WHAT THE GREAT FLOOD OF 1927 WASHED AWAY

Author: By Wil Haygood, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, March 30, 1997

Page: N15

Section: Books

Legions of writers have taken on the Mississippi River -- poets, travel writers, essayists, foolish journalists. As much of its saga lies on dry land as in the river itself, and no one has told that part of the story with the verve, passionate energy, and literary bravado that John M. Barry now does in ``Rising Tide.'' It is nothing less than the story of America itself: of engineers and the Delta, of ambition and families corrupted, of political shenanigans, of Calvin Coolidge's cold heart and Herbert Hoover's -- believe it or not -- warmth. (Hoover's warmth turned cold once he was inside the White House). Finally, it is the story of black people in Mississippi. It was during the time of the great 1927 flood, which changed the course of history and politics, when black Americans were forced to work on the levees in a kind of peonage. For refusing to do so, many were beaten, or jailed. Some were shot. It is a part of Mississippi River history that is little-known, and it is heartbreaking.

Barry, a journalist whose inspiration for writing about the Mississippi began two decades ago while he worked on a New Orleans weekly, begins his study just before the Civil War with a pitched battle between two engineers, Andrew Humphreys and James Eads. Both wanted to tame the Mississippi. Both had hubris. ``One had genius; the other had power,'' writes Barry. They fought over the inexactness of the exact science of engineering. These were men who scavenged the river looking for clues on how to master it, who studied its soil, who sacrificed their personal lives. In 1852, when he was 32, Eads lost his wife to cholera. He sought comfort in the river. ``Fortune favors the brave,'' Eads wrote, and he built steamboats for Lincoln's war. Humphreys tried to figure out sandbars, floods, the use of levees to control the river.

``Levees confined the Mississippi; outlets released it,'' notes Barry, whose writing can be beautiful. ``Levees represented man's power over nature; outlets represented man's accommodation to nature.'' Early work on the river was backbreaking. But it could be seductive: ``How it must have felt to stand on the bank of the Mississippi in the middle of the nineteenth century, to push one's way through a wild and thick jungle of cane, vines, and willow, to hear the animal sounds mixed with the rush of water, to see water a mile wide, boiling, dark, and angry, two hundred and more feet deep, to watch it thunder and roll south at a speed so great a boat with six men at oars could not move upstream. How godlike it must have felt to a man who intended to find a way to command it.''

With the folly and hope of engineering established (it was always gambling on science, on methods tested in Europe, on inventions) and the Civil War over, Barry's narrative moves on to a prominent family, the Percys of Greenville, Miss. The Percys would come to represent fair-minded (mostly) thinking about black folk. The Percys would battle the Klan. And they would battle the Mississippi.

There had been wicked floods in 1913 (blacks were used as human sandbags) and in 1920. Blacks did the brunt of the work on the levees. Barry sets up a battle between the frightening forces ruling Mississippi and the Percys, now led by LeRoy Percy, as the 1920s came into view. ``If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy,'' said James Vardaman, Mississippi governor. ``The men of Percy's class had ruled in their own interest and class interest,'' writes Barry. ``But they had a code of honor and only, at worst, personal hatreds. They were better than those who were replacing them, who had a darkness in the soul.'' Percy's Mississippi had been invaded from within, by whites from the hill country. ``With them came different values,'' notes Barry. ``And with them came the Ku Klux Klan.''

LeRoy Percy had to worry about the Klan and the river, all at once. In spring 1927, the Mississippi started to rise. Levees were cracking. Rains came, and they kept coming. Ten different flood crests were moving down the Mississippi. Southern newspapers were loath to publish anything about the rising river for fear it would cause panic and economic ruin. What was at work was a blind belief in the levee system. The flood ignored the levees, did its damage: Hundreds of millions in dollars, more than 1,000 in lives. ``Those who knew the river always felt that it seemed a thing alive,'' writes Barry, ``with a will and personality. In 1927 its will seemed intent on sweeping its valley clean of man.''

In New Orleans, town fathers voted to dynamite the upstream levees to keep the city from flooding -- to ruin Louisiana's rural land and homes before the crest reached the city. It worked (though it may have been premature). Lawyers and politicians in the city then refused to give compensation to the thousands whose land and homes they destroyed. (Huey Long would use the incident to launch his own political ambitions).

President Coolidge refused to visit flood sites. The Red Cross was accused of giving bad food and accommodations to blacks. Hoover, an orphan as a child who was now Secretary of Commerce, was called in. He reorganized relief efforts, stomped around impressively, visited levee camps, craved publicity, and rose as a national hero and presidential contender. Hoover promised blacks help if they vowed to vote for him during the presidential race. They did. Hoover lied. Blacks left the party of Lincoln in wild numbers. They haven't returned since. They began to leave Mississippi, too: Chicago was a favorite destination.

The flood, in the end, changed everything the river touched -- especially the population and the politics of a region. It also changed flood-control policy. From keeping its hands off, the federal government moved to become deeply involved in river control.

As much as ``river control'' is possible. The Mississippi remains its own ruler.