http://hnn.us/articles/15163.html
9-03-05
In New Orleans, Once Again, the Irony of Southern History
By Christopher Morris
Mr. Morris is a historian at the University of Texas at Arlington, and the
author of books and articles on the history of the South. He is completing
a book on the environmental and social history of the Lower Mississippi
Valley, including New Orleans.
Once again the entire country is confronted with the legacy of Reconstruction.
It is too simple to chalk the tragedy that continues to unfold in New
Orleans to the force of nature, or to an unfathomable God. Hurricanes, like
earthquakes, tornadoes, eruptions, and tsunamis, do come, but who or what
sends them is only half the story. Such disasters whatever their origin
smash into worlds of our making. What they do when they make landfall, what
they meet when they reach the coast, is largely up to us. In the case of
New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina hit a city of intractable poverty, in which
the most desperately poor are African American. It also hit a city that was
largely defenseless precisely because it is black and poor. And because its
once powerful white citizenry has largely vanished.
In the decade following the Civil War, the white business and political
leaders of New Orleans and Louisiana begged the federal government to take
the lead in sealing the city off from the waters that surrounded and all
too often inundated it. These same men had just fought a war against the
United States government, they liked to tell themselves, to protect states
rights, and they could not wait for the occupying army to pack up and
leave. The irony in asking for federal money, expertise, and leadership in
controlling the Mississippi, and in admitting that the state of Louisiana
was simply not up to the task, was probably not lost on them. But the war
over states rights, if thats what it was, was behind them. What they and
the nation needed in 1866 was to get the cotton and sugar plantations up
and running, and to safeguard their regions largest port. To accomplish
that white leaders in New Orleans and surrounding plantations needed safety
from flooding and they needed certain control over their predominantly
black laborers. The first required federal assistance, the second required
the federal government to back off efforts to assist the former slaves.
Over the next two decades they succeeded in getting both. In 1877 the new
Republican administration of Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew the army from the
Southern states and abandoned the former slaves to white redeemers, as
they were called, because they redeemed the South for the Democratic Party
and for white supremacy. But in the bargain that settled the disputed
election of 1876, Louisiana demanded and got a promise of federal
leadership in flood control. Over the next half century, the federal
government worked to protect the land and businesses of whites, who in turn
used their control over the land to control black laborers. The great flood
of 1927 momentarily made visible the descendants of the former slaves. But
when Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, visited the scene and
empathized with victimsan act that helped put him into the White House the
next yearhe reached out to whites. Black folks were disfranchised.
The black population of New Orleans in slavery and freedom has largely been
poor and powerless. Their city was protected from flooding, however, so
long as white leaders had clout, which they had back when cotton and sugar
mattered, and when the Solid South of white Democrats ruled Congress.
Louisiana did not vote for Hoover, but that did not matter. Southern
Democrats ruled Congress. Hoover needed them more than they needed him.
Civil Rights destroyed the Democratic Party in the South, as whites fled to
the party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The demise of cotton and
sugar, and the end of seniority privileges in Congress, meant that white
political flight in Louisiana brought little to the Republican Party. The
Southern states that matter most are those filled with migrants from the
North, namely, Texas and Florida. Louisiana, and within that state New
Orleans most of all, is a place of poor blacks abandoned since
Reconstruction to powerful plantation interests who protected them by
default when protecting the plantations. But Louisianas whites no longer
have any clout.
Civil Rights, it turns out, did little to give power to New Orleanss black
population. In the early 1990s the Clinton Administration overhauled
welfare. It was part of a Democratic political strategy to ward off
conservative Republicans whose campaigns played on latent fears of vicious
black rapists and welfare moms, an angry politics energized by outright
white supremacist populists, such as Metairies David Duke. At the same
time Louisianas leaders began to express concerns about New Orleanss
vulnerability to flooding. Fears grew with the 1993 floods in the central
Mississippi Valley, though the lower valley was spared that year, and
following a series of devastating hurricanes that collided with the Gulf
and Atlantic coasts.
The Clinton strategy failed to secure the Democrats against the
Republicans. As in 1876, Louisiana in the contested election of 2000 helped
to put another Republican in the White House, a man who, like Hayes,
promised drastic reduction of federal intrusion into state affairs. Just as
in 1876, Louisiana once again sought an exception to the states rights
philosophy it otherwise espoused: massive federal funding for flood
control. What changed between then and now was what Louisiana politicians
could not see clearly. They no longer mattered. In 1876 Louisiana was a
player, one of the states (along with Florida and South Carolina) that
delayed the election of Hayes. New Orleans, in addition to federally
administered flood control, held out for a transcontinental railroad, which
it eventually got.
Louisiana did not put George W. Bush in the White House, nor did it later
hand his party control of Congress. Florida did. Texas did. When
Louisianas leaders asked George W. Bush for funds to shore up New
Orleanss defenses against the waters that surround the city, the president
turned them down. There was nothing they could do. They had, after all,
signed on to a political philosophy and Republican agenda of tax cuts and
minimal federal intervention in state affairs. They had agreed with the
Republican and Democratic Parties when they cried out against the special
privileges of affirmative action, welfare, and aid to families with
dependent children. They agreed, too, with a Republican Party that measures
worth in terms of market value. No corporation came forward with a plan to
build better levees around New Orleans, and by the logic of the Bush
administration, therefore they couldnt be worth building.
New Orleans and Louisiana might have gone a different route over a century
ago. White leaders might have linked the future prosperity of their city
and state to the prosperity of the former slaves. Had they done so then,
black and white might stand today united, as a real political force to be
reckoned with. Together, they might have demanded and received the
protection they so desperately needed. Over much of the last century,
whites in New Orleans gambled that they could build a society of white
privilege and black disfranchisement, and do so with the help of the rest
of the nation. Tragically, that is exactly what happened. But they did not
see the day when black powerlessness would drag them down too. Sure, the
white folks of St. Charles Avenue were able to drive their BMWs out of the
city as Katrina approached. We will hear a lot over the coming weeks about
how whites survived the storm just fine, while blacks lost everything. But
that isnt quite true. More whites than blacks will have homes to return
to. But their city will be gone, unlikely to return. As major industries
announce divestment and departurepetroleum companies have begun to say
they will not return to New Orleansaffluent whites will lose too.
We will also hear a lot about the natural environment of New Orleans, how
it is to blame for the disaster, and people to the extent that they live
there. A good case can be made that New Orleans ought never to have been
built, or rebuilt after the fires, floods, and hurricanes that have
devastated it in the past. The environment around New Orleans is probably
no more unsuitable for urban development than south Florida. Speaker of the
House Dennis Hastert questioned the wisdom and worth of rebuilding New
Orleans. No doubt many around the nation share his sentiments. It is hard
to imagine he or anyone else would make similar remarks about San Francisco
or Los Angeles, were they devastated by earthquake and fire.
New Orleans wasnt built just on a swamp. It was built, too, on the backs
of black laborers. White supremacy helped make New Orleans an important
place. In recent decades it has become a curiosity of little real import.
If the city never recovers, it wont be just because of the natural
environment. It will be because long ago the whites of New Orleans, and
whites in Washington and around the nation, made a bargain with the devil
of white supremacy, and now they, we, will have now lost it all.
