The True Story of Bernarr Macfadden

Contents

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THE STRONG MAN’S STORY .... . I WHY MACFADDEN BECAME AN ATH-— ERTS RS et Oi a a MR ae, THE MAN WHO FOUND HIS WORK .. 73 THE STRANGE STORY OF PHYSICAL CUL- PURE MAGAZINE). h.ee ces eerie OO . MR. MACFADDEN AND THE DOCTORS . 137 . THE FIGHT AGAINST PRUDERY .. . 170 THE: YEARS: BETWEEN... 6 30s eh) 208 THE TRUE STORY OF TRUE STORY BEACSAZINED: oils), ehss. «epee eee OO . THE STORY OF THE GRAPHIC ... . 242

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I Tue Stronec Man’s Story

Ir was eight o’clock in the evening in the Winter Garden at Berlin.

The vast auditorium was thronged and glowing with lights. High in the curved roof gleamed a painted sky sparkling with electric stars. On the terrasse gay parties chatted and laughed, while waiters came and went with their trays of glasses and bottles. The band blared and crooned and then, as the lights dimmed out, the music crashed into a mighty chord.

The curtain lifted and the performance began.

An athlete strode upon the stage; a strong man whose mighty body was bare, except for a jungle skin wrapped about his loins. What a physique! His arms were like Samson’s, strong enough to pull down the pillars of this temple of entertainment. Here, one felt, must be the strongest of all the strong men; a young Hercules ready for a Titanic demonstration of strength.

He lay upon his back and twirled immense weights around and around, moving them with his bare toes alone. He lifted men and women as if they were dolls. High over his head he raised great weights, smiling

Wid with a serene confidence all the while, as if to a man of such skill and strength it were not so difficult a feat as we weaker mortals might suppose.

Europeans love such demonstrations of might and physical power. When the performance was. over, the din of the applause was deafening. Again and again the strong man bowed his thanks.

I turned to my companion, curious thoughts stirring in my head.

“Suppose,” I, said, “there were a prophet sitting with us at this table tonight?”

“Well?”

“Suppose this prophet were to tell us that before many years the strong man there would step down from the stage and become one of the most important figures in influencing the thoughts, habits and development of the common people of this country.”

INO,

“You would not believe it?”

“Tt would be irapossible.”

“Impossible is a big word.”

“Then it would be almost impossible,” he qualified.

“But why?”

“Because the development of a body such as that man displayed here, the acquirement of such strength, is the work of a life-time. It is, in its way, a great test of character. One has to give to it everything one has. It takes all a man’s time and all his character. Your strong man wouldn’t have the time or the capacity to develop into anything else. What on earth made you think of such a thing?”

I did not tell him then, for my thoughts were busy in quite another direction. What my friend had said sounded true enough. The average strong man would have time only to be a strong man. To be anything else would be a kind of miracle.

Yet I knew that such a miracle had come to pass before the eyes of this generation of Americans.

For once, at least, and here in the United States a strong man, a wrestler, an athlete had stepped over the ropes of his arena, put on his street clothes and made himself a living force in the lives of his fellow-men. Now more than twenty-five millions of people in his own country hear him monthly, weekly, daily with the closest attention, while still other millions in all parts of the earth also listen to his doctrines and are advised by his counsels.

What my friend had believed impossible in Germany was an actual fact in the United States—made so by the life and work of Bernarr Macfadden.

For the moment I am not concerned with the question raised by Macfadden’s antagonists as to whether this influence is good or bad. That, here, is quite beside the point. I am dealing simply with the facts.

It is a fact that Bernarr Macfadden wields an almost incalculable influence in the lives of millions of people. True, he is not the first publisher whose magazines and books have had circulations of magnitude, nor will he be the last. But he is the only publisher of his time whose own personality pervades a magazine and book distribution of such magnitude. Moreover, he is the only publisher of his time who takes his own philosophy with a religious seriousness. I do not know any other publisher in America today who would die for his ideas. I think Macfadden would die two or three times over for some of his; more than once he has risked death to prove himself right.

It is with a crusading passion that he exhorts the millions who hear him with such reverence. There is the living vigor of the evangelist in his daily enthusiasms.

Such a man is bound to be a problem to those who disagree with his ideas. When he has the ear of many millions, he becomes a national problem. Macfadden is all of that.

There is more to the strange story of Bernarr Macfadden and his rise from obscurity to fame and power and their possessions than merely a tale out of the school of Horatio Alger. He is both a cause and a symptom. He has played a part in his times bigger than either his friends or his enemies suspect. What posterity may accord him does not matter. Beyond any question, it will receive from him an inheritance; an endowment which it will be glad to use.

What will be the nature and quality of that bequest ?

No off-hand answer can be given to such a question, just as no off-hand opinion of Macfadden and all his works will suffice. The man has said and done too much, and what he has said has been heard by too many people, what he has done has been too effective, to be dismissed so readily. One must study his career from its humble beginning onward, study it honestly and without prejudice, before venturing an opinion. Even then it can be only an opinion. More than once, as his life will readily disclose, Macfadden was twenty years ahead of his time. There was the absurd time when old Anthony Comstock declared war because the physical culturist was exhibiting athletic girls in tights in Madison Square Garden! That was more than twenty years ago! Perhaps the very ideas for which he is criticized today may likewise be commonly accepted, in another twenty years.

Therefore, it would be foolish to try to judge Bernarr Macfadden and his work today. That wiil be a task for the future, when he, together with his friends and his enemies, have passed from the scene.

On the other hand, his own story can cast upon the matter a ready and informing light.

There are three Bernarr Macfaddens. Indeed, if one knows him intimately, one soon becomes aware of more than three; of many personalities in one body, a complex individuality, yet with a simple and resolving spirit. But there are three distinct phases of the man that are important to the public. One is the physical culturist, another is the magazine publisher, the third is the newspaper proprietor and editor.

Macfadden has played all three parts energetically and successfully; he has played them simultaneously, and he continues to do so with an industry and personal application and success that have won for him the support of a large part of the public, baffling his competitors and enraging many interests whose fields of activity he has invaded.

First and above all things he is the physical evangelist, the apostle of health, the missionary to the ailing, the halt and the maimed. Nothing else matters so much to the man as this. For it he has the fervor of the patriot and the zeal of the martyr. Like a John out of the wilderness, he has emerged from the farmlands of Missouri, calling men to repentance for their sins against their vigor and their strength; preaching a doctrine of Spartan simplicity that will give them a new birth in health and vitality.

One must understand this zeal thoroughly, if one would understand Macfadden at all. His victories as an editor and publisher are of little consequence to him, placed beside his endeavors in the field of health. To talk with him for only a little while is to be convinced of this irrevocably. Once he is led to speak of physical culture, the man is transformed. His face lights up with a glow. His head is thrown back and there is a clear gleam in his eye; his voice vibrates with feeling. This is the Macfadden of today, after more than forty years of constant laboring in that field; his enthusiasm for his work is as keen as when he threw his first wrestling partner, and saw his system of development first change an invalid into a healthier and happier man.

Physical culture is the corner stone on which he builds all his theories. Beneath every human problem Macfadden discerns a physical cause. All the vexing questions of these curious days seem to him to revert finally to the body and its mental and spiritual influence. Long before Sigmund Freud had put such words as complex and libido upon the lips of highschool girls, Macfadden, the physical culturist, was fully aware of the two great hungers, of food and love, and how they exercised the human ego.

And if he did not befog his thoughts with a terminology borrowed from Greek fairy tales, he knew the truth instinctively. He did not consider himself a psychologist. But he had found what Freud had also found; that the hungers of the body, the disregard of the body, and the old shameful tabu of the body which made a good girl ashamed to take a bath because God would see her naked, that these hideous profanities of prudery were a prime cause of much of all the moving misery in the world.

I recall one winter night, when he and I were walking around the outside of Central Park, that he gave me a vivid example of how his mind works upon such matters; how, like a chemical retort, it resolves a number of elements into their simplest solution.

We passed an apartment house, and the curtains of one of the first floor suites were raised; inside the lights were glowing softly.

We caught a brief and dramatic glimpse of that room.

Sprawled on the sofa lay a man. His coat was off; his head was thrown back, exposing his neck with its thick rolls of red fat; his mouth was wide open; his eyes were closed; he was asleep. A crumpled spill of newspapers lay near him on the floor. A pretty woman sat opposite him in a chair. She was gowned for the evening, and she was younger than he; a woman full of the glow of life. So restless she looked, and so unhappy !

All this we saw in one brief glimpse and then we had passed on.

“There!” said Macfadden, with an angry shake of his head. ‘There is one of next year’s divorces.”

“Tt looked that way,” I admitted.

“That woman won’t wait much longer for that fellow to wake up,” he predicted. ‘“‘Isn’t it terrible to think that we are powerless in such a situation? I should like to ring their doorbell and tell them what to do.”

“Do you mean to say that you believe physical culture would prevent that divorce?” I asked, feeling somewhat like Watson in his earlier conversations with Sherlock Holmes.

“T certainly do. The absence of the principles of physical culture in the lives of people is the greatest single cause at the bottom of most of our divorces. Take that couple as an example. That man has worked all day in an office. Probably the air in his office is very bad. He looked like the kind of man who works in an airless office. And I am sure the sun doesn’t shine on his desk. He looks like a man who would get out of the sun if it made him the least bit uncomfortable. I know that he eats too much lunch.”

I agreed with the deduction there.

“Now what does he do?” demanded Macfadden. “He comes home and eats a great big dinner. Then he lies down and reads the sporting pages of his newspaper. By that time his brain is so dulled, and his stomach is working so hard to digest a lot of unnecessary and unwholesome food that he hasn’t the strength to get up and pour himself another drink of poison bootleg liquor. In a very little while he has gone to sleep.”

“And the lady?”

“Yes! The lady! She’s all dressed up and she has no place to go! How long is any high-spirited woman going to stand for that?”

He stopped and put his hand on my shoulder.

“But don’t get the idea,” he added seriously, “that men are the only offenders in that regard. The women are often the ones at fault. Their refusal to follow a sensible and reasonable diet makes them gross and fat and costs them all the charms by which their husbands were first attracted to them. I make it as a statement capable of demonstration that a large proportion of divorces, in fact, the great majority will be found to have a physical cause at their foundation— whether it is loss of the power to charm, of the necessary physical vitality, or of perpetual bickering, infidelity—the secret of them all will be found in bodies that have not been treated properly. From this I do not exclude cases of palpable mismating. A marriage must be a wedding of the body, mind and spirit, but if the first is wrong, the other two cannot rectify that wrong and trouble is bound to result.”

Thus Macfadden looks upon life and its multiplied complexities. Without a sound body, nothing can mean as much as it can mean with a sound body. “Weakness is a crime; don’t be a criminal,’ was printed in black letters on the front of his magazine for many years. For a while it was a catch-phrase on the tongue of the man in the street. Macfadden urges you to postpone your funeral. Your criminals are sick men. Your failures are sick men. Your revolutionists are men whose bodies are under-nourished. The source of every problem of the individual, if followed through, will be found somewhere in his body. Great scientists have spent life-times in laboratories, only to confirm this elemental diagnosis.

And for a prescription, Macfadden entreats you to save yourself with physical culture.

What is his physical culture?

Ask the average person what is a spiral and he will immediately make spiral gestures with his forefinger. Too often, if you ask the uninformed man what is physical culture, he will put his hands against his shoulders, and then thrust out his arms in a mock dumb-bell drill.

Physical culture, as it has been developed and evangelized and propagated by Macfadden for more than forty years, is much more than such physical exercises. Primarily, it is an effort to establish an understanding of the body, so that it gets what it wants to heal itself and keep itself well. That means, of course, a certain amount of exercise; it means also a great deal more, including the right food to eat, and only enough of it to feed the body, not to fatten it, or to make it gross and diseased. The physical culturist never forgets that millions of people today are going to their graves prematurely through improper feeding. It means also a balance in living; the right amount of sleep and of fresh air and of sunshine.

Thus it is living a natural life as far as that is possible in a thoroughly unnatural civilization.

None of this can sound startling today. The public mind is thoroughly receptive to such ideas and responsive to such teaching. But when Macfadden started, forty years ago, the scene was different. People slept with the windows shut down tightly, against the dark menace of the “night air’! Eating and drinking were on an entirely different basis. If you were sick, you assuredly took medicine. Perhaps you took two or

[ar three kinds of medicine, each more nauseous, more disgusting than the last. A medicine that tasted pleasantly was no medicine at all. You drugged your body, by the advice of a doctor, or under the spell of lurid testimonials to patent medicines, advertised freely in all the papers.

It really seems a very short while ago. To read such books on the nineties as have recently come into vogue—Mark Sullivan’s “Our Times,’ and “Tides” by Julian Street, and “New York in the Last Fifty Years,” a Valentine manual, “The Mauve Decade,” by Thomas Beer, and others whose names now escape me —to read them is to marvel at the changes through which this generation has passed.

The corset has been thrown into the ash-can, and you have yet to hear the part Macfadden played in throwing it there. We are wearing more sensible clothes; and we have broken the old shackles of prudery, although Macfadden nearly went to prison for helping to break these shackles. The doctor who prescribes one drug after another today is regarded with suspicion. He is one of the last few survivors of the old race of medicine men, who flourished from the fire circles of savage tribes down to the dawn of our own century.

Much of this came about through the activities of Bernarr Macfadden. What he did to rid the earth of certain highly respected evils, the fight he waged for the simple principles of his original creed, the hosts of privileged enemies he thereupon raised against himself, all of this is yet to be told.

Macfadden did not invent fresh air, or sunshine, or dieting or fasting, or frankness in sex education, or any of the other principles for which he has been arguing so many years. Nor did he originate the idea of systematic exercise. On the tombs of Egyptian kings you will find diagrams of some of his calisthenic drills. In Babylon they believed in and taught the virtues of fresh air. Plato argued that we should know ourselves first of all. There is nothing new under the sun, an adage which is more true today than when King Solomon said it—and probably somebody else had whispered it into his royal ear. Macfadden has never claimed to have originated these things. He was simply their great modern pioneer; their rediscoverer.

That much must be accorded him even by his most uncharitable enemies. No other man in the United States has devoted his life to the promulgation of the idea of health obtained and made secure by natural methods. So successful was his career in doing this that today, as we look around us, we see an entire world converted. We are tempted to wonder if Othello does not find his occupation gone. The idea is no longer a fad, as it was when Macfadden first shouted it down an unlistening street.

Everybody today believes he must take some kind of exercise if he wants to keep well. Everybody wants some fresh air in the house, and sleeps with fresh air in his bed-chamber. Everybody wants to eat food that will agree with him. Pick up any newspaper today and you will find in it drawings and directions for simple exercises, you will find advice on sensible eating, and how to live to be a hundred years old. It is all very different from the time—it does not seem ages ago— when a young wrestler named Macfadden bombarded the editors with just such manuscripts and was told there was no public interest in health matters. The public interest in it had to be awakened, and more than any other man, Macfadden brought about that awakening. To do it, he had to start his own magazine, for no editor would print what he had to say— and that is one of the most significant phases of the history of his publications.

What was the secret of the man’s flaming enthusiasm for his subject? The answer is simple enough. He was saved by it himself: By his bootstraps he lifted himself out of a grave dug for him by his father and his mother. It gave him what the psychoanalysts have sometimes called a world-saving complex. How much he has saved the world can be computed only when his life is studied with an unprejudiced mind.

Upon his mission he embarked with a spirit that is hard to understand, an enthusiasm almost beyond calculation. J have never known any other. man with the fierce enthusiasm for any idea that Macfadden has for physical culture. He stopped at nothing. With only a farm school education to begin with, he had to

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teach himself. Yet to such good purpose did he apply himself in public libraries, and in schools where he coached the teams, that he informed himself fully upon the subjects that he most wished to know. He learned things that the world was passing by. When he proclaimed sun-baths they laughed at him. When he proclaimed the healing virtues of water they laughed at him. Yet today, some scientists speak with respect of Father Kneipp, the German pioneer in hydrotherapy. While other specialists talk of their heliotherapy, and the marvelous cures that can be wrought by the invisible rays of the sun, Macfadden was preaching sun-healing and water-healing before some of these specialists were born.

There is something here that is baffling about Macfadden; some instinctive prompting in him that leads him to a truth which he may not fully understand, while others get nowhere at all. Repeatedly the same phenomenon will occur in his own office. He will get an idea and it will meet prompt objection from all his associates. He will listen attentively, but he has learned from bitter experience not to listen too trustingly. More often than not, he will carry out his plans in spite of their objections, and again, more often than not, the end justifies his confidence in himself. When it does, his associates put it down to ‘‘Macfadden luck’”’ which is a by-word in his office. But that is far from the truth. It is an instinctive prompting that leads the man. He is like someone in a dark room, someone who reaches out and touches something. Perhaps he does not know what it is he has found, but it is something, and Macfadden is the man to hold on to it. The others grope around blindly and find nothing at all— and they try to tell him there is nothing there.

That, I think, explains how so many times Macfadden has been right and the medical profession has been wrong. With a Jesuitical cunning, the austere company of medical men always contrive to make the world believe they were the ones to discover the truth before anyone else. No one need blame them for that, for they are human beings, with the same failings as other human beings; they die like everybody else, in spite of their materia medica, their knowledge of bacteriology, of pathology, of physiology, and the other essentials to a sound medical education, the names of which they hurl at Macfadden as a reproach.

These doctors have fought him throughout his career. They fought him first with indifference. They considered his ideas on fasting nonsensical and refused to give them a dignified hearing. Not until university professors, a quarter of a century later, stumbled upon the same truth, did they pay any attention, and then they said that doctors knew about it all along. The same thing occurred with many other physical culture ideas, including weight increase and reduction, and the cure of tuberculosis.

Later I shall present these theories, just as Macfadden has developed them, but for the moment I am interested in giving a general portrait of a personality.

It was this personality that the medical profession treated with indifference. But only for a few years. The man had a tongue in his head, and at his right hand was pen and ink, at his left a printing press and in his pocket money enough to pay for printing his magazine. People were listening. They were being led away from nostrums that tasted like poison gas was to taste, years later, on the battlefields of Flanders. They pushed back the pills and powders; they rubbed their thumbs skeptically up and down the gleaming knives of the operating room and then drew back with a new doubt in their eyes.

Macfadden could no longer be treated with indifference. The man was dangerous. Because of him, the doctors were beginning to lose patients.

There is no question that much of the antagonism of the medical profession to Macfadden was sincere. But sincerity is often as much a curse as a blessing. All the armies in the World War were sincere. The German clergymen prayed just as sincerely for the victory of the Kaiser’s troops as our clergymen prayed for their defeat. There is no one more sincere than the reformer, who would wrap up the whole world in a bag of blue laws and go back to the days of witchburning. Sincerity can be wrong as well as right.

Moreover, there can be no question that Macfadden was himself grievously wrong in many an instance. Life taught him that. Life taught him that the medical profession which he lambasted with such bouyant gusto had in it many great and fine men, as anxious for the truth as he himself, and yet absolutely convinced that he was wrong.

With such men Macfadden learned at last not to quarrel. He came to understand that men can honestly differ in their views, and this lesson in tolerance was brought home to him in so many ways that later he was to become a stern advocate of tolerance in a time that was drifting back into an intolerance which exalted lynchings, whipped white women in the dark, and condemned men to prison cells for the honest expression of their views.

Certainly Macfadden suffered himself sufficiently from intolerance to learn its most informing lessons. One of the great physical horrors of the present day is venereal disease. Macfaddem saw it in all its malignancy in the wrecks of men ‘who came to the gymnasiums, seeking to regain the health they had lost. He saw, too, that ignorance had brought most of them to their dreadful plight. He saw that silence in the face of such an evil was a crime, and as soon as he had the opportunity he began to strike at that evil boldly.

With what result ?

That intolerance nearly crushed him. That for this fight for frankness in sex education he found himself on the very threshold of prison. Again he was ahead of his time. Today the Health Department of the United States government circulates information regarding sex infinitely more unreserved than anything Macfadden had dared to print. And had it not been for his audacity and fortitude then, the public might not have been ready to read and benefit by such literature.

But that was a part of the lone game he was playing. The enthusiasm which rode him, and made itself his master, was not to be out-faced by intolerance. He was ready for anything that would advance his cause. When the doctors would not listen to him, he tried thousands of experiments on his own body. What kind of experiments? As one instance, he fasted two weeks. Again, he fed himself for three weeks on less than six cents a day. He exposed his muscles and organs and digestive system to every promising treatment he found. And he still continues to do it. Only a few weeks ago I found, on a visit to his home, that he was sleeping on the floor every night. I asked him why.

He explained that he believed human beings made a mistake in lying down in soft beds; that it was better for the delicate construction of the spinal column that a man sleep on an unyielding surface. I do not say his idea was right. It may be right and it may be wrong. Certainly it did not convert me from my comfortable mattress. But Macfadden earnestly assured me that it had helped him and he meant to continue the practice permanently. I mention it here only

[ 19 | to indicate the experimental nature that is his, and that the years have failed to discourage.

This is Macfadden, the physical culturist, the man who stepped out of a small arena to enter a large one, and who became the Macfadden the world knows today. This is the real Macfadden. In this is the uniqueness of the man. To know him as he is, one must perceive in him the unquenchable passion for health both for himself and his fellow-man. So close is this health to his spirit that he cannot understand the indifference of many people to its importance. Why do they smoke cigarettes? He would not take their cigarettes away from them by a constitutional amendment. He doesn’t believe in reform by legislation. But why do they smoke cigarettes, when they must know the injury they are doing to their own bodies? He cannot understand that.