'Who was watching the levees?'
The Great Flood of 1927 was a true catastrophic event. Fed by late winter and early spring rains that seemed to never end, rivers in the Mississippi River drainage–which is most of the country's midsection–swelled to unimaginable proportions.
The numbers begin to tell the tale: 27,000 square miles–an area the size of Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts combined–were inundated by floodwaters. The lower Misssissippi River's tributaries flooded as far north as the Ohio River and as far west as the Red River in Texas. Some 700,000 people were displaced and an estimated 1,000 died. More than 137,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged.
In the mid-1970s, Pete Daniel went up and down the Mississippi River, gathering oral histories and photos of the Great Flood of 1927, an event he discovered while working on his doctoral dissertation on peonage in the South. He found a vibrant collection of survivors and witnesses. He compiled their observations about the river into a book, Deeper'n It Comes: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood.
Daniel now serves as the curator of the Division of Work and Industry at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. He was interviewed by freelance writer Judd Slivka:
Q: What are you thinking about New Orleans now?
A: I think they fell down on the job. In '27, they patrolled the levees, they knew where the weak spots were. They were right on top of it . . . That's the whole key right there to the survival of the city. So who was watching the levees?
Q: The Great Flood of 1927 was a seminal event, maybe the seminal event, in the South before integration. In your interviews, what did you keep hearing?
A: Everybody I talked to had a different story. I interviewed one guy who walked over to see the crevasse. He said he was 14 and stupid, and he walked over and almost was swept away by the water. He said, "That was the dumbest thing I ever did; I'm lucky I lived." And then there were people who were terrified of the water, anyway, because they couldn't swim.
But people remember this very clearly. You'd say, I'd like to talk to you about the 1927 flood, and you didn't need to explain anything else. It was the most significant event of their lives. I went to interview a woman–I got the title of the book from what she said–and we visited for a few minutes and I said, "I'd like to talk about the 1927 flood." And she paused for a minute and said, "I think it was a Thursday," and then we talked for hours.
Q: [In '27,] New Orleans leaders, along with the Louisiana governor, persuaded the federal government to blow up a levee south of New Orleans to lessen the pressure against the city's levees. Was that justifiable?
A: It's a Monday-morning quarterbacking question. They thought it was enough of a threat that they got the people in Plaquemines Parish to leave and told them they'd look after them and pay for their property.
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