Clarence L. Mohr and Lawrence N. Powell

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Clarence L. Mohr and Lawrence N. Powell | Through the Eye of Katrina: The Past as Prologue? An Introduction | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Through the Eye of Katrina: The Past as Prologue? An Introduction

Coming four years after the trauma of September 11, 2001, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 delivered an unwelcome aftershock to the American psyche. In a period when "homeland security" had been thrust to the forefront of political dialogue, the federal government's seeming inability to provide timely humanitarian assistance to storm victims in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast raised doubts about the nation's readiness to meet future emergencies. For outside observers, as well as displaced local residents, the Katrina debacle proved deeply unsettling. The entire episode represented not only a blow to America's psychological recovery from the 2001 attacks but also an affront to our sense of civility and collective responsibility for the welfare of our fellow citizens.

In the most visceral sense, history hovered over the Katrina disaster. As hours turned into days for suffering refugees at the New Orleans Superdome and on isolated interstate overpasses, television reporters with little grasp of either the recent or the remote past struggled to give voice to a question that many viewers were already asking: New Orleans, Louisiana—is this America? As had been true when violence against civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 led to that question, it would readily admit of either a positive or a negative answer—both equally unnerving to the historically innocent. Today as in 1964, it is possible to view poverty and racial inequality as American problems requiring national intervention or as localized aberrations within a generally fair and open democratic society. In a similar fashion, the manifest inability of New Orleans to cope with a long-predicted natural disaster may be attributed chiefly either to the presumed moral failings of an exotic Third World culture or to the prolonged failure of Congress and the executive branch to invest in basic urban infrastructure. Either view of the problem contains an implicit mandate to connect the nation's past with that of the South and of the self-proclaimed city that care forgot in the state that has all too often forgotten to care.

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