Working Paper: Understanding the Multiple Roles of the Emergency Manager Through Pomerance’S the Elephant Man

1 Working Paper: Understanding the Multiple Roles of the Emergency Manager through Pomerance’s The Elephant Man Cindy L Pressley ([email protected]) and Michael Noel ([email protected]) Stephen F Austin State University *Cindy L Pressley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Stephen F Austin State University. Michael Noel is a graduate student in the Master’s of Public Administration Program at Stephen F Austin State University. 2 Working Paper: Understanding the Multiple Roles of the Emergency Manager through Pomerance’s The Elephant Man BISHOP: I find my sessions with him utterly moving, Mr. Treves. He struggles so. I suggested he might like to be confirmed; he leaped at it like a man lost in a desert to an oasis. TREVES: He is very excited to do what others do if he thinks it is what others do. BISHOP: Do you cast doubt, sir, on his faith? TREVES: No, sir, I do not. Yet he makes all of us think he is deeply like ourselves. And yet we’re not like each other. I conclude that we have polished him like a mirror, and shout hallelujah when he reflects us to the inch. I have grown sorry for it. -p. 64, The Elephant Man This paper first began to develop out of a story told by William Alexander Percy in his autobiography Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son originally published in 1941. One story he relates is that of the deadly 1927 Mississippi flood that killed close to 1,000 people. During the flood Percy was placed in the position of Flood Relief Committee and Red Cross chairman. “I found myself charged with the rescuing, housing, and feeding of sixty thousand human beings and thirty thousand head of stock. To assist me in the task I had a fine committee and Father’s blessing, but no money, no boats, no tents, no food” (Percy, 1941, p. 251). Unlike today there was no FEMA. Percy was aided by various locals, such as bootleggers, and received some help from the National Guard and the Red Cross. Percy explains how he acted to confiscate necessary items such as boats and food. “We sent out a nation-wide appeal. The response was immediate and on a grand scale. Whenever you are just about to decide that Americans are selfish, unpatriotic, and unintelligent, they always prove themselves the most liberal and lovable people in the world” (Percy, 1941, pp. 252-253). Percy discusses the 3 difficulties he faced in managing the needs of the population in such a chaotic situation. Eventually the situation deteriorated as the flood waters did not dissipate. “Undoubtedly the flood should have ended in June. If it had, we could have remembered ourselves as paragons of unselfishness and devotion. But it didn’t and, descending precipitously from our heights, we lapsed into true, everyday sons of Adam” (Percy, 1941, p. 259). Racial tensions later emerged after a popular black man was killed by a white police officer. While Percy was able to avoid a full blown race riot from emerging, the entire situation left him Exhausted and I [Percy] felt I had the right to resign as chairman. Having persuaded my friend Hazlewood Farish-later my law partner and the grandfather of my namesake-to take my place, I sailed for Japan. I had never imagined I was naturally given to attacks of hubris, but the painful truth is that when I left the work to which I had devoted myself exclusively for four months, I was convinced it would suffer because of my absence. I suspect I even hoped it would. Human beings are engagingly absurd, we oscillate between being insignificant and imagining ourselves God. It is a small man indeed who is not made big by a big job, but never as big as he imagines. I returned from Japan to find that the relief work had proceeded distressingly well without me. (Percy, 1941, pp. 268- 269) As Percy tells the story we see the different ways he behaves as emergency manager, a role he was appointed to, and the way he is perceived by others as emergency manager. Percy’s story is particularly interesting in that it reflects the frustration that emergency managers may feel in doing their jobs. Percy’s opinion toward his responsibilities as an emergency manager seemed to change based on how others perceived his actions, seemingly leading to feelings of disappointment and burn out. The question this paper began to address was how the perspectives of emergency managers held by those the emergency managers interact with have evolved over time and the impact these perspectives have on the emergency manager. Examination in pursuit of this question seems to reveal however that the perspectives others hold of emergency managers 4 fluctuate depending on the time and situation. The perspective is not a static one. Rather, the perspective vacillates as though the emergency manager were standing in front of a funhouse mirror where the image ebbs and flows depending on what part of the mirror the emergency manager is looking into. It is multiple but yet always distorted, at least from the perspective of the emergency manager. There is no one clear image but rather simultaneous distortions in the same mirror. An image is always a distortion of reality so no one image is truly valid. Acceptance of one image is futile because of the nature of the work of the scenario where it is an emergency/disaster. The scenario, the emergency/disaster, is a sideshow and the emergency manager is one attraction within the sideshow. This paper seeks to address the changing distorted perspectives held of the emergency manager and how these perspectives impact the emergency manager and their ability to function as an effective professional. The paper begins by first examining the history and development of emergency management and the role of emergency managers. This is followed by a theoretical discussion of emergency management connected with a classic tale of an individual considered to be a ‘sideshow’, Joseph Merrick, also known as the elephant man. Merrick was not a fictional person. His story was real. Part of his story was fictionalized as a play by Bernard Pomerance. The play continues to be staged today. It tells the story of Merrick and the way that others viewed him and the impact this had on Merrick. This story can be applied to the story of the emergency manager. By taking heed of the tales of the story, it may be possible to determine ways to minimize potential negative repercussions placed on the emergency manager due to the perspectives of others, most notably repercussions such as disappointment and burnout. This paper concludes by suggesting ways to address these repercussions. 5 Development of Emergency Management In society today, government help and assistance is a reality that is hard to escape. Programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, and federal unemployment benefits are used extensively by the people of the United States. They are well known programs that are heavily depended upon. Emergency management and assistance from the government is not much different in the way it is used and understood. “As is typical in many countries, the US government often provides grants or low interest loans to citizens who are victimized by natural disasters” (Barnett, 1999, p. 139). However this has not always been the case. The government’s role, as well as the public administrator’s role in professional emergency management in regards to natural disasters has changed drastically over time. Handling and recovering from natural disasters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was to be left largely up to the citizens who were living in the particular area where the disaster struck and “with the exception of disaster responses such as firefighting in urban areas and forests, programs to address hazards and responses to disasters were almost unknown in the United States prior to World War I. Disaster relief or recovery was largely the province of charitable and religious institutions” (Waugh, 2000, p.11). Government officials and public administrators did not feel that giving aid during times of natural disasters was a primary duty of the public sector. It was the citizens’ responsibility to address their particular situations when disaster struck. This is evidenced by the actions of numerous administrators during the late 18th and early 19th century. In 1887, President Grover Cleveland vetoed an emergency appropriation of 6 $10,000 for drought victims in Texas. “He stated that the federal government had no ‘warrant in the Constitution . to indulge a benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds . [for] relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service’” (Barnett, 2000, p.140). During the Yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans that ended in 1905, President Roosevelt, and the federal government “required New Orleans banks to give a $250,000 dollar guarantee before the surgeon general would help fight the epidemic” (Barry, 1997, p. 369). During the Mississippi flood of 1927, there was no aid given by the federal government because there was no federal response agency for disasters such as this (Kosar, 2005). In 1927, many people still believed that the federal government did not need to be involved in disaster relief. Individual relief was seen as a handout. The Treasury shared this belief because even though they collected “a record surplus of $635 million, in a disaster that affected almost 1 percent of the nation’s population, the government would not even create a loan-guarantee program” (Barry, 1997, p.371).

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