Federalizing Floods

PETER ONUF: This year, the Army Corps of Engineers will spend $234 million on flood control along the Mississippi. This, of course, does not include the sometimes billions of dollars needed to respond to major river-related disasters, like Katrina or the 2011 floods.

ED AYERS: But throughout most of American history, flood control was not a responsibility to US government was interested in. In fact, many believe that government involvement was unconstitutional. Other people said this is just a handout to a few landowners along the river, plantation owners.

BRIAN BALOGH: All this changed with the 1917 Flood Control Act, the first piece of legislation to say unequivocally that the US government was responsible for flood control along the Mississippi. And this change of heart was the product of a concerted effort by some of the people most affected by the flooding.

Karen O’Neill is a sociologist at Rutgers. She told me about the efforts of landowners along the Mississippi to funnel government dollars their way, government dollars that would lead to bigger and better levees.

KAREN O’NEILL: By the turn of the 20th century, you see these groups form what we really would recognize as interest group politics now. And they locate their headquarters in DC. They do letter writing. They do all sorts of things to make it look like their support is really widespread.

They try to get manufacturing groups, industrial groups upstream, and people from other locations as well. It really looks self-serving to be arguing that you should have flood control aid for our river. And so they often did things like get people from New York state, California, and other regions to help make that argument. And their goal, they really know that eventually they want to add these other rivers into getting federal aid.

So then you could make these broader arguments. And I think they were just much more persuasive to people.

BRIAN BALOGH: And presumably, there are more people actually living in towns along the river, as opposed to simply farmers.

KAREN O’NEILL: Yes. Although what’s really impressive is that from probably the 1880s on, there’s a pretty sophisticated use, and possibly cynical use, of photos of displaced sharecroppers and tenants. Because those people would be the ones who are certainly living most exposed to the risk. They are in these swampy areas that have just barely been drained enough to grow crops. They’re actually living there, as opposed to living off the farm.

And they get hit first. And so you’ll see these brochures that the advocates distribute widely. And they usually have pictures of many people up on what is the last few pieces of unflooded area, usually on top of a levee. And then there’s the sympathy aspect. So these photos happen again and again. And it certainly happens in the 1927 flood as well.

BRIAN BALOGH: If you had to sum up the impact of the 1927 flood on the very kinds of things we’ve been talking about, flood control, what was the effect of the ’27 flood?

KAREN O’NEILL: Well, the 1927 flood really humbled to the Corps of Engineers. They thought that their approach of building levees was effective. It turned out that even the levees that were built up to their standard couldn’t hold the river back.

You could have said at that point, it’s time to get humble and say, maybe we shouldn’t try to control the river. Or maybe we shouldn’t try to control it in quite this way. But they persisted, because they’re engineers. They’re hands-on people. And they see a task. And they want to do it.

So that was definitely a big part of it. The other was that it clearly was a national event. So you have in 1927 the presence of radio networks that hook up and broadcast live reports from the river flood. This goes on for months.

People went around giving speeches about it. And so it definitely felt like a national event. And this is the thing that people had to really push through, is to say, this is not a local problem. This is a national problem. And that’s a harder task to do than you might think. We actually still have debates like that today.

BRIAN BALOGH: Karen O’Neill teaches at Rutgers. She writes about controlling the Mississippi in her book, Rivers By Design.