To an audience of no one who mattered, the St. Bernard Voice sneered: “The owner or lessee of marsh lands has been making $3000 to $8000 during each trapping season…[but] ‘Muskrats are the property of the state,’ says the law. And our levee-cutting neighbors in New Orleans hide themselves behind it. It was well enough to order trappers out of their homes and to destroy the muskrats on the marsh lands, for which trappers paid princely prices and, in many cases, on which there rest heavy mortgages, but when it comes to tiding them over until their lands are replenished, that is another question and side-stepping is in order for ‘Brutus is an honorable man’ and muskrats are the property of the state.”
IN ST. BERNARD and Plaquemines Parishes, total claims, including those that Monroe refused to accept for consideration, reached $35 million. Those he did allow to be filed totaled $12,491,041. He agreed to settlements totaling $3,897,276—but then deducted nearly $1,000,000 from these settlements for feeding and housing the claimants while they were homeless, leaving roughly $2.9 million that the city paid. Of this, $1.5 million went to Molero’s company. Five other large claimants, including the Louisiana Southern Railroad, received a total of $600,000. That left roughly $800,000 to divide between 2,809 claimants, who received an average of $284 each to compensate for, in many cases, having their homes and livelihoods destroyed and having their lives disrupted for months. An additional 1,024 claimants received nothing; not a single trapper was offered any compensation for trapping losses.
The two parishes were destitute. In November 1926, trappers had gathered more than a hundred pelts a day; a year and a half after the flood, in November 1928, they were lucky to collect six. In Delacroix, the trapping center, families were literally starving. A newspaperwoman who knew the area well demanded that the Association of Commerce help these people, and threatened to write “a very good feature story for several New York newspapers” if it did not.
Monroe replied to her. He made no mention of the fact that New Orleans had forced the dynamiting of the levee and caused their loss. But he did tell her that New Orleans had been generous: “The disastrous floods of 1927 did incalculable damage to many thousands of persons in the Mississippi Delta and out of these many thousands of persons none were compensated for their losses save the inhabitants of St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes. The compensation of the people of these parishes was a purely voluntary act on the part of the State of Louisiana and the Orleans Levee Board.”
Five hundred twenty-six claimants sued over two issues. Sixty-two suits involved the question of damages discovered after a claim had been filed. Monroe had refused to accept any such claims. The special court created by Dufour and Phelps’ legislation, located in New Orleans and with New Orleans judges, decreed, “We have viewed with patience and forbearance the attempts of many claimants to foist groundless claims upon the people of New Orleans, but we must confess that these…ravel our nerves.” The court gave the plaintiffs, the victims, nothing. Appeals courts affirmed the judgment.
The remaining suits involved the question of lost income, as opposed to damaged property. It would cover the trappers. In three test cases involving Herman Burkhardt, Alfred Oliver, and Claude Foret, a trapper and two laborers, lower courts rejected the claims and found “no cause of action.”
Their attorney was Leander Perez. Arguing before the state supreme court, he established his clients’ losses. He read into the record newspaper quotations of Butler and others affirming their moral and legal commitment to compensate victims for all losses. He presented the pledges signed by the bankers, by the mayor and city council, by the levee board, and argued that those pledges had the force of a legal contract.
Then Monroe began. He quoted Simpson’s statement when he announced plans to dynamite the levee: “‘I am impressed with the danger, and I am determined to avert it. The people in the affected area will be removed to safety and properly cared for. No lives will be sacrificed…. The damage to property resulting from this act will be paid for.’” Monroe insisted that it was only for property that compensation would be paid. Then he dismissed all the pledges made by all the leaders of New Orleans, arguing, “The constitutional amendment fixes definitely the rights and obligations of the plaintiff and defendant herein.” The amendment took precedence over the proclamations of moral obligation, of pledges of honor, of signed documents. All of that, he insisted, was “irrelevant to this case.”
On December 2, 1929, the supreme court rendered its decision on the two cases. The justices stated that although the city had demanded the break, “the act of creating the crevasse nevertheless remained the act of the State, through its Governor, in the exercise of its police power…. [A]s observed by counsel for defendant, the sole liability of the Orleans Levee District for the results of the crevasse is the liability voluntarily assumed for it by the Legislature and people of the state, when they passed and adopted the constitutional amendment cited above.”
The court declared that the amendment referred only to losses caused by “‘the encroachment of said waters.’” The court then said, “In using these words, the constitutional amendment conveys the idea that just compensation is directed to be paid for damages to what is encroached on by the waters, that is, physical property.”
Yet a contemporary edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defined “encroach” as “to intrude usurpingly on the territory, rights or accustomed sphere of action of others.” Contemporary editions of both Black’s Law Dictionary and Bouvier’s Law Dictionary defined it in nearly identical terms. Far from limiting damages to physical property, the word “encroach” specifically expanded it beyond physical property.
The Louisiana Supreme Court, the court from which Blanc Monroe’s father had retired as chief justice, the court dominated by the New Orleans bar, had chosen to misstate the definition of a simple word, and to base its finding upon that misstatement.
The court then concluded, “The judgment is affirmed.”
The plaintiffs received nothing.
The levee board promptly voted a resolution of thanks to Monroe, crediting him with success “due to the painstaking and most diligent and skillful manner in which his work was prosecuted…and to the great benefit of the taxpayers of Orleans Parish in general, because of the great savings affected between the amounts claimed and those settled for.” It also paid him a $25,000 bonus.
No bank, business, or government agency ever made a voluntary payment to the victims to fulfill the self-proclaimed moral obligation, nor was there any organized charity drive to ease the burden of the trappers.
The word of honor of the gentlemen of New Orleans, the gentlemen of the fine clubs, the gentlemen of Carnival, was “irrelevant.” J. Blanc Monroe, who belonged to the finest of those clubs, who once reigned as Comus, had declared it thus himself. But a reckoning would come.
Part Eight
THE GREAT HUMANITARIAN
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
WHILE TRAPPERS in St. Bernard fought with New Orleans over reparations, upriver a different fight was going on. There the river had lingered for months, not leaving all the land until September. Then it finally fell back within its banks, languid once again, like a snake that had swallowed its prey and lay now digesting it. It left behind ruin and rot.
At the site of each crevasse it had dug out “blue holes,” pockets of deep water lakes where fishing was often best and that exist still, and deposited mountains of sand over thousands of acres. In the entire flooded region 50 percent of all animals—half of all the mules, horses, cattle, hogs, and chickens—had drowned. Thousands of tenant-farmer shacks had simply disappeared. Hundreds of sturdy barns, cotton gins, warehouses, and farmhouses had been swept away. Buildings by the tens of thousands had been damaged, and in towns whole blocks had become heaps of splintered lumber, like the leavings of a tornado. In some places great mounds of sand covered fields and streets. On the fields, in the forests, in streets and yards and homes and businesses and barns, the water left a reeking muc
k. It filled the air with stench, and in the sun it lay baking and cracking like broken pottery, dung-colored and unvarying to the horizon.
Throughout the flooded region, as people turned toward rebuilding, there was a surge of energy, activity, and determination. Looking at the desolation in Washington County on September 1, 1927, Alfred Stone declared bravely, “We shall weather the storm. We shall stay here and see it through.”
But the immensity of the rebuilding task was overwhelming. LeRoy Percy said: “Sometimes you find that you have overestimated a disaster. I see nothing to indicate that in this case. The road ahead of us is a long and very rocky one.” Percy Bell wrote his sister, “Whether we are going to come back or not, nobody knows.” After weeks of effort, even Stone confessed, “By and large we have quit.”
The situation was nearly as bleak outside of Mississippi. One Red Cross executive complained that throughout the flooded region “[n]o real concerted effort has been made…to obtain independence, but rather a spirit prevails of expecting substantial help in leadership and in wealth from the outside…. There is an inherent something in all of us that reaches out for relief and encouragement as long as distress continues. This urge is emphasized in this disaster because of the multiplicity of needs, the recurrent ills due to nature’s fickleness, and the all too prevalent desire to look on the dark side. It is just possible that there is a native indolence that fosters this latter spirit, which, in many places, is true not only of the individuals but of the whole community.”
In Arkansas in October, C. C. Neal, president of the black Haygood College and an aide to the Colored Advisory Commission, reported, “Yesterday I went to Arkansas City and spent the day: it presented the worst sight I ever witnessed, wreck and ruin by water everywhere in evidence. Very little in the way of crops is to be seen but plenty of work for the winter.”
In Louisiana it was the same. In October, LeRoy Percy visited New Orleans and observed, “The Boston Club was about as cheerful as a morgue.” Time was not healing. Even in February 1928, a Red Cross executive visited Melville, Louisiana, and reported: “The civic authorities and individuals have made no effort on their part in clearing the property [of collapsed buildings] or making an endeavor to level the lots. Even where the houses have been raised by us out of the sand and put on a firm foundation, owners have made no attempt to fill in with sand where the depression was made by the house.”
HOOVER HAD an odd reaction to the desolation. In one way he found it gratifying, for it presented him with his first great domestic challenge. He intended to meet it. Back in April in Memphis when Red Cross disaster chief Henry Baker had given him his first briefing, Baker had concluded by saying, “The public is insisting on some form of rehabilitation and our standing in the disaster field requires that we do this work.” But, he warned, the disaster was so great that any aid the Red Cross could possibly offer was “so meager that the word rehabilitation would not be justified.”
Hoover had other ideas. Earlier he had said that prosperity could be “organized,” that it was only a matter of “intelligent cooperative group effort” and “planning.” There were few places in America that seemed to offer a greater potential response to rational reorganization than the alluvial plain of the Mississippi; it had the richest soil in the world, yet it was the poorest part of the nation. The flood had put this land in his power, power such as no man in modern America had ever had. He commanded every government department, including the military, and had de facto control over state governments; martial law or a near equivalent existed in much of the flooded region; the railroads, the broadcast networks, and such companies as Standard Oil, had all volunteered to obey him; and he controlled millions of dollars. His power was only temporary, but he knew how to use it. He soon developed a plan for massive rehabilitation that reflected his sense of how the world worked, and it involved the then new concept of “human engineering.” He intended to apply such engineering to the nearly 1 million people in the region and change the way they lived.
He did not understate the difficulties before him. On May 23, 1927, only hours before the final crevasse of the flood at McCrea, he told a luncheon audience in New Orleans: “We have before us perhaps the most difficult and discouraging of all periods. No longer is there the excitement of catastrophe, the stimulation of heroism and fine sacrifice. Reconstruction is always the most trying period of all disasters.” Yet he was more than simply optimistic, adding, “I have said the word ‘reconstruction’ advisedly because I believe we may give it a new significance in the relations of North and South.” Later he declared that the flood would prove “a blessing in disguise.”
His comment reflected his ambition and supreme confidence. I shall be the nominee, probably, he had said. It is nearly inevitable. Given the booming economy, it also seemed nearly inevitable that he become President of the United States. If his rehabilitation plan succeeded, as president he could use it as a model to apply to other of the nation’s problems.
And as grand as his goal of economic reconstruction was, he had another even more ambitious plan, one that involved race, and politics, and power.
HOOVER BEGAN by imposing his plans on the refugee camps, and he involved himself in extraordinary detail. It was almost as if, as an act of will, he intended to lift the entire region out of squalor. Most refugees, whether black Delta sharecroppers or white Cajuns, lived stunningly primitive lives amid epidemics of pellagra and venereal disease. He personally ordered the Red Cross to purchase hundreds of thousands of packets of vegetable seeds—beans, beets, squash, tomatoes—to give to refugees leaving camp so they could grow vegetable gardens, something few croppers did. He also saw to it that the refugee camps swarmed with home economists and agricultural extension agents who taught captive audiences how to sew, make soap, can vegetables, raise poultry, protect cistern water from mosquitoes, use a toothbrush, bathe, treat gonorrhea.
Hoover attended to even closer detail when it came to larger changes: he wanted to end the Delta’s dependence on cotton by introducing other crops. The thought was not new, but few Delta planters had paid attention to it. Cotton, however, has to be planted in the spring; just as the June rise was ending any hope of a cotton crop for 1927, Hoover was demanding from experts a “definite program of agriculture…stating the end of periods when different crops can be put in.” Even before getting definitive replies, he ordered the Red Cross to buy enough seed for 400,000 acres of soybeans. Agricultural scientists soon told him that planting soybeans so late was “positively contrary to not only our experience, but the leading planters of the Delta.” Despite the advice, he personally contacted banks to have them “undertake to loan money on a Soya bean crop.”
For the key to rebuilding, he believed, was credit. Delta cotton planters and Louisiana sugar growers had, as always, mortgaged nearly everything to plant the crops now submerged. Credit had disappeared. He was determined to supply it. Again almost as if by act of will, he began to create something out of nothing. While engineers were still fighting to hold the Bayou des Glaises levee, he was drafting a plan for private nonprofit “reconstruction corporations” in each flooded state that would loan money to planters on easier terms than would banks. He wired information on his idea to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and Eugene Meyer, a financier soon to become head of the Federal Farm Loan Board (and later chairman of the Federal Reserve and owner of the Washington Post). To Meyer, a confidant, he said: “Am more impressed than ever with need for some kind of credit backing for situation. For your confidential information”—to guarantee confidentiality Hoover sent the telegram to Meyer’s home—“some outside banks are now refusing checks on flooded banks. If there is any failure of these banks the trouble will be vastly increased.”
As Hoover requested, Meyer immediately arranged for federal credit agencies to prevent any such failure. Meanwhile, Hoover himself proceeded to organize a separate reconstruction corporation in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Money would come not from the
government but from, as he once said, those “strong men who …with definite purpose exert a greater influence on the situation from the outside than from in.” If his plan worked, then the flooded area would in fact be pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. And if it worked, he would have a model for economic change that could be used almost anywhere.
He wanted bankers and leading businessmen in each state to buy stock—$500,000 worth of stock each in Arkansas and Mississippi, $750,000 in Louisiana—in their state’s corporation. He expected national business leaders to buy an equal amount of stock in them. The reconstruction corporations would use the capital to make loans, sell these loans at a discount to the Federal Intermediate Credit Corporation, then use the money from this sale to make more loans, repeating the process until each corporation’s loan portfolio amounted to quadruple its capital.
Hoover threw all his personal force into raising money. In mid-May, even before the river had finished its war dance through Louisiana, he met with Mississippi bankers in Jackson. He explained the plan and asked every bank and large business to subscribe 1 percent of its capital. Governor Murphree reminded everyone, “You are not called upon to donate, but to invest some of your money in the integrity of these people, and I know that you will do that.” Will Whittington, the congressman from the Delta, said, “The best help that can be given any people is that help which enables them to help themselves.” Then, with all the fervor of a revival meeting, to cheers and foot-stomping, one pledge after another was announced. But there was a hollowness to the meeting; pledges were soon broken and few new ones made. Hoover met a second time with Mississippi bankers and this time was more emphatic: “You are upon the firing line! We are discussing economic questions but in fact we are discussing the problems of men, women, and children…. We have in our charge the responsibility of the welfare of these thousands of people. It is the duty of leadership!” Yet he could not move them. Out of 500 banks in Mississippi, only 115 gave anything at all. Less than half the quota he had set was actually subscribed. In Arkansas the numbers were worse.
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