President Harry S Truman, best remembered for his folksy phrases like “The spam stops here” and “If you can’t stand the heat, you better wear a canned meat,” popularized the spam ‘stache in the final months of World War II, when he stretched the square slab of fleshy pink pork across his own lips in solidarity with the boys at the front who, far from home, were resigned to suffer the indignities of lining their mouths with canned meat byproducts. First a fad among navy men at Pearl Harbor, the spam stache sensation set sail around the globe, and quickly became an enduring symbol of soldierly sacrifice. Truman, the son of a Missouri farmer and livestock dealer, had grown up raising the hogs he 'stached, and was thus surprised to discover his predilection for the strange sweet “meat” that dangled akimbo above his lips. As a haberdasher in his early years, and later in the army, he had sworn that the finest mouthpiece was simply a lipline of bacon, and yet the odd odor of Shoulder of Pork and hAM wafting beneath his nose enticed Truman to revisit his beliefs about the kind of moustache a hardworking American might wear.
Following the war, he busied himself writing up a doctrine about the need to contain communist duck 'staches and advocating the promotion of democratic lip-dos around the world. General MacArthur is credited with the military dictum, "In facial hair, there is no substitute for ham," which is why Truman ultimately had to fire him.
Truman continued to wear spam long after it lost sway with the public in the postwar years, though it enjoyed a brief resurgence on the lips of patriots and paranoids during the red-baiting hearings of the 1950s.
The SPAM moustache is now generally only worn in Guam and Hawaii, where it was recently spotted in a bastardized sushi roll 'stache.
