THE WHISKER WARS

The social history of a peculiar American fascination.

- BY MARGARET TALBOT

The nineteenth-century beard boom came with ardent pro-beard propaganda.

A stroll through the Presidential-portrait wing at the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C., is, among other things, a game of Now You See It, Now You Don't. In the beginning, not a whisper of a whisker—not on Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, or Monroe. In the early nineteenth century, John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren change things up with fluffy muttonchops that drift like snow from ears to laugh lines. Otherwise, it's a series of glabrous, faintly pink visages until you get to Abraham Lincoln. He adopted a beard after Grace Bedell, an eleven-year-old girl from Chautauqua County, New York, wrote him in October, 1860, urging him to let his whiskers grow: “All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President.” Lincoln wrote back, wondering if “people would call it a piece of silly affectation.” But he took Grace’s advice, and won the election.

Moving into the late nineteenth century, you notice a post-Lincoln efflorescence of beards. Rutherford B. Hayes rocks a glorious russet-and-gray fur bib. James Garfield sports a luxuriant, pewter-colored mustache-and-beard combo. Chester Arthur's ruddy face is framed by lacy, drooping curtains. And then, in the early twentieth century, another abrupt shift back to clean-shaven faces. No President since has cultivated a beard in office; the last with any facial hair—a sportive handlebar mustache—was William Howard Taft, who left the White House in 1913. J. D. Vance is the first Vice-President since the nineteenth century to wear a beard while in office.