Mighty Mississippi

DESCRIPTION: "Way out in the Mississippi valley, Just along the plain so grand, Rose the flooded Mississippi River, Destroying the works of man." The Mississippi River flood of 1927 is described, and the plight of those flooded out detailed
AUTHOR: Words: Kelly Harrell
EARLIEST DATE: 1927 (recording, Ernest Stoneman)
KEYWORDS: flood river disaster
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
1927 - Mississippi River floods, devastating the Delta region and leaving thousands homeless
FOUND IN: US(SE)
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Cohen/Seeger/Wood-NewLostCityRamblersSongbook, p. 87, "Mighty Mississippi" (1 text, 1 tune)
DT, MGHTYMSS*
Roud #21713
RECORDINGS:
New Lost City Ramblers, "Mighty Mississippi" (on NLCR02)
Mike Seeger, "The Story of the Mighty Mississippi" (on MSeeger01)
Ernest Stoneman, "The Story of the Mighty Mississippi" (Victor 20671, 1927)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Great American Flood Disaster" (subject)
cf. "Backwater Blues" (subject)
cf. "Mississippi Heavy Water Blues" (subject)
cf. "The Mississippi Flood (The Murrumbidgee Flood)" (subject)
cf. "Cairo (II)" (subject)
NOTES [3306 words]: Kelly Harrell wrote this poem but never attempted to record it (shows how different attitudes toward composed songs were back then); it was Ernest Stoneman who took the piece, found a traditional tune for it, and recorded the result. - RBW
And the recording was out within a few months of the disaster -- probably by September, 1927. - PJS
According to Kip Lornell, Virginia's Blues, Country & Gospel Records 1902-1943, the recording session was even more timely: It was made May 21, 1927. Stoneman also cut "Jim Hoover's Mississippi Flood Song" in that session, but Victor declined to issue it.
According to Parrish, p. 1, the great flood wasn't just the result of a wet spring in 1927. 1926 had also been wet in the upper Mississippi watershed. This had caused some relatively local flooding, but its main effect was to fill every lake, river, and reservoir to capacity. There was no place for additional water to go except straight down the Mississippi. And then 1927 was a wet year also....
To make things worse, the heavy engineering that had gone into Mississippi flood control had straightened the river's course and made it possible for waters to flow faster, and the wetlands and backwaters had been drained or cut off from the river, and the land cleared, all of which meant that the river had more power and fewer places to hold excess water (Parrish, p. 11). The pre-engineering river might flood, but it flooded slowly and relatively locally. The new river rarely overtopped its banks, but when it did, look out: "In trying to lessen the risk to property inherent in a floodplain, this 'levees only' policy paradoxically turned natural disturbance into potential catastrope" (Parrish, p. 28).
The levees were more than just floodwalls. Barry, pp. 190-191, describes them. The area closest to the river, the "batture," was a wide area of riverbank that the river was simply allowed to flood; it was usually planted with trees. Then came the "barrow pit," a great gulley or moat to slow, contain, and channel the water. The earth cut out of the barrow pit was usually used to build the "berm," the great ridge that most of us would think of as the levee -- a great earthen embankment, gently sloped, with a flat eight food crown, planted with heavy grasses to hold it together. They were great works of engineering -- but they were often made of relatively unsuitable local dirt, and the embankments, although grassy, had no rocky carapace to guard them. Like all earthen dams, they were strong but could be washed away if overtopped or undercut.
The other thing about the Mississippi Flood is that it was slow (relatively speaking). A tornado or hurricane comes quickly and hits hard; there is no time for coverage. But the Mississippi Flood could be tracked as it flowed down-river. There was a lot of time for press coverage, so people were able to talk about it at length (Parrish, p. 12).
Parrish, pp. 34-35, describes the chronology: in September-October 1926, there was heavy rain and local flooding in South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana -- in other words, in all three major upper watersheds, the Missouri, Ohio, and Upper Mississippi. In December 1926, there was more rain in Montana and South Dakota, adding to the water levels in the Missouri. Pittsburgh was flooded on January 23, 1927; Cincinnati was hit five days later (Barry, p. 181). In March 1927, rains and tornadoes hit almost the entire watershed. This was the beginning of the Great Flood itself, with levees weakening and many workers, mostly black, being impressed to work on repairs and shoring up.
And there were no fewer than ten crests (Barry, p. 78), increasing the destructive power even more. At one time, the flooding on the Missouri and Upper Mississippi was so severe that it caused the Ohio River to flow backward! (Barry, p. 339). There are maps of the failures and floods on pp. 36-37 of Parrish and pp. 170-171 of Barry. The first levee to fail was at Dorena, Missouri (about 30 miles south of Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio joins the Mississippi/Missouri), on April 16.
On April 21, the levee at Mounds Landing, Mississippi failed (Barry, p. 201), about halfway between Memphis and Vicksburg. It created a channel that, near the river, was a half a mile wide and a hundred feet deep (Barry, p. 202), supposedly carrying more water than the Upper Mississippi has ever carried in its entire recorded history (Barry, p. 203). It flooded an area fifty miles wide by a hundred miles long (Barry, p. 204). There were reportedly 185,459 people who lived in the area flooded by just that one break (Barry, p. 206).
The various levee boards downstream did make preparations; they had called in workers to maintain and sandbag the levees, and people were working around the clock. There were guards posted to prevent sabotage (and, yes, there had been some such -- Barry, p. 188, 192 -- though it's not clear whether the saboteurs were just terrorists or if they were trying to blow up someone else's levee to protect their own property. In New Orleans, on just one day, April 19, three supposed saboteurs were shot, one fatally; Barry, p. 196, and at times people were shot just for coming too near the levees; Barry, p. 238. When, on April 23, a molasses tanker hit a levee just below New Orleans and broke it, many were sure it was deliberate).
It will tell you a lot about the contemporary Southern culture that many areas conscripted Blacks, at gunpoint, to do the hard physical labor (Barry, pp. 195-196; according to p. 206, they were typically paid 75 cents a day, which was even worse than the absurdly low payment they received for picking cotton). But there was no general coordination or alternative plan for what to do if it was clear the levees would fail or be overtopped. And the weather was unusually cold at the time of the crests, making outdoor work much harder (Barry, p. 186).
Five million acres in Arkansas flooded as water from the overflowing Mississippi pushed back up the Arkansas river, causing it to flood as well. The St. Francis River in Missouri and Arkansas also flooded. The so-called "Good Friday Storm" on April 15 caused a major levee break that flooded Mississippi's Yazoo Valley region; it is believed that at least a hundred Blacks were killed on the levees on April 21. Then the flood pushed south toward New Orleans.
According to Barry, p. 15, the Good Friday storm "would pour from 6 to 15 inches of rain over several hundred thousand square miles, north to Missouri and Illinois, west into Texas, east almost to Alabama, south to the Gulf of Mexico.... Little Rock, Arkansas, and Cairo,Illinois, would receive 10 inches. New Orleans would receive the greatest rainfall ever known there; in eighteen hours officially 14.96 inches fell, more in some parts." That would have caused local flooding anyway, but when it fell on already-saturated lands, the effect was even more disastrous. It was a wild weather system; in many areas, the temperature dropped 30 degrees Fahrenheit in the space of a few hours (Barry, p. 189).
New Orleans had a plan, of sorts: they convinced higher authorities to let them blow up a series of levees beyond the city, so as to flood some relatively sparsely-populated areas rather than the city itself (Parrish, p. 38). As Barry, p. 209, puts it, "The struggle against the river had begun as one of man against nature. It was becoming one of man against man." It turned out that New Orleans didn't need to do what it did -- other levees broke. (To be fair, the other breaks might not have entirely relieved the problem -- much of the water that flooded then flowed back toward the Mississippi basin, so it put pressure on the levee on the side opposite the river! (Barry, p. 281).)
The deliberate breaking of levees was perhaps the rational course if it had been done fairly (if you have to flood somewhere, it makes sense to flood sparsely-populated areas rather than a large city), but New Orleans did not do it fairly. They had promised compensation to the inundated areas before they blew up the levees, but the compensation fund they set up was trivial ($150,000), and locals in the flooded areas had only one-fifth of the votes on the fund's board (Barry, p. 247). The amount was eventually raised to $2,000,000, with more help for the refugees (Barry, p. 251), but it was still New Orleans threatening to destroy the neighboring areas -- and the residents who could expect to be flooded threatening to fight back (Barry, pp. 254-255).
Once the place for the break was decided, they sent in trucks and forced everyone out of the flood area, took aerial photographs to document the flood effects, set guards to prevent the locals (many of whom wanted revenge) from interfering, and tried to break the levee. To add irony to injury, the levee there was particularly strong; they spent two days trying to blast it before they really got it to start releasing water; in the end, they needed 39 tons of dynamite! (Barry, pp. 254-257). One day later, the failure of other levees proved that the destruction of two whole Louisiana parishes (counties) had been unnecessary (Barry, p. 258). And, naturally, when it came time for New Orleans to pay compensation, they realized that it was going to cost a lot, and started trying to cheat (Barry, pp. 346-347; pp. 348-349 details some of the mechanisms they used to force people to take what was offered, no matter how unfair, On p. 357, he says that claims for compensation totaled about $35 million, of which $22 million were not even allowed to be filed; on the remaining $12.5 million the city and its agent J. Blanc Monroe approved less than $4 million -- and then knocked off $1 million on the grounds that the victims had gotten help while homeless, deducting that from individual claims. Thus New Orleans paid out less than 10% of the claims against it, and a lot of that went to one or two entities with political clout). Although it was patently unjust, Louisiana's courts quickly quashed the lawsuits that followed (Barry, pp. 358-360).
There were actually two peaks, one in May and one in June; the latter was a relatively normal event (water frequently rose in June), but with the levees down, it caused more flooding. People were left trying to find high ground, or boats; many found themselves stuck on top of the crumbling levees, that being the only place near the river that was above the water (Parrish, p. 39).
"In total, during this months-long flood in the Lower Valley, water covered 27,000 square miles, land in seven states where about a million people lived... roughly 637,000 people became homeless, approximately 555,000 of whom were people of color; somewhere between 250 and about 1,000 people died, and 50 percent of all animals in the flooded areas drowned. And financially, direct property losses totaled $250-500 million, while indirect losses brought that figure up to $1 billion" (Parrish, p. 41). Barry, p. 285, gives the precise figure of 931,159 residents of flooded areas, and says there were 154 "concentration camps" in the seven affected states. P. 286 says that the camps housed 325,554 people (the majority of them Black), and that the Red Cross fed 311,922 people outside the camps; he largely agrees with Parrish's figures on economic loss.
Barry, p. 285, says that the waters did not entirely recede until August.
The Mounds Landing break had finally forced action. The Red Cross was already at work, but the United States government, led by King Log Calvin Coolidge, had been ignoring the situation because of his "belief in a minimal federal government." Coolidge had ignored every earlier request from governors seeking help (Greenberg, p. 132). Finally the heat was too much even for Coolidge. Coolidge appointed his Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, to lead a response, with various other cabinet secretaries and agencies called upon to him; Hoover also had the power to give directions to the military (Barry, p. 240; Parrish, p. 40. Greenberg, p. 133, says that, "Having delegated the job, Coolidge considered his own duties largely discharged." He refused even to discuss the matter lest people decide that the government should do more). Hoover, the former World War I aid boss and future President, eventually established a series of almost 150 camps which housed about 325,000 people (Parrish, p. 41) he also made several radio addresses to the nation (Parrish, p. 72), helping establish the idea of national figures reaching the population via the mass media. He quickly started touring the region in a Pullman car, calling on people to help the displaced and raising money (Leuchtenburg, p. 68).
"Unhappily, the Mississippi flood, which showed Hoover at his best, also revealed him at his worst" (Leuchtenburg, p. 69) -- genuinely non-racist (he had integrated the Census Bureau), he largely refused to interfere with others' mistreatment of Blacks, even when they were murdered or beaten, and he offered little support to Black sharecroppers because they had no property. His work earned him enough publicity to make him the frontrunner for the 1928 Republican Presidential nomination -- even though he had never held, or even run for, electored office (Leuchtenburg, p. 71). (Barry, p. 262, calls Hoover a "brilliant fool": very clever, but so rigid in his thinking that he could not go beyond his false opinions about how the world works.)
Blacks suffered the most, according to Parrish, pp. 44-45; they were impressed into fighting the floods, they were housed in poorer conditions if displaced, and they were given far less help to rebuild. The problem as assessed by Barry, pp. 369-372, was that while Hoover did a great job of rescuing refugees and caring for them in the short term, it was all done with volunteer contributions (of which there were a great many; America was tremendously generous), and when it came time to put people back on their feet -- which often meant giving them grants, or at least loans, to rebuild their lost homes and livelihoods -- gave them only the slightest support, and that again came from charity, not the government. Even such money as was available mostly went un-lent, because the people had no collateral for the loans; if they were laborers, they owned nothing, and if they were landowners, their land had already been used as collateral to plant the crops that had been ruined by the flood (Barry, pp. 376-377). Somehow, money had to be provided by someone who would not require collateral. Very little was provided.
To add insult to injury, the wet spring gave rise to a very dry summer, then an early frost. Most of the crops planted in the flooded areas failed. The problems were so bad that pellagra (niacin deficiency) became widespread, adding yet more to the woes of the flood victims (Barry, p. 387).
Neither Hoover nor Coolidge was willing to use government resources to rebuild -- Coolidge faced loud demands to call a special congressional session, and ignored it (Barry, pp. 372-373). Given that the refusal to help people rebuild left something close to 1% of Americans destitute, I have to suspect that that helped make the Great Depression even worse, and so contributed to Hoover's defeat in the Presidential election of 1932. Sometimes you have to do the right thing even when it violates the requirements of the false gods you worship!
Eventually Congress passed legislation giving the Federal Government responsibility for flood control on the Lower Mississippi, said to be the biggest thing it had taken on outside of wartime, but it was a far more limited move than many states wanted (Barry, pp. 404-407).
The people of Louisiana's flooded parishes would have their revenge on the New Orleans power brokers. In 1928, they elected Huey Long governor, and he had no use at all for the elites (Barry, pp. 407-408). And the way the banks had done their work -- often by putting money into bad reconstruction projects -- left them unusually vulnerable; every New Orleans bank except one would fail in the Great Depression (Barry, pp. 409-410).
The statements in this song that "There were children clinging in the treetops who had spent a sleepless night" and "There were some of them on the housetops with no way to give an alarm" are absolutely right; Barry, p. 275, says that tens of thousands of people were trapped that way after the Mounds Landing break, and with few boats available to rescue them, some of them died of exposure due to unseasonably cold weather. On p. 285, he estimates that 330,000 people were rescued from small areas of dry ground, rooftops, trees, and unbroken levee tops.
The event soon became famous in popular culture. Much of Parrish's book is devoted to these popular manifestations. Perhaps the most peculiar was a $125 "Walk-through Exhibition" that Charles T. Buell & Company produced for uses in carnivals and other public events (Parrish, p. 66). Parrish, pp. 63-65 describes various comic performances to raise money, many of them having the feeling of a minstrel show. Apparently the flood response caused some sectional strife between North and South, with the latter regarding themselves as being patronized; the Southerners considered the flood primarily man-made, the Northerners regarded it as more natural, resulting in a lot of newspaper articles slinging charges at the other sections and/or races (Parrish, pp. 98-99) -- for instance, on May 15, the Atlanta Constitution editorialized, "The unvarnished truth is the great disaster in its entirety is directly chargeable to congressional neglect" (Parrish, p. 101). H. L. Menken contributed an editorial about Southern society that, although largely true, was so inflammatory in tone as to create lasting tensions (Parrish, p. 120).
There was of course a congressional investigation. But it strikes me as something of a joke -- e.g. they called Will Rogers because he was a "common man" who had raised money for victims, not because he actually knew anything! (Parrish, pp. 176-177).
This is not the only, or indeed, the most famous, song about the flood; the biggest hit was pretty definitely Bessie Smith's "Backwater Blues." Parrish, p. 127, says that the song influenced "the flood fiction of William Faulkner and Richard Wright," and goes on to devote entire chapters to the "flood fiction" of each, which in Faulkner's case began with The Sound and the Fury of 1929. It is not tied to the actual Mississippi Flood, but Parrish thinks that provided much of the background (though on p. 206 she also rings in the Johnstown Flood of 1889). Parrish, p. 230, also connects it to Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Richard Wright was an eighteen-year-old living in Memphis at the time of the flood; although that city was mostly spared, it saw the refugees and the relief operations, and Wright himself worked for an insurance agent at the time, so his knowledge of the flood was intimate (Parrish, p. 243). Works such as "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," "Silt," "Down by the Riverside," and the anthology Uncle Tom's Children were based on what he had seen (Parrish, p. 244).
The most modern book about the flood is of course Parrish's, but I don't really recommend it. The introduction, in particular, sounds more like a Marxist dialectic tract than an actual study of history. Half of it is about Faulkner and Wright rather than actual history. It's so dull and mind-numblingly dry that it could probably has sopped up half the water in Louisiana -- and, although it covers a lot of musical reflections on the flood, it does not include this song. Barry is a much better read, but its hundreds of pages about events before the flood include a lot of not-really-very-relevant biographical material that I could have done without. - RBW
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