– contributed by Lizette R. Barton, reference archivist & facial hair aficionado.
Movember is a charitable organization that raises money and awareness for men’s health issues including prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and mental health and suicide prevention. One way they raise money is by encouraging men to enlist donations from friends and families as they grow moustaches throughout the month of November. It’s like a walkathon or a telethon. It’s a facial-hair-athon.
The Movember Foundation isn’t supporting this post or anything. But it’s a good reason as any to highlight some of the truly majestic moustaches from psychology’s history. Here are a few of my personal favorites.
Alfred Binet. The O.G. of intelligence testing. Check out that twirly moustache. I bet it has an intelligence quotient of at least 140.
Genius moustache with near-genius accompanying beard!
Wikipedia tells me Floyd H. Allport, “…played a key role in the creation of social psychology as a legitimate field of behavioral science.” Whoa. Serious stuff from a serious ‘stache.
This individualistic moustache is a social force all its own
Check out Raymond Dodge’s moustache. Even that gigantic model brain on his Wesleyan University desk looks tiny in comparison.
This is where I tell you Dodge was the mentor of my historical boyfriend Walter R. Miles. Miles was clean-shaven. I won’t hold that against him.
Speaking of Raymond Dodge, take a look at all the moustaches in his 1896 class at the University of Halle.
Old school moustaches. And plenty of them.
And more new school – check out the amazing goatees on these two 1979-1980 Nassau County Psychological Association executive board members.
Goatee AND pinstripes? Get outta here!
And as long as we’re kickin’ it new school here is my good pal and CCHP friend and board member Andrew Winston rockin’ his 1990 moustache at the annual Cheiron meeting at Westfield State College.
I’ve come to the methodological consensus that Andrew’s moustache is tops!
I could go on and on. There are a slew of marvelous moustaches throughout psychology’s history. But I need to wrap up this silly blog and if it has to end then it must end with psychology’s single greatest moustache. And that moustache belongs to Max Wertheimer.
The whole of this moustache is greater than the sum of its parts.
Ok, I lied. I can’t end just yet. We all know that history doesn’t happen in a vacuum, right? Someone is nearly always influenced or mentored by someone or something before them, right? In Max’s case I’m guessing his moustache mentor was his father, Wilhelm Wertheimer.
This one is simply the best.
His eyes are smiling. Hopefully there is a big, toothy grin underneath all that facial hair.