In 1975, like many in the cast, I grew a beard for our high school’s production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” (I played the rabbi.) Except a few brief interludes in the late 70s, I’ve had a beard ever since.
Beards change the way people look, and, presumably how they are perceived. That’s dramatically illustrated by the two stamps that make up today’s #stampoftheday missive. The first, is a 1-cent stamp, issued on February 12, 1959, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. It shows a beardless Abraham Lincoln, which is a strikingly unfamiliar image. The second, which was issued 50 years earlier, on February 12, 1909, shows the more familiar bearded Lincoln (who was the first president to sport facial hair while in office).
The story of Lincoln’s beard is a wonderful, frequently repeated chestnut of American history. And like most historic chestnuts, it’s missing a few key pieces.
The standard story is that in October 1860, 11-year-old Grace Bedell, of Westfield, New York wrote a short but rambling letter to Lincoln, then the Republican nominee for president. She began by telling him “my father has just come home from the fair and brought home your picture.” She digressed a bit. She told him she was 11; she informed him she hoped he would win; she asked if he had a daughter about her age who might write back to her; and she reported that she had four brothers and that “part of them will vote for you any way.”
Then she got down to business, telling him “if you will let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you.” She continued, “you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. [Moreover,] all the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husband’s to vote for you and then you would be President.”
She added more about her family and then signed off “answer this letter right off.”
Bedell’s wasn’t the only one who didn’t like the way Lincoln looked. When he was running for president in 1860 a paper in Houston described him as “the leanest, lankiest, most ungainly mass of legs, arms, and hatchet face ever strung upon a single frame.” And some Republicans in New York State apparently told Lincoln during the campaign that he “would be much improved in appearance,” if he would “cultivate whiskers, and wear standing collars.”
Lincoln himself knew his looks were unusual. Notably, when Senator Stephen Douglas called him “two-faced” during one of their famous debatea in 1858, Lincoln is said to have answered, “If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?” So not surprisingly, when Lincoln answered Bedell’s letter, “right off”, he asked: “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 wearing them now?”
Nevertheless, not long after the election, Lincoln started growing facial history. By mid-November, his friends, reportedly started teasing him for “putting on [h]airs.” By February 1861, when he left Illinois for Washington, he had taken on what became his iconic look, sideburns and a beard, but no mustache. And on his way to Washington, he stopped in Westfield, New York to publicly say hello to 11-year old Grace. “It was an extraordinary transformation,” wrote historian Sean Trainer in a 2019 essay that appeared on “Brewminate,” a wonderfully eclectic website. “For the first and only time in American history, a president-elect dramatically changed his personal appearance between his election and inauguration.”
“What,” Trainer asked, “did facial hair do for Abraham Lincoln that being clean-shaven did not?” Most of Lincoln’s biographers argue that he grew a beard to give him an air of “patriarchal gravitas” needed, Trainer summarized, because “in the face of widespread doubt about his ability to manage the secession crisis, the president-elect at least ‘looked up to the job.'”
But, Trainer contended, there’s a big problem with these assessments because, as his correspondence with Grace suggests (and a review of other accounts of his facial hair confirm), Lincoln didn’t have a “beard.” He had “whiskers.”
This is important, he argued, because “the words ‘beard’ and ‘whiskers’ connoted distinctive styles in mid-nineteenth century America-and contemporaries used the words differently than we do.”
“What often distinguished beards from whiskers…was neither facial real-estate nor the length of one’s hair-one might wear a short, untamed beard-in-the-making or a long, carefully-sculpted set of whiskers-but rather one’s relationship to the work of men’s grooming. Hairy men who continued to visit the barber, trim their mustaches, or wax their locks wore whiskers; men who let their facial hair grow unrestrained sported beards.”
This, in turn, was significant because “whiskers didn’t signify maturity, statesmanship, or gravitas.” Rather, by “adopting a fashionable style of grooming-the wreath of whiskers that had been a fixture of men’s fashion for decades-Lincoln “was cultivating the appearance of a man of the world.”
“It’s a strange story, to be sure,” Trainer concludes. “But it reminds us of the extraordinary currency of symbols like these: that faced with national dissolution and civil war, Lincoln sought the urbane sophistication required for his job in, of all places, his hair.”
All of this makes me think about my own hair. I haven’t been as deliberate as Lincoln but it does seem to me that I’ve moved from being more beard-like to being more whiskers-like (in the 19th century sense of the word). But I wonder if that means, I now look more like a “man of the world.” Maybe, it just means that’s it’s taken me more than four decades to grow a beard worthy of my role as the Rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof.
Stay well, be safe, keep your facial hair carefully trimmed (or not), fight for justice, and work for peace.