In Revolutionary France the National Assembly banned social distinctions in dress. Terming himself “the Wonder of the World, an honest Barber and Peruke-maker,” John Still, late of London, arrived in New York in 1750 ready to supply wigs of all shapes and sorts: “Tyes, Full-bottoms, Majors, Spencers, Foxtails, Ramalies, Tucks, cuts and bob Perukes, also Ladies Tatematongues and Towers after the manner that is now worn at Court.”īut gradually wigs, too, began to go. If they removed all hair from their faces, eighteenthcentury gentlemen did not for a long time totally abandon the wig (though indoors they laid it aside, protecting their shorn heads from the chills with a little skull cap or turban).
These were curiosities which she clearly regarded as equally deserving of mention. Franklin considered it an eccentricity that Keimer, his first employer in Philadelphia, insisted upon wearing a beard, and Elizabeth Drinker wrote in 1794 that she had seen an elephant and two bearded men on the streets of Philadelphia. Whether this forward-thrusting hair should be considered a rudimentary beard or a part of his haircut is a close technical question in any event, his chin and cheeks were clean-shaven.ĭr. No signer of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution wore a mustache or beard, though Edward Rutledge of South Carolina wore his hair unusually long and brushed forward over forehead and cheeks so that it was visible in front of his ears. Washington and his generals were whisker-free.
The eighteenth century would have nothing to do with facial shrubbery. Not all Puritans removed the hair from their faces or agreed with Saint Paul, who asked rhetorically (in First Corinthians), “Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?” So the New England Puritans, being Parliament men, went “crop-headed.” Yet often enough, among those who were not fanatic in their outlook, custom had its way. The cascading ringlets and well-disciplined facial hair had social significance: they were associated with the court party. The barber-surgeon in the days of the Stuarts left only a tiny lip beard and mustache-the mustache a thin, mannered line, like that of a modern film star. In England, Van Dyck painted his aristocratic subjects with beard and ringlets falling shoulderlength, often with the lovelock, a long curl worn over the left shoulder, tied with a ribbon ending in a rosette. When Louis XIII began to lose his hair, wigs were “in” and facial hair ceased to be the mode: wigs and whiskers together seemed to be too much. Later in the seventeenth century, French fashions dominated the Western world. Dominie Everardus Bogardus, a mirror of fashion in New Amsterdam who perished in the wreck of a Dutch ship on the coast of Wales near Swansea-an event piously characterized by John Winthrop as “the observable hand of God against the Dutch”-met his end with a whiskered chin. In Virginia, Captain John Smith was full-bearded at the time of the Jamestown settlement. Edward Winslow wore a mustache and a thick, pointed beard.
#Presidents with mutton chops professional#
Along the way, the issue of whether to shave or not to shave became enmeshed in politics, manners, morals, business, and professional ethics.Īmerica’s Atlantic Coast was explored and colonized by men who wore whiskers-Cabot, Champlain, the first Lord Baltimore, John Endecott with his soldierly “stiletto” beard. The pageant of the American male physiognomy moves from the heavily bearded seventeenth century into the clean-shaven confines of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries then, around the time of the Civil War, the beard once more flourishes, only to disappear by way of the mustache in the early decades of the smooth-faced twentieth century.
Anyone who believes that women are the fickle sex has only to look at the history of the American man and his beard to have that smug certainty shattered.
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