Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  Simultaneously, the New Orleans committee also pressured the media directly. The St. Bernard Voice had been complaining that the dynamiting was unnecessary, that St. Bernard and Plaquemines were being sacrificed for “the financial interests” who worried only about investor confidence. The reporters traveling with Hoover believed it. As natural crevasses far upriver proved that the dynamiting had been unnecessary, editorials from Springfield, Massachusetts, to Kalamazoo, Michigan, began to criticize the city. The Memphis Commercial-Appeal wrote mockingly of “New Orleans ‘Babbitry.’… If New Orleans is ever flooded the world will not know it unless there is some outside newspaper man there. The newspapers of New Orleans have not told their own people the actual situation. It’s business depression that’s feared. Many leaders of the town had much rather take a chance at loss of life and destruction of property than face the possibility of the grain market slumping a couple of notches, the price of cotton falling 50 to 100 points, or New Orleans stocks going under the least of a strain.”

  The city’s financial interests responded aggressively enough that the Memphis Commercial-Appeal apologized and agreed to print no more such stories. Then the city began to reach out. Butler’s committee had already wrung promises of cooperation from every national newsreel company. Now it contracted with two clipping services covering hundreds of papers, each of which was “carefully reviewed for mis-statements.” It got corrections printed by the New York Times, the New York Sun, Literary Digest, the Atlanta Journal, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Birmingham News, United Press, and dozens of others. Alvin Howard, a director of the Times-Picayune, informed. Butler that “the famous writer” Richard Child was in town writing for the Saturday Evening Post. He suggested that top businessmen and journalists contact him and try to influence the story. They did.

  And the committee asked Jim Thomson to help. Through his national political connections and ownership of papers in Virginia as well as New Orleans, he was well known in the newspaper community. He convinced executives of the wire services to cooperate and wrote to Editor and Publisher, a trade magazine for newspaper executives, the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association, and elsewhere that “a citizens committee representing all of the business interests of New Orleans has asked me to attempt to get before the news and picture editors throughout the United States a correction of several unfortunate and damaging impressions that experts feared for the safety of the city of New Orleans itself.”

  There was one other effort to improve the city’s image. The Association of Commerce, whose leading members all served on Butler’s Citizens Committee, had a budget of $130,000 in 1927, along with a surplus of $78,000 in its treasury. It donated $500 to the Red Cross flood relief fund. It spent $605 honoring Hoover at a luncheon. In advance of that luncheon, the association demanded that the police clear beggars from downtown streets. It later reported: “Superintendent of Police Healy inaugurated and carried forward an intensive campaign against beggars during the entire month. The effort resulted in 21 arrests.”

  BUT IF THE CITY succeeded in convincing the nation that, despite its insistence upon dynamiting the levee downriver to relieve pressure on itself, it had never been in danger, it was creating resentment in its neighbors.

  The New Iberia Enterprise thanked “the noble and unselfish manner in which our sister towns have responded to our appeal in distress, and rushed trucks and men and cowboys with their own mounts to plunge headlong into the thick of the great rescue work,…risking their lives.” From New Orleans they had gotten nothing. “What a contrast to our own metropolis, boasting the greatest population of the South, conspicuous by her failure to respond! Not a single truck, which bore the name of New Orleans! How her great dailies have played up our calamity to the world in advance of the flood, while they proclaimed their own security, purchased at so dear a price.”

  Even the board of the Association of Commerce conceded “in the mind of a great many of the country people New Orleans was only concerned with its own safety during the recent high water period.” In response, it planned a new publicity campaign “to see if we cannot overcome the feeling that exists between the city and the country…. Unless we [are] able to sell the city to the country the city will always be the loser when it comes to legislation.”

  Perhaps this effort might have yielded at least some success, but then the city, through Butler and the men with whom he met daily, began to hammer against the refugees.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  J. BLANC MONROE was not a large man, but his reach embraced all New Orleans. He was the city’s leading attorney, made all important decisions for the Whitney Bank—although he was only a board member—and ruled Carnival as Comus. Physically, he resembled LeRoy Percy in his prime, distinguished-looking, his hair just turning to gray, not tall but broad-shouldered and immaculately dressed, with a presence that emanated from his self-confidence and intensity. Like LeRoy Percy, he was direct, tenacious, fierce, and, when he chose to be, charming. In both there was coldness, arrogance, smallness, and pride of family. Monroe’s sister Kitty was the city’s social arbiter and leading hostess and married to a Harvard friend of Will Percy; Will ushered at their wedding.

  In more important ways, however, they did not resemble each other at all. LeRoy had helped build a society; Monroe merely reflected one. LeRoy had ambitions of empire; Monroe had not so much ambition as expectation, expectation that the world would bend to him.

  Monroe’s ancestors included two presidents, James Monroe and James Polk, one on each side of his family. His father, Frank Adair Monroe, chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, had represented both Jefferson Davis and James Eads, and, like his friend Edward Douglass White, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, had served as president of the Louisiana Club. Blanc Monroe so frequently argued cases before his father, who never recused himself, that the state legislature once considered a bill requiring recusal when a lawyer argued a case before a judge who was closely related. At a hearing on the bill, a state senator asked one witness, “You’re talking about Blanc Monroe, aren’t you?” Came the reply: “That’s right! That’s the son of a bitch I’m talking about.”

  Not surprisingly, given his position at the pinnacle of his society, Monroe considered the world nearly perfect. Even as a young man, in an 1899 commencement speech at Tulane University, he did not question the order of things. His subject was the legacy of the Spanish-American War, a legacy controversial enough that Speaker of the House Thomas “Czar” Reed, probably the strongest Speaker in American history, resigned from Congress to protest it. Yet Monroe gave no hint of doubt, perspective, or depth of comprehension when he proclaimed: “Into the fiercely contested struggle for empire the ‘draught’ of the Anglo-Saxon race is forcing us…. [Other] powers suddenly loom up as neighbors to be jostled against and outranked in the race for trade…. [T]he eagle’s claws establish our claims to prestige and consideration…. We are powerless to resist the spirit of Americanism which exacts from us not exertion merely but the grandest efforts of our broadest men. We realize that we must indeed take up the white man’s burden.”

  Monroe’s power came from his ability, his personal force, and his business and social connections. The combination of him and his law partner Monte Lemann made the firm Monroe & Lemann a formidable one. Lemann was Jewish, had a national reputation, was a close friend and Harvard classmate of Felix Frankfurter, would brief Franklin Roosevelt on Louisiana politics and Huey Long, and once declined appointment as a judge to the U.S. Court of Appeals. In terms of legal scholarship and argument, Lemann was a better lawyer than Monroe. Yet Monroe dominated the law firm, shouted at associates, once even publicly rebuked his partner for ordering a book for the law firm, a matter of a few dollars, without asking him.

  Monroe was also “social,” which in New Orleans means Carnival. Not only was he once Comus, but the Atlanteans, one of the most prestigious krewes, was called “a wholly-owned subsidiary of Blanc Monroe.” Lemann, being Jewis
h, of course never received an invitation to any Carnival event.

  But if Monroe used his connections and advantages, he did not rely upon them. He worked ferociously. No one could outwork him. His eyes could chill a man. He sent bills for his time to doctors who kept him waiting. He threatened to tow the cars of people who parked in front of his house. He drove people and bullied them. An attorney who knew him well said, “I’ve never seen a meeting he was in that he did not dominate.”

  Butler had picked Blanc Monroe to represent the city, to represent the money, regarding reparations. Not only did Monroe embody the city’s establishment, but he had back-channel connections to St. Bernard Parish. Monroe had already made Sheriff Doc Meraux a director of the Whitney Bank, one of the most conservative banks in the South, though, as another board member put it, Meraux “was tres ordinaire.” (In the 1990s the financial magazine Barron’s noted that the Whitney was “doing business exactly the way it had a century earlier. It offered no credit cards, had no automatic teller machines,…made the loans it did extend on a handshake, all under a thick coat of secrecy.”) The day the decision was made to dynamite the levee, Meraux was given $5,000 by the Whitney through an intermediary, and later he filed a claim for $235,000 in reparations.

  Monroe could make a deal when it served his purpose or fight when that served his purpose. When he fought, he was relentless, yielding nothing. He was the perfect choice for Butler to unleash upon the city’s adversaries—the victims of the dynamiting.

  NEW ORLEANS had publicly promised that citizens of St. Bernard and Plaquemines would suffer no loss. The mayor, the city council, the levee board, the presidents of every bank, every major business, of the Association of Commerce, the Cotton Exchange, the Board of Trade, and leading individuals had all pledged their civic and personal honor that this would be so.

  In theory, the Reparations Commission, on which St. Bernard and Plaquemines had four votes to the city’s three, with two men chosen by the governor, was to guarantee fair treatment of the victims. Commission chairman was Ernest Lee Jahncke, a Tulane classmate of Monroe who owned a shipyard. He was also one of three Americans on the International Olympic Committee and a fine sailor—later an assistant secretary of the navy, he preferred the title of “Commodore,” given him by the Southern Yacht Club, to “Mr. Secretary.” A man of principle, he would later oppose sending a U.S. Olympic team to Nazi Germany in 1936, and at the commission’s first meeting he declared: “The words of the people of this city and of the state are pledged to the complete recompense of those who have lost their homes and property to save the city of New Orleans from grave danger. It is the function of this committee to see that full justice is done in every instance, and it will do so.”

  But the Reparations Commission would have no power. Indeed, when it first convened, Butler called it to order, even though he did not serve on it. He then dropped into the background, but he, Monroe, Hecht, and Dufour—the few men whom Butler had chosen and with whom he met each day—determined how the city met its moral commitment. Without consulting the mayor or a single member of either the levee board or the city council, these few men decided everything.

  Butler, Monroe, Hecht, and Dufour decided to use the Orleans Levee Board, whose members were appointed by the governor, as the vehicle to pay reparations. They decided that the levee board would issue bonds to pay them. They decided the millage. They decided that Blanc Monroe would represent the city and the levee board in all reparations work. Only after the decisions were made did they inform public officials of them. (Typically, Butler invited the levee board president to a private meeting, informed him that Monroe was to be hired by the levee board, and the board president then told other board members, “The business interests suggested Mr. J. Blanc Monroe be appointed as Special Counsel of the Board”; by unanimous vote, the board promptly did so.)

  More important, Butler and his colleagues decided how to handle the nearly 10,000 refugees. Roughly half stayed with friends or relatives; the city housed the rest in a warehouse lined with cots. At first, the city met its obligations well enough. Butler created subcommittees to handle food, employment, transportation, even education for the children. But as expenses rose and the Red Cross refused help, a new realism informed decisions.

  The first indication of this new realism came when the members of the food subcommittee asked for “guidance” in a meeting with Butler, Monroe, and Hecht in Room 326 of the Canal Bank Building, that plush conference room with leather-backed chairs, the long table, and shining objets d’art. The subcommittee chairman explained that his subcommittee did not consider the refugees “as objects of charity. They are for the most part industrious, self-supporting and self-respecting citizens who were forced to leave, on short notice, their homes and possessions that the city of New Orleans be saved. They are crowded into the city without adequate housing, ready cash, or disinterested assistance except from the committee…. They [cannot] be cared for by herding in concentration camps without having a heritage of bitterness toward our city which will be long remembered.” But food expenses alone were running $20,000 a week, far above what they had expected. It was only the middle of May, and the flood would likely cover the two parishes deep into August, three months away. What should their policy toward relief be?

  Butler, Hecht, and Monroe decided that “relief be granted only people who had been placed in necessitous circumstances.” More significantly, to cut costs, they would have John Legier, a New Orleans banker on the Reparations Commission, offer a resolution “to deduct from personal damage claims the amounts extended by way of relief for parties claiming damages.”

  Any money given the displaced refugees, even for food or housing, would be deducted from their settlements.

  The commission promptly passed this resolution; the governor’s appointees, both of whom came from New Orleans, joined the city’s representatives, outvoting those from St. Bernard and Plaquemines 5 to 4. By then Butler and Monroe had taken effective control of the entire reparations process.

  THE REPARATIONS PROCESS began when a flood victim filed a claim. If he or she could not reach agreement with Monroe, who technically represented the Orleans Levee Board, the Reparations Commission theoretically served as an arbitrator. The commission’s decision could be appealed to the courts. But in fact Monroe dominated the entire system. He did so chiefly because he had, literally, written the commission’s rules. He had done so even though the commission had its own legal adviser in Percy Saint, attorney general of Louisiana, and its own staff. And in procedure—in the rules—lay power. Monroe used it.

  First, the rules stated that the firm of Monroe & Lemann would decide whether to reject a claim or settle it. (Monroe and two assistants actually did nearly all the work; his partner had little involvement.) If a claimant protested Monroe’s decision to the commission itself, the commission relied heavily on the factual findings of Monroe.

  Second, Monroe prevented small claimants from having legal representation. After two attorneys spoke to several claimants about representing them on a contingency basis, he, Dufour, and Esmond Phelps had the state bar association threaten them with disbarment. Saint, the attorney general, then promised publicly that for claimants who wanted an attorney, “[v]olunteer legal services will be obtained.” A resulting headline read, “Legal Advice for Refugees to be Gratis.” But after several attorneys offered to work pro bono for the refugees, Monroe, Dufour, Phelps, and others again went to the bar association and had it decree that such work would be “unethical” and, again, cause for disbarment. The commission, with Jahncke voting with the representatives from St. Bernard and Plaquemines, then voted to hire an attorney to help claimants. Monroe, Butler, and Dufour promptly had Saint “state the legal objections to this policy.” The idea of hiring an attorney for the claimants was killed.

  Third, and most important, the rules stipulated that no partial payments be made. This contradicted the policy the Reparations Commission had announced at its very first
meeting, when, recognizing that few refugees had savings and even fewer had an income, it had formally resolved that “a man may file his claim as his losses become provable.” Jahncke himself promised, “If a man receives forty percent of the claim immediately, he will receive sixty percent more as soon as humanly possible.”

  Monroe’s prohibition of partial payments was an extraordinarily powerful weapon. Claims were divided into “schedules,” with each schedule covering a different kind of loss—crops, equipment, housing, etc. The rules stated that once a given schedule was filed, it could not be amended; no further loss on that schedule could be added. Claimants who wanted money quickly had to limit their claim to losses they could prove while water still covered their property; after the water drained away, if more damage was found, they would get no compensation. If Monroe disputed part of a claimed loss, the claimant received nothing for that schedule. Even if Monroe accepted as valid part of the claim, the claimant received nothing. Only a complete settlement of a schedule released any money.