Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America

by John M. Barry

An account of the 1927 Mississippi River flood explores one of the greatest national disasters the United States has ever experienced and its consequences in a comprehensive volume that clearly shows how the flood changed the course of history. 60,000 first printing. Tour.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Politics, Nature, Book Club, Historical

528 pages, Hardcover

First published April 9, 1997

About the author

John M. Barry is an American author and historian, perhaps best known for his books on the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 the influenza pandemic of 1918 and his book on the development of the modern form of the ideas of separation of church and state and individual liberty. His most recent book is Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (Viking 2012).

Barry's 1997 book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list and won the 1998 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians for the year's best book on American history. His work on water-related issues was recognized by the National Academies of Sciences in its invitation to give the 2006 Abel Wolman Distinguished Lecture on Water Resources; he is the only non-scientist ever to give that lecture.

His 2004 book The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Greatest Plague in History was also a New York Times Best Seller, and won the 2005 Keck Communications Award from the United States National Academies of Science for the year's outstanding book on science or medicine. In 2005 he also won the "September 11th Award" from the Center for Biodefense and Emerging Pathogens at Brown University. He has served on a federal government's Infectious Disease Board of Experts, on the advisory board of MIT's Center for Engineering Fundamentals, and on the advisory committee at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health for its Center for Refugee and Disaster Response.

The expertise he developed in these two areas has involved him in policy-making, risk communication and disaster management strategies, and developing resilient communities, and this work resulted in his induction into Delta Omega, the academic honorary society for public health. More specifically, he has advised the private sector and local, state, national, and international government officials about preparing for another influenza pandemic. He has also both advised officials and taken a direct role in preparing for water-related disasters. A resident of New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina he was also named to both the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority, which is the levee board overseeing several separate levee districts in the New Orleans area, and the state's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, which is responsible for hurricane protection for the entire state.

His first book, The Ambition and the Power: A true story of Washington, appeared in 1989 and explored the operation of the U.S. Congress, the use of power by Speaker of the House Jim Wright, and the rise of future Speaker Newt Gingrich. In 1995 the New York Times named it one of the eleven best books ever written on Congress and Washington.

With Steven Rosenberg, MD, Ph.D., chief of the Surgery Branch at the National Cancer Institute and a pioneer in the development of "immunotherapy" for cancer—stimulating the immune system to attack cancer—Barry co-authored his second book, The Transformed Cell: Unlocking the Mysteries of Cancer, which was published in 12 languages.

Barry has written for The New York Times, Time Magazine, Fortune, The Washington Post, Esquire, and other publications and frequently appears as a guest commentator on broadcast media.

He has also coached high school and college football, and his first published article was about blocking assignments for offensive linemen and appeared in a professional journal for coaches, Scholastic Coach.

Reviews

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barry gives us much more than the story of a flood. We get the history of the Mississippi Delta and of the efforts to tame the river, still a work in progress. He shows how the politics of Mississippi and Louisiana were shaped by the river and how the river’s turmoil spread to Washington even determining who would be president. We learn about the plantation sharecropping system of the 1920’s in the Delta and how the Great Flood of 1927 showed Delta blacks were essentially treated as still slaves. He tells the stories of people whose fate was tied to the fortunes of the river: Engineers James Eads and Andrew Humphries, generations of Percys from the ante-bellum Delta plantation founder to the end of the bloodline in 1941, the behind the scenes power brokers in New Orleans, and the engineer who rode the river to the White House, Herbert Hoover.

The Delta area between the Mississippi River and the Yazoo River is a fertile alluvial plain centered on Greenville, MS. An early 19th century traveler described it as, “a jungle equal to any in Africa”. In 1841 Charles Percy left Alabama with his belongings including slaves to take advantage of the rich soil. His slaves cleared the land and started growing cotton. His plantation would switch to the sharecropping system after the war and continue on much the same for succeeding generations.

With development came the problem of controlling the frequent floods, a problem for the entire river system that drained an area from Montana to Georgia, from New York to New Mexico. In the 19th century two engineers, James Eads and Andrew Humphries fought over flood control policy. The self-made Eads was brilliant, but Humphries felt his authority as head of the Army Corps of Engineers was threatened. In the end this led Humphries and his successors to oppose Eads proposals and adopt a system of levees doomed to fail.

By 1927 when the Great Flood occurred, Leroy Percy was ruling his share cropped plantation as well as Greenville and Washington County. He was a United States Senator and powerful in the region, well connected through club memberships and social connections to those who controlled Louisiana politics in New Orleans. Percy and his friends would face tough choices in the flood. Greenville and the Delta plantations would be destroyed with lasting consequences. The plantations needed the black tenants to be profitable. As the river swelled, whites rounded up blacks at gunpoint and forced them to work without pay to build up the levees. After the levees failed, the same white landlords used their guns to keep blacks from leaving, desperately needing them to rebuild and replant. But in the years following, dissatisfaction with their treatment during the flood caused over 50% of blacks to leave Washington County. They joined the Great Migration to the North and the Delta plantations would never return to their former grandeur.

New Orleans was spared as its power brokers took no chances in protecting their investments in the city. They decided to dynamite the levee protecting St Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes on the other side of the river to reduce its level. They did this despite the advice of river experts that this was needless since so many other levees would naturally fail and spare New Orleans anyway, which is what happened. But they went ahead and everything in the two parishes was wiped out. The city’s bankers and politicians had promised reimbursement for damages to the residents of the two parishes. But predictably they reneged on most of their promises and the livelihoods of the residents were destroyed. Huey Long used the ill will created by this disregard for the common people to win election as governor. He broke up the old power network of bankers and businessmen who had for so long operated secretly through their elite clubs and social connections to control Louisiana.

Another politician to benefit and benefit immensely was Herbert Hoover who as Secretary of Commerce under Calvin Coolidge got the job he wanted leading the relief effort, something he had done for Wilson in Europe after WWI. An engineer and great organizer but not a gifted politician, he was still able to control the press and the people involved to make himself look like a hero. Even though he was often disingenuous, especially with blacks, he crafted an image of stellar competence leading to his landslide victory in the 1928 presidential race. Largely disliked by those in his party who had worked with him, without the flood he would never have been even considered for the nomination. While clever, he was not a good listener and always thought he knew best, an attitude that would soon cost him dearly when he faced the Great Depression.

I haven’t commented much on the flood itself and Barry gives a dramatic account. It was huge completely inundating an area equal to the states of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut combined, it lasted for months, and it was devastating. But to me the real story was how the river itself had always been addressed through the lens of politics and how it answered back taking out the political elites in its path, electing a new governor and even deciding who would be president. That was the real power of the river.

[ALLEN · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book wondering how any author could spend over 400 pages documenting the Mississippi River flooding of 1927. The raging flood came, went away, better levees were built -- right? Well, there's a lot more to it than that. This worthy volume takes the reader from the days of James Buchanan Eads (who built the first bridge across the lower Mississippi), who favored "spillways" to contain the raging river's inevitable floods, and his rival engineer Edward Humphreys, who favored ever-taller levees.

When the incessant rains and floods came, they were more pervasive and worse than anyone had imagined. Author John M. Barry details not only what happened in "the Delta" -- cotton country -- but what happened on Mississippi tributaries, too, leaving hundreds of thousands of poor farm families destitute and homeless. When the flood hits, the author concentrates on little Greenville, Mississippi, including the aristocratic Percy family (one cousin of whom was novelist Walker Percy), that ran the plantations and dominated politics; also then-reigning New Orleans, which tried to save itself by having levees downriver dynamited. By trying to raise quick labor to raise the levees, the Percys and other leaders conscripted black sharecroppers and then brutalized and abused them, making of Greenville a sore spot in race relations in what was once a relatively tolerant area. New Orleans' inability to fulfill its commitments to reimburse those it flooded out (and its duplicity in tweaking the legal system to its advantage) gave rise to Louisiana populism, most notably Huey Long.

RISING TIDE is a readable and useful chronicle of a surprisingly underdocumented subject in national history. Reading this book helps readers understand the shifting national politics of the late 1920's and 1930's, and such social phenomena as the exodus of disenfranchised blacks to the cities of the North. I would have hoped that a book of this scope and specificity would have more than one "overview" map, but that's a minor deficit in such a generous study.

[happy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this a fantastic look at both the geology/hydrology of the Mississippi River and the society that grew around its delta. Mr. Barry does a very commendable job of exploring both the problems and advantages of living next to the longest river in North America.

The author starts out the narrative by exploring the attempts to tame the Mississippi Riven the late 19th Century and the rivalry that developed between two men – Gen Andrew Humphreys – head of the Army’s Engineer Department and a self-taught engineer and Mississippi expert James Eads. The class of egos between these two men and what it did to the theories of channeling the river and delta is very well done. Gen Humphreys comes off by far the worse in comparison. He is depicted as not willing to give an inch to Eads and feeling that not only is he right, but Eads doesn’t know a thing about the river.

Eads theories are rooted in his experiences as both a river pilot and a man who salvages river wrecks and their cargos. This includes actually walking on the river bottom. The two theories can mainly be summed in levees vs jetties. The levee to hold the river in its channel and the jetties to help the river scour a new channel. It discussing the river, Mr. Berry also looks at how the river dug it channel, the shear amount of water and silt the river carries at any one time, the nature of the Delta and exactly how big it is (almost up to the Mississippi/Arkansas border). One fact that struck me is that from Vicksburg, Miss down to the mouth of the river that river bottom is actually below sea level and the water at the bottom of the river has no reason to keep on moving and the affect this has on the hydrology of the river.

The next section of the narrative looks at the Percy family of the upper Delta. In looking at the Percy family, the author looks at their, for the times, liberal attitude in race relations. This does not mean that they had the same ideals of race relations as modern people, but the Percy’s went out of their way to see blacks in their county educated – the Greenville (the power base of the Percy family) public schools spent more money per black student that the rest of the state spent per student on white children, suppress lynching and they treated their share croppers fairly. The author also looks at Leroy Percy’s, the last Senator from Mississippi to be selected by the State Legislature, fight to expel the KKK from Greenville in particular and Northern Miss in general. The author relates ones episode in Greenville where a white man who attempted to lynch one of the black residents was himself lynched. The impression this section left with me is that the Percy family in general and LeRoy in particular were not particularly racist, but more of a classist, ie everyone has his/her place is society and should stay there.

In addition to Percy’s the author looks a New Orleans and who were the power brokers in the city. It wasn’t the elected officials. In discussing the power brokers he also looks at how bigotry and antisemitism gradually took hold in the power welding circles in New Orleans.

As the author tells the story of the people living in the Delta, the power of the Mississippi is always in the background. There had been several major floods in the two generations preceding the 1927 flood and one of the items Mr. Berry discusses is the growth of the levee system and the actual size the levees themselves. As the flood waters rise, the attempts to protect the levees and raise them is extremely well done. He also does a good job of explaining how a levee fails. It's not just from water overlapping the levee, but the river can undermine also. This section looks at how principles and people can be overcome by events. During the '27 flood, the need for labor on the levees even the Percys resort to the whole sale conscription of black men, sometimes literally at gunpoint, to work on the levees with almost no compensation and with white foremen, really echoing the conditions of the antebellum southern plantations. Some this is a really hard read.

Mr. Berry also looks at how the power brokers in New Orleans (NO) conned the people of two parrishes south of the city to blow their levees in an attempt to save the city. In order to get the buy in of the leadership of the two affected parrishes, the men of NO promised to fully compensate the people of the parishes for their monetary losses. To put is simply, after the floods subsided NO decided to play hard ball with the compensation and Mr. Berry supposes this led directly to the rise of Huey Long. One of the sad things about this story is that the levees didn't have to be breeched. The river started to recede the day before they were dynamited.

In looking at the flood in general, Herbert Hoover and the Federal Government’s role in fighting the flood is explored. At the time all flood control was the responsibility of the states, after the flood legislation was passed in Congress make flood control on the Mississippi the responsibility of the Federal Gov’t. Mr. Barry opines that this laid the intellectual basis for FDR’s wholesale involvement in the economy during the Great Depression. He also states that Hoover’s work during the crisis led directly to his succeeding Coolidge as president of the US.

All in all this is a very good look at a pivotal moment in US history. I would rate this 4.25 if GR allowed, so I’ve rounded down.

[Melinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book explains many issues that I never understood from my basic "public-school-history-class-taught-by-a-coach" years. When did blacks defect from the Republican party, the party of Lincoln, and flock to the Democrat party? Why did they do that? When did the federal government first step in to organize help after a disaster where before local communities were on their own?

I have read John Barry's other book on "The Great Influenza", and found it to be an absolutely excellent book. This book is only slightly less gripping, but that is because the influenza book had doctors in it, and I've always been partial to medicine and physicians. This book has engineers, my second favorite group of people, so it stands a close second now.

Measured from the head of the Missouri RIver, the Mississippi river is the longest river in the world. It stretches from Canada in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south, then from New York and North Carolina in the east to Idaho and New Mexico in the west. The Mississippi River valley is 20% larger than China's Yellow River, twice as big as the Nile river in Egypt and twice as big as the Ganges in India; 15 times larger than the Rhine in Europe. Only the Amazon river (barely) and the Congo have larger drainage basins than the Mississippi River.

Controlling the river so that it serves the purpose of man has been a huge engineering project since the mid-1800's. How to control it.... with levees? with cut-throughs? with reservoirs? A combination? The first part of the book deals with two engineers who would decide the control and method of management of the river. James Buchanan Eads was one of the most brilliant engineers of all time, ranked by the deans of American engineering colleges with da Vinci and Edison. Andrew Atkinson Humphreys was the other Union soldier / engineer from the Army Corps of Engineers. A bitter rivalry between these two men eventually caused the formation of a committee to determine which method proposed by the two men would determine how the Mississippi River would be managed. True to form, the committee selected the worst components of each man's recommendation, and selected a solution that neither man would ever have wanted, a "levees only" solution.

Levees restrict the river to flow between them. Cut offs are a way of straightening the river by cutting through the S bend's created naturally. Reservoirs were a way to capture runoff flood waters and direct them into man-made lakes. The levees only policy set up the river to amass the largest level of flooding ever recorded in the 1927 flood.

New Orleans, the origins and politics, are explained in fairly great detail in this book. It was settled not by immigrants, but by blue-blooded families of importance who came to the area because of the amazing availability to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Immigrants and former slaves made up a huge portion of the people in the area, but the city itself was ruled and ruled very efficiently by an elite cadre of families. Because of James Eads who established man-made jetties that kept the mouth of the Mississippi River clear of sandbars, New Orleans became a stable port and very prosperous city. So when the 1927 flood threatened New Orleans, a deal was struck by the elite New Orleans rulers to dynamite the levees of downriver St. Bernard parish and Plaquemines Parish. These two parishes were much poorer than New Orleans and the "deal" struck was that the city of New Orleans and the city elite would pay back damages to the people impacted. The levees there were dynamited, the surrounding areas were flooded, but reparations to the affected people became a legal nightmare. City officials backed away from their promises, the city elite also backed away from their promises.

People in the area eventually fought back with their votes, and the unrest in the area brought in a new political group, one led by Huey Long instead of the elite families.

In answer to the questions I raised above, here are the answers I found.
Blacks defected from the Republican Party after Herbert Hoover was elected president in 1928. Hoover had worked as the Secretary of Commerce during the 1927 flood and during the aftermath. His efficient organization of aid to the area would keep his name in newspapers and before the public in such a way that he received the Republican nomination for the 1928 election. Hoover had worked with Robert Russa Moton, head of the Tuskegee Institute after Booker T. Washington died, to provide accountability for the relief effort among blacks. Moton was led to believe by Hoover that he (Hoover) would provide a means for blacks to sharecrop in the areas controlled by the New Orleans elite families. Hoover deceived Moton, and as a result lost the votes of those blacks affected adversely by the 1927 flood. Blacks left the south in huge numbers, and many from the Mississippi / Louisiana / New Orleans area moved to Chicago.

Herbert Hoover, as Secretary of Commerce organizing relief efforts for the 1927 flood, was the first to request that the Federal Government step in to organize things that were too big for the local states and communities. The 1927 flood simply overwhelmed southern states in scope of devastation and need to get an influx of cash to rebuild. Calvin Coolidge, who was president at the time, resisted strongly in committing the Federal Government to such activities. But eventually pressure from the local communities, the states affected, and those political machines who sought to re-establish governance of those areas along different lines, prevailed. And thus, the 1927 Mississippi River flood became THE FIRST disaster where the federal government stepped in to organize and provide disaster relief. In the past, natural disasters were dealt with by those communities and states that were affected. But after 1927, that precedent was changed, amazingly enough against the wishes of the President of the United States and most of Congress!

An interesting aside..... the head of the New Orleans Weather Bureau was Isaac Cline. Those of you who have read "Isaac's Story" about the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, will remember his name. He was head of the Galveston Weather Bureau when the hurricane practically destroyed Galveston. Cline's wife and unborn child died in the Galveston Hurricane. He was able to rescue his 3 daughters. As a sort of "demotion" in the Weather Bureau, he was sent to New Orleans, where he served well although without enthusiasm for the area. To the credit of Cline, he fairly and accurately reported river surges and provided warnings to those along the Mississippi River during the 1927 flood. I am reading "Isaac's Storm" also right now, and was amazed that he also played a part in this event!

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don’t let the title fool you, while the focus of the book is the great 1927 flood (an event overlooked today), this is a book about the Mississippi River and man’s attempt to live with and in some cases tame it. Full of rich descriptions of men and women whose lives were shaped by the river and the 1927 flood, and of powerful men who tried to control and profit from it, including one who became President, this book really grabs you from the outset.

Starting with early attempts to erect bridges over it, to map its courses and devise ways to keep it from hampering economic growth in the Mississippi Delta, through its role during the Civil War, and how it affected economics, culture and race relations in the south, the Mississippi River itself is a character in this story, with a personality all its own. This is expertly brought to life by Barry.

Most fascinating for me was the many ways in which the 1927 flood so profoundly changed the character of the deep south, and how in many ways it set back nascent progress on race relations. In order to combat the flood blacks were forced to work, shoring up levees, hauling supplies and digging trenches, all at gunpoint and without adequate food and shelter to sustain themselves. In many places (particularly Greenville, MS which in many ways was the epicenter of the flood), white leaders, aided and abetted by the Red Cross virtually re-instituted slavery. Prior to the flood, through the cooperation of local blacks and the relatively enlightened views of its leaders, particularly LeRoy Percy (a central figure in the latter half of the book), race relations had seen improvement. The flood, and the reaction of the white leadership to it nearly destroyed all that.

It also profoundly reshaped the labor system in the South. One reason why white leaders were so eager to keep blacks under foot during the crisis was to prevent them from leaving the Delta where they were the primary source of labor. However, once the waters had receded and it became apparent promises of restitution from local leaders and from the federal government were not going to be forthcoming, many blacks began migrating to the north. This caused a huge problem for large landowners who relied on the labor blacks provided, and from their percentage of income from sharecropper activities. It certainly helped hasten the transition to a de facto free labor system which had only existed in name only up until that time; a transition that continues to be a very painful one for the region.

Also interesting is the affect the flood had on presidential politics, and on the eventual shift in the relation between the federal government and her citizens that we saw under President Franklin Roosevelt. Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge’s Commerce Secretary of Commerce was tasked to coordinate the government response to the flood. It was his work, and the positive press he received from it that propelled him to the White House.

Hoover was tasked by Coolidge to coordinate the efforts of mostly private organizations as they attempted to deal with the enormous human suffering that was the result of the flood. Coolidge himself refused to set what he considered a dangerous precedent by providing the type of government disaster relief we take for granted today. As a result he was the focus of extensive media and public criticism for what was viewed as a heartless reaction to the crisis. All the while Hoover was being lionized in the press as the only member of the administration willing to do something about the crisis. Coolidge’s opposition to government relief, however, was a policy with which Hoover totally agreed. It also foreshadowed the disastrous way he reacted to the Great Depression.

In hindsight the resources brought to bear by Hoover were wholly inadequate, and in many case failed to provide even minimally adequate relief. It was this same strategy that he used as President, to try and relieve the suffering experienced by so many during the Great Depression; a strategy that failed miserably and gave rise to FDR and the more active governmental role he implemented. It was also the beginning of the end of the alliance between African-Americans and the Republican Party.

I found very little to criticize in this book. Occasionally Barry provided a bit more detail, particularly about financial matters, than was probably necessary to make his point, but that is a minor quibble. Overall highly valuable book, about a significant even in American history that is often overlooked. Highly recommended!!

[Steve Bennett]

Charley Patton expertly summarized both the majesty and impact of the great Mississippi flood of 1927 in under three minutes in High Water Everywhere.

"Well, backwater done rose all around Sumner now,
drove me down the line
Backwater done rose at Sumner,
drove poor Charley down the line
Lord, I'll tell the world the water,
done crept through this town

Lord, the whole round country,
Lord, river has overflowed
Lord, the whole round country,
man, is overflowed
You know I can't stay here,
I'll go where it's high, boy

I would go to the hilly country,
but, they got me barred
Now, look-a here now at Leland
river was risin' high
Look-a here boys around Leland tell me,
river was raisin' high
Boy, it's risin' over there, yeah

I'm gonna move to Greenville
fore I leave, goodbye
Look-a here the water now, Lordy,
Levee broke, rose most everywhere
The water at Greenville and Leland,
Lord, it done rose everywhere
Boy, you can't never stay here

I would go down to Rosedale but, they tell me there's water there
Now, the water now, mama,
done took Charley's town
Well, they tell me the water,
done took Charley's town
Boy, I'm goin' to Vicksburg
Well, I'm goin' to Vicksburg,
for that high of mine

I am goin' up that water,
where lands don't never flow
Well, I'm goin' over the hill where,
water, oh don't ever flow
Boy, hit Sharkey County and everything was down in Stovall
But, that whole county was leavin',
over that Tallahatchie shore Boy,
went to Tallahatchie and got it over there

Lord, the water done rushed all over,
down old Jackson road
Lord, the water done raised,
over the Jackson road
Boy, it starched my clothes
I'm goin' back to the hilly country,
won't be worried no more."

Dylan also summarizes the critical events of the Mississippi flood of 1927 in "High Water (For Charley Patton)":

"High water risin' - risin' night and day
All the gold and silver are being stolen away
Big Joe Turner lookin' East and West
From the dark room of his mind
He made it to Kansas City
Twelfth Street and Vine
Nothing standing there
High water everywhere

High water risin', the shacks are slidin' down
Folks lose their possessions - folks are leaving town
Bertha Mason shook it - broke it
Then she hung it on a wall
Says, "You're dancin' with whom they tell you to
Or you don't dance at all."
It's tough out there
High water everywhere

High water risin', six inches 'bove my head
Coffins droppin' in the street
Like balloons made out of lead
Water pourin' into Vicksburg, don't know what I'm going to do
"Don't reach out for me," she said
"Can't you see I'm drownin' too?"
It's rough out there
High water everywhere."



If it's an epic event for Patton and Dylan, it's epic enough for me. Not certain what Barry can add to these two songs, or why he needs 527 pages, but I guess I'm willing to take a chance. (Everyone should likewise take a chance on "Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton" the best cd box set ever).

[Tom Mathews · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have decided that I will never again read another book by James M. Barry. Not that the books aren't good, they are excellent. The problem is that I am currently 2 for 2 on having bad things associated with the book's subject matter happen when I read them. In 2020 I read The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History only to experience the next great pandemic. This month I am reading Rising Tide: the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America in preparation for a Mississippi riverboat cruise in two weeks only to learn today that the cruise line closed up shop and cancelled all future trips. Granted, that's not as bad as a pandemic or a great flood, but we're terribly disappointed.

Seriously, I really enjoyed most of it, starting with the history and geography of the river and the story of man's attempts to tame it, and moving on to the catastrophic flood itself. I was less impressed by the final chapters that described the cruel treatment of black refugees and the sordid political machinations to avoid making promised reparations.

Bottom line: This is an excellent book that drills deeply into not only the most consequential flood in U.S. history but into the events leading up to it and the short and long-term consequences of it.

I highly recommend it.

[Fishface · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wasn't a bad read, but it was disappointing in one major way: 3/4 of the book had basically nothing to do with the flood of 1927. Almost every page was about the history of the competing, mistaken beliefs about the Mississippi River Valley, including several short-form biographies of the famous men who held those beliefs. I was pleased to see several names pop up of people I've read about in other books -- Leander Perez, Isaac Cline -- because they helped give the story context and helped orient me to the time and place the flood occurred. But again, there was precious little about the flood itself. If you like history books, you'll love this. If you want to know about the devastation and long-term effects of this flood, I'm not sure what to recommend, but it wouldn't be this book.

[Mark Hartzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Someone once said that '...unless you know history, every day is like being born yesterday'. In this book, Mr. Barry cleverly weaves multiple threads together into a coherent story of the great flood of 1927.

Long ago, we were looking at vacation property in Trempealeau County Wisconsin which overlooked the Mississippi. Even that far north, it was obvious that swimming in the Mississippi was way too dangerous to consider. Barry includes a number of excellent maps including the drainage basin of the Mississippi. It is simply immense. Two thirds of the country drains into the river, and when it gets to the delta region, the amount of water is mind boggling.

The book is broken up into sections that tie the book together. For example, the 1st section, titled "The Engineers" primarily covers the relationship between the Army Corps of Engineers and James Eads, (whose bridge still stands and crosses the river at St. Louis). It is necessary background as prelude because I think of lessons not learned. We are living the legacy today of massive and ever larger levees. More than 60 years after the 1927 flood, the levees once again failed in 1993 when it was necessary to blow up a levee causing the inundation and destruction of little Valmeyer, Illinois. The idea that we could control this river was realized as hubris 100 years ago, yet here we are.

Even more interesting is how the 1927 flood accelerated the Great Migration. Black lives certainly did not matter whatsoever after the flood, (and not much better for poor white folks either). Herbert Hoover made a name for himself as the 'Great Humanitarian' and won the Republican nomination largely for his (frequently superficial) efforts to alleviate the disaster. Because of the broken promises he made to black leaders and the community in general, he was directly responsible for the abandonment of the Republican Party by blacks. Previously, it had been the party of Lincoln; after, not so much. Enormously consequential.

From West Virginia & New York to Montana, and Minnesota to Louisiana, the Mississippi and its tributaries are an essential part of American history. Barry's book makes the 1927 flood absolutely relevant to us in 2021. The Mississippi will flood again, perhaps catastrophically, we just don't know when. This may be one of the 10 best historical books I have ever read. I first read it back in 1997 and shelved it to read again. I'm really glad I did. This is a fabulous book by a talented writer. 5 stars.

[Eric_W · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book about the enormous flood that inundated much of the Mississippi basin in 1927. In fact, the flood covered an areas greater than several northeastern states combined. The flood stretched from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, and in some places the water was thirty feet deep. In a nation of 120 million, over one million were left homeless.

The reasons for the flood were numerous: a river policy that emerged from the hatred of two engineers (James Eads and Andrew Humphreys) for each other and brought untold wealth to the planters of the Yazoo-Mississippi delta. The social impact was enormous and resulted, in part, for the black immigration north.

Weeks of nothing but rain culminated in an incredible storm on April 12th that dumped record amounts of rainfall in a very short period of time. As comparison, the flood of 1993 filled the Mississippi at St. Louis so it was moving one million cubic feet of water per second. In 1927, just before the levees broke, the river was moving three times that.

The battle between Eads and Humphreys concerned how to best control the river: outlets for excess water to accumulate, or levees to channel the increased flow. Levees create their own dynamic. If they are built on both sides of the river, the cause the river to move faster, the theory being that the faster flow will scour the river deeper. This does not always occur so levees often have to be built higher. A four-story levee breaking has the same effect as the rupture of a dam.

Barry writes well and takes you right into the midst of the political battles and their outcome.

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

One day in the mid seventies while driving across the great plains and listening to Don McLean sing American Pie, It was a great time to be in America,most Americans needed little instruction in how they wanted to live. They were optimistic about the future. The black and white days were over.
Bye bye, Miss American Pie.
drove my Chevy to the levee
but the levee was dry.
I turned to my brother and his partner and asked what is a levee?
They both looked at me as if what kind of trolodyke I might be.
A few months later we stayed with my sister-in-law's Grandmother who lived at the foot of a levee on the Mississippi, she told us stories about the river that made it come alive, we then climbed up that bank and all of a sudden there it was this huge and majestic river with just a levee to keep us safe.
Rising Tide: It's no just the story of a levee, it's the story of how much we are willing to gamble for profit, and if we lose how that can change the course of history.
I would recommend it, not at all like his other book.

[Sonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

― “Even before the storm, levees along every significant tributary to the Mississippi had been shouldered aside by the water. In the East, Pittsburgh had seen 8 feet of water in city streets; in the West, outside Oklahoma City, 14 Mexican workers had drowned. And the Mississippi was still swelling, stretching, threatening to burst open entirely the system designed to contain it.”
― John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America

Rising Tide tells the gripping story of the 1927 Mississippi River flood, one of America's most devastating natural disasters. More than just a disaster narrative, John M. Barry examines how decisions by individuals, businesses, institutions, and governments shaped both the event and its effects on the Mississippi River’s lower alluvial valley.

The Mississippi River drainage basin, spanning over 1.2 million square miles and including parts of 31 states and two Canadian provinces, is the largest in the United States and among the largest globally. For thousands of years, flooding along the Mississippi River left behind millions of acres of some of the richest alluvial soil on earth, reaching depths of more than one hundred feet.

The lower alluvial valley of the Mississippi River is a relatively flat plain of about 35,000 square miles bordering on the river. The rich alluvial soils of the floodplain naturally attracted European settlers who realized this could be one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the world. The problem for planters was that the river would continue to overflow during times of high water. 19th-century America engineers believed that they were capable of controlling and directing the Mississippi. They lined stretches of the river with massive levees; in some cases, 30 feet high and 188 feet wide at their base. In their overconfidence, they underestimated the power of the river.

― “Unlike a human enemy, the river has no weakness, makes no mistakes, is perfect; unlike any human enemy, it will find and exploit any weakness. To repel it requires an intense, nearly perfect, and sustained effort.”
― John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America

Persistent heavy rainfall across the central U.S. from the summer of 1926 through the spring of 1927 led to the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States. As unprecedented amounts of run-off from the different tributaries combined, extreme water levels overwhelmed the levees protecting the Mississippi Valley floodplains, breaching the flood defenses as the water moved south. The waters flooded 27,000 square miles along the river at depths up to 30 feet, over lands where 931,159 people lived.

Cities, towns, and farms were damaged. Crops were destroyed, and industries and transportation paralyzed. More than 200 died and 600,000 were displaced. Property damage was estimated at $350 million dollars, equivalent to approximately $5 billion today. In April 1927, Herbert Hoover, Commerce Secretary, was appointed as the official to lead the rescue and relief efforts. He coordinated efforts to rescue 330,000 people from rooftops and other high places.

Yet that wasn’t the end of the matter. In some ways, the 1927 flood led to the destruction of a way of life. Many black sharecroppers took the opportunity to escape north to cities like Chicago. The story has almost no heroes; some individuals were downright villainous. Many individuals and institutions showed no concern or care for others. To save their own city, members of New Orleans's elite diverted flood waters to their less politically connected neighbors downriver.

This is not just a story about a flood. It is a comprehensive look at the many factors that combined over time to create this disaster, the response to it, and the way it changed life in the floodplains of the Mississippi Valley. Barry looks at the river, the people, the planters, the government, the businesses, and the inherent flaws in each that led to this disaster and its outcome.

[GrandpaBooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's nothing worse for an old American history major to read a book and discover how ignorant of that history he really is. The 1927 flood of the Mississippi River may have been the worst natural disaster in terms of people displaced and society destroyed that America has ever faced; it quite simply dwarfs Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The author details the battles over man's often futile attempts to control the Mississippi; the rich and racist white society that controlled the Deep South and their attempts to preserve that society through the subjugation of Black Americans trapped in tenant farming, nothing but a legalized form of slavery.

The author also shows the rise of Herbert Hoover, the so-called Great Humanitarian, who in reality was selfish, grabbing, bigoted and racist. Finally, the author documents the acceleration of the Great Black Migration, the splitting of Black Americans from the Republican Party, and the slow and inexorable decline of New Orleans.

[Bonnie Huval · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most powerful books I've ever read. It's thick but I would not have wanted it any shorter. I was born in Texas because of this flood. My father's parents added up their earnings from a year of sharecropping in southern Louisiana, and it came to $14. They moved to get jobs for several years. But until I read this book, I had no idea that my family is only a tiny ripple of lingering consequences from that flood. Aftereffects are visible in local and national politics in the USA. The accounts of what happened in Greenville and around New Orleans are painful. As for what we've done to the river... When I hear some Britons talk about what they want to do to some of their rivers to manage flooding, I tell them to read this book. I tell them not to make the same mistakes with their rivers that we made with our grandest river.

[Tim Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was far, far more than the story of the 1927 Mississippi River flood, the author skillfully presenting a number of other stories that while not directly about the famous flood, both impacted the flood and were impacted by it, stories that weren’t “one and done” so to speak but ones in which the author would present and then come back to to a greater or lesser degree, with the reader really appreciating I think why those other stories were told. I really admired Barry’s writing style, of dividing the book into different sections, centered around a certain time period, event, or a group of people, and within each section weaving a strongly narrative driven telling of history, providing information that really deepened the story of the flood, and most of all as far as making this a page turning book (and it definitely was), providing some sort of conflict for the reader to get carried away by, some sort of clash between people.

As I said the book isn’t all about the flood and from my notes the flood isn’t even in the book till about page 179. The reader in the first section is treated to the epic, hubris-filled, very strong and willful personality, man can conquer nature and shape nations by his sheer will, very on-brand for the 19th century story of three different engineers who tried to shape the Mississippi River in terms of navigation, commerce, and flood control, their actions impacting a large percentage of the country’s land area, population, and commerce, the decisions and legacies of these three men – James Eads, Andrew Humphreys, and Charles Ellet – and of the organizations that carried out (or ignored) their findings and decisions having an enormous impact on how damaging the 1927 flood was (specifically the “levees” only policy that was eventually adopted by the Mississippi River Commission, a policy “that Eads, Humphreys, and Ellet had all violently rejected”). It was interesting to note as titantic as the fight between Humphreys and Eads especially was (very much worthy of its own book), they both agreed along with Ellet that a levees only policy to deal with flood control was a mistake, with eventually the policy followed “combined the worst, not the best, of the ideas of Eads, Ellet, and Humphreys,” with over time the positions taken by the Mississippi River Commission becoming “increasingly petrified and rigid.”

Oh and what does levees only policy mean? Without getting overly technical or weighing down the narrative with too much engineering terminology, the reader is treated to the nuts and bolts as it were of how rivers are improved upon for navigation and most especially how the lands around the river are protected from floods, be it through levees (basically earthen structures built a little back from the river to contain high flood waters), outlets (essentially places for flood waters from the Mississippi River to go, places for the river to escape), reservoirs (while outlets drain off water from the Mississippi itself, reservoirs were a place to withhold flood water coming from tributaries to the Mississippi), and cutoffs (cutting a line “through the sharp S curves of the river; these cutoffs would move the water in a shorter and straighter line, increase its slope, and hence its speed” serving to both move flood waters out of an area faster and to help scour out the river bed, allowing for a deeper river without making flood waters higher). The reader learns to their probable dismay that after all the Epic Fights over the control of the river, pretty much a levees only policy was adopted, one that created hundreds and hundreds of miles of wall-like levees lining the river, with no place prepared for the inevitable breech (crevasse is the term used) when (not if) that happened and no place for flood waters to go other than eventually the Gulf of Mexico.

Before, during, and after the actual coverage of the 1927 flood in the book, one gets the story of two areas, the Mississippi Delta (especially Greenville and Washington County Mississippi) and of New Orleans for three reasons. One, the areas were either hard hit by the floods (as Greenville was, with the town virtually destroyed, homes and businesses wiped out, and sadly poorly recorded numbers of people dying when the crevasse opened up and a wall of water poured forth, drowning people immediately or later washing out the foundations of houses where people had sheltered, killing them then) or the story from that point of view had a big impact on the overall story (the fight to save New Orleans from the approaching flood waters was a huge part of the overall narrative of the 1927 flood, and some of the actions taken to protect the city actually made things worse for others, as pretty much unelected people – bullying elected people into supporting these actions – dynamited the levees, deliberately flooding areas that looked like they wouldn’t be flooded [St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes], all to relieve the Mississippi of a good bit of its flood waters and hopefully save the city). Two, these areas, the Delta and New Orleans, were forever changed as a result of the flood (though the author admits that though the flood wasn’t the only cause for some of these changes it was either the biggest cause or the final push that lead to massive changes for these two areas), with the Delta region seeing a large flight of blacks after the flood, a huge labor pool migrating away, no longer allowing for the enormous Old South cotton plantations that used to exist there (and the political and cultural influence of the Old South plantation aristocrats, their last real place the Delta, finally ending), and marked a turning point in the fortunes, power, and prestige of New Orleans, of the city no longer being the biggest and most important port and city in the South and marking its long slow decline and increasingly insularity. Three, the gripping drama (and outright horror) of what happened in those areas, of treacherous politics in New Orleans that lead to the dynamiting of the levees, destroying the homes and livelihoods of others, and later the rather corrupt and miserly Reparations Commission that did all it could to pay little or nothing to those affected by the flooding of St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, the decisions they made ruining people and businesses left and right, all after very public and solemn pledges that the city would do everything to make right and take care of those affected by the decision to flood those two areas.

As gripping as the New Orleans saga was, I think even more riveting was what happened in Greenville, Mississippi, of the almost Shakespearian rise and fall of one of the biggest personalities of the book, LeRoy Percy, the dominant figure and practical benevolent feudal lord of Washington County, a former U.S. Senator, close friend of Teddy Roosevelt, governor of a Federal Reserve bank, a trustee of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, and close friend to two chief justices of the Supreme Court, a man who early on was an enormous ally of the black people of Washington County, engaging in epic and very public fights with the Ku Klux Klan, of fighting hard to stop lynching, of making sure both blacks and whites got for Mississippi well-funded public education, of seeing to the cultural development of the entire county and especially of Greenville, building up a huge legacy of trust and admiration from the black community, all of it to come to an ugly demise with the flood as it became clear to all that Percy didn’t do all of this out of love for the blacks as people but for his very clear and logical understanding that the plantation economy and his wealth and power would collapse if black workers left, his fights to protect black people more about preserving a labor pool than doing the right thing for its own reason. The author painted a very complex picture of LeRoy Percy, at times corrupt, at times benevolent, definitely standing up to very bad people at great risk, but then in the end essentially a man who created an empire and defended it, helping when needed but for his own reasons. Decent sized sections of the book were essentially a biography of LeRoy Percy and that was more than ok with me, as he more than anyone represented the old Mississippi Delta, his actions kept it going as long as it did, and was the most ruined perhaps of anyone in power by the 1927 flood.

The author doesn’t just focus on the fall of Percy either as far as the coverage of Greenville goes, but also on the very sad state of affairs of the African Americans in Washington County. Helping squash efforts to evacuate them from the county – something that was doable and in fact was being done until there was an intervention – Percy feared that once the black laborers left, they would never return for that is what they were in the end, laborers. Forced to stay on the levee (though right next to the river, the only dry spot for miles and miles except for a few high buildings in Greenville), they were forced to work night and day wherever directed, often at gunpoint (as one black minister wrote, “being made to work under the gun…mean and brutish treatment of the colored people is nothing but downright slavery”), unpaid, with for a time little shelter and living in squalid conditions, with only the foods the whites allowed them to have (whites picking and choosing from Red Cross relief supplies what was “suitable” for the blacks), with whites only as overseers and bosses, never laborers shoring up levees before the crevasse or later on unloading boats with relief supplies. A sad but gripping tale, one that became a national scandal, it was sadder still to read that even after people were finally able to leave the levee, the Percys (including his son, William Alexander Percy, also a major figure in the book) continued to make race relations worse and if anything exacerbate black migration from the Delta.

As a reader I enjoyed the vivid contrast with how the flood destroyed LeRoy and William Alexander Percy but created the rising star of Herbert Hoover, a nationally known figure before the flood but one very much a political outsider, not even considered a long shot to be the next president of the United States (if Calvin Coolidge didn’t run for a third term, something prior to the flood no one knew for sure), but after his very public ownership of flood relief, coordinating federal and state agencies and the Red Cross to provide relief and save lives throughout the affected areas, becoming a national star and in the end essentially by far the most obvious candidate from the Republican party for president.

However Barry was far from glowing in his portrayal of Hoover, a man he called “a brilliant fool,” brilliant in terms of grasping and solving problems, of understanding issues and coming up with effective and original solutions, but also foolish in “deceiving himself,” rejecting “evidence and truths that did not conform to his biases,” and fooling “himself about what those biases were.” Thanks to Hoover, of how his behind the scenes campaigning to become the candidate for president was conducted, of how he did (or really didn’t) respond to the situation in Greenville, and his using of a national prominent black leader (Robert Russa Moton) to shore up support among black voters all while lying to Moton again and again about a resettlement plan in the Delta that would greatly benefit black citizens there, Hoover essentially started the beginning of the end of blacks being prominent in Republican politics and vital to their electoral chances, of really getting the trend going of blacks abandoning the party of Lincoln, the party that had fought the disenfranchisement of black voters and outlawing whites only primaries, that while Hoover was never racist, he did use black leaders and black voters for his own ends all while finding more white voters, lessening GOP dependence upon black voters.

I could go on for a while in my review, of talking about the strong personalities in New Orleans that were covered, of James Pierce Butler, Jr, J. Blanc Monroe, and Manuel Molero, of the weird, exclusive world of the various clubs, krewes, and Carnival balls of New Orleans society, of the role the flood had in the rise of Huey Long (who beat incumbent governor O. H. Simpson, who had approve the dynamiting of the levee to supposedly save New Orleans), of how very little Coolidge said or did about the flood despite numerous high level politicians begging him to do so, of how people feared people dynamiting levees on one side of the river to relieve pressure on levees on the other side of the river and so had guards that shot people on sight and even killed people, but other than what I just wrote, I won’t.

A really fine example of popular history writing, I had no idea how the 1927 marked the end or the beginning of so many things (most of what I mentioned in my review were endings, but one beginning was the result of a bill passed as a result of the flood and signed into law by President Coolidge, one in which the federal government would assume control over the lower Mississippi River, taking full responsibility for flood control, setting “a precedent of direct, comprehensive, and vastly expanded federal involvement in local affairs…a shift that both presaged and prepared the way for far greater changes that would soon come”).

The book has a section of black and white photographs of flood devastation and some of the people and places mentioned in the book, several maps, an impressive bibliography, and a comprehensive index.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a non-fiction about the 1927 Mississippi flood and attempts to fight it, which was another snapshot of race problems in the USA. I read it as a Buddy Read for August 2024 at Non Fiction Book Club group. I used the abridged audio version, therefore I may have missed something from the full print version.

The first parts described the peculiarities of the Mississippi River and its extremely flat basin, so that during floods the river often changed course, and moved a lot of sediment to all nearby lowlands, making them extremely well suited for agriculture. This is followed by different attempts to suit the river better to serve humans, from deepening to move larger barges, to preventing floods. After the US Civil War this led to a very intense rivalry between military and civil engineers. Before the 1830s, military ones were the best of the best, and West Point dominated American engineering. West Point offered the only academic training in the field in America, and Army engineers were a true elite. Only the top two cadets of each West Point class were allowed to enter the Corps of Engineers, while only the top eight cadets in each class could enter the separate Corps of Topographical Engineers. One of them was the chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, who wrote a massive and revolutionary report about Mississippi, which took him 11 years. The civil ones were presented by Charles Ellet, Jr., who, among other things, constructed a 1,010-foot-long suspension bridge, then the longest in the world, across the Ohio at Wheeling, West Virginia. Humphreys was in favor of levees-only approach, while Ellet promoted jetties and usage of natural and artificial outlets and reservoirs. There I was especially surprised with using state and federal powers to force a military variant of ‘levees-only’ over a much cheaper alternative - I was assuming with rogue barons and their excesses, state/fed powers were weak. Here they even had a battle between the House and Senate:
Immediately after Eads’ testimony, Louisiana’s Senator Rodman West, a longtime canal advocate, announced his support of jetties. The New Orleans Chamber of Commerce condemned him as a traitor and mounted an effort to defeat him; meanwhile, his conversion marked the complete rout of Humphreys in the Senate.
Humphreys still had strength in the House. The day the House voted, Humphreys circulated a letter stating that recent measurements proved his theory that a new sandbar would develop beyond the jetties. Also, despite his earlier charge that the jetties would cost $23 million, he now claimed that Eads’ offer of $10 million would give him a profit of $7 million.
The House rejected jetties and passed the canal bill. The Senate refused to consider a canal. The two houses finally compromised by creating a new board of engineers including three from the Army, three civilians, and one from the U.S. Coastal Survey. This board spent six months studying the bar as well as jetties in Europe. Eads, though not in direct contact with them, followed them through Europe. In January 1875, by a vote of 6 to 1, the board recommended jetties.
But it did not give Eads total victory. Just before the Mississippi reaches the sea, it splits into three main channels, or passes. He had offered to build jetties for $10 million at Southwest Pass, which carried most of the river’s water and, hence, its potential power. The board estimated the cost for construction and twenty years’ maintenance there at $16,053,124, and therefore recommended building jetties at the South Pass, where it estimated the cost would be $7,942,110.

Finally, we move to the 1927 flood and the role of the Percy family. After the Civil War the South needed a workforce, but at the same time despised former slaves. They even tried to ‘import’ Italians to replace Blacks. In the late 19th century, W. A. Percy and later his son LeRoy Percy was the man, who linked interests of developing the lower Mississippi (esp. the Delta) and financial markets of New York and London, and the political market of Washington. His approach toward Black tenants was practical – they were the only available labor force, so he was strongly against the ‘excesses’ of KKK. He formed a goodwill with local Blacks for years, but his son, William Alexander Percy destroyed it by forcing Blacks (but not Whites) to work under gunpoint, calling them “lazy lying lustful animal[s] which no amount of training can transform into a tolerable citizen.”

An interesting read, both technically (the first part) and sociologically.

[Vicky Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

When the Levee Breaks

A history of the land and the people washed away by the raging Mississippi River, Rising Tide chronicles the science and the real human issues of disaster. Amidst the political wrangling, the world changed. Many died. Many migrated across the country. Political careers were made and destroyed. Not much has changed since Memphis Minnie sang the Blues.

The book is detailed and thorough. I had read about the Great Flood, but there were many things here that are hard to read, like the workforce held in the camps, instead of allowing them to evacuate. It's over 500 pages, but it is a must read.

I picked this up in hardback off Amazon from third party sellers in excellent condition. The author does an excellent job of focusing on the facts and the issues. And, it has numerous quality photos from that era of history.

[☕Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is certainly well-researched! The amount of information presented is impressive if at times overwhelming. It was a long haul but I came out of it feeling much more knowledgeable about, and impressed by, the great Mississippi. With this book having been written prior to Katrina, I'm curious as to how the problems and solutions presented here played out in that disaster. I will have to do some more reading on that, but first, onto something lighter!

[Lily]

Some parts of this book had me hyperfixating on it (anything to do with river flood control or engineering), other parts were a slog (mini biographies of the Percys and Hoover). Altogether, though, SUPER interesting. There was so much in my daily life is a child that I never paid attention to that is directly tied to these events.

[Jen Sines · Rating 4 out of 5]

How had I never heard of this huge event? The author did a great job of relaying events, but consistently used outdated language that would have been considered offensive and outdated at the time he wrote it. I was surprised the publisher allowed it and found it distracting. This is an important event that really did change America so the publisher should consider releasing an updated version.

[JG (Introverted Reader) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Telling the story of an epic flood of the Mississippi River in 1927, this book explores the early history of flood control efforts and a rivalry that made flood controls at the time practically a joke, the politics involved in decisions for handling the flood itself, the politics of disaster relief, and the impact of the flood into the future.

It's too much. There is a ton of interesting detail in this book, but I got bogged down in the details. Any one of the above aspects of the flood would have made an interesting, shorter book on its own. Putting them all together made me read at a stupefying pace and left me confused as to who was who and what was going on where. Just too much.

However.

The author makes a lot of good points. He asserts that the flood was responsible for hundreds of thousands of African Americans migrating out of the Mississippi River valley, the slow decline of New Orleans, the death of a way of life in the South, the eventual shift of the black vote to Democrats, the beginnings of big government in America, and could someday lead to the mouth of the Mississippi transferring over to the Atchafalaya. It's interesting to see how one event led to so many changes in America.

Reading this as the Mississippi is currently having another epic flood is interesting too. I have to say that I've gotten pretty good at keeping my head in the sand when it comes to national news, but this flood has even made it into my awareness. Today's flood is being compared to the flood of 1927. I read a brief article about it before I wrote this review, and I now have an understanding of the flood control measures that are in place, precisely because of the 1927 flood. I feel horrible for the people who live on the wrong side of the levee(s?) we have blown up to save bigger cities. I don't know what the answer to that is, but I hope that we treat these people better than people in similar situations were treated in 1927.

Parts of the book just enraged me. All the back room deals that the men in positions of power made was ridiculous. I'm not naive, I know it still happens, but seeing it spelled out like this is maddening. Elected officials had no power and no voice in any of the decisions made about the 1927 flood. The men with the money were trying to protect their own interests, with little to no regard to how their decisions affected those who were already barely surviving. It is amazing what a talent politicians and powerful people have for believing the science that is convenient for them. Many things were effectively shown to them (for example, it was unnecessary to blast a levee to save New Orleans), yet they went ahead and did what they wanted to do anyway. And then there were the race issues. Holy cow. It was nasty. In some areas, black men were forced to work on the levees for food. If they didn't work, the whole family went hungry. There was no question of receiving any actual pay, when they had lost what little they had in the flood as well. They were beaten and killed and whipped and just treated worse than farm animals. Truly. Farm animals trapped on the levees were evacuated on boats while black families were left behind to continue working.

It took me about two months to wade through this ~430 page volume. History like this isn't typically my first choice in reading material, so those who do have a bigger tolerance for straightforward history will enjoy it more than I did. I do feel that I learned a lot, I just wish I hadn't had to work so hard to finish this!

[Bob Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Rising Tide after being educated and entertained by Barry's more recent Roger Williams. That was a mistake. In Rising Tide we are given a detailed...a very detailed...story of a truly enormous and tragic history of an American natural disaster that I had never before known about. The enormity of the flood, however was trumped by the flood of anecdotes and details. A more careful job of editing would have improved my appreciation of Barry's research and scholarship.

That said, Rising Tide opened my eyes to a sad chapter in the larger story of the Mississippi Delta, and I recommend it to anyone interested in American social history.

One of the big players in this chapter was Herbert Hoover, and my mind is now piqued to learn more about him. Hoover was so eclipsed by FDR, at least in my mind, and he is a far more complex man than I ever imagined. Barry gives us an introduction to this complexity, an unexpected bonus in reading Rising Tide.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books that is more educational than fun to read. I couldn't help but think that it could have made a good expose but is a little tedious as a novel. The big takeaways from this book are how destructive the flood of 1927 was, how political the decisions governing our approach to managing the Mississippi have been and are, how Herbert Hoover came to be president,and - perhaps, most interestingly - how the Republican party starting marginalizing and alienating African Americans. In fact, the primary reason that I would recommend this book is that it covers race relations in some depth.

[TMGo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a book pick for my local OS Book club. I had heard about the Mississippi River woes through the years, having grown-up & living right on the Mississippi River in Illinois & New Orleans, and now living on the Gulf of the Mississippi. Thus, I’d always heard , seen and known of its powers and conveniences .

Although when I saw this was a 400 page book, a little dread sunk in… thinking, oh my gosh, this is going to be like reading a history book full of facts, names and dates! 😣

Despite my concern about it possibly being dull for me , my interest peeked for as a Katrina survivor I already knew about the false hood of placing your faith in levees. I also knew from living on the MS River all my life there is no holding back a tempest.

So I dove in and I couldn’t put it down ! If you are like me and enjoy reading books for pleasure in your free time I would add this to your TBR!
There is so much more than the history of the flood… politics of LA, MS & all the way to Washington are woven in the rivers “turmoil” The treatment of freed slaves being treated and expected to be enslaved to the endeavor of taming the river, was just one of the disturbing elements in the book and our history!

The former senator of La.during that time Huey P Long is mentioned in the book. Having myself in lived in La. Longs time in office is well known. He was a US Senator of La & was known for running the state as a dictator. Long or “Kingfish” his self appointed nickname was shot in the capital in Baton Rouge , La in 1935 & died 30 hours later from the wound.

Long had the the state house built during his time in office and it is a gorgeous bldg. He had an apartment on the 24th floor and his own private elevator. I believe it’s still the tallest bldg in MS. If you have a chance to tour the capital Bldg in Baton Rouge it’s a grandeur of a bldg inside and out .Even today their is still a hole in a marble column from the shooting of Long .

I gave this book 5 stars for the historical information and how it captivated my attention.

This recounts of our history in this novel left me more disappointed with man seeing how we need to be tamed more than the river

FYI, the info I included on HP Long is not in the book - so this review contains no spoilers

Info on the state capital of Louisiana
https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story...

https://house.louisiana.gov/pubinfo/V...

[Peyton Davy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Turns out I actually had a month longer to read this book than I thought. It was pretty good though, told very theatrically and kept the fact heavy history pretty engaging and interesting. It’s a great case study on the policy and tactics used to deal with flooding and a great read for anyone involved in construction and development in the lowcountry!

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

John M. Barry's Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America is a surprisingly interesting take on efforts since the early 1800s to tame the largest and wildest river system in the country. These efforts have been the result of often-vicious debates among hydrologists that lend a human background to the story, and show that while science might always be rational, scientists aren't.

In fact, I think the lessons about river management are so important that I'll focus on the period before the Great Flood of 1927. It's a remarkable story of intense debate, bureaucratic dysfunction, and mismanagement that set the foundation for continued flooding of the Great River.

The Mississippi River

The Mississippi is the water collection point for a watershed covering forty percent of the lower 48 states. It begins at Minnesota's Lake Itsaka and ends at the Gulf of Mexicoi in Louisiana, collecting water along the way from the Missouri River in the west, the Ohio River in the east, and numerous other rivers. As it moves south toward New Orleans it carries millions of cubic feet of water per second and massive sediment at currents that can run up to 20 knots in flood stage. It's numerous sharp bends interdict and slow the water's flow, backing the water up into local floods while allowing the river to pick up sediment; as each bend is passed the flow rate accelerates until the next bend is reached. At its exit into the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans, the fast-moving current meets shoals in the Gulf of Mexico created by deposits of the river's sediment.

As the river flows from New Orleans toward the Gulf it reached an area called Head of Passes.


Mississippi River Watershed


Head of Passes


Considered the mouth of the Mississippi, Head of Passes is the outermost part of the Mississippi delta system; it is 95 miles south of New Orleans as the river flows. Created by river sediments collected to form islands between which water flows to the Gulf, there are three natural channels: Southwest Pass, South Pass, and Pass d' Loutre. Before the river was eventually tamed, these passes were frequently subject to shoaling, thus bottling cargo ships up in the Port of New Orleans for months at a time. So there were two major goals of river management: reduce the flooding that occurred all along the river, from Cairo, Illinois to New Orleans, and deepen the passages to the Gulf at Head of Passes.

The economic importance and unruly behavior of the Mississippi began to get national attention in the early 19th century when hydrology was a new science. Two factors were the increase in the river's use as a transportation route for freight and passengers, and increased confinement of the river's ability to spread out due to agricultural and residential development along its banks. Three basic solutions were proposed: the continued reliance on levees, the Corps solution; creation of outlets and spillways channeling water into reservoirs, proposed by Charles Ellet to allow the river to spread out in flood stage, reducing the flow going downstream; and jetties in the river with cut-offs straightening the river at sharp bends, the Eads proposal. These would address the issues with the river as far south as New Orleans, but additional work had to be done at Head of Passes to open the river to the Gulf of Mexico,

Hydrologists worldwide were weighing in on the choice to be made not only at the Mississippi but around the world, everywhere that a major river too frequently ran wild. While debate had gone on since the 1830s, the real work would not begin until the mid-1870s.

The Debate

In the U. S. there were two primary figures in the new science who focused on the Mississippi: James Buchanan Eads and Andrew Atkinson Humphreys; a more remote third party was Charles Ellet who, it turned out, had the best answer.

Humphreys and Eads couldn't have been more different. Humphreys was a West Point graduate and veteran of the Seminole Wars and the Civil War. He was a martinet and a vicious opponent in all things, approaching those who disagreed with him as mortal enemies. In 1866 he became head of the Army Corps of Engineers on the basis of his ongoing study of The Mississippi's work hydraulics. The next year he completed his study of the Mississippi River, titled Report Upon the Physics and Hydraulics of the Mississippi River. When that study was finished it became his Bible—its methods and conclusions were never to be questioned. Humphreys advocated a levee system as the solution to flooding, and he never wavered: levees, he believed, would channel the water and increase its flow rate, thus scouring the bottom and deepening the river.

Eads, on the other hand, was a man of cool and charming temperament who attracted others rather than repelled them. He was able to form companies with well-heeled and like-minded people who were politically connected. He saw opposing views as opportunities to learn rather than as implacable enemies. He was a risk-taker who worked on the idea that if he couldn't deliver he wouldn't be paid, an attitude that assisted him in getting federal contracts for work on the river, but meant that he had to have stronger financial backing to withstand losses.

Eads began his career as owner of several dredging barges that worked the river. He understood that to know the river he had to know its bottom as well as its surface, so he invented a diving bell that allowed him to investigate the bottom while buffeted by currents and blinded by sediment. His understanding of the river and his creativity at developing new methods and equipment made Eads the go-to man for all things Mississippi River.

Eads believed argued that the levee system was not an effective way of deepening the river because the levees were set back from the river banks, often as far as a mile. This allowed water to spread out before being channeled by levees, thus reducing the rate of flow and minimizing any scouring except in periods of major flooding; scouring would operate only in extreme conditions. Eads proposed replacing levees with a system of jetties between the river banks that would constantly confine the water, making the river flow faster and the increasing the time water was effective in scouring the bottom.

Charles Ellet offered a third approach, earning Humphreys hatred. Ellet believed that the answer to flooding was to let the river spread out by constructing spillways that would channel high water into reservoirs near the river. This would reduce the river's water volume in an organized way rather than flooding large areas of valuable land. It would turn out much later that this was, in fact, an effective approach.

The dispute became vicious as Humphreys worked hard to undermine Eads. It lasted from the early 1870s to 1879 when Humphreys resigned from the Corps in disgrace: Eads had proved him wrong on both the levee idea and on the idea of a canal at Head of Passes. In the investigation hat followed, Humphreys' misdoings to defeat Eads came to light and Humpreys was finally seen as a dishonest man.

Eads and Humphreys disagreed not only on what should be done to manage the Mississippi, but also on how river management should be governed: Humphreys wanted the Corps of Engineers to run the river, as it traditionally had. Eads wanted an independent commission—a Mississippi River Commission—to govern river management.

In 1879, After Humphrey's disgrace, a Mississippi River Commission was formed. However, the result was not as Eads intended. The charter required two members to be Corps officers (one acting as president). Over time the expertise of these "scientists" overwhelmed the amateur civilian members and the Corps was back in full control of the river.

The Proposals

Humphreys' solution was to continue and improve the levee system on the Mississippi while deepening the South Pass by cutting a canal to depth of eighteen feet from its normal fourteen feet. This would improve the river's water capacity and rate of flow down to the river's mouth, allowing ships to pass through the Delta without being blocked in the Port of New Orleans.

Instead, Eads proposed that jetties should be built within the river channels to constrain the water flow to a defined width within the banks, thereby making scouring a normal part of the river's activity rather than just during a major flood period. He also called for strategically placed cut-offs to straighten the river at sharp bends, thus increasing its flow and its scouring effect. To solve the Head of Passes problem, he proposed a jetty system to channel the water flow, scour the bottom, and keep sediment moving out to the deep Gulf waters.

This allowed a controlled experiment at Head of Passes. Humphreys would cut his canal through the Southwest passage, down to the target of eighteen feet from the normal fourteen, while Eads would install jetties through the shallower South Pass to use scouring to increase the depth to thirty feet from its normal eight feet. Obviously, Eads had the more difficult task: he had 22 feet of depth to create against Humphreys' four feet. Humphreys also had the financing in hand from the Corps of Engineers budget, but Eads would have to form a financial syndicate of investors, a hard sell because Eads's goal was thought to be impossible.

To make the government accept the deal and be part of the financing, Eads made it a no-risk deal. If Eads was successful, his syndicate would be paid a set amount. For each foot of shortfall in channel depth from the 30-foot target, the government would pay less until, at some point, it paid nothing at all. This no-risk proposition brought the government on board in spite of Humphrey's intense efforts to scuttle the deal by strategies like disrupting the formation of Eads's syndicate and spreading misinformation about Eads's results; for example, when Eads reported that he'd reached a 16-foot depth at South Pass, Humphreys' experts announced that they measured the South Pass at only 12 feet deep. (Long after the time the original Corps records were found—they reported 16 feet.)

To prove his claim and put the ball into Humphreys' court, Eads ran a cargo ship with a 15' 7" draft at high speed through the South Pass. The ship made it with no problem, so it was clear that Eads's jetty solution had scoured the channel to a depth of at least 16 feet, an eight-foot improvement over the prior eight-foot depth. Ultimately Eads's jetty system did create the 30-foot depth in South Pass that led to the federal government's full payment for the work.

By this point Humphreys had exhausted his political capital. His canal construction in Southwest Pass was terminated, having never reached the promised 18-foot depth. Eads was recognized as already having deepened the South Pass by eight feet with his jetties (only 14 more feet to go), and Humphreys was the center of a scandal.

The Corps of Engineers was relieved of responsibility for the Mississippi River and control was given to a newly-created Mississippi River Commission. Unfortunately, the Commission was required to have some Corps officers on it, and they were able trump the civilian members who had no scientific expertise. The Mississippi River Commission became the Corps of Engineers by another name.

Eads's jetties and cutoffs were out, Humphreys' levees were back in, and Ellet's spillways and reservoirs were never on the table.

Segue: Race Relations and Back to the River

Barry moves from the River on to race relations in the general area in a long segue that returns to the river. His central character is Leroy Percy of Greenville, Mississippi. Percy was a lawyer who became wealthy from his law practice and from owning a very large cotton plantation. He was a man of his times—today he would be twittered as a racist because most of his employees on the plantation were black and, while not slaves, were not much above that status. But he was a decent man and held very progressive views on race: he treated his employees well, he punished any white employees who demeaned or physically abused a black, he paid above market wages, and he believed that everyone deserved the respect accorded any human being.

Percy's major business problem was labor supply. After the Civil War blacks left the plantations in droves, and they had continued to move away from plantation work. At one point Percy experimented with Italian immigrant workers, but the social cocktail between whites, blacks and Italians was unsuitable. Perhaps this labor shortage was part of his benign approach to his workers, but if so, self-interest was supporting decency.

For a short period Perry was a U. S. Senator, and he was always the unelected leader of Greenville and Washington County. But in 1922 the Ku Klux Klan arrived in Greenville and began to spread hatred against—well, everyone except poor white protestants. Percy, whose wife was Catholic, was the only town leader who publicly opposed them: at one public meeting he followed a Klan leader's hate-filled speech with a sermon on love and a long mocking speech that devastated his opponent and caused the audience to cheer.

The Klan had moved into major elected positions in Mississippi's other counties, but thus far it only filled the sheriff's seat in Greenville's Washington County. For the 1922 town elections Percy organized a slate of progressive opponents to the Klan's slate. Percy's slate won with one exception—the local Klan's Exalted Cyclops was reelected as sheriff. Eventually the Klan gave up on Greensville and concentrated on other town's and counties, but within two years it was finished nationwide by a scandal involving the Indiana Klan's Grand Wizard.

More importantly, also in 1922 the river flooded. In spite of evidence from earlier floods in 1912 and 1913 that levees were not working—in those floods the water volume was less than in previous but the river level was much higher—the Corps had continued to rely only on levees. The 1922 flood would reach a record 23 feet height(two feet above the 1913 flood) even though its water flow volume was only 1,750,000 cubic feet per second compared to at least 2,000,000 fps in each of the previous two floods. At New Orleans, where the water rushed around a 90-degree bend at Albert Point the trailing edge of the turn wiped out the levy at the French Quarter. In Greenville Percy would arrange private funding to fight the flood and thousands of plantation workers would rally to fill sandbags and, in some cases when sandbag supplies ran out, would use their bodies to reinforce the levees.

Major levee collapses occurred all along the river, but still the Corps declared victory by claiming that the collapses had been at levees that did not meet Corps construction standards.

The Great Flood of 1927

From the fall of 1926 through the spring of 1927 a series of unusually heavy rainstorms spread across the country—one downpour gave New Orleans 15 inches of rain in 18 hours! The watershed was saturated and in the summer of 1927 several separate flood crests were running down the Mississippi. The Great Flood turned out to be a long process, not a single event.

The first levee break was in mid-April at Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River joined the Mississippi. The start of the Great 1927 flood in Mississippi was a levee break at Mound Landing (pop: 50) on April 21, 1927. This "crevasse" created a wall of water dozens of feet high and left an inland lake as much as 20 feet deep in places and covering 5,000 square miles. Survivors reported dead farm animals, houses, and people floating by. 100 Prisoners conscripted to fill sandbags were killed. Mound landing is still a ghost town.


1927 Mound Landing Levee Break

Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was appointed by President Coolidge to lead a blue ribbon committee that included the head of the Red Cross. Coolidge never visited the affected areas in the south, refusing several requests, but Hoover was very active in the Red Cross effort.

The poster city for dysfunction was Greenville, Mississippi. The Mound Landing Break inundated the area behind Greenville, overcoming its protection levee and putting the town under several feet of water. Over 13,000 people, most black, were displaced and they, allong with other refugees, lived on the top of the main levee. Greenville became a "concentration camp" filled with starving, cold, and ill refugees with insufficient food, medicine and shelter. Will Percy, LeRoy's son and a WWI war hero, was made head of the local Red Cross effort and in desperation conscripted the blacks to work on the levees, breaking the tradition of mutual respect that Greenville had established. The result was a national scandal that tainted Greenville's reputation.

As the flood water moved down the river, leaving massive damage in its wake and breaking levees along the way, New Orleans felt relatively safe for two reasons: first, public officials expected that up-river levee failures like that at Mound Landing would relieve the water flow before it reached the city; second, news of an impending disaster was covered up to prevent panic. Still, city fathers developed a backup plan: If New Orleans was seriously threatened, levees below the city at Caernarvan, where a major break had occurred in 1922, would be destroyed, intentionally flooding two parishes (St. Bernard and Plaquemine) to prevent flooding of the city from its south. The plan entailed compensation for the expected 2,000 refugees who would lose everything, but that was well below the level that would have induced them to voluntarily vacate their property. That plan was executed on April 29 but New Orleans was spared by levee breaks at Mound Landing, Greenville and about 150 other areas to New Orleans's north. Residents of the two flooded parishes never received the compensation promised by the city fathers.

The cost of the Great Flood in both human and financial terms was enormous: 250 deaths, an estimated 640,000 people homeless, and an estimated financial cost of $250-$350 billion dollars (at 2018 prices). It was the worst episode of flooding that the nation has ever faced. But there was one clear beneficiary: Herbert Hoover, head of the flood recovery program, was elected president in 1928.

Five Stars.

[Cindy Dyson Eitelman · Rating 5 out of 5]

How is this possible, that a big old book about the politics and people of the great Mississippi flood of 1927, could be so darn good? Okay, there were a few too many 'floating cows' and cold, scared people perched on levees waiting for boats that never came. But the whole story of the mismanagement of the great river, all mixed with politics and racism and engineers who made decisions based on profits rather than facts, was great! It should have been subtitled, the Documentary of a Disaster. Or, more accurately, how mankind's meddling created a disaster.

It started in the 1850's and 60s, when The Army Corp of Engineers was led by a flawed scientist named Andrew Atkinson Humphreys. He took the time to collect the data that would allow him to make informed decisions about managing the river, then ignored it all. One of his proposals for managing the river was so out of touch with reality that,

Privately, even some Army engineers were aghast at Humpreys' position. One was Barnard, the sole dissenting vote...[who said] the plan submitted to the board simply ignored the engineering science of the present....The incompetence from first to last with which the thing has been handled by the [Corps] has thrown it irrecovably into the hands of politicians."

Politicians set up a sort of power play between the Corp and civilian engineers, with Humphreys pitched against the famous bridge builder James Buchanon Eads and the scientist engineer Charles Ellet. Their battles made for good reading but very bad outcomes, and the decisions ended up in the hands of the "Mississippi River Commission"--neither a scientific organization nor an engineering one, but a bureaucracy.

The commission took positions, and the positions became increasingly petrified and rigid. Unfortunately, these positions combined the worst, not the best, of the ideas of Eads, Ellet and Humphreys.
Both Eads and Humphreys opposed outlets. Ellet proposed them. Ellet was right. But the commission opposed outlets.
Both Eads and Humpreys opposed building reservoirs. Ellet proposed them. Ellet was right. but the commission opposed reservoirs.
Eads wanted to build cutoffs. Humphreys and Ellet opposed them. Eads was right. The commission followed Humphreys and Ellet.

And in the end, with outlets, reservoirs and cutoffs all being cast aside, the commission decided to use levees and only levees, a position "violently rejected" by all three men. So over the next decades, levees were built higher and higher and natural outlets were closed off. when the rains came, the Mississippi had nowhere to go but up.

There is no sight like the rising Mississippi. One cannot look at it without awe, or watch it rise and press against the levees without fear. It grows darker, angrier, dirtier; eddies and whirlpools erupt on its surface; it thickens with trees, rooftops, the occasional body of a mule. Its currents roil more, flow swifter, pummel its bands harder. When a section of riverbank caves into the river, acres of land at a time collapse, snapping trees with the great cracking sounds of heavy artillery. On the water the sound carries for miles.

Unlike a human enemy, the river has no weaknesses, makes no mistakes, is perfect; unlike a human enemy, it will find and exploit any weakness.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once in a while, a book will be pretty good on the surface, but blow you away with what you learn from it. Rising Tide is one of those books. (Clearly I didn’t know it was going to be this good when I put it aside for a few months.)

The story of the Mississippi’s greatest flood is not just about the loss of 2 seasons of crops under 30-ft of muddy water over 27,000 square miles, though that would be plenty to talk about. This is a richer, wide-ranging (and very heavily researched) education in how interconnected all aspects of life are when disaster comes: homes and livelihoods, transport, food supply and banking challenges that affect the whole country--and how mere humans handle it.

Most of it reads like a smooth narration, because this is also a story of natural catastrophe intertwined with race, power, money, and menace. There are technical details about levees and jetties and layers of variable speeds as water moves. The hydraulics are fascinating, but the humanity -- what people do to help or hinder one another- is mind-blowing.

Rising Tide tells us that a million people were forced out of the Delta and the Mississippi Basin that year, having immediate implications for the communities they left (the labor gone!), and for those they settled in (who are these hundreds of thousands of people? how do we scale up our infrastructure to handle such a boom? how cool is jazz?).

Many more affects were far-reaching:

- Though Jim Crow was still too real, the power of the black vote surged greatly at this time.

- The debates over a nation’s responsibilities to its people vs. what people must only do for themselves, were stark. FEMA didn’t exist; FDIC didn’t exist; unemployment and farm bills didn’t exist. A tenth of the nation was still on the ropes when the Great Depression hit the following year.

President Coolidge is represented as a do-nothing bastard who didn’t care if people lived or died, because that’s not the role of government. We are still having this argument today, among people who have faced nothing like the natural and financial disasters pre-FDR. (Significantly, one of the things that has changed is the distributed burden of taxation, but that’s another book.)

- With his commanding disaster response, and an active PR machine, you can see why Herbert Hoover was such a popular President-elect at the time. The nation called him The Great Humanitarian, but when Will Rogers quipped, “Bert’s just resting between disasters,” he could not have known that Hoover’s failures behind the scenes would be magnified and visited upon the whole country when the stock market crashed.

New Orleans today is one of the most beautiful and interesting towns I've ever seen, unique in all of the country. But it’s not the city it was, nor what it could have been. It was once the wealthiest city in America, but after the flood—and how it was handled-- came the decline of its banks, industry and investment, and the reliance on a self-induced insularity that they thought would save them. The author (who lives in NOLA) observes its decay, ingrown and dying. He leaves open the question of whether that’s a direct result of the flood, but it seems pretty apparent to me.

[J.K. George · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't remember where or when (or how) I got this book, but I'm sure glad I did. This story and the impact of the Great Flood of 1927 is not as well known today as it should be, even to people like a good friend who lives in New Iberia, LA, a town flooded in that tragic event. Barry's book, published in 1997, is extremely well researched and detailed. It could have been separated into several different books, including the two Mississippi River engineers, Eads and Humphreys, who were mappers and experts; then the story of the Percy dynasty of Greenville, MS and their benevolent semi-serfdom of blacks in the area and the never-ending search for labor to work the almost infinite super fertile land of the Delta in NW Mississippi. Following these comes the incredible story of New Orleans, with the multi-century transition from Spain to France to the US to the Confederate States and back to the United States of America layered into "old elites" and the almost unbelievable insular clubs of the true old families there. Throw into the mix the presidencies of Calvin Coolidge and then Herbert Hoover and the complex interactions of the Corps of Engineers and politics. Layer all this onto the river itself, and we learn a great deal about the power of great amounts of water and the debates of how to use it and how to prevent it from destroying the surrounding areas including major cities all along the upper and lower Mississippi, especially New Orleans. We read about the debates on levees, cutouts, outlets, crevasse failures, and jetties out into the Gulf of Mexico. Throw all this into a basket with the knowledge the River has meandered around south Louisiana over millennia, and actually would today flow out to the Gulf through the Atchafalaya Basin. Today, the great river is restrained to flow directly through the center of New Orleans and serve the business interests of that city as well as to support river traffic into and out of and through the entire center of the country as the River drains nearly half of the continental United States territory.

The climax, the build-up and subsequent detail concerns the flood of 1927, and the impact to vast areas, both east and west of the present river course, is just almost too much to understand. The impact of the water is the center dramatic theme, but the key demographic movement of blacks from the plantations of the region north to Chicago and to Detroit and other industrial cities is key, and has changed the country forever. All in all, this book is well worth the effort to read it in its entirety.

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing book that goes far beyond the story of the 1927 flood.

Although like most popular history books today its subtitle contains the words "...and How It Changed America," the most interesting and extensive part of the book actually deals with the background to the flood.

Barry tells the amazing story of the Mississippi Delta, which, due to its association with the Blues, I had always assumed was a particularly backward and racist region. Turns out that one semi-benevolent planter family (the Percys, descended from Harry Hotspur in Henry IV's time) made the area a peculiar bastion of racial tolerance in the Reconstructed South. In defiance of all trends, black officeholders in the Delta continued to hold office, black-owned farms were relatively common (at one point 2/3s of all farms in the Delta were owned by blacks), and lynchings were relatively rare (there were only two during the whole era in the Delta's Washington County, and one involved whites lynching another white for killing a black man!).

Barry also tells the amazing backstory to New Orleans' disastrous and unnecessary decision to flood St. Bernard's Parish to protect itself from the rising waters. He manages to describe the unbelievably inbred high society that was able to use its control of the newspapers to clamp down all coverage of the flood, to threaten those who "fearmongered," and to run the town through a couple of male social clubs and Mardi Gras "krewes" while the mayor and other elected officials merely watched. This was oligarchy at its most blatant, but its decisions would anger the rural population of Louisiana enough for them to throw their votes tp rabble-rouser Huey Long.

The flood itself is actually the most boring part of the book. Tides are constantly rising, houses are constantly crushed, cows are constantly drowned, but Hoover's purblind mismanagement of the relief efforts does provide an amazing story (he started "reconstruction corporations" to try to revive the region with cheap loans long before his 1932 presidential "Reconstruction Finance Corporation." Both were largely ignored by those they were intended to assist).

There's much more: about the engineers' battle over levees versus jetties in the 1880s, about local fights with the Klan, about Mississippi politics. Almost all of it is fascinating. This book deserves all the lavish praise it has received.