Today I found a photograph from 1926 of a man named J.H. Diggs, standing outside his barbershop in Knoxville, Tennessee, pointing at his own window with what can only be described as conviction. His window has painted across the glass: "Live and Let Live."

Right under it, a second sign told a different story.

"SPECIAL NOTICE — Positively no more women's and girls' hair bobbed here," Diggs's sign read. He didn't stop at the announcement. He footnoted it with scripture, chapter and verse: "For such is abomination in sight of God — Isaiah 3, Chapter 1; Corinthians 11:5-15. Be not deceived, God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. — Galatians 6:7."

Diggs had apparently been bobbing women's hair faithfully for two years before he reached his breaking point. He told reporters he'd finally "rebelled," casting off what he called "feminine domination" and issuing his ultimatum in the form of the sign.

The story caught on, and it caught on fast. Letters arrived from one end of the country to the other — men and women writing in to tell Diggs what a great man they thought he was, or what a darned fool, according to how they felt on the question. According to the photo caption running alongside one report, mysterious projectiles had been thrown at his shop since the edict went up.

Diggs didn't seem to mind any of it. If anything, business improved. His masculine trade, as one paper delicately put it, had about doubled. Men caught the streetcar specifically to visit his shop in the suburbs, just to shake his hand and tell him: "Brother, you're right. The Lord gave women hair and he meant for them to keep it."

He wasn't even the first barber to take this particular stand. A barber in Lancaster, Pennsylvania had already done the same thing, which meant Diggs was, at best, the second man in the country to legislate hairstyles from behind a barber's chair.

Here's the detail that I genuinely cannot get over. Among the letters Diggs received, one correspondent pushed back on his theology directly, and made an argument I have to assume he didn't see coming. She pointed out that men wore long hair during biblical times too. Which meant, by Diggs's own logic, that men with clipped, short hair were in just as much danger of hellfire as any woman with a bob.

In other words: if the Bible opposes cutting hair short, Diggs's entire professional existence was the problem. He ran a barbershop. Cutting hair short was, definitionally, the whole business model. The man had built a career on doing to men exactly the thing he refused to do to women, and somehow positioned that as moral consistency.

Nobody in the coverage records what Diggs said in response to that one.