Home Today, Gone Tomorrow

PETER: This last segment I want to share with you comes from the show “Weathering the Storm: A History of Extreme Weather.”

It’s a riff with the three of us — me, you and Ed. And in it, we talk about the social impact of hurricanes.

BRIAN: Peter, I lost track of the number of riffs we’ve done together, and I have to tell you I love each and every one of them, but I am curious as you why you picked this one.

PETER: Well Brian, I think some of the magic of BackStory – well I’ll say all of it for me – was when the three of us were brainstorming together, when we didn’t prep, and we surprised each other. We had a lot of fun coming up with some new ideas and new insights right on the spot in conversation. As I like to put it, thinking with our mouths.

And we came up with an idea in this particular riff on hurricanes, and hurricanes just blew right through the centuries, we ended up developing a theme about the impact of hurricanes that seemed right, and you concluded it. You just brought it home at the end when you said “you know, even though we’ve tried in the 20th and 21st centuries to make the world safe for all Americans, because after all, we’re all created equal, it turns out that when a big storm comes along, guess who’s going to benefit from it? Not you, not me, not most of our listeners (forgive me if you’re rich), it’s the rich people.

So that was the big theme and it goes back to the 17th century, a big through line through our history and it just blew me away.

So Ed starts us off here with a question.

E. Ayers: So, I’ve got a question for you guys. I know both of you know all about the places where hurricanes hit. They were big storms, were the most extreme of extreme weather as the history of the United States goes. Whether it’s the Caribbean of the 18th century or Brian’s beloved Florida of the 20th and 21st centuries, it seemed to me that these hurricanes that blow through with such regularity must’ve been a great social equalizer. They must’ve sort of taken down the houses of the powerful and given—

P. Onuf: Levelers, so to speak.

E. Ayers: Levelers, yeah, and given other people a chance at a start. Would that be a fair supposition or not?

P. Onuf: No. No. Absolutely wrong, Ed, and the reason is this: hurricanes and extreme weather events generally have differential impact. Now, in the West Indies, the great development in the 17th century, before my century, as plantation societies emerge in the Sugar Islands, the big development is consolidation. It’s the people who have lots of labor, lots of land, and lots of credit back in the metropolis, back in Britain, those are the people who can ride out a storm and not only ride it out, but pick up the pieces afterward, and it’s the big slaveholders who pick off the small farmers who can’t rebound after extreme weather, after a hurricane, and in some ways, the places that best sustain middling sorts are the places without extreme weather, in the temperate climates, and hurricanes, I think, epitomize the ways that climate encourages the rapid consolidation of wealth.

E. Ayers: Because, it would strike me, the same places that would foster a hurricane also foster environments when you could grow very valuable crops.

P. Onuf: That’s absolutely the point, Ed.

E. Ayers: Yeah, but Brian, you don’t grow valuable crops in the 20th century—

B. Balogh: Hey, tourists are our most valuable crops…

P. Onuf: Whoa.

B. Balogh: Ed, so just watch what you’re saying, but I shouldn’t be mean to you because actually your supposition for the 20th century is kind of correct in an aspirational way.

E. Ayers: Right. Partial credit. That’s all I ask.

B. Balogh: Yep. And here’s the partial credit. We in the 20th century aspire to great projects of equality, egalitarian projects and we believe through construction methods and building codes on a house-by-house basis, are going to make houses safe, whether they’re the houses of poor people or of wealthy people—

P. Onuf: Sounds great, Brian.

B. Balogh: So your supposition is what fuels so much in the 20th century. Sadly, this does not pan out in reality and here’s why. A combination of hubris and federal insurance actually lures people to where the hurricanes are, only to see those people wiped out. Now, who benefits after that destruction?

E. Ayers: Well, Peter has told us it’s the rich.

B. Balogh: Yeah, and the story is pretty much the same thing in the 20th century. They have access to capital and what they tend to do is use these natural disasters to in a way fast forward the economy of an area, so if you had smaller houses and that fishermen lived in along the Gulf Coast at the very time that fishing is becoming less economically viable, people, let’s say a wealthy land developer who is trying to grow a cash crop which is called northern tourists—

P. Onuf: I like it.

B. Balogh: They use that natural disaster in a way to do part of their work, clear out the land, use capital to buy up large plots of land and really fast forward that economy to what today we called the Sun Belt.

E. Ayers: So, my question was freaking awesome because even though it turned out to be exactly wrong, it did show an important continuity across American history which is hard to find. [laughter] Really, things changed so radically, but here’s a case that extreme weather tends to create extreme social orders.