Canned soup-as I gather from the advertisements-has its virtues, but New Orleans will have none of it. None other is its master in the art of political corruption, whose forms and patterns in New Orleans rival those of its tropical foliage none other has an electorate whose political apathy so closely verges upon complete paralysis.Īt the same time New Orleans, however much it is willing to turn its whited body over to politicians to do with it as hey will, and however eager it is to gulp canned ideas, insists upon making its soup at home. But only one other city-San Francisco-is its equal in cuisine. Other American cities have taller buildings than New Orleans, more people, greater bank deposits, a larger trade, and many more superior items of that miscellany known as 'progress.' It may even be granted-although this is a violent assumption and statistically insupportable-that other cities rival New Orleans in the beauty and beguiling charm of their women. A shabby tribute is paid the memory of long departed first families by naming shabby streets in their honor: Choctaw, Teche, Natchez, Opelousas, and Tchoupitoulas. And if gods do not stroll the streets of New Orleans, mortals walk the streets of the gods: Urania, Melpomene, Terpischore, Clio, and Thalia. The Catholic religion is enshrined in street signs reading Ascension, Nuns, Piety, Religious, Assumption, and Annunciation. Here we find France celebrated in streets called Dauphine, Toulouse, Bourbon, Burgundy, Ibervile, and Bienyule. ![]() Its fierceness is equaled only by that of a Congressman clinging to his prerogative of putting his relatives on the federal payroll. In New Orleans you walk streets whose names testify to the French origins of the city, to the domination of the Catholic faith, to the old Southern love of the classics and mythology, and to the American custom of commemorating with place names the aborigines whom the settlers were careful to exterminate. Patios bloom with the ponderous flowers of the banana plant, glow with the cream-white of camellias, sound with the silken softness of fountain waters while Andrew Jackson, liberator of the city from the English, charges perpetually forward bronze-mounted on a horse in the old Spanish parade ground, and the near-by Mississippi sweeps on to the Gulf of Mexico. Sacks of oysters stand on the sidewalk in front of the numerous oyster bars, where customers eat shellfish around the clock fruit sellers, vegetable venders, chimney sweeps, and prostitutes cry their wares and services unabashed nostril-quickening odors of coffee, sugar, molasses, and tropical fruits linger in the heavy, hot, damp atmosphere. Bells quiver on its air, cassocked priests and crisply starched nuns are familiar figures in its streets the doors of little shops are always open, as in the hot countries, so the life of the streets and that of the shops are one, and what is business elsewhere seems comic opera here. New Orleans is an easygoing, pleasure-loving, colorful, odoriferous, church-attending city whose dead are buried aboveground and whose politics is carried on underground. It is a city of pimps, prostitutes, and gamblers French-speaking grandes dames who wear the eighteenth century in their black lace shawls hoodooworking Negroes oyster-fishing Jugoslavians industrious Germans fiesta-loving Italians Spaniards, Greeks, Jews, Filipinos, Chinese and, on the extreme periphery, a large group of Anglo-Saxons who sometimes look strangely out of place in this least typically American of American cities. It is distinguished by superb cooking, a bad climate, excellent manners, some of the best and also some of the worst architecture in the land, good duck shooting within forty-five minutes ride of its main street, and a political corruption tropical in its rotten lushness. This city was founded by the French, embellished by the Spanish, fought for by the English, purchased by the Americans, and sold down the river by its own citizens. In any event, when you tear yourself away from New York and begin to see the United States, you must visit New Orleans. Local statisticians estimate that if no more is manufactured for five years there will still be enough home consumption and for export. ![]() ![]() When I wrote you last I was just leaving Natchez in my moss-grown car-accurately dubbed 'struggle-buggy' by my colored friends-for New Orleans, whose chamber of commerce calls it 'The City That Care Forgot.' At the moment there is an overproduction of care in the town. Deep Snow Plantation Ivanhoe, Mississippi
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