Interview with John Barry, Author of
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
By John Rabe
April 8, 1997

To listen: RealAudio 2.0 14.4 - RealAudio 3.0 28.8

Not that it's much consolation to the people losing their homes in the flood of 1997, or to the volunteers filling and stacking sandbags in the freezing cold, but it could have been worse. It could have been worse if there hadn't been The Great Flood of 1927, when man and nature conspired to cause one of the country's worst disasters; worse if a flood 70 years ago hadn't forced a major change in the way we deal with disasters.

MPR's All Things Considered Host John Rabe interviewed journalist John Barry, author of Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed the World.

John Barry: It was a disaster of literally tremendous proportions. It killed people from Oklahoma to West Virginia. In Kansas alone, it flooded 8,000 square miles. Downtown Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and so forth were flooded. But the real disaster came on the lower Mississippi from Cairo, Illinois to the Gulf, and there it flooded 27,000 square miles, not counting the tributary flooding. And that's approximately equal to New England without Maine. It covered that region with up to 40 feet of water. It made approximately a million people homeless, which was almost one percent of the population of the United States at the time. 700,000 people were fed by the Red Cross, some of them for months.

John Rabe: You point out that not only did the flood have its root in meteorological causes, but more in the way that the Corps of Engineers and others tried to control the river ahead of time. So there were man-made reasons this flood happened the way it did.

John Barry: In fact, Gifford Pinchot, who was then the governor of Pennsylvania and before that had been Teddy Roosevelt's first forester, said this isn't a natural disaster, it's a man-made disaster. And he was referring to what you just said. After the Civil War, the (U.S. Army) Corps of Engineers came up with what they call the "levees only" policy. It was kind of counter-intuitive. There were two approaches to handling the river. One was to keep water from getting into it with reservoirs and letting water out of it with spillways and outlets. The idea, of course, was the less water in the river, the less high it would climb against the levees. But there another theory, called the "levees only" theory, which actually wanted to add water to the river. The idea was that the more water in the river, the faster it would move. The faster the current, it would naturally scour out the bottom of the river, so naturally deepening the river. Eventually, the river bed would get deep enough to accommodate a flood.

John Rabe: So what did that levees only policy do to create the flood of '27? What role did that play?

John Barry: Because there were no outlets or spillways or reservoirs or some other technical devices, one of which is called "cut offs," with only the levees to hold the river, they just fell short. And they fell short by tens of feet. And the result was probably 100 crevasses on the river, some of them of immense proportions. The biggest single crevasse occurred in the river about 15 miles above Greenville, Mississippi. This one levee break was almost two-thirds of a mile wide. Six weeks after the break, an engineer sounded it with an 100-foot line and found no bottom. In other words, it was over 100 feet deep and two-thirds of a mile wide. And out of this levee break, more water poured onto the Mississippi Delta than the entire upper Mississippi River carried in 1993. And this one levee break flooded an area 50 miles to the east and 100 miles south. It put water over the rooftops 75 miles away in Yazoo City, (Miss.).

John Rabe: So it made a lake.

John Barry: Uh, a city.

John Rabe: One of the main points in your book is to show how blacks were treated because of the flood: how they were displaced, how they were forced into servitude, how many died, how many were put into refugee camps and kept there. And this plays itself out in a story that seems like almost out of a movie. There's the story of the Percys, one of the families of the aristocracy in this part of the world at this time. The younger Percy wanted to move many of the blacks out of a certain refugee camp on a levee. He wanted them to be evacuated to safety and to better living. But the father wanted them to stay because he knew if they left, they'd never come back to Mississippi.

John Barry: LeRoy Percy, the former U.S. senator and the friend of the presidents, had no illusions. He's a very sophisticated man and I think he a very large figure. His son, Will, idolized his father. But the two were not close at all. And Will believed in the mythology of the South and believed in the aspects of the noblesse oblige. His father was much more realistic and pragmatic. And Will thought, without a doubt, the best thing for the blacks, who lived on the levee itself -- that's where the refugee camp was. There was the river on one side, the flood on the other. And this one refugee camp held 15,000 blacks. It stretched as much as 11 miles off the levee, plus the thousands of heads of livestock. And the levee is only a mound of earth. It was probably no more than 40 feet wide that was out of water. And so you had this tent city. Again, there was no water, there was no food, there was no clothing. In fact, at first there weren't even tents.

Will Percy wanted to evacuate the blacks to high ground in Vicksburg. His father, thinking if they left they would never come back, countermanded the order. Out of this betrayal -- there's a saying that if a man has to choose between his father and the truth, only a fool chooses the truth -- and at least by this definition Will Percy was not a fool. He'd rather go with his father. The dynamic between the two, I think, had national repercussions. Will couldn't take out his anger and his frustrations on his father for the betrayal, so he took it out on the blacks. This ultimately led to a burgeoning national scandal that got international politics.

John Rabe: We're talking with John Barry, the author of Rising Tide, which describes The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and how it changed things in America. One of the ways it changed things, it propelled Herbert Hoover to the presidency. Hoover had overseen the flood relief efforts. It also moved a lot of blacks from the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, to the Democrats because the blacks were so angry at the way Republicans treated them. Another way that it changed America was in disaster policy.

John Barry: It certainly reversed the flood control policy that had been in place for 75 years. It was completely reversed, it didn't just change it. We talked about the "levees only" policy. The dynamiting of the levee outside of New Orleans was symbolic in the sense that it also blew up the levees only policy and totally altered the way the Corps of Engineers treated the river. Now there are reservoirs, there are reservoirs on the Missouri -- big ones. There are reservoirs are also in the upper Mississippi, in Minnesota and Iowa area, although smaller ones. There are many reservoirs on the higher river system. They also now have what they call floodways, which are sort of a parallel river. They're sort of a controlled flood that takes a minimum amount of land.

John Rabe: What about changes in the way the federal government acted in the case of disasters, in terms of the amount of federal money that was used?

John Barry: Maybe the most important impact of the flood was sort of a psychological watershed moment. The immensity of the disaster of 1927 really altered the mindset of Americans. We're talking about 700,000 being fed by the Red Cross, a million people displaced. And the federal government paid not a single dollar for relief for those people even though the government had a surplus that year. They actually did not have a deficit that year; they had a surplus. There were editorials in virtually every paper in the United States about this on one side or the other. Well over 80 percent of them said the federal government should do something -- the federal government should have a responsibility for its citizens' welfare. Now, how much responsibility -- that's a line that continues to be defined. But, it was a watershed moment in the sense that people said suddenly that yes, they should do something. In Louisiana there's an example of that. There had been a flood in 1922 in Louisiana with 35,000 homeless. It was a major disaster by any standard, except 1927. The governor of Louisiana at the time said Louisiana has not asked for aid and will not. He was just too proud to ask for aid. But 1927, the scope was too much. He was one of the many people who demanded -- not asked, but demanded -- that the government act.

Read a listener's historical anecdote in response to the interview.
Return to Flood of 1997.