A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Lillian Smith Award.

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America

ANNOTATION

The author of The Ambition and the Power now dissects the story behind the great Mississippi River flood of 1927--an untold American epic of money, race, culture, and empire in New Orleans and the Delta, and of one family--the Percys--whose members ruled a state, hunted with presidents, and defeated the Ku Klux Klan. Illustrations. 512 pp. 75,000 print.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In 1927, the Mississippi River swept across an area roughly equal in size to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont combined, leaving water as deep as thirty feet on the land stretching from Illinois and Missouri south to the Gulf of Mexico. Close to a million people - in a nation of 120 million - were forced out of their homes. Some estimates place the death toll in the thousands. The Red Cross fed nearly 700,000 refugees for months. Rising Tide is the story of this forgotten event, the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known. But it is not simply a tale of disaster. The flood transformed part of the nation and had a major cultural and political impact on the rest. Rising Tide is an American epic about science, race, honor, politics, and society. Rising Tide begins in the nineteenth century, when the first serious attempts to control the river began. The story focuses on engineers James Eads and Andrew Humphreys, who hated each other. Out of the collision of their personalities and their theories came a compromise river policy that would lead to the disaster of the 1927 flood yet would also allow the cultivation of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta and create wealth and aristocracy, as well as a whole culture. In the end, the flood had indeed changed the face of America, leading to the most comprehensive legislation the government had ever enacted, touching the entire Mississippi valley from Pennsylvania to Montana. In its aftermath was laid the foundation for the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

FROM THE CRITICS

David Futrelle

On a quiet day, the Mississippi River seems to flow as gently as a burbling brook, but that outward calm is deceiving. "The Mississippi never lies at rest," John M. Barry writes in his often fascinating account of the Great Flood of 1927. "It roils. It follows no set course. Its waters and currents are not uniform. Rather, it moves south in layers and whorls, like an uncoiling rope made up of a multitude of discrete fibers, each one following an independent and unpredictable path, each one separately and together capable of snapping like a whip." And when the river begins to fill with more water than it can handle, it becomes quite a formidable force indeed -- as generations of Americans have learned.

Rising Tide tells the story of a slow-motion, not-quite-natural disaster of tremendous proportions. The proximate cause of the disaster was the rain that fell on the Midwest in torrents for months and months without pause, saturating the earth and overflowing the innumerable tributaries that flow into the Mississippi River. But the disaster was magnified, as many disasters are, by human hubris -- in this case the hubris of 19th century engineers who firmly believed (with typical Victorian confidence) that even this great river could be reined in. The levees they built to contain the river in many ways exacerbated the disaster, raising it to higher levels and increasing both its speed and its force -- so that when the levees fell (as, faced with the record rains of 1927, they inevitably would) the damage was more severe than would have been the result of a flood uncontained, or better controlled with a combination of outlets and reservoirs alongside the levees. Ultimately, nearly one million Americans were left homeless by the flood. Several hundred lost their lives, it is estimated.

Barry tells the tale of the flood through the stories of the "large men" whose words and actions most influenced its course -- from head Army engineer Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, whose stubborn insistence on a "levees only" policy in the 19th century contributed mightily to disaster in the 20th, to powerful Sen. LeRoy Percy of Mississippi (grandfather of novelist Walker Percy). Though at its best it's as gripping as a good disaster flick, Rising Tide can meander as unpredictably as the river itself. Barry spends too much time hashing over biographical details and not enough elucidating the effects of the river's slow fury.

Despite these flaws, Rising Tide is both a bracing history and a cogent warning. In an age when self-professed futurists speak blithely of living in virtual worlds beyond the prison of human flesh and the laws of physics, it is worth remembering that nature has a habit of reasserting itself. -- Salon

John Opie

...[I]mplicates both the Mississippi River and the South in a deeper, darker side of the American experience....focuses on imperiously powerful personalities who willfully had their ways, often gravely flawed, to control the river....[The book reminds] us that Americans are just beginning to comprehend the power of their geography...(John Opie is a professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology). — Mississippi Quarterly

Publishers Weekly

The worst natural disaster in U.S. history, the Mississippi River flood of 1927, which killed more than 1000 people and left 900,000 homeless from Cairo, Ill., to New Orleans, had a far-reaching impact on American society, as revealed in this gripping grassroots epic, redolent with gothic passions of the Old South. The flood shattered the myth of a quasifeudal bond between Delta blacks and the Southern aristocracy. African American flood victims were the principal occupants of squalid Red Cross refugee camps rife with profiteering, pellagra and murders and beatings of blacks by white policemen and civilians. Barry reports that black refugees were given just enough food to avoid starvation, were denied federal reparation through legalistic maneuvers and were compelled by gun-wielding National Guardsmen to work on dangerous levees. The flood triggered an exodus of Southern blacks to Chicago and Los Angeles, among other cities. The cataclysm also marked a watershed, the author persuasively argues, because although the Coolidge administration did virtually nothing to help flood victims recover economically, a public outcry shifted U.S. opinion toward favoring a more activist federal government. The flood made Herbert Hoover, Coolidge's commerce secretary, a national hero, solidifying his presidential ambitions after he headed a special federal rescue effort to handle the emergency. An extraordinary tale of greed, power politics, racial conflict and bureaucratic incompetence, Barry's saga begins in the 1870s as two influential engineers-James Eads, who built a Mississippi-spanning bridge in St. Louis, and army surveyor Andrew Humphreys-battle over how to contain the wild, erratic river. The focus then shifts to Mississippi's powerful Percy family-to railroad magnate W.A. Percy, pioneer of the sharecropping system; to his son LeRoy, banker, plantation owner, senator, who protected blacks against demagogues and the Ku Klux Klan; to poet and lawyer Will (LeRoy's son), ineffectual head of a flood relief committee; and to novelist Walker Percy, Will's blood cousin and adopted son. A cast of power-hungry villains and crusading reformist heroes rounds out this momentous chronicle, which revises our understanding of the shaping of modern America. Photos. BOMC and History Book Club alternate. (Apr.)

Library Journal

In the spring of 1927, America witnessed perhaps its greatest natural disaster: a flood that profoundly changed race relations, government, and society in the Mississippi River valley region. Barry (The Transformed Cell, LJ 9/1/92) presents here a fascinating social history of the effects of the massive flood. More than 30 feet of water stood over land inhabited by nearly one million people. Almost 300,000 African Americans were forced to live in refugee camps for months. Many people, both black and white, left the land and never returned. Using an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, Barry clearly traces and analyzes how the changes produced by the flood in the lower South came into conflict and ultimately destroyed the old planter aristocracy, accelerated black migration to the North, and foreshadowed federal government intervention in the region's social and economic life during the New Deal. His well-written work supplants Pete Daniel's Deep'n as It Come: The 1927 Mississippi Flood (1977) as the standard work on the subject. Recommended for public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/96.]-Charles C. Hay III, Eastern Kentucky Univ. Libs., Richmond

AudioFile - Yuri Rasovsky

This very opinionated account of the devastating Mississippi River flood of 1927 and its causes is the sort of book that benefits from plates and footnotes. The former would help the reader understand the crucial engineering issues; the latter would help one assess the accuracy of the author's assertions and value judgements. We get neither in the audio version. Instead we have the voice of award-winning George Grizzard. His sharp, distinctive voice has gotten sandy with age. His mind, however, remains as sharp as ever. He performs not only with comprehension, but with a controlled sense of drama and not a little of the author's outrage at political shenanigans. So, although he can't do much for the book's credibility, he certainly makes it a good listen. Y.R. ? AudioFile, Portland, Maine Read all 11 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

John M. Barry's Rising Tide is a highly original and absorbing book, which I found fascinating. His account of the great Mississsippi River flood of 1927 brilliantly recaptures the panic, the desperation, and the suffering of one of the greatest natural disasters in American history.  — David Herbert Donald