It has been said that in Hell, there will be nothing but law. Like the Spanish frailes, Marcos also ordered all Filipino men at the onset of the Martial Law in the early 1970s to cut their shoulder-length hair as part of the “taming of their revolutionary spirit with the gentleness of the New Society.”

Boys rushed to the barbers to have their already short hair cut even shorter (white-side wall) after seeing pictures of local male celebrities’ long-hair snopaked in the government-controlled and censored newspapers. This was the “maximum tolerable” haircut and anyone sporting long hair would instantly get a mutilated haircut from the police.

Pictured here is the late Zamboanga Mayor Cesar Climaco who wore his hair long in open defiance over Martial Law. When he was finally gunned down, his white hair reached his waist.

The late American historian William Henry Scott, an anti-Marcos activist who was also jailed during Martial Law, never cut his own hair until he died in 1994 in Manila. The mortician there shaved his beard and gave him a military haircut.

Scott’s adopted sons and daughters in his adopted town of Sagada were horrified. He looked just like he did in the 1950s when he first arrived in Sagada as an Episcopalian lay minister.

Sources:

https://opinion.inquirer.net/104546/8-things-martial-law-ph

https://www.rappler.com/voices/imho/240488-martial-law-teenagers/

https://cpcabrisbane.org/Kasama/1996/V10n3/LongHair.htm

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