Stanford 1900’s Mad Hatters Plug Ugly Top Hat, Original 1898-1915 For Sale

Wonderful, battle scarred Plug top hat from a Stanford Junior early 1900’s Grey felt beneath the painted and adorned exterior Bought at an Oakland estate sale in 2019 Refer pics- has expected wear and tear and damage from wear in the annual event that was cancelled in 1915 due to increasing injuries to the juniors who participated. From the Stanford archives;“The fashion for plugs—top hats, essentially—was an import from Berkeley, but the rest was pure Stanford. And at a young college acutely aware of its lack of tradition, the homegrown hokum found fertile soil, says Josh Schneider, assistant university archivist, who has researched its origins. Indeed, the Daily immediately pronounced the Plug Ugly "the greatest outdoor class ceremony that Stanford has ever seen," assigning special credit to the respectful student spectators.Perhaps inevitably, the niceties wouldn't last, given the etymology of the event's name. The original Plug Uglies were a bygone East Coast street gang notorious for stuffing their eponymous hats with rags as protection against truncheons and fists, Schneider says. As if to nod to its gangster inspirations, the show's jokes eventually turned more barbed, the audience more unruly. Performers routinely struggled under a torrent of jeers, food and even firecrackers.But the real mayhem began once the Plug Ugly performance ended and the upperclassmen raced to settle their scores in the Quad. The juniors arrived bedecked in plugs lacquered with so much paint they could double as cudgels; the seniors lay in wait to crush them.There were rules—supposedly: "The Juniors have a right to hit a Senior over the head with their plug," the Daily wrote," but the Junior must at the command of the Senior put his plug on his head so the Senior can hit him."Black eyes, bruises and occasional bouts of unconsciousness didn't seem to alarm the administration. Despite high-minded opposition to violence—Stanford, along with Cal, took a lonely stand against the dangers of college football by suspending its program for a decade starting in 1905—Farm life came with a brutish edge. Some freshmen slept in armed groups to ward off hazers, a state of affairs apparently enabled by the administration's reluctance to meddle. "Persons fit to be in college are fit to look after their own affairs," Stanford President David Starr Jordan said.”