THE SUGAR KING: LEON GODCHAUX

THE SUGAR KING – PREVIEW Lion Godchot – a thin, short, impoverished Jewish boy, and yes, illiterate -- steps off the Indus’ gang plank at the foot of Canal Street in New Orleans. It’s February 20, 1837. He’s traveled four months below decks across the illimitable Atlantic from Lorraine, France. Lion carries no more than a bar of soap, knitted underwear, a homespun shirt or two, wrapped in a checkered scarf, all woven by his mother on her own loom. The thirteen year old child is alone. The boy walks onto the delicate, perpetually threatened, tiny knoll of elevated terrain that is raucous, polyglot New Orleans, tenuously visible just above sea level, at the edge of a vast, vicious river, in the midst of a disease laden swamp. By the end of his intrigue-filled life, and still illiterate, Leon Godchaux is the owner of fourteen plantations, the largest tax-payer in the state – the acknowledged “Sugar King of Louisiana.” Simultaneously, negotiating his way through slavery and then caught up in the Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, he builds the most esteemed merchant organization in New Orleans to become “The Duke of Clothing.” While amassing these outsized achievements, Godchaux relies upon the accomplishments of two Black men: Joachim Tassin, a slave whose birth status both men conceal; and Norbert Rillieux, a free man of color, whose ingenious scientific invention enables Godchaux to build his sugar empire. * At the end of his life, obituaries assert that Leon Godchaux never owned a slave. All later published commentators, as well as Leon’s descendants, vehemently supported this position. They were and are wrong. In the pre-Civil War era when slavery was legal and rampant, it is true that Leon did not depend upon slaves in his manufacturing or wholesale businesses as did his competitors. With the extraordinary exception of Joachim Tassin, no slave worked in his store. Nevertheless, with other options unavailable, and in need of household help to assist his wife with their family of ten children, Leon and Justine relied upon a succession of privately purchased Black women whom they paid well and cared for diligently. Leon’s Jewishness and humble background contributed to his aversion to slavery. He felt a profound secular connection to his race. Since birth, he had known poverty and the rudiments of the Passover story which reminded him that he was part of a once-enslaved people. Leon Godchaux’s anti-exploitive moral compass proved in time to be a key to his prosperity. * Leon’s approach to risk varied in fundamental ways from that of the great tycoons of his American generation. John D. Rockefeller, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Jay Gould, and the Lehmans were preeminent Masters of Risk who sought to lever their wealth and proprietary information, sometimes ruthlessly, to compile fortunes. Leon’s horizon line was lower, but nevertheless one lit by driving ambition. Even when he ventured into railroading as a builder and financier he never ventured beyond south Louisiana. As a railroad owner, sugar titan and clothing magnate Godchaux retained hands-on contact with each enterprise and with the people working within it. Unlike the nationally and internationally ambitious financiers of his era, he depended entirely upon his own hard earned capital deployed only in his own known territory. For all his outsized success, Leon’s mindset was that of a French bourgeois rather than of a freewheeling American mogul industrialist. Eleven years after his death, still in awe of the man and his achievements, the New Orleans Item reminded its readers “When Leon Godchaux died on May 18, 1899, his obituary crowded the news of the day aside in the newspapers. The dramatic incidents of his career were telegraphed to the East and West and the far Pacific slope. Information of his career was in demand for his name was widely known.” * Leon Godchaux experienced life as an outsider. He was a poor village boy who plunged into a sophisticated, cosmopolitan urban world. He was a Jew residing in a Catholic city. He was an emigrant in a community that valued ancestry, bloodline, and tradition. At a time when slaveholders -- Black, White, and Creole --were recognized as the most successful citizens, he barely participated. He was an illiterate peddler who scrapped his way into becoming a large-scale merchant. He was a city merchant who became a mega plantation owner with no aspiration toward the landed life. His native language was French in a community that was increasingly English speaking. If he could read and write, which is doubtful, he did so haltingly amid a culture that was literate. Even after he became wealthy and a generous philanthropist during the glamorous belle époque, Leon Godchaux shunned ostentation. Godchaux, when all is said, was guided by his humble past while far outstripping it. Though he built a career and a family that could be thought a saga, an empire, a fairy tale, he quietly and inconspicuously assimilated socially and culturally into a turbulent southern culture without being morally compromised by it. Three short generations later, like the sweet smell of night-blooming jasmine on the morning air, there was nothing left.