of beards and men

Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair by Christopher Oldstone-Moore (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

At last, a book that directly addresses what I've always considered one of the most mysterious questions in social history: what was responsible for the Wave of Beards that settled on the faces of many European and American men in the middle of the 19th century, and then disappeared around the end of it? The only problem is, I'm not sure I entirely believe the explanation.

Previous books I've seen on the topic of facial hair consisted of little more than cumulative anecdotes about individual beard-wearers. O-M is much more ambitious than that. He tells the entire history of facial hair-wearing from the Sumerian kings on down, and puts his discussion of individuals into social context. Thus he explains Hitler's toothbrush mustache as a style that had been popular in Hitler's younger days among German men who abjured the large military mustache but didn't want to adopt a thinner mustache, which was considered decadent, or go clean-shaven, which they thought was weak. Hitler, who wore a military mustache when he was actually in the army, only adopted the toothbrush later as it was going out of style. O-M further notes that the incongruous resemblance to Chaplin's Little Tramp really did cause people to underestimate Hitler's malignancy.

Further context is provided by O-M's assiduous search through the history of polemic literature on facial hair. The advent of the Wave of Beards was accompanied by much rhetoric advocating beards as manly and attractive, and its disappearance was accompanied by a further wave of rhetoric advocating a clean-shaven face as manly and attractive. (Actual surveys of what both men and women think of facial hair tend to be ambiguous.) That these viewpoints alternate in favor over time is one of O-M's major theses.

Thus his explanation of the Wave of Beards. After getting on to two centuries of socially enforced beardlessness - the last mustaches, final vestige of the previous, Renaissance-era Wave of Beards, had disappeared around 1680 - there was a pent-up need for men to express themselves in a new wave of beards. But with the significant exception of the military mustache - so much expected among officers in the early 19C that there were moves to ban civilians from wearing them - beards of the time were considered the mark of dangerous political radicals and were shunned by respectable men for that reason. (O-M strangely doesn't point out the parallel with the view of beards in the 1950s and 60s.)

But here's where I get a little skeptical. O-M says that the failure of the European revolutions of 1848 threw the radicals into political impotence, liberating beards from their association with politics and freeing respectable men to wear them. But while that may have been true in Germany, in France the revolution succeeded, Britain had radicals but no attempted revolution, and the US had no equivalent to this at all, yet the Wave of Beards settled in all those places too.

O-M says that Louis Napoleon was the main trendsetter for beard-wearing, but outside of France few followed his style of beard. Walt Whitman is also cited as an influential beard-wearer, though I've always understood that Whitman was considered a dangerous eccentric in his own day. I'm more convinced by the statement of the continued association of the mustache with the military, which explains why Lincoln, emphatically not a military man, when he grew a beard in 1860 continued to shave his upper lip, resulting in a style of beard much associated with clergymen.

As for the disappearance of the beards, O-M points out that shaving has existed since antiquity, so improvements in shaving technique have little effect on beard-wearing. King Gillette's safety razor didn't cause men to shave; Gillette merely caught a rising tide.

O-M is of the school that believes that all bodily decoration, or the purported lack of it, is intended to send a social message. He equally denies that shaving or beard-wearing are done as a convenience. In the case of ornamental beards, whose wearers carefully shave around the edges of the beard, I believe this. But not in my case. All that the increased social acceptability of beards in the 1970s and 80s did for me was free me to wear a beard without being considered terminally eccentric. I grew a beard for the sole reason that I saw no point in wasting time scraping it off every morning. For the same reason I don't trim it, and equally so I keep it short, because a short beard is less nuisance than a long one.

So I'm still not sure I have an answer to my question, but I have read an awfully interesting and illuminating book.