Athletes' footnotes: Macfaddists, Well-Sandowed, Gym's Bondage, &c.

Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet

During two feverish decades between the world wars, Bernarr Macfadden did more to educate the world about healthy eating, alternative medicine, regular sexual activity, and exercise than anyone in history. A tubercular orphan at age eight, he discovered the nascent fields of vegetarianism and weight lifting, and at the turn of the century founded Physical Culture, the most influential health magazine of all time and the cornerstone of a thirty-million-dollar media empire. His disciples included Upton Sinclair and Charles Atlas; among his employees were Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, and Eleanor Roosevelt. He launched the worst newspaper in U.S. history, founded a whole-grain utopian community in the New Jersey suburbs, trained fascist cadets for Mussolini, and came within a hair's breadth of being elected senator from Florida—running on a physical fitness platform.

Yet today few have heard of this larger-than-life entrepreneur who changed American society. In Mr. America, Mark Adams illuminates Macfadden's captivating, ambitious, and unparalleled life. After examining the thousands of diets in Macfadden's revolutionary five-volume Encyclopedia of Physical Culture, Adams plays guinea pig and tests several of the most extreme ones on himself—with amazing, and sometimes hilarious, results.

From Booklist

In the first half of the twentieth century, Bernarr Macfadden was central to American popular culture. Publisher of Photoplay, True Detective, and his flagship magazine, Physical Culture, not to mention the New York Evening Graphic, home of gossip columnist Walter Winchell and “widely considered . . . the worst newspaper in U.S. history,” Macfadden tirelessly advocated strenuous exercise, a diet high in vegetables and milk, and frequent sex for health and recreation. He discovered, groomed, and marketed Charles Atlas, creating a ubiquitous public face of fitness in the media. Macfadden was so well known that as a mystery guest on What’s My Line? in 1951 he was obliged to “ridiculously distort” his voice, lest the celebrity panelists recognize him from his long-running radio show on exercise. In his declining years, he fell into poverty, rather ironically, given that he had poured money into establishing a foundation for spreading clean living and exercise. He died broke and forgotten, which only underscores his dramatic life. Bravo to Adams for enabling the rediscovery of this phenomenal American. --Mike Tribby

"Hilarious...Delightful...If Macfadden hadn't existed, we would have had to invent him, yes . . . but who could have? Theodore Dreiser throws up his hands. Sinclair Lewis runs screaming from the scene...`Mr. America' may actually be the rare biography -- very well, the only biography within the past two decades -- that runs too short." --Washington Post

"It is to Mark Adams' great credit that, in `Mr. America,' he has rescued from obscurity a man whose influence is still felt in this country more than a century after he muscled his way onto the national scene...It is a remarkable story, and Mr. Adams tells it with the kind of awe and occasional amusement that it deserves. He writes with an easy grace and has plainly gone to great lengths to research his quirky, fascinating subject. He even goes the extra mile and tries some of Macfadden's early diet and exercise regimens, to see if they work." --Wall Street Journal

"Imagine if Rupert Murdoch, Jack LaLanne, and Dr. Andrew Weil all got together and had a baby, then raised that child on wheat germ and 100 pushups a day. Only such a prodigy could give you a sense of the sheer eccentric magnificence of Bernarr Macfadden." --John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise and More Information Than You Require

The Perfect Man: The Muscular Life and Times of Eugen Sandow, Victorian Strongman by David Waller

The Perfect Man now has the perfect biographer. Like its subject, David Waller's book is well-balanced and a thing of beauty that bulges in all the right places.
--Rose Collis - author of Colonel Barker's Monstrous Regiment

Eugen Sandow (1867-1925) was a Victorian strongman who was colossally famous in his day and possessed what was deemed to be the most perfect male body. He rose from obscurity in Prussia to become a music-hall sensation in late Victorian London, going on to great success as a performer in North America and throughout the British Empire. He was a friend to King Edward VII and was appointed Professor of Physical Culture to King George V. His physical culture system was adopted by hundreds of thousands around the world. He lost his fortune at the time of the First World War and he ended up being buried in an unmarked grave in Putney Vale Cemetery. There is lively interest in him on the web where his dumbells or chest-extenders sell for hundreds of pounds and an autographed photograph for thousands. Written with humour and insight into the popular culture of late Victorian England, Waller's book argues that Sandow deserves to be resurrected as a significant cultural figure whose life, like that of Oscar Wilde, tells us a great deal about sexuality and celebrity at the fin de siecle.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

One winter's day in 1904, Arthur Conan Doyle steered his Wolseley Motoring Machine too quickly into the drive of his Surrey country home. The car clipped a gatepost and ran up a high bank before overturning completely. Doyle's passenger was thrown clear but the author was pinioned by the heavy vehicle. "The steering wheel projected slightly from the rest," he wrote later, "and broke the impact and undoubtedly saved my life, but it gave way under the strain, and the weight of the car settled across my spine just below the neck, pinning my face down onto the gravel, and pressing with such terrible force as to make it impossible to utter a sound..."

The creator of Sherlock Holmes remained under the car until a crowd gathered and was able to lift the vehicle from him. "I should say think there are few who can say that they have held up a ton weight and lived unparalysed to talk about it," he recalled. "It is an acrobatic feat which I have no desire to repeat." In correspondence, Doyle subsequently attributed his narrow escape to a course of muscular development he had undertaken with Eugen Sandow, the world-famous strongman and music-hall performer who provided personal fitness coaching from his Institute of Physical Culture at 33A, St James's Street, in the heart of London's fashionable Clubland. The training had left Doyle in superb physical condition, and provided Sandow with what today we call "celebrity endorsement" for the near-miraculous efficacy of his method.

Readers who come across this anecdote in a biography of Doyle may be forgiven for regarding Eugen Sandow (pronounced "You-jean Sand-ow to rhyme with "how" or "now") as a mere footnote in late Victorian and Edwardian cultural history. Sandow (1867-1925) is now almost totally forgotten by the broader public by whom he was once adored. The man who rose from humble origins in Prussia to become internationally famous as the literal embodiment of masculine perfection, a century ago the possessor of the most famous male body in the world, lay for more than eighty years in an unmarked grave in Putney Vale cemetery. Only recently has his great-grandson erected a memorial, ending more than three quarters of a century of ignominious anonymity. He is remembered today chiefly by body building enthusiasts for whom a statuette of Sandow is the coveted first prize in the International Federations of Body Builders Mr. Olympia competition. (Arnold Schwarzenegger won one of these figurines in 1980). Not surprisingly for so good-looking a man, who posed near-naked for photographs long before pornography entered the mainstream, Sandow has also become an icon of homosexual culture: the various Sandow artefacts (such as bill-posters, dumb-bells, cigar-boxes and indeed semi-nude photographs) that regularly come up for sale on eBay tend to be flagged as "gay int.," i.e. of special interest to the gay community. Even in his lifetime, he was a pin-up for a circle of covertly homosexual intellectuals such as the author and critic Edmund Gosse and J. Addington Symonds, the consumptive art historian who moved from Victorian England to Switzerland in search of health and athletic young boys. In 1889, barely weeks after the strongman made his music-hall debut, Gosse sent pictures of Sandow to Symonds at his home in Davos as a Christmas present, and Symonds wrote a drooling thank you note by return. "They are very interesting," he gushed. "The full length studies quite confirm my anticipations with regard to his wrists and ankles & feet. The profile and half-trunk is a splendid study. I am very much obliged to you for getting them to me."

'How would a Jewish person feel if you put a swastika on a shoe?' Adidas under fire for unveiling new trainer with orange 'shackles' like those worn by black slaves

* JS Roundhouse Mids have bright 'shackles' that fit around wearer's ankles
* Many have compared devices to those worn by black slaves in America
* 2,000 label design 'offensive, ignorant' and say Adidas 'sunk to new lows'