Another Flood That Stunned America
For days, the rain fell. The rivers swelled, the lakes rose. And when the water could no longer find a place to go, it battered the weakest parts of the levees that had protected thousands of people and blew through, sending a surge of white-capped brown water faster than the spill of Niagara Falls.
So began the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the most catastrophic deluge ever to hit the South and one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.
The seminal event of pre-integration southern politics, the 1927 flood inundated an area about half the size of New England. It killed as many as 1,000 people and displaced about 700,000 more. At a time when the entire federal budget was barely $3 billion, it caused an estimated $1 billion in damage.
Most significant for the course of America, however, the tragedy hastened the mass migration of African-Americans to northern cities and marked the beginning of the end of southern sharecropping. "You'd say, 'I'd like to talk to you about the 1927 flood,' and you didn't need to explain anything else," says Pete Daniel, author of Deep'n As It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood. "It was the most significant event of their lives."
The 1927 flood spared New Orleans, yet parallels to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are hard to miss. Authorities were ill-prepared to deal with refugees, and the brunt of the damage was borne by poor blacks unable to get to high ground.
Like Katrina, the tragedy was in many ways born of man's hubris--fitting because New Orleans itself grew out of man's assumption that he could control nature, no matter how stubborn nature was. The city was founded in 1718 by Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville on a piece of high ground between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain. It was built below grade, against the advice of engineers. Pumps and canals, its founders thought, would handle the water.
Over the centuries, the same attitude would direct development of the rest of the lower Mississippi. Earthen levees rose ever higher to corral the river in its channel. But they have come at a price: The same volume of water just moves faster through a smaller space, scouring the channel and weakening the levees from below.
When the rains broke records in April 1927, the Gulf of Mexico was full and worked as a stopper to the Mississippi. The Mississippi was full, too, pushing its own waters up tributaries, breaking levees and causing flooding as far as Ohio and Texas. All that water had to go somewhere.
It couldn't go to New Orleans, panicky city fathers told the Army Corps of Engineers; it would devastate the regional economy.
To save New Orleans, the leaders proposed a radical plan. South of the city, the population was mostly rural and poor. The leaders appealed to the federal government to essentially sacrifice those parishes by blowing up an earthen levee and diverting the water to marshland. They promised restitution to people who would lose their homes. Government officials, including Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, signed off.
On April 29, the levee at Caernarvon, 13 miles south of New Orleans, succumbed to 39 tons of dynamite. The river rushed through at 250,000 cubic feet per second. New Orleans was saved, but the misery of the flooded parishes had only started. The city fathers took years to make good on their promises, and very few residents ever saw any compensation at all.
The water, which had started rising on Good Friday, would not recede until July. Many victims would never return to their homes. Hoover, who won support for leading relief efforts, went on to win the presidential election. And the Corps of Engineers, who had said the levees would hold, was humbled. Says Daniel: "People complained about the corps . . . but they never blamed the river. They understood: 'That's the river. That's nature. That's what it's supposed to be doing.' "
This story appears in the September 12, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.