Speaker 1: Mudcasting guessing. Are you recording, Robert, I am, yeah, we
Speaker 1: have to make sure professional podcaster, Robert Evans. Are you podcasting?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know, but I know that
Speaker 1: this is the opening of part two of this episode podcasting.
Speaker 1: This is how we're doing it. This is what we're doing.
Speaker 1: So this this is started like the episode started, I
Speaker 1: don't know, thirty seven seconds ago, according to my recorder.
Speaker 1: Like we're in it now, Sophie. There's no pulling back,
Speaker 1: there's no there's no going back to a world before
Speaker 1: we opened to the podcast this way, Sylvie, what is
Speaker 1: this show? Who are we? Um? I'm right into a
Speaker 1: few states episodes your Sophie Lichtman, this is God's the
Speaker 1: behind because this see, I feel like being Sophie looked
Speaker 1: him and it sounds like a really difficult job. It's
Speaker 1: really hard much there. I would much rather be the
Speaker 1: other guy. Um, let's do it that way. Let's do
Speaker 1: it that way, and then I just have to Sophieman
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna go cry. Okay, Well, Caitlin Durante, how
Speaker 1: are you doing today? You said, how are you doing
Speaker 1: on this Durant day? It's good. I am doing well,
Speaker 1: I just had a snack. So I'm not taking the advice,
Speaker 1: which would be don't eat or go to doctors. I
Speaker 1: eat food and well I I, um, you know, I
Speaker 1: do try to avoid doctors, but not for the same
Speaker 1: reasons that he did. I believe in science, but um,
Speaker 1: you know, I've had I've had some problems with doctors
Speaker 1: in the past. Go ahead and listen to Sludge and
Speaker 1: American healthcare story if anyone once you my experience. So
Speaker 1: I have more of a problem with some just the
Speaker 1: kind of institution of the American health care system than
Speaker 1: like it's bad doctors, right, I've known a lot of
Speaker 1: great doctors. I avoid medical care like the plague. Um,
Speaker 1: although right now that is on the advice of several
Speaker 1: medical professionals I know who have who have repeatedly told
Speaker 1: me there was no the hospitals are completely past capacity.
Speaker 1: We have no equipment, we have no room to help
Speaker 1: anybody stay healthy. Don't go to the doctor. You can't.
Speaker 1: You can't go to the hospital now, there's nothing where
Speaker 1: you here. You should avoid them because of the plague. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you know, try to eat well, everybody, be careful
Speaker 1: on the street, just exercise, and then you won't have
Speaker 1: to go doctor. It's more like, it's more it's not
Speaker 1: that you shouldn't go to the doctor, it's that we
Speaker 1: have systematically destroyed large aspects of our health care system UM,
Speaker 1: and so there may not be a doctor. Dear for
Speaker 1: you to go to. UM. Happy Halloween and everybody, it's
Speaker 1: after Halloween. I don't know, I don't know what I'm doing, Haitalen.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twelve, um Bernar McFadden has just come off
Speaker 1: of the failure of Physical Culture City, which I cannot
Speaker 1: get over as the name unbelievable after all those people
Speaker 1: committed physical culture treason, physical culture treason, you know. In
Speaker 1: twelve is also the year that the Titanic sank, so
Speaker 1: a lot of tragedies happened, a lot of tragedy. Thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you, Caitlin. I'm so impressed that you didn't get
Speaker 1: a titantic mention in part one. I'm proud of you. Well, Robert,
Speaker 1: I did as a way to like, as an adjective
Speaker 1: for something else. And I really did think about interrupting
Speaker 1: you and be like, I'm just saying, like that's really
Speaker 1: mad we talk about Titanic, But you know, I was
Speaker 1: I decided to respect you. Thank you. Yeah you did.
Speaker 1: You did not. You did not commit physical culture treason.
Speaker 1: I did not, and you're welcome. You're welcome also to me. Um. So,
Speaker 1: by the way, the Titanic disaster could have been avoided
Speaker 1: if people had had better physical culture. And you know what,
Speaker 1: according to learn how to swim? Motherfucker's you dead assholes.
Speaker 1: That's what I say. According to the movie which James
Speaker 1: Cameron took. You know, he does his research into making
Speaker 1: that mento, making that movie pretty accurate. There is a
Speaker 1: scene that takes place in a gymnasium that was on
Speaker 1: the Titanic. Never watched it, Robert, I can't believe that
Speaker 1: you don't want to watch Titanic. I watch one movie
Speaker 1: and it's The Mummy, and I would watch Titanic, but
Speaker 1: it's giving me some serious Mummy vibes. So I feel
Speaker 1: like I've already seen it. Look, you have one of
Speaker 1: those many rip offs of the Mummy, like Sitting Private
Speaker 1: Ryan or the Crying Game, all all all shades of
Speaker 1: the Mummy. While we're on movies, I did want to
Speaker 1: bring up how the story of um what's his name,
Speaker 1: Bernar Bern. It's a ridiculous name to make for yourself.
Speaker 1: That would be like I'm gonna go by Kate Kately
Speaker 1: from now on, Kate Lar just taking out the last
Speaker 1: letter Rob Very. It's very funny. Uh So the narrative,
Speaker 1: the story of Berner's life sounds remarkably similar to that
Speaker 1: of m Charles Foster Kane of Citizen Kane, where he's
Speaker 1: you know, draw away from his mother that he becomes
Speaker 1: this like you know, I don't well, I don't know
Speaker 1: if Bernar how wealthy he gets, but super he I suspect.
Speaker 1: I'm almost certain he was one of the men who
Speaker 1: was kind of the inspiration for Charles Foster Kane, because
Speaker 1: another man who was an inspiration for Charles Suster came
Speaker 1: was William Randolph Hurst. And at his height, Bernard McFadden
Speaker 1: is a much more popular publisher than Hearst. His magazines
Speaker 1: outsell Hearsts publications. He is he is four a time.
Speaker 1: We're getting to this, but he is for a time
Speaker 1: the number one publisher in the United States of magazines
Speaker 1: like no one else is even I don't think it's
Speaker 1: even all that close. Um, he's hugely successful. We are
Speaker 1: we are building to that. So in nineteen twelve, the
Speaker 1: Titanic has sank because Motherfucker's didn't do enough crunches um,
Speaker 1: and his relationship with Susie has fallen apart, the lady
Speaker 1: that he leaves his wife for in Physical Culture City
Speaker 1: and Physical Culture City. So he's he's hurting, right, you know,
Speaker 1: he's in this like rebound period when you're extra vulnerable,
Speaker 1: and you know, we all we all make decisions that
Speaker 1: maybe aren't the things we're proudest of when we're in
Speaker 1: that like a relationships kind of ended badly. I think
Speaker 1: I think we can all be vulnerable enough to admit
Speaker 1: everybody makes decisions that maybe aren't the things they would
Speaker 1: they would most want to like celebrate in their lives
Speaker 1: in that period of time. And Bernard is no different.
Speaker 1: But because he's the guy he is, he does this
Speaker 1: in a somewhat grander fashion. He goes on a tour
Speaker 1: of Europe with an ulterior motive to find himself a wife. Now,
Speaker 1: the way he does this is fucking incredible. He travels
Speaker 1: to the UK to go on a speaking tour because
Speaker 1: he's incredibly popular in the United Kingdom, right, people, every
Speaker 1: time he does a speech there, it's sold out. He
Speaker 1: auditorium is full of people, and his books, which have
Speaker 1: been banned in the United States, sell like hotcakes over there,
Speaker 1: because he's like, hey, he's got banned in the US
Speaker 1: for being too obscene. But you, you English people, you're
Speaker 1: advanced and like urbane enough to appreciate this, this work.
Speaker 1: Um So as a major celebrity, he announces a contest
Speaker 1: Great Britain's Perfect Woman. Now he frames this as this
Speaker 1: is a health contest, right to see, like who is
Speaker 1: the fittest woman in in Great Britain? Like, who is
Speaker 1: the healthiest woman? Yeah, you're not gonna like it anymore
Speaker 1: after this point. Happy So obviously, since he's the one
Speaker 1: running the test and is the great expert on physical culture,
Speaker 1: he gets to choose the winner, and the prize that
Speaker 1: the winner wins is a job offer from Bernard McFadden
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna quote from a write up by Esquire here.
Speaker 1: She soon settled into her new career as the co
Speaker 1: star of McFadden's traveling physical fitness show. Billed as the
Speaker 1: world's healthiest man and woman, the pair performed feats of
Speaker 1: physical prowess, the highlight of which was Williamson, the woman
Speaker 1: that he he picks out Williamson's nightly jumped from a
Speaker 1: seven foot platform onto McFadden's stomach. It wasn't long before
Speaker 1: Mary Williamson discovered her biggest prize and the secret reason
Speaker 1: for the contest. McFadden was searching for his third wife
Speaker 1: and she was the lucky winner. One day, while the
Speaker 1: pair was halfway through a ten mile run, he proposed.
Speaker 1: When she accepted, she later recalled, he stood on his
Speaker 1: head for me for one minute and four seconds. Fucking incredible. Guy.
Speaker 1: That doesn't That doesn't do it for you, Kaitlin, A
Speaker 1: guy five miles into a run standing on his head
Speaker 1: for a minute to celebrate. I mean the bar has
Speaker 1: been set now now that I know this. Don't you
Speaker 1: dare anyone post me unless you're able to stand on
Speaker 1: your head for a minute in five seconds? Yeah, sixty
Speaker 1: five seconds. You gotta beat him now, like that's the
Speaker 1: one to beat, right, all right? Get practicing, assholes. It
Speaker 1: is like it's easier than I have to think, because
Speaker 1: she's like, wow, he's not again actively dying of typhus. Um,
Speaker 1: What what a catch? He could stand on his head
Speaker 1: and didn't cough up a lung because he's been eating
Speaker 1: cigars nineteen times a day for the last thirty years.
Speaker 1: I mean, isn't that how like peacocks select their mate.
Speaker 1: They're like, oh, this set, this is the sexiest one,
Speaker 1: so I'm going to mate with that one. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that's that's more than peacocks do that. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so as soon as they were married, Bernard started pumping
Speaker 1: babies into his new bride. As a eugenicist, what look,
Speaker 1: this is no place for prudery, Caitlin. You're absolutely right that.
Speaker 1: It was a brutish response for me, and you worded
Speaker 1: that perfectly. Thank you, Thank you, Caitlin, Thank you. As
Speaker 1: a eugenicist, Bernard believed that he had that the fit
Speaker 1: had a responsibility to breed in order to fill the
Speaker 1: world with more genetically perfect children. He lived his creed
Speaker 1: by giving his wife seven children in twelve years, which
Speaker 1: is too many. I would say too many. I mean
Speaker 1: it's better than twelve children in seven years. That that
Speaker 1: is better than twelve and also more possible. You might
Speaker 1: be able to make it. That would be real tricky,
Speaker 1: It would be hard. You would have to really time
Speaker 1: that ship out careful. He gave them insufferable names, and
Speaker 1: he may have been the guy who invented insufferable names
Speaker 1: for your celebrity kids. Bernice but spelled b y r
Speaker 1: in e c E hate it, absolutely hate it. Berwin
Speaker 1: spelled b r w y in um. And yeah, just
Speaker 1: like Bryce, he has a Bryce. Like these fucking so
Speaker 1: they're all like vaguely derivatives of his name, yes, of course,
Speaker 1: because they're vaguely derivative of him. And yeah, his his children.
Speaker 1: He only has these kids so that number one, he
Speaker 1: can publish magazines about raising kids, and so that he
Speaker 1: can make his kids into celebrities and Physical Culture magazine
Speaker 1: and talk about all of his how because he's using
Speaker 1: He's had all these different health ideas right that he's
Speaker 1: written about, like you eat this or you don't eat this,
Speaker 1: or you you do this every day and it'll do this,
Speaker 1: and he's testing them on his kids and he's like
Speaker 1: putting them in the magazine and being like, look when
Speaker 1: you starve your child book, and how strong my boy
Speaker 1: is and like all of this kind of ship. The
Speaker 1: irony there is alarming because he was starving as a
Speaker 1: child and he was no, that didn't work out for him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know he's look, people do things our brains work
Speaker 1: in mysterious ways, bad ways. Our brains mostly work in
Speaker 1: bad ways. Um. So, yeah, he believed baldness for an
Speaker 1: example of the kind of things that he believed. And
Speaker 1: I should note that while he is testing a bunch
Speaker 1: of health theories on his children, he also tests all
Speaker 1: this on himself, Like in fairness, he's not not testing
Speaker 1: on himself too. So he believed baldness could be cured
Speaker 1: by tugging on one's hair, which he did regularly. This
Speaker 1: made his permanent pompadour look unkempt and vaguely crazy. So
Speaker 1: his hair is like always shooting out everywhere because he's
Speaker 1: pulling on it constantly, like a man with a scalp condition.
Speaker 1: He went barefoot at all times, convinced that this kept
Speaker 1: him in contact with the Earth's magnetic forces. So he's
Speaker 1: like super rich. He's a millionaire, but he's going to
Speaker 1: all of these business meetings and political meetings stuff like
Speaker 1: barefoot in the middle of like nineteen hundreds New York,
Speaker 1: which is basically has the Edward from Twilight first movie hair. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and look I I run barefoot. I'm I'm a big
Speaker 1: advocate of barefoot stuff. Um, there are some places in
Speaker 1: the world that I was not willing to go barefoot. Um,
Speaker 1: and those included downtown South New Delhi, India. Um, just
Speaker 1: because like it didn't seem like a good idea, and
Speaker 1: New York I have to think, like, I don't think
Speaker 1: it's a good idea to necessarily always be barefoot when
Speaker 1: horseshit is eight percent of what's on the street, which
Speaker 1: in New York and like nineteen ten, it absolutely is. Um.
Speaker 1: But whatever, he's fine. Um yeah, it seems to work
Speaker 1: for him. Uh yeah. And despite being incredibly rich, he
Speaker 1: wore he didn't believe you should get rid of clothing,
Speaker 1: so he wore his suits until they were literally rotting
Speaker 1: off of him. Um. So this man is a millionaire
Speaker 1: and extremely successful and physically fit, but he also looks
Speaker 1: like like a super swoll hobo. Like he's his clothing
Speaker 1: is falling apart, his hair is all shooting out everywhere,
Speaker 1: and he's barefoot. Um. And he also has a habit
Speaker 1: of challenging other men to fist fights for like no
Speaker 1: reason at all, constantly, sometimes on a daily basis, he'll
Speaker 1: try to get into fist fights with people. So a
Speaker 1: lot of folks who see him don't realize. Oh that's
Speaker 1: wealthy publisher Bernard McFadden. They're like, oh, that is a
Speaker 1: mentally ill vagrant like that. This is a man who
Speaker 1: needs medical attention because he's he's he's not well. He
Speaker 1: would refuse to get which he would refuse to get. Um.
Speaker 1: He also launched a variety of different health foods. My favorite,
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I have to I don't want to
Speaker 1: read this to you. I want to show you the
Speaker 1: ad and you can, you can describe this to our
Speaker 1: our audience because it is you. Oh thank you, Sylphie.
Speaker 1: Allegedly Caitlin. Can you see it? Yes, look at that. Okay,
Speaker 1: here we go. It's called Strength. I believe it's just
Speaker 1: probably announced food food food, but it's spelled food. Is
Speaker 1: spelled f U d E strength Strength. I don't like
Speaker 1: upon first glance, I thought it said fudge. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: so strength fudge sort of. Um, let's see it's the
Speaker 1: logo is under strength foot is it's different. Another another
Speaker 1: tagline seems to be don't be a Weakling. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think that's Bernar on the front of the food
Speaker 1: weird like hand showing off his biceps. Don't be a weakling?
Speaker 1: On top of the boxing doing a Schwartzenegger pose with
Speaker 1: the muscles. He's not even that swoll by today's standards,
Speaker 1: is the thing by today's But come on, you gotta
Speaker 1: look at like how recently though today's standards happened, Like
Speaker 1: you watch them action movies from like the eighties and
Speaker 1: like it's fucking mid like overweight dudes in their late forties.
Speaker 1: Um like you look at you know, a good example
Speaker 1: of like how recently what the definition of being jacked
Speaker 1: has changed? In the second Indiana Jones movie, the one
Speaker 1: that everybody prefers to forget because of all the racism,
Speaker 1: right there was going to be like this shirtless scene
Speaker 1: for Harrison Ford, so he got super They talk about
Speaker 1: this and like the behind the scenes that he had
Speaker 1: to get like in crazy good shape in order to
Speaker 1: like do this scene. And he just looks like like
Speaker 1: you would, well what you're talking about, and that you
Speaker 1: would you would cast him today as the guy is
Speaker 1: like the stoner who doesn't exercise, and if he was
Speaker 1: going to be opposite of like the average looking man
Speaker 1: who was Kumail n Gianni with ninety pounds of muscle
Speaker 1: packed on do like that, there's a tag famous authority
Speaker 1: on food and hygiene. Hygiene was a big word in
Speaker 1: this period of time. The Nazis talk about hygiene all
Speaker 1: the time, racial hygiene. UM, food with cream. I don't
Speaker 1: know what it is. I think it's like some sort
Speaker 1: of porridge. I don't want it. I wonder if this
Speaker 1: is like kind of the original protein powder because it
Speaker 1: says that, yeah, I think with cream or sugar or
Speaker 1: sliced bananas and cream. So it sounds like you just
Speaker 1: like put it into your smoothie. Yeah, well it's not really.
Speaker 1: I don't think smoothies science has really been invented yet.
Speaker 1: But he is like this is definitely like the precursor
Speaker 1: to like protein. Literally says berries and cream on there,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, yeah, there's bananas and cream, like what.
Speaker 1: There would be people in this period of time who
Speaker 1: would argue with him that like, no, fruits bad for you. Um.
Speaker 1: So here again he's this mix of like absolutely dangerously
Speaker 1: wrong stuff and also being like, no, you should mostly
Speaker 1: eat vegetables and fruit and like you know, maybe avoid
Speaker 1: red meat, which is good health advice. Generally good health advice, um,
Speaker 1: unless you have an iron deficiency or whatever. But like
Speaker 1: most most people who eat red meat eat more of
Speaker 1: it than is good for their health, including me. So good,
Speaker 1: You're probably much healthier as a result. Um. I tracked
Speaker 1: down and slaughtered an entire cow earlier today, and I'm
Speaker 1: currently wearing its body like a cape and eating it slowly.
Speaker 1: Was going to ask parasite. Yeah, my doctor says I
Speaker 1: have to stop because I've picked up a ton of
Speaker 1: different kinds of worms. But you know, Caitlin, what's life
Speaker 1: without worms? Huh? That's what I have to ask. That's
Speaker 1: what I say every day. That's what I know. I know,
Speaker 1: that's that's my magazine, worm Culture. Well, hopefully no one
Speaker 1: commits worm culture treason against you. Oh you do not
Speaker 1: want to know the punishment for worm culture trees and Caitlin,
Speaker 1: it is. It's I from Actin. It's actually just I
Speaker 1: from Okay. All right. Yeah, So he's tearing right along.
Speaker 1: Business is growing at a very fast pace, and then
Speaker 1: tragedy strikes World War One, which is bad for Bernard
Speaker 1: McFadden and no one else otherwise a great time, right.
Speaker 1: I know, it's very shocking here about World War one
Speaker 1: being bad for somebody, but it's not great for his business.
Speaker 1: Interesting m hm. So we finally found one bad thing
Speaker 1: to say about World War One, which you know has
Speaker 1: been a very probe, the First World War podcast. So
Speaker 1: this is this is hard for me. Um, So yeah,
Speaker 1: his his, you know, disposable income people have less money
Speaker 1: to spend on magazines, right, um. And a lot of
Speaker 1: the young men who are going to be most interested
Speaker 1: in consuming his content are getting shot with machine guns
Speaker 1: repeatedly on the Western front um. But Bernard weathered the storm,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen nineteen, on the advice of his wife Mary,
Speaker 1: he launched a magazine called True Story. Now this is
Speaker 1: yet and again Bernard inventing something that would prove to
Speaker 1: be one of the most influential cultural decisions in history. Like,
Speaker 1: it is hard to overstate the influence of this magazine.
Speaker 1: And in order to help me adequately explain why this
Speaker 1: is important, I am going to read a quote from
Speaker 1: American Heritage magazine. True Story was the originator and exemplar
Speaker 1: of the Confession magazine under the credo truth is Stranger
Speaker 1: than Fiction. The cover of the first issue featured such
Speaker 1: titles as A Wife Who Awoke in Time and My
Speaker 1: Battle with John Barley corn an ex convicts climbed to millions,
Speaker 1: and how I learned to hate my parents. Basically, the
Speaker 1: true story formula consisted of first person accounts written in
Speaker 1: an untutored but clear style of sin and redemption. The sin,
Speaker 1: usually carnal, was described in some detail, but the actual
Speaker 1: consummation nearly always seemed to take place between paragraphs, and
Speaker 1: was invariably dressed up as a moral lesson. McFadden manipulated
Speaker 1: the formula masterfully. He knew the illusion of authenticity was essential,
Speaker 1: so instead of hiring what he called art artists to
Speaker 1: illustrate the stories, he used staged photographs featuring such models
Speaker 1: as that an unknown Frederick marsh, Jean Arthur, and Norma Shower.
Speaker 1: And he made every contributor signed an affid David stating
Speaker 1: that his or her story was indeed true. In nine seven, however,
Speaker 1: after a piece title did the Revealing Kiss, used the
Speaker 1: names of eight actual residents of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who sued
Speaker 1: McFadden for half a million dollars, he found himself somewhat
Speaker 1: sheepishly contending that maybe every story wasn't all that true.
Speaker 1: McFadden turned out to be a cracker jack businessman. His
Speaker 1: initial inspiration was to charge twenty cents for the magazine,
Speaker 1: a dime more than the going rate. The first issue
Speaker 1: sold out. I think I feel confident saying the majority
Speaker 1: of digital content today is in some way descended from
Speaker 1: True Story magazine. This is like half of the Internet
Speaker 1: at least, right, Um, this is half of television. This
Speaker 1: is reality TV. This is Jerry Springer and Dear Abbey.
Speaker 1: This is UM which is I mean Dear Abby's like
Speaker 1: a magazine. This is like everything. This like true confessionals
Speaker 1: about like scandalous things that happen in real life. That's
Speaker 1: like most of culture. He and He's he's invinced this.
Speaker 1: He's the first person to figure out there is a
Speaker 1: a hunger for this that will never be sated, and
Speaker 1: I can I can publish this forever. Um. He This
Speaker 1: makes millions of this dollar like instantly, um. And within
Speaker 1: the year he's already spinning this magazine off into other
Speaker 1: magazines that are just like more focused. He creates True Romance,
Speaker 1: True Experiences, True ghost Stories, True Detective, and dream World.
Speaker 1: So here's how it worked. When Bernard had a major
Speaker 1: hit with a type of story. So he publishes a
Speaker 1: couple of different romantic true stories in an issue of
Speaker 1: true story, and that issue sells really well. He spins
Speaker 1: off an entire magazine devoted to like true romantic stories.
Speaker 1: It's basically the Playboy Confessionals or whatever, the Hustler, whatever
Speaker 1: one it was. American Heritage goes into more detail here.
Speaker 1: Quote and this is about how he like runs his
Speaker 1: publishing empire. A flag flu on the McFadden building for
Speaker 1: each McFadden publication, and employees would go up to the
Speaker 1: roof first thing each morning to see if they still
Speaker 1: had a job. Among the short lived flags were ones
Speaker 1: that bore the legend Beautiful Womanhood Who's Undoing was an
Speaker 1: ill conceived, scathing attack on spinsters and brain power, whose
Speaker 1: title apparently suggested to readers that they were somehow lacking
Speaker 1: in that department. So he's like a b testing So
Speaker 1: he puts up a flag for every different magazine he launches,
Speaker 1: and if it doesn't sell well, he takes it out.
Speaker 1: That's how you know you've lost your job that like,
Speaker 1: this magazine has been canceled. Like but he's he's doing
Speaker 1: like again what every publisher does today. He like he
Speaker 1: is effectively running a massive internet publication. He's doing BuzzFeed
Speaker 1: in like nineteen twenty, Like, that's like, what this is effectively? Um,
Speaker 1: he's just launching different verticals. He's He's like, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I worked for years in an industry that was largely
Speaker 1: defined by Bernard McFadden without ever knowing his name. Um,
Speaker 1: and it sounds like, yeah, this is all like very
Speaker 1: click baity stuff. Yea, who by this sounds Bernard McFadden
Speaker 1: would have made all of the money in the world
Speaker 1: off of the internet. Yeah. Um, he would be eating
Speaker 1: he would be on Joe Rogan's podcast twice a fucking week, like,
Speaker 1: or he would have just eaten Joe Rogan to gain
Speaker 1: his powers. Um. So my projection of him just being
Speaker 1: like an Abercrombie model Jim bro I thought it was
Speaker 1: not right. He wow, No, he's actually he's like business man.
Speaker 1: He's closer to the Gawker guys, except for I think
Speaker 1: he probably would have been friends with Whole Cogan rather
Speaker 1: than getting into a legal fight with him. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: Bernard's personal life was seemingly more stable at this point,
Speaker 1: but his obsessive need to test his theories, paired with
Speaker 1: his reckless belief in his own ideas, led to tragedy
Speaker 1: in his personal life. This is the baby killing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I see that excitement just lighting up your face, Caitlin.
Speaker 1: We all love a good that. I am ecstatic. In
Speaker 1: the spring of nineteen, Mary got pregnant with he had
Speaker 1: another child. Now, Bernard had written articles earlier about several
Speaker 1: theories he had on sex determination, right, how to make
Speaker 1: determine the sex of your child, And this is like
Speaker 1: historically right, this is a constant thing. People have these theories.
Speaker 1: But like, if you do this, if you make her
Speaker 1: lay this way or eat this kind of food, and
Speaker 1: you know she'll have a boy or a daughter. Like,
Speaker 1: this is a whole He's not the first person who
Speaker 1: tries to do this. You know, this goes back as
Speaker 1: long as there have been the idea of patrilineal um
Speaker 1: um whatever, like passing on a property and ship um.
Speaker 1: One of his ideas was that boys were more often
Speaker 1: born to mothers who were starving. So during all of
Speaker 1: her previous pregnancies, he'd starved his wife, but she kept
Speaker 1: having girls. She was, Yeah, isn't that a bummer? I'm nope,
Speaker 1: I wasn't even I'm not going to make the JOKEO.
Speaker 1: So he comes to the conclusion that all of the
Speaker 1: starving he'd done previous slee was cumulative, and he'd probably
Speaker 1: primed her to have a boy at this point. So
Speaker 1: now he made her eat a bunch of roast beef
Speaker 1: during this pregnancy. So that's at least like better than
Speaker 1: starving her. Right, force feeding your pregnant wife roast beef
Speaker 1: instead of making your starve. That's an improvement. He's grown,
Speaker 1: he has, he has not at all. In late December,
Speaker 1: with the baby near do Bernar was so happy, uh,
Speaker 1: and with both the fact that he's about to have
Speaker 1: another kid and with a success of true story that
Speaker 1: he held a company holiday party, allowing his employees to
Speaker 1: smoke and drink to their hearts content even during prohibition.
Speaker 1: He was I'll say this, he doesn't drink. He thinks
Speaker 1: no one should. But he's also like a libertarian, so
Speaker 1: he's he hates prohibition. He doesn't think the government should
Speaker 1: be telling people what to do, which I can respect
Speaker 1: that as like, anyway, we're about to talk about how
Speaker 1: maybe he killed his baby, so whatever. When he came
Speaker 1: home from the party, he found his wife in labor,
Speaker 1: and since he couldn't reach a midwife, and again there
Speaker 1: are phones, not a lot of people are phone connected
Speaker 1: at this point, like it. He he was a millionaire,
Speaker 1: you'd imagine, you'd imagine he could have set this up right. Um,
Speaker 1: But he can't get a midwife on the horn, and
Speaker 1: obviously he's not going to call a fucking doctor. So
Speaker 1: he delivers the child himself. His wife gives birth to
Speaker 1: a boy named Byron, which Bernar confusingly claimed meant that
Speaker 1: his theory about starving pregnant women was correct because he'd
Speaker 1: starved her so much before. You though, he hadn't starved
Speaker 1: her for this baby. Right, he's not really scientific, I
Speaker 1: would say, maybe that's questionable logic. So he forced an
Speaker 1: immediate announcement of the boy's birth into Physical Culture magazine.
Speaker 1: And he only grudgingly allowed a doctor to enter his
Speaker 1: home and put fifteen stitches in his wife after she
Speaker 1: repeatedly begged him. So for hours, she's bleeding in an agony,
Speaker 1: and it's like, please, let me have a fucking doctor.
Speaker 1: I'm ripped open. Let me like please. And finally, because
Speaker 1: he I mean, for one thing, he doesn't want anyone
Speaker 1: to know that he'd have a doctor for anything. Right,
Speaker 1: you shouldn't get you shouldn't get torn open you should
Speaker 1: if you're doing enough sical culture, if you're doing enough
Speaker 1: dumbbell squats or whatever, you shouldn't. You shouldn't rip open,
Speaker 1: you know, when you're pregnant. Um that's what he's saying, obviously.
Speaker 1: Um uh so. Yeah, he eventually does like yield to
Speaker 1: his screaming wife, like screaming not a isn't like hectoring
Speaker 1: if it isn't like dying of blood loss, and allows
Speaker 1: a doctor to come in and put fifteen stitches in her.
Speaker 1: He refuses, though, to allow her any anesthetic or pain killer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, right, kind of sucks, right, what a piece
Speaker 1: of shit? Ho? Look this this is a sympathetic start
Speaker 1: to the Berner McFadden story. We are past the point
Speaker 1: of sympathy now. Um so for almost a year things
Speaker 1: are okay though, Um, and he's like he puts this kid,
Speaker 1: this son of his. He's so proud to have a son.
Speaker 1: Every week there's an article about how strong and like
Speaker 1: good and like, look, he's growing up so much stronger
Speaker 1: than other boys, and like, I'm doing this and I'm
Speaker 1: doing this. He's gonna be the healthiest boy. And he's
Speaker 1: gonna be the healthiest man who ever lived. And like
Speaker 1: this is like a huge active that he almost pivots
Speaker 1: the magazine to focus on his son's development. So a
Speaker 1: year later, the December of the next year, after his
Speaker 1: kids born, when Byron is about one year old, tragedy
Speaker 1: strikes and I'm gonna quote from the biography Mr. America. Here,
Speaker 1: eleven month old Byron, known within the family as Billy,
Speaker 1: was seated on his mother's lap. Suddenly Billy tensed up,
Speaker 1: threw his head back, and began to contort his body
Speaker 1: as if overcome by a seizure. Bernard demanded that the
Speaker 1: infant be stripped and dunked in a steaming hot bath.
Speaker 1: Mary recalled that the water's temperature was so hot that
Speaker 1: she couldn't keep her hand submerged. Though it is impossible
Speaker 1: to know the cause of Billy's fit, many common childhood
Speaker 1: seizures are now known to be brought on by fever,
Speaker 1: so a hot bath as treatment was probably ill advised
Speaker 1: at best. The baby's spasms continued, Mary snatched him out
Speaker 1: of the water and screamed, burn for the love of Christ,
Speaker 1: call a doctor. Billy died in her arms. Yeah, and again,
Speaker 1: this is the nineteen twenties, right, So a baby having
Speaker 1: a seizure. It is entirely possible by the time that
Speaker 1: baby started seizing, it was already essentially dead because medical
Speaker 1: science maybe not great. But also a lot of babies
Speaker 1: had different kinds of seizure disorders and have or have
Speaker 1: seizures because of a fever and get better. There was medicine,
Speaker 1: especially that a rich person could have gotten Like if
Speaker 1: he had taken his child to the best medical care available,
Speaker 1: there's a good chance they baby would have survived. It's
Speaker 1: absolutely guaranteed that dunking a seizuring baby and almost boiling
Speaker 1: hot water is not going to help. So I think
Speaker 1: we can safely say that the you know, he may
Speaker 1: be killed a baby, he may be killed his baby.
Speaker 1: He definitely probably definitely killed his baby. He we can't
Speaker 1: say for certain that he killed his baby. We can
Speaker 1: say for certain that he made that eleven months of
Speaker 1: child's last moments be of horrible confusion and pain submerged
Speaker 1: in near boiling water. Yeah, yes, which is I would
Speaker 1: say bad parents. I'm not an X, I don't have
Speaker 1: a kid. I try not to, like talk about what
Speaker 1: you should do with your kids, but I feel like,
Speaker 1: and again, excuse me, parents in the audience through going
Speaker 1: out on a limb here, it's bad to dunk your
Speaker 1: baby in steaming water while they're having a seizure. Sure,
Speaker 1: I think most people would agree with that. Yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: I know I'm going I'm doing getting into Joe Rogan territory.
Speaker 1: You know, given health advice I'm not qualified to give,
Speaker 1: but that that's my opinion. Don't don't force your baby
Speaker 1: into steaming water while it's having a seizure. Maybe not
Speaker 1: a good idea. You know who else forces babies in
Speaker 1: this Wait? Who doesn't? You know who doesn't ever do
Speaker 1: the thing that I just talked about? All right, I
Speaker 1: don't know the products and services that support this podcast?
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe? So they what did
Speaker 1: you heard me? I think I think what I what
Speaker 1: I said was heard. Well, we'll be back after these
Speaker 1: messages from our sponsors, and we're back. So if he's
Speaker 1: very proud of me, everything's fine. So, Bernard McFadden, if
Speaker 1: you know Bernard at this point, Caitlin and I think
Speaker 1: we know Bernard at this point, I feel like he's
Speaker 1: a close personal friend. He's got he's got his ideas
Speaker 1: about things, right, He's got ideas about everything. He had
Speaker 1: ideas about how to deal with the kid's health issues,
Speaker 1: and he has ideas about how to deal with grieving.
Speaker 1: Do you know what? Do you know what? I would
Speaker 1: guess you he would he would think that, um, the
Speaker 1: best way to deal with grieving is to starve yourself
Speaker 1: kind of. He definitely doesn't want people to eat much.
Speaker 1: But no, it's walking for hours at a time in
Speaker 1: the freezing snow. He's a whole family, yeah, his whole family. Um,
Speaker 1: so he just has them walk for hours and hours
Speaker 1: and hours and hours and hours. Um and yeah. Now again,
Speaker 1: he had spent the better part of a year writing
Speaker 1: articles about how healthy his son was and how this
Speaker 1: is all due to his different nutrition theory. So the
Speaker 1: fact that his son had died, that's bad for business,
Speaker 1: you know, Yeah, that's not going to go good for you. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not going to go good for you. So, uh, Jesus,
Speaker 1: this is such a bleak story. So he doesn't publish anything,
Speaker 1: and in fact, he just like stops working. And you know,
Speaker 1: Bernard at this point, like that's not something he does.
Speaker 1: So he stops putting in articles, he stops doing anything,
Speaker 1: Like his editors are just running the magazines for a while,
Speaker 1: and he forces his wife to walk two miles to
Speaker 1: Manhattan with him, carrying their luggage all the way in
Speaker 1: the snow. That's how he that's how not it's one thing.
Speaker 1: If that's how you deal with grieving, that's actually I can.
Speaker 1: I could honestly see, like I the last time I
Speaker 1: was heavily grieving, I would run like eighty miles a week.
Speaker 1: Like I get that idea, forcing your wife to walk
Speaker 1: two hundred miles in the snow, so that because she
Speaker 1: has to grieve the same way. That's the up and
Speaker 1: the fact that he probably killed his baby. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So when he in the middle of this two d
Speaker 1: mile walk, they get to Greenwich, Connecticut, and he convinces
Speaker 1: his wife to try again for a son. So he's like,
Speaker 1: as she's grieving and exhausted, as like, I gotta make
Speaker 1: another put another boy into you. Um. So eventually they
Speaker 1: get back to the office and he writes an editorial
Speaker 1: about his son's death. You're gonna guess who he blames
Speaker 1: for it. I would guess his his his wife. Oh, Caitlin,
Speaker 1: It's like, you have a lot of experience with toxic men.
Speaker 1: Here's what he wrote. Billy was often over fed. I
Speaker 1: protested on numerous occasions, but my protest was not vigorous enough. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I believe the boy was so strong that he would
Speaker 1: overcome mistakes of that nature. And it is so hard
Speaker 1: to combat the tendencies of mother love. I also some
Speaker 1: what blame myself for neglecting his exercises. So he blames
Speaker 1: his wife for feeding their baby too much. He didn't
Speaker 1: starve that baby enough. Gosh. And also he's making his
Speaker 1: baby do exercises. Yeah, he makes everything do exercises. Get
Speaker 1: a baby at that age eleven months, I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: I don't know. Probably, I mean to the extent that
Speaker 1: like crawling is an exercise. Yeah, it's good for them
Speaker 1: to exercise, like in terms of like it's good for
Speaker 1: babies to like move and learn how to use their
Speaker 1: body slowly. But like, I don't know their babies. They're
Speaker 1: not They don't for the most part. Yes, the motor
Speaker 1: skills aren't great. Their organs, I feel like, are still
Speaker 1: kind of developed. Yeah, you know, Yeah, I feel like exercise.
Speaker 1: I feel like if you're trying to make a baby exercise,
Speaker 1: the odds are good that you will wind up hurting
Speaker 1: the baby. Definitely. Yeah, because they're babies. Because their babies.
Speaker 1: They're mostly just supposed to like roll around and whoop
Speaker 1: in in poop and occasionally crawl babies and be babies.
Speaker 1: They're not supposed to work, hit the gym, get out
Speaker 1: of that bench. But it does make you feel you're
Speaker 1: dead living. You can barely dead lift? What the fund
Speaker 1: is wrong with you? Baby? Baby? Keep your back straight?
Speaker 1: Babies soft. Look at how shitty this baby's pull ups are.
Speaker 1: He's barely getting halfway to the bar. I mean, like,
Speaker 1: how embarrass saying that, Like a baby would be better
Speaker 1: at pull ups though, than say me, Yeah, Well, they
Speaker 1: don't have a lot of like body, so that would
Speaker 1: make it easier. But also their arms they're not really
Speaker 1: muscles yet, they're just kind of noodles, so that would
Speaker 1: make it harder. I don't know, I'll start a gym
Speaker 1: for babies. We'll see if it's a good idea. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So within a decade, by the late nineteen twenties, Bernard
Speaker 1: had amassed a fortune of more than thirty million dollars,
Speaker 1: which today would be like four million dollars. So he
Speaker 1: makes a shipload of money. Um. He was at the
Speaker 1: absolute height of his success, but after time this two
Speaker 1: grew frustrating. Bernar was the peak of publishing influence. He
Speaker 1: had more readers on a monthly basis than anyone else
Speaker 1: in the United States, including William Randolph Hurst. But being
Speaker 1: on top also means you've kind of reached the limit, right,
Speaker 1: There's really nowhere for him to grow. He's the biggest publisher.
Speaker 1: So the only thing you could think of to do
Speaker 1: to expand his audience and become even more influential was
Speaker 1: become the president of the United States. What I did
Speaker 1: not see he's going to try to run for president.
Speaker 1: We talked about this in the John McAfee episodes with
Speaker 1: the Great Lacy Moseley. But like you know, when you
Speaker 1: are a certain kind of white man who has had
Speaker 1: one of those careers where no one ever says no,
Speaker 1: and you just keep doing ridiculous things and being successful
Speaker 1: at them, you will eventually try to become the president.
Speaker 1: I mean, I look at what happened recently. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: look at what's going to happen when I run on
Speaker 1: a platform of making America like the unnamed island nation
Speaker 1: that I rule with an iron fist. It's gonna be great. Caitlin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't wait, neither can America. So um, he decides
Speaker 1: he's going to become the president now. His wife later
Speaker 1: claimed that he started to dream of this career in
Speaker 1: nineteen fourteen, when, at the eve of World War One,
Speaker 1: he suggested that wrestling would be a good way to
Speaker 1: solve political conflicts, which I actually think would be incredible.
Speaker 1: I'm in agreements with Bernard about this. He says, quote
Speaker 1: political contests that derive their support through a vocating physical
Speaker 1: culture reforms will I believe become a reality in the
Speaker 1: not far distant future. And he's wrong about this, but
Speaker 1: my god, it would have been so good if like
Speaker 1: Kaiser Wilhelm and fucking uh Czar Nicholas and whatever the
Speaker 1: French president's name and the fucking King of England had
Speaker 1: all had to like fist fight. That would have been
Speaker 1: so much better. If every war, if George Bush in
Speaker 1: like Saddam Hussein, had had a cage match, I feel
Speaker 1: confident saying we would think fondly on the Iraq War. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was that time George Bush got stabbed in the
Speaker 1: eye by Saddam. Who's saying that was funny as hell?
Speaker 1: Can you believe he thought Saddam wouldn't pull a knife
Speaker 1: in a fist fight. What an idiot? Barack Barack Hussain,
Speaker 1: Obama and John McCain just like street fighting, just just
Speaker 1: just wailing on each other, well fucking uh Joe Biden
Speaker 1: and uh what's her name, the governor of ala esca,
Speaker 1: Uh Sarah? Yeah, like have a chain fight. My god,
Speaker 1: it would be so much better. Sure, sure, yeah, everything
Speaker 1: would be better. Okay, good, I see your point. I
Speaker 1: see your point. Yeah, Um, World War two might have
Speaker 1: gone worse because I do not think FDR would have
Speaker 1: been able to beat Hitler in a in a in
Speaker 1: a in a street fight. Yeah, so there's limits to this.
Speaker 1: We would have needed to elect Bernar mac fadden president.
Speaker 1: He could have taken on Hitler um, although he might
Speaker 1: not have wanted to. As we'll get to, so, Bernard
Speaker 1: decides he's going to become president um and in the
Speaker 1: mid nineteen So if first he thinks like inevitably the
Speaker 1: progress of physical culture, because I'm getting so popular so quickly,
Speaker 1: by and in another ten years, everyone will agree that
Speaker 1: the strongest man in the country should be president. And
Speaker 1: then I'll be president because I'm the strongest man that
Speaker 1: does not happen, and so in the mid nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: burn Our decides to launch a magazine dedicated to making
Speaker 1: him into a serious intellectual and political figure. So he's
Speaker 1: very successful this point, but he is not a serious person.
Speaker 1: He has seen as like a silly tabloid publisher, right,
Speaker 1: Like he's putting out kind of sleazy material, and that
Speaker 1: is how he's viewed. He's like, there are people like
Speaker 1: within the exercise world who take his health ideas somewhat seriously,
Speaker 1: but he generally, like the mainstream media kind of laughs
Speaker 1: at him and again not unlike Donald Trump, to be honest.
Speaker 1: In nineteen he launches another magazine. This one is dedicated
Speaker 1: to make him into a serious political figure, and it's
Speaker 1: called The New York Graphic. Though he was attempting to,
Speaker 1: you know, again, kind of established like a New York
Speaker 1: Times analog that will give him respect, the New York
Speaker 1: Graphic immediately becomes like the tackiest scandal sheet in the country.
Speaker 1: That said, it also employs some of the biggest names
Speaker 1: in American media history at early stages of their career.
Speaker 1: Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan both get their start writing
Speaker 1: for Graphic um and Sullivan who and Sullivan like almost
Speaker 1: helps to create. He's like a precursor Carson like. He
Speaker 1: helps to create the idea of like the like late
Speaker 1: night kind of variety show type thing. UM, a lot
Speaker 1: of like the biggest musicians in the rock and roll
Speaker 1: eric get their start on the Ed Sullivan Show. Um.
Speaker 1: Most of the titles of of graphic articles were lurid
Speaker 1: to say the least one was two women in fight,
Speaker 1: one stripped other eats bad check. UM. I have I
Speaker 1: kind of love that one. I don't really know what
Speaker 1: to expect from that article, but it sounds fascinating. My
Speaker 1: favorite thing about the graphic is that it's yet another
Speaker 1: example of Bernard inventing something that would later become hugely influential.
Speaker 1: The Bernard creates photoshop kind of Um. He invents for
Speaker 1: his magazine a graphic design technique called composo graphs. These
Speaker 1: are staged composite photos. Well where he'll have celebrities. You
Speaker 1: know how he's had celebrities, He's had people posing for photo.
Speaker 1: Those and articles about like true crime, which you can
Speaker 1: see is kind of a precursor to like reenactments and
Speaker 1: like unsolved mysteries and stuff. Well, so a big part
Speaker 1: of the neuographic is like stories about celebrities getting in
Speaker 1: like legal trouble or having divorces or all this stuff.
Speaker 1: And in order to illustrate these, because he can't get
Speaker 1: photos of the celebrities, he hires models and he has
Speaker 1: them pose as whatever the celebrities were doing, and then
Speaker 1: he basically has a picture of the face of that
Speaker 1: celebrity superimposed over the head of the model. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's like photoshopping celebrities into like like larded scenes in
Speaker 1: order to sell newspapers. Um. Yeah, And he convinced this
Speaker 1: new technique for the first time to cover a celebrity
Speaker 1: divorce trial. Leonard Kip Rhinelander was a millionaire who was
Speaker 1: suing his bride of one month over the fact that
Speaker 1: she had hidden that she was part black. Um, this
Speaker 1: is the twenties, you know, Um, because this was a
Speaker 1: racist time. Her response to this was to deny the
Speaker 1: charges in court by stripping to the waist. Obviously. Number one,
Speaker 1: these are famous people. Number Two, a woman has stripped
Speaker 1: in court. This is big news, right, Like, this is
Speaker 1: a huge story. And the graphic used its first composo
Speaker 1: graph to illustrate the moment where this famous woman strips
Speaker 1: in court without actually having photographs of it, and circulation
Speaker 1: leaps to a hundred thousand people like over or buy
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand people overnight as a result of this. Now,
Speaker 1: the graphic was influential and popular, but it was also
Speaker 1: too trashy to get much purchase among advertisers. It was
Speaker 1: a lot of people bought it, but it wasn't profitable
Speaker 1: because it was expensive to make and no one would
Speaker 1: advertise in it. And by the time it ended in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty two, Bernard had lost more than eleven million
Speaker 1: dollars on the venture. And this gives you an idea
Speaker 1: of how much money he's willing to light on fire
Speaker 1: and the hope of establishing a political career for himself.
Speaker 1: That is like half of the money in the world
Speaker 1: at this point. Yeah, what an investment that miserably failed
Speaker 1: for him. He doesn't give up though. In nine he
Speaker 1: commissions three biographies about himself. Now, this was a new
Speaker 1: idea at the time, a want to be presidential candidate
Speaker 1: paying to have a biography written by a ghost writer
Speaker 1: in order to drum up interest in his campaign. Every
Speaker 1: single candidate does that now, right, like a hundred percent
Speaker 1: of people who run for president have a book published
Speaker 1: about them like that. They supposedly right, you know, bernar
Speaker 1: In Vince this, as far as I can tell, he's
Speaker 1: the first guy to do this. Um again, a visionary. Truly,
Speaker 1: he is living in the twenty first century in nineteen nine.
Speaker 1: I mean, good for him. Yeah, Unfortunately he's not living
Speaker 1: in any of the good parts of the twentieth century. Um.
Speaker 1: But so these books were obviously trash. One invited readers
Speaker 1: to quote study him as he governs the whole community
Speaker 1: of employees that is like a little city, so he
Speaker 1: can run a magazine. So he's clearly ready to run
Speaker 1: the country. Um, he did run that one little city.
Speaker 1: Committed treason against physical culture, treason. So these are not
Speaker 1: well regarded by a reviewers these books. The American Heritage
Speaker 1: article that I've been reading from sites an H. L.
Speaker 1: Lincoln review quote, the authors of these brochures do not
Speaker 1: spare the goose grease. Poor mcfaden chokes and gurgles on it.
Speaker 1: And every one of their eight hundred and twenty five
Speaker 1: pages I can recall no more passionate anointing of a
Speaker 1: living man. He appears as a hero without a wart,
Speaker 1: spiritual or temporal, sworn only to save us from the
Speaker 1: medical trust and make us strong enough to lift a
Speaker 1: piano with our bare hands. Wait, one of these biographies
Speaker 1: is over eight hundred pages long. Yeah, he's again. They'll
Speaker 1: dial it in by the time Pete Botages is getting
Speaker 1: his vanity biography published. We've gotten much better at it,
Speaker 1: you know. M While the graphic had no luck establishing
Speaker 1: Bernard as a political name, it was influential in getting
Speaker 1: Jimmy Walker did mayor of New York City. Unfortunately for Bernard, mayor,
Speaker 1: Walker refused to appoint McFadden's city Commissioner of Health, which
Speaker 1: Bernard was hoping would jump start his political career. The
Speaker 1: new mayor argued that while Bernard's ideas on health were good,
Speaker 1: nobody actually wanted to live that way. Um. Despite this,
Speaker 1: by the mid nineteen thirties, Bernard was more successful than ever.
Speaker 1: Circulation of his magazine's topped seven point three million people,
Speaker 1: which again beats every other publisher in the country. As
Speaker 1: time went on, some of the most influential people in
Speaker 1: world history would write columns for Bernard's magazines. Winston Churchill,
Speaker 1: Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Singer, Mahatma Gandhi and Adolf Hitler. Well,
Speaker 1: all right, okay, so the Hitler article was not technically
Speaker 1: a column. His editor had interviewed Hitler in nineteen twenty three,
Speaker 1: and when Hitler started rising to power in the early thirties,
Speaker 1: they published this interview as a column because that's like
Speaker 1: the s see your way to advertise it. And the
Speaker 1: column is it's titled as if Hitler wrote it. It's
Speaker 1: titled When I Take Charge of Germany. Um, by the way,
Speaker 1: for an example of again the way Berner does this
Speaker 1: sort of thing. So the article that Gandhi writes or
Speaker 1: quote unquote rights is titled My Sex Life by Mahatma Gandhi.
Speaker 1: It's about celibacy. But like that's not how you sell
Speaker 1: that article, right, basically spin a story. You know who
Speaker 1: else talks a lot about Mahatma Gandhi's sex life, Caitlin,
Speaker 1: is it the products and services that we will not
Speaker 1: not period bring in a sponsor if they don't talk
Speaker 1: to us for solid thirty minutes about how they think
Speaker 1: Mahatma Gandhi might have sucked. That's the behind the bastard's guarantee.
Speaker 1: It is not. This is why we have so few sponsors.
Speaker 1: They just can't hang Yeah. Sorry, yeah, I mean I
Speaker 1: don't know what to say about it. There's nothing to say. Uh,
Speaker 1: we're back and we're just having a great time. How
Speaker 1: were you. How are you doing, Caitlin, I'm doing well.
Speaker 1: I've heard a lot of information about Bernar. He's a
Speaker 1: fascinating man, fascinating fellow I and it keeps you know,
Speaker 1: there's peaks and valleys as far as you know his
Speaker 1: conduct in his life. And uh, but I continue to
Speaker 1: be amazed at some of his choices. So you're you're
Speaker 1: keeping me on the edge of my seat. Yep. Well,
Speaker 1: let's talk about how he got Franklin Delano Roosevelt elected.
Speaker 1: And eighteen thirty one, he bought an existing magazine called Liberty,
Speaker 1: which was compared to his other publications, fairly respectable. Like
Speaker 1: it's a politics and culture publication. So he immediately starts
Speaker 1: writing editorial columns for this on topics as broad as
Speaker 1: organized crime and the importance of returning Americans to farming.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty two, in the wake in the midst
Speaker 1: of the Great Depression, FDR starts his run for president,
Speaker 1: and Liberty magazine backs FDRs candidacy. Now, one of the
Speaker 1: chief questions of the election was whether or not the
Speaker 1: aging polio victim was capable of handling the physical strains
Speaker 1: of the presidency. Right like, that is a big can
Speaker 1: he do the job he's dying of polio, post polio
Speaker 1: or whatever. As America's best known fitness nut, bern Ar
Speaker 1: McFadden was in a unique position to allay people's suspicions
Speaker 1: because people do listen to what he has to say
Speaker 1: about fitness. So if one of his publications gives FDR
Speaker 1: a clean bill of health, that means something. As Liberties publisher,
Speaker 1: he had the magazine sponsor a medical examination of Roosevelt
Speaker 1: by several doctors, even though Bernard is on record is
Speaker 1: saying that doctors are all full of shit. In this case,
Speaker 1: they might have been because they said FDR was in
Speaker 1: perfect health, which he absolutely was not in But this
Speaker 1: article saying that FDR was in great health, um is
Speaker 1: a big like has a significant role in the election.
Speaker 1: Mark Adams, Bernard's biographer, writes, the biggest doubt about the
Speaker 1: Roosevelt campaign vanished almost overnight, and that is broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: I don't know, probably good. I mean fdr complicated history,
Speaker 1: shall we say, to say the least in a number
Speaker 1: of ways. Um, but within the context of Bernard's career,
Speaker 1: I will say this is a positive moment because we're
Speaker 1: about to talk about how big a fan he was
Speaker 1: a fascism. See, yeah, totals another thing. I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess I could have you know, the threads are there
Speaker 1: to to to arrive at this point, but I am
Speaker 1: still a little prize. So once again, thanks for keeping
Speaker 1: me on the edge of my seat. It's all. It's
Speaker 1: all thanks to Bernar. So Bernar is both a product
Speaker 1: of his culture and a culture creator. And as the
Speaker 1: U S went, you know, real into eugenics in the
Speaker 1: twenties and thirties, so did he. He had his paid
Speaker 1: columnists right glowing articles about eugenics, one of which included
Speaker 1: this paragraph. Eugenics is the mightiest comment that ever came
Speaker 1: skitting into the little solar system of human thoughts. Suppose
Speaker 1: we are breeding for a sound mind and a sound body.
Speaker 1: And it formulated a scheme of judging the applicants with
Speaker 1: a score system not unlike that which they glade the
Speaker 1: Orpington's at the country fair. Here is a one her
Speaker 1: score is ninety five and three quarters the best applicant
Speaker 1: in the lot for the high and holy functions of
Speaker 1: motherhood in essency saying we had to judge ladies like
Speaker 1: we judge pigs. Which it's fine by me. Yeah, not
Speaker 1: at all problematic feminist icon Bernard McFadden. Yeah, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: and this and specifically on like the criteria of like
Speaker 1: how um, how good they would be a like bearing children? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Well what else is there? Well? What else is yeah? Exactly? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what their function can you serve? That's what Bennar McFadden
Speaker 1: would probably shout at you while using an exercise bike. Um.
Speaker 1: I found a paper by the Stark Center for Physical
Speaker 1: Culture and Sports Studies at the University of Texas. They
Speaker 1: describe McFadden's beliefs as soft eugenics because he's not he
Speaker 1: doesn't spend a lot of times. He's not talking about
Speaker 1: like races, he's not spending a lot of timing like
Speaker 1: the arians need to do. We need to get rid
Speaker 1: of the Jews. Like that's not really his thing. He's
Speaker 1: thing is more healthy people need to breed, and we
Speaker 1: need to raise up people to be healthy and strong
Speaker 1: so that they can breed. More healthy and strong people.
Speaker 1: I'm not sugen Yes, it's not good. I'm just like
Speaker 1: it's not. It's there's different kinds of eugenics. That's kind
Speaker 1: of the one that he lands on UM in his
Speaker 1: hatred of earnity, and he blames modernity for all of
Speaker 1: the health problems that people have. UM and in his
Speaker 1: obsession with perfect bodies. He lands right in the crosshairs
Speaker 1: of a lot of fascist theory. When Benito Mussolini took
Speaker 1: power in Italy, he emphasized physical training as a way
Speaker 1: to prepare young people for all the fighting they were
Speaker 1: going to have to do as foot soldiers of fascism.
Speaker 1: Italy's war record shows how successful this plan was. Um
Speaker 1: Bernard absolutely loved this idea from the Stark Center quote.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty two, readers of Physical Culture magazine, then
Speaker 1: with a circulation in the hundreds of thousands, were greeted
Speaker 1: with an unusual interview. Past magazine issues featured everyone from
Speaker 1: George Bernard Shaw to Upton Sinclair, but this was the
Speaker 1: first time a self proclaimed fascist appeared. The man was
Speaker 1: Benito Mussolini, the leader of Italy. Since Mussolini's rise to
Speaker 1: power in nineteen twenty two, McFadden had kept a close
Speaker 1: eye on il Duce's love of sport. Mussolini was detailed
Speaker 1: the subject deemed to be of utmost national importance Physical Culture.
Speaker 1: On this point, Mussolini found a captive audience throughout the
Speaker 1: night teen thirties, Bernar McFadden attempted, ultimately in vain, to
Speaker 1: enter American politics through a presidential bid. His guiding focus
Speaker 1: was a belief in the importance of personal hygiene, health,
Speaker 1: and strength. This quest, which ultimately proved unsuccessful, explained to
Speaker 1: Mussolini's appearance in Physical Culture magazine. Months prior to il
Speaker 1: Duche's article, McFadden traveled to Europe as part of President
Speaker 1: Hoover's Conference on Child Health and Protection. McFadden himself seems
Speaker 1: to have had no solid set of political beliefs, focusing
Speaker 1: primarily on issues of health above all else. He unsuccessfully
Speaker 1: ran as a Republican candidate in nineteen thirty six, but
Speaker 1: later attempted to gain a position in Democratic President Franklin
Speaker 1: Delano Roosevelt's office. It was during this trip to Europe
Speaker 1: that McFadden crossed path with Mussolini. United at scene and
Speaker 1: their appreciation for fitness a deal was struck, the contents
Speaker 1: of which were revealed to Physical Cultures readers. So he's
Speaker 1: political in that he thinks everyone should be jacked all
Speaker 1: the time, and he likes fascism because fascism also wants
Speaker 1: everyone to be jacked all the time. Right. That's that's
Speaker 1: his entry, and that's his article that he lets Benita Selini, right,
Speaker 1: is on the importance of physical culture for like national identity.
Speaker 1: And they enter into a deal which they detail in
Speaker 1: this article. And the deal is that Benito gives Bernard
Speaker 1: personal responsibility for training forty Italian naval cadets. These men
Speaker 1: are brought to New York, they're trained under McFadden, and
Speaker 1: they're inculcated in American popular culture. The experiment lasts six
Speaker 1: months and it's the subject of a number of articles
Speaker 1: in Physical Culture. The ultimate message of the experiment, in
Speaker 1: McFadden's eyes, is that fascism builds healthier, stronger people through
Speaker 1: good physical culture, and the U s should emulate Italy.
Speaker 1: In this the Italian cadets are often used as a foil.
Speaker 1: They're contrasted with the lazy Americans who have unhealthy diets. Now,
Speaker 1: after six months in the United States, these Italian naval
Speaker 1: cadets all showed improvements in strengthen the growth of muscles.
Speaker 1: Bernard claimed that this was evidence fascism could work its
Speaker 1: wondrous physical effects even in the United States. From the
Speaker 1: Stark Center, McFadden stopped short of saying Italy was superior
Speaker 1: to the United States, but his writings included wishful appraisals
Speaker 1: of the Italian state and claims that America had much
Speaker 1: to learn. According to McFadden, his Italian sojourn was a success.
Speaker 1: This explained, or so it was claimed, why the Portuguese
Speaker 1: government extended a similar invitation to McFadden in nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 1: The same year Antonio de Olivera Salazar assumed control of
Speaker 1: the state. A military dictatorship existed in Portugal from ninety six,
Speaker 1: but Salazar's rise to power marked an intensification of authoritarianism
Speaker 1: alongside a growing cult of personality. Salazar's government shared at
Speaker 1: least somewhat Mussolini's admiration of strong and healthy bodies. Mauricio
Speaker 1: Drummond's study of sport in Salazar's resume explained that although
Speaker 1: Salazar rarely expressed an interest in sport, he used it
Speaker 1: for political purposes. So he winds up working for two
Speaker 1: different fascist dictators establishing like a physical culture for their
Speaker 1: young people. And in in Portugal, Salazar, this dictator gives
Speaker 1: him a few dozen children which he's able to put
Speaker 1: on a compound which he calls McFadden children's Colony, and
Speaker 1: he sets them up with a a vegetarian diet and
Speaker 1: a workout program. And Bernard claims again in his magazine
Speaker 1: that this is so successful it turns their quote dull
Speaker 1: and stupid little faces alert and interested. What. Oh okay,
Speaker 1: let me just take a moment to to just comprehend
Speaker 1: all of that. Oh keetoki. A lot going on there.
Speaker 1: There's a lot to unpack and I don't know if
Speaker 1: my brain can do it at this time. But yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot going on with this with this episode. Um,
Speaker 1: the turns they keep coming, keep coming, barely keep up.
Speaker 1: There's actually another one at the end of this paragraph. Witness.
Speaker 1: He's so happy with how this Portugal experiment goes that
Speaker 1: he co authors a book about the experiment with um
Speaker 1: who we'll call a prominent author. Do you want to
Speaker 1: guess who it is? Thirties author? Do you think he'd pick? Oh,
Speaker 1: my Uh, Faulkner, I don't know. Does the name Thomas
Speaker 1: Dixon mean anything to you know? Thomas Dixon wrote a
Speaker 1: book called The Klansman, which was the basis of D. W.
Speaker 1: Griffith Griffith's Birth of a Nation as I'm amazing, was
Speaker 1: Faulkner writing stuff in the thirties? Or am I not? Am?
Speaker 1: I do I not know anything? Because i've Oh jeez,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm bad at he's I'm bad at authors.
Speaker 1: Clearly he's dead by then, right, who knows? Um? Okay?
Speaker 1: So the guy who wrote the thing the um Birth
Speaker 1: of he writes a book about how good it is
Speaker 1: to train fascist kids to be fascists through exercise and vegetarianism.
Speaker 1: Oops seen as the nineteen thirties war on McFadden became
Speaker 1: an anti war activist, which you know as a positive
Speaker 1: connotation now, But if you're an anti war activist in
Speaker 1: the thirties, it means you don't think that anything should
Speaker 1: be done to stop fascism. Like that's that's what the
Speaker 1: anti war movement in the US generally is in this period,
Speaker 1: is like, why would we go to war against Tyler?
Speaker 1: He seems like a good chap he's doing just great
Speaker 1: and we should not challenge him now. By nineteen thirty eight,
Speaker 1: two is somewhat credit. Bernard comes around on the issue,
Speaker 1: likely because he sees public opinion shifting, and he becomes
Speaker 1: pro war, turning out monthly calls for his readers to
Speaker 1: exercise in order to defend their nation. Nineteen forty one,
Speaker 1: the year that the US gets into the war, is
Speaker 1: the year things fall apart for Berner. Minority stakeholders in
Speaker 1: his company charge that he's used company funds to pay
Speaker 1: for his political campaigns. He's forced to sell all of
Speaker 1: his interest in the business and step down as president.
Speaker 1: Physical Culture was turned into a woman's magazine as he left.
Speaker 1: I didn't do particularly He doesn't like that. It also
Speaker 1: doesn't do very well, but the media landscape changed a
Speaker 1: bit by this point. By the end of the war,
Speaker 1: McFadden's marriage to Mary was also at its end. A
Speaker 1: wedge had been driven between them when he blamed her
Speaker 1: for their son's tragic death. She divorced him, and along
Speaker 1: and brutal legal battle ensued. At the end of it,
Speaker 1: she published a book about how much her ex husband sucked.
Speaker 1: In a final middle finger to him, she dedicated her
Speaker 1: autobiography to the doctors who had helped ease the pain
Speaker 1: of childbirth, Which is the meanest thing you could do
Speaker 1: to Bernard, doctor brutal After I let her get stitches. Eventually,
Speaker 1: I um, I like that. I like that for her.
Speaker 1: The book contains a number of allegations, including that Bernar
Speaker 1: caused her a miscarriage by forcing her to work out
Speaker 1: incessantly while she was pregnant. So good guy, A right
Speaker 1: up from American Heritage ably describes the remainder of the
Speaker 1: former publishing Titans life. Alden later wrote of Edward Lear
Speaker 1: that he became a land Bernar McFadden became a press release.
Speaker 1: In the last eighteen years of his life, he was
Speaker 1: featured in Time, which dubbed him body Love or Newsweek.
Speaker 1: Eighteen times. He ran for the Senate in Florida. He
Speaker 1: conducted innumerable fasts and hikes. He offered a prize for
Speaker 1: the best biographical play about his life. In nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 1: at the age of eighty one, he took up parachuting
Speaker 1: and thereafter tried to make a jump each year on
Speaker 1: his birthday. Claiming that his third wife had humiliated him
Speaker 1: by losing her figure, he married a woman of forty two.
Speaker 1: She later had the marriage and old In nineteen fifty three,
Speaker 1: he declared his acceptance of the nomination of the Honest
Speaker 1: Party from mayor. He pledged a business administration that would
Speaker 1: make sales tax unnecessary, eliminate traffic congestion, and obtained double
Speaker 1: deck subway cars. He also promised to purge the city
Speaker 1: of communists. So he keeps doing the same thing his
Speaker 1: whole life, but he's less influential. He doesn't have a
Speaker 1: bunch of magazines. Nobody really gives a ship. Also, he
Speaker 1: lives quite long. He lives a long life. Look, he's
Speaker 1: not wrong about all of the things that he's saying.
Speaker 1: There's some things he gets very right, and he lives
Speaker 1: a long, healthy life as a result of it. He
Speaker 1: remains in good health into his early eighties, which suggests
Speaker 1: that again, some of the stuff he's saying is not bullshit.
Speaker 1: He celebrated his eighty first birthday by jumping out of
Speaker 1: an airplane while wearing a full suit. He repeated this
Speaker 1: stunt on his eighties, second and eighty third birthdays. By
Speaker 1: ninety five, though age had started to take its toll.
Speaker 1: In October, he came down with a urinary blockage, which
Speaker 1: he tried to cure by fasting. This did not work,
Speaker 1: and he resigned himself to go into a hospital where
Speaker 1: he died. Oh yep, that's it. That's the end. That's
Speaker 1: all the Bernardic anticlimactic ending for people. It's generally is not.
Speaker 1: Everybody has the whole the whole Hitler. You know, he's like,
Speaker 1: all right, I'll go along, all right, I'm dead right
Speaker 1: by it was proved right in the end. Going to
Speaker 1: the hospital got him killed real quick. And that's the
Speaker 1: message of today's episode. Don't go to the hospital. That's
Speaker 1: not the message of today's episode, Robert. I think that
Speaker 1: is the message of today's hospital episode. Hospitals are bad. No,
Speaker 1: don't go them. I am be fuddled about everything I've
Speaker 1: learned here today. Yeah mm hmm. And on that note,
Speaker 1: Caitlin plugables Okay, yep, yeah. Um. Well, since I brought
Speaker 1: it up earlier, you can listen to a podcast that
Speaker 1: I did a little bit of and then um abandoned
Speaker 1: because I'm not nearly as ambitious as Bernard. But I
Speaker 1: did do a podcast called Sludge, an American Healthcare Story,
Speaker 1: in which I the first season as me detelling my
Speaker 1: experience with having gall stones a k a. Sludge, sludgeballs
Speaker 1: and um and all the chaos that ensued from that UM.
Speaker 1: And then I did a few other episodes about other
Speaker 1: people's stories, but then I got too busy and I
Speaker 1: abandoned that effort. But the podcast I haven't abandoned is
Speaker 1: the Bechtel Cast, So check that out. It's a movie
Speaker 1: podcast because I am able to talk away. Um, I'm
Speaker 1: better at talking about movies than I am about healthcare stuff.
Speaker 1: And then you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram
Speaker 1: at Caitlin Darante. Yeah. Yeah, well that's everything we have
Speaker 1: to say about everything forever. This has been the last
Speaker 1: episode of Behind the Bastards. Um, I am quitting in
Speaker 1: order to start my own magazine about how if you
Speaker 1: do enough crunches and stop your wife for meeting, all
Speaker 1: of your babies will be Superman. M hm, No, Sophie,
Speaker 1: you could have a cush gig as the executive publisher
Speaker 1: of my new magazine, Starve your Baby Digest gonna politely say, well,
Speaker 1: you just turned down a million dollars, but okay, it's
Speaker 1: okay moral my morals are worth more well mine, or
Speaker 1: I know that I have a good night everybody. Bye
Speaker 1: bye bye