Mississippi Flood 1912

Mississippi Flood 1912

In April and May, 1912, the Mississippi reached a height never before equaled, and the great river went tearing through levee after levee on its resolute course to the sea. The river reached a maximum width of sixty miles, killed 1,000 persons, rendered 30,000 homeless, and caused damage to the amount of $50,000,000.

Government boats rescuing flood victims, Louisiana 1912

By April 2nd, Columbus, Missouri, was buried under fifteen feet of water, and in some parts of the town residences were wholly submerged. New Madrid was not much better off, and Hickman, Kentucky, looked like a small city of Venice. President Taft sent a hurry call to Congress for half a million dollars, and within fifteen minutes after his message was read, the lower house had passed an appropriation bill and sent it to the Senate, which laid everything else aside to give it right of way. By April 5th, the Reelfoot Lake district, covering 150 square miles of Kentucky farm land, was an inland lake and the river at Cairo, Illinois, had risen to nearly fifty-four feet, the average depth from St. Louis to New Orleans being301 ordinarily but nine feet.

Flooded small town 1912

Cairo was for days surrounded by the torrents from the Ohio and the Mississippi beating at the levees, while to the north of the city factory buildings were immersed to their roofs or even entirely covered. By April 7th, the levee in Arkansas, seven miles south of Memphis, had a gap a mile long and Lake County, Tennessee, had no ground above water but a strip six miles long by four wide. By the middle of the month, the levees at Panther Forest, Arkansas; Alsatia, Louisiana; and Roosevelt, Louisiana, had succumbed, and a thousand square miles of fertile plantations were from five to seven feet under water.

FARMS AND PLANTATIONS SUBMERGED

Mississippi River Flood 1912

Rain-storm after rain-storm caused the stream to swell, undermined dikes, and broke new crevasses all the way from Vicksburg to New Orleans. Hundred of farmers and their families, a majority of them negroes, were cut off and overwhelmed by the flood. For several weeks the people of New Orleans were under the fear that a large part of the city might be submerged and ruined. Near by vast sugar plantations were under water, while the prosperous town of Moreauville was inundated. Refugees’ camps were established and relief work began. Many vessels assisted the army. Pitiful stories of famished and suffering victims of the flood were told, and the miles and miles of desolated country struck horror to the heart. They have a pregnant saying down there: “Come hell and high water.” Some day, it is to be hoped, we are going to take the force out of that expression.302

http://www.emergencysteps.net/wordpress/the-flood-of-1912/

Mississippi's "Concentration Camps" on the Levees

Great Flood

Expedition Journal

Stephen Ambrose May 1, 2001

"Concentration Camps"

To save the land, frantic efforts to raise the levee by stacking sand bags on the top were begun. Charles Williams was an employee of former Mississippi Senator Le Roy Percy's on one of the largest cotton plantations in the Delta. He set up "concentration camps" on the levee protecting Greenville, complete with field kitchens and tents, for thousands of plantation workers--all African Americans--to live as the men handled sand bags.

Original caption: Sweeping all before them and spreading destruction in their wake, the overflowing waters of the Mississippi River continued "on to New Orleans", which city has taken great measures to prepare for the worst flood in the history of the United States. Photo shows a street fronting the levee at Greenville, Mississippi, showing the refugees tents pitched on the levee. Almost the entire town has been submerged by the Mississippi waters.

The river, not the men, won the battles. On April 21 it broke through the levees. Major John C. H. Lee, the Army district engineer at Vicksburg (and in World War II in command of the Services of Supply in the European Theater of Operations--there the chief quartermaster and called by the enlisted men, who halted hated him, "Jesus Christ Himself Lee" wired the chief of the Corps of Engineers, General Edwin Jadwin, "Levee broke...crevasse will overflow entire Mississippi Delta."

The crevasse, just upriver from Greenville was huge, a 100-foot channel half a mile in width. Water poured through, more than double the amount of Niagara Falls, more than the entire upper river ever. In 10 days it covered one million acres with water 10 feet deep--and the crevasse continued to pour water for months.

Evacuation barge on river

Panic. Hundreds of workers on the levee climbed into a barge below the break to escape. A tugboat tried to push the vessel downstream, but the flow through the crevasse pulled it upstream. One white man called out "Let's put all the niggers on the barge and cut it loose." Another man, Charlie Gibson, interceded. "We ain't goin' to cut the barge loose. I'll shoot you if you try that. If we go, we go together."

Senator Percy's son Will, a World War I hero and a noted poet, took charge of the Red Cross relief efforts for the blacks stuck on the levee. His first impulse was to evacuate them on steamers.

Feeding Negro flood refugees on levee, Greenville, Mississippi 1927

The planters protested. They persuaded Le Roy Percy to instruct his son to leave those blacks on the levee. Cotton was the principal, indeed almost the only crop grown in the Delta. Cotton was labor intensive--it was planted, cultivated, and picked by hand. The planters grew rich because of it. The workers got $1 a day for their sunrise to sunset labor.

The planters knew that if the blacks got out of the Delta, they would never return. They had nothing to come back to and anyplace was better than the Delta. Keep them here, the planters declared. Le Roy Percy backed them. Will Percy, after some feeble protests about putting their own economic welfare ahead of people's lives, gave in.

In 1942, those same planters, or their sons, paid the local police to patrol the Illionois Central railroad depots to prevent the blacks from getting on the train to go to Chicago, where they could get work at, for them, big wages, in the war industries. In 1944 the first cotton picking machine came to the Delta. By 1945, the planters were buying one-way tickets to Chicago for the blacks.

On the levee the blacks filled and stacked sandbags, for which Percy set a pay scale of 75 cents per day. Those who were put to unloading and distributing Red Cross food parcels, which were starting to come to Greenville by barge to feed 180,000 people and thousands of animals.

Percy ordered all Greenville blacks to the levee. The camp stretched seven miles. Percy ordered that all the Red Cross work be done for free. There were too few tents, not enough food, no eating utensils or mess hall. Black men were not allowed to leave--those who tried were driven back at gunpoint by the National Guard.

The food they received was inferior to what the whites got. Canned peaches came in, but were not distributed to blacks for fear it would "spoil them. Whites kept the good Red Cross food for themselves. Giving it to the blacks, one white man explained, "would simply teach them a lot of expensive habits."

In John Barry's judgement, the levee was not a labor camp, it was a slave camp.

The River Wins

Mississippi River Watershed Map

President Coolidge did nothing. Despite pleas from governors and mayors and other officials in the flooded states, he refused to visit the area. The radio network NBC asked him to broadcast an appeal for relief funds on an historic nationwide hookup. He declined.

Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover chaired a special committee that handled the emergency. He used the position not to alleviate the suffering bit to get publicity for himself. He became a hero--just about the only hero to come out of the crisis--and thus won the 1928 Republican nomination for presidential candidate.

The flood dominated the front pages of the nations newspapers for weeks. Editors later overwhelmingly named the flood the greatest story of 1927. Thus did nature triumph over man's attempt to conquer it--on May 22, Charles Lindbergh flew over the Atlantic Ocean to Paris in a plane named, ironically, the Spirit of St. Louis.

Nature always wins. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later, but always the river will make its own route to the Gulf of Mexico.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/05/0501_river4.html

The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927

In the New York Times Book Review, T. H. WATKINS writes in his article, "Boiling Over" on

April 13, 1997:

Greenville Mississippi underwater, 1927

Near the end of John M. Barry's extraordinary history there is a kind of epiphany that is as dark as the gelatinous, stinking muck the Mississippi left behind after one of the most devastating floods in American history. For weeks, Will Percy of Greenville, Miss., the son of the Delta plantation owner and Southern entrepreneur-aristocrat LeRoy Percy and the future adoptive father of the writer Walker Percy, had floundered, frustrated by circumstances and his own incompetence as head of the Washington County Red Cross and chairman of a special flood relief committee. Black work gangs and their refugee families resented being held as virtual prisoners in dreadfully squalid ''concentration camps'' set up along miles of the Greenville levee. Water, food and medical supplies were inadequate. Percy's subordinates held him in contempt, and his equals, including his own father, undercut his authority and ignored his decisions.

And now a black man had been killed by a white policeman for refusing to go back to work on levee repairs after having labored all night. The black community seemed certain to explode. To prevent this, Percy, whose family prided itself on its amicable, if typically patrician, relations with black people, addressed a mass meeting of blacks and launched into a diatribe that could have spewed from the likes of Theodore Bilbo. He had ''struggled and worried and done without sleep in order to help you Negroes,'' Percy whined. In return, he said, they had demonstrated a ''sinful, shameful laziness,'' and because of that, ''one of your race has been killed. You sit before me sour and full of hatred as if you had the right to blame anybody or judge anybody. . . . I am not the murderer. That foolish young policeman is not the murderer. The murderer is you! Your hands are dripping with blood. Look into each other's face and see the shame and the fear God set on them. Down on your knees, murderers, and beg your God not to punish you as you deserve.''

Greenville, Mississippi Map

Greenville's black people -- perhaps too numb with disbelief to react -- did not rebel, but, Mr. Barry writes, ''the bond between the Percys and the blacks was broken. The Delta, the land that had once promised so much to blacks, had become, entirely and finally, the land where the blues began.'' In that one brief vignette, Mr. Barry peels back layers of self-delusion and myth, inviting us to stare into the racial abyss of the Deep South. And the abyss has stared back.

Long before Hurricane Katrina, a massive flood of the Mississippi River devastated the region. John Barry, author of "Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America" discusses the natural disaster which killed as many as 1,000 people and displaced some 700,000 more in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana

''Rising Tide'' is that kind of book, filled with moments in which reality erupts, sometimes with violent force. There are two failed visions at the heart of Mr. Barry's story: the struggle to control a river that drains more than 40 percent of the contiguous United States, and the attempt to maintain an agrarian civilization in the lower Mississippi River Valley that, its white ruling class managed to believe, combined the best elements of Roman aristocracy and American democracy. The first vision was undone by stupidity (assuming anything could have been done at all); the second proved a mask of pretension that the fury of the river ripped away as if it had been a flimsy Mardi Gras disguise.

A 1927 photo of Washington Street in downtown Greenville. The Mississippi River broke out of its levee system in 145 places in seven states and flooded 27,000 square miles. It caused over $400 million in damages, killed 246 people and left thousands homeless. John Barry’s ”Rising Tide” is the definitive book on this great American tragedy, a fascinating read.

The stupidity began early enough. In the 1870's the Mississippi River Commission recommended the construction of levees as the best means of containing the river, dismissing the advice of engineers like the great bridge builder James Eads. To compress a rising river between such walls, critics said, would be to increase its volume and enhance its power to destroy. And so it proved in the spring of 1927, when after weeks of incessant rains the river rose to alarming heights and began blowing away levee after levee from Cairo, Ill., to Greenville, ripping through the resulting ''crevasses'' with Niagara-like force. In the end, 27,000 square miles were inundated, thousands of farms and hundreds of towns vanishing beneath a brown pall of moving water. At least 246 and perhaps as many as a thousand people were killed, and nearly a million made homeless. Estimates of the damage ranged from $246 million to $1 billion (roughly $2 billion to $7.8 billion in modern dollars).

1927 Great Mississippi Flood , dynamiting through the levee to create an artificial crevasse at Caernarvon, St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, 14 miles belowNew Orleans. The crevasse was created to take pressure off levees at New Orleans.

It is a gripping narrative, and Mr. Barry, the author of ''The Ambition and the Power: A True Story of Washington,'' relates it well indeed, showing himself as skilled in explaining the intricacies of flood dynamics as he is in capturing the drama of particular moments. Which is not to say that ''Rising Tide'' leaves you feeling warm all over with pride in the human race. Except for a few individuals who exercised true bravery, what Mr. Barry gives us is a chronicle in which greed, cowardice, arrogance, racism, cruelty, lust for power and plain ignorance combined in a fetid brew -- the leaders of New Orleans callously sacrificing two neighboring parishes in order to protect the city, then cheating their victims out of fair recompense; plantation owners and local governments holding thousands of blacks against their will to insure a supply of labor; the Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover coldheartedly supervising relief efforts and manipulating black leaders as a means of assuring his selection as the Republican Presidential candidate; and President Calvin Coolidge demonstrating an indifference to the fate of hundreds of thousands of people that is nothing short of breathtaking.

African American citizens stranded in Greenville, Mississippi 1927

Apart from what it revealed of human depravity, Mr. Barry says, the flood of 1927 changed America. It put Herbert Hoover in the White House, even while his duplicity in dealing with blacks helped begin the shift of black voters from the Republicans to the Democrats. It inspired Congress to pass a law putting responsibility for the Mississippi in Federal hands, making it easier for both Congress and the public to accept an even larger Federal presence during the New Deal years. And the pressures the flood brought to bear on the delicate racial fabric of the Deep South caused tears that could never be mended.

Altogether, then, ''Rising Tide'' stands not only as a powerful story of disaster but as an accomplished and important social history, magisterial in its scope and fiercely dedicated to unearthing truth. What the book doesn't do, doesn't intend to do, is to give us much reason to think that humans are ever going to control the river for any length of time (as the floods of 1993 demonstrated once again). The river's power is too great and our dreaming too small (and perhaps too ignoble) seriously to impede the course of what Mark Twain called ''the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi rolling its mile-wide tide along.''

T. H. Watkins is the author of ''Mark Twain's Mississippi'' and ''Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold Ickes,'' among other books.




Keynote speaker: John Barry - Part 1


Keynote speaker: John Barry - Part 2

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/188763-1

Watch John Barry on C-Span click here.