KINDER'S COMMENTARY: NEW BOOK PAYS TRIBUTE TO HISTORY AND POLITICS OF THE RIVER

Today seems as good a time as any to mention a fabulous book about the Father of Waters we so often take for granted. I'm referring to "Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America," by John Barry (Simon & Schuster, 1997). If you like history, especially history that touches directly on our life here in the Mississippi Valley -- Cape Girardeau, Cairo, New Madrid, and tiny Dorena in Mississippi County all get multiple mentions -- get your hands on a copy and plunge in.

Rush Limbaugh Sr. (1891-1996) once observed, late in a remarkable life, that in a long legal career he had handled many divorces, all of them sad, but the "saddest" ever was "the divorce between the town of Cape Girardeau and the river that gave it birth." This book is an antidote, helping us all to reconnect with the Mississippi, one of God's most fearsome and awe-inspiring creations.

Never was it more fearsome, or awe-inspiring, than in its rain-swollen rampage down the Lower Mississippi Valley through the winter and spring of 1927. That valley begins, according to river engineers, between Cape Girardeau and Cairo and extends to the Gulf. (North of here is considered the Upper Mississippi River Basin). Author Barry provides some context in comparison with recent flooding, not in the Lower Valley, whose greater capacity easily handled 1993's flow, but above:

"At the peak of the great Mississippi River flood of 1993, the river in Iowa carried 435,000 cubic feet of water a second; at St. Louis, after the Missouri River added its waters, it carried one million cubic feet a second. It was enough water to devastate the Midwest and make headlines across the world.

"In April 1927 [at Greenville, Mississippi in the river's delta], the Mississippi River would be carrying in excess of three million cubic feet of water each second. (Emphasis original.)

When the levees broke, the Lower Valley's devastation seemed of nuclear proportions, but in a sense it was worse: Only God could wreak such havoc. Proud mankind would redouble his feeble efforts to tame the waters: The Corps of Engineers' plans for "controlling" the river are another legacy of 1927. These include mammoth, five hundred-year levees and our Bootheel's Corps-designed, 130,000-acre Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway.

Barry quotes President Calvin Coolidge on Herbert Hoover, his ambitious, brilliant and brilliantly flawed secretary of commerce and the man charged with flood relief efforts: "That man spent six years giving me unsolicited advice, all of it bad."

The great flood of 1927 would end up handing the 1928 Republican presidential nomination to Hoover, a temporary hero on his way to a landslide. President Hoover would react to what might have been the temporary stock market crash of 1929 in the same manner that he handled the Lower Valley's catastrophe, and in 1932 opposition Democrats swept everything in sight. The Republican Party wouldn't really recover from "Hoovernomics" and the dour face he stamped it with until the Reagan ascendancy of the 1980s. In part, one far-reaching consequence of the flood.

There's more, lots more, besides history and politics. Engineering, in both its glories and limitations. Race. Sex. Murder. Heroism. Cruelty. Culture. Social criticism. Wealth on an extravagant scale. Then there's the unbelievable snobbery of New Orleans aristocrats, once America's wealthiest city but one that, according to Barry, has never recovered from 1927.

John Barry has written an extraordinary book.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Commuhiciations and is a state senator from Cape Girardeau.