Did you know there was a time
when whale watching could make crowds blubber?
Everyone there is absolutely showered
in rotting whale carcass.
People are running, everyone scared.
There's blood everywhere.
Or when crowds packed in ringside
to watch the Civil War.
Hundreds of people load up into carriages
so that they can see the battle that's about to unfold.
Suddenly bloody frightened, screaming men
are hauling ass straight at you,
retreating from a battle that they are losing.
Do you remember when the Black Friday rush
could happen any day of the week?
Women are getting trampled.
Windows are getting broken out.
This is way before Black Friday is a thing
and the stores are not prepared.
These are the things we used to do.
For fun,
for money,
or maybe out of boredom
that we'll never see again.
Were they dangerous? Certainly.
Deadly? Occasionally.
But boy, wasn't it exciting?
If you want to get in with the popular crowd,
it doesn't get much better
or bigger than the Kentucky Derby.
Up in the stands, it's all fancy outfits, mint juleps.
But back in the day, down in the infield,
it was less garden party and more animal house.
Every year since 1875, tens of thousands of fans are drawn
to Louisville, Kentucky and Churchill Downs
to see the Kentucky Derby.
At the Triple Crown fans
witnessed a thriller diller of a Kentucky Derby.
If you look at the crowd of the Kentucky Derby,
everyone is dressed elegantly.
Fedoras, women in elegant, expensive gowns
with beautiful ornate hats.
But in the 1930s,
Churchill Downs realizes "We can sell more tickets
and the venue for that is right in front of us.
Let's sell tickets to the infield."
What they do is they build a tunnel from the outside
to the interior of the park so that fans can go down there
and come out in the middle of the infield
and it's kind of this really fun signature experience.
At first, it's a family friendly affair.
Bring picnic baskets, bring blankets
and lay out for the whole day,
and it culminates
with the Kentucky Derby right in front of you.
But as the derby grows,
the infield starts to shift from polite gathering
to something a little wilder.
The crowds grow, and they're not the crowds of old.
Goodbye debutantes and fancy hats and hello partying.
The infield becomes a scene.
By the late 1960s,
the infield has gone from picnic blankets to party central.
And when the track bans outside booze in 1968,
Derby goers start a new tradition, sneaking it in.
You got people with like canes that are hollow
that they fill up with whiskey
or people are hiding flasks on 'em everywhere.
People begin sneaking in alcohol in lotion bottles,
fake disguised binoculars that are actually flasks.
There's a legendary story of a group of men
caught attempting to stash liquor
in the Churchill Downs infield
by burying it 11 months before the Derby.
The booze may be hidden,
but by the 1970s the loss of inhibition is on full display.
Things get a little rowdy, a little wild,
tarps become makeshift trampolines.
People are dressed in bizarre costumes
and it becomes a "partay".
In 1970, the famous Gonzo Journalist Hunter S. Thompson,
that madman writes an article
that says The Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved.
In 1973, secretariat wins the Kentucky Derby
and the Triple Crown and it's huge.
So the next year,
the infield is the hottest ticket in sports.
In 1974, it is a big year for the Derby.
It's the hundredth race.
Princess Margaret of Britain is there.
It's just a very special year.
Ooh, you got people doing a little bit of drugs,
maybe smoking a little bit.
Before you know it, you got Woodstock in the middle
of all these, these horses running around.
Like after a while people are like,
this isn't what it was supposed to be.
One guy even climbs a flagpole
in the middle of the infield.
He manages to hold on with one hand
and actually moon everybody and not fall.
Then hundreds of people crash the fence
that surrounds the track.
Man, it got dangerous.
They got within striking distance of the horses
before the riot police came in
and had to knock some skulls and get 'em outta there.
The notorious flag pole is taken down.
Then they double the price.
And they hope this'll attract a more upscale crowd,
but there's plenty of security
to make sure it doesn't go 1970 style.
These days, Churchill Downs and the Derby is lined
with metal detectors and cameras,
but believe it or not, the biggest deterrent to chaos,
everyone's cell phone.
With the ability to be caught on camera doing no good,
people on the infield
have sort of changed their stripes a little bit
and they're more interested in being part
of the spectacle than being a spectacle.
In the 1970s, college campuses were packed
with kids wearing bell bottoms, I did.
Platform shoes and colors that demanded attention.
But for some, the real way to stand out in a crowd
was not wearing anything at all.
In 1973, the full counterculture is in effect.
This is a generation that is sick of the rigid rules
of their parents and especially of the boomer
and World War II generation.
The motto was Let it all hang out.
And that's when a group of college kids was just like,
oh, let's literally have it all hang out.
The way they do this,
especially on college campus,
is to strip down naked and run around the grounds
and they call this streaking.
Streaking, it's fun
because it's transgressive, you know.
But it's also harmless in a way.
But it does feel dangerous and it does feel freeing.
It's not really clear
where the origins of streaking on campus are.
By 1974, kids are streaking across campuses
all over the country.
These fraternities and these sororities
that are letting people know
that they're gonna streak the quad.
Word gets out and people start coming to the quad
to watch the show.
What starts as a naked fraternity prank
becomes a movement and soon people gather by the thousands
to watch people get their streak on.
Things just get outta hand.
In North Carolina, 4,000 people show up.
At SMU, more people show up
to watch the streakers than the basketball game.
In the 1970s,
streaking has kind of gone mainstream.
You have things like Time Magazine
calling it the "epidermis epidemic."
That spring, a streaker runs by it.
The Academy Awards actor David Niven, is on stage.
Quite likely...
Probably the only laugh
that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off
and showing his shortcomings.
But the carefree days don't last.
And believe it or not, it's not the nakedness
that ends the party.
It's crowd control.
4,000 people turn out at the University of Delaware
as spectators to a streaking event,
and that just turned into mayhem.
It ends with injured police, damaged police cars,
and a dozen arrests.
Things get so bad that the police start showing up
with riot gear at these streaking events.
Streaking eventually dies down by the end of 1974
because of this mix of police crackdowns
and universities trying to stop it
and just the thrill of it kind of wanes.
Turns out if you wanted to be part of the cool crowd,
clothing was very much optional.
They say there is safety in numbers
unless you are in a crowd drawn to something strange,
smelly, and ready to blow.
If you've ever been to a beach,
sometimes some unusual things will wash up on the shore
and it draws a crowd.
In 1970, when a dead eight ton
sperm whale washes ashore in Florence, Oregon.
Sure enough, it's gonna draw some attention.
Sperm whales are among the largest animals on earth,
but few people ever get to see them up close.
They're way too big for any aquarium.
A fully grown adult can reach 60 feet and weigh 45 tons.
That's like a semi-truck.
Seeing a creature this big up close
is an incredible experience.
But what's also incredible is
when a dead animal begins to rot.
Word spreads fast.
Television stations and newspapers pick up the story,
and soon the beach is packed.
People drive in from miles away.
After three days, the crowd
and the stench around this beached whale begin to grow.
The tough thing about a sperm whale,
it's hard to dispose of, right?
Like you can't bury it on shore, it'll come back up.
You can't push it back onto the sea,
'cause then it'll disintegrate
and then its parts will come back onto the shore.
It's a conundrum of what to do.
Inside the carcass,
it's creating gases like hydrogen sulfide and methane.
And worse still, these gases are flammable.
Crowds climb on top of the whale
looking for a souvenir,
but if someone were to actually puncture it,
that would cause an explosion.
Mom or dad could light up a cigarette
right next to the whale and boom.
They did ask if anybody wanted to cut it up
and haul it away and use some of the blubber
for another project.
No takers.
The authorities really are under the gun
to do something about it,
and that's when the Oregon State Highway Division
steps in with an idea.
The Highway Division has an interesting way
of removing the whale.
It includes 20 crates of explosives,
nearly a half ton of dynamite
that is enough to demolish an office building.
So they dig a big trench, and their thought is,
if we pack this trench full of dynamite,
when this thing goes off,
it's gonna blow the whale back towards sea.
Today, that plan would need
an environmental review, permits
and about a dozen safety meetings.
But this is the 1970s. Things were way looser back then.
Local papers stoked the excitement.
And on November 12th, 1970,
a crowd gathers eager to watch the big event.
But they'd start to think, you know what?
With this much dynamite,
we should move people back a little bit.
Right guys? A little bit.
With other demolitions,
they know how far back to send people.
But with whale demolition, they're kind of making it up.
In the crowd is a guy named Walter Umenhofer,
who is a military veteran with demolition experience.
He's trained in demolition
and he is trying to warn all these guys,
"Hey, this is way too much dynamite."
Like 20 sticks would probably get the job done,
but 20 crates is an insane amount of dynamite.
You can't imagine the elation on people's faces
as they hear that countdown.
Three, two, one.
Well, you know what goes up must come down.
Moments later you notice the sound
of like pieces of whale thumping down,
and in some cases hitting people
because the blast radius
of a sperm whale apparently is much larger
than what they had anticipated.
Everyone there is absolutely showered
in rotting whale carcass.
People are running, everyone scared.
There's blood everywhere.
It's basically a meat shower.
One slab about the size of a coffee table lands
right on the roof of a brand new Oldsmobile.
And this huge chunk that crushed a new Oldsmobile,
guess who owned it?
That's right, Walter, who told them,
"That's way too much dynamite."
He bought that car at the "Whale of a Deal" sale
at the car dealership.
I mean, it's poetry, it's whale explosion poetry.
So how does Oregon deal
with this whale carcass problem moving forward?
Well, the next time it happens, in 1979,
they did not use any explosives.
They just burned it and buried it and carried on.
So an exploding sea creature wasn't a whale of a time.
But some crowds can't resist a risky front row seat,
even if it's in the middle of an active combat zone.
At the outset of the Civil War,
the federal government is confident
that this conflict will be settled in a matter of weeks.
By July of 1861, President Lincoln is under pressure
to produce a quick victory.
He knows those Confederate troops
are right there in Virginia,
so he orders the Union troops to go engage them.
The residents of Washington DC are pumped up
on patriotism, eager to watch their boys win the war,
literally with their own eyes.
Ordinary civilians are following these troop movements
and a large group of them decides
that they're gonna go watch a war.
It's crazy to think now that anybody would want
to be a spectator to an armed military conflict
where people will die, but people are excited.
Civilians follow the Union troops
because they wanna see the battle like it's Lollapalooza.
Hundreds of people load up into carriages
and complete the 30 mile seven hour journey
so that they can see the battle that's about to unfold
along the banks of a creek called Bull Run.
Most are perched on a hill about five miles away
from the action.
They can hear in the distance cannons and gunfire.
For all intents and purposes, they seem perfectly safe.
Someone later commented,
it felt like being at a county fair and it has that vibe.
Men are dressed to the nines.
Women are wearing their Sunday best, children are playing.
Local entrepreneurs are out there selling pies
like a vendor selling hot dogs at a ball game.
This is like tailgating at a football game,
but it's the Civil War.
But when the Union starts losing,
this picnic on the sidelines
suddenly feels a lot more like war.
28,000 poorly trained US Army soldiers
are being outdone by their Confederate adversaries.
The Union lines buckle
and the soldiers flee
straight through the stunned crowd of spectators.
Suddenly bloody, frightened, screaming men
are hauling ass straight at you,
retreating from a battle that they are losing.
You can imagine the mayhem.
Picnic baskets flying, people running in every direction,
whether they are civilians or combatants.
People immediately get to their wagons
and they're trying to get out,
just trying to get away from danger that had been miles away
and is now on top of them.
Suddenly the spectacle has become terrifying.
There is a retreating armed force that Southerners
will eventually nickname the "Great Skedaddle."
The battle goes badly for the Union
and all those spectators who came for a front row seat,
they learned to keep a little distance from the conflict.
Crowds would watch Civil War fights,
but mostly naval battles from afar
and they're much further away
and less likely to get run over by a retreating army.
In the 20th century,
increased firepower made watching battles far too risky
and crowds stop treating war like dinner theater.
Sports fans today are used to a certain standard
when they pay good money for a ticket.
And if the action doesn't deliver, they may boo
or maybe head for the exit.
But there was a time when standards were non-existent,
and disappointed crowds had a very different response.
During the summer of 1904,
20 million people visit the World's Fair in St. Louis
with the hope of experiencing modern things
like an ice cream cone, a Ferris wheel or electricity.
A promoter named Richard Norris
sees these curious fair crowds as a major opportunity.
Near the fairground he's built
a brand new 18,000 seat arena.
He plans a one of a kind event to draw a huge crowd,
a Spanish bull fight.
In 1904, Americans don't really know very much
about bull fighting.
They might have seen some paintings
or read about it in a book,
but nobody's really seen a matador up close.
So Norris sells 7,000 tickets
at a dollar a piece,
which is about 36 bucks today per head.
And at two o'clock, all these people file in
getting ready for the show.
But as the minutes tick by there are no bulls,
and the crowd begins to get restless.
By 3:00 PM people in the crowd
are starting to chant.
"Where are the bulls? Where are the bulls?"
A local deputy sheriff steps in
and makes a startling announcement.
There will be no bull fighting today.
Today you'd see on the big screen an announcement.
So sorry, here's how you get a refund. Follow this link.
Everybody would just file out single file.
That's not how it was.
No, it's just all these people confused, angry,
and a bunch of 'em have been overserved at this point.
So you have the type of people
that want to watch a bull fight,
a lot of them together in an arena.
And they're in the sun
and they're drinking and they're waiting.
And then instead of a bull fight, out comes a cop
and says, "Get outta here.
There's no bull fight today."
And they erupt.
The crowd storms the box office
demanding their refunds.
Unfortunately, there's no money.
The cash has disappeared along with Richard Norris,
and the police are completely outnumbered
to handle these angry fans.
Angry spectators storm the animal pens.
They want to see these fearsome bulls,
but instead of raging beasts,
they find seven completely calm bulls.
They wave red handkerchiefs at the animals
trying to provoke them, but the bulls just stand there.
One of them just has one horn.
I mean not exactly the fiery one-ton monster
this audience was expecting.
The crowd starts to suspect they've been duped
and they're right.
Days before the event,
it turns out that Richard Norris is informed
that bull fighting is indeed illegal
in the state of Missouri.
So he got the permit kind of assuming
that things would just work out.
So when the sheriff shows up,
Norris just decides, you know what?
I'm gonna cut my losses.
I'm gonna grab the cash and get outta here and be on my way.
This crowd is angry.
They've come to watch a blood sport
and they're gonna get it one way or another.
And they rip open the pens
and the animals are running free over town
and the people are fighting with each other.
They're stomping all over each other.
The crowd sets the arena on fire.
And when the fire department shows up,
the crowd blocks them from putting out the fire.
Norris's Arena costs $25,000.
So really he should have just refunded the $7,000.
Miraculously, no one is killed in the melee,
not even the bulls.
I hope if there's any justice in this world
that the bulls are just watching all these humans
beat the crap out of each other and they had a great show.
Today, when you go to the ballpark
and you see your team lose, you don't walk away happy.
But in baseball's early days,
some fans didn't walk away at all.
Nowadays all major league ballparks
have requirements of netting that protect fans
who are in those first rows, not just behind home plate,
but beyond first and third base.
But the game of baseball now is way different than it was
back in the late 1800s.
Baseball's invented in the 1800s.
The fields are not terribly standardized.
Like the foul line can be
just sort of like where a creek is.
The smaller the team and the more rustic,
the less care for the field.
And that's where the term "Bush League" comes from.
In this early form of baseball, you're in the action.
You could be just at arm's length
from your favorite third baseman.
It's great. You're up close and personal.
The game is intimate and it's yours.
Fans are even allowed to stand right on the field,
but the best seats in those early parks
are right behind home plate.
It's also the best spot to catch a foul ball
straight in the face.
By the late 1870s, fans behind home plate
get hurt so often that those front row seats
earn a nickname the "Slaughter Pen."
You have to think about the momentum
of a baseball off a bat.
That ball could be coming off the bat
at 70 to 90 miles an hour straight at you
if you're in the stands.
A well hit ball
can actually travel 140 feet per second.
That's not a lot of time to get out of the way.
A foul ball can hit you with the strength
of a sledgehammer blow.
It's kind of like having a bowling ball
dropped on your head from three stories.
It's not until 1879
that the Providence Graze install a woven wire backstop,
but that's still 17 years
after the first dedicated ballpark is built.
So you've got 17 years of foul ball injuries.
Think you're sitting safer in the grandstands?
Think again.
Grandstands first appear the 1870s.
The expensive seats are in the shade.
The rest of the seats where the regular people sit are
under this sunlight.
The constant exposure of the sun actually bleaches the wood,
and that is why they are called bleachers.
These are just ad hoc wooden structures
and they're gonna be especially prone to fire.
It doesn't help that crowds at baseball games also
partake in that other American pastime, smoking.
In 1894,
four major ballparks suffer catastrophic fires.
At one fire in Chicago, the ballplayers themselves
have to pry open a containment fence
to let fans flee from the encroaching fire.
The day after the Chicago fire,
a plumber making some repairs at the Phillies ballpark
knocks over a stove
and ends up burning down the whole ballpark.
At one point in time,
several major ballparks will have burned down.
In 1895, Philadelphia builds a new stadium
made of brick and steel except for the cheap seats,
which are still made of wood.
But this time the danger isn't fire.
In 1903 in Philadelphia,
there is a baseball game.
A lot of people that are packed in there,
and a fist fight breaks out.
As everyone turns their attention toward this fight
and then move toward it, it causes the bleachers to collapse
and 12 people are killed, 200 people are injured.
The cause of the collapse is rotten timbers,
and that's why today the only wood you'll really find
at a ballpark is in your Louisville Slugger.
Talk about paying for your seats.
With college crowds, Spring break usually means sun
and sand and bad decisions.
In 1969, spring breakers in North Dakota skip the sun
and the sand, but they went all in on bad decisions.
In 1969 during the brutal winters
in Fargo, North Dakota,
a student at North Dakota State University
named Chuck Stroop, can't afford to go to Florida
for spring break.
So he kind of jokes to his friends,
"And why don't we go to this tiny town called Zap
North Dakota?"
So good old Chuck's like,
we're gonna do it Zap baby.
And he starts spreading the word that like,
"Hey, we're doing an alternative to spring break in Zap."
Zap is like the Mayberry of North Dakota.
Main Street is an actual dirt road.
It's got one cafe and two bars
and a total population of 250 people.
It starts out as a joke like,
oh, wouldn't it be funny if we do this?
Then the more they talked about it, they realize,
no, this might be a really awesome spring break idea.
Let's do it.
Let's go to Zap.
You know, at first these guys are like,
oh, we're gonna Zip to Zap, you know,
and they start calling it the Zappening.
And the chatter around this thing builds.
It gets covered by the campus newspaper.
People are hearing about this huge party,
and it's talked about all over the place.
Other colleges, even the radio as far as Minnesota,
they're talking about this college spring break party,
it's gonna happen in North Dakota.
Everybody wants to go. It's gonna be huge.
And at first the town is supportive of it.
Like, oh, this, we're bringing a few bucks,
this'll be great.
How many people could be coming to this?
The local Sheriff says he hasn't given much thought
to the Zap-In, but he plans to have his two-man force
swing by over the weekend to check things out.
So the first day, Friday, May 9th,
the town of Zap is absolutely slam packed with people.
3000 college students
have descended upon this town.
That's more than 10 times the actual population of Zap.
Zap thought they were prepared for who is coming
except they were really, really unprepared.
For a moment, it looks like Zap might just survive
the attack of the spring breakers,
but when the beer runs out, the mood turns ugly.
They had gotten hundreds of cases
of beer ready for this.
They were gone.
The one restaurant in town sold completely out of food.
The crowd in the bar starts to get a little bit unruly,
first a bottle breaks, then a window breaks.
Things are getting a little wild.
This is a party in the 1960s.
Society was a little looser back then.
People back then took partying to an art form
that puts any party today to complete shame, man.
Very quickly the party outgrows the town
and the town has no idea how to reign it back in.
Oh, and by the way,
where are all these kids gonna sleep?
No one's even thought about that,
because by the way, it is North Dakota and it is freezing.
So what you gotta do? You gotta build a fire.
Where do you get the wood? Wherever you can get it.
The siding on people's houses, construction sites,
chop down trees, fence posts,
everything goes into a bonfire.
Things start getting outta control.
With the rowdy crowd,
burning Zap down piece by piece,
the terrified Mayor calls for backup.
And eventually 500 members
of National Guard come in,
and afix, bayonets,
something that people killed each other with
in the Civil War.
When you have 500 bayonets
going after drunk college students, that is a scene.
But do they give up and stop partying? Nope.
They climb in their cars and go to the next town over,
Beulah.
Sure enough, those kids showed up
and they continued the party.
After they're done with Beulah, they move over
to another town called Hazen where they wreak havoc.
And this is just like rinse and repeat,
like a terrible pub crawl from town to town to town.
They herd them to Bismarck,
which is the capital of the state.
And it's starting to sound like a Civil War movie, man.
They're just marching on Bismarck,
and that's where they find the solution to this problem.
Finally, the authorities are like,
all right, let's like push them into a park
and they'll just bore themselves.
And eventually they do.
They move to this park in Bismarck, it's boring,
nothing's going on, and they finally disperse.
Once the crowd gets corralled
inside the city park, the excitement fizzles out.
By Sunday, it's all over except for the hangover.
This sounds like the sort of party
that doesn't happen anymore.
These kids got to party, these kids got to blow off steam.
These kids got to have fun.
And they got to do it in a way that will
almost never be recreated again in modern society.
And I think that's, that's kind of fun.
If you've ever visited Yosemite, you know
it's one of America's most spectacular national parks.
But in the 1970s, the wildest thing you might have seen
wasn't a bear or a mountain lion,
it was a back of feral hippies.
There's this explosion of interest
in the 1960s in the natural environment
in kind of getting back to the land.
One of the most popular destinations
in the country is Yosemite National Park
And so people just head there in droves.
At this time,
there's no real system governing camping at Yosemite.
There's no reservations, there's no kind of check-in.
There's just a campsite. First come, first serve.
It's very different today.
You control the numbers coming in.
You've got very specific campsites.
You gotta reserve maybe months in advance.
If you were to show up at Yosemite today,
you don't have a reservation for a campsite,
they're just gonna turn you away at the gate.
On busy weekends, you got crowds of people
trying to set up in one camping area.
You'll get 30, 40, 50 people in a campsite
that's intended for one family.
And you might go out for a hike only to return
and find that your stuff has all been taken down
and just dumped nearby,
and somebody else is now in your campsite.
And with few rangers and even fewer rules,
things are about to reach a breaking point.
July 4th, 1970, huge crowds show up to Yosemite,
thousands of people.
It's like a medium sized city relocating
into the national park.
A crowd gathers in the iconic Stoneman Meadow
and it's a lot of hippies, a lot of counterculture people.
The park's wide open freedom makes it a magnet
for peace loving hippies,
but it doesn't take long for all that peace to be broken.
This crowd is not all peace and love, man.
Get on out...
They can be a rowdy bunch
and sometimes an intoxicated bunch
and they do show up in large numbers.
They litter, they're rude to other campers.
They're loud, they're messy.
Rangers are finally called in to clear the meadow.
I was a seasonal park ranger for several years.
Park rangers, they're law enforcement,
but they're not really equipped
or interested in trying to be heavy duty crowd control.
There were times when you really felt outnumbered.
The Rangers encircled them on horseback
and over loudspeakers order them to leave.
But the crowd is not contained.
It's ignited.
It gets violent.
People start throwing rocks at the Rangers.
They're injuring the rangers and the horses.
And the result then is that
it descends into a melee.
The Rangers respond by starting to hit these guys
with their batons and then they start using tear gas.
The campers, they start a bonfire
in the middle of the road.
Things just keep elevating.
They end up rolling a police car over onto its side.
Things are getting insane.
The mayhem lasts for two days
before the Rangers get the upper hand.
There are 174 people arrested and a lot more injured.
This is just a year after Woodstock.
What happened to peace and love?
In the aftermath, the park changes policies
for both traffic and crowd control.
So now it's more organized, orderly and safer,
and they even train the Rangers on
how to handle young people.
You don't have the same feeling
that our forefathers did
by rolling into the park, setting up camp
wherever you want to, and then just experiencing nature.
Now it's very regulated and orderly, which is safe,
but it sort of pulls a little bit of the thrill
out of the process.
Today, Yosemite is thriving.
The hippies, they've gone pretty much extinct,
although lovely people.
After World War II,
everyone wanted to look their best again.
And the crowds of women that showed up at stores
were all chasing the same thing,
and they were not in the mood to share.
Hosiery's been around forever,
but by the 1920s when the hemline started to go up,
then it became like crucial
because having bare legs was sort of unseemly,
and so you really needed to like have not just hose,
but kind of good looking ones.
In 1939, a new type of hose hits the scene
from a company known for making explosives
and industrial chemicals.
At the 1939 World's Fair,
DuPont wheels out this new revolutionizing technology
in the form of nylon.
It's strong, versatile,
and destined to be in all sorts of things,
from toothbrushes to parachutes,
but it's nylons' use in stockings
that makes the crowd go crazy.
Women are coming up,
they're trying them on, they're a hit.
Finally, something has come along
that provides them with a creature comfort
that they really needed at an affordable price.
Before nylon
stockings were made from silk or rayon,
which would easily snag and get a tear,
but with nylons, they're practically untearable.
On May 15th, 1940,
nylon stockings officially hit the market.
780,000 pairs are sold in one day.
That is unbelievable.
The day becomes known as Nylon Day,
which is still around today.
But then things hit a snag
when the US enters World War II.
Nylon is being very effectively used
throughout the second World War as parachute material.
Nylon suddenly becomes a commodity
that has to be controlled carefully
in the interests of national defense.
And this is just 18 months
after they unveiled these hose
that become an instant sensation.
Then they're asked to part with them.
It hits hard for a lot of ladies.
They essentially stopped
selling nylons in the store.
They become very rare commodities.
Because they can't get the real thing,
people are trying to mimic the look of a hose on their legs
by dying their legs with like brown gravy and tea
and like drawing a fake seam on the back of their leg.
If you can even find them on the black market,
they're gonna be expensive.
$20 maybe for a pair of nylons,
that's the equivalent of around $300 today,
and people are still willing to pay that.
Japan surrenders in August 1945,
and just eight days later.
DuPont declares it's back in the hosiery business.
What nylon stockings?
You think we're kidding? Not at all.
So a store in Pittsburgh announces
that they're gonna have nylons in stock,
and it's this big event.
All these women come out, they line up.
There's this sense of anticipation.
My first pair of nylons in five years.
One Pittsburgh store says,
okay, we're gonna have 10,000 pairs of nylons.
Ladies show up.
The line stretches for 16 blocks
and police have to form a human chain
just to keep the crowd under control.
Women are just having a good time there.
So excited to have nylons back.
A storm comes, that doesn't dampen their spirits.
There's some men that are heckling them as they go by,
that doesn't dampen their spirits.
They're excited.
And instead of 10,000,
40,000 women show up to buy these nylons.
It's a math problem.
10,000 pairs of nylons divided by 40,000 women
equals one fourth of a nylon per person.
In other words, pandemonium.
There's law and order in the lines
outside of stores initially,
but then eventually it descends into disorder and chaos.
By the time some women
actually make it into the store,
the nylons are already selling out
and these women have had enough.
So they start climbing onto displays,
taking them off mannequins, just getting their hands
on whatever they can.
People start pushing people outta the way.
And there's some fainting, you know,
and a sort of mob mentality forms.
The so-called nylon riots
break out in Washington DC,
New York City and San Francisco.
Women are getting trampled, windows are getting broken out.
This is way before Black Friday is a thing
and the stores are not prepared.
These women are basically accusing DuPont
of under supplying their nylons to inflate prices.
Eventually, DuPont is actually forced to share their formula
with other companies
so that it can be made more available to the public.
Today there's certainly chaos
and enthusiasm over whatever viral item is selling out,
but I think there's a little bit more management
of the kind of in-person experience.
So I think you don't have that same kind of rage today
as you once did.
They say two is company, three is a crowd,
but 40,000, I think that's a riot.
Did you know there was a time
when wearing the right hat really mattered?
And if you weren't careful, there was a crowd
that had a way of letting you know.
It's hard to imagine,
but from like the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s
most men would not leave the house without wearing a hat.
The felt hat like a fedora or a bowler
is the typical businessman's urban hat,
but it's far too hot for the summer.
In the summer, stylish gentlemen switch to straw hat.
And in fact, gents are only allowed,
yes, allowed to wear straw hats
from May 15th Straw Hat Day
until September 15th, Felt Hat Day.
You know, never wear white to a wedding
and never wear white after Labor Day.
It's these rules.
Everyone knows what they are.
They're not necessarily written anywhere,
but everyone knows about them.
In the early 1900s,
if you get caught wearing a straw hat in late September,
you risk more than ridicule.
Stockbrokers on Wall Street start this custom
where they smash their straw hats
at the end of every summer for good luck.
And if they catch another broker wearing his straw hat
on or after September 15th,
they snatch that straw hat and crush it.
Soon it spreads from New York to other cities.
In 1910, teenage boys take the streets
and just start tearing the straw hats off of strangers.
But soon this pranking spreads to Pittsburgh
and to South Jersey and around the country.
Every year the hat crushing crowds
get bigger and bolder.
And on September 13th, 1922, everything comes to a head.
In New York City,
some rowdy teenagers go looking for hats
to smash two full days before they're supposed to.
Suddenly, what's supposed to be so good natured
takes a whole different turn.
By starting early, nobody's spared.
Everybody's still wearing their straw hat.
The police are completely overwhelmed.
There's not enough of them,
and there's too many of the boys flicking off hats.
The kids are getting aggressive,
they're almost feral.
The police come out, but what are you gonna do?
I mean, it's a load of kids kind of losing their minds.
Some mischievous kids even tack nails
on the end of long sticks using the poles
to knock hats from targets from distance.
So it keeps snowballing.
At a point, the amount of hat smashers
grows to over a thousand.
And the police themselves, they aren't spared.
When their hats start getting smashed, that's it,
That's the last straw, so to speak.
Despite the efforts to calm the crowds,
straw hat madness goes on for days.
Seven young teenagers appear in front
of Magistrate Peter A. Hatting.
Yes, that's his real name.
Seven other boys are too young to face charges.
So the police make a special request.
They ask the parents to come in
and publicly spank them, which the parents happily do.
Finally, to put an end to the madness, in 1925,
President Calvin Coolidge goes out in public
wearing his straw hat after September 15th.
It's a powerful fashion statement
and one made by the president of the United States
in such a way that these hardened rules about fashion,
about what hats you can and cannot wear,
they really just sort of crumble away
like a smash straw hat in the street.
When you are in a crowd,
there is something infectious there.
There's a collective energy.
You're part of something larger than yourself.
Sometimes the energy turns for the worse
and you get swept up in that
and it is easy to lose who you are,
lose where you are in the sea of people.
Looking back at the times we were shoulder to shoulder,
whether it was front row seats at the Civil War,
watching whales explode or rioting over pantyhose,
there is nothing like a shared experience
with a little volatility.
And maybe that's why our hazardous history
always draws such a big crowd.