Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (25 page)

The twentieth century vied with the eighteenth as history’s most clean-shaven. The reasons were not the same, however. In the eighteenth century, shaving was part of a code of gentlemanly good manners. In the twentieth century, it was important for men to exhibit youthful energy and disciplined reliability suited to corporate and professional employment. A smooth face made a man look younger and healthier. It also indicated honesty and sociability. The common English phrase “clean-shaven” neatly sums up these associations. A shorn man was neat, energetic, and dependable. Because society valued these virtues, men were eager to prove themselves with their razors.

Lieutenant T. E. Lawrence was a new hero for a new generation. He was a thoroughly modern, clean-cut, reliable soldier doing his small bit for the vast British military machine. But he became much more: a hardened desert chieftain who matched wits with wily bearded rivals, endured the raw elements, and fought the enemy hand to hand. For a European and American public scarred by the murderous quagmire of World War I, his story offered hope that brave and intelligent individuals still mattered in an age of mass armies and hellish mechanical firepower.
It helped that Lawrence did not confront massed German forces on the dreary Western Front, but faced instead the more dispersed, less well-equipped troops of Ottoman Turkey in the desert expanse of Arabia. As an intelligence officer stationed in Egypt, Lawrence took the initiative in creating a new self, taking up Arab guise and guiding camel-riding commandoes on a string of unlikely desert victories. The curious anomaly of the beardless “blond Bedouin” was surprising enough, but when he proved also to be a conqueror, the legend was born of a modern man who had mastered a timeless and primitive land.

Lawrence’s first great victory was the capture of Aqaba, a strategic Red Sea port (now part of Jordan). He and his Arab allies used speed, endurance, and toughness to surprise the city from the supposedly inaccessible northern wastes. First, however, they had to dispense with a Turkish battalion sent out to stop them at a remote settlement called Abu el Lissal. It was here that the Arab insurgents proved their true mettle.

On camel and horseback, the rebels reached Abu el Lissal on an unusually hot day in July 1917. Friend and foe were groggy from heat and thirst. Holed up in a narrow valley, the languid Turks failed to detect the approaching Arabs, who began firing down upon them hour after hour from the cliffs above. Long-range potshots would not do the trick, however, and Lawrence goaded his allies to charge. One chieftain initiated the engagement by galloping with fifty horsemen into the harried ranks of Turkish regulars, who fled straight into an even larger wave of camel cavalry led by Lawrence himself, white robes flying and guns blazing. “I had got among the first of them,” Lawrence recalled later, “and was shooting, with a pistol of course, for only an expert could use a rifle from such plunging beasts; when suddenly my camel tripped and went down emptily upon her face, as though pole-axed. I was torn completely from the saddle, sailed grandly through the air for a great distance, and landed with a crash which seemed to drive all the power and feeling out of me.”
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Stunned, he recited to himself a favorite poem as he awaited death under crashing camel hooves. As he recovered his senses, however, he realized that the body of his fallen mount had saved him from the stampede, and that he had accidently shot his own poor beast with his gun. The Turks, meanwhile, had been swept away by the irresistible battering of four hundred camels galloping down the slope at thirty miles an hour.

The legend of “Lawrence of Arabia” was built upon this sort of daring, toughness, and luck. It rested also on Lawrence’s uncanny ability to live in two worlds, British and Arab, and to navigate the contradictory complexities of modern guerrilla warfare involving daggers, camels, explosives, and airplanes. He was an Oxford-trained intelligence officer proud to serve his king and empire, yet he was also the blond Bedouin, an honorary Arab tribesman seeking to free a subject people from their foreign masters. Troubled by fear that he would be forced to betray his Arab friends in the end, he grasped onto the hope that it might be possible to be both sorts of man and to serve both sets of masters.

To perform his dual role, Lawrence had to be a great actor as well as a cunning strategist. Most men had to worry about how to define one manly identity; Lawrence had to contrive two at the same time. During the two years he was active in the desert, he always wore the white Arab robes and headdress presented to him by Prince Feisal of Mecca, the primary leader of the revolt. Even when he occasionally returned to Egypt to meet with his British superiors, Lawrence wore this costume. At the same time, he was meticulously British and un-Arab in his regular shaving, even when a lack of water forced him to scrape his face with a dry blade. This practice completed his heroic look, unique among British and Arabs alike. “It was notoriety to be the only clean-shaven one,” Lawrence explained, “and I doubled it by wearing always the suspect pure silk, of the whitest (at least outside), with a gold and crimson Meccan head-rope, and gold dagger. By so dressing I staked a claim which Feisal’s public consideration of me confirmed.”
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As he rode camelback in flowing white robes across a primitive, biblical landscape, his hairless face confirmed that he remained a thoroughly modern man.

Shaving was an ideal symbol of modernity precisely because it was the latest and most up-to-date mode for men. Less than a year before his raid on Aqaba, the British military had buckled to agitation within the ranks, issuing new rules permitting soldiers to be clean-shaven. For half a century, British soldiers, like most of their European counterparts, had been required to grow mustaches as a sign of military esprit de corps. In the years before World War I, however, British soldiers began pressing for the freedom not to grow them.
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In 1915, in the midst of war, King George had been obliged to issue a stern warning that the hair regulations would be enforced. The following year, however, after the government implemented the draft, and worries about morale
deepened, the general staff capitulated. They had no appetite to fight their own soldiers in addition to the enemy.
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Contrary to some later suppositions, the abandonment of mustaches had nothing to do with gas masks or trench hygiene. Nor was it a matter of improved shaving technology. The true cause of the downfall of beards and mustaches in the twentieth century was a social development
even the military could not resist: the renovation of manliness to the specifications of urban and corporate society. Like the patriarchal beard, the chivalric mustache lost favor among men eager to display the virtues of a new century: youthfulness, energy, cleanliness, and reliability.

Before Lawrence, Tarzan was another heroic shaver. The creation of American author Edgar Rice Burroughs, the King of the Apes, who first appeared in print in 1912, was an orphaned English nobleman raised by hairy denizens of the jungle, unaware of his true identity. As he grew to manhood, his humanity and nobility asserted themselves, allowing him to command and subdue the beasts around him as well as his own primitive impulses. He taught himself both to read and to shave in order to claim his human birthright: “True he had seen pictures in his books of men with great masses of hair upon lip and cheek and chin, but, nevertheless, Tarzan was afraid. Almost daily he whetted his keen knife and scraped and whittled at his young beard to eradicate this degrading emblem of apehood. And so he learned to shave—rudely and painfully, it is true—but, nevertheless, effectively.”
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Here was a subtle but direct assertion of the ideals of a new era. Tarzan reasoned that, although civilized men had worn facial hair in the past, doing so risked introducing an element of wildness and disorder that he needed to resist.

Burroughs was not a great novelist, but he had a feel for the fears and fantasies of his times. Like Tarzan, men of the twentieth century were afraid of the ape within and worried about maintaining self-discipline. At the same time, modern city dwellers hoped that they, like Tarzan, might call upon a primitive potency within themselves when needed. As early twentieth-century icons of modernized manhood, Lawrence of Arabia and Tarzan were wildly popular because they suggested that men could have it both ways, as shaved men of the wild. Their stories also implied that steadfast loyalty to the male collective—the English nation for Lawrence, civilized Europe for Tarzan—were the foundation of true manliness.

The emergence of heroic shavers marked the end of the nineteenth-century beard and mustache movement. The year 1903 proved to be the tipping point. An enterprising reporter for the
Chicago Tribune
illustrated this fact by careful count. Standing on a busy street corner in downtown Chicago, he tallied in one hour 3,000 men, of whom 1,236 wore mustaches and 108 some kind of beard. The rest (1,656)
were clean-shaven.
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In other words, there was a rough balance, but the reporter also knew that the trend was moving strongly toward shaving. This was also the view of a contributor to the American journal
Harper’s Weekly
, whose 1903 article “The Passing of Beards” was partly a eulogy for facial hair, partly a reluctant recognition of the virtues of a shaved face. The beard, he wrote, “really cannot be kept clean; but it was natural, and it was dignified.” As for shaving, “there is gain for honesty if not beauty.”
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It so happened that King C. Gillette secured a patent for his famous safety razor in 1904, which appears at first glance to fit the common narrative that improvements in shaving technology explain what was happening. Gillette’s invention, however, was the beneficiary rather than the cause of the beard’s demise. Facial hair was on the way out when Gillette entered the scene. Advertising by his and other shaving-products companies reflected the fact that they were serving rather than creating the desire for a smooth face. No effort was needed to persuade men to rid themselves of hair. There was instead a relentless focus on how their products made shaving easy and comfortable. The razor and shaving cream industry, with estimated annual sales of eighty million dollars by 1937 in the United States alone, provided the tools for middle-class mobility, enabling the common man to meet exacting grooming standards approved by corporate bosses.

Three powerful forces converged at this time to pressure men to shave: medical science, employers, and women. The understanding of disease was revolutionized in the late nineteenth century when it was discovered that contagious illnesses were caused by microorganisms. This prompted a dramatic about-face with respect to health and facial hair. In the nineteenth century, physicians routinely argued that beards and mustaches helped protect skin and nerves from the sun and weather, as well as filtering dust and bad air. Louis Pasteur’s discoveries changed all that, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, doctors increasingly denounced facial hair as a haven for microbes. In the new century, newspapers, magazines, and medical journals were filled with increasingly alarming reports, such as that of a French scientist who described in 1907 an experiment showing that the lips of a woman kissed by a mustached man were polluted with tuberculosis and diphtheria bacteria, as well as food particles and a hair from a spider’s leg.
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In 1909, a study in the British medical journal
Lancet
found clean-shaven men were less likely to suffer from colds. Their supposition was that removing facial hair removed a nursery of dangerous organisms, and allowed for the more effective use of soap.
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The microbe fear was powerful, but not unchallenged. Many doctors continued to wear mustaches, and some persisted in arguing for their health benefits.
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For most people, however, cleanliness was next to shavenness.

Employers were an even more effective force against facial hair. Fewer and fewer men in the industrialized world were independent or self-employed in the twentieth century. Increasingly, employees worked in professional, industrial, or corporate environments in which the prevailing virtues were teamwork, energy, cooperation, and good manners.
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Men were eager to display these virtues, and to appear young, eager, and prepared. The man with a razor reaped the reward of being part of a team.

Businesses that introduced shaving codes justified their actions in terms of hygiene, professionalism, and the need to please customers. The Burlington Railroad, for example, banned facial hair on its conductors in 1907, at the same time introducing white linen collars, ties, and vests. The company’s management announced that these changes would give its employees a uniform appearance and make them less likely to spread germs and contagion.
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A few years earlier, the police department in Evanston, Illinois, had ordered its officers to shave their mustaches as part of a new insistence on drill and professionalism. The department issued a public statement, promising that “the inspector will see that each patrolman has clean shoes, clean gloves, a neat uniform, and that he is clean shaven. Slovenly or untidy dress at inspection will be considered a neglect of duty and will be entered against the officer.”
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In 1915, the Los Angeles Police Department stopped promoting any patrolman or detective who chose to wear a mustache, because, in the words of the superintendent, it gave “an untidy and irregular appearance to his men.”
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These were but samples of a sweeping international trend.

Women also made their desires known, sensing an opportunity to reinforce the message of regulated manliness. Alma Whitaker, in a column in the
Los Angeles Times
in 1920, complained about men who had returned from the war with “tricky little mustaches,” an affectation
she suspected “helps a fellow feel dashing and debonair, no matter how we happen to think he looks in it.” In a half-serious tone, she urged her fellow women to put a stop to this trend, warning that “these ostensibly meager little hairy assertions on the male upper lip may become patriarchal whiskers before we know what has happened to us.”
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A few years later, a woman on a Chicago street echoed this antipatriarchal attitude when asked whether she liked mustaches. Absolutely not, she replied, “I want a modern husband, not one reared in Noah’s ark.”
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As this comment suggests, changes at home as well as the workplace inclined men to adopt a more sociable shaved face. The Victorian domestic patriarch was no longer the ideal man.