Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Articles
I would like to thank Gareth Davies and Paul Milazzo for their close reading and valuable suggestions for improving this essay, as well as others who have offered feedback, including John Burnham, Tom Krainz, Marion Moser Jones, and Patrick Roberts. Thanks also to Kate Cruikshank at the Modern Political Papers at the Indiana University Libraries, Elaine Ardia at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections at Bates College, and the staffs at the National Archives in College Park and at the Special Collections, McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi. Finally, thanks to my interviewees and correspondents for this project, particularly Senator Birch Bayh and Ms. Katherine Bayh.
Although it still smelled slightly of seaweed, the dining room at the Broadwater Beach Motel in Biloxi, Mississippi, was about the only choice for hearings when the Special Subcommittee on Disaster Relief from the Senate Public Works Committee met in January 1970. "Couldn't find anything else in the whole area," recalled one participant; "they were all knocked down."1Hurricane Camille, one of the most powerful hurricanes to hit the United States in the twentieth century, had scoured the beachfront of the Mississippi Gulf Coast in August 1969, killing 143 people. The Broadwater, though its first floor had been flooded during the storm, was one of the few large public spaces to escape major structural damage and to be usable five months later.2The subcommittee, headed by Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, consisted of Senator William Spong of Virginia (Camille had also deluged a narrow valley in central Virginia, killing 113 people), Mike Gravel of Alaska, newly elected Senator Robert Dole, representing the Republican minority, and Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, a member of the Public Works Committee who had helped arrange the hearings.
After a few moments granted to local Congressman William Colmer to address the hearing, the committee turned to its first witness, Governor John Bell Williams. Though Bayh was deferential to Williams, Muskie quickly zeroed in on the subject that had inspired the hearings in the first place--accusations of racial discrimination in the handling of relief after the hurricane. Such accusations about Mississippi would not have surprised anybody in early 1970, considering the state's...