Plague of Strength

Missed Part One? Go here.

From 1810 to 1860, the United States changed in ways that are hard to conceive of today. Our population went from 7.2 million to 32 million in 1860, we expanded from 17 states to 33, had over 9,000 miles of railways traversing the nation where none previously existed, and gradually pared down the influx of slaves to nothing, though we still had slavery going strong and people were ready to go to war to protect it… plus we’d driven all of the indigenous peoples we hadn’t already slaughtered into giant concentration camps.

To say the 19th century was a bit of a mixed bag is a hell of an understatement.

With every technological step we took forward, we took six back from an individual liberties standpoint, and most people lived in such shitty circumstances by the end of the 19th Century that death was a welcome respite. As I mentioned previously, Americans shrank in height from 1830 to 1890, mostly due to a combination of the prevalence of disease (and its spread via the railroads) and due to food shortages during the Civil War and the Reconstruction. On the eve of the war, however, something cool happened in American culture that would change the way Americans would view their free time considerably- a movement around heavy lifting on machines, called the “Health Lift” started up, accompanied by legends of real life badasses Paul Bunyan and John Henry, which instilled in the minds of Americans a love of physical strength they’d never had before.

Americans in the 19th Century were three things- hard working, avaricious, and drunker than sailors in a distillery. People were so drunk that they generally only worked four days a week- they were crippled with hangovers on Mondays due to the insane amounts of liquor they consumed on top of their regular workday drinking, which I can say from experience is a fine line to walk. The line between functional drunk and unmitigated disaster is a literal high wire act, and most of the time you end up falling to what you wish had been your death. Regardless, that was the life people were living in the 1800s- long-ass work days punctuated by extended libation vacations.

Nor did they give a flying fuck what anyone thought about their drinking- that bullshit people pull now when they see you have your second double at lunch on a day off (“maybe you should slow down” and “don’t you think you’re going a little fast?” and the whispered “I think so-and-so might have a little problem”) would have been met with a fist, knife, or brick in those days.

“As a Georgian wrote: ‘If I take a settler after my coffee, a cooler at nine, a bracer at ten, a whetter at eleven and two or three stiffners during the forenoon, who has any right to complain?’” (Crews).

Seven shots before lunch was a normal amount to drink in the 19th Century, because the average per capita alcohol consumption in 1790 was 34 gallons of beer and cider, five gallons of distilled spirits, and one gallon of wine, and by 1830 the average american was drinking the equivalent of 7 gallons of ethanol a year on top of their beer and wine. That’s 17 and a half handles of Everclear a year in addition to enough beer to drown most frat boys, and that number factors in the millions of abstainers into their total, so the actual amount drunk by drinkers was considerably higher than that, even. Lest you think every American was just an alcoholic by choice, they though it was healthful. Recall that Arthur Saxon’s “Health Drink” contained a shot of gin and a beer and that he drank up to 100 beers pre-performance, for instance, and you start to get the picture.

“To their minds, drink kept people warm, aided digestion, and increased strength. Not only did alcohol prevent health problems, but it could cure or at least mitigate them. They took whiskey for colic and laryngitis. Hot brandy punch addressed cholera. Rum-soaked cherries helped with a cold. Pregnant women and women in labor received a shot to ease their discomfort. Water, on the other hand, could make you sick. Though the New World had plenty of fresh, unspoiled water, incautious Americans sickened and sometimes died by drinking from polluted sources. Jamestown gentleman George Percy, relating the troubles of the settlement’s early days, wrote that the colonists’ drink was “cold water taken out of the River, which was at a floud verie salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men.” In some cases, even when it was safe to drink, river water had so much mud that a bucket of it needed to sit long enough to allow suspended material to settle. In Europe, where polluted waterways were a bigger problem, people substituted alcohol. It was an easy example for the colonists to follow” (Vorel).

As you can imagine, anyone preaching a healthy lifestyle at this point had a tough row to hoe- Americans were so obsessed with making money and working that they had no concept of leisure time, and even when they had time off, they were far too drunk to do anything but drink. Though dieting and discussion of diet had become a part of British society in the 19th Century with William Banting and the Banting Diet, Americans were still some of the healthiest motherfuckers on Earth, and had neither the time nor the inclination to give a fuck what they ate beyond getting it from the plate and into their stomach. Nor did their food sources change much until mid-century- the cattle industry really didn’t take off to fuel the steak and potatoes American diet of the first half of the 20th Century until the invention of the refrigerated railroad car in the 1860s. As such, America’s cattle herds grew immensely almost in anticipation of that invention, and much of the beef went to waste while cattle were harvested for their hides and tallow.

Thus, when Americans decided to start getting jacked, it wasn’t an outgrowth of healthy eating or anything of that sort. Instead, it was a combination of a couple of things- Muscular Christianity, the rise of professional wrestling, a couple of tall tales about real life strongmen, and the invention of the Health Lift. These things all coalesced in the minds of the average American to create a widespread fervor for physical strength not seen in a populace since the days of ancient Greece and ancient India.

Aside from being somewhere between moderately and insanely drunk during every waking hour, the trend in America in the 19th Century was for men to be weak-backed, small-chested, fat-bellied pussies. That was the American ideal- a corpulent man was an opulent man, and a weak man was a man who made his money by means other than the strength of his back, which was the ideal after Hamilton and his lackeys drove the Jeffersonian ideal out of American politics and hunted the last holders of that ideal to the ends of the Earth. As such, lifting weights for recreation was essentially unthinkable- it would be like everyone in the Straight Pride parade sucking dicks out in the open, rather than behind closed doors as they almost certainly do, or Catholic nuns burning Bibles while wearing Blackcraft t-shirts in public.

Enter Muscular Christianity. If you’re unfamiliar with the muscular Christianity movement I first mentioned in the Zuver’s Gym article, check out my series on Muscular Christianity at some point, but here are the broad strokes. In a hilarious mirror of today, Christians in the 1850s were all wild-eyed about the death of masculinity and cast about looking for a solution. Men had begun spending too much time at home, according to critics, and with the encroachment of secularism and atheism in the intellectual sphere, Christian s developed the ideas of Christian Masculinity and Muscular Christianity- in building their bodies, Christian men could reaffirm their masculinity and assert themselves physically if need be. Instead of being men who “could button up their collars but not roll up their sleeves,” Christian men would be “going through the world with rifle in one hand and Bible in the other,” again bizarrely mirroring the weak-chinned, limp-dicked fuck knuckles with which we now have to contend as their idiot children use their sporting rifles to shoot up high schools and movie theaters, or the family car to run over unsuspecting pedestrians on the streets.

In 1871, a preacher named Henry Ward Beecher wrote a letter to the editor about a cure he had discovered for neurasthenia, which he referred to as “nervous exhaustion.”  This was a very distinctly American affliction, much like the American pharma industry’s modern fabrications of ADHD and social anxiety.  The diseases were in almost every case bullshit, but the existence of a few isolated cases gave rise to the widespread diagnosis of neurasthenia, because once people heard the symptoms, they magically started having them.  Thus, faced with a spate of phantom migraines, indigestion, fatigue, depression, and “complete mental collapse,” people were looking for answers, and Beecher delivered one- weight lifting.

Beecher had six of his parishoners begin lifting with dumbbells and machines under the direction of trainers, and all of them emerged full of Christian vitality after a short period of time. He preached this message to all of his 3,000 congregants, who lapped up his teachings and spread them further. Though he was publicly tried for banging a friend’s wife directly on the heels of preaching against a prominent women’s rights leader’s campaign in support of free love, Beecher was still considered to be the most popular preacher in America (along with one of the most famous men in the nation), and his influence was massive.

The thing Beecher promoted most was the Health Lift, which was essentially a hand-and-thigh lift done on one of a couple of machines that had become popular in the United States in the second half of the 19th Century. I’ll get into the nitty gritty of the invention of weightlifting machines in an upcoming article entitled the Rise of the Machines, but here is the gist of it- weightlifting machines were hardly rare in America in the second half of the 19th Century. Not only were they common in gymnasiums in practically every town, but private citizens could and did buy them, particularly in extremely rural or extremely wealthy areas.

The man behind Beecher’s beloved lift was none other than a Harvard-educated doctor who advocated a meat-heavy diet and heavy lifting for health.- George Barker Winship (also spelled Windship in some sources if you end up googling him). Winship was a tiny sixteen-year-old when he entered Harvard who stood five feet tall and weighed 100 pounds. To give you some perspective on exactly how tiny that is- I am 5’5″ and weighed 135 at the same age, and I was the smallest male in my class. Soon thereafter, Winship found himself getting relentlessly teased about his height as fucked with by older boys, so Winship got good and pissed and decided to do something about it. Instead of taking the modern route of just whining and blaming everyone but himself, then doing nothing about the root cause of the issue, Winship did what motherfuckers with hate in their heart, dignity, and self-respect do- he got fucking jacked.

After logging endless hours in the school’s gym lifting and doing gymnastics, Winship graduated a physical specimen who was regarded as the strongest man at Harvard, because he was capable of 12 one arm chins with either arm and a single one-arm chin using only his little finger. Winship then used one of the strength-testing machines that were scattered across every town in bars and restaurants, and pulled 420 in the hand-and-thigh lift. Rightly thinking this is a bullshit pull for someone who just spent four years killing themselves in the gym, Winship went home resolving to crush the fuck out of that test, so as to pull mad bitches at the bar. As such, he went home, dug a hole, put an empty barrel in it attached to a handle, then started loading weight into it and pulling daily.

In January of 1856, while working as an assistant Physician at the Boston Lunatic Asylum, he maxed out at 700lbs. Four years later, he was pulling 1208, and he decided to make improvements to his machine to move more weight. After adding a yoke to the thing, he was moving over a ton on the lift, and he decided to take his show on the road, so he could bring a little life back into the the people being slowly crushed under the robber barons’ thumbs.

“Windship added heavy dumbbell training to his regular routine of heavy partial lifting in June of 1858.  He began with a pair of fifty pound dumbbells, which he could not press overhead at first. By the end of 1861, however, he could simultaneously press a pair of one hundred pound dumbbells, a considerable feat for a man who never weighed over 150 pounds.  At roughly the same time, Windship began training with what he described as a “dumbbell” of 141 pounds. This dumbbell, which was actually a barbell, consisted of a bar and two round, sixty-eight pound spheres. By unscrewing the handle, Windship could add lead shot to the spheres, bringing the total weight of the bar to around 180 pounds. In April 1860 he gave a public demonstration of his ability to jerk this barbell overhead” (Todd).

Calling himself the American Samson, Winship traveled the country preaching his motto: “Strength is Health.” His Health Lift machines caught on like wildfire, and Winship was able to open the world’s first sports medicine facility in Boston in 1866, three years after he opened a sort of physical therapy office in the same town. Meanwhile, copycats were popping up all over, and the most notable of these was George Butler. Where Winship was an idealist and inventor, Butler was an entrepreneur. While Winship was out touring and spreading the good word about moving big weights, Butler continuously tinkered with his designs to shrink the size of his Health Lift machine, and wrote a book on its use entitled Butler’s System of Physical Training: The Lifting Cure. In New York, yet another company released a larger but easier to load version of the machine called Mann’s Reactionary Lifter, which had handles on each side, rather than a single middle handle, so chicks could use it without having to change out of the clothes they’d been wearing for the last month or so.

Almost as important as Winship’s invention of the Health Lift was the diet he promoted- one heavy in meat. The only real health fad going at the time in the US was vegetarianism, which was a psychotic anti-sex movement promoted by Seventh Day Adventist shitslug Sylvester Graham (the inventor of the graham cracker), and because evangelicals are endlessly screeching their screeds in public, this was the only prescription for health anyone ever heard.

“Graham, a Presbyterian minister and general agent for the Pennsylvania Society for the Suppression of Ardent Spirits, believed that meat, fats, salt, spices, ketchup, mustard, and rum were collectively responsible for American crime, fornication, and mental and physical disease. The public promptly fell upon the Graham system, a Spartan regime of oatmeal porridge, beans, boiled rice, unbuttered whole-grain bread, and graham (originally Graham) crackers, supplemented with cold baths, hard beds, open windows, and vigorous exercise.

Among Graham’s followers was Bronson Alcott—father of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women—whose experimental community in Harvard, Massachusetts, spurned meat, coffee, tea, alcohol, milk, and warm bathwater, and wore no leather, since animals were killed for it. They used no artificial light, drank only water, and ate only “aspiring vegetables”—that is, those that grew upward, as opposed downward-plunging carrots and potatoes. The community lasted just seven months (Rupp).

Winship, on the other hand,

“maintained that workout sessions should never last more than an hour and that proper rest must be obtained before the next day’s training. As for nutrition, meat and a mixed diet helped build his strength, he explained, while his experiment with vegetarianism resulted in a diminution of his vitality” (Todd).

As that diminution in vitality is exactly why Graham and his band of foaming-at-the-mouth fucktards wanted, it’s thoroughly unsurprising that Winship arrived at that conclusion as well.

Tragically, Winship dropped dead of a stroke in 1876, at the age of 42, which pretty much killed the popularity of the Health Lift and a heavily meat-based diet Just as armchair lifters of today blame every single pitfall, injury, and death on steroids, the world blamed heavy lifting for Winship’s death, and the practice fell out of favor in the general populace for some time. Regardless, professional wrestling had become popular in the United States in the preceding decade, and with rumors circulating of two mythical beasts of men, John Henry and Paul Bunyan, America’s obsession with physical strength and impressive stature would continue to grow.

And if you have’t jumped on the 365 Days of Brutality train yet, my badass new book is available in print and ebook!

Sources:

Crews, Ed.  Rattle-Skull, Stonewall, Bogus, Blackstrap, Bombo, Mimbo, Whistle Belly, Syllabub, Sling, Toddy, and Flip.  The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Journal.  Spr 2007.  Web.  23 Aug 2019.    https://www.history.org/foundation/journal/holiday07/drink.cfm

Mirabello, Mark. Handbook for Rebels and Outlaws. Oxford: Mandrake of Oxford, 2006.

Pena, Carolyn Thomas de la.  The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American.  New York: New York University Press, 2003.

A timeline of changes: beef cattle farming in North America.  Arrowquip.  6 Jun 2017.  Web. 6 Aug 2019.  https://arrowquip.com/blog/cattle-research/timeline-of-changes-beef-cattle-north-america

Todd, Jan.  Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of  American Women 1800-1870.  Macon: Mercer University Press, 1998.

Todd, Jan.  “Strength is Health”: George Barker Windship and the first American weight training boom.  Iron Game History.  Sep 1993. (3)1: 2-14.

Vorel, Jim.  The 1800s: when Americans drank whiskey like it was water.  Paste Magazine.  10 Aug 2018.  Web.  23 Aug 2019.  https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/08/the-1800s-when-americans-drank-whiskey-like-it-was.html

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