The Wild Story of King Camp Gillette

Brennan Kilbane
·7 min read

At a certain point in a young man's life, after his ice cream sandwiches have been consumed and his playground scabs have healed, but just before he accidentally discovers internet pornography, he’ll be introduced to — or clandestinely seek out at his nearest drugstore — the work of a businessman named King Camp Gillette (who would have celebrated his 165th birthday this year). At the turn of the 20th century, Gillette branded his legacy into the iron scrolls of time by popularizing the safety razor, technology that accompanies every prepubescent boy down the craggy path of sexual development. Unfortunately, it was perhaps not the legacy he was hoping for.

When the Gillette public relations team emailed me a press release announcing the launch of King C. Gillette, a new shaving collection, I was intrigued to learn that the name Gillette (as in Gillette ProGlide) refers to a person, and that person was...some kind of sovereign? No: King C. Gillette was simply a red-blooded American male afflicted with the curse of human vanity.

At the time Gillette was born, men's fashion favored full, virile beards popular among Civil War generals, a style in which facial hair floated around the nose and mouth like plumes of dragon’s breath. In the 1890s, when Gillette was a traveling salesman living in greater Boston, facial hair trended toward a tighter, more Kentucky Fried aesthetic that lent itself to frequent grooming. "You really only had two options," says Greg McCoy, a historian for the brand, who is clean-shaven as to almost sparkle. "You could go to a barber multiple times during the week, or you could risk shaving yourself with a straight razor." The technique for using a straight razor, a.k.a. a cutthroat razor, is a little bit like dancing a small machete over one’s jugular vein every morning for a lifetime. But in 1904, King C. Gillette patented the first disposable safety razor, a mace-looking device compatible with wafer-thin steel blades.

(Here is a glimmering nugget of biz-history you can use to dazzle friends: Gillette's disposable blades created a new and lucrative tautology in which razors were sold for less to create the market for selling higher-priced blades, locking the consumer into a continuous revenue stream for the company. This was henceforth known as the razor and blades model, and has been applied to a variety of industries. A famous example is printers and ink.)

This year, Gillette chose to commemorate its founder's legacy by launching an expansive suite of beard-care products and tools, including a three-piece, double-edge safety razor based on the design he popularized. KCG did not invent the razor, nor the safety razor, nor the concept of disposable blades, but he was the first to patent it. His economic legacy is best felt in the frustration that heats your face when you realize your $22 razor blade set requires you to continually repurchase a $36 eight-pack of refills.

Yet the career businessman's vision extended far beyond grooming: Gillette's greatest ambition was to condense the United States of America into a single, monolithic corporation, organized like a vast, muscular apartment building, and naturally powered by Niagara Falls. Gillette made this ambition public record in four books on economic theory, one of them cowritten with Upton Sinclair. I had some free time, so I ordered the first one: The Human Drift.

In it, Gillette proposes the United Company, in which America looks like a business and acts like a nation. This company was conceived in Gillette’s imagination amid his frustration with the turn-of-the-century economy, which enabled individuals to accrue massive wealth at the expense of others in the supply chain. He emphasized this on nearly every other page of his manifesto: "We must go further back than cooperative societies or stores," he wrote, "before we can hope to dam the golden flood which flows incessantly into the hands of the nonproducers, the interest-takers, the schemers, and the manipulators." He ventured that 9 out of 10 American families lived "hand-to-mouth," but, by a more specific estimate, the richest 1 percent of American families, in 1897, possessed as much wealth as the other 99 percent. In 2015, the richest 1 percent possessed more than 25 times as much wealth as the rest of our great nation.

I only understand Gilded Age economics after researching the bare minimum required to write this story, but it seems fascinating that this titan of industry quite radically opposed the free market. This is considerably less interesting to P&G, the parent company of Gillette. "It's really difficult to take a person out of time," McCoy says. "I can tell you his books didn’t sell very well."

"A lot of the Gilded Age manufacturing types came up with different ideas on how to organize a city to benefit the common worker," says Peter Liebhold, a curator of work and industry at the Smithsonian Institution, whose own enormous mustache rests formidably on his upper lip.

The most important thing to do, wrote Gillette, is to dissolve all industry.

According to Liebhold, Gillette's ascent occurred as the gorge between America’s wealthy and America's everyone else grew throughout the 20th century. There was great public anxiety about the arrival of socialism in America and increased attention paid to the gap between a company's CEO and its lowest-paid worker. "We’ve returned, in terms of inequality, to those times of Gillette," says Liebhold. "There was a lot of tension then and there’s increasingly tension now."

KCG abhorred competition in business. At one point in The Human Drift, he wondered if Satan invented capitalism as a way to bolster population numbers in hell. It is — and he pontificates at length here — evil. (What Gillette would make of his brand's iron grip on the contemporary shaving industry is, again, information we cannot know, and it's probably not worth thinking about anyway.) The most important thing to do, wrote Gillette, is dissolve all industry over the American populace, giving each citizen more or less the same stock options. Commerce would be comprised not of separate operations but vertically organized industries. One "company" for eggs, another for elevators, another for shoelaces.

The book eventually transitions from a quasi-socialist manifesto into a series of dreamily painted landscapes of an equitable American future: Gillette described his metropolis, sprawled from Niagara Falls to just outside of the Finger Lakes, with hyperspecific instruction, including porcelain-faced brick for his 25-story apartment complexes, circular buildings ridged like gears so each unit could receive equal sun exposure.

And yet, just shy of a decade after The Human Drift was published, Gillette filed a patent that would result in his namesake billion-dollar corporation. He continued to write dreamily about socialist utopia — and proposed a World Corporation (book three) headquartered in the Arizona Territory, with former U.S. president Teddy Roosevelt at its helm — while he built the brand that bears his name. According to the company, KCG's restless pursuit of shaving efficiency inspired its latest collection, which is luxuriously branded in handsome amber and navy. Liebhold credits the company with some of the first lifestyle branding in history, by associating the concept of shaving with virility and manhood. P&G did something similar with its virginally marketed Ivory soap, which launched a few decades prior to Gillette's patent.

During an American Enterprise exhibit at the National Museum of American History, Liebhold handled a 1917 razor of Gillette's design. The blades were sumptuously wrapped in emerald tissue, enclosed with a small photo of KCG. "And I understood, then, the importance of branding," he says. "It wasn’t a knockoff. It was a Gillette."

This story originally appeared in the October 2020 issue of Allure. Learn how to subscribe here.

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