Stop. Flash back a hundred years to 1912, when this picture was taken. Every man wore a hat back then. Boys, or pre-men, wore caps — a kind of junior hat. This is a socialist political rally in Union Square in Manhattan. (The photographer's motivation? Unknown.) There may be a bare head or two in this crowd, but I think those heads are women's. Do you disagree?
Snap back to the present. Here's another rally, Union Square again. Manhattan again. Another photograph — in color, of course. This time it's an Occupy Wall Street demonstration. A hundred years have passed. Same place. Same kind of crowd, if you catch my drift, with all due respect. Same partially obscure/d signs on sticks, yes, but this time: hardly a hat. And again, the photographer's motivation is unknown to everyone — excluding, only perhaps, the photographer:
Skip back one more time. We're still in Union Square, still near the future home of a DSW retail outlet, and Emma Goldman, a brunette, is 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 puddle of men. The meniscus of this puddle is composed of hats. It is safe to assume, knowing what we know, that the photographer who shot this photo was — if he was a man — probably wearing a hat.
So what happened? Why did midcentury American bros drop the follicle-topping chapeaus?
The turning point — or tipping point — most people might say, was John F. Kennedy's inauguration. Before Kennedy's inauguration, no Catholic president had uttered a single word, kissed a single woman, or drawn a single breath. Kennedy was, you see, the first president to be called by people — including himself — a Catholic. (You could look it up: every single president prior to Kennedy wasn't Catholic.)
Furthermore, all presidents up to and including Kennedy wore top hats on their first days at work. Older readers may remember, thanks to Disney's "Teariest Tophat on Pennsylvania Avenue" cartoon: Kennedy brought a top hat to work, but hardly ever put it on. Fashionistas say Kennedy was one of our most charismatic presidents. They say he made hats un-happen. They say that, chronologically speaking, after JFK, guys everywhere, even balding ones like astronaut John Glenn, went topless. Only one thing is for sure: when fashionistas speak, the quantity and quality of the listening is in constant flux. Who's to say who's listening, and how carefully, at any moment?
I am the son of an industrial fiberglass salesman. And my father, Sean McMullen (B.S., Ohio State, 1973), shares this theory with the fashionistas: "Kennedy didn't wear a hat — he hated wearing hats — so hats went out of fashion."
But it is here that my father's theory diverges from that of the fashionistas: "And the Supreme Court outlawed prayer in schools. This was in 1963. And all hell broke loose," dad posits via phone. He continues: "I'm at your nephew's birthday party. Do you want to talk to your mother?"
"Sure," I say.
"I trimmed some bushes in front of grandma and grandpa's house," mom says. "There was water in their basement, too, so Aunt Kris and I cleaned that up. I was happy to be there and help out. It's going to take a long time for grandpa to recover [from recent heart surgery involving a bypass and the replacement of two valves]; he's just really out of breath and having a hard time walking up and down the stairs."
My grandpa was born in 1925. My mom was born in 1951. I ask my mom: "Did grandpa wear a hat to work when you were a little girl?"
"I don't know. I don't know. I don't think so. Of course now he's obsessed with putting a hat on when he goes outside. If he goes outside for one second, he has to have a hat on."
"Why?"
"He has Actinic Keratosis — pre-cancerous lesions on his scalp. He had them frozen with liquid nitrogen by the dermatologist, and now he wears that hat — you know the hat — that white hat that he wears crooked on his head. He won't leave the house without it."
If I were the son (or grandson) of Allen S. Krulwich, a hat designer, I could tell you — from a son's (or grandson's) jazzy journalistic perspective — about Allen's theory on the decline and fall of the hat's happy hegemony.
The president who de-hatted America, Allen S. Krulwich thought, was Dwight Eisenhower.
Here's his logic:
In the 1950s — and this was one of Ike's grand accomplishments — 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, Krulwich 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.
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.
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, some believe prayer in school was outlawed; but if we are looking for a president to blame — and Allen S. Krulwich, whose business suffered in the 1960s and 1970s — 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.
