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A New Life. Despite all this, the displaced thousands gradually settled into a new pattern of existence. Clubs, baseball teams sprang up. There were parties at which old-fashioned dancing competed with U.S. jitterbugging—under their flowing robes the Japanese girls wore U.S. saddle shoes (see cut). Thousands of residents worked hard at tilling the soil, manufacturing adobe bricks, making camouflage netting—at wages of $12 to $19 a month. But a great part of Poston's people went on feeling insecure, bewildered, resentful. Many an older Japanese was convinced that Nisei and Kibei were "dogs" (informers). Gangs of men began roaming the camp at night beating suspected "dogs" with clubs and canes.
Torn by dissension, the Japs finally struck against their American warders. When the strike was settled after eight days, the air was cleared. But Poston was never a placid place again. By this week, nearly 13,000 of Poston's inhabitants, still uncertain and bewildered, had gone back to their old homes on the Coast.
Commander Leighton, objective throughout, reaches no conclusions on this U.S. experiment in governing another race behind stockades. But his attitude is aptly expressed in the quotation from which he got his title*: Oh, it were better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with the governing of men.
* A remark made by Danton just before he was guillotined in Paris' Terror (1794).