As a result of this disruption, many joined the Great Migration from the South to the industrial cities of the North and the Midwest; the migrants preferred to move, rather than return to rural agricultural labor.

Then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover's handling of the crisis gave him a positive nationwide reputation, helping pave the way to his election as U.S. President in 1928.

This commission recommended raising extensive levees along its channels to contain the flow, dismissing the advice of experts such as James Eads, who had directed the Saint Louis Bridge project in the 1860s.

[8] Without trees, grasses, deep roots, and wetlands, the denuded soil of the watershed could not do its ancient work of absorbing floodwater after seasons of intense snow and rain.

A group of influential bankers in New Orleans met to discuss how to guarantee the safety of the city, as they had already learned of the massive scale of flooding upriver.

Historians estimate that of the 637,000 people forced to relocate by the flooding, 94% lived in three states: Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana; and that 69% of the 325,146 who occupied the relief camps were African American.

Louisiana received $1,067,336 from the federal government for rebuilding,[14] but it had to institute a state gasoline tax to create a $30,000,000 fund to pay for new hard-surfaced highways.

Channeling of waters has reduced the absorption of seasonal rains by the floodplains, increasing the speed of the current and preventing the deposit of new soils along the way.

To better study and plan for future situations, Lt. Eugene Raybold proposed laying out a physical hydraulic model to simulate the basin's response to various rainfall scenarios.

[21][22] The devastation of the flood and the strained racial relations resulted in many African Americans joining the Great Migration from affected areas to northern and midwestern cities, a movement that had been underway since World War I.

Hostilities had erupted between the races; a Black man was shot and killed by a white police officer when he refused to unload a relief boat at gunpoint.

[26][27] Herbert Hoover enhanced his reputation by his achievements in directing flood relief operations as Secretary of Commerce under President Calvin Coolidge.

In upstate Louisiana, anger among yeomen farmers directed at the New Orleans elite for its damage of downriver parishes aided Huey Long's election to the governorship in 1928.

[29] The refugee camps also dealt with extreme racial inequality, as supplies and means of evacuation after flooding were given strictly to white citizens, with Blacks receiving only leftovers.

[28]: 259–290 [note 1] Several reports on the terrible situation in the refugee camps, including one by the Colored Advisory Commission headed by Robert Russa Moton, were kept out of the media at Hoover's request, with the pledge of further reforms for Blacks after the presidential election in 1928.