Bulletin of the History of Medicine

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For scholars, suicide represents a remarkable cipher, particularly by comparison with other causes of death. Because suicidal individuals choose to take their own lives, their decisions, often explained in suicide notes, provide clues about how people respond to social, cultural, economic, and mental health challenges.¹⁵ By contrast, accident and disease victims exercise no such volition or control over their deaths. Nor do homicide victims select the moment and method for ending their lives.

Suicide victims frequently revealed their motivations, at least as they understood them. Many left suicide notes in which they disclosed the aspects of their lives they particularly valued and could not endure losing.¹⁶ [End Page 56] Other suicide victims explained their actions in deathbed declarations or discussed their suicidal ideations with friends, spouses, and sometimes strangers. Joseph Heydan, a fifty-four-year-old ship captain, for instance, divulged his intentions to a hotel maid. As she tidied his room on November 17, 1937, Heydan announced that he planned to “see the shrimp” and was “going to jump in the river” and “kill himself.” Moments later, Heydan left the Rex Hotel, marched to the Mississippi River, and drowned himself.¹⁷

Finally, perhaps because of a voyeuristic streak among residents of the city of Mardi Gras and Storyville, local newspapers covered suicides in raw, unflinching detail. They routinely published suicide notes, and editors frequently assigned reporters to write follow-up articles. These journalists probed and pried, interviewing relatives, friends, and police detectives, who investigated suicides to eliminate “homicide” as the cause of death. Between 1920 and 1940, the newspapers provided accounts for over 90 percent of suicides. Some were brief and perfunctory, though most overflowed with detail, including revelations from surviving spouses, reactions from grieving children, and unvarnished descriptions of self-inflicted injuries.

Thus, diverse sources, ranging from autopsy reports to suicide notes and containing private perspectives and explanations, have survived for suicide cases in interwar New Orleans, though this material is far from uncomplicated, since overwhelming emotions shaped these revelations. Extant documentation focuses on completed suicides, even though more New Orleanians attempted suicide than committed suicide. Twenty-first-century researchers estimate that, for every suicide, at least twenty people attempt to take own lives.¹⁸ Because nonfatal attempts were seldom documented, it is impossible to calculate the ratio of completed suicides for early twentieth-century New Orleans, but most suicide attempts then also failed.

The method often determined the lethality of the attempt, with guns yielding the most deadly outcomes and poison the least. Modern studies [End Page 57] provide suggestive evidence. Scholars analyzing recent data report that over 90 percent of suicides attempted with firearms are lethal, compared with 2 percent of those using poison.¹⁹ Early twentieth-century experts identified a similar pattern but lacked the evidence to quantify the disparity.²⁰ Newspaper accounts of poison-induced suicides, however, sometimes indicated that the lethal act followed two or three ineffectual ones. Twenty-two-year-old Frances Rice, for example, committed suicide in 1929 on her fourth attempt.²¹ As a consequence of these factors, the deaths that the coroner attributed to suicide were not representative of the New Orleanians who attempted suicide.

Furthermore, the surviving documentation can be misleading. Relatives sometimes concealed information or dissembled, motivated by shame or guilt to insist that the gun fired in the victim’s mouth must have somehow discharged accidentally.²² An early twenty-first-century study estimated that nearly half of relatives “lie” about the cause of death in suicides, and researchers a century ago expressed similar concerns.²³

Nor did autopsies always yield definitive conclusions. In the overwhelming majority of cases, coroners reached incontrovertible determinations of the cause of death. Powder burns surrounding an entry wound to the temple, a revolver next to the body, and a suicide note, for example, constituted unmistakable evidence. Similarly, parish coroners considered it inconceivable that an adult could accidentally consume large quantities of “Rough-on-Rats,” an arsenic-based rodent poison.²⁴ But early twentieth-century physicians struggled to determine if individuals who drowned or fell from balconies did so intentionally, though these cases were rare.

Even suicide notes could be misleading. Victims occasionally used these documents to express grievances and exact postmortem revenge on unfaithful spouses or meddlesome relatives. Most often, however, suicide notes were heartfelt and unguarded, but they identified only the [End Page 58] proximate cause—the proverbial last straw—and overlooked distal or underlying pressures that contributed to suicidal ideation.²⁵

Despite these issues, forensic evidence, deathbed declarations, revelations to spouses, and especially suicide notes typically identified the triggers or stressors that prompted early twentieth-century New Orleanians to take their own lives, making suicide data a rich source for exposing the fears that tormented these victims. Thus, suicide records provide insights into the private, ordinarily hidden dimensions of the social and cultural history of the era.²⁶

New Orleans offers a surprisingly good setting for such an analysis. Most important, a broad range of sources have survived, including annual public health reports that provide detailed aggregate-level data and a nearly complete run of autopsy reports. The latter documents not only contain demographic information but also identify each suicide victim, making it possible to trace cases through local newspapers, census records, and police files.²⁷

It would be easy to dismiss local suicide trends as the product of a unique social and cultural climate. Aggregate data on rates, methods, race, and sex, however, reveal that suicide in interwar New Orleans mirrored national trends. Moreover, both the quantitative and the qualitative patterns of local suicides aligned with those documented by sociologists and statisticians examining other early twentieth-century urban centers. In short, for all of New Orleans’s cultural eccentricities, ranging from its fluid racial lines to its raucous Mardi Gras celebrations, the city’s suicides were typical for the era.

Undergirded by a quantitative analysis of 1,394 suicide cases, this essay blends four perspectives.²⁸ First, it charts changing rates. Second, the essay [End Page 59] examines the patterns revealed in a quantitative analysis of case-level data culled from individual autopsy reports, newspaper reports, and census information. Third, it connects this statistical foundation with the private, intimate perspectives revealed in more than one hundred suicide notes and related sources, such as deathbed declarations. Finally, it interweaves these quantitative and qualitative dimensions of New Orleans suicide with the wider social and economic currents of the interwar period.

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Early twentieth-century statisticians dubbed suicide victims a “motley crew,” explaining that their “only common characteristic lies in the fact that they die by their own hand.”²⁹ New Orleanians who killed themselves fit this description and hailed from a wide range of backgrounds; suicide claimed rich and poor, young and old, male and female, and African American and white residents. Despite this heterogeneity, the victims were concentrated in particular segments of the local population. Men, for example, killed themselves at 3.6 times the rate of women, though women attempted suicide more frequently.³⁰ Although both young and old residents took their own lives, the mean age was 42.7 years and almost two-thirds of victims were between twenty and forty-nine. On average, women who committed suicide were eight years younger than men, and the older the victim, the higher the proportion of men; 67.1 percent of victims in their twenties were men, and the proportion mushroomed to 85.3 percent for those in their fifties and to 92.4 percent in their sixties. Early sociologists found the same trends in Boston, Minneapolis, Chicago, and nationally, reflecting, they concluded, the ways in which gender roles imposed greater stress at particular life cycle stages.³¹ Young women confronted especially formidable expectations to establish “satisfying and [End Page 60] secure married” lives, whereas men shouldered greater burdens later in life as their careers unfolded—or unraveled.³²

Unlike homicide and most diseases, suicide claimed more wealthy New Orleanians than poor residents and more whites than African Americans. Those from households headed by unskilled workers composed 23.1 percent of victims, whereas 33.2 percent came from white-collar families. Early twentieth-century experts found the same pattern across the nation.³³ The racial distribution of suicide victims puzzled contemporaries.³⁴ African Americans composed 28.4 percent of the city’s population but only 10.9 percent of suicide victims. By comparison, they made up 70.5 percent of homicide victims and succumbed to disease at twice the rate of whites.³⁵

More than any other lethal method, New Orleanians shot themselves. Guns accounted for 47.8 percent of suicides, twice the proportion of poisonings, the second most common method. But the decision to use a firearm varied by sex, race, and class. Men relied on guns at more than triple the rate of women. Cultural factors contributed to this disparity and the resulting differential in suicide rates, for men more often possessed guns, sometimes because they hunted but mainly because firearms connoted masculine authority. Reinforcing the lethality of this suicide method, 78.7 percent of gun users shot themselves in the head. As a consequence, half died at home, succumbing before medical help arrived. By contrast, only one-sixth of those who committed suicide by ingesting poison died at their residences. Suicide attempters who lived long enough to receive medical attention more often survived. Gender differences even affected how suicidal New Orleanians aimed their firearms. Gunshot wounds to the head nearly always produced catastrophic injuries, and men fired into their temples or mouths in 81.2 percent of firearm suicides, compared with 57.1 percent for women, who often shot themselves in the abdomen.

Race also influenced the method of suicide and the lethality of attempts. Half of white victims relied on firearms, while 32.1 percent of African American victims shot themselves. The latter group employed knives three times more often than white New Orleanians. Economic and [End Page 61] cultural factors contributed to this gap. Handguns could be purchased for modest sums in Canal Street pawnshops, but the poorest residents, most of whom were African American, often lacked the three to five dollars necessary to procure a secondhand pistol.³⁶ Equally important, according to contemporary observers, for African American men, knives and knife fighting demonstrated masculine dominance.³⁷ African American women routinely carried knives as well, for practical purposes, such as cooking, but also for self-defense.³⁸ Therefore, when these residents opted to take their own lives, they had cutting instruments readily available, though such a choice produced fewer fatalities than pistols.

Gun use also varied by class. The wealthier the suicide victim, the higher the proportion of shootings. Between 1920 and 1940, 62.2 percent of the merchants who killed themselves relied on guns, compared with 52.5 percent of salesmen and 44.2 percent of unskilled workers. Simply put, the greater lethality of firearms contributed to the disproportionate concentration of suicide victims among wealthy New Orleanians, white residents, and men—especially among wealthy white men.³⁹

The ingestion of toxic substances accounted for 23.5 percent of deaths. In any pharmacy, New Orleanians could purchase toxins, particularly rodent poisons and household antiseptics. Women overwhelmingly used poisons, and this method most often proved unsuccessful, helping to explain why men attempted suicide less frequently but committed suicide at nearly four times the rate of women.⁴⁰ Half of female victims, though only 15.3 percent of male victims, poisoned themselves.

Drowning, cutting, hanging, and jumping from buildings claimed most of the remaining 29.6 percent of New Orleans suicides, with each accounting for a roughly equal proportion of deaths. The poorest men tended to [End Page 62] employ these methods. To the consternation of attempters, longshoremen frequently rescued residents who tried to drown themselves, and friends and relatives usually interceded before slashed wrists produced exsangui-nation. Hanging and jumping from roofs promised high lethality rates but also considerable pain, making them unappealing options.

A wide range of stressors fueled suicide in interwar New Orleans. Although some victims attributed their acts of self-destruction to “nervous diseases” or other mental health challenges, such disorders usually operated beneath the surface, and suicidal individuals identified more concrete, external causes. Many blamed chronic problems, while others emphasized specific events and acted impulsively. Modern research indicates that nearly a quarter of suicide attempters “took less than five minutes between the decision to kill themselves and the actual suicide attempt, and 70 percent took less than one hour.”⁴¹ Many interwar New Orleanians also acted impulsively, responding to news about illnesses, financial losses, or unfaithful spouses by grabbing revolvers from mantels and shooting themselves.

More than any other single stressor, health problems, according to suicide notes and other sources, led early twentieth-century New Orleanians to take their own lives. In 47.3 percent of suicides, physical or emotional struggles prompted the act of self-destruction. A roughly equal proportion of men—47.1 percent—and women—49.1 percent—attributed their actions to unendurable illness. Most had struggled for years with degenerative, seemingly incurable, health problems, and suicide notes described the resulting despair. The victims admitted that they could neither bear the pain any longer nor contemplate the prospect of continuing agony. “I have suffered for 11 years. Can stand it no longer,” one New Orleanian wrote.⁴² Likewise, Walter Jansen’s suicide note read, “Cannot stand the pain any longer.” The fifty-three-year-old fisherman slashed his right wrist with a razor and drove an ice pick into his chest.⁴³ Early twentieth-century researchers also found health problems to be the “predominating motive.”⁴⁴

Some New Orleanians committed suicide immediately after receiving their prognoses. William Victor, a fifty-year-old financier, for example, wrote in his suicide note that “the doctor told me today that I could not hope to get well.” As soon as he returned home from his appointment, [End Page 63] Victor drafted a suicide note and shot himself in the mouth.⁴⁵ Similarly, James Vinet, a fifty-seven-year-old railroad paymaster and the widowed father of nine children, left the Touro Infirmary, where he was been treated for a stomach ailment, dashed home, and “fired a shotgun charge into his mouth,” obliterating “practically [his] entire forehead.”⁴⁶

More often, the cumulative weight of prolonged illness drove residents to seek death and an end to their suffering. Plagued by violent headaches for months, Fabian Borie, a forty-two-year-old attorney, wrote, “I could not continue living like this, and [would] rather be dead.”⁴⁷ Suicide victims frequently conceded that the emotional weight of long-term illness and the knowledge (or at least the belief) that they would never be free from pain led them to choose death. Justus Goodson admitted that “I’m tired of living and being sick,” while forty-year-old Ulysses Walker’s suicide note, scrawled on an Easter postcard, stated, “Since I lost my health, I cannot go on living.”⁴⁸ Suicide promised relief.

Men driven to suicide because of failing health often expressed a particular fear of becoming a “burden” to their families. Their suicide notes indicated that sickness would render them useless as providers, make them dependent on their wives or children, rob them of their occupation-based status, and hence brand them as failures as men. Affluent men, who especially defined their masculinity in terms of wealth and control, suffered from illness less than poor New Orleanians but more often committed suicide because of failing health. Between 1920 and 1940, 41.1 percent of unskilled men who killed themselves attributed their acts to health problems. Among local merchants, 61.9 percent blamed sickness, and 83.3 percent of the physicians and attorneys who took their own lives identified illness as the precipitating factor. Many who worried about becoming burdens feared that they would go blind and become helpless and dependent. Peterson Hamilton, a forty-eight-year-old insurance agent, had endured failing eyesight for three years when he committed suicide. “I am slowly going blind,” he wrote in a suicide note to his wife. “I will not be a burden to anyone so I will go out this way.”⁴⁹ Men’s notions of masculinity shaped their reactions to health crises. [End Page 64]

In suicides attributed to “illness,” women were twice as likely to identify emotional difficulties as the principal stressor. Especially in comments to relatives and friends, they blamed “mental disorders,” “nervousness,” or “anxiety.”⁵⁰ New Orleanians defined and responded to health problems in gendered ways, producing distinctive suicide trends. Contemporary sociologists studying other cities found comparable patterns.⁵¹

Marital discord constituted the second leading motivation, accounting for 17.1 percent of suicides. As with the choice of methods, patterns varied with class, age, race, and gender. Working-class residents killed themselves because of failing marriages at more than twice the proportion of businessmen, doctors, and lawyers.⁵² Such suicides disproportionately occurred among relatively young adults. The mean age was 35.2: 38.9 for men and 29 for women. Spousal conflict generated a particularly high proportion of African American suicides, accounting for 41.2 percent of their suicides but only 15.3 percent of white suicides. In part, this disparity reflected the cumulative impact of poverty, uneven sex ratios, and searing discrimination on African American family formation in the age of Jim Crow.⁵³

The morphology of these suicides varied along gender lines. For men, a specific event, particularly the dissolution of marital unions initiated by their wives, usually ignited the violence. In most cases, a woman left a crumbling marriage, and her husband, enraged that she had usurped his patriarchal authority and exerted control over the fate of the household, immediately responded, nearly always with a gun. Again and again, men tracked down their estranged wives, demanded that they return, and committed suicide when the women refused. In almost half of these cases, however, the husband first murdered his spouse. The men typically anticipated such an outcome, for they drafted suicide notes and purchased weapons just before the deadly confrontations.

When domestic problems led women to take their own lives, they rarely acted in response to a specific event and seldom killed their partners, committing murder-suicide in only one-eighth of such cases. Rather, according to their suicide notes, years of suffering in toxic marriages drove them to choose death. Thirty-seven-year-old Bessie Blass, for example, wrote that she had “sought to make [her home] a haven of love, peace, and happiness.” [End Page 65] But George Blass, a forty-four-year-old clerk, had made her life “an intolerable purgatory.” Her suicide note explained that “my dearest wish was to make a success of my married life. I wanted peace, love and happiness in the home. I prayed, strived, suffered and endured for it. But my husband wanted to hang out in dirty barrooms . . . I can’t endure it any longer.” Blass signed the note “A Heartbroken Wife.”⁵⁴ Most of the women who killed themselves as a consequence of poisonous marriages attributed their suicides to such emotional pain.

Smaller numbers of New Orleanians took their own lives because they struggled with grief, unemployment, and financial setbacks. One-eleventh of victims committed suicide out of despair from losing a loved one, typically a longtime spouse. These acts of self-destruction usually occurred among relatively wealthy, middle-aged, white women. Joblessness sparked an additional 6.6 percent of local suicides. The rate for men, nearly always white men, was nine times the figure for women, and most of the victims had toiled in unskilled positions. Unemployment frequently interacted with health issues, as physical infirmities caused poor white men to lose their jobs, a twofold assault on their dignity and status as white men.⁵⁵ African American men, more vulnerable to bouts of unemployment but also possessing better strategies for surviving poverty, had far lower rates of suicide as a result of joblessness.

Financial reverses, of the sort that haunted Stricker Coles, accounted for 4.9 percent of suicides. In nearly three-fourths of such cases, the victims were men and nearly always wealthy men. For poorer New Orleanians, economic status hinged on jobs more than investments. Thus, “financial misfortunes” triggered one-fiftieth of suicides by unskilled white men but one-fifth of those committed by white merchants. Prominent men who either lost their class privilege or feared downward mobility frequently blamed themselves. Unable to bear the ignominy of failure, they chose death.⁵⁶

In some ways, the core characteristics of suicide remained constant during the turbulent interwar era. From the flush times of the 1920s through the lean years of the 1930s, from the explosive population growth of the earlier decade through the relative demographic stagnation of the later [End Page 66] decade, and despite the rise and fall of Prohibition, the basic demography of suicide changed little. During the five-year periods between 1920 and 1940, for example, the proportion of white suicide victims ranged from a low of 87.3 percent to a high of 90 percent, and gender disparities barely fluctuated. Similarly, health problems constituted the leading single trigger in every year, and guns provided the leading method in all but one year.

Such continuity, however, masked volatile shifts in suicide triggered by the collision between personal expectations and changing material conditions. The rate of self-destruction varied dramatically, even as the profile of victims remained relatively constant. During the 1920s the local suicide rate nearly doubled and then dropped by half during the 1930s. Three distinct trends unfolded between 1920 and 1940, exposing the ways in which powerful social forces wracked and roiled the inner worlds of New Orleanians.

First, during the 1920s suicide shifted in patterns that contradicted the conventional wisdom on the topic. Despite the overwhelming consensus among experts for over a century, suicide did not plunge during the economic boom of the 1920s. Rather than moving in countercyclical fashion, New Orleans suicide rates climbed by 49.5 percent between 1920 and 1929, mirroring the national pattern.⁵⁷ The U.S. urban rate jumped by 52.1 percent, while the rate for the country rose by 36.3 percent.⁵⁸

Because white men committed most New Orleans suicides, shifts in the rate at which they killed themselves accounted for the lion’s share of the variance. During the 1920s, white men made up 26 percent of the local population but two-thirds of suicide victims, and their rates swelled by 45.8 percent. Across the nation, it increased by 46.1 percent.⁵⁹

For white women, the trend was more complicated and shifted independent of economic conditions. Between 1920 and 1926, their suicide rate more than doubled, propelled by a nearly threefold increase in the proportion of residents who killed themselves because of marital turmoil. With the rapid population growth of the early 1920s, and the resulting unbalanced sex ratios and overcrowding, this proved to be a turbulent period for New Orleans families, generating all manner of domestic [End Page 67] violence.⁶⁰ The white spousal homicide rate, for example, mushroomed during this span, rising by 542.9 percent between 1920 and 1926. During the closing years of the decade, the white female suicide, homicide, and spousal homicide rates dipped, indicating that market conditions did not determine suicide trends for this segments of the city’s population.

The African American suicide rate climbed faster but also was not directly the product of economic forces. Between 1920 and 1929, it quintupled. During the height of the Great Migration, rapid shifts in sex ratios and the age structure of the city’s population, in combination with poverty and blistering discrimination, disrupted family life and resulted in African Americans committing suicide because of marital problems at four times the proportion of white New Orleanians.⁶¹ Thus, the steep increase in suicide during flush times occurred for diverse reasons, crossed racial lines, and erupted among the poorest and the wealthiest residents.

Health difficulties triggered an unusually high proportion of New Orleans suicides during the 1920s, particularly during the first half of the decade. Illness accounted for nearly two-thirds of suicides during the early 1920s and 58.5 percent for the decade. This surge coincided with a rise in overall death rates, including a 77.6 percent increase in the death rate from cardiovascular disease. The relationship between suicides sparked by sickness and mortality trends, however, was indirect. Pneumonia, heart disease, tuberculosis, and cancer were the leading local killers, yet few of the residents who took their own lives because of health problems suffered from these ailments. Rather, they struggled with debilitating conditions, such as recurring stomach ailments or vision loss, and their suicide notes rarely mentioned death from disease. Instead, unabating feelings of helplessness, despair, and especially burdensomeness fueled their despondence. As William Victor wrote seconds before shooting himself, “in death we die but once,” but “in life we die many times.”⁶²

Similarly, the segments of the city’s population with the highest mortality rates had modest proportions of illness-triggered suicides, while residents who experienced lower death rates more often killed themselves because of poor health. During the 1920s, 42.9 percent of African American New Orleanians who committed suicide attributed their decisions to sickness, compared with 59.4 percent for the white residents, even though the former group endured a death rate from disease twice as high. Likewise, 50 percent of the white men holding unskilled jobs who committed [End Page 68] suicide blamed failing health, whereas 62.5 percent of those with white-collar positions reported that sickness drove them to end their lives. A higher proportion of white men than white women also attributed their suicides to ill health during the 1920s. In short, wealthy white men, more than any other segment of the population, committed suicide because of illness, as fears of dependence tortured the New Orleanians who most expected to exercise control and independence.

In their suicide notes, these New Orleanians typically emphasized two themes. First, they desperately sought relief from pain. “The pain is so great that I cannot stand it,” thirty-one-year-old Clement Litolff wrote to his mother. But second, their suicide notes focused on the emotional toll of illness, despairing that they had lost control over their lives and could no longer compete at a time when their able-bodied peers seemed to be flourishing. The combination of losing their independence, failing in their roles as respectable white men, and the perceived success of those around them made their circumstances unbearable; their suicide notes often used competitive metaphors and the language of the marketplace. “I tried hard but cannot succeed,” Litolff explained.⁶³ Another New Orleanians, who shot himself in the mouth, wrote “[I] have not been well lately and have a headache all the time. I am tired of trying.”⁶⁴ A deputy U.S. shipping commissioner ended his suicide note to his sister by writing “we can fight if we have good health, but cannot without it.”⁶⁵ Unaccustomed to illness and devastated by their anticipated loss of masculine status, these men, and dozens like them, chose suicide as an escape from pain and feelings of failure, even though their racial and class privilege at least partially insulated them from the era’s great killers.⁶⁶ Business cycles only indirectly fueled their suicidal ideation.

Also loosely connected to market conditions, increasing access to guns contributed significantly to the 1920s suicide surge. Surplus weapons from the Great War filled the shelves of local pawnshops, and the price of revolvers plunged, making firearms affordable for most New Orleanians and ensuring that a higher proportion of attempted suicides resulted in fatalities.⁶⁷ Although the gun-suicide rate waned in 1929, it waxed by 46.5 [End Page 69] percent between 1920 and 1928. Among unskilled white men who committed suicide, two-thirds relied on firearms during the 1920s. For white merchants, the figure was 87.5 percent, buoying the lethality rate. The city’s gun-homicide rate jumped by a nearly identical proportion—45.3 percent—during the 1920s, also reflecting the greater availability of inexpensive pistols.⁶⁸

In short, jarring demographic and economic changes generated social instability during the 1920s, elevating the suicide rate. Marital discord increased, particularly spearheading surges in suicide by African American residents and white women. Prosperity also exaggerated businessmen’s expectations for status and occupational success, and many salesmen and merchants who fell short because of illness felt particularly inadequate and humiliated. With the local marketplace booming, they blamed themselves for their struggles, sparking suicidal ideation.⁶⁹ A rising mortality rate and a huge supply of cheap firearms contributed to the suicide increase as well. Taken together, these forces generated a sharp rise in suicide. Thus, New Orleans’s suicide rate moved procyclically, in lockstep with business conditions during the 1920s, climbing as the economy expanded but not entirely because the economy expanded.

The 1920s upswing accelerated during the four years after the stock market crash, producing a distinct second trend in self-destruction. The stressors precipitating suicide, however, abruptly shifted between 1929 and 1933. Both local observers and national experts traced the surge to the economic crisis.⁷⁰

In the months following the Wall Street collapse, New Orleans officials and market watchers remained confident that the local economy would be spared the worst effects of the crash. At the start of 1930, for example, Mayor T. Semmes Walmsley crowed that business had already begun to rebound.⁷¹ Likewise, a January 8, 1930, political cartoon in the New Orleans Times-Picayune announced that the “South suffers less than other sections from business depression,” while the financial editor of another [End Page 70] local newspaper insisted that “New Orleans had lost little—relatively; its recovery will be rapid and thorough.”⁷² The city had weathered the storm.

But financial indicators told a different story. In March of 1930, municipal officials counted over ten thousand jobless New Orleanians, a figure that would double over the next three years.⁷³ Newspapers reported that thousands of residents “faced with starvation and evictions” and that “children in many families are crying for food and milk and the situation grows hourly more desperate.”⁷⁴ Two years after the market crash, New Orleans’s major factories operated “only a few days each week,” and by 1933, local construction permits had dropped by one-third and retail receipts by 40 percent, and the value of manufactured goods and the volume of foreign trade had plunged by more than 50 percent.⁷⁵ As the ripple effects of the Wall Street collapse reached the Gulf Coast, New Orleans’s suicide rate skyrocketed, climbing by 43.8 percent between 1929 and 1933.

Early 1930s suicide notes particularly blamed unemployment and financial setbacks. Between the 1920s and the early 1930s, the proportion of local suicides attributed to unemployment nearly quadrupled, and the percentage sparked by financial reverses more than doubled. Market conditions fueled these surges.

The early 1930s spike in suicide, and especially the upswing traced to unemployment and financial problems, however, remained confined to a narrow segment of New Orleans’s population. The suicide rate for white women plunged by 73 percent between 1929 and 1933 and continued a trend that began in 1927, well before the financial crisis. In suicide notes, deathbed declarations, and conversations with spouses and friends, few white women during this period attributed their suicides to employment problems, poverty, or any other stressors related to the economic crisis. If the household breadwinners’ joblessness or the threat of eviction weighed on them, these worries failed to surface in suicide notes. Instead, health problems and domestic discord continued to account for their acts of self-destruction, and the plunging women’s rate reflected the ways in which their expectations for family life meshed with social conditions and particularly a drop in family turmoil, one that also revealed itself [End Page 71] in a falling rate of spousal homicide, even as the New Orleans economy collapsed. Nor did sociologists analyzing suicide in other interwar cities find evidence that the economic crisis contributed to women’s suicides, and they concluded that business conditions exerted scant influence over women’s suicidal actions.⁷⁶

African American suicide rates also plummeted during the worst years of the economic collapse, falling by 48.5 percent between 1929 and 1933. When the local suicide rate peaked and the local economy troughed, in 1933, African Americans composed 29.3 percent of the New Orleans population but 7.3 percent of suicide victims. Yet the Great Depression hit these residents hardest. By April 1930, over one-third of African American New Orleanians were jobless, more than double the proportion of white residents.⁷⁷ Furthermore, city officials worked assiduously to safeguard jobs for white residents by pressuring major employers to fire African American workers. By the summer of 1930, every African American employed in the municipal cotton warehouse had been terminated. The mayor also launched a series of initiatives to restrict city employment, particularly on the docks—the largest employment sector in the local economy—to registered voters at a time when literacy tests had reduced African American suffrage to less than 1 percent of those eligible to cast ballots.⁷⁸ Thus, the flowering of Jim Crow and the devastating impact of the economic collapse combined to ensure that African Americans, already the poorest New Orleanians, suffered most. And yet their suicide rates plunged.

The low and falling African American suicide rate perhaps reflected ironic effects of endemic racial discrimination. More accustomed to poverty and unemployment, African American workers likely did not hold themselves individually responsible for their precarious economic circumstances, and self-blame forms a core component of suicidal ideation.⁷⁹ Furthermore, these residents, who had long faced the most formidable workplace challenges, even during flush times, had developed [End Page 72] more effective survival strategies, such as income pooling.⁸⁰ But regardless of the explanation, suicide rates dropped precipitously for the poorest New Orleanians.

While white women’s and African Americans’ suicide rates contracted during the depths of the Depression, white men’s rates skyrocketed. Between 1929 and 1933, they leaped by 62.9 percent, accounting for all of the increase in New Orleans’s suicide rate. These residents composed one-quarter of the city’s population but three-quarters of its suicide victims. In 1933, white men committed 90 percent of New Orleans suicides. Early twentieth-century statisticians discovered a similar pattern across the nation.⁸¹

Suicides by white working-class men rose slightly between 1929 and 1933. The triggers for these acts of self-destruction, however, changed. For unskilled white men, such as the laborers who toiled at the docks, the impact of the collapse in trade was devastating, according to their suicide notes. During the 1920s, they attributed 7.1 percent to joblessness. Between 1930 and 1933, nearly two-thirds blamed employment problems.⁸² On October 12, 1931, for example, pedestrians reported to the police that a man was trudging down Cleveland Avenue “muttering: ‘I would rather die than starve.’” Before the beat cop could intercede, fifty-nine-year-old Albert Armbruster, who had just lost his job, drew a knife from his pocket and slashed his throat, severing both his jugular vein and his carotid artery.⁸³ Similarly, on November 30, 1931, guests heard a gun discharge in the Hotel LaSalle and summoned the staff, who found the body of N. Jameson. Next to his lifeless body, they discovered an open Bible and a note reading “I am doing this because I no longer wish to live without work.”⁸⁴ Both the jump in the proportion of these suicides attributed to unemployment and the suicide notes of white blue-collar [End Page 73] workers revealed the devastating impact of poverty and a loss of status on men accustomed to race- and gender-based privilege.

For white clerks, merchants, and professionals, suicide levels also soared during the early 1930s, with the proportion blamed on financial reverses increasing by two-thirds. During the 1920s, these New Orleanians composed 35.6 percent of the white men committing suicide. Between 1930 and 1932, clerks, merchants, and professionals made up 56.1 percent of white male suicide victims, and the figure swelled to 69.2 percent in 1933. The fraction who killed themselves specifically in response to financial setbacks doubled, reaching its highest level, at 25 percent, in 1933. The proportion blaming their suicides on health problems contracted by 38.9 percent.

Again and again, local salesmen, merchants, and lawyers insisted that business reverses or “financial anxieties” drove them to choose death. In many cases, their suicide notes focused on their fear of financial ruin— rather than actual financial ruin. On April 2, 1932, Charles J. Melchoir, a shopkeeper, fatally shot himself in the chest. According to his suicide note, he felt “despondent because of financial worries.”⁸⁵ Likewise, two hours before he shot himself in the right ear, fifty-year-old Antonio Guell, a General Electric engineer, told his wife that worries “his business [was] going to pieces preyed on his mind.”⁸⁶ In an advice column, a New Orleans Item journalist warned local businessmen to be wary of cries that “business is bad!” Shep Pleasants acknowledged that “a stock market crash is serious. Many men lose their fortunes. But the number is small, limited. The great army of salaries men go on drawing the same pay to meet the same expenses. But they hear the talk.” He explained that the great enemy is “fear. It mounts rapidly in his mind. He doesn’t know who lost money or how much—but he begins to fear. Fear for job; fear for loss of income; fear [sic] almost everything.”⁸⁷

Other merchants insisted that the economic crisis had, in fact, ruined them. Gabriel Bowsky confessed that “business reverses” destroyed his clothing business, which his father had established fifty-nine years earlier. He fired a bullet into his brain.⁸⁸ Thomas Lee Greene, a twenty-nine-year-old bookkeeper, watched in horror as his investments became worthless, plunging him into debt, and he fatally shot himself with a twenty-two-caliber [End Page 74] rifle. His suicide note explained that he had grown “tired of dodging creditors.”⁸⁹

The businessmen whose acts of self-destruction fueled the surge in New Orleans suicides tended to be young, and many acted impulsively, killing themselves immediately after discovering their fragile financial straits. In 1929, 6.7 percent were in their twenties, but in 1930 the figure jumped to 50 percent, and their gun-suicide rate leaped by 78 percent. The shock of unexpected business reverses sparked impulsive suicide attempts, which more often employed firearms and therefore increased the lethality of these visceral actions.

These New Orleanians expressed astonishment that their financial worlds could—or might—crumble. Their expectations remained firmly in 1920s business conditions; they felt confident that flush times would continue and were puzzled and devastated that their circumstances had shifted abruptly, even though they were fully aware of the economic crisis of the era. A local financial writer explained that “we are accustomed to ‘making money quick and plenty.’ When it doesn’t roll in—when sales are behind last year—we are wont to cry ‘bad times!’ The bugaboo grows tremendously.”⁹⁰

The affluent white men who killed themselves had enjoyed class-, gender-, and race-based status, had been accustomed to controlling their own fates, and had anticipated continued business success. Such high expectations made the financial anxieties of the early 1930s unbearable and led them to believe that their own shortcomings had caused their ruin. Contemporary scholars studying suicide noted a lag between personal crises and the recognition of the role of wider market conditions in triggering individual problems.⁹¹ The clerks and merchants who killed themselves during the early 1930s attributed their sudden drop in status—or the possibility of “skidding”—to their own failings, rather than perceiving it as an effect of wider market conditions. For them, the crisis was personal—and the potential loss of status and control threatened their core identities and made death more appealing than the humiliation of failure.⁹² Thus, [End Page 75] Stricker Coles’s suicide note announced “what a failure I have been.”⁹³ Tormented by self-blame, they killed themselves in rising numbers, elevating the local suicide rate. Although this surge produced a four-year span during which New Orleans suicide varied in conformity with economic conditions, such countercyclicality occurred mainly within this narrow slice of the city’s population and only for this brief period.

Both early twentieth-century experts and early twenty-first-century researchers have noted similar shifts in the demography of suicide during depressions and severe recessions.⁹⁴ Economic downturns exert little impact on women’s and African Americans’ suicide rates, but white men, particularly affluent white men, experience surges in suicide during lean times, reflecting the ways in which members of the business class define status. “Suicide is highest,” a 1990 study concluded, “when accustomed levels of prosperity are high but current conditions are unfavorable and deteriorating.”⁹⁵

Patterns of New Orleans suicide shifted for a third time between 1933 and 1940, also reflecting the complex intersection of expectations and material circumstances for different segments of the local population. Even as the New Orleans economy remained prostrate, the city’s suicide rate dropped by 49 percent (see Figure 1). The rate for white women remained flat, while the African American suicide rate fell by nearly half. As in earlier periods, changing trends by white men accounted for most of the overall volatility, and between 1933 and 1940, their suicide rate plunged by 59.3 percent.

Although the city’s suicide rate peaked in 1933, at the depths of the Great Depression, the economic crisis persisted through the decade, both locally and nationally. In 1937, for example, newspapers described so many job seekers that municipal welfare offices closed their doors before noon.⁹⁶ Through the decade, local market observers detected only modest recovery since the 1933 ebb, and late in 1940 the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported “considerable unemployment in New Orleans,” terming financial conditions “distressing.”⁹⁷ Nationally, the unemployment rate also reached its zenith in 1933, at 24.9 percent, but remained above 14 percent through 1940, compared with an average of 3.1 percent during [End Page 76]

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Figure 1.

New Orleans Suicide Rates, 1920–1940

the late 1920s.⁹⁸ Yet, New Orleans’s suicide rate moved in a downward trajectory for seven of the eleven years of the Great Depression.

A confluence of factors accounted for the sharp fall during a period of high unemployment. Although African American jobless rates continued to dwarf those of white New Orleanians, few African American suicide victims attributed their actions to unemployment. Across the nation, African American suicide rates dropped during the mid- and late 1930s.⁹⁹

The white suicide rate tumbled by half between 1933 and 1940, but this decrease reflected pronounced gender differences. For white women, the suicide rate remained largely unchanged after 1929. Poverty, unemployment, and financial misfortunes rarely accounted for their decisions. Instead, illness and marital problems, as in the 1920s and the early 1930s, triggered their suicides, a pattern also evident in studies of women’s suicide in modern America.¹⁰⁰

The suicide rate for white men dropped sharply after 1933 (see Figure 2). The factors that had accelerated the early 1930s increase produced the mid- and late 1930s decrease. For white blue-collar workers, the [End Page 77] proportion of suicides blamed on unemployment had nearly quadrupled between the 1920s and the early 1930s. Between 1933 and 1940, however, it fell by two-thirds, returning to 1920s levels, even though jobless rate in the later period was significantly higher. In part, this paradoxical pattern reflected the changing circumstances of unemployment for these men. During the early 1930s, they often lost their jobs and confronted immediate, dire challenges and a sudden drop in status. By contrast, the men mainly struggled to regain positions later in the decade. Hence, the shock of unemployment hit between 1930 and 1933. Mid-1930s market conditions had tempered their expectations, and they less often blamed themselves for their struggles or felt less stigmatized by their circumstances. Recent scholarship on unemployment describes precisely this pattern.¹⁰¹ According to one modern study, expectations drop and an “adaptive process” typically begins after eighteen months.¹⁰² This model fits the 1930s trends.

The sharpest plunge in New Orleans suicide rates, however, occurred among white-collar workers, the sector of society where the early 1930s increase had been most pronounced. These New Orleanians accounted for 56.1 percent of suicides by white men during the depths of the Great Depression but 31.5 percent between 1934 and 1940. Moreover, the proportion of New Orleans salesmen and merchants who claimed that they took own lives because of financial reverses dropped by 87.5 percent. Like their working-class counterparts, these white New Orleanians encountered fewer unexpected business setbacks after the early 1930s, and, also akin to poorer white men, they less often blamed themselves for their economic plights, even though business conditions remained depressed and relief agencies offered “absolutely no white-collar jobs.”¹⁰³

But economic pressures were not the only factors contributing to the plunging suicide rates.¹⁰⁴ During the 1930s, gun use in suicides decreased precipitously, particularly among working-class men. As the number of secondhand weapons from the Great War dropped over time, local pawnshops offered fewer inexpensive handguns.¹⁰⁵ Moreover, in response to blistering public criticism, mail-order retailers, such as Sears, Roebuck, [End Page 78]

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Figure 2.

Suicide Rates for White Men in New Orleans, 1920–1940

stopped shipping these weapons. As a consequence, stocks of cheap revolvers contracted, prices increased, and the poorest New Orleanians often could not afford firearms, depressing gun use.¹⁰⁶ In view of the extreme lethality of guns in attempted suicides, this change drove down suicide rates. Working-class men intent on killing themselves particularly struggled to afford the weapons; during the early 1930s, 80 percent of the unskilled white men who killed themselves used guns. The proportion fell to 41.5 percent from 1934 to 1940. Between 1933 and 1940, the city’s gun-suicide rate dipped by 31.3 percent (see Figure 2). A similar shift occurred in New Orleans homicides, as the gun-homicide rate decreased by 37.8 percent, contributing to a steep drop in the city’s murder rate. Recent scholarship has emphasized the robust relationship between firearm availability and both suicide and homicide rates.¹⁰⁷

Also accelerating the Depression-era drop in suicide, New Orleans became healthier during the economic crisis. The white mortality rate fell by 10.1 percent, and the African American rate dropped by 29.4 percent. New Orleanians had less disposable income during the 1930s, which reduced binge drinking, lavish dining, and joy riding, leading to sharp decreases in fatal liver disease, heart disease, and auto accidents.¹⁰⁸ Just as the relationship between the rising mortality and suicide rates [End Page 79] during the 1920s was indirect, so too was the correlation during the Great Depression. But as New Orleans became relatively healthier, the rate of health-related suicides fell.

Family life became more stable during the 1930s, further depressing the suicide rate as the flow of young, single newcomers to the city abated. Sex ratios evened, the population aged, and family formation slowed. As a result, the rate of suicide attributed to marital turmoil decreased. Among New Orleans women, the proportion of suicides blamed on spousal difficulties dipped by 40 percent between 1933 and 1940 and fell well below the 1920s level. Likewise, the rate of domestic homicide plunged by 53.4 percent.

Paradoxically, persistently bad times contributed to a drop in suicide, just as it depressed mortality and homicide rates. The protracted economic downturn reduced feelings of personal failure for struggling New Orleanians, tamping down suicidal ideation. The lean years also made it more difficult for working-class residents to afford guns, denying them easy access to the quickest, most lethal method of suicide. The proportion of suicides by hanging soared during the 1930s, but the difficulty and pain of strangulation likely discouraged many despondent New Orleanians from attempting to take their own lives. Thus, the combination of falling death rates from disease and accidents, reduced access to guns, more stable family lives, fewer unanticipated economic or financial setbacks, and lower expectations for personal success drove down local suicide rates during most of the Great Depression.

Nor were these counterintuitive, procyclical suicide trends unique to New Orleans. The city’s mean suicide rate for the early 1930s was 22.1 percent higher than the mean rate for the 1920s. For the same span, New York City’s rate rose by 38.5 percent, Philadelphia’s by 20.1 percent, and Detroit’s by 28.3 percent. For urban America, the rate swelled by 28.3 percent. American cities experienced common shifts during the early 1930s as well. Between the early 1930s and the 1934–40 period, the New Orleans mean suicide rate fell by almost one-third, while New York City’s rate dipped by 22.2 percent, Philadelphia’s by 20.2 percent, Detroit’s by 31.7 percent, and American cities overall by 19.8. For all of the scholarship asserting that suicide has fluctuated in the opposite direction from business cycles, the data for the interwar period indicate otherwise; rates in New Orleans, other urban centers, and the nation as a whole rose during the prosperous 1920s, and, after a brief, early 1930s spike, tumbled for the remainder of the Depression era (see Figure 3). [End Page 80]

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Figure 3.

Suicide Rates, 1920–1940

At first glance, Stricker Coles’s 1932 death seemed emblematic of suicide trends in Depression-era America, for he killed himself in response to the financial collapse of the period. Dozens of other New Orleans salesmen and merchants did the same, fueling a brief spike in the city’s suicide rate, and across the nation, thousands of affluent white men took their own lives under similar circumstances, propelling the suicide rate to its high point for the twentieth century. But suicide was a complicated phenomenon and not the product of a single factor. Instead, different segments of the population responded to distinct stressors, reflecting the clash of culture-based expectations and market conditions. Coles’s racial, class, and gender status defined his suicidal ideation and made him and those like him sensitive to the economic shock of the era. But other New Orleanians, and other Americans, reacted differently (or not at all) to the financial crisis and took their own lives in response to threats to their race-, class-, and gender-based identifies, generating a series of distinct patterns, rather than a single, market-driven trend.

Broader social conditions influenced suicide trends as well. As modern researchers have demonstrated, gun access dramatically affects suicide rates, often dictating the lethality of suicide attempts. The supply and price of firearms shifted significantly during the interwar era, contributing to rising suicide rates during the 1920s and falling rates during the 1930s. Moreover, market conditions interacted with gun availability, pricing the [End Page 81] weapons beyond the reach of some suicidal New Orleanians during the 1930s and revealing the ways in which economic forces, rather than operating in isolation, combined with social factors. Overall health conditions also influenced suicide, though in complex ways. New Orleans’s suicide rate rose when mortality rates increased and fell then they contracted, even though the residents who committed suicide in response to sickness did not typically suffer from life-threatening illnesses. In short, just as early twentieth-century observers labeled suicide victims a “motley crew,” the cluster of pressures that drove suicide trends was diverse and multilayered.

Suicide does indeed represent a cipher, laying bare the core qualities that people most prize and most fear losing. For men such as Stricker Coles, success in the marketplace shaped their self-image as respectable white men, and challenges to that identity became unendurable during the early 1930s. For New Orleans women, across class and ethnic lines, and for African American residents, expectations for domestic harmony loomed larger than economic conditions, and pressures relating to household stability—not business cycles—shaped suicide rates. When these patterns, reflecting the values and priorities of different segments of the population, are combined, the conventional explanation for trends is found wanting; suicide shifted procyclically, soaring during boom times and plunging for most of the 1930s. Economic conditions alone did not trigger suicide for most of the New Orleanians who chose to end their lives. Paradoxically, with suicide (but also homicide and overall mortality), the wild, prosperous 1920s posed greater challenges and proved to be more unbearable and more deadly than all but the worst years of the Great Depression. [End Page 82]