George Washington’s Hair: How Early Americans Remembered Their Founders by Keith Beutler

Abstract

Beutler’s Washington’s Hair opens with a provocative question: “Did early Americans have beliefs about the nature of memory itself that, by giving shape to their efforts to remember their nation’s birth, affected foundational patriotic American memory and identity? (ix).” Beutler answers a resounding “yes” in five brisk chapters that chart how ideas about memory—especially a turn toward materialist and physical forms of memory—shaped Americans’ notions of patriotism. Beutler convincingly argues that an array of scientific, philosophical, and religious ideas about the very nature of memory shaped how Americans used physical objects to open up possibilities for more “democratic” participation in the Revolutionary commemorations that were so important to national political and cultural life.Beutler maintains that “in the period between 1790 and 1840 … Americans increasingly embraced reductive materialist views of memory,” influenced by “such ideas as physiognomy, brain localization, and their popular combination as phrenology.” Each chapter of his book is organized around case studies of individuals who used memory objects tied to these ideas to connect themselves to the founders and to the American nation in various ways (4). In Part I, Beutler uses the first two chapters—about Charles Willson Peale and Jeremy Belknap—to show how politicized memory in the 1790s led to the founding of institutional repositories of cultural power such as museums and historical societies. Part II shows how less powerful individuals—Black Revolutionary veterans, evangelicals, and female educators—used Revolutionary relics to relate to the founders and therefore to include themselves in the national narrative between the 1820s and 1840s. Beutler argues that cultural elites used memory objects to reinforce their power by connecting to the Revolutionary past and that some “outsider” figures, like Black veteran Hamet Achmet, used them to command social respect. Both groups also used George Washington’s hair and other relics of the founders, at times, to raise money.Throughout the book, Beutler traces how locks of Washington’s hair functioned as physical objects imbuing their owners with personal and political meanings and bonding them to the founding memory at the heart of the American nation. Washington’s hair is a central organizing theme, but Butler’s exploration of materialist memory goes beyond hair to include furniture, portraits, veterans’ bodies, historical sites, and other mementos that connected early Americans to the Revolutionary past. Butler’s extended epilogue traces the “continuing career of Washington’s tresses” from the 1840s to the present day by charting how Washington’s hair was deployed as a memory device in everything from World’s Fairs to the Oval Office (165).Some readers may be left wishing that Beutler had focused even more tightly on the topic of Washington’s hair, so vividly invoked in the book’s title and introduction, in his quest to track Washington’s hair in archives throughout the country. But his interesting and provocative book is more wide-ranging than that. It adds a key component to the ongoing scholarly conversation about Revolutionary memory by examining what historical actors themselves thought about memory and material culture. Steeped in interdisciplinary thought and method, Beutler deftly combines objects, manuscripts, and print sources to say something new about the well-examined topic of how and why early Americans considered their ties to Revolutionary heroes meaningful. At times, his writing relies too much on jargon, but, overall, he manages to incorporate insights from a startling number of academic fields while still engaging with vivid narrative detail. At times he admits that his is a particular “reading” of the primary sources, but it is a reading that should thoroughly convince even the most empirically minded historian that ideas about material memory and objects were linked in the cultural practices and politics of many early Americans. Beutler is particularly insightful about the roles of race, gender, and religion in establishing early nineteenth-century hierarchies that anyone willing and able to connect to the memory of Washington’s embodied greatness could still deftly challenge.