The 1937 Flood and Bourke-White's Billboard
Near Louisville, Kentucky
The rain started falling on January ninth, nineteen thirty-seven, and did not stop for two weeks. When the Ohio River crested at fifty-seven feet in Louisville, seventy percent of the city was underwater. One hundred seventy-five thousand people were forced from their homes. Sixty-five square miles of Jefferson County were submerged. The number of flood-related deaths in Louisville reached one hundred ninety. Across the entire Ohio River valley, three hundred eighty-five people died and one million were left homeless.
The flood-protection infrastructure that existed in Louisville in nineteen thirty-seven was minimal. The city had never experienced anything like it. People fled to second floors, to rooftops, to higher ground, some with what they could carry and many with nothing. The Belle of Louisville, which was then operating as the excursion steamer Avalon, ferried evacuees. The National Guard was mobilized. The Red Cross opened relief stations.
A photographer for Life magazine named Margaret Bourke-White flew into Louisville on assignment and began documenting what she found. On a street in the city, she photographed a line of Black flood refugees, many of them carrying belongings, waiting for Red Cross relief. Behind them stretched a billboard paid for by the National Association of Manufacturers. The billboard read: "World's Highest Standard of Living. There's No Way Like the American Way." The billboard depicted a white family smiling from a large automobile.
The photograph Bourke-White took ran in Life in February of nineteen thirty-seven. It became one of the most circulated images of the Depression era. What made it powerful was not manipulation. It was the accident of juxtaposition. The billboard had been there before the flood. Bourke-White simply put her camera where reality put the contrast.
The floodwall that now protects Louisville, twenty-nine miles of earthen and concrete barrier, was begun in nineteen forty-eight and took nearly forty years to complete. It is why you do not think about flooding when you walk along the riverfront today.
