Attorneys of Mississippi

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America

Description

An American epic of science, politics, race, honor, high society, and the Mississippi River, Rising Tide tells the riveting and nearly forgotten story of the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known -- the Mississippi flood of 1927. The river inundated the homes of nearly one million people, helped elect Huey Long governor and made Herbert Hoover president, drove hundreds of thousands of blacks north, and transformed American society and politics forever.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Lillian Smith Award.

When Mother Nature rages, the physical results are never subtle. Because we cannot contain the weather, we can only react by tabulating the damage in dollar amounts, estimating the number of people left homeless, and laying the plans for rebuilding. But as John M. Barry expertly details in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, some calamities transform much more than the landscape.

While tracing the history of the nation's most destructive natural disaster, Barry explains how ineptitude and greed helped cause the flood, and how the policies created to deal with the disaster changed the culture of the Mississippi Delta. Existing racial rifts expanded, helping to launch Herbert Hoover into the White House and shifting the political alliances of many blacks in the process. An absorbing account of a little-known, yet monumental event in American history, Rising Tide reveals how human behavior proved more destructive than the swollen river itself.

Reviews

Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-09-06
Summary: "Good grief, it's raining again"

This book is more a history of southern political game-playing than that of a great flood, the latter being lost in a story of the political skullduggery of local, regional, and even national politicians who played a role, invited or otherwise, in the etiology of the flood and its sequelae. The tragedy of the flood, its human toll, and the devastation of the landscape are all clearly described. Still, it is difficult for the reader to comprehend the range and depth of the devastation, if only because of its immensity. Accountings of the flood itself and how it affected those in its path are well written, but all is overshadowed by the unbelievably self-serving actions of the political leaders of the area, their gross incompetency in providing leadership, guidance,and timely assistance to the untold thousands of their constituencies, and of similar failings in many of the flood control experts, no two of which seemed able to agree on the best way to handle the crisis. It seems that everyone in authority was out to advance his or her career or in some way promote ther private agenda without regard for the thouands who were sick, injured, and/or had lost their land, crops, and personal possessions including their homes. On the positive side, the reader will learn a lot about rivers and their behavior patterns and personalities. Who knew? Dr. Gr.

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Rating: 3 / 5
Date: 2010-07-21
Summary: "All forest, no trees"

Astoundingly, for a book that spends nearly a quarter of its length recounting the life stories of three engineers whose recommendations on how to prevent the Mississippi River from flooding the Army Corps of Engineers ultimately (albeit stupidly) rebuffed, John Barry's Rising Tide provides no background on sharecropping, and next to none regarding anything else about the lives of the black farmers who would suffer the most severely from the 1927 deluge. In fact, between (1) his repeated praise for "planter" LeRoy Percy's fairly enlightened--for his time, place, and station--attitude toward black people (he condemned race-baiting politicians and the Klan); (2) his (Barry's) utterly disingenuous claim that black farmers at the turn of the 20th century owned two-thirds of farms in the Delta (they certainly did not own two-thirds of the land); and (3) his practically total lack of discussion of the Southern black experience outside of Washington County, Mississippi (royal demesne of Percy and family), Barry almost makes it seem like things weren't so bad for black Southerners.

They were. When Barry wrote Rising Tide, he was at least familiar with Pete Daniels' The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969. It's listed in his bibliography. But not only does Barry fail to ever define peonage (it's enslavement for debt), he fails to take it at all seriously. But peons are exactly what altogether far too many black farmers in the South were before the flood, and what every black person was (if not an outright chattel slave) who was held in a Red Cross concentration camp during and after the flood and compelled at the point of National Guard rifles to labor without pay pending return to the plantation he or she came from.

But while Rising Tide lacks perspective, it does not lack worth. What it does deem important--viz., (1) the contest between the Mississippi River and its levees (and the black laborers forced to keep raising those levees ever higher), from the fall of 1926 through the spring of 1927; (2) the hyperexclusive white, male, gentile plutocracy of New Orleans, and how it ran roughshod over the muskrat trappers of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana; (3) Herbert Hoover's rise from Calvin Coolidge's flood czar to the presidency, through, in part, his manipulation of the African American levers of power (such as they were), and despite his heartlessness and incompetence (except in the immediate aftermath of the flooding); (4) Will Percy (son of LeRoy), and his abuse of the black flood victims of Washington County, whom the Red Cross had made his charges--it investigates in great detail, yet explains with ease and perfect clarity. With one exception: Barry never defines the word "flood." The reader is left to guess that a river floods as soon as it overflows its banks, i.e., that a river may be in flood whether it tops or punches through its levees or not. This is a critical issue, and the book should have dealt with it explicitly.

The big problem with Rising Tide, then, is that Barry chooses to tell the story of the 1927 flood solely through the stories of a small handful of personalities, all of them elites, all but one of them wealthy white men (the overly optimistic Robert Moton of Tuskegee Institute is the exception). The reader will thus learn precious little about the ways in which the great deluge harmed the average victim. Again, though, in spite of its want of comprehensiveness, Barry's book is worth reading, as it does at least seem authoritative on those matters which it does treat in depth.

(I should add, though, that, early on, Barry asserts a number of things which are simply not true. For example, he says that James Eads invented the diving bell, that the Eads bridge no longer carries rail traffic, and that Mary Grace Quackenbos was the first woman U.S. attorney. These errors don't necessarily mean that the rest of the book is not to be trusted, but they don't lend unwavering confidence, either. A somewhat slighter criticism is that the Atchafalaya River appears on none of the maps in Rising Tide, even though it plays a very important role in the story of the 1927 flood, and of the Mississippi ever since.)

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-12-28
Summary: "A historical eye opener to the laws of physics vs. politics..."

This book provides an eye-opening history of how our country began planning, designing, financing and building our nations infrastructure. It involves competing egos of brillant men who challenged one another through the laws of physics and politics that all came to reality during the Great Flood of 1927. The Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans in 2005 tells us we didn't learn our lessons in '27. Have we learned them now? Only time will tell. This book will continue to be a popular historical read as future floods challenge our levee systems and flood control projects across the nation. It should be required reading for anyone involved in public service; especially those who work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2009-12-28
Summary: "a story of the flood, but not the aftermath"

I highly recommend this book, but not for the sake of the subtitle. I expected a story of the flood and then a telling of the "great migration" that must have followed, but that is not this book. This riveting story begins about a few key men who tried to tame (direct) the river in good times and, more importantly, in flood times. In the beginning, the mid-1800s, rival engineers argue over and build various flood control systems. This part tells the tale of good science versus political connections. In the middle, mid-1800s to early 1900s, plantations are built in the Yazoo-Mississippi delta. Apparently the richest farmland imaginable on earth -- fortunes are made, slaves are kept, then sharecroppers are employed. Again, politics and flood control mix to mediocre effect. Last, the story of the great 1927 flood is told. For the bulk of the human aspect of the story, the author chose west-central Mississippi (Greenville) down the river to New Orleans and the Gulf. One great lesson is how vast the Mississippi delta truly is. Ohio to Colorado, Minnesota to Louisiana, the combined river system is staggeringly interconnected.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-10-07
Summary: "A Chance Encounter With a Great Author!"

I happened across this book at the library, during a very snowy period in Wisconsin last winter. Many thanks to the author, as it is a wonderful book for someone who loves history and a great story. I will never forget it. It really enlightened me as to what factors made up our American history. The events drew my mind to what my grandparent's lives were like in those days. It's not trite to say that this book was riveting, as so few are these days. Very well done!