Abstract
In 1929, blues singer Blind Willie Johnson was arrested for singing in front of the New Orleans Custom House. He was charged with inciting a riot. Johnson, a migrant musician from Texas, was among the most popular musicians in the South. His poetic style gave voice to the material conditions that faced black and working people. His song retold the biblical story of Samson, a betrayed man who pulled down the building that had imprisoned him. It was called, “If I Had My Way I’d Tear the Building Down.” 1
Johnson’s performance pointed to a long and unfinished struggle over the meaning of the landscape in New Orleans. After all, the New Orleans Custom House had been the site of a coup d’état. In 1874, thousands of members of the White League composed of Confederate veterans engaged in a violent insurrection to overthrow Republican governor William Pitt Kellogg. This coup marked a turning point in U.S. history. Faced with the political choice of either confronting counterrevolutionary forces of white supremacy or backing the Radical Republicans, the federal government withdrew its troops from Louisiana and brought an end to Reconstruction in 1877. In turn, the counterrevolutionary overthrow of Reconstruction in the South came to provide the playbook for white nationalists over the next century and a half. 2
The coup d’état and ongoing struggles over the history of white supremacy have been sketched in the collective memory. Blind Willie Johnson’s alleged incitement to riot through song suggests an ongoing struggle to interpret the past etched in New Orleans’ landscape. This essay situates the historical geography of New Orleans and the region in broader political and economic transformations. To understand the relationships between the regional, U.S., and global political economy, one needs to analyze their interplay in the production of landscapes in New Orleans. 3
Richard Campanella’s The West Bank of Greater New Orleans provides an historical geography of the New Orleans region. Campanella offers a “spatial explanation” of transformations of the landscape over the last five hundred years, locating the central roles of colonization, slavery, shipping, and smuggling in the history of the region. He considers how these political and economic forces were critical to the spatial transformations that marked this definitive moment in the history of capitalism. He shows how shipbuilding, the cotton industry, and sugar plantations in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the lower Mississippi Valley were essential to capital accumulation. The highest profits were secured through colonial projects in the slave trade. They were pursued despite a prohibition in the Louisiana Purchase outlawing the foreign slave trade imposed in 1808. According to Campanella, “transnational privateers sailing the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico would acquire slaves from Spanish colonies as far as Havana and Cartagena or as close as Mexico (Texas) and Spanish West Florida, where foreign slave trading remained legal” (p. 35). In other cases, he notes, they would pursue piracy by seizing slave ships and directing them “into Louisiana’s waters” (p. 35). In these ways, an illegal slave trade flourished.
In this historical-geographical context, shipping and piracy became central features of the economic geography of the West Bank. Campanella shows how the construction of canals, railroads, and ships during the nineteenth century led the region to become the “industrial muscle of an otherwise mercantilist metropolis” (p. 67). He examines how shipbuilding and repair became the region’s most critical industries. In the two decades before the U.S. Civil War, he reveals how the West Bank’s Algiers neighborhood remained an epicenter of shipping construction. “The vast amount of southern capital taking the form of enslaved human beings,” Campanella writes, “. . . would grow in value if slavery spread to the Western territories” (p. 84).
At the same time, he notes how the struggle against slavery became the central political issue being struggled over in the region in the nineteenth century. Increasingly, the revolutionary war against slavery served as an impetus for social change in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, and the world. These struggles led to a defeat of the Confederacy and, as Campanella puts it, the “evaporation of millions of dollars’ worth of ‘property’” (p. 88). As he demonstrates, the abolition of slavery was essential to fundamental landscape transformations that would take place during this turbulent period.
In turn, Campanella explores how the West Bank continued to serve as vital port city as the “subregion” became known as the “Queens and Oakland of New Orleans” (p. xi). In doing so, he demonstrates why an historical and geographical framework matters. The West Bank was forced to develop industries such as lumber mills and foundries as well as manufacturing including rail cars and ships critical to the industrial transformation of the landscape because it lacked the Port of New Orleans’ location on the East Bank of the Mississippi River and its more straightforward abilities to navigate the maritime political economy. These uneven developments led the West Bank to become an “industry-friendly economic geography,” one that persisted in the form of “value-added industry” (p. 262).
The contemporary suburban landscape of the West Bank has features produced in a previous epoch. Unlike other parts of gentrifying New Orleans, Campanella notes, it is common to find multiple generations of the same families living in the West Bank. In neighborhoods such as Gretna, property owners who lived “here in the 1880s are still heavily invested here in the 2000s” (p. 264). Although this connection between the past and the present “has made the West Bank a place where folks can live affordably, where old New Orleans perseveres,” it is unclear what lessons this offers for understanding the landscape in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (p. 264). As a result, some geographers and historians will ask whether Campanella might have missed an opportunity to provide a fuller portrait of the role of the state in landscape transformation. A more fully theorized analysis of the role of the state would enable readers to better understand why it responded to the Katrina events in the way that it did in this precise historical conjuncture. 4
After all, Hurricane Katrina and the levee break led to massive flooding in a region home to more than two million people. The West Bank was spared the worst impacts of flooding, but greater New Orleans was devastated. As the city’s poor, black, and desperate residents attempted to escape over the bridge to Gretna in the West Bank, they were turned away by police as agents of state power. The state’s spectacular deployment of force to criminalize struggles for survival called up collective memories of racist violence. 5 In state- and mass-mediated narratives of the event, survivors were depicted as the source of chaos, lawlessness, and disorder. Campanella observes that the “‘Bridge to Gretna’ incident becomes [the] most-remembered West Bank-related news story of [the] Katrina era” (p. 307). One might add that it has been a story somewhat selectively remembered.
As both Blind Willie Johnson’s song “If I Had My Way I’d Tear the Building Down” and the Bridge to Gretna incident suggest, cultural struggles over the production of landscapes in the past are connected to political struggles in the present. The ongoing struggle over the meaning and memory of the Katrina era underscores the stakes in analyzing of landscape transformation in the early twentieth century. In this critical moment, Campanella’s important study demonstrates why the historical geography of the West Bank matters for the study of New Orleans. It should command the attention of scholars of race and class, geography, political economy, and urban history. It can be productively read alongside work on the role of port cities in the historical geography of global capitalism. 6 In the final analysis, Campanella’s study demonstrates how bringing the study of landscape transformation into the historical analysis of cities is essential to understanding the people and the place in the past and present.
Public policy and cultural politics played central roles in the historical processes that led to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as historian Andy Horowitz demonstrates in his award-winning Katrina. This well-researched and timely study shows that the “climate disaster” was less a “discrete event” and more part of “contingent processes,” ones which require historians to situate the event within a much longer urban and regional history (p. 3). Horowitz begins the story in 1915 to capture the complex causes of this climate disaster in public policies, economic transformation, and political and cultural struggles that stretch over an entire century in the region. He offers an historical explanation of the causes of the disaster, one that should compel a reckoning with its argument about how the disaster was made.
Drawing on a range of primary sources including government documents, oil company records, oral histories, and Census data, Horowitz carefully considers the policies that produced vulnerabilities to flooding and climate chaos in the Crescent City. In doing so, he traces the development of policies that led to the construction of flood vulnerability in New Orleans. Specifically, he locates them within a political project promoted by politicians, policy makers, and oil companies since the early twentieth century. The narrative of states’ rights provided white Southern Democrats like segregationist judge, multimillionaire politician, and oil developer Leander Perez justification for the promotion of their political and economic interests. This racist ideology proved critical to legitimating policies in “the service of owners and shareholders of Standard Oil, Freeport Sulphur, and other transnational corporate interests” (p. 22). Indeed, Horowitz impressively demonstrates the role of elites such as Perez in the construction of canals and levees that led to the sinking of the state of Louisiana well before Katrina, as well as the contradictory consequences of this political project. He provides essential historical context for understanding public policies that caused flood vulnerabilities in the early 2000s, that were, as Horowitz suggests, at least a “century in the making” (p. 47).
Katrina offers a distinct periodization of the Katrina era in New Orleans. Horowitz suggests how twentieth-century New Orleans was shaped by the same federal housing policies as other cities and “with similar geographical outcomes” (p. 70). His study joins a growing body of scholarship in tracing how the Federal Housing Administration’s polices since the 1930s led to the uneven development of the city, suburbs, and rural places throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. At the same time, Horowitz uniquely depicts how core political conflicts between efforts to expand the welfare state and attempts to privatize wealth led to policies promoting private housing construction in areas susceptible to flooding. These policy choices, he argues, challenge what has come to be a taken-for-granted narrative of race and class about Katrina. In particular, Horowitz suggests that racist opposition to African American struggles for access to resources within the welfare state led not “only to racial inequalities in wealth . . . but also to a weaker state in general,” which ultimately failed to “protect anyone who relied on it, regardless of race” (p. 73).
Yet this “regardless of race” narrative rests uneasily alongside the increasing polarization, structural unemployment, mass incarceration, and pervasive and persistent racial, gender, and class inequality that mark the Katrina era in New Orleans. The conscious dismantling of the welfare state emerged from a political project forged in the overthrow of Reconstruction, a racist project that has sustained increasingly central roles for militarism in the governance of U.S. capitalism. This “revanchist” project was revived in the counterrevolution against the long civil rights movement. 7 Indeed, as Horowitz’s evidence demonstrates, the Dixiecrat revolt led far-right forces in the region such as the White Citizen’s Councils to forge a “white consensus” against the civil rights movement and in service of more business-friendly public policies underpinning the region’s oil-dominated political economy in the post–World War II period (p. 51). The promotion of these policies enabled the dilapidation of levees, but, as Horowitz rightly suggests, this outcome was not inevitable. Rather, it was the product of a political philosophy promoted by elites such as Perez who combined an ideological attack on the welfare state with the opposition to taxes on the wealthy, as part of an overall strategy to expand monopoly control over oil reserves in the region. By 2005, Horowitz observes, Perez’s philosophy had become the reigning ideology among conservatives. To understand the routes of this political project, Horowitz argues for the importance of examining how “social arrangements before the flood and policy decisions after created possibilities for some and foreclosed them for others” (p. 114). These policy decisions, as he concludes, shaped a series of spectacular failures that the world witnessed in New Orleans after Katrina.
As part of an effort to provide a complex story about race, public policy, and climate disaster, Katrina suggests that governmental policies led to upper middle-class whites, working-class African Americans, and middle-class residents of different races to depend on the same “system of levees, floodwalls, drainage canals, and pumps” that failed in the wake of Katrina (p. 119). In doing so, Horowitz contends that racism and poverty are not only necessary categories of analysis for understanding Katrina’s uneven impacts, but also that they can be insufficient on their own as historical explanations of flood vulnerability and climate disaster in New Orleans. He particularly claims that “there are no straight lines that connect racism or poverty to flood depths,” and instead suggests that “while racism set the stage for whose homes flooded, it took a circuitous route to doing so” (p. 7).
Horowitz traces this “circuitous route” through federal housing policies going back to the Great Depression of the 1930s. He considers how federal subsidies not only enabled white residents to construct private homes on lower ground in the suburbs, but also how these homes came with the largely underappreciated increased flood risk. By contrast, he notes that black people who lived in public housing in the inner city ended up being spared from some of the deleterious impacts of the flood. He suggests that widespread flooding in the city’s predominantly Black Lower Ninth Ward, “offers an exception that proves the rule” (p. 8). In this analysis, people who lived in neighborhoods that experienced massive flooding were not there due to disadvantage but rather, as Horowitz argues, because they had been able to “take advantage of the government subsidies required to develop housing in low-lying parts of the region” (p. 8). This may have been the case for some middle-class residents. It is also worth noting that the city’s black, poor, and working-class public housing residents were not allowed to return to their barely damaged apartments after Katrina, which were enclosed with chain-linked fence, barbed wire, and steel plates. 8
Horowitz suggests that the most influential local, state, and federal policy responses to the disaster were not “reducible to market capture,” a critique of scholars and intellectuals who have located the roots of the disaster in racism and revanchist neoliberal policies (p. 147). He specifically challenges Naomi Klein’s interpretation of the disaster, arguing that her theory of “disaster capitalism” fails to explain the complicated causes and consequences of the Katrina-era policy-making. In particular, Horowitz suggests that Klein neglects the central role of government and state policy over a century, contending that the long history of colonialism and capitalism in the city make it difficult to determine shifts in policy in the wake of Katrina. In his judgment, the theory is premised on a mistaken idea of an “antediluvian before, when government operated as a benevolent social welfare apparatus” (p. 148). Yet we should be wary of conclusions too easily drawn.
It would be inaccurate to suggest that the theory of disaster capitalism fails to account for continuities or policy responses to the disaster. Klein’s work provides a compelling counterpoint to the dominant narrative of the event by situating what she calls “disaster apartheid” in New Orleans within a comparative history of the neoliberal project. Indeed, she notes Milton Friedman’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for the privatization of New Orleans’ schools “ended up being his last public policy recommendation,” which was ultimately successful. 9 In this way, the privatization of public education was one part of a larger neoliberal project that included the mass firing of the teaching staff in the city, thereby breaking the then-strongest labor union in Louisiana. The consequences of this neoliberal strategy of development are also evident in the deepening inequality, climate chaos, and “wageless life” in New Orleans. These policies have likewise contributed to the escalation of carceral state responses in a city with one of the largest jail incarceration rates in the country that incarcerates a higher proportion of its population than any other state in the world system. Rather than minimizing the role of racism and neoliberalism, the challenge for scholars is to locate the historically and geographically specific ways in which consent to coercive austerity policies has been secured through racism and nationalism. 10
After all, as Horowitz correctly suggests, the stakes in developing historical explanations of the forces producing flood vulnerability and climate disaster in New Orleans remain high. Katrina offers an important corrective to New Orleans exceptionalism. Horowitz provides significant insights about the causes of climate crisis that has already attracted a broad audience among urban historians. Katrina is also a timely contribution to debates about the growing climate crisis among scholars in environmental history, public policy, and Southern history. At the same time, if read alongside a burgeoning literature on the history of racism, capitalism, mass incarceration, and the carceral state, scholars will be better able to envision new solutions to the challenges of the twenty-first century city. 11
Since the publication of these two books on New Orleans in 2020, widespread social protest amid the COVID-19 pandemic have laid bare the inability of capitalism and the state to solve social problems or meet the demands of social justice movements. This article began with the suggestion that struggles over the memory of the overthrow of Reconstruction in the nineteenth century shaped struggles over the material conditions in New Orleans in the long twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Contemporary social justice movements have raised profound questions about transformation amid a crisis of capitalism and for U.S. hegemony at the global scale. In periods of “systemic chaos,” such as the present one, growing demands have emerged for systemic solutions to systemic problems. 12 In this decisive historical moment, these two books compel scholars to ask how we might confront not only the roots of public policy and landscape transformation but also, as social justice movements compel us, to tear the whole building down. Doing so, will require urban geographers and historians to develop understandings of the past adequate to the challenges of the present. 13