Doss Ramsey Dr. Gulliford Recent U.S.

History - 281 Tues/Thurs 10:10 Turn of the 20th Century American Male Bodybuilding: Sullivan, Sandow and Society

The image of the ideal male body has over gone numerous changes in American history, but no period of change before or since has been as radical and influential as that which took place in turn of the 20th century New York City. As Victorian morality s aversion to pride in one s body declined and images of betterdeveloped male physiques began to make their way to American audiences, the American public slowly embraced masculinity and muscular strength as ideals of the male form. New York City, with its enormous population and the influx of immigrants, quickly became the center of this new movement. In the mid-19th Century the image held by Americans of the ideal male body was very similar to that which the Ancient Greeks had idolized one of slender, but well built muscularity.i It was not until the 1870s and 1880s that physical weight began to symbolize solidity and wealth, and therefore it was not until this time that adding weight to one s physique began to be respected.ii As prominent members of society began to use exercise to add this weight, a new image of the ideal male body began to develop. Among the first men to embody this image was prizefighter John L. Sullivan (October 15, 1858 February 2, 1918). Publications and advertisements celebrated him as the finest specimen of physical development in the world, and the ideals and values that he reflected were shared, and taken up by, many of the immigrant 1

working class entering New York City.iiiHis solid trunk and powerful thighs were credited as giving him his stores of energy, and his physical power represented many of the values that the working class could appreciate. Impoverished and worth only as much as their muscles, the working class could relate to the physique of boxer John Sullivan, and therefore took up his image as the ideal. This image soon began to evolve more quickly, however, and just one year later in 1893, the German Eugen Sandow (April 2, 1867 October 14, 1925) redefined the image of masculinity and muscularity with his massive physique. While Sullivan was prized for his thick trunk and thighs, Sandow had developed his entire musculature to such a degree as to make Sullivan appear flabby by comparison.
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Sandow had a

thickly muscled upper body, as well as tremendously strong thighs, while Sullivan held most of his weight around his mid-section. Said to be heavy, yet well built, Sullivan s image was much different from the muscularity and proportion displayed by Sandow s.v When pictures of both Sullivan and Sandow are compared it is easy to see the differences in their physiques and the trend towards male muscularity that has continued since Sandow first entered the bodybuilding scene. In the attached picture of Sullivan you can see that he has a very solid midsection, as well as strong thighs, but relatively little muscular definition. Contrast this with the rounded, broader shoulders, defined abdominals, and narrow waist of Sandow and at once one can see the aesthetic advantage that Sandow held over Sullivan. This aesthetic was culturally determined, and as more and more people began to prefer the body

type represented by Sandow to the body type represented by Sullivan, a cultural shift slowly took place. Sandow also appealed to a different audience than Sullivan had. If Sullivan represented the ideals of the working class, then Sandow appealed to the more affluent classes. Sandow s exhibitions and body served as a form of middle- and upper-class refinement and as respect for what he represented grew, he began to represent not just the ideal man physically, but the ideal man psychologically and morally as well.vi After viewing one of Sandow s exhibitions, shows in which he would hoist enormous barbells, flex his muscles, and encourage women to feel his muscles, a young journalist said that the average New Yorker had to realize what a wretched, scrawny creature the usual well-built young gentleman is compared with [Sandow].
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Taking Sandow s image to an even greater level symbolically, people

began to say that all American men would need the kind of strength Sandow so confidently radiated to succeed in their evolving world.viii For the first time, muscles, masculinity and an improved upon physique connected physical fitness with moral virtue. Sandow was chosen as the model for a sculpture that was meant to capture the image of the ideal European man, and connected with his supreme physical development was the sense that along with all those muscles came a certain moral strength as well. From this theory came the movement of muscular Christianity, inspired by Sandow who espoused muscular Christianity to connect physical strength with moral virtue.
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Muscular Christianity

fulfilled American Protestantism s culturally-defined need to articulate the

compatibility between Christian faith and virile, masculine expression. x Now, not only did a more muscular physique become more desirable from an aesthetic standpoint, but also from a societal, religious and moral standpoint as well. In fact, in the mid-19th century many eminent scholars linked, physical prowess to mental or moral superiority.
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YMCA chapters first opened in colleges in 1877, and in these clubs Muscular Christianity had a profound influence. Worried that urban luxury had enfeebled muscular ardor in the male population, many Protestants at this time feared that the loss of white male vitality could lead to nothing less than race suicide.
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Embracing this language, YMCA clubs and some Protestants began to promote a religion that emphasized action over reflection, aggression over restraint, and heroism over placid goodness.
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This religion was muscular Christianity.

The masculinity embodied by Sandow found its way onto the American political stage in the form of Theodore Roosevelt. Elected into the presidency in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt, although not the ideal image of man at the time, was a fine specimen of physical fitness. Roosevelt had been a weak and sickly child and it was through a bodybuilding program and active summers in Wyoming that he overcame those limitations and became the virile character that he was.xiv Incidentally, it may have been that his bodybuilding program saved his life in 1912. On October 13, 1912, Roosevelt was shot by an assassin in the chest but survived. One doctor theorized that what stopped that bullet, and saved his life, were the thick slabs of muscle in his massive chest.
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Although there were other

obstacles to the bullet, such as his campaign speech and an eyeglass case, the size of his well developed chest surely helped to save his life. While the image of the ideal male body changed over time, bodybuilding as it is known today was very rarely documented, however, the foundations of modern aesthetics and physical training certainly have roots in this era. For the average citizen in New York City, though, the images of Sandow and other strongmen did not represent what they could ever look like. While images of these strongmen s bodies were thought to provide insights in the qualities that should be held by the perfect man, they more likely demonstrated how far short of these expectations the average man would fall in his everyday life.xvi So although Sandow was considered the epitome of masculinity and [physical strength] in 1894, he was by no means representative of the common man.xvii Sandow, and the others like him, influenced not only the American peoples image of the ideal male body, but also how Americans viewed exercise. They saw that exercise could be more than a set of precautions designed to prevent illness, but could also display that one had a proper, necessary and sufficient concern for his body.
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This view was radically different than the one held by Victorian

moralists, and it was the shift towards that view that shaped American bodybuilding for the remainder of the 20th century and to this day. The movement away from an agrarian society towards a more industrialized one left many men and women who had previously been physically active in their agrarian jobs nearly sedentary in the new conditions in which they found themselves. For them, exercise became a way to hold onto the physical strength that

tedious, repetitive factory work tried to take from them. Not only did this new notion promote exercise as a means of preventative care, but it also bolstered masculinity and was often referred to as making the man.
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In all levels of society, masculinity began to become more and more desirable as a quality of men. Gentlemen of the middle- and upper- classes espoused manliness as a way to represent energy, will, straightforwardness and courage as well as physical robustness and readiness for combat.
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These traits were valued

in a man, and as difficult as it was to acquire and polish these traits, they could also unmake a man if he took them too far. In this sense, middle-class men of the time had a fine line to walk between society s demand for self-control and the temptations that they would feel to relax that control.xxi Body image at this time was a complex and tricky idea. With the rise of physique culturalists, exercise programs, masculinity and manliness, and the fall of Victorian morality and societal conventions as they related to the human body, the image of the ideal man was given a freedom to evolve that it had never before held in American history. Bulk, weight and strength were no longer considered brutish characteristics, but instead were celebrated as signs of moral virtue. Men who exhibited these characteristics, like Eugen Sandow and Theodore Roosevelt, were idolized and respected as symbols of the changing times. The trend away from the slender Greek models towards more masculine, heavier men has continued throughout history to the present day, and many of the ideas and practices first proposed during the turn of the century in New York City still shape

bodybuilding today. Never before had such a period shaped the future of exercise, bodybuilding and male body image as much as turn of the century America.

Park, Roberta J. 2007. Muscles, symmetry, and action: "do you measure up?": Defining masculinity in britain and america from the 1860s to the early 1900s. International Journal of the History of 24, no. 12: 1604-1636. ii Davidson, James W. and Mark H. Lytle. 2005. Chapter 17: The body in question. Chap. 17, In After the fact: The art of historical detection, ed. Steve Drummond. 5th ed. Vol. 2, p. 442. 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY, 10020: McGraw-Hill. iii Davidson, 442 iv Davidson, 443 v Davidson, 443 vi Davidson, 443 vii Davidson, 443 viii Davidson, 445 ix Chapman, David L. 1994. Sandow the magnificent: Eugen sandow and the beginnings of bodybuilding. 1st ed. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. x Setran, David P. 2005. Following the broad shouldered jesus: The college YMCA and the culture of muscular christianity in american campus life, 1890-1914. American Educational History Journal 32, no. 1: 59-66. xi Park, Roberta J. 2007. Muscles, symmetry, and action: "do you measure up?": Defining masculinity in britain and america from the 1860s to the early 1900s. International Journal of the History of 24, no. 12: 1604-1636. xii Setran, 60 xiii Setran, 62 xiv Davidson, James W., Clifford E. Clark, Sandra M. Hawley, Joseph F. Kett, Andrew Rieser, Neal Salisbury, Harvard Sitkoff, and Nancy Woloch. 2010. The enduring vision: A history of the american people. Ed. J. P. Boardman. 2nd ed. Vol. Concise 6th. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. xv Pettinato, Tony. Teddy roosevelt shot; delivers campaign speech anyway. http://www.newsinhistory.com/blog/teddy-roosevelt-shot-deliverscampaign-speech-anyway (accessed 2/3, 2011). xvi Forth, Christopher E., ed. 2008. Masculinity in the modern west: Gender, civilization and the body. 1st ed. New York, New York: Palgrave MacMillan. xvii Sandow, Eugen. 1904. Bodybuilding. New and Revised ed. London, England: Gale and Polden. p. 3 xviii Foucault, Michel. 1990. The history of sexuality, volume 2: The use of pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley. Vol. 2. New York: Vintage.
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Forth, 43 Forth, 42 xxi Forth, 43

References Chapman, David L. 1994. Sandow the magnificent: Eugen sandow and the beginnings of bodybuilding. 1st ed. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Davidson, James W., Clifford E. Clark, Sandra M. Hawley, Joseph F. Kett, Andrew Rieser, Neal Salisbury, Harvard Sitkoff, and Nancy Woloch. 2010. The enduring vision: A history of the american people. Ed. J. P. Boardman. 2nd ed. Vol. Concise 6th. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. Davidson, James W. and Mark H. Lytle. 2005. Chapter 17: The body in question. Chap. 17, In After the fact: The art of historical detection, ed. Steve Drummond. 5th ed. Vol. 2, 442-443, 445. 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY, 10020: McGraw-Hill. Forth, Christopher E., ed. 2008. Masculinity in the modern west: Gender, civilization and the body. 1st ed. New York, New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The history of sexuality, volume 2: The use of pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley. Vol. 2. New York: Vintage. Park, Roberta J. 2007. Muscles, symmetry, and action: "do you measure up?": Defining masculinity in britain and america from the 1860s to the early 1900s. International Journal of the History of 24, no. 12: 1604-1636. Pettinato, Tony. Teddy roosevelt shot; delivers campaign speech anyway. http://www.newsinhistory.com/blog/teddy-roosevelt-shot-deliverscampaign-speech-anyway (accessed 2/3, 2011). Sandow, Eugen. 1904. Bodybuilding. New and Revised ed. London, England: Gale and Polden. Schmidt, Adrian P. 1901. Illustrated hints for health and strength for busy people. Vol. 1. New York, New York: Schmidt, Adrian P. Setran, David P. 2005. Following the broad shouldered jesus: The college YMCA and the culture of muscular christianity in american campus life, 1890-1914. American Educational History Journal 32, no. 1: 59-66.