JACKSON -- New Orleans-based author John Barry's book, Rising Tide, a magnificent story of the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 with its far-reaching consequences to this region as well as the nation, is a rare, gripping, historical narrative.
Not only did the 1927 flood rip open a flawed system of river containment laid down decades before, but as Barry relates, it exposed to view the region's ugly fabric of racial structure, the greed and arrogance of the financial community, and the weakness of political leadership.
Subtitled The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, the book was published earlier this year by Simon and Schuster. Barry, a former political reporter with several previous book credits, skillfully and dramatically tells the story of the worst natural disaster to hit this country, a flood that dwarfed any seen since.
The flood elected Herbert Hoover as president of the United States. And we learn from Barry's account it contributed mightily to Huey Long coming to power in Louisiana. Even in Mississippi, Theodore G. Bilbo re-emerged out of the political backlash over the flood.
As can be expected, the state of Mississippi figures prominently in Rising Tide, which very often exposes shameful treatment of Negroes, made both victims and political pawns before, during and after the devastation.
Given high profile in the story is the patrician Percy family of Greenville, three generations of whom had built an empire in the Mississippi Delta that for decades had fought to control the great river as a constant enemy that threatened their society.
They were known to have fought the Ku Klux Klan, yellow fever, and for having stopped lynchings.
Back in the Reconstruction era, the first Percy, Charles, was a major figure in wresting political control of Mississippi away from the post-Civil War "Black and Tan" Republicans.
Charles authored the impeachment resolution that forced Adelbert Ames, the last Reconstruction governor of Mississippi, to flee the state.
Later Percys produced authors and novelists and became part of the state political and financial elite.
Leroy Percy, who had been elevated to the U.S. Senate in 1907, in the last time the state Senate had the power to name senators, was defeated in the 1910 popular election by the racial demagogue James K. Vardaman.
Leroy becomes one of the central figures in Barry's account of how men with power battled the Mississippi River before the flood and then dealt with its consequences when it broke the bonds they had erected.
An aristocrat and wealthy Delta plantation owner, Leroy was uniquely embraced by the powerful social inner-circle in New Orleans, then the most important city and port in the entire Mississippi Valley.
He gained unprecedented inclusion in the tightly-held banking hierarchy of New Orleans, which, Barry tells, held inordinate influence over politicians and government officials all the way to the White House, as well as policies made to control the Mississippi River.
The New Orleans bankers' greed and callous disregard for the welfare and livelihood of citizens in two neighboring parishes (swaying the Louisiana governor to order dynamiting the levee below the city when the river flood began its rampage upstream) brought to power, Barry writes, the politician the bankers most feared, Huey P. Long.
When the river rushed through the dynamited crevasse and spread over the homes and trapping grounds of St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, it created a bitter enmity toward New Orleans and its financial and political forces that would last until this day.
In backing Long in 1928, the two parishes, which brought along others sympathetic to their cause, backed him by outrageously large margins.
Leroy Percy had hunted with Teddy Roosevelt and then became a close advisor to Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, known as the "Great Humanitarian" for his handling of food distribution in Europe after World War I.
Hoover was made the federal czar by "silent" Calvin Coolidge over all government entities, even the Red Cross, when the massive flood bore down.
Again Hoover would become known as "the great humanitarian" across the nation through, as Barry relates, an extremely clever use (even control) of the press in the coverage of the Mississippi flood.
For months during 1927, Hoover kept his flood command post in Memphis, and became a top news figure.
It gave Hoover the chance to sew up support of the black Republican leaders from the South (even though they had no political power in their own state, they held delegate votes in the GOP convention) assuring his party's nomination in 1928.
But as Barry insightfully relates, once elected president, Hoover turned his back on blacks, triggering the historic shift of black voters away from the Republicans to the Democrats.
Leroy's son Will (author of Lanterns on the Levee) who had been a World War I hero, was thrust into carrying on the vaunted Percy name and compassion when Greenville and the Delta was made a prime target of the river's rampage.
As head of the Washington County Red Cross, Will became responsible for thousands of refugees, most of them black.
Horror stories of how blacks were held and treated in dreadful "concentration camps" on the miles of levee, went to newspapers nationally and besmirched the shining image of the Percys as caring and considerate of Delta Negroes, albeit within their paternalistic system.
Despite their efforts (old Leroy was still the patriarch) to make National Guardsmen and law officers treat black refugees civilly, a white officer gunned down a black man because he refused to go back to work after all night duty on levee sandbagging.
But afterwards, Will himself irreparably damaged the amicable ties with blacks when addressing a mass meeting of them by charging that they had demonstrated "sinful, shameful laziness."
The Percy descendants must not be pleased over Barry's critical treatment of their ancestors, Leroy and Will, even though the book often speaks of their nobility and vision at a time when there was little of either.
Barry misses nothing, even spotting the bad judgment of Dennis Murphree, newly elevated to the Mississippi governorship by the previous occupant's death, for naming a wealthy South Mississippi timber baron, far out of the flood zone, as the state's flood "czar."
The rich lumber man bankrolled Murphree's race for governor later in 1927. Significantly, he lost to "The Man" Bilbo.
Barry captures the drama of a titanic struggle during the 1870s between two brilliant engineers, James Buchanan Eads and Andrew Humphreys, to decide how the mighty river should be controlled.
The battle was between earthen levees only, or also using reservoirs and cutoffs. When the corps of engineers bought the levees-only policy, it proved a fallacy in 1927.
Bill Minor is a columnist who covers Mississippi politics. He was a long-time reporter for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans.