One Summer: America, 1927

alleys between each two rows of tents. (In fact, for practical reasons mostly to do with terrain, such geometrical perfection was almost nowhere achieved.) Amounts of food, types of entertainment, extent of medical care and all other details of camp life were similarly prescribed, if not often followed. Rather amazingly, Hoover saw the camps as happy places. For many of the inhabitants, he insisted, ‘this was the first real holiday they had ever known’. These were people, remember, who had just lost everything.
    As in Europe, Hoover was not comfortable with the people whose lives he had been sent to sort out. He particularly didn’t like the Cajuns of Louisiana, who he thought were ‘as much like French peasants as one dot is like another’. Hoover was particularly exasperated at the number of Cajuns who repeatedly ignored calls to move to higher ground. One farmer had to be ‘rescued’ six times. In Melville, Louisiana, when a levee on the Atchafalaya River gave way in the night, ten people lost their lives because they hadn’t left when told to – nine from a single family: a woman and her eight children. To Hoover this was not so much a source of tragedy as irritation. ‘I concluded a Cajun would move only when the water came up under the bed,’ he wrote.
    The Cajuns, in turn, weren’t crazy about him. Near Caernarvon, Louisiana, a man with a rifle fired on Hoover’s party as it passed in a boat, then vanished back into the woods before he could be caught. The man’s animosity was perhaps understandable. The party was inspecting a levee that was about to be blown up to divert flood waters away from New Orleans – an action that was widely held to be unnecessary. Levee failures further north hadalready lowered the river and removed any immediate or probable threat to the city, but it was decided to blow up the levee anyway. Two large parishes were sacrificed for the peace of mind of New Orleans businessmen. The city of New Orleans promised those affected that they would be fully reimbursed. They never were.
    As always, Hoover was a tireless self-publicist. He travelled through the South in a private train, which included a carriage exclusively devoted to press operations. From this issued a stream of press releases mostly devoted to Hoover’s vision and hard work. He also made sure that every Republican senator received a copy of a magazine article praising him. To any newspaper, however small, that questioned or criticized his efforts, he wrote a personal letter of rebuke. Sometimes these ran on for several pages.
    Hoover boasted that no more than three people died in the flooding after he took control (‘one of them an overcurious sightseer’), but in fact it was at least 150, and possibly many more. In the end, his efforts were far from an unqualified success. Relief funds were often wasted or misdirected. Emergency supplies were usually entrusted to the largest landowners to distribute to their tenants, and some owners unscrupulously charged tenants for the supplies or kept them to themselves. Reports of abuses were frequently brought to Hoover’s attention, but he dismissed them all. The refugee camps themselves were not comfortable places and the food was often so poor and unwholesome that many of the residents came down with dietary diseases like pellagra. These were not matters that featured in Hoover’s press releases.
    To the wider world, however, the Mississippi flood merely consolidated Herbert Hoover’s reputation as a colossus and made it almost a certainty that he would be the next Republican nominee for president. ‘It is nearly inevitable,’ he told a friend simply.
     
    In the normal course of things, the Mississippi flood would not in itself have troubled Charles Lindbergh, but it happened to coincide with a broad band of turbulent weather that lay right across hisflight path. A towering storm system darkened the skies over a huge area of the Midwest and South-west and sent tornadoes spinning like demonic tops across eight states, from Texas to Illinois. In Poplar Bluff, Missouri, eighty people died and 350 were injured when a tornado tore through the business district. Elsewhere in Missouri, tornadoes claimed a dozen more lives, and many other deaths were reported in Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana and Illinois. In St Louis, high winds caused extensive damage and killed one man (‘a Negro’, the New York Times noted solemnly) who was struck by falling debris. In