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

It has been three quarters of a century since the Ohio River engulfed the towns, cities, and low-lying farm lands lying in what is termed America’s mightiest flood. While the author of the present work has marvelously captured the drama of the occasion, he has added to it context and historical perspective which those who experienced this Great Depression disaster could not have known.

The nightmare began early in 1937 when the river, swollen by days on end of torrential rain, rose to unprecedented heights. It overwhelmed and in instances had a lasting impact on such river or tributary towns as Portsmouth, Ohio; Jeffersonville and Evansville, Indiana; Louisville, Paducah, and Frankfort, Kentucky, and Shawneetown and Cairo, Illinois. Hilly Cincinnati, which except for its downtown, escaped the river’s full wrath as did Pittsburgh and Wheeling, West Virginia, which are treated lightly. Memphis on the Mississippi, on the other hand, garners notable attention. The author, a St. Louis native, stays fixed on the Ohio, calling the happening “the worst river flood in American history” (preface), the destructive power of which today would today be measured in billions of dollars. Yet the story has been largely lost to historians.

Although this review focuses on the flood itself—especially as it impacted on Cairo and Shawneetown and even more on Louisville—Welky does go beyond it. He reminds us that this was a New Deal event, to be viewed through the prism of centralized planning, TVA, the Flood Control Act of 1936, and the saga of the more important one of 1937. Roosevelt’s interest, heartfelt as well as political, energized his response to the calamity and the roles he assigned to Harry Hopkins and WPA’s Indiana head, Wayne Coy. The river itself–its beauty, history, size (a run of 981 miles and encompassing some 204,000 square miles), and the fertile farmland and crucial industry contiguous to it–play in Welky’s presentation. History illumines the river’s taming by examining the roles of the Army Corps of Engineers and the contentious rivalry between two would be tamers, Charles Ellet, Jr. and Captain Andrew Atkinson Humphreys. It shows, too, the concern for flooding which existed long before 1937.

The author’s treatment of Black Sunday in Louisville captures the drama of the moment:

The second largest city in the flood zone stood on the verge of an unprecedented crisis. Cold winds hurled angry waves against buildings. Snow blanketed highland areas. Panicked residents jammed the few usable roads, clogged switchboards with frivolous telephone calls, and gouged customers with inflated prices. Supplies of drinking water ran low owing to inundated pumping stations and widespread hoarding … The clouds closed a few hour later as sheets of rain again pelted the streets. This latest squall was part of a weeklong storm system that carpeted Kentucky and Tennessee with the heaviest precipitation of the four-week weather cycle. It dumped fourteen inches of rain on some places before climaxing on … Jan. 24, or “Black Sunday.” Frozen, saturated ground sped this new precipitation into rivers. Engorged lower tributaries such as the Cumberland, the Tennessee, and the Green submerged wide swaths of land before colliding with the wet wall raging down the Ohio. A colossal hydraulic battle played out as water crashed into water. Repelled by the higher, superior stream before them, tributaries spilled onto surrounding lowlands until the liquid roadblock dropped enough to allow them to resume their path to the sea.

Black Sunday changed a crisis into a disaster. It also marked the moment when President Roosevelt assumed more direct control over the situation … The next several days were a blur. Harry Hopkins ran laps between the White House and the Red Cross building, gathered information from Local WPA officials, and fielded calls from innumerable elected officials seeking federal assistance … Black Sunday proved the tipping point along the Ohio, the day when a major flood turned into a...