Although angry words and fistfights clearly aren’t splendid, at least Trump's rally riot managed to avoided terrific violence and death.
On March 11, Donald Trump supporters and anti-Trump demonstrators engaged in clashes before a Trump rally in Chicago was set to commence. After a short period of shouting and fistfights, the rally was canceled. Although the fistfights are serious because they represent a larger problem with growing radicalism in American political history, a couple of fistfights at a Trump rally is nowhere near as compelling or interesting as some other political riots within history.
Jumping back to 1788, individuals then had a much better reason to riot than a controversial choice for president. In this case, the riot started when a doctor dissecting a cadaver decided to show off a dismembered limb toward a small group of boys playing by the hospital window. Back in the day, it was not uncommon for doctors to steal bodies from cemeteries to study, as dissection was widely frowned upon. As if showing dismembered limbs to children wasn't bad enough, one of the children became convinced that the arm that the doctor was showing off belonged to his deceased mother.
The child immediately told his father, who went directly to his deceased wife’s grave, where he discovered that her body was missing. This initiated an event known in history as the Doctors' Riot, when a group of rioters charged the hospital, discovered several dissected bodies and assaulted the medical students. Officials whisked the students away and hid them in the jail. However, armed rioters, numbering around 300 strong, rushed the jail and demanded that the doctors be handed over. The riot ended when a local militia arrived and killed four of the angry mob, while the medical students were hidden in the countryside until the fervor died down.
To this day, it has yet to be confirmed whether the arm truly did belong to the hysterical child’s mother, a question that most rioters will thankfully never have to ask.
Skipping forward a few hundred years, we find ourselves witnessing the Straw Hat Riot of 1922, a massive hullabaloo instigated over fashion trends. Back then, an unspoken rule existed that straw hats should not be worn on or after Sept. 15. If straw hats were worn on Sept. 15 and onwards, they were liable to be snatched and destroyed, due to the fact that popular opinion dictated that straw hats — warm weather wear — were not suitable for the approach of autumn.
The 1922 riot started because several young boys in New York City decided that they did not have the patience to wait until Sept. 15 to begin their straw hat destruction activities, and decided to begin snatching straw hats on Sept. 13, a full two days before the socially-designated deadline. Naturally, the dockworkers who had their hats snatched on the 13th responded very negatively and began to attack the children. The violent conflict escalated until large groups of people with vendettas against straw hats started attacking individuals, sometimes with clubs studded with nails.
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The police issued a warning that hat-snatching would not be tolerated and that any such activity would result in citations. However, hat-snatching continued over the next few days. Although the police did their absolute best to chase down hat-snatcher gangs in one district of the city, they were utterly incapable of stopping the gangs from destroying every single straw hat they could find.
Not that we shouldn’t be worried about the violence at Trump rallies, but thank goodness we’re not working with nail-studded clubs... yet.
Richard Hwang is a student at Athens High School. Have you heard of the Straw Hat Riot of 1922? Email him at rhwang999@gmail.com.
