Rising Tide. Part 24

THE FIRST SENTENCE of Will Percy's autobiography of Will Percy's autobiography Lanterns on the Levee Lanterns on the Levee reads, "My country is the Mississippi Delta, the river country." The river had created the Delta, and the white man-the Percys and men like them-had brought the blacks to the Delta to clear it and tame it and transform it into an empire. Together they had done that. They had built that empire. reads, "My country is the Mississippi Delta, the river country." The river had created the Delta, and the white man-the Percys and men like them-had brought the blacks to the Delta to clear it and tame it and transform it into an empire. Together they had done that. They had built that empire.

Will believed he was watching that empire disintegrate. Near the end of his autobiography, completed only months before his death in 1941, he wrote: "The old Southern way of life in which I had been reared existed no more and its values were ignored or derided. A tarnish has fallen over the bright world; dishonor and corruption triumph; my own strong people have become lotus-eaters; defeat is here again, the last, the most abhorrent."

He seemed to accept that defeat, if only because he accepted the absurd and, finally, himself. The final chapter of his autobiography is t.i.tled "Home," and it is about the cemetery. He wrote: "I wish a few others out there, under the cedars, could be in this plot of ours.... I should like to bring from that far corner where the poor sleep well one brown-eyed lad who sleeps alone there, for he had loved me." Then he wrote, "I know that the wickedness and the failures of men are nothing and their valor and pathos and effort everything."

A SOCIETY SOCIETY does not change in sudden jumps. Rather, it moves in multiple small steps along a broad front. Most of these steps are parallel if not quite simultaneous; some advance farther than others, and some even move in an opposite direction. The movement rather resembles that of an amoeba, with one part of the body extending itself outward, then another, even while the main body stays back, until enough of the ma.s.s has s.h.i.+fted to move the entire body. does not change in sudden jumps. Rather, it moves in multiple small steps along a broad front. Most of these steps are parallel if not quite simultaneous; some advance farther than others, and some even move in an opposite direction. The movement rather resembles that of an amoeba, with one part of the body extending itself outward, then another, even while the main body stays back, until enough of the ma.s.s has s.h.i.+fted to move the entire body.

The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 forced many small steps. Even in the narrowest and most direct sense the flood's legacy was felt in Was.h.i.+ngton, in New Orleans, in Greenville, in every community along the banks of the Mississippi River and its tributary rivers, and in the nation's black community. Even in terms of just physical issues, the 1927 flood created a legacy of new problems that engineers must deal with today. But the flood also left a far larger, if more ambiguous and less tangible, legacy.

Like the blues music born in the Delta, languid and roiling at the same time, it penetrated to the core of the nation, washed away surface, and revealed the nation's character. Then it tested that character and changed it. It marked the end of a way of seeing the world, and possibly the end of that world itself.

It s.h.i.+fted perceptions of the role and responsibility of the federal government-calling for a great expansion-and shattered the myth of a quasi-feudal bond between Delta blacks and the southern aristocracy, in which the former pledged fealty to the latter in return for protection. It accelerated the great migration of blacks north. And it altered both southern and national politics. The changes would not all come quickly. But they would come.

In 1927 the Mississippi River had gone coursing once again over the land it had created, reclaiming the empire the Percys had taken. Then the waters left. In their wake black Delta sharecroppers looked north to Chicago and west to Los Angeles, and out onto the freshly replenished fields. There, in the fields, the Mississippi had deposited one more layer of earth upon the land.

Appendix:

THE RIVER TODAY.

TODAY what the Corps of Engineers calls "Project Flood" protects the lower Mississippi River valley from a flood considerably greater, the Corps says, than that of 1927. In its present form this plan has finally ended in compromise the great and bitter rivalry of James Eads, Andrew Humphreys, and Charles Ellet begun so long ago. But the plan itself has created a major new problem, and it also has serious flaws. what the Corps of Engineers calls "Project Flood" protects the lower Mississippi River valley from a flood considerably greater, the Corps says, than that of 1927. In its present form this plan has finally ended in compromise the great and bitter rivalry of James Eads, Andrew Humphreys, and Charles Ellet begun so long ago. But the plan itself has created a major new problem, and it also has serious flaws.

Over the years Project Flood has undergone many changes, but its engineering backbone remains the original 1928 law, the Jadwin Plan, which set standards for levees far higher and thicker than those of 1927, but did not rely on levees alone. Instead, it embodied the chief principle articulated by Ellet, that the river cannot be contained within levees. So in addition the Corps has built reservoirs on several Mississippi tributaries, and also allows the Mississippi itself room to spread out through a series of various flood control features.

On the main river, the plan's northernmost flood control feature is a "floodway," essentially a parallel river 5 miles wide and 65 miles long, running from Birds Point, Missouri, south to New Madrid, Missouri. The river enters it through a "fuse-plug" levee, a levee lower than those surrounding it that is designed to blow out in a great flood. (If it holds, the Corps will dynamite it.) This floodway diverts a maximum flow of 550,000 cubic feet of water per second. It has been used only once, in 1937. At New Madrid the water returns to the Mississippi.

For the next 250 miles of river, to the mouth of the Arkansas, the Jadwin Plan originally called for only stronger levees to contain the water. At the mouth of the Arkansas, where in 1927 the river carried its greatest volume, Jadwin wanted to build a second, ma.s.sive floodway that would have run for 155 miles and inundated 1.3 million acres, in effect duplicating the natural flooding that had occurred before the Corps closed the Cypress Creek outlet in 1921. Not surprisingly, this plan aroused intense opposition in Arkansas and Louisiana, intense enough to force a search for another solution.

Eads had one. He had always insisted that shortening the river by making "cutoffs," cutting across the neck of horseshoe bends, would move water much faster and thus lower flood heights. For decades the Corps and most civilian engineers had rejected Eads' argument, but after the 1927 flood William Elam, an engineer for the levee board in Greenville, took up Eads' call. The Corps and the Mississippi River Commission resisted, but Hoover, then president, was convinced that the proposal deserved a test. When Jadwin retired in 1929, the secretary of war recommended ten different men as chief of engineers. Hoover refused to nominate any of them and finally hand-picked the man he wanted, General Lytle Brown. The hydraulics laboratory previously opposed by the Corps was built, and tests there and observations of a natural cutoff confirmed Eads' predictions. In the 1930s and 1940s the Mississippi River Commission made cutoffs that shortened the river by more than 150 miles, largely by eliminating a series of sharp curves called "the Greenville bends." The cutoffs worked dramatically, and lowered flood heights 15 feet, obviating the need for the floodway that Jadwin had proposed.

The next feature of Project Flood appears at a point called Old River, halfway between Natchez and Baton Rouge, where the Atchafalaya begins to flow from the Mississippi to the sea. Here, Project Flood is designed to handle its maximum flow of 3,030,000 cubic feet per second by dividing the water.

To direct this flow, the Corps built the Old River Control Structure and, 20 miles south, the Morganza floodway, immense ma.s.ses of concrete and steel designed to divert approximately 600,000 cfs each into the Atchafalaya. In 1963 a ma.s.sive dam sealed off the natural flow between the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya; since then the Old River structure has controlled the flow between the two rivers. The Morganza structure has been opened only once, in the 1973 flood.

In total, Project Flood sends 1,500,000 cfs-the water diverted from the Mississippi plus all the flow of the Red River-down the Atchafalaya River, and two floodways that parallel it, to the sea. The plan allows 1,500,000 cfs to continue down the Mississippi toward New Orleans. This exactly reverses the old policy called for by the levees-only theory; prior to the 1927 flood, the Corps of Engineers had planned to separate the Atchafalaya entirely from the Mississippi, and send all flood water past New Orleans.

The final flood control feature is a concrete spillway at Bonnet Carre, 30 miles above New Orleans, designed to subtract a final 250,000 cfs from the Mississippi when it is in flood; guide levees direct the outflow across 7 miles of land into Lake Pontchartrain. This spillway was first used in 1937, when it carried 318,000 cfs, the most it has ever handled; it was also opened in 1945, 1950, 1973, 1975, 1979, and 1983. According to plan, then, no more than 1,250,000 cfs will pa.s.s the city of New Orleans.

But Project Flood has several weak spots, and its solutions have created at least one new problem. First, the Corps claims its plans will handle a flood greater than that of 1927, 11 percent greater in the vicinity of the Mounds Landing creva.s.se. This claim is based on the Corps' official 1927 reading of 2,544,000 cfs at the mouth of the Arkansas. In fact, James Kemper and several other civilian engineers independently measured the flow there at over 3,000,000 cfs. Even Army engineers, before being ordered by Jadwin to design an inexpensive plan, unofficially put the flow at over 3,000,000 cfs. This flow exceeds the design capacity of Project Flood by more than 100,000 cfs.

In addition, the levee system falls short of its design specifications. In 1996 there were 1,608 miles of main-stem Mississippi levees; 304 miles of those levees did not meet the design height. Most of these low levees fell only 1 to 2 feet below grade, but several miles of the levee system between Greenville and Vicksburg, on both the east and west banks, fell 6 feet short.

Another problem exists with the cutoffs. The river has not accepted them as final. In the fifty years since cutoffs shortened the river by 150 miles, the river has regained roughly one-third of that length and eroded some of the benefits.

But the greatest problem by far is the Atchafalaya, which offers a much shorter route to the sea, and a steeper slope, than the main channel of the Mississippi. The 1927 flood sent vast amounts of water down it, scouring it out, deepening it, building a channel capable of accommodating-and hungry for-far more water than it had ever carried. Project Flood puts even more water down it. Kemper warned that "the inevitable consequence" of this approach would be that the Atchafalaya "will soon become the main stream [of the Mississippi], and the river past New Orleans a deteriorating outlet."

Kemper was not merely theorizing. The mouth of the Mississippi River has s.h.i.+fted many times. Twenty-five years after his warning, it became obvious that he was right, and in 1954 Congress pa.s.sed emergency legislation to give the Corps money to prevent the Atchafalaya from claiming the entire Mississippi River. Keeping the Mississippi in its old channel has become by far the most serious engineering problem the Corps of Engineers faces. The Old River Control Structure was built to solve it, but the 1973 flood almost destroyed the structure by scouring out a hole 75 feet underwater that came close to causing its collapse. Many engineers believe that sooner or later, no matter what man does, the Mississippi will s.h.i.+ft its channel to the Atchafalaya. And a finger of the sea will climb north past New Orleans, north to Baton Rouge.

So the story ends as it began, with man determined to a.s.sert his will over the river.

Notes.

ABBREVIATIONS OF F FREQUENTLY C CITED S SOURCES.

AAH.

Andrew Atkinson Humphreys AAHP.

Andrew Atkinson Humphreys Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia ACP.

a.s.sociation of Commerce Papers, Special Collections, Earl Long Library, University of New Orleans ALP.

James B. Eads, Addresses, Letters, and Papers of James B. Eads Addresses, Letters, and Papers of James B. Eads CBP.

Claude Barnett Papers, Chicago Historical Society CP.

Caplan Papers, Louisiana State Museum, History Division, New Orleans D&PLCP.

Delta & Pine Land Company Papers, Special Collections, Mitch.e.l.l Library, Mississippi State University, Starkville ECHPC.

Emergency Clearing House Publicity Committee, in Caplan Papers, Louisiana State Museum, History Division, New Orleans ECP.

Elmer Corth.e.l.l Papers, Special Collections, John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island EP.

Eads Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis FC.

Friends of the Cabildo Oral History Collection, Louisiana Room, New Orleans Public Library GD-T.

Greenville Democrat-Times HFCCH.

House Flood Control Committee Hearings, 70th Congress, 1st Session, November 1927 through January 1928 HHPL.

Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa JBE.

James Buchanan Eads JC-L.

Jackson Clarion-Ledger LC.

Library of Congress, Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

LL.

William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son LP.

LeRoy Percy MC-A.

Memphis Commercial-Appeal MDAH.

Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson M&LP.

Monroe & Lemann Papers, Offices of Monroe & Lemann, New Orleans NA.

National Archives, Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

NOCA.

New Orleans City Archives, Louisiana Room, New Orleans Public Library NOI.

New Orleans Item NOS.

New Orleans States NOT.

New Orleans Tribune NOT-P.

New Orleans Times-Picayune NYT.

New York Times P&H.

Andrew Atkinson Humphreys and Henry Abbot, Report on the Physics and Hydraulics of the Mississippi River Report on the Physics and Hydraulics of the Mississippi River PFP.

Percy Family Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson RCP.

Red Cross Papers, Record Group 200, National Archives, Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

RRMP.

Robert Russa Moton Papers, Special Collections, Tuskegee University Library, Tuskegee, Alabama SBV.

St. Bernard Voice TUL.

Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Library, Tulane University, New Orleans WAP.

William Alexander Percy

PROLOGUE.

"The roaring Mississippi": MC-A MC-A, April 15, 1927.

"rainy": Henry Waring Ball diaries, MDAH.

"at 12 it commenced": Ibid.

from 6 to 15 inches: GD-T GD-T, April 16, 1927.

greatest rainfall ever: "Report of the Sewage and Water Board of New Orleans, July 1927"; GD-T GD-T, April 16, 1927; NYT NYT, April 16, 1927; Ball diaries, MDAH, April 15 and 16, 1927.

put on their gun boots: Interview with Florence Sillers Ogden on Mississippi Public Television, "The Flood of 1927," complete transcript of interview in MDAH; interview with Frank Hall, December 16, 1992.

"I saw a whole tree": Interview with William Jones, March 2, 1993; interview with Moses Mason, March 1, 1993; GD-T GD-T, April 21, 1928.

3 million cubic feet of water: Bulletin of the American Railway Engineering a.s.sociation Bulletin of the American Railway Engineering a.s.sociation 29, no. 297 (July 1927); report of Army engineers quoted in 29, no. 297 (July 1927); report of Army engineers quoted in NOT-P NOT-P, April 25, 1927.

CHAPTER O ONE.

"one of the most": Quoted in Todd Shallat, Structures in the Stream Structures in the Stream, p. 175.

"commanding talents": Quoted in David McCullough, The Great Bridge The Great Bridge, p. 347.

five greatest engineers: Universal Engineer Universal Engineer 55, no. 1 (1932), cited in Florence Dorsey, 55, no. 1 (1932), cited in Florence Dorsey, Road to the Sea: The Story of James B. Eads and the Mississippi River Road to the Sea: The Story of James B. Eads and the Mississippi River, p. 307n.

Was.h.i.+ngton Irving was impressed: Charles van Ravensway, St. Louis: An Informal History of the City and Its People St. Louis: An Informal History of the City and Its People, 1764-1865, p. 208.

"towering ambition": Emerson Gould, Fifty Years on the Mississippi Fifty Years on the Mississippi, p. 485.

"more dangerous than": Quoted in Floyd Clay, A Century on the Mississippi A Century on the Mississippi, p. 11.

"The history of the world": Mentor Williams, "The Background of the Chicago River and Harbor Convention," p. 223.

credited as its inventor: See for example Webster's Biographical Dictionary Webster's Biographical Dictionary (Springfield, Ma.s.s.: G. & C. Merriam & Co., 1956), p. 460. (Springfield, Ma.s.s.: G. & C. Merriam & Co., 1956), p. 460.

"From young manhood": Louis How, James B. Eads James B. Eads, pp. 54-57.

"the personal magnetism": Dorsey, p. 130.