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Chittaranjan

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When I heard that many in New Orleans (especially blacks) believed that the Army Corps of Engineers had dynamited the levees protecting the city’s black neighborhoods just after Hurricane Katrina hit, I dismissed the notion as yet another conspiracy theory. These seem to proliferate wherever the powers of the human mind languish unfertilized by action or empiricism, and fasten on any sufficiently inaccessible object – the Vatican, the American Military, Jewry, the Ivy League, whites, the Saudis, the Chinese, the Skull and Bones Club, the publishing industry, the oil industry, you name it. I still believe the Katrina rumor is idiotic, like most of them. But now I see that it grew in the shadow cast by a series of real events which still shape our country today.

The story of these events is told by John M. Barry in his book Rising Tide. The general topic of the book is the 1927 flood of the Mississippi. It turns out that during this flood, the government of Louisiana did dynamite the levees protecting St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes (parishes are counties, in Louisiana lingo) – not black parishes, but certainly poorer ones – in order to protect the city of New Orleans. There was nothing secret about it – there was an evacuation, the press was there, and the action was ordered by the governor – so it was not a classic “conspiracy,” though several influential people pushed it through. And unlike dynamiting the levees after a hurricane, this action made sense from the engineer’s perspective: a large outlet just below New Orleans would reduce the flood level at the city, and it worked as planned. Barry furnishes expert opinions indicating that this action probably was unnecessary: that there were so many levee breaks above New Orleans that the river would have gone down of its own accord. Barry makes a great deal of hay out of this, claiming that New Orleans did it just to boost investor confidence in the city, but seeing that the city was facing something like complete destruction – river floods are many hundreds of times more destructive than hurricane flooding, because the water does not merely rise but flow and scour – I can easily see why the men in authority were in no mood to gamble with the lives and fortunes of half a million residents of New Orleans.

One of the many interesting things about this story is the way that crises reveal our society to be much more traditional, and far less rational and rights-based, than we like to believe. Government action, in this instance, led to tens of thousands of citizens losing their livelihoods – in order to protect others who were both more numerous and wealthier. Barry focuses almost entirely on the latter fact – that the bankers of New Orleans could flood out the fur-trappers and farmers of St. Bernard Parish – while barely considering the broader utilitarian side to the equation. But under any circumstances, the utilitarian arguments prevail over questions of rights. The centers of wealth and population will be preserved and the outlying areas will be sacrificed. The residents of Queens or Staten Island implicitly know this – that in a crisis, Manhattan means more.

The problem is compounded by the organized duplicity known as the law. The residents of St. Bernard parish arrived at their levees armed, in order to defend their homes against the government which was about to destroy them. They were convinced to leave by the promises of the wealthy gentlemen of power in New Orleans, who gave them their “word of honor” and pledged in writing to recompense them for their damages. This ended up being a false promise, as they effectively stacked the Compensatory Commission and used various legal methods, all detailed by Barry, to prevent people from receiving compensation. In the end, of the $35 million in claims, New Orleans paid $2.9 million, $2.1 million of which went to two companies whose presidents were on the boards of the New Orleans banks (those claims do tend to get paid in full). The remainder of the claimants received an average of $200 each in exchange for the complete destruction of their homes, effects, and jobs (the area was flooded throughout the rest of the year). “Never trust a rich man’s word of honor” is a generally useful rule to live by.

All of this is typical municipal politics, of course, and we all know that societies break down this way when encountering a crisis. The rich manipulate the system to protect themselves and dump the losses onto the backs of the poor (see our current financial crisis). But it is always good to be reminded of it.

The book is even more interesting, however, as it confronts the effects of the flood upriver, most notably in the Mississippi Delta. The size of the flood was astonishing – it poured water over 27,000 square miles (about the size of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut combined), displaced more than a million people, made the Mississippi River more than 150 miles wide at places and over most of the flooded area more than twenty feet deep. More than 300,000 people were rescued by the government and the Red Cross from trees and rooftops. The cold water stayed for months and devastated the valley’s economy.

But the flood was particularly dangerous socially. The plantation system in effect there – more or less the same as slavery – could only be preserved by preventing blacks from leaving, even during the flood. Refugees poured in to Greenville, Mississippi, where the whites were quickly evacuated. An initial order was given to evacuate the blacks as well, but the officer in charge was called back by the planters of the region, who informed him of their concerns. Most of the blacks there had nothing but debts to their landowners. Most of them would never come back once they got on that steamer. They had to be kept there. The blacks ended up watching as the last steamer, capable of carrying thousands to safety, “departed with thirty-three white women and children.” The blacks would be kept in the flood zone.

The resulting logistics were quite astonishing. The white men in charge of the relief effort had 20,000 blacks crowded onto a levee no more than twenty feet wide, the only land in the area not flooded. Food and water for all these people had to be brought in by steamer from hundreds of miles away, for several months. Refugees were put to work creating order out of chaos, tents and pathways and the like, which was called a “concentration camp” (an interesting episode in the history of the term, which did not have quite the implication it has today, but still does not indicate much good). They were kept in the camp by armed guards, and “tagged” so they could be returned to the proper plantation when the floodwaters receded. Barry quotes a Red Cross memo: “Plantation owners desiring their labor to be returned from Refugee Camps will make application to the nearest Red Cross representative” (313). A later investigation noted “Negroes were caught slipping out of camp and were … whipped, the men using a strap taken off of one of their rifles” (315).

The blacks in the camps worked loading and unloading the barges and steamers supplying Greenville. They were given food on the following conditions:

1. No rations will be issued to Greenville negro women and children unless there is no man in the family, which fact must be certified by a white person. 2. No negro man in Greenville nor their families will be rationed unless the men join the labor gang or are employed. 3. Negro men … drawing a higher wage [than $1 a day] are not entitled to be rationed.” (317)

The similarity between these rules and those of the later federal welfare system is quite striking. Of course, no other Red Cross refugees were required to work in order to receive food.

The refugees ended up being kept in these camps for nearly a year, and conditions of course deteriorated, with thousands suffering from pellagra, a disease caused by niacin deficiency.

Barry goes into great detail explaining how Herbert Hoover – the man in charge of the recovery effort, who ends up being an extremely interesting figure – started out desiring to help the conditions of blacks and ended up kowtowing to local mores. One of the results of this was the shifting of his Republican party away from its Abolitionist roots. Hoover’s usefulness to the South during the flood gained him partisans there, which led to his realization that he could exploit the South’s revulsion at voting for a Catholic (Al Smith) and win Southern states. He became the first Republican candidate blacks shied away from and the first to win any southern states since Reconstruction (he carried Texas, Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia). Roosevelt of course later began the process of winning the black vote for the Democratic Party.

This is one of the modern results of this flood, another being a transformation of the role of government. Barry notes how Grover Cleveland in 1887 had vetoed an appropriation of $10,000 for seed for Texas farmers devastated by a flood, as he found “no warrant in the Constitution… to indulge a benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds… for the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service” (369). This he said, despite the fact that he believed that it would be effective. After this flood, on the other hand, the U.S. government not only undertook disaster recovery operations, but the Army Corps of Engineers assumed responsibility for the regulation of the Mississippi River, and by extension every other river in America. This built the Hoover Dam, brought water to California, made agriculture possible in the West, brought electric power to the South, and numerous other things.

The main value of this book is in its details, which fill you with that horrible Faulkner feeling (“The past is not dead. In fact, it isn’t even past.”) that so pervades the South. All the labor building and fortifying the levees was done by blacks. LeRoy Percy, a quondam U.S. senator, friend of Teddy Roosevelt, and one of the book’s main characters, wrote to a friend this way:

Nothing could be more interesting, so far as racial study goes, than to see five or six thousand free negroes working on a weak point under ten or twelve white men, without the slightest friction and of course without any legal right to call upon them for the work, and yet the work is done not out of any feeling of obligation but out of a traditional obedience to the white man. (193)

This is the kind of delusion that seemed to grow well at the time with a little money and a university education. The “traditional obedience to the white man” was enforced at a thousand points in the society and was no less violent because it was so habitual. And of course, the crisis brought these facts to the fore:

In towns on both sides of the river, every morning the police ran patrols through the black neighborhoods and grabbed black men off the street to send them to the levee. If a black man refused, he was beaten or jailed or both; more than one man was shot…. William Davis, a black man, drove the trucks, and says, ‘The first of April I started carrying people up there. Never saw any white people on the levee working.’ (195-6)

When the levee broke:

‘The negroes ran to the break also,’ [National Guard officer E.C.] Sanders wrote in his official report, ‘but as they arrived they soon became demoralized and ran away. It then became necessary for the civilian foreman and my detachment to force the negroes to the break at the point of guns.’ (200)

It was no use. The levee was ripped apart by the river.

Paternalism is one of the primary phenomena in the white-black relation in the book; Will Percy, LeRoy’s son, wrote: “None of us was influenced by what the Negroes themselves wanted: they had no capacity to plan for their own welfare; planning for them was another of our burdens” (308). Time has not made this way of thinking or mode of action go away. Here is a description of the Hurricane Katrina evacuation, from the mouth of Anthony Wells, in Dan Baum’s book Nine Lives, some eighty years later:

They didn’t take us to no Superdome. By then, they were cleaning that bitch out. That’s when they found all them women raped, the murdered babies, all that shit. They took us to the Convention Center, and, man, they had that shit tight! The Army was running it by then, and they took everything you had – guns, knives, even my ink pen. One thing they didn’t take away was people’s animals. It was like every other person there had him a damned dog on a leash. One guy had a basket of kittens. Another had a hedgehog up under his shirt. I ain’t kidding you. A hedgehog. Couldn’t take my ink pen in there, but go ahead, sir, take your hedgehog. (262)

Finally, they put us on a plane, a regular airline plane because they’d run out of Army planes. The whole time, they wouldn’t tell us where we were going. ‘You’ll know when you get there,’ they said, but what kind of shit is that? Some people said, ‘No, I ain’t going,’ and the soldiers and police and all, they just said, ‘Oh yes you are.’ Like we was under communism or some shit. Put us all on that plane with dogs all up and down the aisle, people crying. We flew I don’t know how long. An hour. Maybe two. Set down right before dawn. When we come to a stop, the door opens, and this white man gets on. He’s wearing a suit and tie all buttoned up, and it’s like five o’clock in the morning. He looks like a preacher. I look back to see what he’s looking at, and oh Lordy Jesus, that plane was full of stinking, crazy-looking niggers. We got dogs, we got cats. We got that dude with his motherfucking hedgehog. One dude, with the big gold grille, had a big-ass boa constrictor around his neck. This little white dude in the suit, he must have thought his world had about ended. The best of New Orleans delivered up fresh to his doorstep! But I’ll tell you, he was cool. He smiled like he was on a game show. Said, ‘I am the mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, and I’m here to welcome you to my city.’ (268-9)

Whites and blacks both need to figure out what to make of this relationship and how to change it. It makes you want to go out and start reading Kipling, just to understand it better.

There is a third part of Rising Tide, dealing with the engineering questions on the river itself, which are in fact more or less irrelevant to the book. Any ink spent on James Eads – one of the three engineers profiled – is worthwhile to some extent, as he is one of the great autodidact geniuses of all time, but the section as a whole is not worth much except as a proof of Barry’s general contention that personal grievances and politics often get in the way of justice or achievement. For an understanding of the engineering problems of the river, a look at John McPhee’s essay Atchafalaya will better repay your time. Barry does not appear to have a grasp on the technical reasons for the failure of the levees-only theory of river control.

I will close with a word on the book itself. The value of the book derives from the facts and quotations (judiciously selected; Barry has a good eye) in its pages, and the story itself, but not from its handling. A hundred-fifty pages could easily have been excised out of its 420 without any damage; there is no stylistic reason to read the book; and there are entire paragraphs of inaccurate bluster and crass sensationalizing. Do we really need utterances like “There was something dark in Mississippi, darker even than the rest of the South. And it would grow darker still”? You have to endure things like this:

He could face the fact that he would never be his father. He could even face the fact that he had failed his father, but he could not accept that his father had failed him, not because his father had patronized or even betrayed him, but because his father had done what Will could not admire. He could not face his father’s ruthlessness, and the abnegation of everything in which Will had believed. Unless one embraces the truth, one can only be comic or tragic; one cannot be heroic. His father had often been heroic. In the war Will had been heroic. Neither his father nor he were heroic now. (335)

If your story doesn’t make the fact that the son is ashamed of his father obvious, then at least you can say it more quickly than this.

Earlier Will had derided as ‘rabbits’ those men who had fled the city. But he could not tolerate criticism; he could not tolerate public failure; he could not tolerate being treated as irrelevant; he could not tolerate the truth. (335)

You have to tolerate a great deal of this in between the narration of the facts, and it cloys especially as it comes with so little psychological insight. Every man is reduced to wanting one thing (usually power), and every man “would do anything to get it.” You tire of the hyperbole after the first 300 pages or so.

But the book as a whole is worth a look, and it shows how deep and abiding many of this country’s problems are, and shows the truth of this saying, from Margaret Knox (reported by Dan Baum): “Oy! You ask someone in New Orleans a question, and they have to start so far back that they never get to telling you what you want to know.” There is so much water already under the bridge, and the current so vast and uncontrollable, you find yourself unable to say anymore how things could be made better.