Rising Tide

  More Praise for Rising Tide

  “The best book I’ve read in years.”

  —James Carville, Salon

  “Not only does Barry provide a marvelous chronicle of the world’s greatest flood since Noah, he also meticulously mines the residue of its wake for both the relics of a society washed away and the roots of a new one spawned….[A] rich deposit of passion and truth.”

  —Jim Squires, Los Angeles Times

  “John M. Barry’s Rising Tide is a highly original and absorbing book, which I found fascinating. His account of the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 brilliantly recaptures the panic, the desperation, and the suffering of one of the greatest natural disasters in American history.”

  —David Herbert Donald, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lincoln

  “The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 had great consequences for a region and a nation, and served as a catalyst with respect to significant changes regarding race, class, power, politics and social structure…. A superb account of the disaster and its impact on American society…. Engrossing.”

  —Allen J. Share, Louisville Courier-Journal

  “Extraordinary…. Barry’s account is panoramic and reads like a novel.”

  —Steven Harvey, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “To that hypothetical list of books you intend to have when you are marooned on the desert island, please add Rising Tide.”

  —Larry D. Woods, Nashville Banner

  “John Barry’s Rising Tide sweeps his reader along like the Mississippi itself. It is absorbing American history about hubris, nobility, decadence, and race served up in prose that complements the grandeur of the great river.”

  —David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of W. E. B. Du Bois

  “Barry’s brilliant new book, Rising Tide, is a timely, disturbing and fascinating look at the Mississippi during its most powerful self-assertion…. Barry is adroit at drawing his reader into complex political and scientific issues and rendering them with perfect clarity…. After reading this book, you’ll never look at the river the same way again.”

  —Susan Larson, New Orleans Times-Picayune

  “Rising Tide is a marvel—a tense, alarming narrative…. A wonderful book.”

  —Harry Merritt, Lexington Herald-Leader

  “Who could imagine that so much of the American story could be told through the story of the great flood of 1927—and be told so dramatically? John Barry’s masterful account of the last uncontrolled rampage of the Mississippi River shows how a natural disaster can sometimes disclose a society’s fragile workings, even while it alters them forever.”

  —Jay Tolson, editor of The Wilson Quarterly

  “There are many stories in here, all well told—excellent history—stories from that of an effete poet to those of abused sharecroppers. And always there is the river…. Barry’s prose is capable of cracking like a whip.”

  —Bill Roorbach, Newsday

  “Like the river, John M. Barry’s history is broad-shouldered and violent and fascinating…. The Mississippi cannot be placated or conquered. I was not sure it could be captured in words, either, but I am thrilled to report that John M. Barry and Rising Tide have proven me wrong.”

  —Peter Rowe, San Diego Union-Tribune

  “John Barry’s Rising Tide takes us into the heart of one of America’s greatest natural disasters, but his compelling account is more than a description of nature’s devastation, it is a window into the end of one era and the beginning of another.”

  —Dan T. Carter, author of The Politics of Rage

  “Rising Tide is a fascinating tale of the South’s greatest natural disaster. John Barry effectively uses the Great Mississippi Flood as a backdrop for the grim drama of class and race relations along the river.”

  —William Ferris, Director, Center for the Study of Southern Culture

  “A vastly entertaining book.”

  —Wendy Smith, Civilizations

  “Barry’s epic treatment of the flood is rich in detail and draws the reader along with the power of the river itself…. It is a story rich in drama, and makes a significant point for our own time.”

  —Bill Wallace, San Francisco Chronicle

  “Gripping…. An extraordinary tale of greed, power politics, racial conflict and bureaucratic incompetence…. [A] momentous chronicle, which revises our understanding of the shaping of modern America.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A devastating flood is both the protagonist and the backdrop of this brilliantly narrated epic story of the misuse of engineering in thrall to politics.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “This is a book that I suspect will be recalled as one of the best books of the decade.”

  —Keith Runyon, Louisville Courier-Journal

  ALSO BY JOHN M. BARRY

  The Ambition and the Power:

  A True Story of Washington

  The Transformed Cell:

  Unlocking the Mysteries of Cancer

  (with Dr. Steven Rosenberg)

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 1997 by John Barry

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Simon & Schuster edition as follows: Barry, John M.

  Rising tide: the great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America / John M. Barry.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. 481).

  1. Floods—Mississippi River Valley—History—20th Century. 2. Flood control—Mississippi River—History. 3. Mississippi River Valley—History—1865-4. Humphreys, A. A. (Andrew Atkinson), 1810-1883. 5. Eads, James Buchanan, 1820-1887. I. Title. F354.B47 1997

  977'.03—dc21 96-40077 CIP

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6332-7

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-6332-6

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For Anne and Rose and Jane

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One: THE ENGINEERS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two: SENATOR PERCY

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Three: THE RIVER

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Four: THE CLUB

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part Five: THE GREAT HUMANITARIAN

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Part Six: THE SON

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Part Seven: THE CLUB

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Part Eight: THE GREAT HUMANITARIAN

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Part Nine: THE LEAVING OF THE WATERS

  Chapter Thirty-Four


  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Appendix:

  The River Today

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments and Methodology

  And the rain descended, and the flood came, and the wind blew, and beat upon that house;

  and it fell, and great was the fall of it.

  —MATTHEW 7:27

  Prologue

  ON THE MORNING of Good Friday, April 15, 1927, Seguine Allen, the chief engineer of the Mississippi Levee Board in Greenville, Mississippi, woke up to the sound of running water. Rain was lashing the tall windows of his home near the great river with such intensity that the gutters were overflowing and a small waterfall poured past his bedroom. It worried him. He was hosting a party that day, but his concern was not that the weather might keep guests away. Indeed, he knew that the heavy rain, far from decreasing attendance, would bring out all the community’s men of consequence, all as anxious as he for the latest word on the river.

  Tributaries to the Mississippi had already overflowed from Oklahoma and Kansas in the west to Illinois and Kentucky in the east, causing dozens of deaths and threatening millions of acres of land. The Mississippi itself had been rising for weeks. It had exceeded the highest marks ever known, and was still rising. That morning’s Memphis Commercial-Appeal warned: “The roaring Mississippi river, bank and levee full from St. Louis to New Orleans, is believed to be on its mightiest rampage…. All along the Mississippi considerable fear is felt over the prospects for the greatest flood in history.”

  Now it was raining again. Hours later, with the rain heavier yet, the men of consequence appeared at Allen’s door. Even LeRoy Percy appeared.

  No man mattered more in the Mississippi Delta, or perhaps anywhere the length of the river, than he. Sixty-seven years old, still imperious, thick-chested and vital, with measuring eyes, a fin-de-siècle mustache, silver hair, and frock coat, he seemed a figure from an earlier age. If so, he had been a ruler of that age, and in the Mississippi Delta he ruled even now. Not only a planter and lawyer but a former U.S. senator, an intimate of Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and a director of railroads, the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, and a Federal Reserve bank, Percy’s political and financial connections extended beyond Washington and New York to London and Paris. Only his closest friends addressed him by his first name.

  At Seguine Allen’s party that afternoon it was “Senator Percy, how are you?” and “Senator Percy, good to see you,” and “Senator Percy, do you think the levees will hold?” Percy began to answer, but, as if to mock anything he might say, thunder shook the house, wind rattled the windows, and the rain suddenly intensified. The party fell silent. Men and women listened, holding food and cocktails—the Greenville elite separated themselves from hill-country Baptists by ignoring Prohibition with great show—uneaten and unsipped in their hands. The rain pelted the roof, the windows. The sounds of the black musicians echoed hollowly, then the musicians too fell silent before the great booming cracks of thunder and pelting rain.

  It had rained heavily for months. Henry Waring Ball, whose social rank fell somewhere between friend and retainer of the Percys, had recorded it in his diary. On March 7 it had been “rainy”; March 8, “pouring rain almost constantly for 24 hours”; March 9, “rain almost all night”; March 12, “after a very stormy day yesterday it began to pour in torrents about sunset, and rained very hearty until 10….[At] daylight, a steady unrelenting flood came down for four hrs. I don’t believe I ever saw so much rain”; March 18, “a tremendous storm of rain, thunder and lightning last night, followed by a tearing wind all night…. Today is dark, rainy and cold, with a gale blowing”; March 19, “rain all day”; March 20, “still raining hard tonight”; March 21, “Quite cold. Torrent of rain last night”; March 26, “Bad. Cold rain”; March 27, “still cold and showery”; March 29, “very dark and rainy”; March 30, “too dark and rainy to do anything.” April 1, “Violent storm almost all night. Torrential rains, thunder, lightning, high winds”; April 5, “much rain tonight”; April 6, “rain last night of course.”

  Finally, April 8, Ball wrote that “at 12 it commenced to rain hard. I have seldom seen a more incessant and heavy downpour until the present moment. I have observed that the river is high and it is always raining…we have heavy showers and torrential downpours almost every day and night…. The water is now at the top of the levee.”

  Since then, the Mississippi River at Greenville had risen higher than it ever had before. Now came this new rain, the heaviest yet.

  Indeed, no one present at Allen’s party knew it, but the storm of Good Friday, 1927, was extraordinary for its combination of intensity and breadth. That day the great storm would pour from 6 to 15 inches of rain over several hundred thousand square miles, north into Missouri and Illinois, west into Texas, east almost to Alabama, south to the Gulf of Mexico. Greenville would receive 8.12 inches of rain. Little Rock, Arkansas, and Cairo, Illinois, would receive 10 inches. New Orleans would receive the greatest rainfall ever known there; in eighteen hours officially 14.96 inches fell, more in some parts. That amount, in less than a day, exceeded one-quarter the average precipitation New Orleans received in an entire year.

  Senator Percy, do you think the levees will hold?

  Allen addressed the question, reminding everyone that the levees were far stronger than they had ever been. They had held a record flood in 1922. They would hold this one. They would have the fight of their lives, but the levees, Allen assured everyone, would hold.

  Percy suggested that they inspect the levees right now. Perhaps the storm would uncover a weakness they could address. Others nodded. Two dozen men, including Allen, put on their gun boots and raincoats, piled into their cars, and drove the few blocks to the center of downtown, where the levee rose up abruptly. A few decades earlier the levee had been blocks farther west, but one day the river had simply devoured it, taking much of the old downtown as well. Since then the city had covered the levee adjacent to downtown with concrete to prevent a further loss to the river and to serve as a wharf, and the men drove up the slope of the levee itself, parking on its crest, even with third-story windows in the office buildings, high above the city streets, high above millions of acres of flat, lush Delta land. A hundred yards upriver, where the concrete ended, a work gang of a hundred black men under one white foreman struggled in the driving rain to fill sandbags. For hundreds of miles on both sides of the river, other black work gangs were doing the same thing. Then Percy, Allen, and the others climbed out of their cars; leaning against the wet wind, their boots seeking a purchase on the soaked concrete, they faced the river.

  It was like facing an angry dark ocean. The wind was fierce enough that that day it tore away roofs, smashed windows, and blew down the smokestack—130 feet high and 54 inches in diameter—at the giant A. G. Wineman & Sons lumber mill, destroyed half of the 110-foot-high smokestack of the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company, and drove great chocolate waves against the levee, where the surf broke, splashing waist-high against the men, knocking them off-balance before rolling down to the street. Out on the river, detritus swept past—whole trees, a roof, fence posts, upturned boats, the body of a mule. One man working on the levee recalled decades later, “I saw a whole tree just disappear, sucked under by the current, then saw it shoot up, it must have been a hundred yards away. Looked like a missile fired by a submarine.”

  The river seemed the most powerful thing in the world. Down from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado this water had come, down from Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada, down from the Allegheny Mountains in New York and Pennsylvania, down from the Great Smokies in Tennessee, down from the forests of Montana and the iron ranges of Minnesota and the plains of Illinois. From the breadth of the continent down had come all the water that fell upon the earth and was not evaporated into the air or absorbed by the soil, down as if poured through a funnel, down into this immense writhing snake of a river, this Mississippi.

  Even befor
e this storm, levees along every significant tributary to the Mississippi had been shouldered aside by the water. In the East, Pittsburgh had seen 8 feet of water in city streets; in the West, outside Oklahoma City, 14 Mexican workers had drowned. And the Mississippi was still swelling, stretching, threatening to burst open entirely the system designed to contain it.

  At the peak of the great Mississippi River flood of 1993, the river in Iowa carried 435,000 cubic feet of water a second; at St. Louis, after the Missouri River added its waters, it carried 1 million cubic feet a second. It was enough water to devastate the Midwest and make headlines across the world.

  In 1927, a week after and a few miles north of where Percy and the others stood upon the levee, the Mississippi River would be carrying in excess of three million cubic feet of water each second.

  LEROY PERCY did not know the immensity of the flood bearing down upon him, but he knew that it was great. His family had fought the river for nearly a century, as they had fought everything that blocked their transforming the domain of the river into an empire, an empire that had allowed its rulers to go in a single generation from hunting panther in the cane jungle at the edge of their plantations to traveling to Europe for opera festivals. The Percys had fought Reconstruction, fought yellow fever, fought to build the levees, all to create that empire. Only five years earlier, to preserve it, LeRoy had fought the Ku Klux Klan as well. He had triumphed over all these enemies.