Harry Truman and SPAM, A Porkmoustache Historical Interlude

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.

'stache #29 - takoyaki moustache

Under Emperor Hideyoshi, 16th century Japan had become a pale, colorless land. But in 1598, Tokugawa Ieyasu, who despised Jesus and blandness, took power and ushered in the country's first Cherry Blossom festival in Kyoto and relegated the small Christian population to the dingier, less colorful city of Osaka. The next spring, Jesus lovers began shrinking the Pentateuch into tiny octopus capsules, or takoyaki, that would be worn as moustaches and later unraveled to reveal His Word. Tokugawa bedded down the lippy clandestine revolution in 1616 by outlawing all fish-based moustaches, and the style was thought to be lost forever. Until General Douglas MacArthur, of Little Rock, Arkansas, attempted to revive the octopus-ball style, and Christianity, in 1947, but quickly abandoned the look, having grossly miscalculated the smell of day-old octopus.

Christianity, one should note, also failed to take root, do in large part to Japan's love of Kawaii, or cuteness. The takoyaki 'stache may be worn only on grey or rainy days. This Arkansas native stached this octopus ball at Otafuku on East 9th Street in Manhattan.