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 #2Tucson, Arizona 85721Phone: (520) 621-1652Fax: (520) 621-2889bmarks1@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.

1

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

2

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

3

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 petro-

populism 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

4

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.

5

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 ‘wages-

productivity’ 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

6

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

7

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

8

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

9

(Heleniak 2001). By 1933, the city had lost more than half of the foreign trade it enjoyed in 1928.

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

10

achieved such success by selling this program to Louisiana’s white masses with a vocabulary and

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

11

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-

12

sharing device (Weber 1988:46-50). This dependence upon the oil and gas industry for educational

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 2006:226-

7).

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

13

the primary source of funds to greatly expand the city’s public service infrastructure, and Longite

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

14

new social contract between residents of the city and their government.

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

15

doubled between the 1921-1922 school year and the 1935-1936 school year. However, facilities had

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

16

the state machine (Sindler 1956:118-120,126-128). Maestri's machine, which also controlled the

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

17

up very well in every hurricane that struck the city in coming decades. When built, they featured

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 African-

Americans 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

18

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).

19

Growth in state government was similarly expansive, especially under the first Earl Long

(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 ill-

prepared and slow to adapt to the growing dominance of consumer goods imports in U.S. international

20

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

21

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 cabinet-

level 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

22

initiatives like Total Community Action and Model Cities would play a significant role in not only

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

23

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,

24

especially for Orleans parish where mineral severance taxes hardly existed and sales taxes were

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

25

(Harvey 1989).

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

26

to tax its own resources to pay for essential services.

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

27

do better in providing basic human needs to all the people who make this city home.

28

References

Banta, Brady (1997) Passive regulation: Carbon black as a conservation issue in Louisiana during the 1920s. In Becnel, Thomas (editor) Agriculture and Economic Development in Louisiana, Volume XVI of The Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies. pp. 603-614.

Banta, Brady (2000) Money, resources, and gentlemen: Petroleum severance taxation, 1910-1925. In (editor) Matthew Schott, Louisiana politics and the paradoxes of reaction and reform, 1877-1928, Volume VII of The Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies. pp. 624-645.

Beard, Thomas (1969a) Introduction: An overview of the Louisiana Economy. In Beard, Thomas (editor) The Louisiana Economy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. pp. 3-18.

Beard, Thomas (1969b) Government revenues and expenditures in Louisiana. In Beard, Thomas (editor) The Louisiana Economy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. pp. 173-230.

Melton, Lee (1969) Some factors affecting the economic development of Louisiana. In Beard, Thomas (editor) The Louisiana Economy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. pp. 21-54.

Flammang, Robert (1969) Louisiana and the world economy. In Beard, Thomas (editor) The Louisiana Economy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. pp. 133-147.

Boulard, Garry (1998) Huey Long invades New Orleans. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company.

Brasseaux, Carl (2001) Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a People, 1803-1877. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Brecher, Jeremy (1984) Strike! Boston: South End Press.

Brenner, Neil and Nik Theodore (editors) (2002) Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban restructuring in Western Europe and North America. Oxford: Blackwell.

Brenner, Neil and Nik Theodore (2005) Neoliberalism and the urban condition. City 9(1):101-7.

Brenner, Neil, Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore (2010) Variegated neoliberalization: geographies, modalities, pathways. Global Networks 10(1):182-222.

Brinkley, Alan (1983) Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression. New York:Vintage Books.

Caffentzis, George (1992) The Work/Energy crisis and the Apocalypse. In Midnight Notes Collective (editors) Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-1992. Boston: Autonomedia. pp. 215-271. Available at: http://www.midnightnotes.org/pdfapoc16.pdf

Carpignano, Paolo (1975) U.S. Class Composition in the 1960's. Zerowork 1. Available at: http://libcom.org/library/us-class-composition-sixties-paolo-carpignano-zeroworkCoastal Wetland Forest Conservation and Use Science Working Group (2005) Conservation,

29

protection, and utilization of Louisiana’s coastal wetland forests. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University. Available at: http://www.coastalforestswg.lsu.edu/SWG_FinalReport.pdf

Colten, Craig (2005) An unnatural metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from nature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Couch, Jim and William Shughart II (1998) The political economy of the New Deal. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

Dalla Costa, Mariarosa and Giovanna Dalla Costa (editors) (1993) Paying the price: Women and the politics of international economic strategy. London: Zed.

Davis, Mike (1992) City of Quartz: Excavating the future in Los Angeles. New York: Vintage Books.

de Jong, Greta (2002) A different day: African American struggles for justice in rural Louisiana, 1900-1970. Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press.

Fairclough, Adam (1999) Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana 1915-1972, University of Georgia Press.

Field, Betty (2001). Louisiana and the Great Depression. In Haas, Edward (editor) The Age of the Longs: Louisiana 1928 – 1960, Volume Eight in the Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies.

Finegold, Kenneth and Theda Skocpol (1995) State and party in America’s New Deal. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Friedman, Milton (2005) The Promise of Vouchers. The Wall Street Journal, December 5th. A20.

Germany, Kent (2007) New Orleans After the Promises. Augusta: The University of Georgia Press.

Gonzalez-Perez, Margaret (2003) A House Divided: Public Housing Policy in New Orleans. Louisiana History 44(4):443-61.

Green, Elna C. (1999) Social Welfare in New Orleans, 1870s-1920s. In Elna Green (editor) Before the New Deal: Social Welfare in the South, 1830-1930. Athens: University of Georgia Press. p. 81.

Hall, P. and D. Soskice (editors) (2001) Varieties of capitalism: the institutional foundations of comparative advantage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harvey, David (1973) Social Justice and the City. London: Edward Arnold.

Harvey, David (1989) The Urban Experience. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Harvey, David (1989) The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Blackwell.

Harvey, David (2001) Spaces of capital: towards a critical geography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

30

Harvey, David (2005) A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Heleniak, Roman (2001) Local Reaction to the Great Depression in New Orleans, 1929 – 1933. In Haas, Edward (editor) The Age of the Longs: Louisiana 1928 – 1960, Volume Eight in the Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies.

Hirsch, Arnold (1992) Simply a matter of black and white: The transformation of race and politics in twentieth century New Orleans. In Arnold Hirsch and Joseph Longdon (editors) Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. pp. 288-319.

Hirsch, Arnold (2005) New Orleans: Sunbelt in the swamp. In Shepard, Jr., Samuel (editor) New Orleans and Urban Louisiana, Part C: 1920 to Present. Volume XIV of The Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History. Center for Louisiana Studies: Lafayette, Louisiana. pp. 508-537.

Housing Authority of New Orleans (1938) Housing Authority of New Orleans Annual Report 1937. Louisiana Collection, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans.

Housing Authority of New Orleans (1943) Housing Authority of New Orleans Annual Report 1942. Louisiana Collection, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans.

Housing Authority of New Orleans (1937) Housing Authority of New Orleans Annual Report 1946. Louisiana Collection, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans.

Housing Authority of New Orleans (1966) Housing Authority of New Orleans Annual Report 1965. Louisiana Collection, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans.

Housing Authority of New Orleans (1968) Housing Authority of New Orleans Annual Report 1967. Louisiana Collection, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans.

Housing Authority of New Orleans (1973) Housing Authority of New Orleans Annual Report 1972. Louisiana Collection, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans.

Judd, Richard (1989) Socialist cities: municipal politics and the grass roots of American socialism. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Kane, Harnett (1941) Louisiana hayride: The American rehearsal for dictatorship. 1928-1940. Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company.

Klein, Naomi (2007) The Shock Doctrine. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Kniffen, Fred and Sam Hilliard (1988) Louisiana: Its land and people. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Landphair, Juliette (2005) Sewerage, sidewalks, and schools: New Orleans Ninth Ward and Public School Desegregation. In Samuel Shepard, Jr. (editor) New Orleans and Urban Louisiana, Part C: 1920 to Present. Volume XIV of The Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History. Center for Louisiana Studies: Lafayette, Louisiana. pp. 349-370.

31

Leighninger, Robert D. (2007) Building Louisiana: The legacy of the Public Works Administration, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Leuchtenberg, William (1963) Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. New York: Harper Perrenial.

Lewis, Pierce F. (2003) New Orleans: the Making of an Urban Landscape. Santa Fe: Center for American Places.

Link, William (1992) The paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Logdson, Joseph and Donald DeVore (1991) Crescent City Schools. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies.

Louisiana Department of Natural Resources (2009a) Louisiana total crude oil and condensate production. Available at: http://dnr.louisiana.gov/sec/execdiv/techasmt/facts_figures/Table04.htm

Louisiana Department of Natural Resources (2009a) Louisiana total gas production, wet after lease separation. Available at: http://dnr.louisiana.gov/sec/execdiv/techasmt/facts_figures/Table12.htm

Mann, Susan (1990) Agrarian capitalism in theory and practice. Chapel Hill: The UniversityOf North Carolina Press.

McMain, Elenor (1905) Behind the yellow fever in Little Palermo: Housing conditions which New Orleans should shake itself free from along with the summer’s scourge. Charities, November 4th.

Midnight Notes Collective (1990) The New Enclosures. Jamaica Plain, MA: Midnight Notes. Available at: http://www.midnightnotes.org/newenclos.html

Moore, John (2001) The New Deal in Louisiana. In Haas, Edward (editor) The Age of the Longs: Louisiana 1928-1960, Volume VIII of the Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies.

New Orleans Public Schools (1922, 1924, 1934, 1936) Statistical Reports of the New Orleans Public Schools of the Parish of Orleans. Louisiana Collection, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans. Annual reports for school years 1921-1922, 27-28, 33-34 and 35-36.

Nore, Petter and Terisa Turner (editors) (1980) Oil and class struggle. London: Zed.

Parenti, Christian (2005) Hugo Chavez and Petro Populism. The Nation, April 11th.

Peck, Jamie (2001) Neoliberalizing states: thin policies/hard outcomes. Progress in Human Geography 25(3):445-55.

Peck, Jamie (2004) Geography and public policy: constructions of neoliberalism. Progress in Human Geography 28(3):392-405.

Peck, Jamie and Nik Theodore (2007) Variegated capitalism. Progress in Human Geography 31:731-

32

72.

Piliawsky, Monte (1985) The impact of black mayors on the black community: The case of New Orleans’ Ernest Morial. The Review of Black Political Economy 13:5-23.

p.m. (1984) Bolo bolo. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.

Quadagno, Jill and Steve MacDonald (2003) Racial Segregation in New Orleans Hospitals.In Green, Elna C. (editor) The New Deal and Beyond: Social Welfare in the South since 1930.Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Reed, Adolph Jr. (2006) Undone by Neoliberalism – New Orleans was decimated by an ideological program, not a storm. The Nation, September 18th. pp. 26-30.

Richardson, James (editor) (1988) Louisiana’s Fiscal Alternatives: Finding permanent solutions to recurring budget crises. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Ross, Michael (1999) The political economy of the resource curse. World Politics 51(2):297-322.

Rousseve, Charles (1937[1970]) The Negro in Louisiana; aspects of his history and his literature. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation. Originally published by Xavier University Press, New Orleans.

Salvaggio, John E. (1992) New Orleans’ Charity Hospital: A story of physicians, politics andpoverty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Schott, Matthew (2000) Progressives against democracy: Electoral reform in Louisiana, 1894-1921. In (editor) Matthew Schott, Louisiana politics and the paradoxes of reaction and reform, 1877-1928, Volume VII of The Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies. pp. 493-503.

Scott, Loren (1988) The structure of the Louisiana Economy. In Richardson, James (editor)Louisiana’s fiscal alternatives: Finding Permanent Solutions to Recurring Budget Crises.Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. pp. 9-26.

Sheldrake, John (1989) Municipal socialism. Altershot: Avebury.

Shulman, Bruce J. (1994) From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt. Durham: Duke University Press.

Sindler, Allan (1956) Huey Long’s Louisiana: State politics, 1920-1952. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.

Smith, Douglas (1988) The New Deal in the Urban South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Smith, Neil (1996) The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge.

Smith, Neil (2002) New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrificaiton as Global Urban Strategy. Antipode 34(3):427-50.

33

Thompson, Daniel and Barbara Thompson (1982) The black underclass: A continuing saga, Part I. Black Southerner 1:21-24.

U.S. Energy Information Administration (2009) Natural Gas Gross Withdrawals and Production yearly data. Available at: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/natural_gas/info_glance/natural_gas.html

Wall, Bennett, Light Cummins, Judith Schafer, Edward Haas, Michael Kurtz (1997) Louisiana: A History (3rd edition) Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc.

Weber, Robert (1988) Historical development of the Louisiana tax structure. In Richardson, James (editor) Louisiana’s Fiscal Alternatives: Finding permanent solutions to recurring budget crises. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. pp. 43-61.

Wiegmann, Fred (1969) Agriculture in the Louisiana economy. In Beard, Thomas (editor) The Louisiana Economy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. pp. 55-81.

Williams, T. Harry (1969) Huey Long. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Woodman, Harold (1997) Credit and labor relations in the Postbellum agricultural South. In Becnel, Thomas (editor) Agriculture and Economic Development in Louisiana, Volume XVIof The Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History. Lafayette: Center forLouisiana Studies. pp. 337-349.

Wright, Beverly (1989) New Orleans: A city that care forgot. In (editor) Robert Bullard In Search of the New South: The Black Urban Experience in the 1970s and 1980s. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. pp. 45-74.

34