One Summer: America, 1927

the day-to-day running of relief efforts to others.
    For Hoover, the Mississippi flood was a personal triumph. He was especially proud that the federal government had provided no financial assistance at all. All the money for relief efforts came inthe form of donations from private citizens and organizations like the Red Cross and Rockefeller Foundation. ‘But those were days,’ Hoover noted with a certain misty fondness in his memoirs thirty years later, ‘when citizens expected to take care of one another in time of disaster and it had not occurred to them that the Federal Government should do it.’ In fact, the support provided for those trying to get back on their feet was hopelessly inadequate. Hoover helped to push through the creation of a $13 million loan fund to help flood victims, which sounds reasonably generous, but in fact worked out at just $20 per victim, and was, for all that, only a loan, hardly a useful sum to even the poorest person who had lost everything.
    The great Mississippi flood of 1927 had two lasting legacies. First, it accelerated the movement of blacks out of the South in what is known as the Great Migration. Between 1920 and 1930, 1.3 million southern blacks moved north in the hopes of finding better-paying jobs and more personal liberty. The movement transformed the face of America in a decade. Before the Great Migration, only 10 per cent of blacks lived outside the South. After the Great Migration, half did.
    The other important effect of the Mississippi flood was that it forced the federal government to accept that certain matters are too big for states to handle alone. For all Hoover’s proud reminiscence of how relief efforts were entirely private, it was widely recognized that government could not stand by when disaster struck. In 1928, Calvin Coolidge reluctantly signed into law the Flood Control Act, which appropriated $325 million to try to avert future disasters. It was, in the view of many, the birth of Big Government in America. Coolidge hated the idea and refused to have any kind of ceremony to celebrate the passing of the act. Instead, he signed the bill in private, then went to lunch.
    Meanwhile, back in the flood zone not quite everyone was benefiting from the receding waters. In Morgan City, Louisiana, Mrs Ada B. Le Boeuf, wife of a prominent local businessman, hada good deal of explaining to do when the body of her husband, bearing obvious gunshot wounds, was found bloated and glistening on a newly exposed mudbank nine days after she reported him missing. Under questioning, Mrs Le Boeuf confessed that she had formed an attachment to another prominent Morgan City citizen, Dr Thomas E. Dreher, who was a doctor and surgeon and, not incidentally, her husband’s best friend. The devious Dreher had invited Le Boeuf out for a day’s fishing, shot him, weighted the body and dumped it overboard.
    Nineteen twenty-seven was a memorable year for foolish murders, and this was certainly one of those, for it seems not to have occurred to Dr Dreher that it’s never a good idea to dump a body in floodwaters because the waters will eventually go away whereas the body may not. Dr Dreher and Mrs Le Boeuf were tried, convicted and hanged side by side.
     
    For Charles Lindbergh, July did not start at all well. Although he had nobly resisted the crasser commercial blandishments waved before him, he did agree to two money-making propositions and it was now time to make good on those. One was to undertake a three-month tour of America in the Spirit of St Louis . The idea was to visit every one of the forty-eight states, partly to satisfy the national craving to see him in the flesh but also to help promote aviation. The Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics would pay him $2,500 a week during the trip, a generous sum. The tour details would be arranged by Herbert Hoover’s ubiquitous Department of Commerce. The tour was scheduled to start on 20 July.
    At the same time, Lindbergh contracted with the publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons to produce a quick autobiography. Putnam appointed a ghostwriter, Carlyle MacDonald of the New York Times , who came up with a first draft, but Lindbergh couldn’t stand his folksy tone and insisted on writing the book himself – a matter of alarm to his publishers since he had only about three weeks to doit, and that included time off for a trip to Canada to attend that country’s diamond jubilee celebrations as a guest of the prime