Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 210, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 September 1911 — HAPPENINGS IN THE CITIES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

HAPPENINGS IN THE CITIES

Barbers Denounce the Safety Razors

ST. PAUL, MINN. —Ways and means to deprive the safety razor of its citizen’s right and declare it unconstituticnal, to annihilate it, remove it from the home of every free-born American, and thus bring the barber shop again into its own, furnished one of the subjects for the emotional discussion that took place at the National Barber’s Supply Dealers association convention here. As the insidious influence of the degrading safety razor fired the speakers at the convention to eloquent heights, these points were brought forth: Barber-shops are not so popular as thdy were in the past. The dark man with the beard, instead of permitting himself the ecstasy of a 15-cent shave, attacks himself with the safety, in wild, carefree swoops, which are equally injurious to the life and complexion of the victim and to the profession.

Safety razors promote, efficiency. If allowed to flourish they will eventually • accomplish the ruin of American manhood. Rome’s celebrated slump was due ,to just such introductions as the ornery safety razor. “And,” finished one of the speakers, “after weaning its owner from the refinement of the barber shop, making him minister to the demands of his whiskers across his own threshold, the safety will gradually pall upon the man devoted to it Growing careless, the man will'one day lay open the interior of his face with an unusually negligent swing of the supposed ‘safety’ razor, and what then? The man, being weaned from the barber shop, does not care to return. He is timid —the fault of the safety. He lets his whiskers assume abnormal proportions. He becomes a hotbed for germs.. Therefore, down with the tyranny of the r. s.” It was prophesied that in the short spas of a year all the old adherents of the stubble beards and curved Adam’s apples will ba filling the red plush chairs of the shop. The safety razor, it was allowed, was all right for the mere youths and the trembling hands of the old, but further it had not just cause for existence.