With the USA gearing up for an election, it seems to be a good time to ask a question which has always puzzled me - in American culture (tv, editorial cartoons, etc) why are straw boaters used as shorthand for an election?
I found precisely one article which looked at this (Bow Tie Aficionado) which pretty much shrugged its shoulders as to the reasons why.
Is there a reason for wearing boaters during elections? Do people still do it?
We don’t really have an equivalent here in the UK - boaters are something old Public schoolboys wear when watching rowing races.
Probably because they were associated with the party conventions when candidates were still normally chosen at the convention. That may have started because the conventions often happened in cities with muggy weather in late summer or the dog days of autumn. Or perhaps because a straw boater is cheap hat to hand out adorned with slogans.
This.
You can get them cheap (though generally not made of straw any more), in multiple colors, and easily print slogans or candidate names on them. And they come easily adjusted, so you don’t have to worry about getting different sizes, and can be worn by any gender. Plus they’re traditional!
Looking at Google Books, I found that the phrase “straw boater” doesn’t begin to be popularly used until the late 1920s, with most of the early cites British and many of them remarking that it is coming into style again. The hat itself appears to emerge in the late 19th century, but was just called a straw hat then. It was restricted to light summer wear, and never to be worn with anything black.
That makes me think that yabob has it right. The late 19th century was also the era in which newspapers and magazines got the ability to print photographs regularly. A style could be seen by more people more rapidly than before. Conventions were in the heat of summer, in giant builders stifling with the heat of 20,000 bodies. Every account of every convention seems to contain a zillion references to the intolerable heat.
A very quick look through Google Images of presidential conventions finds few if any boaters in the pictures until 1912, when suddenly all the pictures have hundreds of men wearing them, as in this one and this one. That was the start of newsreel footage of major events, so maybe that added to the association.
Lots of guesswork here, but here’s somethingthat may be just coincidence but is too good not to share.
If the image of hat being thrown was that of the ubiquitous boater of 1912, then it’s not surprising that the image stuck.
The answers so far refer to how the convention got started. The OP answered his own question, they are used in media representations because it’s a shorthand. Much like a bear wearing a hat is shorthand for forest fires.
Similarly, elephants and donkey don’t really vote or champion candidates.
