Letter from Louisiana, David Remnick, The New Yorker, October 3, 2005

[Coastie for Truth]

Like so many other news people in town, Dave Cohen had been preparing forty-years-later reports on Hurricane Betsy when Katrina hit. Although L.B.J. and the local officials of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana responded to their crisis with far greater coördination and speed than their successors in 2005, the memories of Betsy remain bitter, and not only because of the suffering and destruction it caused. As Edward Haas has made clear, Betsy was followed within days by widespread rumors that Mayor Schiro had ordered floodwater pumped out of his own well-to-do subdivision, Lake Vista, and into the Ninth Ward. At the time of the flood, Schiro was in a race for reëlection with another Democrat, the city council president, James E. Fitzmorris, Jr. There were also stories that he had ordered the levees breached. Thomas E. Allen, of Hunt Foods & Industries, an ally of the Mayor’s, wrote to him to say that two of his African-American servants “brought this tale to my wife yesterday and said that all of the Negroes were talking about it and were angry with you about it.” Haas quotes Schiro’s secretary, Marguerite Guette, who told the Mayor, “An old 71-years of age colored man by the name of Williams, who says you have helped him all of his life and who lives at 2630 Republic Street, called to say that he is very concerned about a rumor that is going around that may ruin you with colored voters. The rumor is that you cut the Industrial Canal to drown the colored people so that they would not vote in the coming election.” An aide to the Mayor later reported that people claiming to be relief workers and Schiro supporters delivered bags of “supplies” to flood victims in the Ninth Ward. People opened the bags only to find spoiled food and soiled, useless clothing.

Four years ago, a play staged in New Orleans called “An Evening with Betsy” explored the old conspiracy rumors. And although among historians Schiro earns high marks for his handling of the flood (if not for his obstinate views on race), the rumors persist. “That theory is why older people in the Ninth Ward still keep hatchets in their attics,” Dave Cohen had told me. “They remember what it was like to be trapped, with the water rising and no way to get to the roof.”

The pattern in Katrina’s wake is similar. Everywhere I went in Louisiana and Texas to talk to evacuees, many of the poorest among them were not only furious—furious at the President and local officials, furious at being ignored for days—but inclined to believe, as many did after Betsy, that the flooding of the city was, or could have been, a deliberate act.


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