Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  Airplanes flew in circles over the area to be flooded searching for stragglers and taking photographs. The photos were Blanc Monroe’s idea. Butler had insisted he represent the city regarding reparations. Butler had chosen well. No one took advantage of Monroe. After the flood, few buildings in the region would remain standing. The aerial photographs would document what had stood there before, and prevent claimants from exaggerating their losses.

  The two parishes became increasingly desolate and empty. Delacroix Island was empty, its homes deserted, the shelves of the grocery stores empty. In Violet, where deputies had ambushed Claude Meraux’s whiskey shipment and died for their efforts, the buildings stood solemn and empty. At Braithwaite, where the baseball bleachers had held the mass meeting three days before, the only sounds were those of the birds.

  NEW ORLEANS meanwhile was enjoying itself. The fine families, as if on a picnic, traveled down to see the great explosion that would send dirt hundreds of feet high and create a sudden Niagara Falls. Cars jammed the road down to St. Bernard, and yachts crowded the river.

  But not just anyone could witness the explosion. It required an official permit. The men who had decided to dynamite the levee controlled those permits. Residents of St. Bernard could not witness the destruction of the levee, and their parish. As New Orleans writer Lyle Saxon noted: “Only the privileged with their official permits could pass the National Guard…. They came in automobiles, boats, and aeroplanes, eager for the big show.”

  The national and New Orleans media were there, of course. Every newsreel producer in the country had cameras present. Reporters, several hundred in all, from Memphis, from Houston and Dallas, from Washington, from New York, from Baton Rouge and St. Louis, were there as well. Practically every daily newspaper in the country would run the story on the front page, from Alaska to Florida. But no representative of the St. Bernard Voice was allowed a pass.

  BUTLER DID NOT GO to the site of the explosion himself. He was too busy. At 2 P.M. in the Canal Bank boardroom he met with twenty-five men who would care for the refugees. Butler of course chaired the meeting. The St. Bernard refugees would need housing, food, and jobs for several months. The water would not be off their land until July at the earliest. Then the land would be empty of everything except caking, fetid mud.

  Simultaneously, in Thomson’s office the Emergency Clearing House Publicity Committee met. It planned the distribution of copies of Butler’s statement about the city’s safety to 2,100 banks and businesses around the country. It also scheduled regular broadcasts of Army engineers stating that the city was now entirely safe. One member reported that the Pathé newsreel company had pledged to “be very careful in handling all New Orleans pictures”; the International News Reel Company had promised to “cooperate to the fullest extent.” The committee was squeezing even national news organizations into boxes. New Orleans was doing well indeed.

  AT NOON, the time scheduled for the explosion, Army, National Guard, and police motorcyclists dashed about while planes circled overhead. Chaos reigned. The crowds were pushed back, then pushed farther back. They waited, then waited more. Finally, word came that the entire area was clear, that the planes had spotted no one in the lower parishes. The hundreds who had come for the show tensed. At two-seventeen the first explosion occurred.

  The earth of the levee heaved, then settled. A ditch 10 feet deep and 6 feet wide opened, through which waters began to move slowly.

  Two more explosions followed with little effect. Workers used picks and shovels to increase the water flow. Divers went below the river surface to lay more charges. Finally, a reasonable flow developed, but it was no monster crevasse. The dense earth of the levee mockingly recalled Humphreys, who had called the “hard blue clay” of the river bottom impervious to erosion. Much of that clay was in these levees. The crowds went away disappointed. Dynamiting would continue over the next ten days. In all, 39 tons of dynamite would be used, ultimately creating a flow of 250,000 cubic feet of water per second.

  While waiting for the first explosion, Meraux had stood on the levee in his laced boots and riding breeches with his revolver in his holster, talking quietly to a group of reporters. “We’re letting ’em do it because we can’t stop ’em,” he said. “You can’t fight the Government. I have a hell of a time trying to get my people to see that. A lot of them don’t see it yet. They wanted to tell the state of Louisiana to come ahead and cut the levee—but it would be cut over their dead bodies first. We managed to talk them out of that for their own good…. And we haven’t got a line in writing of any guarantee that we’re going to get anything back.”

  He had only the public expressions from southern gentlemen of their moral obligation. As the explosion sounded, Meraux flinched, then turned around and said, “Gentlemen, you have seen today the public execution of this parish.”

  THE DAY AFTER the initial dynamiting, the Glasscock levee on the west bank of the Mississippi gave way, easing pressure on New Orleans levees. Simultaneously, the Weather Bureau warned that “the greatest flood of record” was in prospect the following week for the Ouachita and Black Rivers. Cline, as usual, did not say all he believed, that levees along these rivers would not hold, and their waters would never reach the Mississippi River. They would instead cover the land and roll, like the water from the Glasscock gap, through the Atchafalaya basin to the Gulf. As Kemper and Cline had predicted, the destruction of St. Bernard and Plaquemines was unnecessary. One day’s wait would have shown it to be so.

  Part Five

  THE GREAT HUMANITARIAN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CALVIN COOLIDGE was not a fool. In his autobiography he observed that the political mind “is a strange mixture of vanity and timidity, of an obsequious attitude at one time and a delusion of grandeur at another time, of the most selfish preferment combined with the most sacrificing patriotism. The political mind is the product of men in public life who have been twice spoiled. They have been spoiled with praise and they have been spoiled with abuse. With them nothing is natural, everything is artificial.”

  Coolidge did not have such a mind, and national politics did not come naturally to him. Not only was he an accidental president; he had been an accidental vice president. The 1920 Republican Convention bosses had decided upon Senator Irvine Lenroot of Wisconsin for the post, but delegates, furious at the original “smoke-filled room” that had forced Harding upon them as the presidential nominee, rebelled. When Lenroot was presented, one delegate shouted, “Not on your life!” Oregon was then recognized, with the instruction to nominate Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge for vice president. Oregon too balked. In the turmoil of 1919, Coolidge, then governor of Massachusetts, had gained prominence when he had responded to the Boston police strike by declaring, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.” Oregon announced its support not for Lodge but for “another son of Massachusetts—Calvin Coolidge!” He was swept to the nomination.

  “Silent Cal,” they called him, after Harding’s death in 1923 made him president. He was withdrawn. Photographs of him with others seem uncentered, because the pictures were always composed around him but he could not or would not fill the central space. He became more withdrawn after his teenaged son died in agony in 1924 from an infection that developed from a blister. “The power and the glory of the presidency went with him,” Coolidge said.

  Even before the Mounds Landing crevasse, the governors of Oklahoma, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Mississippi had begged Coolidge for help and asked him to name Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover head of a special federal rescue effort. Hoover had repeatedly solved massive logistics problems of feeding hundreds of thousands of people. But Coolidge had done nothing until he had to, until Mississippi Governor Dennis Murphree wired desperately: “Unprecedented floods have created a national emergency…. This territory will be water covered one to twenty feet in twenty four hours contains population 150,000…. Highways covered….
Railroad operations suspended…. Beyond capacity local and state agencies to relieve and control.”

  Finally, at 10:30 A.M. on April 22, Coolidge had called a cabinet meeting and named Hoover chairman of a special committee of five cabinet secretaries, including Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and Secretary of War Dwight Davis, to handle the flood emergency.

  Hoover would spend sixty of the next seventy-one days in the flooded territory. For nearly all that time he would dominate the nation’s front pages, newsreels, and radio waves. The flood would both test his theories about society and advance his own ambitions. For if Hoover did not have the political mind Coolidge described, he had ambition even greater than that of most politicians. That ambition had been sidetracked. The Mississippi River was offering Hoover his main chance, and he intended to seize it.

  HERBERT HOOVER was a brilliant fool. He was brilliant in the way his mind could seize and grapple with a problem, brilliant in his ability to accomplish a task, and brilliant in the originality, comprehensiveness, and depth of the political philosophy he developed. He was a fool because he deceived himself. Although considering himself as objective and analytical as science itself, in reality he rejected evidence and truths that did not conform to his biases, and he fooled himself about what those biases were. He was, as former President and then-Chief Justice William Howard Taft described him, “a dreamer…[with] grandiose ideas.”

  Yet by the time Hoover arrived in Washington, the press was calling him both “the Great Humanitarian” and “the Great Engineer.” It was a time when those two occupations were considered in some ways synonymous.

  Born in 1874 in West Branch, Iowa, amid rolling hills thirty miles from the Mississippi River, Hoover grew up influenced by two traditions: the silence and community of Quakers and the rationalism and purpose of engineering. He was also raised in loneliness. An orphan, separated from his siblings and shifted from one relative to another, his childhood was spent on edge, and it must have seemed that any misstep would cause him to be sent away. He grew up awkward and shy, obsessed both with how others saw him and wedded to his private thoughts. The one constant was the Quaker meeting; even there his chief memory was loneliness and “the intense repression” forced upon “a ten year old boy who might not even count his toes.”

  At eleven he was sent to an uncle in Oregon. From Iowa he took not much more than the two woven sayings given him by his mother, which he nailed to the wall of his new room. “Leave me not, neither forsake me, Oh God of my salvation,” said one; “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee,” said the other.

  Only at Stanford University did he finally find a home. Though he failed the entrance exam twice and won only conditional admission, once there he thrived emotionally and academically. He met his wife, Lou Henry, there; he was studying mining and she was the only woman studying geology. Stanford became, said his classmate and longtime intimate Will Irwin, “a kind of complex with him.” He would later call the school’s presidency his “lifetime ambition.”

  He also had other ambitions. If unable to make small talk socially, when fixed on a task he was neither shy nor timid, but confident and focused. As a young mining engineer on the violent and corrupt frontiers of turn-of-the-century Australia, China, and Siberia, he thrived as never before. “God deliver me from a fool,” he once said. “I would rather do business with a rogue any day if he has brains.” He helped to find and develop fabulously profitable mines, and during the Boxer Rebellion both he and his wife saved other lives while risking their own. When he was twenty-seven, Leland Stanford’s brother called him “the highest paid man of his age in the world.” When he was thirty-seven, a London mining periodical called him “a wizard of finance.” At forty he owned a share of mines and oil fields in Alaska, California, Romania, Siberia, Nigeria, Burma, Tierra del Fuego, including Russo-Asiatic Consolidated, the Inter-Argentine Syndicate, the Inter-Siberian Syndicate, and Northern Nigeria Tin Mines.

  But money no longer mattered so much to him. Years before, he told Stanford president David Jordan he had “run through his profession.” And he was lonely still. In 1912 he confided to a young friend: “The American is always an alien abroad. His own heart is in his own country, and yet there is less and less a niche for him when he returns….[In America] the esteem one hopes to build among one’s associates would not be wasted…. I have got to the stage now where I am playing the game for the game’s sake, as the counters don’t interest me anymore. I am disgusted with myself.” He told Will Irwin he was “as rich as any man has much right to be.” He wanted to “get in the big game somewhere. Just making money isn’t enough.”

  HOOVER’S INTEREST in “the big game” came partly from his Quaker upbringing, partly from his engineering background, and partly from raw ambition. Both engineering and the Quakers taught self-examination, a very personal truth, and responsibility to society, and engineering then represented more than simply science. It encompassed a revolutionary way of looking at the world, a kind of rationally ordered justice. Hoover preached this new gospel and served as president of three different engineering societies.

  Hoover was so convinced of the moral purity of engineers that he told a friend who was writing a novel in which the villain was an engineer, “But you are trying to make a villain of him which won’t do.” In a mining textbook he observed, “Engineering is the profession of creation and of construction, of stimulation of human effort and accomplishment.” He said engineering’s “exactness makes for truth and conscience.”

  Indeed, Hoover matured during a period when his profession’s growth was geometric and its sense of purpose messianic. From 1880 to 1920, the number of engineers in the United States zoomed from 7,000 to 136,000; in 1930 it reached 226,000. In 1913 the Atlantic Monthly—ironically, just as the certainty of engineering was yielding to the uncertainty of Einstein and Freud—proclaimed “machinery is our new art form,” and praised “the engineers whose poetry is too deep to look poetic” and who “have swung their souls free…like gods.”

  The explosive growth of engineering changed America. Most obviously, it changed manufacturing. Eads had played some small role in that change, with his demands for precision and consistency so unheard-of that he imposed science on steelmaking, formerly an art, as Carnegie himself conceded in 1910. As enormous enterprises employing thousands of people became the rule, owners also began to think in terms of “scientific management.” Frederick Taylor invented the term. A genius of efficiency, he designed a tennis racket for himself and won a national championship with it, then designed a new golf driver and putter, which was outlawed for tournament play. He designed more efficient factories and distribution systems, and he tried to design society, saying, “The same principles can be applied with equal force to all social activities: to the management of our homes, the management of our farms, the management of the business of our tradesmen, large and small, of our churches, our philanthropic institutions, our universities, and our governmental departments.” He proposed “[h]armony, not discord. Cooperation, not competition.”

  “Taylorism” spread rapidly. The Harvard Business School opened in 1908 to teach scientific management skills; one of its founders was Frank Taussig, a nationally known economist and son of Eads’ partner; as a boy he had called Eads “Uncle.”

  This revolution of the rational clearly influenced Hoover. Engineers claimed scientific management meant not only improved profit margins but salvation for humanity. It was a faith, a religion. The president of one engineering society declared, “[M]etaphysics has practically ceased to be considered, and empirical science is universally acknowledged as the source of all human progress…, the herald that brings joy to the multitudes…, their redeemer from despairing drudgery and burdensome labor.” Said another, “The golden rule will be put into practice by the slide rule of the engineer.”

  Waste itself was evil, a great burden, and engineers were determined to stamp it out for the betterment of humanity. Eads had called increasing e
fficiency “a principle so full of benefit to humanity [as to] constitute a theme worthy of the highest effort of the philanthropist.” In 1910 one engineering journal proclaimed, “The Millennium will have been reached when humanity shall have learned to eliminate all useless waste.”

  To eliminate waste, of course, technocrats had to have more power. As Taylor said, “The shop, and indeed the whole works, should be managed not by the manager, superintendent, or foreman, but by the planning department.”

  As a corollary of this new philosophy of management, engineer-philosophers also rejected the ruthless—and wasteful—competition of Social Darwinism in favor of a rational allocation of resources and goods. Hoover himself denounced brutal competition and waste: “By some false analogy to ‘the survival of the fittest’ many have conceived the whole business world to be a sort of economic ‘dog eat dog.’…Industry and commerce are not based upon taking advantage of other persons. Their foundations lie in the division of labor and the exchange of products…. [A] great area of indirect economic wrong and unethical practises spring up under the pressure of competition and habit.” The result was “economic waste through destructive competition, strikes, booms and slumps, unemployment, through failure of our different industries to synchronize and a hundred other causes which directly lower our productivity and employment.”