Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  LeRoy Percy could not help his son. He was in Chicago serving on the executive committee of the largest river control convention ever. He was guiding Lewis Pierson, president of both the Irving Trust Company in New York and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, other financiers, and some of the nation’s leading manufacturers on a Chamber tour of the entire flooded area. He was in Arkansas meeting with a handful of peers to plan strategy on how to get the federal government to take charge of the levee system. He was trying to rebuild the Delta’s finances by convincing New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and New Orleans creditors either to write off planters’ debts by 25 percent “or else take over the land…and pay off the back taxes owed on much of it, so that the rehabilitation process could start afresh.”

  Meanwhile, Will’s orders had encouraged abuses of blacks, and now Will could not stop those abuses. Nor could he stop the fraud, stop the stockpiling of free Red Cross supplies by distributors who would later sell them, stop the charging of black refugees for what should have been free. The national Red Cross launched a secret investigation into profiteering and theft in the county. Will learned of it and, furious, clinging ferociously to his pride, threatened to resign, writing: “I bitterly resent this…. If you want me to go on with the work, I will do so under one condition: that I receive a statement that there will be no secret investigation in Washington County, that all investigators will report to me…. If I am in charge of this county, I am in charge of all the employees in this county.”

  The Red Cross withdrew the investigators. But Will had lost control. He fled into poetry. Earlier he had told the head of the Yale University Press that he had no time for his duties as editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets and suggested someone else do the job. Since then Greenville had finally begun emptying of water, but it remained devastated and isolated while the strains of cleanup had only added to those of supply. Yet now Will asked for and received thirty-five manuscript collections of poetry.

  On July 7, trying to ease black hostility, the mayor stepped forward for the first time since the crevasse; he named a Colored Aid Committee to organize a benefit performance at the Saenger Theater, “giving the entire [proceeds of the] show to the colored people for their relief work.” The leaders of the General Colored Committee would run it.

  The benefit would never be held. That same day two policemen, James Mosely and Pat Simmons, were assigned to collect a work crew while a truck waited to carry the crew to the levee. The policemen separated. Mosely had joined the force shortly before the flood; he knew little of Greenville’s traditions, but knew intimately the treatment of Negroes in the preceding few weeks. At the corner of Delesseps and, ironically, Percy Streets, Mosely called out to a black man named James Gooden sitting on his porch. Gooden was well respected in the black community, a man known personally to the Percys. He had worked all night. Mosely ordered him into the truck. Gooden shook his head no.

  Nigger, you’re going to work.

  No, Suh. No, Suh, I just been workin’.

  Nigger, don’t give no backtalk.

  No, Suh, I’m not backtalkin’ you.

  Gooden got up from the porch, went inside his house, and closed the door. Mosely followed him into his home and pulled his gun. Gooden froze.

  Nigger! Get your black ass in that truck.

  White man. Don’t pull no gun on me!

  According to Mosely, Gooden grabbed for the gun. Mosely shot him. But Gooden told a different version to blacks who carried him to the hospital. In an effort to save his life, two white doctors amputated his arm. James Gooden died anyway.

  THE NEWS swept through the black community. Seething, blacks stopped work. The unloading of barges ceased. The loading of supplies headed inland ceased. Cleaning the muck out of white businesses ceased. The white community grew nervous. There were then more than 10,000 blacks in Greenville, fewer than 4,000 whites. Will heard from “my Negro informant” that there was a possibility of violent reprisal. Rhodes Wasson recalled, “We prepared for a race riot here…. We thought the blacks were going to uprise. Everyone was buying guns.”

  To calm the Negro community, Mosely was arrested, supposedly to be held for trial. No one believed that would ever happen. The county prosecutor was still Ray Toombs, the Exalted Cyclops of the local Klan. (Mosely never was indicted.)

  The city became an armed camp. Blacks and whites who lived in the city had firearms. On the levee blacks had shovels and hoes and knives within reach. In both races fear grew. It was a deep fear, not of something external that penetrated inward; this fear began at a person’s core and suffused the whole, a defining fear that made people aware of who they were. But Will relished the atmosphere of fear. He had failed at everything else that defined a Percy, but he had never showed cowardice. He later wrote: “I told my informant I would call a meeting of the Negroes for that night and speak to them in one of their churches. He vehemently opposed this course, saying the Negroes were all armed and all of them blamed me for the killing. Nevertheless I called the meeting.”

  Chapple, McMiller, and other members of the General Colored Committee agreed to hear Percy at Mt. Horeb, a beautiful stone church with a history of intense emotions; Chapple’s father had once gotten into an argument there and had been knocked through the window into the street. E. M. Weddington, college-educated, large and powerful, the probable author of the anonymous letters to Coolidge and Hoover, was pastor.

  When Will arrived, the church was almost empty. Silently, one at a time, blacks began to enter. The silence was ominous. Finally, with the church full, Weddington arose and, as Will reported, “said starkly, ‘I will read from the Scripture.’ Without comment, he read the chapter from Genesis on the flood. It was as impressive as ice-water. Then he said, ‘Join me in a hymn.’ It was a hymn I had never heard…a pounding barbaric chant of menace. I could feel their excitement and hate mount to frenzy…. The preacher turned to me.”

  Usually, any white visitor, much less a Percy, received a fulsome introduction when addressing a colored audience. Weddington said simply, “I give you Mr. Percy, chairman of the Red Cross.” Unapplauded, he mounted the pulpit and stood there representing all the power of his class and race. Before him rippled a sea of black faces, black necks, black arms.

  Suddenly, it was as if everything Will could not admit to himself transformed itself into anger. He had not come to explain. Percys did not explain. If he had fallen short of the standards of the Percys, that only made him colder, sterner, angrier. “When put upon,” he once observed, “I discovered that a truculent tongue did more to save than a battalion of virtues.”

  He spoke slowly and bitterly: “A good Negro has been killed by a white policeman. Every white man in town regrets this from his heart and is ashamed. The policeman is in jail and will be tried. I look into your faces and see anger and hatred…. For four months I have struggled and worried and done without sleep in order to help you Negroes. Every white man in town has done the same thing…. We white people could have left you to shift for yourselves. Instead we stayed with you and worked for you, day and night. During all this time you Negroes did nothing, nothing for yourselves or for us…. Because of your sinful, shameful laziness, because you refused to work in your own behalf unless you were paid, one of your race has been killed. You sit before me sour and full of hatred as if you had the right to blame anybody or judge anybody…. You think I am the murderer. I will tell you who he is…. I am not the murderer. That foolish young policeman is not the murderer. The murderer is you! Your hands are dripping with blood. Look into each other’s face and see the shame and the fear God set on them. Down on your knees, murderers, and beg your God not to punish you as you deserve.”

  The bond between the Percys and the blacks was broken. The Delta, the land that had once promised so much to blacks, had become, entirely and finally, the land where the blues began.

  The black audience did get down on its knees. But what they prayed for Will did not know.

  AMONG THE 154 r
efugee camps, there were many abuses. In violation of Red Cross rules, county relief committees routinely gave planters goods; they distributed them to tenants and too often charged for them. Routinely, black refugees were not fed as well as whites. Routinely, especially in Mississippi, sharecroppers were not free to leave. There were instances of brutality. But only in Greenville were so many extreme charges made; only in Greenville did the abuses appear to be so systematic.

  “My dear Percy,” Hoover wrote Will two days before Gooden was killed. “You have, I think, had the largest single burden in the flood territory. We are all proud of the way which you have carried through, and I take special satisfaction in it because of its flattery to my original judgment of long ago.”

  The reality was different. Will Percy had failed. Red Cross professionals judged neighboring Delta counties as having “a strong relief committee which functioned in a very business-like manner,” or as having done “decidedly good work,” or at the least as being “decidedly satisfactory.” For Will they made excuses: “No one can ever tell the story of those first days. Whatever may have been the mistakes made, much can be excused because of the horror and the panic…. Into the work Mr. Percy brought a rich experience in human understanding. Not always practical in his planning and somewhat at the mercy of cross-currents of local opinion, nonetheless he was deep rooted in his desire to render genuine service.”

  He could face the fact that he would never be his father. He could even face the fact that he had failed his father, but he could not accept that his father had failed him, not because his father had patronized him or even betrayed him, but because his father had done what Will could not admire. He could not face his father’s ruthlessness, and the abnegation of everything in which Will had believed. Unless one embraces the truth, one can only be comic or tragic; one cannot be heroic. His father had often been heroic. In the war Will had been heroic. Neither his father nor he were heroic now.

  Earlier Will had derided as “rabbits” those men who had fled the city. But he could not tolerate criticism; he could not tolerate public failure; he could not tolerate being treated as irrelevant; he could not tolerate the truth.

  Earlier Will had withdrawn into poetry, calling for those manuscripts to review. But now, his editing responsibility unfinished, on August 31 he returned the manuscripts to New Haven, explaining he was “passing the buck” because “frankly, nervously and mentally I am so fatigued and so harassed.”

  Effective that same day, he resigned as head of the relief committee. Hoover returned to Greenville on September 1. Will did not see him. On September 1, Will fled Greenville. He fled at a time when Washington County most needed help, when his father was writing a friend: “Our people here have a most trying road to travel. Some will be able to make the journey and get back to some kind of prosperity, I trust, but many of them, broken and discouraged, will fail to make the journey.”

  By the time Hoover arrived to be briefed by LeRoy, Will was on his way to Japan. He would remain away for months, escaping Greenville, escaping the criticism, escaping the struggle, escaping.

  Hoover, in his ambition, would deal with the repercussions of what the Percys had done.

  Part Seven

  THE CLUB

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE GREAT RIVER was finally done with its valley. On January 1, 1927, the first of its many crests had breached flood stage at Cairo, Illinois, and began flowing south, the river rising above flood stage January 5 at Memphis, January 16 at Vicksburg, February 12 at Baton Rouge, February 13 at New Orleans. As late as June 30, Isaac Cline was still issuing daily bulletins to warn of the water.

  At its angriest the Mississippi had boiled across its floodplain, crushed the works of man, and forced Nature herself to step back, forced the great Ohio to flow upstream. It had spread, said the preachers, as wide as God’s arms. Then, slowly, the river fell. Like the earlier rise, the fall flowed south, toward the sea. Not until June 14 did the flood subside at Cairo, not until June 22 at Memphis, July 11 at Vicksburg, July 14 at Baton Rouge. But at New Orleans the river, unnaturally, had fallen below flood stage more than a month earlier, on June 12. It had done so because of the use of 78,000 pounds of dynamite on the levee in St. Bernard; the dynamiting had not been necessary to save New Orleans, but it had lowered the river.

  While much of the lower Mississippi valley contended with the June rise, New Orleans went about its business as though the flood had never happened, aware only of summer. It was a hot summer, even for New Orleans. The elegant Saenger Theater, adorned by $25,000 chandeliers brought from one of France’s great castles, put in air-conditioning for the first time and found itself jammed every performance. Elsewhere in the night heat, in the French Quarter, in the neighborhoods for the “coloreds,” in the Ninth Ward shotgun houses extending down to the St. Bernard line, across the river in Algiers, men and women sat on balconies and porches to escape the heat. Along Basin Street in the remnants of Storyville, in the French Quarter, in the steamy close clubs, the jazz music welled up and rolled through the city on its own river.

  It was time to deal with the aftermath. In this too the city’s elite would reveal itself. The revelation would have import.

  THE MEN who ran New Orleans had succeeded. Sitting in offices, windows newly sealed against the heat and the music and cooled by the marvel of air-conditioning, they would determine what their flood did to St. Bernard and Plaquemines.

  James Butler in particular would make that determination. He was not an intellectual like his brother, the Tulane professor and graduate of the Sorbonne, yet he believed that he too dealt with large questions, with the infrastructure of society, power, money, and character. Indeed, he sat at the nexus of these things. He headed the only southern bank listed as one of the world’s largest. His wife was queen of the Mystic Club. He chaired the city’s Citizens Flood Relief Committee. He and John Parker represented Louisiana on the Tri-State Flood Control Committee, an ad hoc group but one that also included LeRoy Percy, representing Mississippi, and Governor John Martineau, representing Arkansas. Together these few men would sit down with Hoover and plan the long-term federal response to the flood, a response that would be enormously far-reaching.

  Butler also controlled what happened to the thousands of victims of the artificial crevasse. The Red Cross and Hoover had refused all responsibility for them, declaring them the city’s business entirely. And the city left it to Butler. Without any legal authority, he chose an executive committee from the larger Citizens Committee to decide what the city should do. But he found even this executive committee too cumbersome. Instead, he met with an even smaller and less formal group each morning at 8 A.M. in his office, and on weekends at his home. This group included Rudolph Hecht, president of the Hibernia Bank, J. Blanc Monroe, and H. Generes Dufour. Butler, Hecht, and, later, Monroe, the attorney and banker who was representing the city in regard to reparations for the refugees, all served on the Board of Liquidation. Dufour, Hecht’s one real friend, was the board’s attorney.

  They and their peers had always run the city sub rosa; now they ran it for all to see, assuming even ceremonial duties. When Will Rogers offered to give a benefit performance in New Orleans, it was not the mayor but Butler who accepted, expressing “my sincere appreciation of your most generous offer.” Now they began to press their weight against, enfold, and suffocate those people and institutions under their control.

  Butler had already created the Emergency Clearing House Publicity Committee to handle public relations for the city. The committee’s first move was to bully businesses within New Orleans. Such bullying had a long history. A month before the levee was dynamited, the Association of Commerce had rebuked ninety-two firms that bought postage stamps outside the city, thereby removing the money from the local economy. As the river was rising, several companies had tried to slash their inventories. When the Otis Mahogany Company failed to get flood insurance, it told customers around the nation “we have decided to cut ou
r prices for a few days to move out quickly a good volume of mahogany lumber, so if anything should happen our flood loss would be minimized.” The publicity committee warned Otis, “This kind of letter…is apt to cause New Orleans considerable harm.” The rebuke was written on New Orleans Clearing House Association stationery, a veiled threat that banks would hold the company accountable. The publicity committee attacked even such New Orleans boosters as Walter Parker, a board member of the Association of Commerce and executive director of the Safe River Committee, who was admonished for sending clients of the brokerage firm Fenner & Beane an estimate of the reparations New Orleans would owe. Meanwhile, local newspaper editors were advised, “[A]ny announcements or developments tending to improve the popular impression of conditions here should be given prominent headlines.” The papers all promptly began running repeated headlines, “City Out of Danger.”

  Then the public relations machine turned outward in an extraordinary effort to convince the world that New Orleans had never been threatened by the Mississippi River. The publicity committee had already distributed Butler’s affirmation of the city’s safety to 2,100 banks and investment firms, scheduled repeated broadcasts of Army engineers stating that the city was in no danger, and forced Moody’s Investors Service to correct a wire it had sent. As the crisis receded, the committee contacted 265 conventions held around the country in May and June, informing them that the city had never been in danger and requesting them to pass flood control resolutions. It also distributed feature stories to 300 trade journals, wired every Chamber of Commerce in the United States, sent out 40,000 reprints of statements by General Jadwin that the city was safe, contacted the Kiwanis, Rotary, the Lions, dozens of real estate boards, and urged every large company in the city to write its clients around the world, informing them of “facts.” And sometimes the committee made threats. As W. K. Seago, a sugar broker, warned one man, “New Orleans is…generously helping those in actual suffering in the flooded areas and we commend her example to her TRADUCERS reminding them that their day of reckoning will come and that while the mills of the Gods grind slowly they GRIND EXCEEDING SMALL.”