Did the Great Flood of 1927 affect the election of 1928 ?

[kentuck]

As we know from reading history, the Republicans were in control of government, much as they are today. Coolidge was president. He had succeeded the do-nothing president, Warren Harding. He told America the "business of America is business". The stock market was booming. After all, it was the roaring '20's.

Then, the Great Flood of 1927 with 100's of thousands displaced and hundreds dead, preceded the election of 1928. The people voted for another Republican, an engineer, Mr Herbert Hoover. But the tragedy and the depression lingered from that Great Flood. Then in 1929, the bubble burst. The stock market crashed. By 1932, the next election,, the people had seen enough. They were finally ready for a "New Deal". The depression was creeping over the entire nation.

[Anywho6]

1. My sister recommended "Rising Tide" by John M. Barry...

...to me just yesterday. I haven't read it yet, but it is on my Wish List. The following is an excerpt from a NY Times review called "Boiling Over" by T.H Watkins published on April 13, 1997. The link that follows will probably require a login for nytimes.com, so I apologize in advance for that. If the rules allow, I can post the last four paragraphs in another reply (?).

RISING TIDE
The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
and How It Changed America.
By John M. Barry.
Illustrated. 524 pp. New York:
Simon & Schuster. $27.50.

Near the end of John M. Barry's extraordinary history there is a kind of epiphany that is as dark as the gelatinous, stinking muck the Mississippi left behind after one of the most devastating floods in American history. For weeks, Will Percy of Greenville, Miss., the son of the Delta plantation owner and Southern entrepreneur-aristocrat LeRoy Percy and the future adoptive father of the writer Walker Percy, had floundered, frustrated by circumstances and his own incompetence as head of the Washington County Red Cross and chairman of a special flood relief committee. Black work gangs and their refugee families resented being held as virtual prisoners in dreadfully squalid ''concentration camps'' set up along miles of the Greenville levee. Water, food and medical supplies were inadequate. Percy's subordinates held him in contempt, and his equals, including his own father, undercut his authority and ignored his decisions.

And now a black man had been killed by a white policeman for refusing to go back to work on levee repairs after having labored all night. The black community seemed certain to explode. To prevent this, Percy, whose family prided itself on its amicable, if typically patrician, relations with black people, addressed a mass meeting of blacks and launched into a diatribe that could have spewed from the likes of Theodore Bilbo. He had ''struggled and worried and done without sleep in order to help you Negroes,'' Percy whined. In return, he said, they had demonstrated a ''sinful, shameful laziness,'' and because of that, ''one of your race has been killed. You sit before me sour and full of hatred as if you had the right to blame anybody or judge anybody. . . . I am not the murderer. That foolish young policeman is not the murderer. The murderer is you! Your hands are dripping with blood. Look into each other's face and see the shame and the fear God set on them. Down on your knees, murderers, and beg your God not to punish you as you deserve.''

Greenville's black people -- perhaps too numb with disbelief to react -- did not rebel, but, Mr. Barry writes, ''the bond between the Percys and the blacks was broken. The Delta, the land that had once promised so much to blacks, had become, entirely and finally, the land where the blues began.'' In that one brief vignette, Mr. Barry peels back layers of self-delusion and myth, inviting us to stare into the racial abyss of the Deep South. And the abyss has stared back.

''Rising Tide'' is that kind of book, filled with moments in which reality erupts, sometimes with violent force. There are two failed visions at the heart of Mr. Barry's story: the struggle to control a river that drains more than 40 percent of the contiguous United States, and the attempt to maintain an agrarian civilization in the lower Mississippi River Valley that, its white ruling class managed to believe, combined the best elements of Roman aristocracy and American democracy. The first vision was undone by stupidity (assuming anything could have been done at all); the second proved a mask of pretension that the fury of the river ripped away as if it had been a flimsy Mardi Gras disguise.

<snip>

<http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE4DC153DF930A25757C0A961958260>

PS - Peace to you, Kentuck! I am now living in CA, but spent my first 35 years in the great Commonwealth of Kentucky! It will always be my true home.

[kentuck]

2. Kentucky is always home...

and I have lived in the beautiful state of Colorado for 27 years... :)

That sounds like a book that would be worthwhile reading at this time.

[RawMaterials]

3. I found this.. Interview with Pete Daniel: The Great Flood of 1927

Q : Was the flood of 1927 a turning point in history? Did it mark a decisive change in the federal government's assumption of responsibilities in a disaster?

A: "The scope of the disaster suggested that only the federal government through an organizer like Hoover could deal with such a disaster. The "levees only" policy had failed, so the new levee legislation took a more sophisticated view of flood control. For the most part, it has worked as predicted."

http://hnn.us/articles/15370.html


I guess *sh didn't need to learn history at harvard.