0:01 [SPEAKER_00]: You know how you're not supposed to wear white after Labor Day? 0:05 [SPEAKER_00]: Imagine a similar rule for baseball hats, making it a crime a fashion to wear any hat with a soft cap in a stiff bill after a certain date. 0:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Say it's up to 15 right near the end of baseball season. 0:19 [SPEAKER_00]: And imagine that the penalty for breaking this rule isn't a bit of a side eye, at the country club, but having a friend of yours, gleefully rip your head off your head and tear it to pieces in front of you. 0:31 [SPEAKER_00]: You may be surprised to learn that this is not a hypothetical situation. 0:34 [SPEAKER_00]: This was socially acceptable behavior, at least in New York in the early 20th century. 0:40 [SPEAKER_00]: The baseball hats of a hundred years ago were straw hats, pretty much everyone had one, and if you were still wearing one. 0:47 [SPEAKER_00]: On September 16th, you could expect to be mocked. 0:50 [SPEAKER_00]: In the very least, if your friends were around, it was perfectly normal for them to tear your hat off your head and smash it. 0:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Serve you right for being one full day out of fashion. 1:00 [SPEAKER_00]: The typical method of destruction was for the persecutor to hold the stolen hat just out of reach of its owner and use the other hand to punch a hole in the top before mingling it further. 1:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Because this was something friends did to one another, they at least had the courtesy to remove it from the owner's head before smashing it to pieces. 1:20 [SPEAKER_00]: On September 13, 1922, two days before the deadline, the usual number of men, a huge number of men, were still wearing hats in the streets of Manhattan. 1:31 [SPEAKER_00]: The reason we know how many men were wearing straw hats in this random place on this random day, in the middle of a far away September, is that almost every one of those hats were smashed, not by friends, but by strangers. 1:46 [SPEAKER_00]: The old courtesy of removing the hat before destroying it was not extended to everyone. 1:51 [SPEAKER_00]: It was much more efficient to just smash the hat where it sat on top of someone's head before moving on to the next hat on the next head and doing it again. 2:00 [SPEAKER_00]: Think of the way teenagers used to smash mailboxes with baseball hats, one after another, while driving down the road and some of these hat smashes were using bats or sticks very much like bats in their attacks. 2:14 [SPEAKER_00]: At first, the police were reluctant to respond. 2:17 [SPEAKER_00]: This is New York, and you want us to pull off this homicide case because of a 15-year kid smashed your pretty hat, but the calls just kept coming in. 2:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Some from hospitals treating victims who had been badly beaten. 2:29 [SPEAKER_00]: It eventually became clear that these attacks were not random, but were part of a coordinated strategic assault, but for what, more than 1,000 use between the age of 10 and 18 had taken to the streets at the same time, in different pockets of the city to perform the same act of wardrobe vandalism. 2:47 [SPEAKER_00]: All that they had accomplished was the destruction a bunch of strangers clothing to what end. 2:52 [SPEAKER_00]: The name of the straw hat riots comes from a New York Times article from the following morning titled, City has wild night of straw hat riots. 3:01 [SPEAKER_00]: It read, Gings of youth hudelums ran riot in various parts of the city last night, smashing unseasonable straw hats and trampling them in the street. 3:10 [SPEAKER_00]: In some cases, mobs of hundreds of boys in young men terrorized whole blocks, a favorite practice of gangsters was to arm themselves with sticks, some with nails at the tip, and compel men wearing hats to run a gauntlet. 3:24 [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes the hudlums would hide in doorways and dash out, 10 or 12 strong, to attack one or two men. 3:31 [SPEAKER_00]: A long Christopher street on a lower west side, 3:34 [SPEAKER_00]: The attackers lined up along the surface car tracks and yanked straw hats off the heads of passengers as the cars passed. 3:42 [SPEAKER_00]: The street were such incidents occurred, were strung with broken straw hats. 3:46 [SPEAKER_00]: Hat stores, which kept open last night, were crowded with purchasers of fall hats. 3:52 [SPEAKER_00]: Once we're got out, anyone wearing a straw hat did the mob's a favor and destroyed his own hat. 3:59 [SPEAKER_00]: To save his head, or at least he removed it, and headed if he could. 4:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Some men did fight back, and a few of them had success. 4:07 [SPEAKER_00]: The dock workers, in particular, came out swinging, in a brawl so big, and violent broke out, but a temporarily stop traffic on the Manhattan Bridge. 4:16 [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, all over straw hats, and here is where it really gets interesting. 4:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Once detectives began investigating the riots, they noticed a pattern or maybe not a pattern, but hot spots around the city for violent hat hunting teenagers. 4:32 [SPEAKER_00]: Men were wearing straw hats all over the city, and the violence was strangely confined to very specific areas, from which these quote, rioters, rarely strayed, the headline in the New York Tribune was even better than the Times, quote, 4:55 [SPEAKER_00]: The gangs patroled Lexington Park and third avenues, 103rd in 125th streets, so zealously that few straw hats escaped. 5:04 [SPEAKER_00]: At every police station, the outgoing platoon was warned at 8 o'clock to be on the alert for had hunting hoodlums in the policemen were busy all night. 5:14 [SPEAKER_00]: A good number of the kids involved in this riot were hauled to jail, a number of adult men were hospitalized for their injuries. 5:20 [SPEAKER_00]: Police departments were overwhelmed by a deluge of reports, traffic stopped on the Manhattan Bridge. 5:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Thousands of innocent straw hats turned back and to straw, everybody involved in these 5:34 [SPEAKER_00]: that is, everybody except for one small group of businesses in the areas of the riots, hat shop. 5:41 [SPEAKER_00]: No hat shops in the history of New York have ever done better business, constellation of felt in velvet hat shops did on the night of September 13th, 1922. 5:52 [SPEAKER_00]: Remember, the time said, the street where such incidents occurred, 5:56 [SPEAKER_00]: were strung with broken straw hats, hat stores which kept open last night were crowded with purchasers of fall hats. 6:05 [SPEAKER_00]: And the Tribune added, some hat stores kept their doors open long after the usual closing time and did a thriving business and soft hats. 6:15 [SPEAKER_00]: In some instances, the police reported that the youth were rotters were suspiciously active in the immediate vicinity of such stores. 6:24 [SPEAKER_00]: Somehow, not one of the stores was ever prosecuted, nor is there any record of them being actively investigated. 6:31 [SPEAKER_00]: But reading about the straw hat riots today, the lesson seems clear. 6:35 [SPEAKER_00]: Whenever something goes wrong in a way that seems premeditated, and everyone in front of you seems to be losing, dig a little deeper, expand your purview, and always, always, follow the money.
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