Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (29 page)

Most of the time, the fight about hair was informal and unspoken, but on occasion it was quite public and explicit, particularly in that most litigious of societies, the United States. In its courtrooms, the impetus to individuality confronted an increasingly firm reaction bent on shoring up the shaven order of things. The fall of facial hair in the 1980s was not a simply a shift in fashion, but the result of a deliberate campaign of suppression.

The purest examples of corporate pressure to eradicate hair came from the quintessential American companies McDonald’s and Walt Disney, which had built their businesses on wholesomeness and efficient service. In the wake of 1960s and 1970s rebelliousness, both companies remained entrenched in the 1950s. McDonald’s insisted that its employees “must impress customers as being ‘All-American’ boys.”
40
These teenagers, all male until 1964, were instructed to bathe and shave every day and were required to wear black pants, shiny shoes, a neat haircut, and a friendly smile. Workers (called “hosts”) at Disney theme parks were given detailed instruction on achieving the “Disney Look,” which for men required shaved faces and “neat natural haircuts” that did not cover the ears. In an odd phrasing, the guidelines stated that beards and mustaches were not permitted, “however, deodorant is required”—as though deodorant were a substitute for facial hair.
41
No instructions could more clearly express the corporate ideal of sanitized manliness
in twentieth-century America. Hairiness was the unacceptable complement of untidiness, irregularity, and unreliability.

The stringent proscriptions at McDonald’s and Disney were simply the most notable examples of an increasingly powerful backlash against the advance of hair in America. The legal right of private employers to regulate the grooming of their employees was rarely questioned, and when it was, employers’ authority was generally vindicated. The sizable minority of American workers in private industry protected by union contracts had access to arbitration to challenge facial hair rules, but even in these cases, arbiters tended to favor company interests over those of individuals. A scholarly review of labor arbitration cases in the United States between 1967 and 1979 revealed that almost all involved rules designed to preserve a company’s public image, and that arbitrators were divided on the issue of facial hair.
42
Workers had the best chance of overturning restrictions if they could demonstrate that their appearance would not harm an employer’s business interests. Those employed in noncompetitive businesses like utilities or urban transport were more likely to win sympathy. A split decision involving utility workers in San Francisco in 1976 best illustrates the uncertain standing of beards in the workplace. In this case the arbitrator ruled that a company ban on sideburns, mustaches, and goatees was unreasonable because they could be kept neat and tidy, but its rule against full beards was reasonable because this type of beard “by its natural effulgence is much more difficult to keep neat and well trimmed than the more localized growths.” As a result, the arbitration board concluded, bearded men were “most likely to provoke the angry public reaction which the Company fears.”
43
One might say this was splitting hairs, but it was clear that the concerns for a company’s image carried more weight than the need to preserve personal freedom.

Public workers in the United States repeatedly turned to the courts to win their rights, but the results were not encouraging. By the early 1980s, the right of both public and private employers to regulate facial hair had become enshrined in practice and in law. Men living the in the “land of the free” did not, and still do not, have the right to grow their own hair.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several groups of public employees initiated or threatened legal action to protect their right to wear
beards or mustaches, including bus drivers and firemen in New York City, postal employees in Van Nuys, California, firemen and a school bus driver in Chicago, railway workers on Long Island, and policemen in Suffolk County, New York. In the early stages of some of these cases, the rulings favored workers’ rights. The postal workers in California, for example got the facial-hair ban reversed before the suit was actually filed, and the New York bus drivers won their case in arbitration. As time went on, however, and as these cases rose higher in the courts, workers suffered stinging defeats. The key case involved the policemen of Suffolk County, outside New York City. The police commissioner there had imposed a strict code in 1972 banning hair below the collar and all facial hair beyond short sideburns and small mustaches. The police union, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union, filed suit, citing First Amendment guarantees of free speech, as well as Fourteenth Amendment protections of personal liberty against state regulation. Suffolk County responded with the argument that hair regulations made their officers recognizable to the public as policemen and contributed to the esprit de corps of the force.

The Federal District Court in New York ruled that the policemen’s suit had no merit, but the Second Circuit Court reversed this decision, agreeing that the policemen should indeed have the freedom to choose their own appearance. The judges on the panel ruled that the county had failed to demonstrate a compelling public interest in infringing a policeman’s personal liberties. Suffolk County then appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which decided the case,
Kelley v. Johnson
, in April 1976.

Writing for the six-member majority, Justice William Rehnquist rejected the police union’s arguments. He denied that there was an absolute right to wear any hair style and insisted that it was the plaintiffs’ responsibility to prove “that there is no rational connection between the regulation . . . and the promotion of safety of persons and property.”
44
This was a far more difficult standard than that proposed by the appeals court, which had insisted that the county respect personal liberty unless it could demonstrate a “genuine public need.”
45
With this more stringent test in mind, Rehnquist and the majority concluded that Suffolk County’s desire to make its police officers “readily recognizable to members of the public,” and its interest in promoting an esprit de
corps, were both reasonable motives for establishing grooming regulations.
46
Two justices, Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, dissented entirely. They held to the logic of the lower court, discounting the argument that long hair or beards would either damage morale or make a policeman less recognizable as an officer of the law.

As one would expect, policemen around the country objected to this ruling against them. The president of the New York City Patrolman’s Benevolent Association complained that “this makes the police officer a second-class citizen because you are taking away his fundamental right of choice.”
47
Many noted the irony that Justice Rehnquist himself, with his bushy sideburns and modish haircut, fell outside Suffolk County’s grooming standards. When this was pointed out to him, the justice responded dismissively that, fortunately for him, he “never wanted to work for the Suffolk County Police Department anyway.” Though this ruling technically applied to only to one police commissioner’s rules, it was obvious that it would have much wider implications. A reporter for the
Los Angeles Times
immediately recognized that the Court’s ruling was so broad that it would preserve virtually all grooming and dress codes regulating the nation’s eleven million public employees.
48

One unsurprising effect of the decision was to embolden police commissioners, fire chiefs, school principals, and other public officials to crack down on employees who were insufficiently exacting with their razors. In 1977, for example, the by-the-book police chief in Englewood, New Jersey, determined that the twenty-five bearded men on his eighty-one-man force needed to shave. “My face was mighty cold out there,” one officer complained after a January patrol without his usual covering.
49
In the decades following the
Kelley
decision, federal courts affirmed and extended its application. A Texas case in 1978 and a Louisiana case in 1982 affirmed the power of school districts to enforce beard bans on employees as well as students. The Louisiana case,
Domico v. Rapides Parish School Board
, arose from a suit filed by bearded teachers and bus drivers who alleged that their civil rights were being violated. A federal circuit court applied the
Kelley
standard in ruling for the school board, concluding that “in the high school environment, a hairstyle regulation is a reasonable means of furthering the school board’s undeniable interest in teaching hygiene, instilling discipline, asserting authority, and compelling uniformity.”
50
Other rulings limited
the rights of public employees in other categories, notably two cases from Arkansas involving a state park naturalist (1983) and emergency medical technicians (1992).
51

The
Kelley
ruling passed another major test in 1992 when Massachusetts consolidated its state police forces into a single department. The new chief, in his first general order, banned all facial hair. Six of the more than 250 men who were forced to abandon their mustaches filed suit claiming, like the Suffolk County officers before them, that the state was violating their constitutional freedoms “by forcing them to sacrifice an integral aspect of their personal identities.”
52
Unfortunately, the legal precedents were strongly against them. Noting the very low bar set by the Supreme Court for state agencies, a district judge ruled that the ban on facial hair easily met the reasonability test. The Supreme Court’s judgment on facial hair held firm as decision after decision piled up against individual choice. The sole exception in all this litigation was a victory for public university instructors. It would seem that one reason it is common to see professors wearing beards is that they are among the few public employees who can do so by law.

The fading of hair toward the end of the twentieth century coincided with a renewed crisis of male confidence about masculinity. A notable expression of this trend in the United States was the so-called mythopoetic men’s movement, inspired by poet Robert Bly and abetted by Jungian theorists and psychotherapists such as James Hillman, Robert L. Moore, and Michael Meade. Bly’s 1990 book
Iron John
served as the manifesto of this movement and was for many years a best-seller.
Iron John
was an extended meditation on a Grimm Brothers folktale about the hairy Wild Man, which Bly took as a metaphor for the male psyche. Growing up, he wrote, men need to acquaint themselves with the wild man within themselves, in order to release positive “Zeus energy”—the strength, joy, and resilience of their masculine souls. The hairy man is frightening, “even more so now, when the corporations do so much work to produce the sanitized, hairless, shallow man.”
53
This link between masculinity and hair permeates Bly’s book. In one passage, he describes the Wild Man as the positive side of male sexuality: “The hair that covers his whole body is natural like a deer’s or a mammoth’s. He has not been clean shaven out of shame, and his instincts have not been so suppressed as to produce the rage that humiliates women.”
54

For the most part, this celebration of hair remained metaphorical. There were Wild Man weekend retreats, at which men were encouraged to bang drums, dance spontaneously, eat rabbit stew, tell stories, and cry, but growing actual hair was not much discussed or especially encouraged. Robert Moore had an impressive beard, but other movement leaders, including Reade, Hillman, and Bly himself, remained shaven. They were like the medieval monks who spoke of the “inner beard” as a spiritual rather than actual expression of manliness. As Bly said, the aim “was not to
be
the Wild Man, but to
be in touch with
the Wild Man.”
55

Though oriented to the left, Bly’s movement was largely apolitical and not, in spite of its rhetoric, inclined to use hair as a form of personal expression. Even so, there was still life in leftist hair at the end of the century, particularly in Europe.

When Frank Dobson, Labour Party candidate for mayor of London in 2000, was urged by party handlers to shave off his beard, he refused. He was losing badly, and a new look was suggested as a strategy for improving his personal appeal with voters. “I told them to get stuffed,” Dobson told the press, “because, quite frankly, I am not in the image business. With me, what you see is what you get. If you don’t like what you see, don’t vote for me, but listen to what I’ve got to say.”
56

Dobson’s defiant stand reflected several realities of political life at the end of the twentieth century: Europeans were less subject to “shavism” than their American counterparts, yet even in Europe the pressure to abandon beards was increasingly strong. Many prominent public figures, particularly on the left, persisted in wearing emblems of resistance to corporate conformity. This was true especially in France, where the victory in 1981 of Francois Mitterrand and the French Socialist Party opened the way for a small beard movement in the halls of power. Several leaders, including defense minister Charles Hernu, labor minister Jean Auroux, and more than thirty deputies in the new governing party—about 12 percent of the Socialist representation—wore beards.
57
At the time of the election, a writer for
Le Monde
noted the collar beards of several leaders, which had gained popularity during
the 1960s among Left Bank professors and intellectuals, and persisted in spite of “advances in metal and electrical appliances.”
58
The correspondent was bemused by the rise of a “Republic of professors.”

As these jokes indicate, however, political beards hardly generated wide admiration, even in France. The pressure against them was strong and growing stronger in the final decades of the century. The election of the British Conservative party in 1979 spelled the end of facial hair in the British government for the next eighteen years, because the Conservative leader, Margaret Thatcher, was adamantly against it. The reign
of the Conservatives was finally ended in 1997 with the rise of the centrist “Lew Labor” party under the leadership of Tony Blair. New Labor promised to preserve some of the probusiness reforms of the Thatcher years while shifting gently to the left on social spending and other measures. One of the ways that politicians of the British left indicated to the public that they were ready for power in late 1990s was by abandoning their beards, so as to appear more like the blandly dependable politicians of the right. As the election of 1997 approached, the
Guardian
noted that “‘New Labour, New Shave,’ seems to be the fashion among rising stars.”
59
Peter Mandelson, the formerly mustachioed Labour campaign manager and a future cabinet member, heeded surveys that revealed the unpopularity of facial hair with voters and convinced others to follow his smooth example, including Stephen Byers, soon to become secretary of trade for transport, and Geoffrey Hoon, who rose to defense secretary. Another Labour leader, Alistair Darling, though rightfully proud of his full, black beard, got rid of it after the election victory and his appointment as chief secretary of the treasury. A small band of three, David Blunkett, Robin Cook, and Frank Dobson, stuck with principle and kept their faces as they were.

Looking every bit like “Old Labour,” Dobson was not Blair’s first choice as Labour candidate for the newly created post of mayor of Greater London in 2000. Nor was he the first choice of the London electorate. Their favorite was Ken Livingstone, “Red Ken,” a leftist with an outsize personality (and no facial hair). Londoners like outrageous personalities (they have since elected the even more eccentric Boris Johnson to replace Livingstone), and Dobson just didn’t inspire any excitement. They also saw Dobson, in spite of his facial hair, as a functionary of puppet-master Tony Blair. In fact, the leak about Dobson’s rebuttal of the suggestion to shave may have been a last-ditch ploy to prove to voters that he was
not
Blair’s puppet.
60
If so, it did not work, and Dobson went down to crushing defeat.

The European battle over hair took on fresh urgency in 1991 as the opening of the Euro-Disney theme park, near Paris, approached. Euro-Disney was a wholesale transplantation of American popular culture into the heart of Europe, replete with everything that most annoyed the European intellectual elite, namely, the commercialization of culture, crass consumerism, and corporate standardization. Applicants for
the twelve thousand jobs at the new park were surprised by regulations requiring “cast members,” including ride operators and ticket takers, to smile constantly for the visitors. There was also general incredulity at Disney’s strict no-alcohol policy. And then there was Disney’s squeaky-clean dress code—spelled out in a detailed pamphlet titled “Le Euro Disneyland Look”—which, among many other regulations, specified short hair for men and a complete ban on facial hair.

To many of the French, already deeply suspicious of American corporate methods, the regulation of women’s makeup and men’s hair was an assault on individual liberty and the dignity of labor. How could the Americans be so inconsiderate of French cultural values? Disney officials assured the French public that they were well aware of the differences between France and the United States, but insisted that the Disney brand relied upon presenting an American-style experience for its customers. Without the clean-cut American dress code, the American director of hiring explained, “we wouldn’t be presenting the Disney product that people would be expecting.”
61
Unconvinced, labor unions filed an official complaint. In a local court, Disney went down to defeat, and in a final judgment in 1995, a Paris court slapped a small fine on the former executive directly responsible for the dress code. In the meantime, the code was withdrawn, though one union still complained that the American standards were being enforced indirectly.
62

The Walt Disney Company came to realize that a more subtle approach would be less irritating, and generally just as effective. On the other hand, it learned that not all was lost if a few concessions were made. A greater variety of hair was a reasonable price to pay for labor peace, just as abandoning the prohibition of alcohol was a reasonable price to pay for larger crowds at the admission gates. Even so, it took another eighteen years for Disney to loosen the proverbial collar back home at its US parks, and to permit modest beards, so long as they maintained “an overall neat, polished and professional look.”
63
While hardly a ringing endorsement for beards, this change signaled, more than any other, a true shift in attitudes as the century came to a close. If the most antihair company in the most antihair country could bend, even a little, one could say that “shavism” was finally waning, leaving both leftist hair and the reaction against it in a diminished condition as the new century began.