Anonymous donor

I'm all for taking the statues down but if you're the public defender's office today you might be thinking hey...

It will cost about $125,000 to remove four controversial monuments to Confederate officials or a white supremacist uprising from their perches in New Orleans, and an anonymous donor has offered to foot the bill, according to Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s top aide.

The one-page report from Landrieu’s chief administrative officer, Andy Kopplin, was forwarded to the City Council this week along with similar short letters from other city department heads.

I wanna see some history

Where has the year gone?  We're almost all the way to the end of Everybody Shout At The Mayor Season. The final Budget Circus Shout Session is next Monday in District E.  If that seems early to you, it's because it is.  Shouting at the mayor season was intentionally moved up the calendar this year in order to better serve the illusion that the shouting actually helps to shape the mayor's budget priorities. It doesn't. But, man, is it ever fun.

Still, the shift in schedule may have caused you to miss your chance to get in on the excitement.  If so, you are in luck. 

Following last week's invite-only daylong discussion on the future of the city's Confederate landmarks, the City of New Orleans hosts two meetings next week that are open to the public.

The Historic District Landmarks Commission hosts a meeting in City Council chambers at City Hall (1300 Perdido St.) from 1 p.m.-3 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 13, followed by a Human Relations Commission meeting at 6 p.m.

Up for discussion are the possible relocations of several monuments to the confederacy, including a statue of Robert E. Lee at Lee Circle, a Jefferson Davis statue on Jefferson Davis Parkway, a P.G.T. Beauregard statue in front of City Park, and the Liberty Place Monument on Iberville Street.

Oh boy. Do you think they know what it is they are asking for? 

According to a release, comment cards at the Human Relations Commission meeting must be submitted no later than 7 p.m. in order for participants to speak. The city also is accepting public comments online at www.nola.gov/hdlc or www.nola.gov/hrc. Those comments must be received by 5 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 11 to be entered into the record

Ha ha, yes they do, indeed.  Well, okay, let's have it out.  This will only take about all of the rest of our lives to resolve.  Not that it should take that long. As I and others have said, this isn't as complicated as the reactionaries are making it out to be. The specific monuments in question represent a propaganda campaign on the part of Confederate apologists during the Jim Crow period. It is time to end that campaign. We've spent enough time trying to annotate or compromise with it to know that isn't going to work.

For example, this is the Liberty Place monument.



Erected in 1891, it commemorates the restoration of white supremacist government to Louisiana by purposefully misrepresenting a riot during which members of the Crescent City White League murdered Metropolitan Police and state militia as a "battle" for "Liberty."  Inscriptions added later celebrated the end of reconstruction declaring, "The national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state."

In the 1970s another inscription was added saying, basically, "Hey we don't actually think the racist stuff we wrote on this monument before." More controversy ensued.

This gesture satisfied almost no one. In 1976, the NAACP Youth Council requested the monument's removal, while some decried the plaque as "historical revisionism." Furthermore, modern white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan began to see the memorial as a rallying point for planned marches and demonstrations.

In 1981, the monument nearly left public view at Mayor Ernest "Dutch" Morial's order, sparking a new round of public discussion and protest. Ultimately, the City Council blocked any move or alteration, and the monument remained on Canal Street, although partially hidden behind tall bushes.

The monument left public view in 1989, reportedly for safe keeping, amidst construction on Canal Street. Mayor Sidney Barthelemy pledged to return the marker, though his administration missed the originally stated date for its replacement. The structure stayed in storage until February 1993, when a movement led by David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, sued for its return. To the chagrin of many residents, the city obliged but moved the obelisk off of Canal Street to its present site in the curve of Iberville Street, between railroad tracks and the entrance to a parking garage.

When they put it back they, somewhat clumsily, patched over the white supremacy inscription with this piece of marble.



They also added a new front panel with some words about how we really need to honor "both sides" of the riot incited by the White Leaguers because doing so will "teach us lessons for the future."



I'll be the first to admit that this thoroughly stupid collection of insults and exacerbating half-remedies is full of historical significance. It should be preserved somewhere. But let's not allow it to continue on public display as a monument. There's nothing we can do to make it appropriate for that. And clearly we have tried.

The mayor wants us to consider renaming Jefferson Davis Parkway. I'm open to that, although I'm not thrilled that he wants to rename it for Norman Francis. But the monuments on the neutral ground are the real problem. Like this one to Colonel Charles Didier Dreux



That one along with other monuments described in this article  to "Poet Priest of the Confederacy" Abram J Ryan, General Albert Pike, and, of course, JD himself make the entire length of the street into a Confederate theme park.



It's probably well past time for us to change that.  But, if last week's District A Budget meeting is any indication, that will not be easy.  

Landrieu: "It does not surprise me that some folks in this room may not feel and may not think that some people in this city are offended every time they drive by a statue that they think reveres—" "History!" one woman yells. Landrieu politely asks her to let him finish.

One wonders, though, why the cries of "History!" are loudest in defense of these Jim Crow era revisionist monuments.  If it's important that we ensure the memory of our city's Old South history remain at the forefront of public consciousness, why not consider the far more significant sites and events we are currently neglecting?

Here is a view of the intersection of St. Louis and Charters Streets in the French Quarter.



The building we're looking at in the photo is a horrendous tourist trap of a "Cajun restaurant" called Original Pierre Maspero's (est. 1788). According to an official enough looking plaque on the wall there, this was the site where Andrew Jackson met with the famous Lafitte brothers to plan the defense of New Orleans from the British.  Oh and also, the plaque says matter of factly, "slaves were sold there."

The first problem for fans of History! is none of that is true. None of it is true of that building, anyway. The building that was once known as Maspero's Exchange (but also under other names) and where at least some of those things happened no longer exists. It was located across the street. On the corner from where this photo was taken, actually. Richard Campanella describes it here.

Originally called Tremoulet’s Commercial (or New Exchange) Coffee House, this business became Maspero’s Exchange in 1814, Elkin’s Exchange after Pierre Maspero’s death in 1822, and by 1826, Hewlett’s Exchange, named for new owner John Hewlett. Because of the place’s popularity and frequent management changes, newspapers and city directories ascribed a variety of names to the business at 129 (now 501) Chartres: the “Exchange Coffee House,” “New Exchange Coffee House,” “Hewlett’s Coffee House,” or “La Bourse de Hewlett.”

The two story, 55-by-62-foot edifice boasted behind its gaudy Venetian screens a 19-foot-high ceiling, four 12 lamp glass chandeliers, framed maps and oil paintings (described by one Northerner as “licentious”), wood and marble finishing, and an enormous bar with French glassware. Like many of New Orleans’ coffee houses, the upper floor contained billiards and gambling tables. Throughout the mid-antebellum years, Hewlett’s Exchange buzzed with trilingual auctioning activity, in which everything from ships to houses to land to sugar kettles to people legally changed hands.

The city’s seven auctioneers worked the block on a rotating schedule, every day except Sunday, oftentimes while maintaining other jobs elsewhere. Joseph Le Carpentier handled Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays; Toussaint Mossy (president of the New Orleans Architect Company) worked Tuesdays and Fridays; H. J. Domingon, George Boyd, and Joseph Baudue got Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays; and the busy Isaac McCoy and Francois Dutillet worked six days a week. At the time of Lincoln’s visit, Hewlett’s Exchange was the New Orleans business community’s single most important public meeting site for networking, news-gathering, and wheeling-dealing.

Which brings us to another point of interest our History! buffs might want to have a look at. The stuff in the plaque about Andrew Jackson and the Lafittes is shaky. But the "slaves were sold there" bit is quite an understatement. Campanella only talks about the Exchange's importance to "the New Orleans business community."  But this may be selling the scene short. In fact this was the center of the American trade in cotton and in human beings.Which is to say it was a major nexus of 19th Century global capitalism.

A recently published book to read here is by historian Edward Baptist. An early chapter in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism describes innovations in banking and credit that allowed great fortunes in commodities and slaves (who were themselves commodities) to be moved great distances at the stroke of a pen. "Innovators" like New Orleans businessman Vincent Nolte could write an order from a table at Maspero's Exchange and thousands of bales would be headed to Liverpool, or thousands of slaves shuffled off from Maryland to Alabama. Baptist calls this the entrepreneur's "right hand" power. Today we might recognize it as "disruption." (You might have to click the image to read the quote.)

Given the modern enthusiasm for wave after wave of  "creative destruction" heralded at every NOLA Entrepreneur Week, you'd think our History! buffs would be thrilled to know more about the dynamic 'treps like Nolte who hung around in hip bars like Maspero's thinking up how to do Uber but for slavery. 

But for some reason, they'd rather fixate on preserving the over-embellished memories of a failed rebellion bent on preserving the slave power these entrepreneurs created.  Maybe they just prefer losers. Or maybe they don't have any idea what they're talking about.  In any case, they're sure to be yelling about it at City Hall next week.  If you have the opportunity to witness this historic event, please take notes. Otherwise someone may call it a "battle" and try to commission a monument.

Back at the budget circus

Every year there's at least one of these meetings where the folks are extra shouty.  This year it was District A.

The “Fix My Streets” group, formed in Lakeview around budget time last year, was among the first cluster to speak and was well represented throughout the comments all evening. They asked how they can be sure that their tax money is really being spent on fixing streets — suggesting they would be open to a dedicated tax to speed the effort — and they asked Landrieu to move swiftly to create a committee to help oversee the process.

Landrieu’s response was a glimpse into the particular kind of hopelessness that municipal government can create. Admitting that the interior neighborhood streets are terrible, Landrieu said it would take $9 billion to fix them all. Even if he completely transferred the budgets of the entire police and fire departments to that effort, it would still take 20 to 25 years.

In the meantime, Landrieu said, the city is doing the best it can to fix the roads that benefit the most people. It has already repaired many major roads around the city, rattling off a list around District that included several in Lakeview (“You ride on them, don’t you?” Landrieu asked, to which someone in the audience yelled back: “Very slowly!”). Next, the city is using new GPS and 3-D scanning technology to map the damage to every street in the city, to prioritize them for repair.

And, from the looks of things, "Fix My Streets" was the tame petitioner last night, relatively speaking.. and that is saying something. The firefighters were there to yell, as usual. And, of course, this being Lakeview, a lot of pro-Confederates were in the audience. 

Another vocal constituency at the Lakeview meeting was the “Save Our Circle” group, formed in response to Landrieu’s recent suggestion that the statue of Robert E. Lee be removed from Lee Circle downtown. Organizer Tim Shea Carroll asked Landrieu how much the effort was going to cost in light of the other budget difficulties, and said he had a petition of 22,000 signatures asking that the mayor “stop talking about the monuments.”

Landrieu replied that, as the city both recovers from the flooding after Hurricane Katrina and prepares for its 300th anniversary, it has the opportunity to correct the mistakes of the past and shape itself into the city it always should have been. The statues honoring Confederate leaders were erected in a period of history during which white supremacy and anti-integration sentiment was being reasserted by the governing class, and Landrieu said that they do not represent his values or those of many other New Orleanians.

“Just because it was part of our past does not mean it has to be there for all time, or that it has to be revered,” Landrieu said, noting that Lee Circle was originally Tivoli Circle before it was renamed in honor of the Confederate general.

If one goes by the tweets and other live-bloggings, that passage downplays the mood in the room where there appear to have been multiple outbursts and standing ovations in favor of keeping the monuments. For some reason, this is very important to District A folks. 

Woman next to me is in visible pain over the mayors stance on confederate statues.

— PB NOLA (@pb_nola) July 31, 2015

We'll have to wait and see if the Civic Leaders take this anxiety into account during their deliberations. 

The final budget circus is scheduled for August 10 in District E at the Andrew P. Sanchez & Copelin-Byrd Multi-Service Center (1616 Caffin Ave)

Shadow Government

We know everyone has been worrying their pretty little heads over what to do with all these Confederate monuments. Worry no longer. Mitch is getting his super smart friends together in secret to figure it all out for us.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu will this month hold a pair of invitation-only discussions centered on his proposal to remove four Confederate monuments from city property.

A spokeswoman for the administration said that invitations were sent to members of Landrieu's Tricentennial Commission. A full list of the recipients was not immediately available after business hours Thursday (July 23).

The talks will be facilitated by Welcome Table New Orleans, a racial reconciliation program Landrieu started with the help of the William Winter Institute at the University of Mississippi.

The administration didn't publicly announce the meetings, but Steve Beatty, editor of The Lens, obtained one of the invitations and posted it to Twitter.

The invitations are addressed, "Dear Civic Leader" and went out to "members of" the Tricentennial Commission which, one assumes, means not all of them. Although, two all day sessions seems like there'd be plenty of time for everybody. Take some time with the roster to mix and match your dream team of unelected "leaders" you'd most like to see make decisions for you in secret.  

In this case, they'll probably agree to take the monuments down since that's what the mayor wants to do and he's paying for their catering and all.  That's an OK outcome. The statues probably need to come down. But who do I complain to if they're replaced by images of Tricentennial Commissioner Erroll Laborde crafted by Tricentennial Commissioner Mignon Faget?

Stampede at the monuments

NOLA.com made you a map to the movie stars' homes but for Confederate statues. They've mostly done this so that a bunch of people linked over from whatever talk radio station posts it first can write a bunch of comments about how their history and heritage is all being erased and whatnot.

But it's a nice map. There may even be a few Confederate place names on there most of us weren't aware of.  I didn't even know the story behind Palmer Park until last year's Rising Tide.

Benjamin Morgan Palmer was the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans during the Civil War era, and his 1860 Thanksgiving sermon after the election of Abraham Lincoln is credited with spurring Louisiana’s secession. In it, Palmer describes slavery as an institution created by God to benefit the “black races.”

“We know better than others that every attribute of their character fits them for dependence and servitude,” Palmer said. “By nature the most affectionate and loyal of all races beneath the sun, they are also the most helpless; and no calamity can befall them greater than the loss of that protection they enjoy under this patriarchal system.”

The park that bears his name at the corner of South Carrollton and South Claiborne avenues was originally called Hamilton Square when it was created as a formal gathering place for the former city of Carrollton, said Kevin McQueeney, a University of New Orleans graduate student in history who presented his findings Saturday at the Rising Tide conference. Hamilton Square was originally named after Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers, but after Palmer’s death in a streetcar accident in 1902, New Orleans city leaders decided to rename the park after him.

“It’s a time period right around when we’re building the Jeff Davis monument,” McQueeney said, describing an era of “commemoration” of the Confederacy in New Orleans.

There are 14 streets and 12 monuments on the map. Some of these are statues. Others are plaques or parks. It's a good idea to remind ourselves that only a selected few of those are even "under threat" of removal by Mitch Landrieu and his supposedly raging horde of iconoclasts and followers of chaos out of control or whatever. 

But rather than worry about that, here's a pretty good Adrastos post about the limits of the various "slippery slope" and straw man arguments posited by the neo-Confederates.  You should go read that. Also, since Adrastos is one of those people who likes to finish posts with soundtracks here's one of those.

Nobody is coming to take your fleur-de-lis

The movement to take down Confederate flags and monuments has nothing to do with "PC culture run amok." It is not an effort to censor or erase history.  Rather, it is an effort to (finally) end a specific 150 year anti-historical propaganda campaign. 

The most successful defenders of the Lost Cause are currently getting everyone caught up talking about statues and place names for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. We've even gone off the rails so far in New Orleans that there's a "serious" discussion over the meaning of the fleur de lis and whether the city should abandon the symbol.

How does it help the so-called Confederacy to talk about bad parts of slave-owners? Well, despite their complex and often troubling places in American history, Washington, Jefferson, & Jackson were all Presidents of the UNITED States of America. There is definitely a need to further scrutinize their mythological histories with their historical realities, but not when the topic of conversation is focused on the so-called CONFEDERATE States of America and the cultural legacy of the Lost Cause in the South. Suddenly, you're rhetorically defending men who tried to destroy the United States through rebellion by referencing men who all used their office to put down rebellions or respond to threats against the United States.

Furthermore, consensus history already includes a lot about George, Tom, & Andy's slave owning, Native American fighting, and general hypocrisies. New Orleans already took names of theirs off local public schools. Most of us learn that the story of George Washington & the Cherry Tree is apocryphal - it is one of our first lessons in the difference between what we tell children at bedtime and what is the real story.

The Lost Cause mythology is a bedtime story treated as real public history. It's time for the sons and daughters of the Confederacy to grow up.  There is no slippery slope here. Anyone making that argument is intentionally trying to muddle the issue.

None of this is to say the mayor is doing some great thing simply by allowing himself to be dragged along by the activists who have seized a moment to make these corrections.  In fact, he's doing exactly what we worried he might do when this process began. He's taking the opportunity to pass out favors to political allies who are themselves questionably deserving figures.

And, of course, the mayor and council are fresh off turning two city streets into monuments for bigots just this year.

What I can't stomach about this current campaign by Landrieu is his blatant hypocrisy.

Just last month Mayor Mitch Landrieu championed the effort to rename two sections of our city's streets after the late Rev. John Raphael Jr. and Pastor Robert C. Blakes.  The effort passed through City Council in a 4 to 3 vote.

I went to City Council chambers and spoke against the move on behalf of NOSHA - New Orleans Secular Human Association.  I cited two main points on why my fellow humanists and I felt the tribute was inappropriate.  The first reason is that in the case of Raphael the street is now using a religious moniker in its official name, "Rev. John Raphael Jr. Way".  This is a clear violation of church and state as taxpayers' dollars have now gone to enshrine a particular religion in our city, in perpetuity.

But the most important issue I raised is that both of these men were hostile towards the LGBT community having made numerous bigoted remarks against gay people.  Raphael went so far as to rant at his own brother's funeral and suggest that his death (he contracted the AIDS virus) was a punishment by God for his evil, gay lifestyle.

How is it that, in June, Landrieu can support renaming city streets after two notorious bigots while lobbying to remove monuments that have been in the city over a century, citing bigotry, one month later?

If there really is any sort of  "slippery slope" it appears to be angled uphill.