Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  “I believe,” Butler said coolly, not explicitly deciding but allowing momentum to gather more force, “the appropriate step at this point is to involve the authorities.”

  GARSAUD WENT from his meeting with Butler and Hecht to see Mayor Arthur O’Keefe. O’Keefe had become mayor a year earlier after the death in midterm of Martin Behrman, who had dominated the city for the preceding twenty-four years. O’Keefe, by contrast, was a weak figure, a huge fat man who had triumphed in patronage wars over other ward leaders and would not even seek reelection. The city’s elite held him in contempt. Speaking at the dedication of Le Petit Theater du Vieux Carré, whose creation by society women signaled the beginning of the restoration of the French Quarter, O’Keefe declared, “This is a wonderful thing for New Orleans, the kind of thing we should be proud of, like our new garbage incinerator.” He was also, as Behrman had been before him, particularly susceptible to bankers’ influence. Though both were products of a city machine called simply “the Ring,” Behrman had been a founding member of the Association of Commerce and vice president of the American Bank, the most political of all the banks. As soon as O’Keefe became mayor, the same bank immediately named him to a vice presidency.

  O’Keefe understood the stakes in the flood. Thomson had already spoken to him. Now Garsaud repeated his warning that, if the levees above the city held, the river would exceed a 24-foot stage. O’Keefe called in Klorer, whom the levee board had just given emergency authority over all city levees. Klorer spoke of the panic already flooding the city. Hundreds of families were fleeing to the Gulf Coast. A large Pythian convention was in town. Many conventioneers had arrived in the morning, looked up at the hulls of ships above the tops of the houses, then taken the next train out.

  O’Keefe agreed to do whatever the bankers recommended.

  Meanwhile, the New Orleans papers continued trying to keep the city calm, reporting only that “more than five inches” of rain had fallen that Good Friday. Triple that amount had. The papers also quoted George Schoenberger, chief engineer for the state of Louisiana, saying, “I am resting easy tonight.”

  Far above the city, levees along the Mississippi’s tributaries were washing out one after another, like dominoes. On Saturday, April 16, the first mainline levee on the Mississippi yielded, at Dorena, Missouri.

  Ironically, that helped to confirm Kemper in his opinion that upriver levees could not hold, and that therefore the city of New Orleans was in no danger. But no one sought Kemper’s opinion. Garsaud was a bitter rival and had Hecht’s ear. Thomson already knew his opinion and did not find it useful. And even if Kemper was right about the river, that did not answer the bankers’ concerns about investor confidence.

  On Sunday, April 17, there was another exodus from the city, but this one included some who were not fleeing. Garsaud and O’Keefe got on a train for St. Louis. They would meet with the Mississippi River Commission early Monday morning. Thomson took it upon himself to board a train for Washington, to see the president. O’Keefe had asked Butler to go to Washington but, hearing that Thomson had gone, “Mr. and Mrs. James P. Butler motored to their country home outside Natchez for the weekend,” as one paper reported. It would be Butler’s last peace for months.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  DYNAMITING THE LEVEE downriver from New Orleans would turn 10,000 people into refugees; depending on the volume of water that was loosed, it could also destroy all of St. Bernard Parish and all of Plaquemines Parish that lay on the east bank of the river. (Both the city of New Orleans and Plaquemines Parish straddle both sides of the river.) Although only a line on a map—no bayou, no canal, no natural boundary of any kind—separated St. Bernard Parish and New Orleans, they had nothing in common. But the river was now making them as intimate as predator and prey.

  In St. Bernard, the town of Arabi bordered on New Orleans. None of its handful of streets were paved, but their surfaces of crushed shell hardened like concrete. Drainage was in open ditches along the streets; eels made a home of these ditches and wrapped around the legs of any children who slipped in. For drinking water people still used cisterns, which had been outlawed across the line in New Orleans because they bred mosquitoes.

  But Arabi thrived. The largest sugar refinery in the world operated there and employed 1,500 people. Several hundred more jobs came from the stockyards, acres of cattle and pigs, and the largest abattoirs in the South. The smell of blood and rotting meat mixed with the delicious sweetness of the cane. In summer, in the heavy heat of Louisiana, the smells hung in the air like grit stuck to sweat, and drew swarms of rats and clouds of insects.

  Arabi also had gambling casinos: the River View, the 118 Club, the 102 Club, the Candlelight Club (a converted grammar school), and, the finest and largest, the Jai Alai Club, with turrets flying pennants like a moorish castle, 3,000 seats, and a magnificent dance floor. The Jai Alai gave away a car a week in a drawing: Henry James and Tommy Dorsey played there. All the clubs were illegal, all operated openly (indeed, they advertised in the newspapers), and all were clustered within a few blocks of New Orleans. Slot machines, also illegal, were in nearly every bar and grocery store in the parish.

  Below Arabi the parish became rural, then marsh. Of St. Bernard’s 617 square miles, 544 were swamp or marsh. On the good land Italians grew vegetables and oranges, from which came a wine popular during Prohibition; bootleggers added carbonation and sold it as champagne. The swamp was thick with cypress, oak, hanging moss, and alligators and water moccasins; bayous were covered with velvety green scum. The marsh was a trembling prairie of grass. It appeared solid, but only an experienced man feeling his way with a long pole could walk on it; a wrong step sank a man hip-deep in muck. Plaquemines Parish, below St. Bernard, was similar—a narrow strip of solid land near the ribbon of river, then a marsh that merged gradually with sea, where Eads had built his jetties.

  Barren as it seemed, the marsh teemed with fishermen, trappers, and bootleggers, most of them “Islenos.” They, their language, and their name came from the Canary Islands in the 1700s, when Spain controlled Louisiana. The largest Isleno town was called Delacroix Island; not actually an island, it was also called “The End of the World.” The road stopped there. It had a school but no electricity, no post office, no telephone. Yet in the twenties, the Islenos made good money. Small fortunes came legally, large ones illegally. Louisiana produced more fur for coats than the rest of the United States combined, or Canada and Russia. And St. Bernard produced far more than any other parish in Louisiana. Muskrats, or simply “rats,” brought as much as $3 for a top-quality pelt, and the best trappers could bring in 150 pelts a day. The governor made $7,500 a year; the best trappers easily made that much in the season from November to March.

  The parish also ran a thriving import business. It imported alcohol. Surrounded by the sea, with an intricate system of waterways that no outsider could navigate, the trappers took their boats out to freighters anchored offshore and loaded as many as 1,000 cases of whiskey onto their fishing boats. Canals and bayous ran all through the parish; along every one of them were homes storing whiskey. Al Capone and lesser gangsters visited St. Bernard, where they were amused by Sheriff L. A. Meraux and his deputies, who charged a toll on all whiskey traversing the parish, and by Manuel Molero, one of the largest bootleggers in the South. Meraux and Molero ran the parish. Both were extraordinary men, and they hated each other.

  Meraux could be a charming sophisticate, speak perfect Parisian French, and discuss premier vintages. He could abruptly turn foulmouthed, violent, terrifying. Six feet four inches and at least 300 pounds, he had a big, broad head—dark eyes, a broad forehead, thinning light brown hair, a wide mouth, and chubby cheeks that gave him a baby-faced appearance. He had a kindly demeanor but anger, the kind before which men trembled, could explode from him without warning. “Meraux had a studied, careful ruthlessness,” notes William Hyland, a parish historian. “He could be rude, crude, despicable, and disgusting, and the next moment display the polish of
a Grandee of Spain.” He was also a physician who began his career determined to do good.

  After graduating from Tulane Medical School, he studied in London, Paris, and Berlin, then settled at Johns Hopkins University to do research; Johns Hopkins was possibly the finest institution for medical research in the world at the time. When the 1905 yellow fever epidemic struck New Orleans, he returned to help and worked at Charity Hospital. But he then fell victim to yellow fever and almost died, and he never returned to research. He started a practice, and observed. What he saw did not please him. He later said, “I used to study people and mankind disappointed me. I found out what people would stoop to.”

  He became a ruthless real estate entrepreneur, and the largest taxpayer and landowner in the parish. His appetites were enormous. For breakfast he ate a dozen eggs, piles of biscuits, slabs of bacon. His lunches were light, but at dinner he would eat several whole chickens, then an entire strawberry shortcake, or an entire cream cheese mold. His appetite for money and power was equally enormous. His home, just inside the St. Bernard parish line, was a mansion built in 1808 and once owned by sugar planter Alexander de Lesseps, cousin of the builder of the Suez Canal. It had a colonnaded porch, windows of cut glass, and was called Château des Fleurs—Castle of Flowers—because of the extensive gardens on all four sides of the house. It had a small racetrack in the rear, a walkway to the levee in the front, a gazebo on the levee from which to view the river.

  Hungry for power too, he used his medical practice to take it, traveling to the farthest reaches of the parish at all hours and often treating people for free. And wherever he went, he gave lollipops to children. “Every one of those lollipops is a vote,” he snorted once. People called him “Doc.” He ran for sheriff.

  Meanwhile, deputies of his opponents were setting up roadblocks and hijacking liquor shipments, then selling it themselves. Bootleggers, including Doc’s younger brother Claude, a former Tulane football star and lawyer, issued public warnings that they would tolerate no more hijackings.

  On April 20, 1923, a caravan of three large trucks loaded with Claude Meraux’s liquor started toward New Orleans. At a narrow bridge, three deputies ordered them to stop. Two of the deputies were shot. One of the trucks drove over their bodies, killing them.

  Claude was indicted as an accessory and fled to Paris. Then Doc was elected sheriff. Claude returned from France, ran for district judge for St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes in the next election, and won. The Meraux family now controlled St. Bernard, especially with Doc’s ally Leander Perez, who controlled Plaquemines, as district attorney for both parishes. Their opponents writhed in their net, fought back, and tried to impeach both Claude and Perez over charges including “oppression.” They survived, and consolidated their power. (A decade later, a second impeachment effort would oust Claude, but Perez’ control would last into the 1960s and CBS’ 60 Minutes would investigate his sons.)

  But Doc was the leader. He was a study in corruption; having started out good, he was truly corrupt. One night he invited a Prohibition agent to join him for his nightly coffee and beignets in New Orleans at the Morning Call. Meraux said, “I heard you take money from people. I heard Manny Molero has you fixed.”

  “I’ve got a few friends down there,” the agent replied.

  Meraux promised him $10,000 a month for advance warning of roadblocks. Prohibition agents had a starting salary of $1,186 a year. But the agent was honest. Meraux, three of his deputies, a New Orleans police captain, and thirty others were later arrested and charged in bootlegging. His deputies pleaded guilty, but charges against him were dropped.

  He used his jail as his personal dungeon, made alliances with the most conservative elements of New Orleans society—Blanc Monroe put him on the board of the Whitney Bank, the most conservative in the city—and prospered. He had almost everything.

  His one rival in the parish was Manuel Molero, a squat, nearly illiterate Isleno from Delacroix Island, barely fluent in English. But Molero was intelligent, with an eye for arcana; he later devised a complex maneuver to cut oil taxes that was copied by the Chase Manhattan Bank, which learned of it through the Canal Bank. A man who was among New Orleans’ most prominent bankers says, “He had absolutely no education, had a terrible Spanish accent you could barely understand. [He and his partner] were the biggest bootleggers around, really thugs, running shiploads of booze. But he was very smart, and very proper in business dealings.” Recalls a New Orleans attorney: “Molero was very principled, with a pound-wise as opposed to penny-foolish approach. He could sense long-term advantages. I picture him smoking a cigar, thinking things out, and coming to a conclusion. He stuck with his plan. Determined. He would persevere.”

  As a young man, Molero bought vegetables in St. Bernard and sold them at a huge profit at the French Market in New Orleans. He bought a truck, then a second one, then a fleet that serviced dozens of New Orleans restaurants and grocers. When Prohibition came, it was only natural that he distribute whiskey—and he sent it even to Chicago.

  In the fall of 1926, Perez and Meraux tried to take control of the trappng business from the Islenos. The trappers asked Molero for his help. The result was “the Trappers’ War.” Perez and Meraux sent a gunboat mounted with machine guns down to Delacroix. The trappers sank the gunboat, killed one deputy, and shot others. The governor refused Meraux’s request for help, and in fact became friendly with Molero. The trappers won the war. Meraux never filed any charges against them.

  A few weeks later the rising river transformed them all, Meraux, Molero, Perez, and the trappers and fishermen and bootleggers, into allies.

  ON MONDAY, APRIL 18, Garsaud and O’Keefe walked into an open hearing of the Mississippi River Commission. Immediately, it went into executive session. While O’Keefe remained silent, Gersaud explained their plan to dynamite the levee and create an emergency spillway near Poydras, the site of the 1922 break. Would the commission approve?

  Colonel Charles Potter, commission president, went off the record, discussed the issues with his colleagues, hinted that they would approve if the emergency worsened, then back on the record formally replied that the commission could not even consider the request until three conditions were met. First, the War Department must approve. Second, the State of Louisiana would have to make the request. Third, the city would have to absolve the commission of any liability for damages and arrange to compensate victims of the crevasse fully for any and all losses.

  Garsaud and O’Keefe, satisfied, boarded an overnight train to New Orleans. While they slept, a skiff carrying several men approached too close to the levee near Poydras. Guards opened fire. One man was killed, two others wounded. The New York Times seemed to shrug: “Residents had been warned not to approach the levees after dark.” No New Orleans paper mentioned the killing in St. Bernard. Violence there was common anyway.

  The next morning, April 19, the establishment of New Orleans gathered together in City Hall, a magnificent structure bedecked with columns designed by the city’s most famous architect, James Gallier. In the splendor of the city council chamber grimly sat the presidents of the Cotton Exchange, the Board of Trade, the Stock Exchange, the Dock Board, the Association of Commerce, the levee board, all the banks, the men who ran the newspapers, and a few individual business leaders. Only one councilman, Klorer, was present, along with the mayor and two congressmen. No representatives of St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, which would be flooded by the proposed crevasse, were invited.

  The meeting marked the beginning of an extraordinary week. It began with O’Keefe naming Butler chairman of an ad hoc Citizens Flood Relief Committee, comprised of all the private citizens present. This committee had no legal authority of any kind, but it, and Butler, would take charge of everything involving the flood and New Orleans from then on, including the effort to determine the policy of the United States government.

  There was no discussion of the decision to dynamite the levee. It was simply assumed they would pursue
that end. Before the week was out, both of Louisiana’s senators and several of its congressmen would do Butler’s bidding. Butler would even be authorized to sign one congressman’s name to any telegram, without checking with him first. O’Keefe also said that he, Pool, and H. Generes Dufour, the attorney for the Board of Liquidation and Hecht’s closest friend, would see Governor Oramel H. Simpson, whose reelection campaign was just getting under way.

  On April 21, the crevasse at Mounds Landing made clear that the Mississippi River was sweeping everything before it, threatening to reclaim all of its natural floodplain.

  The city reacted with panic. The Tribune declared on page 1: “Rumors! A rumor was circulated throughout the city that the newspapers of the city were not revealing the entire truth regarding the river and levee conditions; that news was being withheld from the public, that news was being censored. There is no truth in them, of course. The Morning Tribune and The Item are giving readers all the information they possess.” The Times-Picayune agreed: “There is no reason for alarm in New Orleans. Hundreds of false reports…circulated in New Orleans. Needless to say none of these was true. The Times-Picayune is…giving its readers as complete and accurate information as possible.”

  But the newspapers were ignored. Every day hundreds of people were climbing the levee to see the river. It was angry, wide, high, and fast, swirling in whirlpools, the current sweeping logs, lumber, the bodies of mules and horses past. In some stretches it had risen higher than the levee and was contained by planks backed by thick walls of sandbags. The crest was at least two weeks away.

  General Allison Owen, president of the Association of Commerce and a member of the Citizens Committee, publicly declared: “New Orleans is not affected in the slightest degree by the present high level of water in the Mississippi…New Orleans feels absolutely safe from any threat of flood from the river.” Privately, he worried, “We have never seen such a panic, such an amount of hysteria.”