Abstract
“Dear Friend: Just a line to let you know I am enjoying the best of health,” Charles Atlas wrote to his bodybuilding mentor, Earle Liederman, in 1920. “I often think back of [sic] the days when this was not the case,” he continued. Readers of Physical Culture magazine, where the letter was published in an advertisement for Liederman’s strength-building course, were likely as familiar with the tale of transformation described in the text as was Atlas himself. The testimonial—of which a photograph of Atlas’ nude body played an integral part—followed the well-worn patterns of a genre that had been established during the nineteenth century, and yet was offered as proof that Liederman’s exercise system worked. By the time Atlas cofounded his own mail-order fitness lessons company, Charles Atlas, Ltd. in 1929, testimonials of transformation had become a staple of bodybuilding advertising. Atlas and his business partner, Charles Roman, actively solicited their customers’ personal stories of physical metamorphoses and regularly featured them in the company’s own advertisements during the 1930s and 1940s.
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Notes
One need think only of the popularity of Charlie Chaplin, gangster films, or John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as examples of this trend. For a full discussion of the rhetoric of the common man in American culture during the 1930s, see Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression, 1929–1941 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993)
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
See, for example, John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick, or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New York: Penguin, 1990)
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Louis P. Masur, The Bedford Series in History and Culture (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1993).
E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977).
Warren I. Susman, “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003), 271–285.
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
“How Men May Acquire Strength,” New York Times, March 1, 1896, 9. In his biography of Sandow, David Chapman recounts a similarly told recollection of Sandow’s inspiration; see David L. Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 5.
For the claim that Sandow’s father was a greengrocer, see Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent, 5. Eugene Sandow, Sandow on Physical Training; A Study in the Perfect Type of the Human Form (New York: J. Selwin Tait and Sons, 1894), 23.
Eugen Sandow, Life is Movement: The Physical Reconstruction and Regeneration of the People (A Diseaseless World) (London: Gale and Polden, 1919), 8.
For early bodybuilders’ use of classicism as a way to perform publicly while wearing scarcely any clothing, see Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man, 33; and Roberta J. Park, “Healthy, Moral, and Strong: Educational Views of Exercise and Athletics in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Fitness in American Culture, ed. Harvey Green (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 123–168.
Robert Ernst, Weakness is a Crime: The Life of Bernarr Macfadden (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 18.
Ernst, Weakness is a Crime, 4–10; William R. Hunt, Body Love: The Amazing Career of Bernarr Macfadden (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989)
Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 194, caption.
For the audience of The New Yorker in the 1930s, see, for example, Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 260–261
John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America: 1741–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 219–220.
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
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© 2009 Marlis Schweitzer and Marina Moskowitz
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Padurano, D. (2009). “Dear Friend”: Charles Atlas, American Masculinity, and the Bodybuilding Testimonial, 1894–1944. In: Schweitzer, M., Moskowitz, M. (eds) Testimonial Advertising in the American Marketplace. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101715_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101715_8
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