#POLIO LIKE DISEASE HEALTHNUT PROFESSIONAL#

'Yes,' the editor replied, 'if she doesn't enjoy it.' One of his writers once asked an editor, 'Can a heroine of True Story have sexual intercourse?' At first, it warned young women against 'random flirtations and promiscuous sex.'

It was the first modern true-confessions magazine. True Story began publication around the time of WWI. They were a handsome family, and he loved publishing photographs of his children as representative of ideal American youth, often wearing costumes 'that (looked) like.a number of silk handkerchiefs, hanging here or there.' His four marriages produced eight children, six of whom were females, including Braunda, Beverly, Brynece, Byrne and Beulah. One diet called for grapes?nothing but grapes?which Macfadden insisted would eradicate any cancer in the system. In 1912, his five-volume Encyclopedia of Physical Culture argued that all major diseases, including polio, cancer and Bright's disease, could be cured by simple diets, water therapy and modest exercises. He lectured, denounced alcohol and tobacco, and advocated fasting, natural healing and exercise. He also posed for the magazine in various stages of undress, no doubt as an exemplar of Healthy American Manhood. At first, he wrote most of the magazine himself, including its serialized novels. Four years later, already a vegetarian and nondrinker, Macfadden launched his first magazine, Physical Culture, from the Flatiron Bldg.

#POLIO LIKE DISEASE HEALTHNUT PROFESSIONAL#

He arrived in New York in 1894 after a brief stint as a professional wrestler with Sandow, the Strong Man.

No one knows when or why he changed his name: one memoirist wrote, '.there was a legend around the Macfadden magazines.that the name was a misprint of Bernard, but that upon seeing it misspelled by a printer he had decided to keep it.' He was also fixated on sex, although to call his focus on the human body an obsession is to lend glamour to a grimly Celtic fanaticism.īernard Adolphus McFadden was born near Mill Spring, MO, on Aug.

He was a graphomaniac health nut: during his long career, he published some 150 books on diet and fitness. He was an ignoramus with the courage of his convictions, believing that whatever interested him would interest everybody else, and for an amazingly long time he was largely right. Macfadden proved that material success can be won by the hard-working, ambitious and utterly humorless. Nothing had prepared journalism for Bernarr Macfadden's New York Graphic. In 1924, William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal and the New York American, declared war by starting his own tabloid, the Daily Mirror.īut these papers still published something that could be recognized as news. Within five years its large photographs, wild headlines and popular columnists had given the Daily News a circulation of more than 750,000, making it the most widely read daily in the United States. By the 20s, a combination of massive capital investment and increasing difficulties in distributing the papers made launching a new daily something only an established publisher might try.įor example, the Daily News, first published on June 26, 1919, was founded by an heir to the family that published the Chicago Tribune. In 1900, when newspapers were still the only mass media, at least 30 daily papers of general and specialized circulation were published in Manhattan alone.

Polio like disease healthnut