The Choctaw Club, seen here in 1934, on the corner of St. Charles and North Maestri Street across from Gallier Hall and Lafayette Square, was a political organization born during the city’s raucous post-Reconstruction days when Democrats and Republicans vied for power.
Political drama in New Orleans, especially back in the 1880s, 90s and early 1900s, is the stuff books are written about, and the Choctaw Club played a major role in that story. It all began in 1896 when the Crescent Democratic Club (CDC), riddled with scandal, began to fall apart. Many of its members defected to the newly formed Citizens’ League, which backed New Orleans businessman Walter C. Flower in the 1896 mayoral campaign. Meanwhile, Governor Murphy J. Foster supported the CDC candidate, Congressman Charles F. Buck. After a bitter campaign, Flower won.
Post election, the CDC disintegrated, and Flower served only one term. Out of the CDC’s ruins rose the Regular Democratic Organization, known as the RDO and later Old Regulars, that would in three years take control of city government for the next four-plus decades until the rise of Mayor deLesseps “Chep” Morrison in 1946.
According to a 1930 study by a Columbia University graduate student, the RDO had an effective organizational structure that included the Caucus and the Club. The Caucus — the machine’s ruling body headed by the city’s 17 ward bosses — dictated who ran for office with the Regulars’ endorsement and who received patronage. And then there was the Club.
In March 1897, the newly reorganized Regulars formed a political and social wing known as the Choctaw Club. As to how the club got its name, Old Regular leader Martin Behrman, mayor of New Orleans from 1904 to 1920 and 1925 to 1926, stated in his memoirs that club members tossed around various tribal names such as Chickamauga, Houma and Tensas, before finally choosing Choctaw.
“We followed the old-fashioned way of using an Indian name for a political club,” he continued. “I have been told that this fashion started in New York nearly 150 years ago when a political society, known around town as the ‘Roebucks,’ because they used the tail of the buck deer in their hats, … adopted the name Tammany society.”
The Choctaws’ first clubhouse was located on Carondelet St. It later moved to Canal and then in the early 1930s to the location seen here on St. Charles and North Maestri. Unfortunately, this classic, three-story, double galleried building, designed in 1841 by the renowned Irish-born New Orleans architect James Gallier Sr., was demolished in the early 1970s to make way for a new office building.
