Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  THERE WAS ANOTHER response to the Mounds Landing crevasse as well. Even before it, the Red Cross had established refugee camps, set up a headquarters in Memphis, and transferred all its disaster personnel into the flooded regions. Yet the numbers of refugees—70,000 before Mounds Landing—the geographic reach of the flood, and the disruption of transportation created logistic problems far beyond its capacity to cope. Six governors had beseeched President Calvin Coolidge for help, but he had done nothing.

  Now Coolidge had to act. At a cabinet meeting the morning after the crevasse, he named Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover chairman of a special committee of five cabinet secretaries to coordinate all rescue and relief efforts. Coolidge also gave Hoover authority to issue orders to the Army and Navy.

  That was the situation when Thomson arrived in Washington. Despite the crisis, or because of it, he liked being there. It was home to him, more of a home than New Orleans. Here there was no Boston Club, no Louisiana Club, no Mardi Gras krewe. Here was a briar patch in which he could operate, in which many of his New Orleans peers would be lost.

  Immediately after the morning cabinet meeting, Thomson presented the case for dynamiting the levee to Secretary of War Dwight Davis and Chief of Army Engineers General Edgar Jadwin. Jadwin resisted. He said levees upriver from the city would surely break, and predicted that the flood stage at New Orleans would not go above 22 or 23 feet “unless there were no further breaks.” The city’s levees could certainly hold such a stage.

  Thomson persisted, citing the panic in the city and quoting Jadwin’s predecessor about blowing a hole in a levee. The city had counted on that commitment. Was the War Department now going back on its word? And what was the cost of blowing the levee? It would flood only marsh.

  Finally Davis said if he received a formal request to dynamite the levee from the governor of Louisiana, and the federal government was absolved of any responsibility, he would look “sympathetically” upon it. Later that afternoon Thomson met with Coolidge personally and received a more ambiguous response. But it was good enough. He called Butler. Then Thomson headed back to New Orleans.

  Early the next morning, Saturday, April 23, Hoover, Jadwin, and Red Cross acting chairman James Fieser departed for Memphis.

  While newspapers and radio stations across the United States headlined Hoover’s appointment and the plight of Greenville, page 1 of Thomson’s Tribune recounted a censored version of his meetings with Coolidge, Davis, and Jadwin, not mentioning anything about dynamiting the levee. In St. Bernard people read between the lines. They increased to 500 the number of levee guards, enough to put an armed man every 300 yards twenty-four hours a day. They trusted no one.

  TWENTY THOUSAND men were working on the levees between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Earlier, the Times-Picayune had reported the arrival of 640,000 sandbags in the city, supposedly enough to guarantee perfect protection. In an effort to reassure, it now reported the arrival of 6 million sandbags. The news did not reassure.

  Business in New Orleans simply disappeared. The streets emptied. One national chain closed its eighteen stores in the city; its employees fled. Parents of out-of-town students at Tulane and Loyola ordered their children back home. Hotels emptied and closed off floors. Hospitals handled only life-threatening emergencies; otherwise they too were empty. The only activity was on the levee. Earlier, hundreds of people had come to the levee each day to see the river for themselves. Now thousands came.

  In the Delta the waters were wreaking havoc. The Associated Press reported: “Maj. Allen said that a conservative estimate of the total drownings in the delta region was at least 200 with the possibility that the actual number would be considerably greater…. Property damage is estimated at $500,000,000.”

  There was still a public show of confidence. Parham Werlein, a prominent figure on the Safe River Committee, insisted his sister-in-law remove a boat tied to her backyard porch, saying, “Do you know what people would think if you had a boat?”

  ON SATURDAY, APRIL 23, an oceangoing molasses tanker rammed the levee on the west bank of the river at the Junior Plantation, forty-three miles below the city. The river began to pour through the break. In New Orleans, people only suspected sabotage. In St. Bernard and Plaquemines people were convinced of it. Levee guards tensed. A reporter and photographer traveling in a small boat down the river to examine the crevasse were fired upon repeatedly. They kept their heads literally down, below the gunwales, choosing to risk a collision with floating wreckage over being shot.

  Thomson returned to New Orleans Sunday morning and went straight to Butler’s home on St. Charles Avenue to brief him on what had happened in Washington. Butler nodded approval, then called Dufour, whose family owned the tanker that had rammed the levee, for a report on Governor Simpson’s position.

  Dufour lived a few blocks up St. Charles and came over with disheartening news. Simpson had come to the city on Friday and talked with Klorer, Garsaud, and state engineers. The engineers had presented their reasons for dynamiting the levee. Simpson had asked piercing questions, complained that their predictions of danger to New Orleans were valid only if upriver levees held, and demanded to know what they thought the chances of that were. Their answers had been evasive. Simpson had proved evasive himself, returning to Baton Rouge without seeing the delegation of Dufour, Pool, and Mayor O’Keefe.

  On Saturday, Dufour had finally gotten the commander of the National Guard to convince Simpson to see them. The three New Orleans men had ridden the train to Baton Rouge and entered the governor’s mansion late Saturday night, just after a delegation of men from St. Bernard and Plaquemines left. Manuel Molero, who had won the trust of the governor, had complained of rumors of the plans to cut their levee. He had pleaded with Simpson not to allow it, not to sacrifice them. Simpson had listened carefully. An election was only a few months away. Flooding country people to save the city did not play well politically in rural Louisiana. Besides, there was something so foul about the idea of the government, which should be trying to protect people, destroying people’s livelihoods. The idea left a bad taste in Simpson’s mouth. O’Keefe, Pool, and Dufour could not convince him to agree to their plan.

  Sunday morning their case weakened further when the New Orleans States quoted Isaac Cline, who stated that his prediction of flood height at New Orleans depended upon all levees above the city holding. He declared, “The possibility of danger to the city, with the proper precautions which are being taken, is very remote.” Simpson knew Cline’s history, knew that Cline would never underestimate the danger. Simpson considered Cline’s statement a near guarantee that natural crevasses would relieve the city.

  Later in the day Simpson received reports that the Arkansas River levee near Pine Bluff, Arkansas, had washed out. The Arkansas was now rolling south like an invading army, and would soon inundate hundreds of thousands of acres of northern Louisiana. Then came reports that the Glasscock levee above Baton Rouge was already caving into the river, with the crest more than a week away. Both crevasses, while terrible news for Louisiana, would help relieve New Orleans; the failures of those levees also strongly suggested more crevasses would follow.

  Butler, Thomson, and Dufour reviewed the situation. There was one politician in New Orleans whom Simpson trusted—Paul Maloney, a former city councilman who had lost the last mayoralty race. Butler considered him a mediocrity. But he needed him now. He called Maloney and told him what was required. Maloney immediately left for Baton Rouge, but soon reported that he could do nothing with Simpson, that Simpson clung to Cline’s assessment that danger was “remote,” and refused to approve dynamiting the levee.

  Cline had become key. Pool knew Cline well; they shared the same tastes in art. Butler asked Pool to call him. Cline later remembered: “Pool pleaded with me to go to Governor Simpson. I told Mr. Pool that I did not consider New Orleans in danger from overflow.”

  Pool persisted, arguing that the panic in the city and threatened confidence in its safety was every bi
t as deadly as the river itself. Cline refused to help and hung up.

  Pool called back. Didn’t Cline worry about “the mass psychology of fear” in the city? Of course he did. But he couldn’t lie. He couldn’t compromise the integrity of his office. Pool argued that he had the future of the city in his hands. He could save it. And what if he was wrong? The risk to life would be tremendous. Was he so certain of his predictions as that? Cline told Pool to let him think about it and hung up again.

  “I knew the levees could not carry the flood waters as far as New Orleans,” Cline later explained. “However, the levees were under another branch of Government service and I could not say what the flood would do to the levees. I could only say ‘If the levees hold the volume of water now in sight.’”

  He called Pool back and said, “You may go to Governor Simpson and tell him that I say there is another rise in the river on the way here and that if the levee is going to be opened to relieve the situation it should be opened at once.”

  MALONEY CARRIED THIS MESSAGE to Simpson. Simpson had been relying on Cline but could no longer. And, only a few hours earlier, he had received a confidential memo circulated by hand because, the memo stated, it was “too confidential and alarming to telephone or telegraph.” It reported that the Mississippi River Commission expected the water from Mounds Landing to “flow back into the river at Vicksburg. It will swing against the Louisiana levees opposite Vicksburg, and a break is anticipated somewhere in Louisiana between Vicksburg and Natchez…. [This] probably would send part of the water down the Atchafalaya Outlet and thereby relieve the situation at New Orleans.” But if this expected break did not occur, the commission was “genuinely alarmed about the fate of New Orleans.”

  Maloney asked Simpson how he could take any risk with the city of New Orleans. Nearly half a million people there were at the river’s mercy.

  It was Sunday night. The day had seemed endless. Although Simpson had yet to agree, Butler had just sent Thomson and Garsaud to Vicksburg to meet the members of the Mississippi River Commission there and ask formal permission to dynamite the levee.

  Meanwhile, Butler, Hecht, and Dufour were waiting for news in the solarium of Butler’s home. It was modest compared to Hecht’s home on Audubon Place, and smaller than Dufour’s a few blocks away. Hecht and Dufour, both sharp and inquisitive men, traded quips. They were often together, each the other’s closest friend. Butler sat, humorless, not participating.

  Finally, near midnight, Maloney called from the governor’s mansion to say Simpson would agree to the dynamiting of the levee, under certain conditions. He would require in writing: first, a definitive statement signed by engineers that the dynamiting of the levee was absolutely necessary, and there could be no equivocating language about “if the levees hold”; second, legal opinions that he had the authority to order the levee dynamited; third, written promises from the city of New Orleans to compensate victims for all losses.

  Butler immediately agreed to all conditions. Simpson, who did not get on the phone, said he would be in the city late the next day, Monday. Butler got busy. With Hecht and Dufour he called upon other men, men of the city’s establishment. The city, they believed, depended upon them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE MOMENT OF DECISION, the moment before which contemplation had been possible, had come earlier, when Butler had allowed the process to go forward. Since then Butler and those with him had been in continuous motion, and, in motion, Butler had never reconsidered. Now he and the others began pushing to the inevitable conclusion, using all their powers. They had the power of panic. They had the power of money. They had the power of caste. They had the power of the times, when it was believed that men with money not only knew better than others but acted better.

  Rumors spread about the plan for dynamiting. It barely kept pace with the fear. On Monday, April 25, the Red Cross asked every nurse to register. A sand boil erupted at the Oak Street levee uptown. At Dumaine Street in the French Quarter, the river began seeping through the levee. The same day, the first break on a Red River levee occurred, further suggesting that New Orleans would be relieved by breaks upriver. In St. Bernard more guards were added.

  In New Orleans, for three hours Monday morning Dufour sat in his office with Esmond Phelps, J. Blanc Monroe and his partner Monte Lemann, and two other prominent attorneys; together they drafted a legal opinion to compel the governor to dynamite the levee. They also wrote a separate opinion for Percy Saint, attorney general of Louisiana, to give to Simpson.

  Klorer was busy preparing a formal statement of engineers to give Simpson, to be signed by himself, Garsaud, Colonel William Wooten, an Army engineer, and George Schoenberger, chief of the three-man board of state engineers. One of the three state engineers protested that dynamiting the levee would be a “hysterical” and “simply ridiculous” act, and complained that New Orleans was in no danger and that the state engineers were caving in to pressure. He was kept from Simpson, and no newspaper ever quoted him.

  In Vicksburg, Thomson and Garsaud met with the Mississippi River Commission onboard the commission’s boat, said they represented “all the interests” of the city, and formally requested approval to cut the levee. Colonel Potter asked them to go into the back cabin. Then in private he somberly told his fellow commission members he would “prefer to wait” to see whether the expected crevasses relieved the city, but to refuse permission now that the request had been made would truly panic the city. They had to approve “for the psychological effect.”

  Potter then called Thomson and Garsaud back and handed them a wire to send to Simpson, with a copy to Butler: “In order to avoid the loss of life and property incidental to…an accidental break along the levee line, the Commission believes that it is advisable to create a break in the levee at a predetermined point or points in the State of Louisiana selected by the Governor of the State, or by his authorized agents.”

  Garsaud returned to New Orleans. Thomson remained in Vicksburg to see Hoover and Jadwin, who were coming downriver and would arrive the next day.

  AT SEVEN O’CLOCK that evening Governor Simpson, Butler, Hecht, Dufour, Maloney, and Garsaud met in Butler’s office at the Canal Bank. No representative of the city government was present. Butler laid before Simpson the documents—the legal and engineering opinions that the action was necessary, the wire from the river commission, a pledge to reimburse victims—he had requested.

  Then they walked out of Butler’s office into the bank’s boardroom. There Mayor O’Keefe and fifty of the wealthiest men in the city waited, crowding the long mahogany table and crammed in chairs lining the wall. It was fitting that they met there rather than in City Hall. Simpson called the meeting to order, but there was no pretense about who was in charge. It was Butler.

  Simpson was grimly formal, surrounded by men who controlled New Orleans and who were demonstrating that they controlled the rest of the state as well. He began to read aloud each document in its entirety. It took him almost an hour to read them, his voice punctuated by an occasional cough, the silence of his audience broken by the sound of a chair shifting or a match being struck or a man leaning backward. It was as if it mattered to say all the words, as if it would make these men understand. But they already understood.

  Butler had invited two men to this meeting to represent St. Bernard and Plaquemines. He had not invited Molero, or Meraux, or Perez. Instead, the two men were John Dymond, Jr., and Simon Leopold, men of wealth and position. Their lands lay in the two parishes, but they were not truly of them. Indeed, Dymond belonged to the Boston Club. When Simpson finished, Dymond spoke up. If the levee needed to be cut, he argued, it should be cut above New Orleans. There the cut would relieve the most pressure, and there men were expending immense energies to save the levees. To destroy those levees required no dynamite; if they simply ceased trying to save them, the river would take care of the rest. The water would flow harmlessly into Lake Pontchartrain. Wasn’t that morally better than sacrificing St. Bern
ard and Plaquemines, especially if the sacrifice turned out to be unnecessary?

  But all the weight of the room, all the money and power in the room, pressed against Dymond. And he was one of them, only protesting for form. He well knew that the land upriver was far more developed, and a flood there would cause far more expensive damage. The city was not prepared to promise reimbursement for such an amount. The decision had already been made. Dymond asked at least for a written guarantee that damages would be paid.

  “We can certainly do that,” Butler said. “Write it, and we will all sign it.”

  Dymond and Leopold left the room. The fifty men remaining in the boardroom waited uncomfortably. Some sat at the table, silent. Others stood in groups of three or four, assuring each other that they were doing the right thing.

  Twenty minutes later Dymond and Leopold returned with a resolution, and read it aloud. It stipulated three things. First, signatories “pledge ourselves to the people of the parishes of Plaquemines and St. Bernard to use our good offices in seeing that they are reimbursed by proper governmental agencies, the losses which they may sustain as a result of this emergency work.” Second, it proposed a five-member commission to decide all reparations issues. The governor would appoint two members; the New Orleans City Council would appoint two; and the Lake Borgne Levee Board would appoint one. Third, it created a fund of $150,000 to care for the refugees.

  Butler agreed quickly. The victims would get only one of five votes on the board to determine damages; the city would get two. The fund of $150,000 guaranteed less than $20 to each refugee for the destruction of his or her home, property, and livelihood. After the river went through, there would be nothing left.