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ABSTRACT
Eugen Sandow gained renown in fin de siecle Britain as a strongman and bodybuilder and in the early twentieth century as a publicist, entrepreneur, and crusader for physical fitness on the international scene. Much less is known about his underlying zeal for eugenics, a movement that coincided with Social Darwinism as an evolutionary theory and practice that culminated during his most productive years. A pioneer in the burgeoning field of physical culture, Sandow sought to use his celebrity status to propagate his universal health doctrine as a means to address widespread public concerns about degeneration or suicide of the race. What made Sandow’s system unique was his neo-Lamarckian belief that acquired characteristics of health and fitness could be transmitted to the next generation of humanity by physical training. Fuelled by ongoing recruitment crises in the South African War and World War I, it was an ulterior agenda of environmental eugenics that Sandow promoted not only through public and official channels but to the four corners of the earth. Ultimately his utopian vision could not be sustained by the 1920s either through science, public opinion, or by political efforts to reconstruct a society fit for heroes.
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Notes
1 Aaron Gillette, Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture Debate in the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 9.
2 Eugen Sandow, Life Is Movement, The Physical Reconstruction and Regeneration of the People (A Diseaseless World) (London: National Health Press, [1918?]), 6.
3 Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Newcastle UK: Acumen Publishing, 2007); Michael W. Taylor, The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer (London: Continuum, 2007); Nicholas Wright Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Curtis Cate, Friedrich Nietzsche (Woodstock, NY; Overlook Press, 2005); Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, A Comedy and A Philosophy, ed. A. C. Ward (London: Longmans, 1956), and Sally Peters, Bernard Shaw, The Ascent of the Superman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
4 James C. Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness, A History of American Health Reformers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 153.
5 Carlton J. H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, 1871-1900 (New York: Harper & Row), 330.
6 See Tony Ladd and James A. Matheson, Muscular Christianity, Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999).
7 Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 38.
8 Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, The Oxford Handbook of The History of Eugenics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4, 14.
9 Sebastian Conrad, ‘Globalizing the Beautiful: Eugen Sandow, Bodybuilding, and the Ideal of Muscular Manliness at the Turn of the Century’, Journal of World History 32, no. 1 (2021): 100.
10 Adolphus Vongieur, A Treatise on the Bane of Vice (London: L. Pennington, 1787), 41–2.
11 Jan Todd, ‘Reflections on Physical Culture, Defining Our Field and Protecting Its Integrity’, Iron Game History, 13 (November 2015): 5.
12 David L. Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent, Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 61.
13 Eugen Sandow, Sandow on Physical Training, ed. G. Mercer Adam (New York: G. Selwin Tait, 1894), 1, 5, and 9-10. A decade later, Sandow estimated that sales of his treatise likely reached 200,000 copies and there was ‘hardly a quarter of the globe where the red-covered book is not well-known’. Eugen Sandow, Body-Building or Man in the Making (London: Gale & Polden, 1904), 34.
14 Sandow, Sandow on Physical Training, 24–5.
15 Ibid., 91–2.
16 Ibid., 117.
17 Ibid., 110.
18 Ibid., 132.
19 Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration, Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 4.
20 Ibid., 10.
21 Caroline Daley, Leisure & Pleasure, Reshaping & Revealing the New Zealand Body, 1900–1960 (Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2003), 38.
22 See Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
23 Kenneth R. Dutton, The Perfectible Body, The Western Ideal of Male Physical Development (New York: Continuum, 1995), 204.
24 See G. R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
25 Conor Heffernan, ‘The Best Developed Man in Great Britain and Ireland? Eugen Sandow and the Commercialization of Eugenics in Twentieth-Century Britain’, Journal of Victorian Culture XX (2023): 1.
26 Carey A. Watt, ‘Physical Culture as “Natural Healing”: Eugen Sandow’s Campaign against the Vices of Civilization c. 1890–1920’, in Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890-1950: Fighting Drinks, Drugs, and Immorality, eds. Jessica R. Pliley, Robert Kramm and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
27 That Sandow and eugenics had an impact beyond the burgeoning field of physical culture is evident in the essay by Austin Briggs, ‘The Mismeasure of Bloom: Sandow, Folklore, Scientific Racism, Eugenics’, James Joyce Quarterly 59 (Summer 2022): 597–615.
28 Chapman to the author, 10 July 2022. L’Athlete survived for only 36 issues, the last one appearing on 11 November 1897. See https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb00069201?page=,1.
29 Edmond Desbonnet, Pour devenir fort, xv–xvi, and xviii. Cited in Desbonnet, Kings of Strength, 428. Although Desbonnet’s use of the term ‘race’, like Sandow’s, was intended to bridge all racial, religious, cultural, and geographical barriers, the context of its origin and use was centred predominantly with the peoples of Britain and Western Europe.
30 Chapman to the author, 10 July 2022.
31 Robert Ernst, Weakness Is a Crime, The Life of Bernarr Macfadden (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 21.
32 Sandow, Physical Culture, I (July 1898), 4.
33 Ibid., 4–5.
34 Ibid., 6.
35 Ibid., 7.
36 Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent, 109.
37 Sandow, Physical Culture, I (September 1898), 171–2. See also ‘Mabel Esmonde Cahill’, in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, Cahill, Mabel Esmonde | Dictionary of Irish Biography (dib.ie).
38 Sandow, Physical Culture, I (September 1898), 192.
39 Sandow, Physical Culture, I (October 1898), 246 and 249; (November 1898), 334–5 and 349; and (December 1898), 405–6.
40 J. De. Haas, ‘The Physical Progress of the Artizan’, Physical Culture II, no. 5 (November 1898): 346.
41 Ibid., 316–7. Hastings was a London businessman and student at Sandow’s Institute of Physical Culture on St. James Street. See Eugen Sandow, Strength and How to Obtain It (London: Gale & Polden, 1898), 63–4.
42 Sandow, Physical Culture, II (June 1899), 462–3, and ‘Sir John Arthur Thomson’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Sir John Arthur Thomson | Scottish naturalist | Britannica.
43 Sandow’s notion of planned marriages to reproduce a better breed of humans are not unlike those of Martin Luther Holbrook who advocated an accelerated form of evolution in Marriage and Parentage and the Sanitary and Physiological Laws for the Production of Children (New York: M. L. Holbrook & Co.,1882), 40–3 and 63–6.
44 Sandow, Strength and How to Obtain It, 6–8, and Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent, 104.
45 ‘National League of Physical Culture’, Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture and British Sport II (August 1899): 190–1.
46 ‘National Physical Education’, ibid., V (May 1900), 324.
47 ‘National Physical Education and the Army Medical Examination’, ibid., VII (November 1901), 328.
48 Arnold White, Efficiency and Empire (London: Methuen, 1901), quoted by Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 64. Data derived during peacetime suggests that the rate of recruits rejected for medical reasons did decline significantly from 33.83% in 1903 to 21.43 by 1913. See the General Report on the British Army for the year ending September 30 1907 and 1914 (Cd. 7252, The general annual report on the British Army for the year ending 30 September 1913. Cited in Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly, The Edwardian Army: Recruiting, Training, and Deploying the British Army 1902-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 48.
49 Daley, Leisure & Pleasure, 30.
50 Ibid., 38–9.
51 ‘Sandow Lectures Australians’, Sunday Times (Melbourne), September 7, 1902, 5, cited in Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent, 213. Sandow’s use of ‘never too late to mend’ was derived from a popular 1856 novel by English author Charles Reade. See Charles Reade | British author and producer | Britannica.
52 Sandow, Body-Building, 2–3.
53 Ibid., 13.
54 Royal Commission on Physical Training (Scotland), Minutes of Evidence and Index, ‘A National System of Training’, II (Edinburgh: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1903), 284. The commission’s overall assessment of Sandow’s system, however, seemed at variance with his testimony. ‘Sandow’s system, valuable as it is stated to be for adults, involves an amount of concentrated attention which does not recommend it for the use of children; but some of the movements, notably the breathing exercises, as we saw them practised at the London Orphan Asylum, produce very good chest development, and may be incorporated in a model system’. Ibid., I, 32. See also Report of the Royal Commission on Physical Training (Scotland): Great Britain. Royal Commission on Physical Training (Scotland): Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming: Internet Archive.
55 Sandow, Body-Building, 15.
56 Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine, Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 169.
57 Sandow, Body-Building, 17.
58 Scotland’s Physical Deterioration’, Sandow’s Magazine X (May 1903): 307.
59 ‘National Physical Training’, ibid., I (March 1903), 71.
60 Reprint from The New Idea (Melbourne) as ‘Physical Culture for Women’, Sandow’s Magazine, (February 1903), 120.
61 ‘How Degenerates Are Made’, ibid., XVI (March 1, 1906), 266.
62 ‘What is Heredity?’ ibid., XVII (November 15, 1906), 627.
63 Health and Strength (January 1907), 19; ibid. (13 March 1909), 261; ibid. (11 January 1908, 29); ibid. (2 May 1914), 1; and Ina Zeiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in Interwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History 41 (October 2006): 601. See also David Gentle’s account of the early days of the magazine in ‘The Ever Changing Face of Health and Strength’, Health and Strength 108 (1979): 6–9.
64 Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory, Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 132.
65 Conor Heffernan, ‘Desirable Bodies and Eugen Sandow’s Curative Institute in Edwardian England’, Social History of Medicine 35 (2021): 96–7 and 216.
66 Sandow, Life Is Movement, 46, 2, 4, and 6. The Shakespearean quote appears in Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2 as Hamlet refuses his mother’s invitation to sit by her to watch the play, ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ (The Mousetrap), and he lies down at Ophelia’s feet. See Hamlet in W. J. Craig, ed., The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 888.
67 Sandow, Life Is Movement, 54–5.
68 Ibid., 57.
69 Ibid., 74.
70 Ibid., 88.
71 Ibid., 177.
72 Ibid., 182–3.
73 Ibid., 196.
74 Ibid., 332.
75 Ibid., 402.
76 James Lennox, ‘Darwinism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revised July 24, 2019, Darwinism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
77 Gillham, Life of Galton, 348.
78 Rasmus Winther, ‘August Weismann on Germ-Plasm Variation’, Journal of the History of Biology 34 (2001): 517–55.
79 Marius Turda, ‘Race, Science, and Eugenics in the Twentieth Century’, in Bashford and Levine, History of Eugenics, 69.
80 David Haig, ‘Weismann Rules! OK? Epigenetics and the Lamarckian Temptation’, Biology and Philosophy 22 (2007): 415. James Whorton observes that it was not until the second decade of the twentieth century that Weismann’s revelations gained general acceptance in the scientific community. ‘Abandonment of the inheritance of acquired characteristics was ideologically difficult, and health reformers clung to it as long as they possibly could’. Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness, 157–8.
81 Data drawn from Health and Strength show that Sandow’s ideas continued to have relevance into the late 1930s. The magazine and its league were clearly flourishing with the latter’s membership rising from 133,670 in 1936 to 162,987 in 1939. Health and Strength (9 May 1936), 454, and ibid. (27 May 1939), 785. Cited in Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Building a British Superman’, 606.
82 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 38.
83 Caroline Daley, ‘The Strongman of Eugenics, Eugen Sandow’, Australian Historical Studies 33 (2008): 235 and 247.
84 Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent, 180.
85 Budd, The Sculpture Machine, 82–3.
86 Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent, 227.
87 Suait B. Gissis and Eva Jablonka, Transformations of Lamarckism, From Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011).
88 Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness, 160.