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put up this one: JAPS SHAVED: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ACCIDENTS . Then there was Burma Shave, a shaving cream company that advertised with rhyming signs placed in sequence along highways. The company replaced the advertisement, “A shave / That’s real / No cuts to heal / A soothing / Velvet after-feel / Burma-Shave” with this new one, “Slap / The Jap / With / Iron / Scrap / Burma-Shave.”
    The California hysteria was also beginning to reach across the country. The editorial cartoonist of PM , New York City’s most liberal newspaper, drew a cartoon showing multitudes of bucktoothed, squint-eyed Japanese lined up across the entire West Coast to be given packs of dynamite at a stand called “Honorable Fifth Column.” The caption was “Waiting for the Signal from Home.” The artist’s name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, later to become famous writing children’s books under the name Dr. Seuss.
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    Assistant Attorney General Thomas C. Clark, who happened to be in California in December of 1941, working on a federal antitrust case, began collecting newspapers with headlines such as “Los Angeles Bombed” and “L.A. Raided,” and reports of mass suicides among the Japanese in California. Most of those rumors were not true, but there were a number of individual suicides up and down the state after Pearl Harbor. Dr. Honda Rikita, a physician in Gardena who had served as medical officer in the Japanese army as a young man, was picked up on December 7, one of the “dangerous” leaders. Imprisoned in solitary confinement, he was interrogated for a week by the FBI before he killed himself by slashing his wrists. Some Issei and Tokyo radio claimed he was beaten to death during questioning. He did leave a series of suicide notes, one reading: “A doctor’s vocation is to save lives. In order to save lives it is a doctor’s highest honor to sacrifice himself. I have dedicated myself to Japanese-American friendship.”
    Bombing stories, many of them coming from U.S. Army bases in California, were never confirmed. The civilian reports that the Justice Department’s Clark saw were even more imaginative. One reported seeing Japanese admirals in northern California wearing flamboyant uniforms and cocked hats with feathers. That one turned out to be a meeting of a local Masonic lodge. Clark, whose knowledge of evacuation issues was negligible—he once asked an assistant what “Nisei ” meant—was the first Justice Department official to publicly support military control of all coastal operations, military and civilian. He began traveling from city to city and town to town along the coast, making speeches on the way, saying: “When you hire a doctor, you usually do what he says, or you get another doctor. We have our Army people and they tell us to do this and we must try to do this with as little disruption as possible.”
    The army source Clark trusted and talked to every day was Lieutenant General John DeWitt, the sixty-one-year-old commander of the Western Command and the Fourth Army, five divisions of soldiers and marines, one hundred thousand half-trained and ill-equipped men scattered at bases from Puget Sound in Washington to San Diego, California. DeWitt, like many of the leaders of the peacetime military, was ill equipped himself, a military bureaucrat, an organizer of the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression of the 1930s, whose career had been mainly in the Quartermaster Corps.
    Now headquartered at the Presidio in San Francisco, DeWitt was an officer with a reputation for changing his mind, often echoing the last person he had talked to on the telephone. He was also noted for covering his career flanks. He had refused to talk to either Ringle or Munson, probably because he believed neither the navy nor political Washington had any business evaluating army performance. One point that stuck in DeWitt’s mind and often appeared in his conversations was that after Pearl Harbor both the