Historians call the 1927 natural disaster the nation's worst

By Bob Miller ~ Southeast Missourian

Seventy-five years have passed since refugees were harbored in Cape Girardeau's churches and public buildings.

Flooded out of their homes in the spring of 1927, hundreds of families from Illinois and Missouri's Bootheel came to Cape Girardeau. Some residents welcomed these drifters into their homes. Some families had to take shelter in abandoned boxcars.

While caring for the flood victims -- most of them women and children -- Cape Girardeau was inundated with its own problems. The downtown area was under water. Rail transportation was halted, meaning mail had to be delivered by boat. The flood wreaked havoc on the construction of the new bridge and ferries could not cross the river when the water was well beyond the banks.

The river, which reached flood stage in many states at the beginning of 1927, created what most historians call the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

"The '27 flood was sort of the granddaddy of them all," said Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the center for regional history at Southeast Missouri State University. "It's the flood in which all other floods are still measured."

Evaluating the damage

The flood, which widened the Mississippi River to 100 miles across in some areas, inspired novels and documentaries. It also was responsible for unprecedented damage to the lower drainage system of the Mississippi.

Cape Girardeau escaped the worst of the flooding, but Charleston, Mo., New Madrid, Mo., and Cairo, Ill., were hit with massive destruction.

In all, more than 16 million acres were flooded. About 162,000 homes were damaged, and 9,000 homes were lost. It has been estimated that about 1,000 people died as a result of the floods, though only 276 were confirmed. More than 700,000 were fed by the Red Cross, and 325,000 were forced from their homes.

One reason there was so much damage was because of a poor river control system. The use of a "levees only" system proved unorganized and inadequate.

Although levee districts existed, they were not jointly coordinated. One-hundred and forty-five levees broke from the pressure of flood waters.

The lesson of the flood was not lost on engineers. In 1928, the nation's first comprehensive flood control act was born. That act put the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in charge of flood control along the entire Mississippi River. From this legislation came a plan by Lt. Gen. Edgar Jadwin that included floodways, channel stabilization and better mapping. Eventually, flood control would include dams, reservoirs and pumping plants.

Locally, the flood sparked some conversation about protecting downtown Cape Girardeau. Leaders started talking about protecting the downtown with a flood wall.

In 1958, after several more floods, a concrete wall was built and the business district has remained dry since. The flood-protection system also includes two pumping stations, five gates and six drainage structures.

Watered-down politics

The flood did more than destroy lives and spur changes in flood control. It also affected the political landscape of the country and changed disaster relief into a national affair.

Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, gained considerable popularity. His coordination of relief, historians say, is what elevated him to the White House.

"He called so much attention to the plight of displaced people," Nickell said of Hoover. "He got a lot of national press."

Some historians point to the flood as the beginning of a larger national government, although most of money that went to relief efforts was raised by private donations through the Red Cross. The Red Cross raised more than $17 million.

"As an outgrowth of the flood, people began to realize that the government had a responsibility to citizens," said John Barry, author of the book "Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America."

The 1928 Flood Control Act gave the federal government authority over the river system.

"Prior to the '27 flood, levee boards built and maintained levees using local funds," said Peter Nimrod of the Mississippi Levee Board in Greenville, Miss. "After the 1928 Flood Control Act, essentially 100 percent of the levees were federally funded. Now the levee boards have backed off doing the construction, and now we're in charge of purchasing the right-of-ways and the maintenance once the levees are built."

Some other political events that occurred during the '27 flood are what ultimately broke the emotional ties between blacks and the Republican Party, Barry explained.

Hoover, worried about the national media turning on him, made a deal with Robert Moton, a black leader with the Colored Advisory Commission. Hoover said that if Moton continued to keep the mistreatment of blacks during the flood -- they were often forced to work double shifts at gunpoint without pay -- out of the press, he would redistribute small amounts of water-soaked farmland to the blacks once he was elected.

So the Republican Party, influenced heavily by black supporters, endorsed Hoover for president. But Hoover did not follow through on his promise, and the alliance of blacks to the Republican Party, which dated back to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, was damaged.

Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic president who followed Hoover, eventually garnered the overwhelming support of blacks to the Democratic party.

Memories vanishing

Just as the flood waters eventually receded, so have many of the first-hand memories of the disaster.

A few elderly at the Cape Girardeau Senior Center this week recalled the flood. But after 75 years, most have trouble with specific details.

"I remember all the water down in there, and they would run boats up Main Street," said Melvin Heise, 88.

But 80-year-old Don Ware remembers the flood quite vividly.

Living in a small delta town of Belzoni, Miss., he was 6 years old when the flood water crept slowly out of its banks.

Belzoni is about 50 miles from Scott, Miss., where a major levee broke. Ware, whose house was on high ground and remained safe, remembers how people drove out on gravel roads to watch the murky water move eerily toward their towns.

"It flooded our town to a depth of about four to five feet," he said. "People had to get rowboats or motorboats to get up and down the streets."

Nimrod, of the levee board, said an area known as the Yazoo Delta spans 60 miles and was flooded by the Mississippi River.

"It flooded all the way from the Mississippi to the Yazoo River," Nimrod said.

In Lindbergh's shadow

However, the staggering amount of damage caused by the nation's worst natural disaster is rarely talked about.

The flood is often overlooked by another story in 1928 -- Charlie Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic.

"That's the time when we were starting to develop a celebrity culture," Barry said. "It's harder to encapsulate the flood than it is to say that Lindbergh flew the Atlantic."

It was also difficult, Barry said, to get a grasp back then of how big the disaster actually was.

"Everybody saw the flood from their own perspective," he said. "People in Missouri were not aware that the entire Yazoo Delta was all under water. Nobody who was in the Yazoo region saw the totality of the disaster in Louisiana. But people were killed from Virginia to Oklahoma. It's like a dog trying to bite a basketball. You just can't get a hold of it. It's too big."

bmiller@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 127