Rising Tide:
The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
By John M. Barry
Simon & Schuster, 524 pages, $27.50
The “great man” theory of history, in which powerful people shape large events, has suffered much of late. Many historians now train their lenses on how African-Americans, women and the poor have forged “cultural passageways,” a resonant term coined by the late Herbert Gutman, a scholar of lasting influence.
Perhaps it takes a political journalist to resurrect the “great man” theory with such inventive skill as John M. Barry marshals in “Rising Tide,” a gripping account of the mammoth flooding of 1927 that devastated Mississippi and Louisiana and sent political shock waves back to Washington.
Barry invests his protagonist, the Mississippi River, with metaphysical powers reminiscent of Old Testament plagues sent to punish mankind. “There is no sight like the rising Mississippi. One cannot look at it without awe, or watch it rise and press against the levees without fear. It grows darker, angrier, dirtier, eddies and whirlpools erupt on its surface. . . . Unlike a human enemy, the river has no weakness, makes no mistakes, is perfect.”
Against nature’s perfection the author casts a succession of powerful men as supporting players, swept along by efforts to control currents more powerful than themselves.
Barry approaches these politicians, planters, bankers, lawyers and publishers with the moral fuel of an early century muckraker, an insistence that truth must speak to power. Within this annal of a mighty river lies an indictment of elite society in New Orleans and Mississippi’s Delta, many of whose descendants are prominent today and undoubtedly not pleased by the book.
The author sets up the theme of a society in conflict with itself by chronicling a fascinating struggle between two 19th Century engineers, James Eads and Andrew Humphreys, who spent most of their professional lives advancing theories about how best to control the flood-prone mighty river. As the theories clashed, the two men ended up loathing each other.
Eads, self-made and effectively self-educated, walked the floor of the river in a diving bell as a salvage operator. He went on to build a huge suspension bridge in St. Louis, where he settled and made his fortune. He invented a wedge to deepen the riverbed’s outflow to the Gulf of Mexico and advocated jetties and cutoff channels to thwart flooding.
Humphries was an Army engineer who built his career on contacts in the government, including Congress. He advocated strengthening the levee system along the river. Eads, who scoffed at the “levees-only” policy, had the better plan, according to Barry; but the Army Corps of Engineers eventually fused the two plans, after their authors had died. The compromise laid the groundwork for the massive flooding of 1927.
Barry also focuses on LeRoy Percy, a patrician attorney and cotton planter in Mississippi who served briefly as a U.S. senator. After a huge flood in the 1870s, Percy arranged for railroad lines to be built through the area, and a system of tenant-farmer sharecropping to maintain a black labor force. This was pure self-interest for Percy and other planters with massive acreage. Barry is surprisingly restrained in his treatment of Percy’s elitist economics, perhaps because of the enormous human effort it took to transform a vast jungle into a productive cotton region.
Percy treated sharecroppers better than most planters did; he also waged a valiant war against the Ku Klux Klan that made him a hero in the national press. His town of Greenville, hardly immune to racism, at least staved off mob violence that dominated other parts of the state. But contradictions, within a democracy, of a society built on semifeudal labor were bound to erupt.
Percy’s wife was from New Orleans, where he cemented business ties with aristocratic leaders who devised a brutal plan to fend off the rising waters of 1927. They decided to dynamite levees south of the city, which would spare New Orleans by flooding St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes. Bankers, lawyers and business leaders made a solemn pledge to see that farmers, muskrat trappers and others in the lower parishes would be duly compensated.
No representative of city government was at the initial meeting where the plan was presented to Gov. Oramel Simpson, writes Barry. Had the commercial barons waited one day, the spillover of floodwaters across Atchafalaya Basin, west of the city, would have made the levee destruction unnecessary and prevented most of the $35 million worth of damages.
Hubris entwined with greed creates a special kind of villainy. Barry provides a memorable portrait of J. Blanc Monroe, who founded one of the city’s leading law firms, Monroe and Lemann. With other prominent attorneys of the day he waged war against the victims of the massive flood created by his own class’ manipulations. For his effort in holding down reparations to $800,000, Monroe earned a $25,000 bonus from the Orleans Levee Board, the government agency that was his formal client.
The flood ravaged thousands of Mississippi acres, and the region never really recovered economically. Many blacks left to find work in the North, especially Chicago. Barry argues that Huey Long’s election as governor in 1928 was a consequence of his predecessor’s role in the dynamiting of the levees. The assertion may be true, but the book lacks sufficient election data to support it.
LeRoy Percy’s son Will, a lawyer and gentle poet, tried to fill his father’s shoes as a community leader by organizing black laborers in a massive effort to keep Greenville from flooding. But he failed to prevent harsh mistreatment by gun-toting white guards in refugee camps, and later lashed out at black leaders who were indignant about the mistreatment of their people.
This scion, William Alexander Percy, would publish a famous autobiography, “Lanterns on the Levee,” and devotedly raise three orphaned nephews, including the future novelist Walker Percy. Barry focuses on Will’s closeted homosexuality, suggesting that his internal conflicts, like a mirror to society’s contradictions, provoked his blunders in dealing with the flood. It is a compelling analysis, but Barry goes further, writing of sexual “rumor” and “it was said” events–a needless overlay of innuendo.
Barry distills complex engineering theories into lucid prose and excavates a society haunted by racism and class prejudices. “Rising Tide” is a brilliant match of scholarship and investigative journalism.
