The Rise of the Straw Hat and the Riot of 1922

The Straw Hat Riot of 1922 is a strange piece of history, and it all centered around the boater hat. How did how the boater become so important to men’s fashion in the early 20th century? And how did that lead to a very bizarre conflict in the 1920s?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. So the
straw hat Riot of two is a very strange piece

(00:21):
of history. For one, there's no clear reason for it. Uh,
we don't really know how it started, and even the
way it was perceived at the time seems to have
been a mix of mild irritation, a little bit of
boys will be boys permissiveness, and then some outright frustration
and anger. Uh. And while there are news articles from

(00:44):
the time about how things played out, there are still
some pretty big gaps and we'll talk about those. But uh,
it all centered around the boater hat. So I thought
it might be fun to kind of look at this
topic from a really wide angle, starting with just how
straw hats came in to Western culture and developed, and
then how the boater became so important to men's fashion

(01:05):
in the early twentieth century, all leading to this very
strange conflict that, while it's often called a riot singular,
actually played out over the course of several nights in
New York. We don't really know when straw was first
used as a material to make hats in Western culture.
The lack of historical knowledge on this subject is probably

(01:27):
because for a long time, at least in Europe, using
those kinds of materials was really something confined to the
lower classes. But there are mentions of plant based materials
used for hat making as far back as ancient Rome,
including depictions of the Goddess Era in a tall hat
made a braided grasses in an early Greek and Roman writing.

(01:49):
But there really isn't much in the way of detail
in any of these writings or visual depictions. They're just
kind of named and then they move on. We can
pick up the thread in European history as far back
as fourteen fifty nine and an English night Sir John
Fastoff died in one written description of his spinal moments,
straw hats are specifically mentioned. From that point on, straw

(02:13):
headwear became more and more commonly mentioned in literature, including
in the works of William Shakespeare, Edmund Spencer, and Samuel Peeps.
These hats became increasingly common in paintings as well. Yeah,
that that note just says that he is possessed of
straw and hats. I don't know if he was wearing
them or just had them nearby. Maybe he had so

(02:35):
many hats that it was particularly worthy of note he
was that hat guy. I feel like when I go
people will be like she had a lot of high tops. Um.
Some sources claim that Mary, Queen of Scott's, brought straw
hats to Scotland in the fifteen fifties and from there
that fashion traveled throughout the British Isles. But uh, I

(02:56):
was looking at a book called Straw Hats, Their History
and manufest Acture, which was published in Nino, and in it,
author Henry Inwards makes the case that while woven straw
hats were already known in the region at the time,
plated or braided styles of straw hats may have in
fact traveled from France with Mary when she journeyed to Scotland.
If you grew up where I did, you may also

(03:18):
say that plattid. Yes, I have heard it both ways. Uh.
And just to be clear, it's like they kind of
braid the fibers into, you know, a braid, and then
that those braids are sewn together to create the hat.
Straw hats for women were rated as a necessity by six,
and that was in the book The Ladies Dictionary, being

(03:40):
a General entertainment for the fair Sex, a work never
attempted before in English. After that, straw hats for women
weren't just commonly mentioned in Western literature and depicted in paintings.
They were seen virtually everywhere. Those styles and millinary techniques
used to make them really varied widely by location. Even
the materials used were completely different from one region to another,

(04:02):
depending on what local grass or straw was most abundant. Originally,
most of these hats used the fiber pretty much exactly
as it grew from the earth, but plated or platted
straw hats created this way could quickly become heavy and burdensome,
and so to lighten the load, enterprising hat makers eventually

(04:23):
started pulling the outer sheath of the straw away, leaving
the lighter and more pliable interior to work with. Another
approach to improving on the raw materials involved splitting straws
down the middle lengthwise with a knife. At some point,
braids were also created that used these two halves of
the straw placed together again after cutting, and that retained

(04:44):
the same amount of material, but made it a lot
easier to plat the straw and create finer work. As
these experiments with straw for hats continued, two branches of
the technique developed split straw or hole straw, and in
addition to giving milliners options regarding the pliability and the
weight of the hats, the decorative uses for straw on

(05:05):
the hats opened up. Yeah, you'll also see developing along
these times what's called straw work embroidery that was sometimes
used on gowns as a fun fact for people that
like film costumes. Uh, the wedding dresses in the angle
sense and sensibility have straw work embroidery on them. Um,

(05:25):
if you ever get to see those in real life,
they're quite pretty. I love that movie. Yeah, me too. Um.
But yes, so straw was being used on hats and
that kind of embroidery in this idea that it could
be more than just a functional thing, but also something
that could be turned into some really delicate shapes and
and some really beautiful decorative work was also happening, and

(05:46):
soon a wider range of fibers started to become available
for what we're still generally called straw hats. Even though
many different things were used, and that was thanks to
global trade. So eventually raphaie, bamboo, hemp, and even silk
that was made into stiff ribbons were all used in
what we're called straw hats, particularly in England where this

(06:07):
really became a huge industry. And then it took advantage
of all of those techniques that had been developed over
centuries just using local grasses, and then they were basically
applying these new materials to those techniques. And Great Britain
had emerged as the nexus of straw hat manufacturer by
the eighteenth century, but then in the mid nineteenth century,
other countries that had developed their own straw hat industries

(06:30):
began exporting to Great Britain. Bonnets were the most popular
straw hats style of the late eighteen fifties in early
eighteen sixties, and the ones made in Switzerland, France and
Italy in particular were often very ornate and embellished beautifully,
and that really put a dent in Britain's hat industry.

(06:50):
Then imports from China and Japan started to arrive, Asian
countries had been using grasses and straw and braided goods
long before this idea caused on in Europe, so their
work was really excellent, even when they were building on
designs that had originated in Europe. Even the raw materials
imported from other countries displaced locally grown grasses, the material

(07:13):
of choice in British hat makers. This was a very
real threat to the livelihoods of many tradespeople in Britain
at the time. While milliners worked with all kinds of
materials to create hats, platters who specifically worked with straw
and grass to create hats, we're being displaced and so
as a form of solution in the British Straw Plotting

(07:37):
Company was created to try to find a solution to
this problem and reduce the likelihood that an entire workforce
would find itself without income. This company basically leveraged the
fact that it was a cooperative effort of many hat
makers who would all promote straw hats and place orders
with local craftspeople to give straw hat making in their

(07:57):
home country a shot in the arm. That worked, at
least briefly, as new designs emerged and the platters made
an effort to really compete with the work that was
coming into Britain from other countries, but importers also wanted
to compete and they started slashing their prices. By the
end of the British Straw Platting Company was out of business.

(08:19):
It was just too expensive to produce hats in Britain
compared to making them in other places. Additionally, this craft
of making hats had changed, so starting in the mid
eighteen sixties, various techniques were developed to sow braided straw
into shapes by machine rather than by hand, and over
the course of just a few years, machine stitched straw

(08:40):
hats were the standard, and hand stitching was only done
on very coarse materials that just weren't suitable to run
through a machine, and soon sewing machine manufacturers were all
offering their own machines that could stitch plats together to
create hats. Over the years, many many different styles of
hat were developed, both for women and for men, and

(09:01):
one of these hats for men, the boater, is the
focus of the rest of this episode. We will get
right into that after we pause for a word from
one of the sponsors that keeps stuffy missed in history
class going. So the voter hat, just in case you

(09:23):
are not familiar with it, is a flat topped hat
with straight sides and a very flat brim, and it's
usually made with plaid straw stitched together in a spiral
and then blocked onto a form, and around the base
of the crown is a ribbon, which in modern era
you usually see a striped ribbon for a long time.
In its earlier inception, the ribbon was usually black, and

(09:43):
while boaters are still seen today, the origin of this
hat style is reportedly different depending on source. Everything from
eight two to the eighteen eighties is mentioned as the
advent of the boater. In all likelihood, this was probably
because there were boater like hats on their early end
of that time scale, and they started to look more
like what we would call a voter as time went on,

(10:05):
so I think that is probably why there is some
discrepancy there. In the United States, the voter became more
and more popular starting in the late eighteen hundreds, first
with younger hat wearers and then with middle classmen, and
by the nineteen twenties voters were practically required as summer
men's wear. They offered shade and were cooler temperature wise

(10:26):
than felt hats were. Yeah, every well dressed gentleman always
had his voter in the summer, and a cultural rule
began for men of wearing a voter from May fifteenth
to September fift This a lot like the idea of
not wearing white after Labor Day, just kind of became
accepted and adhered to by the majority of New Yorkers.

(10:47):
In particular. It was throughout the country, but New York
was very serious about this whole thing. A September article
in the New York Times, with the byline of the
initials E. A. J. Skewered the entire social convention of
these hat calendar rules. It read, is it not written
in the Great Book of the Herd? On May fifteen,

(11:08):
shalman don the straw, being authorized by long and accredited tradition,
And on September fifteen, shall man doff the same or
be judged a mocker of the herd Gods. This article
goes on to cite the statistic that of all hats
sales take place during just two separate weeks of the year,
one in May and one in September. Yeah, there is

(11:29):
a subtle side I in that article that has cast
towards the hat trade as maybe being the people that
are stirring this whole thing up. There is some very
subtle but really their racism to it, because most uh
hat sellers and haberdashers were Jewish at the time in

(11:51):
New York. Um. But yeah, there is this suggestion of like,
you have just stirred this whole thing up so you
can make a ton of money two weeks of the year.
But this tradition or social law had this element, not
unlike the deeply irritating practice that still sometimes takes place
here in the US of pinching people on St. Patrick's
Day if they aren't wearing green. There's a lot to

(12:12):
unpack there. But in short, that whole thing is so wrong.
Please don't ever do that. If you do it, I
can't promise that I won't enact some sort of cruelty
to you, uh if I witness it. But in New York,
the way this played out is that if a man
was wearing a straw hat after September fift it was
common and really kind of accepted for a kid to

(12:34):
whip it off his head and stop it in the street. Again,
don't do stuff like that. Uh. This was generally an
issue of irritating shenanigans. But it was not seen as
especially dangerous, But then in Nineto things did get out
of hand. Before things boiled over in September of that year,
there had been an article in the New York Times

(12:55):
on May seven titled straw Hats for ninety two. It
outline mind just how serious a man had to be
about his voter. This article opened with quote, the choice
of your straw hat this year will require more serious
thought and consideration than formerly. And that article discussed the
wide range of voters that had become available, and that

(13:16):
no properly dressed gentleman could get by with just one
hat for the season. The China split straw style was
preferred for evening attire and the Panama style for semi dress.
If you were going out for a round of golf,
the leghorn straw hat was the proper choice. Even the
shade of the straw, the article advised, had to be
carefully considered. The writer advised that the public needed education

(13:40):
about how to properly care for a straw hat, and
also extolled the virtues of American hats. French hats were
deemed too fanciful, English hats were too heavy and prone
to discoloration. But there is a particular paragraph in that
article which kind of jumps out in retrospect. It opens
with less attention will be paid this year to the

(14:02):
conventional dates for putting on and taking off straw hats,
and then it concludes with this season, the temperature will
be the chief arbiter of fashions. This could not have
been more wrong. The trouble started on September, two days
before the random and completely arbitrary date of September that

(14:23):
had been set down as the socially accepted end of
straw hat wearing season. The New York Times reported quote
on the theory that September is the last day of
straw hat season and that they had the right to
declare open season on straw hats on other person's heads.
Scores of rowdies on the East Side and in other

(14:44):
parts of the city started smashing hats last evening. They
were snatching the hats from the heads of the wearers
and then smashing them in the street or throwing them
onto bonfires. Yeah, there are some accounts that this actually
kind of got a little bit of fuel from the

(15:05):
fact that like kids who were normally doing this sort
of thing because I thought it was fun. Again, you
can hear the disdain in my voice. I'm sure Um
had actually gone after a group of dock workers, and
the dock workers fought back, and that kind of fueled
this whole like tension and and anger about it, and
that's kind of what sparked this to get bigger than

(15:25):
it was. I read that in a few places. I
didn't find hard confirmation of it, so just f y
I if you see that, that's the scoop. But from
the night of the thirteen, seven men were apprehended and
they were brought before Magistrate Peter A. Hatting. That name
is just a really nice coincidence, and he found them
all guilty, and he find each of them five dollars.

(15:45):
But he was serious that he did not like any
of this business. He was adamant that he was not
going to be so lenient going forward of people brought
into his night court for hat snatching and stomping. He
gave this statement in the courtroom, and it was printed
in the Times on September quote, it is against the
law to smash a man's hat, and he has the

(16:06):
right to wear it in a January snowstorm if he wishes.
To hit a man's hat is simple assault, and in
this court it will be treated as such. And I
want you to spread this word among all who would
smash hats. A man's hat is just as much his
property and as just as much to be defended as
his watch, and the courts are going to enforce the laws.

(16:28):
But Magistrate Hattings warning did not really have the desired effect,
because there were more attacks the night of the fourteenth,
and one headline the next day read Boy's scalp straw hatted,
and it mentioned that the reason for the riot was
quote yet undiscovered. No one knew why this was going on.
On the fifte the New York Times ran an editorial

(16:49):
that supported Hatting's position. Editorial also mentioned that it wasn't
clear where this entire social law had even come from,
and that quote, its enforcement is left to boys and
others with undeveloped minds who delight in destruction for its
own sake, especially when it is accompanied by noise and excitement,
and when it makes somebody else angry. This reminds me

(17:13):
of so many sports riots. The writer also went on
to note that a man should quote fight if he can,
and call the police if he can't, and then on
the night of the fifteenth, the rioting intensified. The New
York Times September coverage of the previous night opened with
this line, Gangs of young hoodlums ran riot in various

(17:35):
parts of the city last night, smashing unseasonable straw hats
and trampling them in the street. The article describes mobs,
some including hundreds of boys and young men, prowling city
blocks looking for straw hat wearers to punish. Anytime the
police were called and showed up on a scene to
break up these mobs, they would disperse, only to reform elsewhere.

(17:58):
Shortly thereafter. The New Or Tribune reported quote boys who
were guided by the calendar rather than the weather, and
most of all by their own trouble making proclivities, indulged
in a straw hat smashing orgy throughout the city last night.
A dozen or more were arrested, and seven were spanked
ignominiously by their parents in the East one fourth Street

(18:21):
Police Station by order of the Lieutenant of the desk.
There's lots of unpack there too. There is there's a
lot to unpack in terms of social norms throughout this episode.
Uh So sticks with nails run through the tips, where
the weapons of choice for some of these boys and
young men who were forcing men that they encountered on
the street to basically run a gauntlet of them in

(18:43):
the hopes that their nails would snag the hats. Obviously,
this is also incredibly dangerous because it's a sharp object
that you're waving at somebody's head. There were also sneak
attacks where unsuspecting pedestrians were jumped by one or two
boys at a time. On the street car track song
Christopher Street, lines of boys and young men waited by

(19:03):
the tracks and snatched hats from the passengers as they
passed by. According to the statement of a man named E. C. Jones,
has Amsterdam Avenue street car was boarded by a group
of boys at nine pm on September. These boys attacked
passengers and then rejoined a mob that Jones estimated to
be as large as a thousand people, a number that

(19:24):
seems pretty unlikely, but at this point is impossible to
fact check. And we're going to talk a little bit
more about how things played out on the night of September,
but first we're going to take a quick break for
a word from one of our sponsors. So on the

(19:45):
night of September fift in the midst of all of
this hat smashing, one particularly bad spot was the area
arranging from A hundred and second to streets in Manhattan
along Third, Lexington, and Park Avenues. In particular, eight boys
is from a group of ten to twelve were apprehended
by two policemen. Those policemen were named Lamore and King,

(20:06):
and they had spotted the kids running from a doorway
with sticks in their hand. And though the captured boys
were taken into the station at East hundred and fourth Street,
none of them were formally charged because they were all
younger than fifteen, but they didn't get a lecture. They
were told they would be put in a cell if
they were hauling again, and once again spanking was recommended
to their parents when they came to collect kids. We'll

(20:28):
just keep unpacking all of the weirdness of this entire situation.
It's weirdly ironic that we are recording this episode today
because I think it is this week that one of
like the National Pediatrics Associations was like, do not spank
your children. It is bad. An incident on a street
sent twenty five year old Henry Gerber to the hospital.

(20:50):
Gerbert tried to fight back when a group of boys
tried to take his hat, but he was overpowered. There
were a lot more of them. He was beaten and
kicked and left on the street. Yes, so that advice
about fighting back maybe not so good. On d and
Second Street, acting detective Sergeant brend Daz, remember that name,
was jumped by a gang who threw his hat into

(21:13):
the street, and he tried to give chase, but he
tripped and he fell. He didn't manage to make one arrest.
He arrested a man named Leo Cohen, who was not
a boy. He was a grown man of age thirty four,
and Cohen was booked on a disorderly conduct charge. Uh
Cohen was actually discharged by a judge after denying the
charge that he had tripped brind d Z. Incidentally, the

(21:36):
New York Tribune wrote up that same story, but with
a few notable differences. The detective is listed as Roco
brun Doozy, not brind Dizzy. The man he arrested is
listed as Sigmund Cone, who was a special policeman. He
was not part of the riots, but brend Daz arrested
him for tripping him as quote, interfering with an officer

(21:58):
in the discharge of his uty charge. The Tribunes coverage
also indicated that the police were not especially concerned about
all of this hat snatching. They quote were inclined to
regard their activities lightly. That they're being uh the boys
and young men who were doing this, and that is
until plain clothes officers got jumped, and then things started

(22:19):
to get a little more serious with the police. Sixteen
year old Morris psycho Witz, who was a resident of
East hundred and seventieth Street, was apprehended by the man
he and his friends tried to attack. When the group
approached Harry old Baum at one sixteenth and Lexington, they
managed to get his hat, but old Bound fought back
and ended up chasing several of the young men until

(22:41):
he caught psycho Witz and Psycho Wits got a disorderly
conduct charge. But when psycho Witz went directly before Magistrate
Peter A hatting at night Court, he was about to
be sentenced to jail time when a surprising thing happened.
His victim, old Baum, moved by the presence of Psychowitz's
elder we mother intervened, and he actually asked the judge

(23:03):
to be lenient a magistrate. Hatting agreed to this, but
he was adamant that he would jail the next hat hoodlum,
adding quote, I intend to see that citizens are protected
in their property. Hatting was true to his word on this.
The next case he saw was that of a silverman
who had been charged with smashing straw hats after Abraham

(23:23):
Burnbaum had filed a complaint against him. Silverman was sentenced
to three days in jail for hat snatching and destruction.
So one of the incidents of the night of September fifteen,
as reported by the New York Times, is to me
a little bit confusing in its wording. So their report reads,
quote John Sweeney, ten of three sixty three West sixteenth Street,

(23:46):
ran into an automobile driven by John Montfort of four
eleven East nineteenth Street while John and the other boys
were enjoying the hat smashing sport on seventh Avenue between
seventeenth and eighteenth Streets. His right egg was broken. He
was taken to Bellevue Hospital for treatment. So it sounds
like this kid collided with a car while he was

(24:07):
on foot. But because both the child and the driver
were named John, and perhaps also because the paper maybe
didn't want there to be any indication that the car
hit the child, but rather the child was responsible for
running into the car. It reads a little weird. You
don't often see a person on foot described as running
into a car. It is worth noting that hat stores

(24:30):
stayed open long past their normal closing times during all
of this, so that gentlemen could come in and purchase
appropriate autumn headwear and the stave off being attacked for
their straw hats. These stores did a massive business during
this time. Over the next several nights, the straw hat
riots slowly died down. While the following years had some

(24:52):
level of this strange hat vigilante behavior, it was not
on the level of the riot. Just a few years later,
on September, the New York Times ran a brief article
with the headline discard date for straw hats ignored by
President Coolidge. The blur mentioned that the President had worn
a straw hat with a black brim on both the

(25:14):
eighteenth and the nineteenth of the month, and no one
snatched it from his head or stopped it to pieces.
And that is a very weird moment in New York
is it is very weird. It just strikes me as
so completely strange, and one of those things that I
think sometimes when you read modern articles about it, it

(25:38):
kind of gets sensationalized to be like this crazy brawl.
Like I said that one account of of the dock
workers being involved suggested that there was a brawl and
it actually stopped traffic on the Manhattan Bridge. I don't
know if that were true or not, but yeah, it's
often depicted as though it was like this wild, maniacal thing,
and it is interesting that some of the news are

(26:00):
portrait like the police thought it was funny until some
of their guys got jumped, so it clearly was not
really considered like a terrifying riot or anything more like
this bizarre inconvenience of hot smashing of hat smashing and man,
don't smash my closure accessories, I will come for you.
I can think of a very very very few circumstances

(26:24):
when it might be appropriate to smash someone's hat, Like
if someone hat on a hat bearing a lot of
racist slogans, sure, maybe it might be okay to smash
that hat, but not if they're wearing a hat after September. Well,
especially because I mean, like we mentioned earlier on in

(26:44):
the episode, these were great options for warm days because
they were a little cooler, but they still let you
get some shade and be you know, presentable and wearing
a hat, which was very, very important at the time
for men. Uh So, why you gotta be a jerk?
And it could be really really warm in New York
like well into the autumn. Yes, in October sometimes it

(27:06):
is hot in New York. So those kids are jerks,
That's what that's my sonation. I have two pieces of
listener mail, one because it involves being a snappy dresser
like wearing a hat, although it does not involve a
hat specifically, and uh and then a second one. I'll
we'll read the snappy dresser one first. It is from
our listener Sarah. She says, I'm listening to your episode

(27:27):
on Bob Hope and I thought I would share this
picture of my grandfather, who passed away this August. Here
he is looking dapper with my sister in When I
posted this on Instagram, my dad told me the story
that when Pop Hop was in the army during World
War Two, Carrie Grant came to entertain the troops. This
was part of the USO, which was also part of
that Bob Hope episode, and he got a seat right

(27:49):
up front, and he said he felt like a shlub
in his uniform compared to the well dressed grant and
he decided that when he got out of the army
he would start dressing like that too, and he did
for the rest of his life. Not super relevant, but
I hope you enjoyed this picture of my beloved grandfather
and my sister wearing one of his sweaters. Uh. He
is indeed a snappy dresser. Um. And that is a

(28:11):
really beautiful, fun story and a gorgeous picture, So thank
you so much for sharing that, Sarah Um. Our other
listener mail that I have today is a little bit
of a gear change from that. It is about our
Princess Sofia uh tragedy episode. It is from our listener Lisa,
and it is piece of physical mail, and Lisa writes
on an absolutely adorable auto card, I love your show.

(28:31):
Thank you so much for the informative, entertaining podcast. I
recently listened to your episode on the Princess Sofia and
then I happened to be in Juneo, Alaska on the
one anniversary, and I went to an opera about the tragedy.
I think you now have many more listeners from Alaska.
Thank you for all your work. And she very sweetly
sent us her program from the opera. So has that

(28:51):
in the office the next time Tracy is here, because
I know she will love to see it. Uh. It's
very cool. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History podcast at how to
works dot com. You can also find us pretty much
everywhere on social media as missed in History, and you
can find back episodes of every show and show notes
for every episode Tracy and I have worked on on
our website Missed in History dot com. You can subscribe

(29:12):
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For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
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