Keenan's Book Reviews: Search results for Mississippi River

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Sunday, July 10, 2016

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

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 19^th 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

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

Blue Revolution by Cynthia Barnett

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Elixir by Brian Fagan

Life's Matrix by Philip Ball

Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

Barry, James M. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Road to the Sea by Florence Dorsey

James B. Eads was a prominent 19^th Century civil engineer who was based in St. Louis most of his long career. The mark of his work can still be found on the Mississippi River more than a century after his death in 1887. Florence Dorsey’s 1947 biography, Road to the Sea, recounts his life and accomplishments.

Eads came to St. Louis with his family in 1833 at the age of 13. They were coming by river from Louisville, Kentucky, to set up shop in greener pastures ahead of his father, Col. Thomas Clark Eads, who moved westward from one failed venture to the next. The ship that carried them caught fire just as they arrived in St. Louis and all their possessions burned up with it.

The family needed the support of the enterprising boy, so he had no opportunity to go to school. He read voraciously, though, borrowing books from an employer, Barret Williams, whose collection included many books on scientific and mechanical subjects.

Eads decided to stay in St. Louis when his family moved upriver to Iowa. He was on his own at age 17, but maturing into a man who would have success as an engineer, businessman and builder.

Eads career began to flourish when, at age 22, he designed and had built a boat with a diving bell. He eventually launched a fleet of bell boats that supported his salvage business. He salvaged wrecks and cargo from the Mississippi and its tributaries. He spent a lot of time in the river and began to know it very well.

By the time the Civil War broke out he had retired from salvaging and enjoying his wealth, but he risked his own fortune to secure the Mississippi River for the Union. He built ironclad gunboats to guard the river and attack Confederate fortifications. America’s military leaders weren’t sure what to make of them at first, but as the war progressed his ships were in great demand.

Eads found it frustrating to deal with Washington politicking and bureaucracy, especially in the U.S. Army. In his post-war endeavors he regularly had opposition from the Army Corps of Engineers and its chief, Andrew A. Humphreys.

These ventures were daring feats of engineering that were aimed at improving the commerce of the Mississippi valley. He built the world’s first steel arch bridge at St. Louis that would connect the city to the east by railroad (and got soaked by his contractor, Andrew Carnegie, while he was at it). He opened a route through the mud at the mouth of the Mississippi River that gave passage from the middle of the country to the ocean and helped make New Orleans a major port. In both these efforts he faced opposition and meddling from the Corp of Engineers.

In his last days he proposed to build a railroad across Mexico’s Tehuantepec isthmus to permit shorter passage from the Atlantic (i.e., the Mississippi) to the Pacific Ocean. His proposal was a serious alternative to Ferdinand de Lesseps’ Panama Canal. Though others took up the cause, Eads’ ship railroad proposal practically died with him. The Panama Canal didn’t fare much better at the time; the United States didn’t take over the project until 1904 and it didn’t open until 1914, de Lesseps’ plan for a tide-level canal with no locks having been abandoned.

As an engineer and Missourian, I’m fascinated by Eads and his extraordinary career. I would recommend Dorsey’s book to anyone looking for an interesting and little-known bit of history.

If you’re interested in this book, you also be interested in

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Great Bridge by David McCollough

Katy Depot Historic Site edited by Deborah Biermann

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

On the Mainlines by William B. Claycomb

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe

Dorsey, Florence. Road to the Sea: The Story of James B. Eads and the Mississippi River. New York: Rinehart & Company, 1947.