News-Record.com

When a reviewer of a John M. Barry's book wrote that the writer "digs up (the) deadly past to learn its lessons for the future," the reviewer was referring to Barry's "The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History." The book was about the 1918 flu pandemic that killed millions worldwide.

A more apt example of digging up the past to see the future would have been Barry's book, "Rising Tide," published in 1997 and nominated for the National Book Award.

The book chronicles the great flood of 1927 that drown the Mississippi Valley from Illinois to the Delta, killing thousands and making 700,000 people homeless.

Barry warned in the book then the devastation could happen again. As in 1927, he said, the nation in the 1990s was unprepared and even indifferent to the possibilies of a hurricane-caused flood in the lower Mississippi area.

In an interview here in 1997, he said he had visited Greenville, Miss., recently and saw that a 31-story had been built between the levee and the Mississippi River.

"I don't think,'' he said. "they are treating the river with respect."

He was in Greensboro that year with his wife, Anne Hudgins Sullivan, who grew up here and is the daughter of the late Edward Hudgins, who was chairman of the city school board in 1957 when he and school Supt. Ben L. Smith convinced the board to integrete the Greensboro schools in light of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision.

The Barry couple was spending half of each year in Washington and half in New Orleans.

In his book, Barry writes, "The complexity of the Mississippi exceeds that of nearly all other rivers. Not only is it acted upon: it acts. It generates its own internal forces through its size, its sediment load, its depth, variations in the its bottom, its ability to cave in the riverbank and slide sideways for miles."

What's astonishing about the book are parallels that critics of Bush Administration are sure to see in the response to the present disaster.

The '37 flood hurt black people the most, and began their migration from the lower Mississippi region to the north. The black refugees - and that is the word used then and now - complained about horrid conditions and treatment in the refugee camps.

The flood brought criticism to one politician and praise to another.

President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican, ignored the floor. He refused to visit the damaged area or to even send a letter of condolence for humorist Will Rogers to read at a flood-related event.

As a result, Herbert Hoover, who seeking the GOP nomination (Coolidge was not eligible to run again) stepped in the void and led the flood relief effort. His public relations machine made sure Americans knew all about what he was doing. As a result, he won the presidency in 1928.

Later, black people came to view the Hoover administration as hostile. That and the coming of the Great Depression, blamed on Hoover,led to a break in the 70-year loyalty black people had held for the GOP since Abraham Lincoln. They became Ronosevelt Democrats and have remained such to this tday.

Barry's book, a page turner, is recommended reading to anyone who wants to understand politics of the Deep South and the role the Mississippi River plays.

And readers will like Barry. Even though he wears a high fulatin title as "distinguished visiting scholar at the center for Bioenvironmental Research of Tulane and Xavier universites" (at least he did before the flood), he's a regular guy, a former jock.

He played football at Brown University and served a stint as an assistant coach at Tulane in the early 1970s. Tulane, a brainy school, was every team's choice as a homecoming opponent. But while Barry was there, the Green Wave upset the school's arch-rival LSU, and also beat the North Carolina Tar Heels.

Barry left football to write, but got the inch again in 1990. He took a year off from words to coach the Sidwell Friends School team in Washington.