The Thousand-Year Flood

The Ohio-Mississippi Disaster of 1937

David Welky

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780226887180
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the early days of 1937, the Ohio River, swollen by heavy winter rains, began rising. And rising. And rising. By the time the waters crested, the Ohio and Mississippi had climbed to record heights. Nearly four hundred people had died, while a million more had run from their homes. The deluge caused more than half a billion dollars of damage at a time when the Great Depression still battered the nation.Timed to coincide with the flood's seventy-fifth anniversary, The Thousand-Year Flood is the first comprehensive history of one of the most destructive disasters in American history. David Welky first shows how decades of settlement put Ohio valley farms and towns at risk and how politicians and planners repeatedly ignored the dangers. Then he tells the gripping story of the river's inexorable rise: residents fled to refugee camps and higher ground, towns imposed martial law, prisoners rioted, Red Cross nurses endured terrifying conditions, and FDR dispatched thousands of relief workers. In a landscape fraught with dangers—from unmoored gas tanks that became floating bombs to powerful currents of filthy floodwaters that swept away whole towns—people hastily raised sandbag barricades, piled into overloaded rowboats, and marveled at water that stretched as far as the eye could see. In the flood's aftermath, Welky explains, New Deal reformers, utopian dreamers, and hard-pressed locals restructured not only the flood-stricken valleys, but also the nation's relationship with its waterways, changes that continue to affect life along the rivers to this day.A striking narrative of danger and adventure—and the mix of heroism and generosity, greed and pettiness that always accompany disaster— The Thousand-Year Flood breathes new life into a fascinating yet little-remembered American story.

THE THOUSAND-YEAR FLOOD

THE THOUSAND-YEAR FLOOD

THE OHIO-MISSISSIPPI DISASTER OF 1937

DAVID WELKY

The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London

DAVID WELKY was born and raised in St. Louis, the consummate midwestern river town. He received a BA in history from Truman State University in Missouri and an MA and PhD, both in history, from Purdue University. He has written widely on American culture and society in the interwar era and is the author of Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression and The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II. He is currently associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, Arkansas, where he lives with his wife and two children.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2011 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2011.

Printed in the United States of America

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-88716-6 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-88716-2 (cloth)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Welky, David.

The thousand-year flood : the Ohio-Mississippi disaster of 1937 / David Welky.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-88716-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-88716-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Floods—Mississippi River Valley—History—20th century. 2. Floods—Ohio River Valley—History—20th century. 3. Disaster relief—United States—History—20th century. 4. New Deal, 1933–1939. 5. United States—Politics and government—1933–1945. I. Title.

HV6101937.M57 W45 2011

363.34′93097709043—dc22

2011014875

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To KMW, my own flood baby

Women and children were screamin’, sayin’, “Mama why must we go?”

Women and children were screamin’, sayin’, “Lord, where must we go?”

The floodwater have broke the levees and we ain’t safe here no more.

LONNIE JOHNSON, “Flood Water Blues” (1937)

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

1 The River

2 Roosevelt and the Rivers

3 Moving Out, Moving In

4 Black Sunday

5 Send a Boat!

6 Those Who Stayed

7 The Exiles

8 Coming Home

9 Politics

10 Moving?

11 Legacies

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Index

PREFACE

WHENEVER I SAID I WAS writing a book about the 1937 flood, people inevitably asked whether I meant the 1927 flood. I assured them that, no, I really meant 1937—it was even bigger than the earlier crisis. This comment generally produced a grunt of either incomprehension or suspicion and a quick change of topic because my conversation partners had reached the limit of their knowledge on the subject. They were aware of the great Mississippi River flood of 1927, the subject of a marvelous documentary and several excellent books, but they were certain they had never heard of any flood in 1937. Those who knew me well suspected I was making the whole thing up as a joke at their expense.[1]

I have been known to spin a yarn, but to the best of my knowledge I have never fabricated a natural disaster. An enormous flood, the worst river flood in American history, really did paralyze the Ohio valley and much of the lower Mississippi valley in January and February 1937. President Franklin Roosevelt had to shift from celebrating the start of his second term to dispatching tens of thousands of New Deal employees to fight the water. Red Cross executives organized their agency’s largest peacetime relief effort to that point in its history. By the time the crest passed, the flood had killed hundreds of people, buried a thousand towns, and left a million people homeless. Some of those communities never came back, at least not in any recognizable form, and all of them were changed.

For all this, the 1937 flood is a catastrophe lost to historians. It merits scant attention in classrooms, textbooks, or even books about the Depression era. My first encounter with the flood was a brief mention, perhaps a sentence, in a survey of the 1930s. It sounded impressive enough that I dropped a mention of it into my PhD dissertation. In retrospect I am baffled that I had never heard of the flood, because much of my personal and professional life has orbited around it. I grew up in St. Louis. With the exception of New Orleans, no city is more closely associated with the Mississippi River basin that encompasses the Ohio. St. Louis’s history is to a great extent a story of man’s relationship with water. Every time I stood on the river landing I watched a muddy current that was destined to mingle with the Ohio within a day or so. In my life the river was a constant presence, a literal presence. It was something to drive across, a backdrop for television commercials, the setting for occasional visits to the old Goldenrod Showboat. Like my heartbeat, the river was rarely contemplated yet always there.

My adult years kept me circling around the flood. I became a historian of the 1930s, a decade replete with both natural and manmade disasters. During a visit to Pittsburgh I stood atop Mount Washington to watch the Ohio’s ongoing birth and rebirth at the junction of the Allegheny and the Monongahela. Watching this triple union, I laughed to realize that every drop of the water enjoyed one shining instant as the leading edge of the Ohio River. Later I moved to Arkansas, site of some of the worst moments in the flood’s early days. Trips to see my family took me through Arkansas’s old sharecropper region—a district that in 1937 swarmed with flood victims seeking safety—then carried me into the Missouri bootheel, another scene of great suffering. From there the highway passes just west of the setback levees of the Bird’s Point spillway, a structure that will play an important part in the following pages. Finally, I made several visits to Memphis, where I navigated streets that once echoed with footsteps from tens of thousands of refugees. All this time I knew nothing of the flood, and I had no idea that life was familiarizing me with places destined to carry great personal significance.

One day I noticed that casual reference to a 1937 flood I had made years earlier. Resolving to learn something of this catastrophe, I soon discovered that apart from a handful of quickie recaps appearing a few months after the crest, no one had written a book about it. And from that realization came this work.[2]

This project took me all over the eastern half of the United States. It gave me an opportunity to revisit familiar archives, investigate cities I had never seen, and explore towns I had never heard of before I delved into my research. I learned in Cairo, Paducah, Shawneetown, and the other places my journey led me that the people of the Ohio valley were eager to discuss the flood—it was not so much a lost disaster as one that has gone into hiding. It’s still there if you know where to look for it. It seemed that everyone I met had a story to share once they established that I was interested in 1937, not 1927. They convinced me that the flood never really passed to the sea. Today it rolls down the valley as a torrent of memories, some of them firsthand and others passed from generation to generation like prized heirlooms.

These stories touch on a few consistent themes. Many people express amazement that they or their ancestors had endured a calamity of such inconceivable magnitude. Survivors of the disaster remember it with crystal clarity twenty, fifty, sixty years later. Their descendants exhibit profound respect for the sacrifices their parents or grandparents made during the wet, frigid weeks of early 1937. Such admiration suggests that those people were somehow different from us, that the Americans of 1937 were better equipped to handle a crisis. This implies that a social decline has occurred over the past seventy-five years, that present-day Americans are too weak, ineffectual, or pampered to fight a rising river, run from their homes, or rebuild cities. It reflects a longing for a simpler time when neighbors cared for each other and communities stuck together.

Memories of the 1937 flood are bound up in how we understand the present. We use the disaster to evaluate ourselves, our families, and our society, and the modern world usually comes up short. Recent remarks about the crisis appear within the context of Katrina, the hurricane that devastated New Orleans in 2005. The botched federal rescue campaign and horrifying scenes of suffering inside the Louisiana Superdome are seared into the nation’s consciousness. From the safe distance of seventy-five years the response to 1937 appears smooth, competent, and effective in comparison. Again there is a feeling that they were better than us. Back then, the argument goes, Washington knew what it was doing. Back then Americans knew how to take care of themselves. Back then we were a better people.

Ideas raised in these accounts touch on the questions I asked while researching this book. Were they superior to us, or is that assertion another example of Greatest Generation nostalgia? Did they have it right back then, or were personal and government responses beset with shortcomings? How did victims respond to the flood? Were their actions noble or lamentable? What if anything did they do to prevent another such incident? What do the answers say about who Americans were?

One more question haunted me: Why did this happen? That buckets of rain fell in early 1937 seemed insufficient to explain an emergency of this magnitude. Americans had populated the Ohio valley ever since there was an America. Century-old towns flooded to the rooftops. Had it never occurred to anyone that building a city next to a thousand-mile river carried risks? Had no one taken precautions against the inevitable? I carried this question around the valley. I asked it when I drove through the Memphis fairgrounds, former site of an overcrowded refugee camp. I asked it when I stood just south of Cairo at the intersection of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. I asked it when I walked the Louisville riverfront. I asked it when I read documents housed at the Franklin Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, and at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Why did this happen?

The answer is long, involved, and fascinating. Understanding why the flood of 1937 happened, and why it happened as it did, requires us to examine choices made long before the Great Depression began. Human folly is as much to blame for the deluge as is impersonal nature. Greed, ignorance, passivity, and overconfidence combined to discourage an amicable accord with the environment and left the Ohio valley vulnerable. My purpose here is to explore the origins of that vulnerability, the response to the flood itself, and the world the flood created.

INTRODUCTION

“THEY ARE ALL TRYING to blame this on me,” Nebraska senator George Norris laughed as he pointed at a knot of shivering reporters watching Franklin Roosevelt prepare to take the oath of office. Norris had championed the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, a modification that advanced the inauguration from March 4 to January 20. This wet, chilly gray day in 1937, the first day of FDR’s second term, marked the new date’s initial application. Inauguration morning brought more of the relentless precipitation that had turned Washington, DC, into a swampy morass. Residents scuttled through near-freezing temperatures and a nasty mix of rain and sleet. Tiny rivers streamed down Pennsylvania Avenue, and small ponds capped with skins of ice dotted the National Mall. Resentful correspondents ribbed the senator for forcing them into this mess. They groaned when a cheerful Norris reminisced about the March 1909 blizzard that had compelled William Howard Taft to recite the oath indoors.[1]

President Franklin Roosevelt, smiling to the crowd from the rostrum, was oblivious to their carping. His aura of stolid resolution mocked both the storm and the thirty pounds of iron braces encasing his paralyzed legs. FDR had spent the past few days polishing his inaugural address in the comfort of the ...