Great Mississippi Flood of 1927

The Mississippi River flood of 1927 was a flood of the century and represents the floods with the previously devastating impact in U.S. history dar. At its peak, 700,000 people were evacuated and an area of ​​70,000 km ² in the states of Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee flooded.

Course

In the winter of 1926/27, the headwaters of the Mississippi dined in Kansas and Iowa as a result of heavy rainfall up to capacity. On April 15, 1927 Good Friday, sat across the entire Mississippi Valley and the surrounding states of a violent and persistent rain. By May of the Mississippi was from Memphis, Tennessee downriver a width of up to 97 kilometers achieved. To, Louisiana derive the flood of New Orleans, Parish levees were blown up with the help of 30 tons of dynamite in St. Bernard; a measure which later turned out to be unnecessary because other dams upriver from New Orleans were broken and so spared the city largely. It took until August, until the floods were completely drained.

Effects

In politics and society

1928 Flood Control Act was passed and the U.S. forces tasked with the development of flood fuses, whereupon the longest dam system in the world was born. Politically helped flood the then Economy Minister Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge administration to introduce itself as a crisis manager in front of a nationwide audience. The following year, he ran for the presidency and was able to defeat his Democratic opponent. During his presidency, but details came to light how bad the African Americans were treated in the Evakuiertencamps. Black had under gunpoint build dikes, starved in refugee camps and were not saved, while they took care of only in White. This cost a lot of sympathy and Hoover was not least to his defeat in his re- nomination in 1932.

More than half of the population affected by the disaster were African American, and therefore the flood one of the factors that promoted the Great Migration of African Americans 1915-1930 was. Before 1927 this had shrunk migration from the rural South to the industrial cities of the Great Lakes and in the Northeast of the United States to a minimum.

In the pop music

Culturally, the memory was reflected in the tide especially in folk music and in the then nascent genre of the Delta Blues. Artists such as Charley Patton, Bessie Smith and Barbecue Bob dealt with it, but the most famous song was not published until nearly 50 years later on the Randy Newman - concept album Good Old Boys in 1974. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005 took Newman Louisiana 1927 with orchestral accompaniment again for the benefit of disaster victims, whereupon the ballad carried the unofficial anthem of the State of Louisiana was.