Jim Bradshaw
Calamities and politics have gone hand-in-hand in Louisiana for a long time, and it is almost a certainty that the coronavirus crisis will be no different. The history of that sort of political fallout goes back at least to the Great Flood of 1927 that turned much of south Louisiana into one huge lake.
It’s a stretch to say that the flood put Herbert Hoover into the White House, but maybe not that much of one.
The flood propelled Hoover, who as secretary of commerce was in charge of flood relief operations, into the national spotlight and set the stage for his election to the presidency -- and then it contributed to his defeat when he ran for reelection four years later. Some folks say flood politics also helped get Huey Long elected governor in 1928.
The flood crisis began in south Louisiana on May 13, 1927, when levees broke at Moreauville and Bordelonville in Avoyelles Parish, and water began to rush south. The levee broke at Melville on May 17, and water roared through the Atchafalaya Basin and down Bayou Teche.
When the Melville levee broke, according to a report in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, “Breakers were shooting through and leaping over each other way up into the streets of town. [The flood] swept everything before it. Washtubs, work benches, household furniture, chickens and domestic animals were floating away.”
That same day Hoover visited St. Martin Parish and, according to press reports, “particularly advised citizens of St. Martinville to prepare for inundation” and urged “residents of Breaux Bridge and other points along the Teche … to be in readiness to flee from the racing waters.”
It was good advice. Within days, boats had replaced the trucks pulling people out of the flood and all of the Teche valley was under water.
Thousands of the people who fled the flood ended up in refugee camps in Lafayette, which, like everything else in those days, were racially segregated. The old Fair Grounds in north Lafayette was the principal white camp, and a camp for black people was set up in the Greenville section.
Hoover later toured the camps and found “unacceptable conditions in both white and black facilities,” according to reports at the time. Congestion and sanitization were among the biggest problems; on the good side, the refugees were being well fed and at one of the most economical rates of all the camps set up in the entire Mississippi Valley.
John M. Barry, who wrote Rising Tide, the definitive history of the flood (Simon & Schuster, 1997), says Hoover’s nomination as the Republican candidate for president was “another legacy of the flood,” but there was more of the legacy to come to light.
Hoover was highly praised at first for his masterful handling of refugee camps and for his direction of the flood relief effort, but concerns over the treatment of blacks in those camps caused him to make promises to the African-American community which he later broke.
During the flood, several reports on the terrible situation in the refugee camps, including one by the Colored Advisory Commission by Robert Russa Moton who succeeded founder Booker T. Washington as head of the Tuskegee Institute, were kept out of the media at Hoover’s request He promised that things would change for blacks after the presidential election.
Those promises brought him the black vote that put him into office. But when he failed to keep the promise, Moton and other influential African-Americans helped to shift the allegiance of black Americans from the Republican party to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats, where it has largely remained ever since.
As for Huey Long, another legacy of the flood was a distrust by people, particularly those who lived below New Orleans, of the state government and a resentment of New Orleans’ political clout after a levee was dynamited to save the city.
Long, who was opposed by powerful New Orleans politicians, campaigned as the champion of the “little man,” and found substantial support among people who had been washed out of their homes.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.