'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.
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."