Notably, this is when we witness the rise of facial hair as an essential accouterment of the capitalist class. Jay Gould, the most feared financier of the era, grew a beard that concealed most of his face, making an already inscrutable countenance even more difficult to read. Other robber barons followed suit.

These men didn’t view themselves as conformists, much less corporate drones, but as rugged individualists who single-handedly built vast business empires. Their beards became part of their larger-than-life brand. Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, Collis P. Huntington, William Henry Vanderbilt and almost every other member of the vilified capitalist class sported extravagant facial hair.

But nothing lasts forever. From the 1870s onward, as the workers’ rebellion revived internationally, a new wave of labor radicals sported long, unruly beards. In the popular press, as the conflict between labor and capital turned increasingly violent in the 1880s, facial hair became a shorthand for the forcible resistance to capitalism. Illustrated newspapers covering the Haymarket bombing in 1886 in Chicago showed radicals wearing unkempt, tangled beards.

Cartoonists soon began depicting labor, and strikers in particular, as modern-day Samsons, pulling down the columns of an orderly society, killing their capitalist adversaries and themselves in the process. One barber quoted by this newspaper around the turn of the century put the matter bluntly, when describing various “cranks” and radicals: “They carry their banners on their faces, proclaiming them Populists or Anarchists, or some other sort of ists.”

Most “respectable” men, including capitalists, ran from this image. While the invention of the safety razor by King C. Gillette in 1901 is often blamed for the demise of the beard, businessmen (and labor leaders eager to avoid the taint of radicalism) had already gone for a neatly trimmed mustache before going entirely cleanshaven by the dawn of the new century. The changing fashion may also have reflected a shift away from the untrammeled, individualistic capitalism of the Gilded Age to something more corporate, faceless — and beardless.

In succeeding decades, beards and mustaches all but disappeared. The organization man of 20th-century America was cast as cleanshaven, his individuality subsumed into a larger, corporate identity. Iconic critics of capitalism — Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh — kept alive the identification of facial hair with leftist politics.

But with the end of the Cold War and the defeat of Communism, the groundwork for a scruffy capitalism was laid. In the semiotics of capital today, whiskers no longer code as a threat. With free market ideology essentially unopposed by any major power and energized by the entrepreneurial swagger of the technology world, beards are back in business.