Malaise and Miasms

In 1919, with Prohibition upon him, Tom Anderson, the ever-appositized “Mayor” of Storyville, saw the imminent decline of that once-profitable urban neighborhood and diverted his saloon earnings into oil, organizing Protection Oil Company, and later Liberty Oil, which he sold to Standard Oil. ¹ As with Standard Oil of New Jersey, which established the subsidiary Standard Oil (Louisiana) in 1909, Anderson was awake at the dawn of Hydrocarbon Man. In 1948, Standard Oil paid documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty to tell the story of their growing presence in Louisiana. Flaherty’s lyric Louisiana Story follows a Cajun boy and his pet raccoon at play in the bayou country where they live and in which, by the way, some men are also drilling an oil well. ² The boy can pull his pirogue up to the platform of the drilling operation and get a full tour of the machine in the swamp, finding less threat there than from the alligator that eats his raccoon. After the drilling is finished and the men wave themselves away, very little visible artifice remains to disturb nature’s bounty, beauty, mystery, and charming human inhabitants in south Louisiana’s wetlands. At mid-twentieth century, Flaherty retells as a regional story the urban creation myth New Orleanians told themselves, from their beginnings into the nineteenth century, about their relationship to the Mississippi River: “‘Nature,’ through its agent, the river, favored the city and would nurture it.” ³