Jon Michaud revisits “American Hair: Its Rises and Falls,” a 1938 New Yorker article by Lewis Gannett:
Gannett remarks that the New World was discovered and settled almost entirely by men with whiskers:
Balboa and Magellan and Sebastian Cabot, Cotes, Pizarro, Ponce de Leon, and De Soto, Champlain and Cartier, Hawkins and Drake, Captain John Smith, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Winthrop, and the first Lord Baltimore all were bearded men.
But, by the eighteenth century, due in part to the influence of the Puritans, the beard was out and the wig was in. “Not one of the signers of the American Constitution wore a beard or even a mustache,” Gannett notes. Even Uncle Sam, in his earliest incarnation, dating to 1852, was clean-shaven. It was not until Abraham Lincoln that we had a President with a full beard.
(Image: the Grant Administration, also known as "the hairiest in our history.")
The Dish 