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

CHAPTER 2 New Era New Orleans: The Great Depression, Taxation, and Robert Maestri

C H A P T E R 2 i= 8] NEW ERA NEW ORLEANS The Great Depression, Taxation, and Robert Maestri In late 1932, New Orleans Mayor T. Semmes Walmsley addressed an appreciative crowd of welfare workers, who honored him for his efforts to boost employment through municipal projects. Walmsley expressed gratitude at their thankfulness, but his tone reflected the gloom Americans felt as the depression reached new depths. He pondered, “While, of course, I feel that prospects are not very bright and there isn’t much hope at present for us all, I am not going to say, as it has been said in the past that the depression will be over in the next thirty days and that prosperity is Hoovering around the corner.” No matter the harsh economic conditions, Walmsley and his fellow New Orleanians maintained their sense of humor. The election of Franklin Roosevelt to the presidency offered hope: said Walmsley, “The letter ‘R’ is the greatest letter in the alphabet, it is in the beginning of Roosevelt and the end of Hoover.” President-elect Roosevelt promised a more active assault on the stagnant national economy. Americans would receive a new deal in which the federal government stepped up relief efforts as well as primed the nation’s economic pump. Walmsley declared that as long as New Orleanians believed that a “new era” loomed, the citizenry would persevere.1 Walmsley’s joking remarks about the letter R could well be extended because the leadership of New Orleans also embraced an enterprise— 70 recreation—that formed a bulwark potentially capable of sustaining an otherwise severely fractured economy. Politicians, like the members of the New Orleans Association of Commerce, sought to mitigate the effects of economic depression through mass tourism. Municipal officials harnessed New Orleans’s financial well-being to the promise of the tourism industry. Traditional forms of taxation such as property assessments failed to pay municipal bills during the depression, and other possible revenue sources such as industrial and commercial enterprises were too weak to shoulder a greater share of taxes. Consequently, the city’s cash-strapped politicians restructured the tax system, compensating for budgetary shortfalls with levies on urban amusements and tourist attractions, thereby shifting the tax burden as much as possible away from New Orleanians. Taxes on entertainmentrelated enterprises supplied a means of sustaining city services while passing costs to nonresidents and locals capable of affording leisure activities. New Orleanians, particularly Walmsley’s successor, Robert Maestri, also used Roosevelt’s New Deal programs to change the physical appearance of the cityscape as well as to preserve the city’s history, often with tourists in mind. Corporations interpreted the success of populist politician Huey Long as an attack on them, and the more tyrannically Long exercised power in the state and the more vehemently he assaulted the city’s Old Regular political machine, the more tourism became an economic and political lifeline for Long’s opponents hunkered down in City Hall. Efforts to promote the city brought positive publicity in the face of an increasingly ugly political row between Long and the New Orleans–based machine. The political war strengthened Roosevelt’s commitment to his allies in Louisiana as he attempted to weaken Long’s base of operations going into the 1936 presidential election. New Deal programs permitted New Orleans politicians to bolster the tourism industry by adding new attractions and enhancing old ones. Maestri’s ascendance to the mayor’s office in 1936 solidi- fied the political commitment to tourism. Though a devoted Longite, Maestri agreed to a deal with Roosevelt shortly after the assassination of the troublesome Long. While the president neutralized the powerful New Era New Orleans 71 political network left by the slain U.S. senator, the new mayor received the benefits of federal largesse and made a long-term commitment to tourism.2 The Whole Tax Structure Has Broken Down As the depression approached its nadir in late 1932, New Orleans Finance Commissioner A. Miles Pratt, in consultation with Mayor Walmsley , demanded a thorough overhaul of the municipal tax structure. The city budget for 1933 was 18 percent smaller than it had been prior to the economic crash a few years earlier, but even more drastic cuts were needed. More than 64 percent of the city’s total revenue came from real estate taxes, a burden of taxation that Pratt “emphatically” argued remained “wholly...