Crises are institutional stress tests. From revolutions to depressions, system-wide shocks can change incentives drastically, tip equilibria, and reveal which political and economic commitments are truly renegotiation-proof. Natural disasters are no exception, and have proven to be a rich source of variation for recent papers in economic history. David Welky, in his book, The Thousand-Year Flood, documents the human and government responses to the massive 1937 Ohio-Mississippi flood. In doing so, he reminds us of this often-forgotten natural disaster, and illuminates the interaction of the New Deal administration with both environmental and disaster relief policies. In particular, the technocratic policies of the Roosevelt administration, especially the WPA mobilization of labor, made the flood less damaging even as it made flood control less provincial and more coordinated.

Welky's book argues that in terms of devastation, the 1937 flood was larger than the 1927 flood, and his mission is to bring this event to life. This is not as clear as the author suggests. The 1927 flood damages were estimated at between $250,000,000 and $350,000,000, while Welky notes on page 22 that the 1937 flood damages were close in nominal terms, estimated at roughly $300,000,000. However, his narrative reveals why the 1937 flood was not the memorable event of 1927; New Deal policies, particularly the army of relief workers sent in by the WPA, managed to effectively mitigate much of the flood's human costs, and the subsequent flood control policy ensured that the losses of the 1927 flood were not likely to be repeated again soon. In short, the national political response to the flood was effective enough to blunt the flood's historical impact, even if local responses of municipal government and charity (the Red Cross) were underwhelming, if adequate.

The first chapter offers a history of the Ohio River, and also a history of water engineering personalities focused on taming the Ohio. The resulting efforts opened the banks of the Ohio to development of towns and cities. The author introduces us to Shawneetown, the largest town in the early nineteenth-century West, with the memorable line from a financier: “Since none of us have heard of your village, Chicago, we have decided that you are just too far from Shawneetown to amount to anything” (p. 34). Shawneetown, which was evacuated and inundated during the flood, never permanently recovered, and today sits split into pre-flood and post-flood areas, as documented in the last chapter and the epilogue. Cairo, IL and Louisville, KY are other cities prominently featured in the book.

The second chapter focuses on the Roosevelt administration's plan for a comprehensive, centralized waterways management policy. However, it was not a high priority for the president, so nothing had been done about flood control leading up to 1937. The next few chapters focus on the immediate impacts of the flood, documenting the massive population movements of residents out of the flood vicinity, the influx of WPA relief workers into the flooded areas, and the people who decided to stay (many of whom had to be rescued by said WPA workers). These chapters are stories in the best sense, filled with characters and events that make for suspenseful, interesting narratives. Finally, the book documents the changes wrought by the flood, and its national and local political fallout. One thread focuses on the Southern Tenants Farmer's Union, and how this embryonic political organization of poor tenants was broken by the flood, retarding economic challenges to planter rule in the Southern end of the flooded region. Another thread focuses on WHAS, the stubbornly brave Louisville radio broadcasting station that operated through harrowing flood conditions.

For economists, the most interesting lesson of the book may be the strengths and the weaknesses of the New Deal administration in dealing with the disaster. An economist curious about institutional design might wonder why the government has such an important role during disaster relief (as in wartime). Indeed, economists might see the flood response as a political version of the classic Weitzman (Review of Economic Studies, 1974) prices versus quantities argument. When marginal benefits (in this case from relief goods) are very steep and the private costs of supplying them are heterogeneous, quotas and fiat allocations can be more efficient than prices. From the beginning of the onset of the flood with “Black Sunday,” the federal government used all of its considerable economic command to move resources and people to accommodate and manage the flood. The centralization and coordination necessary to respond quickly to this level of disaster would not have been possible without the various arms of the federal government, from the army to the WPA, something that was recognizably absent during the previous 1927 Mississippi Flood. Chapter 9, however, suggests that the efficacy of the short-run federal response to the flood was not present in post-flood policymaking, which was dominated by wasteful jockeying over limited budgets by politicians at various levels, preempting a truly comprehensive national flood control plan.

The main weakness of the book is that there is not enough environmental or social science to illuminate anything general about the flood. There are a host of stories and personalities and musings about internal psychology, but little systematic evidence or overarching framework. So while the book succeeds as historical narrative, and is very well-documented and researched, it does not offer much to readers seeking natural science-based environmental history or lessons about the interaction of social institutions with natural disasters. While Welky shies away from generalization, a possible lesson of Welky's fine book is that private charity and decentralized government is no substitute for national environmental disaster management, and the 1937 Flood was relatively mild in its human costs precisely because of the vast supply of quickly mobilized relief labor enabled, ironically, by the Depression and the WPA.