Advertising: The Mad Hatters

If anything makes a hatmaker's hair stand on end, it is a man who does not wear a hat—especially if he is the President of the U.S. Last week, fearing the national impact of John F. Kennedy's usual hatlessness, the hat industry set out to rescue the nation's impressionable young men (and itself) from the perils of bareheadedness. In an eye-catching, full-page ad in the New York Times appeared a huge portrait of a beatnik so snaggy—and hatless—that no rising young man could afford to look anything like him.

"There are some men a hat won't help," said the ad,...

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