Book cover courtesy of Mark Adams
Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet.
Another goofball.
I plunk the book on the castoff pile, upside down—and my eye falls on a blurb from John Hodgman, resident expert of The Daily Show: "Imagine if Rupert Murdoch, Jack LaLanne, and Dr. Andrew Weil all got together and had a baby, then raised that child on wheat germ and 100 push-ups a day."
I can't help pausing to contemplate that particular ménage á trois. Then I remember an email noting that Macfadden grew up in St. Louis; therefore, it could be said that St. Louis transformed the nation through sex, salad, and the ultimate starvation diet.
I start reading. Author Mark Adams, who's written for Rolling Stone, GQ, Outside, New York magazine, and The New York Times Magazine, is smart but doesn't dampen the fun. And Macfadden's a hoot.
In the 1920s and '30s, the man founded a $30 million publishing empire, opened a series of sanitariums and healthatoriums, and fought a multitude of enemies: prudishness, white bread, the American Medical Association (he called physicians "pus-instillers"), corsets, laziness, alcohol, cigarettes, and two of his four exwives. In the days of salt pork, white bread, and potatoes, he was preaching organic food, core training, detox fasts, olive oil, whole grains, power-walking, vegetarianism, and radically low-calorie diets to prevent aging (Washington University is just now doing that study). He gave talks across the country and in England; afterward, he'd either challenge men in the audience to match him in deep knee bends (several had to be hospitalized) or angle his body from a table to the floor, feet still up on the table, and do 25 one-handed push-ups, picking up a match with his teeth every time he went down.
He wrote books like The Virile Powers of Superb Manhood and Macfadden's New Hair Culture (in which the author, convinced he was going bald at 26, tugged hard on his remaining hair every day and thus averted disaster). He ate fine quartz sand on the beach and wrote "Sand Cleans Glass Bottles—Why Not Bowels?" He was fondly nicknamed BM by one of his disciples, muckraker Upton Sinclair. He tried to buy the Republican nomination for president, parachuted into the Seine to celebrate his 84th birthday, watched his empire crumble, and died in a hotel room, bankrupt. Who was this guy, and why had I never heard of him?
Bernard McFadden—his name would evolve with his persona—was born in 1869 in Mill Springs, Mo., down in the Ozarks. His father glugged corn whiskey and beat 4-year-old Bernard until his mother, ill with TB, left in protest. Four years later, close to death, she sent the boy off to a cheap boarding school he pronounced "the Starvation School." He soon left and made his own way, working first at a hotel and then on a farm. At 12, he came to St. Louis to live with his grandmother. And at 15, he walked with his Uncle Harvey past the Missouri Gymnasium, a turnverein club where German immigrants worked out and drank beer.
Intrigued by posters of musclemen, the two stepped inside; McFadden would later write that he "felt a tingling sensation" as he watched bare-chested men in tights working out and taking hot and cold baths. Vowing to be like them, he bought used dumbbells and built himself a gym—with swinging trapezestrapezes— in Uncle Harvey's cellar. Eventually, he saved enough money to join the Missouri Gymnasium with a friend, and they spent hours exercising together, "thrilled almost continually with the throbbing, pulsating forces of life."
In 1891, McFadden hung out his shingle on a "fairly prominent St. Louis Street," billing himself as a "Kinistherapist, Teacher of Higher Physical Culture." Nobody had the slightest idea what it meant, but people liked his slogan: "Weakness is a Crime—Don't Be a Criminal."
Two years later, he was restless. He went to the Chicago World's Fair and came home revved up, eager for new opportunities. He wound up in New York as "Professor Bernarr Macfadden," his hair wild, clothes rumpled, feet bare whenever possible. "When he was young," Adams explains, "he fell into a swamp and felt like there was some sort of energy coming up through the earth into his feet, and from that time on he wanted to walk barefoot."
An instinctive evangelist, Macfadden wrote some really dreadful books. Then, in 1899, he founded a magazine dubbed Physical Culture. "Writers and editors were accosted in the office halls by strongmen who demanded that staffers feel their bulging muscles, watch them bang out over-the-transom pull-ups, or perform feats of strength," Adams writes. "No telephone book was ever safe from being torn in half."
There were contests (Macfadden handpicked a Brooklyn weightlifter, a guy by the name of Charles Atlas, as the world's most perfect man) and lots of cheerful nudity ("How could anyone show how physical culture has improved the body if the body is clothed?" he retorted when the head of the Society for the Suppression of Vice tried to have him arrested). Physical Culture's popularity peaked in the 1930s; between the two world wars, the magazine sold close to 50 million copies.
The empire grew quickly. Macfadden paved the way for celebrity gossip with a magazine called The New York Graphic, with Walter Winchell writing about couples middle-aisling (marrying) and Reno-vating (divorcing). Macfadden hired John Huston as a cub reporter and Ed Sullivan as a sportswriter. Macfadden even hired Eleanor Roosevelt to edit a magazine called Babies, Just Babies.
At 45, twice-divorced and childless, he went off to London and launched a national search to find Great Britain's Perfect Woman. From 500 applications, he chose Mary Williamson, a 19-year-old swimming champion who measured 38-25-39. "He was elated to learn that I had never been vaccinated," she said later.
In 1913, two months after meeting Williamson, Macfadden proposed. When she said yes, he stood on his head to celebrate and asked her to time him (64 seconds).
They moved to Brighton and filled the house's wine cellar with beet juice, honey water, carrot bins, and macerated wheat, dumbbells straddling the champagne racks. Mary was to breed, and that she did, her babies emerging fatter and rosier with each pregnancy. Macfadden didn't make parenting easy. "He felt that Santa was a bad role model, with his fat belly and tippler's nose," Adams remarks dryly. Worse, when Macfadden's baby son Billy had a seizure, he insisted Mary bathe him in warm water. The boy, whose seizure was probably caused by fever, died. Macfadden, who would later publicly blame his wife's coddling for the death, convinced her to overcome her grief by walking from New Hampshire back to Manhattan through the snow. Finally, they stopped to rest at an inn in Greenwich, Conn.—and he persuaded her to try for another son.
Mary grew less compliant over the years, eventually hurling a box of razor blades at him (it broke two of his teeth) and writing an exposé of their years together. But early on, she helped conceptualize and edit yet another magazine, True Story, which launched the confessional genre.
Then the ideas ran out. "Right around the stock-market crash, Macfadden's instincts kind of failed him, and he lost touch with America," Adams remarks. "I think it shook him. He was one of these guys who thought, 'As long as I'm making millions, I'm a genius,' and when the rules change, they start to second- guess themselves."
Adams is convinced Macfadden wasn't crazy, just "incredibly Spartan. If diet and exercise books were in Cliffs Notes, you'd have the bumblebee cover and one piece of paper inside that read, 'Eat less and exercise.' The whole problem is motivation. Jack LaLanne had a saying: 'If it tastes good, spit it out.' But man, I love to eat. I like a nice glass of wine or two. I like cheese. I like meat."
The intriguing thing about Macfadden is that he survived near-starvation in childhood and, instead of stuffing himself in reaction, took complete control over the process, fasting regularly and telling his followers starvation would cure any illness.
"Probably the worst general thing he did was convince a lot of people there was nothing you couldn't treat yourself," Adams remarks. "The greatest good he did was wake up America to the fact that just because industrialization was taking place and mechanization was making their lives easier, they couldn't just turn into jellyfish and let their health slip away." He foreshadowed the organic revolution, the fitness revolution, the alternative and holistic health movements, even the radical reduction in calories that scientists are now exploring as a way to slow aging.
"It's unfair, except for the hair, to compare him to Einstein," Adams adds dryly. "But he did have ideas that caught on 20 years later. His tragic flaw was putting too much faith in his own abilities and his own ideas and thinking because he had such a forceful personality he could essentially bend the whole nation to him."
Nobody can pump that much iron.
