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Crime Waves and Savage Fads From History That Were Just Unnatural

Khalid Elhassan June 18, 2020 35 min

37. Pittsburgh Pioneered Straw Hat Riots

New York City crowd in 1912, with most of the men wearing straw hats. Library of Congress

Pittsburgh was home to one of the earliest recorded instances of widespread crime, violence, and rioting surrounding the end of straw hat season. On September 15^th, 1910, Felt Hat Day demonstrations were organized. Mobs descended upon straw-lidded pedestrians to snatch away and destroy their headgear. When some stood up for their right to wear whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, and resisted the wrecking of their straw hats, they came close to getting violently wrecked by the demonstrators.

As crime and violence spread, some straw hat wearers pulled guns to protect their headgear. Elsewhere in the city, some had their hats taken off their heads at gunpoint. Eventually, police were mobilized to disperse the rioters, and serious bloodshed and loss of life were narrowly avoided. The following day, many newspapers wrote it off as “youthful exuberance”. As the scale of the September 15^th rioting grew in subsequent years, however, the public’s and the media’s patience with such exuberance grew thin.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.