We recently had our Labor Day holiday here in the United States, which is our unofficial mark of the end of summer.
In addition, it’s supposedly the day after which one is no longer supposed to wear white. Which, of course, means that I have to hang up my polyester white suit. I’ll need to find something else to wear while I am boogying on down to the Bee Gees, KC and the Sunshine Band, Donna Summer, and the like at our local discotheque.
Seriously, just what would happen if someone wore white after Labor Day? While you may get a funny look from the fashion police, my hunch is that most people wouldn’t even notice.
But it hasn’t always been that way. Wearing white after Labor Day was definitely a fashion faux pas at the turn of the 20th century. Excluding white wedding dresses, ladies of the upper crust never wore white during the fall and winter months.
Men had a similar rule, and it was strictly enforced. At a time when nearly all men wore hats, it was customary to wear white or lightweight straw hats in the summer, while winter hats – typically made from fur or felt – were the acceptable norm for the remainder of the year.
They even had a name for the switching of the hats. The exact dates varied, but in Spring, there was Straw Hat Day, which typically fell during the first half of May each year. The switching back to winter hats had a definitive date. Felt Hat Day came around every September 15th, after which one didn’t dare to wear their summer headgear one more day.
Just when it became a sin for a man to don a white or straw hat after September 15th is unknown, but in the New York City area, it almost certainly began at the New York Stock Exchange.
Based on my research, the earliest mention of this custom was a story in a September 20, 1877, edition of The New York Times. Known then as “White-Hat Day,” the article described how anyone who walked into the exchange the previous day wearing a white or straw hat would have it ripped off his head and stomped on by a group of brokers. This was all done in the name of fun, with scores of members purposely wearing their summer hats, knowing exactly what fate was about to be brought upon them.
It was around this time that the straw boater hat became all the rage. While out of fashion – they are mostly only seen at political conventions today – you would definitely recognize one if you saw it. Boater hats have a stiff, flat brim, with a flat-topped crown. A broad solid or striped ribbon typically surrounds the crown where it attaches to the brim.
As a result of their popularity, the Stock Exchange’s annual tradition evolved. By the early 1880s, they were no longer destroying white hats. But if one dared arrive wearing a straw hat on the now-established date of September 15, that hat would be destroyed within minutes.
The practice of sacrificing straw hats soon spread to the other exchanges as well. On September 16, 1887, The New York Times reported that a man named Franklin Woodruff walked into the Produce Exchange wearing his straw hat. A crowd quickly gathered around him and demanded that he surrender it, but Woodruff refused. The mob eventually backed down, and his hat was spared, but the same could not be said for the straw hats of others at the various exchanges, many of which met a less fortunate fate.
Like clockwork, throughout the remainder of the 19th century, newspapers reported every September 16 on Wall Street’s annual smashing of the straw hats. Some years, depending on the state of the economy, the tradition was a major event; in others, it was largely ignored by the brokers.
While straw hats were fashionable, they had one significant drawback: they were made from a natural material that gradually lost its strength and shape with repeated wear. So, whether a man’s hat was smashed by the brokers on Wall Street or not, it probably didn’t have much life left in it by the end of the summer anyway.
For haberdashers, September was a particularly profitable time of year, as men began buying new hats in large numbers. Before long, they adopted Wall Street’s September 15 deadline as the unofficial cutoff for wearing straw hats. Newspapers soon joined in, publishing reminders that straw hat season was coming to an end.
An article in the Brooklyn Daily Times on September 14, 1904, makes it clear that the September 15 deadline, as well as its tradition of smashing straw hats, had spilled out of the exchanges and into the city streets. The article declared, with a touch of humor, “This is the last straw hat day of the year 1904. If you wore one today, there is probably not enough left of it to use tomorrow, anyhow.”
It’s one thing for a group of men on Wall Street to have a bit of fun smashing straw hats, but it is another when the tradition is adopted by adolescent males who sometimes take things to the extremes. With each passing year, a harmless prank became increasingly more violent.
For many decades, Coney Island in New York held an annual Mardi Gras celebration complete with a parade. During the 1906 festivities, small groups of young men began snatching straw hats from the heads of unsuspecting men, tossing them to the ground, and destroying them. At first, this was regarded as harmless fun. But over the next few years, the number of hats being destroyed – and the aggressiveness of those doing the destroying – steadily increased.
It was around this time that the city’s youth began terrorizing men who dared to wear boaters on Felt Hat Day. They not only taunted and ridiculed anyone walking down the street sporting one of the hats, but also came up with a new, and somewhat dangerous, way to knock them off. Groups of teenagers would tie a long string to a tree. As an unsuspecting man approached, they would quickly raise the string to the height of his hat and pull it tight. The hat would then flip off the victim’s head, and the moment it hit the ground, the boys would stomp and destroy it.
Arrests were rare, but they did occur. On Felt Hat Day 1910, an estimated twenty-five boys and men were charged as disorderly persons for destroying hats worn out of season.
On September 17, 1911, two boys, aged 16 and 18, appeared before Chief Magistrate Otto Kempner for doing the same. He said, “Busting straw hats is no joke. It is the worst kind of rowdyism, and you can contemplate on its lack of humor for the next five days in the Workhouse.”
In Bridgeton, in southern New Jersey, the unofficial deadline for wearing a straw hat came even earlier: September 1. In what would later become known as the “Straw Hat Rebellion,” a group of men began snatching straw hats from people’s heads on September 10, 1912. What started in City Park quickly spiraled out of control and spread into downtown Bridgeton. Before long, hundreds of people were involved, and some of the victims decided to fight back. The police were outnumbered and unable to bring the riot under control, so the fire department was called in and turned its hoses on the crowd, finally bringing the mayhem to an end.
Back in Manhattan the following year, sixty young men were found guilty of destroying straw hats and fined between $5 and $10. (Roughly $170 to $340 today.) Many of the hat destroyers had also come up with a new twist: they would jump aboard passing streetcars and snatch straw hats right off the heads of unsuspecting passengers.
At roughly 1 A.M. on September 16, 1919 – just one hour after straw hats had officially become taboo – a straw-hat riot erupted in Harlem’s Black Belt section of Manhattan. A crowd of roughly 200 gathered near the corner of 115th Street and Lenox Avenue (now Malcolm X Boulevard) to enforce the hat ban.
Someone spotted Police Corporal Amanada O. Hayes, an off-duty officer dressed in street clothes and wearing an out-of-season straw hat. It probably didn’t help matters that he was a white man walking through a predominantly black neighborhood. In other words, he stood out like a sore thumb.
Suddenly, a voice rang out: “Off with that hat!” Another man lunged for Hayes’s hat, but Hayes resisted. Within moments, the confrontation erupted into a fight. Greatly outnumbered, Hayes drew his revolver and fired two shots, one of which struck and killed 30-year-old Ephriam Gethers.
On September 13, 1920, several hundred East Side youngsters descended on Manhattan’s Chinatown and began snatching boaters from residents’ heads and destroying them. What started as a bit of rough amusement soon turned into a melee between the young men and members of the Chinese community that roughly lasted for an hour. Then the mob turned its attention to a new target: sightseers who happened to be wearing straw hats. Many of them fought back, and the resulting battle continued until police arrived and finally brought the chaos to an end.
All of this violence would reach its climax at the end of the 1922 straw-hat season. When people today mention the “Straw Hat Riot,” it is this particular incident, one that unfolded over several days, that they are usually talking about.
Beginning on September 13, the street gangs returned to Chinatown, this time targeting the straw hats worn by factory workers in the Mulberry Bend area, now Columbus Park. From there, they moved on to the waterfront, where the burly dockworkers had little interest in surrendering their hats without a fight. A huge brawl erupted, eventually spilling onto the Manhattan Bridge and bringing traffic to a halt.
Concurrently, at the corner of Grand and Mott Streets, where Chinatown met Little Italy, roughly fifty young men lined the narrow street, waiting to snatch straw hats. Several of the hat hunters acquired a ten-foot-long pole (~3 m), which they poked through the open windows of passing trolley cars to knock the hats off unsuspecting passengers. From there, they moved from block to block, smashing every straw hat they could find.
By the time the chaos ended, seven men, ranging in age from 19 to 29, were arrested. Each was given a choice: pay a $2 (~$40 today) fine or spend two days in jail. All seven opted to pay the fine. When the streets were later cleaned up, nearly 500 straw hats were found piled in a doorway at 211 Grand Street. The remnants of others were found scattered along the streets, hanging from lamp posts, or tossed into garbage cans.
Over the next several days, riots broke out up and down Manhattan Island, from the Bronx in the north down to the Battery at the southern tip. Gangs continued to prowl the streets, many of them armed with sticks through which long nails had been driven to more easily hook the hats.
Interestingly, some hat stores opted to remain open late, hoping that the violence would send frightened straw-hat wearers rushing into their shops to purchase new winter hats. According to police reports, this strategy had an unintended consequence: the marauders soon caught on and began targeting people as they entered the stores.
Because the newspapers were published on different schedules, it is difficult to piece together an exact timeline of what happened on each night. What follows, therefore, is a brief overview of the mayhem.
Violence was reported throughout the city, but it was concentrated primarily in Harlem and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Mobs numbering in the hundreds of boys and young men terrorized entire blocks, and those who tried to defend themselves were often beaten. Numerous injuries, some of them serious, were reported.
Farther north, along Amsterdam Avenue, reports claimed that more than 1,000 hoodlums were roaming the streets in search of straw hats.
On the Lower West Side, groups of ten or twelve would lurk in doorways, waiting for the sight of someone wearing a straw hat before suddenly emerging to attack.
Needless to say, the police were overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the disturbances. But by sunrise on September 16, 1922, the violence had finally subsided.
There were arrests, but they were surprisingly few considering the thousands of men and boys who had taken part in the straw-hat riots.
Eight boys, all under the age of 15, were taken to the East 104th Street police station. Because they were underage, they were not charged, but they were given a stern warning: if they were brought in again, they would be locked up. Their parents were then notified and instructed to give each boy a good spanking.
A 34-year-old man was brought to the same station after allegedly tripping an officer who was pursuing a gang that had attacked him. The man denied the accusation and was released.
Next up, we have the Silvermans. Being a Silverman myself, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that at least a few of us were rounded up and hauled off for taking part in the mayhem.
First, there was 17-year-old Louis Silverman, who was arrested for destroying a man’s hat in front of 197 East Broadway.
Then there was another Silverman living at a different address: 12-year-old Abraham Silverman, who, along with 13-year-old Walter Shulka, was arrested for smashing another straw hat at First Avenue and Seventh Street.
And finally, there was an A. Silverman, who may have received the harshest punishment of all. He was sentenced to three days in jail. Was this the same Abraham Silverman I just mentioned? The newspaper article doesn’t make that clear. But it’s hard to imagine a judge sending a 12-year-old to jail for three days. So, maybe it was Abraham. Maybe it wasn’t.
Which raises the obvious question: Were any of these two, possibly three, Silvermans related to me?
Unfortunately, I can’t claim any of them. My grandfather was born Abraham Litwak and later changed his name to Jack Silverman. Could he have been using a transitional name – perhaps Abraham Silverman – during this period? It’s certainly possible. But, based on what I know, I think it’s doubtful.
That said, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if my grandfather, who was living on the Lower East Side in 1922, had been somewhere in the middle of the Straw Hat Riots. Everybody has secrets that they take to their grave.
There would be no more straw-hat riots in New York City after 1922. Although the custom of knocking straw hats from men’s heads after September 15 continued for a few years, it was largely harmless, although I did come across one more death. In the end, however, it wasn’t the police, the courts, or changing social attitudes that brought the tradition to an end. Instead, it was fashion. The straw boater simply went out of style.
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
