'Who was watching the levees?'
Q: What effect did the Great Flood of 1927 have on New Orleans?
A: It had little effect on the city. They dodged a bullet. I don't know how many people really understood what had happened. They could go to the levee and see the river was up and the river was going down, but I don't know how many of them really understood why or what was behind it.
It seems to me the city's always been vulnerable. The pumps go out for any minor reason. The pumps go out because they got flooded, and it seems that you could build waterproof pumps or build them high enough that you'd always be able to have some pumping capacity. But maybe there's a technical reason for that . . . I think they relied on Providence more than anything else.
Q: We just talked about a technical legacy. Was there a cultural legacy left by the flood in New Orleans?
A: I can't imagine what it would be. I can't think of anything. I mean, there were some good songs that were written about it, but I don't think it had very much of an effect.
Q: Greenville, Miss., was hit much harder. It had significant flooding. Was there a cultural legacy left by the flood there?
A: Greenville did have one. They learned they were vulnerable from the rear. The break that flooded Greenville was 20 or 30 miles away. They learned they could be pilloried for racist behavior. But what they might have learned, what people there learned is that in the flooded areas of land, you just have to set aside segregation. People would pick up whoever was in the water. They'd segregate them the moment they got on dry land, but it didn't matter who was in the water. You went and picked him up.
Q: Were there lessons to be learned?
A: The Army Corps of Engineers was humbled. They had claimed in early April that they could hold all the water in sight. And these levees turned into sieves and just blew out all the way down the river. I think they learned a lesson about hubris.
People feared God and the Mississippi River, in that order, and I think that came home to them with the flood.
When I was interviewing people, people complained about this, that, or the other. They never damned the river; they never said "that goddamned river." They complained about the Corps of Engineers, but they never blamed the river. They talked about it with admiration, with veneration.
Q: They consistently talked about it that way?
A: They did. It was as if they understood, "That's the river. That's nature. That's what it's supposed to be doing."
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