Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945

Introduction: The City of Myths

INTRODUCTION The City of Myths New Orleans existed, like only a few other American cities, in a realm of mythology and fantasy and history and romance that made it more than a mere city. . . . Like New York City, it is a center against which America defines itself; and, perhaps more than New York, New Orleans is our most foreign city. There the loose, drunken, partying society we’ve come to think of as French and Catholic contrasts with the Protestant and the straitlaced and the early-to-bed/early-to-rise English. It is all myth. But in New Orleans’s romantic decay, it is possible to project, and isolate, those antidotes to rectitude Americans want to have. —Randall Kenan, Walking on Water Randall Kenan’s observations at the end of the twentieth century suggest the power of New Orleans’s mythology. The myths identified by Kenan accentuate local uniqueness in a nation of homogenizing mass consumerism. Stories about the past, touched with fictitious embellishments , have defined New Orleans’s relationship to the modern world. An intertwined set of images and assumptions about New Orleans has penetrated the national consciousness. But how and when did the mythology emerge? For what purposes was it propagated? Why has it seeped so deeply into the American mind? 1 An examination of the years between the First and Second World Wars, when persistent tourism boosters and prolific popular writers crafted urban images with a mass appeal, offers insight into the mythology . Several writers from the period—most notably Grace King, Lyle Saxon, and Robert Tallant—forged careers by writing books about New Orleans that have remained in print and well read since the interwar period. In addition, literary figures Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams provided descriptions of New Orleans that both captivated readers and turned mundane built environments into alluring tourist attractions, a process that also occurred in Charleston, South Carolina, which capitalized on DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, and Monterey, California, which exploited John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.1 Nevertheless, despite the importance of literary figures in crafting popular perceptions of New Orleans, their pens alone did not create the Big Easy. A wider assortment of residents either knowingly or unwittingly shaped the tourist city. The works of writers merged with the efforts of tourism boosters to enhance the images associated with New Orleans: the elegance of Creoles, the skill of jazzmen, the seductiveness of courtesans, the joy of Mardi Gras maskers, the romance and exoticism of the French Quarter. Although such legends had existed prior to 1920, the ensuing flood of writing about the city along with the determination of promoters popularized and reshaped Americans’ view of New Orleans. As Michael Kammen has argued in his study of national memory, many Americans during the interwar period sought to “democratize tradition” through “meaningful, purposive myths that could explain and justify how their ‘world’ had come to be the way it was.”2 The appearance of more and more travelers gave impetus to this trend. In New Orleans, the need to create and propagate an urban mythology intensified as the mass tourism industry penetrated the local culture. A Dangerous City The tourism industry that emerged in New Orleans between the world wars evolved from the images and sites popular since the previous cen2 Introduction tury. The past provided tourism boosters with a rich ore from which to fashion tales about the ethnically diverse city that prospered from river commerce. Until the 1920s, however, the ore possessed impurities that prevented urban leaders from successfully casting New Orleans as a mass tourism destination. Negative perceptions of the American urban environment persisted from the age of Thomas Jefferson through the era of muckraking journalism in the early twentieth century.3 The American aversion to cities as tourist destinations, coupled with specific negative associations with New Orleans, revealed the limitations faced by tourism advocates before the First World War. In 1802, resident James Pitot recorded his observations of life in New Orleans. His commentary attempted to persuade French officials to reclaim the colony, which had been languishing both culturally and economically since it was ceded to the Spanish in 1763. Spain had little interest in developing Louisiana, conceiving it primarily as a buffer to protect Central American colonies against encroachment by the British and, after 1783, by the United States. Because Spain exerted little cultural influence over...