Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (27 page)

The famous mustaches of the 1940s did not generally inspire confidence. Hitler was evil, Chaplin’s tramp was a fool, and Clark Gable
was a rogue. When Thomas Dewey, the mustachioed governor of New York, won the Republican presidential nomination in 1944 to challenge Franklin Roosevelt, and again in 1948, when his opponent was Harry Truman, many American voters could not help questioning his unusual style. Back in 1939, as Clark Gable was portraying devil-may-care Rhett Butler and Hitler was launching his war on Europe, Thomas E. Dewey was a young attorney general of New York and a rising political star. One admiring journalist effused that “in this clean-shaven age . . . [Dewey’s mustache] is little short of epic. It is fulsome, luxuriant, raven black, compelling, and curved in a way to gladden an artist’s eye.”
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Dewey was, in that writer’s opinion, “a Clark Gable of candidates” with more charm, personality, and political sex appeal than other Republicans. Neither this journalist, nor Dewey himself, understood the high cost any politician must pay for having the look of a charming rogue.

Murmurs began immediately when Dewey launched his campaign in 1944. Women writers were the most critical. The syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen supported Dewey, though she admitted that mustaches did nothing for her.
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Others were less tolerant. After attending the Republican National Convention in Chicago that July, Helen Essary, a syndicated political columnist, declared herself impressed by Dewey’s intelligence and courage but hopeful that the candidate would get himself to a barber right away. “I have heard dozens of women make the same criticism of the gentleman from New York,” Essary wrote. “It takes from the seriousness and strength of his face. Moreover it will not help with the women vote . . . You see only the mustache. You remember only the mustache. Without it, Governor Dewey would look a million per cent more real as the proper man for the White House job he is after.”
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Edith Efron, writing in the pages of the
New York Times Sunday Magazine
in August 1944, also concluded that Dewey “may be elected to office, but it will be in spite of his ‘manly attributes’—not because of them.”
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To Efron, it seemed clear that whatever reasons a man had for wearing one, a mustache had a profound, often negative effect. “It plays many roles today,” she wrote. “It is Chaplin-pathetic, Hitler-psychopathic, Gable-debonnair, Lou Lehr–wacky. It perplexes. It fascinates. It amuses. And it repels.” The following month, the magazine published a letter from a well-known model named Cornelia Von Hessert who amplified Efron’s thesis that mustaches connoted undesirable masculine traits. “The man who decides to sport lip adornment,” Hessert wrote, “asserts his masculinity and desire to tyrannize over the home. No matter how prettily he waxes it, droops it, shingles it, at heart he’s the Man’s Man and ruler of his own roost.”
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Men in Britain and America were generally clean-shaven, she reasoned, because women rightly insisted on having their say.

Many male commentators agreed with these women that mustaches marked a strong, assertive type of man, but this was for them a positive quality. One syndicated columnist who contributed two articles on the subject declared that he felt “called upon to protect the fair name of gentlemen who wear mustaches, whether they’re rather scraggly affairs like mine or strong, virile ones like Mr. Dewey’s.”
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This squabble over hair had little effect. In the wartime election of 1944, the voters stuck with the shaven man they knew and trusted, awarding Franklin Roosevelt an unprecedented fourth term.

When he won the nomination a second time in 1948, Dewey stood a much better chance against the less popular Harry Truman. But again the Republican contender’s small mustache loomed large in perceptions of him as a candidate. As before, articles appeared in the press musing on the fact that he would be the first president with facial hair since William Howard Taft left office in 1913. Other journalists speculated on whether he would start a new national trend in men’s fashions. And again, Dewey’s defenders took to the press, one assuring his readers that Dewey was not affecting “a trick trim . . . like some movie actors have. The Dewey mustache is merely a part of him.”
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When an Alabama businessman made a public appeal to Dewey to shave for the sake of southern votes,
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another male columnist encouraged the candidate to stand firm, assuring him that he (the columnist) also had a mustache, yet had managed some years earlier to win the hand in marriage of a southern voter.
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The banter in the press hinted at innumerable private conversations and still more private feelings. Helen Essary had, four years earlier, mentioned hearing negative comments from dozens of women about Dewey’s hairy lip. Who can say how many others shared this opinion? One we do know about is Emilie Spencer Deer, an Ohio wife and mother from a solidly Republican family. In 1948 she let her family know that she would vote for President Truman instead of Dewey because she could not vote for a man with a mustache.
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An educated and conscientious woman, she was careful to read the masculine visual codes: a clean-shaven man was sociable and reliable, whereas a man with facial hair demonstrated willful independence that did not win her confidence.

When the votes were counted in 1948, Dewey had narrowly lost. The tallies were particularly close in California, Indiana, and Ohio, Emilie Deer’s state. In those three states, Dewey lost by just 38,218 total votes out of the 8.6 million cast—just four-tenths of one percent. Had he won over half that tiny margin he would have become president.
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Polling data is not available to prove that his mustache cost him the presidency, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is certainly possible. Dewey himself could not ignore the possibility. When he ran successfully for reelection as governor of New York in 1950, Dewey was still explaining himself to female voters. Appearing in a televised forum, the very first question came from a woman who asked why he kept his mustache.
The governor responded that as a young man he stopped shaving because it hurt his lip, and he kept it because Mrs. Dewey liked it.
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Later that year, the wistful governor told a visiting group of boy scouts, “Remember fellows, any boy can become president—unless he’s got a mustache.”
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It was a joke—sort of. Dewey had learned by bitter experience that being the “Clark Gable of candidates” had not worked out for him. No major candidate for the presidency has dared flaunt even a hint of facial hair since that time.

In the early twentieth century men were strongly encouraged to conform. It was important to be a reliable member of the masculine collective, whether it was the army, a company, or a sports team. A shaved face was part of the uniform, both clean and regular. Shaving was even heroic in some circumstances, as when Lawrence stood alone on behalf of his nation. There was, of course, a natural desire for men to test these limits, at least in their fantasies. Hollywood stars like Clark Gable gave expression to a daring and roguish spirit wishing to break free from social restraint. Hitler and Stalin were rogues on a profoundly sinister level, and though their mustaches were conservative in respect to military tradition, they underscored in the Western mind the danger of men who do not shave. Thomas Dewey was unable to overcome this headwind of mistrust. The only hope for a freer expression of manly hair was the emergence of a new spirit of political and social dissent.

The strong association of cleanly shaved faces with conformity in the early twentieth century made it almost inevitable that critics of the status quo would again choose facial hair as a sign of protest. A spirit of restless independence, along with a few furry chins, emerged among beatniks soon after World War II. In the late 1960s, these iconoclasts were joined by thousands more, and the growth of hair paralleled the radicalization of the baby-boom generation. In the 1970s, a reaction against both radicalism and hair gained strength, leaving a mixed legacy for our times.

The summer of 1969 was, if measured in terms of hair and beards, the longest summer of the twentieth century. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin arrived on the moon with crew cuts, but the Fab Four made an equally famous trek across Abbey Road in London with more hair on their heads and faces than ever before. All four Beatles had cultivated beards that summer, though Paul McCartney shaved his off before the photographer snapped the iconic
Abbey Road
cover in August. Just days later, across the Atlantic, the rock and drug utopia known as the Woodstock Festival opened on a farm in New York; there, long-haired,
bearded, and mustachioed rockers such as Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, Country Joe McDonald, David Crosby, and Graham Nash performed for a massive assembly of American youth, many of whom paraded their own rebellious fuzz.

Not a few of these bearded, beaded, jeans-wearing youngsters looked up to the Jesus-in-wire-rims, John Lennon, as their model. That spring, before
Abbey Road
and Woodstock, Lennon had deployed his hair as a moral cause in a bizarre though strangely effective way, staging two “bed-ins” with his new wife, Yoko Ono. They conceived these demonstrations as performance-art honeymoons, one in Amsterdam in March, another in Montreal in May. The newlyweds hoped to exploit the frenzy over their love affair to publicize their call for world peace. On each occasion, a long-haired, fully bearded Lennon, dressed in pajamas, sat and lay in a hotel bed alongside frizzy and laconic Ono, holding court for a week before a rotating circus of journalists, well-wishers, and television crews. The cameras and interviews recorded long hours of the honeymooners philosophizing about the ills of the world and the need for peace and nonviolence.

On the window behind John and Yoko’s heads were handwritten signs with the slogans “Bed Peace” and “Hair Peace.” A short video they produced explained these themes. Appearing before the camera in pajamas, Lennon strums a few chords, trading chants with Yoko: “Stay in bed, grow your hair. Bed peace, hair Peace. Hair peace, bed peace.” Then, speaking as he strummed, Lennon explains that “this is an alternative to violence: it’s to stay in bed and grow your hair. If you are Mrs. Higgins living in Rotterdam, and you announced to your local paper, ‘I’m staying in bed for peace, and growing my hair for peace,’ they would be interested.” The Montreal bed-in culminated in the recording of a new song with a catchy, mantra-like chorus: “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” In contrast to Mohandas Gandhi, one of Lennon’s heroes of nonviolence, he and Ono avoided the sufferings of prison and hunger strikes, opting instead for coffee and comfort. This pillowy protest bemused critics on both the left and right, but in significant ways it fit the times perfectly.

The year before had been especially violent. The Vietnam War had reached its zenith as the communist North launched the massive Tet Offensive. Meanwhile, Soviet tanks smashed popular uprisings in
Prague; students clashed with police in the streets of Paris, London, and Chicago; and assassins gunned down Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. The Beatles, following Lennon’s lead, had responded to this horror with the song “Revolution,” affirming that “we all want to change the world, but when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out.” The Beatles opposed revolt and spoke for the majority of their young listeners in expressing a positive frame of mind: “Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right.” Lennon’s bed-in was a natural extension of this outlook. Lying in bed and growing long hair was protest to be sure, but it was passive and pleasant rather than dogmatic and angry.

The Lennons hoped to send other, less obvious messages as well. Their passivity mocked middle-class values of hard work and self-denial, while their “Bed Peace, Hair Peace” credo mimicked the catchy jingles of Madison Avenue advertisers. As both the beneficiary and prisoner of intense media fixation, Lennon, more than most leftists,
was keenly alert to the psychological power of image and marketing. He and Ono were very clear that they believed people were moved by slogans and gestures rather than ideas and doctrines. At the bed-ins, Lennon openly rejected intellectualism and just as unapologetically embraced the superficiality of consumer advertising. We live in an era of “gimmicks and salesmanship,” he asserted to reporters, and it was necessary to sell peace just like companies sold soap. Eventually everyone, including housewives and children, would think about peace just as much as they did about toys or televisions.

In spite of all the talk about salesmanship, however, Lennon saw himself as a spiritual messenger to the masses, readily comparing himself to Christ as prophetic and persecuted. In 1966, he had precipitated the Beatles’ worst public-relations debacle when he proclaimed offhandedly to a reporter that “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. . . . [The Beatles] are more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.”
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American conservatives took offense, and the Fab Four faced vehement protests during their subsequent North American tour. Now again in 1969, Lennon compared himself to the suffering Christ in the “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” recorded between his two bed-ins. The playful lyrics describe his troubled quest to arrange a simple marriage to Yoko in France and then in Gibraltar, followed by their honeymoon-demonstration in Amsterdam. Now looking more like the conventional image Jesus than ever, Lennon sang this about himself:

Things were really not all that bad, of course, though Lennon and Ono did attract as much criticism as praise for their oddball nonconformity. Even his fellow Beatles were beginning to wonder. With his wire-rim glasses, long hair, beard, and “Hair Peace” mantra, Lennon had established himself as a counterculture guru, the icon of youthful idealism and hippie rebellion.

While the John and Yoko show played to the TV cameras and radio microphones, New York and London audiences flocked to see Gerome
Ragni and James Rado’s hit musical
Hair,
a lyrical celebration of love, liberation, and indulgence inspired by San Francisco’s famous Summer of Love in 1967. Few of the thousands who had attended
Hair
and also witnessed the Lennons’ demonstration could have missed the common themes of hair and beds. The final words of the Broadway show’s signature song could double as a description of John Lennon:

Before Lennon and Ono, the composers of
Hair
had struck upon the idea that a bed was the ideal place to mount a revolt against social and sexual repression. “You can lay in bed,” the chorus sang. “You can die in bed; you can pray in bed; you can live in bed; you can laugh in bed, you can give your heart, or break your heart in half in bed . . . You can lose in bed; you can win in bed. But never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never can you sin in bed!” Parental repression be damned. The bed—laziness, sexual pleasure, and hairy independence—was true liberation.

The language of hair and rebellion that Lennon and the hippies exploited had emerged over time, beginning with the beatniks and restless university students of the late 1950s. In 1958, when the society editor of the
Chicago Tribune
decided to investigate a rise in beards, she found that “scholars, ecclesiastics, artists, bums, musicians, and frontiersman have been among the few who kept whiskers from dying out entirely,” but that they had been “joined by increasing numbers of young men.”
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The best place to find youthful beards on either side of the Atlantic was on a university campus.
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A reporter who interviewed bearded students at Columbia University in New York City found one student who admitted that he might have been expressing “antipathy to the Madison Avenue man.” An undergraduate anthropology major
summed up the cavalier self-satisfaction of the newly bearded with his response: “I look better with than without it—though, for all I know, it may be a sign of rebellion, but don’t ask against what, at the moment I am feeling much too good just sitting here in this warm, spring sun.”
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Bearded men may not have been protesting against anything in particular, but they still offended employers and other guardians of the social order. Eric W. Hughes, an employee of a large company in New York City, described what happened to him in 1958 when he showed up for work after vacation with a well-trimmed beard. His vice president was outraged, insisting that no man with a beard could appear presentable and that customers would stop using the company’s services. After several confrontations along these lines, Hughes resigned, declaring that he would not conform to the executive’s “rigid and narrow conception of an employee—a bland, beardless face, obedient as a machine, immaculate black or gray suit, and outrageous necktie.”
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It was the sort of confrontation that occurred with growing frequency. When a young insurance company trainee in Swansea, Wales, decided to adopt a more distinguished appearance in 1962, he was coolly informed by his manager that beards “were not the thing in the insurance business.” He took his case to the top-level management and was rejected. Like the New York office worker, the woolly Welshman decided to resign before he was fired.
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Narrow-minded though they might have been, bosses on both sides of the Atlantic were surely right that customers disapproved of facial hair. A national poll in the United States, conducted by the syndicated magazine
This Week
in 1957, asked respondents whether they thought beards or mustaches were attractive. The results were definitive: 81 percent of men and 85 percent of women said no to beards, with 73 percent of men and 80 percent of women also opposed to mustaches.
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A shaved face might be bland and featureless, but that is what the public wished to see. In the London
Times
in 1960, the Gillette Company produced a full-page advertisement featuring a small essay by Siriol Hugh-Jones, an editor for London’s
Vogue
magazine, who sang the praises of shaven men. The author drolly warned against the untrustworthiness of beards, asserting that “bearded men are often dangerous, independent to a fault, and prone to stay out all night without revealing incriminating evidence around the jawline.” On the other hand, “with a clean-shaven man you know—so far as such a thing is possible with men—smoothly
where you are.”
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Hugh-Jones was impishly witty, but she artfully wove together the stereotypical fears of beards with a contrasting admiration for “honest” hairlessness.

As the 1960s got under way, it was still possible to be lighthearted about faddish facial hair. When, however, it spread beyond the bounds of bohemia and academia, the guardians of propriety reacted with alarm. By the middle of the decade, male hair had become a contentious and emotional issue. It was as if all the aspirations and anxieties of the era were manifest in mops, mustaches, bangs, and beards.

The crisis at John Muir High School in Pasadena, California, in 1963 is a striking illustration of this social fear. Paul Finot was a government teacher with a history of challenging his superiors. He had experimented with a beard in the 1950s at another high school, but when he was hired at John Muir, he promised to remain shaved. When he changed his mind and grew a Vandyke, the principal removed him from the classroom and assigned him to be a private tutor to homebound students. It did not matter that the school was named for a famous naturalist whose marble bust graced the entry of the school in full-bearded glory. The principal was worried that the predominantly black and Hispanic student population might be tempted to imitate their teacher’s insubordination. Finot sued the school district, claiming an infringement of his constitutional rights of personal liberty and free speech.

In court, the principal testified that Finot’s beard made discipline more difficult because it “might encourage Negro students to wear mustaches.”
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It was a rare moment of truth. The real issue was the danger that young black men might feel independent and resist authority. When some residents objected to the racist implications of this statement, the board of education issued a public statement of support for the principal.
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The court subsequently ruled in favor of the school, affirming its right to require that teachers and students remain shaved.

What happened next was indicative of developments in subsequent years in Los Angeles, and in Western culture generally. Finot appealed his loss, and in April 1967 a higher California court reversed the earlier judgment, unanimously affirming the rights of facial hair. The three-judge panel acknowledged that the principal’s regulations against beards were reasonable, but they held that the school district had not established that the social value of its restrictions outweighed the infringement of personal liberty, nor had the board proved that it
lacked other means to enforce a ban on student beards. “A beard, for a man, is an expression of his personality,” the judges wrote. “On the one hand it has been interpreted as a symbol of masculinity, of authority and of wisdom. On the other hand it has been interpreted as a symbol of nonconformity and rebellion. But symbols, under appropriate circumstances, merit constitutional protection.”
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The justices thus acknowledged that beards imply rebellion but ruled that such rebellion should be permitted as protected political expression. There were similar decisions in other courts around this time. A worker at Douglas Aircraft in California also won his right to wear a beard at work, and in 1969 a labor arbitrator allowed facial freedom for New York City bus drivers.
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Still, the question remained: how much hairy rebellion could society accept?