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S W A M P   F E V E R   |   B Y   J A M E S   C A R V I L L E

After the Deluge

Looking back at the momentous
legacy of the most devastating natural
disaster in American history.

lately, Hollywood has been going nuts over natural disasters. Twisters, volcano eruptions and asteroid collisions are the recent rage, but it's only a matter of time before every other act of God gets its own movie, too.
When floods get their two hours of fame, I sure as hell hope the subject is the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the biggest natural disaster in the nation's history. I've just finished a brand-new book on the Great Flood, and I've been sending it out to all my friends. John M. Barry's "Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America" is the best book I've read in years.
Though most of you coastal city slickers have never heard of it, the Great Flood changed the character of America more than the Great War and only slightly less than the Great Depression. It altered forever the way we view our federal government. It warped our race relations. It reshaped the demographics of North and South. It swept Herbert Hoover to the White House and Huey Long to the Louisiana statehouse. It leveled a self-serving aristocracy. The story of the Great Flood is a classic American epic. Even Kevin "Waterworld" Costner couldn't screw up a story this good.
I grew up on the Mississippi, in a one-stop-sign town by the name of Carville, La. I was born 17 years after the Great Flood, but that did not diminish my respect for the river. To me, it was a serpent. When the water was low, the serpent was pretty harmless. But in the spring, when that serpent was swollen with runoff from Canada, Colorado, Montana and all of the Midwest, it was an angry, unpredictable beast. Like many towns in Louisiana, Carville was below sea level. If not for man-made barriers -- which could have failed under any number of provocations -- the serpent would have swallowed Carville whole every spring.
Looking back on it, the idea that the mighty serpent could be restrained during a period of heavy rains and runoff was a pretty cocky notion. It's a good thing the 19th century was a pretty cocky time. Back then, engineers saw no limit to what they could do with their slide rules. Hell, why not take on the mighty Mississippi? Even by today's standards, the dynamics of the river were unbelievably complex. But if science could make the beast behave, it could protect hundreds of towns from floods, expand river shipping and open up some of the richest lands on earth to the till. The stakes were huge.
While today it is damn near impossible to name a single famous engineer, in the 19th century engineers were masters of the universe -- with egos every bit as outsized as today's Wall Street bigwigs. The first section of "Rising Tide" focuses on two of the most egotistical and brilliant, James Buchanan Eads and Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, who spent their lifetimes trying to conquer the Mississippi. Unfortunately, the two men worked equally hard trying to conquer each other. Like all great man vs. nature stories, this book has a strong undercurrent of man vs. man flowing beneath its surface.
Eads and Humphreys agreed on one thing: Continuing the work of building high earthen levees parallel to the banks of the resting river made all kinds of sense. Levees allowed the river to spill out well beyond its banks, while still holding it to a predictable channel. Levees had another benefit as well: Confining the flooding river would speed up its current; the faster current, in turn, would gouge out the river's bed and lower the water level in the future.
But would the faster current carve out enough to prevent big-time floods? That was the billion-dollar question. Eads said no. He proposed other ways of carving out the riverbed, because he knew levees alone could not work. Humphreys actually had plenty of data showing the same thing -- he simply chose to ignore it. Driven far more by rivalry than reason, he put his name to a cockamamie levees-only policy. A half-century later, during the Great Flood, that policy submerged more than 27,000 square miles under a murky inland sea.
The levees-only policy was not an immediate bust. For several generations it worked well enough to allow some of the South's most fabled families to reclaim the rich soils of the Mississippi Delta and build huge cotton empires. Barry introduces us to the most powerful of those families, the Percys of Greenville, Miss. (Novelist Walker Percy and historian Shelby Foote are two illustrious members of the clan.) Barry chose the Percys not only because of the size of their empire, but also because of their empire's unique character. Aristocrats to the core, the Percys had a strict code of noblesse oblige. They took it as their duty -- and good business -- to shield blacks from the worst of the South's bigotry. During the reign of LeRoy Percy, the most impressive patriarch of the bunch, the Klan would not dare lay a finger on a black man under Percy's protection. The Percy empire was no utopia, but it was a relative oasis of calm.
But that all came to an end when the flood waters started rising dangerously high on the levees, exactly 70 years ago this month. The river was the most awesome enemy imaginable. Unlike a human enemy, it made no mistakes. In war an enemy might outrun its supply lines or fail to call in enough air support. But a flooding river does not err. It finds each crack and exploits it. That's what happened in spades in '27.
The first cracks showed up in the levees. After biblical rains throughout the Midwest, the Mississippi started busting right though weak stretches of levees. Then the river exploited the logical gaps in the levees-only strategy. Because the scouring effect was not that big after all, the river threatened to pour over the top even of intact levees. For most people, the only hope of avoiding the floodwaters was a sudden crevasse on the opposite side of the river. And not everyone was content to leave the matter up to chance. Locals patrolled every stretch of levee with guns -- and shot on sight anyone who approached close enough to plant a few sticks of dynamite. As you can see, the river was good at exploiting social fissures, too.
Under pressure, racial fissures started opening wide, too. When push came to shove, the blacks got shoved once again. Even along the Percys' stretch of the Mississippi, whites essentially re-enslaved blacks, forcing them to work day and night without pay to shore up the levees with sandbags. In the towns that did get flooded, whites herded the blacks who didn't get washed away to the top of dry levees and kept them in nasty tent cities called "concentration camps" to try to hold their labor supply in the South. The vile strategy backfired. Just as soon as the waters receded, millions of blacks voted with their feet and fled to the promised land of the North.
Herbert Hoover, then the secretary of Commerce under President Coolidge, was the guy charged with coordinating the relief efforts. Though Hoover had a knack for organization, his greatest skill was making himself look good. He had every intention of riding the flood into the Oval Office -- and he succeeded. Barry does a great job of showing how cynically Hoover exploited high-profile black leaders with his empty promises to help ease the plight of the blacks in the concentration camps.
The flood brought another clever political manipulator to office: legendary Louisiana Gov. Huey Long. Long's populist mandate arose in great measure as a reaction to a huge fissure that the flood created in New Orleans society. As the flood waters started approaching New Orleans, the close-knit cabal of New Orleans bankers who ran Louisiana from their exclusive krewes and clubs decided they were going to save their own skins by dynamiting a levee about 10 miles from the city. They were powerful enough that they didn't even need to do it under the cover of night -- they got the governor to sign an order making the operation legal.
On the afternoon of April 29, 1927, workers started blowing a massive hole in that levee. As New Orleans aristocrats watched from their yachts, the river buried St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes under 30 feet of water. The story gets worse: Although the New Orleans bankers had promised to repay the families they had flooded, they later reneged. To compensate for the loss of their homes and livelihood, each family wound up with a pittance of less than $300.
Before the flood, it was possible to believe that letting a bunch of rich guys with good table manners take care of everybody else was a good idea. The flood -- with help from Huey Long and his partisans -- shattered that notion. The flood did not destroy the New Orleans bankers, but never again did they enjoy dominance over the state's affairs. For all of democracy's faults, it was still a far better system. At least elected politicians could be held accountable at the polls.
When the waters receded from the Mississippi Valley in the summer of 1927, they left behind ruined reputations and failed notions. The flood also stole some of our innocence. It did not sow evil in our hearts -- another serpent did that long, long ago. But wherever greed and envy lurked, the floods brought them to the surface, just like a good rain flushes worms out of the soil. The flood proved that fancy science could not restrain the fury of nature. More importantly, it proved that fancy society was not all that good at restraining the brutality of its own nature.
April 7, 1997