The Golden Age of Facial Hair

One of the questions you will get asked when they are checking your thinking and whether you are showing signs of dementia is "Who is the president?" I have heard people give some very wrong answers.  Psychiatrists used to make it harder by asking who the vice president is and/or who the previous president was before that. If you were still going, they would push you back further still. In the 1980s I was doing an admission and the psychiatrist asked the patient who Ford's VP was, then corrected himself. "Never mind that," he laughed. "I don't remember it myself." The three of us thought for a moment, and then I remembered it was Nelson Rockefeller.

I have always liked lists and kill time in meetings by naming European capitals (Quick: Azerbaijan.) or American rivers. So quite naturally, I started to list presidents backwards to see if I could get to the end - er, the beginning.  I kept getting to McKinley and falling apart, even after looking them up repeatedly.  That last quarter of the 19th C just all ran together even though I could pull out their names. I couldn't tell you a damn thing about most of them except that one was president twice, interrupted, and Benjamin Harrison was the grandson of another forgettable president. I tried working from the other end and would start waving my hands ineffectually after Van Buren. So the second quarter of the 19th C was weak as well.  I might have lost track all the way up to Lincoln, but Franklin Pierce was from NH and it was easy to stuff in the one between him and Abe, James Buchanan.

It was gratifying, then, to listen to a history podcast and hear two historians joking about the same problem. They were talking about Reconstruction and the Gilded Age and confessed the presidents ran together for them. They both remembered that all had magnificent mustaches or beards, however, and called it The Golden Age of Facial Hair.  Which it was. (Van Buren remains the all-time #1, however.) Their explanation was intriguing. For the forgettableness, I mean. They didn't offer an explanation about the hair. That period was one in which the corruption was so great, and so widely shared, and the presidents so consistently centrist compromise candidates, that they actually were less distinctive. I feel much better now.

                                                             A president.