Birch Bayh, Congress, and Disaster Relief Reform

Contemporary disaster relief policy owes much to a spate of high-profile disasters in the mid-1960s, particularly the 1964 Alaska earthquake and Hurricane Betsy in 1965. Each of these events prompted passage of legislation aimed specifically at their victims, and expanded the amount and types of federal aid available to the regions and to individual disaster victims. While disaster relief had traditionally been viewed as the responsibility of state, local, and voluntary agencies, with federal assistance playing a supplementary role, in fact the federal role in major disasters had occasionally been substantial from the late nineteenth century onward.^{Footnote 9} Expansions in disaster relief was made possible by periods of widening federal administrative capacity: New Deal agencies mobilized to deal with disasters in the 1930s, and Congress formalized federal assistance under the 1950 Disaster Relief Act at the same time that it created the Cold War civil defense system in the 1950 Civil Defense Act.^{Footnote 10}

But disaster relief in the mid-1960s moved from the federal focus on restoration and repair of public facilities (the main element of the 1950 act) to encompass broader economic redevelopment aid and direct assistance to individuals. In Alaska, for instance, its peculiar relationship to the federal government—in 1964, it had only recently been admitted as a state and was still heavily dependent on federal resources—provided justification for placing federal relief at the forefront. Federal funds provided over half of the reconstruction and relief assistance. Those whose homes were lost or damaged during the earthquake received much more direct relief from the government than previously available through the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) modest disaster loan program: thirty-year, low-interest loans, write-offs for some federally subsidized loans, and special loans to pay off previously existing mortgages.^{Footnote 11}

The Alaska precedent of a disaster-specific relief program was on the mind of Senator Birch Bayh as he toured Indiana in the wake of a series of tornadoes that cut through the northern part of the state (as well as sections of Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa) on Palm Sunday, 1965. Indiana was the hardest hit, with more than 140 people killed in the worst disaster in the state’s history. Bayh, a first-term Democratic senator, was struck by what he perceived to be the inadequacy of the aid available to individual disaster victims. The gap between what the state could do and what the federal government had done following the Alaska earthquake was obvious to him. “The state had a rudimentary . . . Band-Aid kind of thing . . . but they were limited compared to the great purse strings of Uncle Sam,” he recalled.^{Footnote 12}

Bayh was a reliable liberal vote in Congress, and had become a favorite of President Lyndon Johnson. Bayh helped convince LBJ to come visit the stricken area. A “misty-eyed” Johnson was photographed picking his way through the ruins of a subdivision in a suburb of Elkhart, Indiana, where twenty-seven people had been killed, and he promised that the federal government would “do everything conceivably possible under our laws” to help disaster victims.^{Footnote 13} Johnson’s visit in the immediate aftermath of the disaster seemed to augur well for new legislation.^{Footnote 14} Bayh announced a week later that he would seek legislation to extend federal relief to individuals, particularly homeowners and farmers, along the lines of the provisions made to the Alaska earthquake victims.^{Footnote 15} “It seemed to me,” he said later, “if there was ever a time when the government ought to be compassionate, is when its citizens are smitten by an act of God or whoever creates the weather up there, over which they have no control.”^{Footnote 16}

Bayh’s proposed legislation was framed squarely within the Great Society rhetoric of an expanding safety net and the creation (or restoration) of economic opportunity. It embodied many of the same elements of the Alaska relief bill, but opening it up generally to the victims of any major disaster without requiring special legislation.^{Footnote 17} Bayh emphasized that this increased federal assistance was not a handout; disaster loans would go to victims “so they can lift themselves up by their bootstraps and re-establish themselves as contributing citizens.”^{Footnote 18} Paul Douglas of Illinois argued that disaster relief was an essential part of the national safety net: “We need, I believe, to use the fiscal resources of the Federal Government to insure that no citizen is dealt an insurmountable blow by a flood, tornado, or other natural disasters.”^{Footnote 19} The measure passed the Senate on a voice vote.

Hurricane Betsy inundated New Orleans in early September as the House was considering the Bayh disaster bill. Though the body count was lower than the Palm Sunday tornadoes, the property damage from Betsy was far greater. The powerful Louisiana congressional delegation sprang into action immediately, with Senator Russell Long entreating LBJ to tour the area, and then introducing special legislation to provide additional relief specifically for the victims of Betsy—most notably, the cancelling of $1,800 of victims’ Small Business Administration disaster loans, after they had paid $500.^{Footnote 20} The Betsy bill went forward, backed by the Louisiana delegation and Johnson’s strong support, while the broader Bayh bill languished in the House.^{Footnote 21}

One might expect, given Bayh’s relationship with Johnson, and the Great Society thrust of Bayh’s relief proposals, that Bayh’s subsequent efforts to promote the bill would have enjoyed greater success. However, the House would prove a substantial barrier to comprehensive disaster relief over the next few years, much to the frustration of Bayh and his staff. While the House ultimately passed a stripped-down version of Bayh’s bill in 1966, it removed much of the specific assistance to individuals while expanding a few categories of support for the repairs of public facilities. The most significant barrier to Bayh’s comprehensive approach was the political advantages of the tradition of one-time relief measures. Congressmen from disaster zones appreciated the chance to champion a bill that would benefit their constituents, while members of the House Public Works Committee (which oversaw disaster relief) preferred the logrolling of individual disaster bills, where they could accumulate political debts from the representatives of disaster-afflicted states.^{Footnote 22} A similar pattern was evident with Social Security benefits, where congressmen enjoyed a more or less biennial tradition of passing increases for their constituents.^{Footnote 23}

The Senate passed the revised version, but Bayh almost immediately introduced a new bill that again expanded direct relief to individual victims. In hearings held back in Indiana to follow up on relief after the Palm Sunday tornadoes, one witness encapsulated the thrust of Bayh’s efforts: “It seems to me that your legislation here goes a long way to clarifying where the individual stands in a disaster program. . . . People that have suffered this kind of misfortune, they like to have some feeling of pride left, and it really gets so hard to be begging for things all the time, and it would help them, I think, to know that they have a clear legislative right, and we don’t need to plead or request these things; they are a matter of right.”^{Footnote 24} The invocation of “rights” is significant here. There was a long history of disaster victims presenting themselves to Congress as objects of pity who deserved compassion from the national government, as Michele Dauber has shown.^{Footnote 25} In the context of the 1960s, though, pleas for compassion began to mix with more forceful demands for entitlement for relief, undoubtedly influenced by the civil rights movement. As Hugh Heclo has noted, demands for rights led to national solutions: “a right could not exist in one corner of America and not another. Rights talk not only invited, it virtually compelled the nationalization of public policy.”^{Footnote 26} When, as we will see, the emerging belief in a right to disaster relief combined with the specific context of racial conflict in Mississippi following Hurricane Camille, that logic of nationalization was even more compelling.

One might expect that this logic would have advanced disaster relief policy to a more permanent national program during the Johnson administration. But though these sentiments were congruent with many Great Society initiatives, the administration actually proved to be another obstacle to Bayh’s legislation at this juncture. Johnson made a federal flood insurance program his priority for disaster policy and instructed his executive department heads to oppose Bayh’s bill in testimony (despite many having testified in support of Bayh’s bill in 1965).^{Footnote 27} Undaunted, Bayh introduced his bill once again in early 1969, but now, it was jousting with yet another special disaster bill, this time aimed at a series of floods and mudslides that had affected California in the winter and spring of 1969. The Senate passed Bayh’s bill, but the House passed a California-only bill, and the two chambers reached an impasse that likely meant another bill tailored to the particulars of a single disaster.^{Footnote 28}

Hurricane Camille

Hurricane Camille intervened to disrupt the congressional dynamic of disaster policymaking. Camille hit the Mississippi coast on August 17, 1969, during the congressional recess. Wind-speed estimates for the storm topped 200 mph, and at Pass Christian, Mississippi, one of the hardest-hit areas, the storm tide exceeded twenty-four feet. Though the hurricane had originally been predicted to hit Florida, it veered west and caught many victims unaware of its severity during the night. Pass Christian, Waveland, Bay St. Louis, Gulfport, and Biloxi, Mississippi, were the most severely damaged, along with Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, the wetland region at the mouth of Mississippi River. For about twenty-seven miles on the western edge of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the storm stripped away nearly all the structures several blocks in from the beach. The storm weakened as it moved inland, downgraded to a tropical depression, but it again changed course and hit central Virginia with intense rainfall, causing flash floods and landslides in mountain creeks and streams. Between Mississippi and Virginia, 250 people died, six thousand homes were destroyed, and more than fourteen thousand homes suffered major damage. Damage estimates exceeded those of Hurricane Betsy, nearing $1.5 billion.^{Footnote 29}

The effectiveness of local responses varied widely. The narrative histories of the disaster tend to stress the heroics of individual local officials. In Plaquemines Parish, parish commissioner Luke Petrovich, though part of the political machine run by the spectacularly corrupt and racist Judge Leander Perez, nonetheless had developed a well-organized evacuation plan that had been tested during Hurricane Betsy. Though Camille hit the parish hard, few people died there.^{Footnote 30} Along similar lines, Wade Guice, a Harrison County, Mississippi, civil defense official, is credited with convincing thousands to evacuate and worked tirelessly for days after the hurricane, despite the destruction of his own house.^{Footnote 31} However, some local governments simply fell apart in the wake of the hurricane. Shocked by the state of the small communities of Waveland, Pass Christian, and Bay St. Louis, one federal Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP) staff member remarked that “the government which may be adequate for day to day operations in normal times is grossly inadequate in times of emergency. They do not have the staff nor in my judgment, the competence to do the job.”^{Footnote 32}

The state response was also problematic. The Mississippi National Guard had evacuated most of the remaining residents of the Coast to points north, including a hotel in Jackson, Jackson State College, and the grounds of the National Guard’s facility Camp Shelby in Hattiesburg—but during the evacuation and in the facilities, officials repeatedly tried to racially segregate the victims.^{Footnote 33} This was hardly surprising. After all, as Camille hit, Mississippi was in the last throes of fighting federal orders to achieve meaningful desegregation in the schools.^{Footnote 34} A network of civil rights groups was already mobilized to monitor the state’s educational desegregation, and they were primed to critically examine the state’s response to the hurricane. An ad-hoc group of civil rights and antipoverty organizations formed the Combined Community Organizations Disaster Committee in early September, headed by Aaron Henry of the Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and run out of the office of the Mississippi Council on Human Relations. Other national organizations involved in school desegregation in the region, such as the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), also began to investigate the racial aspects of Hurricane Camille relief.^{Footnote 35}

Individual relief at first was largely in the hands of the American Red Cross. The Red Cross, whose quasi-governmental responsibility for disaster relief dated back to a congressional charter in 1905, depended on a mix of local volunteers and regional and national professional staff.^{Footnote 36} While the organization had slowly been ceding ground to public sources of disaster relief since World War II, they nonetheless remained the frontline agency for individual victims. They had set up over thirty emergency shelters on or near the coast to house evacuees from the hurricane, but despite praise by many later on for their efforts, the organization stumbled badly in its immediate response.^{Footnote 37} In early September, the executive national vice president of the Red Cross, John C. Wilson, admitted to OEP Director George “Abe” Lincoln that the local chapters of the Red Cross on the Gulf had been caught off guard and “collapsed completely.”^{Footnote 38} The Red Cross blamed state and local officials for poor coordination.^{Footnote 39} The sheer scale of the disaster would undoubtedly have taxed the organization in the best of times, but the growing expectations of a right to adequate relief in the wake of calamities would put the organization under more intense scrutiny than in the past.

The federal government poured massive resources into the Gulf Coast, urged on by the Mississippi and Louisiana congressional delegations. President Nixon declared Mississippi and Louisiana, and later Virginia and West Virginia, major disaster areas, and Vice President Spiro Agnew, Housing and Urban Development Secretary George Romney, OEP Director Lincoln, and James Collins, president of the National Red Cross, flew to Mississippi on August 20 to inspect the damage and observe the relief effort. Nixon visited personally on September 8 and flew back to Washington with Mississippi Senators John Stennis and John Eastland, Congressman Colmer and Governor Williams on Air Force One. Upon returning to Washington, Nixon appointed his aide and Mississippi GOP activist (and future Watergate “bagman”) Fred La Rue as his unofficial liaison to state officials to facilitate the flow of disaster funds.^{Footnote 40} Not only was the profile of the presidency in disaster relief gradually increasing in tandem with the greater resources at its disposal, but Nixon was also specifically seeking the favor of Stennis, who controlled a key vote on the administration’s proposed antiballistic missile program. Stennis was already using the ABM vote as leverage for the administration to back down on the enforcement of school desegregation, so a sweetener of copious disaster relief was most likely foremost in Nixon’s mind.^{Footnote 41}

But federal relief also faced some immediate problems. While the region benefitted in the short term from the plentiful military resources in and near the Gulf Coast, longer-term assistance faltered quickly. Most notable was the provision of temporary housing on the massive scale that Camille required. Federal law had, since 1951, authorized the provision of emergency housing to disaster victims, one of the most tangible services provided by the federal government to individual victims (the Red Cross shelters, and the Camp Shelby facility, where most of the evacuees who were moved upstate ended up, were only intended for short-term stays). By 1969, the Department of Housing and Urban Development was responsible for the program, but, like many disaster programs in larger federal departments, it was more or less an afterthought from the department’s main functions.^{Footnote 42} When Camille struck, agency personnel scrambled to find any surplus trailers owned by the federal government; coming up short, they began to contract with suppliers to lease mobile homes to ship in to the coast.^{Footnote 43} The pace of trailers arriving in Mississippi was tortuously slow and soon began to attract political and media attention. By late August, Congressman Colmer’s assistant, Trent Lott, was fielding calls from constituents about problems getting trailers, and Colmer began haranguing the OEP and HUD about the issue. Colmer was joined by an unlikely ally, Dr. Gilbert Mason, the president of the Biloxi chapter of the NAACP, who sent a telegram to Clarence Mitchell in the Washington NAACP office asking for help in expediting trailer delivery. By mid-September, the national television networks were running stories on the problems with the trailer program.^{Footnote 44}

Even before the problems in relief had become apparent, the sheer scale of the damage from Camille was enough to jolt the legislative process back in Washington, where the conference committee was attempting to reconcile Bayh’s broad disaster relief bill with the narrower House California bill. Though Bayh was on a trip to the Soviet Union when the hurricane struck, his legislative aide Clark Norton recounted that immediately after Camille hit, the press started calling to ask about the status of the bill and why it was being delayed.^{Footnote 45} At the same time, no fewer than four bills were introduced in the Senate and House for specific relief to the Camille-affected states by Eastland, Stennis, Colmer, and Louisiana congressman Hale Boggs. Most of the bills had lifted parts verbatim from the Bayh bill passed by the Senate earlier that year, but applied them only to Camille (later rolling in California as well). There were not many substantive differences, outside of their geographic scope, between the Camille bills and Bayh’s national measure. Significantly, Eastland’s staff indicated to Norton that they would now be willing to go along with a broader bill—one of the first times an influential southern conservative had joined on with Bayh’s national approach.^{Footnote 46} However, Congressman Bob Jones of Alabama, chair of the House Public Works Committee, at first refused to agree to anything more than a Camille-California bill. A frustrated Norton concluded that the House, and the Public Works Committee in particular, valued the political benefits of sponsoring specific legislation over creating a “uniform, permanent” system. “This is a cynical view but it is hard to understand their position otherwise.”^{Footnote 47} Jones was finally coaxed into supporting a national bill that was limited in time to disasters in 1968 and 1969, not ideal from Norton’s and Bayh’s point of view, but enough of a precedent to open the door for further extension.^{Footnote 48}

Race and the Politics of Disaster Relief

Even as the bill was being hashed out in committee, events on the ground were starting to change the political calculus of disaster relief. Civil rights organizations were primed to expect the worst from the relief effort. The Combined Community Organizations Disaster Committee (the coalition of civil rights groups) was on the lookout for further evidence of bad intentions after the segregation debacle during evacuation, and national civil rights organizations were putting their feelers out through their contacts in the state. It wasn’t long before accusations of racial discrimination in the relief process also began to surface.^{Footnote 49} On the coast, African Americans found themselves ill served by local relief efforts, particularly the Red Cross. Dr. Gilbert Mason of the Biloxi chapter of the NAACP recalled, “Red Cross workers in Biloxi developed a reputation for needlessly humiliating those seeking relief, whom they often seemed to make beg, cajole, or grovel for assistance.”^{Footnote 50} Red Cross personnel at times explicitly favored whites—some clothing distribution centers held back better clothing in rooms they opened only to whites.^{Footnote 51} And Red Cross reimbursement policies for food and shelter followed their traditional practice of restoring victims to the status quo ante; victims who were better off often got more substantial reimbursement for more expensive household effects, for instance, than poorer people. Most damning was a schedule for food stipends with two budget categories, one to be given to low-income families that provided cheaper food such as potatoes and dried beans, while the “moderate cost” budget allowed for fruit, eggs, higher-priced cuts of meat, and some frozen and convenience food.^{Footnote 52} Many local whites, in contrast, perceived blacks as taking advantage of Red Cross disaster assistance to upgrade their pre-disaster standard of living; the New York Times quoted a Bay St. Louis motel operator, “‘I’ll never contribute to the Red Cross again . . . people too proud to beg weren’t offered a thing and those are the same people who support the Red Cross. But the colored came from all over with their hands out and grabbed up everything they could.’”^{Footnote 53}

The actual and perceived racial indignities suffered by African American disaster victims were compounded by the perception that there was little that the Nixon administration intended to do to counter these trends in Mississippi. In the context of the school desegregation battle, in 1969, Nixon had sent a number of conciliatory signals to white southerners, infuriating national civil rights leaders.^{Footnote 54} Most controversially, Nixon agreed that federal disaster aid and reconstruction in the state should be coordinated by the Governor’s Emergency Council, an ad hoc group appointed by Williams with no black members and with only three of its ten members from the Gulf Coast. Contemporary observers viewed the council as Nixon’s attempt to curry favor with conservative Mississippi Democrats and as a proving ground for “New Federalism” decentralized policymaking.^{Footnote 55} As the Reverend Kenneth Dean of the Mississippi Council on Human Relations later said, “There was from the beginning an atmosphere or attitude that caused many of us to believe that long-range planning would take place in a form that would not give priority interest to black people and other minority groups.”^{Footnote 56}

Senate Public Works Committee staffers had been in contact with civil rights groups over the allegations as well as about the general disorganization of the relief effort (particularly the trailer program), and several traveled down to the region to conduct their own investigation. Edmund Muskie’s staff took particular interest and convinced both Bayh and Public Works chairman Jennings Randolph to consider another series of hearings to observe the implementation of relief.^{Footnote 57} Bayh and Randolph had already created a new special subcommittee on disaster relief to begin to build on the 1969 law toward a consolidated and permanent disaster statute, but were, according to one Muskie staff member, somewhat reluctant to hold hearings that might antagonize southern governors. But the impending release of a report by the AFSC and the Southern Regional Council (SRC) detailing discrimination in Camille relief, as well as a threat by Muskie to hold his own independent hearings, led them to agree to open hearings in Biloxi as well as in Virginia.^{Footnote 58} The AFSC had sent a fact-finding team to Mississippi for several weeks in the fall, which had catalogued the crimes of commission and omission in the relief effort, and compiled these into a joint report with the SRC.^{Footnote 59} The release of the AFSC/SRC report in November ratcheted up the pressure even further, as it catalogued not only the failings of voluntary, local, and state leaders, but accused federal agencies, particularly the SBA, of discrimination in lending practices, and in general indicted the federal effort for paying attention more to physical reconstruction than the needs of individuals.^{Footnote 60} The threat of a lawsuit against the Department of Commerce for its planning grant to the Governor’s Emergency Council despite the council’s exclusion of blacks also heightened the political salience of the Camille issue.^{Footnote 61}

Senate staffers for the Public Works Committee were well aware of the potential for the hearings in Mississippi to improve the chances for permanent disaster legislation. As one recalled, Camille was “a glorious hurricane. . . . We decided that this was the time to strike.” The racial angle, in his view, was the key hook: “All in all it had the makings of a bomb.”^{Footnote 62} Muskie was already actively contemplating a run for president in 1972 and saw the chance for national publicity and to reiterate his civil rights bona fides. “There was no better stage for thundering righteous indignation than this one,” said a Muskie aide.^{Footnote 63} While the disorganization of federal relief had initially attracted Muskie’s aides, the evidence that would emerge in the hearings of discrimination by local Red Cross chapters as well as the state offered a more vivid narrative. It also fit into a broader pattern of disillusionment with federalism on the part of many Democratic liberals, frustrated by the way that southern states had abused the latitude given them in a federal system.^{Footnote 64} The Camille relief effort offered up a perfect case study of a policy area where the federal government could counteract southern racial prejudice.

Bayh would ultimately strike a more conciliatory note in the South, but presidential visions were dancing around his head as well; he had enjoyed a good deal of press coverage during the fall of 1969 thanks to his vocal opposition to Nixon’s nomination of Clement Haynsworth to the Supreme Court, and began seriously contemplating a presidential run that winter. The disaster subcommittee, while not a “dynamite” issue, nonetheless afforded him some national publicity as well.^{Footnote 65} Those under the microscope perceived politics at work as well. When the hearings were announced, an arch-conservative Mississippi columnist complained, “Senator Bayh, who led the inquisition against Judge Haynsworth, elated over his victory, is continuing his role of sectional hatred and persecution,” while Congressman Colmer warned, “I hope this will not prove to be another effort by misguided liberals to downgrade Mississippi.”^{Footnote 66} An OEP staff member groused to Lincoln, “The Muskie-Bayh effort is intended to establish the impression, through nationwide news media, that they, particularly Senator Muskie, are concerned about poor people in general and Negroes in particular, and that the Administration is not. Senator Muskie’s motives are purely POLITICAL.”^{Footnote 67}

Hurricane Camille and the Disaster Relief Act of 1970

Thus, when the hearings opened in the Broadwater Hotel in early January, the stage was set for high political theater. All three national networks and national print media covered the event. While many of the veteran national correspondents on civil rights had moved on from Mississippi by 1969, the national media infrastructure in the South was still robust and attuned to civil rights.^{Footnote 68} Though the focus purportedly was on problems with federal relief, the thrust of the three days’ testimony was that local and state relief efforts, the supposed frontline of disaster relief, were also woefully lacking in ability and also in equity. The cataloguing of discrimination at the hands of the Red Cross, the seemingly irrepressible urge by state authorities to impose segregation, along with allegations of poor outreach by the SBA and mismanagement of the HUD trailer program, left the carefully designed impression of the need to strengthen and extend federal relief policies. A more substantial federal effort could counter the indignities faced by the poor and African Americans in the wake of the hurricane.^{Footnote 69}

With Muskie on the attack, the hearings garnered the publicity its organizers had hoped for, but it allowed Bayh to appear less heavy-handed. OEP officials were furious at the criticism leveled by the Biloxi hearings, even though few instances of direct discrimination at the hands of the federal government were ultimately confirmed. Senator Dole had defended the performance of the federal agencies, but OEP Director Lincoln fumed in notes to himself after the hearings, “Hurricanes are discriminatory. Federal disaster relief is not.” One of Lincoln’s assistants excoriated Muskie’s prosecutorial conduct of the hearings, arguing that with the help of a “friendly press,” he succeeded in his aim to “dramatize himself as a champion of the poor and the Negro, and to further accentuate his criticism of the Administration.”^{Footnote 70}

Nonetheless, the media attention given by the Mississippi hearings, with the drawing power of the racial narrative, created the policy opening Bayh had waited years for.^{Footnote 71} Immediately after returning to Washington, Bayh held a press conference to propose a new, permanent disaster relief act. Bayh used the moment to push for a bill that would permanently authorize the sections of the 1969 bill that were due to expire at the end of 1970, and proposed additional measures such as a revolving fund for loans to communities that had lost their tax base in disasters, a combination of the Office of Emergency Preparedness and the Office of Civil Defense, and a new federally subsidized all-hazards disaster insurance program.^{Footnote 72}

This time, the anticipated House resistance did not materialize. Bayh and Norton agreed to drop the insurance proposal due to probable opposition in the House as well as the reorganization proposal, which the administration opposed, but beyond that, the scope of the Camille disaster, and the problems with implementation of relief revealed at the hearings, had changed the political calculus.^{Footnote 73} Congressman Colmer’s experience with his constituents after Camille apparently convinced him that a permanent disaster program was preferable to episodic, disaster-driven relief bills. It is unlikely that the testimony on discrimination stirred Colmer, and Bayh’s relatively low-key approach, compared to Muskie’s more visible role, in the hearings and afterward, most likely helped retain Colmer’s support for a broader bill. As OEP Director Lincoln recalled, “Senator Bayh was at some pains to indicate that he tried to conduct the hearings in Mississippi fairly, and that he himself was only looking for better disaster legislation and management.”^{Footnote 74}As chairman of the powerful Rules Committee, Colmer was a significant ally in the House. A well-timed tornado in June 1970, in Lubbock, Texas, hometown of Congressman George Mahon, proved important as well. Mahon chaired the House Appropriations Committee, and the tornado was enough to throw his support toward the Bayh bill. With the two venerable southern Democrats pressuring the House Public Works Committee, the House members finally agreed on a permanent bill of national scope. Congressman Bob Jones, who had fought so hard to preserve the prerogatives of the House in doling out disaster relief, relented. Throughout the conference process the broader and more liberal Senate bill prevailed, and ultimately passed that winter by voice votes in both chambers.^{Footnote 75}

The 1970 Disaster Relief Act would be put to the test in 1972, in the wake of a severe flash flood in Rapid City, South Dakota, and Hurricane Agnes in Pennsylvania. There were a host of problems with the administration of federal assistance (the trailer program again proved to be difficult to manage, as it had in 1969), but when compared to Camille, the criticism was focused almost exclusively on the federal program, rather than on the state and local response. When George Romney, Nixon’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, was sent to absorb the anger of area residents, one activist confronted him face to face and accused him, “‘You don’t give a damn whether we live or die!’”^{Footnote 76} Her statement encapsulated the shift in expectations of the federal government that the 1970 act had sought to embody. The new law accomplished what Bayh and his allies had hoped: that individuals could now anticipate, at least in the case of severe disasters, that the federal government would weave a tighter safety net that would treat all disaster victims equitably and would help them back on their feet more quickly than the previous patchwork of state, local, and voluntary resources. As the aftermath of Agnes suggested, the anticipation was often greater than the actuality, as federal disaster relief would continue to be plagued with administrative and logistical problems. But the shift is still noteworthy. No longer wholly dependent on the vagaries of local relief organizations or the political power of their congressional representatives to obtain special legislation, disaster victims could now, at least in theory, expect assistance as a right of national citizenship.