The Hurricane Betsy Conspiracy: New Orleans

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "The Hurricane Betsy Conspiracy: New Orleans"

American History Hit
Host: Don Wildman
Guest: Andy Horowitz (Historian, Author of "Katrina: A History, 1915-2015")
Release Date: November 13, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Don Wildman and historian Andy Horowitz explore the impact and legacy of Hurricane Betsy—the catastrophic storm that struck New Orleans in 1965—and the conspiracy theories that followed in its aftermath. The episode delves deeply into the complex geography, history, and social dynamics that made New Orleans particularly vulnerable to hurricanes, drawing strong parallels with Hurricane Katrina 40 years later. Horowitz, drawing on his acclaimed book, discusses how disasters are not just natural phenomena but are shaped by historical and social forces, and he examines the roots and legacy of mistrust between New Orleans’ Black communities and the authorities tasked with their protection.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Unique Geography and Vulnerability of New Orleans

• Bowl-Shaped City Surrounded by Water
  • New Orleans sits at the Mississippi River’s end, bordered by Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico ([06:11]).
  • Most of the city is below sea level except for the “natural levee” along the Mississippi.
  • "New Orleans is at the end of the Mississippi river and it's essentially a coastal city...Its early colonial inhabitants thought of New Orleans as an island..." – Andy Horowitz ([06:11])
• Transformation of Land and Wetlands
  • The city relied historically on wetlands for storm surge protection.
  • Wetland loss was accelerated by levee construction (preventing sediment deposition) and the oil industry canal-building, which led to saltwater intrusion and the destruction of protective marshes ([07:38]).
  • "As oil was discovered... oil companies just carved up those wetlands and built canals. The saltwater killed the grass.... And over the course of the 20th century, some 2,000 square miles of Louisiana have disappeared." – Andy Horowitz ([07:38])

2. Social and Demographic Context: The Ninth Ward

• Ward System and Population Shifts
  • Wards are simply New Orleans’ version of city districts ([11:14]).
  • The Ninth Ward—especially post-WWII—became a predominantly middle-class, African American neighborhood due to white flight ([12:34]).
  • “The Ninth Ward was a place for African Americans in New Orleans who were on the economic ascent. This is a middle class neighborhood...these were a lot of the people who were building their new homes in the lower ninth." – Andy Horowitz ([13:28])
  • Notably, Fats Domino built a celebrated home in the Lower Ninth Ward in 1960.
• Role of Drainage and Development
  • The city’s growth depended on draining swamps and constructing a sophisticated pump system, modeled after Dutch engineering ([18:38]).
  • While it enabled city growth, the system created an illusion of safety.

3. Hurricane Betsy’s Impact (September 9–10, 1965)

• Storm Strikes
  • Hurricane Betsy made landfall as a Category 4, hitting New Orleans overnight with 125+ mph winds ([21:02]).
  • Poor forecasting caught many off-guard.
  • "It was probably a Category 4 storm, 130 mile per hour winds when it made landfall... Not only did it land in the middle of the night, it took a number of people by surprise, sort of how strong it was and that it came over New Orleans at all." – Andy Horowitz ([21:02])
• Engineering Catastrophe
  • Betsy’s storm surge pushed waters through the city’s canals, overwhelming floodwalls and inundating the Ninth Ward ([22:16]).
  • Industrial Canal floodwall failures caused catastrophic flooding—especially in the Lower Ninth, a predominantly Black, middle-class neighborhood.
  • "On the east side of the Industrial Canal, the flood walls in many places just collapse. And so water floods in at a much higher, at a fatal velocity into the Lower Ninth Ward and floods thousands of people there and kills dozens of people there as well." – Andy Horowitz ([22:16])
  • 76 people drowned; 164,000 residents were flooded ([23:29]–[23:33]).
• Aftermath and Suffering
  • Floodwaters remained for over a week, creating intolerable living conditions.
  • The overwhelming losses were borne by Black residents in the Lower Ninth, fueling anger and suspicion.

4. Racism, Mistrust, and the Levee Bombing Conspiracy

• Historical Precedents and Paranoia
  • Many Black residents believed the levee was bombed to save white neighborhoods, a fear rooted in fact: during the 1927 flood, officials purposefully destroyed levees to divert flooding ([25:56]).
  • "In 1927... the governor had proudly bombed the levee... and it was done in broad daylight. The Louisiana State engineers used dynamite and filmed themselves doing it..." – Andy Horowitz ([25:56])
• Contemporary Reality and Conspiracy
  • No evidence of deliberate dynamiting in 1965, but officials did take action that increased flooding in the Lower Ninth (e.g., closing a siphon to trap water) ([28:14]).
  • “It is a decision by the city to choose to make the flood higher in the Lower Ninth, you know, in order to lower flood levels in the Upper Ninth. So this is... exactly what the people in the neighborhood claimed happened.” – Andy Horowitz ([28:14])
• Generational Trauma
  • Mistrust stems from repeated governmental decisions that sacrificed Black and poor residents’ safety for others’ benefit.
  • "When you see patterns in history... what we're observing are structures of power that remain constant over time." – Andy Horowitz ([36:00])

5. Recovery, Federal Policy, and the Legacy of Injustice

• Post-Betsy Recovery and Policy Failures
  • Desire for grants for relocation/reparation was unmet; instead, residents forced into debt via loans using their flooded property as collateral, obligating them to rebuild in place ([33:00]).
  • "It was the federal policy that essentially forced them to rebuild in the Lower Ninth... They had petitioned against it... warned the people with power... were ignored and were forced to live in that kind of peril." – Andy Horowitz ([33:00])
• Birth of the National Flood Insurance Program
  • Betsy led to congressional action, creating the program so disaster relief could be handled (in theory) sustainably ([36:54]).
  • However, the new levee system—Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Program—was underfunded, poorly executed, and incomplete when Katrina hit ([38:37]).
  • "The Army Corps in an internal audit... called the Hurricane Protection System, quote, 'a system in name only.'" – Andy Horowitz ([38:37])

6. Katrina, Repetition, and the Lessons of History

• History Repeated
  • Betsy’s lessons went unheeded; the same communities were devastated in Katrina ([39:24]).
  • "They lived there because the federal government, in significant ways, made them [stay] and they had petitioned against it." – Andy Horowitz ([39:24])
• Broader Warning
  • Floods struck not only the poorest but the postwar, middle-class city—the very product of 20th-century development ([39:58]).
  • "It wasn't black New Orleans rather than white New Orleans... It was just 20th century New Orleans that flooded... The siren of Katrina's warning should really ring for anybody... who relies in some way on public investment..." – Andy Horowitz ([39:58])
• Future Outlook and Climate Crisis
  • New Orleans remains at risk; though post-Katrina levees are more robust, they’re not rated to withstand storms as powerful as Betsy or Katrina ([41:28]).
  • Similar vulnerabilities exist nationwide as climate change intensifies storms and exposes more Americans to risk.
  • "Of course New Orleans has an expiration date. I would not venture to say when it is. Every summer could be New Orleans last..." – Andy Horowitz ([41:28])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Illusion of Safety:
  "It was a technological marvel and Louisianans were quite proud of it... gave the illusion anyway that New Orleans had finally conquered its topography." – Andy Horowitz ([19:02])

• Disasters as Historical, Not Natural, Events:
  "You can't start the story of a flood with a broken levee because somebody had to build the levee before it could break. And...it helps events like this that can seem senseless...make sense, which is the real purpose of history, isn't it?" – Andy Horowitz ([20:04])

• On Repetition of Disaster and Policy Failure:
  "They understood this to be, in one way or another, the government's fault... [their] letters that I was talking about...were very difficult to read—physically—because they had flooded in Katrina..." – Andy Horowitz ([33:00])

• On Infrastructure and Inequality:
  "It's not that lower ninth's gonna flood every 40 years because there's some sort of cosmic rhythm to the thing. It's that the Army Corps has never adequately secured this city..." – Andy Horowitz ([36:00])

• On National Significance:
  "There are more people...living in the Hundred year floodplain in New York City than do in New Orleans. And so...everybody...should be lobbying...for better protections, better infrastructure protections..." – Andy Horowitz ([41:28])

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Major Timestamps

• [05:15] – Introduction to the topic and guest
• [06:11] – Why New Orleans’ geography is so vulnerable
• [07:38] – Impact of levees and oil industry on coastal erosion
• [11:14] – Demographic shifts and the Ninth Ward
• [13:28] – Middle-class Black communities in the Lower Ninth
• [18:38] – The pump and drainage system; illusion of control
• [21:02] – Hurricane Betsy strikes: timing, impact
• [22:16] – How the flooding unfolded, engineering failures
• [25:56] – Historical memory of levee bombings (1927, 1965 beliefs)
• [28:14] – Contemporary actions increasing flooding in the Lower Ninth
• [33:00] – Post-Betsy recovery policy and resident activism
• [36:54] – Policy outcomes: flood insurance, levee system failures
• [39:58] – Lessons from the repeated disasters, the American city at risk
• [41:28] – Current risks, climate change, and the uncertain future

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Conclusion

This episode of American History Hit provides a compelling, meticulously researched narrative that connects the disasters of Hurricane Betsy and Katrina through the lenses of geography, history, race, policy, and social memory. Andy Horowitz’s insights illuminate how natural disasters in New Orleans were shaped and worsened by historical decisions, flawed infrastructure, and entrenched inequalities—lessons that echo powerfully in today’s era of worsening climate crises.

“The siren of Katrina’s warning should really ring for anybody... who relies in some way on public investment to make their neighborhood possible, because that’s who’s at risk now.” – Andy Horowitz ([39:58])

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Transcript

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[Don Wildman]

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[Andy Horowitz]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Don Wildman]

We're going to be focused in this conversation on a famous hurricane that strikes in the mid-1960s, but it will be involuntary to compare it to the more recent Katrina. Strong parallels between these storms and their effects aren't there?

[Andy Horowitz]

You can compare them and also Betsy in really important ways creates the conditions for Katrina and really is accountable for some of Katrina's worst damage. So as we tell the story of Betsy, we can bring it up into 2005 and even into the present.

[Don Wildman]

And yet this is one of the first times I've ever even Focused on this. I mean, I've heard of Betsy, but I really hadn't thought about it very much. And it's specials on Katrina on television. I mean, it's amazing. For anyone who has not been to New Orleans, I think it's important to address the unusual lay of the land, which was kind of an epiphany for me, New Jerseyite, to find out later in life how this works. The geography of the city makes it particularly vulnerable to hurricanes, Is that right?

[Andy Horowitz]

Yeah. Well, New Orleans is at the end of the Mississippi river and it's essentially a coastal city. It's right there in the Gulf of Mexico. Its early colonial inhabitants thought of New Orleans as an island because not only is it on the coast and surrounded has got the river running through it. There's this big, it's called Lake Pontchartrain, but it's really a brackish bay open to the Gulf of Mexico. So it's surrounded by water. And the only sort of high ground that is meaningfully above sea level in New Orleans is the so called natural levee near the Mississippi river. Built up by every spring and the annual spring flood on the Mississippi, the Big Muddy drops its mud and built up the high ground. Beyond that it's all swamps. And so the city really shaped like a bowl and has prone, been prone to flooding forever.

[Don Wildman]

Everything we talk about is a sort of developing process through the 20th century, primarily that that involves controlling that flood, which was of course a natural occurrence with at the end of this major river, the floodwaters would come through like the Nile, all those big rivers, and they deposit this amazing sediment that makes such a fertile land down below it. Also in this case, the Mississippi delivers all the sediment to the wetlands that are on the southern side of Orleans and all the rest. And those wetlands had a lot to do with protecting tradition, you know, through the ages, protecting those lands from the surges that would come through these storms. And this has all been affected majorly by the levee systems and also the carving up because of all the petro industry, basically. Right?

[Andy Horowitz]

Yeah, exactly. So New Orleans has to worry about flooding from two directions. It's got to worry about freshwater flooding from the river and it's got to worry about saltwater flooding from the Gulf and from storm surges. And you're right, sort of. After 1927, the Army Corps of Engineers built an enormous control system for the Mississippi river, which more or less successfully protected New Orleans from river floods. In doing so, they stopped that natural process of sediment deposits in the wetlands and so starting around the beginning of the 20th century, the wetlands that had buffered the city from storm surges started to erode. And then as oil was discovered in the coastal wetlands and offshore, as you said, oil companies just carved up those wetlands and built canals that allowed salt water to intrude. The saltwater killed the grass. The grass's roots had held the soil together, and that just accelerated the collapse. And over the course of the 20th century, some 2,000 square miles of Louisiana have disappeared, sunk into the Gulf of Mexico. So it's become just way more vulnerable to storm surges. And then, as we'll talk about today, not only were there those canals built through the coastal wetlands, but the port has been New Orleans major economic engine. And so in an effort to sort of age the shipping and make the port more efficient, the city and the state have constructed canals right into the heart of the city. And those also enabled storm surges to come right up into people's homes.

[Don Wildman]

The flavors of New Orleans, and I use that term intentionally, are so cultural and so historical and having to do with enormous amount of heritage there. But you also feel the topographical aspect of this place. You know, when you're there, there's this sort of feeling of vulnerability because there is so much water around you. And literally, when you're walking in some of these neighborhoods, the ones we're going to be talking about, especially you, are below water level. You know, sometimes in the higher water months, these levees are keeping the river in there, but you're sitting there watching ships above your head go by. It's the strangest aspect of things.

[Andy Horowitz]

There was a geographer in the 70s who described new Orleans as an inevitable city on an impossible site. Which makes sense if you think about it, because it really is. It's inevitable from an economic perspective that you would want a city, you know, at the site of the continent's great artery. But for all the reasons we've been. We've been talking about, it is just a very difficult place to live safely, I think. You know, in the 1960s, probably roughly half of the city was below sea level. And the city itself has been continuing to sink. It was been sinking for the entire 20th century and into the 21st.

[Don Wildman]

It's. It's dicey and a miracle at the same time. I love the place. City of New Orleans reached its peak population 1960, 627,000 people. The port, one of the busiest in the US cotton, coffee, oil, grain. Very important economic engine of this whole part of the country. Nevermind the rest of it. It's the musical center we know of today. All the jazz that comes out of that. I'm just sort of given the bullet points of why this place really matters in the world. Then again, it is right smack in the middle of the hurricane path of so many of that we've heard about over the times. Then add to this environmental fragility, you have this human factor, this multiracial culture that has defined it for time, which was, of course, so painful with segregation, Jim Crow, all of that was crosshairs on this part of the world. And it stretches on into the 20th century. Of course, we're going to talk about New Orleans in terms of wards. Can we explain what that means? They're districts of the city, right?

[Andy Horowitz]

Yeah. The city is just divided up into a number of different districts as any place. Would you talk about census tracts or aldermanic districts or whatever? New Orleans are just called wards. And I think the one we're going to talk about in particular Here is the Ninth Ward. The Ninth Ward became famous after Katrina, but in 1960, we can think of it, it's right along the river, and it is downriver from the French Quarter, which is the sort of iconic center, old center, colonial center of the city. And it is split in half, the Ninth Ward, by a piece of infrastructure called the Industrial Canal. And we'll talk more about the Industrial Canal in a second. But for now, just as we get the sort of lay of the land, the thing to know about the Ninth Ward and the Industrial Canal is that the part upriver from the Industrial Canal is called the Upper Ninth Ward, and the part downriver is called the Lower Ninth. So these are sort of geographical descriptions, but not topographical ones. The Upper Ninth Ward is not higher ground than the Lower Ninth Ward. It just is upriver as the river flows south to the Gulf of Mexico.

[Don Wildman]

And are they divided by that canal?

[Andy Horowitz]

Yeah, the canal runs right through there, a couple of bridges over it, and people have. People who live there have complained about the Industrial Canal for many, many reasons. For many, since it was constructed in the 1920s. But a key one is simply traffic. You know, as soon as they cut it in half, then there were only two bridges, and everybody had to. Some of the times those bridges would open to allow ships to come through, and then you're stuck and you're late for work.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah. In the early 20th century and before, I mean, the primary population was white, it was 68% white. There were 11,556 people in the Ninth Ward in the early 20th century, after World War II, you have cars now. What happens there happens in every American city. The white folks split. This is white flight, it's called. And the American suburbs are born. And those neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward become primarily African American. This is especially acute there. You know, that's what happens. By 1960, the population of the Ninth Ward was 33,000 people and nearly 90% black. As I say, all over America, this happens. I grew up in the Philadelphia region, certainly happened there. But in New Orleans, this left these populations especially vulnerable, not least because of the hurricanes and the reliance on the levees. Important to realize that's why the Ninth Ward was there in the first place. Right?

[Andy Horowitz]

Well, yeah. And first, just as we think about the population of the Ninth Ward, those numbers you give 33,000 is the lower ninth. And it is, you know, when we hear about white flight and we hear about the increasing segregation that you're absolutely right to find American cities and suburbs in the 1950s and 60s. You gotta know that the Ninth Ward was a place for African Americans in New Orleans who were on the economic ascent. This is a middle class neighborhood. These are veterans. You know, if you served in World War II and were able to access the GI Bill, for example, these were a lot of the people who were building their new homes in the lower net. So this is not exactly a situation where you have the city's most marginalized citizens because they were black, sort of shunted into an undesirable neighborhood. This was rather a place that people who had choices would choose to move. Now, their choices were very constrained because there were law and custom that kept black people out of many of the other desirable neighborhoods in the city. But, for example, you know, Fats Domino, the famous musician, he chose to build a very fancy house in the Lower Ninth Ward. He built that house in 1960, was featured in many magazines because it was $200,000 mansion, the Creole Graceland. So, you know, the Lower Ninth was a welcoming place for middle class black families. Rates of homeownership were higher there than in other parts of the city. And so I wouldn't want to give the impression that it was a sort of, you know, terrible place to live. It actually, you know, it had. It had its problems. People complained that they weren't getting their share of city services, the streets flooded when it rained. But it was also not the place where the city's most disadvantaged people lived. Right.

[Don Wildman]

And we're talking about 65, and then we're going to talk about Katrina. There were hurricanes before this which led to lots of flooding in those 1947, right?

[Andy Horowitz]

Yeah, the city flooded in 1947 pretty badly. And but you had mentioned before that it was levees that made construction possible. And starting at the beginning of the 20th century, the city of New Orleans had built a pump system to drain a lot of those swamps farther away from the Mississippi River. And part of that was to stop the breeding grounds for mosquitoes. New Orleans have been known in the 19th century as the great necropolis of the south because thousands of people would die of yellow fever every summer. And so you drain the swamps and you, and you kill the mosquitoes. This is good. And also it created all of, opened up all of this new area for development. So the, the back part, by which I mean the part towards the Lake Pontchartrain away from the high ground near the Mississippi river, had not really been habitable into the 1940s. But then this new drainage system enabled much more, opened up much more of the whole city and the ninth Ward in particular for new development. So if you were walking around the lower ninth, say in 1960, you would see a lot of new construction. A middle class neighborhood, ranch house on slab. You could think of it as like a Louisiana Levitt town.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah, right.

[Andy Horowitz]

All built on drain swamps.

[Don Wildman]

Interesting. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

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[Don Wildman]

And drained by a very, very sophisticated pump system. I mean I went into one of those pump houses. They brought a Dutch engineer over in the early part of the century, 20th century, and built these enormous screw pumps that were what the Dutch used to help themselves, you know, the country underwater over there. So they knew better than anyone how to do this. And that kind of system existed. It just was going to be affected by other factors what we're going to talk about.

[Andy Horowitz]

Yeah, it was a technological marvel and Louisianans were quite proud of it. You know, they would brag about statistics like how a assessed property in the city had exploded over the course of the 20th century, stuff like this, because it really was sort of seemed gave the illusion anyway that New Orleans had finally conquered its topography. Topography had looked like a kind of fate for the early 20th century. And now here, through the construction of levees and flood walls and the pump system, it seemed like New Orleans could could finally sort of grow and not for nothing compete with the ascendant Sunbelt cities like Houston and Atlanta.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah. Sidebar Andy I'm thrilled to have this conversation because I remember like so many when Katrina hit it all, you know, those of us in the north were like, gosh, what's going on down there? Why is this so bad? And you find out that there's all these major factors involved in the story of New Orleans that you had I had no idea were about then I did a special down there and I learned a lot of this stuff. You have to know this background to understand the story of these hurricanes like the one we're about to discuss.

[Andy Horowitz]

Yeah. This has been what has driven a lot of my research as a historian. We think of hurricanes and other disasters. Often we imagine them to be acute emergencies, sort of events without histories. We always say they're unprecedented or they came out of nowhere. But disasters, like everything else, have histories. And, you know, you can't start the story of a flood with a broken levee because somebody had to build the levee before it could break. And you know, so it's really important, I think, to understand. It helps events like this that can seem senseless. It helps them make sense, which is the real purpose. History, isn't it?

[Don Wildman]

Yeah. And put into place one last fundamental building block of this story is that we're in the middle of the civil rights era. This is 1965. Enormous changes happening in all American life around the country. It's what's been going on everywhere. And suddenly, almost emblematically, comes Betsy, you know, to sort of move into this very, very fraught environment, certainly in that regard, but for all kinds of things. When does Hurricane Betsy hit exactly?

[Andy Horowitz]

Hurricane Betsy made landfall on September 9th late at night. It made landfall in a place called Grand Isle, which is south of New Orleans. It's an island in the Gulf of Mexico. And then moved up. It was Probably a Category 4 storm, 130 mile per hour winds when it made landfall. It arrives in New Orleans sort of overnight, September 9th, September 10th. Yeah, you know, they knew it was coming, but actually it was not a very well forecast storm. Not only did it land in the middle of the night, it took a number of people by surprise, sort of how strong it was and that it came over New Orleans at all.

[Don Wildman]

It hits 11 o' clock at night and it comes in with 125 mile an hour winds, category four. It's called a sledgehammer by some who explain it. I remember back then, I mean, I was very, very young, but the forecasting was not done. You know, it was. It didn't obviously have the sophistication and satellite technology that we have today. Betsy has a massive storm surge up to 10ft 3 meters in Lake Pontchartrain, which is important to realize. And again, keep this sandwiched city in mind here. You got Lake Pontchartrain on top and then the Mississippi river down below. Lake Pontchartrain is going to be the primary engine of this problem. Right. And it was in Katrina as well, the Industrial Canal, which is running down between the Ninth Ward, that levee breaks. Right?

[Andy Horowitz]

Yeah. So what happens is Betsy pushes as you say this big storm surge, basically a wall of water into the bay we call Lake Pontchartrain. And there it encounters the Industrial Canal, which was meant to be a shortcut between a connection between the lake and the river. So it runs right through the Ninth Ward, north to south from the lake to the river. The storm surge enters the Industrial Canal. It also, at the same time, the city or the port has been building something called the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, which is another canal that runs through eastern New Orleans and also links up, connects the Gulf of Mexico to the Industrial Canal. So all of this, the storm is pushing all of this salt water, piling it up in the Industrial Canal. And two things happen. One is that on the west side, the upriver side, water just comes over the top of the canal and floods thousands of people in the Upper Ninth Ward in a neighborhood called Gentilly on the east side of the Industrial Canal, the flood walls in many places just collapse. And so water floods in at a much higher, At a fatal velocity into the Lower Ninth Ward and floods thousands of people there and kills dozens of people there as well. Right.

[Don Wildman]

76 people drowned in that period, right?

[Andy Horowitz]

Yeah, that sounds right.

[Don Wildman]

About 164,000 are flooded. Water then stands for more than a week. And this is where we can, you know, compare to the pictures anyway, of Katrina. We understand how this works. You've got this. This place is very hot. You know, this is September in New Orleans, and you got bedded water in the streets. The horror things crops elsewhere and livestock are killed in farmlands and so forth. It's the worst fatalities and property loss were experienced in the predominantly lack Lower Ninth Ward. Inevitably.

[Andy Horowitz]

Right, that's the thing. Not inevitably. This is what history teaches us.

[Don Wildman]

Being sarcastic.

[Andy Horowitz]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's see. Like you just prime a historian, you know, we just pounce on that word because it could have just as easily, you know, there was no natural reason that the flood walls didn't break, for example, on the up river side. And then the racial dynamics would have been totally different. So there's some contingency here for sure. But of course, you know, black people in Louisiana in the 1960s who had seen their congressional representative sign just a few years before the Southern Manifesto against Desegregation, you know, who had watched their senators filibuster against voting rights, who had just experienced, who had seen lynchings firsthand, who had just experienced every manner of racism, had every reason to understand what was happening to them, not as inevitable, but as a certain kind of, you know, plot the world they lived in was structured by racism. And so you said you were joking about inevitability, and I know just what you meant. But I think, you know, we have to understand that for black people living in Louisiana in the 1960s, racism felt like it structured so much of life that it could come to feel inevitable. For sure.

[Don Wildman]

Of course. Yeah. Is it fair to call it a conspiracy about the levees being purposefully broken?

[Andy Horowitz]

Yeah. Well, let's tell the story a little bit, and then we can decide what the right. What the right word is to describe it. But what you're referring to is that many black people, maybe even most black people in the Lower Ninth, came to believe that the flood walls along the Industrial Canal had been bombed. Oh, some people thought that it was done by Mayor Victor Skiro. Some people sort of didn't assign that level of agency, but thought that somehow someone associated with the government had purposely flooded the Lower Ninth.

[Don Wildman]

Now, let me understand. So this would have been because that water would be heading towards a whiter, more affluent area and therefore flooding that. And instead of that happening, they took contingency plans.

[Andy Horowitz]

Yes, that was the logic. And this idea was firmly rooted in reality. If we go back and think about the 1927 Mississippi river flood, the biggest Mississippi river flood in US history, certainly in Louisiana. The governor had proudly bombed the levee in Louisiana downriver from New Orleans and Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes to do exactly this. The idea was to signal that he flooded out an agricultural area that was inhabited mostly by poor people, less densely inhabited, and it was to show that he would protect New Orleans at any cost. He wanted to signal to real estate investors and others that he would keep the city safe from floods. And this was not a conspiracy theory at all. This was published on the front page of the Times Picayune. You know, it was done on purpose, and it was done in broad daylight. The Louisiana State engineers used a bunch of dynamite and filmed themselves doing it and put it in front of the movies at the time. So people in the Lower Ninth knew the state of Louisiana would sometimes bomb levies to protect some people rather than others. This was true.

[Don Wildman]

True.

[Andy Horowitz]

And they applied that historical knowledge to their contemporary circumstances in 1965.

[Don Wildman]

Right. So what is, you know, claimed to be an act of God turns out to be an act of man in many ways. Very deliberate.

[Andy Horowitz]

Yeah. And. And this was the sort of the way you've framed it really sets up the argument that citizens of the Lower Ninth had with their elected officials, because you had the governor, the mayor, and the other sort of prominent white male officials using that language of an act of God, somebody, I think it was the congressman said, or no, it was the governor who attributed Betsy's damage to the. Something like the waterborne spirits of the weather world. But the idea was essentially that there are certain things that happen in life over which people can have no control, and that the Betsy Flood was one of them. It was an act of God. And people in the Lower Ninth, what they saw was not God's hand. They saw a broken piece of public infrastructure, and they said, well, this is not God's fault. This is the engineer's fault. Or maybe it's, you know, someone's fault for actually putting some sticks of dynamite there.

[Don Wildman]

And so had their grandparents. You know, this is what we're talking about. We're talking about a generational storytelling that's going on here. Was it ever proven that this actually happened?

[Andy Horowitz]

No. And, you know, as a historian, I don't think it did. I think that most people today, there's, you know, there's not. There's no evidence other than these sort of reports. People heard explosions. Those explosions are explainable by just the force of the water knocking down the flood walls. So there's no evidence that there was a bomb. There is, however, evidence. And this is a little complicated, but I think it's significant because it just goes to the kind of credibility for why people in the Lower Ninth would believe this. Underneath the Industrial Canal, there's what is called a siphon, basically a tunnel, a sewer pipe, essentially, that connects the Upper Ninth and the Lower Ninth, the two sides of the Industrial Canal. And I found in my research, an internal report by the Sewerage and Water Board. This is the public agency that's in charge of flood control, in charge of that pump system in New Orleans. And they reported that very early in the morning on September 10, they were witnessing that water was draining from the Lower ninth into the Upper Ninth through this siphon. And they had to make a decision about what to do. And they closed the siphon to trap the water on the Lower Ninth side. So this is not a Levy bombing by any means. It's nothing like it. But it is a decision by the city to choose to make the flood higher in the Lower Ninth, you know, in order to lower flood levels in the Upper Ninth. So this is, you know, in essence, exactly what the people in the neighborhood claimed happened. I can't say for sure how much of a difference that made. I don't know how much that decision raised the water level But I do know that it was a choice that the city made.

[Don Wildman]

I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

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[Don Wildman]

Many of these stories now are about walls, about concrete walls. Are we talking about pure earthen levees all the way through the Industrial Canal in these days?

[Andy Horowitz]

No, these are sort of sheet pile walls, you know, rooted in some kind of concrete, but we're talking about metal here.

[Don Wildman]

Oh, I see. Interesting.

[Andy Horowitz]

Yeah. The place was already pretty developed or it was already developing when they built this thing. So they didn't have the space and they didn't want to spend the money to build the big, much safer earthen flood walls like those that line the Mississippi River.

[Don Wildman]

That's the other confusing thing is that when you're over the Mississippi, you're standing on like mountains of dirt that have been put there over, over time. And the Army Corps of Engineers very proud of those things. They'll walk you along there and tell you how this worked. When you're talking about the Industrial Canal and other places as well, there's these walls which are very controversial to this day as to how they're designed and planted in the earth. And much of that had to do with what happened with Katrina.

[Andy Horowitz]

A really important part, a terrifying light motif for 20th century Louisiana history, is cost benefit analysis. How much the Army Corps is going to be willing to spend on flood Control. And what they built along the Industrial Canal was the less expensive version. And it's important to say that people, from the time these things were built, people have been crying out that they're not safe. Before a spade of earth was moved to build that Mississippi River Gulf outlet, the St. Bernard Parish newspaper was running headlines that said St. Bernard Parish is doomed because they knew that this infrastructure was going to put them at much greater risk. They predicted exactly what happened in Betsy and in Katrina. And the federal government was just never there to. They were there to build the infrastructure that created the vulnerability, but not there to spend, to create a consummate amount of safety.

[Don Wildman]

It's an amazingly repetitious story, isn't it? I mean, this is what's really incredible about it. And I suppose your book must. You're covering a century in your book. Does it astonish you that this just keeps happening?

[Andy Horowitz]

Astonish? I don't know if I'd use the word. It makes me very sad, is the truth. It just. So we'll come. Maybe I'll skip ahead a little bit. This was one of the saddest moments for me in writing my book. After the Lower Ninth flooded, there was an activist organization, mostly of women, called the Betsy Flood Victims. And they understood, because their neighbors had drowned and their houses had flooded, they understood how dangerous it was to live in the Lower Ninth. They understood this to be, in one way or another, the government's fault. And so they had a petition signed by 10,000 people or so calling, among other things, for $10,000 grants, which they understood to be reparations for the flood damage. There was no National Flood insurance program at this point. Flood was not insurable. $10,000 was about the value of the average Lower Ninth Ward home. So they wanted cash so they could move somewhere safer. And ultimately, the compromise that passed was a scheme premised on loans rather than grants. And the loans had to be secured by collateral. And the only collateral that people in the Lower Ninth had was their flooded real estate. So it was the federal policy that essentially forced them to rebuild in the Lower Ninth. And these. So that's what they did. It was the only thing they could do. Then in 2005, when again, a storm surge comes into Lake Pontchartrain, comes into the Industrial Canal, comes up the Mississippi River Gulf outlet into the Industrial Canal, again, the flood walls collapse. Again, the Lower Ninth floods catastrophically. Again. So many people die. People asked, why did people live there in such a vulnerable place? They lived there because the federal government, in significant ways, made them and they had petitioned against it. Those letters that I was talking about, that petition and the letters that people in the Lower Ninth wrote, when I read them, they were very difficult to read physically because they had flooded in Katrina. They were in the basement archives at Tulane University, where I was then working, and the archives had flooded. So the papers kind of disintegrated in my hands as I tried to read them. But it was just so devastating to see people who knew exactly the kind of danger they lived in, warned, tried to organize, to deal with it, warned the people with power of exactly what was going to happen, were prescient, were correct, and were ignored and were forced to live in that kind of peril. So, again, not. Not astonished, because I could see it coming historically, 40 years in advance.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah.

[Andy Horowitz]

Just sad, because so. So, too, could the people who flooded.

[Don Wildman]

Well, and. And it's also sad the way someone like me, you know, sees watches the media around Katrina, in my case, in our case, and has immediate gut reactions to how sad this is. Oh, my gosh. Why are there people living there? And that's how most of America judges this neighborhood in particular. But any number of neighborhoods in any number of cities, and this is how poverty is sustained and how it just repeats itself.

[Andy Horowitz]

Yeah. You know, when you see patterns in history, you know, as we know, when we say history repeats itself, it's not. We don't mean that literally.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah.

[Andy Horowitz]

You know, we don't think that there's some sort of cosmic rhyming that's happening. Instead, what we're observing are structures of power that remain constant over time. And so what you have here is an underfunded and often, frankly, arrogant engineering regime at the U.S. army Corps of Engineers that is creating vulnerabilities that they're not accounting for adequately. And so, you know, it's not that lower ninth's gonna flood every 40 years because there's some sort of cosmic rhythm to the thing. It's that the Army Corps has never adequately secured this city that hundreds of thousands of people live in, nor has the government created any mechanism to allow people to move to safer places.

[Don Wildman]

Well, Betsy prompted the construction of the levee system that then fails in 2005, is what you're saying. But again, when I say levee, that brings to mind earthen walls. We're talking about concrete walls in this.

[Andy Horowitz]

Case, Betsy, in a way that maybe it's even hard for us to recognize today. Betsy sort of shocked the country and was subject to many significant congressional hearings, and it was seen as a national problem in Part, it was the first hurricane that caused more than a billion dollars in insured damages. So it became known as Billion Dollar Betsy. And it raised the need not just for new flood control and hurricane protection in New Orleans, but also it prompted the passage of the National Flood Insurance Program. Because representatives from around the country understood that Betsy was not a kind of UN problem to New Orleans, but was actually posed a national problem of disaster relief. Especially if Congress was going to be in the business of making appropriations for disaster relief, it was seen as unsustainable to do it on a piecemeal basis. They wanted to create an insurance scheme where people could pay into it and maybe make it economically sustainable. These are the same issues we face today in the throes of the climate crisis. How do we account for these seemingly episodic disasters? But when you zoom out, you know that this is this kind of structural problem that the United States. So yeah, they passed a big hurricane protection system called the Lake Pontchartrana Vicinity Hurricane protection program after 1965. Meant to protect New Orleans against the next Betsy. On paper, meant to protect against a storm the size of Katrina. It was unfinished in 2005. Forty years later, there was a piecemeal appropriations process and it was just shot through with all kinds of engineering mistakes, political squabbles, inadequate oversight of contractors, basically everything that could go wrong. Did the Army Corps in an internal audit. So describing its own work called the Hurricane Protection System, quote, a system in name only.

[Don Wildman]

Wow.

[Andy Horowitz]

So on its paper it seemed ambitious, but in reality, I mean, obviously it failed.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah. Not least of which it was in the form of loans rather than grants. Right. It basically put all those people into debt.

[Andy Horowitz]

Oh, yeah. So that's, that's this Betsy. So they were a couple of different major pieces of legislation that passed after Betsy. One was this Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Program, the big levy system that failed, also the National Flood Insurance Program and also this Hurricane Betsy relief bill, which as you say, came in the form of quasi refundable loans from the Small Business Administration. I saw some signs in the archive that people had hung around the neighborhood that said 40 years of debt is not freedom. Because they were keenly aware that this so called recovery program just put them in debt and bound them to a place that they knew was vulnerable.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah, right. So much repetition. I mean, this is the incredible thing that I hope comes out of this for anyone listening. It certainly did for me reading about this. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know much at all about hurricane Betsy. But when Katrina hit and those neighborhoods were wiped out, I went down there and shot that show. I couldn't believe how many empty lots there were. I mean, that's how naive I was about this. It was just wiped out. And what we were seeing wiped out was not slums. It was not ghetto. It was homes that were owned. It was stepping stones toward the American dream. That was the real heart of the tragedy, wasn't it?

[Andy Horowitz]

When I started my research on Katrina, I started with the assumption that the flood would have affected the most disadvantaged people in New Orleans or in the United States, that the flood victims would be exclusively poor or exclusively black, because that's the way inequality works in the United States. What I found, really the most surprising thing that I learned in the course of my research for the book was that it wasn't black New Orleans rather than white New Orleans that flooded in 2005. It wasn't poor New Orleans rather than rich New Orleans that flooded in 2005. It was just 20th century New Orleans that flooded. And so it was the houses that were built reliant on this big investment in drainage infrastructure. It was houses built that were subsidized by the GI Bill. It was the city built for cars and commuting, relying on oil and gas. That was the city, the 20th century city. And knowing that makes it, I think, should make all of us feel much more uncomfortable or imperiled. Because it's one thing, if you're not a poor person, you can say, oh, well, that would never happen to me. Remember in 2005, people said stuff like, oh, well, this would never happen in New York City. And then here comes Hurricane Sandy in New York City. The siren of Katrina's warning should really ring for anybody, I think, who relies in some way on public investment to make their neighborhood possible, because that's who's at risk now.

[Don Wildman]

Is it going to happen again? I mean, this next hurricane that hits New Orleans inevitably will have the same story unfold.

[Andy Horowitz]

Of course. Of course New Orleans has an expiration date. I would not venture to say when it is. It could be, you know, every summer could be New Orleans last. It might get. You know, when I used to live in New Orleans, I thought of myself as living in front of a drunken firing squad. You know, that's the sort of hurricane season. Every summer could be its last. Or you might get lucky and hang on for another century or two. Yeah, the Levy system, hurricane protection system that the Army Corps of Engineers built after Katrina is more robust and resilient. It shouldn't collapse in the way that the Katrina one did, the Post Betsy one did. But it's built to a much lower standard. It's not built to protect against a storm as powerful as Betsy or as powerful as Katrina. And So there's a 1% chance that it's overtopped any given year. That's the actuarial value assigned by the Army Corps itself. And New Orleans in this way, is not uniquely imperiled. There are more people that are living in the Hundred year floodplain in New York City than do in New Orleans. And so as we survey our dystopian climate crisis reality of flood and wildfire, everybody, I think, who has a desire not to die in their own home should be lobbying pretty, pretty strenuously for better protections, better infrastructure protections, and also, you know, let's stop burning the fossil fuels that are making these storms so much more powerful.

[Don Wildman]

Andy Horowitz is an American historian and author. He won the Bancroft Prize. That's a big deal. For his book, A History 1915-2015. That's fascinating. You're covering way more than just Katrina in that, and that speaks to everything we've just discussed. Thank you so much. Great to meet you.

[Andy Horowitz]

Thanks for having me. And thanks for paying attention to this important topic.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Thank you.

[Don Wildman]

Hey, thanks for listening to American History hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.

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[Andy Horowitz]

What about toys?

[Don Wildman]

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Do you mean they have? Of all the brands I adore, they.

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