For New Orleans has been wicked for a long time.”Ĭhilds was certainly not the first journalist to offer a breathless exposé of the city’s robust underworld. “What was really remarkable,” Childs wrote, “was that anyone should, at this late date, even professedly for the purposes of making political capital, become aroused over the wickedness of the city at the end of the river. In the end, everyone, including Childs, conceded that the scandal-mongering hearings were a sideshow, nothing more than an attempt on Huey’s part to swing voters toward his purportedly more upright slate of candidates just days before an election. Long, Richard White describes how Long began each radio broadcast by promising to clean up gambling, to end graft paid to city officials, and to “stamp out prostitution,” noting that “the red light district has expanded to the point of national disgrace.” Though Long refused to admit journalists, or the lawyers of those he questioned, into his hearings, he did have the proceedings broadcast on radio stations under his sway. Long ensconced himself in the Canal Bank Building, where he summoned and questioned numerous witnesses about the city’s toleration of, if not outright support for, many kinds of vice, especially prostitution and gambling. Long roared into town, surrounded by armed bodyguards, accompanied by hundreds of the state’s National Guard troops, and animated by politically motivated outrage about allegedly widespread vice in New Orleans.

The particulars of the city’s allegedly sordid present had been brought to light two months earlier, when Senator Huey P.

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