Paying Proposition

Like a farmer surveying a sugar maple for the right place to cut for sap, Seattle’s paunchy, cigar-smoking Promoter Arthur J. Ritchie watches the public with a veiled and contemplative eye. This week Art Ritchie was watching a big one, and the sap bucket was filling up fast. Art Ritchie’s newest idea: why not band the nation’s Japanese-haters together and put the whole business on a paying basis?

Last year Promoter Ritchie drew a nice full bucket with a book entitled The Pacific Northwest Goes to War; he charged businessmen $200 a page for eulogy, $50 apiece for a picture, then sold copies for $5. Last winter he set out to raise $100,000 for a statue to Negro soldiers of World War II. That time he had to back off from the tree with an empty pail—Seattle’s Negroes complained that the project was not their idea and wanted nothing of it.

When Gresham (Ore.) citizens started an “Oregon Property Owners’ Protective League, Inc.,” Ritchie and a friend named A. E. McCroskey dropped in to help. The name was soon changed to Japanese Exclusion League. Said Organizer Ritchie, “Oregon Property Owners’ Protective League, Inc. is a hell of a long name to sign on a receipt.” The League charged $10 initiation fees, $1 a month dues. Soon it had hundreds of paying members.

“Dues go into a fund to wage a continuous education campaign,” cried Ritchie. “We’ll hire lobbyists, legal aid … get a constitutional amendment to take the Japs’ citizenship away and move them out.”*

Certain Expenses. Ralph Hannon, the League’s treasurer and a Gresham grocer, naively put all this in a different light: “Why, the initiation fees go to Mr. Ritchie and Mr. McCroskey. They turn in expense accounts every month and get the balance for education.”

Last week Ritchie and friends moved into the Seattle area to harangue a big crowd at suburban Bellevue. A bust of “America’s No. 1 Jap Hater,” offered as a door prize, turned out to be a likeness of General Douglas MacArthur. Money clinked musically as ushers moved down the aisles.

“We got 856 names with door prize cards and 200 people joined,” Ritchie said happily. “We’ve got more meetings scheduled. We’ll go national as soon as we’re solid on the coast. Why, you’re going to have ten million soldiers coming back from Japan all maimed and crippled and every one a missionary for this movement.”

Appalled ministers issued a protest: “It is unthinkable that we at home should be false to those ideals for which [our sons] have been asked to pay so high a price.”

But other Northwest citizens talked of Art Ritchie’s new project with wry humor. West coast hotheads have been hating the Japanese free ever since Pearl Harbor. To the confirmed haters, the news that henceforth there will be a slight fee just seemed to make it official.

* For the opinion of a high U.S. Government official on how to treat enemy Japanese, see PEOPLE.