The last U.S. President with facial hair was William Howard Taft.
On Inauguration Day in 1913, mustachioed President William Howard Taft passed the presidential baton to clean-shaven Woodrow Wilson. What Taft couldn’t have known at the time was that his departure began a long streak of clean-shaven faces occupying the Oval Office.
In fact, out of the 46 Presidents in U.S. history so far, only 13 have had any facial hair whatsoever. Although sixth President John Quincy Adams, eighth President Martin Van Buren, and 12th President Zachary Taylor sported impressive mutton chops, the first serious presidential facial fuzz belonged to 16th President Abraham Lincoln — thanks to an 11-year-old girl whose 1860 letter convinced him to grow out his whiskers. After Lincoln, eight of the next 10 Presidents sported some sort of facial hair.
The mid-to-late 19th century saw an explosion of beard-wearing in both Europe and America. Whether it was scientists such as Charles Darwin or poets like Walt Whitman, many influential men sported impressive beards, mustaches, or newly popular sideburns. The reasons for this sudden popularity are as varied as the styles of facial hair themselves: Scholars have argued that it might have been a reaction to first-wave feminism, or simply reflected the rise of romantic (or naturalistic) thought. In the early 20th century, facial hair suffered some serious PR issues as medical experts began to see it as unhygienic, and the introduction of the disposable razor in 1901 encouraged its demise. Although facial hair’s cultural fortunes have ebbed and flowed in the ensuing century, a fuzzy face has yet to return to the Oval Office.
The nation’s 27th President, William Howard Taft (1909 to 1913), was the heaviest chief executive to ever sit in the Oval Office. For more than a century, a famous myth has posited that Taft got stuck in the bathtub one night when he was bathing at the Executive Mansion. Although a colorful anecdote, the tale is completely false. It is true that a few weeks after Taft was elected, a New York company crafted a 7-foot-long, 41-inch-wide porcelain tub for the White House, capable of holding up to four averaged-sized men comfortably. The bathtub was installed on a warship carrying Taft to inspect the Panama Canal, and similar tubs were installed in the White House, onboard the presidential yacht, and inside Taft’s brother’s summer home in Texas. But Taft never got stuck in this tub, or any other sort of porcelain prison. Taft is associated with at least one bathroom-related mishap, however: In July 1915, he reportedly miscalculated the liquid displacement of a hotel tub in Cape May, New Jersey, and water soaked through the ceiling of the downstairs dining room below. According to The New York Times, when Taft boarded a train the morning after the “deluge,” he glanced at the Atlantic Ocean and said: “I’ll get a piece of that fenced in some day, and then when I venture in there won’t be any overflow.”
