New York City: A beautiful sunny September day in 1922. Many gentlemen are out on the streets, their heads protected by a fashionable straw hat. Suddenly they are attacked by a horde of youths who specifically target the elegant headgear. Hats are torn off and those who cannot flee quickly enough are beaten. The whole thing degenerates into a mass brawl that keeps the city in suspense for three days and will go down in history as the Straw Hat Riots. To understand how it could have come to this, let us take a brief look at the fashionable customs of the time. It may not seem understandable today, but wardrobe choices were not always free from social constraints. Some things, such as the wearing of certain headgear, were even strictly regulated at times in the United States, where an official Cut-Off Day was introduced, after which a certain hat was no longer worn until the next season.
In the late 19th century and into the 1920s, there were special models for the summer and winter seasons. The straw hat (boater hat) was particularly popular for the warm season, and the homburg, bowler hat or fedora for the colder months. To ensure that no one accidentally walked around with the wrong hat, Cut-Off Day was announced in good time in all the major newspapers. The cut-off date for straw hats (Straw Hat Day) was usually 15 June, and the cut-off date for winter hats (called Felt Hat Day because the hats were made of felt) was 15 September, but this could vary depending on the area. At the New York Stock Exchange, Felt Hat Day was ushered in with a special ritual. The brokers threw their straw hats on the floor as they entered the building and crushed them, then ceremonially switched to the felt hat. It should be noted here that the straw hats of the time were made of barely treated natural straw, which usually lasted only one season before they became unsightly or damaged and had to be replaced with new ones. A variation of this ritual involved stealing the straw hats of others who had missed Cut-Off Day and then trampling them as well. At some point, stealing and crushing other people's straw hats after the official cut-off date became a popular pastime outside the stock exchange as well, especially among young people who were not always so particular about the date either, so they liked to go hat hunting a few days earlier than "allowed".
In the late summer of 1922, however, hat stealing unexpectedly escalated. Since it was still very hot and sunny in September of that year, there were a lot of people wearing straw hats on the streets of New York every day. On 13 September, two days away from Felt Hat Day, young people tried to steal the straw hats from a group of dockworkers, who did not put up with it. The whole thing degenerated into a mass brawl that stopped all traffic on the Manhattan Bridge. When the police intervened, the situation briefly eased. But the very next day, the youths continued with the hat hunt, this time armed with sticks that had pointed nails attached to the ends. A mob of over 1,000 young men marched through the seventeen-kilometre Amsterdam Avenue, hat wearers were attacked and beaten indiscriminately, many had to go to hospital, including police officers, for whom it became increasingly difficult to assert themselves. Some arrests were made, but the youths were mostly minors and were released after paying fines or corporal punishment like spanking by their parents. The mob raged for another day, but the attacks gradually diminished and soon only the remains of the destroyed straw hats on the streets were a reminder of those mad days in September 1922.
Whether the reason for the riots was to be found among the youths alone or whether the hat industry did not have a hand in it can no longer be clarified in retrospect. It is noticeable that there were many hat shops in the vicinity of the riots, which certainly did not have a bad turnover in the days of the riots. Whether this was really a marketing campaign that got out of hand stays a matter of speculation. The fact is that it was not an isolated incident, but happened again and again in the following years, although not to the same extent. The annual excesses were finally ended by Calvin Cooldige, the then President of the United States, by deliberately ignoring Cut-Off Day in 1925 and wearing his straw hat on official occasions throughout September. All one can say about that is: Chapeau!
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