Hopi hair dresser, Arizona, circa 1909. Source: Library of Congress

Crowning Glory

A History of Hair in America

05.04.18

It’s been fifty years since “Hair” debuted on Broadway. The groundbreaking play featured an integrated cast and defined the rock musical genre.

On this episode, Brian, Joanne and Nathan explore some of the many meanings Americans have attached to hair – as a marker of personal identity, a living connection to distant loved ones, and even as the root of business empire.

fashion; hair

Open Episode Transcript as PDF

Segments

GI Haircut Blues

Researcher Joseph Thompson joins Brian to discuss one of the most famous haircuts in American history, when Elvis Presley’s signature locks came up against the rules and regulations of the U.S. military.

Music:

Netherland by Podington Bear

Gnossienne 1 by Podington Bear

Elvis Presley; hair

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

MALE SPEAKER: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

JOANNE: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory.

BRIAN: Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

NATHAN: I’m Nathan Connelly.

JOANNE: And I’m Joanne Freeman. On BackStory, Brian, Nathan, our colleague Ed Ayers, and I, all historians, take a topic and explore it through three centuries of American history. Today, Nathan, Brian, and I are going to tackle the subject of hair.

BRIAN: And we’re going to start in 1958. At that time, all young single men were at risk of being drafted into the US army, but there was one man whose conscription caused a national uproar. Hundreds of concerned citizens even wrote letters to President Dwight D Eisenhower. Historian Joseph Thompson says that many of them pleaded the same case. This is Thompson reading from one of those letters.

JOSEPH THOMPSON: I really don’t see why you have to send him in the Army at all, but we beg you, please, please don’t give him a GI haircut. Oh, please, please don’t. If you do, we will just about die. And they signed the letter, Elvis Presley lovers.

BRIAN: That’s right. The matter at hand, making it all the way up to Eisenhower’s desk, was Elvis Presley’s famous hair, but the pleas from his female fans were ignored.

On March 24th, Private Presley reported for duty. Nearly 70 newsmen were on hand to capture that anxious moment.

MALE SPEAKER: His lucrative career as rock and roll king interrupted for a while, Elvis Presley begins his military service at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, just another GI to become acquainted with those interminable army line ups.

BRIAN: The following day came the moment of truth so many of his fans feared. Presley climbed into one of Fort Chaffee’s barber chairs.

MALE SPEAKER: Uncle Sam doesn’t play favorites, and those celebrated sideburns, which were his trademark, are sacrificed to military uniformity.

JOSEPH THOMPSON: He’s making jokes in the barber’s chair as this civilian barber is cutting his hair and he supposedly picks up some of the hair and blows it out of his hand and says, hair today, gone tomorrow.

MALE SPEAKER: Locks his fans would love to touch, shorn and scattered on the barbershop floor.

JOSEPH THOMPSON: He gets up to leave and it’s kind of an embarrassing moment for Elvis, because he has to come back because he forgot to pay this civilian barber the $0.65 that he owed him, which, as he was raking in millions of dollars a year, he could certainly afford.

BRIAN: Elvis’s hair had been cut down in its prime.

NATHAN: OK, Brian, why exactly is this so important to his fans?

BRIAN: Well, Nathan, Thompson says that at the time, Elvis’s hair wielded quite a bit of power.

JOSEPH THOMPSON: At one level, we can just consider his hair as a symbol of this male virility, right, and sexual potency that he performed so well.

BRIAN: So he’s got lots of hair.

JOSEPH THOMPSON: He’s got lots of hair. Yeah, exactly. And if you watch early footage of him, his hair moves like almost as much as his hips, right? And it’s always kind of dropping down over his eyes, and he’s always having to push it back. And we should note that Elvis was really kind of copying black hairstyles, and particularly a black hairstyle known as a process, right? And, ironically, the process itself is a black imitation of white hair style, so with Elvis, you have this kind of cultural exchange coming back around.

So in the mid-50s, when you’re having these rampant fears about juvenile delinquency, and it’s also the end of Jim Crow segregation, I mean, Elvis really represented the culmination of a lot of white middle-class fears, and not just in the South. There was ministers, especially, from all over the country who were denouncing Elvis leading this slippery slope into what one of them called jellyfish morality.

BRIAN: In other words, issues of sex, race, and even the moral compass of the nation were all wrapped up in Elvis’s wavy, pomade-laden hair. That government-issued haircut threatened to neutralize his dangerous image. And Thompson says that that new do, and his time in the service, did change Elvis’s image. In the long run, it made him more acceptable to white middle-class America.

JOSEPH THOMPSON: Frank Sinatra famously trashed rock and roll before Elvis went into the army, but his daughter Nancy was there at Fort Dix, New Jersey, when Elvis came back in 1960, on behalf of her father and presenting Elvis with a box of shirts, kind of welcoming him into the fold of mainstream pop.

[LAUGHING]

Yeah, with a box of shirts. And Elvis’s first public musical performance when he got back was a TV special with Frank Sinatra in May of 1960.

BRIAN: In a way, Thompson says, those fans who were writing letters to Eisenhower had legitimate fears. Elvis did have something to lose, and so did they.

JOSEPH THOMPSON: The overt sexuality, the kind of non-conformity. So if you take that away from their idol, from the person that they love so much that they would write the president in his defense, then that feels like an affront to them. Elvis was, in many ways, was a– you could think about him as a conduit for young women to express their own sexuality, right? And so if you take that away from them, that’s not only Elvis getting a haircut, that’s a repression of them as well. And so whenever we kind of land on these historical moments where hair seems important, it’s because people are making an important political statement through that hair.

BRIAN: So he really was on to something when he said hair today, gone tomorrow.

JOSEPH THOMPSON: I believe he was, yeah.

NATHAN: Whether you spend minutes or hours on your hair, or if you’re like me and you don’t spend any time at all, those strands or lack thereof of say something to people around you. And as the Elvis case shows, your hair can tell people that you want to stand out or that you’re striving to fit in, but throughout American history, regardless, hair has been wrapped up in identity, reflecting social tensions of the day.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Growth Market

At the turn of the twentieth century, Madam CJ Walker built a thriving business on hair care for black women. Journalist A’Lelia Bundles, Madam Walker’s great-great granddaughter, discusses how Walker built her business, and her often controversial legacy.

Music:

Honor Roll by Podington Bear

African American culture; business; hair

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

JOANNE: So today on the show, we’re going to look at the tangled topic of hair in American history. We’ll find out why Americans knead buttons and even reeds from their manes in the 19th century. We’ll chat with one of the world’s top hair collectors, and we’ll hear from you, our listeners, about what message your hair sends to others.

BRIAN: Now, we already mentioned that hair can be very personal. It could represent identity and attitude, and perhaps because of that, hair can also be big business. No one knew that better than the woman who became known as Madam CJ Walker. She was an African-American entrepreneur who built a business empire out of hair care in the early 20th century.

A’LELIA BUNDLES: Madam CJ Walker was one of those amazing American rags-to-riches story.

BRIAN: This is journalist A’lelia Bundles. She’s also Madam CJ Walker’s great-great-granddaughter.

A’LELIA BUNDLES: Born on a plantation in Delta, Louisiana right after the Civil War in 1867. A poor washerwoman until she was 38. Discovered a formula that healed scalp infections and helped hair grow. Made a fortune, and by the time she died in 1919 at 51, she was a millionaire.

BRIAN: Bundles’ mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all helped run the company Madam Walker started. Her father was even an executive in a rival hair care company. Hair care has been her family’s business for generations.

NATHAN: Now, Walker’s business was successful almost from the very start, mixing the personal and the professional. Thousands of Walker company agents sold shampoos, ointments, and hair moisturizers to African-American women across the country, sometimes, the Asians. All women of color went door-to-door. They also held demonstrations at private homes or churches.

JOANNE: So it sounds like what we’re talking about here is something along the lines of Mary Kay cosmetics, right?

BRIAN: That’s exactly right, Joanne, but before Mary Kay even existed.

NATHAN: Madam Walker was also a controversial figure, even during her own lifetime. That’s because she sold products designed to straighten African-American hair, and her critics would say, to make it conform to white American beauty standards. The best known is something called the hot comb.

BRIAN: But Bundle says Walker’s best seller was also her very first product, Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower. This product and her whole business model grew out of something less controversial, Walker’s efforts to manage her own hair.

A’LELIA BUNDLES: She was going bald because she had really bad dandruff and really bad scalp infections because hygiene was really different 150 years ago. When she was born, people didn’t have indoor plumbing. They didn’t have electricity. They didn’t bathe very often. Necessity is the mother of invention. She was losing her hair and she needed something to solve her problem.

BRIAN: So how did she go about solving that problem? Did she just tried mixing different formulae that were bubbling in the bucket?

[LAUGHING]

A’LELIA BUNDLES: Well, you know, now we walk into the drugstore and there are 1,000 different kinds of shampoos and everything that we take for granted, but then, there really wasn’t this hair care and cosmetics market. So you couldn’t just walk in the store and find something on the shelves.

Her brothers were barbers in St. Louis in the late 19th century, so she learned some things from her brother. She experimented with home remedies. For a while, she sold the products of a woman named Annie Malone, who became her major competitor. And with a combination of all of those things as well as working briefly for a pharmacist in Denver, she was really his cook, but he was able to analyze these various formulas and helped her figure out what she wanted.

She was selling door-to-door, traveling around Colorado with this very small black population that was there. And then her boyfriend from St. Louis, Charles Joseph Walker, moved to Denver and they got married. She became Madam CJ Walker and she was taking out ads, selling Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower.

BRIAN: I love looking through old ads in newspapers. I’m wondering if you could tell me what Madam Walker’s advertisements looked like.

A’LELIA BUNDLES: Just look at my hair. You can see that I used to be bald, and now I have a full head of hair. The advertising industry was really just being born in the early 1900s when she was starting out, but she was already using her own image in her before and after pictures. She was using testimonials. Before I started using Madame Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower, my hair was an eighth of an inch long and now it’s down my back and I’ve been able to throw my wig away.

BRIAN: And she really had before photographs?

A’LELIA BUNDLES: She had before photographs. The very earliest photograph of her, her hair is very short and patchy. She used that as the centerpiece of her ad, and then on either side, she had a front view and a side view with her hair down below her shoulders.

BRIAN: Wow.

A’LELIA BUNDLES: She looked like a very African-American woman, really full-featured, dark skin, and therefore like most of her customers.

BRIAN: So she became, of course, a remarkable business empire, really. Tell me the story of how she transitioned from one very innovative and energetic salesperson to a large scale business.

A’LELIA BUNDLES: I think she was like a sponge in terms of watching what other people were doing, because in 1904, when the World’s Fair was in St. Louis, the National Association of Colored Women, this amazing group of civic-minded women from all over the United States met in her church. And she watched how these women organized. And when she was ready to organize her sales agents, she told her attorney, I want us to structure ourselves like the National Association of Colored Women, with local chapters and state chapters.

BRIAN: And what about the agents themselves? What could a typical agent expect to bring in selling Madam Walker’s hair product?

A’LELIA BUNDLES: So, of course, it varied and it depended on the hustle of the agent. In the testimonials in her advertisements one woman said, you have made it possible for a black woman to make more money in a day than she could in a month working in somebody’s kitchen. And she said, I have agents who are making as much as $100 a week. Most, of course, are not making that much. Some are making 50. Some are making 20. Some are making 10.

BRIAN: There was some controversy about some of her products, right?

A’LELIA BUNDLES: Definitely.

BRIAN: The hot comb that was used to straighten hair, trying to make African-American hair look more European.

A’LELIA BUNDLES: Absolutely, I mean you can’t get away from that. So, of course, she did not invent the straightening comb and that’s the myth about her. But there was a pressure, both internally and externally, for women of European standards of beauty.

And, you know, when we look at this through a 21st century lens, it’s very easy to be critical. But when you consider 90% of African-Americans lived in the rural South, and again, hygiene was really different. People didn’t have these options. They would keep their hair tied up all winter long. Women wanted to be able to do something else with their hair other than hide it. And so we have this complicated relationship with beauty in America. We still see it. You know, this pressure to conform to a European standard of beauty is still with us.

BRIAN: Why is hair such a lightning rod?

[CHUCKLING]

A’LELIA BUNDLES: Yes. You know, this is– you know, I will be 65 in a few days. And I am a survivor of the hair wars of the 1960s and 70s.

BRIAN: You’ve been through a lot, I’m sure.

A’LELIA BUNDLES: So in the late 1960s when I was trying to express myself as a young black woman, hair was very much a part of that expression. And I decided I wanted an afro. And my father was adamantly opposed to this, but my mother, who was much wiser about hair, took me to the Walker beauty school. And the Walker’s students rolled my hair up on permanent wave rods and fashioned a big afro, and eventually my perm grew out.

And I thought when I went from a perm to a natural, to my big, large halo of a natural hairstyle, I thought that we were through that. I thought that we had overcome that and women would be comfortable with their hair. And that pendulum keeps swinging back and forth. Some of it is just beauty and aesthetics and culture, and some of it is political. And I think that natural hair threatens people who don’t really believe that African-Americans should have full equality. I mean, I wish it weren’t that basic, but I think that hair is an expression of, I’m comfortable with myself. I love myself. And that is just too much for some people.

BRIAN: Now you’re a journalist, and you’ve written about your great-great-grandmother Madam Walker. Has your own take on her story changed over the course of your writing career?

A’LELIA BUNDLES: I think growing up, I was ambivalent about her because in the late 60s when other people had their views about Madam Walker and it was, she’s the person who invented the hot comb, I really was trying to step away because that wasn’t something that I wanted to know about. And then WB Dubois was my intellectual hero, and I discovered when I was in college doing some research his obit of her in the crisis magazine, and he had good things to say about her. And I said, well, you know, maybe I need to re-examine who she is.

And then I continued to do research. I discovered she had known all of these people who I admired like Ida B Wells and Mary McLeod Bethune, and that she was a political activist. That she was even called a Negro subversive by the Woodrow Wilson administration because she was so outspoken on lynching and on the rights of black soldiers. So once I was able to combine her entrepreneurship, her empowerment of women, and her political activism, then I saw her in an entirely different light.

BRIAN: A’lelia Bundles is the great-great-granddaughter of Madame CJ Walker and the author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam CJ Walker.

JOANNE: Earlier, we heard from Joseph Thompson, a PhD candidate in history at the University of Virginia and our show’s researcher.

The Root of the Matter

Brian, Joanne, and Nathan explore the many ways that hair can act as a marker of identity — and what it means when others step in to police your hair.

Music:

Gonzo by Jahzzar

fashion; gender; hair; race

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

NATHAN: So I really love that exchange, Brian, with A’lelia Bundles. And I got to share with you all this quote that I found that really does speak to this in Madam CJ Walker’s own terms. This is actually taken from the annual convention of National Negro Businesses in 1912.

BRIAN: No fair doing research, Nathan.

[LAUGHING]

NATHAN: She says, quote, “Surely you are not going to shut the door in my face.” And she’s talking about the door being closed by black businessmen. “I feel that I am in a business that is a credit to the womanhood of our race. I went into a business that is despised, that is criticized and talked about by everybody, the business of growing hair. I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. I was promoted there to the washtub, then I was promoted to the cook kitchen, and from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations.” Unquote.

Talking about getting out of the most menial forms of labor that are available to black women at that time and providing a kind of elevation for herself and so many other women, really, hair as access. And it just made me think, again, how many other ways can we think about the value of hair as obviously an expression, but also as something as kicking down doors to new political conversations and new opportunities?

JOANNE: That’s an amazing quote on so many levels, because obviously it’s about race, but it’s also about gender and it’s also about class, right?

NATHAN: Absolutely.

JOANNE: It’s about all of those things. And certainly, I think that if you look way back to early America and think about hair and markers and power, certainly there were certain ways of wearing your hair that would have been seen as assertions of power in one way or another.

And, you know, it’s sort of the same thing when you think about what people wore in the 18th century, particularly men, and they had the sort of white, frilly cuffs. The reason why wealthy people wore those is because they were the ones who could keep that clean, right? So if you had them, it was a marker that you were wealthy and you were showing it, literally, on your sleeves. And I think there was a–

NATHAN: I can’t even keep my shirt clean.

JOANNE: Yeah, I know.

NATHAN: That’s funny.

[LAUGHING]

JOANNE: Yeah, I’m not referring to myself at all in any way, but that was a statement and I think hair as well in that period. Powdered hair, if you powdered your hair, was an assertion that you were wealthy enough to have that. That you had enough leisure time to worry about that. And that, you know, basically your appearance advertised to the world that you were of a certain ilk, and if you didn’t have that, the assumption was that you were not. I mean, I think it was kind of clear to people.

There’s a famous spy story during the Revolution of John Andre, who’s a British spy who was in on Benedict Arnold’s plot to deliver West Point to the British, and one of the ways in which Andre is found out is that although he’s disguised himself as John Anderson, average guy, the hair ribbon that he’s wearing has a little powder on it. And someone who sees that ribbon says, wait a minute. You’re a gentleman. So those were powerful markers. And although that’s not necessarily banging down doors, that’s certainly keeping doors closed.

NATHAN: Right. Well, hair is dangerous. And obviously, for people like Madam CJ Walker and those who she was representing, the meaning of black women’s hair was certainly different than that of the kind of powdered man of the 19th century. But there still, right? I mean, there is an idea that you can sum up the meaning of an entire group of people based on how they basically [INAUDIBLE]. I mean, the notion of the mammy, as the black woman whose hair is tied in a bandanna. That’s meant to show that she is not the person who can afford the grooming supplies. She’s not meant to look beautiful, even, in some cases, to be a woman in public.

BRIAN: Yeah, Nathan, that quote is so compelling because it’s all about control, which of course, African-Americans were struggling for, well, forever. But they have, or are at least gaining, a bit more control over their lives, certainly compared to slavery. And it’s important to remember that this is a woman who ends up employing 40,000 agents, right? She sets up what we might call the Facebook of her time by going from church to church and recruiting all of these church women to be her agents to sell these hair products.

And it strikes me also on the personal level that hair is virtually the only part of our bodies that we actually can control, that we can do something with, that we can use to show something about ourselves. I mean, maybe it’s just because I’m a six foot five bowlegged guy with a very large nose, none of which I can control and always have wanted to, that hair is one of the few things that I actually can exercise some control over. And I think that’s why it’s been so important.

JOANNE: But, you know, I want to pipe in for a moment here as a woman. We’re talking about race and class.

BRIAN: I don’t see gender, Joanne.

JOANNE: Brian.

NATHAN: We’ll give him a pass on that one.

JOANNE: I’m not going to go there. But what I wanted to talk about for a moment is I’ve seen and read about the fact that men are capable of dressing neutrally, so that you can wear a certain kind of pair of pants and you can wear basically a nice, tidy shirt and you’re not making a statement really. And I think for women, that’s much harder to do with clothing and I think it’s equally hard to do with hair, because I think no matter what you do with your hair, you’re making a statement, to a degree. That’s not true if you’re just a guy with short hair. So if I wear my hair up, it says something. If I wear my hair down, it says something. If I cut it short, it says something.

You know, I mean, no matter what I do with my hair, and I think this is true of most women, you realize that you’re making a statement and there have been times when I’ve gotten up and spoken to the public and had my hair tied back. I gave a lecture, I finished the lecture. Someone came up to me afterwards, a guy, and said, you know, you should wear your hair down. It would be much more attractive that way.

NATHAN: Oh my God, you’re kidding.

JOANNE: Why? Why was it tied back? No, I’m not kidding.

NATHAN: And what did you say?

JOANNE: I actually said, that’s why I wear it up. I don’t think he got what I was saying. I don’t think he understood I was saying, yeah, so that you wouldn’t be thinking just what you’re thinking, but, yeah.

NATHAN: Wow.

JOANNE: I would venture to say, guys, that probably neither one of you has stood up and given some kind of a public lecture and had someone come up to you afterwards and commented on your hair.

[LAUGHING]

NATHAN: Yeah, no, never.

BRIAN: Never happened.

NATHAN: Well, no, I mean, it’s so interesting because you think about, you give these talks and the first thing you do is you kind of debrief about how it went in your own mind and I think if anybody came up and put my own appearance on the table again for one more thing to be worried about, I don’t know if I could take it.

JOANNE: Right, well, right. But I do think, and it’s related to everything that we’re saying here, hair is such a charged thing, generally, for women, I think.

BRIAN: Joanne, I want to complicate this a little bit.

JOANNE: Uh oh.

BRIAN: You guys know I have three African-American kids and I will tell you that, especially when they were young, of course, this is when I was always with them, when I would know best, when we were out in public, it was not unusual for complete strangers to come up and just start feeling their hair.

NATHAN: I think what’s interesting about the problem of touching the head of black children, because I too have three African-American children, and you actually have to be on guard about policing strangers touching your children’s heads.

BRIAN: So Nathan, I’m assuming this happens to your kids. We’ve never really talked about that.

NATHAN: It absolutely does, but I think it’s also true that my girls are already bearing the burden that Joanne is describing and so far is their hair always has a different kind of meaning than our boy, right? And our boy goes out with his hair kind of like matted up and my wife will not let the girls leave the house without it being brushed in a particular way. I mean, it’s actually kind of strange. I’ve never thought about it in this way until just now, but you know, with three children, two girls and a boy, the girls get a touch-up every day.

The boy’s just kind of left to kind of be wild and mangled and then it’s like, oh, he’s so edgy, right? It’s kind of like a positive value judgment on the fact that we don’t, but I think it is absolutely necessary to think about this dynamic where women in public are always going to have to consider their hair as a site of some kind of political commentary or meaning.

JOANNE: Right, absolutely.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

American Hair Story

BackStory listeners share how signature hairstyles have changed how they see themselves.

Music:

Escape the Profane by Ketsa

Flutter by Jahzzar

hair

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been asking BackStory listeners to tell us about how hair reflects their identity. A few of you sent in messages to tell us what your hair means to you.

TOBY CROWLEY: Hey, BackStory, I’m Toby, an American living in Dresden, Germany, and I thought about your question about hair, and I realized that I grew up in one of those families where all the boys went to the barber together and got the exact same haircut, which is just like what the army requires. And then later I grew my hair out when I moved away. I cut it back to my official family haircut in order to like, I don’t know, have a piece of them with me.

SAMANTHA NEWMAN: This is Samantha from Illinois. I’ve had long hair almost my whole life and I’ve always associated my identity and prettiness with it being long because I received the message loud and clear from just about every direction, especially my mom. I’ll never forget that as a kid, my best friend cut her hair short and her elderly male neighbor told us that a woman should have long hair because hair is a woman’s crowning glory. And it wasn’t until recently at the age of 33 that I felt comfortable enough with myself to admit, hey, I want my hair very short, and I have for a long time, but I was too afraid people wouldn’t think I’m pretty anymore, and that’s so important. So I had it cut into a pixie and I love it.

JAY FULLER: Hey, BackStory kinfolk. My name’s Jay. I’m 28. I identify as black. I live in the DC metro area to the north. The haircut that I rock almost religiously is the Caesar, 1 and 1/2 faded to the side and to the back, but I’m also growing out my beard. And I know that there are historical accounts of black men not being permitted to grow beards because of the masculinity and manhood that is symbolized. Thanks.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NATHAN: Those were the voices of Toby Crowley, Samantha Newman, and Jason Fuller. We’ll hear more listener perspectives later in the show.

The (Hair) Ties that Bind

Historian Helen Sheumaker tells Brian about the 19th century craze for jewelry and art woven out of human hair, and how hair came to be seen as a symbol of authenticity and enduring emotional bonds.

Music:

Night Lights by Ketsa

art; hair; middle class

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

BRIAN: When historian Helen Shoemaker was a teenager, she stumbled upon a strange artifact in an antique fair. It was just a little thing, a small button made of woven material, but she says she noticed something odd about the fabric.

HELEN SHOEMAKER: The dealer, who was grumpy, I asked him if it was hair. It looked like hair to me. And he said no, that would be stupid.

[LAUGHING]

NATHAN: It turns out, it wasn’t that stupid. The button was made of human hair. Shoemaker would later learn that using hair in ornamental objectcs was fashionable throughout the 19th century. For example, in the Victorian era, some Americans had the locks of their loved ones fashioned into elaborate room decorations, in which the hair would be arranged in wreaths or flowers.

HELEN SHOEMAKER: But the more popular kind was hair jewelry, and it was in the form of everything from earrings to bracelets to watch chains.

BRIAN: Shoemaker says the fad died out by the 1920s, but at the height of its 19th century popularity, hair art and jewelry had deep meaning. It was a reflection of the Victorian penchant for sentimentality.

HELEN SHOEMAKER: It was supposed to be from the heart. It was supposed to reflect your very close connections to other people and your emotions, but in very artificial, structured ways. So the hair was used to represent the individual but, I think even more, it represented the emotional connections between individuals.

BRIAN: And why hair? Why was hair such an important medium for expressing this sentimentality?

HELEN SHOEMAKER: Yet they thought of hair as a physical extension of the person. This became all the more important when a person died, but it was an important aspect of it when the person was alive as well. They talked a lot about it as a living part of the person that never aged. That is actually true. Once the hair is made into hair jewelry, the hair stays the same as when it was originally made. Hair, I think, had a pliability to it both in terms of its material but also in terms of its, it didn’t actually depict the person, but it was the person.

BRIAN: So what kind of people wore hair art or displayed hair art in their homes?

HELEN SHOEMAKER: Largely white middle class Americans. It’s much rarer to come across jewelry made of hair that was extremely inexpensive. There is a certain amount of hand labor that just made it in the cost range for the middle class, or at least comfortable.

BRIAN: And was it just the cost or was there something about middle class culture at this time that just screamed out for hair?

HELEN SHOEMAKER: Yeah, this was more about expressing a kind of middle class identity. The middle class status was derived in part by a man being able to support a wife and family in a home. So women weren’t supposed to be working outside the home for pay. That sets up a kind of tension between the work world that the man is competing in and the home, domestic life that is supposed to be quite distinct and apart from that economic world.

BRIAN: And how did hair bridge that divide or bridge that gap?

HELEN SHOEMAKER: So one of the most popular forms of hair art was the man’s watch chain.

BRIAN: And would this be something that he wore on his wrist or something that he hung from his belt?

HELEN SHOEMAKER: It would be something he would wear, actually, over the vest but under his jacket.

BRIAN: Oh, I see.

HELEN SHOEMAKER: And then the end of it held the watch that was tucked into a pocket on the other side. So when you saw a man wearing the male uniform of the dress suit or the business suit, one of the most popular accents was this braid of, usually, your wife’s hair intermixed with the hair of your children. So it served as a reminder to you, to the man, but also to the people around him, that he had an emotional life beyond his work life.

BRIAN: So what do you think the popularity of hair art among the middle class in the 19th century tells us about the way they conceived of themselves?

HELEN SHOEMAKER: So I think that the hair art really taps into the ways in which 19th century Americans were uneasy about the culture as it moved towards a more modern 20th century outlook. And what they were concerned about was that it was eroding the emotional ties between people, the very reason that you would be working. The very reason that you would partner with somebody was also being undermined by this larger economic change.

BRIAN: And what is today’s equivalent of hair art?

HELEN SHOEMAKER: If you’ve ever been at a grocery store or a convenience store and the person who checks you out has a row of photo buttons and they are their grandchildren or their children, you are seeing the same phenomena.

BRIAN: Fascinating. Yeah, fascinating.

HELEN SHOEMAKER: So at our Wal-Mart when I get checked out, I’ll sometimes have a clerk who will have three or four of these photograph buttons.

BRIAN: Sure, sure.

HELEN SHOEMAKER: And what she’s telling me without having to say it is I am a lot more than this job, because I have emotional relationships and responsibilities.

BRIAN: How long did you work on your book about hair art?

HELEN SHOEMAKER: 10 years or so. I lived with the project.

BRIAN: OK, so when you tell people you examine lots of hair art, what was their reaction?

HELEN SHOEMAKER: Most people asked if it had bugs.

[LAUGHING]

That was by far the most– you know, like, did I see a lot of bugs? You know. It was just hair.

BRIAN: Thank you so much for joining us on BackStory today.

HELEN SHOEMAKER: Thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: Helen Shoemaker is a historian at Miami University and the author of Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hair Work in America.

A Bit of Hair Worth Quite a Bit

Brian talks with John Reznikoff, a historical artifact dealer with the largest collection of celebrity hair, about some memorable locks in his collection.

Music:

Wild Ones by Jahzzar

celebrity; collection; hair

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

JOANNE: We just heard Helen Shoemaker describe how 19th century Americans treasured hair, making art or even sending their locks as a token of love or friendship. As a result, there is a lot of famous hair floating around out there. And even today, celebrity hair is a lucrative niche market, a market that collector John Reznikoff knows how to navigate.

JOHN REZNIKOFF: I own the record for the largest collection of historical and celebrity hair locks.

BRIAN: When we called up Reznikoff, he told us that his job is a little like the document scavenging movie, National Treasure.

JOHN REZNIKOFF: Similar to Nicolas Cage, only I don’t steal the Declaration of Independence, I buy it. So that’s what I do.

BRIAN: Through his collection, Reznikoff helped authenticate a clump of Elvis’s hair from his famous army haircut you heard about earlier. It sold for $15,000 in 2009. But that’s not the only relic from the King in Reznikoff’s collection.

JOHN REZNIKOFF: I have several different samples, but one of the samples I have is from his hairdresser, one of his hairdressers.

BRIAN: Is that the most famous bit of hair or bits of hair that you have in your collection?

JOHN REZNIKOFF: Well, I mean, it depends. I mean, if you’re an Elvis fan it is, but if you could care less about Elvis, I think there are other locks of hair that I have that are far more important historically and more desirable. For instance, I have the Lincoln lock of hair that was removed the night of the assassination to clear the wound.

BRIAN: Wow.

JOHN REZNIKOFF: Yes.

BRIAN: What is the brief history of that lock of hair? How did it move from Lincoln’s head to your collection?

JOHN REZNIKOFF: Well, it’s interesting, and we have reams of documentation, but the surgeon that night was Charles Taft. And that surgeon passed on the hair to his son who sold it to a civil war general. Apparently also, several strands of that hair were purchased by Lincoln’s assistant, Secretary John Hay, who put it in a ring, and the night of Teddy Roosevelt’s inauguration presented that ring with hair in it to Teddy Roosevelt as a token of his esteem.

BRIAN: How did Roosevelt react to that?

JOHN REZNIKOFF: Well, I don’t know. I wasn’t there, but.

[LAUGHING]

But I’ll tell you that this particular lock of hair, it’s probably my most valuable lock. And I’d say it’s somewhere between a 1/2 and 3/4 of a million dollars.

BRIAN: Wow. Wow. You know, I’m a host of a pretty popular podcast, should I sign a non-disclosure agreement with my barber?

JOHN REZNIKOFF: You know it’s– Again, an internet search will show how I was involved with buying Neil Armstrong’s hair when he was alive. It came from his barber, and he went crazy, absolutely crazy, and threatened to sue and it became kind of a little bit of a nightmare, but he never got his hair back. And those types of things are not unfathomable that it could happen.

BRIAN: So how long have you been collecting hair all together?

JOHN REZNIKOFF: I’m going to say about 25 years.

BRIAN: Has it changed the way you think about hair?

JOHN REZNIKOFF: It hasn’t changed how I think about hair, but the advances in DNA have really conceptually changed the way I think about the collection, because it’s just a matter of time until we get to a point where there is an accurate test by the hair that we have. And then you start thinking about that scientists are trying to decode what sickness John F Kennedy had or all these types of things that could be done with the DNA that exists in this collection that I have. And in essence, what I have is a card catalog of the DNA of many of the most famous people in history.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: John Reznikoff is founder of University Archives, which deals in historical artifacts.

Common Strands

Brian, Joanne, and Nathan mull over the stories we heard on this episode, and ask: what does our hair tell us about ourselves?

Music:

vibe tribe by Ketsa

Sometimes by Jahzzar

schmaltz by Jahzzar

hair

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

JOANNE: Over the past weeks, our listeners have been sending us stories that tell the meaning behind their hair. Here are a few more of those voices.

DIANA HARPER: This is Diana. It’s hard to summarize the entire weight of something like having dreadlocks, but starting dreadlocks when I was 17 in a very white and rural part of America was the first true action of bodily autonomy that I engaged in. And it was something that allowed me to claim blackness as a mixed-race person in a way that wasn’t available to me otherwise. Now, they’re just part of who I am. They also continue to represent agency and autonomy, and I love them for it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DEBBIE SELIGSON: Hi, my name is Debbie Seligson, and I’ve had a purple streak in my hair for about seven years. I didn’t know how it would go over, but I’ve even testified in front of a congressional committee with my purple hair. I never really loved my own curly hair until I added the purple. It really has become my brand.

TJ GREGORY: Hey, this is TJ from Virginia with my facial hair story. I had wanted a beard for a while. Unfortunately, I was riding out my time on a contract with some pretty strict rules about that, to the point I was supposed to be shaving even on my time away from work. Nevertheless, I skipped it enough on weekends and leave to get a glimpse of how I’d look, and I liked it.

Anyway, when I finally separated from the service and moved on to grad school, I think it got to about eight months of growth before trimming back. It was bliss. My fellow redheads out there will understand this. Now, instead of being the guy who looks like Opie, Axl Rose, Archie, et cetera, I’m the guy with the beard. I’m OK with that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

PETER ONUF: Hello. My name’s Peter Onuf, retiree, former history professor, and before that, a journalist. And it was when I was a journalist that hair was a big thing. We’re talking about 1969. It was a hot button issue, and I had a lot of it. I was working on the New Britain Herald in New Britain, Connecticut, but I never planned to stay there, because I was a young man with great ambitions. But before I went, I was going to hitchhike across the country, I recognized the need to cut my hair in order to get rides. And the paper decided to cover my haircut, and so a colleague of mine came to the barbershop and watched me get my haircut.

There’s a picture of me and it was written up as an item in the news. Onuf gets his hair cut. What a magnificent moment. Can you imagine that now? Well, being a trimmer, as they say in the business, I let it be trimmed and, well, I’ve been fairly respectable ever since. And now don’t need to much anymore because it’s getting thinner and thinner, big bald spots, and that’s all there is.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOANNE: Those are the voices of Diana Harper, Debbie Seligson, TJ Gregory, and for all of you who have missed him lately, BackStory’s founding host Peter Onuf. Thanks to all the listeners who reached out with their stories. I’ll be chatting with Peter on next week’s show as we celebrate our 200th episode.

BRIAN: Nathan, Joanne, I did want to come back to one of our listeners’ comments from a few minutes ago. Diana talked about growing out dreadlocks and the way that gave her a sense of bodily autonomy. And to me, that kind of tied one of the central themes of the show together, and that’s the sense that hair is something that can represent us in our real selves, like it’s an authentic representation of us, at least when we get it right.

JOANNE: Well, right, sometimes. Let’s talk a little bit about early America, because of course, I think in most people’s minds when they think about early America, what do they think about? They think about wigs, right, guys running around in wigs. And the fact of the matter is that’s, again, in a sense in league with everything else that we’re talking about in this show. Not to be taken for granted, because although we see them as normal for early America, the fact of the matter is that, go way back into the 17th century and some people really thought that wigs were upsetting the natural order of things. You know, that they were making–

BRIAN: Oh, come on.

JOANNE: Well, you know, they made men maybe look like women. They made old people look young. Somehow or other in a wig, you’re hiding something or you’re pretending to be something that you’re not. It was upsetting categories, and just for that reason, was upsetting to some people. Now, of course really the larger point here is that autonomy and authenticity maybe are in the eye of the beholder.

NATHAN: Right. You know, something else that I thought was so powerful about the callers’ remarks, Diana’s, is that as she’s describing her choice to wear dreadlocks in, say, middle America, she’s actually making a claim not just for autonomy but for community, right? I mean she’s actually attempting to claim an identity that gives her a certain kind of collective meaning and I think that’s really powerful. And again, if you talk about gentlemen’s wigs in the colonial era, I mean, so much of the power of the wig was to locate somebody within a social stratum that had, again, peers, had power associated with that particular class of society.

And if you think about the meaning of hair across the 20th century, it’s clearly about marking you as belonging to a particular kind of collective, whether that be afros in the black power period, conks in the 1940s, or something else in an earlier era. I mean, I think it’s actually pretty profound to think about hair as something that’s not just about marking authenticity or kind of a quote unquote “natural”, but really about an active self-fashioning as a kind of expression that’s both individualized, certainly, but also very collective in its meaning.

BRIAN: And Nathan, if I understand you correctly, you’re saying that in Diana’s case, that community transcends her immediate physical community most likely.

NATHAN: Absolutely. And it connects her to Ethiopia or it connects her back to the Bible, right? In the case of dreadlocks, and the Nazarenes going way back to even before colonial America in this case, right?

JOANNE: You know, I will confess that when I learned that we were doing a show about hair, I thought this was going to be a rather light episode, meaning, la, la, la, we’re going to tell some good stories, but in this case, what Nathan, what you just said about hair being a way to claim community, and I think if you bind that up with some of what we heard– Oh, that was a pun. I didn’t even intend. With some of the callers and the obvious deep meaning that their hair has for them. Both of those things, I didn’t expect to find those in this show and I find both of those things really fascinating.

NATHAN: I guess it’s proof positive yet again that sometimes the most kind of an innocuous or seemingly harmless aspects of American culture can really be full of great meaning.

JOANNE: And contain the most of our humanity.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

That’s going to do it for today, but you could keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about American history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at BackStory Radio and if you like the show, feel free to review it in Apple Podcasts. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

NATHAN: This episode of BackStory was produced by Andrew Parsons, Bridget McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Milner is our technical director, Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Joey Thompson is our researcher.

JOANNE: Additional help came from Emma Greg, Courtney Sponya, and Robin Blue.

NATHAN: Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music came from Podington Bear, Ketza, and Jizar. And as always, thanks to the Johns Hopkins University Studio in Baltimore.

BRIAN: BackStory’s produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. We’re a proud member of the Panoply Podcast Network. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the provost’s office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of history at the University of Virginia and the Dorothy Compton professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is Professor of the humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.