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Introduction: The Vitriol and Balm of a Nineteenth-Century Prophet
- Louisiana State University Press
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xiii THE NEW ORLEANS OF LAFCADIO HEARN INTRODUCTION The Vitriol and Balm of a Nineteenth-Century Prophet Historians have called the last few decades of the nineteenth century in the United States the Gilded Age, a period of technological progress and opulent wealth. But New Orleans was left far behind after the Civil War, showing few signs of renewed prosperity until the 1880s.1 Even after Reconstruction ended in 1877, reform was haltingly slow in the city, and it never recovered its former status as Queen of the South. By 1880, some New Orleanians (those with interests in the Louisiana Lottery Company, for example) had been swept into easy times. In sharp contrast, however, the city was drowning in debt and often literally in floodwaters. Despite the end of Reconstruction’s carpetbag rule, graft and corruption continued under new Democratic administrators. The criminal justice system was ineffectual. For months, public school teachers and other city employees went unpaid. Adding to the general malaise, a yellow fever epidemic in 1878 crippled commerce and left behind a bereaved population. Despite these conditions and Sabbatarians’ disapproval of Creoles’ Sunday recreations, the city still emanated its inherent joie de vivre. The 1880–81 season of the French Opera House was one of the most brilliant. Even though the majority of citizens would never see, let alone receive, an ornate invitation to an extravagant Carnival ball, they could attend the spectacular parades. They could also watch W. C. Coup’s circus parade, and many could afford a ticket to one of his Monster Shows, where “That Grand Electric Light . . . turns darkness into noonday sunlight! Floods the earth with fairy tints! Gilds with eternal grandeur every mortal object !”2 It was the age of the electric light—in 1880 a novel attraction but for many a hopeful sign of a brighter future. That year lamplighters of various nationalities still made the rounds at dusk to light the city’s gas lamps, but throughout the summer, West-End Garden, the popular resort on Lake Pontchartrain, advertised “Beautiful Electric Lights.”3 At that time only exterior electric lamps were available, but newspapers reported that an interior incandescent light bulb was just around the corner. Yet not everyone was optimistic about New Orleans’ future, electrified or not. Diogenes is said to have wandered in the daylight with a lighted lamp searching for an honest man. Lafcadio Hearn depicted him in a woodcut (August 16, 1880) as hunting in complete darkness for honest men to serve as city administrators. For realists, dispelling the moral darkness of New Orleans was more daunting than illuminating the physical xiv INTRODUCTION world. Earlier that same year, Hearn wrote of the city’s hard times in a letter. “Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava-flood of taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become only a study for archaeologists. Its condition is so bad that when I write about it, as I intend to do soon, nobody will believe I am telling the truth.”4 To these complaints, which seem to echo the Hebrew prophets, he added, “But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes, than to own the whole State of Ohio.” This thorough disillusionment following idealization—Hearn would later shake off the ashes of New Orleans as he had the dust of Cincinnati—colored a misanthropic streak that contributed to his soon becoming a superb satirist. Since the summer of 1878, Hearn had been assistant editor of the Daily City Item, a four-page reformer-Democratic daily founded in 1877, whose success was largely due to innovation and old-fashioned legwork— it had neither telephone nor telegraphic service—in filling the afternoon niche of the local newspaper market.5 It had survived the short-lived Evening News of the year before; it was holding its own against the other English-language dailies—the Daily Picayune, the New Orleans Democrat , and the New Orleans Times—and their afternoon editions; and it was compatible with the two surviving foreign-language dailies, L’Abeille and Deutsche Zeitung.6 But now the little paper had a formidable new competitor, a daily evening paper with a familiar publisher and editor which debuted early in 1880. Circulation of H. J. Hearsey’s Daily States climbed as that of the City Item declined, causing consternation among the latter’s publishers and staff.7 Hearn, of all people, knew that creating sensations increased...