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chapter 5 selling “The Greatest free show on earth” It’s a myth made of tinsel, yet a real way of life to those proud of French lineage whether existent or not. —sid moody (1972) On the eve of the 1967 Mardi Gras celebration that plunged the Crescent City into another fit of pre-Lenten revelry, a feature written by New Orleans States-Item columnist Charles L. “Pie” Dufour appeared in Southern Living, the South’s leading travel-oriented publication. Dufour described the crowds that filled the streets: “Lyndon Johnson walking down the street arm in arm with Joe Stalin or Khrushchev , threading his way through hordes of clowns and cannibals, astronauts and alligators, bunnies and bunny girls, Batman, Superman, and little green men fresh from their flying saucers, devils, Indians, pirates, Rebel generals, colonial dames, and hundreds of others. . . . This is Mardi Gras in New Orleans. This is ‘The Greatest Free Show on Earth.’” The Southern Living contributor went on to assure readers that “there is nothing else on the North American continent like Mardi Gras in New Orleans.” Dufour was careful to emphasize that Carnival was authentic because it was “financed exclusively” by private “krewes” without “a penny of subsidy from city, civic, or business interests,” and without any coordinating efforts or organization whatsoever. In a mere two pages, Dufour outlined the New Orleans white elite perspective of Carnival by conjuring images of streets that filled with maskers, parades that magically materialized on their own, and a celebration that existed for New Orleanians themselves, and, of course, any tourists who wished to join the party.1 Indeed, this characterization proved persuasive, for the French Quarter swelled each winter with thousands of eager tourists in town for Carnival. Just as tourists considered Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the dropping crystal ball at Times Square’s New Year’s Eve celebration to be New York traditions, they readily associated Mardi Gras with New Orleans. For the throngs of revelers perched on the rickety iron-clad galleries, the narrow streets below presented a colorful mosaic of humanity, often in drunken abandon. Hordes of onlookers joined the spectacle of maskers, college students, hot dog and corn-on-the-cob vendors, and cameratoting tourists outside neon-decked taverns and nightclubs as the wail of sirens grew closer. Soon the first glimpse of the flashing blue lights of squad cars and the flicker of flambeaux, the kerosene-fired torches used to illuminate parades, would announce the arrival of Comus, the last of several nightly processions through the Vieux Carré. For the next hour, thousands of outstretched arms would jostle for the colorful beads and baubles tossed by the city’s self-styled aristocrats as they proceeded to their private ball. Tourists probably seldom considered that the entire spectacle, despite its social meaning for many locals, was becoming not just intertwined with but gradually dominated by tourism interests. In order to understand the tourist transformation of Mardi Gras, it is essential to make a distinction between the pre–World War II celebration, which already featured some parades aimed especially at tourists, and that of the postwar years, which by the 1970s began to reflect the eclipse of the Carnival establishment’s control over the shape and public image of the spectacle . Although many city leaders yearned to build upon the modernizing impetus of World War II to steer New Orleans away from the languor that the holiday epitomized, old-line Carnival organizations resumed their festivities with similar verve in 1946, little expecting that, in the ensuing decades of social, political, and economic change, they might lose their ability to dominate the most visible presentations of the city’s social order to a national audience. In the postwar years, the New Orleans Carnival celebration took up more time each winter as new parade organizations comprised of the middle class, black and white, took to the streets. Just as the city’s jazz revival gradually drew upon a broader, biracial civic base, the expansion of the Mardi Gras festivities reflected the city’s changing dynamics of race and class. Growing numbers of Americans, including many ex-GIs who had enjoyed their first taste of New Orleans revelry during the war, took advantage of improved highway, rail, and air travel that made the once-isolated city more accessible. For years the old elite continued to present the most popular parades and hold balls to which frustrated tourists could not gain access, but the postwar decades saw the...

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