The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927: How It Changed America - Historical Disaster Book for US History Enthusiasts & Students | Perfect for Research, Education & Understanding Natural Disasters

John Barry writes tremendous character-driven historical narratives. He is perhaps best known for his 2004 bestseller “The Great Influenza” about the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which returned to the bestseller list in 2020 as COVID-19 swept the globe. “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America” came out in 1997 and won the Parkman Prize, among other critical accolades. Barry writes that the unprecedented national disaster in 1927 shook American institutions to their core: “Honor and money collided. White and black collided. Regional and national power structures collided. The collisions shook America.”Both “Influenza” and “Tide” take the long view, providing lengthy historical backgrounds to the main story and developing a handful of colorful characters that propel the narrative forward. In “Influenza” we learned about the remarkable achievements made by American medical science pioneer William Welch at Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Canadian-American pathologist Oswald Avery. In “Tide” Barry presents to us Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, the nineteenth century homicidal narcissist in charge of the US Army Corps of Engineers, James Buchanan Eads, perhaps the greatest American engineering entrepreneur that you’ve never heard of, and LeRoy Percy, a character straight out of a William Faulkner novel who ruled over the Mississippi Delta like some sort of benevolent feudal lord.Barry begins by explaining how the tragedy of the 1927 flood was allowed to happen. The seeds of disaster were planted nearly a century earlier with the 1861 publication of the “Report on the Physics and Hydraulics of the Mississippi River” by Andrew Humphreys. According to the author, it is almost impossible to overstate the widespread influence of this seemingly esoteric report. “Humphreys’ report would in fact become the single most influential document ever written about the Mississippi River,” Barry writes. “Indeed, it would become one of the most influential single engineering reports ever written on any subject.”In his report, Humphreys argued for a “levees-only” approach to controlling the river. “It has been demonstrated,” Humphreys wrote, “that no advantage can be derived either from diverting tributaries or constructing reservoirs, and that the plans of cut-offs, and of new and enlarged outlets to the Gulf, are too costly and too dangerous to be attempted. The plan of levees, on the contrary, which has always recommended itself by its simplicity and its direct repayment of investments, may be relied upon for protecting all the alluvial bottom lands liable to inundation below Cape Girardeau.” With these words the eventual fate of the Mississippi Valley was more or less sealed, according to Barry. The author suggests, but never says so directly, that levees alone will never be sufficient to contain the Mississippi River.Faith in the levees grew in the late 1870s when it was dramatically demonstrated how the artificial narrowing of the river’s channel would accelerate the velocity of the current, which in turn would scour out the riverbed and naturally dredge a deeper channel. One of the most longstanding and vexing challenges to navigation on the Mississippi occurred at the river’s mouth. The river deposited billions of tons of sentiment that blocked the mouth of the river with ever shifting sandbars that regularly reduced the river’s depth to less than ten feet. James Buchanan Eads, fresh off of his triumph in building the world’s largest steel suspension bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis, declared that he had a simple solution to the seemingly intractable problem. He proposed to build a series of jetties that would harness the power of the river to plow a 30-foot-deep channel across the sandbars. The country’s leading civil engineers, including Humphreys, said it was impossible. Eads agreed to pay all construction expenses upfront, only accepting reimbursement from the government after his ambitioius goals had been met.The jetties were an immediate and dramatic success and Eads became a national hero. The economic results were incredible. In 1875, when Eads began work on the jetties, roughly 7,000 tons of goods were shipped from St. Louis through New Orleans to Europe. In 1880, the year the jetties were finished, that same route shipped over 450,000 tons. New Orleans instantly jumped from the ninth largest port in the United States to second, trailing only New York. The true and full economic potential of the Mississippi River and its many tributaries had finally been unlocked.Congress moved to establish firmer federal control over the river. In 1879 it created the Mississippi River Commission, a joint civil-military advisory body established to oversee federal funds for flood control and provide ongoing expert opinion in the areas of flood control and navigation. Instead, Barry writes, the commission quickly became a bureaucratic obstacle that obstinately defended a variety of ill-advised compromise decisions that would ultimately lead to disaster. “The Mississippi River Commission,” Barry writes, “certain of its theories, constrained the river within levees, believing that the levees alone, without any other means to release the tension of the river, could hold within narrow banks this force immense enough to have spread its waters over tens of thousands of square miles, where millions of people would settle.”With this extensive historical background established, Barry finally moves to the great flood itself. The national calamity of 1927 unfolded slowly, like a slow motion train wreck. It began in the autumn of 1926 as a series of extensive storms drenched the Great Plains and Midwest and slowly made their way through numerous tributaries to the mighty Mississippi. And then blizzards raged across the northern United States during the winter, adding tens of feet to the snowpack that would eventually melt in the spring and feed the run-off to the Mississippi basin. By New Years Day 1927 the river was already at flood gauge in Cairo, Illinois at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. “It was as if the Mississippi was growing and swelling and rising in preparation,” Barry writes, “gathering itself for a mighty attack, sending out small floods as skirmishers to test man’s strength.” The flood gauge at Cairo wouldn’t fall back to normal until late June. Things would only get worse. In the ten years from 1916 through 1926, not a single storm had poured as much precipitation on New Orleans as did any of five storms that struck in the first four months of 1927. The “immense, formidable, impregnable” government-approved levees all along the river that protected the citizens of the Mississippi River Valley would soon be tested as never before.The levee broke just above Greenville, Mississippi at Mounds Landing on 21 April. It would be the singled largest crevasse ever to occur anywhere on the Mississippi River and would inundate an area 50 miles wide and 100 miles long with up to 20 feet of water.The flood devastated a thousand mile stretch from Cairo to the Gulf Coast, but Barry’s narrative focuses in on just two places: New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta.The city of New Orleans has always lived under constant threat of inundation, but as the events of 1927 unfolded, the city had not experienced a serious flood since 1849. Nevertheless, business leaders fretted over the potentially devastating economic impact of a flood, even just the threat of such a flood. “Long term,” Barry says, “if the nation’s businessmen lost confidence in the safety of New Orleans, serious damage could result.” Barry writes that early twentieth century New Orleans was controlled by an aristocracy of gentlemen bankers and attorneys, men whose families had played leading roles in New Orleans society for generations. Civic power was measured by what social clubs you belonged to, such as the ultra-exclusive Boston Club, and which Mardi Gras krewes you participated in, specifically the Krewe of Rex, not by any temporary elected office one might hold.When the flood of 1927 threatened the city of New Orleans, a small group of business leaders, led by Canal Bank president James Butler, determined on their own authority that the levee below the city needed to be breached in order to ensure the safety of the city. A group of 57 leading New Orleans businessmen publicly pledged to support the restoration of St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, which would be intentionally inundated by the breach. According to Barry, the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana sat passively by as these men met in private and then meekly accepted the decisions reached by this unelected group of civic leaders.In the end, Barry writes that the breaching of the levee below New Orleans was completely unnecessary. The city would have avoided inundation without it. The business leaders had anticipated the cost of reparations to be $2M. It turned out to be over $30M (nearly $500M in today’s dollars). Far from rising to the occasion, Barry says the New Orleans gentry simply cut their losses and walked away, abandoning the poor farmers and trappers in the flood zone to their fate. The immediate political repercussion would be the election of the populist Huey Long in 1928. Over the next half-century, Atlanta, Houston, and even Memphis would eclipse New Orleans economically.The second story Barry tells occurs in Mississippi. “There was something dark about Mississippi,” the author writes, “darker than even the rest of the South.” The Mississippi Delta region encompasses the northwest corner of the state and is anchored by the small city of Greenville. The Delta population in 1927 included some 170,000 black residents, mostly sharecroppers, and just 25,000 whites. It was a wild, semi-feudal land under the benevolent but total political and economic control of the Percy family. The two leading figures in this part of Barry’s narrative are LeRoy Percy, a former US senator and trustee of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, and his son, William Alexander Percy, an attorney, war hero, and poet. William Faulkner couldn’t have created two greater representations of Mississippi planter gentlemen if he had tried. In Barry’s estimation, both of the Percys were decent, honorable men who nevertheless failed in their time of trial.The obvious solution to the calamity in the Delta was to evacuate the refugees, the vast majority of whom were black. But this presented Will Percy, who had been appointed head of the local Red Cross, with a serious dilemma. The local agricultural economy depended completely on black labor. If large numbers of black refugees whose homes had been destroyed were relocated outside of Mississippi a great percentage of them would likely never return. “Mississippi was determined to keep its workers if it required force to do so,” Barry writes. Percy turned the Red Cross refugee camp in Greenville into a veritable “slave labor camp.” Despite draconian efforts to keep the Delta’s black population in place, Barry estimates that perhaps 50% still managed to leave, mostly to Chicago, never to return.As late as July, 1.5 million acres remained underwater. An estimated 330,000 people were rescued from rooftops. Amazingly, only 246 people drowned. The flood was a watershed political moment in American history, according to Barry, “when the nation first demanded that the federal government assume a new kind of responsibility for its citizens.” From the perspective of a twenty-first century reader, the federal response to the disaster was shockingly limited. “The Treasury that year collected a record surplus of $635 million,” Barry writes, “yet in a disaster that affected 1 percent of the nation’s population, the government would not even create a loan-guarantee program.”Nevertheless, the undisputed hero of the hour was secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover, who President Coolidge appointed to oversee the government response to the disaster. “The Red Cross and Hoover … performed magnificently during the initial stages of the flood,” Barry says. The Great Humanitarian, as he was known from his previous successful leadership efforts to alleviate food shortages in Belgium and then the United States during the First World War, led from the front, establishing a headquarters in Memphis during the early stages of the flood and then crisscrossing the region non-stop for several months. For many Americans, the first national radio address they ever heard was Herbert Hoover reporting on the flood from the banks of the swollen Mississippi.Hoover’s performance as Flood Czar carried him directly to the White House, Barry says. Not even considered a possible dark horse candidate in early 1927, six months later he was the overwhelming favorite for the Republican nomination. “Hoover won the nomination on the first ballot,” Barry writes. “The flood had swept him to it; the flood had returned him to the countrymen’s consciousness, made him once again a hero, once again the Great Humanitarian.” He was elected president in 1928 in one of the largest landslides in history.The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 made more than a president. It remade American government. Citizens across the political spectrum demanded that the government do more to protect them. Once again, a small group of unelected power brokers, including Percy and Butler, met to discuss the pending federal legislation concerning control of the Mississippi flood plain. In less than half an hour, Barry writes, these men “largely decided the fate of the most comprehensive and expensive piece of legislation Congress had ever considered.” The Flood Control Act of 1928, reluctantly signed by small government advocate President Coolidge on 15 May, “set a precedent of direct, comprehensive, and vastly expanded federal involvement in local affairs … a shift that both presaged and prepared the way for far greater changes that would soon come” during the Great Depression and New Deal.One hundred and seventy five years after the levee-only recommendations from Humphreys and Eads, federal authorities have finally embraced a mixed approach to controlling the floodwaters of the Mississippi River system. In a program called “Project Flood,” the Corps of Engineers has set standards for levees far higher and thicker than those of 1927. Engineers have also added a “floodway,” essentially a parallel river that runs for 65 miles in the northern flood plain in Missouri. A series of “cutoffs” slice through S-shaped curves in the river, increasing the velocity of the flow and, in total, shortening the river by 150 miles. Finally, a concrete spillway 30-miles above New Orleans is designed to guide floodwater safely across 7 miles of land and into Lake Pontchartrain.