Eating Their Own Tails: Racialized Violence, Sex Work, and the Progressive Pendulum in New Orleans, 1897–1925

At the turn of the 20th century New Orleans sanctioned Storyville, a red-light district that necessitated new policing strategies for a city still reeling from the Civil War. The state intervened when it could not transform a diverse cohort of sex workers into docile bodies by turning to biopolitical population management in the form of Bertillonage. Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon created this method of data collection, recordkeeping, and photography to crack down on criminal recidivism. New Orleans Mayor Walter C. Flower, who had been a part of the largest lynching of Italian Americans in U.S. history, turned from vigilante justice to state biopower when he personally traveled to Paris to learn the Bertillon Method on behalf of New Orleans Police Department. The Bertillon method relied principally on measurements of eleven human body parts including the circumference of the head, length of one’s torso, and fingers. Bertillonage also set the photographic standard we now know as mugshots. This work examines the political environment that embraced Bertillon Cards, explores the possible personal and political motivations of Bertillonage supporters, and analyzes what the cards can and cannot tell us about the women of Storyville and the circumstances of their lives. These women and their newly legal sex trade threatened the body politic via their own sexual license and interracial intimacy. The state did not believe it could eradicate sex work entirely, but within in the confines of Storyville, it could wield its growing power of community oversight to control, profit, and usher in a new era of government surveillance.