JD Vance could break nearly 100-year-old record — with his facial hair. What to know

JD Vance — and his beard — are just a hair’s breadth away from making history.

If he’s elected in November alongside former President Donald Trump, he would bring facial hair back to the White House after a long hiatus.

For almost 100 years, no president or vice president has sported much more than a five-o’clock shadow while in office, according to historians.

“The clean-shaven look has been dominant since very early in the 20th century,” Thomas Balcerski, a presidential historian at Eastern Connecticut State University, told McClatchy News.

History of beards in the White House

“The last president to have a beard was Benjamin Harrison way back in 1889-1893,” Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University, told McClatchy News.

After him, Harry Truman briefly grew a beard while on vacation following his election in 1948, but he shaved it before entering the White House, Kazin said.

“So, it doesn’t really count,” Balcerski said.

The last president to have any sort of facial hair at all was William Taft — known for his hallmark mustache — who served from 1909 to 1913, Balcerski said.

And the most recent vice president with facial hair was Charles Curtis, who served under Herbert Hoover from 1929 to 1933, Kazin said.

In contrast, during much of the 19th century, facial hair was common for politicians.

Abraham Lincoln started the trend of presidents having beards, Balcerski said.

He reportedly embraced the bewhiskered look after receiving a letter from an 11-year-old girl, in which she argued that facial hair could help boost his chances of winning the 1860 election.

Many of the presidents that followed Lincoln throughout the Reconstruction Era, including Ulysses Grant and James Garfield, continued to wear beards.

Facial hair was viewed as “a sign of authority, maturity, manhood and patriarchy,” Balcerski added.

But, around the turn of the century, the clean-shaven look quickly came in vogue — for complicated reasons, Kazin said.

One of them was that facial hair came to be seen as unhealthy in an era when public hygiene started to take on greater importance, Balcerski said.

During this time, military regulations began prohibiting beards as well as long hair, he added.

“Mustaches have lingered longer as sort of genteel expressions of facial hair, but even the mustache, after World War II, went bye bye,” Balcerski said.

Now, with Vance — the first millennial on a Republican or Democratic ticket — things could be changing.

“Societal standards are changing,” Balcerski said. “I don’t think we’re going back to the era of the 19th century. I think Vance right now is an outlier, but he may set a trend.”