Crazy. This is a good article to point to when people say everyone used to be better. Aside from all the, you know, racism, sexism, etc.
This country used to be absolutely fuckin bonkers on a day to day level, back before TV made everyone lethargic and gullible and slow to pick up on things. I’m not saying that as a good thing or a bad thing, it was just nuts.
One of my grandad’s high school classes didn’t like their teacher, so they rushed the front of the class and grabbed him and hung him upside-down out the 2nd story window by his ankles. He never came back to class and they had to get someone else to teach who was capable of keeping the class in order.
Wild read.
The tradition of hat smashing continued for some time after the riots of 1922. In 1924, a man was murdered for wearing a straw hat.
I would like to learn more about that.
The article cited Hatless Jack by Neil Steinberg, and it looks like the book is available secondhand online.
Absolute madness, the only person that should have a serious eight-day fight over a straw hat is Monkey D. Luffy.
A great read, thank you for posting!
It was socially acceptable for stockbrokers to destroy each other’s hats, due to the fact that they were “companions”,but it was not acceptable for total strangers. If any man was seen wearing a straw hat, he was, at minimum, subjecting himself to ridicule, and it was a tradition for youths to knock straw hats off wearers’ heads and stomp on them. This tradition became well established, and newspapers of the day would often warn people of the impending approach of the fifteenth, when men would have to switch to felt or silk hats. Hat bashing was only socially acceptable after September 15, but there were multiple occasions leading up to this date where the police had to intervene and stop teenagers.
