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These Insane Viral Trends and Fads Overtook History Long Before the Internet

Khalid Elhassan July 13, 2022 37 min

Viral - Marathon dancers in 1923 — Marathon dancers in 1923. Library of Congress

19. When Fashion Led to Riots

Most people in this 1912 New York City crowd sported straw hats. Library of Congress

The viral fad of snatching straw hats off people’s heads and destroying them led to serious disturbances. In 1922, New York City erupted into a days-long Straw Hat Riot, which put that of Pittsburgh in 1910 to shame. It began in Manhattan’s Mulberry Bend, when some urchins decided to ignore the September 15^th cutoff. They got a head start on their annual crime spree, and began to snatch and destroy straw hats on September 13^th. The kids’ first target was some dockworkers, but the dockworkers did not see the humor in it, got ticked off, and fought back. Things escalated, and that night, widespread mayhem and crime engulfed Manhattan.

After they got beat down by the dockworkers, the kids regrouped in ever-larger and increasingly more violent gangs. Soon, mobs of out-of-control youth roamed the city, snatched hats off heads, attacked people en masse, and beat up any who resisted. NYC’s 1922 Straw Hat Riot went on for days. The initial mayhem on the night of September 13^th grew so widespread and got so bad that it halted traffic on the Manhattan Bridge. Police reinforcement were rushed in to end the violence, but the relief was only temporary. The next night, the crime spree intensified when youth gangs, some of them armed with nail-studded clubs, returned to the streets of Manhattan.

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.