The Thousand-Year Flood: The Ohio-Mississippi Disaster of 1937 by David Welky (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 102 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY A second problem concerns the relationship between white supremacist teachings and lynching. DuRocher argues that lynching served as the ultimate expression of southern whites’ determination to maintain racial control. On this point few scholars will disagree. Yet because she leaves the relationship between the racialized lessons she describes and lynching uninterrogated , readers are left to wonder exactly how she believes that racial education prepared white youths to participate in lynchings—and, ultimately, to carry out similar acts of violence as adults. While she convincingly shows that white children received no shortage of racialized teachings, why these necessarily led to violence is not clear. On this count, DuRocher’s study disappoints. Failure to delineate the teachinglynching relationship undermines her argument and leaves the book with a fundamental disconnect between the first three chapters and the last. Despite these reservations, Raising Racists delivers important insights into the racial education of white children. Even with its shortcomings , the book reveals the racial dimensions of white childhood and suggests directions for further investigation. Daniel Vivian University of Louisville The Thousand-Year Flood: The Ohio-Mississippi Disaster of 1937 David Welky Writing the history of natural disasters is not as easy as it may seem at first glance.While extreme natural events such as floods, earthquakes, or tornadoes are usually well documented and can thus be rather easily reconstructed, historians find it more difficult to unearth the social, cultural, and economic origins of catastrophe. As a result, many historical disaster studies are “event-centered” and more or less completely ignore patterns of vulnerability and resilience that might have developed over decades or even centuries. This is not true, however, of David Welky’s account of the 1937 Ohio-Mississippi flood. Welky does not limit himself to describing the flood in great detail; he also traces path dependencies, analyzes the anthropogenic components of the disaster, and highlights its short-term and long-term effects. The Ohio-Mississippi flood of 1937 represented one of the most devastating natural catastrophes in United States history. On January 24, 1937, still remembered in the region as “Black Sunday,” the Ohio River had reached flood stage David Welky. The Thousand-Year Flood:The OhioMississippi Disaster of 1937. Chicago: The University Press of Chicago, 2011. 384 pp. ISBN: 9780226887166 (cloth), $27.50. BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2012 103 all the way between Portsmouth, Ohio, and its confluence with the Mississippi River at Cairo, Illinois. The flood affected 196 counties in twelve states. Almost one million people had to leave their homes and seek shelter with friends, relatives, or in one of the 1,575 refugee centers and tent cities that the American Red Cross erected. In terms of its destructive force, the 1937 disaster surpassed all previous floods in the history of the U.S. When weighed against the coping capacities of a society in the midst of the Great Depression, it becomes the most destructive natural disaster of the twentieth century—more damaging than both the 1927 and 1993 Mississippi River floods (see Roger A. Pielke Jr., et al., Flood Damage in the United States, 1926-2000 [Boulder, Co., 2002], 58). Welky clearly shows that the flood affected people of dissimilar backgrounds differently and to varying degrees. Natural disasters can illuminate the fact that marginalized people often occupied hazardous lands. Low-lying riverfront neighborhoods in Wheeling, Cincinnati, Evansville, Paducah, and many other cities along the river housed a disproportionately high number of African Americans and poor whites. In Louisville, “about three thousand drifters and river rats” lived next to the river and were thus especially vulnerable to flooding. Prevalent racist attitudes and practices also contributed to the creation of separate and unequal flood experiences. Officials used different buses to evacuate the black and white residents of Cairo, for example, and temporary flood shelters such as the courthouse in Paducah and the Shawneetown High School had separate quarters for the black population. The American Red Cross did not object to these practices; neither did it pay equal wages to its own black doctors and nurses, arguing that it was “following the customs of the community” (195). However, despite all these problems and the magnitude of the 1937...