One Summer: America, 1927

pressures were too overwhelming. On 16 April, on a great bend of the river in south-east Missouri at a place called Dorena, the first levee gave way. Some 1,200 feet of earthen bank burst open and a volume of water equal to that at Niagara Falls poured through the chasm. The roar could be heard miles away.
    Soon levees up and down the river were popping like buttons off a tight shirt. At Mounds Landing, Mississippi, a hundred black workers, kept at their posts by men with rifles, were swept to oblivion when a levee gave way. The coroner, for reasons unstated, recorded just two deaths. In some places, the water rushed across the landscape so swiftly that people had no means of escape. At Winterville, Mississippi, twenty-three women and children perished when the house in which they were sheltering was swept away.
    By the first week of May, the flood stretched for 500 miles from southern Illinois to New Orleans, and was up to 150 miles wide in places. Altogether an area almost the size of Scotland was underwater. From the air, the Mississippi valley looked like – indeed, for the time being was – a new Great Lake. The statistics of the Great Flood were recorded with chilling precision: 16,570,627 acres flooded; 203,504 buildings lost or ruined; 637,476 people made homeless. The quantities of livestock lost were logged with similar exactitude: 50,490 cattle, 25,325 horses and mules, 148,110 hogs, 1,276,570 chickens and other poultry. The one thing that wasn’t carefully recorded, oddly, was the number of human lives lost, but it was certainly more than a thousand and perhaps several times that. The numbers weren’t more scrupulous because, alas, so many of the victims were poor and black. It is a shocking fact that a closer count was kept of livestock losses than of human ones. It is perhaps only slightly less shocking to note that outside the affected areas the flood received less coverage on most days than the murder trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray.
    The nation’s inattentiveness notwithstanding, the Mississippi flood of 1927 was America’s most epic natural disaster in extent, duration and number of lives affected. The scale of economic loss was so large as to be essentially incalculable. Estimates ranged from $250 million to $1 billion. It wasn’t the most lethal catastrophe in American history, but it ruined more lives and property than any other, and it lasted far longer. Altogether the Mississippi would be at flood stage for 153 consecutive days.
    Fortunately America had a figure of rock-like calm – a kind of superman, a term that he was not embarrassed to apply to himself in private correspondence – to whom it could turn in times of crisis such as this. His name was Herbert Hoover. Soon he would be the most derided president of his time – quite an achievement for someone elected in the same decade as Warren G. Harding – but in the spring of 1927 he was, and by a very wide margin, the world’s most trusted man. He was also, curiously, perhaps the least likeable hero America has ever produced. The summer of 1927 would make him a little more of both.
     
    Herbert Clark Hoover was born in 1874 thirty miles west of the Mississippi (he would be the first president from west of that symbolically weighty boundary) in the hamlet of West Branch, Iowa, in a tiny white cottage, which still stands. His parents, devout Quakers, died tragically early – his father of rheumatic fever when little Bert was just six, his mother of typhoid fever three years later – and he was sent to live with an uncle and aunt in Oregon. These dour relatives, themselves ardent Quakers, had just lost a much-loved son, ensuring that Bert would feel the gloomy weight of death on his shoulders during every moment of his formative years. Whatever high spirits he was born with – and it is by no means certain that there were any – were thoroughly extinguished by the experiences of his youth. Herbert Hoover lived to be ninety, and never in the whole of that time, so far as can be told, experienced anything approaching a moment’s real joy.
    Though he never finished high school – his uncle, disregarding his brightness, sent him to work as an office boy in Salem instead – Hoover nurtured a fierce ambition to better himself. In 1891, aged seventeen, he passed the entrance examinations for the brand-new Leland Stanford Junior University (or just Stanford as we now know it), which then was a free school. As a member of