by Ben Shapiro
Jackson was able to counter charges of brutality easily—he simply portrayed Quincy Adams as a scheming aristocrat. Better a toughened military man than a short, bald, effete intellectual, Jackson’s campaign said. Jackson biographer Robert Remini explained, “Adams’s lordly and aristocratic manner was projected in the press to emboss their image of a President who was hostile to the aspirations of the majority of the American people.”28
The 1828 election was bald snobbery versus rough-hewn democracy, said the Jacksonians. The American public believed them. Once again, an incumbent Adams was unceremoniously turned out of office—once again, hair conquered all.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN MADE A CRUCIAL DECISION in October 1860, just weeks before the most important election in American history—it was time to grow a beard. Lincoln’s decision was the direct result of a letter he received from an eleven-year-old girl named Grace Bedell. “Dear Sir,” Bedell wrote on October 15,
My father has just come home from a fair and brought home your picture and Mr. Hamlin’s. I am a little girl only eleven years old, but want you should be President of the United States very much so I hope you wont [sic] think me very bold to write such a great man as you are. Have you any little girls about as large as I am if so give them my love and tell her to write to me if you cannot answer this letter. I have got 4 brother’s [sic] and part of them will vote for you any way and if you will let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you. you [sic] would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husband’s [sic] to vote for you to [sic] but I will try to get every one to vote for you that I can.
Lincoln replied four days later. “Your very agreeable letter of the 15th is received,” he wrote. “I regret the necessity of saying I have no daughters. I have three sons—one seventeen, one nine, and one seven, years of age. They, with their mother, constitute my whole family. As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?” He signed it: “Your very sincere well-wisher, A. Lincoln.”29
Lincoln put his protestations aside, however, and stopped shaving. The choice to do so sprang not merely from a desire to please a young girl but from political considerations. Lincoln was one of the ugliest men in politics.During the 1860 campaign, Lincoln’s looks became a campaign issue. The Houston Telegraph stated that Lincoln was “the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege, which all politicians have, of being ugly.”30
The Albany Atlas and Argus printed a joke about Lincoln. A uniquely ugly farmer approached Lincoln and leveled his musket at him, the paper reported. When Lincoln asked if the farmer truly intended to shoot him, the farmer replied, “Yes, sir . . . I’ve pledged myself if I ever saw a worse-looking man than myself, I would shoot him.” “Well,” Lincoln supposedly responded, “if I look worse than you do, fire away!”31
Democrats circulated a little ditty about Lincoln:
Tell us he’s a second Webster,
Or if better, Henry Clay;
That he’s full of gentle humor,
Placid as a summer’s day.
Tell again about the cord-wood;
Seven cords or more per day;
How each night he seeks his closet,
There alone to kneel and pray.
Tell us he resembles Jackson,
Save he wears a larger boot,
And is broader ’cross the shoulders,
And is taller by a foot.
Any lie you tell, we’ll
swallow—Swallow any kind of mixture;
But O don’t, we beg and pray you—
Don’t for land’s sake, show his picture.32
With all that negative attention focused on his face, a beard couldn’t hurt. It worked; the beard softened Lincoln’s face and granted him a more distinguished look. It also brought the candidate in line with the latest fashions from Europe. In the 1850s, Britain adopted a beard-friendly attitude, largely because soldiers returning from the Crimean War came back bearded. Facial hair historian Allan Peterkin wrote, “Soldiers for most of the 19th century were the celebrated dandies, sex objects, and style setters, and were widely imitated . . . Not surprisingly, American presidents followed the fashion of the day despite its being set abroad. Even Uncle Sam had whiskers added to his clean-shaven face in about 1855.”33
Lincoln won the election. On his way to the White House, he visited Grace Bedell’s hometown, where he gave her a hug, smiled, and said, “You see, Grace, I let my whiskers grow for you.”34
Before Lincoln, facial hair had been restricted mostly to the overgrown muttonchops of J. Q. Adams, Zachary Taylor, and Martin Van Buren. Lincoln changed all that, ushering America into the “Golden Age of Facial Hair.” From Lincoln to William Howard Taft, a span of twelve presidents, only Andrew Johnson and William McKinley were clean-shaven. Of the electoral losers during that fifty-two-year span, only Samuel Tilden and William Jennings Bryan were clean-shaven. Clearly Lincoln had ended the reign of the razor.
DESPITE THE ADVENT of the Golden Age of Facial hair, not all facial hair was good facial hair. Horatio Seymour learned that lesson the hard way during the election of 1868. The 1868 Democratic presidential candidate and former governor of New York was bald on top, but wore his remaining hair up in curls. He also sported a well-developed pair of muttonchops, meeting beneath his chin in a bizarre neck beard. Seymour’s strange appearance earned him the unremitting scorn of cartoonists.
Seymour had a checkered political past. As governor of New York, he had tolerated draft riots, leading to accusations that he was a Copperhead, or Southern sympathizer. Legendary political cartoonist Thomas Nast consistently depicted Seymour as the devil, his tufts of hair sticking up on either side of his head like horns.35
In one cartoon Nast drew the devil-haired Seymour in a dress as Lady Macbeth; his hand is covered not with blood but with the words “New York Draft Riots.” “Out, damned spot!” Seymour cries, “Out, I say! . . . Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Democracy will not sweeten this little hand. Oh! Oh! Oh!”36
In another cartoon, Seymour has sprouted a tail and hooves; to complete the satanic profile, he tempts the voters toward hell.37 Continuing the references to Macbeth, one Nast cartoon depicted Seymour, vice presidential nominee Francis Blair, and former Confederate Wade Hampton surrounding a boiling pot, chanting:
Double, double, toil and trouble,
Fire burn and caldron bubble,
Round about the hell-broth go,
In the motley fragments throw;
Hand of Treason, reeking red,
Poison-fang of Copperhead . . .
Hampton’s torch, Fred Douglass’s fetter,
Booth’s revolver, Blair’s letter . . .
Seymour stirs the horrid broth —
Bound about his head a rag,
From the Alabama’s flag . . .
Wand of witchery that bore
Treason’s flag in ’64;
With a weird and hissing sound
Rocks the caldron round and round,
And he cries, “ ’Tis very good!
Lo! The cup of brotherhood!”38
And they say today’s campaigns are rough.
Seymour’s opponent, General Ulysses S. Grant, wore a distinguished and closely shorn beard. One Union soldier at the crucial battle of Vicksburg described Grant thus: “He stood solid, erect, with square features, thin closed lips, brown hair, brown beard, both cut short and neat. He weighed apparently about one hundred and fifty pounds. He looked larger than Napoleon, and not so dumpy. He looked like a man in earnest . . . .”39
An early biographer wrote, “His brow was straight and square, but his head gave no indication of unusual capacity. His full beard, cut close, partially concealed a square and heavy jaw and straight lips which gave indication of his
strong will and inflexible purpose . . . His hair, which was worn short, was chestnut-brown in color.”40
Grant’s solid good looks, accentuated by his well-groomed but undandified beard, helped him immensely during the 1868 campaign, when accusations flew that he was a drunkard. He campaigned as a tanner and a general, a determined and earthy fellow; he didn’t look the part of the disheveled wino.
And Grant crushed Seymour easily. Harper’s Weekly, partisanly pro-Grant, ran an inflammatory cartoon depicting the president-elect holding aloft in one hand an American flag emblazoned with the words Union and Equal Rights; in the other hand, Grant held a sword. Grant was using the sword to stab Seymour through the neck beard.41
Four years later, Grant ran against another neck-beard devotee, New York publisher Horace Greeley.Greeley was perhaps the most unlikely presidential candidate in American history. As editor of the New York Tribune, Greeley vociferously supported Abraham Lincoln; he supported Grant in 1868. He then broke with Grant, critical of Grant’s patronage policy, which he saw as corrupt. In 1872, he started the Liberal Republican Party, calling for cleaner government and an end to Reconstruction. The Democratic Party, his lifelong adversary, supported his presidential bid.
Greeley’s strange political past was matched only by his strange physical appearance. Matthew Hale Smith described Greeley in 1869:
His head is massive, fringed with flaxen hair around the base of the brain, till it blends with a loose, thin beard of the same color, which creeps out irregularly around the throat, and over a loosely-tied black silk neckerchief. In height he is a little below six feet. His eyes are of a grayish-blue. His eyebrows are so flaxen as to be almost unobservable. His dress has long been the subject of caricaturists . . . Physically, he is powerful but awkward. He stoops, droops his shoulders, swings his arms, and walks with a lounging, irregular gait.42
Thomas Nast once again did yeoman work for the Grant campaign. His cartoons pilloried Greeley. After Greeley accepted the Liberal Republican nomination by asking Americans to “clasp their hands across the bloody chasm,”43 Nast went to work. One of his cartoons depicts the clownlike Greeley, tubby and sloppily attired, attempting to clasp hands with a Democrat over the infamous Andersonville prison.44 Another shows Greeley, enormously rotund, ridiculously bald and heavily neck-bearded, clasping hands with a Confederate soldier who stands with one foot on the corpse of a murdered black man and the other on the American flag.45 Further cartoons would show Greeley shaking hands with John Wilkes Booth over Lincoln’s grave, handing a black man over to a KKK member who has murdered another black man, as well as a black mother and child.46
No one factor decides presidential elections. Except, that is, for the neck beard. Grant won a stunningly enormous reelection victory; Greeley did not win a single electoral vote.
THREE BEARDS (Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison), three mustaches (Grover Cleveland, TR, William Howard Taft), and one giant sideburns (Chester Arthur) later, the “Age of the Bankers” began.Woodrow Wilson’s election victory in 1912 spelled the end of presidential facial hair; not a single president since has sported a mustache or beard. Part of the transition from hirsute presidents to clean-shaven ones can be explained by changes in technology and fashion. In 1895, the disposable razor blade was invented; in 1901, it was mass-produced; by 1906, hundreds of thousands were bought annually.When the United States entered World War I, the military ordered 3.5 million razors and thirty-six million blades for soldiers.47
Wilson was responsible for reinventing the image of the presidency and ushering in the Age of the Bankers. Sir Harry Lauder, Scotland’s foremost entertainer during the first half of the twentieth century, painted a fascinating picture of Wilson:
Woodrow Wilson looked to me exactly what he was—a schoolmaster. That long, clean-shaven face, the cold logic in his eyes, the lines about his mouth, in fact every outward aspect of the man savoured of the university classroom. If you had put on his head a mortar-cap, underneath his arm a couple of books, and in his right hand a cane you would have got the perfect dominie. I am told that few people ever warmed to him. He certainly over-awed me when I met him.When he shook hands with me I thought he did it coldly and perfunctorily but he allowed a genuine beam of enthusiasm to creep into his eyes as he thanked me for what I had done in the way of entertaining the American troops. While he spoke I thought what a remarkably well-groomed man he was. He was as neat and “kenspeckle” (Scots for dainty) as a new pin. He appeared to me to have devoted a good deal of attention to his personal adornment before leaving his bedroom that morning.48
Wilson was as punctilious with regard to policy as he was with regard to personal grooming. Politics, Wilson felt, could be separated from administration; groups of policy wonks could come up with the correct answers without engaging in political wrangling.To that end, Wilson demanded Congress authorize the creation of executive agencies charged with creating politics-free regulatory schemes, in contravention to the traditional constitutional separation of powers. The president, then, would become the chief administrative officer.
And Wilson looked like an administrator. So did his successors. Warren G. Harding was clean-shaven. A reporter for the New York World described the immaculately clean Calvin Coolidge as “outwardly neither impressive nor expressive, and looking at him therefore is rather wasting time. It will not inform you who it is who lives behind the cold mask of his lean and muscular face.”49 Herbert Hoover, too, could have passed for an administrator, particularly since he had been one as head of the Food Administration during World War I and secretary of commerce under both Harding and Coolidge. FDR, too, had the clean-cut look of an administrator—and his policies enshrined Wilson’s administrative state on the largest possible scale. The Age of the Bankers was truly the age of administrators and accountants.
DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE John F. Kennedy revolutionized the politics of hair. Where most of his contemporaries slicked back their hair—the “wet” look—Kennedy wore his hair dry, brushing it low across his forehead.50 Sycophantic journalist Theodore White said in 1956 that JFK had a “boyish, open face, bronzed, hair almost golden with sun bleaching.”51
His good looks and better hair made him a sex symbol before he ever ran for the presidency. By 1957, three years before his presidential run, Kennedy had become Washington’s “hottest tourist attraction.” Life magazine featured Kennedy in 1953, March 1957, and December 1957; the December article pitched Jack as a man who “has left panting politicians and swooning women across a large spread of the U.S.”
According to JFK biographer Michael O’Brien, the December piece “received more letters and favorable comment than any feature story in the magazine’s history.”52 JFK’s media coverage irked his political rivals to no end. “I don’t know how he does it,” complained Senator Hubert Humphrey. “I get into Photoplay and he gets into Life.”53 Columnist William Shannon questioned whether JFK’s hair should be enough to get him elected: “Month after month, from the glossy pages of Life to the multicolored cover of Redbook , Jack and Jackie Kennedy smile out at millions of readers; he with his tousled hair and winning smile, she with her dark eyes and beautiful face . . . But what has all this to do with statesmanship?”54
It had nothing to do with statesmanship, and everything to do with image. His beautiful bouffant accentuated his youth and charisma. “You put a hat on Kennedy, you lose three-quarters of the head and all the charisma,” observed campaign aide Dave Powers. “Kennedy’s hair is almost a trademark,”55 stated the Charlotte Gazette-Mail.
Before the 1960 election cycle, that trademark hair was long and “tousled.” James Reston of the New York Times called the hair “a masterpiece of contrived casualness.”56 The Associated Press reported that “barbers get minute instructions on how to trim it . . . His aides admit that without the wistful forelock dangling over his right eyebrow . . . his appeal to women voters might suffer.” Kennedy himself admitted that the hair was part of a strateg
y to broaden his base: “Two million more women than men are eligible to vote in this country.”57 He hired a stylist who would arrive at the Senate each morning to blow-dry his hair.58
But the longer hair had its drawbacks. As a forty-three-year-old candidate, he was already negatively associated with the younger generation; the overgrown coiffure made him look too counterculture. “As Kennedy’s political image-making moved along with the popular culture of the 1950s, his long and unruly hair, his restless gestures, and his flashes of barely controlled fury all linked him to the young rebels who in the 1950s became heroes of the new youth subculture,” explained John Hellman.59
Reporter Joe McCarthy posited that Kennedy’s “collegiate haircut [makes] him seem like a lad of twenty-eight. An often-heard remark about Kennedy, credited to a New York political strategist, is: ‘He’ll never make it with that haircut.’ Another politician in the Midwest had said that Kennedy’s youthful appearance is a bigger problem for him than his religion. ‘It makes no difference how mature Kennedy may be,’ this man says, ‘if the bosses and the voters decide that he looks immature.’ ”60
And so in January 1960, the Kennedy hair changed drastically. It was trimmed down; the forelock met the scissors. “It must have been a tough decision,” wrote the Mansfield News Journal. “That forelock has served Kennedy well as a political trademark. Still, as any advertiser knows, if a trademark becomes a liability the thing to do is to drop it. Kennedy does look a shade older now—though not quite as old as Vice President Nixon.”61
