1 37: the year of portent 1

An excerpt from 37: The year of portent,

Markham Shaw Pyle & GMW Wemyss,
Bapton Books 2012:

On the just and on the unjust

I
t began to rain in America in the new year. For a number of
Americans, it had been stormy or a long drought, or both
together for some time. Unemployment had declined
from its level of some 20.1% in 1935 and 16.9% in 1936 to a rate that
could seem less than appalling only by contrast; certain tender
green shoots of recovery were discernible, or at any rate discerned,
in other economic metrics. The President, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, was to take the oath of oce and be inaugurated for his
second term in January of 1937: the rst January inauguration in
the history of the Republic, the Twentieth Amendment having
moved it forward from the Founders chosen date in March. No
one forecast that by the end of 1937, the glimpsed recovery should
have drowned, pounded into the mud and paste of the Recession
of 3738, the green shoots of recovery proving as evanescent, as
symbolic of hope and change stillborn, as the Eliotian lilacs of a
2 37: the year of portent 2

cruel Waste Land April.

No one foresaw the Flood of 1937, either, but it was beginning,

in cold January rains in the Ohio River watershed and that of the
Lower Mississippi.

T
he Pulitzer Prize for Biography and Autobiography
had, in 1935, gone to Douglas Southall Freeman for his
biography of RE Lee.1 The indefatigable Dr Freeman
for in those days, newspaper editors not infrequently, in
America, possessed PhDs in history and allied disciplines, and Dr
Freeman was a Johns-Hopkins-trained historian already hard at
work on his (irresistibly readable) bibliographic historiography of
writings upon the War of 1861,2 and collecting material for his
joint biography of Lees Lieutenants,3 the commanders of the
Army of Northern Virginia, had not skimped, in his thumping
volumes, Lees early career in the US Army Corps of Engineers:
including his struggles with improvements to navigation upon the
Mississippi River at St Louis.

The Mississippi had defeated Lee as a young ocer of

engineers; it had defeated the Corps of Engineers every time.

1 R. E. Lee: a biography, 4 vols, Charles Scribners Sons 1934.

2 The South to Posterity: An Introduction to the Writing of Confederate History, Charles
Scribners Sons (1939).
3 In three volumes, Charles Scribners Sons (1942, 1943, 1944).
3 37: the year of portent 3

Science generally, and practical science in particular, had in 1937

the thrusting self-condence of renewed youth. Events that might
seem to anyone else to cast doubt upon its self-assurance were, in
the manner of youth, dismissed as minor setbacks, accidents,
mistakes, bad luck, and irrelevancies.

This was to be little comfort to the ooded, the drowned, the

evacuated, and those rendered destitute.

J anuary 1937 was mild and wet in London. By months end,

there had been a full eight-and-forty hours of sunshine
rather more than commonly enjoyed in a London January
and three and three-quarters inches of rain. On the 29th of
January, the weather waxed colder, and some snow fell.4

Nine days prior, on 20 January, Berlin Tempelhof recorded its

lowest temperature for 1937, 12.8C, 8.96F.

The ctional Four Yorkshiremen of a later generation, in their

dismissal of rival claims to hardship, represent what should have
been the American response in 1937 to such meteorological
reports: Luxury. The winter of 1935 1936 had been infamously
harsh: beginning at Christmastime or earlier in the East, the cold
had begun to bite, Florida seeing its coldest December on record.

4 Met Oce archival records.

4 37: the year of portent 4

After the turn of the year, the Midwest and the Plains began to
feel the pinch of frost as well, and by February, Minnesota and the
Dakotas were experiencing all-time record cold. By March of 1936,
when thaws brought severe ooding in the Midwest and the
Plains, Iowa had joined Minnesota, North Dakota, and South
Dakota in logging their coldest winters in recorded history.

By that juncture, Americans in 1936 were ready to welcome the

sun and drier air. The welcome, soon outworn, did not last.

The 1936 North American heatwave followed the 1936

coldwave as if to whipsaw the continent. Record high
temperatures were recorded in Ontario and Manitoba, and in
much of the United States.5 Treble-digit highs smashed records
that have not yet been broken in July in numerous Midwestern
and Plains states; from New Jersey and West Virginia to Kansas
and Texas, record high temperatures persisted. The Dust Bowl
nally succumbed fully to its long dying, its denuded soil cooking
in desert temperatures, becoming, for a time, desert itself,
reecting and radiating the brutal heat. Night-time low
temperatures were in the 80s and 90s Fahrenheit. People slept
outside for relief, in farmyards and on courthouse squares in the
heat-battered small towns: women in cotton print dresses,

5 References are to the contiguous United States: in 1937, Alaska and Hawaii remained
territories.
5 37: the year of portent 5

barefooted children plaintive and miserable with the heat, lean

farmers in caps and brogues, corduroy-clad and corduroy-faced,
shabbily overalled; prosperous large farmers and townsmen,
bellies reecting their prosperity, trousers halfway up their
corporations in their dark suits, their ties painted and their hats
straw: all enduring an equality of misery. Heat-related deaths of
people and livestock were common. A persistent strong ridge of
high pressure over the Pacic coast channelled heat into the Plains
and the Midwest. And persistent drought, hydrologic decit,
gripped the land.6

The people prayed for rain.

They got it.

In the Maumee Valley of Indiana and Ohio, the middle of

January saw some minor ooding of no real consequence. On the
Eastern Seaboard, there were considerable rains that raised the
Susquehanna and its tributaries, and all Atlantic-draining rivers
from the Potomac southwards to Florida, to above ood level, but
the damage that ensued was minor. In the watersheds draining
into the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, January rains were well above
normal: in parts of Mississippi, thrice the normal amount of rain
6 See inter alia The Heatwave of July 1936, National Weather Service Weather Forecast Oce,
La Crosse, WI; Kohler (1937), Weather of 1936 in the United States, Monthly Weather Review
65 (1): 1216; The Great Flood of 1937, National Weather Service Weather Forecast Oce,
Louisville, KY; Swenson (1937), Rivers and Floods, Monthly Weather Review 65 (2): 71 et
sequitur.
6 37: the year of portent 6

fell in January. The Pearl River and Pascagoula watersheds saw

remarkable rainfall totals for January 1937: 21.48 inches at Hickory,
Mississippi; 18.77, at Meridian. Heavy rains on New Years Day
and 2 January over the entirety of the Tombigbee and Black
Warrior watersheds resulted in rapid rises in both rivers, which
remained at or above ood stage, often by a considerable measure,
into February and beyond. The same was true of the lower
Apalachicola, and there was minor ooding along the Alabama as
well.

The Upper Mississippi River drainage and the Missouri River

drainage were, instead, almost unaected during January. The
Illinois, Meramec, and Bourbeuse Rivers endured minor ooding
in January from thaw and the breakup of ice, and none from new
precipitation; the Upper Mississippi stages remained quite low
well into February. In the Missouri River drainage, on 31 January,
there was ooding of the Grand River at Chillicothe, Missouri,
with no resultant damage; the Missouri River itself reached its
lowest recorded stage at Kansas City, Missouri, on 9 and 10
January, almost three feet below zero (the mean level).

The Ohio River and Lower Mississippi watersheds were not so

fortunate.

Modern occupancy of the Ohio River Valley was, by 1937, of

7 37: the year of portent 7

some 175 years duration. There had been historic and devastating
oods in 1773 and 1884; there had been expensive and extensive
oods in 1933 and 1936. The Flood of 37 was to surpass these
and, if the geology has been read aright, to surpass all prior oods
since the land had attained its present form.

In December of 1936, there had been moderate to heavy rains

over the entire watershed of the Ohio River. On New Years Day
1937, the Ohio was already swelling.

An unseasonable change in the jet-stream, and what may just

perhaps have been, in retrospect, an early and westwards-displaced
Azores / Bermuda High, funnelled Arctic weather into the West
and tropical moisture and unseasonably warm temperatures to the
entirety of the country east of the Mississippi River. Records
reconstructed by the Midwestern Regional Climate Center,
Illinois State Water Survey, show that, between 1 and 24 January
1937, from Pennsylvania into Oklahoma, from Missouri into
Mississippi, literally centred upon the Ohio River and aligned
axially upon its course from near Carrollton in the north-east
almost to Paducah in the south-west, total precipitation fell at or
in excess of 600% of mean precipitation for the place and time.
Spreading out concentrically from that area of deluge were
isohyets of only slightly lesser downpours. Northwards of a line
8 37: the year of portent 8

running from Charleston, South Carolina, through Macon and

Montgomery, to Port Arthur, Texas, rainfall for the period
exceeded 100% of mean precipitation; a line from Raleigh to Fort
Smith, that dipped southwards of Greenville, Birmingham,
Meridian, Vicksburg, and Shreveport, marked the 200% level; a
circle running from the Pittsburgh suburbs to Cleveland,
Indianapolis, Perryville and Springeld in Missouri, Little Rock,
Memphis, Chattanooga, and Lexington, Kentucky, enclosed an
area that received 300% or better of its mean precipitation. So also
did a smallish circle described around Meridian itself. Louisville,
Evansville, and Cairo, Illinois, were in the eye of the disaster.

The Cumberland and Tennessee River basins took heavy rain

on the night of 1 January, over four inches in some areas, and rose
swiftly. The Wabash had already been running high as December
1936 ended; it swiftly reached and exceeded ood stage with the
New Years rains, and remained in ood throughout most of
January. The Ohios three largest tributaries were, then, already
discharging ood-waters into the river when the heavens broke
open over the Ohio Valley.

By 8 January, the Ohio had reached ood stage through much

of its lower length; on 10 January, when ice storms tormented
Evansville, the river was two-thirds full from Pittsburgh to
9 37: the year of portent 9

Louisville, near ood stage from Louisville to Paducah, and above

ood stage from Paducah to its mouth, the meeting of its waters
with those of the Mississippi, at Cairo.

On 24 January, the Ohio was at 29.2 feet 4.2 feet above ood
level at Pittsburgh; it was to crest at 9.5 feet above ood stage,
34.5 feet, on 26 January. Near Wheeling, West Virginia, at Dam
No. 12, it was at 45 feet and rising, to crest at 48.7 feet, 12.7 feet
above ood stage, on 26 January. At Point Pleasant, West
Virginia, ood stage being 40 feet, the river on 24 January was 17.5
feet above ood level, to crest on 27 January at 62.7 feet, 22.7 feet
above ood stage. Flood level at Portsmouth, Ohio, was 50 feet;
on 24 January, the river was at 68.7 feet, and rising, to crest on 27
January at 74.1 feet, 24.1 feet above ood stage. Near Maysville,
Kentucky, Dam No. 33, ood stage being also 50 feet, saw 69.4 feet
of water on 24 January, cresting eventually on 27 January at 75.3
feet. Flood stage at Cincinnati was 52 feet, which the river was to
exceed on 18 January; on the 24th, the river was at 73.4 feet, and
was to crest at 80 feet on the 26th. The ood stage for the low-
water gauge at Louisville was 51 feet; by the 10th, the river was 2.8
feet above ood level, was at 75.4 feet on 24 January, and crested
on the 27th at 81.4 feet,7 30.4 feet above ood stage.

7 Or so the February 1937 Monthly Weather Report of the US Department of Agriculture

Weather Bureau stated. The National Weather Service, Louisville, Kentucky, currently asserts a
gure of 85.4 feet, which was the crest at what is now McAlpine Lock, at the Falls of the Ohio.
10 37: the year of portent 10

Shawnee, Illinois, as the Weather Bureau insisted upon naming

it in reports today the near ghost-town of Old Shawneetown
was not able to keep records of the water levels on 10, 18, and 24
January; what is known is that the river crested at Shawnee on 2
February at 65.5 feet, 32.5 feet above ood stage. At the mouth of
the Ohio, at Cairo, the river was at 56.8 feet on the 24th, cresting
overnight on the 3 / 4 February at 59.6 feet, 19.6 feet above its 40-
foot ood stage.

The Ohio was above ood stage from Paducah to Cairo on 10

January; on 18 January, from Cincinnati to Cairo; and on 24
January, above ood stage and beyond all previous records from
Portsmouth, Ohio, to Cairo.

The 24th was a Sunday. It became known as Black Sunday. It

was the last day of the exceptional rains. The rains that fell
between 1 and 12 January were heavy, but widespread; those that
fell from 13 24 January were exceptional and intense, and
concentrated upon the course of the river and its immediate banks
and short distances inland, from Cincinnati to Cairo and on into
Arkansas. Rains were exceedingly heavy in the target area and it
felt like precisely that to those who lived through it 8 on 13, 14,
and 17 January. The nal crushing deluge that commenced upon
17 January persisted for a solid week.
8 Including Mr Pyles late mother, then a small child living in Madisonville, Kentucky.
11 37: the year of portent 11

Almost all of the tributaries of the Ohio were now in ood, in

their lower stages, themselves receiving downpours from the band
of rain that was sited along the rivers course, and backed up in
their banks, their mouths stopped, by the ooding Ohio itself.
Louisville received 19.2 inches of rain in the month of January; 15
inches of those fell between 12 and 24 January, Black Sunday.
Bowling Green suered a monthly total rainfall of 20.7 inches;
Earlington, Kentucky, 23.0. Between Memphis and Cairo,
drenching Jackson and Milan, Huntingdon and Camden, Paris
and Mayeld, western Tennessee and western Kentucky were
drowned in rainfall of between 18 and 20-plus inches.

On 25 January 1937, on the Missouri side of the Mississippi

River just downstream of Cairo, the levees of the Birds Point-New
Madrid oodway were opened, and a sheet of water spread over
130,000 acres. Cairo was saved; the rate of rise in the cresting Ohio
was decreased as far upstream as Paducah. The engineers alone
had not saved Cairo: the Ohio itself had broken through into the
Cache River drainage just upstream of Cairo on the Illinois bank,
there in Little Egypt. The historic and now protected Cache
River wetlands were not unfamiliar to the Ohio: once, the river
had owed through them to its conuence with the Mississippi,
when the future Cairo had been on its southern bank. The river
ran through it anew, into the Mississippi.
12 37: the year of portent 12

Even with this relief, the Ohio River Valley had been
devastated. Ninety percent of Jeersonville, Indiana, that
gambling, wide-open town that had, in the face of Prohibition
and Depression, turned to crime, had been submerged. Its larger
(and insistently more respectable) twin on the south side of the
river, Louisville, had been inundated through some 70% of its
area, and 175,000 souls were refugees from Louisville alone: not
the most pious man in Louisville, nor yet the hot-gospelling, faith-
healing Reverend William Branham of Jeersonville, could claim
that Jeersonville had fallen to a particular judgement of God.
Dead horses and cattle festooned the tops of the highest trees
when the oods receded; houses had been washed from their
foundations; the damage done was estimated at $250,000,000
today, perhaps a shade over $3.3 billion (or $3.3 thousand million,
in British usage).

Cairo had been saved, but only just: its ood-wall was 60 feet
high. The Ohio crested at Cairo, after spending part of itself in the
Cache River breakthrough, at 59.6 feet: saved by less than ve
inches. The ood-wall at Portsmouth, Ohio, had also been 60 feet
high. The river crested at Portsmouth at 74.1 feet. To avoid a
catastrophic breach, the ood-wall was opened, and Portsmouth
ooded.
13 37: the year of portent 13

Relief came from all over the country: sailors from New York,
water department workers from Gloucester, Massachusetts, and
of course the US Coast Guard and the WPA and the Corps of
Engineers. Yet the water had stood six feet deep in the Bullitt
County courthouse; all of Paducah had ooded, and its entire
population of some 35,000 had been evacuated from the city;
Evansville, facing 54 feet of water, was under martial law; Crosley
Field was under water although the Reds were accustomed to
being underwater, having gone 74-80 in 1936, ending in fth,
eighteen games behind the pennant-winning New York Giants,
and were to nish in the cellar in 1937, 59-98, forty games out as
the Giants won yet another pennant. Raw sewage ooded streets.
There was no water to ght res, which ravaged towns and cities
even including comparatively unscathed Cincinnati. And it was
January, in refugee tents and makeshift quarters, stalked by disease
as well as by cold, wet, and privation. Almost 400 people were
dead or dying.

Now the ood-waters and the ice were gone: gone with the
river itself, where the river always sent its waters and all that they
bore: into the Mississippi, down the Lower Mississippi to the Gulf
of Mexico.

14 37: the year of portent 14

T
he arts and sciences of peace were by no means centre-
stage in 1937. On 8 January, the Brooklyn Navy Yard
launched WPG-36, which was to be commissioned as
USCGC Spencer; on 12 January, the Mare Island Navy Yard put
DD-391, the future USS Henley, a Bagley-class destroyer, in the
water. In Hamburg, Blohm & Voss were nishing the future
heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper; in Clydebank, John Brown & Co.
launched D61, what was to be HMS Ilex, an I-class destroyer, on
28 January.

The day on which Ilex launched was the day Arthur Pollen
died.

Arthur Pollens father, John Hungerford Pollen, was an

Anglo-Catholic clergyman and a younger son of the second Pollen
baronet of Redenham, Hants: a product of Eton and the House,
and Fellow of Merton, who had swum the Tiber in company with
his friend, John Henry Newman, forfeiting his fellowship and his
Orders, becoming an ecclesiastical artist, a friend of the Pre-
Raphaelites, and Professor of Fine Arts at the Catholic University
of Ireland; Arthurs brother, the younger John Hungerford
Pollen SJ, was a Jesuit and an historian of the Reformation and
Counter-Reformation. Arthurs great-uncle on his fathers side
was the architect Charles Robert Cockerell RA, author, architect,
15 37: the year of portent 15

archologist, sitter to Ingres, son-in-law of John Rennie the Elder,

and great-grandson of Pepys; Arthurs mother, an authority on
lace.

Arthur Pollen was of a somewhat dierent stamp. He was up

at Trinity, Oxon; he was called to the Bar at Lincolns Inn; he
stood, unsuccessfully, for the House of Commons as a Radical
Liberal; he married the daughter of the Conservative MP Joseph
Lawrence, later Sir Joseph, chairman of the Linotype company
of which son-in-law Arthur soon became Managing Director. So
far, so conventional.

But Arthurs destiny was not to be so conventional, after all.

After observing appalling results in Naval gunnery exercises in
1900, Arthur Pollen, with the aid of Linotype board member Lord
Kelvin and the encouragement of Jacky Fisher, Tug Wilson, and
at rst Jellicoe, began to create a gunnery re-control system
worked by a prototype electrically-powered analogue computer.
His subsequent career was complex and vexed: naval
commentator, Naval contractor and then outcast, in and out of
favour with the Admiralty, Great War propagandist, sworn
enemy of Jellicoe and backer of Beatty, arms manufacturer,
patents dispute victor (to the happy amount of 30,000) over the
Admiraltys self-dealings, political gady, rescuer of The Tablet
16 37: the year of portent 16

(whose want of Catholic orthodoxy today should have sent him

into a rage), and polemicist. Yet even as he died on the day on
which Ilex rst touched salt water, his true legacy was already
secure: it was aboard every warship and in every bomb-sight.

T
he Lower Mississippi River drainage began the New
Year with low water and excess capacity. The Upper
Mississippi and the Missouri were low the Missouri
exceptionally so sending very little water down; the Arkansas
and the Red River basins were in three-year drought. The Black
River was in moderate ood in January; the White, although its
lower stages reached ood levels last seen in the iconic 1927 Flood,
did not this time breach its levees. The St Francis and the Yazoo,
however, having suered the same deluges as had the rest of the
central states, were in ood, although the waters did not reach
ood stage in the lower stages of those rivers until February and
March.

Nevertheless, the ood-waters sent into the Lower Mississippi

by the ooding Ohio did produce widespread alarm and
destruction, although a 1927-style superood was evaded by mere
good fortune. The Mississippi broke all previous records, from the
conuence with the Ohio to Helena, Arkansas, and at Natchez,
17 37: the year of portent 17

between 13 January and 23 March. Below the Mississippi River

cut-os, at Natchez, the Mississippi exceeded its 1927 ood-crest
by a considerable amount.9 The crests of the ood were, at New
Madrid, 13.9 feet above ood stage, exceeding the 1913 record by 3.3
feet; at Memphis, 14.7 feet above ood stage, and 15.3 feet above it
at Beale Street, 3.7 feet higher than the 1913 record; at Helena, 16.3
feet above ood, exceeding the 1927 record by 3.5 feet.

From Arkansas City to Vicksburg, the cut-os kept the 1927

records intact. The Mississippi crested at Arkansas City at 53.8 feet,
11.8 feet above ood stage; in 1927, it had crested at 60.4 feet. At
Greenville, Mississippi, the river crested at 52.2 feet, 16.2 feet above
ood stage but 2.5 feet lower than in 27; at Vicksburg, the crest
was at 53.2 feet, 10.2 feet above ood stage, 5.4 feet lower than the
1927 crest.

But Natchez saw a crest of 12.0 feet above ood stage, 58.0 feet
of water, 1.4 feet over the 1927 record. Below Natchez, however,
the past decades work had paid: Baton Rouge saw a ood-crest of
45.0 feet, 10.0 feet above ood stage and 2.8 feet below that of
1927, and New Orleans, a crest of only 2.3 feet above ood stage.
The Corps of Engineers had opened the Bonnet Carr spillway,
some miles upriver from the Crescent City, and allowed the river
to pour into and spend itself in Lake Pontchartrain.
9 Those so inclined may here hum Randy Newmans Louisiana 1927 if they like.
18 37: the year of portent 18

The upper Ohio River Valley had been ooded badly in 1933
and massively in March of 1936; upriver from Louisville, the 1937
Flood did not hit as hard. But from Louisville to Cairo, there was
devastation that made March of 36 a happy memory. Gas tanks
exploded and could not be doused. Portsmouth had sacriced
itself to stave o catastrophic failure of the ood-wall; it had
succeeded only in part. Houses, farms, and business were ruined
in the midst of a ruinous Depression. Lives had been lost;
starvation and privation were near presences. Some communities
never recovered; Shawneetown, Illinois, and Leavenworth,
Indiana, moved in toto, rebuilding on higher ground, away from
the river; Clarksville, Indiana, was wholly rebuilt, to a new plan.
One person in eight one million people in the region was
homeless. At some points, the Ohio was ve-and-twenty miles
wide. The waters did not begin fully to recede until February.

Both public and private enterprise had been pitted against the
elements and the river before the ood, to tame them; in the
recovery, both private and public eort were to be matched
against the river and the elements. As they had been throughout
the history of the river, dating to the days of the Mound-Builders.

And always, for all the temporary, trumpery triumphs man

may trumpet as success, the river and the elements have, in the
19 37: the year of portent 19

end, defeated man, by sovereignty of nature.10

10 Coriolanus, act iv, sc 7, as we hope it was in fact unnecessary to tell you.