This worthy volume begins with the days of James Buchanan Eads (who built the first bridge across the lower Mississippi), who favored "spillways" to contain the raging river's inevitable floods, and his rival engineer Edward Humphreys, who favored ever-taller levees. The Army Corps of engineers and local authorities had largely followed the "levee only" policy from after the Civil War until the unprecedented 1927 flood.
When the incessant rains and floods came, they were more pervasive and worse than anyone had imagined. Author John M. Barry details not only what happened in "the Delta" -- cotton country -- but what happened on Mississippi tributaries, too, leaving hundreds of thousands of poor farm families destitute and homeless. When the flood hits, the author concentrates on little Greenville, Mississippi, including the aristocratic Percy family (one cousin of whom was novelist Walker Percy), that ran the plantations and dominated politics; also then-reigning New Orleans, which tried to save itself by having levees downriver dynamited. By trying to raise quick labor to raise the levees, the Percys and other leaders conscripted black sharecroppers and then brutalized and abused them, making of Greenville a sore spot in race relations in what was once a relatively tolerant area. New Orleans' inability to fulfill its commitments to reimburse those it flooded out (and its duplicity in tweaking the legal system to its advantage) gave rise to Louisiana populism, most notably Huey Long.
RISING TIDE is a readable and useful chronicle of a surprisingly under-documented subject in national history. Reading this book helps readers understand the shifting national politics of the late 1920's and 1930's, and such social phenomena as the exodus of disenfranchised blacks to the cities of the North. I would have hoped that a book of this scope and specificity would have more than one "overview" map, but that's a minor deficit in such a generous study.
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