Book Review: Hatless Jack - The President, the Fedora, and the History of American Style by Neil Steinberg

John F. Kennedy was a president without precedent: the youngest man ever elected to the Oval Office, the first to be born in the twentieth century, and the first president-elect to become a father. Right from the start it was clear this was going to be a very different presidency.

And, for the most part, it was a bareheaded one. In striking contrast to his predecessors, JFK was rarely seen in any kind of headwear. It’s perhaps for this reason that Kennedy has been blamed for ending America’s longstanding love affair with the hat. But in Hatless Jack: The President, the Fedora, and the History of American Style, author and Chicago Sun-Times journalist Neil Steinberg has gone to extraordinary lengths to nail that myth.

From our viewpoint, it’s almost impossible to imagine a time when a man could not appear in public without a hat. Yet Steinberg shows that hats were once regarded not merely as accessories, but as indispensable components of a man’s wardrobe. In George Gissing’s 1888 novel, A Life’s Morning, the loss of the protagonist’s hat impels him to steal from his employer to replace it. The theft has catastrophic consequences, but he is quite prepared to risk all rather than lose public respect. Such extreme cases, says Steinberg, may have been rare, but the very existence of the story and the fact that it could never have been written in our own times, is one measure of how society has changed in little over a century.

Similarly incredible is Steinberg’s account of how civil disorder on the streets of New York was provoked merely by the sight of straw hats. What had started as a publicity stunt by the hat trade turned into a widely observed canon that straw hats could only be worn between May and mid-September. President Calvin Coolidge actually made the front page of the New York Times just because he’d taken an autumn stroll in a straw boater. For those not accompanied by the secret service, the consequences of breaking with this sartorial custom would prove more serious. Steinberg describes how riots broke out in 1922 when mobs of boys roamed the streets of New York City, attacking any man daring enough to wear a straw hat.

Article Author: James Carson

Sometime writer, part-time librarian, full-time Scotsman who enjoys reading, travel, writing and music.

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