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BORN IN THE USA

The invention of a national pastime; how the ball cap was born and raised on America’s baseball fields; a visit to the “birthplace” of baseball; and an interview with a baseball uniform historian.

OVER the past thirty years, the baseball cap has emerged as America’s national hat, evolving from a sports accessory to a universally accepted part of our casual wardrobe. No one knows exactly why this happened.

The ball cap is by far the most popular headwear apparel in the United States today, accounting for more than 80 percent of hat sales, according to some estimates. Moreover, it has been adopted by virtually every social stratum in the country, from disaffected teens to celebrities to software moguls to middle-aged, middle-class moms and dads to retirees. Nearly everybody in the United States owns at least one ball cap.

If the cap has become a part of our collective national uniform, though, there is nothing uniform about why or how it is worn. We wear ball caps to make a statement; to show an allegiance; to shade our eyes from the sun; to look and feel sporty or hip; to be a part of something larger than ourselves. We wear them backwards, forwards, and sideways, tilted at various angles. They are a simple but ingenious product—inexpensive, utilitarian, and aesthetically appealing.

An American invention, the baseball cap is now worn and sold in most countries around the world. Along with blue jeans and Coca-Cola, it has become one of our most ubiquitous cultural symbols. Internationally, ball caps are a two- or three-billion dollar industry, which has roughly doubled in size every few years since the early 1980s.

How ball caps ascended to such prominence is a question with no simple, single answer. Nor can we say with certainty where the cap-wearing trend will lead or how long it will last. But we do know where the ball cap came from: It was born on the fields of America’s “national pastime.”

Like baseball itself, early ball caps were derived from existing models—among them cricket, jockey, and military caps. But in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, as the country began to distinguish itself on the world stage, baseball took on a uniquely American personality, complete with its own unifying rules, its own traditions, its own venues, and its own uniform. The baseball cap as we know it today—with the six-panel crown, visor, and top button—has its roots in this era.

The idea that baseball is America’s “national sport” first began to circulate in the decade before the Civil War (on the heels of such ideas as American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny). Baseball was one of a number of factors that stitched together our disparate, still-fledgling country, helping to assimilate droves of immigrants and to strengthen the identities of America’s cities. In some ways, the story of how the cap evolved parallels the story of how the country evolved.

To learn the origins of the baseball cap, we went first in search of the origins of baseball—journeying into a rich and rolling land of lore, where the scenery is often awe-inspiring but seldom to be trusted. We begin with a visit to baseball’s “birthplace”—Cooperstown, New York, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

BIRTH OF BASEBALL

Baseball was invented, the story goes (or, went), in the tiny village of Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. The inventor of the game was a twenty-year-old Army cadet named Abner Doubleday. On a summer afternoon in 1839, Doubleday pulled a stick through the dirt in Elihu Phinney’s cow pasture—once, twice, thrice, four times—tracing the outlines of a baseball diamond, then extended the first- and third-field lines to create an outfield. He scratched marks in the dirt to show where the fielders stood, and later wrote out a set of rules describing how the game was played. Doubleday also came up with the name for this new sport: “base ball.”

Those were the findings, anyway, of a group called the Mills Commission, which was convened in 1905 to determine baseball’s origins. The commission’s findings, summarized in a report released on the next-to-last day of 1907, stated that, “according to the best evidence obtainable to date, (baseball) was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, N.Y. in 1839.”

The report concluded, “In the years to come, in the view of the hundreds of thousands of people who are devoted to baseball, and the millions who will be, Abner Doubleday’s fame will rest evenly, if not quite as much, upon the fact that he was (baseball’s) inventor … as upon his brilliant and distinguished career as an officer in the Federal Army.”

At the time, baseball was not only America’s national sport; it was also becoming a thriving national industry. Six years earlier, the American League had been launched, challenging the hegemony of the National League, which had monopolized professional baseball since 1876. The National League was created by a group of team owners and managers who realized that they could make more money by pooling resources and controlling who was allowed in the league—a business model that set the pattern for professional sports leagues in America, which continues today. The introduction of eight American League teams in 1901 (in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Washington) led to two years of bitter rivalry between the leagues. But in 1903, sensing that both sides would benefit by joining forces, the American and National Leagues staged the first “World Series,” and a new, larger monopoly was created. (In that first, best-of-eight series, American League pennant winners the Boston Americans (later the Red Sox) upset the National League’s Pittsburgh Pirates 5–3.)

Abner Doubleday, the “inventor” of baseball, according to the 1907 Mills Commission report.

As the sport grew more widespread, its uniform became increasingly standardized. Gone was the smorgasbord of cap styles that followed the earliest straw hat days. At the time of the Mills report, the pillbox cap, popular in the 1880s and 1890s, had been replaced by what would become the modern-day baseball cap.

Baseball had developed from the gentlemanly, upper middle-class club game of the 1840s and 1850s—a game modeled on English cricket—into a highly competitive, commercially driven spectator sport. Early wooden baseball stadiums—known as baseball parks, grounds, or fields—came along in the 1860s, with bleacher seating for hundreds and eventually thousands. Hilltop Park, where the Highlanders (later the Yankees) played from 1903 to 1912 in upper Manhattan, had a capacity of sixteen thousand with room for ten thousand standing patrons. The first steel-and-concrete stadium, Shibe Park in Philadelphia, opened in 1909, with seating for twenty-three thousand.

Baseball gradually took on the grain of the country. The Book of American Pastimes, the first comprehensive study of sports in America, noted, “(Baseball) is a game peculiarly suited to the American temperament and disposition … it has an excitement and vim about it.” That was 1866. Two decades later, the American poet Walt Whitman said, “Baseball is our game, the American game … I connect it with our national character.”

Baseball was a game made for heroes—a team sport that emphasized the individual. Its symbolism was suitably American: each man taking his turn, standing alone, with an equal but limited number of chances to hit back whatever life threw at him. Baseball was a microcosm of the American dream, and the stage for a burgeoning American mythology, played out in the long shadows of late afternoons on grass-and-dirt fields in front of bleachers filled with thousands of people who dressed up for the occasion.

The actual origins of the sport, though, had been disputed for many years. Newspaperman Henry Chadwick, a cricket reporter who began covering baseball in 1856, was one of the game’s early boosters—he may have been the first to use the term “national pastime”—but he didn’t buy the idea that baseball was an American invention. Chadwick, born in England, maintained that the sport was simply a variation of longstanding English ball-and-bat games such as rounders.

For many Americans, who took pride in their nascent national sport, the notion that baseball may have originated in England seemed decidedly unpatriotic. It bothered no one as much as former baseball-star-turned-sporting-goods-impresario Albert Spalding. Big and blustery, with a brush mustache and a flair for self-promotion, Spalding had been a pitcher for the Boston Red Stockings and the Chicago White Stockings, who compiled a career won-loss record of 253–65. Shortly before retiring as a player in 1878, he and his brother started a sporting goods business that would become the country’s largest. As a player, team manager, and owner, Spalding was one of the most influential men in the sport for about thirty years.

Spalding was friendly with Chadwick, but the men disagreed on the origins of the national sport. After Chadwick made the case, in a 1903 article, that baseball was really an English game, Spalding responded by creating the Mills Commission. The commission consisted of Abraham Mills, former president of baseball’s National League and Spalding’s longtime friend; Morgan Bulkeley, a U.S. Senator and the National League’s first president; James Sullivan, president of the Amateur Athletic Union; Alfred Reach and George Wright, sporting goods distributors and former ball players; Arthur Gorman, a former player and president of the Washington Base Ball Club; and Nicholas Young, also a former National League president.

The commission advertised across the country, seeking input from anyone who had knowledge or information about the invention of baseball. For two years, letters came in, mostly from former ball players. But the commission did little legwork or follow-through. Its report, which included a dissenting comment from Chadwick, was nevertheless widely accepted for several decades.

The notion that baseball was born in Cooperstown was bolstered in 1934, when a small, homemade baseball was found in a farmhouse three miles from the village. This ball, people in Cooperstown began to speculate, might, indeed, have been the game’s first. The misshapen ball, which became known as the “Doubleday Baseball,” was purchased by a wealthy local resident named Stephen Clark, who displayed it in town.

If baseball had been invented in Cooperstown in 1839, as the Mills Commission determined, then its centennial was fast approaching. Clark and several baseball officials, including National League President Ford C. Frick, and American League President William Harridge, began planning an event that would mark the anniversary. Frick proposed a Hall of Fame shrine in Cooperstown. In 1936, the first Hall of Fame election was held and five inductees were chosen: Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Christy Matthewson, and Walter Johnson. By then, the mythology of American baseball had been enhanced by such stars as Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmie Foxx. The low-scoring, so-called “dead ball era” of 1900 to 1919 had given way to the home-run era of the 1920s, when, for various reasons, baseball became a much more exciting, and lucrative, spectator sport. The proliferation of radio in the 1930s further boosted baseball’s fortunes. Everyone, it seemed, followed the game. Baseball players were national heroes, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, which opened in Cooperstown on June 12, 1939, seemed a fitting monument to America’s game.

AMERICA’S GAME

The only real problem with the Mills Commission report was that its findings were completely bogus. The “best evidence” cited in the report was actually based on a single source: the testimony of a seventy-one-year-old Colorado miner named Abner Graves, who claimed to have witnessed Doubleday invent the game back in 1839, when Graves was a five-year-old living in Cooperstown.

Doubleday, though, was not actually in Cooperstown during 1839; he was a cadet at West Point for the whole year. He went on to become a national war hero, seeing action in the Mexican-American War, the Seminole Wars, and the Civil War where, as a Union general, he played a key role in the Battle of Gettysburg. When Doubleday died in 1893, there was no mention in his New York Times obituary of baseball. Nor did he write about baseball in any of the sixty-seven diaries that he left behind.

Although the Mills report described Graves as “a reputable character,” other accounts cast him as a fanciful storyteller. Toward the end of his life, Graves shot and killed his second wife, and he spent his final days in a mental institution.

The objective of the Mills Commission—most of whose members were friends of Spalding’s—wasn’t to settle the controversy over baseball’s origins so much as it was to quiet it down. Their report accomplished that, even though its findings are no longer taken seriously. The National Baseball Hall of Fame, which wouldn’t be where it is without the report, even has an exhibit discrediting the Mills Commission. But in many ways it had the elements of a perfect yarn—that baseball had been invented in a small, idyllic lakeside village in rural America, in a town founded by Judge William Cooper, the father of Leatherstocking Tales author James Fenimore Cooper; and that its creator had been an American war hero, who was no longer around to comment on it one way or the other. Although the story had no more basis in fact than Parson Weems’ account of George Washington chopping down his father’s cherry tree, it fed into the mythology of baseball—and literally created a shrine to the sport. It had been Spalding’s goal to show that baseball had “an American dad.” The Mills Commission did that, at least for a while.

The Mills Commission report came along during a pivotal decade for America’s national sport—when the American League doubled the size of baseball to sixteen teams (a number that would hold until 1961) and the World Series was begun. It was also the decade when the ball cap became standardized. The baseball cap was one of the features that gave the sport its distinctive look. Baseball was, and still is, the only American sport with an official uniform that includes a cap.

Gradually, baseball historians chipped away at the Cooperstown myth. In 1953, the United States Congress credited Alexander Cartwright with “inventing” baseball in the 1840s. Cartwright, a bookseller and fireman, had started the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in New York in 1842 and four years later drew up a set of rules that many believe established modern-day baseball. On June 19, 1846, the first officially organized American baseball match was played at Hoboken’s Elysian Fields between the New York Base Ball Club and the Knickerbockers (the New York Base Ball Club won 23–1, with Cartwright umpiring).

But, in truth, baseball’s origins substantially pre-date 1846—or 1839, for that matter. Several years ago, the first known documented use of the term “base-ball” in the United States was discovered at Pittsfield, Massachusetts—in the form of a 1791 ordinance, banning the play of “base ball” within eighty yards of the town square, “for the Preservation of the Windows in the new Meeting House.” When the ordinance was discovered, Pittsfield Mayor James Ruberto proclaimed, “Pittsfield is baseball’s Garden of Eden.” Mentions of “base-ball” also appear in American newspapers from the 1820s.

The earliest known reference to baseball came from England, though, in a 1744 children’s book called A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. A German book on sports games, published in 1796, included a section on “English base-ball.” And Jane Austen’s first novel, written in 1798 and 1799, contained this sentence: “No more cricket, no more base-ball, they are sending me to Geneva.” Most baseball historians now agree that baseball was adapted from English bat-and-ball games.

Perhaps the real origins of baseball go back even earlier, though. On a wall at the National Baseball Hall of Fame is a 1251 AD drawing of Spaniards playing a game with a ball and bat, which bears a superficial resemblance to baseball. Next to it is another, much older image, a wall relief from the shrine of Hathor, in a temple at Deir-el-Bahari, Egypt. It shows Thutmose III, a pharaoh who ruled Egypt in the fifteenth century BC, holding a ball in one hand and a long, wavy-looking stick in the other. The hieroglyphic over the image says, “Batting the ball for Hathor.”

Peter Piccione, an Egyptologist and professor of comparative ancient history at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, gives a talk titled “Pharaoh at the Bat” about this early game. Piccione believes that the Egyptians were the first people to play “bat-and-ball” games.

Of course, there are no known stats on Thutmose III, who became Egypt’s ruler as a boy and reigned for almost fifty-four years. Nor is there any footage of Thutmose and his cronies playing ball. But one can sort of imagine it: The youthful Thutmose stepping up to the plate, wearing his customary kilt and headdress (first precursor to the baseball cap). He is a slightly rotund young man with spindly legs, whom the workers call “Babe” because of his boyish looks. He points his wavy-looking bat in the direction of the Pyramid of Giza and calls his shot.

Swings at the first pitch.

The workers turn.

It’s going …

They begin to run.

Going …

Back, back, back …

It’s …

Alexander Cartwright (top center), with members of the New York Knickerbockers. In 1849, the Knickerbockers wore the first recorded baseball uniform, which included straw hats.

THE NATIONAL SPORT’S CAP

Even if baseball’s origins were not truly American, we adopted baseball and made it our own. Similarly, the baseball cap, which went through various trials before becoming standardized, borrowed elements of existing caps.

The first official baseball uniform was that worn by the New York Knickerbockers on April 24, 1849. Records show that it consisted of blue woolen pantaloons, white flannel shirts, and chip straw hats. In the 1860s, as semiprofessional baseball began to take root, particularly in New York City, an early version of what we know as the baseball cap, with a bill and a curved crown, was born.

Here are ten evolutionary signposts on the road to the modern-day professional baseball cap:

Boston/Brooklyn Style

The Brooklyn style hat, worn by the Brooklyn Excelsiors in the 1860s, was, in some ways, the forerunner of the modern ball cap. This cap incorporated elements of other hats, including the jockey cap and military hats. A similar cap, advertised in Spalding Guide, was called the Boston Style Cap. Both featured a small brim and a round, forward-leaning crown, with a button on top joining the stitching. The earliest cap in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, from 1866, is similar to these caps. This style was not widely worn until the late 1890s.

Pillbox

A more popular design was the “Chicago style” pillbox cap, with a flat top, a short bill, and horizontal or vertical stripes. This style, derived from military caps, was the most popular when the National League was formed in 1876 and continued to be widespread throughout the 1880s and the 1890s.

Letters and Logos

Letters identifying team names and home cities began appearing in the 1880s, although they did not become widely used until the late 1890s. The first big-league club to put an image of the team’s nickname on its cap was the Detroit Tigers in 1901. That cap featured a running orange tiger.

The last big-league team to don a cap without a letter or a logo was the 1945 St. Louis Browns, who wore a white cap with thin orange and brown stripes.

Air Holes

Air holes in the crowns of baseball caps were not a feature in the pillbox hats, but appeared in other ball caps during the 1890s. Their function was to allow air to enter the cap and cool the head on hot days. Air holes became a regular part of the baseball cap by the first decade of the twentieth century.

An advertisement for “Base Ball Caps” from the 1888 edition of Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide.

Standardization

The standardized look of the “baseball cap” was not realized until about 1900. Early sports catalogues show a variety of hats under the broad heading “base ball caps.” An ad from an 1888 Spalding catalogue, for instance, includes ten different styles, including hats that could be described as a beanie, a conductor’s cap, a derby, a jockey’s hat, and what appears to be a layer cake with a visor. Standardizing the uniform became a way of standardizing the game. By the turn of the century, the pillbox-style cap was on its way out, and an ancestor of the current-day ball cap was in widespread use.

Stitched Visor

In 1903, Spalding introduced the Philadelphia-style cap, which was the first to feature a stitched visor. The stitching attached the fabric of the bill to the cardboard insert. This soon became a regular part of the ball cap.

Six Panels

In many early ball caps, the crown was made of eight separate panels. The six-panel cap became more common in the late 1880s, although it wasn’t standard until well into the twentieth century.

Longer bills

The bill gradually became longer in the 1920s and 1930s, providing a more pronounced shading effect (all baseball games were played during the day until 1935). The visor also became firmer, changing from cardboard to latex rubber, which was in general use by the 1940s.

Vertical Crowns

In the late 1940s, the crown of the baseball cap became more vertical. A weave of cotton fibers called buckram became the stiffening agent used to reinforce the front crown panels and is still a part of MLB caps. The vertical crown made the team logo more prominent and also gave the cap a more aesthetically pleasing look.

Polyester

Caps were made out of wool for most of the history of Major League Baseball. But other materials changed. The leather sweatband, for instance, became cotton in the 1920s. The most recent change to the Major League baseball cap came in 2007, when the standard cap changed from wool to a polyester fabric. The change was made to better manage sweat, reduce shrinking, and reduce odor. The new cap was designed to “wick” sweat—spread it across the fabric, then absorb and evaporate it. The new caps retail for thirty-two dollars, three dollars more than the old ones.

EXPORTING BASEBALL

America’s version of baseball, invented in the 1800s, soon spread to other countries, carrying with it some elements of the American spirit and, yes, the American baseball uniform. Baseball was introduced to Cuba, for instance, in the 1860s by Cuban students studying in the United States. It became popular in other Caribbean-region and Latin American countries, including the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. It is played professionally in all of these countries today.

Baseball and its cap were introduced to Japan in the early 1870s by an American teacher, Horace Wilson. The country’s professional baseball league was launched in 1920. Over the past fifty years, baseball has been Japan’s most popular spectator sport.

BEFORE PEOPLE THOUGHT THAT WAY

“We shouldn’t say baseball invented this cap, but I think it would be fair to say that baseball solidified its place in our culture.”

– Tom Shieber, Senior Curator, National Baseball Hall of Fame

Beneath the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is a treasure trove of memorabilia—storage vaults and rows of shelves containing tens of thousands of artifacts, including caps, uniforms, bats, gloves, and balls. There are several aisles filled with boxes of old Major League game-worn baseball caps, some of them dating to the nineteenth century. Tom Shieber, the Hall of Fame’s senior curator, leads a private tour of this remarkable subterranean baseball museum.

Shieber, an expert on the history of baseball uniforms, has created an online exhibition called “Dressed to the Nines,” which traces the year-by-year development of the baseball uniform. Most of it is based on hours spent poring through old ads from Spalding catalogues and other sports publications.

Normally, when an item comes to the Hall of Fame, there is little accompanying information; it is the job of Shieber and the curatorial staff to determine what role, if any, the artifact played in the history of baseball.

“Our job really is to tell stories,” he says. “There’s a story to everything here. But it often takes a lot of research to put those stories together.”

Wearing white gloves, he displays one of the gems of this storage area: the Hall of Fame’s oldest New York Yankees cap, dating from 1912. Technically, it isn’t really a Yankees cap, it’s a Highlanders cap. The team wasn’t officially named the Yankees until 1913, even though fans called them that for several years. The logo on this cap is similar to that on the current Yankees cap; but this cap has a looser crown and a shorter brim.

Baseball Hall of Fame Senior Curator Tom Shieber with boxes of game-worn MLB caps, in the storage vault below the Hall of Fame.

It was donated to the Hall of Fame in 1990, Shieber says, by a little-known former Highlander player named Paul Otis. Several months after donating the cap, Otis passed away. His signature, “P. Otis,” can be seen on the cap’s sweat band; but Shieber determined that Otis had probably signed the cap right before giving it to the Hall of Fame. As he inspected the cap further, he noticed that another name was also written in the band: “Dolan.”

“This cap does match the 1912 cap. I looked up Paul Otis’ record and the times he played. What I found was that he was with the team very briefly. Literally for only five games. Then I found out that Cozy Dolan also played with them in 1912. What happened was Dolan played with them early in the season, and they brought Otis out of the minors later on and gave him the cap.”

Neither player is recognized today, but there is an interesting history to this cap, Shieber says. “The Yankees played in a benefit game right after the Titanic sank (on April 14, 1912). Dolan was there for that game, sitting on the bench. And I also found out that Dolan was in the lineup for the first game at Fenway Park, on April 20, 1912. So he almost certainly wore this cap during the first game ever played at Fenway Park.”

Shieber, who worked as an astrophysicist for UCLA’s astronomy department for a dozen years before joining the Hall of Fame ten years ago, shared some of his thoughts about the evolution of the baseball cap:

BCN: Where did what we now call the baseball cap come from?

TS: What we can say is that the baseball cap developed over a period of time and that it came from different sources. The first hats were straw, but baseball was a different game then. Baseball started out as a club sport, as a social get-together, a fraternal group. The earliest baseball uniform was more a club uniform than a sports uniform. As the game changed, the cap took on more functional purposes—it shielded the eyes, and it also identified the teams—but there were many different styles. We do know that when the National League started, in 1876, and into the 1880s, the pillbox style was the most popular.

BCN: That’s the cap that the Pirates brought back for the 1976 centennial of baseball?

TS: Yes. Actually, what happened was in 1976 a number of National League teams, not all, wore an imitation of the pillbox-style cap to celebrate the anniversary. The teams all went back to their regular caps the next year. The Pirates didn’t get the message. They continued to wear it for several years and actually won a World Series wearing it in 1979.

BCN: Why did the pillbox-style ball cap fade away?

TS: There are functional reasons and there are fashion reasons. Exactly why some of these styles went out of fashion is unclear. Sometimes there are obvious influences that cause a change in what teams wear. When the University of Michigan basketball team started wearing the baggy uniforms, it caught on, it went up to the pros and that’s the standard today. With the baseball uniform, it has tended to be more subtle and more gradual. Often if a certain player or a winning team does something that’s a little different, it catches on.

BCN: Do you have any favorite baseball caps?

TS: I liked the halo on the top of the Los Angeles Angels cap in the early sixties. That was innovative. The Angels had an idea, went with the theme, and it became part of their identity. The other one was the “scrambled eggs” design on the Seattle Pilots cap. Those were two inspired caps. I’m an old-school kind of guy, but I don’t mind experimentation with uniforms.

BCN: What were the most significant changes to the baseball cap during the twentieth century?

TS: The longer bill and the vertical crown were the two significant developments. The vertical crown made sense—you could see the letter or the team logo better. It also set the stage for commercial caps, such as John Deere and Caterpillar. It helped make the cap a forehead billboard.

BCN: Ball caps are worn everywhere now off the ball field. Why has the cap grown so popular over the past thirty years?

TS: I don’t know if it’s possible to know why. I would say in part it’s a style-driven thing, but it’s hard to trace.

BCN: Now that most MLB games are played at night, what is the functional purpose of the baseball cap? Is there any reason for the visor, for instance?

TS: That’s something I’m looking at right now. Would a player be as good or better if he didn’t wear a baseball cap? Is it even beneficial? I don’t know. In other sports—in swimming or track, or bicycling, for instance—efforts are made to shave every second off your time by streamlining your equipment and uniform. Baseball’s origins go back to long before people thought that way. Caps are a tradition. Are they necessary? That’s a good question.

THE MODERN CAP

The look of the baseball cap hasn’t changed substantially since the mid-1950s, when the New Era company introduced its 59Fifty—the cap used by all Major League Baseball teams. Most ball caps worn casually today are similar in appearance to those of professional baseball, although they tend to be a cotton blend rather than polyester, to be less structured, and to have adjustable one-size-fits-all bands.

What has changed is people’s attitudes about the ball cap and about its role in our culture. Baseball caps may have been born on America’s ball fields, but they’re worn now for reasons that have nothing to do with baseball. This change in attitude was the result of a quiet American revolution that has not yet made its way into our history books. We’ll call it the Cap Revolution.