JFK, Eisenhower, And Hats

[nomeus]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/05/04/152011840/who-killed-mens-hats-think-of-a-three-letter-word-beginning-with-i


A hundred years ago â€" and that's when this picture was taken, in 1912 â€" men didn't leave home without a hat. Boys wore caps. This is a socialist political rally in Union Square in Manhattan. There may be a bare head or two in this crowd, but I think those heads are women's.


The Library of Congress/via flickr

Here's another rally, Union Square again. This time it's an Occupy Wall Street demonstration. A hundred years have passed. Same place. Same kind of crowd. But this time: hardly a hat.


Allison Joyce/Getty Images

Flip back one more time. We're back, I think, in Union Square, with Emma Goldman arriving by car. She's another socialist (this isn't an essay about lefties, it's about hats) and there she is, the only woman in a sea of men wearing a sea of hats.


Emma Goldman at Union Square, 1916 Wikimedia Commons

So what happened? Why did guys stop wearing headgear in midcentury America?


The turning point, most people say, was John F. Kennedy's inauguration. Before Kennedy, all presidents wore top hats on their first day at work. Kennedy brought one, but hardly ever put it on. Fashionistas say Kennedy, one of our most charismatic presidents, made hats un-happen. And, chronologically speaking, after JFK, guys everywhere, even balding ones like astronaut John Glenn, went topless.


Astronaut John Glenn, left, and President John F. Kennedy, center, inspect the Friendship 7 Mercury capsule on Feb. 23, 1962, which Glenn rode in orbit. At right is Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.
AP

Astronaut John Glenn, left, and President John F. Kennedy, center, inspect the Friendship 7 Mercury capsule on Feb. 23, 1962, which Glenn rode in orbit. At right is Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.

But I am the son of a hat designer. And my father, Allen S. Krulwich, had a different explanation. The president who de-hatted America, he thought, was Dwight Eisenhower.

Here's my dad's logic.

In the 1950s â€" and this was one of Ike's grand accomplishments â€" he built a vast highway system across America. Interstates went up everywhere. Cities extended roads, turnpikes, highways, and suburbs appeared around every major city. People, instead of taking a bus, a tram, a train to work, could hop into their new Chevy or Ford and drive.

Before Eisenhower, many more people used public transportation. After Eisenhower, they used a car. That, my father thinks, created the critical Head-To-Roof Difference.

A person of average height standing in a bus, tram or subway car has, roughly, three feet between the top of his head and the roof.


Robert Krulwich/NPR

If he chooses to wear a hat, (which depending on the hat can extend his height 3 to 18 inches), there is still lots of room above him. So he keeps his hat on.

Now imagine the same person, sitting in the drivers' seat of his car. The Head-To-Roof distance is much narrower, so narrow that to stay comfortable, a man would feel it proper to remove his hat.


Robert Krulwich/NPR

Until cars became the dominant mode of personal transport, there was no architectural reason to take your hat off between home and office. With Dwight Eisenhower's interstate highway system came cars, and cars made hats inconvenient, and for the first time men, crunched by the low ceilings in their automobiles, experimented with hat-removal, and got to like it.

Yes, there may have been other motivations; Kennedy had great hair; so did the Beatles, fashion was changing wildly at the time, but if we are looking for a president to blame â€" and my father, whose business suffered in the 1960s and 1970s â€" wanted to blame someone, I'm going to stand with him: I blame Ike, because Ike built the highways that created the cars that lowered the roofs that crushed the hats that changed the fashion that ruined the business that supported the Krulwiches.

[Timkin]

Interesting read, Nomeus   !!

[strider]

As one who was in this twenties in the 70's, I always like hats.  Of course, my father never wore hats, even in the forties there were no photos of him in hats (except when in uniform).  Occasionally those around him had hats, but not him.  I also never saw my Grandfather in hats so I think it might have been a cultural thing.  My Fathers parents were immigrants from Croatia, my Grandfather being a farmer and my Grandmother the daughter of the tavern owner. As my Grandfather had immigrated at 16, one would think that he would have adopted the American hat culture, but he didn't and certainly, even if he wore hats when he was younger, he did not pass on that habit to his sons.  At least not all of them.  One certainly did wear hats, he was the playboy of the family.  Known to have a want-a-be starlet or a model on his arm at times, I remember his flashy convertibles and sharp suits ... with hats.   The hard working blue collar of us never seemed to wear hats.  Makes me wonder if that by the time WWII ended, hats were consigned to the white collar crowd and forgotten as not needed by the hard working but upwardly mobile blue collar middle class.  And the upwardly mobile blue collars were also buying cars by then.  Hmmm, perhaps your father was indeed onto something there, Nomeus.

But back to my 20's.  Liking hats, I bought several nice ones but I found I was always asked to remove the hat for pictures and then when you wore one out and about, there was nothing to do with it so it ended up left in the car.  And, of course, you could not wear the hat in the car anyway, at least my preferred type of car.  By then there were no Hat Check girls and even when there was a coat check, they looked at you a bit odd when you handled them that hat.  Eventually, I gave up and just let my hair grow longer.  And took to wearing a head band to control that hair. 

I still love to watch movies like Casablanca and the Big Sleep.  Bogart and hats.  But of course, you will quickly notice that while in the majority of the interior scenes, Bogart politely removes his hat, he still wears it in those big cars of the era.  Plenty of hat room in a 1946 Chevy.  A bit different than the sporty little numbers I liked to drive in the 70's.  Starting to seem like there was a bit more to it than just the cars.  Maybe if the hats had stayed around, the cars would have had more "hat room" designed into them.

In thinking about all this, I do wonder if WWII played a part in the hats being cast aside.  Did having to wear that heavy metal "hat" discourage hat wearing after the war ended?  Did being exposed to the tropics have something do do with it?  Did being forced to wear a hat or else while being in the military, and during WWII, most men were indeed in the military, have something to do with it?  A way of rebelling against the establishment? Or was it being exposed to so many other cultures? Lots of possibilities.

I wear hats more often today.  Something to do with keeping the sun off my growing bald spot I guess.  Of course they are ball caps today, but mine are often sporting the name of my current boat rather than anything to do with a ball game. It would be kinda fun if real hats made a come back.  Us old guys could have some fun flirting with those young and attractive hat check girls.  Well, at least that's what the old movies always show, isn't it?

Thanks Nomeus for the fun thread.  It was fun thinking about hats and why they lost their luster.  As I truly believe that street cars and mass transit will be the norm once again by the end of this century, so perhaps will hats have their day again too.