Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  Other New Orleans banks were also weak, weaker perhaps than those in any other city of consequence in the country. After the 1933 bank “holiday” in the Depression, only a single New Orleans bank reopened as the same institution. That was the Whitney, the conservative Whitney, dominated by Blanc Monroe and on whose board sat Doc Meraux.

  Rudolph Hecht survived. He became president of the American Bankers Association, a figure important enough in Washington that the Gridiron Club would build a skit around him. But his Hibernia Bank disappeared, one of those that failed to reopen after the bank holiday, although a new bank reopened with the same name and still under his control. Its collapse and Hecht’s questionable dealings led to the most involved litigation in New Orleans history, and in a cross-examination still talked about half a century later among New Orleans lawyers, Hugh Wilkinson proved Hecht a perjurer. But Hecht went on, unperturbed, traveling around the world and doing international business. In 1939, after telling the groundskeeper at his retreat in Pass Christian, Mississippi, to allow some visiting bankers to view his Japanese garden, he was driving back to New Orleans when he ran over a three-year-old boy and kept going. The child died. Witnesses described the car and gave a partial license plate number, and police stopped him less than an hour later. Human blood and flesh were found on his car. But the witnesses were Negroes. He argued that witnesses described the car as black and his was blue. It was dark navy blue. “I know absolutely nothing about the accident,” he said, “and it is inconceivable to me that my car could have struck the child…. [The police] felt it their duty to make a charge against me on the statement of this Negro, whereupon my friends in Gulfport signed a $5000 bond for me and I returned to New Orleans.” A Mississippi grand jury declined to indict him.

  NEW ORLEANS had never been open, not in the way cities in the West were, where “old money” was measured in months, nor even in the way cities in the East were, where immigrants could muscle their way into first political and then economic power. New Orleans had been exclusive from the first. When the United States initially gained sovereignty over the city, the existing French and Spanish elite had mocked the Americans, who in turn created their own institutions, including the Carnival krewes. Over the next century, the Americans with their money took precedence over the remnants of the European society, and also took over their pretensions. But before the flood New Orleans had at least accepted transfusions of fresh blood. After the flood the city grew ever more insular. The Boston Club and the finest Mardi Gras krewes closed even more tightly about themselves and seemed to take special pride in excluding newcomers, especially oil company executives. And the city’s elite held grudges: Russell Long, Huey’s son, was elected six times to the U.S. Senate and chaired the Finance Committee for many years, but was never invited to the Comus ball.

  The social conservatism intertwined with the financial conservatism; the one magnified the effect of the other. In the 1970s, a local economic study concluded: “[The] social system excludes executives recently transferred to New Orleans and discourages their participation in community issues…. A narrow circle of wealth-holders…represent a closed society whose aims are to preserve their wealth rather than incur risks in an effort to expand it…. This development has reduced the opportunities.” At the same time, Eads Poitevent, a bank president and Boston Club member, conceded: “The long-established New Orleans financial community has often been accused of being a conservative aristocracy that was tight-fisted and wanted to keep things as they have always been. To some extent, that is absolutely true.” As a result, business in the city did not expand; it shrank. Local companies found it more difficult to grow. Large companies looking for headquarters, or even a regional headquarters, put their operations in Houston or Atlanta. Only one Fortune 500 company, Freeport McMoran, has its headquarters in New Orleans.

  And so the city decayed. Before the flood New Orleans had vastly more economic activity than any city in the South. Decades later, while in the newest New South such cities as Charlotte and Miami—not to mention Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston—thrived and grew, New Orleans fell far behind its old competitors, and banks even in Memphis now dwarf those in New Orleans. Meanwhile, the city’s social and business elite increasingly went separate ways; in the early 1990s not a single bank president belonged to the Boston Club.

  New Orleans had become even more ingrown, and it was dying. Only the port, created by the great river and Eads, remained vital. The city had become a place for tourists, and picture postcards. Perhaps all this had nothing to do with the 1927 flood. Or perhaps it did.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  ONE MONTH AFTER Calvin Coolidge signed into law the bill to contain the Mississippi River, the Republican National Convention chose Herbert Hoover as its nominee for president of the United States. His nomination was another legacy of the flood.

  Moton continued to have high hopes that Hoover would help the race and dispatched his deputy Albion Holsey to work full-time for Hoover’s presidential campaign, informing Hoover that Tuskegee would continue to pay Holsey’s salary “as a form of contribution from Tuskegee to your campaign.” After the convention, Hoover met with Moton, who then told his secretary, “Hoover said that anything I said would be approved.” Hoover and he had discussed the creation of a new Colored Voters Division of the Republican National Committee. Moton had emphasized how important it was “that the right type of man be selected to head the colored division,” and recommended the president of the National Negro Bar Association to the job.

  But once again Hoover was merely using him. Earlier, after receiving the Colored Advisory Commission’s final report, Hoover had told an aide to call in “another element of the colored world.” Now Hoover ignored Moton’s suggestion, installing a member of this other element as head of the new division, and making both Holsey and Claude Barnett report to this rival. Nor were Moton’s other suggestions often approved. Hoover had the nomination already, and Republicans believed the black vote belonged to them by default. In presidential politics it had always belonged to the Republican nominee. Lincoln had freed the slaves. Democrats had destroyed Reconstruction, enacted the Jim Crow laws, stripped the vote from blacks, opposed antilynching legislation. Only four years before, the Democratic National Convention had voted down a resolution condemning the Klan; in doing so it had reaffirmed the historic link between blacks and Republicans.

  In addition, since the same southerners who supported the Klan would not vote for a Catholic, Al Smith’s nomination provided an opportunity for both a historic Republican landslide and to create a competitive Republican Party in the South—a “lily white” Republican Party. After securing the nomination with black support, Hoover now moved to build such a party. It was not the first such move by Republicans, but it was the first such move taken by a presidential candidate at the beginning of a campaign.

  It began with a deal made with white Mississippi Republicans at the national convention, a deal known to Hoover when he talked with Moton. The white Mississippians had sought credentials. Instead, an assistant attorney general who chaired the credentials committee seated Perry Howard, a black Republican national committeeman from Mississippi who supported Hoover and was well known nationally. But the whites did not protest. A few weeks later the same assistant attorney general who had seated Howard indicted him for selling patronage jobs. (A white Mississippi jury later acquitted him.)

  The incident, combined with continued attacks from the Chicago Defender on Hoover’s role in flood relief, aroused anger among blacks. Barnett and Holsey were traveling through states where the black vote was of consequence and took note of “uncertainty in many sections as to [Hoover’s] attitude toward the Negro in the Mississippi disaster.” They warned that a campaign aimed at shoring up support should begin immediately, or “there will be a heavy defection in the Negro vote.”

  No such campaign was mounted. Instead, as Hoover’s aides pursued the new southern strategy—the precursor of a much later one—a
wedge opened between blacks and the Republican Party. And if Hoover’s aides were duplicitous, blacks were far more expert than whites at playing a double game, at presenting a smiling face. As Barnett saw his own and Moton’s advice ignored, in July, a few days after Howard’s indictment, Barnett wrote George Brennan, a member of the Democratic National Committee: “You, more than any man I have met, white or black, have a comprehensive knowledge of the advantages which the Negro would gain by splitting his vote and becoming something of a factor in the Democratic Party…. A remarkable latent sentiment exists for ‘Al’ Smith which an educational campaign can develop into real support…. I can’t serve myself but I am sending you two of the best publicity men in the country. Percival L. Prattis and R. Irving Johnson who will present this letter…. They know the game.”

  Only a week earlier Prattis, Barnett’s deputy at the Associated Negro Press, had told Barnett: “I am out-and-out for Hoover…. I can use my vacation and…Raise Hell for Hoover, believe me.” Barnett now ordered Prattis, for the good of the race, to take Johnson and together offer themselves to Brennan and work for Al Smith. They did.

  In the 1920 campaign Harding received an estimated 95 percent of the black vote, even higher in Harlem. In 1924, Coolidge received marginally less, but more than three-quarters of the votes he lost went not to Democrats but to Robert LaFollette, who ran as a Progressive. In 1928, by contrast, Hoover lost an estimated 15 percent of the black vote. Such black papers as the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Boston Guardian, the Louisville News, the Norfolk Journal and Guide, all endorsed Smith. Noted one political scientist, “Democrats made deeper inroads on the Republicanism of Negro voters than in any previous national election.”

  Hoover won the presidency in a historic landslide. He even carried Texas, Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia, the first time since Reconstruction that any southern state voted Republican.

  Hoover’s election did give Moton one thing that he had worked for: access to the White House, more than any black man other than a servant had ever had. He even dined in the White House once, a politically significant event, and over the next several years he would be in constant communication with President Hoover, making many recommendations regarding southern whites and northern Negroes for posts ranging from federal judge to “a competent woman to work full-time in the Department of Child Welfare.” In one four-month period they would exchange twenty-one letters. But Hoover would follow few of his recommendations and do little for blacks in his administration. There would be no land resettlement scheme, nor anything like it. There would be only repeated promises. Hoover would even nominate a man to the Supreme Court so racist that a Senate controlled by his own party rose in protest. Moton declined Hoover’s request that he endorse the nominee, who was then rejected by the Senate. Even Moton had finally had enough; he rebuked Hoover, the president, informing him that blacks doubted “your personal concern for the welfare and progress of one tenth of the citizens of the United States.” Hoover replied with more promises, then approved severe cuts in the 10th Cavalry, a famous black combat unit, that would force black combat soldiers to become servants to white officers. Moton declared this “repugnant to all self-respecting Negroes.”

  Moton had little use for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, observing that if Roosevelt “has done anything for the Negro as Governor of New York, I have not heard of it.” Barnett thought Roosevelt’s election would be “fatal” to the race.

  Even so, in 1932, Moton refused to endorse Hoover for reelection. That year Hoover still received an overwhelming majority of the black vote, but he had driven a wedge between Republicans and even the most loyal black leaders that was splitting them asunder.

  GREENVILLE CHANGED TOO. There, when the 1928 river legislation became law, LeRoy Percy gave no speeches. None were needed. Parties and celebrations went on for days. Business boomed at Muffuletto’s, the finest restaurant in the state. Drummers lucky enough to be in town laid their trunks open in the display rooms at the Cowan Hotel and made money. Bootleggers from the White River came down in the fast steel boats with which they had rescued thousands and made money too. And men and women paraded up and down the crown of the levee, looking down at the river, throwing empty bottles and cigarettes into the enemy they still feared, some even daring to think that man would finally vanquish it.

  But the celebration had a hollowness. Greenville had changed. Earlier, two weeks before Christmas, 1927, Hoover had returned to the city, meeting with Red Cross county chairmen from the Delta in the Elysian Club, that stately and columned building with its long porch, yellow brick walls, and the hedge in front where people hid corn whiskey during dances. The club was part of the fabric of Greenville. In summer, fans had blown air over 300-pound blocks of ice for cooling, and its card room was filled with memories of planters gambling entire loans they had just taken out to cover a year’s crops. The club had smelled of fear then, the fear of wives clinging terrified to the wall. A few days after Hoover’s visit, the club hosted a Christmas dance. Then it closed forever.

  The Delta was beaten down in a way it had never been. As late as March 1928, almost a year after the Mounds Landing crevasse, the Red Cross was still feeding 12,000 people in Washington County alone. There was no money. The Young Men’s Hebrew Association followed the Elysian Club into memory. The days when the biggest touring shows, big as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, came to Greenville, the days of Enrico Caruso playing in the Opera House, were over.

  Greenville also took on a sullenness it had not had. Everything the blacks had endured changed things; the murder of James Gooden had changed things. Levye Chapple, who had organized the General Colored Committee and who had close connections to the Percys, left for Chicago. Though he later returned, most of the thousands of others who left did not. The Reverend E. M. Weddington had signed the letter of praise and thanks to LeRoy Percy during the Klan fight and pastored to Mt. Horeb, the church where Will Percy had castigated the black leadership; he left for Chicago and did not return. One man at a time, one family at a time, in an accelerating flood, blacks left Greenville and the Delta and did not return. They worked all week, took their pay, and left. Every Saturday night crowds of blacks gathered at the Y&MV railroad station to see who was leaving and say goodbye. It was cheaper than the movies, and far more intense. It was also exciting; even those who were remaining felt all the possibilities of the world.

  White planters worried about the departures. In July 1927, Alex Scott, son of LeRoy Percy’s old ally Charles Scott, warned: “A great deal of labor from the flooded section after being returned to the plantations is going north. It is thus a serious menace and it is going to offer a tremendous problem to all of us.” He was correct. Three months later LeRoy Percy informed L. A. Downs, the president of the Illinois Central: “The most serious thing that confronts the planter in the overflowed territory is the loss of labor, which is great and is continuing. I would hesitate to give an accurate estimate of the loss of labor in Washington County but I am quite sure that thirty per cent is too small. If eventually we get by with a loss of fifty per cent I shall consider it fortunate.” Oscar Johnston’s 60,000-acre plantation produced only 44 bales of cotton in 1927 (only his aggressive trades in cotton futures early in the flood avoided losses in the millions). Nearly all bridges and buildings on the property had been washed away, and ditches and drainage canals had been filled with sand. Workers did not want to face the rebuilding task. Even though he canceled all old debts, even though he had established a refugee camp near the plantation to keep his workers close by, even though the Illinois Central had moved hundreds of his tenants from the Vicksburg refugee camp 260 miles to that camp, he had no workers with whom to rebuild. “Labor was completely demoralized and the plantation was left almost completely without labor,” he reported to his shareholders.

  By early 1928 the exodus of blacks from Washington County, and likely the rest of the Delta, did reach 50 percent. Ever since the end of Rec
onstruction, blacks had been migrating north and west, out of the South. But it had been only a slow drain, with the South losing about 200,000 blacks between 1900 and 1910. During World War I “the Great Migration” began; the South lost 522,000 blacks between 1910 and 1920, mostly between 1916 and 1919. Now from the floodplain of the Mississippi River, from Arkansas, from Louisiana, from Mississippi, blacks were heading north in even larger numbers. In the 1920s, 872,000 more blacks left the South than returned to it. (In the 1930s the exodus fell off sharply; the number of blacks leaving Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi fell by nearly two-thirds, back to the levels of the early 1900s.)

  The favorite destination for Delta blacks was Chicago. They brought the blues to that city, and there the black population exploded, from 44,103 in 1910 to 109,458 in 1920—and 233,903 in 1930. Certainly not all of this exodus came from the floodplain of the Mississippi River. And even within that alluvial empire, the great flood of 1927 was hardly the only reason for blacks to abandon their homes. But for tens of thousands of blacks in the Delta of the Mississippi River, the flood was the final reason.

  THERE WERE other changes in Greenville. For the Percys Greenville became a dark place. In 1929, LeRoy’s wife, Camille, was dying. Even so, LeRoy left her sickroom to visit his deeply depressed nephew LeRoy Pratt Percy in Birmingham. The nephew was a few years younger than his cousin Will, about the age of LeRoy’s own long-dead son, and LeRoy and his nephew had hunted together, gambled together, joked together, even talked of the law together. LeRoy the elder had become closer to his nephew than to his own son. In July 1929, LeRoy Pratt Percy did what his own father had done twelve years before. He killed himself with a shotgun. The death stunned LeRoy, who felt not only the loss but his own failure to prevent it. His nephew left a widow and three boys.