The levees and other flood control measures along the lower Mississippi valley are the responsibility of the federal government because of a disaster long before Katrina:

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break, (X2)
When The Levee Breaks I’ll have no place to stay.

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, (X2)
Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home,
Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well.

When the Levee Breaks, Bonham, Jones, Page, Plant, Memphis Minnie

Many of us have heard this Led Zeppelin song a thousand times without knowing what it’s about. Memphis Minnie is listed as one of the songwriters because she originally wrote the song, back in 1927, after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which displaced 700,000 people permanently and probably got Herbert Hoover elected president.

The Flood of 1927 inundated large parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee. On 1 Jan 1927 the levees at Nashville were overtopped at 56.2 feet; Nashville is on the Cumberland River, which is a tributary of the Ohio, which flows into the Mississippi. Below Memphis, the river was in some places 60 miles wide and sometimes 30 feet deep. Above New Orleans, levees were deliberately blown, causing the flood waters to go into several poor parishes, thus avoiding flooding New Orleans.

There was no federal disaster assistance plan at the time. Public outcry nationally led to massive Red Cross and other assistance and the Flood Control Act of 1928 that made flood control the responsiblity of the federal government. This was partly because the track record of the local governments was not good; evacuations were spotty and sometimes skewed by race, relief supplies were mostly nonexistant, and that matter of local powers saving New Orleans at the expense of its neighbors.

It’s pointless to point fingers at the current mayor of New Orleans or governor of Louisiana about the levees. While the track record of the local officials is once again bad (and I personally think many of them should be defeated at their next elections), the federal government has been in charge of the levees since 1928.

Speaking of elections, Herbert Hoover was Secretary of Commerce, and the national exposure he got in organiziing relief efforts helped him get elected president. Unfortunately for him, he promised more than he delivered, and partly as a result lost the election after that, to FDR. It’s probably not overstating to say that the political fallout from the 1927 Flood was one of the contributing factors to the New Deal. Meanwhile, that famous kingfish populist Huey Long got elected governor in Louisiana, with numerous results both good and bad; I’m not sure good local government was one of them.

Meanwhile, even after the waters eventually receded by August 1927, few of the displaced could go home. As mentioned, 700,000 people had to move:

Don’t it make you feel bad
When you’re tryin’ to find your way home,
You don’t know which way to go?
If you’re goin’ down South
They go no work to do,
If you don’t know about Chicago.

Many of them went to Chicago, leading to the blues music scene there, which produced the original version of this song by Memphis Minnie, and eventually one of Led Zeppelin’s more popular songs. Disasters can produce enduring art.

But 700,000 people had to find new homes and jobs, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover successively lost their jobs, and the levees became a federal responsibility.

Disasters of this magnitude can’t be left to local governments; the federal government is the guarantor of last resort, and 77 years ago  explicitly took on the task of prevention for Mississippi River floods.

Risks of not fulfilling such promises go beyond merely monetary, to people’s homes and livelihood, to politicians careers, to shifts in political makeup and basic government strategies. In this case, the burden of the levees lies squarely on the U.S. federal  government.

-jsq