Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor,

the National Endowment for the Humanities,

the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation,

and the Arthur Vining Davis foundations.

From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines.

I'm Brian Ballow. I'm Nathan Connolly.

And I'm Joanne Freeman. On backstory,

Brian, Nathan, our colleague Ed Ayers and I, all historians,

take a topic and explore it through three centuries of American history.

Today, Nathan, Brian and I are going to tackle the subject of hair.

And we're going to start in 1958.

At that time, all young single men were at risk of being drafted into the US Army,

but there was one man whose conscription caused a national uproar.

Hundreds of concerned citizens even wrote letters to President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Historian Joseph Thompson says that many of them pleaded the same case.

This is Thompson reading from one of those letters.

I really don't see why you have to send him in the army at all,

but we beg you, please, please don't give him a GI haircut.

Oh, please, please don't. If you do, we will just about die.

And they sign the letter Elvis Presley Lovers.

That's right. The matter at hand,

...