The messed-up world of Bernarr Macfadden.
The guy who invented modern physical culture.
If you have ever wondered where the current health and fitness industry started, and who was ultimately responsible for everything from the muscle culture, the Jane Fonda fitness fad, aerobics and the Peloton thing; look no further than Bernarr Macfadden (1868 - 1955).
The real Bernarr Macfadden in 1910.
Credit: By Unknown author - Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77512267
Macfadden was a kook, an odd-ball and possibly a dangerous obsessive, but his life follows the narrative arc of the Great American Dream; but it’s what he did with his dream that makes it all the more interesting and horrific.
The fuller life story of Bernarr Macfadden makes him sound like an ego gone crazy.
A clue that he had a driven idealist personality is perhaps revealed by why he chose to change his name from ‘Bernard’ to ‘Bernarr’. His reasoning was that it gave the impression of manly strength if his name sounded like the roar of a lion. Seriously!
Early days.
Bernarr (or Bernard) had a terrible start in life. The opening scene shows his father abandoning the family and his mother dying of tuberculosis. Weakened by poverty in Missouri he was not really supposed to have survived.
His first brush with death came at the age of six, when a crude form of inoculation involving scraping diseased flesh into a wound made in his arm, inevitably gave him blood poisoning. From that point on he hated doctors, a bias that later ended up being instrumental in the death of some of his own children and imposed incredible suffering on some of his wives.
Later on; at a time when Bernarr was a very rich man, one of his daughters was left to die of a deliberately untreated heart condition. After her death he is quoted as saying, “It’s better she’s gone, she would have only disgraced me”. Oh, the callousness and the cruelty.
His obsession with health and fitness came very early on, when he was removed from the orphanage and sent to live on a working farm. The health benefits gave him a springboard whereby strength and nutrition became his whole focus, with a particular obsession with fasting and weight training (which wasn’t really a thing in the later 19th century).
Other things he became advocate for were; whole foods, vegetarianism and cutting out white bread, which all sounds so very enlightened and modern, but Bernarr was doing this in 1890’s America.
Bernarr in his prime.
Credit: No photographer listed - TCS 1.2400, Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33180327
Opportunities and ambitions.
He definitely lived the life; attempting to transform his body, aiming at perfection. Fads, diets and extreme exercise were his credo.
All of this this stoked his vanity and his ambition. He always had an eye for a gap in the market, and over time he found one that aligned perfectly with his beliefs.
He peddled these ideas energetically and eventually started a magazine called ‘Physical Culture’. On the back of this he was to create a publishing empire that rivalled that of William Randolph Hearst.
Magazine cover 1948.
Source: https://alsobooksbooks.com/products/physical-culture-may-1948-vol-92-no-4-magazine
His ambition knew no bounds and at one time he decided to build a commune called ‘Physical Culture City’, but it was a short-lived project.
The publishing side of his business projects developed further and he was one of the originators of the idea of the ‘Kiss and Tell’ magazines; also ‘True Confessions’, but this sometimes got him into tricky positions, as he was inclined to cross legal boundaries. Add to that his lack of fear of publishing photographs of nudity in the guise of ‘celebrating the body’. This caused an outcry and litigation was swift to follow.
As mentioned above, his personal life was quite messed up. He went through four wives and produced eight children, all with names starting with ‘B’.
One of his ex-wives published a memoir outlining what a monster he was and blamed him for the death of one of their sons.
His third marriage came about when he organised a pageant to find ‘the most perfectly formed female’. English girl, Mary Williamson, was the winner and her prize was… marriage to Bernarr Macfadden. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
The facts about his life can be found in the entertaining and slightly horrifying podcast ‘Behind the Bastards’ hosted by Robert Evans and in two parts:
Macfadden comes out of it like a totally despotic ass; with his flirtations with fascism, through connections with Mussolini and a fascistic obsession with turning the nation’s youth into ‘Supermen’.
But the balanced side of this is that Macfadden kicked off the whole of the modern movement towards fitness, strength and diet. He also made sure he looked the part, being totally jacked until his later years. He lived until the age of 87, but could have gone on longer if he’d have trusted doctors.
Being previously a millionaire, when he died he left behind a measly $50,000 and a trail of damaged people, particularly the wives.
The fruition of Macfadden’s legacy (if you can call it that) was to come long after the passing of two world wars and well into the digital media and information age we now all live in. Every muscle-bound hunk and fitness bunny owes some kind of debt to the massive ego of Bernarr Macfadden.
As a closing point; compare Macfadden’s ‘legacy’ with that of Thomas Midgely Jnr (1889 – 1944), who really had no intention of killing all those people.
Thomas Midgely.
Midgely was probably responsible for the death of an innumerable number of innocent civilians, as well as kick-starting the beginning of the climate change disaster we are all currently so anxious about; why?
Because Midgely was the American inventor who not only thought it was a great idea to put lead into petrol, but also CFC’s in refrigerators; despite being fully aware of the damaging toxicity of both products.
Although there is a touching, and slightly sad, story behind Midgely’s own death.
He had contracted polio in 1940 and, being an inventor, created a device of straps, cables and pullies to help him get out of bed. One morning in November 1944 he became entangled in the device and died by strangulation. Weirdly, the coroner pronounced it as death by suicide.
It is often said that the Americans have no real appreciation or irony; probably here is the truth.
Maybe I don’t feel so bad about Bernarr anymore?
Midgely image credit: By NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF THOMAS MIDGLEY, JR. 1889-1944 BY CHARLES F. KETTERING, PRHSENTED TO THE ACADEMY AT THE ANNUAL MEETING, 1947, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34712719