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Louisiana Petro-Populism and public services in the city of New Orleans
Christian Roselund1 and Brian Marks2
(1) Journalist and Independent Scholar
4300 Burgundy Street, New Orleans, Louisiana, 70117
(2) PhD Candidate
School of Geography and Development
University of Arizona
Harvill Building, Box #2
Tucson, Arizona 85721
Phone: (520) 621-1652
Fax: (520) 621-2889
bmarks1@email.arizona.edu
Keywords: Social democracy, neoliberalism, Louisiana Petro-Populism, public services, urban
political economy, New Orleans
Abstract
Hurricane Katrina highlighted New Orleans’ dependence on a public services regime marked by
chronic crises. Public schools, hospitals, and housing under-girded the social reproduction of many
New Orleanians but also made those residents particularly vulnerable to catastrophic shocks like the
2005 disaster and its aftermath. The most contentious struggles in the city since the storm have
centered on the future of these institutions, further underscoring their importance for New Orleans and
beyond.
National commentators on the city’s reforms have characterized these struggles in terms of
contemporary debates around free markets, the role of government, race, and poverty. We understand
these struggles as a clash between social democratic and neoliberal ideologies, but argue New Orleans’
public services regime must be understood in this city’s particular historical and geographical context,
embedded in a regional form of populist social democracy and an economic base founded on energy
extraction and underdevelopment. New Orleans’ modern public service sector was constituted in a
framework of ‘Louisiana Petro-Populism’ – a class compromise exchanging energy-intensive
underdevelopment for a social wage of public services paid for with energy rents, manifested in
populist electoral mobilizations and public service institutions.
During the late New Deal period, New Orleans was a national pioneer of large-scale public projects
like ‘Big Charity’ and the ‘Big Four’ housing developments, edifices that materially manifested a new
articulation between capital, labor, and municipal, state and federal government in the distribution of
wealth and power. These institutions played an important role in sustaining the city’s low wage workers
as well as reproducing many of its glaring inequalities, sowing the seeds of later crises. The Civil
Rights crisis of 1960-73 both expanded the scale of social democratic programs in New Orleans as well
as posed their limits in addressing deep-seated class and racial inequalities. The city was partially
shielded from the 1970s urban fiscal crisis by high energy prices, but was doubly hit in the mid-‘80s by
the oil slump and Reagan-era fiscal austerity.
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Introduction: Social democracy, neoliberalism, cities, and New Orleans’ public services
Recent disasters in Louisiana have highlighted two salient facts about its political economy: the
Deepwater Horizon spill demonstrated the state economy’s dependence on and vulnerability to the
energy industry, while Katrina and its aftermath laid bare the dependency and vulnerability of New
Orleans on a public services regime in chronic crisis. While these disasters have drawn the attention of
many scholars, the connection between Louisiana’s oil dependency and the crisis of New Orleans’
public sector has thus far received scant attention. This paper addresses New Orleans’ public service
sector, specifically public housing, hospitals and schools, and the consequences of their constitution
around a particular form of mild American social democracy - what we call ‘Louisiana Petro-Populism’
(LPP) - that transferred a share of profits from the circuits of the energy industry to subsidize the social
reproduction of Louisiana residents while reproducing the underdeveloped and dependent nature of the
state economy.
Drawing out the linkages between New Orleans’ public service infrastructure and Louisiana’s
energy-intensive economic base allows a situated understanding of the development of two forms of
political regulation in capitalist societies – social democracy and neoliberalism – in the particular
historical and geographical contexts of their development in Southern Louisiana. Social democracy
here refers to a network of relations or ‘class deal’ between the working class, capital and the state
based on trading off greater working class power for more stability in the rhythms of accumulation
(such as greater worker productivity and the social wage), mediated by an expanded government role in
regulating class and market relations (Caffentzis 1992; p.m. 1984). Neoliberalism describes the
application of radical free-market doctrines to the regulation of society, associated with the rollback of
social democratic forms of governance, aggressive support by government of the interests of private
capital, and the ideological justification of these policies as the public interest (see Peck 2001; Harvey
2005).
Cities played a leading role in the promulgation of social democratic reforms in the early 20th
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Century and their consolidation into ‘municipal socialist’ regimes of regulated capitalism, public
enterprises and services, and labor-based politics (Harvey 1973, 1989; Sheldrake 1989; Judd 1989).
Likewise, world cities like New York, London and Los Angeles have held a similarly vanguard position
in rolling back social democratic gains and imposing a ‘revanchist’ political order expressed in fiscal
austerity, gentrification, the privatization of public space, and the transformation of municipal
government from guarantor of working class reproduction to booster of urban growth machines under
conditions of heightened competition for global capital flows (Davis 1992; Smith 1996, 2002; Harvey
2001, 2005; Brenner and Theodore 2002, 2005). Applying these perspectives to post-Katrina New
Orleans, several commentators have framed the city as a battleground between social democratic and
neoliberal modes of urban governance, be they critics of neoliberal reforms (Reed 2005; Klein 2007) or
their promoters, using a language of ‘opportunity’ to express their ‘chance’ to remake a "new" New
Orleans around free-market principles (as in Friedman 2005) and use the disaster to, in Grover
Norquist’s phrase, ‘drown [big government] in a bathtub’ (Peck 2004:392).
The paper seeks to address the following questions: What is the relationship between historical
modes of political economic regulation in Louisiana and the development of New Orleans’ public
service infrastructure? How has that context shaped the course of development of the city’s public
services? This work contributes to the literature on urban political-economic regimes by following the
varieties of capitalism argument advanced by authors like Hall and Soskice (2001), Peck and Theodore
(2007) and Brenner et al. (2010), stating that modes of political economic regulation, including
neoliberalism, are not universal abstractions or cookie-cutter programs, rather are embedded in specific
spatial and geographic contexts. We describe how capital accumulation and political rule was secured
in 20th Century Louisiana through a particular form of social democracy that prioritized public service
institutions like the (now shuttered) ‘Big Charity’ and the (now largely demolished) ‘Big Four’ public
housing developments, the concrete manifestation of the new compromises made between capital, the
masses and the state over the distribution of wealth and power. New Orleans’ present crisis is strongly
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influenced by its distinctive past. Likewise, this understanding of the constitution of Louisiana's mild
form of social democracy and its contradictions connects New Orleans’ vulnerability to fiscal crises,
disinvestment and public sector collapse with this earlier age of New Deal and Longite politics. In
order to understand these issues, it is necessary to understand both systems and the strong connection
between the two.
Defining Louisiana Petro-Populism
Petro-populism is a mode of political economic governance wherein a populist political regime
secures the conditions for capital accumulation by redistributing wealth created by oil and gas
extraction to the population. By populist, we mean a political order centered upon charismatic political
leaders who position themselves as personal agents of social change and express a political discourse of
‘the common man,’ anti-elite sentiments, the distribution of wealth and ultimately the role of the mass
leader with a direct connection to the masses. The ‘petro’ refers to the regime’s material economic
basis, the most significant source of revenues to be distributed. Energy wealth shapes economies and
political regimes in multiple ways, including a tendency towards the under-development of
disarticulated economic sectors and crises caused by production and price fluctuations and contests
over resource revenues, i.e. the ‘Resource Curse’ and/or ‘Dutch Disease’ (Ross 1999).
The term ‘Petro-populism’ was first used by journalist and author Christian Parenti (2005) to
describe the Chavista regime in Venezuela; however we feel that it applies to the prevailing political
economic order in Louisiana for most of the 20th century as initiated by Huey Long and
institutionalized and extended by leaders like Richard Leche, Robert Maestri, Earl Long and Edwin
Edwards. In light of this lineage, we call this system Louisiana petro-populism or Longite petropopulism interchangeably.
Petro-Populism hinged on public service institutions that provided basic services to low-wage
workers. These services are so central to Petro-Populism because they compensate for capital’s failure
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to pay for reproducing the state’s workforce. Instead of a ‘wages-productivity’ deal, Petro-Populism
was a ‘public services - energy-intensive underdevelopment’ deal. While in Fordist social democracy
capital paid high union salaries in exchange for productivity gains and labor peace, in Louisiana
citizens got some essential services, energy-intensive industry got a free hand to exploit the state’s
resources, and state politicians got greatly enhanced power and influence.
Though revenue sources and services vary over time, it is possible to draw a broad outline of
petro-populism's fiscal regime. Education was paid for with severance taxes, bonuses and royalties,
primarily from oil and gas, with less contribution from local revenues from property taxes (Weber
1988:46-50). The state's portion of public welfare programs were paid for primarily out of the state's
sales tax, with additional funds coming from federal transfers. Healthcare, including a tradition of free
medical care for the poor through the Charity Hospital system, was paid for out of the general fund.
The political logic of petro-populism was to incorporate progressively larger fractions of the
population into its networks of distribution and through that recompose broader and broader portions of
the public into a voting block for the Longite political faction. This began under Huey Long by
recomposing the white working class vote across cultural lines, then later on it would incorporate urban
and rural residents, eventually at the apex of its power in the 1970s black and white working class
votes.
Louisiana Petro-Populism gained broad acceptance because the full cost of its public services
was not borne by most Louisianians, powerful constituencies in labor and industry had parochial
interests in sustaining the deal, and overall petro-populism moderated class conflict by building a
strong, durable electoral coalition of the state’s poor and working people that did not directly conflict
with the wealthy, rather offered substantial concessions to the largest, most capital-intensive business
sectors in the state. The result was substantial improvement to the state’s infrastructure, education,
health, and income as well as the conservation and reproduction of Louisiana’s economic
underdevelopment.
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The background to Louisiana Petro-Populism and New Orleans
Louisiana petro-populism was both a precursor to and an influence upon the Roosevelt
Administration’s New Deal, and survived as a regional variant after the incorporation of Louisiana in to
the national political order in the "Second Louisiana Purchase" in 1936. As a social order, Louisiana
Petro-Populism a distinctive form in terms of the institutions created and the economic and political
structures supporting those institutions.
Shaped by the greater political power of the working classes, the consolidated power of the
great corporations over economic life, and the greatly expanded role of the federal government in
balancing and directing relations of class and the market, a mild form social democracy in the United
States was consolidated in the 1930s as a regime of regulated capitalism between big government, big
business and big labor (Leuchtenburg 1995; Couch and Shughart 1998; Finegold and Skocpol 1995).
American social democracy is strongly associated with Northern industrial cities and their
manufacturing and assembly industries. Workers in those industries increased their wages, benefits and
social protections through mass strikes and subsequent legislation and union contracts in the 1930s
(Brecher 1984). In such settings this form of social democracy meant unionization and ‘wagesproductivity’ deals linking rising wages with increased worker productivity and labor peace to generate
a social wage for working people and stable profits for capital. This Fordist economic structure, welded
onto a New Deal-era political order, meant expanded investment by business in the reproduction of the
workforce (through the wages, benefits, retirements, and so on), backed up by increased government
funding of unemployment insurance, Social Security, and public education.
Louisiana social democracy grew out of an economic context much different than Northern
industrial cities. If the national New Deal was a deal between labor, capital and the state based on a
manufacturing economy, petro-populism is a deal between the masses, the oil industry and the state,
based on a resource extraction economy. Under the New Deal, industrial workers and their families
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could demand a share of profits through the structure of unions, whereas under petro-populism the
charismatic leader negotiates with the oil industry on behalf of the masses and redistributes a portion of
the surplus through services. This weakness of organized labor also means less democratic and
accountable forms.
However, it is important to remember that these political forms arose in very different
economies. In a manufacturing economy, more workers produce the primary wealth; therefore
redistribution through higher wages in manufacturing will elevate the economic position of more of the
population. Under an oil and gas extraction and processing economy, a much small portion of workers
produces an enormous amount of wealth, and redistribution through higher wages in the oil industry
will not necessarily change the material circumstances of the majority of the state's residents. These
material circumstances create social pressures for other forms of redistribution, pressures such as gave
rise to Huey Long.
Conditions in late 19th and early 20th century Louisiana that led to petro-populism
The composition of Louisiana’s working class and the means of production were characterized
by a great distance between the preeminent industrial sectors (dominated by the highly capitalized oil
drilling, forestry, and petrochemicals sectors) and a labor-intensive and greatly under-developed
agricultural sector. This disparity was much wider than the North, with its labor-intensive assembly
industries and more prosperous and better capitalized farmers (Woodman 1997; Brasseaux 2001; Mann
1990:95-127; de Jong 2002:19-40). Decades after mechanization swept grain farming, cotton and sugar
were still picked and cut almost exclusively by hand. The returns to the laborer were small and seldom
reinvested in improving land or equipment because incomes were often barely enough to meet basic
needs after paying outstanding debts. State and parish government did little to provide education, roads
and bridges, or other support to the farmer, both by political inclination and due to the limited tax base.
In Louisiana’s circumstances, the import of outside capital and technology was necessary for
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economic growth and diversification, but the form this development took only compounded
inequalities in the state’s economy. The traditional agricultural base where the majority of people
worked remained detached from the rising modern industrial sector. Industry in Louisiana, while more
developed than some Southern states, required little labor to transform huge amounts of raw materials
and energy into commodities. Most of the industry attracted to Louisiana was in resource extraction:
Huge fortunes left Louisiana from booms in timber, sulfur, salt, rice, furs, and especially oil and gas
extraction while the state’s infrastructure, education, hospitals, and standard of living of its people
remained moribund. The capital brought in remained in the enclave economies of the resource
extraction industries – little spilled over to the larger society, while irreplaceable natural resources were
depleted at small cost to industry. The surplus generated by these industries did not translate into public
investments necessary to utilize the state’s resources better, boost overall economic productivity, or
improve the well-being of the public.
Louisiana suffered particularly from a lack of transportation infrastructure. Its southern half is
split by the Mississippi and contains extensive bayous and wetlands; heavy seasonal rains fall
statewide. In 1928 there were only three hundred miles of paved roads in the state and no bridges
across the Mississippi River (Williams 1969:318; Sindler 1956:103). Unpaved farm-to-market roads
became muddy, impassible ditches in the rainy season. Bayou communities in the south were
particularly isolated given the lack of bridges, and until the mid-20th century the primary mode of
transport in many areas was by boat.
Literacy in Louisiana was among the lowest in the nation (Field 2001). African-Americans were
the least likely to be educated of any group, with the significant exception of those living in New
Orleans, which held the state’s greatest concentration of educational institutions. Relative to their share
of the population, overall black student enrollment in Orleans Parish in 1929 was equal to that of
whites, although high school enrollment was only half. The black schools in the city were in worse
physical condition, had many more students per teacher, and paid teachers much less than in white
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schools, but were markedly better than the atrocious underinvestment in black education in many rural
parishes (Logdson and DeVore 1991:199; Rousseve 1937[1970]:142-3).
New Orleans was in some ways a reflection of and in other ways exceptional to these
conditions. While the “Queen City of the South” had not yet been eclipsed in population by today’s
Sunbelt metropolises, New Orleans’ regional significance was declining, a decline that would last and
intensify throughout the twentieth century. While its 450,000 people made it in 1930 still by far the
most populous Southern city, its banking sector had been outpaced by Atlanta, which also had a higher
standard of living and a much faster rate of growth. What little industry existed in New Orleans was
largely static, related to the port or the processing of agricultural products, unlike the dynamic and
rapid growth of heavy industries of coal and steel in Birmingham or light manufacturing and rail
transport in other fast-growing Southern urban centers like Atlanta, Durham, Dallas or Nashville
(Smith 1998:3,12-14; Lewis 2003:49). Housing conditions for the poor in New Orleans were among
the worst in the nation. New Orleans was also far behind other American cities in its infrastructure. In
the ‘Twenties, passengers and goods could only cross to the west bank of the Mississippi River by
ferry.
New Orleans in the 1920’s was like much of the nation in that public services such as health
care and unemployed relief were largely provided by charitable institutions - many of them religious not the government. In New Orleans, as throughout the South, such relief efforts were woefully
inadequate to deal with the scale of need (Green 1999:81). Of the few institutions that cared for the
poor regardless of ethnicity, foremost was New Orleans’ Charity Hospital, established in 1736. By the
Depression, the hospital was badly overcrowded and under-resourced, housing 2,400 patients in 1,756
beds, supplying care at the lowest per-patient cost of any in the United States (Salvaggio 1992:121;
Leighninger 2007:139).
When the Great Depression arrived in force in Louisiana in 1930-1931, the state’s
underdevelopment was further exposed, and one of the places hit hardest was the Port of New Orleans
(Heleniak 2001). By 1933, the city had lost more than half of the foreign trade it enjoyed in 1928.
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Black residents of New Orleans were particularly hard hit by unemployment, in many cases made
worse by laws limiting jobs to whites (Smith 1998:21). Retail sales fell to 60% of their 1928 level,
causing ripple effects throughout the city’s economy. Schoolteachers were hit by the slowdown worse
in New Orleans than in other cities in the Deep South. Class sizes expanded as the city began to lay off
teachers, and those who remained saw their salaries reduced.
The crises of the Depression and the Petro-Populist response
Out of the twin crises of regional underdevelopment and Depression, a new and long-lasting
form of political economic regulation would be established in Louisiana which would synthesize
competing agendas for reform, the interests of industrial capital and the state’s poor masses, and often
stormy relationships between state and national leaders. In the 1920’s populist and progressive
tendencies in reformist state politics came to the fore. A progressive governor, John Parker, won in
1920 pledging to end the rule of rural oligarchs and machine politicians, stop the wasteful use of the
state’s resources and tax their extraction to pay for expanding roads, bridges and education, and bring
cheap natural gas to New Orleans. Up against those entrenched forces, Parker was only partially
successful, succeeding in taxing oil and gas at a low rate through a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with the oil
companies but failing to break machine politics or greatly improve public services or transportation
(Banta 2000).
However, the progressives laid the institutional foundation for Huey Long, Parker’s bitter
opponent, who would expand upon and radicalize the progressives’ plans for modernizing the state.
Long’s constituency differed from the progressives’ urban, professional classes who sought to mediate
from above the problems of political and economic modernization (Schott 2000; Link 1992); his core
constituents were rural, white small independent producers, clawing defensively to hold onto their
socio-economic position as industrial capitalism hemmed them ever deeper into marginalization. Long
achieved such success by selling this program to Louisiana’s white masses with a vocabulary and
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delivery altogether different, a political practice altogether more aggressive against any and all
opponents, and with the intent to mobilize rural poor white voters who a generation previous made up
the populist electorate.
Building the petro-populist order: Huey Long's reforms to public services and taxation
Huey Long's first act as governor was to use oil severance tax funds to begin distributing free
textbooks to school children of all races, which enabled many poor children to go to school for the first
time (Williams 1969:322-3; Fairclough 1999:22). Long's program of distribution included students of
religious institutions, which he defended by stating that he was providing the textbooks to the children
and using the schools as convenient distribution points (Sindler 1956:59). This direct, personal
interaction with the masses, regardless of existing legal structures, was classic populism; thus both in
the source of the funding and the style of redistribution Long was establishing the petro-populist order.
Many of the characteristics of Long's regime were established relatively early. As Governor,
Huey Long started night schools for adults, black and white, and began supplying natural gas to New
Orleans despite the opposition of the city’s ruling Old Regulars and the business interests they
represented. Huey also began large-scale improvements to transportation infrastructure. He won
legislative support to begin building the promised roads and bridges that would connect rural areas to
towns across the state and span the state’s many waterways including the Mississippi. Louisiana’s state
budget went from $29 million in 1928 to $83 million in 1931, directing two-thirds of that total towards
roads and bridges (Moore 2001).
The new spending was paid for with a mix of new taxes and bonds. While Governor Parker
succeeded in implementing a severance tax on oil and gas in 1921 and otherwise diversified the state’s
tax structure, however in 1922 severance taxes on petroleum were set at only 3% of value. Long took
bolder action, changing the formula from one based on value to one based on quantity, in the process
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doubling the state’s revenue from oil in his first year in office (Sindler 1956:103). By 1931 higher taxes
on gasoline and motor vehicle licenses meant that Louisiana got about 40% of its revenue from
automobile use (dedicated to road and bridge construction). With another 10% coming from severance
(dedicated to education), that made about half the state’s budget derived in some fashion from oil
production and consumption, whereas in 1915 only 2% of state revenues came from these sources
(Weber 1988:45-8). $30 million in road bonds were issued in 1928 followed by $60 million more in
1930, replacing the earlier pay-as-you-go plan which greatly accelerated the pace of construction
(Sindler 1956:59, 68, 102-4). Years before the New Deal’s programs and alone in the South, Louisiana
initiated a major public works construction program as a means of employment and economic stimulus.
Long’s lasting contribution was his ability to integrate rural white working-class desires with a
program for economic modernization into a new political order. While his career demonstrates a
personal quest for power and its flagrant exercise on a national scale, his strongest legacy was his
inauguration of a durable political order in Louisiana that would outlive him for at least five decades
based on a public service infrastructure paid for with resource revenues.
The significance of oil to the politics of Longite Louisiana was greater than its role as fodder for
Long’s tirades against Standard or the opportunities of graft for his cronies from ‘hot oil’ deals that sold
bootleg oil outside federal production caps. Petroleum was the financial fuel for the expanded state role
in the economy, lubricating the gears of social and institutional change that had been frozen in place for
so long.
Long's increase in oil and gas severance taxes and the dedicating of these revenues to education
was a defining act in the creation of the petro-populist order. In a move towards more progressive tax
policies which reflected his base among poor rural whites and small landowners, Long likewise
increased homestead exemptions, creating a structure whereby local governments were reimbursed for
their share of lost revenue. However, a federal court ruled this reimbursements unconstitutional in
1972, to which the state responded by again increasing severance taxes to fund an alternative revenue-
sharing device (Weber 1988:46-50). This dependence upon the oil and gas industry for educational
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funding was to prove damning after the collapse of oil and gas revenues in the mid-1980's.
The oil industry would pay more for extracting energy from Louisiana through higher severance
taxes, but would also handily protect itself from greater exactions from the more concentrated
processing sector of the industry where the oil majors dominated. In 1929, Long proposed a processing
tax on oil refined in the state, provoking Standard’s allies in the Legislature to begin impeachment
proceedings against Long. While Huey survived the mostly fallacious charges leveled against him, the
refining tax did not (Sindler 1956:61-7; White 2006). A second attempt by Long for a processing tax in
1934-5 would end with four of its five cents being repealed after Standard fired hundreds from its
Baton Rouge plant and armed mobs of Standard employees occupied parts of the city (White 2006:2267).
Petro-populism, the New Deal and the Building of modern public services in New Orleans
It was not energy taxes alone, but also bonds, more regressive state taxes, and especially large
federal transfers to Louisiana that allowed the construction of major new public service institutions in
New Orleans to begin in earnest in the late 1930s. Few federal public works were approved in
Louisiana during Long’s rule of the state. New Orleans in particular had suffered as Long withheld
funding as a weapon against his political rivals, while Roosevelt withheld federal funds from Louisiana
to keep them out of Long’s hands (Boulard 1998:179-80; Smith 1998:110-11). However, after Long
was assassinated in 1935, federally financed work ramped up rapidly. Huey Long's heirs made peace
with Roosevelt, and in exchange for political loyalty, Louisiana received tens of millions in federal
money for construction (Kane 1941:181-6, 200-02; Leighninger 2007:45-7; Gonzalez-Perez 2003:455).
Between 1937 and 1939, the massive art-deco structure of the new Charity hospital rose over Tulane
Avenue, a symbol of both a modernizing Louisiana and the social rights of its citizens. This
subordination to the national political order did not mean an end to petro-populism; public services in
New Orleans and the state had their greatest expansion during this time. The federal government was
the primary source of funds to greatly expand the city’s public service infrastructure, and Longite
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leaders continued to tax the oil industry at the state level to augment and maintain these services. Thus
petro-populism was institutionalized as a regional, hybridized variant of the New Deal.
However, Huey Long and his petro-populism must also be given credit for the influence exerted
on President Franklin Roosevelt and his policies, which came in the form of both an example and a
threat. It is important to note that Roosevelt's "shift to the left" in the creation of Second New Deal
Policies, including Social Security and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) came when Long
was at the height of his national power (Leuchtenburg 1956:99-100). While a wealth of circumstantial
evidence of Roosevelt's fear of Long's power exists, the most revealing is a secret poll commissioned
by Roosevelt in January 1935, only months before the Second New Deal was proposed to congress,
which showed Long with 11% support nationally, much of it coming from areas outside the Deep South
(Leucthenberg, 1963:196, Brinkley 207-208, 284-286).
Long's roads program was the largest public works program in the South during the Depression,
and the approach of using public works to directly create jobs and thus political support is replicated in
the WPA, an approach that Roosevelt had resisted until 1935. Likewise, the creation of Social Security
directly mirrors one of the key tenets of Long's national "Share Our Wealth" program - the creation of
universal old-age pensions (Sindler 1956:84).
Between 1936 and 1939, under the administrations of New Orleans Mayor Robert Maestri,
Governor Richard Leche and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the City of New Orleans was
transformed. Acres of slum housing was destroyed and the building of thousands of units of new public
housing was initiated. Construction began on a modern, 18-story Charity Hospital to replace the old,
decrepit, overcrowded hospital. A large number of new public schools were also planned. School
construction and public housing construction would increase from the 1940's through the 1960's.
Roads, bridges and the infrastructure of City Park and the Lakefront were also put in place in this
period. These structures represented the modernization of the city of New Orleans and a fundamentally
new social contract between residents of the city and their government.
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Perhaps nowhere was the vision of petro-populism as a provider of social services so manifest
as in the Charity Hospital system and its flagship hospital, ‘Big’ Charity on Tulane Avenue in New
Orleans. Further, nowhere, perhaps besides public housing, has a public service dating to this era been
so thoroughly dismantled. Between the actions of the LSU Health Sciences Center, now-Governor
Bobby Jindal as former head of the Department of Health and Hospitals, and other recent
administrations, little remains besides the empty building to represent what this system meant in its
heyday.
The Charity Hospital system put Louisiana ahead of the rest of the country in terms of medical
care for the poor, and represented a version of the social contract closer to Western European social
democracy than anything that has been established in the United States. This guarantee of free medical
care for the poor was among the most promising manifestations of Longism's concrete delivery of
services. Under Longite political leaders, the hospital moved from an underfunded, private religious
Charity to a state institution, gained a new, modern building, and became the center of a statewide
medical system and a promise of care for the poor. Additionally, Long provided a new mechanism for
training of medical personnel. The LSU Medical School is a product of petro-populism, created by
Long so that his “poor boys” could become doctors, breaking the monopoly of Tulane University on
the profession (Salvaggio 1983:110-111).
Public school facilities, particularly high schools, had traditionally been in short supply for both
white and black residents of New Orleans, and school enrollment was low. However by the 1930’s a
dedicated program of school construction had alleviated shortages for white students. No such
arrangements had been made for African Americans, and until 1942 there was only one public high
school — the first McDonogh 35 — for black students (Logsdon and Devore 1991:192). While Long’s
free textbooks program doubtless helped many black families, black enrollment at public schools had
been rising even before the program. The number of black students attending public schools nearly
doubled between the 1921-1922 school year and the 1935-1936 school year. However, facilities had
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not kept pace - by 1935 schools for African Americans were horribly crowded. Craig, Valena C. Jones
and Thomy Lafon elementary schools had 2,375, 2,647 and 3,332 students respectively, while no white
elementary school had more than 1,565 students. McDonogh 35, the only black high school, was also
viciously overcrowded, with 3,286 students (New Orleans Public Schools 1922, 1936).
Although Long had been willing to put money to his textbook and adult literacy programs, he
had shown no similar dedication to overall educational funding. Long’s lack of support and declining
local revenues in the cash-strapped city meant that per student funding fell sharply in the first five years
of the depression. Per student funding in white schools in New Orleans went from $79 per student in
the 1927-1928 school year to $52 by the 1933-1934 year, while funding for black students fell from
$42 to a meager $27 in the same period (New Orleans Public Schools 1928, 1934). Even in the New
Deal, an adequate infrastructure for the public education of all citizens was not built in New Orleans.
The Public Works Administration (PWA) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) filled some gaps
in Long’s educational policy by supplying badly needed buildings. However, while the PWA built a
large number of schools around the state, only three were built in New Orleans: two elementary
schools, one for black students, and Francis T. Nicholls High School (now Frederick Douglass), for
white students. More schools were built under the later, more aggressive WPA, including a second
high school for black students, Booker T. Washington, which was opened in 1942 as a vocational
school and still stands today (Logsdon and DeVore 1991:198).
In contrast to the Charity Hospital system and reforms in public education, public housing in
New Orleans was not a petro-populist idea, but rather a form of political lagniappe, with the concept
coming out of urban progressive movements, actualized by the New Deal. However, New Orleans'
disproportionate share of public housing and its subsequent role in New Orleans’ landscape can be seen
as a by-product of Long's political threat to Roosevelt and the circumstances following his unexpected
death, which promoted an urban Longite leader – New Orleans Mayor Robert Maestri - to leadership of
the state machine (Sindler 1956:118-120,126-128). Maestri's machine, which also controlled the
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Housing Authority of New Orleans, assured that such projects would proceed smoothly (Smith
1988:1975).
As early as 1933, the New Orleans Council of Social Agencies began taking applications for a
proposed public housing development. By April of 1935 the city had acquired five million dollars for
the development of two housing projects, however the contract became yet another casualty in the
battles between Huey Long and Interior Secretary Ickes. The city reapplied shortly after Long's
assassination; however Roosevelt closed the housing division of the PWA in October 1935 (HANO
1938:2; Smith 1988:172).
In 1936, with the feud between Huey Long and Roosevelt administration no longer an issue,
Louisiana's state government quickly built mechanisms to absorb federal funds for public housing, by
passing legislation to build housing authorities in municipalities well before the Wagner-Steagall Act
actually made such funds available (Smith 1988:175). In the final months of 1937 demolition of slum
housing began to make way for two developments, the Iberville and Lafitte complexes, each spanning
tens of acres of land near the business district and French Quarter. In 1938, ground was broken for the
St. Bernard Development, in a sparsely populated area on the edge of the city in today's Gentilly
neighborhood. In January 1941, the first family moved into the Magnolia (C. J. Peete) Development,
and by the end of 1942, almost all of the 4,881 units in New Orleans' six new public housing
developments were occupied. In coming decades, the federal government and HANO would expand on
these developments and build four more large-scale developments across the city, bringing the number
of units to over 10,000 (HANO 1938, 1943, 1947).
Public housing was a vast improvement on the housing that existed in their neighborhoods prior
to their construction. In the early years of the program, HANO lived up to the promise that “tenants...
will occupy dwelling facilities far above the reach normally of the income group in which they fall”
(HANO 1938:11). All of the seven developments were built of durable brick-faced concrete, and held
up very well in every hurricane that struck the city in coming decades. When built, they featured
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modern appliances and ample green space for children to play in, a stark contrast with the close rows of
dilapidated wooden houses that characterize many New Orleans neighborhoods to this day. The
greatest problem the new program faced in the early 1940's was the large numbers of poor people who
sought to move into public housing. In 1941 HANO began only accepting applications on an
emergency basis, and in 1942 stopped taking new applications altogether. In early 1943, officials at the
agency estimated that they had received five applications for every available unit (HANO 1943:7, 17).
Despite these modest improvements for black students, New Deal-era school construction
primarily augmented an already-existing municipal policy for expanding public education for whites.
It also did not fundamentally alter the gross inequalities in facilities or funding between black and
white education or the low overall level of school funding and teacher pay in New Orleans. And despite
the large scale of the investments in New Orleans housing and health care in the late 1930s and early
‘40s, it was clear to proponents that there was still much progress to be made in the city. In 1945
HANO Chairman James Brodtmann declared that, despite the construction of almost 5,000 units of
public housing, “one third of the city's residential section are slums... in some instances as many as
five or six persons occupy the same room. Many of these blighted areas breed disease, juvenile
delinquency and vice, and are fire hazards” (HANO 1946). The number of public schools for AfricanAmericans were also inadequate for the city's growing black population, and many black children had
to travel long distances to attend one of the city's two public high schools for African-Americans.
Continuity and change in the maturation of Louisiana Petro-Populism
A quarter century later in the late 1960s, New Orleans and Louisiana had changed much, but
some noticeable continuities remained as well. Urbanization and the consolidation of small agricultural
producers likewise proceeded rapidly (Wiegmann 1969). The decades since 1940 had seen a surge of
industrial investment and growth, much of which was in oil, gas and related chemical industries, a
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trend that would continue through the 1970s (Kniffen and Hiliard 1988:187). In 1960 industrial wages
in Louisiana were the highest in the South, nearly equal to the U.S. average (Wall et al. 1997:319).
However, these figures must be considered in light of the sectoral composition of Louisiana’s
workforce relative to the national average, reflective of the state’s capital- and energy-intensive
industrialization: In Louisiana in 1966, 17% of employees worked in industry compared to 30%
nationally, a rate even lower than most Southern states; employment in contract construction,
transport/utilities, and especially mining, supplying the energy industry with physical plant and raw
materials, were all significantly higher than U.S. states as a whole. Average incomes had risen by this
year to 77% of the national average, up from 59% in 1929 and a faster rate of growth than other parts
of the South for this period (Beard 1969a:7-10).
Louisiana’s economy remained undiversified, highly dependent on a few key sectors of resource
extractive industry, with a continuing marked dualism between the modern energy sector and the rest of
the economy, as described by Melton in 1969 (25-6):
As a state, Louisiana must be classified as one of the least developed parts of the most
developed nation in the world. ... Any casual examination of Louisiana economy reveals
a pattern of striking contrasts. Pockets of industrial complexes representative of
economic advancement of the highest order are not far removed from areas of abject
poverty and the absence of economic growth. … The nature of much of the
industrialization that has taken place makes it almost axiomatic. While not without some
carry-over impact, the influence of the raw materials processing industries appears to
have had negligible impact on the indigenous activities. This is the typical response of
underdeveloped areas to the extraction and processing of raw materials, even when done
by the most advanced techniques.’
The dominant oil and gas sector also provided a much larger portion of state revenues during this
period than it did in Huey Long’s time. Mineral revenues went from just 15% of total state government
income in 1945 to nearly 30% throughout the 1960s (Weber 1988:59) as oil and gas production in
Louisiana went from 139 to 494 million barrels between 1945 and 1970 and gas production likewise
grew from 796 billion to 5.50 trillion cubic feet (Louisiana Department of Natural Resources 2009a,
2009b).
Growth in state government was similarly expansive, especially under the first Earl Long
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(1948-52) Administration, during which time state spending tripled (Sindler 1956:208-18, 264) and
welfare payments quadrupled, especially for the elderly, making Louisiana in 1949 the national leader
in old-age pension coverage. Income sources were highly concentrated at the state level, parishes and
cities being subject to a variety of tax restrictions like the Homestead Exemption and receiving
compensatory funds from state government. In 1965, about a third of state spending went to education,
a quarter to highways, 1/5th to welfare, and 7% to public hospitals out of a $1 billion total. Compared to
the U.S. average, Louisiana assessed low property, sales, and income taxes, while funding a
considerably larger state government than states of a similarly low average per capita income (Beard
1969b). While New Orleans benefited from these revenues, not least of which in the operation of the
city’s Charity Hospital, support for public education, and public assistance for the city’s poor, it was the
rural parishes left furthest behind by the modernization and urbanization of Louisiana that were the
greatest electoral bastions of Longism and its aggressive Petro-Populist program (Sindler 1956:252-4,
262-5).
New Orleans and the urban crises of the 1960/’70s
A ‘shadow on the sunbelt,’ New Orleans was an exception to post-war urban growth in the
South, and what little industry the city had was languishing (Shulman 1994:175-9). The metro area’s
already small industrial base overall lost jobs during the 1950’s and 1960’s, despite a temporary boost
from NASA rocket manufacturing in the mid-1960’s. With growing suburbanization, the city’s central
business district lost 40% of its share of metro area retail sales between 1948 and 1963 (Hirsch
2005:514). The port was failing to keep pace with the international move from “breakbulk” cargo to the
large metal containers that would dominate shipping trade to the present day, and was losing its share
of commerce to other ports. A port oriented to the export of raw materials, New Orleans was illprepared and slow to adapt to the growing dominance of consumer goods imports in U.S. international
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trade (Flammang 1969). These factors combined to slow growth, restrict employment, and compound
the city’s poverty. In 1969, half of New Orleans’ work force was underemployed. Compared to
Atlanta’s 9% and Houston’s 10%, 17% of New Orleans metro area families - 38% of black families lived in poverty (Hirsch 2005).
In New Orleans and Louisiana, even if African Americans lacked adequate work, they could
still count on a low but certain level of services in overcrowded public schools, public housing and
most significantly the Charity hospital system. Longism delivered public services to all residents of the
state, but the quality of those public services differed sharply upon racial lines, a situation which was
no longer accepted after World War II. The great significance of public services in the lives of residents
of New Orleans, particularly black residents, is demonstrated by the fact that public services such as
public schools, hospitals and housing were both a primary grounds for and the actual physical spaces
where struggles for equality occurred.
Despite decades of legal victories for African-Americans, in the early 1960's segregation
remained the rule in New Orleans’ schools, hospitals and housing. For all the political rancor and
white protests of the schools crisis in New Orleans, the federally backed integration of Frantz
Elementary and McDonogh 19 Elementary resulted in only four black students attending white schools
in the 1960-1961. Despite a series of desegregation orders from Judge Skelly Wright, integration
proceeded glacially, with 12 black students attending white schools in the 1961-1962 school year, 107
in 1962-1963, 392 in 1963-1964 and 873 in 1964-1965, still only 1.3% of the almost 65,000 black
students in New Orleans (Logsdon and DeVore 1991:252, 260-5; Fairclough 1999:436-7) . In April
1965, Judge Frank B. Ellis somewhat reluctantly issued an order to fold the separate black and white
school districts into one district, starting in the 1965-1966 school year with two grades and continuing
to all grades by 1969. The 1964-1965 school year was when the white student population of New
Orleans public schools peaked at over 39,000. It was not until the 1969-1970 school year that white
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parents began to pull their children out of the city's public schools in large numbers, coinciding with the
large-scale desegregation of the teaching profession (Logsdon and DeVore 1991:264-6).
After years of successfully resisting integration through a system of separate wards, the board of
Charity Hospital chose to comply with the Civil Rights Act. In April 1965, the first black patients were
admitted to formerly all-white wards in the hospital (Salvaggio 1992:189). Similarly, when Johnson
signed the act creating Medicaid in 1965 he created new funding sources for hospitals, but one that
required a certification that they were not discriminating. The vast majority of Southern hospitals
complied rather than miss out on the funding Medicaid provided (Quadagno and Macdonald 2003).
Public housing was also affected by these waves of change. In March 5, 1965, the all-white
HANO board of commissioners passed an ordinance declaring that applications for housing would be
“handled without regard to race, color or creed.” Within months, public housing authorities began
placing black families in white developments. And in early 1966, New Orleans Mayor Victor Schiro
appointed A. P. Tureaud as the first black member of the HANO board of commissioners (HANO
1966:15, 34).
The social struggles of the 1960s took place in the context of Great Society federal programs
which represent in some senses the apex of American social democratic politics. Great Society
programs expanded medical care to the elderly and welfare recipients through Medicare and Medicaid
and made permanent President Kennedy's pilot food stamp program. They included greatly increased
federal spending on public education, which would benefit communities and states with low tax
revenues to fund schools, including New Orleans. The Great Society's focus on urban problems was
reflected in the creation of the federal department of Housing and Urban Development as a cabinetlevel department in 1965. Earlier housing programs from the New Deal reflected Roosevelt's
ambivalence about cities and had primarily emphasized encouraging suburban homeownership,
however HUD was directed to deal with urban problems in housing. In New Orleans, Great Society
initiatives like Total Community Action and Model Cities would play a significant role in not only
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material assistance to many of the city’s working and underemployed poor, but also in the cultivation of
a new, post-segregation political order that relied on patronage networks tied to municipal
government’s distribution of public sector work and public services (Germany 2007).
While the Great Society vastly increased federal funding of education under the Title 1
program, the revenues available to New Orleans schools remained low, and teacher salaries continued
to lag behind not only national averages, but even other cities in the South (Logsdon and DeVore
1991:271). Furthermore, many of the Great Society’s initiatives would prove short-lived. By 1970 the
federal government was beginning to disassociate itself from the public housing system, the programs
of the Great Society, and the social democratic city. In 1966 HANO experimented with a program of
“scattered site” public housing in the Lower 9th Ward, where unlike traditional housing developments
tenants would be housed in apartment complexes architecturally similar to those on the private market
(HANO 1968). HANO still boasted full occupancy of all traditional developments and a waiting list of
12,000 families, arguing that “thus far public housing represents the only proven method of housing
low income families in large numbers,” but was not interested in building more of the developments it
had opened in previous decades. This move away from traditional public housing developments came
at the moment that integration became a reality for public housing residents. HANO's annual report for
1967 (pages 22, 34, 52) is the first one that shows photos of black and white children playing and
eating together in HANO-run developments. This precipitated three years of a massive white departure
from public housing. By the 1972 annual report, there were no more photos of white families in public
housing.
Charity was no exception to the declining fortunes of other public services. Ironically, the
availability of Medicare gave more of the poor the ability to seek treatment at private hospitals, and this
lowered the number of patients cared for by New Orleans' Charity hospital. After the initial boost of
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Medicare, federal funding for public hospitals declined in the late 1960's. The state also gave Charity
less money; providing only $23.3 million of $28.1 million requested for the 1967-1968 fiscal year. In
1969, the budget crisis became more severe. Ongoing problems for the hospital were staffing and staff
morale concerns caused by the wage differences between Charity and private hospitals. Charity staff
was continually asked to do more with less funding even than other public hospitals, and the late ‘60's
saw several threats of strikes if pay and conditions did not improve (Salvaggio 1992:193-201).
The movement away from traditional public housing and a lack of funding for public schools
and hospitals was overshadowed by a larger, more damning trend that began in the 1960's: the physical
movement of whites, their relative affluence and tax dollars, and employment away from cities.
Suburban Jefferson parish was the largest recipient of fleeing whites, growing from 50,000 people in
1940 to over 300,000 in 1970 (Wall 1997:337). Others moved to St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes,
where arch-segregationist Leander Perez welcomed them with open arms. The suburban parishes were
bedroom communities, drawing sales and property tax revenues away from Orleans parish while still
dependent on the city for their commuting residents’ incomes. In 1980, almost a third of St. Bernard
residents’ income came from outside the parish; for Jefferson, 43% and for St. Tammany, more than
half (Scott 1988:25). In 1980 about 100,000 commuters from those three parishes drove to jobs in
Orleans every day, more than a quarter of the parish’s workforce (Hirsch 2005:514). This fiscal
mismatch meant that New Orleans supported a larger share of the metro area’s amenities and
infrastructure than its tax base, causing the city to raise sales taxes, pushing more retail business across
parish lines in a vicious cycle.
When whites did not physically leave the city, they began to de-invest from newly integrated
public services. An increasing number of whites sent their children to private schools, usually Catholic
parochial schools, which made up a very considerable share of the overall educational structure in the
city. More significantly for public services, Louisiana’s generous homestead exemption meant most
homeowners were immune from paying local property taxes to fund schools, making funding difficult,
especially for Orleans parish where mineral severance taxes hardly existed and sales taxes were
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declining. This was compounded by the state ceasing in 1972 to reimburse parishes for the income they
lost to the homestead exemption (Weber 1988:50).
Over time this geographical separation and divestment of large numbers of whites and their
economic activity from the city and its public services regime would prove devastating both materially
and politically. It would take another fifteen years for a new movement away from the New Deal to
come to national political power under Reagan, and another forty years for the physical structures of
American social democracy in New Orleans to be closed and torn down post-Katrina. However, the
withdrawal of poor and working-class whites from the electoral base for social-democratic programs in
the coalition formed under Long and Roosevelt meant this coalition was no longer sound in the 1960's.
Southern whites were the first to leave. As early as the 1940's Southern whites showed they would
abandon the Democratic Party if it showed too much support for black aspirations. In the 1948
presidential election segregationist Strom Thurmond captured Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and
South Carolina in his bid for the presidency. Two decades later George Wallace ran a similar political
campaign, winning every Deep South state with the exception of South Carolina in 1968.
Conclusions: The legacy of Petro-Populism and differential paths to neoliberal urbanism
1973 was a year of systemic change in international political economy, heralded as the Year
Zero of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005), when the energy crisis, the shift from fixed monetary policies to
floating currencies, the rightist coup in Chile, and fiscal crises in cities like New York began to
undermine the social democratic class compromises of earlier decades. The Pruitt-Igoe public housing
tower, a symbol of modernist social democratic urban planning, was demolished in St. Louis that year,
foreshadowing the changes to the built environment, to the public sector, indeed to aesthetics that
would accompany the shift from Keynesian/Fordist modes of social regulation to neoliberal ones
(Harvey 1989).
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Yet in New Orleans, 1973 marked the beginning of a boom decade, when the city, on the
surface at least, approximated the image of black electoral ascendency espoused in
Parliament/Funkadelic’s anthem ‘Chocolate City’: In the post-Civil Rights revolution era, black
political and, presumably, economic power could be wielded through control over the governments of
majority-minority cities. Riding the wave of high energy prices, Governor Edwards, elected with a
strong biracial coalition of working class votes and espousing a supercharged Petro-Populist program
of public works, increased oil and gas severance by 30 and 50% respectively (Wall 1997:346). During
the 1970s, energy rents fueled a doubling of state spending, adjusted for inflation. In New Orleans, the
oil business drove rapid development of high-rises and office employment downtown and greater
suburbanization towards the urban fringe, while Orleans Parish continued losing population. Under
Mayors Landrieu and Morial, city contracting and jobs were opened to black New Orleanians to an
unprecendented extent, as Great Society political mobilization was transformed into institutional power
for a growing black middle class (Hirsch 1992).
Yet under this surface of prosperity, in 1979 some 25% of New Orleans’ housing stock remained
substandard (Wright 1989:487), in 1980 the city’s public schools were the worst in the state and infant
mortality was higher than all but one other American city (Thompson and Thompson 1982). In 1982
one-third of the city’s black work force was under- or unemployed; three years later, despite the gains
in income of many black professionals, only 3% of metro area businesses were black-owned (Piliawsky
1985). The city’s public services (partially) compensated for this neglect and poverty and were vital for
sustaining the many poor of New Orleans, but depended on flows of federal aid and state government
transfers themselves dependent on national political commitments to urban liberalism and the state’s
ability to harness sizable rents from the energy sector. More than half of New Orleans’ budget in 1978
came from federal and state funds (Piliawsky 1985:534) and because of Louisiana’s high homestead
exemption, only 5% of New Orleanian homeowners paid any property taxes, limiting the city’s ability
to tax its own resources to pay for essential services.
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Both those sources of funding would decline catastrophically in the first half of the 1980s. The
Reagan administration cut federal aid to cities deeply, nearly halving New Orleans’ appropriation
between 1980 and 1982 (Piliawsky 1985). High energy prices cushioned some of this loss until 1983,
when oil prices began sliding rapidly, slashing mineral revenues to Louisiana by more than a third and
bringing the state into a severe, multi-year fiscal crisis (Richardson 1988). New Orleans was thus faced
with a double bind: Firstly, the urban fiscal crisis that so many other U.S. cities experienced, as social
democratic demands for services became ever more difficult to sustain as capital and work fled for
lower tax suburbs, other metro areas, or even abroad, and secondly, the collapse of a fiscal structure
base on natural resource revenues, a situation more akin to the structural adjustment crises seen in
many developing countries in the 1980s who ran their own versions of petro-populist redistribution
with oil money in the prior decade such as Mexico, Nigeria, Iraq, and Venezuela (see Nore and Turner
1980; Dalla Costa and Dalla Costa 1993; Midnight Notes Collective 1991).
The tremendous vulnerability of New Orleans’ public services and the people that depended on
them to the disaster of Katrina are not sui generis features of this unique place, a locally-specific
pathology disassociated with larger forces. Nor did those failures result not from any inherent
inefficiency or inferiority of social democratic politics, or else were the inevitable consequences of a
placeless global neoliberalism. Rather, the course of development of New Orleans’ public services are
material social legacies of specific forms of social democratic politics in this city. These public services
are neither representatives of an abstract ‘big government’ or ‘urban liberalism’ gone wrong, nor mere
stand-ins for the New Deal, Great Society, or other national initiatives in urban social democracy, but
rather reflect the geographical context in which they developed, one where state government and flows
of capital from the state’s energy sector played a central role in institutional development and
performance. We must attend to this particular history and geography if we are to understand how New
Orleans’ public sector came to be so important for the city and yet so prone to crisis, as well as how to
do better in providing basic human needs to all the people who make this city home.
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