Questions about the role of the federal government in American disaster relief policy have roots in another hurricane tragedy that took place over 50 years ago.
On the night of Aug. 17, 1969, Hurricane Camille’s nearly 200 mph winds drove a storm surge of up to 20 feet smack into the Mississippi Gulf Coast and coastal Louisiana. One of only three Category 5 hurricanes to hit the U.S. mainland in the 20th century, Camille killed more than 140 people in Mississippi. Another 113 died when the storm, downgraded to a tropical depression, triggered flash floods and mudslides in central Virginia.
The storm, which was smaller but more powerful than Hurricane Katrina, firmly shifted disaster relief from states, localities and the Red Cross to the federal government. Today, victims of major disasters expect that the federal government through FEMA will be there to help them rebuild their lives, a sentiment that we can trace to changes in the law brought about by Hurricane Camille and its aftermath.
It was a Democratic senator from Indiana who actually championed the idea that the federal government, not the states or volunteer organizations, should come to the relief of its citizens during natural disasters. Sen. Birch Bayh had been pushing for a permanent federal disaster aid program since 1965, when the Palm Sunday tornadoes struck six Midwestern states, killing 137 and injuring 1,200 in Indiana alone.
Help for Hoosier residents was very limited. “The state had a rudimentary, Band-Aid kind of thing,” Bayh told me later. “ … But they were limited compared to the great purse strings of Uncle Sam.” As President Lyndon Johnson launched his Great Society initiatives, Bayh also envisioned a greater federal role for helping disaster victims. He was further encouraged by the fact that Congress had passed a special law for extensive federal aid to the victims of the 1964 Alaska earthquake and would soon do the same for the victims of Hurricane Betsy.
Bayh’s constituents, however, did not receive this sort of help from the federal government. The tradition of federalism in disaster relief, the lobbying of the Red Cross to retain its role in providing for disaster victims and the preferences of some in Congress to respond ad hoc to disasters (thus building up political capital with their grateful, disaster-struck colleagues), all worked against an expansive and permanent federal disaster safety net.
Four years later, however, Camille changed the policy conversation.
Pragmatic politics and a desire to deliver much-needed aid to constituents propelled the powerful Gulf Coast congressional delegation into action. Mississippians and Louisianans wrote their senators and representatives, pleading for federal aid and comparing their plight to the costs of the Vietnam War and the recent Apollo 11 mission. One resident in the small Mississippi town of Waveland wrote Sen. James Eastland (D-Miss.), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that the government should “use this moon landing monkey business spending to make our people decent here on earth.”
Eastland and two other conservative segregationist Mississippi Democrats — Sen. John Stennis, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rep. William Colmer, chair of the House Rules Committee — were joined by House Majority Whip Hale Boggs of Louisiana. Together, they marshaled support from their colleagues for a bill specifically for Camille victims a few weeks after the storm.
Their efforts were also boosted by the endorsement of President Richard M. Nixon. Eager to burnish the president’s credentials with conservative Southerners, Nixon’s aides convinced him to stop on the coast on the way back from his summer sojourn at the Western White House, Nixon’s California vacation retreat, in September. The first president to visit Mississippi since Franklin Roosevelt, Nixon was met by an audience of thousands of rapturous Mississippians — one sign read “NOT MANY REPUBLICANS HERE BUT LOTS OF NIXONCRATS.”
And yet, despite widespread political support for relief, the legislation for Camille victims still fell short of the permanent national policy that Bayh had envisioned.
But the politics of disaster relief once again shifted that fall thanks to the work of local and national civil rights activists, who protested the way that the relief effort extended the segregation and discrimination they had been fighting in Mississippi for decades. With Gov. John Bell Williams, the last openly segregationist governor of the state, heading state efforts, and with local Red Cross agencies dominated by White Southerners, there were plenty of examples of Black and poor victims of Camille being treated unfairly.
Activists revealed injustices ranging from state officials segregating buses carrying evacuees from the coast, to the Red Cross policy of restoring disaster victims only to the status quo ante — meaning, if your house didn’t have indoor plumbing before the storm, you would still be stuck with an outhouse even after your house was rebuilt. In fall 1969, a report by the American Friends Service Committee publicized these problems, generating a firestorm of criticism about the discriminatory policy advanced at the state level and even by volunteer organizations.
The solution? A federal policy that ensured equal treatment to all recipients, and Bayh happened to have one.
Bayh’s proposal offered a program of ongoing federal disaster aid that satisfied both liberal and conservative demands. It was more equitable but also offered the leadership of such states as Mississippi the promise of subsidized reconstruction of coastal economies the next time a hurricane struck. As Stennis said in support of Bayh’s bill, “It will give assurance to financial investments and bonds and the insurance problems and a great many other matters.” Civil rights and Sun Belt development were, for a moment, able to coexist in the bipartisan glow of disaster policy.
As a result, the Disaster Relief Act of 1970, significantly raised Americans’ expectations that the government would be there for them in times of disaster. As Bayh said when he introduced the legislation, “I think the time has come when we should treat the citizens of this country more compassionately when they are hit by a disaster.” Among other policies still with us today, the act created the Disaster Unemployment Assistance program for disaster victims, the pot of money recently raided by the Trump administration to attempt to patch part of the hole left by the failure to negotiate an extension of the federal pandemic unemployment benefits. Revised and expanded over the years, and paired with the newly created FEMA in 1979, the law has placed the federal government squarely in the middle of 21st-century disaster politics and policy — a framework now being tested by repeated disasters in 2020.