1927 and the Rise of Modern America

by Charles Shindo

  The flood was significant, not only as the worst natural disaster ever experienced by the nation but also as the largest domestic crisis since the Civil War. As such, the flood helped accelerate changes originally brought about by the war. Black migration to the North and West increased following the loss of productive lands and heightened racial tensions caused by the flood, which in turn reinforced the transformation of agriculture from a plantation-based economy dependent on sharecroppers and tenant farmers to agribusiness dependent on wage labor. The flood also brought about an increase in the federal government’s role in the economics, politics, and culture of southern society, most notably in the form of the Flood Control Act of 1928, which gave responsibility for the construction, management, and maintenance of levees, reservoirs, and spillways to the Army Corp of Engineers. The flood not only reinforced trends already in place but also marked the beginning of some that would come to full fruition in the 1930s and 1940s, such as the political realignment of African Americans from the Republican to the Democratic Party. Many of the long-terms effects of the flood were not directly the result of high waters but rather arose from the way the relief efforts, and the part played by Herbert Hoover (then secretary of commerce and presidential hopeful) in heading those efforts, focused attention on the race-and class-based distribution of power in the South. The southern aristocracy of planter families had been giving way to the industrialism of the new South, and for many the flood was a fatal final blow. While the flood did not bring about these changes by itself, the consequences of the flood illustrate this transformation and the extent to which people challenged these changes. Like Show Boat, the flood highlighted the changes occurring in society and drew attention to racial inequality in the South.

  The waters that ran over the levees of the Mississippi and its tributaries did not discriminate based on race or class. Large planters, black tenant farmers, and white sharecroppers all experienced the devastation of the flood. Of course, the wealthier or more politically powerful counties and parishes along the Mississippi were able to build higher levees, which theoretically would make them better protected than their neighbors, but in the end it did not really matter, since the waters flowed through weaker levees and filled in behind the stronger ones. The main exception was the city of New Orleans, the wealthiest and most powerful city on the lower Mississippi and the most cosmopolitan in the South.30 The “leading citizens” of the city (bankers and businessmen, most of them members of the city’s elite men’s clubs) devised a plan to spare their city and businesses from the flood by releasing the built-up pressure of the river downstream by flooding St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, displacing 10,000 residents and destroying their homes and property.

  The result of this blatant show of power by the elite of New Orleans was a political backlash pitting the country against the city. In May 1928, the citizens of Louisiana elected Huey Long governor, marking the end of the hold New Orleans and its “leading citizens” had over state, and even local, politics. The largest banks in New Orleans—including the Canal Bank, the largest in the South—began to fail as a result of the flood and were dealt their final blow with the onset of the Great Depression. Only one New Orleans bank survived the Depression as the same institution. As the social elite of New Orleans isolated themselves from the world around them, their city declined and eventually would be surpassed in size and importance by such new South cities as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Miami.31 New Orleans had physically survived the flood, but it was devastated in many other ways; the last remnants of the Old South had given way to the new.

  african americans and the aftermath

  Another indication of the passing of the Old South was the destruction of Greenville, Mississippi, a Delta town about halfway between Memphis, Tennessee, and Natchez, Mississippi. Greenville had a population of around 15,000, a lively downtown on the edge of a busy wharf, two train stations, three cotton exchanges, four oil mills, six sawmills, a meat-packing plant, Mississippi’s finest hotel, and the Opera House and People’s Theater, which presented such nationally known performers as Enrico Caruso and Al Jolson.32 The area, like much of the Delta, was built on cotton. The rich alluvial land between the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers allowed for abundant cotton production and created vast fortunes for the white planters who owned the land. The work, however, was done primarily by black sharecroppers and tenant farmers, who were generally more successful than black farmers elsewhere in the South but who still remained at the bottom of the economic, not to mention the social, ladder. Former U.S. senator LeRoy Percy lived in Greenville, and it was from him, his family, and his peers that the prosperous Delta society emanated. Percy’s political influence ensured the Delta’s growth primarily by ensuring protection from the river. This influence and prosperity led to Greenville’s being proclaimed “the Queen City of the Delta.” Yet the relative prosperity of the region grew from a social system in which whites dominated blacks, not only politically and economically but culturally as well. “The Delta,” writes Pete Daniel, “had survived as a tangible link with the antebellum South. Both in Mississippi and across the river in Arkansas the planters jealously guarded their black labor from agents who infiltrated from the North and tempted the black men to desert their agrarian life.”33 Labor was the most important ingredient in the economic success of the white planters in the Delta, and the one most lacking. The plantation society, built on the labor of sharecroppers and tenant farmers, began to die as the continual out-migration of African Americans, begun during Reconstruction, became an exodus. Half of all the African Americans in Greenville’s Washington County left the state for points north and west in the wake of the flood.

  While the departure of the black population reflects the lack of opportunities in the Delta following the flood, it was also precipitated by the deeply racist society in which black southerners lived, a situation highlighted by the events of the flood. “The treatment of black laborers, the attitude of planters, and the bureaucratic indifference of the federal government and the Red Cross were instructive in understanding how Southern society could contain covert and suppressed customs that appeared only in an emergency.”34 Both during and after the flood, African Americans experienced the worst of racist attitudes and actions, ranging from verbal and physical abuse to being forced at gunpoint to work on the levees, where they faced great danger and in some cases died.

  During the flood, all along the lower Mississippi River, gangs of black workers toiled with sandbags, lumber, and shovels reinforcing weak points in the levees and raising the levees above the rising waters. Black workers saw the necessity of preserving the levees, not only to their communities but to their own homes and families, but their work on and off the levees was often not voluntary but forced by white planters. White workers, placed in charge of black workers by local levee boards and governments, forced African Americans to work long hours on the levees, but some planters would not allow the African Americans with whom they had sharecropping and tenant arrangements to assist the flood detail. Local leaders, like Greenville’s Percy, repeatedly admonished local planters to release their laborers to help build up the levees.

  In Vicksburg, Mississippi, Major John Lee of the Mississippi River Commission coordinated the efforts of 1,500 full-time black levee workers, forming them into gangs and housing them in camps near the levee along the 800 miles of river under his care. Up to 200 African Americans worked under the direction of one or two white supervisors.35 Guards patrolled the levees, not only to protect them from sabotage (a crevasse on one side of the river eases pressure on the other, as well as up- and downstream) but to keep black workers on the job. At Mounds Landing, just as a crevasse started to develop, black workers brought in to fill the breach began running away in the face of the levee’s collapse. “It then became necessary for the civilian foremen and my detachment to force the negroes to the break at the point of guns,” reported Lieutenant E. C. Sanders of the National Guard.36 When the levee broke, t
he advancing waters swept away hundreds of workers. No accurate count exists of the number of lives lost, but the one official report concerning the crevasse stated, “No lives were lost among the Guardsmen.”37 Observers and local newspapers estimated the figure in the several hundreds.38

  The abuses of southern racism, as well as the abuses of farm tenancy, became even more pronounced during the relief efforts in the wake of the flood. Since the waters poured out over the land for months and remained for several months more, it became necessary to house, feed, and care for hundreds of thousands of homeless refugees stranded on the levees—virtually the only high and dry land around. The Red Cross took on the task of caring for the flood refugees; no direct federal aid programs existed. According to the official report of the Red Cross, they housed 325,554 people in refugee camps and cared for another 311,922 in public buildings and private homes.39 The segregated refugee camps demonstrated the racism of the region, as evidenced in the situation in Vicksburg, where Camp Hayes sheltered 1,200 white refugees, Camp Juarez housed 400 Mexican workers, and Camp Louisiana and Fort Hill contained 12,000 African Americans.40 The Red Cross estimated that nearly 70 percent of all refugees housed in the camps were black.41 To coordinate the efforts of the Red Cross with the War, Treasury, Agriculture, and other cabinet departments, President Calvin Coolidge created the President’s Committee on Relief headed by then secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover, whose selection seemed fitting not only for his background in relief efforts during the Great War but for his engineering training as well. Coolidge gave Hoover the authority to direct the various governmental agencies involved, though he was given no separate budget for the effort. Funding for relief came from the Red Cross, which used $100,000 from its own general budget and raised over $17 million in donations from individuals across the country and around the world.42 Hoover and the Red Cross oversaw the relief effort, but it was primarily administered by local chapters of the Red Cross or by local levee boards or governments. As a result, even though the massive relief effort signaled a trend toward nationally coordinated assistance, it still reflected and reinforced local power structures and prejudices.

  Planters, concerned about retaining their workforce until farming could resume, impeded the relief efforts that called for the removal of the refugees from the levees. Dr. Sidney Dillon Redmond wrote to Coolidge about the conditions black refugees faced. “These people are hurdled [sic] in camps of 5000 or more and soldiers from the National Guard are used to let none out of these camps and to keep people on the outside from coming in and talking with them.” White refugees, Redmond complained, were removed from the levees and taken to shelters, whereas African Americans were held there by planters “at the point of a gun for fear they would get away and not return.” To add insult to injury, rescuing mules took precedence over rescuing black refugees.43 The NAACP’s Walter White reported abuses as well, such as black refugees’ inability to leave the camps and the Red Cross’s policy of distributing supplies not directly to refugees but to planters. In some cases, planters charged their sharecroppers and tenants for the food and clothing, forcing them deeper into debt and therefore increasing the planters’ claim to control the workers.44

  Complaints to Coolidge and Hoover concerning the treatment of African Americans led Hoover to create the Colored Advisory Commission to investigate the situation. Headed by Tuskegee Institute president Robert R. Moton, the committee did not include anyone from the NAACP, which had become the loudest critic of the relief effort when the press carried stories about White’s report on conditions. Hoover countered these stories by denying the poor conditions and announcing the formation of the Colored Advisory Commission. The commission visited camps in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana in June.45 Its report to Hoover supported the charges of discrimination in the distribution of supplies, in the forced seclusion of the refugees, and in the general treatment of black refugees as opposed to the treatment of white refugees. The commission’s report on the camp at Opelousas, Louisiana, stated that the impression it left was “more of being a prison camp than a refugee camp which probably accounts for the fact that so many of them want to leave.” In addition, the commission reported that the guards had “been too free with a few of the colored girls.”46 The commission also reported that of the fourteen camps visited, only the one in Baton Rouge had supplied cots to black refugees.47 A second report to Hoover by the commission, made in December after a second visit to the flooded area the month before, continued to criticize the conditions created through discrimination. The commission did not blame the National Red Cross for these discriminatory practices, but it did complain about the lack of supplies and services for the black population in the refugee camps. The commission discovered that “supplies were being given out irregularly through landlords and plantation commissaries. The common practices which had grown up in the communities and the local Red Cross officials, adjusted as they were to the plantation system, frequently nullified the intentions and program of the National Red Cross.”48 The commission singled out one local Red Cross administrator in particular, Cordelia Townsend of Melville:

  Our investigators were discourteously treated by Miss Townsend and told in a most abrupt manner that they were not needed and were given no consideration. We know of instances where Miss Townsend ordered colored people to give up tents and find some place to live where there was absolutely no place for them to go. We also know that hundreds of homes for white people have been repaired and rebuilt in Melville and these homes furnished with rugs, sewing machines, refrigerators, etc., while only seven Negro homes in Melville have been repaired. Many of the colored people are sleeping on pallets or use mattresses spread upon planks.49

  In addition to the recommendations that the Colored Advisory Commission made to Hoover and the Red Cross, Moton also suggested to the commission members that they publish a public report to illustrate not only the flood conditions but the situation of black labor in the agricultural South. “They [the refugees] felt that the flood had emancipated them from a condition of peonage,” Moton wrote, a condition he referred to as “one of the greatest labor questions of America, which found itself in the relation between the planter and these tenant farmers.” These were not circumstances brought about by the flood; rather, they were part of the daily experience of the black citizens of the region, who “lived not only in a state of fear but a state of abject poverty although they work from year to year.” Moton hoped that publicizing the refugees’ plight would help “relieve the hopeless condition under which these people have lived for all these years” and would give them “a sense of freedom and hope.”50

  The commission did not release a public statement, but Walter White did in an essay he wrote for the Nation in June. Under the title “The Negro and the Flood,” White described his observations on the conditions of the flood refugees. He relates a conversation he had with General Curtis Green of the Mississippi National Guard in Vicksburg in which Green explained to him “the system by which a plantation-owner or his manager bearing credentials would come to the camp, identify ‘his Negroes,’ and then take the Negroes back to the plantation from which they came.”51 While White generally applauds the Red Cross relief efforts, he does criticize the way relief administrators allowed, “whether wittingly or not, . . . plantation-owners further to enslave or at least to perpetuate peonage conditions in many parts of the flood area” by restricting the movement of their sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Ultimately, for White, the flood illustrated the basic problem of southern society. “Harrowing as these stories are,” he concludes,

  they are the almost inevitable products of a gigantic catastrophe and are part of the normal picture of the industrial and race situation in certain parts of the South. The greatest and most significant injustice is in the denial to Negroes of the right of free movement and of the privilege of selling their services to the highest bidder. That, if persisted in, would recreate and crystallize a new slavery almost as miserable as th
e old. (689)

  The flood and its aftermath highlighted the problems of a tenantry- and race-based economy, but it also hastened the end of that system by introducing federal aid to the agricultural South. While federal intrusion in southern agriculture was not new (federal farm agents had assisted southern cotton farmers in fighting the boll weevil earlier in the century), southern farmers had not been dependent on federal aid. Sharecroppers and tenant farmers were dependent on planters and merchants for supplies, credit, land, and food and on informal local assistance such as that offered by churches, relatives, and neighbors. The suddenness and immensity of the flood overwhelmed local relief organizations, which could not meet the demand for aid, a demand filled by the National Red Cross and coordinated by Hoover’s relief committee. Federal assistance, however, did not recede with the flood waters; instead, it became the accepted (though contested) norm, replacing the paternalism of the planter class with the paternalism of the federal government. “The federal government supplanted landlords and merchants with relief and, at the same time, with acreage allotments and benefit payments assumed direction over agriculture that had once belonged to the planter class.”52 This transformation was not exclusively the result of the flood, but the flood did mark the beginnings of large-scale federal aid, which continued with drought relief in the early 1930s and the New Deal in the mid-1930s. Both the drought and New Deal agricultural programs, such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, reinforced the shift away from an economy based on plantations and tenants to one based on agribusiness and mechanization. This shift in the agricultural economy from smaller, independent (or semi-independent) farms to large-scale agribusiness organized along manufacturing lines was not exclusive to the South, but the hold of tradition and the sense of southern isolation helped maintain traditional farming practices longer there than in other parts of the nation. With the flood, and the federal aid that followed in its wake, agriculture in the United States became more homogenized, industrialized, and corporate.