Beard-O-Rama Bonus: The Rise and Fall of the Mustache

One of the interesting folks I spent time with as I researched my book The Battle of Jackson was Robert Jones Burdette, a 17-year-old private in the 47th Illinois—part of Joseph Mower’s “Live Eagle” Brigade. Jackson was Burdette’s first battle. “I called it a battle,” he admitted. “The old soldiers spoke of it as a fight.”[1]

During part of the fight, Burdette’s regiment supported the guns of the 1st Illinois Light Artillery. It was there Burdette saw a bullet kill one of the young gunners. “Fear, before unfelt because unknown, clutched my heart like the hand of death, with the voice of that hissing spiteful bullet,” he admitted. “My very soul was faint.”[2]

Burdette survived the battle and eventually wrote a memoir about his war experiences, The Drums of the 47th, which his second wife, Cora, published following his death in 1914. By that point, Burdette had become a nationally known humorist, and the chance to cash in on the name of her late husband must have surely crossed Cora’s mind. The book is evocative, grounded in a strong humanism that sprang from Burdette’s postwar career as a preacher.

Burdette’s writing chops were honed by a 45-year career that began with newspapers in Peoria, Illinois, and Burlington, Iowa. His “humorous paragraphs and sketches, often tinged with gentle satire” for the Burlington Hawk Eye became widely republished.[3]

By 1876, “The Hawkeye Man” had become so popular that he went on his first lecture tour. His most famous of these talks—and his tie to our Burnside Beard-O-Rama—was “The Rise and Fall of the Mustache.” By one estimate, Burdette delivered the lecture some 3,000 times over thirty years.

The lecture traces the adventures of a boy’s growth to old age, marked first by “the dawning consciousness of [a] grand truth in the human economy. It dawns upon his deepening intelligence with the inherent strength and the unquestioned truth of a new revelation, that man’s upper lip was designed by nature for a mustache pasture.” By essay’s end, “old Time comes round, bringing each year whiter frosts to scatter on the whitening mustache.”[4]

“Old Time” finally caught up to Burdette on November 19, 1914, in Pasadena, California. You can find his full mustache essay beginning on page 102 of Modern Eloquence, Vol. 8: Famous Lectures.

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[1] The Drums of the 47th (Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1914), 49–50.

[2] Burdette, Drums, 52–53.

[3] Modern Eloquence (Vol. 8): Famous Lectures: humorous, inspirational, scientific (New York : Modern Eloquence Corp, 1923), 102.

[4] Eloquence, 112, 130,