| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Rivers by Design: State Power and the Origins of U.S. Flood Control. By Karen M. O'Neill. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. xxii, 278 pp. Cloth, $79.95, ISBN 0-8223-3760-6. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-8223-3773-8.)
After the Compromise of 1877, in which Rutherford B. Hayes won the presidency with the promise of river and harbor aid to the South, the Mississippi River emerged as the spine of a powerful lobby that remade federalism. Grain farmers joined steamboaters and cotton planters in pressing for river improvement. The Midwest and South united in a campaign to remove debris from the Mississippi and to protect its lowlands from floods. Soon the "lobby that couldn't be licked" was stronger than a president's veto. As waterway programs grew to include every flood-prone river, the seemingly invincible lobby kept flood-control patrons in power.	1
Karen M. O'Neill of Rutgers University finds localism at the root of America's vast but decentralized system of flood engineering. Flood control, she begins, extended the reach of Congress and brought the army into construction. Public lands became private farms as swamps behind federal levees were drained for agriculture. Capitalists and the cotton kingdom benefited the most.	. . .

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