The Art of Manliness - #624： The Crazy, Forgotten Story of America's First Fitness Influencer

00:00:00.000 I'll see you next time.

00:00:30.000 Mr. America, how muscular millionaire Bernard McFadden transformed the nation through sex, salad, and the ultimate starvation diet.

00:00:37.360 Mark and I began our conversation with how McFadden discovered a passion for health and fitness as a young man and failed at his attempt to become a personal trainer, despite coining the motto, weakness is a crime, don't be a criminal, all in capital letters.

00:00:48.620 We then discussed how McFadden went on to start the highly successful magazine, Physical Culture, and then an entire publishing empire, which pioneered many of the confessional, first-person, personal branding techniques still used today.

00:00:59.680 Mark shares the tenets of McFadden's sometimes sound, sometimes wacky health philosophy, including his advocacy for fasting, and what happened to Mark when he tried out some of McFadden's protocols on himself.

00:01:09.540 Mark and I then delve into how McFadden founded a utopian community in the New Jersey suburbs, was convicted of obscenity charges, trained fascist cadets for Mussolini, and then ran for U.S. senator on a physical fitness platform.

00:01:20.420 We entered a conversation with why McFadden was forgotten, and yet had a lasting effect on the world of health and fitness, as well as media as a whole.

00:01:27.340 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash McFadden.

00:01:31.300 Mark joins me now via clearcast.io.

00:01:41.920 All right, Mark Adams, welcome to the show.

00:01:44.420 Thank you for having me, Brett.

00:01:45.260 So, over 10 years ago, 12 years, you wrote a book called Mr. America, How Muscular Millionaire Bernard McFadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet.

00:02:00.660 And this is about this icon of the physical fitness movement that started in America, really, the late 19th century, early 20th century.

00:02:09.060 We're going to talk about this guy today, but how did you go into a deep dive on the history of this guy that a lot of people haven't even heard of?

00:02:16.880 Well, in the late 90s, I was named fitness editor of GQ Magazine.

00:02:22.360 And as many magazine editors do, I went to some old magazines in a thrift store looking to steal ideas, and I came across a stack of physical culture magazines.

00:02:35.020 I was not familiar with the title at the time, opened it up, and in these magazines from the 1920s, there were stories about reversing heart disease through exercise, there were stories about yoga, there were stories about intermittent fasting.

00:02:49.560 And I was like, what is this magazine?

00:02:52.080 I've got to look into this.

00:02:53.240 And the more I looked into it, the more I learned the story of Bernard McFadden's life, the more I realized that there was, at the very least, a book, if not a movie, and a miniseries inside this man's life.

00:03:05.580 So yeah, we're going to talk about some of his exploits, because we were talking earlier, it's like, you read his story, and you're like, this can't be real.

00:03:11.920 Because he did so much in his life, and he had a huge impact on physical fitness that we still see today, and we'll talk about that.

00:03:20.560 But beyond that, he had a huge impact on the publishing industry, the magazine industry.

00:03:25.880 And you could even say he's sort of a predecessor for blogs or Instagram influencers as well.

00:03:32.480 Oh, without question.

00:03:33.280 He is the progenitor of all reality television, all personal branding, all of that sort of thing.

00:03:41.920 He is, he's the man who really got all of that off the ground about 100 years ago.

00:03:47.360 But you know, the title of the book is Mr. America.

00:03:49.080 And like, this guy is like, he's the American story.

00:03:51.860 He's like the Horatio Alger story.

00:03:54.220 He was, had a really tough childhood growing up in post-Civil War Missouri, basically an orphan.

00:03:59.960 His dad died, he was an alcoholic, mom was so poor that he just kind of shipped him off to some family members, and had a really hard life.

00:04:08.180 But at what point in his childhood did Bernard discover physical fitness?

00:04:12.840 So he is sent off to this, his mother called it a boarding school, but it was basically an orphanage for a couple of years.

00:04:20.280 After that, he's sent into what is essentially indentured servitude with some relatives, and then a guy who the relatives gave him to, a farmer for a couple of years.

00:04:31.900 And he's, he's working just for room and board, and they traded, I think the New Yorker called it a scattering of mixed produce for this boy.

00:04:39.920 And it's only at the age of 15 or 16 that he, for the first time, meets some family members who are actually glad to see him.

00:04:47.880 And he goes to St. Louis, which at the time is a boom town.

00:04:52.780 St. Louis is a conduit for German immigrants into the United States.

00:04:57.120 This is a time when German is still required in St. Louis public schools.

00:05:02.000 And the Germans bring with them this traditional of social physical fitness. 0.97

00:05:08.240 They call it Turnverein.

00:05:09.320 And Bernard McFadden walks into the St. Louis gymnasium one day after work with his uncle and discovers guys performing acts that are, you know, like gymnastics, we would call it now.

00:05:20.500 You know, working with ropes and pulleys and pommel horses and that sort of thing.

00:05:25.640 And he's utterly mesmerized.

00:05:27.720 And from that day forward, he commits himself to physical fitness, and that's the rest of his life, essentially.

00:05:34.440 And these German gymnasiums are really interesting because it's an interesting part of fitness culture in America.

00:05:38.700 Because not only were you there to build your body, but they had like a reading room where you'd go and you could read and discuss philosophy and play chess.

00:05:48.140 Well, it's interesting because this is a moment in American alternative medicine where the area around Missouri is like cutting edge.

00:05:58.100 This is the Wild West.

00:05:59.800 So you've got, you know, the Germans bringing hydropathy, which is like hot and cold baths, sweats, enemas. 1.00

00:06:07.040 And then you've got osteopathy being created right around this time in that area.

00:06:12.700 You've got chiropractic being invented right across the border in Iowa, just up from St. Louis.

00:06:18.000 So this is, you know, a really interesting time.

00:06:21.200 The Germans also brought homeopathy.

00:06:22.880 And this is also, you know, a moment when Americans are starting to move from the farm into big cities and there becomes this sort of national panic that basically American men are becoming a bunch of wussies because they're not working on the farm anymore. 0.80

00:06:40.680 They start suffering from what was called neurasthenia, which is like a nervous condition where you sit at a desk all day and you get weak and then you start shaking.

00:06:49.040 And, you know, you're not really a manly man anymore.

00:06:51.140 And McFadden is reading about this stuff at the German gymnasium, the St. Louis gymnasium that he goes to.

00:06:59.460 And in particular, he comes across a book by William Blakey, who is a Harvard teacher.

00:07:06.300 And he's essentially saying, if you lift heavy things and get cardio exercise, you will be in amazing shape and you will never get sick.

00:07:16.120 And this is like a magic charm for McFadden.

00:07:18.440 And he carries that book with him the rest of his life.

00:07:20.300 So basically, there was just in this gymnasium, he was exposed to all these different, these new ideas that were percolating in Western culture, particularly in America with different alternative medicines.

00:07:30.700 Because at the time, a lot of people were seen like professional doctors as corrupt.

00:07:36.580 And in fact, this is the time when this is before the medical industry where there is any sort of standardization or ethics.

00:07:43.660 Like, I mean, you could just be a doctor.

00:07:45.480 And I think a lot of people mistrusted that.

00:07:47.540 No, this is the era of patent medicines, you know, snake oil, medicine shows.

00:07:53.300 The AMA, the American Medical Association, is not organized until I think the second decade of the 20th century.

00:08:00.160 So if you wanted to call yourself a doctor at this time, you could call yourself a doctor.

00:08:04.560 And a lot of it was quackery.

00:08:06.000 And this had a great impact on McFadden, especially because as a boy, he was vaccinated against smallpox, which at the time meant that you would have a lesion from someone who's suffering from smallpox.

00:08:20.480 And they would take some of the pus and then cut open your arm and rub some of the pus in there. 1.00

00:08:24.960 And then you would get like a low-grade, you know, version of smallpox.

00:08:28.380 And that would be your vaccination for the rest of your life.

00:08:31.200 And McFadden had that happen, was in bed for months and months as a child, and never forgave doctors and never trusted them again for the rest of his life.

00:08:39.240 Yeah, he got blood poisoning.

00:08:40.800 He got blood poisoning, essentially, yeah.

00:08:42.440 I mean, it's a barbarous form of medicine, but McFadden, you know, his mind never moved forward from the 1880s as far as doctors were concerned.

00:08:52.080 And that sort of, I mean, he became an anti-vaxxer, basically, for the rest of his life.

00:08:55.680 That experience he had as a boy influenced what he thought about medicine or particularly vaccinations going forward and what he wrote about later on in his career.

00:09:03.980 Oh, yeah.

00:09:04.440 Yeah, I mean, he wrote up a list in his magazines of the seven great enemies of American society, and one of them was doctors and vaccinations.

00:09:14.820 When he started publishing a newspaper in the 1920s, you know, you may remember the Disney movie about Balto, the husky who, you know, runs across Alaska to get this important serum to Nome so that people can be rescued from diphtheria.

00:09:29.820 So every newspaper in America is covering this, you know, heroic run, you know, town by town is this dog sled team is going across Alaska.

00:09:39.780 McFadden's newspaper is covering it as some sort of tragedy.

00:09:42.900 You know, he's talking about how this is a, you know, public relations scam put together by what he calls the POS Trust.

00:09:49.280 So, yeah, he, you know, never, never really comes around to any sort of, you know, medical, what at that time was known as chemotherapy, any sort of, you know, medicine involving chemicals.

00:10:01.460 So besides these new, like, alternative medicine things that were popping up in the physical culture scene, like this is when people actually started taking physical fitness serious in America.

00:10:09.840 Before that time, people, exercise was mainly for, like, soldiers, and then I think there was references of Ben Franklin, you know, using Indian clubs or dumbbells.

00:10:19.140 Yes.

00:10:19.560 But this, yeah, this period, this is when people, Americans, were like, no, exercise is a thing you do separate from whatever else you do in your life.

00:10:27.100 Right.

00:10:27.620 This is the, this is like the rebirth of the old Greek ideal of, you know, mensana, incorpore sano.

00:10:33.660 No, I guess that's Latin, but anyway, it comes from the Greeks, you know, Hippocrates and all that, you know, keep your body sound and your mind will follow.

00:10:40.520 And, you know, we take that for granted now, but up until the 1870s, 1880s, everybody was working so hard physically that they didn't really have to worry about this.

00:10:50.300 As industrialization comes in, you know, the YMCA is invented over in Britain.

00:10:55.340 People start worrying about America's youth and, you know, it becomes a major issue.

00:11:00.660 People are, you know, are worried for national security reasons that Americans are just becoming a bunch of, you know, slovenly trolls who, who won't be able to fight in a war if it comes up.

00:11:10.780 And this is a, an obsession of McFadden's that comes up again and again over time.

00:11:15.060 So as a teenager, he's going to this gymnasium in St. Louis, this German gymnasium, and he's soaking in all this stuff and formulating a philosophy of physical fitness that he ends up calling physical culture.

00:11:25.800 But like, when did he start seeing himself, not as a student, but as a teacher of physical culture?

00:11:32.320 Like, when did that happen?

00:11:34.320 Around 1891, McFadden has, you know, worked for his uncle for a while, moved around the Midwest, worked at a couple of schools as essentially like a football coach, athletic director.

00:11:45.480 And he hangs out a shingle as what he calls a kinestherapist.

00:11:49.980 It's a coinage of his own.

00:11:52.120 It means person who cures using exercise.

00:11:55.280 He's what we would now call a personal trainer.

00:11:58.260 And he comes up with the great slogan of his life, which is weakness is a crime.

00:12:04.080 Don't be a criminal.

00:12:05.800 So he's got, you know, he's got the package down.

00:12:08.860 He's working on the marketing.

00:12:10.480 But in St. Louis in 1891, he cannot find the audience.

00:12:14.920 And what happens is, in 1893, he goes to the Columbia Exposition in Chicago, the Great World's Fair, and sees a performer named Jürgen Sandow.

00:12:28.920 Sandow is a German.

00:12:30.540 In the 1890s, he's one of the most famous men in the world.

00:12:33.480 He's a strong man.

00:12:34.840 He performs around Europe and the U.S. in poses.

00:12:39.920 He dusts himself down with chalk, and he stands in front of a black cabinet and shows off.

00:12:45.300 He's got an extraordinary physique.

00:12:46.780 It's easy to find photographs of him.

00:12:49.080 And he performs stunts like there will be two draft horses in baskets, and he will, you know, put a beam between them and then lift the two draft horses on his back on stage.

00:13:00.280 He does that sort of thing.

00:13:01.320 So McFadden sees this, and he realizes that if he can imitate Sandow's posing and show off some incredible stunts of his own, he might be able to sell this exercise machine, this sort of proto-nautilus machine with pulleys that you attach to your wall.

00:13:18.980 And, you know, barnstorm around the U.S. and make some money that way.

00:13:25.160 Well, it doesn't work out in the U.S., so he goes to England, where Sandow is living, and it's a huge success.

00:13:32.200 While he's in England, he sees that Sandow has started a magazine called Physical Culture.

00:13:37.800 And McFadden essentially steals Sandow's idea, comes back to New York, and decides to do a much better version of his own.

00:13:46.140 The Sandow, we've had a podcast about Sandow before.

00:13:49.700 I mean, that was another interesting phenomenon, because this is where, yeah, he basically almost got naked, basically had like a leaf there and did these poses.

00:13:57.960 Yeah, yeah.

00:13:58.420 I mean, there's so many pictures of him.

00:14:00.240 You know, he's so strong.

00:14:01.680 He's got this enormous chest.

00:14:03.140 And when I went down to the University of Texas, which is where the world's biggest physical culture library is located, I asked him, I said, you know, how come guys around this time are, you know, they're huge in their legs, they're huge in their arms, they're huge in their, you know, sort of traps and deltoids, but their chests aren't as big.

00:14:21.380 And the guy told me, Terry Todd, the professor, told me, well, the bench press hadn't been invented yet.

00:14:25.900 You know, the bench press wasn't invented until the 1930s, 1940s.

00:14:29.140 So, the fact that Sandow was able to get this big before the bench was invented is just extraordinary to me.

00:14:36.260 I thought one of the funniest parts from Sandow's history.

00:14:38.540 So, he'd do these performances, but then afterwards, he'd have like private performances where people could get up close and like touch him.

00:14:45.100 And like women would literally faint, like the like 19th century lady would faint and you had to do the smelling salts thing. 1.00

00:14:51.180 Totally. 0.99

00:14:51.820 It's just, I don't know, crap. 0.99

00:14:53.220 I think that's funny. 0.98

00:14:54.140 So, yeah, basically, he sees Sandow doing this, does Sandow's thing, takes it back to America, starts Physical Culture Magazine.

00:14:59.880 This is the thing that made him into a publisher.

00:15:03.320 What kind of stuff was he writing about in physical culture?

00:15:07.700 You know, he's writing about, you know, his two great ideas in life, neither of which were original to him, but which he found a way to broadcast to a bigger audience,

00:15:18.380 were Americans eat too much and Americans don't exercise.

00:15:21.680 So, he got that point across.

00:15:24.420 But what he did differently that made his magazine an instant success was, first of all, he wrote in a very personal voice.

00:15:33.120 You know, some of the great magazines in American history, things like, you know, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Martha Stewart Living,

00:15:40.200 they were successes because they're all about the passion of the founding editor.

00:15:45.180 You know, Hugh Hefner, Jan Wenner, Martha Stewart.

00:15:47.560 And that was definitely the case with physical culture.

00:15:50.540 You could hear Bernard McFadden's voice screaming from the pages.

00:15:55.220 You know, you think people use too many exclamation points now?

00:15:58.360 I mean, he was the king of italics, bold type, all caps.

00:16:02.480 That's what he was all about.

00:16:04.140 And what he wanted to do was teach Americans, not just men, but women too, and that was another innovation of his, that, you know, if they would, you know, eat less and exercise and obsess less about, you know, Victorian morals, what he called prudery, they could have a much happier life going forward.

00:16:26.580 That idea of, you know, him making the magazine personally, he wrote about his own personal, like he was sort of like a proto, like I said, he's a proto blogger talking about him doing these things and then showcasing the results of him doing these experiments on himself like a guinea pig.

00:16:42.340 And then he'd also get readers to like submit stories of like them following the McFadden protocol of basically not eating very much and exercising a lot and showing pictures of like the before and after.

00:16:52.800 Yeah. And, uh, especially racy photographs before and after of himself, you know, as, as I noted, uh, in the book, you know, he's the only politician to run for national office and circulate nude photos of himself because he's on every page of physical culture.

00:17:10.400 He's showing off, you know, here's what happens after a week of fasting.

00:17:13.400 When I lift a 200 pound man off my chest, you know, here's what I look like after a week of drinking nothing but raw milk.

00:17:19.980 You know, here's a picture of my baby doing a handstand.

00:17:23.400 He really invited himself into people's homes.

00:17:26.120 And like you said, he's, he has this sort of proto blogger, proto Instagram voice that just had not been seen before in American publishing and caught on like wildfire.

00:17:37.260 So the magazine was a huge success and I mean, big response to it.

00:17:40.720 And because of that, it laid, this is where you started seeing the groundwork for his publishing empire that he built up.

00:17:46.140 And one of the first things he did was he went to books.

00:17:49.020 Like he tried to write a book earlier.

00:17:50.860 It was sort of like, he called it like a physical culture, love story.

00:17:53.600 Didn't get, didn't get published, but he became, he had enough capital that he could self-publish his books on the idea of health.

00:18:01.500 What were some of the zany ideas he was talking about in these health books he started cranking out?

00:18:06.720 I mean, once physical culture took off in the first decade of the 1900s, McFadden is publishing a new book every few months to make money.

00:18:14.120 You know, he's publishing things like the virile power of supreme manhood.

00:18:18.600 He's publishing strengthening the eyes, which is an eye exercise book, which a woman wrote to me when I was writing this book, who said that her mother made her use it as a child.

00:18:27.620 And she never had to use spectacles in her entire life.

00:18:30.240 And she was now like 90 years old.

00:18:32.080 He wrote to McFadden's new hair culture, which essentially says, if you pull at the roots of your hair, you'll never go bald.

00:18:38.000 And his biggest book is his magnum opus is the 3,000 page encyclopedia of physical culture, which says it can solve any physical or mental malady, mostly through fasting and exercise.

00:18:54.980 But anything you can think of from cancer to kleptomania can be solved using the encyclopedia of physical culture.

00:19:01.900 And as you said, like the stuff was receptive at the time because Americans were really concerned about, you know, neurostenia, getting fat, they wouldn't be able to fight.

00:19:10.480 So, I mean, he had a really captive audience.

00:19:13.760 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:19:14.520 You know, he's writing books also for women.

00:19:16.280 He's writing Muscular Power and Beauty saying, you know, look, if you want to take care of your family, if you want to take care of the health of your husband and your children, you know, you have to eat more vegetables.

00:19:26.280 You have to eat more whole grains, you have to stop eating processed food, and you have to limit your portions, you know.

00:19:32.900 And the thing that really stuck out to me when I started going through my notes again from this book is, you know, everybody talks about intermittent fasting these days.

00:19:43.120 That was McFadden's core idea.

00:19:45.180 He called it the two-day-a-meal plan.

00:19:46.920 And his description of eating a meal at 10 and then another at 6 and, you know, reducing your calories 25% or something, I mean, talk about something you could be reading on a blog today.

00:19:57.600 It just, it echoed so closely to the things that we're seeing around these days.

00:20:02.360 And, you know, somebody from the local NPR affiliate in New York City came out to interview me a couple years ago because he realized that McFadden was also the predecessor of the keto diet.

00:20:13.080 You know, he was using this to treat kids with...

00:20:16.920 What's the term here?

00:20:18.260 Epilepsy.

00:20:18.800 Yeah, epilepsy.

00:20:20.120 You know, 100 years ago.

00:20:21.580 So, you know, part of the reason why he's so far ahead of the curve on this stuff is because he tried everything.

00:20:28.420 You know, he had these health homes.

00:20:30.240 He had this, you know, sort of utopian community that he founded.

00:20:33.920 And in all of these places, you know, he would try out these new theories, and sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn't.

00:20:40.220 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:20:46.920 And now back to the show.

00:20:48.380 Yeah, we're going to talk about his utopian community he tried to establish.

00:20:51.120 Yeah.

00:20:51.200 But besides, like, the extreme, like, you know, not even extreme, it's like intermittent fasting and reducing your calories, he was sort of like the proto, like, paleo fitness guy.

00:21:00.820 I mean, one thing he did was, as a CEO of this publishing company, he lived outside of New York City, but he would walk to the office.

00:21:08.260 I think it was like, it was really far.

00:21:10.760 But he'd walk there barefoot.

00:21:11.200 25 miles.

00:21:11.720 Yeah, 25 miles every day, and he'd walk there barefoot.

00:21:15.080 Yeah.

00:21:15.400 He would only do it one way, but it took him about six hours, and he would, you know, come up with ideas.

00:21:21.140 That's how, when he did most of his thinking, walking six hours.

00:21:24.100 It was Nyack, which is just over the Hudson River from New York City, you know, down to the lower end of Manhattan.

00:21:30.640 And he said, you know, that's when I get most of my best thinking done.

00:21:33.580 But, you know, 25 miles, it's, you know, calorically, it's probably like running a half marathon or something.

00:21:38.640 And this is a guy who, you know, lived on a couple thousand calories a day and never ate anything on Mondays.

00:21:43.700 He always fasted on Mondays.

00:21:45.220 And later in his life, he would, when he opened a health home in upstate New York near Rochester, which is about 350 miles, he would organize what he called cracked wheat derbies, where he would get a bunch of fat people in midtown Manhattan and load up a cart with essentially wheat germ and feed them wheat germ and fresh food.

00:22:05.120 And they would walk every day until they got to Rochester.

00:22:07.580 It would take two or three weeks, and everybody would lose 20 pounds of fat.

00:22:11.060 Right. 0.89

00:22:11.140 So, it's like the biggest loser. 0.66

00:22:13.880 Yeah, essentially. 0.89

00:22:15.200 Right.

00:22:15.880 And what's interesting, as you're researching, you know, because, again, you were doing this because you became the fitness editor, the health editor at GQ.

00:22:23.100 You actually tried to do some of these McFadden health protocols of fasting and lots of walking.

00:22:28.180 How did that work out for you?

00:22:29.560 You know, some of them worked really well.

00:22:31.360 But probably the most extreme thing I tried was I wanted to do a seven-day water fast, which was McFadden's big thing.

00:22:38.200 And I made it about five and a half days, and I got this excruciating headache, which I now realize is probably from not eating any salt.

00:22:46.680 That's what my doctor told me.

00:22:48.260 Probably could have made it the whole week easily if I'd just, you know, gotten a little more balance in my endocrine system.

00:22:54.600 But after five days, I had suffered from this lingering chest infection for years and years that would come and go, and that cleared up, never came back.

00:23:05.260 The other weird thing was I'm not a particularly flexible person, but suddenly I could lean over and touch my palms to the floor.

00:23:12.460 I was incredibly flexible.

00:23:13.660 Other things I tried were, you know, two hours a day of walking, which was not only helped me lose weight, but which gave me this weird, hypersensitive proprioception.

00:23:24.680 Like I could see, feel where my body was in space to a much higher degree than I ever had before.

00:23:29.980 I did a raw food diet for two weeks, like McFadden suggested.

00:23:33.440 And after about a week, my sweat stopped smelling like sweat, and it started to smell like cilantro or green apples to the degree that my dog started getting confused because I no longer smelled like me.

00:23:47.440 And, you know, at one point, I lost 20 pounds in a month putting a bunch of these things together, which I wouldn't recommend because it's pretty extreme.

00:23:56.540 But all of them had, you know, they were mostly pros and a few cons.

00:24:00.260 They were just a little bit crazy.

00:24:01.760 Right. So, I mean, again, I mean, this whole thing was just like eat less, move more.

00:24:05.700 And that's the advice you'd get today for losing weight.

00:24:07.440 He'd just kind of go crazy with it and where it's not healthy anymore.

00:24:11.740 Right. As I usually say to people, you know, he was two parts genius and one part crackpot.

00:24:16.780 It wasn't enough to, you know, help somebody lose 30 or 40 pounds.

00:24:21.620 You know, he had to starve them down to their, you know, absolute bare minimum.

00:24:26.800 I mean, he didn't know when to say when sometimes.

00:24:28.560 He would cut off his children's food if they got a cold.

00:24:30.820 You know, I met his son down in Virginia when I was writing the book.

00:24:34.700 And he said, yeah, you know, we would never tell our parents when we were sick because, you know, they wouldn't say have some soup and go to bed.

00:24:43.380 My father would say, you can't have any more food.

00:24:45.800 You can have water until you feel better.

00:24:47.640 Oh, and also go jump in this cold swimming pool.

00:24:50.540 Right. So he had a big impact on physical culture.

00:24:54.180 He got Americans moving, eating, doing all these fad diets, and we can still see that influence today. 1.00

00:24:59.660 But you mentioned some other things that he had influence on.

00:25:02.060 With his magazines, Physical Culture, he would basically post nearly nude photos of himself and his readers with their before and after pics.

00:25:09.380 And this got him in trouble with vice squads, basically.

00:25:13.880 And eventually, he ended up getting sued by, I think, the New York government or the federal government for, you know, sending obscene things through the mail.

00:25:21.580 Yes. There were two things that happened.

00:25:23.800 He, you know, McFadden loved – his nickname was Body Beautiful McFadden because he insisted that, you know, there was nothing wrong with showing off a gorgeous figure.

00:25:33.600 Because of this, he started the first bodybuilding competitions for both men and women in the United States in 1903.

00:25:40.900 This became what was known as the Physical Culture Exhibition.

00:25:45.040 And in 1905, he put this thing on at the old Madison Square Garden, sold a few thousand tickets.

00:25:52.880 It was a huge success.

00:25:54.740 And there was a fellow named Anthony Comstock, who was the head of the suppression of vice, which was an actual government job at that time.

00:26:02.440 His job was to make sure morals didn't get too out of control.

00:26:07.480 And he came in, and he shut the thing down.

00:26:10.740 They threw McFadden in jail.

00:26:12.860 And, you know, he actually was convicted of a felony eventually.

00:26:17.180 So, you know, that wasn't a big deal until a few years later when he started his utopian community out in the wilds of New Jersey, decided that he was going to move his publishing business there and mail everything out of the post office nearby.

00:26:33.920 And Anthony Comstock came back again and got him on a sending indecent materials through the mail charge.

00:26:40.960 And that was his second felony.

00:26:43.180 So he also had people, you know, running around in short shorts and G-strings, and some women were topless, helping him build the city out in New Jersey.

00:26:51.520 So people coming through on the train from New York to Philadelphia would ask for the conductor to stop so they could gawk out the windows at this craziness that was going on.

00:27:00.900 The physical culture city was a major failure.

00:27:04.680 And because he suddenly had two felonies, he was forced to go away to England, where he met the woman who led him into the next chapter of his life.

00:27:14.240 Yeah, became his wife. 0.68

00:27:15.660 I mean, so it's interesting.

00:27:16.740 So not only was he sort of a proponent of physical fitness, he was one of the first, you know, mainstream publishers, like, offering sex advice at the time.

00:27:25.240 Like, this was something a lot of people didn't even do.

00:27:27.080 They didn't talk about it.

00:27:28.400 But he was sort of like a proto-Hugh Hefner.

00:27:31.180 He was.

00:27:31.840 His big concern was venereal disease, which was absolutely out of control in the U.S. at that time and not talked about.

00:27:38.420 So what McFadden said was, look, if we don't deal with sex education, you know, syphilis and gonorrhea are going to, you know, continue to ravage the country.

00:27:47.260 It was quite normal at that time for a man to have a venereal disease and not tell his wife. 0.51

00:27:52.120 So she gets it and passes it along to their child when the child is born.

00:27:56.060 And, you know, the cycle continues.

00:27:58.280 In physical culture, McFadden is hiring people like, you know, Margaret Sanger, the birth control advocate and, you know, other sort of free thinkers of the time.

00:28:06.820 And, you know, these sorts of things get him into a lot of trouble.

00:28:11.340 So you mentioned he tried to make physical culture city, his physical culture utopia, like most utopias, failed.

00:28:17.460 And then he goes off to England and he meets who became his future wife.

00:28:21.300 Well, he not only meets his future wife, you know, remember McFadden is a fan of eugenics.

00:28:27.000 You know, he believes that humans can be bred like corn, as he put it in one of his books.

00:28:32.500 So he goes off to England and decides he's going to host a contest called Britain's Most Perfect Woman.

00:28:42.340 He's 44 years old.

00:28:44.360 And what he doesn't say is that he's essentially looking for a perfect, eugenically perfect specimen who will bear his children.

00:28:52.380 So he has these women send in postcards of themselves in tight clothing so that he can get a good look at their measurements. 1.00

00:29:00.680 And he chooses a swimming champion from Yorkshire named Mary Williamson.

00:29:05.180 She's 19.

00:29:06.040 They go on this sort of barnstorming tour of England where she jumps off of a six-foot ladder onto his rock-hard abs every night.

00:29:16.080 And he jumps up and yells, ta-da, and then poses with chalk all over himself, like in the act that he stole from Eugen Sandow.

00:29:23.120 And somewhere along the line on this barnstorming tour, he gets her away from her chaperone and proposes to her, and she says yes.

00:29:31.120 And then they proceed to set off to have the perfect, eugenically perfect physical culture family, but not before Bernard makes Mary sign a piece of paper saying that she will never have a doctor present at any of their children's births.

00:29:44.700 Right. So yeah, that's another thing people forget, and part of American history or even history in the United Kingdom, eugenics was, that was a thing.

00:29:52.460 That was a popular accepted idea in the early part of the 20th century.

00:29:56.820 Woodrow Wilson was a big eugenicist, so.

00:29:58.960 Yeah. So yeah, he gets married, and then he also, because he's like the typical fitness writer, blogger person,

00:30:06.540 like he brings his family and makes it a part of his public life, like he basically uses his family as an experiment to show that his ideas about fitness work.

00:30:17.320 Yeah. His family essentially becomes part of the, you know, rolling McFadden show.

00:30:24.320 You know, McFadden was an early adopter of new forms of media, and that was part of his greatness.

00:30:30.000 You know, first he started putting pictures into magazines, started putting celebrity pictures into magazines, which is unknown at the time.

00:30:37.740 Then when the New York Daily News came out in 1919 and took off as a huge success, he decided to publish a tabloid newspaper in New York City,

00:30:45.760 which was like the hottest new thing back then.

00:30:48.100 Later on, he puts his whole family on the radio.

00:30:51.040 The McFadden kids are getting up at four o'clock in the morning out in Nyack, and then later in Englewood, New Jersey,

00:30:56.680 and taking a car into Midtown Manhattan on WOR, which still broadcasts, and, you know, do calisthenics from five to six in the morning.

00:31:04.640 And after that, he's one of the first famous people in America to buy an airplane,

00:31:09.100 and he zips all across America following, you know, railroad wires to navigate and crashes at least a half dozen airplanes over time.

00:31:17.420 One of the interesting tidbits, I mean, one of the part that made me laugh out loud from his family life.

00:31:22.020 So all of his kids, they had a name that started with B, and I thought the funniest one, his wife wanted to name one of his daughters Brenda,

00:31:30.220 and he's like, no, no, no, that's too wussy.

00:31:33.620 We're going to call her Bronda.

00:31:35.760 And they named her Bronda.

00:31:37.380 B-R-A-W-N-D-A. 1.00

00:31:39.340 Yeah, Bronda. 0.87

00:31:40.240 I think they softened it with a U after that.

00:31:42.900 But what had happened was, because he was so interested in breeding perfect children, his first two children were small.

00:31:50.840 They were six or seven pounds.

00:31:52.240 When he made the announcement in Physical Culture magazine, he added two or three pounds to make it sound more impressive.

00:31:57.800 Bronda was born at 13 pounds.

00:32:00.420 So you can imagine, you know, a 13-pound baby delivered with no doctor present.

00:32:04.800 Well, how Mary must have felt after that. 0.94

00:32:06.520 He even went on to name one of his sons, whom I met, Brewster, because Mary wanted to name him Bruce. 0.98

00:32:13.640 And he said, no, this kid's going to grow up to be like a fighting cock. 0.94

00:32:17.120 So let's call him B-Rooster. 0.99

00:32:18.880 B-Rooster.

00:32:19.500 Now, I should say, you know, eugenics has, to say the very least, fallen out of favor in the last hundred years.

00:32:26.180 But Bruce McFadden, when I met him, you know, his mother was a swimming champion in England.

00:32:31.880 He looked exactly like his father, except he was six inches taller, about 50 pounds of muscle heavier.

00:32:40.440 And he went off to Yale and, as a freshman, swam on two relays that set world records.

00:32:46.260 So maybe there was a little something to McFadden's planning.

00:32:49.200 I don't know.

00:32:49.540 So he had this physical culture thing going on, and he used that to springboard other magazines.

00:32:55.920 And he basically became a publishing tycoon, like a Hearst, basically.

00:32:59.640 You mentioned some of the magazines.

00:33:00.740 They're basically just these confessional magazines where readers would write in these crazy stories.

00:33:06.600 And it was reality television, essentially.

00:33:09.200 Yeah.

00:33:09.460 Other magazines at the time referred to it as the I'm Ruined, I'm Ruined school of journalism.

00:33:15.420 All he was interested in was, you know, first-person, allegedly factual confessional stories like, you know, I had a baby with my friend's husband.

00:33:26.540 It was a formula for women's magazines. 1.00

00:33:29.700 You know, women's magazines at the time were really dry, very highbrow.

00:33:34.140 Theodore Dreiser, who wrote An American Tragedy, who wrote Sister Carrie, he was one of the editors of one of the big six women's magazines at the time.

00:33:42.220 So this confessional magazine format that McFadden came up with was like a bolt of lightning, and it took off.

00:33:49.380 It sold, you know, 10 times the number of magazines that physical culture ever sold and, you know, essentially created the sort of reality first-person narrative genre that we're still dealing with today.

00:34:03.140 All right, so he started True Story, and what's crazy, this publishing empire that he began, like, he had a lot of influence or who went on to be influential media personalities on his payroll.

00:34:16.800 He had Walter Winchell working for him, Ed Sullivan of The Ed Sullivan Show, and even Eleanor Roosevelt.

00:34:22.540 Well, what happened was, you know, McFadden's suddenly sitting on this huge amount of money from True Story and True Detective magazine, and he decides, as many men who suddenly find themselves sitting on a pile of money do, that he wants to have greater influence in politics.

00:34:40.040 And the way in the 1920s that one could have greater influence in politics was to start one's own newspaper, like William Randolph Hearst had.

00:34:48.040 So he decides he's going to do a combination of true story and physical culture, put it in a pink tabloid newspaper, and call it the New York Evening Graphic, which has been described as the worst newspaper in American history.

00:35:02.860 So he puts together this staff with Walter Winchell, the inventor of the gossip column.

00:35:08.500 Ed Sullivan is his sports writer, also acting as master of ceremonies for bodybuilding contests and evenings.

00:35:17.200 One of the people who was discovered in these bodybuilding contests was Charles Atlas.

00:35:21.580 He hires the editor, John Houston, the director, who is fired for accusing someone of murder who was not guilty of murder.

00:35:28.740 And he hires the guy, Robert Harrison, who goes on to start Confidential Magazine, which is the most scandalous, scandal wreck of all time, according to Tom Wolfe, and which led directly to things like the National Enquirer and TMZ.

00:35:44.800 It basically laid the groundwork for the publishing industry, and we can see his influence today.

00:35:49.560 And then in the 1930s, as you talk about, you've already mentioned, he started getting involved in politics.

00:35:55.420 He reinvented himself as a politician, and of course, his platform was physical culture.

00:36:01.160 So what did the physical culture party platform look like?

00:36:04.960 Well, McFadden did something very clever in the 1930s.

00:36:07.660 This was his third big publishing success, which was he bought a weekly magazine called Liberty, which was in the days before Time and Newsweek became huge.

00:36:17.120 One of the three biggest magazines in the country.

00:36:21.060 And to build circulation, he allies himself with Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt.

00:36:28.660 So he publishes the first big story saying Franklin Roosevelt is physically fit for the presidency.

00:36:35.200 And that sort of, you know, quashes any talk that the polio had made him, you know, unable to run the country.

00:36:41.520 It was a huge thing for FDR, and it was a huge thing for McFadden.

00:36:44.540 It gave him a huge boost.

00:36:45.580 To cement the relationship with the Roosevelts, McFadden signs a contract with Eleanor Roosevelt saying,

00:36:56.440 I want you to edit a magazine about babies called Babies Just Babies.

00:37:01.320 I'll pay you $500 a month, but if you end up in the White House, I'll pay you $1,000 a month.

00:37:07.720 So for 18 months or two years, Eleanor Roosevelt is editing this baby magazine for Bernard McFadden.

00:37:16.720 All is as, you know, this way that the Roosevelts are using McFadden and McFadden is using the Roosevelts.

00:37:23.280 Eventually, they sort of drift apart.

00:37:26.100 McFadden is, he started off as a real progressive because of his anti-doctor stance and, you know, pro-health food and all that.

00:37:33.720 But at heart, he's a Republican by the late 1930s, and he really, really hates paying taxes.

00:37:41.520 So around 1936, he starts spreading rumors through his publications that, you know, he would be open to accepting the Republican nomination.

00:37:52.540 He gives a review, interview to, I think it's the New York Herald, and it's indicative of how serious his candidacy was taken that the Herald runs a headline, something like, you know, Bernard McFadden exposes himself to the Republican nomination.

00:38:08.100 You know, at this time, he's still known for his, you know, nudism and things like that.

00:38:11.880 But he's pushing for physical fitness. 0.99

00:38:15.840 He sees World War II coming, and he says, you know, look, the Germans are going to kick our ass. 1.00

00:38:22.520 The Japanese are going to kick our ass. 1.00

00:38:24.740 They're training, you know, kids in school. 1.00

00:38:27.800 And as a part of this, McFadden develops an obsession with Benito Mussolini over in Italy, who he sees as a strong man who is training the fascists to become a sort of master race.

00:38:43.000 And he's, you know, he's obsessed with this.

00:38:45.360 He goes over, he meets Mussolini. 0.99

00:38:46.740 And because McFadden is sort of a nervous conversationalist, he blurts out, your fascist cadets are fat. 0.99

00:38:53.140 I could whip him into shape. 0.98

00:38:54.600 And Mussolini says, okay, here's a battalion.

00:38:59.200 Take him to one of your health homes.

00:39:00.660 And McFadden invites these fascist cadets over, puts them through their ropes for two months, cuts off their pasta, cuts off their red wine, makes them learn how to play baseball.

00:39:10.440 And they each drop about 10 to 12 pounds, gain all sorts of stamina.

00:39:14.380 And this is, you know, of course, a 12-page story in Physical Culture magazine in 1931.

00:39:20.520 And Mussolini orders the king of Italy to give them the order, to give McFadden the order of the crown.

00:39:25.800 So he's like a national hero in Italy.

00:39:28.740 And so, I mean, his, I guess his political career really didn't go anywhere.

00:39:31.880 He tried to move to Florida and run for the Senate, but that ended up not working out for him.

00:39:35.800 So in 36, he convinces himself he's going to be able to buy delegates at the Republican convention.

00:39:41.440 He doesn't get a single delegate.

00:39:43.400 He ends up sitting in his room alone, listening to the radio, waiting for his name to be called, and it's never called.

00:39:48.800 So he decides, okay, I'll run for Senate in Florida, which was a tiny population state.

00:39:54.560 Mississippi and Iowa had bigger populations at that time than Florida.

00:39:58.740 And says, okay, I'm going to run as a Democrat, even though I'm essentially a Republican, because only Democrats get elected here.

00:40:07.440 And if you're in the top two finishers, there's a runoff, and I can beat the incumbent.

00:40:12.240 So he pours all this money into an ad campaign in Florida.

00:40:16.200 He gets in his airplane.

00:40:17.380 He's flying from small town to small town.

00:40:19.760 He picks up momentum.

00:40:21.360 You know, when the election results start coming in, he's number two.

00:40:24.940 People are like, you know, maybe he's going to, you know, get this runoff.

00:40:29.260 Something happens.

00:40:30.320 He says that, you know, there was some skullduggery, but I couldn't find any evidence that there was.

00:40:35.940 He falls to third place.

00:40:38.320 At the end of that, he goes back to New York City, and his board of directors says, hey, buddy, you've been wasting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars on this political career that's going nowhere.

00:40:49.140 You're kicked out of McFadden Publications.

00:40:51.380 And as of 1941, he is no longer affiliated with the company that bears his name.

00:40:56.840 And what happened in his later years of his life?

00:40:58.980 How did he spend it?

00:41:00.320 I mean, it sounds like America just moved on.

00:41:02.080 They didn't – his ideas no longer synced up with what Americans were looking for.

00:41:06.960 It was.

00:41:07.580 You know, just as I thought while rereading this book that I had published it at the wrong time.

00:41:12.680 I probably published the book 10 years too early.

00:41:15.220 It would be super timely now.

00:41:17.200 McFadden was the wrong guy or the right guy at the wrong time.

00:41:21.740 In the 1930s, by the time, you know, he had, you know, built up physical culture to its greatest circulation,

00:41:28.820 by the time he had Liberty as a mass circulation magazine, World War II was starting.

00:41:34.200 They didn't want to hear about his love of autocrats over in Europe.

00:41:38.200 They didn't want to hear, as rationing started, that he thought people were eating too much and should have their meat cut off.

00:41:44.620 You know, they didn't want to hear as, you know, in the early days of antibiotics,

00:41:49.240 that he didn't believe in the germ theory of disease and that they could just, you know, starve themselves free of pneumonia or syphilis or gonorrhea.

00:41:58.740 So what happens is McFadden fades away through the 1940s.

00:42:02.180 He gets smaller and smaller, both physically and in public.

00:42:05.700 You know, he becomes sort of a comic figure.

00:42:07.840 He shows up in newspaper gossip columns.

00:42:10.300 He jumps out of an airplane on his birthday every year.

00:42:13.300 But by the time he dies in 1955, he's essentially forgotten.

00:42:17.180 In the 1950s, people like Jack LaLanne, who learned everything he originally knew from a guy named Paul Bragg,

00:42:26.860 whose name you can still see on things like Bragg Aminos and, you know, Bragg apple cider vinegar in the supermarket.

00:42:33.400 He was one of McFadden's top disciples.

00:42:35.980 So secondhand, you've got Jack LaLanne learning from McFadden.

00:42:40.820 In terms of bodybuilding, in the last few years of his life, McFadden adopts a guy named Joe Weider.

00:42:47.680 Joe Weider is this, you know, Canadian strongman who starts a publishing company, starts a strength-equipping company, becomes the biggest name in bodybuilding in the 70s and 80s.

00:42:56.860 He, much like McFadden, found an immigrant bodybuilder in the 1920s, finds a guy named Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the two of them make millions and millions of dollars.

00:43:04.920 People start publishing health food cookbooks in the 60s.

00:43:09.060 People start, you know, doing yoga, things, you know, that McFadden had been writing about.

00:43:13.880 McFadden had written about Pilates.

00:43:16.040 You know, all these things that McFadden had written about in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s start coming back.

00:43:21.880 But because his personality is no longer there, he's essentially buried in the mists of time.

00:43:28.420 So we've talked about, we can see McFadden's influence.

00:43:30.840 We've made that explicit that we can even still see today on American Cultures.

00:43:35.340 For that, I mean, he's, you know, he's someone we should remember for that.

00:43:40.280 But as I was reading this book, I didn't know what to, I mean, what was your takeaway from McFadden the man?

00:43:44.640 Because, I mean, as I was reading this, I found him absolutely kooky.

00:43:47.380 But at the same time, I found I was actually impressed by his moxie, his confidence that he had in himself. 1.00

00:43:53.500 I mean, what was your takeaway from McFadden after you finished writing a book about him?

00:43:58.720 You know, he really reminded me of some of these guys who succeed in Silicon Valley.

00:44:05.360 You know, he started with what sounded like a crazy idea, and nobody believed in him.

00:44:10.180 But he just kept pushing it and pushing it and pushing it.

00:44:13.620 And eventually, the world came around, and, you know, the naysayers were wrong, and he was right.

00:44:22.060 You know, that said, as with a lot of things that have come out of Silicon Valley, there was a dark side to it, you know?

00:44:29.040 I mean, he had two children who died from treatments that he gave them.

00:44:35.480 He had a baby boy who died because he probably had a fever, and McFadden put him in a, you know, red-hot sits bath.

00:44:44.100 And he had a daughter who died in her early 20s because she had a heart murmur, and he made her exercise all the time and put her on a fast.

00:44:52.100 So, you know, I mean, on the one hand, he had a lot of incredible, you know, ideas.

00:44:58.940 You know, one of the last things he did before he died was he sent a letter to President Eisenhower, who had, you know, suffered a heart attack.

00:45:06.420 And he said, here are some exercises you can do to get your heart back in shape, which at the time was radical.

00:45:11.180 And I'm sure Eisenhower never saw the letter, but he was, you know, he was ahead of his time in terms of, you know, sound mind and the sound body.

00:45:19.400 And, you know, he really does have that sort of personal branding, you know, I'm going to drag this thing to success sort of moxie that, you know, often equals success. 0.87

00:45:32.060 Well, Mark, where can people go to learn more about the book and the other stuff you've been doing?

00:45:36.360 You can read about all of my books at markadamsbooks.com.

00:45:41.980 So there's a whole series.

00:45:44.160 Fantastic.

00:45:44.560 Well, Mark Adams, thanks for your time.

00:45:45.640 It's been a pleasure.

00:45:46.820 Brett, it's really been a lot of fun.

00:45:48.840 My guest today was Mark Adams.

00:45:50.040 He's the author of the book, Mr. America.

00:45:52.340 It's available on amazon.com.

00:45:53.700 You can also find out more information about his work at his website, markadamsbooks.com.

00:45:58.160 Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash McFadden, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:46:11.620 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.

00:46:14.420 Check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles about physical fitness, personal finances, you name it.

00:46:21.400 We got it there.

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00:46:46.600 Until next time, it's Brett McKay, reminding you not only to listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

00:46:51.980 All in datemen, as always, we've heard about the AOM podcast, and we'll get you next year.

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The Art of Manliness - July 06, 2020

#624： The Crazy, Forgotten Story of America's First Fitness Influencer

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