American History Tellers - The Great Mississippi Flood | Media Storm | 4

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

In 1927, a slow-moving catastrophe like the Great Mississippi Flood was perfect material for a relatively new medium: radio. Over the airwaves, the flood became the first natural disaster that Americans could follow almost in real time, day by day, as the rising river waters swept away one town after another.In this episode, Lindsay talks with Susan Scott Parrish, author of The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History, about the ways Americans far from the Mississippi River experienced the disaster in newspapers, on the radio, and in popular culture. They'll also discuss how entertainers of the time rallied the public to raise funds for recovery, while federal relief efforts only enforced existing socioeconomic and racial divides in the South.Listen ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App. https://wondery.app.link/historytellersPlease support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's April 26th, 1927. You're sitting in the stands of a baseball field in Braithwaite, a small village in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. You're a muskrat trapper. You've lived here your whole life, making your living selling fur. You and your neighbors are furious at the news that your local levee is going to be dynamited. They're saying it's the only way to save New Orleans from rising floodwaters on the Mississippi River.

But they want to divert those floodwaters into your community, washing away everything you've ever known. You're sitting among 600 local men, many of them trappers like you. Others are oyster farmers and fishermen. But all are hoping to convince local authorities not to go through with the plan. Sheriff L.A. Moreau rules your parish with an iron fist. He stands on the field and looks up into the bleachers. All right, everyone, settle down. I'm sure you've heard the news.

Fifty of the most powerful men in New Orleans have gotten approval to dynamite our levy. Raw anger bubbles up inside you as you rise from the stands to speak. Sheriff, what gives these fat cat bankers the right to drown us out of what gives these fat cat bankers the right to drown us out of our homes? And what will this do to the wetlands where we make our living? I don't think there's anything for us to do here. They're backed by the state of Louisiana.

Governor himself authorized the plan. Well, we won't stand for it. We'll go to the levee and guard it. We'll sleep on our shotguns. Look, look, I respect your willingness to fight. But this is not a fight you're going to win. The levee will be broken by force of arms if necessary. I have a statement here from the commander of the Louisiana National Guard. This is all but done.

He pulls a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket. It begins to read. See? See here? It says, if it is necessary to cut the levee, the cut will be made by a corps of engineers backed by the whole state militia, or even United States soldiers. We will brook no interference whatsoever

from the citizens of these parishes. Now look, I've tried to convince the governor to stop this, but he won't budge. Fighting, it's not going to do anything. They're going to break the levy one way or another, even if they have to shoot or drown all of you to do it. So you're saying there's nothing we can do about this? Nothing. Moreau throws up his hands in defeat. They're gonna dynamite that levy. It's a done deal. I can't change it. But I can damn well make sure the New Orleans pays up. Yeah, but they've only promised $150,000.

There's thousands of us. That's a pittance. I agree. But I promise you I'm gonna get you men more money. I'm gonna go to New Orleans. Make sure. I'm gonna demand $2 million and not a penny less. The crowd applauds in approval of the plan, but you sit back down, resigned to your fate. You know you'll be lucky to see any relief money, and no dollar

amount will make up for the loss of your livelihood, your community, and your home. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away.

Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. When the Mississippi River flooded in April 1927, the bankers and business leaders who ran New Orleans

feared the levee protecting their city would not hold. To reduce pressure on it and save the city from flooding, they convinced the Louisiana governor to dynamite another levee protecting their city would not hold. To reduce pressure on it and save the city from flooding, they convinced the Louisiana governor to dynamite another levee 13 miles downriver. The water released from that demolished levee flooded St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, displacing thousands of poor trappers and fishermen. And in the end, the dynamiting proved to be unnecessary. Several levee breaks upriver diverted so much flood water that New Orleans would have been spared anyway. And before the levee was destroyed,

the city promised to pay out $2 million in reparations to the poor residents of St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. But few victims were ever compensated for their losses. Elsewhere around America, scenes of destruction in St. Bernard Parish, Greenville, Mississippi, and elsewhere around the flood zone appeared in newspapers, magazines, and was also described on a relatively new medium, radio. The Great Flood of 1927 was the first natural disaster in U.S. history that played out in mass media as it was happening. And because of that, its cultural impact was far-reaching and could be heard and seen in everything from blues songs to political cartoons

to depictions of the Deep South and popular entertainment. Here with me to discuss the Great Flood and its portrayal in popular culture is author and professor Susan Scott Parrish. She's a professor in the Department of English and the program in the environment at the University of Michigan and the author of the book, The Flood Year, 1927, A Cultural History. Here's our conversation. Scotty Parrish, welcome to American History Tellers.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Now, this is a catastrophe that most Americans don't know about or remember. The flood of 1927 was enormous in its consequences to America, but very few really know anything about it. What sparked your interest in the subject of the flood? I think it was the Katrina event of 2005. I happened to be teaching a course on American literature right as that was unfolding,

or really, you know, just after it had occurred, which made me interested in precedence. And I happened to teach a novel by Zora Neale Hurston called Their Eyes Were Watching God, which actually ends on a different historical flood, the Lake Okeechobee flood of 1928, which was in many ways more devastating to life than the 1927 flood. But it got me very interested in Southern catastrophe and particularly catastrophes that occurred where there was racial and class imbalances in the South

and how Katrina, or as some people call it, the New Orleans levee disaster, was not unprecedented. And so I was really interested to think, well, what was the history that created this 2005 event? How did we find ourselves here? So that's what got me involved. And as a literary historian, I became aware that Richard Wright had written fiction on the 1927 flood, and William Faulkner had written even more fiction on the 1927 flood. So I came into it from, I guess, a cultural history or literary history angle, but then I became really interested in many other facets of the event. So your book, The Flood Year 1927, it has in its subtitle a cultural history,

but you dive in a little deeper, you think? Yes. I mean, I wanted the readers to be aware of the history that got us to 1927. John Barry, a wonderful historian of this flood, wrote Rising Tide in 1997. And he does a great job describing the engineering history that had set up the levy's only policy that in his mind was a big part of the catastrophe. I was interested in the environmental history of the Mississippi Valley, you know, what had been occurring since 1850 to change how flooding occurred in the valley. And then I also wanted my readers to understand the social makeup of people who lived where the flooding was worse.

So essentially in the Mississippi Delta and in the states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, for them to understand, okay, when floodwaters came pouring in on those communities, it determined the contours of the disaster to know how power was exercised and how relief was offered differently to different citizens in that area. So I was both interested in the environmental history and the social history, you could say. But I started reading the newspapers, the newspaper coverage of the event as it was unfolding. And that became incredibly fascinating to me to see how the flood was covered and how contentious it ultimately became. You mentioned the environmental history, the policies that led up to perhaps the disaster

itself, and in contrast to just the engineering problems. Let's explore that for a bit. What were the environmental policies or pressures that you think led up to the 1927 flood? country in places like my own home state of Michigan, which is outside of the Mississippi watershed, but Wisconsin, for example. Forests do an excellent job with their root system and all the leaves that fall off of trees in keeping the soil very spongy and with a lot of places where water can go when there's an excessive amount of rain or snowfall. But as forests were removed from the upper watershed, it removed one of the ways that soil can absorb water. Another thing that happened is that as large-scale monoculture agriculture developed in the plain states, so corn and wheat,

all those long grass prairies west of the Mississippi River were mowed down and in its place, you know, much shorter rooted grains were planted. And again, they don't do nearly the job of holding water in the soil. And then finally, wetlands were also drained in order to make all that land arable. Basically, all these measures that nature already had to absorb water in times of flooding, whether that's root systems or pockets of wetlands, had been eradicated in the 19th century. And then the engineers had responded by making a levees-only policy of water evacuation. And so the idea had been to create a kind of drainage pipe out of the center of the country that would efficiently move all this water coming into the

Mississippi Valley and just get it out as quick as possible to the Gulf of Mexico. And so there were no what are called distributaries. There were no sort of emergency valves that could be open to get that water out. And as this water started to pour down, this drainage pipe silt came as well, which would raise the bottom level of the river. And so the levees had to be built higher and higher so that ultimately you had four-story levees. And so when a four-story levee broke, let's say on a farm in Arkansas, it came with the kind of velocity and volume of Niagara Falls. In trying to keep the Mississippi River Valley safe from water, it meant that when there was a break, it was a much more catastrophic break than it would have been in the early 19th century, for example.

It would have come much more fast and furiously. And this flood occurred, you know, during the progressive era when there was such confidence that human engineering could make nature behave the way humans wanted nature to behave. You know, there wasn't yet a sense you actually have to work with nature and make your designs mimicking how nature acts. There was more of an attitude around 1900 that you engineer nature to behave. And so it was these, I mean, I guess you could say policies, but it was also an attitude that was different than I think some of our own today. The second chapter, if you will, that you brought up was the social history of the flood. We focused on one town, Greenville, in particular, in our series. But cities up and down the river were affected, and the people and residents of those areas were affected in disparate ways. How did you explore the social history of the catastrophe? I wanted readers to understand what the hierarchy was like in the Delta and that it was a region that had been formed,

you know, from Missouri downward by the plantation. There were some communities, for example, in southeastern Louisiana of white Acadian citizens who were affected and afflicted by the flood. There was an intentional dynamiting of a levee in Carnarvon, Louisiana, which flooded out this Acadian community of trappers and bootleggers and farmers. But by and large, those who were made homeless by the flood were African-American agricultural laborers. And New Orleans itself, for example, was never flooded. All the floodwaters went west of the city in the Atchafalaya Basin. And so this was mainly agricultural workers. About six out of every seven evacuee was African-American who went to the Red

Cross camps. For landowners who were by and large white, this was economically devastating to have their farms or their plantations underwater for an entire crop season. But it was more physically devastating for laborers who didn't maybe own their own homes and who had much less control over their mobility. So I think what you have to know is that it was the Jim Crow South, that the wealth that was produced in this region off of sugar and cotton occurred through black labor. And so what the landowners felt very strongly about is they didn't want African-American laborers to leave the region. And so these Red Cross, they were called

concentration camps in 1927, were designed in part to house evacuees, but also to keep evacuees from fleeing the region, from going north on trains or in automobiles and so forth. And so these Red Cross camps were guarded by members of the National Guard. People were forced to labor to reinforce levees or to rebuild the communities at gunpoint. Also, the laboring system that was quite prevalent in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas was sharecropping, which meant that an agricultural laborer borrowed seed, equipment, some startup money at the beginning of crop season, and then was indebted to the landowner for the whole season until at the end when they harvested,

they would pay that landowner back. And so if they were to leave the land in which they were indebted to the landowner, they would be breaking a law. And this is called peonage, where people are no longer enslaved to an owner, but they are essentially kept from mobility by being indebted to the landowner.

Many of these workers, you know, remained illiterate at this time, and so landowners could also manipulate the outcome of the reckoning at the end of the year to keep these laborers indebted to them and to keep them in place year after year after year. So this is sort of the social makeup of the Delta. Many of the counties, what's more, were majority Black laborers and yet very much kept under supervision or under the power of the landholding white elites. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands. But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed. It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse,

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The Red Cross is known today as an exceptional humanitarian organization that does good work across the globe. But what was it then? So Herbert Hoover, who was then the Commerce Secretary and who had had experience with relief efforts during World War I, was put in charge of flood relief at the time. And the Red Cross, as I understood it, was a quasi-governmental organization, you know, with some separation of powers from the U.S. government. But basically, the Commerce Secretary worked in tandem with the Red Cross to design and administer flood rescue and relief. And I think what's the most important thing to realize is that the Red Cross saw its role

as returning the Deep South, the Delta, to the condition in which it was before the flood occurred. It saw itself as providing shelter, providing food, doing a series of inoculations and maintaining public health. But it didn't see itself as intervening in Southern politics or the Southern social order. And so there would be times, for example, when the Red Cross would provide materials for landowners to get started again, you know, in the next season of planting or in order to make repairs to houses and so on. And that those landowners would then charge

sharecroppers for those supplies that were given to them freely by the Red Cross. So that's an example. That's not the Red Cross's fault, but they were coming into a situation of extreme inequality and they didn't see it as their mandate to change that situation. For a time, Herbert Hoover speculated on the idea of property redistribution in the Delta, seeing, you know, in some ways this was not only a cruel, but a very inefficient system. Imagine what it would be like to divide up the properties and take some of the land from the largest landowners and distribute property owning more equally. And that was an idea that never came to fruition. And he quickly decided he was going to run for president soon thereafter and needed Southern support. Herbert Hoover technically did a pretty good job generally

managing the rescue and relief, but I would say a lot of the troubles emerged because there were assumptions that relief would be distributed unequally because of the social order that existed there. And there was a sense that Black labor had to participate in a very compulsory way in the protection of property that wasn't their own. You mentioned Herbert Hoover and his ability to manage this widespread disaster pretty well. He was also pretty good at managing his own image. He was an adept manipulator of the press. But this is also at a time in which the American public is experiencing this particular natural disaster in the press in a much more immediate way than probably any other generation had. Tell us about the country's experience, not just those who were

directly impacted, but the country at large, their experience with this flood as it was happening. So Herbert Hoover had just set up a nationwide radio system in the winter of 1927. And I think that's a really fascinating coincidence because his nationwide addresses as the leader of flood rescue and relief were delivered instantaneously into houses across the country. So in my opinion, this was the first mass experience disaster where people could experience a disaster almost instantaneously and almost virtually. And that seems not that remarkable today because we might be getting live feeds from the forefront of a disaster unfolding and we think that's normal and typical, but this was the first major disaster in the

United States that people far away from the disaster could experience vicariously in real time. And so Herbert Hoover and the Red Cross understood that it was important to develop a narrative about what this flood meant and what their role was in rescue fairly quickly. And in one of Hoover's nationwide radio addresses, the way he described it was that the flood was as a water enemy attacking, and this is a quote, the people of our South. And then he promised that strong and experienced men from every important center were directing a great battle, end quote, against this water enemy. And he also imagined relief workers as what he called an army of rescuers. So he's not imagining that any environmental history or engineering miscalculation caused this flood, but rather that it was a water enemy, you know, kind of abstract and willful in a way. And so that was the narrative that got shared and disseminated around the country here by radio, but also through cartoons and through

news stories and so on. And I think one of the other things about this flood is that it was a slow disaster that occurred in a time of newly fast media. So that accounts for why people could kind of vicariously experience it. But it also meant that after about a month, people in New York City and Los Angeles and Chicago were not very interested in the flood anymore. It was still happening. In fact, the lower south, the lower Mississippi Valley was going to remain inundated throughout the summer

and would struggle to recover throughout that fall. And indeed, in June, Charles Lindbergh made a transatlantic, historic transatlantic flight. The country was gobsmacked over this technological achievement, and they were much more interested in thinking about something heroically. This flight with a heroic pilot crossing the Atlantic really swept them up. And they really didn't want to think about technological failure and wide-scale woe in the Lower South. There were also some pretty acerbic commentators who in the North, I'm thinking of H.L. Mencken in particular, who was an editor at the Baltimore Sun, who had developed quite a bit of animus against what he saw as Southern backward thinking, anti-science, anti-modernity. And so he is beginning to write editorials imagining,

well, if we have to lose that part of the South, that's okay. It's the least estimable part of the country and so this top down narrative of northern technological expertise coming to rescue a suffering south held together and helped to raise a great deal of money for about a month but then it began to fall apart as consumers either became uninterested in an ongoing mucky disaster, or there began to be sort of counter stories. The other development in the Black public sphere was that what was going on in the Red Cross camps was passing outward to people in the Black press who had the power to get that story out to a Black reading public.

So Ida B. Wells, for example, who lived in Chicago, was receiving information from people who were leaving the flood zone and letting her know about conditions. And she wrote for the Chicago Defender. And then W. E. B. Du Bois, who was head of the NAACP at the time, dispatched a white woman investigator to go to a number of the Red Cross camps. And then they published a multi-part expose. And finally, there was a colored advisory commission that Herbert Hoover commissioned to do an investigation of the camps. But he sort of worked behind the scenes with them to meet some of their concerns on the grounds that they would not publish their findings. And so their findings remained unpublished.

But places like the Chicago Defender got the word out, at least to a black reading public, about unequal conditions in the flood zone. But this information really didn't cross the color line. It really wasn't picked up by the New York Times or the LA Times or any of the major newspapers. How did Birkenstocks go from a German cobbler's passion project 250 years ago to the Barbie movie today. Who created that bottle of red sriracha with a green top that's permanently living in your fridge? Did you know that the Air Jordans were initially banned by the NBA?

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In your book, you discuss the vaudevillians' efforts to kind of rally the American public to the cause and entertainers in general. How did they do it? Wonderful question. So this flood occurred before FEMA had been established. So there was no federal money apportioned for flood relief and flood rescue. So all the money had to be raised in the moment. Newspapers would provide a flood dispatch or sort of anecdotes, and then they would ask for donations. It would occur at movie houses as well, where people would go around before a movie played and get donations.

But one of the ways money was raised was through vaudeville benefits. And I knew very little about vaudeville, you know, it's vaudeville is of the past now. But it was still in its heyday in 1927. And I found it really interesting to see all this coverage of master flood benefits. Hollywood would come out and bring some of it, stars would come out and raise funds. So all the proceeds that would be gathered at these vaudeville benefits would then go to flood relief. The single person who raised the most money for the flood was a man named Bill Rogers. I don't know if that name is familiar to you, but he's a fascinating figure, probably the most popular U.S. citizen at the time, maybe other than Charles Lindbergh, who perhaps displaced him in popularity the June of 1927.

But he was someone who started as a fancy rope act in the vaudeville circuit, but also worked in rodeo. And as he gained more popularity, he had a newspaper column, he had a radio show, he was in talking films once talking films began in the fall of 1927. Another thing that's interesting about him is that he is both of Cherokee descent and Irish Scots descent. So he grew up in Oklahoma and his father had been an officer in the Confederacy, but also a leader of Cherokee people in Oklahoma. And so he was kind of a member, if you will, of the Cherokee elite who had an interesting relation to the Plantation South. He both toured the flood zone in airplanes, but then gave huge benefit performances in New York City and in New Orleans

and really kept the nation thinking about the flood longer than it wanted to. The other vaudevillians who I became interested in were a team of Black vaudevillians named Miller and Lyles. They grew up near the Mississippi River in Tennessee, and they had performed in London. They'd performed in Chicago. They were very popular on the vaudeville circuit as comedians, and they were headliners

at a benefit performance at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem, where they would have performed to both Black and white audiences. I was able to kind of piece together what they might have done in their comedy routines. And they tried to draw in their audiences, particularly their white audiences, with a certain amount of appealing humor. But then once they had their audience, they would kind of turn the knife a little and bring up more consciousness about the precarity of Black life. They did one comedy routine about two Black men who were trying to fly across the Atlantic and who had to make an emergency landing in the

middle of the Atlantic. And then they have a kind of back and forth comedy routine as they're sinking into the water, which to me was very resonant that they were recording this around the time of the flood. And as many as a thousand Black people were drowned in this flood. So I think they used comedy in the way it seems to promise mere entertainment to get audiences in to actually offer a certain amount of social critique. The other vaudevillian or someone who we may know better as a blues singer was Bessie Smith. And Bessie Smith was actually caught in the flood in its early stages when the flood was working its way down the Ohio River. And she was on a multi-city tour in January of 1927, moving from Birmingham, Alabama, through Nashville, Louisville, St. Louis, and so forth.

And she was caught in the flood in Nashville, Tennessee. And she needed to be rowed to safety from her railroad car. And that night when she was marooned in Nashville, apparently, according to her biographers, there were people in the audience who were saying, sing Backwater Blues, and she hadn't written it yet. And so some people surmised that there was a kind of local song that had been written called Backwater Blues that she may have heard from some of the audience members that night. But what occurred is that she finished her multi-city tour and went home to Philadelphia and relatively quickly wrote a song called Backwater Blues, went to New York City and

recorded it with James B. Johnson, her pianist. It was then manufactured, advertised, and distributed even to homes in the lower Mississippi Valley before floodwaters arrived in Mississippi and Louisiana. So that's how quick media production was in 1927 and in a way how slow, torturously slow this flood event was. But she was an interesting figure in that she was also a crossover to white audiences. When her music was played, for example, on a Memphis radio station, it would have been

played in both black and white homes. When she toured in big tent shows, there would be the first night would be open to a white audience, the second night it would be open to a black audience. And so unlike in the newspaper coverage where Black reporters were reporting on conditions in the flood zone that never made their way into major white newspapers, entertainers had the power to cross over the color line and relate the experience of Black sufferers in a way that just wasn't occurring in news, in newspapers. And so her song, Backwater Blues, is about a woman who basically she wakes up and she can't get out of her door. She has to be rescued.

And she is taken to a place of higher ground and looks back on her house, realizing that she'll never be able to go back there again. And it's a pretty simple song about losing one's home and the feelings that engenders in one. She could communicate Black feeling across the airwaves and in a way that maybe could have been taken up also by white listeners who, you know, who were in Memphis or who were in parts of Louisiana who also had been displaced or knew people who had been displaced. And so I became really interested in how, what power does entertainment have to communicate experience in a way that sometimes news coverage, at least at that time, did not? I'm glad you bring up the power of entertainment because not only does it communicate, but it has a longevity that we might find surprising.

If you've listened to Beyonce or Eminem or the Beastie Boys, you've likely heard a drum break from a 1971 Led Zeppelin song called When the Levee Breaks, which is itself a cover of a Memphis mini and Kansas Joe McCoy song about this flood. It carries through for, you know, a hundred years of popular culture. What are other examples of the way this flood appeared in popular culture? Yeah, what a wonderful example. That was fantastic. In the years that followed, there were fiction writers. As I mentioned at the very beginning, Richard Wright and William Faulkner are the two writers who remain canonical in American letters, who both were living right near the flood zone and who wrote about it in the 1930s and 40s. So Richard Wright was an 18-year-old living in Memphis. He had been born in Mississippi and had lived for a time in Arkansas. I mean, his father was a sharecropper, but he really knew the region well.

Though he only had an eighth-grade education, he was highly literate and engaged. And he managed to borrow a library borrowing card of a white co-worker. And so he could go into the Memphis Public Library and read newspapers how this flood was being covered, for example, in the Baltimore Sun. And he read that piece by H.L. Mencken that was so condemnatory of the South. And he said he never realized that anyone could do that,

could take the South to task for its behavior because, you know, such criticism would have been deadly for a man like himself. And one of his longer pieces, it's almost a novella length, is called Down by the Riverside. And it tells the story of a man and his family caught in rising floodwaters. And it was award-winning. Eleanor Roosevelt read it at the time and wrote about reading it and how it reduced her to tears.

And so it became, I think you used the word popular, you know, popular culture. It was popular in its day and right is still, you know, taught now taught now so yeah and then William Faulkner was living in northern Mississippi in his in his hometown of Oxford when the flood was occurring and he started to write about this event I think in his first major novel which was The Sound and the Fury and there's a major character in that novel who whos. There are lots and lots of references to water, water coming up, water burbling up. And so, you know, if you imagine a major novelist living in New Orleans the year after Katrina, how could they not have Katrina on their mind, even if they were writing about something else, if they were just writing a family narrative. And so to my mind, Faulkner was already very much

thinking about the 1927 flood in that novel that he wrote in 1928. But then As They Lay Dying has at its very center a river and a flood, a family trying to cross that river, people in the novel talking about this being the greatest inundation they'd ever seen. You said it yourself. It is inescapable to think about the flood of 1927 without also contemplating the more recent flooding of New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina. And of course, we are facing even further peril as sea levels rise and global warming changes the weather patterns in even more unpredictable and damaging ways. What do you think the flood of 1927 and Hurricane Katrina can teach us? What lessons are they offering us as we look into the future I mean, that lesson has been around for a couple of hundred years, even when we think back to Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. We can impose our will on the natural world rather than carefully study how nature's own systems operate and figure out how we can live with them.

I think this exemplifies that. And indeed, the levee system was changed after this flood, and it does have distributaries now. I think the other thing is that the people closest to the dangers of a disaster should be part of the story making, should be part of the narrative making from the beginning. Here, this was very much, as I was mentioning, a top-down narrative that was disseminated by those managing the relief and the rescue, heedless of the people who were closest to the physical consequences of the disaster. These people were often sentimentalized and made into comedic figures. And this is something people in disaster studies think about a lot, how a managerial or an expert class of disaster specialists and managers, and particularly as disaster becomes more common,

cannot exist at a remove from the experiences themselves. And people in disaster studies are thinking about how do we let the experience of the people who are suffering begin to dictate more relief efforts and even policy about environmental management. And you see that in Spike Lee's documentary about the New Orleans levee disaster. He does a great job of bringing in all kinds of voices, whether those are, you know, the governor of Louisiana or a lot of people from the lower Ninth Ward or people who were evacuated, people who were separated

from their families. So I think, you know, his coverage of that event is exemplary in that it brought together all kinds of vantages on an event so that policymakers in the future could not only understand the mistakes, for example, that the Army Corps of Engineers made, but also what was the experience like for someone who had to watch a parent die or what they were thinking when they didn't evacuate or what they were trying to do when they were, you know, trying to get water out of a convenience store. So I think that's a major takeaway is that from the beginning, the representation of the event has to bring in witness from the people closest to the calamity. Scotty Parrish, thank you so much for speaking with me today on American History Tellers. It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

That was my conversation with Professor Susan Scott Parrish. Her book, The Flood Year, 1927, is available now from Princeton University Press. From Wondery, this is the fourth and final episode of Great Mississippi Flood from American History Tellers. Next on American History Tellers, we'll be re-airing a listener favorite, The Age of Jackson, a series that tells the story of early 19th century America's most influential figure, war hero turned president, Andrew Jackson. After that, we'll be back with a brand new seven-part series about the calamity that followed the age of Jackson, the Civil War. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now

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