High Water leads to Slippery Slope

[xoxoxoBruce]

Smithsonian Magazine (Nov-05) has a great article about the great flood of 1927 and it’s after effects on the country. When I Googled “1927 flood” I got 919,000 hits….WTF?
Well, it seems there were a number of floods around the country that year. The flood in the heartland, down the Mississippi, was the one that is described as the worst natural disaster to hit the US, until Katrina.
Here is the timeline.

What I found most interesting was this part of the article:

But the most important and most subtle change generated by the flood involved the way Americans viewed government. Before the flood, Americans generally did not believe government had a responsibility for individual citizens. Consider the Yellow Fever Epidemic that struck New Orleans in 1905: The US public health officials would not help New Orleans until the city put up $250,000 – in advance – to cover federal expenses. Americans accepted this. Likewise, when a 1922 flood left 50,000 in Louisiana homeless, Governor John Parker, a close friend of Hoover’s, refused not only to tap the federal government for help, he declined even to ask the Red Cross, declaring, “Louisiana has not asked for aid and will not.”

Though the federal government in 1927 had recorded a record surplus in it’s budget, not a dollar of federal money went in direct aid to any of the one million flood victims (Hoover established private reconstruction corporations – they were failures). The only money that the US government spent was on supplies and salaries for the military personnel who participated in the rescue.

But Americans believed that the federal government should have done more. John Parker, no longer governor, but then in charge of helping the 200,000 homeless in Louisiana, reversed himself and desperately sought all the outside help he could get. Across the nation, citizens demanded that the federal government take action. The sentiment became concrete a year later, when Congress passed the 1928 Flood Control Act, a law that would cost more than anything the government had ever done except fight World War I; the law would also set a precedent of giving the federal government more authority to involve itself in what had been state and local government decisions.

Since most of the flood victims were farmers, common folk, or in the south where they dynamited the levees to save New Orleans, flooding the poor Blacks, the fat cats said let them fend for themselves.

Half of the Blacks, after being shut out of private relief efforts, packed up and moved north to the cities

Hoover used private corporations to help reconstruction. Sound Familiar?

The call for government action by the people spured the federal involvment in peoples lives that has grown to the nanny state we have today.

I wonder how this year's hurricanes will contribute to federal influence growth?