Lawrence N. Powell

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Lawrence N. Powell | What Does American History Tell Us about Katrina and Vice Versa? | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

What Does American History Tell Us about Katrina and Vice Versa?

Natural disasters invariably provoke a range of reactions. Bereavement mingles with anger. The need to commemorate competes with the urge to blame. Boosterism gets a boost. No matter how deep the ash or how high the rubble, you will always find a politician or business leader promising to bring back a just-ruined city bigger and better than before. Storms, fires, earthquakes, mudslides—these are mere blessings in disguise. What was broken, dysfunctional, and decrepit has been leveled or swept away. Now, long-overdue improvements can finally be launched. The optimistic narratives of resilience and resurrection, so necessary for marshaling the will and the capital to rebuild in the teeth of catastrophe, fill the pages of American urban history. They resounded after the great Chicago fire of 1871 and the Galveston hurricane of 1900. In San Francisco after the earthquake and fire of 1906, local boosters styled themselves "regenerators," to let people know they were as interested in purification as in rebuilding.¹ Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans's pledge to restore the waterlogged metropolis to all its former grandeur, and then some, echoed that language of rebirth and renewal. The businessmen and developers, civic leaders and college presidents, who dominated his Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOBC) repeated it as well, even as many of them favored shrinking the city's footprint. President George W. Bush paid boosterism the ultimate compliment when he told a national television audience from a mostly darkened French Quarter seventeen days after the storm: "We will not just rebuild, we will build higher and better."²	1
Natural disasters also have political effects. Without fail they shift the ground of local politics. The looting that inevitably follows catastrophe triggers repressive measures. To restore law and order, the militia comes to town. The police are told to shoot to kill. Vigilantes are given license. In a short time, the assault on civil liberties elicits a democratic backlash, if not challenges in the courts. Then there is the political opportunism of the business community, which tends to view crises as terrible things to waste. Good-government forces set up ad hoc committees. They convince state legislatures to set aside locally elected officials. The Galveston plan—the shorthand term for the city-manager-and-commission form of government urban Progressives embraced in order to end boss rule—began as a recovery response to the terrible hurricane of 1900.³	2
Natural disasters can also reverberate through national politics. The great Mississippi flood of 1927 made Herbert Hoover's reputation, spurred the passage of the most comprehensive flood control measure in the nation's history, and helped launch the career of Huey P. Long, himself a force of nature. Like wars and depressions, natural catastrophes can serve as detonating events, to use the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s evocative language, nudging history's cyclical movement in a new direction—in the present case toward civic engagement. It is always dangerous for historians to predict the future; most of us get vertigo simply peering over the brink of the present. Even so, enough perspective has opened up in the eighteen months since Hurricane Katrina to venture a cautious judgment. That judgment is partly based on the scope and magnitude of the devastation wrought by the storm—more than a million people exiled from their homes, a displacement dwarfing that of the dust bowl; and $80 billion in property damage, the greatest financial loss in American history. Those statistics alone lift the weather event of August 29, 2005, into the record books. But there is mounting evidence that Katrina may be starting to register in the political almanac as well, surpassing anything experienced by the United States in the past century, including the attack on the World Trade Center, "other than the world wars," according to one disaster recovery expert.⁴	. . .

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