The Mississippi
River is powerful. I’ve seen it. I grew up in the northern tip of the
river’s delta and now live near one of its major tributaries. John M. Barry’s
history
of the 1927 flood of the
Mississippi, Rising Tide, is only
partly about the power of the river. It is more about the power of men,
particularly the political
power of the men who have tried to exert control over the river.
The first political battle related to the river took place in the 19th
Century. It was a conflict between the nation’s military engineering
establishment and their increasingly influential civilian counterparts over who
would control Mississippi River policy.
The principal actors and figureheads for the two sides were Andrew A.
Humphreys, chief of the U.S. Army
Corp of Engineers, and James B. Eads,
St. Louis-based
civil engineer. The Corp largely won this battle, maintaining a controlling voice
in river policy, but the resulting agency, the Mississippi
River Commission, adopted a theory of practice that neither Humphreys or
Eads supported. It would lead to floods on the river becoming increasingly bad.
That conflict doesn’t completely disappear, but it is overtaken by the
greater flow of money, politics, society, and race, mostly
centered in New
Orleans, Mississippi’s
Yazoo Valley,
and Washington,
DC. It is hard to give each player his due in a brief review of Barry’s
book. Barry focuses on Leroy Percy,
who had great influence on river policy before, during and after the flood. He
was a planter in the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta and, briefly, a U.S. Senator from
Mississippi. He was also a relative of Walker Percy,
one of my favorite authors.
The flood made political careers and had lasting effects. President Calvin
Coolidge appointed his Secretary of Commerce, Herbert
Hoover, to lead relief efforts after the flood. The publicity and public
goodwill that accrued to Hoover during this period helped to usher him into the
White House
as Coolidge’s successor. Hoover’s lack of follow-through on promises to black
leaders created a crack between in the relationship between African-American’s
and the Republican
Party that led to a serious split.
Huey P.
Long also owed some of his success to the flood and its aftermath. New
Orleans business leaders promised to provide relief to neighbors who would be
flooded by the dynamiting of levees to protect the city. Afterward, these men
did everything they could to minimize their liability and did not even pay
one-tenth of the cost of damages caused by the flooding. Long rode a wave of
resentment against New Orleans aristocrats into the Louisiana
governor’s office. Once there, he used his position to strip the New Orleans
elite of as much power as he could. As the city elites became more insular and
focused on protecting what they had, rather than growing their businesses and
community, New Orleans lost its position as the leading city of the South as
other more welcoming cities grew.
If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Barry, James M. Rising Tide: The
Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1997.
