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.