FOR a few months in 1922, throngs of America’s youth — from schoolkids to shopgirls — were swept up in a leaderless pyramid scheme that promised “something for nothing” and encouraged promiscuous flirtation. These were the “Shifters.” This is their (brief) story.

The Shifters emerged seemingly out of thin air and landed mid-panic in the pages of the press. On Feb. 10, 1922, The Springfield Republican reported:

“The last two days has seen the Massachusetts Agricultural college campus stirred to an unusual degree by the appearance of a new fraternal order, known as the Shifters. The same order has just swept through Boston like wildfire ... Enthusiasm has run so riot over this new thing that classes have even been forgotten in the rush for new members.”

Although this story called the Shifters fraternal, the society was coed and a majority of initiates seem to have been young women — as shown by one of the next press mentions, an advertisement for special Shifter Hats that ran on March 10 in The New York Evening World.

Image Credit... Courtesy of the New York Public Library

The $10 hat (“for Mademoiselle”) came in a range of “Shifter colors” including Shifter Red, Shifter Green and Quaker Brown. Significantly, the manufacturer was candid enough to admit to jumping on a driverless bandwagon: “The Shifter follows her own fashions and Franklin Simon & Co. follow the Shifter.”