The Mayor of New York said on television, ‘What we’re seeing here is consumer anarchy. We’ve led people to expect certain privileges if they live here in the United States, and one of those privileges is an abundance of food. Now that privilege is threatened, and people won’t let it go lightly. They’ll tear this city apart first.’
In New York, more than anyplace else, the looting quickly took on distinctive social patterns. Up in Harlem, and down in the slums, the break-ins were usually violent, indiscriminate, and often ended in fire. Reports that reached the Police Commissioner’s desk by early Monday morning showed that most of the break-ins in poorer districts netted less than half of the available loot. The rest was smashed, abandoned, or burned. In the better-off parts of the city, however – in the east 80s and around Gramercy Square – the looting was systematic, and efficient, and effected with far less violence. Police surprised eight residents of Olympic Tower working as a co-ordinated looting team, with six station wagons, all legally rented from Hertz, and a truck. They had broken into a Safeway depot on 10th Street, breaking open the gates with bolt-cutters, and by the time a police patrol car came by, they had already loaded their vehicles with a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of foodstuffs. The officers counted two hundred cans of pâté de foie gras, at forty-five dollars a can, and a New York Post reporter remarked, ‘People aren’t taking what they think they’re going to need. They’re taking what they think they’re entitled to.’
By dawn, Detroit was burning. A heavy pall of white smoke hung over Hamtramck and Harper Woods, and they could smell destruction out at St Clair Shores. The night had been wild with helicopters and police patrols and shooting, and when the grimy sun rose over Lake St Clair, there were burned-out vans littering the Detroit Industrial Freeway and the Renaissance Centre was encircled by Michigan National Guard.
The Mayor of Detroit told the newspapers, ‘This was the worst night of my life. Black Sunday. And that isn’t any kind of a joke. This was the night the black people of Detroit let me down.’
The looting and the destruction had been so widespread that the news media hardly knew how to deal with them. From midnight, when the first horrified bulletins began to pour into CBS and NBC and ABC, each television channel had made the decision to stay on the air all night, with almost hysterical first-hand reports from San Francisco, New Orleans, Denver, Chicago, Washington, and New York.
It was easier to tell the individual stories. From Florida, Harold Kane Kaufman-Vorbrüggen of the Cordon Bleu restaurant in Dania, Broward County, hesitantly explained to newsmen how looters had broken into the kitchens and ransacked the larders and refrigerators. They had taken only the steak and the fish, and left thousands of dollars’ worth of truffles and escargots. One of the diners told the news cameras, ‘I guess we have to count ourselves lucky that looters have very little taste.’
In Elizabeth, New Jersey, a supermarket manager and his wife went down to their store as soon as Ed Hardesty’s programme was shown, taking with them a vacuum flask of coffee, two packs of sandwiches, two Colt AR-15s, and eleven boxes of 7.62 ammunition. Two local residents came and rattled the supermarket doors to see if they were open, but when the manager’s wife fired at them from the roof, they quickly retreated. The supermarket manager said, ‘I guess you could rightly say that I’ve always believed in overkill.’
In San Francisco, a Chinese couple opened the doors of their store on Sacramento Street and put up a sign saying, ‘Bad Times Are Coming. Help Yourself.’ Hardly anybody did, despite the fact that five blocks away, a mob was looting a Save-U supermarket, and setting fire to a drugstore.
But although the individual stories were easier to tell, it was the widespread mood of panic and betrayal that swept over the whole country that was the real story. The country had been through thin times before. The Depression had been a thin time, and plenty of people had had to go without. But now, everybody was going to have to go without, rich or poor, lucky or unlucky, unless they made damn sure they had a huge stockpile of canned and frozen groceries. Because of that, the frustration and resentment that boiled up on Sunday night were more explosive than any public feeling that had ever boiled up before. This wasn’t an upsurge of morality and conscience, like the protests over Vietnam. This wasn’t the rattling of political and ethical sensibilities, like Watergate. This was hysteria time, and if you didn’t grab you didn’t eat.
As Sunday night passed over the continental United States like a devouring and apocalyptic shadow, it left behind a trail of destruction and smoke and wrecked buildings. The whole country had changed overnight, from a buoyant and self-assured society with its first feelings of confidence about the 1980s, to a shattered and haunted land where hope seemed to be as scarce a commodity as food.
The National Guard were enforcing martial law in all but seven states. Everywhere you drove that Monday morning there were uniforms and jeeps and personnel carriers, and if you didn’t have a good reason for being in Rupert, Idaho, or Maple Shade, New Jersey, or any place at all that wasn’t home, then you were liable to immediate arrest. At 7.30 a.m. Central Time, on all channels, the President made a live television announcement about the events of the night.
‘What has happened across our nation during the past twelve hours has been the most agonising example of self-destruction we have ever inflicted on ourselves. We have had some hurtful and tumultuous times before. I believe it is the destiny of this nation to test its belief in itself time and time again, no matter how painful those tests may be. In the Civil War, we tested our belief in the sanctity of individual freedom… In the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s, we faced up to the reality of black citizenship…
‘Then there was Watts, and Kent State, and the assassination of President Kennedy and his brother Robert… and Watergate…
‘But last night was not a test… neither of our pride in being American nor our confidence in what we can achieve. Last night was a horrifying exposure of the weaknesses inherent in our whole society. Last night showed that we have set personal wellbeing above national survival. Last night showed that we have become a nation of weak, self-interested, corruptible consumers.
‘It isn’t easy for me to say these words. As your President, I have to take ultimate responsibility for the shape our society is in, and I do. I take responsibility for failing to understand that our recent years of economic recession were warnings of a major shift in our national psychology. Instead of believing in work and its profitable rewards, we now believe in profitable rewards whether we work or not.
‘Well, I’m going to make an appeal right now… an appeal to sanity and an appeal to reason. I’m going to appeal to all of you to carry on your normal everyday lives… to go to work as normal… and to try to restore the best part of the life we lost last night…’
The President was asked if it was true that he had made provisions to hoard food for the administration.
He said, ‘Hoard is an emotive word. Let me just say that there have always been contingency plans to protect the administrative arm of government in the event of a national emergency, and it would not be accurate for me to say that some kind of contingency plan had not been considered in this case.’
‘Yes – but does the administration have its own secret supply of food?’
‘That’s all I’m prepared to say,’ the President answered. ‘It’s a question of national security and I don’t wish to breach national security by shooting my mouth off.’
The Washington Post’s next edition carried the banner: PRESIDENT ADMITS GOV’T FOOD HOARD.
By midday Monday, the first panic was over. But the cost of the night’s destruction was estimated to run into hundreds of billions of dollars. In Los Angeles, seven downtown blocks had been burned into empty shells, and more than eight hundred people were homeless. After a tour of all the looted supermarkets, warehouses, and restaurants, the LAPD estimated that more than fifty people had died in the looting, and that several hundred had been ser
iously injured.
A pall of black smoke drifted northwards across the Hollywood hills, and the residents came out on to the streets to stand in silence and watch their city smoulder.
In Denver, the Brown Palace Hotel had been burned down, and it was almost impossible to see the mountains for smoke. In Las Vegas, rioting guests had stripped Caesar’s Palace, smashing windows and overturning gaming tables, and gutted seventeen restaurants. In Santa Fé, National Guardsmen had fought a three-hour gun battle with local vigilantes who had attempted to break into one of the city’s largest food depots. Eight people had been killed.
The Mayor of Chicago announced a twenty-four-hour curfew. Nobody was to leave their home until the National Guard and the emergency services had been able to clear wreckage and contain the fires. Anybody seen on the street would be shot. When she was asked on television if her orders weren’t too extreme, the Mayor snapped, ‘If you want to talk about extreme, go see what these animals have done to my city.’
Washington, DC, was comparatively unscathed, although there had been severe looting in several of the black neighbourhoods. At the first sign of trouble, the Army had been called in to surround the city centre, and by midnight there had been tanks and armoured personnel carriers positioned at Washington Circle, all the way along Constitution Avenue, and around the Capitol and the White House. One cynical news reporter, filmed beside a Sheridan tank which was parked at the intersection of 17th Street and Constitution Avenue, remarked, ‘The military must be congratulated for the speed and efficiency with which they took up a defensive posture to protect the American President from his own people.’
City life was allowed to continue in New York. The Mayor considered that curfews or military restrictions would not be ‘conducive to normalcy.’ The streets were appalling. There was broken glass littered everywhere, overturned automobiles at almost every intersection, and a fog of foul-smelling smoke. National Guardsmen patrolled Fifth Avenue in pairs, and M723 troop carriers sped across town, positioning guardsmen at potential trouble spots. But thousands of New Yorkers went to work as usual. They had coped with blackouts, transit strikes, Arctic snow, and torrential rain. What had happened during the night was only one more grotesque inconvenience.
At eleven-thirty a.m., after consultation with the governors of the worst-affected states, the President declared ‘a temporary state of National Emergency.’ He ordered special legal provisions for punishing looters, and immediately put into effect an aid-and-recovery programme out of federal funds. The New York Times was to call his actions ‘shutting the larder door after the food was bolted.’
But the national sense of shock was one of the strangest of Monday’s phenomena. It was expressed almost entirely on television, since very few people were prepared to confess to their friends that they, too, had been out looting the night before (in spite of the number of heavily-laden station wagons that had returned to the suburbs at dawn). In any case, most of the looters were law-abiding people who had acted completely out of character, and as Monday brightened, they began to feel ashamed and bewildered, and to look over the odd selection of food they had managed to scavenge, and ask themselves if it had been worth the hair-raising fright of smashing windows and burning stores and trying to elude the police.
Dr William Abrahams, of the Seattle Institute of Motivational Research, expressed his conviction on television that Americans had reached ‘that inevitable moment when their psychological model of themselves has been projected into reality – with disastrous consequences. Americans have always seen themselves as possessed of a divine right to affluence; blessed with a heavenly dispensation to go out and get whatever they want regardless of law, ethics, or basic humanity. Now they’ve put that vision into practice, and may God preserve us.’
At one p.m., the President appeared briefly on television again, and pleaded for ‘calm, constructive thinking, and prayer.’ He announced a forty-eight-hour amnesty for looters, ‘in the sure knowledge that most of you have repented of your actions’, and he asked that all stolen foodstuffs and goods should be returned to designated ‘loot points’ throughout the United States. The loot would be sold at clearance prices, and the money used to compensate city administrations, storekeepers, police departments, and supermarket chains.
By eleven o’clock that evening in the Central Time Zone, Busch Stadium in St Louis, Missouri, which had been signposted as a ‘Loot Amnesty Centre’, had been visited by only five uncomfortable-looking citizens, who returned between them two cases of corned beef, a leatherette swivel armchair, a broken portable television, sixty cans of petits pois, and a box of half-thawed soya-burgers.
By seven o’clock Pacific time, die Hollywood Bowl was stacked with 250 boxes of taco chips, bags of smashed cookies, and a truckload of garden hose.
The President later admitted that he may have made a ‘motivational misjudgement’ in announcing that the goods would be sold to compensate police and supermarket chains. Most people thought of the police as more felonious than the average man in the street; and most people believed that supermarket chains could easily sustain their losses. Apart from that, the supermarkets’ help-yourself technique of selling had convinced most people that the goods on the shelves were pretty much theirs already.
A special NBC film report at mid-afternoon showed a small country store in Forty Four, Arkansas. Looters had ransacked it during the morning, and had beheaded the proprietor with an axe as he tried to stop them. The whole store was splattered with blood, even the light fitting that hung from the ceiling. In an outraged interview, the President’s adviser on National Security said that the United States no longer had any normal right to condemn the barbaric practices of any other country, because the Americans who had committed this crime were ‘Neanderthals.’
Strangely, though, as the sun went down over the eastern seaboard, and the nation settled down for another night, the first shock and the panic began to subside, and were almost immediately replaced by boredom with the subject of looting, and irritation. Viewers began to call the major TV networks to complain that the extended evenings news bulletins were interrupting their regular viewing. A re-run of The Sting had been promised for Monday night’s NBC movie, and many television viewers were afraid they were going to miss it.
So by eight o’clock, most channels returned to normal schedules, except PBS, which doggedly kept on with interviews and analyses of the Sunday night riots. For most people’s attention-span, however, it was probably more than time to change over to something fresh. By eight o’clock, almost every available political commentator had been able to put in his ten-cents’ worth, and the news programmes were reduced to interviewing Naderites, John Birchites, and disaffected evangelists.
Only one major protagonist in the events of the previous night had yet to speak. Senator Shearson Jones, the senior senator from Kansas. He had been unreachable all day, even to Presidential aides. They had tried to telephone him from the White House sixteen times on Monday morning, but each time they had been told that he was ‘still en route to Washington.’ A message was left that the President wanted to speak to him the minute he stepped through his office door.
In fact, Shearson Jones was making no attempt to return to Washington. He judged that, politically, now was not the time. He told his security people to lock the gates of Lake Vista to keep newspapermen and curiosity seekers at bay, and then he closeted himself in his suite of rooms with Peter Kaiser. They had more urgent work to attend to than making excuses to a confused and angry President. In the panic of the night, nobody in the administration had thought to freeze the Blight Crisis Appeal, and Peter Kaiser was arranging for as much money as possible to be transferred to a charitable holding trust. It was difficult and complicated work, and it needed all of Peter Kaiser’s skill and all of Shearson Jones’s bludgeoning. By three o’clock that afternoon, however, they had extracted more than three million dollars extra out of the fund, and Peter was busy dispersing it from the holding trust
to scores of ready-prepared subsidiaries. It would take the IRS years to discover that 250,000 dollars which had been invested in Roseville Hearing Aids, St Paul, had come from Kansas Charitable Investments, Inc., of Kansas City, and that when Roseville Hearing Aids had gone out of business, with no protesting creditors, the money had then been paid directly into the account of Ernest Thompson, of San Diego, California, who was really Senator Shearson Jones.
Shearson had been infuriated by Ed’s revelations, and mortified by the savagery and looting that had followed. But he was flexible enough to adapt himself to a changed situation, and not to cry over spoilt opportunities. The Blight Crisis Appeal had done famously well, considering the few days that it had been open, and Shearson wasn’t going to complain about twelve million dollars or more. He had lost the contribution from Michigan Tractors, and he was sore about that, but twenty or thirty lesser donations had cleared the bank during the Monday morning, before any of the companies involved had thought to act, and these payments had more than compensated Shearson for what he had lost. They could ask for their money back now until they were black in the face. It was too late, because the money had vanished.
Shearson had said nothing at all to Ed after his first angry outburst, but as Monday wore on it became clear that Ed was not going to be permitted to leave Lake Vista until Shearson decided to let him go. Ed was also kept incommunicado. Every time he picked up a telephone and tried to place a call, the house operator told him gently but firmly that ‘all outside lines are busy right now, Mr Hardesty.’
Ed spent the day in his bedroom, drinking beer and watching on television the scenes of violence that his own words had helped to unleash. He didn’t yet know what to feel about what he saw. Should he feel angry? Sad? Indifferent? Was it really his fault that all this disaster had happened? Or would it have happened anyway?
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