'Rising Tide' Chronicles Flow of Changes
- Date Submitted: 01/28/2010 08:11 AM
- Flesch-Kincaid Score: 52.2
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John M. Barry's Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and
How It Changed America, takes us back 70 years to a society that most
of us would hardly recognize.
In 1927, the Mississippi River flooded 27,000 square miles from Illinois
and Missouri south to the Gulf of Mexico. No one expected the
government to help the victims. President Calvin Coolidge even refused to
visit the area. As a result, the flood created and destroyed leaders:
Herbert Hoover, Coolidge's secretary of Commerce, was considered
politically dead until he took over rescue/relief efforts. His competence and
public relations skills sent him to the White House in 1928. (But his
duplicity in dealings with black leaders helped begin turning black voters
from the Republican Party of Lincoln to the Democrats.)
The Percy family, planters who had built an ``empire'' around Greenville,
Miss., moved onto the national, even the international, stage. In 1922,
LeRoy Percy's sense of obligation to blacks led him to fight the Ku Klux
Klan, then a national power.
Yet in 1927, Percy more than acquiesced when the Mississippi National
Guard held black refugees in camps, forcing them to work on levees in
conditions close to slavery.
In New Orleans, officials dynamited a levee south of the city. Water
washing across St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes relieved pressure on
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