Facial Hair, Patriotism and the Enemy in American History

http://www.juancole.com/2014/06/patriotism-american-history.html

Facial Hair, Patriotism and the Enemy in American History
By Juan Cole | Jun. 5, 2014

Media Matters for America put together a collage of Fox Cable News commentators smearing the father of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl as having a Taliban-like beard and maybe even being a Taliban sympathizer. Thanks to MM4A for the Laura Ingram clip in which she says that if he weren’t so light-skinned he could be a terrorist. You always knew that American racists, frustrated by the Civil Rights movement and unable so easily to use racial slurs in public, had adopted ‘terrorist’ as a dog whistle. But to have it so explicitly stated!



The Fox love for the “Duck Dynasty” in contrast to the Bergdahl beard was first pointed out by the wittiest man in America, Jon Stewart, on The Daily Show.

Jon’s observation and the MM4A medley of clips got me thinking about beards in American history as self and other. Jon Michaud links the early American preference for being clean shaven to the Puritan tradition and points out that the Founding Fathers did not sport beards.

Abraham Lincoln grew his beard in office, and it seems likely to me that the beard was a symbol of the Civil War’s hardships and dislocations. Many generals sported them at that time. Very large numbers of men on a battlefield after all would have found it easier not to bother with shaving. The beard was big in the late nineteenth century, then declined.