Marx Schoenberg
Values Codes: I – E – L
Marx Schoenberg (1833-70) came from Germany, married and had five children.
The family moved to New Orleans in 1855.
The couple’s marriage ended in the 1860’s and Schoenberg’s wife and children moved to Ohio.
Schoenberg married Anna Prins, an eighteen-year-old New Orleans native, in 1866 and the couple had three children in the next three years.
The family moved to Donaldsonville, a predominantly French-speaking town in Louisiana’s Cajun region, in 1868.
They joined Anna’s nineteen-year-old sister, Laura, and her husband, Morris Marks, who led a militant Republican fringe coalition in the town.
In 1870, the Republican Louisiana governor, an opponent of Marks’ group, appointed Schoenberg as Donaldsonville mayor.
Sadly, everything changed for Marx Schoenberg on July 5, 1870, when his twenty-three-year old wife died, leaving him to raise their three children—Fanny (three), Louis (two), and Joseph (one)—while continuing to serve as town mayor.
Donaldsonville, LA
Election day that year was November 7, 1870.
After voting closed, Schoenberg’s faction tried to move ballot boxes out of Donaldsonville.
Marks’s faction sent a squad of armed militiamen to stop the transfer. The two hostile groups met and the unthinkable happened: Marx Schoenberg was shot to death.
Several militia members were tried for the murders but all were all acquitted. The identity of Marx Schoenberg’s killer was never determined.
Morris and Laura Marks left Donaldsonville and returned to New Orleans to raise the three Schoenberg kids and their own daughter.
Source
- Mark Rutzick, Breaking New Ground: The Untold Story of Early America’s Jewish Electoral Pioneers – 1788 to 1920, 2025.
Mark Rutzick is the curator of this Marx Schoenberg exhibit.