The Centralized Power Structure

Part 1 is the story of specific men (Eads, Humphreys, Ellet): engineers who made specific decisions based on their individual motivations. Some people find their study/understanding of history and current events is enriched by the biographies of individual persons. I tend to focus on the bigger forces behind the individuals: what ideologies they represent, what environment produced such people.

The antiracist perspective is similar: racism is less a set of behaviors conducted by and directed towards individuals, but rather the inequity historically perpetuated in societal institutions. This "perpetuation" is key, and can be seen as institutional "path dependence." In the antiracist perspective, this means wealth, power, and capability stay concentrated within a demographic heirarcy, with white men of western european ancestry generally at the top. These "winners" are not inherently greedy and imperious by nature, but exist in a complex system that define who they are and what role they place in the system. Essentially, the antiracist perspective is at odds with the traditional American attitude of the "self-made man", where one's station in life is a direct result of one's individual character and moral fiber.

Barry utilizes both the traditional and antiracist lens in his history of how Mississippi River engineering evolved. He details the relationships among the individuals, speeches they gave, memos they wrote. But he also describes the growing rift between the Army Corps of Engineers and civilian engineers. The former was centralized (in DC), historically driven, an esoteric, closed society. Likewise, civilian engineers were driven by science, decentralized, and often educated in universities instead of West Point. Until 1835, West Point was the only educational institution for engineering, with the top students going into the Corps. Their main purpose was closely related to military objectives, such as fortification, mapping, navigation channels, and trenches. The political stature of the Corps, not surprisingly, increased during the Civil War. But as civilian uses of water ways resumed after the Civil War, Mississippi River management through the Corps was subject to path dependence: an organization that is not accustomed to sharing power and responsibility. Humphreys was a product of his environment: wealth, privilege, entitlement, leading him to West Point and then great power in the military beaurocracy. Though he originally believed himself to be a scientist, his rise to power through the civil war reinforced the "soldier" in him, with self-preservation of himself and his Corps as his prime motivation. By refusing to accept the scientific authority of prominent civilian engineers (Eads) and risk losing their own prominence and financial legitamacy, the Corps made poor recommendations regarding levees, outlets, and jetties-- essentially just to disagree with and sabotage civilian engineers! Eads, on the other hand, represents the adaptive (non-path dependent) perspective of qualitative research. Instead of West Point, Eads taught himself about the river by walking the bottom, salvaging wrecks. He taught himself lobbying by his own efforts to grow his business salvaging boats. He was one of the first to use steel in his designs. His flexibility was a product of his environment: a decentralized system of education, without rigid path-dependent structure, with many disciplines (mathematics, boating, capitalism, engineering, commerce) contributing. The Corps, on the other hand, was centralized into an institution with responsibility not to the community, or even investors, but to the Secretary of War.

These dynamic events led to the "levees only" policy of management of the Mississippi River. In one light, the stupid decisions of some individuals were the cause of a long history of poor management of water-ways nationwide, leading to the Katrina floods. In another light, the concepts of hegemony, path dependence, self-preservation, centralized authority, and non-adaptive systems were the basis of the "levees only" policy. Thus, one solution/reaction to Katrina floods would be to discredit the "levees only" perspective and the Corps. (Though, interestingly, Humphreys did recognize the danger of "levees only" with good scientific observation, his final conclusions were biased by politics). Perhaps this truly is a necessary reaction. However, a more meangingful reaction would be to ensure scientific integrity with decentralization of expert authority, facilitate community representation in decision making, and encourage adaptive reasoning with many viewpoints.

Part 2 revolves around the politics of the River--in a democracy, we can assume this means representation (and the lack of it). In my next post, I'll dive into political ecology!