Dear Peoria,
Often, I have found, trying to explain New Orleans is akin to trying to explain the wind or labor pains to someone who has never felt such things. Words probably exist to convey the general feeling, but you won’t ever really get it right. A soul must experience some things in order to truly grasp them.
In the case of New Orleans, that dynamic is generally summed up by the word “mystique,” and it is rooted in the fact that history and folklore so generously overlap here that they can be nearly impossible to separate.
The tale I am about to relate might seem to fall in that category. Yet, fantastical though it is, I assure you it is absolutely, 100% true.
Most of it. Probably.
I was reminded of it recently when confronted with the movie trailer for the Louisiana-set film “Hungry,” freshly arrived in theaters. One could be forgiven for assuming a film with such a title might focus on our South Louisiana culinary scene — or perhaps termites (or nutria or mosquitoes). One, however, would be mistaken.
No, “Hungry” — which was shot largely in Malta, outside of a few scene-setting exteriors in the French Quarter — follows a group of Louisiana swamp tourists who find themselves on the run … from a hippopotamus.
A hungry, hungry hippopotamus.
Now, one need not be a hippopotomologist to detect a few immediate red flags in that scenario. Prime among them: Hippos do not inhabit Louisiana swamps.
But once upon a time, they very nearly did, thanks to the efforts of a larger-than-life, frontier-trained scout/adventurer named Frederick Russell Burnham, with a legislative assist from U.S. Congressman Robert F. Broussard, a well-practiced gladhander and back-slapper from New Iberia known to all as “Cousin Bob.”
It was Burnham who got things started, attaching himself to an early 20th century scheme to import African hippopotamuses and loose them in the bayous of South Louisiana. It got a boost when Broussard filed a 1910 bill in the 61st Congress to study and fund Burnham’s hippo proposal.
“The American hippo bill,” as it became known, would bring two distinct benefits, according Burnham, who argued in favor of it during an actual Capitol Hill hearing.
First and foremost for Louisianians, he posited, the imported hippos’ considerable appetites would be a once-and-for-all answer to the blankets of invasive water hyacinth clogging local waterways. Those plants, allegedly introduced as a souvenir from the Japanese pavilion at New Orleans’ 1884 World Cotton Expo, were then, as now, spreading unchecked like so much maritime kudzu
(One would be justified in questioning the old-lady-who-swallowed-a-fly wisdom of introducing an invasive species to dispose of a previously arrived invasive species. One might also remark on wild hippos’ documented aggressiveness toward humans. As Broussard did not dwell on them, we will leave those points for a future correspondence.)
The plan’s second and more crucial benefit, at least from a national perspective, was as a solution to the country’s “meat question,” a then-much-discussed concern that America had so recklessly depleted its natural resources, including meat sources (think: bison), that the survival of its growing population was very much dependent upon finding alternate meat sources.
“We need more critters in this country,” Broussard eloquently declared in The Daily Picayune of April 10, 1910. “Just plain critters.”
With support from the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, himself a fan of both big ideas and big game, Broussard’s critter bill built improbable momentum. A New York Times editorial hailed it, going so far as to dub hippos “lake cow bacon,” according to a 2013 recounting in The Atavist magazine.
“Toughness is only skin deep,” another scribe mused.
To their credit, New Orleans newspapers of the day were more skeptical, even given the adventurousness of the local palate. “This double-barreled scheme deserves to have originated in the mind of Poe, Mark Twain or Frank Stockton!” the Picayune wrote in May 1910.
In the end, Congress was unconvinced; it took no action on Broussard’s hippo bill. He hoped to marshal enough support to reintroduce it at some point, but that never happened. Broussard later became a senator and died in office in 1918. His hippotamic dreams died with him.
So hippos, thankfully, exist today not in our swamps or our kitchens, but only in our legislative record, in select theaters — and in those shadowier corners of New Orleans in which history and folklore dance together.
Insincerely yours,
New Orleans
