The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History by Susan Scott Parrish (review)

On its face Susan Scott Parrish's imposing new study is a history of modernity's instability. There is the instability of the 1927 flood that opens the book: the swollen Mississippi River overrunning the levees that were supposed to keep it in its place, and its waters inundating 27,000 square miles of land, the vast majority of it in the lower valley from Memphis, Tennessee, to the Gulf of Mexico. And there is the instability of meaning that is Parrish's focus, the flood of stories, songs, and vaudeville routines Americans used to make sense of the catastrophe. In her telling a different dynamic emerges. It is not the malleability of American culture but Parrish's faith in culture's democratic promise that drives The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History.

That faith shapes the book's structure. When the levees gave way, the Calvin Coolidge administration and the American Red Cross launched a nationwide campaign to raise relief funds. Parrish begins her analysis with the reactionary story they told to get the cash flowing. They portrayed the flood as a purely natural disaster, though in fact experts' engineering of the river had helped create the crisis. The relief efforts were made into a moment of national reconciliation, with the noble North saving the devastated South, uniting a house divided in a rush of altruism. The flood's victims fit into predictable racial categories: southern white people—mostly women and children—as the faces of those in need, and African Americans as mindless, shiftless figures straight out of a minstrel show as the campaign's comic relief.

But in the modern media age officials could not control the message. Parrish devotes most of her book to exploring the alternative meanings that a range of Americans imposed on the flood. Occasionally she stretches her evidence a bit too far, most obviously in her attempt to turn vaudevillians Flournoy E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles's 1927 comedy bit on Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic into a critique of the flood as a consequence of technological modernity. For the most part, though, Parrish presents a strikingly sophisticated analysis of the multiple cultural forms produced during and after the flood. She moves from Bessie Smith's hit "Back-Water Blues," which Parrish sees as a fundamental challenge to the official campaign's dehumanization of the African American experience; to Will Rogers's cross-racial populism; to the book's culminating point, a brilliant reading of the flood's influence on William Faulkner and Richard Wright. The movement is chronological: Smith put out "Back-Water Blues" almost as soon as the flood had crested, whereas Wright's short story "Silt" was published in 1937. But the narrative is progressive, demonstrating how a conservative story was overtaken by the voices of the marginalized, who revealed the flood's injustices and in doing so democratized its meaning.

In her conclusion Parrish's faith in the process becomes more explicit. She considers the 1927 flood alongside the flooding of New Orleans in 2005, a catastrophe that caused Parrish to begin working on her book. Again the levees failed, and again there was a semi-privatized rush to provide relief. This time, though, officials did not manage to put an official story in place. Instead, African American artists used their access to major media outlets to offer searing versions of the disaster's meaning: Kanye West on NBC; Spike Lee on HBO; Kara Walker with her cover of the New Yorker; and Natasha Trethewey as poet laureate of the United States. It seems that in the almost eighty years between the Mississippi overrunning its banks in 1927 and Hurricane Katrina inundating New Orleans in 2005, the democratization of American culture has only intensified, even as other portions of American life remain stubbornly unequal.

Parrish's conclusion offers a comforting thought, but it does not fit the flood...