Will Americans Ever Lose Their Grip on the Handshake?

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.In February 1896, when the germ theory of disease was still fairly new, an Atlantic writer wondered whether the “good old-fashioned hand-shake” would survive into the next century: “Will it some time be as obsolete as the curtsy with which our grandmothers greeted the beaux of their day, or the kiss that the gallant impressed on the fragile hand that he raised so respectfully to his lips?”Yet all these years later, the handshake remains the default form of greeting in America. We continue to reach out—thumbs up, fingers relaxed, palms turned to the side—whenever we make someone’s acquaintance or seal a deal. Even the coronavirus pandemic couldn’t kill the handshake, though it seemed for a moment like it might. In 2020, Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, encouraged Americans to discard the unhygienic practice for the sake of our collective health (another infectious-disease expert went as far as deeming the handshake a “bioweapon”). And, for a time, some strangers did keep their distance. But eventually the vaccines were released, the masks came off, and the flesh continued to be pressed.My own aversion to the handshake is rooted less in worry about viral transmission and more in the tendency of certain fellow men—and, in my experience, it is invariably a male phenomenon—to use the gesture as an opportunity to assert dominance. Their handshakes aren’t merely firm; they’re vice-like. This character was dubbed the “knuckle-cruncher” in these pages by the writer David Hammarstrom Jr. in 1977. Hammarstrom insisted that the secret to defending against aggression masquerading as civility was to “get your hand into his as quickly and snugly as you could, before he had the chance to turn you into a lefty.”That tactic might spare your digits, but you’re still left vulnerable to the equally