Hurricane Camille and the New Politics of Federal Disaster Relief, 1965–1970

Although it still smelled slightly of seaweed, the dining room at the Broadwater Beach Motel in Biloxi, Mississippi, was about the only choice for hearings when the Special Subcommittee on Disaster Relief from the Senate Public Works Committee met in January 1970. “Couldn’t find anything else in the whole area,” recalled one participant; “they were all knocked down.”¹ Hurricane Camille, one of the most powerful hurricanes to hit the United States in the twentieth century, had scoured the beachfront of the Mississippi Gulf Coast in August 1969, killing 143 people. The Broadwater, though its first floor had been flooded during the storm, was one of the few large public spaces to escape major structural damage and to be usable five months later.² The subcommittee, headed by Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, consisted of Senator William Spong of Virginia (Camille had also deluged a narrow valley in central Virginia, killing 113 people), Mike Gravel of Alaska, newly elected Senator Robert Dole, representing the Republican minority, and Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, a member of the Public Works Committee who had helped arrange the hearings.

After a few moments granted to local Congressman William Colmer to address the hearing, the committee turned to its first witness, Governor John Bell Williams. Though Bayh was deferential to Williams, Muskie quickly zeroed in on the subject that had inspired the hearings in the first place—accusations of racial discrimination in the handling of relief after the hurricane. Such accusations about Mississippi would not have surprised anybody in early 1970, considering the state’s recent past, including its dogged and high-profile resistance to the acceleration of school desegregation just months before. Muskie and Williams, an ardent segregationist, sparred for a while, and the subject was revisited during the next day’s session of the carefully choreographed hearings, which featured local civil rights leaders and private citizens, who marshaled a long list of problems with the relief effort: racial inequities, unconscionable delays in providing temporary housing, mercenary settlements by insurance companies, and so on. In the glare of the national media, the storyline was firmly established: the management of disaster relief, particularly by state and local institutions, had often been both ineffectual and racist.³

This public examination of the shortcomings of disaster relief helped create the political window for the passage of the 1970 Disaster Relief Act, which made permanent the expansion of a number of federal disaster assistance programs that had been pioneered in limited form in the late 1960s. Most significant, it considerably widened the scope of federal assistance to individual disaster victims, moving beyond the long-standing federal role in reconstruction of public facilities. The 1970 legislation, along with amendments in 1974, solidified a federal disaster safety net that had been widening in the postwar era. It accelerated the transformation of federal disaster relief into something closer to a right, or at least, something that many disaster victims felt strongly entitled to—a significant shift in the outlook from a federal role as only a residual provider for the needs of disaster-stricken individuals.

Existing scholarship on the history of contemporary disaster relief acknowledges the significance of the 1970 act and the role that Hurricane Camille played in stimulating it; indeed, it was another example of a call-and-response pattern of major disasters producing increasing levels of assistance from Congress after World War II. The handful of analysts of disaster policy who have studied legislation in this period ascribe its expansion to both this pattern of disaster-prompted legislation and the general context of expanding federal responsibility in other areas of public policy.⁴ Histories of Hurricane Camille itself tend to dwell on first-person accounts of the storm, and when the relief effort is considered, it is generally without a view of its significance in the broader sweep of federal policy.⁵

As useful as this literature is, the analysis up to this point has paid little attention to the specific political context that prompted disaster-relief legislation and the political actors who championed its expansion...