City Men on the Beard “Frontier”

**This transcript comes from a previous broadcast. There may be small changes between the audio you hear above and the text.**

PETER: One fashion that you may have noticed has been on the rebound lately, is the beard. Earlier this year, the New York Times remarked on the trend with an article slugged, The Brooklyn Beard Goes Mainstream.

ED: Now when, you may be wondering, did the beard trend first hit the American mainstream. Well we’re going to take the story back to the late 1830s. Now by this point, members of the more refined urban professional classes have been wearing facial hair for a few years. They call that look, whiskers, by which they could mean a carefully trimmed beard, lengthy sideburns, or even a wax mustaches.

PETER: What they would have called a beard was different. Beards where wild, unkempt, and often came down to the chest. And in the late 1830s they became the subject of newspaper controversy, for and against. Historian Sean Trainor has collected some of these debates. Those against, he says, argued that beards were indecent and uncultured, but proponents insisted that they saved time and money, or that they were biblical and therefore virtuous, or even that they had health benefits.

SEAN TRAINOR: There are folks who claim that the beard is sort of a natural respirator. That you can avoid throat infections if you wear a beard. The beards and mustaches will filter out the particulate matter in the air, and perhaps men with beards will be less likely to be afflicted with tuberculosis.

ED: But Trainor says that in the 1830s, there was yet another, more important, connotation of beards.

MALE SPEAKER 2: The habit of wearing a beard, is a manly and noble one. Its abandonment is commonly been accompanied not only by a period of general effeminacy, but even by the decline and fall of the states.

SEAN TRAINOR: There’s a sense that wearing a beard is not merely reflective of a sort of strength and virility, but is perhaps even productive of it. That by growing a beard, that you will be stronger, you will be more robust, more virile, that you can go out and do these manly things that perhaps they’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t, do because they didn’t have facial hair.

ED: Considering all this you might expect the beard to be found on the American frontier, but Trainor says it was just the opposite. This is a period when Americans were flocking to cities for jobs behind desks as clerks or salesman. And it was these guys who wore and argued for the biggest beards.

SEAN TRAINOR: Many of these folks are actually coming from the same sort of professional, urban circles, as the clerks sort of who are wearing whiskers. But it is an idea that they’re aspiring to and that they think the beard is suggestive of. But the thing that’s actually really interesting is that you do you find a handful of critics, especially among Western men, and really kind of object to this idea of the beard as a style of the frontier, a style of rugged masculinity.

ED: That is very intersitng. You certainly don’t think of cowboys as having beards, do you.

SEAN TRAINOR: Right, you don’t. In fact an interesting example, there’s a famous mural in the capitol rotunda, entitled Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, features some rather rugged looking Western men with facial hair. But at least one commentator objected to this particular way of depicting Western men and said, that you know well while Western men sort of use a modern term like get scruffy every once in awhile, out doing there sort of frontierzee business.

ED: Right.

SEAN TRAINOR: That whenever they got a chance, they found some warm water, they found some soap, and they found a razor, and they shaved themselves. So I mean there is the sense at least coming from a few sources, the idea of beard wearing is kind of a Western affectation, that’s just as is incorrect.

ED: So what is it that American men in the 1840s would be reacting against? Why are they so eager to prove themselves manly?

SEAN TRAINOR: Well the beard, and facial hair, more broadly, the response to a number of factors. The first perhaps is the burgeoning of women’s activism, women’s rights movement, and the fear among some men that their prerogative is being challenged, and the beard becomes a way to sort of reinforce the distinction between men and women that they feel is being lost.

BRIAN: Even the ladies who in years past so lovingly admired these noble badges of men’s dignity, now demand their curtailment if not utter extermination. They wish to make a “clean shave”, of all badges of manly superiority. They seem determined to have an equality between the sexes anyhow. If they can’t elevate themselves up, they are determined to elevate the men down.

SEAN TRAINOR: But also this is the great period of manifest destiny. You see these folks talking about the bearded races are the conquering races.

MALE SPEAKER 3: In the world’s history, the bearded races have at all times been the most important actors. And there’s no part of the body, which on the whole, they’ve shown more readiness to honor.

MALE SPEAKER 4: It cannot be denied that a certain superiority has always been conveyed by the presence of the beard.

SEAN TRAINOR: If you want to make your presence felt throughout the world as a person of sort of imperial power, that the beard is an emblem for that.

ED: Now, I know that in the 1850s there was a kind of palpable excitement in the air about the impending war. And do you think it’s possible that some American men sort of donned beards as a way to show themselves as men worthy of this moment?

SEAN TRAINOR: I think that as the sectional crisis deepens, as the likelihood of some sort of conflict, whether it’s violent or whether it’s political deepens. I think the beard is part of a wave that men kind of prepare themselves mentally, or socially, or culturally. This is the way that men thought they should or needed to look when facing a crisis, or when facing something that they thought would test their masculinity.

ED: So as you pointed out, men’s imagine wearing a beard the years before the Civil War as a kind of preparation for the crisis. But as you know they still wear beards for decades after the Civil War. Does the beard then have a different meaning?

SEAN TRAINOR: Well, I think that wearing the beard was part of sort of marking one’s status as a veteran. And I mean veteran expansively here, not just as a veteran of the Union or Confederate army but, as a veteran of the experience of the war. And I do think that it continues to carry that meaning throughout the end of the century, in that perhaps one of the reasons why the style sort of falls into disrepair, as it were, is that people are beginning to try to put the war behind them. And I think the beard is part of that or rather getting rid of the beard, moving beyond a style of men’s grooming in which beard wearing and facial hair is kind of the dominant mode of comportment.

[MUSIC PLAYING] I, I like, I like, beards I like–

ED: Sean Trainor teaches history and women’s studies at Penn State University. If you go to our website, you can read a link to an article he wrote for The Atlantic, about the complicated racial history of facial hair.

BRIAN: It’s time for another short break. When we get back the story of the only fashion trend with a riot named after it.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.

[MUSIC PLAYING] I like, beards.