Katrina returns the poor of inner city to forefront

WASHINGTON -- When ordering people to leave New Orleans while Hurricane Katrina lurked in the Gulf of Mexico, state and federal authorities apparently failed to consider that 27.9 percent of the city was below the poverty line and therefore unlikely to have transportation.

The oversight was perhaps more understandable given that society as a whole seemed to have tabled its debate over poor, largely black, inner-city neighborhoods somewhere around two decades ago. Over the years, there have been a few Los Angeles-type flare-ups, some intriguing economic proposals by former housing secretary Jack Kemp, a few good speeches by President Bill Clinton, and a reminder of the ''two Americas" from last year's vice-presidential candidate John Edwards. But otherwise it's hard to remember that the fate of the inner-city poor was once a defining issue in American politics.

The searing images of New Orleans -- including the sight of sick and elderly patients literally lying on a conveyer belt at Louis Armstrong airport -- could well mark America's rediscovery of its poor.

The national shame seems partly due to uncomfortable comparisons with Iraq and other hot spots. Out in the world, where Americans go to war and perform humanitarian missions, chaos is taken to be part of the indigenous conditions. But the images from Louisiana aren't very different from those in Iraq or African countries beset by civil wars: All are awash with hunger, disease, violence, and hopelessness.

The notion that a disaster offers a mirror to the country, forcing a bitter reconsideration of its own condition, should not be a surprise. It happened in the United States with the 1927 Louisiana flood, a catastrophe that shook American politics in its time.

Back in the Jazz Age, the America of Wall Street wealth and scientific advances paid little heed to the still-primitive conditions of the rural poor. While the lights of Times Square dazzled the world, most of the South still lacked electricity; while Charles Lindbergh stretched the bounds of what was humanly possible by flying nonstop across the Atlantic, families in the Mississippi Delta lacked even flat boats to carry them to safety in a flood.

Back then, it didn't take a hurricane to break the levees along the Mississippi. Heavy rains in the summer of 1926 left the river and many of its tributaries dangerously overswollen, and by the winter of 1926-1927 areas within 60 miles of the Mississippi basin began to fill up with water. Six states were affected, with Louisiana among the worst hit, even though the destruction of levees north of New Orleans spared the city at the expense of rural areas.

The death toll was 246, but 700,000 people -- half of them black -- were displaced. Then, as now, haunting pictures and descriptions of the devastation shocked the country. Many blacks were herded into unsanitary evacuation camps.

Amid rising public anger, Herbert Hoover -- then the secretary of commerce -- swept in to oversee relief efforts. Hoover won high marks for his take-charge attitude, though many scholars believe that black resentment over the way the Republican administration handled relief efforts caused the historic shift in black allegience from the Republican to Democratic Party.

The need for federal action challenged President Calvin Coolidge's belief in small government. Coolidge's lack of comprehension of the scope of the disaster was ridiculed in songs, and some historians now regard it as a symbol of Jazz Age indifference, a preview of the social disarray that would mark the Depression years.

Conditions in the United States in 2005 are much different, but the US Census Bureau told a sad story about Louisiana even without the flood: Fully a fifth of the state in poverty, a median income a quarter below the national average, lower-than-average rates of students obtaining high school diplomas or going to college. It's the kind of story that provoked government action from the New Deal coalition that ruled American politics from the 1930s to the 1980s -- a coalition built, in part, on the legacy of the 1927 flood.

Last week, President Bush, while overseeing relief efforts, urged victims to look to faith-based groups for help, a reflection of his preference for nongovernmental solutions. But the 1927 flood is remembered not only for creating the imperative for federal disaster relief, but for ushering in an era of big government.

Perhaps that is why Bush and the Republican-led Congress are rushing to dispel any notion that they were slow off the mark in addressing the crisis. Hurricane Katrina could saturate American politics for a long time.

Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.