CATASTROPHE: Oratory

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Into the grand ballroom of the Hotel Sherman, Chicago, last week strode Chicago's Mayor, William Hale Thompson. Thereupon a band of Chicago high school students (on special vacation for the day) played the Mayor's campaign anthem, "America First, Last and Always," and a sextette of uniformed Chicago policemen harmonized on the same hymn.

Meanwhile some 1,800 delegates to the Mississippi Flood Control Conference clapped hands, stamped feet, as the Mayor mounted a platform over which hung a gigantic banner inscribed with the words, "America First." From the Sherman lobby came, intermittently, strains of a fife & drum corps which, aided by placards, advertised the conference.

Thus opened the Flood Control Conference, called by Mayors Thompson of Chicago, O'Keefe of New Orleans and Miller of St. Louis, but with Mayor Thompson the dominant spirit. Seven U. S. Senators and two Cabinet members (Dwight Filley Davis, Secretary of War and James J. Davis, Secretary of Labor) were present; so were Mayors from many a Mississippi Valley city; so was onetime U. S. Senator William Lorimer, once barred from the Senate after an investigation of his campaign expenditures; so was many another notable.

Speeches numerous and lengthy fell into two classes, depending on whether the speaker did or did not represent the Federal Government. Of the latter sort was Mayor Thompson's address which termed the flood "an indictment of and challenge to the Federal Government," something which "might have been expected in China but not in the rich America with its boasted good government."

Said U. S. Senator Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota: "We have stood around long enough meeting the situation with halfway measures."

U. S. Representative Edward E. Denison of Illinois advocated "more and bigger levees," aroused chuckles by pronouncing "Levys."

U. S. Senator Pat Harrison of Mississippi pointed to the "surplus of $600,000,000" in the U. S. Treasury, said the country was rich enough to control floods.

And Mayor O'Keefe of New Orleans called upon the Federal Government to "assume full responsibility" to "make immediate appropriations."

Then spoke Secretary Dwight F. Davis, who said he came at the request of the President and to indicate the Administration's sympathy with flood sufferers. "The Mississippi can and must be controlled," said Secretary Davis. "The nation whose engineers built the Panama Canal despite seemingly insuperable obstacles can solve the . . . problem of flood control." He added that the solution was a matter for the next session of Congress to determine.

Major General Edgar Jadwin, Chief of the U. S. Army engineers, rose to his feet. General Jadwin reiterated the army-engineer insistence upon levees as the backbone of flood prevention. He said that though the flood has submerged 20,000 square miles, it would have submerged 30,000 had levees not restricted its spread. General Jadwin also attacked the popular theory that reforestation would prevent future floods; he pointed out that in 1844, when the valley was thickly forested, it experienced one of the greatest floods of its history.