I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over
at My
Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read
books that you already own.
Weakness is a
Crime: The Life of Bernarr Macfadden – Robert Ernst
Bernarr Macfadden is a forgotten figure nowadays despite
his great influence on our culture. In the Twenties and Thirties millions and
millions of readers devoured his daily newspaper The New York Graphic and his weekly magazines Liberty, True
Detective, True Story, True Romances, Dream World, Ghost Stories, and the movie
mag Photoplay. He got his start at the turn of the 20th century with
Physical Culture, a weekly that promoted health, fitness, wellness, and diet.
It is arguable that as a mass market publisher, his only rival was Henry “Time-Life”
Luce, who would still come in a weak second.
Macfadden was a child born weak and sickly in
hard-scrabble Missouri. He was unloved and shuffled among grudging relatives as
poor as church mice. By his older teenage years he was on his own. He has very
little education and little taste – he changed Bernard to Benarr because it
sounded like the roar of a lion. However, at the turn of the century, he had
native genius enough to see that body building and physical fitness activities
– along with pro sports – were the coming thing. By the 1920s he had built a
fortune with his publishing ventures. He was arrested for obscenity a couple
times for lewd pix in the mags but will still able to catch the ear of
important people like Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Alf Landon, Eleanor
Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, and Thomas Dewey.
The rich media titan had political ambitions to be
President of the United States. In the Thirties, he peddled the usual claptrap
about shipping all the immigrants back to their homelands (funny how the
message never ever changes: lower taxes, less government regs, anti-other,
etc.). He was a narcissist and egomaniac, not caring what people said about him
as long as he was talked about. He was bombastic yet inarticulate. He had an
insatiable yen for sex, cheating on all his wives.
Yes, he reminds us all of Somebody Else We Know. But
Macfadden didn’t hold grudges and because of his poor childhood had a feeling
for people in hard times.
Macfadden is largely forgotten now because he was hard to
admire and easy to ridicule. A showman of the 19th century style, he
indulged in shameless bragging that thinking people thought was obnoxious. His sensationalist
publications flaunted sexuality and semi-nudity.
In scarcely literate language supported by nutsy thinking, he rejected modern medical science by advocating
weird diets and strange exercise regimens. The AMA and its member doctors
frequently criticized Macfadden for boosting health fads like the raw milk diet
and dynamic tension calisthenics a la Charles Atlas. He was an often kooky figure
in his own time though he did support practices we accept as given in our day: tolerant views about sexuality, daily moderate exercise, restrained eating with little
meat and lots of fruits and vegetables, fasting, no smoking or drinking and good
posture (click here to
listen to his awful earnest prose).
This biographer did a great job by interviewing the
surviving participants (or their progeny), digging out the primary documents,
and explaining what it means to us today. His style is easy to read and he
keeps his sense of humor despite Macfadden’s terrible provocations (i.e., how
he treated his children is harrowing). I strongly recommend this book to
readers who are interested in media history, the Twenties and Thirties, magazines
in pop culture, tabloids and the social idea and value of fitness.
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