Speech of Senator Harry S. Truman at the Mississippi Valley Flood Control Association
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SPEECH OF HONORABLE HARRY S. TRUMAN
Before Members of the Mississippi Valley
FOR PELEASE ON DELIVERY, October 12. 1944
Flood Control Association
For five yeafs I have attended the sissions of the Mississippi Valley
Flood Control Association, and have found them most instructive. I am attending
them this year, even in the midst of an election campaign, because I believe that
flood control is one of our most importatnt problems, and because I believe that
your activities are truly a service to the whole nation.
Water under control is our greatest asset. Without it we could not live.
But not even fire is more terrible or destructive than raging floods. We all recall
the great flood on the Mississippi River in 1927. 700,000 people were driven from
their homes. More than a quarter jillion livestock were drowned. And more than four
million acres of crops were destroyed.
Terrible as that disaster was, it was only the greatest of a large number
of floods that for years had devastated our great river valleys, the most fertile
land in the United States.
The loss was not confined to the hardships of the people in the lower
reaches of the river valleys who were flooded out. A less immediate and less
spectacular but enormously important loss was sustained by those in the upper
valleys as far north as Minnesota, They suffered from soil erosion, declining
fertility of the land, a lowering of the ground water level and a loss of water
that could have been used to great advantage for power nd navigation pruposes.
For example, the United States Department of Agriculture in August, 1928, the year
after the great flood estimated that soil erosion alone was costing the farmers two
hundred million dollars a year.
The cost of proper flood control would be great, just as the cost of
insurance premiums is great. But the returns from sound flood control practices
can exceed the cost. Through intelligent action, a national scourge can be turned
into a national asset of the first magni tude.
to NARA
Terms
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Flood control
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