"The
Silent Generation who didn't wear fedoras"
Robert
T. West
There are undoubtedly a lot of reasons for the decline of hatwearing,
and it's been pretty well gone over. Men have
been wearing hats for at least ten thousand years, and I regard the
last fifty years or so as the oddity. I'm confident hat wearing will be
the norm again, it's just a question of when.
Because I've been noticing the pronounced increase of hats being worn
in my own area very recently, I've become more interested in the
question of "why now?", even if it's just a passing trend, this time.
I think the author, Neil Steinberg, might have missed a couple of
things. My own father
said that he didn't like hats because he was forced to wear one in the
Navy, and the author covers that argument, but I wonder if that was
really the whole story at the time.
My father talked about his own generation, that he said was called "the
silent generation". These were the sons and sometimes younger brothers
of what Tom Brokow has dubbed "the greatest generation", the men who
fought World War Two. What we tend to lose sight of, is that that is
the way they were regarded then, and how very dominant they were in
their own time. Men returning from wars have not been treated that way
in the US since.
My father talked about having to compete in every realm with the guys
returning from the war- in college, with the veterans funded by the GI
Bill, and in the workplace having to compete for jobs with returning
heroes. He talked about how intimidating it could be to work with guys
who had faced down death, who felt that they could accomplish anything,
and to whom the struggles of civilian life, that the "silent
generation" was just learning to cope with, seemed "easy" by
comparison.
Even the war that the "silent generation" fought (Korea) was completely
overshadowed, and when they returned, having done their part and their
duty like their fathers and older brothers, they did not return to the
homecoming they might have expected- that they might have had a right
to expect.
I'm wondering if going hatless became a sort of tacit way for a lot of
that generation to try to differentiate themselves from "the greatest
generation", to try to move out of their shadow a bit. Yes, implicit in
stating that they were a different generation, they were also stating
that they were younger. After all, hat's didn't disappear when the
returning WWII veterans entered the workplace, despite thier complaints
at being forced to wear them- they didn't disappear until at least a
decade later, when a different generation was beginning to make it's
influence known, however quietly.
The shadow of the guys who fought World War Two was huge, and I wonder
if we're still seeing the effects.
It's now a new millenium, and we are the generations that came after
"the silent generation", and were by and large brought up in a hatless
world. Why would hats be returning now? Most of the obvious obstacles
have not gone away. Hatracks and hatchecks are gone, car roofs are
still too low, and the commonly-available hats are of very poor quality.
I think it may be simply because now, in the new millenium and beyond,
that huge shadow has passed, and we're just coming out of it. We no
longer encounter "the greatest generation" in the course of our normal
lives, and for the first time we can wear one of their emblems as
perhaps a tribute to that generation, instead of fearing a face-to-face
encounter with a "rightful owner". No one, anymore, is going to think
that we're claiming to be something we're not by wearing it. Just at
this point in history, that past has become just remote enough, for the
first time, for the statement we're making by wearing a such a hat to
be different.
A classic fedora is still and probably always will be associated with
what we're calling "the golden age", but now our wearing it can be
partly to honor that age and those men, whereas when those men actually
shared our streets with us, it was, and maybe had to be, theirs alone.
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