Speaker 1: For anybody new to this channel, I want to take
Speaker 1: a minute to explain what you're seeing here. We actually
Speaker 1: have two podcasts on this bear Grease feed, and really
Speaker 1: almost three. We have our documentary style bear Grease episodes
Speaker 1: like this one, and then every other week we have
Speaker 1: what we call the bear Grease Render, which is me
Speaker 1: and a group of friends discussing and given behind the
Speaker 1: scenes looks into the making of the bear Grease documentary
Speaker 1: style episodes. So that's what bear Grease is all about.
Speaker 1: But every Friday we also have Brent Reeves this country
Speaker 1: life podcast, which is pure country goal. It's usually under
Speaker 1: thirty minutes long and just a lot of fun. So
Speaker 1: this feed isn't exactly simple, but neither are most worthwhile endeavors.
Speaker 2: I really hope that you enjoy this episode.
Speaker 3: Rivers are absolutely so uncertain, and the more you work
Speaker 3: with them, the more you find out that the data
Speaker 3: that we have is great data. But all this data
Speaker 3: that we take, it's not absolute. It's just snapshawns in time.
Speaker 1: The Mississippi Rivers stories are big, turbulent, and touch a
Speaker 1: far reaching swath of human life. Rivers and men have
Speaker 1: always been linked when trying to decide the sequence of
Speaker 1: telling a story. I'll often imagine I'm telling it to
Speaker 1: my kids, what individual stories and emphasis would I tell
Speaker 1: a ten year old, And usually that sequence works for
Speaker 1: the world's brightest minds like you bear grease listeners. So
Speaker 1: I'm being confronted with where to go with this Mississippi
Speaker 1: River series, and I know exactly where I'm going, And
Speaker 1: I would definitely tell my kids about the two Civil
Speaker 1: War vets who pioneered the doctrine of controlling this great river,
Speaker 1: Charles Ellett and Andrew Humphreys, and how they're obsession and
Speaker 1: rivalry shaped the way we managed the river, which led
Speaker 1: to one of the most costly natural disasters in American history.
Speaker 1: It really changed America, you know what disaster that was.
Speaker 1: I'd also tell my kids about Mark Twain, America's most
Speaker 1: celebrated writer who was obsessed with being a riverboat captain
Speaker 1: on the Mississippi River. He bottled American culture in his
Speaker 1: writing and sent it to the world. And that natural
Speaker 1: disaster that I was talking about, it was the Great
Speaker 1: Mississippi River Flood of nineteen twenty seven. And you better
Speaker 1: believe that my kids would be on the edge of
Speaker 1: their seats when I told them about it, and so
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you about it too. We're continuing
Speaker 1: down the river on this third episode of this series,
Speaker 1: and like William Faulkner were in pursuit of understanding the world,
Speaker 1: I really doubt you're going to want to miss this one.
Speaker 4: Last three months of nineteen twenty six, the average reading
Speaker 4: on every single river gauge was the highest ever known.
Speaker 4: It didn't take much thinking to figure out that if
Speaker 4: you got any rain of any significance in nineteen twenty seven,
Speaker 4: you were going to get a serious flood.
Speaker 1: My name is Klay Nukem, and this is the Bear
Speaker 1: Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
Speaker 1: for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
Speaker 1: story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land.
Speaker 1: Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and
Speaker 1: fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the
Speaker 1: place as we explore.
Speaker 5: Oh me down.
Speaker 1: I know this is hard to understand, but I'll explain.
Speaker 1: Just listen.
Speaker 5: It down down de water WATERJ do down gown.
Speaker 1: That was blues singer Charles Patten singing a song called
Speaker 1: high Water which he recorded in nineteen twenty nine. The
Speaker 1: recording was so rough you have to feel the energy
Speaker 1: of what he's singing about. Some say it sounds like
Speaker 1: the surges of a flood. It's about the flood of
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty seven. Here's some of the lyrics. Now looking
Speaker 1: now in leland Lord, the river is rising high. Looky here,
Speaker 1: boys around Lee tell me the river is raging high.
Speaker 1: I'm going over to Greenville. Bought the tickets. Goodbye, Look
Speaker 1: you here. The water dugout, Lordie. The levee broke rolled
Speaker 1: most everywhere. The water at Greenville and leland Lord, it
Speaker 1: done rose everywhere. I would go down to Rosedale, but
Speaker 1: they tell me there's water there. Backwater at Blitheville backed
Speaker 1: up all around. Backwater at Blitheville don struck Joiner Town.
Speaker 1: It was fifty families and children. Tough luck. They can drown.
Speaker 1: The water was rising up in my friend's door. The
Speaker 1: water was rising up in my friend's door. The man
Speaker 1: said his woman, folk, Lord, we better go, won't be
Speaker 1: no more. I want to now read you the words
Speaker 1: of John Barry, author of Rising Tide. He has something
Speaker 1: to say about rising water. There is no sight like
Speaker 1: the rising Mississippi. One cannot look at it without awe
Speaker 1: or watch it rise and press against the levees without fear.
Speaker 1: It grows darker, angrier, dirtier. Eddies and whirlpools erupt on
Speaker 1: its surface. It thickens with trees, rooftops the occasional body
Speaker 1: of a mule. Its currents royal, more flow, swifter, pummel,
Speaker 1: its banks harder. When a section of riverbank caves into
Speaker 1: the river, acres of land at a time collapse, snapping
Speaker 1: trees with the great crackling sounds of heavy artillery on
Speaker 1: the water, the sound carries for miles. Unlike a human enemy,
Speaker 1: the river has no weakness, makes no mistakes, is perfect.
Speaker 1: Unlike a human enemy, it will find and exploit any weakness.
Speaker 1: To repel it requires an intense, nearly perfect, and sustained effort.
Speaker 1: Major John Lee in the nineteen twenties, the Army District
Speaker 1: engineer in Vicksburg, who in nineteen forty four make the
Speaker 1: Cover of Time as an important World War two general
Speaker 1: observed in physical and mental strain a prolonged high water
Speaker 1: fight on threatened levees can only be compared with real war.
Speaker 1: Rivers are perfect. They are the lawmaker, judge, and jury
Speaker 1: of their world, superseding any man concocted laws we could
Speaker 1: pretend to place. On a river, there is no standard
Speaker 1: to judge a river against. It is neither moral nor amoral,
Speaker 1: good or bad, friend or foe. It simply exists and dominates.
Speaker 1: Mankind is always contended with big rivers, and there's a
Speaker 1: file in every human's brain holding an instinctual awe when
Speaker 1: you stand on a great river's bank. No data exists
Speaker 1: on how many of our ancestors died crossing big rivers,
Speaker 1: but the evolutionary evidence of the trauma of rivers has
Speaker 1: branded us. There are many biblical references that the spiritual
Speaker 1: help granted to the righteous one crossing big water. King
Speaker 1: David's mighty men were commended for bravery for crossing the
Speaker 1: Jordan River during its flood stage, and the prophet Isaiah
Speaker 1: declared to those who are redeemed of the Lord that
Speaker 1: when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep
Speaker 1: over you. River crossings in the Bible are a test
Speaker 1: of faith, and if you cross, there is a new
Speaker 1: life on the other side. In fifteen twenty eight, the
Speaker 1: first European inland exploration of what is now America. Happened
Speaker 1: in Florida and was recorded by a Spaniard named Kebeza
Speaker 1: de Vaka. In his journal, he recounted a river crossing
Speaker 1: early in their trip, and he said, quote, that night
Speaker 1: we came to a river that was very deep and
Speaker 1: very wide, in the current very strong. Since we could
Speaker 1: not cross over on rafts, we made a canoe for it.
Speaker 1: We took a day to cross it on horseman who
Speaker 1: was called wan Velasquez, not wanting to wait, entered the river.
Speaker 1: The current, which was strong, swepting from the horse. He
Speaker 1: kept hold of the reins, and so he and the
Speaker 1: horse drowned. The Indians of that lord found the horse.
Speaker 1: They told us where down the river we would find him,
Speaker 1: and so they went for him. His death gave us
Speaker 1: much pain, because until then we had not lost anyone.
Speaker 1: The horse made dinner for many that night. End of quote.
Speaker 1: The first recorded European death of what is now America
Speaker 1: was from a big, wild, rising, dirty brown river. If
Speaker 1: I was telling this story to my kids, I'd have
Speaker 1: told him that we know more about rivers than we
Speaker 1: ever have. But there's such dynamic systems. Our best science
Speaker 1: research and minds aren't fully able to predict their next move.
Speaker 1: This is doctor Bedenharn, a research hydraulic engineer with the
Speaker 1: core of engineers. He probably knows more about rivers than
Speaker 1: anybody in the country.
Speaker 3: If I could have had this interview forty years ago,
Speaker 3: I'd have had much more definitive answers for you. Yeah,
Speaker 3: because it was a lot simpler than when I didn't
Speaker 3: realize how much I didn't know. Because the older I've
Speaker 3: gotten and the more I've worked with streams, the more
Speaker 3: conservative I've gotten and more cautious really, because oh yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 3: because rivers are absolutely so uncertain, and the more you
Speaker 3: work with them, the more you find out that the
Speaker 3: data that we have is great data. But that is
Speaker 3: just one snapshot in time of where the river was
Speaker 3: on that date in nineteen fifteen. We surveyed this river.
Speaker 3: One month later, it could be completely different. But all
Speaker 3: this data that we take is absolute. It's not absolute,
Speaker 3: it's just snapshots in time. I kind of think about
Speaker 3: it as an inverted pyramid. The Egyptians, you know, and
Speaker 3: the minds knew what they were doing. They started with
Speaker 3: a really solid base and then they built their pyramid up.
Speaker 3: The tip of the pyramid is where we start with
Speaker 3: very little knowledge and then we build from there. You know,
Speaker 3: we get more and more precise. I'm not saying we
Speaker 3: cannot understand and make predictions and do designs on rivers,
Speaker 3: but there is always a pretty large level of uncertainty
Speaker 3: that goes into all our analysis and design that we
Speaker 3: have to recognize it.
Speaker 1: I appreciate doctor Bidenharn's humility. Like I said, he knows
Speaker 1: more about rivers than anybody, and he's telling us they're
Speaker 1: unpredictable and hard to control. And that's exactly what we're
Speaker 1: talking about. The only constant between man and rivers is
Speaker 1: this uncertainty and the fact that we could be swept away.
Speaker 1: And that's what we're going to talk about on this episode,
Speaker 1: but not before we'd do some review from the last
Speaker 1: two episodes. The Mississippi River starts at Lake of Tasca
Speaker 1: in Minnesota and flows roughly twenty three hundred miles through
Speaker 1: the bread Basket of America to the Gulf of Mexico.
Speaker 1: You need to know this. If we were to count
Speaker 1: its tributary, the Missouri River, it would be the longest
Speaker 1: river in the world. There are approximately twenty four hundred
Speaker 1: miles of non dammed free flowing river. When you combine
Speaker 1: the Missouri and the Mississippi. If you go up the
Speaker 1: Mississippi twelve hundred miles to its first dam and turn
Speaker 1: left on the Missouri and go another twelve hundred miles
Speaker 1: to its first dam, that's how you get the twenty
Speaker 1: four hundred miles, making this one of the longest free
Speaker 1: flowing bodies of water in the world. The Mississippi River
Speaker 1: drains parts of thirty one states, roughly forty one percent
Speaker 1: of America, and also two Canadian provinces. Only the Amazon
Speaker 1: and the Congo Rivers have larger drainage basins. It drops
Speaker 1: to the slope, averaging three inches per mile, and has
Speaker 1: an average current speed of nine miles per hour and
Speaker 1: eighteen in a flood. The last four hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: miles of the river are below sea level. These stats
Speaker 1: will never get old to an American, and you'll need
Speaker 1: to memorize them if you plan on being the most
Speaker 1: interesting person at camp. This fault, which I'd expect every
Speaker 1: bear grease listener to beat. Conversations can be boring and
Speaker 1: lack that gritty, greasy gravitass that's bigger than the weather
Speaker 1: and cannon, Barbie, we're equipping you with the stories. This
Speaker 1: is how the Mississippi River was tamed. That's what we're
Speaker 1: talking about, or at least how they tried to tame it.
Speaker 1: Here is our friend John Berry. In the eighteen fifties,
Speaker 1: the US government commissioned two guys to go create a
Speaker 1: comprehensive report on the Mississippi River, right, which was kind
Speaker 1: of like a Lewis and Clark expedition of the river.
Speaker 1: And these guys were pretty unique characters.
Speaker 4: They were, but you know, they were rivals. They weren't
Speaker 4: Lewis and Clark worked together. These guys hated each other's
Speaker 4: guts and they wrote entirely different reports. The first engineering
Speaker 4: school in the United States was West Point period. But
Speaker 4: the superstar of the civilians was a guy named Charles
Speaker 4: Ellett who actually did go to school in France. And
Speaker 4: he was a wild man. You know. He built a
Speaker 4: catwalk across Niagara Falls and then rode across it in
Speaker 4: a chariot.
Speaker 1: That was he was kind of a daredevil.
Speaker 6: Oh.
Speaker 4: He built one of the first bridges across the Ohio,
Speaker 4: which incidentally later collapsed. He was killed and during the
Speaker 4: Civil War in front of Vicksburg. He was the captain
Speaker 4: of naval vessel and Union Naval vessel. But Ellett had
Speaker 4: studied the Ohio River, and he was a champion of
Speaker 4: the civilians. The Congress divided in appropriation because of this
Speaker 4: rivalry between the Army engineers and the Corps of Engineers
Speaker 4: and the civilians. And this guy named Andrew Adkinson Humphries
Speaker 4: was in the corps, and again they split the appropriation
Speaker 4: and Ellen and Humphries went off to do their own studies,
Speaker 4: which were, as I said, quite different. Humphries was also
Speaker 4: a bit of more than a character. He loved to
Speaker 4: fight in the war. He led a charge in Fredericksburg,
Speaker 4: one of the bloodiest battles of the war, and he
Speaker 4: wrote afterwards when he lost almost twenty percent of his
Speaker 4: command in about thirty minutes, that he quote, I felt
Speaker 4: like a young girl at her first ball. He just
Speaker 4: loved the glory.
Speaker 1: That's kind of what it. It almost feels like these
Speaker 1: guys had to be that way to tackle what they
Speaker 1: were trying to tackle.
Speaker 4: Maybe, I mean, they certainly had to have an ego.
Speaker 1: Ellet and Humphries both did their independent studies of the
Speaker 1: river before the Civil War. In the eighteen fifties, following
Speaker 1: a big flood that wrecked the lower Mississippi. Tackling this
Speaker 1: river was a grand feat. It was an exploration of
Speaker 1: science relatively new to mankind. Humphries and Elot were both eccentric, brilliant, driven,
Speaker 1: but egotistical men. Humphries was a decorated Civil War colonel.
Speaker 1: He tasted the mud of the river, citing its grittiness
Speaker 1: and taste in his report, and helped plan the trans
Speaker 1: Continental Railroad route. Ellot directly petitioned Abe Lincoln for funding
Speaker 1: to develop warships for the Union Army for the sole
Speaker 1: purpose of ramming and sinking Confederate ships. His ships were
Speaker 1: significant factors in the Union Army's victories on the Mississippi River.
Speaker 1: These guys were wild. I'm not suggesting that these two
Speaker 1: were healthy patterns for manhood. I can't say for sure.
Speaker 1: I really don't know their personal lives. But when I
Speaker 1: hear about these guys, it hearkened to mine the historically
Speaker 1: low testosterone levels and modern men. It's a fact that testosterone,
Speaker 1: the chemical that makes a man a man, has been dropping,
Speaker 1: which some studies show about one percent per year for decades.
Speaker 1: There are many culprits to this, like obesity, sedentary lifestyles,
Speaker 1: mock estrogens in plastics, which is so real, but some
Speaker 1: even believe that it's tight men's underwear anyway, testosterone in
Speaker 1: the rear view mirror. Now, remember that Humphries and Elliott
Speaker 1: were real ballers. Their stories are interesting because they were
Speaker 1: confronting the most complex challenges of their time, and the
Speaker 1: river would end up exposing human nature. This is the
Speaker 1: theme of rivers, that's what they do.
Speaker 4: Humphries did some really rigorous work, made some measurements that
Speaker 4: stand up today. Ellott was more of a pure genius
Speaker 4: conceptualize saying how to approach the river. He wrote a
Speaker 4: port which called, for example, for reservoirs to contain, you know,
Speaker 4: hold water back from floods and things like that. There
Speaker 4: was a theory at the time called the levees only policy,
Speaker 4: that you use levees to control floods and only level levees,
Speaker 4: because the theory was that the levees, by containing the river,
Speaker 4: would force the river to dig out its own channel,
Speaker 4: essentially dredge its own channels, so it would become deeper
Speaker 4: and deeper. By concentrating the flow, you would concentrate this,
Speaker 4: you would increase the currents. Like narrowing the nozzle of
Speaker 4: a garden hose, the water speeds up, and that you
Speaker 4: point it at mud and they'll cut right through it.
Speaker 4: So the levees only theory was based on that, and
Speaker 4: that the river, if you narrowed it, it would speed
Speaker 4: up and cut through it soft bottom, and pretty soon
Speaker 4: would be deep enough naturally that it would accommodate a flood.
Speaker 4: It was a nice theory. It didn't work.
Speaker 1: Being a human is a weird condition in which you
Speaker 1: roll into the earth, and a lot of problems have
Speaker 1: already been solved. At the time, they didn't know how
Speaker 1: to control the river, and the leading theory was called
Speaker 1: the levees only policy. Ellett, however, hypothesized that a combination
Speaker 1: of levees and outlets into reservoirs was a key to
Speaker 1: controlling the river. But the outlets sounded radical and dangerous
Speaker 1: and unnecessary to some. Why would you want to let
Speaker 1: this dragon out of its earthen levee cage, Here's John.
Speaker 4: The problem was that levees are only in contact with
Speaker 4: the river for a few weeks a year during a flood.
Speaker 4: That's there's not a constant influence. So even though the
Speaker 4: river probably would deepen itself when the current increased, it
Speaker 4: wouldn't deepen itself enough to comminate the enormous increase of
Speaker 4: water that came in a great flood. Anyway, Ellett and
Speaker 4: Humphries agreed that this sery was nonsense. It would never work. Yeah, yeah, Nonetheless,
Speaker 4: that became the policy of the corp of Engineers. Even
Speaker 4: though there's one thing those two guys agreed upon. It's,
Speaker 4: you know, truly a strange story. How a bureaucracy can
Speaker 4: get something into its head and you can't get it out.
Speaker 4: It's not just a bureaucracy. People get wrong information in
Speaker 4: their heads all the time, and just dig in.
Speaker 1: People get wrong information in their heads all the time,
Speaker 1: and just dig in. What how could this have happened?
Speaker 4: But Ellett's view of what went on and how to
Speaker 4: handle the river was, you know, without a doubt, in
Speaker 4: my mind, the best view. Humphrey's study was accurate, but Elliott,
Speaker 4: published much before Humphreys, and Humphreys was so competitive and
Speaker 4: needed glories so much. He called Ellot's study and I
Speaker 4: mean there are hundreds, you know, several centuries of engineers
Speaker 4: studying rivers. He called Eli's study the worst ever in history,
Speaker 4: because Elliott had made certain recommendations. You know, Humphreys wanted
Speaker 4: his work to be, as he said, the work of
Speaker 4: my life. You can't have a great work if all
Speaker 4: you do is confirm someone else's work that came first.
Speaker 4: So he ended up recommended against what his own measurements
Speaker 4: said and what Elliot had said, just because he had
Speaker 4: to be first, and he was a claim. Humphreys was
Speaker 4: acclaimed by the scientific community. As I said, Elliot couldn't
Speaker 4: rebut anything he said because Ellen was dead. Humphries was
Speaker 4: a war hero. He was one of the initial founders
Speaker 4: of the National Academy of Sciences, and you know, honorary
Speaker 4: member of half a dozen European scientific societies and so
Speaker 4: forth and so on. And after the Civil War it
Speaker 4: became out of the corp of engineers, so there was
Speaker 4: nobody to dispute them.
Speaker 1: And so what's so interesting about that from a human
Speaker 1: perspective is ego totally dominated. This guy's definitely a prognosis
Speaker 1: of what needed to be done that was going to
Speaker 1: affect millions and millions of people, and he just needed
Speaker 1: to have a theory that stood out from what his
Speaker 1: dead competitor said, right, I mean, does that not happen
Speaker 1: all across life, at all different levels.
Speaker 4: Unfortunately. Yeah, most of us, if not all of us,
Speaker 4: like to think that we make judgments rationally. I certainly
Speaker 4: like to think that hopefully I have enough sense of
Speaker 4: the absurd and of my own weaknesses that I do.
Speaker 4: But I'm sure I have biases. I know I have biases.
Speaker 4: You just try to count for them. I mean, when
Speaker 4: I was a football coach, we used to run I
Speaker 4: guess we'd call it a four or four today, but
Speaker 4: it was a wide tackle six. In that defense, you
Speaker 4: basically line up two defensive tackles on the guards, so
Speaker 4: they're out numbered three to two by the center and
Speaker 4: two offensive guards. So you know you're outnumbered, and you
Speaker 4: know that's a weakness of your defense. And every day
Speaker 4: in practice we used to work on that weakness. Everybody
Speaker 4: we play would try to exploit it, and you know,
Speaker 4: some had some success, but I don't know that anybody
Speaker 4: actually beat us because of that, because we were so
Speaker 4: aware of that weakness. So, you know, I take the
Speaker 4: same approach to my biases. I try to be aware
Speaker 4: of my biases and adjust for them. Humphries didn't do that.
Speaker 4: Humphries did not do that, and some of the conclusions
Speaker 4: sea reach. For example, Ellett wanted outlets for the Mississippi
Speaker 4: River when it was near the ocean to let water
Speaker 4: out during the flood. Humphreys recommended against that and then
Speaker 4: became the core of engineer's policy to oppose outlets. But
Speaker 4: some of it made sense on a cost benefit analysis
Speaker 4: at the time, but it was really pure ego.
Speaker 1: We are all aware that other people around us, friends,
Speaker 1: family members, and even enemies have blind spots in their life.
Speaker 1: Am I right or am I right? Spanning from eating
Speaker 1: too loudly to complete unawareness of how they dominate conversations,
Speaker 1: or blindness of how they treat their spouse. But how
Speaker 1: much energy do we exert trying to identify the blind
Speaker 1: spots in our own lives. It's the healthy practice of
Speaker 1: normal humans across the planet, and the work is never done.
Speaker 1: It should be on our eternal checklist of things will
Speaker 1: never stop doing. Massively simplify the current strategy of flood
Speaker 1: control that ended up working. It's a system of levees
Speaker 1: and outlets. When the water inside the levee gets too high,
Speaker 1: they open up floodways or outlets that allow massive amounts
Speaker 1: of water to escape the main channel of the river.
Speaker 1: These planned floodways are outside the levees and are usually
Speaker 1: agricultural areas. Ellett, the Union soldier, the one who died
Speaker 1: in the Civil War at Vicksburg, suggested a system of
Speaker 1: levees and outlets. I'd now like John Berry to introduce
Speaker 1: us to a third character of the Mississippi River. A
Speaker 1: brilliant man born in eighteen twenty, the year of Daniel
Speaker 1: Boone's death, by the name of James Buchanan Eads.
Speaker 4: James Buchanan Aids is one of the great geniuses in
Speaker 4: American history. In the nineteen thirties, deans of American colleges
Speaker 4: of engineering put together a list of the five greatest
Speaker 4: engineers of all time, talking about people like Leonardo da
Speaker 4: Vinci in Edison and so forth, and he was on
Speaker 4: the list. He was dropped out of school, literally selling
Speaker 4: apples on the street at Saint Louis when he was
Speaker 4: eleven years old. He arrived in Saint Louis and his
Speaker 4: steamboat sank. He almost around to begin with, but he
Speaker 4: was an absolute genius. He taught himself calculus, there were
Speaker 4: a lot of boats and steamboats sinking. He made a
Speaker 4: fortune when he was a very very young man designing
Speaker 4: ways to salvage those sunken steamboat the cargoes in those steamboats.
Speaker 4: He designed a diving bell which he couldn't get anybody
Speaker 4: else to go down in, so he went down himself initially,
Speaker 4: so he learned what the Mississippi River was like by
Speaker 4: walking the bottom and feeling the softness of it, and
Speaker 4: you just sink and it was like you couldn't see
Speaker 4: anything once you get more than a foot or two
Speaker 4: below the surface because of the sediment load is so dark.
Speaker 4: But just feeling like a lizard in front of his anyway,
Speaker 4: after making fortune building a fleet of salvage vessels, he
Speaker 4: then built a fleet of ironclads called turtles that basically
Speaker 4: conquered the Mississippi River for the Union. They gave Grant
Speaker 4: his first victories at Forts Henry and Donaldson. He built
Speaker 4: them in a matter of a boy, I think delivered
Speaker 4: them in a little over six months from the time
Speaker 4: that they were as someone put it, you know, they
Speaker 4: were standing in the forest until his delivery was a
Speaker 4: little over six months. And again, you know, Grant used
Speaker 4: them before the federal government even paid for him. So
Speaker 4: that was his second great triumph. After the war, Saint
Speaker 4: Louis was losing out in competition to Chicago. Saint Louis
Speaker 4: was by far the biggest city in the Midwest, which
Speaker 4: Chicago was gaining rapidly because of rail transport. And the
Speaker 4: problem with Saint Louis was the Mississippi River. You can
Speaker 4: get trains across the Mississippi River except by ferry, which
Speaker 4: is pretty inefficient. So Yads got together a group to
Speaker 4: build the first bridge across the real Mississippi River. There
Speaker 4: were bridges way up river at the narrows of the river, yeah,
Speaker 4: both not necessarily narrow or but not. You didn't have
Speaker 4: the forts of the water. You had a different kind
Speaker 4: of bottom and much more stable bottom and things like that.
Speaker 4: Was much easier upriver. He decided to make it out
Speaker 4: of steel. Now. Number one, this was going to be
Speaker 4: the first steel bridge anywhere in the world. Number two,
Speaker 4: it had the longest arches of any bridge in the world.
Speaker 4: Number three, it was the first bridge Eads had ever
Speaker 4: designed in his life. So he had a consulting engineer
Speaker 4: who was a chief bridge builder for the Pennsylvania railroad
Speaker 4: who said he refused to attach his name to this
Speaker 4: bridge which was doomed to fall. So he's responded to
Speaker 4: the criticism by firing the guy and abolishing the position
Speaker 4: of consulting engineer. And EIDs did build his bridge, and
Speaker 4: it is still standing and still in.
Speaker 1: Use, really still standing today, Yes, built in eighteen seventy four.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And as I say, he's still in use. Where
Speaker 4: is the bridge St. Louis? They run metro trains over it.
Speaker 1: Remember all that talk of hubris that it takes to
Speaker 1: conquer a river. I'd say Eid's had a lot of confidence,
Speaker 1: but he backed it up. Here's how EIDs Bridge impacted
Speaker 1: America in a unique way.
Speaker 4: Aids essentially forced Carnegie to transform steel making into a science.
Speaker 4: EIDs didn't test random plates off a production run. He
Speaker 4: tested every single plate that went into his bridge.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the steel was unpredictable and the quality wasn't
Speaker 1: consistent correct, And so he came in and said, if
Speaker 1: we're gonna build this bridge, it's every piece has got
Speaker 1: to be exactly right.
Speaker 4: And Carnegie rebelled, but couldn't do anything about it because
Speaker 4: otherwise they weren't gonna you know, he tried to force
Speaker 4: them to accept the custom of the trade, but instead
Speaker 4: Aids in a way, transformed American steelmaking by requiring the
Speaker 4: precision that he insisted upon. And that's why the bridge
Speaker 4: is still standing. At the time, more than twenty percent
Speaker 4: of all the bridges made in the United States would
Speaker 4: fall down. You know.
Speaker 1: I guess in some ways you could look at it
Speaker 1: and say that the bigness of the river and the
Speaker 1: formidable obstacle that it was caused people to rise to
Speaker 1: a new challenge. I mean even saying that Ads, this
Speaker 1: guy that had to build this bridge, change the steel
Speaker 1: industry and maybe if we didn't have a Mississippi River
Speaker 1: we'd still have crummy steel. Well by now it'd probably
Speaker 1: be okay. But Carnegie wanted Ads to just accept the
Speaker 1: custom of the trade, which was a crummy, inconsistent steel strength.
Speaker 1: And we all know why he didn't want to raise
Speaker 1: the industry standard. It was that moo law, the dough
Speaker 1: that's chin. I don't know the full situation, so it's
Speaker 1: not entirely fair for me to cast this kind of
Speaker 1: judgment on Carnegie. But this kind of stuff makes me angry.
Speaker 1: It makes me wonder where in today's corporate world is greed, money,
Speaker 1: stifling advancement, no doubt, it's everywhere. Capitalism, with all its
Speaker 1: glory and benefits, which we all love, has placed the
Speaker 1: highest priority of our society on the acquisition of wealth
Speaker 1: and making money. But this is a double edged sword
Speaker 1: that our society is and will be paying for in
Speaker 1: the future. But in defense of Carnegie, don't hate the player,
Speaker 1: hate the game, And you can't say you hate corporate
Speaker 1: America if you drive a fancy vehicle and have an
Speaker 1: iPhone and buy Big Box store bot meat. Our society,
Speaker 1: including Klay Nukem, is a circus of contradictions. But I
Speaker 1: stand by the idea. The mighty Mississippi, what a chalk
Speaker 1: tawk called the river beyond any age, spurred America to greatness,
Speaker 1: or at least greatness as far as empires gauge it.
Speaker 1: All right, brothers and sisters, There was another man who
Speaker 1: was on the river during the same time period as Humphreys,
Speaker 1: Ellot and EAD's. He was not an engineer, but he
Speaker 1: was studying the river. It was a young man in
Speaker 1: his twenties named Samuel Clemens. He was obsessed with the
Speaker 1: Mississippi River in between eighteen fifty seven and eighteen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: he spent two years as a cub pilot in training
Speaker 1: to be a full fledged riverboat pilot. He'd later go
Speaker 1: by the name of Mark Twain, which is a riverboat
Speaker 1: term used to describe twelve feet of water or two
Speaker 1: twain fathoms. His time on the river exposed him to
Speaker 1: so many different types of people. It helped him become
Speaker 1: one of America's top, if not the top writer. People
Speaker 1: on the river were talkers. It was almost like an
Speaker 1: exhibition of being human in the microcosm of a small ship.
Speaker 1: In eighteen eighty three, later in Twain's life, he would
Speaker 1: write a book called Life on the Mississippi. It's considered
Speaker 1: by many to be the greatest prose in American literature.
Speaker 1: In the book, he idolized river pilots. He said, all
Speaker 1: pilots are tireless talkers when gathered together, and as they
Speaker 1: talk only about the river, they are always understood and
Speaker 1: always interesting. Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on
Speaker 1: earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation
Speaker 1: surpasses the pride of kings. I like that. He went
Speaker 1: on to describe the absolute power of the Mississippi River
Speaker 1: pilots in contras when as to other perceived earthly power.
Speaker 1: Good writing is good thinking, and it makes us see
Speaker 1: something from a totally different angle. I think you'll understand
Speaker 1: why he's considered the greatest when you listen to the
Speaker 1: clarity of his writing. Here's Mark Twain on pilots. If
Speaker 1: I have seemed to love my subject, it is no
Speaker 1: surprising thing, for I have loved the profession far better
Speaker 1: than any I have followed since, and I took measureless
Speaker 1: pride in it. The reason is plain. A pilot in
Speaker 1: those days was the only unfettered and entirely independent human
Speaker 1: being that lived in the earth. Kings are but the
Speaker 1: hampered servants of parliament, and the people Parliament sit in
Speaker 1: chains forged by their constituency. The editor of a newspaper
Speaker 1: cannot be independent, but must work with one hand tied
Speaker 1: behind him by the party and patrons, and be content
Speaker 1: to utter only half or two thirds of his mind.
Speaker 1: No clergyman as a free man and may speak the
Speaker 1: whole truth, regardless of his parish's opinion. Writers of all
Speaker 1: kinds are monacled servants of the public. We write frankly
Speaker 1: and fearlessly. But then we modify before we print. In truth,
Speaker 1: every man and woman and child has a master, and
Speaker 1: worries and frets in servitude. But in the day I
Speaker 1: write of the Mississippi pilot had none. The moment that
Speaker 1: boat was under way in the river, she was under
Speaker 1: the soul and unquestioned control of the pilot. He could
Speaker 1: do with her exactly as he pleased, run her win,
Speaker 1: and withther he chose, and tire her up on the
Speaker 1: bank whenever his judgment said that that course was best.
Speaker 1: His movements were entirely free. He consulted no one, He
Speaker 1: received commands from nobody. He promptly resisted even the merest suggestions. Indeed,
Speaker 1: the law of the United States forbade him to listen
Speaker 1: to commands or suggestions, rightly, considering that the pilot necessarily
Speaker 1: knew better how to handle the boat than anybody could
Speaker 1: tell him. So here was the novelty of a king
Speaker 1: without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute in
Speaker 1: sober truth, and not by a fiction of words. The
Speaker 1: absolute authority of a river pilot is a novel idea.
Speaker 1: Though certainly romanticized by Twain, it's hard not to see
Speaker 1: his point. Perhaps The most intriguing section of his book
Speaker 1: is him describing the incredible navigation skills that a Mississippi
Speaker 1: pilot had to have. Rex weren't just common, they were
Speaker 1: the norm. There are stretches of the river where he
Speaker 1: said shipwrecks averaged one per mile. I think here in
Speaker 1: Twain's voice about the river is important to understanding America.
Speaker 1: At the time, his writing would have been top level
Speaker 1: entertainment for Americans. It would be more influential than the
Speaker 1: trendy Hollywood movie Today. Books and reading were everything. Radio
Speaker 1: didn't even exist until the nineteen hundreds. Here's Mark Twain's
Speaker 1: pilot describing to him how to navigate a river in
Speaker 1: the dark. You see, this has got to be learned.
Speaker 1: It isn't any getting around it. A clear starlet knight
Speaker 1: throws such heavy shadows that if you don't know the
Speaker 1: shape of the shore perfectly, you would claw away from
Speaker 1: every bunch of timber, because you would take the black
Speaker 1: shadow of it for a solid cape. And you see,
Speaker 1: you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1: By the watch. You would be fifty yards from the
Speaker 1: shore all the time, when you ought to be within
Speaker 1: fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in
Speaker 1: one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is,
Speaker 1: and the shape of the river tells you when you're
Speaker 1: coming to it. Then there's your pitch dark knight. The
Speaker 1: river is a very different shape on a pitch dark
Speaker 1: knight from what it is on the starlet night. All
Speaker 1: the shore seemed to be straight lines then, and mighty
Speaker 1: dim ones too, and you'd run them for straight lines,
Speaker 1: only you know better. You boldly drive your boat into
Speaker 1: what seems to be a solid straight wall, and that
Speaker 1: wall falls back and makes way for you. And then
Speaker 1: there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's
Speaker 1: one of those grizzly, drizzly gray mist and there isn't
Speaker 1: any particular shape to a shore. A gray miss would
Speaker 1: tangle ahead of the oldest man that ever lived. Well,
Speaker 1: then there's different kinds of moonlight that changed the shape
Speaker 1: of the river in different ways. You see, Twain interrupts
Speaker 1: this pilot. Oh, don't say anymore, please, I've got to
Speaker 1: learn the shape of the river according to all these
Speaker 1: five hundred thousand different ways. If I tried to carry
Speaker 1: all that cargo in my head, it would make me
Speaker 1: stoop shoulder. My spirits were down in the mud again.
Speaker 1: Two things seem pretty apparent to me. One was that
Speaker 1: in order to be a pilot, a man has got
Speaker 1: to learn more than any one man ought to be
Speaker 1: allowed to know. The other was that he must learn
Speaker 1: it all over again in a different way every twenty
Speaker 1: four hours. This River pilot dissected the different categories of
Speaker 1: night clear, starlet nights, pitch dark knights, and a night
Speaker 1: with a gray mist. I like the hyper specific competence
Speaker 1: in this master's ability to parse out difference in what
Speaker 1: appears to be a monolithic thing. The dark Twain was
Speaker 1: enamored with the pilot's skill set. He said, I think
Speaker 1: a pilot's memory is about the most wonderful thing in
Speaker 1: the world. To know the Old and New Testaments by heart,
Speaker 1: and to be able to recite them ghibli forward and back,
Speaker 1: or begin at random anywhere in the book and recite
Speaker 1: both ways and never trip or make a mistake. Is
Speaker 1: no extravagant, massive knowledge and no marvelous faculty compared to
Speaker 1: a pilot's massed knowledge of the Mississippi and his marvelous
Speaker 1: faculty in the handling of it. I make this comparison deliberately,
Speaker 1: and I believe I am not expanding the truth. When
Speaker 1: I do, many will think the figure too strong, but
Speaker 1: pilots will not. End of quote. Here's Twain on reading water,
Speaker 1: and again I think it's important that we hear Old
Speaker 1: Twain's voice. The face of the water in time became
Speaker 1: a wonderful book, a book that was a dead language
Speaker 1: to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to
Speaker 1: me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as if
Speaker 1: it uttered them with a voice. And it was not
Speaker 1: a book to be read once and thrown aside, for
Speaker 1: it had a news story to tell every day. Throughout
Speaker 1: the long twelve hundred miles, there was never a page
Speaker 1: that was void of interest, never one that you could
Speaker 1: leave unread without loss, never one you could want to skip,
Speaker 1: thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing.
Speaker 1: There was never so wonderful a book written by man,
Speaker 1: never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so
Speaker 1: sparklingly renewed with every reprousal. The passenger who could not
Speaker 1: read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint
Speaker 1: dimple on its surface. On the rare occasions when he
Speaker 1: did not overlook it altogether. But to the pilot it
Speaker 1: was an italicized passage. Indeed, it was more than that.
Speaker 1: It was a legend of the largest capitals, with a
Speaker 1: string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it.
Speaker 1: For it meant that a wrecker or rock was buried
Speaker 1: there that could tear the life out of the strongest
Speaker 1: vessel that ever floated. It is the faintest and simple
Speaker 1: expression the water ever makes, and the most hideous to
Speaker 1: a pilot's eye. In truth, the passenger who could not
Speaker 1: read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty
Speaker 1: pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by
Speaker 1: the clouds, whereas the trained eye they were not pictures
Speaker 1: at all, but the grimest and most dead earnest of
Speaker 1: reading material. When I had mastered the language of this water,
Speaker 1: and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered
Speaker 1: the great river as familiar as I knew the letters
Speaker 1: of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But
Speaker 1: I had lost something too. I had lost something which
Speaker 1: could never be restored to me. While I lived all
Speaker 1: the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of
Speaker 1: the majestic river, I still kept in mind a certain
Speaker 1: wonderful sunset, which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me.
Speaker 1: A broad, expansive river was turned to blood. In the
Speaker 1: middle distance, the red hue brightened into gold, through which
Speaker 1: a solitary log came, floating black and conspicuous, like one bewitched.
Speaker 1: I drank it in in a speechless rapture. The world
Speaker 1: was new to me, and I'd never seen anything like
Speaker 1: this at home. But as I have said, a day
Speaker 1: came when I began to cease from noting the glories
Speaker 1: and the charms which the moon and the sun and
Speaker 1: the twilight wrought upon the river's face. Another day came
Speaker 1: and I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that
Speaker 1: sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon
Speaker 1: it without rapture, and should have commented on it inwardly
Speaker 1: after this fashion. The sun means that we're gonna have
Speaker 1: wind tomorrow. That floating log means the river is rising
Speaker 1: small thanks to that. That slant mark on the water
Speaker 1: refers to a bluff reef which is gonna kill somebody's
Speaker 1: steamboat one of these nights. No, the romance and beauty
Speaker 1: of it were all gone from the river. All the
Speaker 1: value of any feature of it had for me now
Speaker 1: was to amount of its usefulness it could furnish towards
Speaker 1: compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days
Speaker 1: I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the
Speaker 1: lovely flush and the beauty's cheek mean to a doctor?
Speaker 1: But a break that ripples above some deadly disease? Are
Speaker 1: not all her visible charms? So thick with what are
Speaker 1: to him signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he
Speaker 1: ever see her beauty at all? Or doesn't he simply
Speaker 1: view her professionally in comment upon her unwholesome condition? And
Speaker 1: doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or
Speaker 1: lost most by learning his trade? What an incredible question?
Speaker 1: Did he lose or gain something by learning this trade
Speaker 1: of being a Mississippi River pilot. Naivety can carry an empty,
Speaker 1: fleeting bliss, But the naive don't change the world with
Speaker 1: their literature or tame giant ancient raging rivers. Twain went
Speaker 1: through as training to become a pilot, but the Civil
Speaker 1: War ended his career and ultimately ended a sixty year
Speaker 1: steamboat era. He said that Mississis be steamboating was born
Speaker 1: about eighteen twelve, and at the end of thirty years
Speaker 1: it had grown into mighty proportions, and in less than
Speaker 1: thirty years more it was dead. So from eighteen twelve
Speaker 1: to eighteen sixty was the Mississippi River steamboating era. After Humphreys,
Speaker 1: Elliott and the aid studies. By the eighteen seventies, government
Speaker 1: levies were changing the river, making it safer and partly
Speaker 1: taming it. Twain would lament the passing of the wild river.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting because you'd think in the late eighteen
Speaker 1: hundreds that the Mississippi River was wild, but Twain thought
Speaker 1: it was tamed. And our boy Twain actually addressed ads
Speaker 1: in his book. Here's Twain. The military engineers of the
Speaker 1: commission had taken up on their shoulders the job of
Speaker 1: making the Mississippi over again, a job transcended in size
Speaker 1: by only the original job of creating it. They are
Speaker 1: building wing dams here and there to direct the current,
Speaker 1: and dykes to confine it into narrower bounds. One who
Speaker 1: knows the Mississippi will promptly say, not aloud but to himself,
Speaker 1: that ten thousand river commissions, with the minds of the
Speaker 1: world that they're back. Cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot
Speaker 1: curb it or confine it, cannot say to it go
Speaker 1: here or go there and make it obey. Cannot save
Speaker 1: a shore which has been sentenced, cannot bar it's path
Speaker 1: with an obstruction that it will not tear down, dance
Speaker 1: over and laugh at. But a discreet man will not
Speaker 1: put these things into spoken words. But the West Point
Speaker 1: engineers have not their superiors anywhere. They know all that
Speaker 1: can be known of their obstruse science. And so since
Speaker 1: they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river
Speaker 1: and bossom, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man
Speaker 1: to keep still, lie low and wait till they do it.
Speaker 1: Captain eads, there's our boys, with his jetties, has done
Speaker 1: a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which seemed
Speaker 1: clearly impossible. So we do not feel full confidence now
Speaker 1: to prophesy against the like impossibilities. Otherwise one might pipe
Speaker 1: out and say the Commission might as well bully the
Speaker 1: comments in their courses and undertake to make them behave
Speaker 1: as to try to bully the Mississippi into right in
Speaker 1: reasonable conduct, Twain expressed his lack of confidence in science
Speaker 1: and man's bullying in eighteen eighty three, which would have
Speaker 1: been the start of man's biggest push to manipulate the river.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting because he would be right in that
Speaker 1: lack of confidence, at least at first. Mark Twain would
Speaker 1: die in nineteen ten, seventeen years before his words would
Speaker 1: prove true in the flood of nineteen twenty seven. We're
Speaker 1: going to read one more section of Twain, and I
Speaker 1: think it shows his sarcasm, humor, and his thoughts on
Speaker 1: the science of the time. And where we're going to
Speaker 1: start this passage. In the previous paragraph he'd cited all
Speaker 1: the man made cutoffs that had shortened the river by
Speaker 1: two hundred and forty two miles. Here's Twain, this is
Speaker 1: the last one. Now, if you want to be one
Speaker 1: of those ponderous scientific people and let on to prove
Speaker 1: what had occurred in the remote past by what had
Speaker 1: occurred in a given time in the recent past, or
Speaker 1: what will occur in the far future by what has
Speaker 1: occurred in the late years. What an opportunity is here.
Speaker 1: Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data
Speaker 1: to argue from, nor development of species either. That's a
Speaker 1: jab at Darwin. Glacial epics are great things, but they
Speaker 1: are vague.
Speaker 4: Vague.
Speaker 1: Please observe, in the space of one hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: six years, the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred
Speaker 1: and forty two miles. That is an average of a
Speaker 1: trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore,
Speaker 1: any calm person who is not blind or idiotic can
Speaker 1: see that in the Old Silurian period, just a million
Speaker 1: years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward
Speaker 1: of one million, three hundred thousand miles long and stuck
Speaker 1: out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod.
Speaker 1: And by the same token, any person can see that
Speaker 1: seven hundred and forty two years from now, the Lower
Speaker 1: Mississippi will only be a mile and three quarters long,
Speaker 1: and kro and New Orleans will have joined their streets
Speaker 1: together and be plotting comfortably along under a single mayor
Speaker 1: and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating
Speaker 1: about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out
Speaker 1: of such trifling investment of fact. That was good and sarcastic.
Speaker 1: Mister Mark Twain, you know if you understand the math. There,
Speaker 1: you see what he's doing. He's making fun of it,
Speaker 1: and that's wild that he was doing that in the
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties. And he was even poking fun at are
Speaker 1: one and the idea of speciation. Did you hear that.
Speaker 1: I'm fascinated by science and believe in the endeavor wholeheartedly.
Speaker 1: But it's not much different than the way I'm fascinated
Speaker 1: and have pledged my allegiance to writing sheerfooted mules in
Speaker 1: the backwoods. I'm conflicted. Mules and science have a lot
Speaker 1: in common. You see. They're both incredible functional beasts, but
Speaker 1: will kill you if mishandled, and their purpose is easily
Speaker 1: misunderstood too. Joy ride your kids on a dead broke horse,
Speaker 1: not on a vinegar spit and flashy mule. Likewise, don't
Speaker 1: send science to do the work of a spiritual philosopher.
Speaker 1: That's like asking a pinball machine to make bread. And
Speaker 1: if your rational Western mind tells you that science outranks
Speaker 1: and supersedes a man's verified, bonafide spiritual belief backed with
Speaker 1: real life and real faith, I will submit that you
Speaker 1: have taken the bait, and the hook will shortly enter
Speaker 1: your upper lift, leading you to a stringer of human
Speaker 1: existence that is very new to the planet. Only taking
Speaker 1: into consideration the natural without the spiritual is very new
Speaker 1: to mankind. Woom, I'm done. I'm now stepping off this
Speaker 1: box of Irish spring. Let's talk about the Great Flood
Speaker 1: of nineteen twenty seven.
Speaker 6: When it rain five days and the sky the dog
Speaker 6: as night. When it rained five days and the sky
Speaker 6: the dog as night.
Speaker 1: In March of nineteen twenty seven, just a month before
Speaker 1: the start of the Great Flood, Bessie Smith recorded the
Speaker 1: song Backwater Blues about the floods of nineteen twenty six,
Speaker 1: When it rains five or six days and the skies
Speaker 1: are dark as night, Then trouble taken place in the
Speaker 1: lowlands at night.
Speaker 4: She said.
Speaker 1: She was known as the Impress of the Blues and
Speaker 1: would become the most famous female blues singer of the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties. Little did she know what was coming.
Speaker 4: Last three months of nineteen twenty six, the average reading
Speaker 4: on every single river gauge, not only on the Mississippi itself,
Speaker 4: but on the Ohio, on the Missouri, on every other
Speaker 4: tributary was the highest ever known only six times in history.
Speaker 4: At Vicksburg, had the gauge ever broken thirty feet in October,
Speaker 4: and it had never broken thirty one feet. In October
Speaker 4: nineteen twenty six, it broke forty feet. So the whole
Speaker 4: drainage basin was saturated. And it didn't take much thinking
Speaker 4: to figure out that if you got any rain of
Speaker 4: any significance in nineteen twenty seven, you were going to
Speaker 4: get a serious flood. And in fact, you just got
Speaker 4: more rain. You had five storms in the spring of
Speaker 4: nineteen twenty seven, each of which was greater than any
Speaker 4: single storm in the preceding ten years. This is on
Speaker 4: top of a river basin that's already filled with water.
Speaker 4: So beginning on New Year's Day, you had floods in Pittsburgh,
Speaker 4: and you know, proceeding Downriver Louisville, you had, you know,
Speaker 4: floods on basically every tributary system in the entire river.
Speaker 4: So the net result was, I mean, you knew this
Speaker 4: was going to be a bad year. The book actually
Speaker 4: opens with a scene on what turned out to be
Speaker 4: the biggest storm of the year, and that one the
Speaker 4: scenes in Greenville, Mississippi. But on that day in New
Speaker 4: Orleans they got fourteen point ninety six inches of rain
Speaker 4: in twenty four hours. Wow, you were going to have
Speaker 4: a problem.
Speaker 1: And indeed, at that time there were government built levees,
Speaker 1: one thousand miles of government built levees up the river
Speaker 1: right basically the Gulf of Mexico all the way up
Speaker 1: to Illinois.
Speaker 4: Correct.
Speaker 1: And these these levees were touted to the people of
Speaker 1: the river basin as unbeatable.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: It was like the Titanic, Right, it was like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, in nineteen twenty six and the official report of
Speaker 4: the Corps of Engineers it said, I think for the
Speaker 4: first time it said, you know, we're now in a
Speaker 4: position to protect the territory from overflow.
Speaker 1: Classic Cubris, yeah, classic, yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then the big break was in Mounds, Mississippi.
Speaker 4: The single biggest break. There were plenty of big.
Speaker 1: Breaks, right, that was kind of the one that like
Speaker 1: when it happened that people knew we're in big trouble.
Speaker 4: Well, they'd already knew they were in big trouble. That
Speaker 4: particular break. There had already been flooding. As I said,
Speaker 4: you know, people died in Virginia, they died in Oklahoma.
Speaker 4: That one break was probably the biggest single break, not
Speaker 4: only in that flood but maybe in any flood that
Speaker 4: we know of, because you know, close to four hundred
Speaker 4: and fifty thousand cubic feet a second was coming out
Speaker 4: of the river. That's an army rouge. Yeah. Well, the levee,
Speaker 4: of course had breached. There wasn't any levee. Yeah, but
Speaker 4: that single levee break flooded and land seventy miles to
Speaker 4: the east to the hills of Mississippi, and for probably
Speaker 4: about eighty miles I guess it is from there until
Speaker 4: Vicksburg where her so it filled the delta. It flooded
Speaker 4: about twenty seven thousand square miles on the lower Mississippi.
Speaker 4: That's not counting you know, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Knoxville, Oklahoma City.
Speaker 4: It's not counting that land about twenty seven thou square
Speaker 4: miles of the lower Mississippi and Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana
Speaker 4: so forth.
Speaker 1: Here's an excerpt from John Berry's Rising Type. There the
Speaker 1: river had lingered for months, not leaving all the land
Speaker 1: until September. Then it finally fell back within its banks,
Speaker 1: languid once again, like a snake that had swallowed its
Speaker 1: prey and lay now digesting it, it left behind ruin
Speaker 1: and rotted at the site of each crevasse. It had
Speaker 1: dug out blue holes, pockets of deep water lakes where
Speaker 1: fishing was often best and that exists still, and deposited
Speaker 1: mountains of sand. Over thousands of acres and the entire
Speaker 1: flooded region, fifty percent of all animals, half of all
Speaker 1: the mules, horses, cattle, hogs, and chickens had drowned. Thousands
Speaker 1: of tenant farmer shacks had simply disappeared, Hundreds of sturdy barns,
Speaker 1: cotton gins, warehouses, farmhouses had been swept away. Buildings by
Speaker 1: the tens of thousands had been damaged, and in towns
Speaker 1: whole blocks had become heaps of splintered lumber, like the
Speaker 1: leavings of a tornado. In some places, great mounds of
Speaker 1: sand covered fields and streets. On the fields, in the forests,
Speaker 1: in the streets and yards and homes and businesses and barns,
Speaker 1: the water left a reeking muck. It filled the air
Speaker 1: with stench, and then the sun lay baking and cracking
Speaker 1: like broken pottery dung, colored and unvarying to the horizon.
Speaker 1: The Mississippi River flood of nineteen twenty seven, caused the
Speaker 1: Ohio to flow backwards, covered some Delta towns with over
Speaker 1: thirty feet of water, and caused more economic damage than
Speaker 1: Hurricane Katrina. The flood displaced over seven hundred thousand people,
Speaker 1: but disproportionately affected over five hundred thousand Black Americans, which
Speaker 1: comprised seventy five percent of the population of the Delta.
Speaker 1: Official reports showed two hundred and fifty deaths from the flood,
Speaker 1: but deaths resulting from the impacts of the flood, not
Speaker 1: just drowning in the initial water rise, were likely in
Speaker 1: the thousands. The flood highlighted the discrepancy of treatment between
Speaker 1: Blacks and whites. Much of John Berry's book is about
Speaker 1: the refugee camps and the thousands of men working twenty
Speaker 1: four hours a day repairing levees during the flood. I
Speaker 1: want to read an excerpt from Rising Tide, and it's
Speaker 1: an important thing to realize that the forty two year
Speaker 1: old William Alexander Percy, who was Leroy Percy's son. We
Speaker 1: talked about him extensively on episode two, was appointed by
Speaker 1: Herbert Hoover to oversee the Red Cross operations in the
Speaker 1: refugee camps on the levees, So the young Percy was
Speaker 1: in charge of the levee camps. They were camping on
Speaker 1: the levees because it was the only land that wasn't underwater.
Speaker 1: The short version of that story is that the Blacks
Speaker 1: were forced by the National Guard to stay in refugee
Speaker 1: camps on the levees, while most whites were allowed to
Speaker 1: leave on boats. If you remember, a lot of the
Speaker 1: issues of the South came from their desperate need for
Speaker 1: labor in agriculture. Here's John Barry. In the first hours
Speaker 1: of the flood, black and white had risked their lives
Speaker 1: to save each other. There had been a feeling of humanity,
Speaker 1: not race. Now the disparity between life for black and
Speaker 1: white seemed greater than in normal life. Blacks, who had
Speaker 1: believed Greenville to be a special place felt betrayed. Petty
Speaker 1: insults stirred more resentment. Whenever the steamer Capital pulled away
Speaker 1: from the dock, its calliope routinely played by by Blackbird.
Speaker 1: It was like a slap in the face of the blacks.
Speaker 1: Even many whites were bothered. The blacks also resented Will's orders,
Speaker 1: which were printed every day on the newspaper's front page. First,
Speaker 1: he required quote groups of negroes outside of Greenville to
Speaker 1: get to the levee and be rationed there. Leaders of
Speaker 1: the black community complained, so did the whites, but the
Speaker 1: most serious grievance penetrated the soul. The Blacks were no
Speaker 1: longer free. The National Guard patrolled the perimeter of the
Speaker 1: levee camp with the rifles and fixed bayonets. To enter
Speaker 1: or leave, one needed to pass. They were imprisoned. This
Speaker 1: was true in every camp in the state. Mississippi was
Speaker 1: determined to keep its workers, even if it required force
Speaker 1: to do so. I told you the name of will
Speaker 1: Percy would come up later. He was the one that
Speaker 1: made the decision, with the influence of his father Leroy,
Speaker 1: to not evacuate the Blacks out of the camps, but
Speaker 1: rather make them stay. They were afraid they'd leave and
Speaker 1: never come back, which is exactly what would happen to many.
Speaker 1: That's wild stuff. Here's John Berry with how the flood
Speaker 1: of nineteen twenty seven impacted America. If you were just
Speaker 1: describing in a in a in a short version, which
Speaker 1: obviously this is what your whole book is about. Is
Speaker 1: how this flood changed America. What's what's a version that
Speaker 1: we can understand of how this flood changed America?
Speaker 4: Well, they're you know, number one, it elected Herbert Hoover president.
Speaker 4: You know, you can demonstrate that almost with mathematical certainty.
Speaker 4: Hoover was put in charge of the rescue and rehabilitation
Speaker 4: of close to a million people, and he actually did
Speaker 4: a great job.
Speaker 1: It create gained a national fame from you.
Speaker 4: He was already had, you know, it was extremely well
Speaker 4: known from his activities in World War One. He was
Speaker 4: already had a He was referred to as a great humanitarian.
Speaker 4: He was a logistics genius and just getting there were
Speaker 4: there were seven hundred thousand people being fed by the
Speaker 4: Red Cross and just handling the logistics of getting that done.
Speaker 4: He's in charge of that, and he did a terrific job.
Speaker 4: So that's number one. Number Two, it changed the policy
Speaker 4: the corp of Engineers and pretty much every engineer anywhere
Speaker 4: in the world in terms of how you deal with rivers.
Speaker 4: You recognize that you can't simply contain them within the levees.
Speaker 4: You have to give them room to spread out. The
Speaker 4: end result was, you know, just an outlet to the ocean.
Speaker 4: Just well, to the Lake Parncha train and through Lake
Speaker 4: Poncha Train to the Gulf of Mexico just above New Orleans,
Speaker 4: about fifteen miles above New Orleans. You know, there are
Speaker 4: other spill ways if necessary, that start above Baton Rouge.
Speaker 4: It also will lead to the ocean. There are reservoirs,
Speaker 4: you know, throughout the Mississippi River basin on both sides
Speaker 4: of the river to keep water out of the river,
Speaker 4: and of course they increase the levees as well. People
Speaker 4: don't realize it, but in twenty eleven, which is probably
Speaker 4: the second biggest flood ever, they were close to ten
Speaker 4: thousand square miles of land flooded by design. This was
Speaker 4: land that was essentially set aside to allow the river
Speaker 4: room to expand. That's number two. Number three. It was
Speaker 4: an enormous spur to African American migration out of the
Speaker 4: Mississippi Delta, and not just Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana as well
Speaker 4: to you know, Chicago to Detroit to Los Angeles. You know,
Speaker 4: there was upwards of eight hundred thousand people who left
Speaker 4: that region because of the flood, and that it didn't
Speaker 4: start the Great Migration, but it was a huge spur
Speaker 4: to it. It also began the shift of African American
Speaker 4: voters from the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln, to
Speaker 4: the Democratic Party. That was because of some deals at
Speaker 4: Hoover cut to get the nomination. You know, in those days,
Speaker 4: every African American who voted basically voted Republican, and they
Speaker 4: didn't control any state parties except in the South, because
Speaker 4: in those days, the Democratic Party controlled pretty much every
Speaker 4: Southern state and they were all white. They didn't allow
Speaker 4: any black participation. So you're African American. Even though you
Speaker 4: couldn't vote in a state election in Alabama, you could
Speaker 4: be active in the Republican Party in the state of Alabama.
Speaker 4: And that was worth something because if you had a
Speaker 4: Republican president, you had a saying who got to be
Speaker 4: the post you run a post office in your town,
Speaker 4: or who got nominated to a court. Even though you
Speaker 4: couldn't vote, the Republican White House might listen to you.
Speaker 4: Hoover had cut a deal to get the nomination with
Speaker 4: African American leaders, and he later betrayed them. The most
Speaker 4: important change is probably the most subtle and the hardest
Speaker 4: to prove, but it shifted the way people thought of
Speaker 4: about the responsibility of federal government to help people in
Speaker 4: a disaster.
Speaker 1: I want to close with the reading of the last
Speaker 1: page of Rising Tide. The first sentence of Will Percy's autobiography,
Speaker 1: Leonards on the Levee reads, My country is the Mississippi Delta,
Speaker 1: the river country. The river had created the Delta, and
Speaker 1: the white man, the Percys and men liked them, had
Speaker 1: brought blacks to the Delta to clear it entertainment and
Speaker 1: to transform it into an empire. Together they had done that,
Speaker 1: They had built that empire. Will believed that he was
Speaker 1: watching that empire disintegrate. Near the end of his autobiography,
Speaker 1: completed only months before his death in nineteen forty one,
Speaker 1: he wrote, the old Southern way of life in which
Speaker 1: I had been reared existed no more, and its values
Speaker 1: were ignored or derided. A tarnish has fallen over the
Speaker 1: bright world, dishonor and corruption triumph. My own strong people
Speaker 1: have become lotus eaters. The feet is here again, the
Speaker 1: last most abhorrent. He seemed to accept that defeat, if
Speaker 1: only he accepted the absurd and finally himself. A society
Speaker 1: does not change in sudden jumps, whether it moves in
Speaker 1: multiple small steps along a broad front. Most of these
Speaker 1: steps are parallel, if not quite simultaneous. Some advance further
Speaker 1: than others, and some even more in an opposite direction.
Speaker 1: The movement rather resembles that of an amoeba, with one
Speaker 1: part of the body extending itself outward than another, even
Speaker 1: while the main body stays back until enough of the
Speaker 1: mass has shifted to move the entire body. The Great
Speaker 1: Mississippi River flood of nineteen twenty seven forced many small steps.
Speaker 1: Those are the words of John Barry. I can't thank
Speaker 1: you enough for listening to Bear Grease. On the next episode,
Speaker 1: we're going to get back into the science of the
Speaker 1: river and even its danger. We're going to talk about
Speaker 1: it's fish and turtles and all that cool stuff. If
Speaker 1: you've enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend
Speaker 1: and leave us a review on iTunes. I can't wait
Speaker 1: to talk with all the folks on the Bear Grease
Speaker 1: Render next week.