"In the Delta, Development Pays"

From the Civil War to the 1920s, the Mississippi Delta and Basin saw development. And as Barry says on p101: "Development Paid." The Corps continued to build higher and higher levees (as you build a levee and prevent flooding, the overall height increases throughout the river), opening up more and more land for development. Combined with northern capital and railways, the cotton industry boomed, and 2/3 of the world's cotton came from the American South. The alluvial soil was rich from thousands of years of flooding and the white aristocracy bought up these lands, leading to another class of whites "forced to sell" or retain mediocre lands farther from the river. In the minds of the ruling classes, the northern Republican Reconstructionist capitalists and southern plantation-barons, development required 3 things: protection, transport, and labor. Part 3 will dissect the story of river control, which provides protection and transport. Labor, and the complex system of rapidly changing demographics, is the focus of Part 2.

Players:

1) rich white plantation owners. Friendly with northern capitalists after civil war. Percy, a Mississippi senator and plantation owner who was central to development and politics in the early 1900s, is a prototype: family history of wealth, prestige, and power, he wants to protect his legacy and the plantation industry. Generally, these men prefer black share-croppers than any other labor ("superior workers"). They control state industry, even politics usually, but not the levees.

2) poor white rural. Increasingly marginalized as industrialization links southern plantations (cotton) to northern factories (textiles), increasingly poor. Rise of the KKK, rise of Christian fundamentalism, rise of populism aided by new technology: the radio. They see Jews, Catholics (often immigrants before WWI, such as Italians that Percy brought in to work plantations), Blacks, and northerners (carpetbaggers) as polluting their identity as upright Christians who don't gamble or drink (prohibitionists). By the 20s, the KKK would be at least "3 million strong", controlling state governments in Indiana and Colorodo, mayors, sheriffs... comprised of doctors, lawyers, politicians, businessmen. In the end, the KKK would lose power, as it was created as a money-making pyramid scheme intended to enrich the leaders, but would be replaced by white populism.

3) immigrants. major source of labor as Reconstruction lead to industrialization. Often from southern/eastern Europe (not Anglo-Saxon), thus darker, more foreign looking. Their arrival corresponded with urbanization. As to avoid racial violence (worsening throughout early 1900s), and because more and more blacks were going north, Percy brought in Italians to the Delta region to expand his plantation. They mostly lived in squalor similar to black sharecroppers, but they had political voice (via Justice Department and Italian Embassy). As WWI arrived, jingoism and Woodrow Wilson's Americanism prevented further immigration, and and immigrants could not supply the Delta's needs. .

4) northern capitalists. The rulers of the status quo: J.P Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt, Rockefeller. Banks, railway companies, investment firms, steel mills, Wall Street. Reconstruction released black labor from plantations to come north and work factories. As railroads allowed for interstate commerce, the north saw benefit in developing the south. Cotton was big big business (not so much nowadays) and more labor was necessary.

5) blacks. As most of us unlearned the misinformation from grade school, the civil war was not fought to free the slaves. In fact, Lincoln would rather have avoided the whole issue. Thus, after "emancipation", though many blacks were able to improve their station, most were victim to state governments' imposing continued indentured servitude. When Reconstructionists prevented this, sharecropping replaced slavery. This appeased the northern capitalists (as a "morally acceptable" way to expand plantation output), plantation owners, and even some immigrants and blacks (the few who were able to share in profits), but not the rural whites.

Thus, you have an evolving demographic landscape in the Delta, alongside an evolving ecological relationship with the river, with the goal of serving the economic relevance of the South. Floods threaten the blacks and (few) immigrants that live there and they threaten the aristocratic social prominence of plantation barons, but they do not threaten the rural whites. They indirectly threaten northern capital. But "protection" and "transport" are ruled by a federal agency, the Corps, which is not really directly responsible to any of the players. The Corps really wants to protect its own legitamacy. "Levees-only" was the right answer 'cause the Corps said so. As a state leader, if you argued against it, you wouldn't get federally financed infrastructure, a rarity in the early 20th century. You would be criticized by your constituency who said you did nothing in response to the last floods, you would not gain support of the plantation owner community, and you'd lose your job. In the 20s, when the river crested over the levees, the entire community rallied together to fill and lay sandbags. The same way the river is controlled nowadays.

The scene is set for a disaster laid out along tense social and racial fault lines. Just like nowadays.

In a way, the Army Corps of Engineers are the true fathers of the Blues. Check out Jimmie Rodgers and Charley Patton.