Book Review

Book Review: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America by John M. Barry

Floods are the number one natural disaster in the US.  Further lesson on the subject seems relevant especially living near the Eau Claire River and Living in a state right on the Mississippi river.  Rising Tide, by John M. Barry, is about the 1927 flood of the Mississippi river.  Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas were the states affected directly by the flood but the social landscapes across the nation were changed as a result of mitigation efforts after the flood.

John Barry’s Rising Tide combines stories of the 1927 flood of the Mississippi river.  In the 1870’s, levees were built on the river to help prevent flooding which was actually against what many of the engineers would recommend.  They said that the volume and power of the Mississippi would only be increased if walls were raised.  In 1927, the winter was filled with heavy rains and as soon as spring came the river was rising rapidly.  The harsh storms had begun tearing away at the levees that were built.  Soon water began spewing out of the damaged areas with great force just as the critical engineers had predicted.  This flood is claimed to be the worst disaster in US history.  The event was tragic enough to take over 1000 lives and the homes of almost one million. These stories involve the battles between engineers in areas along the Mississippi who were trying to take control of the river while the flooding was happening.  The book describes more than the disastrous event but also includes the power of politics along with greed and racism in the 1920s. Refugee camps were made for African Americans of the nearly 900,000 people left homeless due to the flood. The refugee camps seemed similar to concentration camps in the way they were set up with tents and field kitchens all down the river.  The book shows that African Americans were given just enough food to avoid starvation and medical supplies were inadequate.  Beyond that, they had to work to prevent more flooding and patch up the crevasses in the levees.  The loss of homes and cruel treatment also caused a large departure of the African American population to larger cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago.  Barry explains that after Hoover was in office, and seeing his poor way of handling the refugees, many of the black voters had changed from republican to democratic.

The book gives a good description on what all happened with the flood down to the smell of the stinky muck left behind from the flood.  Protection was demonstrated in sharing how the Levees were initially built to keep the flood from happening.  The Mississippi river had flooding before then but none so extreme.  The book explains that engineers were against the building of Levees because it could just worsen a disaster like this rather than prevent it.  The housing was really made to defend a flood like this because as I mentioned before, this can be considered America’s largest disaster.  Mitigation was the rebuilding of the Levees through these refugee camps made.  Instead of land/homeowners insurance to pay workers to help with the flood, the made the African American workers build up the levees and stop the water from continuing through the cracks.  Cotton was a major product of the area that brought in a lot of money to the farm owners.  Mitigation efforts were to make the soil usable again after the flood so they could continue the growing and selling of their crops.  This was also how many of the African Americans made money at the time even though pay was only about a dollar for an entire day’s worth of work.  There weren’t any laws to get these people paid back for all of the work they had lost.  In the end, The Mississippi River was put under federal laws to prevent massive problems from happening.  Future problems can be made more secure with federal help and without the poor choices made by the Mississippi River Commission.

Rising Tide demonstrates many different points of views of how certain people were affected by the disaster.  Reading the text you get to see what landowners were going through in trying to prevent and fix damage as well as the Mississippi River Commissions poor choices on the prevention of flooding.  Through the chapters you also get to see the differences between the white victims and of the African American victims. Barry opens your eyes on how racism prevented solid mitigation efforts by Hoover.  It was interesting to see how social issues effect the way a nation handles its relief.  After reading the book I did some of my own research on the flood myself.  It seems that Barry got the story exactly right down to the cruel treatment of victims of the flood and how the disaster had eventually changed America socially as well as politically.  Most storm novels give a great deal of information on the storm itself and how the loss of loved ones and valuables affect the lives of the victims.  This story went above and beyond those tragic events by pulling in the social problems and racism of that time.  It was interesting to learn beyond the actual physical damage of the flood.  The flood had actually impacted some of the different social landscapes we have today.