Jim Bradshaw: Magazine's Vermilion Parish story was fighting words
Abbeville was up in arms in December 1954, over a national magazine article in which community leaders claimed the town, and all of Vermilion Parish, were portrayed as “a mucky swamp” inhabited only by those strong enough to wrestle an alligator, which they often had to do.
The article, entitled “Mysterious Marshes,” was written by Ben Lucien Burman and published in Collier’s Weekly Magazine.
Burman was known for a series of children’s books that told fanciful tales of animals living in the fictional Catfish Bend. Mississippi.
Abbeviile’s leaders claimed his Vermilion Parish story was not only just as fanciful, but insulting to the people and damaging to the parish.
The lead illustration showed a man poling a pirogue “in a bayou near Abbeville” which the article said was “deep in the heart of the vast Louisiana marsh country.”
Burman’s article opened with this description:
“Along the Gulf of Mexico where the pelicans dive and the porpoises play lies a vast area of the United States unknown to most travelers, so strange, so different from the rest of the country that it might as well be located on another planet. Over 4.000,000 acres in extent — almost as large as Massachusetts or New Jersey — it is a region of strange peoples and strange creatures, of buried pirate treasure and black magic. .... It is a place where even nature is bizarre, for the earth itself has not decided whether it is land or water.
“It is a land where cowboys who speak only French ride horses over oyster beds instead of open range and fight off giant crabs and leeches; a land where a man can stray for only a moment and never be seen again.”
The rest of the article was of a similar bent, and prompted Abbeville Mayor Roy Theriot to demand a retraction of the entire article.
He said that “in fairness to the people, a photographer should be sent to take pictures of the real Vermilion Parish.”
Burmon’s article, Theriot wrote to Collier’s editor Paul C. Smith, “stirred our people in an attitude of enmity towards everything your magazine stands for.”
He said the article was “a grave injustice to our beautiful parish and especially to its thousands of inhabitants who have worked so hard to make it one of the richest and most progressive parishes in the state of Louisiana.”
The “unfounded article,” he said, was “an insult to … the wonderful people of Vermilion parish whose living standards are the envy of all who visit south Louisiana.
Jimmy Vorhoff, who later became mayor and was then president of the Abbeville Chamber of Commerce, also demanded a retraction. H claimed Burmon had heard a handful of old stories about voodoo and pirate treasure and swamp life, but “did not investigate the legends handed down though generations” and “portrayed them as conditions existing today.”
This, Vorhoff said, created “a vast misrepresentation of facts.”
That wasn’t the first or last time that “outsiders” latched on to folklore and legend to tell about the place and people of south Louisiana.
Until modern times, writers tended to portray south Louisiana in a poor light.
English-speaking writers just didn’t understand the people or the culture of French Louisiana, and the people here didn’t give a hoot whether they understood or not.
For example, Timothy F. Reilly studied accounts of Acadians in the 1800s, as seen through the eyes of English-speaking visitors and reported his findings in a series of articles in the Attakapas Gazette magazine in the 1970s.
He found that “the sharpest criticism … was often penned by authors least acquainted with their topic.”
In this instance, there was no apology and no retraction from Collier’s, which was probably a good thing. Retractions often tend to simply repeat the offensive language, spreading it all over again.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.