Recalls another Republican who ignored flood victims

...It is upon such independence and self-government that is based the greatness of the United States...

...It was the Red Cross that spent nearly $17 million to rescue, shelter, and feed an estimated seven hundred thousand people uprooted by the Mississippi's flooding...

...He treated as adequate a relief effort that estimated a tenant family of four that had lost everything could restart its life if it were given $77.42 upon leaving the emergency camp...

...It is a comforting thought for Bush critics...

...It was, after all, not until 1932, five years after the Mississippi River flood of 1927, when he had to campaign against a Franklin Roosevelt who insisted that government has a "continuous responsibility for human welfare," that Herbert Hoover finally met political defeat and lost his reputation as "the great humanitarian...

...The cooperative spirit of Main Street is what is putting the Mississippi Valley back on its feet after the flood," a triumphal Hoover, who a year later would be on his way to the White House, told a New Orleans Rotary Club in September 1927...

...As president, he never visited any of the flooded cities and towns along the Mississippi, despite pleas to do so, and although in 1927 the Treasury finished the year with a record surplus of $635 million, under Coolidge's orders, the federal government did nothing to pay for flood victims' relief...

...I am here because I want to see with my own eyes what the unhappy alliance of wind and water have done to this land and people," Johnson, speaking without a microphone, told a small crowd that had gathered to meet him at the airport...

...He created private credit corporations that failed to make loans to those in need...

...The story of how Herbert Hoover used the Mississippi River flood as a stepping-stone to the presidency is told in painstaking detail in John M. Barry's Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America...

...ON SEPTEMBER 10, 1965, one day after Hurricane Betsy struck the Gulf Coast, causing widespread flooding, President Lyndon B. Johnson flew to New Orleans on Air Force One with Louisiana's three most powerful politicians—Representative Hale Boggs and Senators Russell Long and Allen Ellender—as well as with the secretary of agriculture, the surgeon general, and the director of the Office of Emergency Planning...

...DISSENT / Winter 2006 13...

...You can be sure that the Federal Government's total resources will be tuned to Louisiana to help this state and its citizens find its way back from this tragedy...

...Early on the Bush administration suspended rules requiring federal contractors to pay prevailing wages and meet affirmative action obligations, and soon after, Mike Leavitt, the secretary of Health and Human Services, sent a letter to Senate leaders urging them to block emergency legislation that would have provided all low-income victims of Hurricane Katrina with health coverage under Medicaid...

...In contrast to Johnson, with his commitment to such liberal Great Society programs as Medicare and Medicaid, Coolidge, like George W. Bush, was from the start bent on running an administration that cut taxes and domestic spending...

...Instead, in Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who headed a special committee of five cabinet secretaries appointed by Coolidge to deal with the Mississippi flood, the Republicans produced a new national hero, whom voters would soon see as the engineer-humanitarian they wanted for a president...

...In this great national enterprise, important work can be done by everyone, and everyone should find their role and do their part...

...But there is another historical example, more in tune with the current political atmosphere, that we also need to consider...

...Although he brought order to the early rescue effort, convincing the railroads to provide free transportation for flood victims and assembling a rescue fleet of boats, he soon turned his back 12 DISSENT / Winter 2006 on problems fundamental to the lives of the flood victims...

...THE PARALLELS between the Bush administration's missteps in the Gulf of Mexico and its missteps in the second Gulf War are impossible to miss...

...Lyndon Johnson's response to Hurricane Betsy, the subject on September 11, 1965, of two New York Times stories and more recently the focus of a "Letter from Louisiana" in the New Yorker by its editor, David Remnick, and a New York Times op-ed by NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, is still seen by many as the best historical example of how the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina should be judged...

...Coolidge and his party paid no penalty for the callousness they showed the Mississippi River's flood victims...

...The real question is what Democrats, whose congressional leaders, a Pew Research Center survey taken after Hurricane Katrina shows, have just a 32 percent approval rating, will do in the coming months...

...Hoover was, however, a master of press relations, and from the Democrats he faced no powerful competing vision of what should have been done to help the Mississippi River's flood victims...

...In his nationwide September 2005 speech from Jackson Square, New Orleans, Bush echoed the same Hoover-like preoccupation with voluntarism: "I challenge existing organizations —churches, Scout troops or labor union locals—to get in touch with their counterparts in Mississippi, Louisiana or Alabama, and learn what they can do to help...

...Yet in 1928, the Republicans handily won the presidential election, continuing the political dominance they had enjoyed since the end of the Wilson administration...

...A Hoover-like approach to government is as inadequate today as it was decades ago, but it won't be rejected out of hand by voters unless a clear set of political alternatives is put before them...

...But in contrast to Iraq, where his own views on preemptive war are an issue, the president, who, in November, under pressure from critics, rescinded his waiver of the law requiring federal contractors to pay prevailing wages, has ample political incentive to do as little as possible for Hurricane Katrina's victims and wait for the media's interest in the rebuilding effort to dwindle...

...Republicans have already gained enormous political advantage in Louisiana from the forced exodus of large numbers of black poor, who constitute reliable Democratic Party voters, and the president's ongoing campaign to contract the nation's social safety net would be set back if he actually tried to address the underlying poverty that Hurricane Katrina has exposed...

...NICOLAUS MILLS is a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and the author of Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial...

...But the most significant parallel between 1927 and 2005 flood relief has been Bush's effort to limit the role of the federal government...

...Not only by contemporary standards but even by those of his own time, Hoover's relief work in 1927 should have been suspect...

...It is the reaction of Calvin Coolidge's administration to the great Mississippi River flood of 1927...

...Hoover ignored the degree to which black workers and farmers were routinely denied supplies and clothing...

...The next day, the mayor of New Orleans received a sixteen-page telegram from the president describing his plans for aiding the city...

...Coolidge's response to the Mississippi River flood of 1927 was to hold tightly to his conservative principles...