The rise of JD Vance as the GOP vice presidential pick marks the return of the beard to the presidential ticket after 76 years in exile, potentially signposting its resurgent acceptability outside the spaces of old men, counterculture, rural communities and public figures scrabbling their way out of deep, soul-rupturing crises. Al Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election, Paul Ryan, who faded as a 2016 presidential prospect before he could even join the race, and Ted Cruz, who joined the race only to suffer ignominy, all re-emerged some time after their trials with a dark shadow newly cast over their lower face.
To go unshaven in the midst of personal hardship is so ubiquitous in popular media, and perhaps real life, that TV Tropes has a page dedicated to the “Beard of Sorrow.” Sometimes, the association is rooted in the idea that a man brooding over his troubles cannot find the motivation to tend to his hair. But other times in the modern day and in history, men in crisis are recorded to have grown their beards as a conscious act to express their melancholy, project strength or just find some way to reinvent themselves. Unlike Gore, Ryan and Cruz, who made the decision merely in defiance of popular convention, two 16th century popes who sprouted facial hair defied their own predecessors’ canon law banning the use of beards among clergy.
For Pope Julius II, his newfound beard was an appropriate sign of mourning to the loss of Bologna and other Papal territories to the Republic of Venice, his sworn enemy. In 1508, he formed a coalition of European powers, the League of Cambrai, setting them upon the Venetians and then taking the field himself. The confrontation that ensued marked an escalation of the so-called Italian Wars that ravaged the peninsula for nearly 70 years, and in 1527, another pope, Clement VII, found himself on the wrong side of a new conflict against the Holy Roman Emperor.
The Emperor’s unpaid German and Spanish troops marched on Rome, subjecting the city and its population to weeks of murder, rape, pillage and destruction, not even leaving nuns and churches untouched. The smooth-faced pontiff, mourning Rome's destruction and now at the mercy of the Emperor who destroyed it, ceased shaving as a sign of contrition and penance for sins that surely were the cause of God's punishment. In 1531, he reversed the ban on priests growing beards in hopes that they would follow suit.
While Clement may have grown a beard of penitence, other churchmen responded to this crisis by growing beards as a representation of their manly strength and what they hoped would be a recovery of Church authority. Italian humanist Piero Valeriano praised both approaches in "Pro Sacerdotum Barbis" ("In Support of Beards for the Clergy"), but emphasized in particular the urgent need for men of God to replace timid and uninspiring beardlessness with more assertive qualities. It behooves men to wear long beards, Valeriano wrote, for "chiefly by that token (as I have often said) the vigorous strength of manhood is discerned from the tenderness of women."
That same call may be shaping the resurgence of beards in the United States after a long phase in which they were seen as unkempt and unprofessional. “What we’ve seen, certainly within the last probably 15 years or so, has been a return to more of that kind of rougher, more masculine kind of appearance,” master barber Matty Conrad told The Washington Post in its article about Vance breaking the hairy ceiling.
The inner beard makes way for self-expression
In some geographical and cultural contexts, history can indeed be divided into phases based on the appearance and disappearance of beards. The answer for what shaped its uneven journey can perhaps be explained by Judith Butler, who wrote the founding texts for modern gender and queer theory. According to Butler, normative society imposes behaviors and expressions that define what is a man or woman to the point where our perception of even corporeal sexual differences is shaped by gendered conventions. As such, facial hair is part of a performance that not only confers its wearer with manly qualities, but also defines him as a man.
Some biological theories from ancient to early modern times seem to join gendered performance in following the lead of such views, with scholars until at least the 17th century positing that beards grew on the faces of men due to heat and moisture generated by the production of semen in the genitals. Thus, Aristotle suggested, the fullest beards were the preserve of men with “strong sexual passions,” though they would also go bald more quickly if they had too much sex.
If the human face and the hair that sprouts from it represents an index of manliness, cultural values did not always welcome the degree of manliness exuded by beards. Even Abbott Burchard, who gave beards a rave review in his 1160 treatise "Apologia de Barbis" ("Explanation of Beards"), conformed to the medieval expectation that priests and monks remain clean-shaven, for the beard that gave worldly magnificence to secular princes was not suitable for men of God who sought to expunge all that was mundane from their feelings and desires. Instead, it sufficed that they possess an "inner beard," the strength and insight that grows within a man and is represented, but not necessarily embodied, by the beard that grows on his surface.
There were times when most secular princes also submitted to the razor, sometimes at the behest of their clergy. Moral discipline, humble virtue and indeed, a trust resting solely on the “inner beard” need not have applied only to priests and monks, but also to kings like Louis IX of France, whose piety, temperance, justice and zeal against heathens and heretics earned him the distinction of sainthood. Two-and-a-half centuries later, Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France, the magnificent, capricious and ruthless Renaissance princes of the early 16th century, bore no such compunction. The two kings swore to grow out their beards in advance of meeting each other at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, an aptly named 1520 diplomatic summit that provided an opportunity for both of them to outdo one another in courtly splendor and martial prowess. Despite the protestations of their disgusted wives, they eventually met amidst the sea of pavilions (and one fake wooden palace), their faces in full bloom.
Even after the meeting, Henry and Francis kept their beards, as portraits of the two kings can attest. By 1540, nearly every Western European man over the age of 20 was represented in art with facial hair. Portrait galleries with art from the time period are among the most lopsided in its favor. In ”The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England,” historian Will Fisher counts that 55 of 60 portraits of men in London’s Tate Gallery exhibition “Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530-1630” display facial hair in one form or another.
Scholars have suggested several mutually compatible theories to explain why manliness began to once again outweigh self-discipline and reserve as a value of expression, and why that manifested itself in the form of facial growth after more than a century of self-imposed drought. One popular view pins its reemergence to an emphasis on Renaissance humanism that favored the expression of human potential over man’s need to control their propensity to worldly sin and the beards that tempted them, but more academic theories point to external factors. In “The New World and the Changing Face of Europe,” Elliott Horowitz advances the idea that European men sought to distance themselves from the heathen other, which in medieval times was associated with typically bearded Jews and Turks. With the encounter of the New World, however, imagery of the other reformed around the indigenous people there, who did not grow beards and were probably repulsed by the appearance of unshaven Europeans rather than impressed by their masculinity, as some of the latter assumed.
Other historians characterize the growth of beards in some contexts as a response to insecurities over manhood and power, with Valeriano supporting this argument with his exhortation for priests to refrain from shaving in order to embody the post-1527 reassertion of Church authority. In the secular realm, Douglas Blow posits in “On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy” that a similar desire took hold over urbane Italians reduced to impotence in the face of repeated invasions and occupations by foreign powers like France and Spain from 1494 onwards. The next best thing to effectively wielding the instruments of war, then, was for men to hide their apparent weakness by bearing that which symbolized masculine prowess in war and other domains. Facial hair was a “natural Ensign of Manhood,” said 17th century English natural philosopher John Bulwer (as cited by Fisher), referring to what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a military or naval standard.”
Courtly men were evidently conscious of taking their beard-grooming too far, lest they resemble fussy women rather than men playing at battle. Baldassare Castiglione, the prototypical (bearded) Italian gentleman of his age, wrote in "Il Cortigiano" (“The Book of the Courtier”), through the character Federico Fregoso, that a courtier ought “to be neat and dainty in his attire, and observe a certain modern elegance, yet not in a feminine or vain fashion . . . nor would I have him more careful of one thing than another, like many we see, who take such pains with their hair that they forget the rest.” Castiglione’s relatively subtle admonition was not shared by the anonymous author of the 1620 English pamphlet "The Womanish Man,” who sneers in mockingly martial language that “were it not for that little fantastical sharp-pointed dagger that hangs” on the chins of men who spend too much time curating their facial hair, or the “cross-hilt which guards their upper lip, hardly would there be any difference between fair Mistress and the foolish Servant.”
Bearded women and gendered expectations
Conversely, a woman with facial hair was seen by some people not as masculine or unfeminine, but as an abomination, who, according to Bulwer, “must be greeted with stones from a distance.” The passage not only suggests violence to enforce normative ideas of gender, but also taps into the imagery of “stones” being thrown at her as a suitable punishment for the imagined transgression of bearing the kind of stones (read: testicles) reserved for men. Other less hostile sources viewed them more as a curious, even wondrous phenomenon. The most striking example of this may be Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera’s 1631 portrait of a lusciously bearded Magdalena Ventura, whom he called “A Great Wonder of Nature.” Ventura, standing confidently at the center of the painting and staring directly at the viewer, possesses a beard surpassing that of her husband, who appears meekly behind her. But her femininity also leaves a strong imprint on the exposed breast feeding the child in her arms and the dress she wears, as if to confirm that she is, indeed, above all else still a woman and mother regardless of her beard.
The view that beards on women were a rare exception sometimes reinforced the stature of those women, who in the case of Saint Wilgefortis was said to receive her hair as a miraculous gift from God, escaping a forced marriage to a heathen only to then be crucified by her father in imitation of Christ. When praising women for embodying the qualities of men, beards were interchangeable with other male body parts as descriptive devices, even if such women did not actually possess them. One story about the 6th century Ostrogothic queen Amalasuintha, whom the Roman historian Procopius extolled as such a wise and courageous ruler that she was essentially a “female man,” foreshadows her violent death: “In the marketplace there was an image of her father Theoderic, and when the stones about his genitals fell to the ground, Amalasuintha passed from the world.” Indeed, Procopius wrote that Amalasuintha would not meekly give way to a coup as “a woman would,” and paid with her life.
And yet, in one form or another, bearded women continued to exist in Western society’s eyes as a freakish aberration to be gawked at in 19th century carnivals and exhibitions. Such attitudes were very different from conceptions of appearance in Qajar Iran during that same century, which held that women and young men with a light mist of hair above their lips, natural or evoked by mascara, represented the apex of beauty. According to Afsaneh Najmabadi in “Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards,” the introduction of heteronormative standards from globally dominant Europe ensured that a woman’s mustache, which made them look like Europe's idea of a man, was by 1920 "in danger of becoming a sign of pastness, of out-of-dateness and was beginning to mark the figure against which Iranian modern woman was defining herself, the so-called traditional old-fashioned woman."
In a modern environment where social codes are forcing physical attributes into strict, gendered categories, the sex of those assigned female at birth, such as Olympian boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, is now being called into question if they do not correspond to a traditionally feminine appearance or personality. A woman who appears feminine and a man who appears masculine is still comforting to many, if not most people, and the reemergence of beards on men could further underscore that difference. Even the famously beard-phobic Donald Trump ended up picking the only bearded running mate prospect, praising Vance as an Abraham Lincoln lookalike, though the 16th president, unlike Vance, spurned the mustache and only grew a beard on his chin.
The two men both share an embrace of facial hair that occurred later in their careers, with Lincoln growing his beard out after being elected president, allegedly persuaded by a young supporter, while Vance grew his beard around the time he ran for U.S. Senate in 2022, years after he published “Hillbilly Elegy.” Lincoln followed existing widespread trends; Vance, on the other hand, bears facial hair when it is still rare among the political class, who in the last century have largely conformed to views that associate beardlessness with crisp professionalism. But crisp professionals are not necessarily the kind of politicians that many Americans on the left and right are looking for in the throes of material hardship, profound alienation and rage against those who have profited from their loss. The rugged everyman, on the other hand, knows their suffering because he's closer to their station in life.
While Vance has portrayed himself as a working man’s candidate, his selective criticism of corporate power is at best a secondary act in a more encompassing tirade against 21st-century modernity, whose primary sin has been to dismantle nuclear families supported by a child-rearing woman and make men miserable in the process. In that sense, Vance’s beard meets the moment of his party – one that, like some of its 16th century forebears, seeks to project toughness, aggression and grievance in an age where Republicans perceive masculinity as an endangered value. It doesn't matter that Vance is friends with largely beardless Silicon Valley billionaires or provided legal representation to big pharmaceutical companies that fueled much of the opioid crisis that Republicans blame on immigrants – his performance has persuaded his supporters that he is the rugged everyman, and the beard is one of his most important props.
