The first decades of the twentieth century saw the creation and spread of children’s courts aimed at diverting law-breaking children early (rather than labeling them as criminals). Juvenile reform institutions were created, to avoid putting children into prisons with adult convicts.
This system, depending on one’s political sympathies, either coddles budding felons, or brutalizes children who are victims of their environment. The pendulum on how to respond to underage criminality continues to swing. Perhaps confident that they would face little or no punishment, attacking hats became a trend (which like other teenage fads, also disappeared).
The hat riot boys represented something new in another way. The decades prior to 1922 had also seen social reformers try to eradicate child labor, long a key part of New York’s industrial economy. The horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire had spurred legislators to action. Bills were passed at a state (and less successfully, federal) level, to protect children under 14 from working. Although not always followed, these laws represented a societal sea change: the hat wreckers were the first generation of New York children it was illegal to employ. They were at the forefront of a new sociological group: the teenager.
September 1922 was warm, with temperatures in New York City well into the 80s on the 14th and 15th. An Indian Summer tends to contribute to crime—and to some men, preferring to continue wearing their straw hats and seersucker rather than layer on wool and a felt topper.
But what prompted these boys to riot over hats? To go vigilante in the enforcement of a social code none of them were likely to live by? The arbitrary hat rule created an out-group, a category of “approved” victims for bored teens to attack.
Most scholarship on riots discusses a flashpoint, or simmering grievance, as the motivation. In the hat riots, it is hard to parse a real motive. An early study on boys in gangs (published a decade before the hat riots), offers some insights. J. Adams Puffer described a typical gang practice of “plaguing people.” This meant singling out individuals to harass and attack, with victims often selected by societal prejudice (race being an obvious example).
Such gang behavior towards designated targets occurs regularly to this day, whether directed at neighborhood outgroups or randomly, in the appalling “knockout game.” But these activities don’t involve large crowds. The huge numbers allegedly involved in the hat attacks made it more characteristic of an urban riot.