Continuing excerpts from The Undressing of America, as our hero flees the brutal farmer to whom he has been indentured and finds himself in the boom town of St. Louis...
Fame and fortune did not come quickly for Barney. The jobs for an adolescent runaway were not many, and he found himself scraping by as a delivery boy and an office boy. Then the print revolution came to his aid. The wave of mass print that had inundated New York and other coastal cities in the middle of the century had flowed more slowly to Missouri, but as the economy rebounded in the wake of the Civil War it began to rise. A penniless immigrant named Joszef Pulitzer rode the rails from New York to St. Louis after the war and by 1883 was making a fortune as the publisher of the city's largest newspaper and was poised to return to his former city as owner of the New York World—the same that fifteen-year-old Bernard McFadden took a job as a printer’s devil at a St. Louis print shop.
Mass print came to the boy’s aid emotionally as well. His formal education was done, but he read. In his tiny room at a boarding house, with no one who cared much about him, lacking the skills and probably the inclination to make friends, isolated and unhappy, his only companions were cheap books, especially the “nickel libraries” and “dime novels” ground out by the fiction factories in New York. He surely read manly adventure stories, but it seems that his favorites were romance novels—a genre then very different from those later incarnations directed exclusively at female readers. The popular romantic novel of the 1880s, usually telling of a humble but virtuous young man who must conquer the forces of corruption and wealth to win the heart of an equally humble and equally virtuous young woman, often through episodes of fisticuffs and daring rescue, appealed strongly to young males and females alike. Lonely Barney, who seems to have had no girls in his life during those years, no doubt took great solace in seeing himself as such a dashing young man in the making.
Work in the printing business took something away from the young McFadden too. During those months of laboring over presses and plates he found himself losing muscle. He began to cough at night, which he feared was an early warning of the tuberculosis that he believed had killed his mother. Years later he would write of wasting away, his arms and legs slimming down, his skin turning pale, his newly won sense of vitality giving way to a familiar pessimism, malaise, and resentment. But like a hero in a cheap novel, mass print arrived to rescue him in the end. In a local gymnasium he found a pamphlet on weight training.
Strength and vigor it promised him. In the privacy of his room he could recapture the power that had set him free of Jenkins’s farm. He saved his money for a pair of fifteen-pound weights and devoted himself to daily exercise. Weight lifting became his routine, his passion, his prayer, and his reason to be.
McFadden was short but broad-framed, and he carried his muscles well. He’d learned that he enjoyed fighting in his youth, and now, as he built up his strength, he began to take up wrestling. A common feature of the carnivals that roamed the middle of the country in those days was the strong man who doubled as a wrestler: after demonstrating his power by bending steel bars and lifting heavy weights he would challenge any man in the audience to grapple with him in the ring, offering a cash prize to any who could last a full minute, or two or three. Most often the first challenger was a plant, an ally of the strong man who would win the prize and embolden other rubes to follow his example. After that first phony match, the strong man rarely lost. An exception came the first time the seventeen-year-old Barney took the bait. With few moves but with simple strength and brute stubbornness he lasted the three minutes and collected his money. From there, the natural step was to join the carnivals himself.
Over the next several years his movements are largely unknown, but he seems to have spent a fair amount of his time scrabbling around the Mississippi Valley, fighting in arranged matches, serving as a plant, and gradually, under his full name, Bernard McFadden, becoming a top-billed strong man and wrestler himself. In addition to wrestling moves, he learned the art of the kayfabe: tricking the rubes. Much of his approach to selling and public speaking in the years to come showed the influence of the carnies.
He also developed his own regimen for health and strength. He may have begun with someone else’s book, but the young McFadden acknowledged no authority, and soon he was working out his own system of muscle-building exercises. For his diet, he drew from the health food movement of the time but ultimately did whatever made him feel strongest: cracked wheat, copious milk, days of fasting. He had a bad reaction to a vaccine in childhood and thereafter declared vaccination a dangerous hoax. He slept on the floor with his windows wide open, wore the loosest of clothing, walked barefoot in order to connect with the magnetic vitality of the earth. His only master was nature, and he believed he was penetrating nature’s secrets on his own.
Wrestling in the dirt rings of Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, and Iowa was not, however, the stuff of careers. McFadden wanted to be not only strong and full of life and known among other strong men but rich and respected. He wanted to conquer America on all its terms. He tried various money-making schemes, including opening a laundry; it failed quickly, however, and he blamed his lazy employees. He learned the hard way that he was neither a manager of men nor a conventional businessman, that everything he succeeded at was driven by his singular passion for physical fitness.
He found a way to use that passion in teaching. American schools were beginning to imitate the gymnasium system of Europe and add “physical education” or “physical culture” programs, and qualified teachers were in demand. In 1892, at twenty-four years of age, McFadden took such a spot at Marmaduke Academy, a military school in central Missouri. He surely impressed the students with his physical prowess, and although he was unpolished and socially awkward, he had the charisma of zeal and self-certainty. There he first experienced the satisfaction of influencing others, a heady feeling for a young man who had grown up discarded and ignored.
In the course of teaching, he found another way to inspire boys to strive for physical fitness: he wrote a novel. He was far from unique among readers of popular novels to try his own hand at them; but in his case, romantic daydreams and hopes of being the next Horatio Alger were not sufficient motivation. He wanted to use the form to spread his personal gospel.
The Athlete’s Conquest is the story of a robust young woman who enjoys tennis, swimming, other physical pursuits—girls of a new sort, colloquially called “amazons,” who were becoming numerous in those fitness-conscious years—seeking a suitor worthy of her. At first she won’t take our hero seriously because he has no money or “sophistication,” but gradually she sees the hollowness of wealth and sportiness and intellect not founded in physical health, and she realizes that her future happiness (as well as her dream of bearing a large, robust, and happy family) depends on finding a man of strength and vitality. The athlete of the title wins her heart with victory in a footrace, and so happiness and health are assured for both characters and their descendents.
It was a dreadful novel by any standard, and McFadden failed to interest any publisher in it. But he was determined to get his message to the world, so he paid for the book to be published by the largest of New York’s vanity presses and sold the copies to his students. So far as we can tell, it attracted no other attention and vanished from the face of the earth. McFadden would attempt no more novels, although in the next few years he proved that his confidence in his ability to persuade others through the written word was not much shaken.
Bernard seems to have finished the school year with no money in his pocket, and he scratched out a bit of income by giving private boxing and wrestling lessons. He was determined, however, not to spend the summer in Missouri. As soon as he could buy the train tickets, he made the trip that every young man in the Midwest was taking that summer of 1893, the trip that showed him his destiny: to Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition.
To be continued...
