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I always thought that the zoot suit was a just a hip and harmless 1940's fashion statement. I remember seeing photos of the over-the-top couture in books and in old copies of Life magazine. The oversized clothing, the big hats, and the ridiculous watch chain created a distinctive and memorable look, albeit a not entirely tasteful one.

I tend to find extreme attire at least faintly amusing, if not downright laughable, which probably explains why my own wardrobe is dull, commonplace, wrinkled, and worn. If clothes provide comfort and do not obviously function as a neon sign saying, "Look at me," then they're my style. But I have no objection to others wearing loud clothes or outrageous hairdos. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. In my mind, zoot suits were just another case of youth looking to outrage their parents and score sex. The look of zoot suits might best be described as a cross between the style and ostentation of 1980's pimp and the bagginess and attitude of recent gangsta.

    Image courtesy pinksugarfashionsuite.blogspot.com

But there's an ugly story behind zoot suits, one that is rotten to its American core. It's a story of intolerance and racism. Zoot suits are not defined entirely by the image above. They are also associated with images like this:

                                    Image courtesy getwellkathleen.us

THE ZOOT SUIT RIOTS

BACKGROUND

On this date in 1943, the Zoot Suit Riots began in Los Angeles and lasted for several days. The riots were a quintessentially American occurrence, fueled by White fear, racism, entitlement, and moral outrage on the one hand and Latino disenfranchisement, anger, poverty, and moral outrage on the other. Young Mexican-Americans were pitted against white sailors and soldiers, and the Los Angeles media egged it on, stoking the fires of bigotry and fear.

By 1942, L.A. was teeming. Preparing for an expected Japanese invasion, servicemen poured into bases in the area. Rationing had begun. War paranoia sent Japanese-American citizens to internment camps for the duration. But, as always, scapegoats were needed, and Mexican-Americans had ever been a favorite target.

Forced to live in barrios, Mexican Angelenos had been blamed for 1930's unemployment despite the fact that many of their ancestors had populated California long before the 1849 Gold Rush attracted the huge influx of white settlers.

During the Great Depression, many white Americans wanted Mexicans to be removed because of the perception that they competed with Americans for resources and jobs. In the early 1930s in Los Angeles County, more than 12,000 people of Mexican descent — including many American citizens —^[6] were deported to Mexico (see Mexican Repatriation).

Wiki

Zoot suit fashion grew from the discontent of second-class citizenship:

Young Latinos, unlike their elders, were not content to stay within their barrios, but were spilling into downtown dance halls, movie houses, pool halls and clubs. As young men are prone to do, many young Latino males distinguished themselves with distinctive hairdos ("duck tails") and apparel ("drape shapes" or "zoot suits" - wide-brimmed hats, broad-shouldered long coats, high-waisted peg-legged trousers and long dangling chains). They called themselves pachucos [a term for a type of Mexican slang].

Source

From the white supremacist perspective, the arrogance of these showy "aliens" was offensive and threatening in and of itself, particularly because the pachucos attracted females of all backgrounds. Horny sailors did not like non-whites cutting in on their action, especially flamboyantly-dressed and slickly-coiffed civilian non-whites. And, in a time of rationing, the wastefulness of fabric in the zoot suits themselves added righteous indignation and misguided patriotism to the mix. As Newsweek reported on June 21, 1943:

The War Production Board virtually banned [the zoot suit] in March 1942, when it restricted [by 26%] the amount of material to be used in men's clothes, but the zoot suit has continued to thrive--mainly through the diligence of bootleg tailors.

As one result of the Los Angeles outbreak, the Federal government cracked down on this illicit trading in zoot suits. The War Frauds Division got an injunction forbidding one shop to sell any of the 800 zoot suits in stock. Claiming that the shopkeeper had contributed to "hoodlumism," agents said they had found that great numbers of zoot coats and pants were being made in New York and Chicago.

Of course, this rather minor disobedience of authority was part of the attraction of the zoot suit to the pachucos. To whites looking for trouble, it was high treason and a good excuse to put "those people" in their place.

IMMINENT CAUSES

The Sleepy Lagoon Case

On the night of August 1, 1942, zoot suiter Henry Leyvas, 20, and some of his friends were involved in a fight with another group of pachucos at the Williams Ranch by a lagoon. Later the next morning, a man named José Díaz was found bleeding and unconscious on a road near the lagoon (later named the Sleepy Lagoon by a reporter). He later died. The autopsy revealed that Mr. Díaz was drunk at the time of death and that his death was the result of blunt head trauma. Though one medical examiner stated that his injuries were consistent with that of being hit by a car, Henry Leyvas and 24 members of the "38th Street gang" (as the group had been dubbed by the local tabloids) were arrested and charged with the murder of José Díaz. Led by the local tabloids, a public outcry for "justice" and vengeance against the zoot suiters caused the Los Angeles Police Department to conduct a roundup of over 600 people on the nights of August 10th and 11th. All were charged with such things as suspicion of assault, armed robbery, etc., and 175 people were held on these charges. Of the 600 plus people arrested during this roundup, every single one was a Spanish surnamed individual!

                             Image courtesy latimesblogs.latimes.com

During the time leading up to the trial and for two weeks into the trial, Henry Leyvas and his co-defendants were not allowed to change their clothes by order of the trial judge, Charles Fricke. The district attorney reasoned, and Judge Fricke agreed, that the jury should see the defendants in the zoot suits, which were obviously only worn by "hoodlums". During the trial, 22 of the 24 co-defendants including Henry Leyvas were tried together. They were not allowed to sit with or talk with their lawyers. Whenever their names were mentioned by a witness or the District Attorney, the defendants were instructed by the judge to stand up, regardless of how damning the statements being made were. Judge Fricke also had E. Duran Ayres come and testify as an "expert" witness as to his belief of the Mexicans' penchant for killing and their "blood thirst". The trial went on for five months and on January 15, 1943, nine of the co-defendants (including Henry Leyvas) were found guilty of second degree murder, given prison terms of five years to life, and shipped off to the infamous San Quentin Prison. This entire incident is documented in the 1981 movie by Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit.

Source

In October 1944, in People v Zammora [66 Cal.App.2d 166], the California Court of Appeals reversed the convictions, thanks in large part to the efforts of Alice Greenfield McGrath, executive secretary of the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee. But by that time, the damage was done. White Angelenos were convinced that pachucos and their zoot suits represented murder and lawlessness. They conveniently forgot that most of the people wearing them were kids and that Mexican-Americans, far from being unpatriotic, were disproportionately overrepresented in the US military.

The Press

The Los Angeles newspapers, including the Times, the Examiner, and the Daily News, took an inflammatory tone directed squarely at Mexican-Americans, both in the run up to the riots and in their reporting during and after the violence. From the August 11, 1942 Examiner:

Its climax made strongly evident by the jailing of nearly 300 youths and girls in week-end arrests, results of the city-county drive against juvenile gangsterism will take form today in an inquest, a big-scale "showup," and a "crackdown conference" of officers.

(snip)

Ten girls, who are declared to have been companions of the young hoodlums, also are to be summoned as witnesses....

Source

A headline from the June 9, 1943, Daily News read "Nazis Spur Zoot Riots," an accusation apparently based on a single letter written by a white serviceman. And the Times boasted that the indiscriminate beating of Latinos and others by white sailors and marines had had a "cleansing effect" by removing "miscreants and hoodlums."

Two Incidents

According to Wiki:

Two conflicts between Mexicans and military personnel had a great effect on the start of the riots. The first occurred on May 30, 1943, four days before the start of the riots. The altercation involved a dozen sailors and soldiers including Seaman Second Class Joe Dacy Coleman. The group was walking down Main Street when they spotted a group of young women on the opposite side of the street. With the exception of Coleman and another soldier, the group crossed the street to approach the women. Coleman continued on, walking past a small group of young men in zoot suits. As he walked by, Coleman saw one of the young men raise his arm in a “threatening” manner, so he turned around and grabbed it. It was then that something or someone struck the sailor in the back of the head at which point he fell to the ground unconscious, breaking his jaw in two places. On the opposite side of the street, young men attacked the servicemen out of nowhere. In the midst of this battle, the servicemen managed to fight their way to Coleman and drag him to safety. It was as a result of this altercation, according to Eduardo Pagán, that the white servicemen believed that they were the only group capable of restoring order and white male dominance.^[19]

The second incident took place four days later on the night of June 3, 1943. About eleven sailors got off a bus and started walking along Main Street in East Los Angeles. At some point they ran into a group of young Mexicans dressed in zoot suits and got in a verbal argument. It was then that the sailors claimed that they were jumped and beaten by this gang of zoot suiters. When the LAPD responded to the incident, many of them off duty officers, they called themselves the Vengeance Squad and went to the scene “seeking to clean up Main Street from what they viewed as the loathsome influence of pachuco gangs.” The next day, 200 members of the U.S. Navy got a convoy of about 20 taxi cabs and headed for East Los Angeles. When the sailors spotted their first victims, most of them 12-13 year old boys, they clubbed the boys and adults that were trying to stop them. They also stripped the boys of their zoot suits and burned the tattered clothes in a pile. They were determined to attack and strip all minorities that they came across who were wearing zoot suits. It was with this attack that the Zoot Suit Riots started.^[20]

THE RIOTS

                                 Image courtesy crisisculture.tumblr.com

The riots continued for several days after that first night. Sailors were joined by soldiers and, eventually, civilians as they roamed through the streets of the barrios, grabbing anyone dressed in a zoot suit (and many who were not), stripping them of their clothes, and beating them. Police stood by and let it happen, often arresting the victims after the mob had moved on:

Not one [serviceman] was arrested by the Police or the Sheriff. In fact, the servicemen were portrayed in the local press as heroes stemming the tide of the "Mexican Crime Wave." During the nights of June 6th and 7th, these scenes were again repeated. Time Magazine later reported that, "The police practice was to accompany the caravans of soldiers and sailors in police cars, watch the beatings and jail the victims." According to Rudolpho Acuña in Occupied America, "Seventeen-year-old Enrico Herrera, after he was beaten and arrested, spent three hours at a police station, where he was found by his mother, still naked and bleeding. A 12-year-old boy's jaw was broken. Police arrested over 600 Chicano youths without cause and labeled the arrests 'preventive' action. Angelenos cheered on the servicemen and their civilian allies."³

Source

Wiki quotes journalist Carey McWilliams, an eyewitness, as reporting,

Marching through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, a mob of several thousand soldiers, sailors, and civilians, proceeded to beat up every zoot suiter they could find. Pushing its way into the important motion picture theaters, the mob ordered the management to turn on the house lights and then ran up and down the aisles dragging Mexicans out of their seats. Streetcars were halted while Mexicans, and some Filipinos and Negroes, were jerked from their seats, pushed into the streets and beaten with a sadistic frenzy.

The L.A. papers, however, focused almost exclusively on reporting whites as victims, continuing the biased coverage that helped create the melee.

Finally, on June 7, Navy and Marine commanders cracked down on the rioting sailors and soldiers by confining them to base and making L.A. off limits. Nevertheless, leaders continued to maintain that military personnel had been acting in self-defense.

In all, about 150 people were injured, most of them pachucos and people of color. Over 600 Latinos were arrested. Property damage was minimal.

AFTERMATH

In the wake of the riots and because of adverse national reaction, California Governor Culbert Olsen (D), ordered the creation of the McGucken Committee to investigate. Wiki notes:

In 1943 the committee issued its report; it determined racism to be a central cause of the riots, further stating that it was "an aggravating practice (of the media) to link the phrase zoot suit with the report of a crime." The Governor appointed a "Peace Officers Committee on Civil Disturbances" chaired by Robert W. Kenny, president of the National Lawyers Guild to make recommendations to the police.^[23] Human relations committees were appointed and police departments were required to train their officers to treat all citizens equally.^[24]

Eleanor Roosevelt commented on the incident in her June 16, 1943, newspaper column, saying,

The question goes deeper than just suits. It is a racial protest. I have been worried for a long time about the Mexican racial situation. It is a problem with roots going a long way back, and we do not always face these problems as we should.

For acting like a grown up, the First Lady was accused by the editorial board of the L.A. Times "of having communist leanings and stirring 'race discord'."

L.A. Mayor Fletcher Bowron blamed the riots on Mexican juvenile delinquents and white Southerners, and the Los Angeles City Council issued an ordinance banning the wearing of zoot suits. Jack Tenney (R), a state senator who headed the State Un-American Activities Committee, predictably decided that the real culprit was the National Lawyers Guild, which he called a "communist front."

I wish I could say the Zoot Suit Riots were an aberration in American history. But such incidents are all too familiar. If you hear echoes of today's headlines in this story, you're not the only one. As film critic Roger Ebert once said,

I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.

I'll leave you with this 1997 swing tune, based on the 1943 incident, performed by the Eugene, Oregon-based--and delightfully-named--Cherry Poppin' Daddies.

Zoot Suit Riot

By Steve Perry

Who's that whisperin' in the trees?
It's two sailors and they're on leave
Pipes and chains and swingin' hands
Who's your daddy? Yes I am

Fat cat came to play
Now he can't run fast enough
You'd best stay away
When the pushers come to shove

Zoot suit riot (riot)
Throw back a bottle of beer
Zoot suit riot (riot)
Pull a comb through your coal black hair

Zoot suit riot (riot)
Throw back a bottle of beer
Zoot suit riot (riot)
Pull a comb through your coal black hair
Blow Daddy!

A whipped up jitterbuggin' brown-eyed man
A stray cat frontin' up an eight-piece band
Cut me Sammy and you'll understand
In my veins hot music ran

You got me in a sway
And I want to swing you done
Now you sailors know
Where your women come for love

Zoot suit riot (riot)
Throw back a bottle of beer
Zoot suit riot (riot)
Pull a comb through your coal black hair

You're in a zoot suit riot
You're in a zoot suit riot
You're in a zoot suit riot

(scat singing)

Oh you got me in a sway
And I want to swing you done
Now you sailors know
Where your women come for love

Zoot suit riot (riot)
Throw back a bottle of beer
Zoot suit riot (riot)
Pull a comb through your coal black hair

Zoot suit riot (riot)
Throw back a bottle of beer
Zoot suit riot (riot)
Pull a comb through your coal black hair

You're in a zoot suit riot
You're in a zoot suit riot
You're in a zoot suit riot

Zoot Suit Riot lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Notes on books I have not read:

Mauricio Mazón has a book with the intriguing title, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation, summarized and available in paperback at University of Texas Press. Amazon also has it. The only available reader review recommends it, calling it "well-written and scholarly" and praising its "good documentation and reports from sources on both sides of the clashes."

Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. by Eduardo Obregón Pagán is offered by The University of North Carolina Press. An LA Times book review said,

A brilliant and ultimately persuasive effort to explain the function of music and fashion in shaping how Americans see themselves, then and now. . . . Pagán has made an important and illuminating contribution to [the] body of [Chicano] scholarship.

For an in-depth look at the Sleepy Lagoon trial, try The Sleepy Lagoon Murder Case: Race Discrimination and Mexican-American Rights by Mark A. Weitz, available with a précis through The University Press of Kansas. Pagán reviewed this work:

One of the real strengths of Weitz's work is that it brings to the case a keen understanding of law and courtroom dynamics, helping readers to understand more completely its importance for legal history. Looking at it from a legal perspective is entirely new and is an important contribution.

Thanks to tonight's Top Comments contributors. Let us hear from YOU when you find that haute couture among the Goodwill hand-me-downs.

TOP COMMENTS

From leu2500:

From Brainwrap's diary Update: Oh Dear Lord. Palin mangles Paul Revere: Yes, Sarah Palin is the gift that keeps on giving.  Gooserock had this comment in response to Palin getting Paul Revere's ride all wrong. The rest of the thread is hilarious also too. (Diarist's note: Especially frsbdg's reply to "The Amish are coming! The Amish are coming!")

From JG in MD:

Troubadour's reply to my comment in his outstanding rescued-to-recommended diary Reciprocity Nonexistence Syndrome: Sociopathic GOP Partisanship 2001-2011 starts a thoughtful thread...not just this thread...the whole diary and comment thread is such a tour de force that I 'd like to see it more generally praised. It's the top ten I've seen since DK4 came online, maybe the top five. (Diarist's note: I'm with you, JG in MD. One of the great rant diaries EVAH.)

From Corporate Dog:

I don't normally make Top Comment recommendations because I'm a giant egotist, but NuclearJo had a good one over in kos' front page post Mitt Romney kicks off campaign with intellectual property theft.

From princesspat:

This comment by Hedwig made me laugh......and hum along in Avenging Angel's diary The Interchangeable Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.

From your humble diarist:

I think this may be the best comment I have ever nominated: Jim P eloquently and devastatingly lays out the Republican mindset, also found in Troubadour's masterpiece.

WisePiper offers this wise-ass response in Colorado is the Shiznit's rant against receiving unwanted pictures of male sex organs, Updated: An Open Letter to Men Everywhere.

In Plubius' rec-listed diary Enough with the Christian Punching, I especially liked these two comments from the atheist perspective: carver offers a pragmatic approach and johnva offers this reality-based observation.