Seven Events That Made America America (16 page)

Both the federal government and, to an extent, the state government succeeded at some of those things governments do well: they issued warnings and assembled troops. The Coast Guard performed brilliantly, leading Sheriff Jack Stephens of St. Bernard Parish, when asked how he would improve FEMA, to answer, “I would abolish it. I’d blow up FEMA and ask the Coast Guard what it needs.”
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Government failure manifested itself in the civilian leadership of Blanco and Nagin, and in the sense that government asked military forces to step outside their primary role of war-fighting in order to provide charity. It was also incorrect to say, as did Marsha Evans of the Red Cross, that “Louisiana had a plan. It’s New Orleans and FEMA that really didn’t have much of one.”
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(The Red Cross, it should be noted, had something of a black eye after 9/11, when millions of dollars donated specifically for New York City and Washington, D.C., for relief and rescue efforts related to the terrorist bombings were instead set aside for other future disasters by the aid agency.)
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FEMA was required to work
through
states, and did have a plan—which was ignored—while the state of Louisiana had authority and the obligation to evacuate New Orleans over Nagin’s own incompetent intransigence. That made Blanco equally culpable.

But there is no question that the federal government heaped more incompetence upon previously astounding incompetence. Even the Army Corps of Engineers, involved in a road-building operation to try to buttress the levees, slowed down the actual road work with “long waits between dumps, because dozens and dozens and
dozens
of trucks . . . were traveling in convoy to their distant supply source.”
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A local supply depot that had been established was much closer, but was ignored. Finally, by Saturday night, the Corps of Engineers went back to the original system. Criticisms of the Corps of Engineers, while valid in regards to its failure to maintain the levees, must be viewed in light of similar praise for the Corps, which had constructed the almost invincible Mississippi River spillway systems, which had not flooded seriously since 1927. Rather, a narrow task given to the Corps had become politicized as each local group sought to use the levee funds from the federal government for its own projects, and the result was predictable. And while FEMA was a useful punching bag, the evidence is incontrovertible that FEMA was disorganized, unprepared, and grossly late in arriving. It is also true that FEMA had done a good job after 9/11, and that the “enormity of the challenge . . . with Hurricane Katrina . . . was an immensely more complex job” than in New York and Washington, but that event came as a complete surprise, while Katrina’s track was known for days.

Of course, the sensationalist press didn’t help either. In part, reporting on a twenty-four-hour basis (something the residents of Johnstown, Dayton, San Francisco, and Galveston did not have to worry about) dampened relief efforts. The reports were so commonplace in the hours after the levees broke that it brought a halt to rescue operations already under way. This led Tucker Carlson on Fox News to say, “If this had been Palm Beach, the 82nd Airborne would have been there Monday afternoon,” but upon hearing that remark, even one anti-Bush writer acknowledged that “most Americans immediately thought, ‘If this had been Palm Beach, there would have been no need for the 82nd Airborne because there would not have been any looters.’”
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And although there was an element of covering one’s rear in the government’s own report on Katrina, nevertheless there was also some truth to the claim that “If anyone rioted, it was the media.”
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USA Today
called the Superdome the “epicenter of human misery,” and wild reports of up to one hundred deaths circulated, but in fact only six died (four of natural causes, one overdose, and one suicide): there were no murders inside the dome.
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There were implications and speculations by otherwise reliable historian Douglas Brinkley that multiple rapes occurred inside the dome, but little real evidence of that exists. Similar media reports spread through Baton Rouge of rampant gunfire, fistfights, and auto theft—all false. But some gross and reprehensible behavior was documented, and could not be explained away. Looters not only stole with abandon, but broke into world-famous restaurants and defecated on tables and cooking surfaces. One Shell mini-market operator returned to find his store robbed blind, with feces deposited throughout his refrigerators: “They behaved like animals,” he said of the vandals.

Michael Brown arrived in Baton Rouge on Monday morning and was briefed extensively. Brown himself would come in for massive criticism later. He had a spotty résumé with big question marks (as do almost all political appointees), knew little about disaster relief, but had performed well during the 2004 hurricanes in Florida. Democrats whined that federal money had also gone to counties that were not severely damaged—again, a common occurrence for money drifting out of Washington. The picture Brown got in Baton Rouge, however, was false, indicating the worst was over just as the levees had started to break. Poor communications from both local people and the FEMA contacts inside New Orleans had failed to deliver this news on a timely basis to Baton Rouge. And while Brown would tout his success in Florida, the hurricanes there came and went, and the state was well prepared. In the Gulf Coast, not only would New Orleans be under water, but virtually every state in the region would be smashed. Worse still, the difficulties of Washington bureaucrats showing up at a disaster site were magnified by their lack of knowledge of the local terrain. FEMA workers didn’t know local wards, place names, or even the course of the Mississippi River. Consequently, they routinely over- or underestimated the time it took to deliver materials.

Somewhere in history, Americans got the foolish notion that just because they wanted to live in a warm climate by the ocean, their fellow citizens and neighbors should subsidize their risk when storms hit. This was as true for California, with its perpetual wildfires, earthquakes, and mudslides, as it was for the hurricane-riddled Gulf Coast. Philip Hearn, who has written about Hurricane Camille, observed in 2005, “New U.S. census figures show that nearly 90,000 people, pursuing warm climate, job opportunities, and southern hospitality, moved into Mississippi’s three coastal communities” in the late 1990s, a migration made possible in part by the federal government’s program of offering insurance for those living in high-risk coastal areas.
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A more disconcerting trend had also become evident, not just in New Orleans, but in many of America’s cities, where for generations Democrats have ruled the structure of city government. The increasing levels of welfare, debt, and deterioration of schools have been accompanied by cries for still more aid, more welfare, and more spending on schools. New Orleans thus had a higher proportion of poor (almost 28 percent below the poverty line) than similar-sized cities such as Portland (13 percent) or Tucson (18 percent), but well below that of some large Democrat-dominated cities such as Detroit (almost 48 percent) or Los Angeles (40 percent), making the Crescent City merely one of the worst examples of a Democratic fiefdom, but hardly unique. The long-term effect was to create a population often entirely dependent on the city government for almost every element of daily life, from transportation to education to welfare. Ruggedly individualistic responses to a disaster, such as those in Johnstown and Dayton, became rarities. Instead, people merely started to wonder, “Who will help me?”

The fact that there were far fewer able-bodied young males available to help in New Orleans who were not criminals (another legacy of Democratic policies of crushing taxes, union favoritism, and deteriorating publicly funded school systems over the years) exacerbated the dependency mentality. With a New Orleans arrest rate of almost 25 percent of the population (or, more chillingly, nearly 50 percent of the
male
population), one was as likely to be mugged as to receive help from the typical New Orleans citizen during an emergency.
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(The city was the nation’s second leading murder capital in 2004.) In both Dayton and Johnstown, some sporadic looting occurred (mostly after rescuers arrived, bringing with them some opportunity-seekers), but both areas handled their own security until National Guard troops took over. As noted, in the case of the Dayton flood, NCR’s own private security patrolled flooded streets. While a large number of New Orleans police simply vanished—some looking after their own families in contravention of their oaths, others simply running—as in Dayton and Johnstown, individuals such as the men guarding the Mardi Gras floats under the supervision of seventy-nine-year-old Blaine Kern fired at looters and chased them away. “If you come on my property,” Kern said, “you’re going to get shot.”
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As in Dayton and Johnstown, a successful response came not from government at any level, but from individuals and businesses. Wal-Mart opened its stores to emergency workers, who were allowed to simply take supplies; gave cash to employees who had to relocate; and, as the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
concluded, “stepped over or around the confused, floundering and sluggish bodies of federal, state and local government relief agencies and sprang into action.”
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The company also gave $15 million to the Red Cross or other aid funds, and the Walton Family Foundation kicked in $8 million. Individually, companies such as American Airlines and Coca-Cola set aside significant sums to help their employees, and Coke used its own trucks to distribute materials. Skip O’Connor, the sixty-two-year-old owner of six hotels in the New Orleans area, left the Marriott Courtyard on St. Charles Avenue open as a shelter. After the evacuation, one dweller left a note saying, “I’m writing to say thanks. . . . We did not destroy anything, but did find food to eat and water. . . . I will send something back finance-wise to compensate the use of your facilities.”
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American Airlines also flew out one thousand evacuees after landing planeloads of emergency supplies. A specific musicians’ relief agency was set up to replace local musicians’ instruments. Individual acts of heroism, such as that of Steve Snyder, who was floating by a nursing home in his boat when he heard screaming, and pulled out a trapped resident incapable of walking, were common. The so-called “Cajun Navy” of volunteers took it upon themselves to drive to New Orleans, organize the launches and rescues, and plunge into the infamous “toxic soup.” Another group, bar patrons known as the NOLA Homeboys, used makeshift rafts, canoes, and anything else that floated to stage rescues.

While Blanco, Nagin, and FEMA all seemed utterly incapable of organizing publicly owned buses to get the Superdome refugees out, one of Blanco’s state employees contacted the private Travel Industry Association, which immediately began rerouting sightseeing buses to the rescue.
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Blanco had the authority to force local parishes to yield their (unused) buses, and there were eighty such vehicles in the Baton Rouge Capital Area Transit System that sat idle the entire time.

Katrina does not teach us that government aid can’t help with disaster relief in some ways, or that proper military and police functions of government aren’t useful (although in New Orleans, Homeland Security repeatedly held up relief and evacuation by civilians out of concern for their safety, delaying the rescues still further). Rather, the lesson in all these cases is that government will always lag behind the efforts of private individuals, and the more towns and communities know they need to rely on themselves, and not Washington, the more rapid and compassionate the response will be. And what
is
the constitutional role for the federal government in such natural disasters? The Founders did not mention one. Did they not ever experience hurricanes, storms, blizzards, and a host of other natural calamities? Of course. The stories of Caribbean storms were oft-told: Alexander Hamilton wrote his famous 1772 “hurricane letter” in which he said he saw “scenes of horror exhibited around us [which] naturally awakened such ideas [about death] in every thinking breast.” At no time did he contemplate any government assistance to any of the victims, even though he wept at the sight of mothers with infants (“Her poverty denies relief . . . her heart is bursting, the tears gush down her cheeks”). Yet he did not appeal to government but to “ye, who revel in affluence, [to] see the afflictions of humanity and bestow your superfluity to ease them.”
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As was clear after the practice of declaring national emergencies became common, virtually any and all hardships could fit the definition. But only recently have presidents willingly and eagerly declared “disaster areas” or used emergency powers. When, in 1887, Congress tried to push through a “compassionate” Seed Corn Bill, which would have given Texas farmers—the victims of a drought—a small amount of money for new seed, President Grover Cleveland vetoed it, writing in his message:

To “indulge a benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds” was wrong, as Cleveland wrote when he vetoed the bill. He ended his veto message with an astounding admonition for modern politicians to consider: “A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this [the government’s] power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should constantly be enforced that,
though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people
[emphasis in original].”
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Insisting that “the friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied on to relieve their fellow citizens in misfortune,” he called on members of Congress to personally donate to the suffering farmers by using seed regularly given to members for distribution to their constituents (at ten times the Texas Seed Corn Bill’s cost), or send money to the farmers.
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