Rising Tide. Part 23

The strategy was decided. They would argue that since in the past states and local levee boards had outspent the federal government, the local contribution had already been made. Thus waiving local contributions in this instance would not set a precedent; it would simply give credit for money already spent.

They then moved on to the final issue, the scope of the bill. On this point they disagreed. Martineau wanted a broad bill to include tributaries. One reason was parochial; many of his state's problems came not from the Mississippi itself but from its tributaries, chiefly the Arkansas, White, and St. Francis Rivers. He also argued: "I believe we have a better chance politically if we take the whole of the Mississippi and all of its tributaries.... [The more] troubles you take care of in this bill, the more support you will have for it, provided you can get enough troubles to take care of to have the support of a majority of the Congress."

But such a project would be immense. Hoover objected, warning: "What I am trying to do is cut off the flood plain of Kansas, Illinois, Tennessee, and other places.... Pittsburgh is getting ready to attach themselves and Kansas is getting ready. North Dakota has got a scheme and they are all going to be right down hanging them on your hatracks.... I am afraid the whole country will rebel against an enormous program." Certainly, Coolidge would rebel. If they pursued too comprehensive a bill, they would get nothing. Then Hoover rea.s.sured Martineau that a narrow bill would protect his state: "All of the overflows in Arkansas would come within my definition of the flood plain of the lower Mississippi.... It is a well defined flood plain from an engineering standpoint."

Martineau did not yield. He argued that if they limited the bill they would be seen as selfish. That too could lead to the defeat of legislation.

Once again Butler stepped in with a solution. The War Department was developing a flood control plan that would cover only the lower Mississippi. The War Department would be the ones narrowing the bill, eliminating help elsewhere, and making enemies. Butler suggested that if everyone in the room agreed to use the War Department plan as the framework for legislation, they would have clean hands. "It seems to me," he said, "that is our answer: 'This isn't our bill, this is a bill that was investigated and is what the engineers are now ready to do....' We may have to promise support on some bill but that won't be a part of our bill. Deal with the flood plain of the lower Mississippi and take on such additional things as expediency might demand.... Suppose the Illinois River comes along with a meritorious claim from the standpoint of votes, it can be tacked on, if it is necessary and expedient to do it."

"I agree with Mr. Butler," Hoover said. So did Percy.

Finally, Martineau too yielded. There were no more issues to resolve, since they did not intend to involve themselves in technical engineering issues. Now they had only to spread their message. Percy noted, "The U.S. Chamber of Commerce have fixed a committee meeting in New York to formulate plans. I am on that committee."

Martineau mentioned that the executive committee of the Chicago conference had also scheduled a meeting to formulate a legislative strategy and pointed out, "Senator Percy is on that."

So were Hecht and Thomson, whom Butler would speak to. With Percy they would convince both groups to unite behind what had just been agreed to. So in this room in Arkansas these half-dozen men, none of whom served in Congress, had largely decided the fate of the most comprehensive and expensive piece of legislation Congress had ever considered.

It had taken barely half an hour.

THE PATH was not smooth, but legislation moved down it. In the fall of 1927, Butler and Percy began spending weeks at a time in Was.h.i.+ngton, both of them staying at the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue a few blocks above the White House and the War Department. The governor of Mississippi designated Percy, not any elected representative, to speak officially for the state. Repeatedly, they saw the secretary of war and Coolidge himself, and were rea.s.sured. Also in the fall, Jim Thomson, uninvited by Butler, simply moved to Was.h.i.+ngton with his wife, Genevieve, both of them comfortable there, moving in the highest congressional circles. But Thomson was still not one of the insiders in New Orleans, and though he had spent almost six years pus.h.i.+ng the White House, the War Department, and Congress on river issues, he was reduced, he confessed angrily, to "following what I interpret to be the lines suggested in newspaper interviews by Messrs. Hecht and Butler." Yet despite his displeasure, he too devoted his lobbying energies to supporting the plan decided upon by Hoover, Percy, Butler, and Martineau. was not smooth, but legislation moved down it. In the fall of 1927, Butler and Percy began spending weeks at a time in Was.h.i.+ngton, both of them staying at the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue a few blocks above the White House and the War Department. The governor of Mississippi designated Percy, not any elected representative, to speak officially for the state. Repeatedly, they saw the secretary of war and Coolidge himself, and were rea.s.sured. Also in the fall, Jim Thomson, uninvited by Butler, simply moved to Was.h.i.+ngton with his wife, Genevieve, both of them comfortable there, moving in the highest congressional circles. But Thomson was still not one of the insiders in New Orleans, and though he had spent almost six years pus.h.i.+ng the White House, the War Department, and Congress on river issues, he was reduced, he confessed angrily, to "following what I interpret to be the lines suggested in newspaper interviews by Messrs. Hecht and Butler." Yet despite his displeasure, he too devoted his lobbying energies to supporting the plan decided upon by Hoover, Percy, Butler, and Martineau.

Everything was coordinated. As one strategy doc.u.ment noted, "The first three days [of congressional hearings] will be devoted to a mammoth demonstration that the business interests of the United States demand that Congress give flood control legislation rights-of-way over everything." On a daily basis Butler, Percy, or Thomson met with the Senate leaders.h.i.+p and senators from their own states, and, in the House, with Frank Reid of Illinois, chairman of the House Flood Control Committee, or Louisiana's Riley Wilson, the committee's ranking Democrat, whom Butler and other New Orleans financial leaders now were supporting for governor.

The only obstacle was the White House and the Corps of Engineers. Representing Coolidge, Jadwin submitted a proposal developed by the Army that became known as "the Jadwin Plan." It was the least expensive proposal, and therefore Coolidge liked it, but the chief engineer of every single levee board on the lower Mississippi signed a letter attacking it, and 94 percent of the 300 witnesses who testified before the House criticized it. In his own House testimony, Jadwin dismissed all the criticism, and all competing ideas, contemptuously. One congressman asked, "You do not expect us to accept any plan simply because you present it, and to shut our minds to any other thoughts?"

"Yes," Jadwin answered bluntly. "I think you ought to do it."

The members shook their heads incredulously. Then Representative Will Whittington, from the Delta, observed that information Jadwin had given the committee stated that the Mississippi River in its natural state, without any levees, did not flood the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. Whittington inquired, "Am I to be told that [the Delta] is not subject to overflow from any floods of the Mississippi River?...As a matter of history, is not that entire Yazoo basin subject to overflow from the floods of the Mississippi River?"

Jadwin said, "The [data] is the best authority I have on that, Judge, and that indicates that it is not subject to overflow in its natural state."

Whittington guffawed. "That is news to us."

But Butler's warning had been prescient. The Jadwin plan, for all its meanness, was proving useful in focusing the attention of the Congress on the lower Mississippi alone. It seemed that each of the thirty-one states whose rivers drained into the Mississippi wanted something. Even states whose waterways did not drain into the Mississippi wanted something. A California congressman said, "Coming from the Imperial valley, [far] below the uncontrolled waters of the Colorado River, I have an appreciation of the menace of floods as great as anyone in Congress...[but] the Boulder Dam project is not going to be used to embarra.s.s or hara.s.s you in the advancement of your legislation." The audience applauded and stamped its feet in approval. He continued, "We expect to give to your problem of the Mississippi the same sympathetic and earnest and helpful consideration that we expect you of the Mississippi Valley to give to the problems of other parts of the country when they in turn are presented to Congress."

The Jadwin Plan kept the bill narrow, and Coolidge was threatening to veto broader legislation. Slowly, the bill advanced. Finally, on March 28, 1928, a bill Butler and Percy supported came to a vote in the Senate. In less than an hour and a half it pa.s.sed unanimously, even though it called for "the greatest expenditure the government has undertaken except in the World War," the New York Times New York Times reported. "For a measure of such importance, concededly one of the most important before Congress in years, the speed with which the Senate acted is believed to be a record.... Today, however, the wheels were greased and the leaders of the two parties demanded quick action and got it." reported. "For a measure of such importance, concededly one of the most important before Congress in years, the speed with which the Senate acted is believed to be a record.... Today, however, the wheels were greased and the leaders of the two parties demanded quick action and got it."

But while the House and Senate ironed out differences, Coolidge promised to veto any bill that did not require local contribution. For the next six weeks Congress fought with Coolidge over the question. The Times Times wrote that "President Coolidge has never shown as much opposition to a measure pending in Congress than he has to this." The wrote that "President Coolidge has never shown as much opposition to a measure pending in Congress than he has to this." The Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal said, "The White House has been stirred as seldom or never before.... Now there emerges a new portrait of the Chief Executive-in quite belligerent outline and color." said, "The White House has been stirred as seldom or never before.... Now there emerges a new portrait of the Chief Executive-in quite belligerent outline and color."

The situation required a final exertion of influence. Every interest in the Mississippi valley applied pressure. Butler, Hecht, and Percy helped those outside the valley see that it was in their interest to apply pressure as well. Levee boards owed $819,642,000 in bonds, and repayment would be jeopardized if the region's economy did not recover. The Investment Bankers a.s.sociation of America lobbied intensely for the president to sign the bill, and the American Bankers a.s.sociation resolved: "The disastrous flood that visited the Mississippi Valley in 1927 is by far the most overwhelmingly destructive calamity experienced by our country in generations.... It is the profound conviction of the American Bankers a.s.sociation representing 20,000 American banks that the control of the Mississippi River is a national problem, should be solved by the nation, and that, cost no matter what it may be, should be borne exclusively by the nation. The bill...should be enacted into law without further delay."

Coolidge finally relented. He accepted the argument Butler had advanced in Hot Springs, and announced that in consideration of the moneys already paid by states and local governments, he would waive further contributions by them. The total cost of the plan was set at $300 million, but even those citing that estimate conceded that the real cost would run to $1 billion.

On May 15, 1928, Coolidge finished his lunch and was about to leave for a vacation. His secretary reminded him that he had promised to sign the bill before leaving the city, handed it to him, and he signed it. There was no ceremony, no commemorative pens, no gathering of smiling congressmen and senators and interested parties and photographers.

Still, the event did not pa.s.s unnoticed. Declared Illinois Congressman Frank Reid, a gritty man who had resisted White House pressure for weeks and generally disliked hyperbole: "The bill changes the policy of the federal government which has existed for 150 years. It is perhaps the greatest engineering feat the world has ever known.... It is the greatest piece of legislation ever enacted by Congress."

The law had many flaws. Civilian engineers condemned it with virtual unanimity both for its engineering and its policy of n.i.g.g.ardly compensation for use of private land, and Hoover privately "unburdened" himself that it exemplified "the viciousness of Army engineers." Yet the men who controlled the lower Mississippi valley embraced it anyway. They would fix what required fixing later; the law would be changed almost continuously over the next ten years. More important, the law declared that the federal government took full responsibility for the Mississippi River.

In so doing, even in the narrowest sense, the law set a precedent of direct, comprehensive, and vastly expanded federal involvement in local affairs. In the broadest sense, this precedent reflected a major s.h.i.+ft in what Americans considered the proper role and obligations of the national government, a s.h.i.+ft that both presaged and prepared the way for far greater changes that would soon come.

THE DAY AFTER Coolidge signed the bill into law, the board of directors of the Ca.n.a.l Bank met in Room 326, where so much had happened, voted for a resolution of thanks to James Pierce Butler, and heaped praise on him. He was visibly moved and replied: "I did not expect this action on the Board's part.... I possibly have been away more than I can reconcile, but I was in the fight and I felt that I had to see it through. I want to thank you for all that you said and to say that I will never let another matter take me away from my very pleasant duties at the Bank as much as this work has done." Later the Coolidge signed the bill into law, the board of directors of the Ca.n.a.l Bank met in Room 326, where so much had happened, voted for a resolution of thanks to James Pierce Butler, and heaped praise on him. He was visibly moved and replied: "I did not expect this action on the Board's part.... I possibly have been away more than I can reconcile, but I was in the fight and I felt that I had to see it through. I want to thank you for all that you said and to say that I will never let another matter take me away from my very pleasant duties at the Bank as much as this work has done." Later the New Orleans Times-Picayune New Orleans Times-Picayune would award Butler its Loving Cup, given annually to the person who did the most for the city in the year. would award Butler its Loving Cup, given annually to the person who did the most for the city in the year.

Meanwhile, New Orleans Mayor Arthur O'Keefe, the 300-pound ward heeler and grocer, declared that the coming Sunday should be a day of thanksgiving and prayer in the city. A special Te Deum was sung in St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter, and special services were held at the St. Charles Christian Church uptown, at Christ Church in the Garden District, and at dozens of other churches and synagogues. It was rumored that the minister at Trinity Church would ask the congregation to applaud and thank James Thomson, who had just returned to the city from seven months in Was.h.i.+ngton lobbying full-time for the legislation. Thomson almost never attended church but did this Sunday. The minister spoke of the bill but did not mention him. Thomson sat silently as the service closed, then left quickly with his wife, saying nothing.

A week after the bill was signed, Congressman Reid joined the swashbuckling and corrupt Chicago Mayor Big Bill Thompson on a trip to New Orleans. A crowd estimated in the thousands greeted them, sirens and steamboat whistles sounded salutes, the police and fire department's bra.s.s bands played, and the crowd-turned out by the city's political machine-cheered. Reid said that without Jim Thomson there would have been no bill.

For Reid there would be an evening banquet in his honor attended by five hundred people, a reception at the elegant City Hall, a reception at Thomson's paper, and a cruise of Lake Pontchartrain on a yacht. There was no invitation to dine at the Boston Club.

But the power of the clubs had already waned, although perhaps no one at Reid's banquet yet realized it. Reid and Big Bill had arrived in New Orleans at seven-fifty on Monday evening, May 20, having attended the inauguration of the governor in Baton Rouge earlier in the day. The governor was not Simpson, nor Riley Wilson, the congressman who had bet his political future on the flood control bill and Butler's support. The new governor was Huey Long.

LONG REPRESENTED a new kind of flood, an inundation that the city had never faced before. Butler informed Hecht, Dufour, and Monroe that he "had had a talk with Mr. Long, who seemed to have some wrong impressions about certain features both as to the facts and the law" regarding the dynamiting of the levee and the situation in St. Bernard and Plaquemines. Nothing changed regarding those payments, but the equation of power s.h.i.+fted. The two parishes, which shared a congressional seat with New Orleans, supported Long in everything he did and helped him wrest control even of city affairs from the city. a new kind of flood, an inundation that the city had never faced before. Butler informed Hecht, Dufour, and Monroe that he "had had a talk with Mr. Long, who seemed to have some wrong impressions about certain features both as to the facts and the law" regarding the dynamiting of the levee and the situation in St. Bernard and Plaquemines. Nothing changed regarding those payments, but the equation of power s.h.i.+fted. The two parishes, which shared a congressional seat with New Orleans, supported Long in everything he did and helped him wrest control even of city affairs from the city.*

The bankers, the lawyers, the members of the Boston Club and Comus and Momus and Rex and the other Carnival krewes, suddenly found themselves confounded by Long, who treated them as they had treated St. Bernard. They despised him. In the evenings they literally sat around their drawing rooms discussing ways to murder him. He laughed and stripped them of power and forced New Orleans to its knees. Once the Board of Liquidation, led by Monroe, told him they could not approve a bond issue he wanted because, it informed him, it had discovered a technicality that would make the issue illegal. Long replied that if that was the case, then their new discovery must apply to bonds already issued, and therefore they need not be repaid. The board went into executive session, studied the question anew, and found that it had been in error.

Meanwhile, Jim Thomson never stopped trying to help the city or work himself into its inside; in a successful effort to generate money, publicity, and tourists, he was largely responsible for creating the Sugar Bowl. But he was never invited to join the Boston Club or the Louisiana Club, or any of the exclusive Carnival krewes. Despite the violent objections of his editor, he had his two papers support Huey Long; in return state employees had to subscribe to his papers. Supporting Long only confirmed his outsider status. Years later a friend asked him one of those questions that usually elicit a joke, and sometimes a longing: if he had his life to live over, what would he do differently? Bitterly Thomson replied, "I'd never have come to New Orleans."

WHEN THE FLOOD CONTROL LAW pa.s.sed, the New Orleans a.s.sociation of Commerce planned a campaign to guide the coming boom, the boom so certain to follow. New Orleans had once been the wealthiest city in America, and a.s.sociation members were confident it would be again. But the city did not boom. Instead came decline, and the first to fall were the banks. pa.s.sed, the New Orleans a.s.sociation of Commerce planned a campaign to guide the coming boom, the boom so certain to follow. New Orleans had once been the wealthiest city in America, and a.s.sociation members were confident it would be again. But the city did not boom. Instead came decline, and the first to fall were the banks.

The first collapse was of the Marine Bank. Leonidas Pool, once Rex, was Marine's president; he had gotten Isaac Cline to convince the governor to dynamite the levee, and he had been one of those visited by men from St. Bernard carrying shotguns just before the dynamiting. Pool had gambled millions of dollars in loans to sugar plantations early in 1927. The flood made his "sugar paper," as he called it, worthless. In June 1928, on a Sat.u.r.day night without any advance notice, the Ca.n.a.l and Marine Banks "merged." Pool died soon after. His daughter, who went to live in Greenville among the people her father had called "the aristocrats of the earth," said the bank failure and the flood killed him.

Butler's Ca.n.a.l Bank, already the South's largest, grew even larger after the merger. But its growth was like the swelling around an infection; Pool's losses were too large for even it to absorb. When the Depression hit, it reeled. In 1931 its board reelected Butler president, then less than one month later, under the command of a controlling faction representing Chase Manhattan, it ousted him. Butler returned to Natchez, to his family's plantation. He too died young. George Champion, later president of Chase Manhattan, ran the bank, but even he could not save it. It closed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE.

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

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

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

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

It began with a deal made with white Mississippi Republicans at the national convention, a deal known to Hoover when he talked with Moton. The white Mississippians had sought credentials. Instead, an a.s.sistant attorney general who chaired the credentials committee seated Perry Howard, a black Republican national committeeman from Mississippi who supported Hoover and was well known nationally. But the whites did not protest. A few weeks later the same a.s.sistant attorney general who had seated Howard indicted him for selling patronage jobs. (A white Mississippi jury later acquitted him.) The incident, combined with continued attacks from the Chicago Defender Chicago Defender on Hoover's role in flood relief, aroused anger among blacks. Barnett and Holsey were traveling through states where the black vote was of consequence and took note of "uncertainty in many sections as to [Hoover's] att.i.tude toward the Negro in the Mississippi disaster." They warned that a campaign aimed at shoring up support should begin immediately, or "there will be a heavy defection in the Negro vote." on Hoover's role in flood relief, aroused anger among blacks. Barnett and Holsey were traveling through states where the black vote was of consequence and took note of "uncertainty in many sections as to [Hoover's] att.i.tude toward the Negro in the Mississippi disaster." They warned that a campaign aimed at shoring up support should begin immediately, or "there will be a heavy defection in the Negro vote."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By early 1928 the exodus of blacks from Was.h.i.+ngton County, and likely the rest of the Delta, did reach 50 percent. Ever since the end of Reconstruction, blacks had been migrating north and west, out of the South. But it had been only a slow drain, with the South losing about 200,000 blacks between 1900 and 1910. During World War I "the Great Migration" began; the South lost 522,000 blacks between 1910 and 1920, mostly between 1916 and 1919. Now from the floodplain of the Mississippi River, from Arkansas, from Louisiana, from Mississippi, blacks were heading north in even larger numbers. In the 1920s, 872,000 more blacks left the South than returned to it. (In the 1930s the exodus fell off sharply; the number of blacks leaving Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi fell by nearly two-thirds, back to the levels of the early 1900s.) The favorite destination for Delta blacks was Chicago. They brought the blues to that city, and there the black population exploded, from 44,103 in 1910 to 109,458 in 1920-and 233,903 in 1930. Certainly not all of this exodus came from the floodplain of the Mississippi River. And even within that alluvial empire, the great flood of 1927 was hardly the only reason for blacks to abandon their homes. But for tens of thousands of blacks in the Delta of the Mississippi River, the flood was the final reason.

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

Again, Will fled. While his parents grieved, he traveled to the Grand Canyon. He remained there for months. Shortly after he returned, in October 1929, his mother died. Three days later, Will and his father went to the resort of French Lick, Indiana; it was a family favorite, only this time it held no life. On their return LeRoy became ill. Will took him off the train and rushed him to Memphis Baptist Hospital. An old friend who visited him there laughed, "I never expected to find you among the Baptists," and later recalled, "I think that was the last time he ever smiled."

LeRoy improved enough to return to Greenville but remained morose. He hardly ate, hardly spoke. President Hoover sent condolences for his wife's death and added, "I am happy to know that you are making so good a recovery." But he was not recovering. His old colleague John Sharp Williams, the warrior who had vanquished Vardaman so many years before and who had finally retired from the Senate, spoke of his own determination to remain in this world "even if only on its outskirts" and pleaded with LeRoy to keep him company.

LeRoy would not. In his home full of echoes, he and his son waited for death. On Christmas Eve, 1929, LeRoy Percy, son of the Gray Eagle, died quietly. With his pa.s.sing, a time in history also pa.s.sed.

All of white Greenville fell into deep mourning. But blacks told each other that on his deathbed he had said, "No matter what you do, keep your foot on the black moccasin's head. If you take it off he's going to crawl away."

AFTER HIS FATHER'S DEATH Will wrote: "One of the pleasantest places near the home town is its cemetery. I come here not infrequently because it is restful and comforting. I am with my own people." Will wrote: "One of the pleasantest places near the home town is its cemetery. I come here not infrequently because it is restful and comforting. I am with my own people."

Will had always found comfort in the past, about which he could weave a personal mythology, rather than with the present or future, which required him to engage realities. His father's death gave him both an object of devotion, and freedom. He escaped into himself less now; it had perhaps become less necessary. He had always been prolific, but since the flood he had written hardly any poems. Now he stopped altogether.

In the cemetery he built a shrine; in the midst of the Depression, at a cost of $25,000, he commissioned Malvina Hoffman to sculpt a statue of a knight standing in armor and mail weary and subdued, yet unvanquished, his hands resting upon a great broadsword. A tablet quotes a poem by Matthew Arnold: "They outtalked thee, hissed thee, tore thee.../ Charge once more then and be dumb! / Let the victors, when they come, / When the forts of folly fall, / Find thy body by the wall!"

It was now Will's responsibility to live honorably. His cousin's widow and her three children moved from Birmingham into the Percy home, now Will's alone, and after her death-perhaps another suicide, perhaps an unpremeditated but opportunistic seizing of death, or perhaps simply an accident-Will adopted the three children, his cousins, Walker, LeRoy, and Phinizy. He was still nothing like his father. But his house was full. His father's allies continued as his allies. He had the power of money; in one Depression year, a time when a family could live well on $1,500 a year, his personal checkbook balance ranged as high as $19,829 and never fell below $3,700. And he began to come into his own largeness.

For Will was a large man, only in different ways than his father had been large. His father had once said, "Hypocrisy is the pet vice of Americans, and bunk their favorite diet." Will's life became not hypocritical but paradoxical. As his adopted son Walker, the novelist, said, "Though he loved his home country, he had to leave often to keep loving it." He traveled constantly to escape the Delta and also brought the outside world to the Delta. Unhappy with the pedestrian views of the existing newspaper-even though its owner had supported his father in the Klan fight and him during the flood-he recruited Hodding Carter and his wife, Betty Werlein Carter, to start a new newspaper that soon took over the older one, and later became a national symbol of heroic journalism. His house became a salon, choked with artifacts and objets d'art from Italy, j.a.pan, Tahiti. An enormous Capehart record player sat in the living room; it was designed, although it rarely worked, to automatically lift records and turn them over. Dorothy Parker visited, William Faulkner visited, Stephen Vincent Benet visited, even Langston Hughes, the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, visited. (Will introduced him by saying Hughes had "risen above race," but Hughes then proceeded to read, Walker Percy recalled, "the most ideologically aggressive poetry you can imagine.") Will lent his weight to other battles too. As the thirties moved into darkness, he opposed Oscar Johnston's efforts to sell surplus cotton to the j.a.panese, protesting: "To furnish [j.a.pan] with munitions of war is the rankest form of stupidity...[and] so completely indecent I don't understand it.... The most dangerous doctrine that can be taught in our country is the doctrine now being taught by Oscar Johnston, that is America will carry on as usual after the Allies are defeated and will do business with Germany."

Then there were the blacks. Everything in the Delta always came back to the blacks. Will patronized blacks in ways his father would not have considered, failed to understand them in ways his father could not have. Once several black ministers asked him for a contribution to build a Negro YMCA. Will offered to help build a beautiful facility on one condition: that Greenville Negroes combined their nearly fifty Baptist churches into one. He did not hear from them again. "Their virtues, to Mr. Will, had almost nothing to do with freedom," Shelby Foote recalled. "It had to do with dignity, and suffering injustice in a better way than most people can."

Yet in his own way, Will s.h.i.+elded blacks as his father would have. In 1937 the Mississippi River rose again and tested the new flood control plan. Ultimately, the river was contained, but while it was rising, whites wanted to call out the National Guard to protect the levees and keep blacks working on them. Will prevented it. He recalled the brutality of the Guard in 1927 and warned: "If the Negroes of this county knew the guards were coming, there would be a general exodus.... I have pledged them I would do all in my power to keep the National Guards out of the county now and during a flood as long as they behave like decent citizens."

He protected black suspects from beatings by the police, even winning damages for at least one victim. He wrote contracts for his sharecroppers on Trail Lake, his plantation, ordered that they be treated decently (his foreman largely ignored his order), and even proposed that the federal government perform audits to see that sharecroppers were not cheated. He defended that proposal to another planter, arguing that "dishonesty practiced by landlords in this section in their settlements with their tenants...is widespread and disruptive of interracial relations...making the tenant distrust or even hate the white man."

And when black men had s.e.x with willing white women, Will protected those blacks too, seeing that they were only hustled out of Greenville and not whipped or lynched. The white men had their black wh.o.r.es on Blanton Street, but the entire white Delta s.h.i.+vered at the possibility of a white woman desiring, submitting to, a black man. For at issue was not only love and pleasure but power; in the sultriness of the Delta, s.e.x represented everything.

Always Will had hated this part of himself, the part he had discovered in Europe and written about so long before: To think n.o.bility like mine could be / Flawed-shattered utterly-and by... / A slim, brown shepherd boy with windy eyes / And spring upon his mouth! /...and I, who, most of all the world, / Loved purity and loathed l.u.s.t, / Became the mark of my own scorning To think n.o.bility like mine could be / Flawed-shattered utterly-and by... / A slim, brown shepherd boy with windy eyes / And spring upon his mouth! /...and I, who, most of all the world, / Loved purity and loathed l.u.s.t, / Became the mark of my own scorning. He had always had desires. He had not indulged them in Greenville but his father was dead, and perhaps his father was appeased by the sculpture by his grave.

Rumors about Will spread through his town. He preferred the women and garden clubs to men and hunting, or poker, or golf. He took young men, both white and black, on trips to Europe and Tahiti, or bought them cars, paid for their flying lessons. "You know he never married," people said of him, raising their eyebrows.

Some rumors were not acceptable. The rumors said that blacks had a power over Will. That his chauffeurs, young black men, showed their power to him. One, Ford Atkins, he had called my only tie with Pan and the Satyrs and all earth creatures who smile suns.h.i.+ne and ask no questions and understand my only tie with Pan and the Satyrs and all earth creatures who smile suns.h.i.+ne and ask no questions and understand. Atkins' mother was Will's cook; she became sullen and alcoholic, and he fired her. When Ford once addressed him in a way that was too familiar, Will instantly fired him too. Soon he hired a chauffeur named Senator Canada whose nickname "Honey" came from his charm, not his skin color. Honey had jet black skin, flas.h.i.+ng teeth, and wore a mink tie. There were rumors about Will and Honey too. Honey spread them himself, going into the poolroom on Nelson Street, parking Percy's enormous black car by the door, and shooting pool. Outside, it was said, Will lay on the floor in the backseat to avoid being seen. Then Honey said, "I got to take my who' home," laughed, dropped his pool cue, got into the car, and drove away.