Bernard McFadden was a pioneer of the physical fitness movement that started in America in the late 19th and early 20th century. He coined the motto, Weakness is a crime, don t be a criminal. and founded a publishing empire that pioneered many of the confessional, first-person personal branding techniques still used today.
00:00:30.000Mr. America, how muscular millionaire Bernard McFadden transformed the nation through sex, salad, and the ultimate starvation diet.
00:00:37.360Mark 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.
00:00:48.620We 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.
00:00:59.680Mark 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.
00:01:09.540Mark 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.
00:01:20.420We 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.
00:01:27.340After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash McFadden.
00:01:45.260So, 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.
00:02:00.660And this is about this icon of the physical fitness movement that started in America, really, the late 19th century, early 20th century.
00:02:09.060We'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?
00:02:16.880Well, in the late 90s, I was named fitness editor of GQ Magazine.
00:02:22.360And 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.
00:02:35.020I 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.
00:02:49.560And I was like, what is this magazine?
00:02:53.240And 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.
00:03:05.580So 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.
00:03:11.920Because 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.
00:03:20.560But beyond that, he had a huge impact on the publishing industry, the magazine industry.
00:03:25.880And you could even say he's sort of a predecessor for blogs or Instagram influencers as well.
00:03:54.220He was, had a really tough childhood growing up in post-Civil War Missouri, basically an orphan.
00:03:59.960His 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.
00:04:08.180But at what point in his childhood did Bernard discover physical fitness?
00:04:12.840So he is sent off to this, his mother called it a boarding school, but it was basically an orphanage for a couple of years.
00:04:20.280After 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.
00:04:31.900And 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.
00:04:39.920And 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.
00:04:47.880And he goes to St. Louis, which at the time is a boom town.
00:04:52.780St. Louis is a conduit for German immigrants into the United States.
00:04:57.120This is a time when German is still required in St. Louis public schools.
00:05:02.000And the Germans bring with them this traditional of social physical fitness.
00:05:09.320And 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.
00:05:20.500You know, working with ropes and pulleys and pommel horses and that sort of thing.
00:05:27.720And from that day forward, he commits himself to physical fitness, and that's the rest of his life, essentially.
00:05:34.440And these German gymnasiums are really interesting because it's an interesting part of fitness culture in America.
00:05:38.700Because 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.
00:05:48.140Well, it's interesting because this is a moment in American alternative medicine where the area around Missouri is like cutting edge.
00:06:22.880And 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.
00:06:40.680They 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.
00:06:49.040And, you know, you're not really a manly man anymore.
00:06:51.140And McFadden is reading about this stuff at the German gymnasium, the St. Louis gymnasium that he goes to.
00:06:59.460And in particular, he comes across a book by William Blakey, who is a Harvard teacher.
00:07:06.300And 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.
00:07:16.120And this is like a magic charm for McFadden.
00:07:18.440And he carries that book with him the rest of his life.
00:07:20.300So 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.
00:07:30.700Because at the time, a lot of people were seen like professional doctors as corrupt.
00:07:36.580And in fact, this is the time when this is before the medical industry where there is any sort of standardization or ethics.
00:07:43.660Like, I mean, you could just be a doctor.
00:07:45.480And I think a lot of people mistrusted that.
00:07:47.540No, this is the era of patent medicines, you know, snake oil, medicine shows.
00:07:53.300The AMA, the American Medical Association, is not organized until I think the second decade of the 20th century.
00:08:00.160So if you wanted to call yourself a doctor at this time, you could call yourself a doctor.
00:08:06.000And 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.
00:08:20.480And they would take some of the pus and then cut open your arm and rub some of the pus in there.
00:08:24.960And then you would get like a low-grade, you know, version of smallpox.
00:08:28.380And that would be your vaccination for the rest of your life.
00:08:31.200And 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.
00:08:42.440I 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.
00:08:52.080And that sort of, I mean, he became an anti-vaxxer, basically, for the rest of his life.
00:08:55.680That 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.
00:09:04.440Yeah, 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.
00:09:14.820When 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.
00:09:29.820So 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.
00:09:39.780McFadden's newspaper is covering it as some sort of tragedy.
00:09:42.900You know, he's talking about how this is a, you know, public relations scam put together by what he calls the POS Trust.
00:09:49.280So, 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.
00:10:01.460So 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.
00:10:09.840Before 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.
00:10:19.560But 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.
00:10:27.620This is the, this is like the rebirth of the old Greek ideal of, you know, mensana, incorpore sano.
00:10:33.660No, 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.
00:10:40.520And, 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.
00:10:50.300As industrialization comes in, you know, the YMCA is invented over in Britain.
00:10:55.340People start worrying about America's youth and, you know, it becomes a major issue.
00:11:00.660People 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.
00:11:10.780And this is a, an obsession of McFadden's that comes up again and again over time.
00:11:15.060So 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.
00:11:25.800But like, when did he start seeing himself, not as a student, but as a teacher of physical culture?
00:11:34.320Around 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.
00:11:45.480And he hangs out a shingle as what he calls a kinestherapist.
00:12:10.480But in St. Louis in 1891, he cannot find the audience.
00:12:14.920And 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.
00:12:49.080And 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.
00:13:01.320So 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.
00:13:18.980And, you know, barnstorm around the U.S. and make some money that way.
00:13:25.160Well, it doesn't work out in the U.S., so he goes to England, where Sandow is living, and it's a huge success.
00:13:32.200While he's in England, he sees that Sandow has started a magazine called Physical Culture.
00:13:37.800And McFadden essentially steals Sandow's idea, comes back to New York, and decides to do a much better version of his own.
00:13:46.140The Sandow, we've had a podcast about Sandow before.
00:13:49.700I 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.
00:14:03.140And 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.
00:14:21.380And the guy told me, Terry Todd, the professor, told me, well, the bench press hadn't been invented yet.
00:14:25.900You know, the bench press wasn't invented until the 1930s, 1940s.
00:14:29.140So, the fact that Sandow was able to get this big before the bench was invented is just extraordinary to me.
00:14:36.260I thought one of the funniest parts from Sandow's history.
00:14:38.540So, he'd do these performances, but then afterwards, he'd have like private performances where people could get up close and like touch him.
00:14:45.100And like women would literally faint, like the like 19th century lady would faint and you had to do the smelling salts thing.
00:14:54.140So, yeah, basically, he sees Sandow doing this, does Sandow's thing, takes it back to America, starts Physical Culture Magazine.
00:14:59.880This is the thing that made him into a publisher.
00:15:03.320What kind of stuff was he writing about in physical culture?
00:15:07.700You 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,
00:15:18.380were Americans eat too much and Americans don't exercise.
00:16:04.140And 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.
00:16:26.580That 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.
00:16:42.340And 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.
00:16:52.800Yeah. 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.
00:17:10.400He's showing off, you know, here's what happens after a week of fasting.
00:17:13.400When 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.
00:17:19.980You know, here's a picture of my baby doing a handstand.
00:17:23.400He really invited himself into people's homes.
00:17:26.120And 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.
00:17:37.260So the magazine was a huge success and I mean, big response to it.
00:17:40.720And because of that, it laid, this is where you started seeing the groundwork for his publishing empire that he built up.
00:17:46.140And one of the first things he did was he went to books.
00:17:49.020Like he tried to write a book earlier.
00:17:50.860It was sort of like, he called it like a physical culture, love story.
00:17:53.600Didn'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.
00:18:01.500What were some of the zany ideas he was talking about in these health books he started cranking out?
00:18:06.720I 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.
00:18:14.120You know, he's publishing things like the virile power of supreme manhood.
00:18:18.600He'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.
00:18:27.620And she never had to use spectacles in her entire life.
00:18:32.080He wrote to McFadden's new hair culture, which essentially says, if you pull at the roots of your hair, you'll never go bald.
00:18:38.000And 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.
00:18:54.980But anything you can think of from cancer to kleptomania can be solved using the encyclopedia of physical culture.
00:19:01.900And 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.
00:19:10.480So, I mean, he had a really captive audience.
00:19:14.520You know, he's writing books also for women.
00:19:16.280He'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.
00:19:26.280You have to eat more whole grains, you have to stop eating processed food, and you have to limit your portions, you know.
00:19:32.900And 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.
00:19:46.920And 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.
00:19:57.600It just, it echoed so closely to the things that we're seeing around these days.
00:20:02.360And, 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.
00:20:13.080You know, he was using this to treat kids with...
00:20:51.200But 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.
00:21:00.820I 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.
00:21:08.260I think it was like, it was really far.
00:21:45.220And 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.
00:22:05.120And they would walk every day until they got to Rochester.
00:22:07.580It would take two or three weeks, and everybody would lose 20 pounds of fat.
00:22:15.880And 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.
00:22:23.100You actually tried to do some of these McFadden health protocols of fasting and lots of walking.
00:22:48.260Probably could have made it the whole week easily if I'd just, you know, gotten a little more balance in my endocrine system.
00:22:54.600But 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.
00:23:05.260The other weird thing was I'm not a particularly flexible person, but suddenly I could lean over and touch my palms to the floor.
00:23:13.660Other 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.
00:23:24.680Like I could see, feel where my body was in space to a much higher degree than I ever had before.
00:23:29.980I did a raw food diet for two weeks, like McFadden suggested.
00:23:33.440And 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.
00:23:47.440And, 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.
00:23:56.540But all of them had, you know, they were mostly pros and a few cons.
00:24:01.760Right. So, I mean, again, I mean, this whole thing was just like eat less, move more.
00:24:05.700And that's the advice you'd get today for losing weight.
00:24:07.440He'd just kind of go crazy with it and where it's not healthy anymore.
00:24:11.740Right. As I usually say to people, you know, he was two parts genius and one part crackpot.
00:24:16.780It wasn't enough to, you know, help somebody lose 30 or 40 pounds.
00:24:21.620You know, he had to starve them down to their, you know, absolute bare minimum.
00:24:26.800I mean, he didn't know when to say when sometimes.
00:24:28.560He would cut off his children's food if they got a cold.
00:24:30.820You know, I met his son down in Virginia when I was writing the book.
00:24:34.700And 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.
00:24:43.380My father would say, you can't have any more food.
00:24:45.800You can have water until you feel better.
00:24:47.640Oh, and also go jump in this cold swimming pool.
00:24:50.540Right. So he had a big impact on physical culture.
00:24:54.180He got Americans moving, eating, doing all these fad diets, and we can still see that influence today.
00:24:59.660But you mentioned some other things that he had influence on.
00:25:02.060With his magazines, Physical Culture, he would basically post nearly nude photos of himself and his readers with their before and after pics.
00:25:09.380And this got him in trouble with vice squads, basically.
00:25:13.880And 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.
00:25:21.580Yes. There were two things that happened.
00:25:23.800He, 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.
00:25:33.600Because of this, he started the first bodybuilding competitions for both men and women in the United States in 1903.
00:25:40.900This became what was known as the Physical Culture Exhibition.
00:25:45.040And in 1905, he put this thing on at the old Madison Square Garden, sold a few thousand tickets.
00:25:54.740And 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.
00:26:02.440His job was to make sure morals didn't get too out of control.
00:26:07.480And he came in, and he shut the thing down.
00:26:12.860And, you know, he actually was convicted of a felony eventually.
00:26:17.180So, 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.
00:26:33.920And Anthony Comstock came back again and got him on a sending indecent materials through the mail charge.
00:26:43.180So 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.
00:26:51.520So 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.
00:27:00.900The physical culture city was a major failure.
00:27:04.680And 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.
00:27:16.740So 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.
00:27:25.240Like, this was something a lot of people didn't even do.
00:27:31.840His big concern was venereal disease, which was absolutely out of control in the U.S. at that time and not talked about.
00:27:38.420So 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.
00:27:47.260It was quite normal at that time for a man to have a venereal disease and not tell his wife.
00:27:52.120So she gets it and passes it along to their child when the child is born.
00:27:58.280In 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.
00:28:06.820And, you know, these sorts of things get him into a lot of trouble.
00:28:11.340So you mentioned he tried to make physical culture city, his physical culture utopia, like most utopias, failed.
00:28:17.460And then he goes off to England and he meets who became his future wife.
00:28:21.300Well, he not only meets his future wife, you know, remember McFadden is a fan of eugenics.
00:28:27.000You know, he believes that humans can be bred like corn, as he put it in one of his books.
00:28:32.500So he goes off to England and decides he's going to host a contest called Britain's Most Perfect Woman.
00:29:06.040They 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.
00:29:16.080And 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.
00:29:23.120And somewhere along the line on this barnstorming tour, he gets her away from her chaperone and proposes to her, and she says yes.
00:29:31.120And 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.
00:29:44.700Right. 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.
00:29:52.460That was a popular accepted idea in the early part of the 20th century.
00:29:56.820Woodrow Wilson was a big eugenicist, so.
00:29:58.960Yeah. So yeah, he gets married, and then he also, because he's like the typical fitness writer, blogger person,
00:30:06.540like 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.
00:30:17.320Yeah. His family essentially becomes part of the, you know, rolling McFadden show.
00:30:24.320You know, McFadden was an early adopter of new forms of media, and that was part of his greatness.
00:30:30.000You know, first he started putting pictures into magazines, started putting celebrity pictures into magazines, which is unknown at the time.
00:30:37.740Then 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,
00:30:45.760which was like the hottest new thing back then.
00:30:48.100Later on, he puts his whole family on the radio.
00:30:51.040The McFadden kids are getting up at four o'clock in the morning out in Nyack, and then later in Englewood, New Jersey,
00:30:56.680and taking a car into Midtown Manhattan on WOR, which still broadcasts, and, you know, do calisthenics from five to six in the morning.
00:31:04.640And after that, he's one of the first famous people in America to buy an airplane,
00:31:09.100and he zips all across America following, you know, railroad wires to navigate and crashes at least a half dozen airplanes over time.
00:31:17.420One of the interesting tidbits, I mean, one of the part that made me laugh out loud from his family life.
00:31:22.020So 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,
00:31:30.220and he's like, no, no, no, that's too wussy.
00:33:09.460Other magazines at the time referred to it as the I'm Ruined, I'm Ruined school of journalism.
00:33:15.420All 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.
00:33:26.540It was a formula for women's magazines.
00:33:29.700You know, women's magazines at the time were really dry, very highbrow.
00:33:34.140Theodore 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.
00:33:42.220So this confessional magazine format that McFadden came up with was like a bolt of lightning, and it took off.
00:33:49.380It 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.
00:34:03.140All 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.
00:34:16.800He had Walter Winchell working for him, Ed Sullivan of The Ed Sullivan Show, and even Eleanor Roosevelt.
00:34:22.540Well, 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.
00:34:40.040And 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.
00:34:48.040So 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.
00:35:02.860So he puts together this staff with Walter Winchell, the inventor of the gossip column.
00:35:08.500Ed Sullivan is his sports writer, also acting as master of ceremonies for bodybuilding contests and evenings.
00:35:17.200One of the people who was discovered in these bodybuilding contests was Charles Atlas.
00:35:21.580He hires the editor, John Houston, the director, who is fired for accusing someone of murder who was not guilty of murder.
00:35:28.740And 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.
00:35:44.800It basically laid the groundwork for the publishing industry, and we can see his influence today.
00:35:49.560And then in the 1930s, as you talk about, you've already mentioned, he started getting involved in politics.
00:35:55.420He reinvented himself as a politician, and of course, his platform was physical culture.
00:36:01.160So what did the physical culture party platform look like?
00:36:04.960Well, McFadden did something very clever in the 1930s.
00:36:07.660This 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.
00:36:17.120One of the three biggest magazines in the country.
00:36:21.060And to build circulation, he allies himself with Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt.
00:36:28.660So he publishes the first big story saying Franklin Roosevelt is physically fit for the presidency.
00:36:35.200And that sort of, you know, quashes any talk that the polio had made him, you know, unable to run the country.
00:36:41.520It was a huge thing for FDR, and it was a huge thing for McFadden.
00:37:26.100McFadden is, he started off as a real progressive because of his anti-doctor stance and, you know, pro-health food and all that.
00:37:33.720But at heart, he's a Republican by the late 1930s, and he really, really hates paying taxes.
00:37:41.520So around 1936, he starts spreading rumors through his publications that, you know, he would be open to accepting the Republican nomination.
00:37:52.540He 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.
00:38:08.100You know, at this time, he's still known for his, you know, nudism and things like that.
00:38:11.880But he's pushing for physical fitness.
00:38:15.840He sees World War II coming, and he says, you know, look, the Germans are going to kick our ass.
00:38:22.520The Japanese are going to kick our ass.
00:38:24.740They're training, you know, kids in school.
00:38:27.800And 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.
00:38:43.000And he's, you know, he's obsessed with this.
00:39:00.660And 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.
00:39:10.440And they each drop about 10 to 12 pounds, gain all sorts of stamina.
00:39:14.380And this is, you know, of course, a 12-page story in Physical Culture magazine in 1931.
00:39:20.520And Mussolini orders the king of Italy to give them the order, to give McFadden the order of the crown.
00:39:25.800So he's like a national hero in Italy.
00:39:28.740And so, I mean, his, I guess his political career really didn't go anywhere.
00:39:31.880He tried to move to Florida and run for the Senate, but that ended up not working out for him.
00:39:35.800So in 36, he convinces himself he's going to be able to buy delegates at the Republican convention.
00:40:38.320At 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.
00:40:49.140You're kicked out of McFadden Publications.
00:40:51.380And as of 1941, he is no longer affiliated with the company that bears his name.
00:40:56.840And what happened in his later years of his life?
00:41:17.200McFadden was the wrong guy or the right guy at the wrong time.
00:41:21.740In the 1930s, by the time, you know, he had, you know, built up physical culture to its greatest circulation,
00:41:28.820by the time he had Liberty as a mass circulation magazine, World War II was starting.
00:41:34.200They didn't want to hear about his love of autocrats over in Europe.
00:41:38.200They didn't want to hear, as rationing started, that he thought people were eating too much and should have their meat cut off.
00:41:44.620You know, they didn't want to hear as, you know, in the early days of antibiotics,
00:41:49.240that 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.
00:41:58.740So what happens is McFadden fades away through the 1940s.
00:42:02.180He gets smaller and smaller, both physically and in public.
00:42:05.700You know, he becomes sort of a comic figure.
00:42:07.840He shows up in newspaper gossip columns.
00:42:10.300He jumps out of an airplane on his birthday every year.
00:42:13.300But by the time he dies in 1955, he's essentially forgotten.
00:42:17.180In the 1950s, people like Jack LaLanne, who learned everything he originally knew from a guy named Paul Bragg,
00:42:26.860whose name you can still see on things like Bragg Aminos and, you know, Bragg apple cider vinegar in the supermarket.
00:42:33.400He was one of McFadden's top disciples.
00:42:35.980So secondhand, you've got Jack LaLanne learning from McFadden.
00:42:40.820In terms of bodybuilding, in the last few years of his life, McFadden adopts a guy named Joe Weider.
00:42:47.680Joe 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.
00:42:56.860He, 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.
00:43:04.920People start publishing health food cookbooks in the 60s.
00:43:09.060People start, you know, doing yoga, things, you know, that McFadden had been writing about.
00:43:16.040You know, all these things that McFadden had written about in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s start coming back.
00:43:21.880But because his personality is no longer there, he's essentially buried in the mists of time.
00:43:28.420So we've talked about, we can see McFadden's influence.
00:43:30.840We've made that explicit that we can even still see today on American Cultures.
00:43:35.340For that, I mean, he's, you know, he's someone we should remember for that.
00:43:40.280But as I was reading this book, I didn't know what to, I mean, what was your takeaway from McFadden the man?
00:43:44.640Because, I mean, as I was reading this, I found him absolutely kooky.
00:43:47.380But at the same time, I found I was actually impressed by his moxie, his confidence that he had in himself.
00:43:53.500I mean, what was your takeaway from McFadden after you finished writing a book about him?
00:43:58.720You know, he really reminded me of some of these guys who succeed in Silicon Valley.
00:44:05.360You know, he started with what sounded like a crazy idea, and nobody believed in him.
00:44:10.180But he just kept pushing it and pushing it and pushing it.
00:44:13.620And eventually, the world came around, and, you know, the naysayers were wrong, and he was right.
00:44:22.060You 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?
00:44:29.040I mean, he had two children who died from treatments that he gave them.
00:44:35.480He had a baby boy who died because he probably had a fever, and McFadden put him in a, you know, red-hot sits bath.
00:44:44.100And 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.
00:44:52.100So, you know, I mean, on the one hand, he had a lot of incredible, you know, ideas.
00:44:58.940You 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.
00:45:06.420And he said, here are some exercises you can do to get your heart back in shape, which at the time was radical.
00:45:11.180And 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.
00:45:19.400And, 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.
00:45:32.060Well, Mark, where can people go to learn more about the book and the other stuff you've been doing?
00:45:36.360You can read about all of my books at markadamsbooks.com.
00:45:53.700You can also find out more information about his work at his website, markadamsbooks.com.
00:45:58.160Also 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.
00:46:11.620Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
00:46:14.420Check 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.