If you come across a photo of Gen. Douglas Macarthur, chances are he’s wearing his trademark khaki cap embroidered with gold leaf.
The famed commander insisted on wearing the hat for almost two decades, including during historic moments such as wading ashore to liberate the Philippines in 1945 and Japan’s surrender aboard the USS Missouri that ended World War II.
“This hat has seen presidents, emperors, just about any famous person you can think of in the mid-20th century,” said Amanda Williams, director of the city-owned MacArthur Memorial in downtown Norfolk, which has housed the item for 61 years.
This year, the cap made the Virginia Association of Museums’ list of the Top 10 Most Endangered Artifacts. Others include the earliest known photo of Robert E. Lee, a ribbon from the 1872 Soldiers And Sailors Convention and a wicker baby basket that once belonged to the sole child of First Lady Edith Wilson.
MacArthur’s hat recently won a public vote between the 10, earning the Norfolk museum the “People’s Choice Award” that comes with a $1,000 prize for conservation work.
MacArthur was an American general who played key military roles during WWII, the occupation of Japan and the Korean War.
“He is also kind of a controversial figure,” Williams said, including being fired by President Harry Truman.
“Around the world, I think he's very well respected as kind of a symbol of America keeping its promises of the Allied victories in World War II,” she said. “Domestically here in the States, I think sometimes people have some mixed feelings about him because there's obviously a large ego in play. He’s a complicated person, like most people are.”
The mustard-colored hat was made in 1936 in the Philippines, where MacArthur worked as Field Marshal.
Williams said some people mistake it for a Philippine Field Marshal cap, but it is, in fact, a U.S. Army General’s cap, decorated with typical iconography such as an eagle and “scrambled egg”--style embellishments around the visor.
The general wore it through 1952, ignoring pleas from his wife to replace it with a clean one.
Williams said he may have loved it for the commanding presence it conferred.
“People that knew him wrote a lot about the hat and the fact that you could sit with him and meet with him in his office and he would not be wearing the cap, and it would feel like you were talking to a professor,” she said. “He puts the hat on and walks out of the office, it’s a totally different person. He looks like he's 10 feet tall.”
The hat eventually ended up in Norfolk along with other personal artifacts sent to the memorial museum. MacArthur’s mother was a Norfolk native and the city was happy to take him on as an adopted son.
For the past six decades, the museum preserved the hat mostly through temperature and humidity control, Williams said.
But officials need to do further conservation work if it’s going to survive the decades to come.
That will include using cutting-edge technologies to carefully clean and stabilize the hat without removing historic touches such as remnants of MacArthur’s sweat and hair gel.
“You need to be able to put the ‘Mona Lisa’ of your collection on display,” Williams said. “And that is what this object is.”
The MacArthur Memorial plans to launch a fundraising effort soon to secure another $25,000 to $30,000 for the hat’s preservation.
