This is a formal panel with 3 paper presentations with a chair and commentator. The panel aims at general interest in New Orleans, the host city for the conference.

Much of the historiography about New Orleans’s legal red-light district known as Storyville, open from 1897 until 1917, concentrates on the large brothels dominated by famous madams, notorious nightclub owners like Tom Anderson, and budding jazz musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton. This panel reexamines Storyville by delving into less understood patterns of urban corruption rampant within the city and the modern policing systems utilized to regulate the infamous district. By examining disease, organized crime, and police classification of arrestees, the panel exposes broad power-structures that sustained Storyville while revealing how the seemingly powerless, such as sex workers and Italian immigrants, exercised agency despite living on the social margins.

Bruce E. Baker begins with a study of uneven enforcement of rat-proofing following an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1914. In a city long stricken by lethal diseases, the plague sparked a city-wide effort to reduce the rat population under Mayor Martin Behrman, a powerful urban boss. Enforcement, however, was uneven. Property-owners in Storyville evaded the rat-proofing law and the expenses involved by pulling economic and political strings. These property-owners, publicly named in the press, reveal a network of powerbrokers who could defy basic health requirements.

Nancy Prescott takes the exploration of political and economic enforcement powers over Storyville further by scrutinizing the arrest cards of prostitutes. The New Orleans Police Department adopted the Bertillonage classification system in 1897, tellingly the same year Storyville opened. This system used measurements of an arrestee, along with a mugshot, for identification. These cards reveal the large number of working women, black and white, who populated Storyville, casting analysis beyond the high-end brothels. Prescott highlights how Storyville compelled the modernization of policing in New Orleans, a necessity given that white conservatives for over two decades had stripped the budget of the police department after seizing power from Radical Republicans during Reconstruction.

Charles Tolman expands the analysis of the marginalized within New Orleans society by demonstrating the central role Italian immigrants played within Storyville. Barely a handful of years after the largest mass lynching in United States history, sparked by the assassination of the Orleans Parish sheriff allegedly by the mafia, Italians extended the reach of organized crime into Storyville. Rampant with sinful pleasures, Storyville rackets run by the competing Black Hand and Mafia could operate without the scrutiny faced outside of the district. By moving their activities into Storyville, Italians more easily funneled wealth and power into their otherwise marginalized community, facilitating Italian assimilation into American society.

Combined, these papers expand our understanding of the role of Storyville within New Orleans culture, politics, and economics to show how property-owners, working class women, and immigrants exploited the city’s trade in sin to defy American social norms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.