It’s like trying to explain what shoes look like. And I say that realizing that I have a moustache and you have sort of an in between facial hair thing that I don’t know what to call it. Why not indeed? But ultimately, you couldn’t come up with a reason and concluded: beards are irrational. I mean, all of a sudden hipsters started wearing beards out of nowhere, right? Where did that come from? Who knows? So why can’t presidents be as irrational as hipsters? So random events may have something to do with it, or random social occurrences, like: Karl Marx for example was not popular in the capitalist United States, so people avoided having facial hair that looked anything like his-maybe? I’ll be perfectly honest: I have not been able to find anyone with a good explanation, aside from random habit and social patterns, which don’t make any sense at all, to explain why it was okay-necessary, in fact-for presidents to be clean-shaven for the first almost century of our existence, and then almost necessary for them to be bristling for another half century, and since then, they can’t. Which means my technical explanation is not true and you have to go into that horrible morass of human behavior and sociology to attempt to explain it. But if you look at our presidents, before 1850, before Abe Lincoln, really, none of them had facial hair. But when you look at it a little broader-so, the pictures of the mayors of Concord start in 1853 which is when the city was chartered and moustaches and beards were in full bloom, so when you look at the pictures, it looks all the same until the safety razor came along. I wanted a technical explanation for this pattern because that’s the kind of stuff I like. Sort of puts a hole in my theory is one way to put it. So what explains that? It sort of puts a hole in your theory. In their paintings, they don’t have any facial hair. Although, there were long eras before the Gillette razor when politicians didn’t have facial hair and there was no safety razor to be had. And I’m having trouble imagining JFK or Lyndon Johnson with a beard. Can you think of a bearded person who has come here for the New Hampshire primary? Certainly not in my lifetime. Teddy Roosevelt and Taft were the last two that had any facial hair and since then, not only no presidents had any but no serious contenders for the office have had any. You had all sorts of facial hair from Abe Lincoln on. After 1900, almost none of them do this-two out of the 25 after 1900 have facial hair.Īnd as went the mayors, so went the Presidents of the United States, right?Įxactly. In 1901, King Gillette patented the disposable razor blade and after that it was easy to shave, and so you get shaved pictures.īefore 1900, virtually all of the Concord mayors had quite astonishing facial hair. And it really kicked off right after the turn of the century. So men were happy to not do it and grow beards and mutton chops and moustaches that are bigger than most hedgerows.Īnd then the safety razor came along in the 1880s and 1890s, ways to take a sharp blade and enclose it so it wasn’t quite so dangerous. More recently it’s been the straight razor, a little tiny sword you run over your jugular vein and upper lip. For millennia, men have removed facial hair by scraping it with sharp objects, you know, clam shells, whatever. The invention, of course, is the safety razor. You verbal people are too clever for us writers. But why? Granite Geek David Brooks recently noticed this pattern in the photographs of the mayors of Concord, which are displayed along several flights of stairs at City Hall, and he says a particular invention may have something to do with the trend. For decades facial hair is in, and then, suddenly, for decades more, it's out. Look at portraits of the nation's leaders and you'll see a particular trend come and go over the years: facial hair.
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