One persons historical perspective...


Katrina’s worst damage will take the form of recriminations
Friday, September 02, 2005
DAVID BROOKS


Hurricanes come in two waves. First comes the rainstorm, and then comes
what the historian John Barry calls the "human storm": the
recriminations, the political conflict and the battle over compensation.
Floods wash away the surface of society — the settled way things have
been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices,
the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. When you
look back over the meteorological turbulence in America’s it’s striking
how often political turbulence has followed.

In 1889 in Pennsylvania, a great flood washed away much of Johnstown.
The water’s crushing destruction sounded to one person like the sound of
a "lot of horses grinding oats." Witnesses watched hundreds of people
trapped on a burning bridge, forced to choose between burning to death
or throwing themselves into the churning waters to drown.

The flood was so abnormal that the country seemed to have trouble
grasping what had happened. The national media were filled with wild
exaggerations and fabrications: stories of rivers dammed with corpses,
of children who died while playing ring-around-therosy and who were
found with their hands still clasped and with smiles still on their faces.

Prejudices were let loose. Hungarians then were akin to today’s illegal
immigrants; they were hard-working people who took jobs no one else
wanted. Newspapers carried accounts of gangs of Hungarian men cutting
off dead women’s fingers to steal their rings. "Drunken Hungarians,
Dancing, Singing, Cursing and Fighting Amid the Ruins" a New York Herald
headline blared.

Then, as David McCullough notes in The Johnstown Flood, public fury
turned on the Pittsburgh millionaires whose club’s fishing pond had
emptied on the town. The Chicago Herald depicted the millionaires as
Roman aristocrats, seeking pleasure while the poor died like beasts in
the Colosseum.

Even before the flood, public resentment was building against the newly
rich industrialists. Protests were growing against the trusts, against
industrialization and against the new concentrations of wealth. The
Johnstown flood crystallized the public’s anger, for the fishing club
was, indeed, partly to blame. Public reaction to the disaster helped set
the stage for the progressive movement and the trust-busting that was to
come.

In 1900, another great storm hit the United States, killing more than
6,000 people in Galveston, Texas. The storm exposed racial animosities,
for this time equally false stories swept through the press, accusing
blacks of cutting off the fingers of corpses to steal wedding rings. The
devastation ended Galveston’s chance to beat out Houston as Texas’
leading port.

Then in 1927, the great Mississippi flood rumbled down upon New Orleans.
As Barry writes in his account, Rising Tide, the disaster ripped the
veil off the genteel, feudal relations between whites and blacks, and
revealed the festering iniquities. Blacks were rounded up into work
camps and held by armed guards. They were prevented from leaving as the
waters rose. A half-empty steamer, the Capitol, played Bye Bye Blackbird
as it sailed away. The racist violence that followed the floods helped
persuade many blacks to move north.

Civic leaders intentionally flooded poor and middle-class areas to ease
the floodwater’s pressure on the city, and then reneged on promises to
compensate those whose homes were destroyed. That helped fuel the
populist anger that led to Huey Long’s success. Across the country,
people demanded that the federal government get involved in disaster
relief, helping to set the stage for the New Deal. The local civic elite
turned insular and reactionary, and New Orleans never really recovered
its preflood vibrancy.

We’d like to think that the stories of hurricanes and floods are always
stories of people rallying together to give aid and comfort. And,
indeed, each of America’s great floods has prompted a popular response
both generous and inspiring. But floods also are civic examinations.
Amid all the stories that recur with every disaster — tales of sudden
death and miraculous survival, the displacement and the disease — there
is also the testing.

Civic arrangements work or they fail. Leaders are found worthy or
wanting. What’s happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a
human tragedy. But look closely toward the people you see wandering,
devastated, around New Orleans: They are predominantly black and poor.
The political disturbances are still to come.

David Brooks writes for The New York Times.