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 seriously 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.