New Orleans’ raison d’etre

NEW ORLEANS is battered and submerged today. But it will rise again because it is -- and always has been -- the single most important cog in the nation’s economy.

The American regime was founded in 1789 in Philadelphia, when the Constitution was written. But the American economy was founded years afterward, just outside New Orleans. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson arranged for the purchase of the Louisiana Territory -- the rich farmland between the Alleghenies and Rocky Mountains -- from France. What made this territory special was not just its soil but the rivers. The entire region was drained by an extraordinary system of rivers that were navigable and flowed to the ocean.

The Missouri, the Ohio and innumerable other rivers could carry shallow-draft vessels that could be loaded with the produce of American farms. All of those rivers flowed into one: the Mississippi. And the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. That fact, in itself, created a social revolution. For the first time in history, a class of farmers and small landholders was created, on a mass basis, that could sell what they produced globally. That meant they had money. And that money went into small-town banks across the region and became the seed capital of U.S. industrialism. It was the founding capital of the railroads and steel industry, enticing European investment. It also became one of the pillars of American democracy.

For the river-based economy to work, it needed a port near the mouth of the Mississippi so barges and rafts that could navigate the river could offload onto oceangoing vessels. Locate the port too far upriver and the oceangoing vessels couldn’t reach it. Put it too far south, in the swamps, and people couldn’t live near it. And people had to live nearby. Workers not only had to operate the port, they had to be able to buy food and clothing, live in houses with their families, build schools and so on. Where there is a port, there must be a city.

The city at the mouth of the Mississippi had existed for that purpose from the time that the earliest trappers and traders penetrated the hinterland of the United States. That city was New Orleans, and the entire North American agricultural and trading system depended upon it.

The British knew that. In 1815, not realizing that the War of 1812 had ended, British troops lunged for the American jugular: They went for New Orleans. They knew that taking it would strangle the American westward expansion. Louisiana Territory settlers would have to pay tolls. Had they been successful, the British would have wrested economic control of the Louisiana Purchase away from the United States.

At the Battle of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson won -- and saved the country. He remained obsessed with New Orleans all his life: When he encouraged Sam Houston to stir up trouble in Texas, it was because the presence of a Mexican force a few hundred miles west of New Orleans scared the daylights out of him. During the Civil War, when the South closed off the Mississippi, the North counterattacked and fought to hold the river open. During World War II, the Germans fought an intense U-boat campaign in an attempt to close the river.

Today, the Port of South Louisiana is the largest port in the United States by tonnage, and the fifth-largest port in the world. A large percentage of the bulk farm commodities of the upper Midwest are still loaded on barges and shipped down the Mississippi to be offloaded onto cargo ships near New Orleans. Massive cargo shipments come to the United States through the port as well. Steel, cement, rubber -- the nuts and bolts of American industrialism -- all flow upriver.

The ports at New Orleans aren’t much for bringing in GameBoys or stereos, but for the basic agricultural and industrial commodities that drive the American and global economy. Not all of the nation’s important commerce travels through these ports, but enough of the basic materials do to make the loss of these facilities economically disastrous to the world.

The alternative shipping routes for these goods aren’t a good substitute. There aren’t enough trucks or railroad cars to haul these materials long distance, and other U.S. ports don’t have the capacity to make up for New Orleans, even if they had the rivers. Only river transport is cheap enough to be economically viable, and only river transport can handle the tonnage involved.

Hurricane Katrina left the port pretty much intact, and the river seems navigable. But you can’t have a port without people, and the commercial facilities will be needed in two weeks, when Midwest farmers begin harvesting. Their harvest will be handled this year and, if civilian workers cannot be found, the Army units cleaning up the storm damage could be expected to stay and work the ports.

But in the long run, the economic health of the nation depends on developing a port city about where New Orleans sits -- a port surrounded by workers and better protected from nature. That city will be called New Orleans. It will be rebuilt for the same reason it was built in a malarial swamp in the first place: because it is where a city must be built.