Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  Percy belonged to the large world. By 1925 he was a governor of the Federal Reserve Bank at St. Louis, a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, on the board of directors of the Rockefeller Foundation, companion of presidents of great northern universities. Though a Democrat, he often dined with the chairman of the Republican National Committee and was routinely consulted by black Mississippi Republicans about appointments Republican presidents made in the state.

  Yet what he cared about most remained the Delta. He had shown absolute focus, and a certain ruthlessness, in his fight against the Klan. It had made him a hero to many across the country. He had built a society and he would protect it against any enemy—even if it made him reviled. The great invincible enemy was of course the river.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THERE IS NO SIGHT like the rising Mississippi. One cannot look at it without awe, or watch it rise and press against the levees without fear. It grows darker, angrier, dirtier; eddies and whirlpools erupt on its surface; it thickens with trees, rooftops, the occasional body of a mule. Its currents roil more, flow swifter, pummel its banks harder. When a section of riverbank caves into the river, acres of land at a time collapse, snapping trees with the great cracking sounds of heavy artillery. On the water the sound carries for miles.

  Unlike a human enemy, the river has no weakness, makes no mistakes, is perfect; unlike a human enemy, it will find and exploit any weakness. To repel it requires an intense, nearly perfect, and sustained effort. Major John Lee, in the 1920s the Army district engineer in Vicksburg who would in 1944 make the cover of Time as an important World War II general, observed, “In physical and mental strain, a prolonged high-water fight on threatened levees can only be compared with real war.”

  In 1922 the Mississippi River was rising. Soon after LeRoy Percy began his struggle with the Klan, the river reached extreme high water and threatened all the tens of thousands of square miles in the river’s floodplain. Even more than the Klan, it threatened the society LeRoy Percy had built, and it turned both his focus and that of his Klan opponents to the river, temporarily unifying them again.

  And there was something new and frightening about this flood. For more than forty years the Mississippi River Commission had set standards and contributed money to build levees. For most of that time the overwhelming majority of the people in the Mississippi valley had trusted the commission and its strategies. Now some were accusing it of flawed strategies that exposed the valley to danger.

  To understand the threat to the Delta and to all the floodplain, one has to understand both this criticism and what man had done in the years since James Eads had triumphed over Andrew Humphreys.

  ALTHOUGH for very different reasons, Eads and Humphreys had both rejected the theory that levees alone caused a significant deepening of the channel. It was the only thing they had agreed upon. Yet, beginning a few years after both had left the scene, Mississippi River Commission engineers began to meld Humphreys’ arguments for levees with Eads’ arguments about the effect of current. The result was a bastardization of both their arguments, and a theory that both Eads and Humphreys had not only rejected but condemned: in 1885 the commission stated flatly, and repeated thereafter, “Levees designed to limit the high water width of the river, by concentration of the flood discharge of the channel,…secure the energy of the flood volume in scouring and enlarging the channel.”

  This pure expression of the levees-only theory was now policy. Few people along the lower Mississippi disputed this policy because Congress, throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, resisted spending money on “internal improvements” on fiscal and constitutional grounds. So those who wanted money for levees embraced the claim that levees deepened the channel and thus aided shipping and interstate commerce, a clear federal responsibility. For forty years, congressmen and senators, governors and state and local politicians, local levee boards, contractors, planters, and cotton brokers all became wedded to and defenders of the commission’s policy.

  Meanwhile, the commission itself, although created specifically to inject civilian input into Army thinking, had fallen under the influence of Army engineers. Its president was an Army officer who reported to the chief of Army engineers. The commission did include two civilians and employed civilians, but Army engineers, who had neither special background nor training in the problems of the Mississippi River, made all important decisions. They were not scientists asking questions. They were soldiers serving a regular tour of duty. By the 1920s, after decades of adherence to the levees-only policy, few officers questioned it.

  So for decades the river commission followed a policy of sealing the river off from its natural reservoirs and outlets. This both opened up millions of acres to development, reinforcing the political support for levees-only, and increased the volume of water in the river along with the current. But the stronger current did not seem to dredge out the bottom enough to compensate. Floods that carried less water were rising higher than earlier ones that had carried more. In 1912, for example, a flood devastated the lower Mississippi region. Though carrying far less water than the great flood of 1882, it smashed height records on seventeen of the eighteen river gauges from Cairo to the Gulf.

  This contradicted the predictions of the levees-only theory, but the Corps ignored the findings. After the 1912 flood a few civilian engineers tried to reopen the debate about levee policy, chief among them James F. Kemper, a thin, intense young man to whom the cause became an obsession. The commission ridiculed him. Later Kemper recalled, “I was not accustomed to ridicule and it hurt to the bone.” But as he persisted, abuse supplanted ridicule. “That was more to my liking. I rather like to fight.”

  When he presented his arguments to a meeting of engineers in New Orleans, General Arsène Perrilliat patronized him: “The alluvial stream is a gigantic hydraulic dredge…. Just as your arm will have its muscles developed if you exercise it and train it intelligently, so if the Mississippi River is guided intelligently…by a levees-only policy…it will grow in section so that it will carry floods to the sea, where we want them to go, without damage to us.”

  Then came the 1913 flood. The New York Times estimated 2,000 dead in Ohio alone. Fifty died in Hamilton, 150 in Zanesville, 200 in Dayton, and at least that many in Columbus. When the same waters reached the lower Mississippi, deaths were few but economic damage was vast.

  The deaths of northern whites sensitized the country in ways that deaths of black sharecroppers did not, and Percy took advantage of the disaster to push Congress to increase appropriations for levees and, for the first time, to do so solely for flood control—no longer using the pretense of aiding shipping. He spent weeks in Washington leading a consortium of interests, and wrote home that he “succeeded in getting a favorable report…[and] its passage.”

  A few civilian engineers also opened savage attacks on the river commission and the Corps. Yielding finally to the pressure, the commission agreed to conduct “new” studies of cutoffs, reservoirs, and outlets. But the respective reviews lacked scientific integrity.

  The “study” of cutoffs, for example, reviewed old arguments and observations—originally made between 1831 and 1848—regarding two cutoffs in Louisiana. It collected no new data and performed no experiments. Its conclusion affirmed the old policy: it rejected cutoffs.

  The issue of reservoirs was handled similarly. Reservoirs had been a pet proposal of Humphreys’ archenemy Charles Ellet, and in 1874, Humphreys had convened a board of Army engineers to investigate them. That board had rejected reservoirs but conceded, “The question of absolute practicality could only be decided by a series of extensive and elaborate surveys, for which neither funds nor time were available.”

  In the ensuing forty years not a single such survey had been made, yet the “new” study again unequivocally condemned the idea. Ohioans who had just suffered a disastrous flood ignored the findings and built their own reservoir system. Army engineers opposed it and warned it
would not succeed, but, since no federal money was involved, they could not block it. (Over the next three-quarters of a century, these reservoirs would prove successful.)

  Then came the question of outlets, also called spillways. The deaths in 1913 had frightened New Orleans; the city had demanded a new study. Mississippi River Commission secretary Major Clarke Smith did collect fresh data and confessed, “[T]here is no doubt that a spillway would reduce extreme flood heights at New Orleans.” Still, he recommended against building one because “its use would be rare…and the expense great.”

  The commission published his conclusion but, despite repeated requests from civilian engineers, refused to release his new data. And the formal commission response to the call for spillways came in 1914 from commission member J. A. Ockerson. Ockerson revealed the openness of his mind when he said that he conducted his study solely to calm people in New Orleans, adding, “Whether their fears are groundless or not, whether based on facts or not, it justifies a review.” Ignoring both the commission’s new data and Humphreys’ old data, he declared: “Guglielmini confirmed the opinion as to the little utility of spillways for reducing flood heights…. It is difficult to find a reason for any change at this time.”

  Guglielmini had made his observations on the Po River centuries earlier. Humphreys himself had stated that the results predicted by Guglielmini’s theory “are all contrary to observation.”

  The engineering review thus left the levees-only policy in force. The only policy impact of the 1912 and 1913 disasters was to force the Mississippi River Commission to set new standards for levees, making them higher and thicker. Then in 1920, in accord with its theory that called for increasing the volume of the Mississippi River, the commission began sealing the river off from Cypress Creek.

  CYPRESS CREEK was located on the west bank of the Mississippi, about 35 miles by river (less than half that in a straight line) above Greenville and 15 miles below the mouth of the Arkansas, which drains a basin stretching deep into the mountains of New Mexico and Colorado.

  The 1916 Mississippi River flood was not a great flood, but during it 336,000 cubic feet of water each second escaped from the Mississippi into Cypress Creek. This amount exceeds the flow of the Danube in flood, far exceeds Niagara Falls in flood, and more than doubles the flow of the flooding Colorado River.

  The water that escaped into Cypress Creek inundated a huge natural reservoir, and eventually found its way into the Boeuf, Ouachita, or Red Rivers, thence to the sea either by returning to the Mississippi or going down the Atchafalaya River, the greatest outlet of the Mississippi.

  Closing Cypress Creek sparked controversy. James Kemper and a few others argued that increasing the volume of the Mississippi by 300,000 second-feet or more was madness. He insisted that the closure would raise the flood height 6 feet higher than it would otherwise be.

  To prove his case he and others tried to convince the Corps to build a hydraulics laboratory for studying the river. It was not a new idea, but General Lansing Beach, chief of engineers, rejected it, explaining: “The art of dam construction is so far advanced in this country that a national hydraulic laboratory is not necessary to advance that science…. I particularly desire to emphasize my opinion that the hydraulic laboratory proposed would have no value whatever in solving flood control.”

  As Kemper later observed, “It is so much easier to believe than to think; it is astounding how much more believing is done than thinking. It is more astounding that an honest study was not made of conditions resulting from [the levees-only policy]. Not only was essential data not available but it appeared as though the failure to acquire it was deliberate. The determination to carry out this impossible theory was so great that, with many, it appeared to be an obsession.”

  The obsession was proving dangerous. The Corps of Engineers and the Mississippi River Commission closed the Cypress Creek outlet in 1921. No longer could Mississippi River water escape into Cypress Creek.

  BY MID-MARCH 1922, shortly after LeRoy Percy first spoke against the Klan, Kemper was predicting a record or near-record flood. At the time, he stood alone in that prediction.

  On April 10 in Greenville, the river rose unexpectedly over the 50-foot mark on the gauge, just inches below the all-time record of 50.8 feet.* Water already “in sight”—i.e., upriver or in tributaries—would keep the Mississippi rising for at least two more weeks.

  On April 11 the gauge at the foot of Canal Street in New Orleans, more than 400 miles downriver from Greenville, also neared a record. Along the entire length of the lower Mississippi, people grew tense, fearing they were in for the battle of their lives.

  The next day in Louisiana a call went out for volunteers to guard the levee at night. In Mississippi identical efforts had already begun. Armed men walked every inch of the levee watching for weak points; they also watched for dynamiters. If the levee yields on one bank of the river, those on the opposite bank are suddenly safe.

  On April 15 the river at Greenville rose to 51 feet—a record—and continued rising.

  Each hour the river drained more resources, more energy, from the people along it. Supplies of sandbags were exhausted. The men stacking them were exhausted. Money was exhausted.

  On April 19, Percy once again addressed a mass meeting convened in the People’s Theater. The Klan fight was put on hold; the river took precedence. This address contained no rhetoric and little pleading. He stated the facts. Already the levee board had expended all of its funds. There was no money for sandbags, for barge fuel, for lumber, for any of the other things a high-water fight required. They needed to work together, he said, to pool all that they had, to make all their labor available, to devote all their resources to this fight. Hundreds of people listened to him, and they organized in smaller groups, each agreeing to feed levee workers, or arrange for timber, or supply shovels.

  Percy stripped his own cotton compress and plantations of laborers and sent them to the levee under the command of his manager, Charlie Williams, an expert flood fighter. Tens of thousands of men were fighting the river, filling and stacking sandbags, building “mud boxes”—planks nailed together at the crown of the levee, backed up by sandbags—to protect against wave wash, searching for signs of sloughing or of the river undermining the levee.

  Meanwhile, Percy was asking bankers across the country for money; he also, with nine other leading Delta planters, one from each affected county, created the West Mississippi Flood Committee to mount an emergency lobbying effort in Washington. As a result, up and down the river mayors, the heads of levee boards, and bank presidents rained telegrams on Congress. Read one wire: “Everything possible is being done to hold the levees from ravages of highest water in histroy [sic] but with funds exhausted by the river commission and levee board they cannot expect to hold the situation….” Read another: “Without the $2 million…the fight will be hopeless in this district. With sufficient funds we have every prospect of winning this fight.” Within days, Congress appropriated $1 million for the emergency.

  The levees were holding, but the river was so high that tributaries could not empty into it; instead, the Mississippi forced its own waters back up their mouths. The flooding covered parts of six Delta counties and turned 20,000 Delta people into terrified refugees. “People from Belzoni to Vicksburg flooded by backwater,” pleaded a new wire to Congress. “Conditions desperate without food or means of escape…. Suffering growing daily more widespread and acute. Believe only relief organized by government on large scale can equal emergency.”

  There was no more federal relief. At Greenville the river, far above the old record, was still rising. Virtually every male black within miles was working on the levees. Meanwhile, the flood poured south.

  IN 1922, NEW ORLEANS was a city of 450,000 people. At its back lay Lake Pontchartrain, 22 miles across and 50 miles wide, and at its front lay the river. No bridge crossed the river, much less the lake. Roads were poor in the best of circumstances, worse than useless in heavy ra
in. The only way out of the city was rail; a flood would cut even that connection. In an emergency the city would be impossible to evacuate or escape.

  The Mississippi River Commission’s official New Orleans flood gauge was at Carrollton Bend near Tulane University, where St. Charles Avenue, one of the most elegant streets in America, intersects with Carrollton Avenue. The 1912 flood had set the record height of 21 feet at Carrollton. On April 14 the 1922 flood registered 21.3 feet at Carrollton, and rising. The crest was still hundreds of miles upriver.

  At the foot of Canal Street in downtown New Orleans, the U.S. Weather Bureau maintained its own gauge. On April 25 it registered 22.7 feet, with the crest still far upriver. The river rose above rooftops, to the top of the levee. In places it rose above the levee. City engineer John Klorer, in a highly confidential report to the mayor, warned: “At Octavia there is low levee as well as levee deficient in cross-section…. At Louisiana Avenue the levee occupied by the Celeste Street shed is below the present stage of the river by 18 to 24 inches…. [The river] is being held out by a line of sandbags plus loose dirt…. There is not enough progress being made by the present forces.”

  Three thousand city workers and the National Guard frantically struggled to raise the levees higher. Far above New Orleans, when a levee board president discovered a dangerous section of levee and begged Governor Parker for a few men to patrol it, Parker refused: “We are in a most desperate fight here and need every man we are able to secure.”