Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T13:01:36.626Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Making Broad Shoulders: Body-Building and Physical Culture in Chicago 1890–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

David S. Churchill*
Affiliation:
University of Manitoba

Extract

In February 1899, the Committee of Physical Culture of the Chicago Public School Board approved an intensive “anthropometric” study of all children enrolled in the city's public schools. The study was a detailed attempt to measure the height, weight, strength, lung capacity, hearing, and general fitness of Chicago's student population. Through 1899 and 1900, thousands of Chicago's primary, grammar, and high school students had their bodies closely scrutinized, measured, weighed, tested, and, in a few cases, diagrammed. What the School Board members wanted to know was the “fitness” of the student body. Were Chicago public school students—many recently arrived immigrants from eastern and southern Europe—vital and vigorous children who could become energetic modern workers and citizens (Figure 1)?

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The History of Education Society 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 In 1900 the school board established a separate committee for “Child Study and Pedagogic Investigation” to continue the work begun in 1899. See Chicago Board of Education, Forty-sixth Annual Report of the Chicago Board of Education (Chicago: Board of Education, 1900), 37116.Google Scholar

2 To Make Physical Tests,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 8, 1899: 8.Google Scholar

3 Historian Jacqueline Wolf argues that wet nurses had “dreadful reputations” in the late nineteenth century. Wet nurses were often young working-class women, and frequently seen by their employers as vulgar, untrustworthy, and of questionable morality. Dr. Christopher reassured middle-class mothers that a wet-nurse was only necessary for sickly infants with low body weight. Christopher, W.S., “Feeding the Healthy Infant.” The Chicago Medical Recorder 3 (November 1892): 727728; Wolf, Jacqueline H., “‘Mercenary Hirelings’ or ‘A Great Blessing'?: Doctors’ and Mothers’ Conflicted Perceptions of Wet Nurses and the Ramifications for Infant Feeding in Chicago, 1871–1961.” Journal of Social History 33, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 99.Google Scholar

4 Dull Children Ill Fed,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 13, 1900: 8.Google Scholar

5 Chicago Board of Education, Forty-fifth Annual Report of the Chicago Board of Education (Chicago: Board of Education, 1899), 28.Google Scholar

6 Chicago Board of Education, Forty-sixth Annual Report of the Chicago Board of Education (Chicago: Board of Education, 1900), 49.Google Scholar

7 Hofstadter, Richard, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1944), 163.Google Scholar

8 Rotundo, Anthony E., American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 223.Google Scholar

9 Greene, Harvey, Fit for America: Health Fitness, Sport and American Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986); Mrozek, Donald, Sport and American Mentality 1880–1910 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983); Wharton, James, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); See also Cavallo, Dominick, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); Gorn, Elliot and Goldstein, Warren, A Brief History of American Sport (New York: Wang and Hill, 1993); Kasson, John F., Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002); T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Rotundo, Anthony E., American Manhood (New York: Basic Books, 1993); White, Kevin, The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America (New York: New York University Press, 1993). On the physical culture in Great Britian see: Budd, Michael Anton, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (New York: New York University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

10 Butler, Judith, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 66.Google Scholar

11 Kimmel, Michael, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 137; Toon, Elizabeth and Golden, Janet, “‘Live Clean, Think Clean and Don't Go to Burlesque Shows': Charles Atlas as Health Advisor.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 57, no. 1 (2002): 39–60.Google Scholar

12 Dyreson, Mark, “Regulating the Body and the Body Politic: American Sport, Bourgeois Culture and the Language of Progress, 1880–1920” in The New American Sport History, ed. Pope, S. W. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 124.Google Scholar

13 Bordo, Susan R., “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault,” in Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, ed. Jaggar, Alison M. and Bordo, Susan R. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 1331; Brooks, George A., ed. Perspectives on the Academic Discipline of Physical Education: A Tribute to G. Lawrence Rarick (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1981); Park, Roberta J., “Physiologists, Physicians, and Physical Educators: Nineteenth Century Biology and Exercise, Hygienic and Educative.” Journal of Sport History 14 (1987): 28–60.Google Scholar

14 Verbrugge, Martha, “Recreating the Body: Women's Physical Education and the Science of Sex Differences in America, 1900–1940.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 71, no. 2 (1997): 273; see also: Grant, Julia, “A ‘Real Boy’ and not a Sissie: Gender, Childhood, and Masculinity, 1890–1940.” Journal of Social History 37, no. 4 (2004): 829–851.Google Scholar

15 Nassaw, David, Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Robert Church and Michael Sedlack, Education in the Untied States (New York: Free Press, 1976), 255–56.Google Scholar

16 Bederman, Gail, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7. See also Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Lauretis, Teresa de, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: The University of Indiana Press, 1987).Google Scholar

17 Bederman, 7.Google Scholar

18 Chicago Board of Education, Forty-fifth Annual Report of the Chicago Board of Education (Chicago: Chicago Board of Education, 1899), 45.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 52.Google Scholar

20 Chicago Board of Education, Forty-Sixth Annual Report of the Chicago Board of Education (Chicago: Chicago Board of Education, 1900), 95.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., 95.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., 78.Google Scholar

23 Hofstadter, , Social Darwinism in American Thought, 201.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., 202.Google Scholar

25 Seltzer, Mark, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 149.Google Scholar

26 Gotlieb, Robert, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993); Schmidtt, Peter J., Back to Nature: The Acadian Myth In Urban America, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Nash, Roderick, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967).Google Scholar

27 Foster, H.W., “Physical Education vs Degeneracy.” Independent 52 (August 2, 1900): 1835.Google Scholar

28 Gullick, Luther Halsey, Spalding Athletic Library: Muscle Building, vol. xx, no. 238 (New York: American Sports Publishing, 1905), 5.Google Scholar

29 Wharton, , Crusaders for Fitness. Harvey Green, “Introduction” in Fitness and American Culture, ed. Kathryn Grover (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 317.Google Scholar

30 Shee, George, “The Deterioration in the National Physique.” Nineteenth Century 53 (May 1903): 797.Google Scholar

31 Grant, Percey Stickney, “Physical Deterioration Among the Poor in America and One Way of Checking It.” North American Review vol. 184 (February 1, 1907): 254255.Google Scholar

32 Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1981), 7577; McLaren, Angus, Our Own Master Race, 1885–1945 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989), 14–16.Google Scholar

33 Mrozek, Donald, Sport and American Mentality 1880–1910 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 3640; Donald, B. Van Dalen et al., A World History of Physical Education (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Inc., 1953), 389–91.Google Scholar

34 Park, Roberta, “Healthy, Moral and Strong: Educational Views in Nineteenth-Century America” in Fitness in American Culture: Images of Health, Sport and the Body, 1830–1940, ed. Grover, Kathryn (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 124.Google Scholar

35 Gorn, Elliot and Goldstein, Warren, A Brief History of American Sport (New York: Wang and Hill, 1993), 153–64.Google Scholar

36 George, L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 7879.Google Scholar

37 Gems, Gerald Robert, “Sport and Culture Formation in Chicago, 1840–1940” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1989), 5053. The early Turners also tended to be politically active, espousing socialist and abolitionist views. For a history of the Turners in America see Metzner, Henry, A History of the American Turners (1911; repr., Rochester: National Council of American Turners, 1974); Rippley, LaVern J., “Status versus Ethnicity: The Turners and Bohemians of the New Ulm” in The German Forty-Eighters in the United States, ed. Brancaforte, Charlotte L. (New York: Peter Lang, 1989). On the importance of the Turners to social and political activity in the city of Chicago see Heiss, Christine, “German Radicals in Industrial America: The Lehr-und Wehr-Verein in Gilded Age Chicago” in German Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1850–1910, ed. Keil, Harmut and Jentz, John B. (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983), 206–23; and Peter Buhle, “German Socialist and the Roots of American Working-Class Radicalism” in German Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1850–1910, 224–35.Google Scholar

38 Gerber, David A., “Germans Take Care of Our Celebrations” in Hard at Play: Leisure in America, 1840–1940, ed. Grover, Kathryn (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 4041.Google Scholar

39 Greene, Harvey, Fit for America, 94.Google Scholar

40 Greene, Harvey, Fit for America, 99.Google Scholar

41 Gerber, David A., “Germans Take Care of Our Celebrations” in Hard at Play: Leisure in America, 1840–1940, ed. Grover, Kathryn (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 3960.Google Scholar

42 Pesavento, Wilma Jane, “Historical Study of the Development of Physical Education in the Chicago Public High Schools, 1860–1965” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1966), 58.Google Scholar

43 UCSC: Amos Alonzo Stagg Papers, Box 18, Folder 3, memorandum (no date).Google Scholar

44 Lee, Mabel, A History of Physical Education and Sport in the USA (New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1983), 4043.Google Scholar

45 Hughe, Theodore, “On the Physiological Effects of Moderate Muscular Activity and Strain.” Sciences 29, no. 743 (March 26, 1909): 484.Google Scholar

46 Chicago Historical Society (CHS): YMCA of Chicago Manuscript Collection, Box 7, Folder 3, “Highlights in the History of the YMCA of Chicago, 1858–1944,” 3.Google Scholar

47 CHS: YMCA of Chicago Manuscript Collection, Box 7, Folder 4, “Recollections of Early Days of the Chicago YMCA,” 6.Google Scholar

48 CHS: YMCA of Chicago Manuscript Collection, Box 7, Folder 3, “Highlights in the History of the YMCA of Chicago, 1858–1944,” 9–12.Google Scholar

49 Putney, Clifford, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Donald Hall, ed. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

50 Hopkins, Howard, History of the YMCA in North America (New York: Association Press, 1951), 459.Google Scholar

51 Ibid., 456.Google Scholar

52 CHS: Chicago Athletic Association Brochure.Google Scholar

53 Ray Brosseau, ed. Looking Forward: Life in the Twentieth Century as Predicted in the Pages of American Magazines from 1895–1905 (New York: American Heritage Press, 1970), 292.Google Scholar

54 CHS: Burke, William Henry, Chicago Athletic Association Past and Present (Chicago: Chicago Newspaper Union Press, 1896), 6.Google Scholar

55 University of Chicago, Special Collections, Joseph Regenstein Library (UCSC): Amos Alonzo Stagg Papers, Box 18, Folder 3, statement for a Chicago Tribune article, July 1910.Google Scholar

56 Ibid.Google Scholar

57 Roberta Park, 147.Google Scholar

58 Cooper, Emmanuel, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1986), 131–33.Google Scholar

59 CHS: “Grand Illusions: Chicago's World Fair of 1893,” display, May 1, 1993 to July 14, 1994. Van Dallen et al. A World History of Physical Education (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1953), 417.Google Scholar

60 Greene, Theodore, America's Heroes: The Changing Models of Success in American Magazines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 127.Google Scholar

61 CHS: A. G. Spalding Bros. Physical Culture: A Manual of Home Exercises (New York: Rogers and Sherwood Press, 1892), 10.Google Scholar

62 Stearns, Peter N., Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West (New York: New York Press, 1997).Google Scholar

63 In their classic study of Midwestern city Robert and Helen Lynd found that Physical Culture was purchased by one in five in the 1920s. Lynd, Robert S. and Lynd, Helen Merell, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929), 239.Google Scholar

64 Macfadden, Bernarr, “Diseases of the Stomach, Their Causes and Cure.” Physical Culture ix, no. 6 (June 1903): 533534; Raymond, T.F., “Exercise Cures Drunkenness.” Physical Culture vi, no. 3 (December 1901): 119; Scottgood, J. E., “Moral Strength Developed by Physical Culture,” Physical Culture vi, no. 2 (November 1901).Google Scholar

65 Macfadden, Bernarr, “The Strenuous Lover” Physical Culture, 9, no. 1 (January 1903). Heylinger, William, “How a College Athlete Won His Tuition and the Way to a Woman's Heart.” Physical Culture 12, no. 1 (July 1904): 4345.Google Scholar

66 Pfaff, Katherine A, “A Young Woman's Ideal in Regard to Perfect Manhood.” Physical Culture 12, no. 6 (1904): 305.Google Scholar

67 Pease, Harry R., “Physical Culture Experiences of a Laborer.” Physical Culture vi, no. 4 (January 1902): 171172.Google Scholar

68 Sargent, Dudley A., “Home Gymnastics for the Business Man” reprinted in Ray Brosseau, Looking Forward (New York: American Heritage Press, 1970), 291.Google Scholar

69 Rotundo, , American Manhood, 250–51.Google Scholar

70 CHS: Chicago YMCA Brochure “Health and Recreation via Gymnasium Classes,” 1907–08.Google Scholar

71 Anderson, William G, “The Making of a Perfect Man.” Munsey Magazine 25 (April 1901): 94104.Google Scholar

72 Taylor, Charles K., “Better Boys: New Standards for Judging Your Boys Physical Development.” American Magazine 77 (June 1914): 1721.Google Scholar

73 Taylor, Henry Ling, “Exercise and Vigour,” National Education Association Journal of Proceedings and Addresses, vol. 37 (1898).Google Scholar

74 Hughe, Theodore, 485.Google Scholar

75 Chicago Board of Education, Forty-fifth Annual Report of the Chicago Board of Education (Chicago: Chicago Board of Education, 1899), 28.Google Scholar

76 Meyerowitz, Joanne J., Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 13.Google Scholar

77 It is important to remember that race was used broadly at this time to indicate what we might consider nationality, cultural group or ethnicity.Google Scholar

78 D'Emilio, and Freedman, , Intimate Matters, 165.Google Scholar

79 Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 147; see also Takaki, Ronald, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

80 Lears, , No Place of Grace, 46–7.Google Scholar

81 Hodges, N.D.C., “Physical Development.” Sciences 18, no. 441 (1898): 34.Google Scholar

82 Pesavento, Wilma Jane, “Historical Study of the Development of Physical Education in Chicago Public High Schools, 1860–1965” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1966), 39.Google Scholar

83 Chicago Board of Education, Proceedings of the Chicago Board of Education (Chicago: July 19, 1893), 2; Chicago Board of Education, Proceedings of the Chicago Board of Education (Chicago: November 18, 1885), 53.Google Scholar

84 Pesavento, 46.Google Scholar

85 CHS: Sudder, Henry, Chicago Public Schools Program of Exercises on Physica 1 Culture (Chicago: n.d.).Google Scholar

86 Chicago Board of Education, Forty-First Annual Report of the Chicago Board of Education (Chicago: Chicago Board of Education, 1895), 77.Google Scholar

87 Macleod, David, Building Character in the American Boy (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 29.Google Scholar

88 Susman, Warren, “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture” in Culture as History (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 273–74.Google Scholar

89 Macleod, , Building Character in the American Boy, 44, 30.Google Scholar

90 Rotundo, , American Manhood, 223; Mrozek, Donald “Sport in American Life From National Health to Personal Fulfillment, 1890–1940” in Fitness in American Culture: Images of Health, Sport and the Body, ed. Grover, Kathryn (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 19.Google Scholar

91 Kron, William O., “The Development of the Will Through Physical Training.” National Educational Association Journal of Proceedings and Addresses vol. 35 (1896): 879.Google Scholar

92 Hughes, James L., “Physical Training as a Factor in Character Building.” National Educational Association Journal of Proceedings and Addresses vol. 35 (1896): 911919. See also D'Emilio, and Freedman, , Intimate Matters, 206–07.Google Scholar

93 Chicago Board of Education, Sixty-Fourth Annual Report of the Chicago Board of Education (Chicago: Chicago Board of Education, 1918), 36, 127.Google Scholar

94 Chicago Board of Education, Proceeding of the Board of Education of the City of Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Board of Education, 1918), 543. Pesavento, 110–12.Google Scholar

95 Chicago Board of Education, Sixty-Sixth Annual Report of the Chicago Board of Education (Chicago: Chicago Board of Education, 1922), 37.Google Scholar

96 Chicago Board of Education, Sixty-Fourth Annual Report of the Chicago Board of Education (Chicago: Chicago Board of Education, 1918), 126.Google Scholar

97 Zeiger, Susan, “The Schoolhouse vs. the Armory: U. S. Teachers and the Campaign Against Militarism in the Schools, 1914–1918.” Journal of Women's History 15, no. 2 (2003): 150179.Google Scholar

98 See Kessler-Harris, Alice, Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Meyerowitz, Joanne J., Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988). Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

99 Dubbert, Joe, “Progressivism and the Masculinity Crisis” in ed. Pleck, Elizabeth H. and Pleck, Joseph H., The American Man (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 308. For more on separate spheres see Kerber, Linda, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History.” Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 28; Cott, Nancy, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Stansell, Christine, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789–1860 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, Disorderly Conduct (New York: Knopf, 1985).Google Scholar

100 Scott, Joan Wallach, Gender and the Politics of Social History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 4243.Google Scholar

101 McKeever, William A., Training the Boy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915), 196.Google Scholar

102 Halprin, David M., One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990), 15. See also Haking, Ian, “Making Up People,” in Forms of Desire, ed. Stein, Edward (New York: Routledge, 1992), 87.Google Scholar

103 Chauncey, George, Gay New York, 79–86.Google Scholar

104 D'Emilio, John and Freedman, Estelle, Intimate Matters, 227. George Chauncey, “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era” in Hidden From History, ed. Martin Duberman et al. (New York: Meridian, 1989).Google Scholar