New Orleans’ History Is America’s History, and Katrina Is America’s Possible Future

Consider that during the 1915 hurricane, across the state of Louisiana, 275 people died. Property damage estimates ran to $12 million ($280 million in 2015 dollars). Upriver from Burrwood, only four houses remained standing in the town called Empire. East of New Orleans, in St. Bernard Parish, the settlement of Saint Malo was washed from the map entirely. That village bore the name of Jean Saint Malo, who in the 1780s had led a group of Africans trying to escape from slavery. Eventually captured by Spanish authorities, Saint Malo was executed in 1784 in front of the Cabildo, in the historic center square of New Orleans — where the hurricane winds had sent pieces of slate flying from the steeple of Saint Louis Cathedral. A foot of water remained in parts of the city for five days. Nonetheless, once the storm passed, many New Orleanians celebrated. 

“‘Storm proof!’ The Record Shows Orleans,” the newspaper proclaimed after the hurricane. The mayor quickly rejected outside offers of aid. Surveying the event a month later, the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board, the agency charged with protecting the city from floods, concluded that its new drainage system had passed a defining test. ​“It is safe to say,” its report asserted, ​“that no city anywhere in the world could have withstood these conditions with less damage and less inconvenience than has New Orleans.” Marshaling statistics from meteorologists like Isaac Cline, the report reasoned that the recent extreme occurrence of wind and rain ​“renders more remote the probability of a repetition of any of these things in the early future.” 

It was a curious logic in a city that had seen ninety-two hurricanes or tropical storms since its European colonial founding in 1718. Despite this history, the Sewerage and Water Board believed that even if another big storm came, New Orleans would be safe. The report’s authors reflected on the storm’s ​“lessons” this way: ​“there is no reason why this city and its surrounding country should not continue, even more successfully than heretofore, [its] developments in all directions.” The experience of the 1915 hurricane affirmed the consensus among engineers and investors, city planners and politicians, home builders and home buyers, that New Orleans should grow. 

The city they created became one of the most celebrated places in the world. ​“Ain’t no city like the one I’m from!” the women in the Original Pinettes Brass Band sang a century later. New Orleans’s admirers lauded it as ​“The Land of Dreams,” ​“The Big Easy,” ​“The City that Care Forgot,” ​“America’s Most Interesting City,” and ​“the soul of America.” With its jazz, Mardi Gras, and other iconic contributions to world culture, more than any other place in America, New Orleans called to mind creativity, cosmopolitanism, and love of life.

But today, New Orleans also calls to mind catastrophe. The city drowned when its levee system collapsed on August 29, 2005, killing hundreds of people, destroying thousands of homes, and precipitating not only one of the most horrific moments in modern American history, but offering an emblem for the idea of disaster itself: Katrina. The response to the 1915 storm thus cast a century-long shadow, because the new neighborhoods developed after that storm experienced the worst flooding in 2005. More than any other single factor, including the race or class of its inhabitants, the age of a building best predicted how it would fare in 2005. Tracing the outline of the Katrina flood reveals the shape of New Orleans as it stood nine decades earlier: most houses built before 1915 did not flood, but most houses built after the Sewerage and Water Board’s 1915 call for further growth did. 

Usually, we imagine disasters as exceptions. We describe them as external attacks, ahistorical acts of God, blows from without. That is why most accounts of Katrina begin when the levees broke and conclude not long after. But these stories offer a denuded sense of what happened, why, or what might have prevented the catastrophe. Somebody had to build the levees before they could break. 

I begin the story of Katrina in 1915 in order to pursue a different idea: that disasters come from within. Disasters are less discrete events than they are contingent processes. Seemingly acute incidents, like the largely forgotten 1915 hurricane, live on as the lessons they teach, the decisions they prompt, and the accommodations they oblige. Their causes and consequences stretch across much longer periods of time and space than we commonly imagine. Seeing disasters in history, and as history, demonstrates that the places we live, and the disasters that imperil them, are at once artifacts of state policy, cultural imagination, economic order, and environmental possibility. 

And yet, if understanding history usually demands drawing connections between seemingly disparate dots, trying to make sense of what happened in Louisiana after August 29, 2005, also poses the opposite problem, because the hurricane called Katrina did not cause many of the effects commonly attributed to it. 

After the storm passed, New Orleans police officers shot and killed unarmed citizens. The Federal Emergency Management Agency gave flood victims trailers laced with formaldehyde. The New Orleans City Council voted to demolish the city’s public housing apartments. The Louisiana State Legislature voted to transform the city’s public school system into a confederacy of charter schools. Congress voted to fund the largest housing recovery program in United States history; the program appropriated money to home-owners but not to renters. New Orleans police officers arrested musicians for leading jazz funerals without permits, while violent crime plagued the city. Louisiana State University shut down New Orleans’s public Charity Hospital, while rates of mental illness surged. The Army Corps of Engineers encircled the city with a new levee system, while the wetlands beyond the walls continued to erode and the city itself continued to sink. A decade after the storm, New Orleans’s population had fallen from 484,674 to 390,711. Of the people missing, the vast majority — nearly 92,000 people — were African American. We have come to refer to this sequence of events as ​“Katrina,” but for none of these effects was the hurricane the proximate cause. 

The flood line thus tells one important story, but it is not the only story that matters. ​“Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature,” President George W. Bush declared in September 2005, ​“and we will not start now.” After the flood receded, policymakers reapportioned the challenges the water had posed. Legislators designed recovery programs that favored white people over African American people, wealthy people over poor people, and people who owned homes over people who rented them. These policies reinforced existing inequalities. And they often undermined what the many Louisianians who opposed them argued were essential facts of life: the bonds of family, the solidarity of community, notions of political legitimacy, feelings of cultural belonging, and a sense of moral order. 

Katrina brings together several of the defining concerns of our time. The climate crisis that seems, at once, to have revealed the power of humans to change the world, and the powerlessness of humans to control those changes; the fossil-fueled growth that made single family homes affordable and vulnerable; the infrastructure that is not up to a warming world; the ongoing state of emergency and the corresponding yearning for sustainability and resilience; the racism that rends our communities; the crushing inequality; the sometimes reckless, sometimes revolutionary, hope that the future might be better than the past — none of these are unique to Louisiana. They define the United States in the twenty-first century. Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey, Hurricane Harvey in Texas, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and other frighteningly similar events have demonstrated what many Louisianians always understood: that New Orleans’s history is America’s history and that Katrina is America’s possible future. 

Why did people live in such dangerous places? What made these places dangerous? These were the questions that many cried at their televisions as they watched 80 percent of New Orleans and nearly all of neighboring St. Bernard Parish fill with water in the late summer of 2005. Scholars and policy makers have struggled with these questions since, because they are not only about Louisiana, but about how to make sense of twentieth- and twenty-first-century America. And these questions haunt us still, especially as people increasingly understand that Katrina is not receding safely into the past but looming ever larger as a portent of the future. 

People lived there because, for over a century, federal programs — including the Swamp Land Acts, the GI Bill, the Disaster Relief Act, the National Flood Insurance Program, and levee building itself — have encouraged building and rebuilding in flood-prone places. What made these places so dangerous? They were not always. Rather, they were made increasingly so over the course of the twentieth century because the benefits of Louisiana’s most lucrative industries — shipping and oil — were not first allocated to mitigating their costs, creating a dramatic imbalance of private profits and public liabilities. This arrangement prompted a stunning collapse of land into water, an existential crisis for Louisiana that the new levee system constructed after 2005 did little to address.

Racism and poverty are necessary beacons for navigating Katrina’s history, because they structure American inequality, often leading to inequities so stark they can be fatal. Yet at times, they can offer insufficient explanations for the suffering cataloged in these pages. This is particularly true when it comes to flood vulnerability. Many observers have assumed or asserted that in New Orleans, as one scholar put it, ​“topographic gradients doubled as class and race gradients,” but the truth is more complicated. When the levees broke, the homes of tens of thousands of suburban, middle- class white people flooded catastrophically, while the homes of New Orleans’s poorest African American residents, who lived in public housing, largely did not. There are no straight lines that connect racism or poverty to flood depths. 

Instead, while racism set the stage for whose homes flooded, it took a circuitous route to doing so. The flood was not the result of racist policies or practices in the years directly before the levee breaches in 2005. Rather, racism in federal housing policies from the 1930s through the 1960s — including redlining, segregation, and Veterans Affairs loans that went disproportionately to white people — all enabled the white middle class to move into new homes. Since the only available land was on lower ground in new neighborhoods and suburbs, these homes were located there, while many African Americans continued to live in the inner city. The older parts of the city were on higher ground. Therefore, confining African American families to the older parts of New Orleans ironically spared them from some of the flooding, while the same racist housing policies put white people, and the African American people who managed to access them, at risk. 

It is worth lingering on that last point. Racist housing policies moved a predominately white population to new neighborhoods that came with new streets, new schools, more valuable homes and — largely invisible to many of their inhabitants — greater flood risk. African Americans were left to older neighborhoods, deemed less desirable in most ways, although they had the lost-to-view benefit of being at higher elevations. The Lower Ninth Ward offers an exception that proves the rule. The African American neighborhood was low-lying and subject to a devastating wall of water in 2005. But it had not been home to the city’s most marginalized citizens. Rather, it had been built by and for middle-class African Americans who had found ways to access the benefits of the local, state, and federal commitments to metropolitan growth and home ownership. 

In the long run, the policies and practices that once seemed to enable American progress created catastrophic vulnerability. People who lived in flood-prone parts of metropolitan New Orleans generally did not live there because they were disadvantaged. Rather, they lived there because they had been able to take advantage of the government subsidies required to develop housing in low-lying parts of the region. More broadly, they had benefited from the redistributional policies that created the American middle class and defined the post-World War II American dream. The liberal desire to expand the welfare state combined with a conservative desire to privatize the ensuing growth: this uneasy but expansive détente built America in the twentieth century and imperils it in the twenty-first. It has no better emblem than the federal levee system that surrounded metropolitan New Orleans from the late 1960s until its failure in 2005. The levee system was one of the largest public works projects in United States history — a physical promise of a national commitment to the safety, well-being, and growth of the communities it encircled. But its foundations were not steady enough. And when the system collapsed, those with power tried to prop it back up for themselves on the backs of the already disadvantaged. 

The day after the 1915 hurricane made landfall, the New Orleans Item announced, ​“City Cut Of From Rest of World.” The reference to downed telegraph lines resonates with the way many people have tended to think about New Orleans as an exceptional place, and disasters as exceptional moments, disconnected from the rest of time and space. In 2005, when President Bush called Katrina ​“a tragedy that seems so blind and random,” or when scholars argued that some array of ​“factors … conspired to make the eventual — and inevitable — disaster what it was,” they suffered equally from the limiting view of Katrina as sudden break. Katrina was neither random nor inevitable, but both assessments are artifacts of seeing disasters as events without histories. 

Acknowledging that disasters have histories does not mean asserting that those histories amount only to relentless, teleological stories of decline. Many environmentalists and environmental historians describe disasters as nature’s response to human efforts to engineer landscapes. They would paint New Orleans’s physical expansion in the nine decades following the 1915 hurricane as a defiance of the natural order, and Katrina, as the New York Times put it in a headline, as ​“Nature’s Revenge.” This dim view leaves little room for the obvious truth that people have sometimes changed the world around them in ways that have made their lives better. To gloss the last century of Louisiana’s history as a story of ​“hubris, stupidity and wishful thinking,” may be briefly satisfying in its moral sweep, until one realizes that doing so gathers up Louis Armstrong, Ruby Bridges, Tennessee Williams, my wife Sarah, and over a million other Louisianians with all of their hopes, achievements, and beignets piled high with powdered sugar, and deposits them in the dustbin of history’s mistakes.

On the other hand, casting recovery as disaster’s inevitable second act is just as misleading. Many have gone so far as to claim that New Orleans improved after the flood, offering heroic tales of resilience, if not redemption. But even if these accounts did not celebrate changes that were, and are, deeply contested, they would remain bewildering to people who know that at the immovable center of Katrina’s story are hundreds of needless deaths. Asserting that the city came back better defames those who could not come back at all. 

The more I have thought about Katrina, and disaster studies, the more uncomfortable I have become with the idea of ​“disaster” altogether. A disaster is at best an interpretive fiction, or at worst, an ideological script. Scholars have attempted classification schemes, but they rarely hold up to scrutiny. How many buildings must fall for an event to count as a disaster? How many people must die? Over what space or period of time? Squinting too closely at a problem can blind rather than focus your vision. 

Calling something a disaster implies that there is a regular course of things, and that the moment in question was an exception. It suggests that the event was prompted by an exogenous force, that it was extraordinary (rather than ordinary), acute (rather than chronic), local (rather than diffuse), unpredictable (rather than expected), and revolutionary (rather than evolutionary). And so, just as slavery outlines the bounds of freedom, or darkness reveals the extent of light, the idea of disaster limns — and affirms — its inverse: order. 

Cordoning of moments when things go badly, the disaster idea enables us to perceive the arc of the moral universe as a long, smooth curve toward justice. To name something a disaster is to decry its outcomes as illegitimate, and to call for a restoration of the status quo, instead of suggesting that the status quo may have been illegitimate in the first place. The disaster idea makes enduring suffering appear to be a personal failure. And when people with power seem to recover quickly, the disaster idea allows them to celebrate themselves for beating the odds, without acknowledging the ways that history had loaded the dice in their favor.

“Maybe the mistake we made, right at the beginning,” the sociologist Kai Erikson said to me, in a conversation in 2015, ​“was to call it ​‘Katrina.’” What I took him to mean was that it may have been a mistake to use the hurricane’s name to refer to how the contingent histories of race, class, community, trauma, inequality, the welfare state, metropolitan development, extractive industry, and environmental change manifested themselves in Louisiana early in this century — a mistake because it risks misleading observers into thinking that the weather had made these histories matter, rather than the other way around.