Rising Tide

John M. Barry

4 ideas

1. Greenville refugees held on the levee

   When the Mounds Landing crevasse flooded the Mississippi Delta in April 1927, roughly 13,000 Black residents of the Greenville area were stranded on the levee top. Relief chief Will Percy first decided to evacuate them by steamboat. Local planters, backed by his father, Senator LeRoy Percy, persuaded him to reverse the decision because they feared the labor force would never return. The refugees were kept in camps under National Guard guard for months, forced to work without pay, and required to wear labor tags to receive food rations.

2. Dynamiting the Caernarvon levee to save New Orleans

   In late April 1927, New Orleans bankers and business leaders pressured the governor and federal officials to dynamite the levee at Caernarvon, downriver of the city. The blast deliberately flooded the poorer St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes to calm investor panic, even though upstream breaks had already reduced the threat to the city. The written promises to fully compensate the flooded residents were largely broken, and most claims went unpaid or were settled for a fraction of their losses.

3. Engineering orthodoxy hardened into levees-only catastrophe

   Institutional rivalry and pride kept the Corps holding to this doctrine against contrary evidence and the ideas of rivals like James Eads. Confining the river raised flood heights instead of lowering them, which made the 1927 levee failures far more destructive than a flood with room to spread would have been.

4. Hoover's broken promise shifted Black political allegiance

   Herbert Hoover used his management of flood relief as national publicity that helped carry him to the presidency. To contain reports of abuses in the relief camps, he enlisted Robert Moton and a Colored Advisory Commission, implying that he would support land resettlement for Black sharecroppers.

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