More on the Button Snatcher

The dreaded button snatcher!

I stopped my research too early. Sure, I stumble on a cool piece on a guy who was slicing buttons off women's coats in 1895, do a little more research, and then write it up. It wasn't the last article on Mr. Volpe. New York, by the way was home to several men of the name Antonio (or Anthony) Volpe at the time, some of whom clearly aren't our button snatcher. Should the tailor I mentioned in my earlier post not have been our Antonio Volpe, I apologize for the misunderstanding.

The Bryan Daily Eagle of Bryan, Texas no doubt convinced their readers that the time, expense, and difficulty of a trip to New York in 1896 simply wasn't worth it. Mr. Volpe had been arrested four months before, but he was the first item in an article on those who terrorize women in New York. The piece is probably something that was published in a variety of newspapers, just as there are syndicated pieces in newspapers still.

In my earlier piece, I raised the question of the cost of buttons in 1895. The Daily Eagle answers the question. Buttons were pricey.

Fancy buttons in pearl and oxidized metals vary in price from 50 cents to $5.

Okay, let's do the math here. The treasury has only been tracking this since 1913, eighteen years after Mr. Volpe was cutting buttons off coats. It'll have to do. Those 50¢ buttons? Like walking around with a bunch of $10 bills pinned to your coat. A $5 button in 1895? Look at you Miss Manybucks! Mr. Volpe's crime seems fairly serious.

The later piece also offers something of a motive. When I told my husband about this article, he jokingly said that the guy must have been a button fetishist. We had our little laugh. What does the article say?

He confessed to having clipped them from the clothes of ladies on the street, and that he did not have the power to resist temptation when he saw a nice, large, round button. While out foraging for buttons, the "Snatcher" carried a small, sharp-bladed knife in his right hand. A larger instrument would have needlessly frightened the victims, whom Mr. Volpe did not wish to harm. All he cared for was to amputate the buttons and jingle them in his pockets.

Okay, that's kinda pervy.

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Snatches Buttons, Motive Unclear

The police were able to
button this case up. Sorry.

Were buttons valuable in 1895? A New York policeman apprehended a young man on December 7, 1895, on the suspicion that he was engaging in pickpocketing. Officer Klan found that Antonio Volpe had been snatching buttons off women's coats. The policeman thought he was dealing with a pickpocket, then he saw Volpe pull a button off a woman's coat.

He had been industrious, since he had forty buttons (not stolen, according to Volpe) on his person after throwing a "handful" of buttons into the street.

He might be the same Anthony Volpe who shows up in the 1905 New York Census. This seems likely, because in 1895 he's living on Prince Street. The Anthony Volpe on the census lives only a few blocks away on a street that crosses Prince Street.

One other thing: at 18, Antonio Volpe is snatching the buttons off women's coats. Ten years later, Anthony Volpe is working a tailor. Maybe he was trying to drum up business. Or make sure that an employer had a ready supply of women's coat buttons. If both items reference the same person, let's hope he made amends. Maybe by not charging women whose buttons had been ripped off their coats.

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Ten Commandments not for women, said 1920s politician

The man's a prominent American political figure.
He must be right.

I've been burrowing into newspaper archives researching a topic I hope to write about soon. On one page, I was surprised to see the headline,

Col. Harvey Says Decalogue Does Not Apply to Women

But it's okay, he's got you covered. The subhead is:

New Ten Commandments Should be Devised to Save Their Souls, He Tells Author's Club in London

He gave this talk in October, 1922, since which I am not aware of a second set of commandments created for women. Any women reading this might take that in mind while planning out their weekend.

Mr. Harvey was in London because it was part of his job to be there. He was the Ambassador to the Court of St. James, the formal title of ambassadors to Great Britain. The Ambassador was worried that women might just discover that they are not actually forbidden from doing certain things.

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