Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession

By Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

A century ago, “working out” was the activity of a strange subculture, but today it is almost impossible to avoid exhortations to exercise. In her new book, spanning more than a century of American history, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela explores the history of working out not just as consumers have experienced it, but as it was created by physical educators, trainers, instructors, and many others. Examining venues from the stage of the World’s Fair and Muscle Beach to fat farms, feminist health clinics, radical and evangelical college campuses, yoga retreats, gleaming health clubs, school gymnasiums, and many more, Fit Nation is a revealing story that shows fitness to be not just a matter of physical health but of what it means to be an American. What follows is an excerpt.

Intentionally cultivating one’s strength, strongman Eugen Sandow argued, separated men like him from savages. Or so he hoped, given how emphatically he belabored this point with one outlandish anecdote after another, from describing the tailored finery he fancied offstage to the aristocrats who attended his shows and lavished him with luxurious gifts. No story made this distinction between the civilized cultivation of strength and unrefined brute force clearer than a trip Sandow took through Germany, in the course of which he met Karl Westphal, a hulking quarryman with a head “so huge and grotesque as that of any pantomime mask, and a nose as big as [Sandow’s] fist.” The man’s own fists were three times the size of Sandow’s, and his boots so enormous that the enterprising and comparatively agile strongman hopped inside one with both feet and “turned entirely round inside.” Keenly entrepreneurial, Sandow sensed opportunity in this chance meeting. He hired this man, dubbed him Goliath, and excitedly began planning his career as a strongman in England. Sandow grew even more thrilled about the fortunes that awaited them when he paraded “Goliath” from Charing Cross to Piccadilly after his meaty limbs proved too large to fit into a cab, and thousands of Londoners abandoned their midday work to gape at a sight Sandow could compare only to spotting a “white elephant.”

The animal analogy is telling. Before long, Sandow was sorely disappointed with the obtuseness of his would-be protégé. Westphal could hoist enormous loads, but having never deliberately trained his muscles, could do little else, and demonstrated little interest in learning the stunts Sandow knew would please a paying crowd. After seven fruitless weeks under Sandow’s tutelage, Westphal had made no progress toward refining his technique, due, Sandow believed, to his idleness. Westphal’s apathy may have been despondency due to Sandow’s keeping “this rare creature” in captivity, unwilling to let this adult man roam the streets unchaperoned. Ultimately, the two parted ways, but not before they performed together one last time, in a number choreographed by Sandow that unsurprisingly cast Westphal as a hapless lout bested by the more intellectually and corporeally superior Sandow. The show began with Goliath intimidating Sandow but concluded with the relatively slight Sandow lifting Westphal with one hand before dragging him off the stage. The lesson Sandow imparted onstage that night and later in his memoir was that a “strongman” who deliberately trains his body as a form of self-improvement has little in common with a mere “breaker of stones... who uses his muscles to earn his daily bread.” True strength, he averred, is intentional, impossible without mental acuity, and always trumps brute force.

Sandow took this message across the Atlantic. When he docked in New York Harbor on a blazing hot day on his way to the World’s Fair, he immediately found the more socioeconomically fluid and racially diverse United States — “that great country of wonderful records” — a new arena to prove not only his carefully cultivated physical strength, but also the cultural and moral superiority he believed it conferred. It took less than an hour on American shores for Sandow to find his first contest, not on a stage but in the sixteenth-floor stairwell of a Manhattan hotel. After his first-ever elevator ride, Sandow found himself alone with a Black bellhop, a notable circumstance made more so when the man audaciously rolled and lit a cigarette, and took a deep, exaggerated drag right there in Sandow’s handsomely appointed quarters. Sandow instructed the bellhop, to whom he referred with a now unprintable slur, to shine his shoes.

B. J. Falk, Eugen Sandow, Full-Length Portrait, Standing, Leaning on Column, Facing Left, Wearing Wrestling Leotard, Roman Sandals, and Six Pointed Star Pendant, ca. 1894. Strongman Eugen Sandow poses in gladiator sandals and a bejeweled belt, standing on an intricately designed rug and leaning on a classical column, a setting designed to present him as civilized rather than as a “mere breaker of stones.” Photograph Print, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, control number 91480334.

“We don’t do that in America,” replied the bellhop matter-of- factly. Sandow recoiled, unsure he understood correctly. Resolving any confusion but escalating the conflict, the bellhop lit another cigarette and sprawled on Sandow’s sofa. With a smile, he elaborated: “We (speaking of course for himself and [others] like him) don’t clean boots here.” In Sandow’s esteem, this impudence was “too much for white flesh and blood to bear.” He threatened to report the “boy” to the manager, and the bellhop “squared up” for a fight. Enraged, Sandow grabbed him by the lapels and dangled him over the sixteenth-floor banister, “just to give him a view of the depth, which was so tremendous.” The “shouts and screams” of the terrified bellhop rang out so loudly that a small crowd gathered. Yet Sandow assures his reader that thanks to his own restraint — he says he had subtly checked that the bellhop’s jacket could withstand the strain — tragedy was averted. Once Sandow was satisfied the bellhop would not again challenge European superiority, he pulled him back over the railing and released him unscathed. Sandow warned the shaken man that “if he attempted his impertinences again” he would enjoy no such mercy.

Sandow could have clocked the bellhop in the face, but consciously cultivating strength and wielding it with control was key to how Sandow distinguished himself from, and exercised power over, the louts he so disdained. African Americans, for example, were widely stereotyped as almost superhuman in their strength, but also in their uncontrolled appetites and impulses. In emphasizing that he had developed his strength for self-improvement, and to a lesser extent for looks, rather than as a form of labor; in resisting the urge to let the bellhop plummet to his death; and also in abstaining from most alcohol and tobacco, Sandow linked the cultivation of strength to an enviable capacity for discipline. This was fitness for white civilization.

Such early strongmen are often remembered as the pioneers of contemporary American fitness culture, and in some ways they certainly laid the foundation for the twenty-first-century understanding of exercise as a pursuit of the affluent, disciplined, and attractive. Throughout colorful careers that stretched into the post–World War II era, Sandow and his telegenic, entrepreneurial peers such as Bernarr MacFadden and Charles Atlas spread these ideas through shows, magazines, and consumer products that first displayed fit bodies and later instructed how to achieve them. MacFadden had spotted Sandow at the World’s Fair because he had set up shop to sell his own “exerciser” device — akin to today’s resistance bands — nearby. But the similarities end there. In this era, most Americans considered the deliberate pursuit of fitness a spectacle to see onstage, rather than an activity in which to engage their own bodies. Crowds lined up to ogle at these strapping exemplars, but it would be decades before any significant proportion of the public would aspire to lift, or look, like them. Indeed, Sandow likely boasts so proudly of his proximity to European aristocrats — and affluent Americans bearing lavish gifts — because most strongmen were more likely to be featured alongside bearded ladies and Siamese twins at seedy carnivals and circuses from which Sandow endeavored to distance himself. MacFadden was less successful at avoiding such associations. In 1905, just as the doors to his second annual Physical Culture Exhibition were about to open at Madison Square Garden, the police, summoned by anti-obscenity crusader Anthony Comstock, blocked the doors and tried to turn the crowds away from what he had categorized as an indecent performance. Though the 1904 competition had featured men and women posing onstage in the style of classical statues, such “carnality” was indecent, Comstock and other skeptics insisted.

Just over the bridge in Brooklyn, another European-born strongman was attempting to make his way in America. Born Angelo Siciliano in Calabria, Italy, the scrawny immigrant boy who became Charles Atlas was so bowled over by the beauty of the classical sculptures of Hercules, Apollo, and Zeus at the Brooklyn Museum, he decided he wanted to look like them. In his own telling, young Angelo began lifting weights, and found a job as a sideshow strongman, lying on a bed of nails and daring passersby to walk across his chest. In between shifts, he spent his days flexing on the Coney Island boardwalk in hope of getting noticed for bigger, paying gigs. Those dreams came true when a passing artist spotted him in 1916 and quickly booked him for nude and semi-nude sessions posing for downtown sculptors and painters who reimagined historical figures with Atlas’s strapping physique. Before long, New York City statues of the Founding Fathers bore the familiar faces of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton but atop bodies modeled on Atlas’s. Subtly, pedestrians strolling through Washington Square Park or Washington, DC, would see a physically fit form attached to the most esteemed Americans, a decidedly different association than that of seeing such a body in a sideshow. Atlas soon broke into another echelon of fame, posing in MacFadden’s Physical Culture magazine and in 1922 being declared “The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man” by a panel of doctors and artists who analyzed his musculature before a packed Madison Square Garden. Though no longer banned as pornographic, fit bodies were bizarre, extraordinary, entities to be placed on pedestals, rather than emulated by everyday people.

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is Associate Professor of History at The New School, and the author of Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture, and Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession, from which this blog is excerpted.