PHOTO: A Guide To Presidential Facial Hair

by Verena von Pfetten | 12:06 pm, January 7th, 2011

It’s not every day that you click on a Wikipedia article and think, “Wow! This is genius.” In fact, that never happens. Until today — when we discovered a page on the crowd-sourced, web-based encyclopedia dedicated solely to presidents with facial hair.

Though Wikipedia describes the page as “an orphan” — meaning “few or no other articles link to it” — we think it’s the best page ever made. Besides alerting us to the fact that the last major presidential candidate to have facial hair was Thomas E. Dewey and his moustache in 1948, it opens with this bit of fashion trivia: presidential facial hair was at one point a veritable trend.

The majority of men who have held the office of President of the United States, have been clean shaven, including the Founding Fathers.[1] Between 1860 and 1913, however, all but two presidents wore either beards or mustaches during their tenure in office.

It goes on to note that facial hair is largely considered to have a negative effect on presidential campaigns, which makes us sad. We love beards! And glasses. (Apparently — at least according to a bunch of unverified internet sources — all the US presidents have needed glasses, though not all of them have worn them in public. What gives? Embrace the inner nerd, we say!)

Anyway! Here’s the chart. And please note that Harry Truman’s beard didn’t actually go on vacation — it was just grown during one.