The Significance of Facial Hair in American History

A recent anti-intellectual screed published in my local community paper suggested that historians do nothing more significant than inquire into the length of Walt Whitman’s beard. I took this insult as something of a challenge, and uncovered fascinating material regarding Whitman’s beard as a symbol, particularly of the poet’s “homosexuality.”¹ Beyond Whitman, beards and facial hair in general have served as powerful cultural symbols for communicating sexuality, manhood, insanity, and divinity in American history.

The Spanish poet and playwright, Frederico Garcia Lorca, spent the year 1929 in New York City, where he wrote a number of poems including “Oda a Walt Whitman.” Addressing “viejo hermoso Walt Whitman”—beautiful old Walt Whitman—Lorca wrote that “los maricas te soñaban”—the Queers dreamed of you. “¡También ese! ¡También!”—he is one too, they say! “And they tumble,” continued Lorca, “on your luminous, chaste beard.” “Not for a moment,” the Spanish poet confessed to “viejo hermoso Walt Whitman,” “have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies”—“tu barba llena de mariposas.”²

For Lorca, Whitman’s beard identified him as a marica. Allen Ginserberg, who used Whitman as a model for his poetry, his sexuality, and perhaps also his facial hair, similarly identified the poet’s beard with his homosexuality. Lorca and Whitman appear together in Ginsberg’s poem “A Supermarket in California,” published in 1956 in Howl and Other Poems.

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

Ginsberg opens this remarkable poem addressing Whitman, and a few lines later he addresses Lorca.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

“Where are we going, Walt Whitman?” asks Ginsberg in this poet’s meditation on queerness, loneliness, and queer loneliness in America. “Which way does your beard point tonight?” “Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love / past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?” Ginsberg asks his silent companion, addressing  him finally: “Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher.”³ Here, again, Whitman’s beard is a symbol of homosexuality, but for Ginsberg, the beard also paints Whitman as a father figure, a wise old teacher.

In his poem “Defending Walt Whitman,” published in 1996, Native American poet Sherman Alexie imagines Whitman enjoying a somewhat erotic game of basketball with American Indian boys. “His huge beard is ridiculous on the reservation,” Alexie describes.

He is a small man and his beard is ludicrous on the reservation, absolutely insane.
His beard makes the Indian boys righteously laugh. His beard
frightens the smallest Indian boys. His beard tickles the skin
of the Indian boys who dribble past him. His beard, his beard!⁴

“His beard, his beard!” From Lorca, to Ginsberg, to Alexie, Whitman’s beard is his sexuality, his genius, and a symbol of his self.

Turning from poetry to painting, another nineteenth century beard has become famous in American culture. Abolitionist John Brown only grew a beard for a few months of his life. Only one photograph exists of him with a beard; several depict him without facial hair, including during the time of his raid on Harper’s Ferry. Nevertheless, there is almost no image of Brown in paint or in print that shows him without a long, wild beard. The image of Brown with a tangled beard may well be linked to the idea of Brown as insane, a charge invented by his defense lawyer and spread by southerners and nervous northern moderates. With a long unkempt mass of hair beneath his chin, Brown does look the part of the zealous lunatic.

In Thomas Hovendon’s sympathetic painting, The Last Moments of John Brown (left), completed in 1884, however, Brown’s soft white beard against the check of the young black child he leans forward to kiss makes him appear fatherly and even god-like.

Brown is also depicted as a god figure in John Stueart Curry’s Tragic Prelude (below) completed in 1940, but this god is a vengeful god. With his larger-than-life beard blowing violently to one side, this John Brown looks like an angry Zeus, or perhaps he is Moses, also bearded, parting the seas.

Brown wears a beard throughout Jacob Lawrence’s series of twenty-two prints depicting Brown’s life and abolitionist efforts. In the final of these prints (below), Brown’s beard is perhaps his most distinctive feature.

It is not surprising that Whitman’s and Brown’s facial hair should carry such important symbolism. Indeed, in American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen discusses the importance of the images produced and reproduced of Nietzsche—was that mustache a sign of his madness, his genius, his German-ness?⁵ The best exploration of the meaning of facial hair in American culture can be found in Kristin L. Hoganson’s masterful Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, published in 1998.

Hoganson demonstrates the deep gender anxiety seeping out of every aspect of American life and framing political debates in the lead up to the Spanish-American War. Although she stops short of arguing for gender anxiety as a cause of the war, her evidence would allow her to make that argument powerfully. Among the ways in which Hoganson sees gender anxiety invading political discourse are demeaning depictions of President McKinley by those who believed the President was failing to take a strong stand against Spain. Hoganson presents cartoon after cartoon featuring McKinley in a dress or with a rattle, or both. He is a woman, and a baby, or a baby girl, the opposition cried! At the center of anxiety about their President’s manhood, Hoganson argues, was his lack of facial hair. Every President since Ulysses S. Grant had sported some kind of facial hair— from Chester Arthur’s fancy muttonchops, to Grover Cleveland’s simple mustache. Clean-shaven McKinley, however, had put his gender identity up for question by failing to grow hair on his face.⁶

From this small amount of evidence, it does seem that if all historians did was discuss beards in the past, we would still have a window into ideas about gender, sexuality, madness, justice, politics, and war.
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