We resurrect this blog briefly to point you to this important survey at the Smithsonian’s website. Unfortunately, who had the best Civil War whiskers is not an interesting question for us. We are only impressed with outrageousness. And in that category, we must cast our vote for Major General Christopher C. Augur.
It was definitely a really hard decision, though.
Was Lord Lugard really an evil 12-year-old prodigy who glued a fake dimestore mustache to his upper lip as a disguise?
Lord Frederick John Dealtry Lugard was one of the biggest assholes of history, and he had the ‘stache to prove it.
You know those pesky civil wars that kept popping up across Africa in the last 50 years? Like Biafra, Rwanda, Sudan, Congo, etc.? There’s probably no individual in history who played more of a direct role in making them happen.
As the newly appointed High Commissioner of the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria in 1899, the Indian-born Lord Lugard faced a huge challenge. With only a handful of colonial administrators to aid him, he had to enforce Mother Britain’s absolute control over a vast area and a multitude of local people. To do so, he pioneered a new method of government called Indirect Rule.
Indirect Rule worked like this: Lugard reasoned it was impossible and costly to try to directly control the local populace and make them do stuff you needed to enrich the empire, like give up their land, rights to resources, equal protection under the law and participate in communal work (i.e. forced labor) programs. So Lugard chose the most corruptible African political leaders — or, in chief-less societies, created them — and told them that, if they’d accept British suzerainty over major political issues, they could run their chiefdoms and kingdoms as they pleased. The promise of British resources and mighty military back-up meant that the new rulers could govern with an arbitrariness that was previously impossible. Worse, Lugard’s system involved attaching people’s rights and land-ownership to their tribal identity (if you were fuzzy on which tribe you belonged to, British census takers would help figure that out for you).
That meant that if you were, say, a Yoruba speaker who lived in a Fulani-designated area, you suddenly were branded a foreigner and might have had your land or other rights taken away from you. Suddenly one’s ethnicity became extremely important — maybe even important enough to go to war over.
For the British, it was a great way to divide and conquer. Other colonizers, impressed with the Brits’ handy work, adopted similar policies. And the inheritance of that legal framework formed the basis for South African apartheid and postcolonial legal systems and prejudices like those that led to the Rwandan genocide and the war in Darfur, Sudan.
But in implementing the plan, there was just one problem: Lugard apparently resembled a 12 year-old boy with rickets and a sun allergy. How was he to impress upon the chiefs he visited the vast power of the British empire?
He seems to have settled on a long, thick, luxurious mustache that resembled Yosemite Sam’s. And it worked — until just like Bugs Bunny, Africa’s liberators (most did not sport ridiculous facial hair) ran Lugard and his ilk out of town, starting in the 1950s.
Lugard may have been the inspiration for a famous hater of rabbits.
A mustache that would make Geraldo quiver.
You’re in the psych ward of the Auburn Prison in New York state. It’s 1914, and conditions are none too luxurious: there’s a padded cell caked in the bodily fluid stains of yesteryear, and you’re huddled in the corner. A petty thief from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, you’re having a bit of a nervous breakdown due to the bad food, bad company and general chilliness of the building.
In comes Dr. John T. Gerin, prison physician. He walks right up to you, his gold pocket watch chain dangling from his vest, leans over with his hands on his knees and begins screaming incomprehensibly in your face. He’s close enough to you to feel flecks of spittle that — most awfully of all — must pass through the filter of his preposterous ear-to-ear mustache, which is redolent of mustard and creamed corn.
Would that be enough to drive you permanently insane?
If one believes accusations leveled at Gerin in 1914, the scenario is not hard to imagine. According to a New York Times report from that year, George W. Blake, a “special prison investigator” for New York Governor William “Plain Bill” Sulzer, said that Auburn prison had extremely bad conditions, and Gerin was a big part of the problem. Blake charged “that a number of prisoners were driven insane through punishment administered at the institution and that Dr. Gerin was largely responsible for cruel and brutal disciplinary measures.”
Auburn Prison, New York
The State Prison Commission eventually cleared Blake of those charges. But it’s worth noting that New York politics — and its commissions — were incredibly corrupt in those days. In fact, Sulzer was later impeached, and historians believe that it was because he refused to abide by New York City political machine Tammany Hall’s instructions about who to appoint on commissions.
The scant historical data leaves us little evidence to settle the matter besides Gerin’s outrageous Franz Josef mustache. (So named because the Emperor of Austria sported a similar one around the same period — a subject for another chapter.) Our resident psychoanalyst says that Gerin’s Geraldo-embarrasing ‘stache hints at a deep-seated sadism, a fear of expressing feelings and, given the hair style’s namesake, delusions of grandeur.
Enough to posthumously convict a man of the wanton neglect of prisoners? You be the judge.
Facial hair in the news and on the net
Historical Facial Hair 