F ashion is a complex multi-layered means of aesthetic expression but it’s also a means of social identification. If you think the fashion rules about when to wear white shoes and such are strange and complicated, this story will knock your hats off.

Fashion trends get revivals every now and then. It can be considered a fad for a minute but then if it really takes off, it becomes a full-blown revival and that’s kind of what we see with the straw hat riots of 1922.

So, hats used to be a way bigger deal than they are now. And here’s an excerpt from a New York Times article;

‘Gangs of young hoodlums ran riot in various parts of the city last night, smashing unseasonable straw hats, and trampling them in the street. In some case, mobs of hundreds of boys and young men terrorized whole blocks.’

These are some pedantic young hooligans. You can tell right from the onset that this was an issue of them being appalled in some way by someone wearing the hat out of season by just a couple of days.

There was this rigorous tradition amongst the male members of the population, from the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th. It was all centered on dressing appropriately for the season.

Straw hats were fashionable and comfortable to wear during the summer months because they would shade you from the sun but after the 15th of September, it was essentially an unwritten fashion mandate to switch to heavier felt hats.

You would wear a felt hat until May 15. And after May 15, you could switch to a straw hat and that would be fine. On September 15, you have to put away your straw hat and break out the felt hat again, and woe betides those who did not follow this rule.

You’re essentially opening yourself up to a light mugging, or at the very least, being accosted by young fashion-conscious ruffians who really started taking this very seriously, possibly a little too seriously.

We get a lot of information about this event from the New York Times. Here’s another quote from one magistrate Peter .A. Hatting. No pun intended.

“the inalienable right of a man to wear a straw hat in a snowstorm, if he desires, is to be upheld in this city by both police and the Magistrates, and a warning was sent broadcast to all straw hat smashers last night that jail terms on assault charges awaited them if they started any such carnival today.”

So why was this such a big deal? Why was the New York Times, the most prominent paper in the nation reporting on this so heavily? Well, it’s because they sort of created the fire or they definitely stoked the flames that would lead to out-and-out madness in the streets. When they were explaining September 15, which was known as felt hat day at the time, they said that it was indeed a mandatory thing and that any person who wore a straw hat after this date may even be a communal enemy and a potential murderer of the social order.

Back then, of course, in the 20s, everybody wore hats. And the weird thing is, no one knows why September 15th was chosen as felt hat day. It just became a thing. The logic really breaks down when you consider that summer doesn’t end until September 21. So for some arbitrary reason, the zeitgeist decided September 15 was the day you could no longer wear a straw hat.

The idea of fashion curation is a hierarchical aesthetic thing, whereas looking at today, some of the clothes that some of these luxury fashion brands put forward are kind of bizarre and ridiculous looking. If we are being honest, they aren’t functional or comfortable in the least. This kind of goes into that. There is a certain stuffiness to it all that maybe meant being fashionable required being a little bit uncomfortable and to lean into staying comfortable. Wearing a straw hat past the point of no return was an affront to this entire arrangement.

If you are still wearing your straw hat when autumn starts, people think you’re naive or you’re kind of dumb, and this was taken so seriously in multiple US cities that the police had to intervene.

Pittsburgh Press article noted in 1910 that the police were protecting ‘straw-lidded pedestrians’. They went on to say;

“If the informality should become general there will sure to be a number of obstinate gentlemen (most likely with English blood in their veins) who will coolly proceed to treat the fun-making as a physical assault and defend themselves in a manner which will spoil the fun for all concerned,”

You gotta love the casual Eurocentric racism here. The implication that Irish people are going to be fine with this, but watch out for the English because you know how they are.

The straw hat rule really reached a breaking point in New York. The entire time, people were obeying this straw hat rule. And it had become so accepted that it was just understood that you couldn’t really walk down the street after felt hat day with a straw hat, without some kid snatching it off, stomping it in front of you, and getting away clean.

This took a hot minute to reach critical mass. It was a good 12 years before this kind of playful hat flipping progressed into a full-blown riot.

On September 13, 1922, just two days before the straw hat ban was supposed to go into effect. Gunmen jumped the gun. They started grabbing and stomping the straw hats of factory workers in a specific section of Manhattan, ‘Mulberry Bends’. And then the gang tried to do the same stunt on a bunch of dockworkers. But dockworkers like the Wu-Tang Clan are nothing to mess with. They started swinging back and a fight broke out.

It was on the Manhattan Bridge and the police actually had to make arrests after breaking up the fight.

‘Scores of rowdies on the East and other parts of the city started smashing hats. Police reserves were called out. Straw hat bonfires were started, and seven men were convicted of disorderly conduct in the men’s Night Court.’

The New York Times reports the next day, September 14, ‘Straw hat Riot Embroil the East Side.’ And this is where we see that quote from magistrate Hatting.

People are calling for civility, calling for an end to the violence. They are unsuccessful in this because the riots continue the next day and the day after that. They moved from the East side to the Upper West Side. Mobs of hundreds of boys and young men, again from that quote, terrorized entire blocks. The teenagers started roaming the streets with sticks that literally had nails on the end.

This was some next-level mischief but what’s at play here? Is it a class divide situation? Are these youngsters potentially of a lower class and do they resent the fashionista elites?

I’ll like to point out that those nails on the ends of the sticks weren’t to puncture people’s heads, they were to help hook the straw hats off clearly.

Initially, these hooligans were fined five bucks. That wouldn’t have been a paltry sum in those days, because after all, this is a form of assault and destruction of private property.

But here’s the thing, a lot of these boys were kids and didn’t get arrested because they weren’t of age but I guess they could have been sent to juvie. The cops came up with a different attack for their disciplinary measures which would be problematic by today’s standards. They were spanked and given a thrashing.

In a few instances, the police in New York at the height of the riots, would catch these scamps and would invite the fathers of the boys to come to the station and spank them instead.

Which, how humiliating right? if you’re 14 or 15 getting a public spanking. It’s hard to come back from that. The thing that is most impressive to me about these young hoods is that they seemed pretty organized. It really was an act of low-grade domestic terrorism. There was a report from Ripleys.com, that a man by the name of EC Jones made the claim that 1000 teenagers were participating in a roaming mob on Amsterdam Avenue. How did they communicate with each other?

One man named Harry Gerber who was 25 was kicked and beaten by these kids so badly that he had to go to the hospital. Police officers were also victimized. One detective sergeant had his hat stolen and was trying to chase the kids but he tripped and fell into a gutter full of trash. Every time the authorities would break up a gang, the kids who scattered would find another neighborhood and join up with more people.

This chaos did work out very well for one group. One very small group in New York- The hat store owners. I guess because everyone needed new hats after they’d been stomped. As things tend to do, straw hats fell out of favor. They were replaced by things like Panama Jack hats, which are infinitely less dorky.

This hat-snatching phenomenon continued for a few more years. No one died in the 1922 riot. But one man, according to reports, was killed in 1924 while he was trying to fight back against some hat stompers. President Calvin Coolidge was spotted one time wearing a straw hat on September 18th. This got covered on the front page of The Times.

He may have played a role in history here because after he wore the straw hat, people eventually started following his example, and hat smashing died out. The Panama hat became much more fashionable.

It is tempting for us to look back and think, oh, how silly, but the truth of the matter is these arbitrary opinions about fashion continue today. For instance, I was thinking of hat stereotypes and one of the big ones is that the Trilby or the fedora has become associated with ‘nice guys’ on the internet.

It really started with Justin Timberlake. He turned the fedora on its hat.

The problem for people who objected to those hats was that they were irritated that people would wear these hats while wearing a T-shirt and cargo shorts. I fall very much on the side of letting people do and wear what they want, as long as they’re not hurting someone else.

If you have to do a lot of outdoor work or something, based on functionality, it would make sense to wear a straw hat since it shades you from the sun. Apart from straw hats, do you own any kind of hats, and what do you think about them in general?

https://www.nytimes.com/city-has-wild-night-of-straw-hat-riots-gangs-of-young-hoodlums-with.html

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/straw-hat-riot-remembering-one-of-the-weirdest-crime-sprees-in-american-history.html

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