The 1927 Mississippi Flood

[Neil Foxlee]

John M. Barry's book Rising Tide: The great Mississippi Flood and how it changed America (see: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... 3?v=glance ) looks like fascinating reading, and even more so now after Katrina. Here's what one Amazon reviewer wrote in 2000:

"No one remembers the 1927 flood, or even that it happened; but it was the events surrounding that single event which more than anything else gave us modern America, and John Barry's book is essential to understanding it.
Obviously the book gives a full account of the flood itself, of the history of the river and of the delta, of the people who carved a nation out of wilderness and who lived and died in the catastrophe; without a doubt, Barry does all this, and does it in gripping style: the book is hard to put down.

But Barry does far more. In telling the story, he shows how a heretofore anti-socialist America was forced by unprecedented circumstance to embrace an enormous, Washington-based big-government solution to the greatest natural catastrophe in our history, preparing the way (psychologically and otherwise) for the New Deal. He shows how this was accomplished through the Republican (but left-wing) Herbert Hoover, who would never have become President without the flood. Most importantly, he shows how Hoover's foolish, all-encompassing arrogance single-handedly drove the backbone of the Republican Party -- African Americans -- away from the GOP and into the arms of the segregationist, generally pro-KKK Democrats (a truly amazing feat). It is an amazing tale indeed.

It holds important lessons for the future as well. Hoover's loss of the black community is a lesson virtually unknown to modern readers (who generally assume they just drifted away under the New Deal), and holds important (and perhaps urgent) lessons for modern Democrats and Republicans alike.

But on a more fundamental level, the book teaches us the power of the river, a lesson we've forgotten even in the face of some reasonably large modern floods. Someday, possibly very soon, the levy system will likely be destroyed by the long-predicted earthquake along the New Madrid Fault: when that day comes, the lessons of Rising Tide will be life and death matters. Southerners in particular may ignore Rising Tide only at their peril."

See also the webpages for Fatal Flood, a PBS documentary http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flood/filmmore/index.html

[David Godwin]

I got hold of this book a few weeks ago, and can confirm what is written above - the book certainly gives an excellent account of the entire episode. I had no idea that New Orleans largely "escaped" in 1927, essentially because the levees upstream were broken, thus reducing the flow of water, whilst the levee immediately downstream was dynamited, flooding only two (!!) of the poorer neighbourhoods of New Orleans. This sounds familiar. The book also describes in detail the entire history of the incident in Greenville, as mentioned in Charley Patton's song, and the appalling treatment of black people in that town, who were pressganged into working on flood relief, but were not allowed to leave the area, as landowners were afraid of losing labour.

Clearly, the flood marked a massive political upheaval. The South went Democrat after the Civil War, because Abraham Lincoln (a Republican) freed the slaves; after the flood, several southerm states (eg Texas) went Republican for the first time since the Civil War.