1927 and the Rise of Modern America

by Charles Shindo

  But the effect of the flood and federal aid loomed over more than just the agricultural economy. The relief effort, by the Red Cross and by the President’s Committee on Relief, illustrates the expanding role of national organizations and the federal government and the importance of the media in raising funds, influencing public opinion, and cultivating political support. The relief-fund campaign by the Red Cross was a highly coordinated, national effort that “built up the greatest Red Cross fund ever raised in the history of the organization, except in time of war, and the largest single disaster relief fund in the history of the world.”53 The total collected by the Red Cross, $17,498,902.16, not only paid for refugees’ food, housing, and health care but was also used in rehabilitation programs that rebuilt houses and supplied feed and seed to farmers.

  Involving 3,420 Red Cross chapters receiving individual donations, the campaign also relied upon the media to spread information about the disaster and the relief operations. The Red Cross received the cooperation of the Associated Press, United Press International, and the International News Service in publicizing the disaster and relief efforts. Newsreels, radio broadcasts, and newspaper and magazine stories all focused the nation’s attention on the flooded region and the need for donations. Radio stations and movie theaters also sponsored fund drives, with many theaters organizing Red Cross benefit showings of films offered free of charge by studios and producers. As a result of

  this invaluable cooperation by the press, the radio and the motion pictures, the entire populace of the United States, from coast to coast, was kept informed daily of the progress of the disaster relief work as the crest of the flood crept its way slowly southward along the Mississippi. They knew the amount of money needed to keep the relief job at Red Cross standards, how much had been raised each day, and how much remained to be given before the job was over.54

  Along with coordinated efforts by churches, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, local organizations, and fraternal societies, the Red Cross flood-relief program was a national unifying event that marshaled primarily private funds and agencies. Federal agencies did assist the Red Cross relief, but no direct federal funds went to the Red Cross or to the flood refugees. There was government involvement in the relief efforts: the War Department supplied the Red Cross with tents, cots, and blankets for the refugees; the National Guard supplied protection; and other government agencies supplied boats to help rescue and relocate refugees. “But the burden of caring for the homeless,” President Coolidge stated, “rests upon the agency designated by Government charter to provide relief in disaster—The American National Red Cross.”55 This reliance on the private sector was the hallmark of Republican politics during the 1920s, but the enormity of the flood-relief effort required national coordination as well as a national sense of unity. It also required the flood victims to accept nonlocal aid, which, although the aid did not come directly from the federal government, meant accepting outside assistance, something rural people, especially southern rural people, did reluctantly. The nature of the flood—an uncontrollable and unforeseen disaster—helped ease flood victims into accepting outside assistance, since their plight was a result not of their own actions but of a natural occurrence. The inability of local agencies to adequately provide relief forced the victims to turn to national sources of relief, and while this was not the first time rural southerners had accepted outside assistance, it was the first major instance of what would become a trend with drought relief, New Deal reform, and home-front mobilization for World War II.

  This growing dependence of southerners on the federal government was, in part, a result of federal policy. Indeed, if anyone could be “blamed” for the severity of the flood, it would be the federal government—in the form of the Army Corps of Engineers—which prior to the flood had embarked on a program of only building levees to contain the Mississippi River. Without spillways, cutoffs, and reservoirs, especially along tributaries, the volume of water in the Mississippi had reached unprecedented levels before and during the flood. Southerners along the river accepted the army’s plan since it meant the federal government would provide matching funds while states and landowners primarily supplied land. After the flood, with the Flood Control Act of 1928, the government replaced the “levees only” policy with a comprehensive system of flood control, to be built and maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers and funded by the federal government. What had been under the supervision of state and local levee boards was now firmly under the federal government’s control.

  This increase of outside influences—from the federal government and from northern industrialization and modernization—did not proceed unprotested. In the early 1920s, a group of southern poets at Vanderbilt University, known as the Fugitives, developed a critique of modernization. By 1927, this critique focused on promoting the values of the Old South as a remedy to the dehumanizing effect of the industrialization being promoted by the advocates of the new South. “Our fight,” John Crowe Ransom wrote to Allen Tate in 1927, “is for survival; and it’s got to be waged not so much against the Yankees as against the exponents of the New South. I see clearly that you are as unreconstructed and unmodernized as any of the rest of us, if not more so. We must think about this business and take some very long calculations ahead.”56 These writers, which included Donald Davidson, Andrew Lytle, and Robert Penn Warren, eventually produced the manifesto of the agrarian movement, I’ll Take My Stand (1930). Under the collective authorship of “Twelve Southerners,” the agrarians promoted the traditions, history, and culture of the Old South as an alternative to the individualistic, and to their minds destructive, values of industrial capitalism. Though their critique does point out some of the flaws in the modern industrial system that had developed in the nineteenth century and come to full fruition in the 1920s, they could not provide solutions that fit the modern circumstances. For example, the agrarians espoused the virtues of the plantation system (in its postslavery incarnation), with its communal workforce and semi-independent and (theoretically) self-sufficient tenants, as compared to the specialization and alienation of industrial labor, which made workers dependent on factory owners. Their vision of the plantation system, however, did not take into account the degree to which sharecroppers and tenant farmers were dependent on planters because of low crop prices and perpetual indebtedness. The failings of the plantation system became obvious in the wake of the flood and the exodus of black farmers out of the Delta and the South.

  In addition to bringing greater federal intrusion into the South, the flood and its consequences demonstrated the possibilities created by a national emergency, especially for national politics. Herbert Hoover’s role as chairman of the President’s Committee on Relief gave him public exposure on an almost daily basis for months during the emergency. Hoover ensured his role would be very visible by creating a press car on the train he used to tour the flood area. As secretary of commerce during two prosperous administrations, Hoover was well regarded by the public, but his reputation primarily stemmed from his humanitarian efforts during the Great War, first in Belgium, then as the director of the successful food administration that not only fed a starving Europe but helped increase production and profits for American farmers as well. But the war had receded in the public’s memory, and by early 1927 Hoover was only rarely mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. His very public role in the flood relief not only reinvigorated his image as the “Great Humanitarian” but also reinforced his image as the “Great Engineer,” since Hoover publicly took charge of—and credit for—the relief, reconstruction, and flood-control planning operations. Hoover’s direction of the flood-relief effort did not, however, immediately signal an increase of federal authority, since Hoover pronounced that his goal was “to coordinate the activities of the War, Navy, Treasury, and Commerce Departments into support of the Red Cross, which it was determined must continue the primary responsibility for the organization and administration of the relief measures to be taken.”57 By doi
ng so, Hoover created no new administration, relying exclusively on existing institutions and organizations to create a comprehensive plan of relief and reconstruction.

  This hierarchical structure created by Hoover, with himself at the top of the organizational pyramid followed by public and private organizations and resting firmly on local administrators and volunteers, was the major strength (and weakness) of Hoover’s approach to government, the use of bureaucracy to strengthen the individual, what Bruce Lohof describes as “humane efficiency.”58 Hoover, and the public and private resources he marshaled, enabled local chapters of the Red Cross and other relief agencies to engage in the actual relief operations of building, maintaining, and staffing refugee camps and relief centers without direct federal intrusion, except for the National Guard (the most localized of the armed services), which policed the camps. Information, standards, supplies, equipment, and funding all came from centralized sources to local operations. This was true not only of the immediate relief operations but of the process of reconstruction as well. Once the danger of additional flooding disappeared, the “one great task demanding immediate attention,” Hoover declared, was “the replacement on the farms and in industry of this great army of unfortunate people.”59 Much of this reconstruction would be made possible through the extension of credit. Hoover oversaw the creation of statewide credit corporations in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas whose capital came from banks and commercial interests in each state and from Federal Intermediate Credit Corporations, adjuncts of the Federal Farm Loan Board.60 While most of the funds eventually issued to borrowers came from local sources, the federal guarantee of the intermediate credit corporations and the “knowledge that their resources were available in case of need not only facilitated the operations of the [state] credit corporations but helped to maintain confidence generally.”61 In addition, Hoover brought together corporate leaders to create the Flood Credits Corporation, an adjunct to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which issued bonds to chamber of commerce members and the various state credit corporations. The result was what Lohof describes as “efficient, centralized authority [that] served to sustain an essentially grass-roots effort.”62

  This balance between a central authority and local effort worked well for many of the flood victims by providing them the means necessary to rebuild their lives without the direct intrusion and control of the federal government. It was for many an indication that bureaucracy could work to the benefit, and not the detriment, of the individual. What the agrarians saw as the destructive force of modern life—industrial and bureaucratic values replacing individualism, honor, and duty—Hoover saw as constructive. “For Hoover a bureaucracy was a source of nourishment for grass-roots activity. Properly administered, a bureaucracy would not replace or stifle individual effort or community enterprise; rather, it would vitalize these activities by coordinating and rationalizing the resources upon which they draw.”63 In this way, Hoover resolved the major conflict of modernity, between the bureaucracy and the individual, by not seeing them as adversaries. But this “humane efficiency” did not resolve all the conflicts it addressed. As president, Hoover’s direction of relief for the Great Depression relied on the same formula of federal, private, and local effort but could not overcome the immensity of the crisis, primarily because, whereas the flood-relief effort was able to take advantage of sources outside the affected area, the Depression affected the entire nation, indeed the world, leaving no external source of support available.

  In the flood relief itself, Hoover’s political ideas did resolve the basic and immediate problems—rescuing, housing, and caring for refugees; initiating reconstruction; and implementing flood control—but they failed to address existing problems, such as the economic dependency of tenant farmers and racial discrimination. Hoover contemplated a solution to these problems utilizing the same kind of corporate bureaucracy to implement land reform through the creation of a “land resettlement corporation” that would buy foreclosed plantations, divide and stock them with farm materials and livestock, and make them available to “a great number of buyers amongst both blacks and whites.”64 This resettlement would distribute land more widely than was possible under the plantation system, and it would create a Delta region of small, independent, self-sufficient farmers. “Had the scheme been acted upon, sharecroppers and tenant farmers would ideally have become yeomen, and the valley would come to enjoy, in Hoover’s words, those ‘infinite values to good citizenship . . . that comes with a population who have a stake in the land.’”65

  One man who shared Hoover’s vision of independent farmers in the Delta was Robert Moton, head of the Colored Advisory Commission. Hoover detailed the plan to Moton, leading him to believe it would be implemented, if not soon after the flood then after Hoover was elected president. As a result, Moton backed down from criticizing Hoover and the relief effort, even after it became clear that nothing would be done about the discriminatory handling of the aid and supplies in the relief and reconstruction efforts. Moton’s final report to Hoover from the Colored Advisory Commission was critical of the treatment accorded African Americans by the Red Cross and by planters. When told by Hoover that the report was a “disappointment,” Moton relented and revised it to praise the Red Cross and Hoover. Moton also worked to protect Hoover from criticism over the flood relief during the election campaign of 1928. “With Moton’s help no scandal had erupted and black Republican delegates had fallen in line.”66 But once nominated, Hoover sought to increase his support by courting white southerners, who would not support Democratic candidate Al Smith, a Catholic. This support would only come at the expense of black Republicans, who saw few benefits in supporting Hoover and the Republicans. As a result, Hoover lost around 15 percent of the black vote, down considerably from Warren G. Harding’s 95 percent support from the black community. In the South, the election was significant not only as an early sign of what would become a major defection of African American voters from the Republican to the Democratic Party, but also as the first election since Reconstruction in which southern states voted Republican, a trend that would grow much stronger after World War II.

  Political realignment, black migration, the decline of farm tenantry, the decline of New Orleans’ old-money power, and the intrusion of federal authority into the South all illustrate how the flood transformed the lower Mississippi Valley and, through dispersion and policy effects, transformed the nation as well. While the “new woman” represented the modern era in this struggle between Victorian and modern cultures, and the Agrarians represented the old southern values, African Americans in the flood-affected South were caught between the two as industrialization and agribusiness, along with federal intervention, replaced the plantation-style system of farm tenantry. But the flood illustrates another characteristic of modern American life in the use of the media and publicity, especially by Hoover, to gain financial and political support. Hoover’s use of the available media (newspapers, magazines, newsreels, and radio), as well as his support of a new medium (television), ushered in a new era of political campaigning. Even though this media savvy would be more apparent in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was much more adept at using the press to his advantage, Hoover was key in the development of a new political phenomenon, a national media identity. Hoover saw the potential of the media to assist in national efficiency, as he had with bureaucracy, and he used the media accordingly; but also like bureaucracy, the media possessed dangers as well as potential, dangers masked by optimism and the quest for notoriety.

  “dead!” Ruth Snyder’s execution. Front page of the New York Daily News, January 13, 1928. (Courtesy of the New York Daily News)

  Poster illustration for the movie Babe Comes Home.

  CHAPTER 3Seeking Notoriety: The Infamous and the Famous

  INFAMY AND FAME: Celebrity came in many guises in the 1920s. Some, such as executed murderer Ruth Snyder, gained notoriety for criminal behavior symbolic of the era; others, such as athlete Babe Ruth, broug
ht their unique personalities not only to their chosen professions but to vaudeville stages, barnstorming tours, and motion pictures. To many Americans, Snyder represented the dangers of such modern values as sexual equality, pleasure-seeking, and lack of respect for authority and traditional values. Ruth also embodied many of those same traits, but his success on the field as a baseball player and off the field as a celebrity grew from his rags-to-riches background, not his demonstration of modern ideas. Both Snyder and Ruth filled the pages of the emerging tabloid press, sold to an eager audience, illustrating the benefits and dangers of celebrity in America.

  Herbert Hoover’s faith in publicity and the media as a bureaucratic tool stemmed from his belief in the value of expert management of both business and public affairs. Used wisely, publicity experts could inform the public about the information and services available from the government without being intrusive or obstructive. Publicity had helped Hoover illustrate the benefits of such wartime agencies as the Food Administration and of such peacetime initiatives as the Mississippi Valley flood-relief effort, both voluntary efforts and both highly successful. Even though Hoover encouraged the development of the publicity machine into a smoothly running and enormously profitable industry, he did not fully understand its dimensions and limitations. Hoover understood the potential benefits of mass media and publicity, but his own limitations obscured the dangers inherent in a public service run for profit. Among those dangers was a press dominated not by hard political, economic, or international news but, rather, by soft human interest stories or sensationalistic stories about crime and celebrities. The tabloid press enlarged the newspaper-reading audience as newspapers focused more attention on crowd-pleasing stories. Reinforcing the tendencies of the press, the rise of collegiate and professional sports provided ample material for soft news. Newspapers became more than a method for informing the public; they became a commodity among many others trying to gain the public’s attention. The publicity machine, and the celebrities created by it, were not new to the 1920s, but the dominance of publicity and the sheer number of celebrities during the decade illustrates the central role of image in the modern world.