The Little Giant Passes...

by Harry Paschall

The fabulous Bernarr MacFadden, whose name was synonymous with physical culture, now strides across a larger stage...

TO THOSE whose paths crossed that of Bernarr Macfadden his recent passing in a Jersey City hospital was not the true finale to his controversial but always colorful career. He left large footprints on the sands of time for such a small man (He was only about 5'5" in height and around 140 lbs. in bodyweight), and he made a tremendous impression in the everyday living habits of three generations of Americans. To most of us he was the Father of Physical Culture.

Was he a great man or a charlatan? Several exposé-type books and articles have implied the latter, yet to physical culturists his name will always be revered. To countless thousands of people he meant the difference between a miserable existence and a full, happy healthy life. His books and magazines must have influenced millions to change their way of living for the better. I know that I can be numbered among the myriads whose lives were transformed by his teachings and beliefs.

The present generation, unfortunately, does not know the vital, vigorous crusader of his early and middle years. They only know him as a somewhat vain old man who jumps out of airplanes in long red underwear, and who insists that "old age is a bad habit!" They read the newspaper stories about a man who was once rated at $30 million, and who wound up with an estimated estate of under $5 thousand, and they may justifiably think that a fool and his money are soon parted. To this generation the name Macfadden does not stand for the fine things it represented not only to my own generation but to the one before mine and to the one that came after.

I shall never forget the day, back in 1912, when I first noticed a copy of Physical Culture magazine on a local newsstand. I paid fifteen precious pennies for it, took it home and read it until the covers fell off, and the pages were dog-eared. I was fascinated by the pictures of muscular men and well-formed women, although both were considerably bundled up in athletic clothing compared to modern standards. The words in the magazine about exercise, natural foods and clean living seemed sensible to me then, and they still do today. Many people of that time, including a bearded gent named Anthony Comstock, who guarded the morals of New York City, not only considered Macfadden a crackpot on living habits, but a dangerously immoral character who printed nasty pictures of girls in tights. Time has proven Macfadden right and Comstock wrong.

Some years later I contributed to Physical Culture , and in the 1920s I went to New York and worked for Macfadden as a cartoonist on his Daily Graphic. I remember well the active, pushing, ambitious Macfadden of middle years. He was like a Napoleon at the head of his various enterprises. The magazines (he published more than a dozen of them, including True Story, Liberty, Physical Culture, and a flock of confession type magazines) were put together in the old Macfadden Building at Lincoln Square on upper Broadway. The Graphic was published far downtown in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, and I can remember seeing Bernarr Macfadden swinging along Broadway, his long hair blowing in the breeze, his sandaled feet pushing briskly against the hard pavement, as he walked from one office to the other, a total of about 12 miles daily, to and fro.

At that time he would burst into the editorial offices like Hurricane Hazel and completely upset the routine, but he always knew exactly what he wanted, and usually got it. He seemed to have all the details of his many operations on file in a corner of his brain, and there never was any doubt about who was running the show - it was Macfadden! He, like most of our big business figures, had a tremendous personal drive - he got things done through sheer force of will. No obstacles ever stood long in his way, if he couldn't climb over them, he blasted a way through them. He never had any doubts about who was right. He was. He had apparently figured out a whole system of living in his early years, settled all his decisions, formed a strict philosophy and never departed one iota from these decisions in his later years.

It is amazing to me, not that he made so many mistakes in his later life through this closed-door mental attitude, but that he was right so often! Almost all of his original ideas about exercise, hygiene and diet have been confirmed over the years. His fight against white bread still continues, but it begins to look like he has the millers on the run. He got the women out of corsets (for a while at least) and into briefer garments that would have gotten them arrested in the old Hay-market days of indecent exposure. He claimed that activity is the law of life, and today, the slow-moving medics are almost ready to come to the same conclusion.

The work that Macfadden got through in his younger and maturer years was incredible. He was here, there and everywhere. he ran health resorts and sanatariums, he edited magazines, he gave lectures, he walked millions of miles, he wrote books, he wrote music, he founded a chain of vegetarian restaurants and actually ate in some of them, he appeared on the stage, he wrestled, he lifted weights, he posed for pictures in a lion skin, he was always available for publicity stunts, the people in New York were familiar with his flying figure on the streets, he was the most incredibly peripatetic and indispensible of men!

This poor orphan, born in the wilds of Missouri, bound out as a farm boy before he reached his teens, sick, ill-fed, scrawny - literally lifted himself by his own bootstraps to become rich and powerful and as well-known to the average man in the streets as Jack Dempsey or Franklin Roosevelt. In future years he may be even better known than these two giants of our time, for their fame is already fading, while the spread of physical culture has just begun. Who can say that Macfadden was not the greater man?

Many of our present-day readers may be unfamiliar with the saga of Macfadden. Let me recap briefly. Certainly he could have posed for one of the greatests Before and After advertisements in the history of muscle making. he might have been the original 98-lb. weakling who became a Perfect Man. He was undersized, had a touch of TB, and came out of the Missouri hills weak and friendless and hungry. Only he, of the millions who were undernourished at that time on the average poor diet of over-fried foods, realized that there was something he could do about changing his eating habits. He not only changed his own - but later the habits of a nation.

He recognized the value of exercise - life is movement - and he began to experiment with various free-hand systems of training. he grew gradually stronger, he began his athletic life as a semi-professional wrestler, and slowly worked his way to the larger cities. In Chicago he branched out into a health institute, and his sanitarium flourished for a while. Everywhere he went he preached Physical Culture - such a daringly new concept of living that it drew sneers from all the wise characters of his era. He was not the first man to advocate this general principle, but he was the first to shout so long and loud about it that other people heard him. Later he went to England, practiced his life-work there, met and married the winner of a Miss Britain contest, and finally returned to New York around the turn of the century to start his far-flung publishing enterprise with the magazine which brought him fame, Physical Culture.

Macfadden, during his long 87 years, lived as much as most men would in a dozen lifetimes. he was never idle. He married three times, had nine children. He had some trouble with his last two wives, since neither could see the percentages involved in eating carrots and knocking off 250 deep-knee-bends per day, but the real reason for this incompatibility was because Bernarr was constantly going at about 250 revolutions-per-minute whereas the average person is doing well to get up to 25 rpm.

The drive he placed behind Physical Culture magazine brought many readers, and finally thousands of converts like myself. he surrounded himself with capable associates, men like Fulton Oursler, afterward a senior editor of Readers Digest, Carl Easton Williams, and others. This staff became an asset in the 1920s when he suddenly hit the jackpot with magazines such as True Story and Liberty. At one time his holdings were worth $30 million.

At this point, money rolled in so fast, Macfadden was in danger of being drowned in greenbacks. So he started a chain of daily newspapers, the NY Graphic, Detroit Daily News, Philadelphia Daily News, New Haven Times, and this venture lost enough money so that he had time to count his magazine profits. He bought hotels, health resorts, a Miami Beach hostelry, a Military School, and finally decided to go into politics and sold out his magazines for $7 million and put this in a Foundation Fund. He even dropped Physical Culture magazine at this point, and this was probably the biggest error of his life. While he continued all his life to preach these principles, his idea upon retirement from publishing was to become elected President and enact P.C. principles into Law. Thus everyone in the country would be forced to exercise and eat whole wheat bread, even against his will if need be, and Utopia would be here and Macfadden would be Headman.

Now, in the evening of life, Macfadden was to make errors that almost wiped out the prestige he had built during a lifetime of physical culture. The Foundation (non-profit) that he had formed was so tightly drawn that in later years Macfadden was not even able to secure the money he needed to live. His various hotel ventures lost money, his political ambitions came to nothing, and when, at a later date, he attempted to revive Physical Culture , it was so badly and cheaply done that it bore no resemblance whatever to the vigorous magazine upon which his fame and fortune was founded.

It was these last years that those of us who were acquainted with the younger Macfadden would like to overlook. The end at Jersey City was post-climatic. His greatest work ended more than a score of years before when he sold his magazines, and stopped publication of Physical Culture. In evaluating his life we must take this into consideration.

Macfadden can be credited with many "firsts". He was first to advocate sensible dress for women, first to lay out in minute detail in his famous and popular Encyclopedia of Physical Culture , which sold by the hundred thousand, all the principles of exercise, personal hygiene, physical therapy, hydrotherapy, natural diet, etc. He not only told 98-lb. weaklings that they could become Supermen, but himself showed the way. He conducted the first big physique contests, and variety strength shows. He put Charlie Atlas in business by trading him advertising space in his popular magazine when he won one of Macfadden's Body Beautiful contests. He gave vegetarianism a terrific boost, though not strictly a vegetarian himself. He waged an endless battle against refined and devitalized foods, such as sugar and white flour. He made fasting respectable. He did everything for the cause in which he believed so strongly that not once in his life did he waver in his original tenets.

He believed in eating sparingly, in long hikes barefoot to absorb through the skin the vital magnetism of the earth, he slept on the floor (another innovation now respected by the medics who recommend bed boards for patients), he wore loose clothing, did sun-bathing, and continually shouted the glories and benefits of exercise. He said something as true as the sun will rise tomorrow - "Three meals a day, regardless of need or appetite is the great American sin."

He was frequently over-emphatic in his maxims, such as "Weakness is a crime - don't be a criminal" and "sickness is a sin, don't be a sinner". But he carried the torch, he delivered the message. If anyone is the Father of Physical Culture in this country, then truly Bernarr Macfadden deserves the title.

This piece must not be considered an eulogy. Nor can it be expected to make you know Macfadden as a man. Like many great men Macfadden was unique. Nobody was really close to him. He was the man nobody really knew. Yet the carping critics who laughed at him during his lifetime could never keep pace with him as he swung along on a 20-mile cross-country hike with his leonine head held high, and they will never match paces with him as he now strides across the far Green Pastures.

Those of us who walked a part of the way with him realize now that we walked with Greatness.