Long before Las Vegas, New Orleans proudly claimed the title as America's sin city. At the close of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the Mississippi River port featured a smorgasbord of prostitution, gangland wars, lynchings, police corruption and gambling, surrounded by a raucous soundtrack of that most American of all music forms: jazz. As one newspaper described a Crescent City jazz club, "Here male and female, black and yellow, and even white, meet on terms of equality and abandon themselves to the extreme form of obscenity and lasciviousness."
In "Empire of Sin," author Gary Krist presents a thrilling tableau where moral crusaders engaged in a 30-year war against the lords of vice. In 1898, when sin was paying big profits for entrepreneurs such as Tom Anderson and Josie Arlington, New Orleans Mayor Walter C. Flower's solution was to move all the dens of iniquity to a one-stop-shop location, "a mixed-race working-class neighborhood" known as Storyville.
Anderson's election to the Louisiana State Assembly benefited Storyville greatly, and reformers such as ax-wielding, bar-busting Carrie Nation were rebuffed. To keep the odds stacked in his favor, Anderson "sponsored bills to raise the salaries of New Orleans police and court stenographers."
But reformers would ultimately prevail through the use of segregation laws that tore apart Storyville's culture of "relative racial tolerance." The final blow came when the United States entered World War I and the federal government became worried about the ill effect that Storyville's temptations would have on its young soldiers. Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels warned, "Men must live straight to shoot straight."
Krist's "Empire of Sin" is the perfect follow-up to his last book, "City of Scoundrels," an exposé of 12 horrible days in Chicago in 1919. The same factors were in play in New Orleans as in Chicago — race, vigilantism and politics — but Krist expands his keen focus to explain how the emergence of jazz stood up to a darker type of reform, one of racial purity and institutional racism.
Storyville was more than just free-flowing booze and fallen women. This enclave of sin contained the hippest venues for a new earthy sound that originated from a grandson of slaves, cornet player Charles Joseph "Buddy" Bolden, and later from other famed players such as Louis Armstrong and Joe Oliver.
Bolden's pure sound was so extraordinary that it was said to make "women jump out the window. … He had a moan in his cornet that went all through you." For a city wanting respectability, all that jumping and moaning could only lead to trouble.
Stephen J. Lyons is the author of three books, most recently "The 1,000-Year Flood: Destruction, Loss, Rescue, and Redemption Along the Mississippi River." "Going Driftless" will be published next May.
