A great obscure morality tale novel is Salt, by Charles Norris, brother of Frank who wrote McTeague.
The protagonist, from upper class New England stock, gets kicked out of college for cheating. At the same time, his mother dies, and, instead getting the substantial inheritance he had expected, he learns that she has died broke and hasn’t left him any money.
So he gets a job in an office, and he naturally feels he is too good for it, and all the other clerks are below his station. In particular, he scornfully considers their haircuts…shaven at the back as if around a bowl on the head. But that’s how most men wore their hair up through the early 1960s, and now many do again, since short hair has come back into fashion.
How did upper class males wear their hair circa 1910? Obviously, they didn’t wear super-long hair like Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies, but did they wear it a little long in the back and around the ears?
I"m having a hard time putting the passage in Salt into context then. The examples you showed me are not what I would remotely call long.
Maybe it was a college fad back then. Speaking of which, I’ve heard of some doozies which it appears only the laissez-faire attitudes of the 1960s cured us of. Apparently during the 1930s it was common for each class (year) to have its own customs that everyone had to follow, or tried to follow. At some point during the 1930s, at Berkeley, only guys of a particular class–I think it was juniors–were “allowed” to wear corduroy pants. The same pair. the whole year. Without washing them. At the end of the year they would practically stand up by themselves. And to think some of these very same men, years later, might have despised “dirty” hippies!
Are you sure that the difference he sees between himself and others is that he has long hair and they have short? I see it as him having a decent haircut, while they had bowl-cuts, which are cheap and can be done at home - I’m thinking of Moe, of the Three Stooges, haircut. I don’t know that I’ve picked up the same sentiment here, but I remember growing up in Russia that it was considered a sort of plebeian haircut, one worn by peasants and such who would literally put a bowl/pot on their head and have someone cut off everything that peaked through.
The really short haircuts did not come into fashion until the 1930s. Although they generally wore pomade, which held it in place, so it still looked a lot shorter than it actually was.
Watch old movies from the 19teens through the early 1930s. Look for scenes where a character gets his hair mussed. You will see locks of hair far longer than my dad (WW2 vet) would ever have allowed.
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