That was the question...
The wearing of beards in America did not become popular until the middle of the 19th century, and one man who took to whiskers earlier, Joseph Palmer, became one of the most hated eccentrics of his day. As such, he was subjected to persecution so incredible that it boggles the mind. Palmer may well have been the first man in the nation to wear a beard...I would never have guessed that beards were almost completely absent from Britain and America from the 1730s until the 1850s, even though in theory I should have been able to realize that none of the Founding Fathers or any other American I’d seen pictures of before that time had one.
Also, you would think that a social consensus that strong would have left enough imprint in the historical record that I would learn about it from somewhere other than a Twitter account called “SatanWatch”, but it happened completely silently!
This puts the “Lincoln grew a beard on the advice of a young girl who wrote him a letter” story in a different light. 1860 was just at the beginning of beard acceptability; this would be the equivalent of a candidate dying his hair pink on a young girl’s advice today!
by Scott Alexander, ACX | Read more:
Image: uncredited
