the fittest survive."

In 1927 every bank president in the city but one-believed to be a Jew, although he denied it-belonged to the Boston Club. Charles Fenner, whose investment firm later merged into Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Smith, was a club past president. John Parker belonged. So did LeRoy Percy; whenever he came to New Orleans, a limousine picked him up and took him to the club, where he played poker. (Gentlemen all, no one even kept careful track of money. After one game Percy sent a check of several thousand dollars to cover his losses, noting, "The aggregated amount may be three [hundred] out of line on either side, but any way, this will do to go on account." Another time the club manager wrote Percy to ask what he had won because "there is a discrepancy in the sheet"; the club had several hundred dollars too much and the manager was trying to find to whom it belonged.) The club men had power.

But these men were not like Percy. His vision extended deeper and wider than theirs. Unlike Percy, these rulers of New Orleans did not initiate or create, did not grow or make or build things. Bankers and lawyers, they judged what other men grew or made or built. Their power was over money itself, and whether to give it to those who produced or created. It had always been that way. From the city's earliest days New Orleans had close ties to the money centers of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, London, Paris. English bankers began living full-time in New Orleans in the early 1800s.

As a result, before the Civil War, on a per capita basis New Orleans was the wealthiest city in America. In the 1920s it remained-by far-the wealthiest city in the South. Its Cotton Exchange was one of the three most important in the world. Its port was second only to New York. Its banks were the largest and most important in the South. According to a Federal Reserve study, New Orleans had nearly twice the economic activity of Dallas, the South's second-wealthiest city, and between double and triple that of Houston, Atlanta, Memphis, Louisville, Richmond, or Birmingham.

The city's power over money also meant its power extended far outside the city itself. Percy recognized this himself when he, Parker, and several others organized the Staple Cotton Cooperative a.s.sociation to control prices by limiting production. In 1926, Percy urged several New Orleans bank presidents and financiers, all but one of whom were members of the Boston Club, to force "a compulsory reduction in acreage" by refusing to lend money to planters who exceeded their crop allotments. "[S]uch an agreement made among the bankers would at once be accepted as effective and immediate relief would follow."

A few other organizations, such as the Board of Trustees of Tulane University, indicated even closer proximity to the inside of New Orleans than did club members.h.i.+p. But the most interior inst.i.tution in this city of insiders wielded the power of the establishment in a way unique in the United States, and probably the world. This organization was serious, not social, and did include an occasional Jew. It controlled New Orleans in the way that really counted: it controlled the money.

THE B BOARD OF L LIQUIDATION of the City Debt was initially created to handle the huge debt left over from Reconstruction. Mississippi, led by LeRoy's father William Alexander Percy, had, similarly, created the Liquidating Levee Board, which built no levees but did eliminate old levee bonds by paying only pennies on the dollar, and then was abolished. But New Orleans, which produced few goods and grew no crops, had to retain the confidence of investors in New York, Boston, and London; the city had to pay off its bonds in full. So New Orleans bankers in 1880 created the Board of Liquidation and gave it extraordinary powers. (It operates today with many of those powers.) of the City Debt was initially created to handle the huge debt left over from Reconstruction. Mississippi, led by LeRoy's father William Alexander Percy, had, similarly, created the Liquidating Levee Board, which built no levees but did eliminate old levee bonds by paying only pennies on the dollar, and then was abolished. But New Orleans, which produced few goods and grew no crops, had to retain the confidence of investors in New York, Boston, and London; the city had to pay off its bonds in full. So New Orleans bankers in 1880 created the Board of Liquidation and gave it extraordinary powers. (It operates today with many of those powers.) First, every day the city deposited all all the money it collected in taxes in the board's bank accounts. The board paid off whatever notes and interest were due, then gave any money left over to the city government. In the 1920s, payments on bonds absorbed between 39 and 45 percent of all city taxes, leaving little for the city to spend on anything else. the money it collected in taxes in the board's bank accounts. The board paid off whatever notes and interest were due, then gave any money left over to the city government. In the 1920s, payments on bonds absorbed between 39 and 45 percent of all city taxes, leaving little for the city to spend on anything else.

Second, the city could issue no bonds-not for schools, not for roads, not for lighting-without the board's consent.

But the most extraordinary aspect of the board was its composition. It had nine members: the mayor and two councilmen served ex officio, while six "syndicate" members, who made all real decisions, served for life. And the board was "self-perpetuating." When a syndicate member died or resigned, surviving syndicate members picked a successor.

Though the mayor, the governor, and the voters had no say over who became a syndicate member, the syndicate members dictated decisions about nearly all large public expenditures. Elected officials controlled only current operating budgets. The syndicate members answered to no one but themselves-and their colleagues in the clubs.

Between 1908 and 1971 only twenty-seven men served as syndicate members; virtually all were either bankers or bank directors. Twenty-four of the twenty-seven belonged to at least one of the exclusive clubs; most belonged to several. At least two of the other three, probably all three, were Jewish.

In the 1920s three men in particular had strong voices on the Board of Liquidation. One was James Pierce Butler, Jr., a towering gangly man who headed the Ca.n.a.l Bank, the largest bank in the South and the only southern bank listed among the world's largest; it also had intimate ties with the Chase in New York. Butler was a president of the Boston Club. A second man was Rudolph Hecht, president of the Hibernia Bank, who had a reputation for brilliance and arrogance; in 1921 he had received the Times-Picayune Times-Picayune Loving Cup, given annually by the paper to the citizen who had contributed most to the city in the preceding year, for his work as president of the Dock Board. Later he became president of the American Bankers a.s.sociation. The third man, J. Blanc Monroe, was an unyielding litigator who dominated the board of the Whitney Bank; he combined social connections with real abilities to become the city's most powerful lawyer. LeRoy Percy knew all three well, both through clubs and business. Loving Cup, given annually by the paper to the citizen who had contributed most to the city in the preceding year, for his work as president of the Dock Board. Later he became president of the American Bankers a.s.sociation. The third man, J. Blanc Monroe, was an unyielding litigator who dominated the board of the Whitney Bank; he combined social connections with real abilities to become the city's most powerful lawyer. LeRoy Percy knew all three well, both through clubs and business.

In 1927, Butler sat snugly at the center of the New Orleans world of money, society, and power. His position was signified by the treatment given him by the Mystic Club, a Mardi Gras organization called "ultra-exclusive...[with] a reputation among fastidious people for presenting the most elaborate and most successful costumed entertainments of America." That year the club put on a Mardi Gras ball whose theme came from a movie starring Rudolph Valentino and Doris Kenyon. Booth Tarkington, who wrote the movie, also wrote the pageant for the ball; the same jewels worn in the film by Valentino and Kenyon adorned Mystic's king and queen. The queen's gown was said to cost $15,000, double the $7,500 annual salary of the governor of Louisiana. The Times-Picayune Times-Picayune, the paper that was run by and served as the voice of money and society and authority, ran photographs of all but the Mystic Club's queen on its society pages; the photograph of the Mystic Club queen appeared on page 1. She was Mrs. James Pierce Butler, Jr.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

AFTER THE 1922 FLOOD the chief of the Army Corps of Engineers had advised the New Orleans financial community that, if the river ever seriously threatened the city, they should blow a hole in the levee. In the years since, those words had never left the consciousness of either the people in St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, who would be sacrificed, or those who dealt with the river in New Orleans. Both groups had been monitoring the river closely all year. As early as New Year's Day the the chief of the Army Corps of Engineers had advised the New Orleans financial community that, if the river ever seriously threatened the city, they should blow a hole in the levee. In the years since, those words had never left the consciousness of either the people in St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, who would be sacrificed, or those who dealt with the river in New Orleans. Both groups had been monitoring the river closely all year. As early as New Year's Day the St. Bernard Voice St. Bernard Voice had warned, "Flood Water Is Coming Down!" And in late January, hydraulics engineer James Kemper wrote a report on the river situation for newspaper publisher James Thomson. had warned, "Flood Water Is Coming Down!" And in late January, hydraulics engineer James Kemper wrote a report on the river situation for newspaper publisher James Thomson.

No layman in New Orleans spent more time on river policy than Thomson. Five years earlier he had organized the Safe River Committee, and ever since he had been pus.h.i.+ng hard in Was.h.i.+ngton to change the policy toward the Mississippi. It seemed, however, he had adopted the river issue at least partly to make himself a larger figure in New Orleans, to push himself into the inner sanctums.

Thomson was not a member of the club and wondered why. An ancestor had tutored John Marshall, and he had run a paper in Norfolk, Virginia, then bought the New Orleans Item New Orleans Item and moved to the city in 1907. He started a second paper in New Orleans, the and moved to the city in 1907. He started a second paper in New Orleans, the Morning Tribune Morning Tribune, and became a director of a midsized bank, while in Was.h.i.+ngton he remained a confidant of senators as well as his father-in-law, Speaker of the House Champ Clark. But none of that was good enough for New Orleans. Perhaps he was kept in New Orleans' outer reaches because he lacked appropriate style. Tall, with a disproportionately large head, he liked to be called "Colonel" despite his lack of military experience. In hot weather he often stripped off his s.h.i.+rt in his office, treating those who worked for him to the sight of his pale white skin and soft body. Or perhaps he was excluded because he had criticized the Board of Liquidation for allowing banks with whom it deposited millions of dollars of the city's tax receipts to pay no interest to the city (after a lengthy campaign, banks finally did begin paying interest), and for favoring certain banks-the Ca.n.a.l, the Whitney, and the Hibernia-with these deposits.

Whatever the reason, his exclusion bothered him. His only child had died. His place in the city mattered. Charles "Pie" Dufour, a Boston Club member and writer who worked for him, said: "Thomson was an ambitious man, always seeking acceptance from the establishment and never quite getting it. He moved in the establishment but always tentatively.... He was on a tightrope, a treadmill."

His river campaign allowed him to insinuate himself into the establishment. Once he had brought Butler, Hecht, and Lonnie Pool, the president of the Marine Bank & Trust Company who ruled Carnival as Rex in 1925, to Was.h.i.+ngton to see President Harding. Harding had listened to a presentation by Kemper and had promised action, but died before he could keep his promise.

Still, when a dinner was given celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Thomson's owners.h.i.+p of the Item Item, the governor, the Louisiana congressional delegation, present and former mayors, even a senator from Wisconsin attended. Blanc Monroe and Jim Butler did not. Nor did a single person a.s.sociated with the Times-Picayune Times-Picayune. It was a snub from the social elite, a snub that only made Thomson more determined to penetrate into the city's decision-making. His knowledge of the river was his battering ram. For the report Kemper gave him in January 1927 was not good news.

The weakest levees in the state lay just thirty miles upriver, Kemper said, outside the jurisdiction of the Orleans Levee Board. A creva.s.se there could send water pouring into the city from the rear as had happened in 1849, the last time a serious river flood hit the city. New Orleans had a rear protection levee but "it offers protection in name only," Kemper warned. As for the city levees themselves, the river had already begun to strain them. At a ferry landing uptown a hole in the levee had developed and needed immediate attention, while four and a half miles of city docks fell below the Mississippi River Commission's grade for height. But the biggest problem was the new Industrial Ca.n.a.l, built to connect the river and Lake Pontchartrain. The height of its locks, Kemper said, "was based on a miscalculation in slope. The Mississippi River Commission and the Dock Board have concluded there is a four foot drop over the 10 miles between Carrollton and the ca.n.a.l. It is no more than one foot, eight inches. A flood equal to that of 1922 will overtop the locks by four feet."

The turbulence this would generate could rip the locks, and the levee there, apart. They required immediate attention.

Kemper also explained that, paradoxically, a great flood would not threaten the city because it was certain to overwhelm levees upriver. The river would then spread over the land, lower the flood height at New Orleans, and eliminate any danger for the city, although it would devastate the rest of the lower Mississippi valley. Kemper's chief concern, in terms of New Orleans, was actually a lesser flood, one higher than 1922 but not so high as to breach levees above the city.

Thomson had made Kemper his personal engineering expert and put his newspaper's weight behind him in many fights, but he chose to reject Kemper's insistence that a great flood would not threaten New Orleans. The rejection would have vast impact. Meanwhile, he informed members of the Safe River Committee of Kemper's opinion on the narrower question of the city's levees.

Soon after Mardi Gras a Dock Board engineering report also warned of trouble: "The levee between Ca.n.a.l Street and Esplanade Avenue is not up to Mississippi River Commission grade and section." Those blocks included the entire French Quarter. It added, "Serious settlements have taken place [here].... Mistakes at this time would have far-reaching consequences."

By mid-March the public was paying close attention to the river. People needed no report; they simply climbed the levee and looked. The river was high and angry. Hundreds of men were working on the levees, and hundreds more were being hired. Railroads were putting their own crews to work on the levees as well. In one area railroad crews built an emergency bulkhead; within weeks waters washed part of it out. It was repaired, sacked, and additional revetment added.

In late March, John Klorer, the city councilman and former river engineer, personally inspected the levees, walking their entire length on both banks for the third time in four weeks. Though an elected official, he gave his report to Thomson, not to the mayor or the council. He cited "decided improvement" overall, but noted that 7,000 feet of the levee line still fell short of safe margins and "should be taken in hand promptly."