Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever by Geoff Williams Page A

public—and yet, anyone who goes throughout life not knowing how to swim is putting their life at risk. That’s underscored every time there is a drowning in the news, of course, but during the summer of 2010, when six teenagers in the Red River drowned in Shreveport, Louisiana, it put a spotlight on how many African-Americans don’t know how to swim: seventy percent of black youth, according to many of the reports that came out shortly after the tragedy. Children at a family get-together waded into the Red River, and one of the teenagers stepped off a ledge, falling into water almost twenty-five feet deep. A cousin tried to rescue him but also slipped over the ledge. More teenaged relatives and friends attempted to help the two, but they didn’t know how to swim and drowned. The grownups watched, horror-stricken, but none of them knew how to swim either.
    It wasn’t a tough call for many communities to include the female persuasion in swimming lessons. Women and girls drowned just as easily as men and boys, although it did seem to usually be the latter who did drown. In a culture in which girls were considered nonathletic, dainty, and pure, the boys took more risks. One syndicated article that ran in May 1913, around the country in papers like Frederick, Maryland’s Daily News, observed: “Every mother of a boy who is nearenough a swimming pool is haunted during the summer by the fear that her child will meet his death.… Every boy likes to show his prowess by going out farther than the others and oftentimes this venturesome spirit is the cause of drowning.”
    In fact, since at least the 1880s, the term “drowning season” has been employed to describe the summertime. As Washington Post noted in a July 15, 1913 editorial, two days earlier, eight people in Boston had drowned and four more near Philadelphia, “and every large city reported one or more similar accidents on the same day.” The editorial pointed out that boys who grew up near the wharves of a big city, “the kind we call street urchins, rarely die from drowning. They learn to swim when they are 7 or 8 years old, and they never forget how to take care of themselves in the water.”
    The editorial concluded with a chilling suggestion that was clearly influenced by the March and April floods in the country just a few months before: “Both boys and girls should be taught to swim, not only in bathing suits, but with heavy clothes on their bodies.”
    Nobody could argue that. In fact, the phrase “don’t rock the boat” appears to have started because so many people didn’t know how to swim, and the last thing you wanted, when you were climbing into a tiny vessel floating in a muddy, fast-moving current, was for the boat to rock.
    March 24, Dayton, Ohio
    John H. Patterson wasn’t preparing for a flood. He was preparing to go to jail.
    Several weeks earlier, on February 13, Patterson, the founder of Dayton’s famed National Cash Register Company, and his right-hand man, sales manager Thomas J. Watson, who would someday create a little company known as IBM, were found guilty in an anti-trust suit, accused of creating a monopoly.
    This was not, at least not for Patterson’s competition, simply about trying to get a piece of the pie of the lucrative cash register market in an ethical and legal way. If the charges against Patterson were true, and there is ample evidence that they were, Patterson’s salesmen literally threatened their competitors’ salesmen. They bribed freight agents to hold up shipments of the other guy’s products and then poured sandin their competitors’ machines to put them out of order. Patterson’s men then opened offices next door to new companies selling cash registers with super cheap prices that would knock them out of business. They hired salesmen at rival companies and paid them to spy on their employer and report back to NCR.