Katrina

A History, 1915–2015

Andy Horowitz

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780674246768
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Winner of the Bancroft Prize
Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Book of the Year "The main thrust of Horowitz's account is to make us understand Katrina—the civic calamity, not the storm itself—as a consequence of decades of bad decisions by humans, not an unanticipated caprice of nature."
—Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster can be traced back nearly a century. After the city weathered a major hurricane in 1915, its Sewerage and Water Board believed that developers could safely build housing near the Mississippi, on lowlands that relied on significant government subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee system failed, these were the neighborhoods that were devastated.The flood line tells one important story about Katrina, but it is not the only story that matters. Andy Horowitz investigates the response to the flood, when policymakers made it easier for white New Orleanians to return home than for African Americans. He explores how the profits and liabilities created by Louisiana's oil industry have been distributed unevenly, prompting dreams of abundance and a catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today."Masterful…Disasters have the power to reveal who we are, what we value, what we're willing—and unwilling—to protect."
— New York Review of Books "If you want to read only one book to better understand why people in positions of power in government and industry do so little to address climate change, even with wildfires burning and ice caps melting and extinctions becoming a daily occurrence, this is the one."
— Los Angeles Review of Books

PART I

1 HOW TO SINK NEW ORLEANS

CONTROLLING FLOODS, OIL, AND STATES’ RIGHTS, 1927–1965

Emile Riche knew the river across the road from his house in Betrandville, Louisiana, as the Mississippi, but Choctaw people had called it bulbansha, “place for foreign languages.”¹ In 1927, many of the folks around Betrandville—white, black, and shades between—spoke French; Emile’s parents spoke French because they came from Alsace, but Atakapa-Ishak people had lived out on Grand Bayou since before the French arrived in North America, maybe since the muddy river had brought the land itself, and they too spoke French in 1927.² Downriver toward Empire, Dalmatians spoke Croatian as they raked oysters.³ They traded them with “Germans, Italians and Irishmen; Spanish-speaking Filipinos; Chinese, Malays; Portuguese, English, Danes, Greeks, and Swedes.”⁴ Across the Chandeleur Sound, along the Bayou Terre aux Boeufs and on Delacroix Island, Isleño fur trappers spoke Spanish; they sang decimas they had brought with them from the Canary Islands. When the storms came, Isleño old timers summoned the Spanish phrases that cursed the winds, and the motions of the knife that might make the storms change course.⁵ It is unclear if the Choctaw word bulbansha meant to signal a kind of cosmopolitanism, or something more like Babel.

Nonetheless, on the signboards he posted around his property throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Riche painted his protests in English. English, after all, was the language that Louisiana Governor Oramel Simpson had used in 1927 to announce the plan to protect New Orleans from the Mississippi River flood. How? By dynamiting the levee across from Riche’s home, blowing open a crevasse to lower the water level in the city.⁶ English was the language, too, that “fifty leading financiers and business men of New Orleans” had used in a front-page resolution “assuring” people like Riche, the truck farmers, fur trappers, and fishermen of Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes who were flooded, that they would be given restitution for their losses.⁷

But over time, Emile Riche’s experience taught him that the New Orleans businessmen treated their promises just as they treated that levee: as something to break. “IN THE TIME OF THE CREVASSE THE BURGLARS GOT $2200 OF MY MONEY,” Riche wrote on one of his signs in 1955, nearly three decades after the flood, when he still had not been compensated. He added a simple appeal: “I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHO THE BURGLARS WERE.”⁸

The plea was a rhetorical flourish, because Riche already had figured it out. There were many to blame—too many—but he focused on one man: Leander Perez. Perez was the district attorney for Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes from 1924 to 1960, and during that long reign in what otherwise might have been an insignificant office, Perez made himself famous as an advocate for “states’ rights” in the 1940s and as a segregationist in the 1950s. Riche called Perez the “pocket drainer,” because of the way he secreted Plaquemines’s oil deposits from the ground and cash from his constituents’ pockets.⁹ Lording his control over coastal Louisiana’s oil rights, the district attorney became a millionaire many times over. Firms large as Standard Oil and Freeport Sulphur supplicated before him. Above all, then, Perez distinguished himself as an autocrat, a man whose despotic control over local affairs made him seem to be a kind of American dictator. The New York Times called Perez the “czar of Louisiana’s greatest remaining sub-empire,” who “rules Plaquemines as a personal fiefdom”; to Fortune magazine in 1958, he was the “swampland Caesar” of “the last unconstitutional monarchy in the U.S.” At home at Promised Land Plantation, his guests called him “Judge.”¹⁰

The irony, though, is that the political, economic, and environmental order Perez came to represent—one that gave a local politician the power to boss around thousands of well-armed people on their own land, to dictate to the largest industrial corporations in the world, to dare to reshape even the mighty Mississippi River for his own ends—would prove, in the hindsight of history, to be its own undoing. Perez ambitiously attempted to reform the national Democratic Party in Louisiana’s image by helping to lead the Dixiecrat revolt; he pursued Louisiana’s legal claims to offshore oil royalties all the way to the Supreme Court; and he enacted audacious economic, political, and even military plans to transform Plaquemines into a quasi-independent, self-sufficient parish.

These efforts all backfired. Perez’s lifework as “Mr. Dixiecrat,” a name he gave himself to demonstrate his commitment to “states’ rights,” ultimately eroded local power.¹¹ Similarly, efforts in the name of flood protection ultimately made Louisiana more flood prone. Today, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on levees and canals are causing the place once known as “The Empire Parish” for its astonishing wealth in natural resources to disintegrate into the Gulf of Mexico.¹² In 2013, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration removed thirty-one Plaquemines place names from the official government map; the places no longer exist.¹³ Geologists warn that the majority of Plaquemines Parish may be underwater, lost to the Gulf, by 2050. New Orleans may not be far behind.¹⁴

In Louisiana, floods, oil, and states’ rights are three sides of the same story, because local levee boards owned the oil lands. The struggle to control Louisiana’s petrochemical wealth represented a contest between competing political, economic, and social visions, but the fight turned on a geological coincidence: an enormous amount of oil and gas happened to lie under land designated by the government to protect Louisiana from floods. The coincidence of local political power, natural resources, and environmental stewardship could have led to a regime where government agencies managed public lands for the common good. Instead, Emile Riche’s nemesis Leander Perez used the coincidence to help create a system in which the public domain could be exploited for private advantage, and the costs and benefits of development would be distributed wildly unevenly.¹⁵

Masquerading as the natural order of things is a landscape where power and impotence, wealth and poverty, even land and water, have been given shape by identifiable human decisions. Sometimes, the causes are as clear as the sticks of dynamite carefully positioned on the Caernarvon levee in April 1927. In other cases, the causes can be more difficult to see. Nonetheless, a close examination reveals how politicians, policy makers, oil company executives and engineers, flood control experts, real estate developers, and other residents restructured Louisiana’s land and the way people live on it. The system that prevailed gave rise to a startling juxtaposition of unfathomable wealth and existential danger.

Most accounts of this period of American history describe the rise of a New Deal order, defined by strengthening federal regulation and narrowing economic inequality. But in Louisiana, Riche witnessed the channelization of the Mississippi River, the dredging of oil exploration canals, and the transformation of public agencies into instruments of private profit—in other words, he saw the privatization of public space, the deregulation of environmental development, the disfranchisement of voters, and the stratification of economic stations. In Perez’s efforts to control Louisiana’s oil, Riche saw the avant-garde of modern conservatism.¹⁶

States’ rights offered Perez and his renegade flank of white southern Democrats a flexible platform for promoting their vision of the modern South. The pursuit of white supremacy shaped their ideology. So did the pursuit of wealth.¹⁷ The “smell of crude oil mingles with magnolia in that southern revolt,” is how one reporter put it at the time.¹⁸ When Perez took lawsuits to the Supreme Court to argue against federal oversight in Louisiana, he was not seeking to maintain racial segregation in the public schools, although he strongly supported that cause, but rather to maintain local control of the state’s oil wealth. “States rights include segregation but it includes a lot of other things too,” W. H. Talbot, the oil industry attorney and campaign manager for several Louisiana Democratic gubernatorial campaigns reflected, “such as making the federal government keep its nose out of the gas and oil business in Louisiana.”¹⁹ Protecting oil interests, the reporter A. J. Liebling wrote, “lies behind much in the South that otherwise seems irrational.”²⁰ “States’ rights” heralded a defense of a racial caste system; it also announced an economic platform of limited regulation and unfettered industrial development.

Southern Democrats like Perez, icons for an almost fascist level of government power, used that power in the service of the owners and shareholders of Standard Oil, Freeport Sulphur, and other transnational corporate interests. Working with local government, these firms rewrote Louisiana’s Constitution and redistributed its mineral wealth. Even as Governor Huey Long promoted quasi-socialist reforms to make “Every Man a King,” and Perez boasted of his parish’s “Utopia” with full employment, they were transferring huge amounts of public resources to private markets.²¹ Once they yielded influence to the oil interests, local politicians never regained the reins of power.²²

Riche watched as these decisions combined to sink Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes. By the end of his life, they imperiled New Orleans, too.²³ In one of his protest signs, Riche called himself a picture “of depression and starvation at once.” He struggled in the ways he could against Leander Perez and the system Perez represented until he died in 1962.²⁴ That was a long time to spend on what may have seemed a quixotic protest. But four decades after the state engineers directed the Mississippi River to flood his house, the catastrophe was not yet over for him. Disasters can seem acute, his protests remind, but their causes are long in the making and their effects last a very long time.

Riche’s warning offers another message, too. It is the most important lesson history can teach: for better and for worse, things might have been different.

SWAMP LAND ACTS

In April 1927, “A Delta official spoke solemnly to all who listened: ‘You are witnessing the public execution of a parish.’ ”²⁵ An explosion of dynamite heralded the execution. Or rather, a series of explosions, because the levee that convict laborers had constructed in 1915 to protect Emile Riche and the other people of Plaquemines and St. Bernard from the Mississippi River took the determined efforts of the Louisiana state engineers to destroy on April 29, 1927. “Sixty negro laborers, working with pick, shovel and auger practically throughout the day, and 1500 pounds of dynamite, were required to open a breach,” the Times-Picayune reported.²⁶ The residents of St. Bernard Parish had resigned themselves to the directives of the National Guard troops who arrived, armed, to order them from their homes. Ten thousand people headed for New Orleans, “a highway of humanity,” one reporter observed, “on trucks, in pleasure cars, on wagons, horseback, muleback, afoot, on oxen, goading cattle, leading cattle.” “It was Exodus,” the reporter wrote, “the evacuation of a people from their homeland.”²⁷

After a full day of assaults, the levee finally gave way. Two hundred fifty thousand cubic feet of water per second swept across what once might have been called the center of the Western world.²⁸ Just around the bend of the river, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville had in 1700 kept Louisiana in the hands of its namesake, King Louis XIV, and changed the course of empire.²⁹ A short walk away was the Chalmette Battlefield, where in 1815 Andy Jackson (his orders translated into French, Spanish, and Choctaw for his polyglot troops) “beat the bloody British in the town of New Orleans,” as Johnny Horton would later sing.³⁰ The land above and below Caernarvon had offered up vast bounties of timber and sugar. Then there was the river itself, the continent’s artery, which for 200 years had allowed New Orleans, the self-anointed “Queen City of the South,” to claim much of the hemisphere as her hinterlands.³¹ “The position of [New] Orleans certainly destines it to be the greatest city the world has ever seen,” Thomas Jefferson had written in 1804.³²

In 1927, though, the future no longer seemed to beckon along the banks of the lower Mississippi.³³ On the narrow st...