Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  During the pre-Cold War period, administrations were careful not to tread on the rights of states following the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 in which the Congress, responding to the deployment of federal troops in the South to maintain civil order following Reconstruction, stated that the use of federal troops for law enforcement within the United States was prohibited except “in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.”51 There were deep and widespread concerns that the use of federal troops to conduct law enforcement on home soil would lead to the politicization of the military and possibly dictatorship. While the Cold War became the mechanism by which the federal government incorporated disasters into the catalogue of occurrences over which it had authority, the change in public attitudes toward government help had come more than a decade earlier, under the New Deal.

  Although, as so many scholars have pointed out, the New Deal had its programmatic origins in the administration of Herbert Hoover, conceptually Franklin Roosevelt broke with all previous American attitudes toward relief by tying national security to the economy, and tying the economy to confidence. When he proclaimed, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he had subtly bundled public confidence with policy, thus giving him the authority to do whatever was necessary (including lie) to restore a positive view of the future. As Amity Shlaes wrote of the moment, “The country was in no mood . . . to put Roosevelt’s concepts up to a microscope. What mattered was change: like an invalid, the country took pleasure in the very thought of motion.”52 Will Rogers, a comedian and social critic, observed, “The whole country is with him. . . . If he burned down the Capitol, we would cheer and say, ‘well we at least got a fire started anyhow.’”53 The purpose here is not to review the New Deal. Amity Shlaes and Burton Folsom have done so in detail, explaining convincingly how FDR’s programs prolonged and deepened the Depression by squelching capital formation, innovation, work, and investment. 54 An entire cohort of Americans moved from self-sufficiency to government dependency. It was irrelevant if they thought their work was legitimate and productive. In the absence of a war, virtually all make-work created by the government is by definition unnecessary or unwanted, or market forces would have already addressed it. A small group held out—the “Forgotten Men”—who still tried to “get along without public relief.” But in the meantime, noted one Muncie, Indiana, paper, “the taxpayers go on supporting many that would not work if they had jobs.”55 Roosevelt’s “revolution” had the dual effect of convincing ordinary Americans that welfare was not a badge of shame, while at the same time encouraging more and more Americans to accept it even when they could work. Thus Americans began to see government as a savior that addressed life’s inequities.

  And nothing was more unfair than a natural disaster. The Cold War provided the final impetus toward transferring disaster response to the federal government with the Disaster Relief Act of 1950, which sought to provide “orderly and continuing . . . assistance to the state and local governments [suffering] from a major peacetime disaster. . . . [emphasis mine]”56 By including peacetime disasters, the act opened the door for the federal government to act in the case of non-war-related events, and as one historian of the bill noted, it “was a logical expansion of the New Deal social policies.”57 Andrew Mener, a student of government disaster response bureaucracy, observed that by assuming those powers, “the federal government became the subject of intense criticism every time disaster relief was less than ideal.”58 Authority was batted around different agencies until it finally landed in the Department of Defense, and within the DoD it continued to be transferred repeatedly.59 Control of the program jumped from the Housing and Home Finance Agency (1951-52) to the Federal Civil Defense Administration (1952-58) to the Office of Civil Defense and Mobilization (1958-62) to the Office of Emergency Planning (1962-74) to the Federal Disaster Assistance Administration (1974-79) before Jimmy Carter created the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Relief efforts after Hurricane Agnes in 1972 were “characterized by mass confusion.”60 The National Governors Association began lobbying for better preparedness and more aid.

  In 1979, the radiation leak at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant set in motion many of the Cold War preparedness procedures, once again deemed inadequate by critics.61 Similarly, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania found its own emergency preparedness inadequate in the situation.62 One could make a national security case, on a number of levels, for the difference between a leak at a nuclear facility (with its potential radiation clouds that might imperil dozens of states) and a “contained” flood or hurricane, but what did not change was the hysteria and sensationalism the media brought to the event.63 Walter Cronkite, whose inflated reputation seemed to shrink after more careful examination of his reports, intoned that “The world has never known a day quite like today,” suggesting that “the horror tonight could get much worse” and that the radiation release was second in scale only to an atomic explosion.64 Such comments, when examined today, seem shockingly similar to the unproven reports of snipers in New Orleans in 2005.

  Three Mile Island prompted Carter to create FEMA, which clearly focused on preparedness, not relief, and which was justified almost entirely in terms of civil defense. Almost no new emergency response functions were added, and it “did not overhaul the way disasters are handled in the United States.”65 What had changed was the underlying assumption that the federal government could, and should, get involved in any and all calls for help.

  Nevertheless, the burden of responding to an emergency began with the states, which developed their own emergency plans. The federal government was to provide manpower, but the states, in theory, were to coordinate all efforts. FEMA had no trucks or planes of its own, but had to rely on a wilderness of agencies (some twenty-nine, total) to provide equipment and transportation. Yet in its first major test (Hurricane Hugo in 1989) FEMA proved sluggish, and, more important, in a preview of Katrina, the states failed to make timely requests.66 Governors and federal authorities maintained separate emergency management offices, with little communication between the two. A second hurricane, Andrew, which struck in 1992, revealed that little had improved, only this time the blame was laid at the feet of Florida officials, who were late in requesting aid.67 After reviewing the effort in Hurricane Andrew, the General Accounting Office recommended to Congress that still more power be handed to FEMA.

  But it was a genuine national security threat, the 9/11 attacks, that provoked President George W. Bush, succumbing to calls that he “do something,” to establish the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. The act establishing DHS grouped 170,000 employees from twenty-two different federal agencies (including FEMA) into a cabinet-level agency. The potential for uncoordination and chaos was extreme: a study at the American Enterprise Institute found that some thirteen House and Senate committees and sixty subcommittees exercised some level of authority over DHS.68 When an analyst concluded that the department’s senior officials were “so buried under the pressing day-to-day operational issues” that they had no time to resolve management conflicts or coordination problems, it was an indictment across the board of big government and its likelihood of achieving effective disaster response.69 Moreover, by lumping in natural disasters with national security threats, such as terrorism or sabotage, DHS virtually ensured that it would be poorly prepared for either.

  Despite massive planning, including a hurricane “war game” in 2004, Hurricane Katrina once again overwhelmed the system. Certainly there was some degree of media bias that sought to indict President Bush and anyone in his administration, so much of the carping about FEMA can be reduced to little more than Bush bashing. One thus has to use caution when reading headlines such as “FEMA, Slow to the Rescue, Now Stumbles in Aid Effort” (New York Times, September 17, 2005) or “FEMA Was Unprepared for Katrina Relief Effort, Insiders Say” (ABC News, September 8, 2005).70 The real evaluation of Bush and FEMA was far less damning, but overall, the m
ajority of successes from Katrina came from individuals and businesses, and the worst failures came from government at every level.

  Hurricane Katrina hit the American Gulf Coast in August 2005 and was estimated by the National Hurricane Center as a Category 5 hurricane (categorized by “winds in excess of 155 miles per hour,” including total roof failure on many residences and industrial buildings and major evacuation of residential areas within five to ten miles of the shoreline). After flattening the entire Gulf Coast beach area and smashing into New Orleans, Katrina generated such stresses on the waterways that the levees failed. Over 1,800 people died from either debris or drowning. Historically, in terms of loss of life, this was nowhere near some of the other hurricane disasters: Calcutta, in World War II, lost 35,000 to a storm; the Galveston hurricane in 1900 killed between four and five times as many; and a cyclone in East Pakistan in the early 1960s wiped out over 22,000 people. But because Katrina became a political issue—a club with which to bash the Bush administration’s “poor response”—it took on the aura of one of the worst disasters ever to strike America.

  Yet the oft-overlooked story of Katrina tells of the utter incompetence of local government and, overall, of government at any level to do what people, individually or in groups, could and did accomplish. New Orleans, in fact, had a “Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan,” which outlined evacuation procedures. It recommended “long range planning,” which was never implemented by then-mayor Ray Nagin. Not only did the city follow “virtually no aspect of its own emergency management plan” when Katrina struck, but New Orleans also “failed to implement most federal guidelines.”71 For example, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration had tasked the mayor’s office with coordinating the use of school buses and drivers to support the evacuation of 100,000 citizens who did not have personal transportation. No such effort was made. As one well-reviewed history of Katrina put it, “Direct action was necessary on a dozen fronts and Nagin was hesitating like a schoolboy afraid to receive his report card.”72 As the deadly storm bore down on New Orleans on Saturday afternoon, Nagin—who should have been ordering a mandatory evacuation—was consulting with city attorneys about possible legal ramifications from the hotels, which stood to lose considerable revenue when guests were forced out. Most of the tourists could have gotten out, but by the time Nagin made the evacuation official, he could only “hope they have a hotel room and it’s at least on the third floor up.”73

  The federal government did its job in providing proper warning to Louisiana and New Orleans when the National Weather Service issued a 10:11 a.m. advisory on Sunday, August 28, that said:DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED . . . HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED STRENGTH . . . RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF CAMILLE OF 1969 . . . MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS . . . POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS . . . DO NOT VENTURE OUTSIDE.74

  Not only did the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issue this dire warning, but President Bush issued a disaster declaration before the hurricane even reached landfall, which was extremely rare. Moreover, the director of the National Hurricane Center personally called Governor Kathleen Blanco to warn her that New Orleans should be evacuated, “the only time he had made such a call in his 36-year career.”75 The fault lay first and foremost with Mayor Nagin’s failure to evacuate New Orleans and with Governor Blanco for not superseding him and ordering the evacuation herself. Had that been done, even when the levees were breached, the near-term human losses would have been a fraction of what they eventually were.

  Although Governor Blanco rightly requested that President Bush declare a state of emergency on Saturday, her formal request did not include any provision for help in advance of the storm, either in terms of additional transportation or rescue boats. Her nonchalance contributed to the view in Washington that state and local officials had the effort under control, in contrast to similar actions by governors in New York, Oklahoma, and California in other disaster scenarios.76 This also influenced the actions of FEMA director Michael Brown, who was universally assailed for his incompetence after the fact, because he had concluded the request was not urgent. Yet even as they dithered (in Nagin’s case) or filed boilerplate reports (in Blanco’s case), both the mayor and the governor had time to criticize the federal government for inaction, leading historian Douglas Brinkley to observe, “the blame game had begun even before Katrina made landfall.”77 Later, Blanco swung to the other extreme, issuing such emotional appeals that they came across as near-hysterical but ineffectual, leading her to conclude, “I should have screamed louder.” In neither case did her appeals strike the right tone to achieve action or deliver information.

  Meanwhile, Nagin’s incompetence seemed to grow by the hour. He did not assemble or employ the city’s hundreds of public buses or school buses, which sat in massive parking lots while citizens struggled to get out of town. The Regional Transit Authority alone had 360 buses, each capable of holding 60 people, meaning on a single trip they could have evacuated over 20,000 people. If the city government had mobilized the RTA buses, it could have evacuated New Orleans in four trips—a total evacuation time of less than twelve hours. But on top of the failure to use the buses, the city had no clearly marked signs for bus evacuation pickup. Even at that, Amtrak officials “repeatedly tried to offer seven hundred seats on an unscheduled train” leaving on Sunday, and Nagin’s office “would not accept their telephone calls.”78 Ultimately, Amtrak took five empty trains, which could have evacuated 3,000 people total, out of New Orleans. Five months later, the remorseless Nagin said, “If I had it to do again, I would probably go to the school board, cut a cooperative endeavor agreement with them, and move all the city-controlled buses to another section of the state,” leading former mayor Marc Morial to say Nagin didn’t have a disaster plan “because he was the disaster.”79 These comments prove that even five months after the fact Nagin still did not understand that buses were needed to be involved in the evacuation process itself. Not that it mattered after a while because, by the time FEMA was called in, the streets were flooded and it was too late for the buses to have any impact. Not until Sunday at 10:00 a.m. did Nagin order the first mandatory evacuation in New Orleans’s history—at which point it was unenforceable. About 100,000 residents remained in the city, and no one at City Hall even knew what the term “mandatory” actually meant. The police were unable to arrest transgressors, and as Douglas Brinkley reported in his book The Great Deluge, up to 200 NOPD had already left the city.

  FEMA director Michael Brown convened a videoconference at noon on Sunday with emergency officials from every state in the Gulf, plus President Bush and Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff. Under less dire circumstances, FEMA and the federal government’s preparations would have been considered adequate. The National Guard had helicopters on twenty-four-hour alert throughout the Gulf Coast, and began rescue missions only four hours after the hurricane made landfall (the Coast Guard alone rescued 33,000 people). National Guard troops totaled over 36,000 by Tuesday, while virtually all of FEMA’s national Urban and Rescue Incident Support Teams were sent to the Gulf.80 When trying to save the levees on Tuesday, government helicopters dropped 3,000-pound sandbags, and within an hour of Governor Blanco’s decision to evacuate the Superdome, FEMA had the U.S. Department of Transportation assemble over 1,100 trucks and vehicles to get people out, even as the city’s own buses sat idle thanks to its myopic mayor.

  FEMA itself was a large, Carter-era agency created in 1979 and staffed with 2,600 full-time employees overseeing twenty-seven other federal agencies. It has responded to more than nine hundred declared disasters since 1990, including Hurricane Andrew in Florida and Louisiana in 1992, the Northridge, California, earthquake in 1994, and the 9/11 attacks. As with many federal bureaucracies, it was formed to coordinate . . . all the other bureaucracies. Planning for a Katrina-type event had resulted in a 2004 week-long meeting that concluded that a severe hurricane striking New Orleans needed to be met with an immediat
e evacuation. Even so, FEMA had astounding resources prepositioned, including millions of tons of ice, millions of MREs (meals ready to eat), and millions of gallons of water, all contained in nearly one thousand tractor-trailers. Yet it took five days for FEMA trailers to roll toward New Orleans, and when they did, it was a local New Orleans Fire Department contact at the Emergency Operations Center inside the city who radioed the FEMA caravan to “vector” to Metairie—not the Superdome!81 Moreover, it was later confirmed by the FEMA representative on site that “the fire department made the [unwarranted and unnecessary] decision to change the destination.”82

  By the time people huddled in the Superdome, the Louisiana National Guard had sent in a 46-member Special Reaction Team specifically trained in emergency law enforcement, followed by 220 more crowd control soldiers and more than 100 other military personnel. However, the Superdome constituted an entirely inadequate shelter of last resort, even with the staff and security in place. One of the Superdome managers, Doug Thornton, observed, “We can make things very nice for 75,000 people for four hours. . . . But we aren’t up to really accommodate 8,000 for four days.”83 Even before the hurricane actually hit land, more than 40 Superdome refugees were in life-threatening situations, not counting the gangs and thugs that had taken refuge there. Within twenty-four hours, the masses had become “a community of beggars, crowding the sports arena as the Hebrew cripples at the pool of Bethesda. . . . Hallways and corridors were used as toilets, trash was everywhere. . . .”84 “Nagin’s folly,” as the mess was called, had turned into a scene out of Dante’s Inferno.