What Does American History Tell Us about Katrina and Vice Versa

Natural disasters invariably provoke a range of reactions. Bereavement mingles with an ger. The need to commemorate competes with the urge to blame. Boosterism gets a boost. No matter how deep the ash or how high the rubble, you will always find a politician or business leader promising to bring back a just-ruined city bigger and better than before. Storms, fires, earthquakes, mudslides?these are mere blessings in disguise. What was broken, dysfunctional, and decrepit has been leveled or swept away. Now, long-overdue improvements can finally be launched. The optimistic narratives of resilience and resur rection, so necessary for marshaling the will and the capital to rebuild in the teeth of catastrophe, fill the pages of American urban history. They resounded after the great Chicago fire of 1871 and the Galveston hurricane of 1900. In San Francisco after the earthquake and fire of 1906, local boosters styled themselves "regenerators," to let people know they were as interested in purification as in rebuilding.1 Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans's pledge to restore the waterlogged metropolis to all its former grandeur, and then some, echoed that language of rebirth and renewal. The businessmen and de velopers, civic leaders and college presidents, who dominated his Bring New Orleans Back Commission (bnobc) repeated it as well, even as many of them favored shrinking the city's footprint. President George W. Bush paid boosterism the ultimate compliment when he told a national television audience from a mostly darkened French Quarter sev enteen days after the storm: "We will not just rebuild, we will build higher and better."2 Natural disasters also have political effects. Without fail they shift the ground of lo cal politics. The looting that inevitably follows catastrophe triggers repressive measures. To restore law and order, the militia comes to town. The police are told to shoot to kill. Vigilantes are given license. In a short time, the assault on civil liberties elicits a demo cratic backlash, if not challenges in the courts. Then there is the political opportunism of the business community, which tends to view crises as terrible things to waste. Good