Bernarr MacFadden - The Fascist Anti-Vaxxer Who Paved The Way For Donald Trump and WWE

How’s that for a clickbait title? You don’t get this shit on WhatCulture, I can tell you.

While researching and writing my forthcoming book - Kayfabe: A Mostly True History of Professional Wrestling - I encountered no shortage of tall tales, outlandish characters, and unlikely connections; whether that’s the two degrees of separation between Antonio Inoki and Charlie Chaplin, the unlikely link between George Hackenschmidt and convicted Soviet spies, or how one of the inspirations for Gorgeous George turned to pseudo-science, fraud and cross-border jailbreaking in later life, to name but a few tantalising topics.

One name I was surprised to encounter was Bernarr MacFadden, which meant little to me on first discovery, yet was mentioned in very significant company - one book claimed that it was the financial backing of MacFadden that allowed Vincent J. McMahon and Toots Mondt to start up the Capitol Wrestling promotion that would, in time, morph into the WWWF, the WWF, and ultimately to today’s WWE. In truth, it was an earlier Toots Mondt incursion into the New York territory that attracted MacFadden’s support.

A word, first, on Toots Mondt and New York. I won’t go into too much detail, as - cheap plug - this is detailed at length in my book, but you will often see Toots Mondt credited with any number of wrestling innovations, of having invented or perfected almost every trick and trope in the book to make professional wrestling what it became in the second half of the twentieth century. He’s often credited with introducing single fall matches, time limits, and much of the theatrics, sequences and finishes that remain part of wrestling today - it’s only on that last count that I’m prepared to extend old Toots the courtesy; he was a former vaudeville performer and circus clown, and he brought the rhythms of vaudeville and the broad physicality of clowning into the wrestling arena. Almost every other “innovation”, any booking decision before somewhere around 1940, credited to Mondt likely has its genesis elsewhere. The Church Of Toots Mondt has its genesis in one 1937 book - Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce by Marcus Griffin, a book that coined many nicknames and catchphrases, but one that stuck; The Gold Dust Trio, in reference to Mondt, Ed “Strangler” Lewis and Billy Sandow, crediting them collectively, but mostly Mondt, with reinventing the wheel, and with bringing in the big bucks during the 1920s and ‘30s. Truth is, Sandow’s chief business partners were his brothers, not Toots Mondt. Many of the changes Mondt was credited for came earlier, thanks to promoters like Jack Curley.

So why the focus on Mondt? Because by the time Mondt did become a powerful booker in his own right, Marcus Griffin, the author of Fall Guys, was a newspaperman on his payroll. As the earliest known kayfabe-breaking book, and the primary source for most people reading or writing about wrestling’s second golden age, Fall Guys seemed like gospel truth, but it was widely inaccurate, and often outright propaganda for Mondt’s significance as a wrestling powerbroker. Not that Toots Mondt needs any extra effort to secure his place in the wrestling history books - long after Fall Guys, he went on to be a founder member of the National Wrestling Alliance, and a mover-and-shaker in the WWWF (some argued that he was the brains of the operation, and Vince McMahon Sr. a mere figurehead). What of Marcus Griffin? After leaving Mondt’s employ, after a time as a sports and gossip writer for hire, he took up with his brother William’s fledgling newspaper. William Griffin was a protégé of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the model for Orson Welles’ Charles Foster Kane, who used the new ‘paper as a means to try out new ideas, and to print stories and pursue agendas and vendettas he wouldn’t be comfortable attaching his own name to. During the 1930s and ‘40s, Griffin’s paper was an apologist for fascism, gave a bully pulpit to American antisemites, and preached American isolationism in World War 2. In the 1950s, it was bought out by Gene Pope Jr. thanks to a conglomerate involving the Mafia and future Republican kingmaker Roy Cohn, and rebranded as The National Enquirer, everybody’s favourite journal of UFO sightings, celebrity gossip, and fascist apologia.

It’s another publishing magnate that intersected with Toots Mondt’s career that we’re here to talk about, though, and that’s Bernarr MacFadden. When Toots Mondt first tried to position himself as the kingpin of New York wrestling, it was after decades of managed decline - former Greco-Roman champion William Muldoon had run the New York State Athletic Commission for decades, enforcing backwards and draconian rules that alienated fans and hamstrung promoters. Jack Curley, who for a time was able to get around Muldoon’s diktats by running in armouries that were technically federal land and therefore fell outside of the NYSAC’s jurisdiction, had lost much of his influence by the time of his death in 1937. Tex Rickard, who before his death in 1929, had controlled Madison Square Garden, disliked wrestling personally and seemingly only ever promoted it himself to spite Curley. New York in the 1940s was simply not a wrestling town any longer.

When Toots Mondt and his allies - boxing promoters The Johnston Brothers, the equal parts infamous and innovative wrestling promoter Jack Pfeffer, and an old Tex Rickard associate named Jess McMahon - planned to run Madison Square Garden in 1949, it was to be the first wrestling show held at the Garden in a decade. The New York State Athletic Commission still kept a tight grip on professional wrestling in the city - they refused to sanction championship matches, or recognise champions at all, which restricted most promoters from advertising their top stars in the manner most suited to drawing a crowd, and insisted that the word “match” never be used, favouring “exhibition” to skirt around any questions of legitimacy. They also asked a small fortune of any promoter looking to acquire a license to hold wrestling exhibitions, certainly somewhere as significant and prestigious as Madison Square Garden, and that expense was well outside what a perennial gambling addict like Toots Mondt could afford, even with all his supporters and allies arrayed. To that end, he turned to Bernarr MacFadden.

Bernarr MacFadden had been a wrestler, a high school wrestling coach, and a wrestling promoter. He trained under St. Louis catch wrestler (and former George Hackenschmidt opponent) George Baptiste, wrestled the circus and carnival circuit, before turning his hand to promotion in the early 1900s, even promoting a number of wrestling events at Madison Square Garden. As a wrestler he claimed to have competed in hundreds of matches, and to have held innumerable championships - scant evidence exists for either, though evidence of a few documented catch-as-catch-can matches survives, including one encounter with the pioneering Japanese wrestler Sorakichi Matsuda, though what records exist suggest MacFadden came out on the losing end far more than his hyperbolic self-promotion in later life would attest.

But who was he? He was born Bernard Adolphus McFadden in 1868, in near abject poverty. As the requisite post-Eugen Sandow strongman biography requires, he was a weak and sickly infant, who doctors didn’t expect to survive to see adulthood. He was abandoned to an orphanage at age eight, put to work on a neighbouring farm at nine and, by age eleven, both of his parents had died - his mother of tuberculosis, and his father as a result of his alcoholism. Surviving his own bout with tuberculosis against all odds, young Bernard became obsessed with physical health and fitness, reading whatever literature on the subject he could get his hands on, and buying a set of 50 cent dumbbells to transform his frail frame. He trained as a gymnast, before finding his way to the wrestling gym of George Baptiste. It was around this time that he rechristened himself, finding the name “Bernard” too flowery, weak and effete, and changing it to “Bernarr”, which he thought mimicked the sound of a lion’s roar, and evoked strength and defiance, while also adding a superfluous “a” to his surname for good measure.

After a stint working as a football and wrestling coach, and wrestling all-comers at a travelling circus, MacFadden found his way to the nexus point of all late nineteenth century Americana - the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. There, he took in performances by Eugen Sandow, and operated a booth selling exercise equipment. The following year, he moved to New York and opened a fitness studio, giving himself the meaningless title of “kinistherapist” and styling himself as “Professor MacFadden” - he never even attended high school.

You probably have the impression by now that Bernarr MacFadden was a tad eccentric, but you’d be wrong. He was a full-blown quack, and believed every pseudoscientific bit of health advice that crossed his path. While his father’s fate led him to eschew alcohol, tobacco and recreational drugs - admirable, if not much fun - he extended that self-imposed ban to all drugs and medicines, supported by a pathological distrust of the medical profession, and a fondness for every bit of quackery, grifting and pseudoscience that came his way.

And, in 1898, when the barely literate MacFadden founded his first magazine, Physical Culture, America was in the thralls of a golden age of quackery, woo-woo and assorted bullshit. This was the age of John Harvey Kellogg, the segregation-supporting eugenicist who invented Corn Flakes in an effort to discourage children from masturbating, and of Horace Fletcher (a particular favourite of Bernarr’s), who argued that all food should be chewed upwards of 150 times before swallowing, and MacFadden was happy to believe all of that and more. As well as swearing off alcohol, tobacco and coffee, he warned his readers and followers against the evils of ice water, pickles, and white flour. He believed that there was only one disease - “impurity of blood” - that differed in symptoms but never in treatment. He advocated fasting as a cure for any and every health issue imaginable, and in the pages of Physical Culture and in his innumerable books on health and physical fitness, made the case for any number of scientifically illiterate miracle cures and fitness regimes, until the American Medical Association singled him and his magazines out for doing “incalculable harm” to American public health.

Nevertheless, MacFadden’s publishing empire would continue to grow apace - growing from Physical Culture to include lurid gossip and true crime magazines like The New York Evening Graphic, True Detective, Photoplay and True Story. In the way that turn-of-the-century crank seemed surprisingly expert in, he amassed a small fortune and an ever-growing list of business interests - he operated sanatoria, marketed his own breakfast cereals (“Strengthfude”, with a photo of a shirtless MacFadden and the tagline “It’s Different” on the box, somehow failed to catch on, and “Strengtho” brand cereal fared little better), opened penny health food restaurants, and “physical culture hotels” that fell somewhere between a health spa and a holiday retreat for a fanatic cult. Speaking of cults, he founded a religion - Cosmotarian - that haphazardly mangled Bible passages into supporting his theories on health and fitness. He promoted bodybuilding competitions - not in the manner of strongmen performers of days gone by like Eugen Sandow, with feats of strength and gimmicked weights, but merely the exhibition of the male body beautiful, sculpted and scantily clad; the 1922 contest was won by a man MacFadden promoted endlessly, Charles Atlas, the future figurehead of bodybuilding and physical culture for decades to come, the master of “dynamic tension”, advertised in the back of comic books, wrestling magazines and anywhere a weedy wimp was at risk of having sand kicked in their face, and parodied in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Wherein Charles Atlas’ claims that “in just seven days, I can make you a man” are taken rather too literally). Atlas even sold books that instructed the reader on the finer points of professional wrestling, and the mechanics behind some of the more popular moves and holds, though it’s doubtful he ever wrestled himself outside of the amateur mats in high school.

By now, you probably get the picture - Bernarr MacFadden was a nutjob, in the way that seemingly only the most singularly driven self-publicists of the early 20th century get to be nutjobs. Even when making millions of dollars from his publishing portfolio, he often went barefoot and dressed in rags, believing that contact with the Earth heightened his physical, mental, and sexual powers. He wore his hair in a tall, elaborate and ridiculous style, in the belief that tugging on the follicles prevented baldness. Even at the height of his powers as a publishing mogul, he had a habit of challenging people to fights, seemingly without rhyme or reason. He had eight children (that we know of - he had countless affairs and infidelities) - seven of them with names beginning with “B” - by four wives, all of whom were much younger than him, and each younger than the last. His third wife, Mary Williamson, was an English millworker and champion swimmer who won a MacFadden-promoted contest to find “Great Britain’s Perfect Woman”, the prize of which was to go on tour with MacFadden in an exhibition of feats of athleticism and physical fitness. It was some months in to the tour when Mary realised that the real reason for the competition was that Bernarr, more than twice her age, was in want of a wife. Two of his children died in infancy - sadly not unusual for the time, though in both cases the result of preventable illness, of MacFadden’s insistence on fasting as treatment, even for an infant, and his refusal to allow their mother to take her own children to see a doctor. When one daughter died, he was recorded as saying, “It’s better she’s gone, she would only have disgraced me”.

In spite - or, regrettably, sometimes because of - MacFadden’s near-infinite quirks, his never-ending torrents of bullshit, and his magazines repeatedly drawing the ire of anti-pornography activist Anthony Comstock, MacFadden remained hugely influential, his magazines reaching a combined readership of more than 7 million. With reach like that, he had potential to act as a kingmaker. Countless members of American journalistic royalty - Walter Winchell, for example - got their start writing for a MacFadden publication, and he printed articles penned by Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, and even Mahatma Gandhi. He gave Eleanor Roosevelt a regular column to write about “women’s issues”, and when the American public were concerned that Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the 1932 Presidential Election, suffering partial paralysis and the after-effects of polio, might not be physically up to the job of running the country, it was MacFadden’s Liberty magazine that sponsored a physical examination claiming FDR was physically fit for the job. It would be a stretch to say that Bernarr MacFadden was the man who made FDR President, but the endorsement of his health by American’s then-leading “expert” on physical culture spoke volumes. It’s perhaps ironic, then, that FDR provided the political will to develop the polio vaccine, when such an influential promoter of his presidency viewed vaccination as toxic, immoral, and unnecessary.

Bernarr MacFadden’s love affair with the politics of Roosevelt was, once FDR entered the White House, short-lived. MacFadden had long flirted with political aspirations himself, and more than once floated the idea of a presidential run, but for now was content to put pressure on Roosevelt to introduce the official cabinet position of “Secretary of Health”. When Roosevelt did so, but didn’t choose MacFadden for the post, Bernarr was incensed, and turned his ire, his poison pen, and the combined efforts of his publishing empire against the newly elected President.

When Roosevelt came up for re-election in 1936, MacFadden’s own odious politics came to the fore, when he attempted a presidential run of his own. Like so many physical culture enthusiasts, MacFadden’s views on the human body and its natural abilities often veered dangerously close to eugenicist in their thinking. While for many of MacFadden’s forebears it was a perhaps inevitable conclusion of the nonsensical, unscientific theories they followed, and the connection remained largely rhetorical, but with political ambition in mind, MacFadden took on a far more proactive approach when embracing eugenics and fascism. His magazines began to publish apologia for Adolf Hitler, while MacFadden himself sang the praises of Mussolini’s Italy, even visiting to train Il Duce’s soldiers in the finer points of his brand of health and fitness. While, once the Second World War got underway, MacFadden would disavow Nazism and supported American involvement in the War, you could still barely fit a cigarette paper between the ideologies of European fascism and his own deeply racist, xenophobic American nationalism.

So what were the politics of a bizarrely coiffured self-publicist who happily slapped his name as a brand on any product that came his way? He ran as a Republican, rallied against the creeping Socialism of the new deal, and on a staunchly anti-immigration platform, arguing for the mass deportation of illegal immigrants and of poor, unemployed or otherwise “unproductive” immigrants. It was the Japanese who were a particular target for MacFadden’s ire, however - he believed that they were infiltrating American society, armed and primed to overthrow all that was good and holy about Western democracy, and called for Japanese Americans to be documented, and for a complete and total halt on all Asian immigration until the problem could be resolved.

MacFadden had high hopes that the Republican Party would turn to him as the outsider candidate, but the call never came. American politics would have to be completely, irreparably broken for something like that to happen, surely?

The combined promotional might of MacFadden’s publications, a staggeringly expensive campaign, and an estimated $100,000 in bribes, didn’t win him the election. Bernarr tried to save face, claiming that it was all a publicity exercise to keep his name in the headlines, that he had never hoped to have won. If that was the case, it was an exercise he attempted twice more - running for the Florida senate in 1940, and as mayor of New York City in 1953, but never successfully.

A stopped clock is right twice a day, and some of MacFadden’s ideas, however he stumbled upon them, weren’t terrible. He was a vegetarian, and sung the praises of raw fruit and vegetables, and of regular exercise and sunlight. It was perhaps that, rather than the fasting, ice cold baths, and barefoot connection to Earth’s unseen magnetic forces, that allowed Bernarr MacFadden to remain in relatively good health well into his 80s. From the age of 83, he celebrated his birthday every year with a parachute jump.

When he died in 1955, his publications had all long since gone out of business, and his millions had been squandered, lost to gambling, publicity stunts, failed political adventures, and alimony payments. At 87 years old, he was struck with a urinary tract infection, and refused medical treatment, opting to fast instead. He was eventually taken to hospital on October 7th, and died a likely avoidable death on October 12th. His fourth and final wife, Johnnie Lee MacFadden - forty years his junior - claimed that Bernarr wasn’t as penniless as people thought, that he had buried money and valuables all over the country. That may be true - a metal box containing $89,000 was unearthed on a Long Island property once owned by MacFadden in 1960. As for Johnnie Lee, she continued to espouse the MacFadden doctrine long after Bernarr’s death, writing on health and beauty, and holding physical and mental health consultations from her New York apartment until her death in 1992, aged 88.

Bernarr MacFadden was a peculiarly American phenomenon, and a product of the dying days of the 19th Century. His rise from successful, if widely-ridiculed, businessman and pop culture face of “big business” through periods of apparent self-parody to xenophobic, rabble-rousing nationalism and political ambition motivated by little more than petty revenge for a perceived personal slight, are more than a little proto-Trumpian, and suggest an insidious undercurrent of American politics that was always inclined towards nativism, populism and celebrity, but which took another few decades to explicitly breach the surface. That, like Donald Trump, Bernarr MacFadden dabbled in the world of professional wrestling, and provided financial support to what would become the WWE, is an admittedly unusual coincidence, but it made for a good excuse for a clickbait headline here on what would otherwise be another digression of mine into unusual figures on the fringes of wrestling history.

——-

I have been lax in updating this blog in recent weeks, as a result of real-life, work pressures and a continuing period of ill health (thus far, fasting, ice baths and a strict avoidance of pickles have failed to result in a miracle cure), so I have posted this blog entry here directly. Ordinarily, my blog posts will be first released a week or more early on my Patreon account, which you can sign up for at www.patreon.com/patrickwreed - there you can also find some exclusive content, ephemera and additional findings from my research; a recent example is a collection of newspaper articles discovered about the legless wrestler Mr. Wonder, as an extension of research I undertook while writing about The Great Antonio, in a post you can find earlier on this very blog. There will be more and more exclusive and unusual content as the Patreon and this blog continue to grow, and I hope you’ll join me for the ride.