Louisiana treasures
Exhibit commemorates state’s bicentennial year
NEW ORLEANS — The words blare their message in headline type, which only revealed that the women of New Orleans were getting to Gen. Benjamin Butler.
He headed the Union troops that captured then occupied the city in 1862, and its residents were not happy. Especially the city’s ladies of society, who demonstrated nothing but defiant disdain for what they considered barbaric soldiers from the North.
These women thought themselves immune to retribution and took every opportunity to insult and ridicule Union officers and soldiers, which exasperated Butler.
So, he decided to remedy the situation by issuing General Order No. 28, which is displayed among 49 other items in The Historic New Orleans Collection’s exhibit The 18th Star: Treasures of 200 Years of Louisiana Statehood.
The exhibit commemorates Louisiana’s bicentennial year of 2012 and will run through Sunday, Jan. 29, in the collection’s Williams Gallery at 533 Royal St. in New Orleans.
“We’ve chosen items from our collection that represent all areas of the state,” John H. Lawrence said.
He’s director of museum programs, and he and other key museum officials involved all members of the museum staff in choosing items for this show. The process was a difficult one, whittling the collection’s thousands of items into a representative 50 to reflect the state’s 200 years of history.
Historical documentation is always important, but quirky and extraordinary items do just as good a job — and sometimes even better — in telling the state’s story.
And the poster demanding attention with its headline of “INFAMOUS!” in capital letters, is an illustration of one of Louisiana’s notorious quirks. It tells the story of staying true to self and identity in the face of an intruder’s forced entry.
The women of New Orleans knew they were powerless in the grasp of its current occupant. Or were they?
The poster’s text outlines Butler’s decree:
“As the OFFICERS and SOLDIERS of the UNITED STATES have been subjected to the REPEATED INSULTS from the WOMEN, calling themselves ‘LADIES,’ of NEW ORLEANS, in return for the scrupulous NON-INTERFERENCE and COURTESY on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any OFFICER or PRIVATE of the UNITED STATES she shall be regarded and held liable to be TREATED as A WOMAN OF THE TOWN PLYING HER VOCATION.”
It ends with “By command of Maj. Gen. BUTLER.”
In this day when capitalized words in emails, social media and text messaging indicate that the writer is yelling, it would appear that Butler was raising his voice quite a bit in this order.
And it raises a question — who was the one really whining here? It certainly wasn’t the New Orleans women, who seemingly refused to be broken by their Union visitors.
In fact, that seems to be an unintentional running theme throughout this show. That is, the part about Louisianians refusing to succumb to a broken spirit. The whining part will be left to Butler.
That’s not to say there are things in the state that haven’t been broken from time to time. The shovel on the left when entering the exhibit was used to break ground in New Orleans in 1971, the same ground where, most recently, Drew Brees led the New Orleans Saints to a victory over the Detroit Lions on Jan. 7. The same ground on which the Mercedes-Benz Superdome stands.
Speaking of which, the LSU Tiger Marching Band was at that Saints game in the Dome, as well as the BCS Championship game two nights later. Which is a significant tidbit of information, because the band is well-represented in this exhibit, too.
“We have a copy of the original sheet music for ‘Touchdown for LSU,’” Erin Greenwald said.
She’s an associate curator and historian at the collection, and she’s right. There on the wall with cover sheet of purple and gold is “Touchdown for LSU,” by co-songwriters Huey Pierce Long and Castro Carazo.
Historians have documented the Louisiana governor’s association with Carazo, who was the swing band leader in the Blue Room in New Orleans’ Roosevelt Hotel. Long handpicked Carazo to be director of the Tiger Band, and the two collaborated in writing the school’s fight songs, which the band continues to play today.
Football fans immediately will recognize “Touchdown for LSU” as the fast tempo song that follows the “Tiger Rag” stadium salute in the band’s pre-game show.
Still, the sheet music symbolizes more than the band or even the football team. It represents Long’s legacy concerning LSU, how he threw himself into building up the university and all that was associated with it.
You simply can’t tell the story of Louisiana’s 200 years without a chapter on Gov. Huey P. Long, just as you can’t talk about the state without mentioning its music, its food, Mardi Gras and even its natural disasters.
Again, history is documented in different ways throughout this gallery, beginning with a manuscript copy of the first Louisiana State Constitution. The document was handwritten in French, dated Jan. 22, 1812.
And though settlers already inhabited the territory, this is the paper on which the foundation of a state was built.
Visitors will have to pull back a large piece of canvas attached to the glass exhibition case to see the constitution.
“We had to do this to protect it from the light,” Lawrence said.
Near the exhibition case is an odd piece known as the Zimmerstutzen rifle, manufactured in 1850s New Orleans by French native Jean-Baptiste Revol.
“The gun was a parlor rifle,” Greenwald said. “This rifle was used for inside target practice.”
The firearm essentially is a small-bore, light-caliber target rifle with a low muzzle velocity. It’s equipped with short, rifled barrels which fire small, spherical lead balls.
Revol worked in New Orleans as a gunsmith from around 1850 until his death in 1886. His last business and residential address was 400 Chartres St., which now is owned by The Historic New Orleans Collection.
Then there are the stark reminders of nature’s relationship with the state, which, many times, can be quite brutal.
A 1927 photoprint of livestock stranded atop a levee during the great flood of 1927 is a reminder of what happens when the state’s vast natural resources go awry. A photo of oil-covered pelicans along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast is another commentary on that subject.
Both photos are surreal in their own way with animals desperately doing what they can to survive. The pelican photo illustrates destruction caused by the BP oil spill in April 2010, and still another artifact — a 12-ounce can of drinking water — is a reminder of the hurricanes that have ravaged the state.
Still, this can of water symbolizes a specific storm. Anhueser-Busch, Inc. distributed the water to survivors throughout New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
But again, New Orleans isn’t the only area represented in this show. Northwest Louisiana’s news is told by the front page of the Natchitoches Times published on May 28, 1864. The newspaper is still published, but not as it’s seen here — on the back of a piece of wallpaper.
The collection has reproduced the wallpaper and placed it next to the front page so visitors can see it. It’s pretty, but the message is clear.
The year 1864 was still wartime in Louisiana. Union Gen. Nathaniel Banks was marching his troops through the central and northwest parts of the state on what was called the Red River Campaign.
The campaign proved to be a disaster for the Union, but the point here was that paper was scarce in wartime, so the Natchitoches Times used what it could, which, in this case, was wallpaper.
Meanwhile, Alfred R. Waud’s 1866 drawing “Washing Day in Acadia on the Bayou Lafourche, Louisiana” is representative of south Louisiana.
A first edition copy of Lafcadio Hearn’s 1885 cookbook La Cuisine Creole generates discussion of Louisiana’s reputation of good food, and a 1917 Columbia 78 rpm of the Original Dixieland Jass Band playing “Livery Stable Blues” also is here.
“Jass Band One-Step” is on the flip side of that record. The band was a five-piece, white ensemble led by trumpeter James “Nick” LaRocca. This record was the first-ever recording of jazz music.
The band, by the way, later corrected the spelling of its name from jass to jazz. LaRocca would become a legend in jazz circles, and it’s said that a young musician named Louis Armstrong bought a copy and listened to it over and over.
Of course, Armstrong became a legend in his own right.
Then there’s the quirky stuff, beginning with a bottle of Hadacol, a patent medicine concocted by Louisiana state senator and unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate Dudley LeBlanc. LeBlanc also was a champion of Acadian culture.
And Hadacol, the collection’s exhibit catalog explains, “is an acronym for the Happy Day Company (later LeBlanc Laboratories) with the owner’s name providing the final ‘l.’ A combination of vitamins — notably B1 and B2 — and minerals with 12 percent alcohol, Hadacol initially was mixed in a barrel in LeBlanc’s barn.”
Hadacol’s popularity skyrocketed with the boost of an aggressive advertising campaign, so much so that it even attracted the attention of Hollywood celebrities. But it also attracted the scrutiny of the American Medical Association and the Federal Trade Commission.
LeBlanc sold the company to a New York syndicate in 1951, which realized too late that Hadacol was burdened with financial woes.
The company finally retired the product in 1968.
And speaking of quirky, also to be seen here is a copy of the Blue Book. Now, this is nowhere near the kind of blue books used by college students when taking essay tests.
No, New Orleans’ version of the Blue Book was totally different, a price listing of the wares sold in Storyville, the city’s redlight district from 1897 to 1917.
“The district was named for Alderman Sidney Story, who sponsored legislation to confine prostitution to one designated area of the city,” the collection’s catalog states. “Storyville was not in the French Quarter but occupied the area now home to the Iberville public housing project.”
Visitors can get an idea of Storyville’s location by standing on the edge of the quarter and looking toward Rampart and Basin streets. It was Basin Street where the books were sold to men as they got off the train.
The copy in this exhibit is considered to be the last edition issued. And, of course, it refers to women who were really in this line of work, unlike those against which Gen. Butler railed.
Yes, he made his threats on his posters, but what results did those posters really generate?
These days, that answer is simple — instant smiles as visitors enter The Historic New Orleans Collection’s Williams Gallery.
And even a commemorative pat on the back coupled with a modern “you go girl” for making a grown general whine.
Only in Louisiana.