CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY SAN MARCOS

THESIS SIGNATURE PAGE

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE

MASTER OF ARTS

IN

HISTORY

THESIS TITLE: Progressive Gymnastics: American Physical Education, Military Training, and International Sport at the Tum of the Nineteenth Century

AUTHOR: Kevin Stahl

DATE OF SUCCESSFUL DEFENSE: November 30, 2016

THE THESIS HAS BEEN ACCEPTED BY THE THESIS COMMITTEE IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS TN HISTORY.

/ / Dr. JeffreyCharles l � le.. �& THESIS COMMITTEE CHAIR DATE

Dr. Katherine Hijar THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER

....- Dr. Anne Lombard THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER Lv�SIGNATURE

Progressive Gymnastics:

American Physical Education, Military Training, and International Sport at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

by

Kevin Stahl ii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... iii

Abstract ...... iv

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter One: Essential Gymnastics ...... 14

Chapter Two: Military Gymnastics...... 55

Chapter Three: Competitive Gymnastics ...... 84

Conclusion: Finding Balance in the Twentieth Century ...... 120

Bibliography ...... 126

iii

Acknowledgments While historical research is often a solitary pursuit, it is by no means a venture completed alone. I have been significantly influenced and aided by many people in the year and a half in which I conducted my research and put thought to page. Some I have spent my whole life with, others I have never even met, but whose work inspired me to take on this project.

I would like to thank the members of my committee for appreciating my original thesis concept, and for supporting me when the research led me in many new and unexpected directions as I eagerly followed. Their insight into elements of inquiry that I failed to consider greatly contributed to my understanding of the sources. I am especially grateful for their ongoing support and encouragement, even when the demands of their normal duties might have made assisting me an inconvenience.

My family, friends, fellow graduate students, and the writing group I joined after attending a conference in late 2015 have been endlessly supportive, mindful listeners that graciously checked my writing and my lines of argument to ensure it all made sense to everyone besides me. We have developed many “MAKisms” in the last eleven months.

Though it might sound unusual, I must also thank Google Books, and the archival team at

Oxford, Princeton, and Harvard for charging into the digital age full speed ahead and uploading so much of their materials to the internet. The majority of my primary source materials were derived from open-source providers of information.

Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to the people who inspired me to strive in all that I do: the professors of history at California State University San Marcos and Palomar

Community College. You taught me the value of learning from the past. iv

Abstract Gymnastics training has had a profound and lasting impact on American physical culture.

It was the first physical training system widely practiced throughout the United States after its

introduction in Massachusetts in the early nineteenth-century, and became incorporated into

military training towards the end of the nineteenth century as part of a renovation of the United

States Armed Forces. Gymnastics appealed to the White middle-class men in the New England

region throughout the nineteenth century because its training principles addressed contemporary

concerns regarding the safety of the new republic, the moral and physical health of young men,

and the deficit of discipline within not only the civilian population, but also the military. These

principles of civil masculinity can be found not only in the training systems of German

gymnastics, New Gymnastics, Swedish Gymnastics, and military training manuals, but also in

popular physical culture literature of the period. However, at the turn of the nineteenth century,

American sporting culture was on the rise. Although gymnasts adapted their training methods and amended their prohibition on gymnastics competition, contemporary nationalistic fervor and enthusiasm regarding the manliness associated with American originated sports such as baseball and football overshadowed gymnastics training. Gymnasts were relegated to the role of physical educators despite gymnastics’ status as an international sport with the formation of the Modern

Olympics. This thesis examines the various training systems of popular gymnastics throughout the nineteenth century and tracks gymnastics’ decline in the early twentieth century following the 1904 Olympic Games.

Keywords: Gymnastics, American History, Exercise, Masculinity, Military, The Olympic

Games.

Introduction In the last decade of the twentieth century, gymnastics only seemed to matter to

Americans once every four years, at the quadrennial Summer Olympic Games. It is also when

they were exposed to some scant facts about gymnastics’ origins. The spectator guide for the

“Artistic Gymnastics,” competitions at the Rio Olympic Games in 2016 included a section on the

history of gymnastics in the world, entitled, “How It All Began.”1 The guide notes gymnastics’ origins in Ancient Greece, omitting its connection with religious ceremony, and adding that,

“’artistic gymnastics’ was used for the first time in the 19th century to differentiate free flow

styles from techniques used in military training.”2 The guide goes on to discuss how gymnastics

spread to schools and athletic clubs throughout Europe during the nineteenth century, but

mentions nothing of the same occurrence in the United States. It does contribute some useful

information concerning how the parameters of competition. When describing how gymnastics

are to be judged, the guide states that, “the athletes’ greatest challenge is to make everything

seem simple, demonstrating grace and lightness.”3 However, outside of the Olympic Games, not

all who practice gymnastics ascribe to these principles.

Today, with the rise of exercise crazes such as CrossFit and the information

disseminating capability of the internet providing a platform for Olympic gymnastics coaches to

sell training guides to the population at large, gymnastics has a much more salient influence and

widespread following in America.4 CrossFitters, military personnel, YouTube personalities, and

veteran Olympic coaches all recommend their own style of training with gymnastics, some for

1 “Artistic Gymnastics: Understanding the Sport,” accessed October 2, 2016, https://www.rio2016.com/en/artistic- gymnastics. 2 “Artistic Gymnastics.” 3 Ibid. 4 “CrossFit Gymnastics,” accessed October 8, 2016, http://www.crossfitgymnastics.com/#welcome; “Gymnastic Bodies,” accessed October 8, 2016, https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/. 2

competition, but most for basic physical fitness. Gymnastics is experiencing a revival. There are

over 10,000 CrossFit affiliate gyms in the United States alone, and all of their members are asked

to perform some variation of gymnastic drills.5 However, despite its growing popularity,

gymnastics’ history in the United States, the story of how and why it changed from a physical

training regimen to a competitive sport, continues to remain obscured, both in public perception

and in the historical literature.

Gymnastics had a profound impact on the development of physical culture, the

development of sporting culture, and changes in the physical training of the military in the

United States throughout the nineteenth-century. As a training system, it boasted theories of

developing the body for the purpose of instilling discipline, bodily control, and overall physical

preparedness. This was in contrast to contemporary American middle-class ideals of athletic

specialization, professionalism in sport, and the growth of spectacle competition in the late-

nineteenth and early-twentieth century.6 The theories that informed its systems of training, and

even competition, valued serving others, subordination of the gymnasts’ will to their instructor,

and progressive improvement as opposed to learning through play. These elements appealed to

certain groups of the United States population, including the military, physical educators, and

reformers of the period. Due to several factors surrounding the increased popularity of team

sports at the turn of the nineteenth century, other activities largely replaced gymnastics in

recreational sport, physical education, and military training.7 Even as its advocates loosened

5 Paul Teetor, “The Story of How CrossFit Went From Zero to 10,000 Locations,” accessed October 14, 2016, http://www.laweekly.com/arts/the-story-of-how-crossfit-went-from-zero-to-10-000-locations-5005604. 6 Donald J. Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 1880-1910, (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1983; Benjamin G. Rader, American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Spectators, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1983), 45-170. 7 Steven W. Pope, “An Army of Athletes: Playing Fields, Battlefields, and the American Military Sporting Experience,” in The Journal of Military History, Vol. 59, No. 3 (July 1995), pp. 435-456, accessed September 22, 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2944617. 3 their prohibitions on competition to accommodate dominant societal values and continued to promote physical education in several organizations throughout the United States, gymnastics soon lost relevance in these realms to sports such as baseball, football, and other competitive,

American-original activities.

Similar to its decline in American activity, gymnastics has remained on the outskirts of historical literature in the last thirty years. At the first quarter of the twentieth century, when sport and exercise were fully cemented into American culture, historians of physical education published full volumes detailing all the systems of gymnastics, outlining their influence and biographing their practitioners, both in the United States and around the world, most notably physical education historian Fred Eugene Leonard.8 However, by the 1980s, gymnastics was largely relegated to the footnotes of historical studies of related disciplines. Research on the military, as well as American sport, medicine, gender history, and popular culture casually mention gymnastics in the context of a fringe system of exercise and cultural activity with relation to these broader topics.9 Gymnastics, a fundamental part of American physical culture, has become trivial in the literature, its true influence overlooked.

In the nineteenth century, Gymnastics was one of the ultimate expressions of physical training in the United States. American perceptions of physical training, the idea of engaging in well-defined, progressively difficult exercise to produce intentional physical change, comes chiefly from gymnastics. Physical education in schools was largely possible because of the transportation of German ideas of training and human development carried across the Atlantic in the nineteenth century and incorporated into both common schools and universities such as

8 Fred Eugene Leonard, A Guide to the History of Physical Education, (Philadelphia and New York: Lea & Febiger, 1923), accessed January 13, 2016, https://archive.org/details/guidetohistoryof00leon.

4

Harvard. Besides education and physical training, gymnastics also influenced American concepts of sport and Olympic competition. Many of the events Americans consider track and field sports were once standard gymnastics drills: the shot put, the javelin throw, the long jump, wrestling, and of course, the gymnastics events themselves. Gymnastics also influenced the experiences of some American immigrants. It preserved German cultural identity when Turners,

German gymnasts, were persecuted in America after immigrating to the United States in the mid nineteenth-century. Decades later, the American armed forces adopted gymnastics for training its soldiers and sailors as part of a broader wave of innovation to modernize the military.

Gymnastics has taken many forms in America, changing with the country and the groups that practiced it, adapting to prevailing attitudes regarding the purpose of exercise and the perceived needs of the American people. However, some elements of gymnastics remained the same, and that explains its shifting popularity and transformations throughout American history.

This thesis is not a comprehensive investigation into the history of gymnastics in the

United States. Rather, it will serve as a study of how gymnastics training changed in the latter half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and how a certain theme in gymnastics training pervaded these changes. This theme was that physical training could improve the character of the men, women, and children who practiced it, and that elements of good citizenship informed gymnastics training and American participation in gymnastics competition.

Gymnastics and its changes over the nineteenth century in America were closely tied to its theories connecting physical training with personal character and the needs of the nation, and can partially explain its decline in the early twentieth-century. This can be seen in the popularity of

German gymnastics, New Gymnastics, and Swedish gymnastics, all of which argued that their systems granted moral and physical development. It is also evident in the adoption of 5

gymnastics training into military training to correct muscular imbalances and to instill discipline

in soldiers in preparation for combat. Finally, gymnastics’ theories on the evils of competition

and personal aggrandizement hindered its ability to remain popular at the turn of the nineteenth

century, even as it incorporated competition to remain relevant, and became an international

sport with the creation of the modern Olympic Games.

This thesis will examine exercise manuals and physical culture literature in America.

Since this thesis examines gymnastics practice and culture from the early 1800s to the first

decade of the twentieth century. It contains material from a variety of sources, not all directly

related to exercise. The primary form of study for this thesis was examining the development

and response of intellectual theories regarding gymnastics training in the public, the military, and

the educational systems of the United States, including the Massachusetts’ common school

system and New England universities, including Harvard. To understand the ideals of training,

the execution of gymnastics practice, and the equipment related to it, the thesis refers to training manuals from Swedish gymnastics, New Gymnastics, German gymnastics, and military training.

Information on the practice of gymnastics competition was taken from official Olympic programs for the 1896 Summer Olympics at Athens and the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and

Olympic Games; the official handbooks of the Amateur Athletic League, the North American

Gymnastics Union, and the Athletic League of the Young Men’s Christian Association of North

America; and other popular athletic journals. In order to examine popular perception of various

forms of gymnastic practice with its relation to competition and moral development, these

materials were supplemented with articles from physical education and military periodicals published in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. These sources included

Mind and Body, The American Physical Education Review, The Posse Gymnasium Journal, The 6

American Gymnasium and Athletic Record, School Science, and The Journal of the Military

Service Institution.

Historiography

This thesis will contribute mainly to the history of gymnastics, but it also supplements three separate historical areas of study: physical education history, American military history, and the history of Sport in America. While also intersecting with medical history and Olympic history, and the thesis also contributes to gender history, explaining how gymnastics fulfilled perceptions of virtuous manhood involving military service, self-control, and civic responsibility.

The thesis contributes to existing history by fully examining the gymnastics practices popular within nineteenth-century America, describing how gymnasts developed and described their exercise regimens as well as to explain how certain training methodologies, such as progression, were thought to bring a better moral effect than others, such as specialized athletics and competitive team sports. These concepts also meshed with contemporary American middle-class ideals. This will supplement a previously deficient focus on not only the history of gymnastics’ influence on American culture.

Numerous scholars have studied the social aspects of gymnastics, sports, physical activity, and American masculinity but they have mainly discussed their interrelationship in general terms, especially in the case of gymnastics.10 Several studies of American masculinity during the nineteenth century have mentioned the importance of social settings such as the gymnasium and the sporting field in forging new paradigms of manhood and morality, but none

10 Linda J. Borish “Catherine Beecher and Thomas W. Higginson on the Need for Physical Fitness,” In Major Problems in American Sport History, Steven A. Riess, ed., (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 94-103; Allen Guttman, “Capitalism, Protestantism, and the Rise of Modern Sport,” In Major Problems in American Sport History. Steven A. Riess, ed., (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997). 5-15; 7

delves into how the exercises were meant to create healthy male bodies or why their advocates

would compete over whose system or sport achieved the best results.11 The thesis will explain how physical training, such as gymnastics, was thought to convey moral qualities in its practitioners, supplement previous scholarship that focused on the role of athletics and American sports, such as baseball and basketball, in teaching masculine virtues.

Cultural historians James Whorton, Peter Stearns, and John Money have studied the health reform culture and middle class cultural changes of nineteenth-century America, focusing on the New England region where reformers were most active.12 Many of them psychoanalyze

well-known health reformers such as Sylvester Graham, Henry Ward Beecher, and William A.

Alcott, discussing in detail the development and dissemination of their ideals of natural living.

However, these studies are often devoted to the psychological foibles and flawed theological reasoning behind reformers’ recommendations, ignoring much of the influence gymnastics training and its advocates had on New England physical education. The religious and civic influences on early reform efforts and the development of medicine have also been explored with little more than passing remarks about contemporary exercises such as gymnastics. There is a small exception with regards to the Swedish Movement Cure, which is often mistaken as an exercise regimen instead of its true nature as a form of massage. Historians Harvey Green and

Joan Burbick have studied the influence of millennialism and the conflicting feelings between

11 Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era, (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 222-224; Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America, A Cultural History, (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 43-45, 126-130; Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 142-144, 157, 208-210. 12 James C. Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); John Money, The Destroying Angel: Sex, Fitness & Food in the Legacy of Degeneracy Theory, Graham Crackers, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes & American Health History, (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1985). 8

emerging nineteenth-century nationalism and reform efforts.13 In Healing the Republic, Burbick examines what she terms the “narratives of health” in nineteenth-century literature, including

Sylvester Graham’s Lectures on the Science of Human Life and the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity.14 Burbick theorizes that concerns about bodily survival and enrichment created

implicit systems of cultural hegemony within these texts. She asserts that Americans held a

physical, visceral fear for the safety of their republican freedom, both in its vulnerability to

invaders and for the potential for creating social disorder. In order to assuage these feelings, they

sought to create and control social order through physiological conditioning. Green examines

health reform from an almost opposite perspective. Instead of observing physiological concerns

affecting cultural hegemony and political fears, he tracks the development of the philosophy and

technology of health and concludes that reformers’ physical methods grew out of Americans’

attempts to achieve perfection, not to resolve fear. According to Green, this desire was rooted in

Americans’ millennialism and a developing positive nationalism. Health and moral reformers’

political concerns informed their methods, Green observes, not the other way around. While

Burbick raises intelligent questions on the cause and intended results of health reform and Green

provides a thorough survey of reformers’ philosophies, neither discuss reformers and physical

culturists’ exercises beyond providing a description of their origins. On the subject of

gymnastics, their discussions note the purported moral-training effects of various systems, but

fall short of in-depth analysis of the systems themselves, the clear themes of community values

in their drills, or how they changed over time to adapt to the needs of contemporary Americans.

13 Joan Burbick, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth- Century America, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Harvey Green, Fit For America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). 14 Burbick, Healing the Republic, 2. 9

Historians who include the military in their scholarship such as Allen R. Millet, Peter

Maslowski, Steven J. Pope, and Donald J. Mrozek have either focused on only one aspect of

gymnastic training’s influence on their physical training systems, or overlooked its presence.

While all still note the figures surrounding gymnastics’ incorporation into military training, such

as Emory Upton, Herman Koehler, and Lieutenant Edmund Butts, they miss its intended purpose

of promoting discipline.15 In For the Common Defense, A Military History of the United States

in America, Millet and Maslowski detail the changes in military organization of the Army and

Navy from the pre-colonial era to after the Cold War through stunning campaign studies and

attention to the economic and internal politics of the American military. As part of their analysis

of the late nineteenth-century, they illuminate the role of key figures such as General Sherman,

politicians such as Teddy Roosevelt, and members of the War Department in modernizing

America’s armed forces. However, their analysis does not often descend to the training of the

individual soldier, or explain how it was influenced by European militaries, such as the German

and Swedish Army, both of which practiced similar forms of gymnastics present in the United

States.16 In Sport and American Mentality, 1880-1910, Mrozek argues that sport gained

legitimacy between the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century by not arousing the opposition of the middle and upper classes, who could have slowed the rise of sport or changed the direction of its development.17 As part of his overall argument, Mrozek makes a compelling

case that the military’s adoption of team sports in the late nineteenth-century to decrease

desertions and instill competitive values aided in sports acceptance in the United States, as

15 Allen R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America, Revised and Expanded, (New York: The Free Press, 1984), 248-284; Captain David Yebra, “Colonel Herman J. Koehler: The Father of Physical Education at West Point,” in The American Military Experience and the United States Military Academy, accessed February 28, 2016, http://digital- library.usma.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p16919coll1/id/14. 16 Millet and Maslowski, For the Common Defense, 272-273. 17 Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, xiii. 10

soldiers returning from service brought a love of sport and physical activity back to civilian

life.18 Mrozek fails, however, to describe how sports as military training were preceded by

gymnastics exercise, or how either sports or gymnastics were meant to accomplish the

transformation of character its advocates argued that such physical activity provided.

Another theme in the scholarship on the history of exercise is provided by gender historians Jan Todd, Ann Chisholm, and Roberta J. Park. Their scholarship provides discussions

of the physiological reasoning, and moral conflicts behind purposive physical activity for women

in the nineteenth-century.19 Their examinations of exercise as a purposive training system for the development of certain ideal physical traits in order to instill specific character traits was a great inspiration and a methodological compass. Their scholarship centers on how women in the nineteenth century trained, and how different exercise philosophies competed for legitimacy with adherents of each arguing that their approach produced a culturally and morally superior body over others. Their work also corrects flawed cultural theories about the physicality of Victorian women, which have seen them as attempting, at most, light callisthenic exercise. All reference gymnastics training and its influence on these training practices. This thesis will continue their work by demonstrating men’s use of gymnastics’ to develop traits considered manly and desirable at various points in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

18 Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 51-66. 19 Jan Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women, 1800- 1870, (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1998); Ann Chisholm, “Nineteenth-Century Gymnastics for U.S. Women and Incorporations of Buoyancy: Contouring Femininity, Shaping Sex, and Regulating Middle-Class Consumption.” Journal of Women's History 20.3 (2008): 84-112,219, accessed August 31, 2015, https://muse-jhu- du.ezproxy.csusm.edu/journals/journal_of_womens_ history/v020/20.3.chisholm.html; Roberta J. Park, “’Embodied Selves’: The Rise and Development of Concern for Physical Education, Active Games and Recreation for American Women, 1776-1865,” in Sport in America, From Wicked Amusement to National Obsession, David K Wiggins, ed. (Illinois: Human Kinetics, 1995), 69-93. 11

Chapter Descriptions

Chapter one describes the three most popular systems of gymnastics training in the

United States during the nineteenth century: German gymnastics, New Gymnastics, and Swedish gymnastics, specifically examining how their theories reflected contemporary concerns regarding military readiness, physical health, and moral well-being. It also charts their introduction into

American physical culture and their influence on American thought surrounding physical education, namely that gymnastics was for the purpose of developing moral, disciplined, and physically balanced individuals, which could be accomplished through the practice of specific movements and styles of exercise.

Chapter two describes the introduction of gymnastics, specifically German gymnastics, into American military training for cadets at West Point and for the rest of the Regular Army.

Elements of gymnastics, such as its promise of discipline and balanced physical development, made it highly appealing to the officers of the United States Army. The chapter will also discuss how gymnastics inclusion was part of a larger effort to modernize the United States military in order to ensure it was prepared to act on an international theatre of war. Importantly, the chapter notes the shift away from gymnastics training to competitive sport in the military as ordered from high-ranking officers who saw more value in team sports and boxing for developing martial spirit despite gymnastics earliest theories regarding the need for military preparedness.

Chapter three describes the state of gymnastics in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century and its transformation from a system of physical and moral development to a competitive sport, both within the United States and on an international scale with the Olympics.

The chapter also discusses the controversy surrounding American gymnasts seeming indifference towards gymnastics as an international competition and sport enthusiasts’ indifference towards 12 gymnastics with the primary example of the 1904 St. Louis Olympic Games connected to the

World’s Fair Exposition.

This thesis is founded on an underlying assumption that the way Americans sought to change their bodies and the bodies of others warrants historical analysis. Gymnastics training is part of a larger cultural heritage, not just of America, but also of the entire world because it is a training system for the human body. In the United States, gymnastics has its origins in this history of immigration as a deeply cherished and celebrated practice for Germans seeking a better life in America, then adding their traditions to the culture that initially viewed them with suspicion. Gymnastics was touted as a health and moral improvement system, a method of physical training, a means of conditioning men for combat, an educational tool, and even an international sport. The legacy of gymnastics in America and in history is a reminder to us all:

Movement matters. 13

14

Chapter One: Essential Gymnastics Practice at the Boston School of Gymnastics in 1890 looked and sounded more like a

series of military drills than an exercise class. Students formed orderly lines, standing on pairs of

footprints painted on the wooden floor. More experienced students grouped towards the front of

the floor space, allowing novices to watch and duplicate their movements. A drill instructor,

Baron Nils Posse, or one of his devotees, led the class, standing off to the side. When the

instructor shouted, “Atténtion!” all the pupils assumed the starting position: legs straight, heels

together, toes pointed out forming a ninety-degree angle, bellies tightened and chests protruded.

Students pulled their arms and shoulders back, dipping their chins slightly to allow the head and

spine to fall into alignment. This posture had a special place in American culture symbolizing

strength. A similar posture was used to model “Washington as a Free Mason,” a lithograph

envisioning America’s first president as a pillar of stability for the republic.20 It was also based

on the standard soldier’s posture with which instructors and critics often compared it.

Keeping time with the drum-like rhythm of his voice, the instructor guided the students through a progression of movements. They began with simple bending motions of the torso and the limbs, hinging of the shoulders and hips, folding at the belly and expanding the chest. From there, movements increased in complexity and difficulty. After completing the introductory exercises, the students would split into groups and spread about the gymnasium. Under the

guidance of more instructors or senior pupils, they clambered up ropes suspended from the

ceiling, jumped atop and over vaulting horses, balanced on narrow beams, and navigated along

horizontal bars arranged throughout the studio’s equipment. The exercise apparatus also

20 Nils Posse, The Swedish System of Educational Gymnastics, (Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1890), accessed August 13, 2015, http://babel.hathitrust.org.ezproxy.csusm.edu/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t41r6pf5k;view=1up;seq=5, 34; Timothy Winkle, “Brother Washington’s Apron: A Masonic Mystery,” accessed August 20, 2015, http://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/2011/02/brother-washingtons-apron-a-masonic-mystery-part-1-of-3.html 15

included bar stalls for stretching drills, ladders, and assorted parallel bars set at varied heights

where students raised themselves by their arms. The students tested and trained at the limits of

their bodily control, moving through ever more intricate positions, shifting faster and faster

through the drills until an instructor might call for student to perform a “Zigzag, serpentine,

downward, headfirst, through vertical ladder!” maneuver.21 If done properly, the student

executed the movement without visible strain, snaking downward through the ladder rungs

before dismounting and returning to a position of attention until called to act once again.

Middle-class men of Boston performed these drills, and subordinated themselves to their

instructors, not only because Swedish Gymnastics was one of the newest and most highly praised

exercise system of the time, but also because by striving to better themselves, they could leave

the gymnasium better men.

Americans were familiar with gymnastics exercise long before Nils Posse brought them

to Boston. Gymnastics training had been practiced in the United States in various forms since

the first quarter of the nineteenth century, although it was known about as early as the 1810s.22

Medical “authorities” such as Russell Thatcher Trall recommended it for purposive exercise.

Other health-reform writers operating between the 1830s and 1860s such as Sylvester Graham,

John Alcott, Catherine Beecher, and Charles Caldwell prescribed gymnastics as a worthy supplement to hygienic living and a temperate diet. Even if walking in the open air and labor in the outdoors were the chief activities connected with healthful and moral life, gymnastics had its

21 Nils Posse, The Swedish System of Educational Gymnastics, 115. 22 Trall was also involved in what historian Harvey Green termed quasi-medical and pseudoscientific philosophies like phrenology, which will be relevant to later discussions of gymnastics and Social Darwinism. To learn more about Trall and his treatment philosophies, refer to The Hydropathic Encyclopedia (1852), The Illustrated Family Gymnasium (1857), and The True Healing Art (1880) Green, Fit for America, 63; Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful, 46-59 16

places of practice as well. Graham, arguably the most notable and prolific health writer of the period, wrote in his A Lecture to Young Men:

Let the patient, like a rational and intelligent being, promote the tone and action of his organs, and general vigor of his system, by active exercise; and let him exhilarate himself, by free and copious draughts of the pure air of heaven!...Let him go to the gymnasium…let him ride on horse-back, and walk and run and jump: or labor on the farm; and avoid sedentary habits.23 The fact that Graham remarked on the presence and benefit of gymnasiums in antebellum

American indicates that gymnastics, if not widely used, was still known to the American people.

However, definitions of gymnastics throughout the antebellum years would have been

ambiguous at best. Just like “exercise,” the word “gymnastics” was used to describe nearly any

organized series of movements. Examples included gymnastics of dance, fencing, and

gymnastics especially designed for the face and eyes.24 This was likely not the kind of

gymnastics Graham referenced, however. Until the 1850s, gymnastics did not have a ubiquitous

definition in New England. However, by that time, physicians and health writers like RT Trall

and Charles Caldwell adopted the seemingly new and now fashionable practice of German

Gymnastics as part of a holistic health treatment that catered to their patients’ needs. An

important source of gymnastics’ appeal was from their connection to medical authorities in

continental Europe, including, Baron Nils Posse, who called himself a medical gymnast. Born to

nobility in Stockholm Sweden in 1862, Posse served in the Life Grenadier Regiment and studied

for the two-year course offered at the Central Institute of Gymnastics at Karlberg. He took

medical training along with educational and military gymnastics, graduating on his twenty-third

23 Originally from Graham’s A Lecture to Young Men, page 39, but cited from John Money’s, The Destroying Angel, 69-71 24 Posse, The Swedish System, 2 17

birthday in 1885.25 After graduating from the gymnastics institute, Baron Posse traveled to

America to visit the vice-consul of Norway, and afterwards took up residence in Boston for the

specific purpose of inviting physicians there to attempt medical gymnastics and to create a new

movement for their use in patients’ treatments. As he wrote in his 1891 manual on Swedish

Gymnastics, Americans understood gymnastics to refer to a system of exercise for the restoration

of health, the development of strength, and “the preservation of the physical powers.”26 By

1889, with the opening of the baron’s Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, founded with the

backing of philanthropist Mary Hemenway, Americans already had their own experiences and

opinions of gymnastics system. Their attitude could reasonably have been one of confusion. In comparison to Diocletian Lewis’ New Gymnastics or the culturally entrenched movement practices of German Turnverein clubs, Posse’s Swedish Gymnastics was an upstart system of exercise.

By the 1890’s, gymnastics training was widely expected of both white boys and men in the American middle class, especially in the northeast. It was believed to impart self-control, encourage symmetrical development of the human body, correct physical defects, and to preserve the vital forces. In this way, gymnastics reflected a mixture of the three ideal forms of

American middle-class masculinity that gender historian Anthony Rotundo posited were dominant in the late 1890s. This shows that Americans chose their fitness regimens and physical activities based on what they felt was lacking in society at the time, and the gymnastics was culturally relevant as a vehicle for obtaining these qualities. Early German gymnastics contained

25 Leonard, A Guide, 322; Intensely physical, he was known to be a vigorous man. His surplus of vitality drove him to expend his excess energies with numerous extracurricular activities. He was a member of the Stockholm Gymnastic and Fencing Club, the Gymnastics Association, the Rowing Club, and two skating clubs. He later went on to win a title as amateur champion in fancy skating. 26 Posse, The Swedish System, 1 18 overtones of militarism and undertones of racism, stressing the importance, both in the system’s origins, but also its purpose, to preserve the vitality and superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and

Germanic races. Americans took this idea to heart, turning gymnastics training into a vehicle to preserve the people of their fledgling nation. Gymnastics was one of many ways they sought to train strong, moral men that could protect their country, despite its origins abroad.

As a cultural import from Europe, gymnastics was unique in that it was the first true fitness movement to sweep across the United States in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. It was a supplement of fitness from an older culture meant to gird the new nation against potential threats. After the Civil War, once America’s taste from conflict had soured,

New gymnastics brought a shift away from the militarized gymnastics first brought from

Germany. It denounced heavy lifting and other elements of German gymnastics perceived as aggressive, and focused more on play. However, despite distancing itself from German gymnastics, New Gymnastics could not conceal its origins within the German system and methods from contemporary German physical educators. It also continued arguing the movement was the cure for moral and physical woes in the American people. Finally, Swedish gymnastics replaced New Gymnastics in the 1890’s as American men sought method for engraining a disciplined and militaristic manhood within the country, as concerns for the

Nation’s military readiness heightened in the last years of the century.

The European Connection

Gymnastics was a foreign import to the United States, as was physical education in general. In the preface to his 1926 Guide to the History of Physical Education, Professor Fred

Eugene Leonard noted that there were no manuals in the English language to elucidate these systems that did not credit past civilizations or foreign lands. His curiosity compelled him to 19

gather all the European texts he could on the subject and he took a summer trip to Germany in

1896 as part of his efforts to accomplish this. Through study, Leonard concluded that Americans

had contributed little to the cumulative human knowledge of physical education. They were, in

fact, the consumers of a European product, or perhaps byproduct of European culture.27

Gymnastics became popular because it supplied something that Americans in the early nineteenth-century thought their country desperately needed: a way to strengthen its people. On the frontier, men and women had the natural elements to contend with, but in urban areas,

Americans sought some way to recapture the physical prowess of their colonist ancestors. To do

this, they were forced to look across the Atlantic to the lands those ancestors left behind. They

did not have to wait long, as soon they were joined by those trained in the knowledge they

desired.

German immigrants in search of new lives or fleeing the revolution and

counterrevolutions of 1848 crossed the Atlantic to settle in the United States. They were less

than welcome in eastern cities as nativist organizations actively, and often violently, opposed

their presence. Turnverein clubs, the first of which was the Cincinnati Turngemeinde,

established in November 1848, were formed of men who shared a sense of pride in being

German as well as familiarity with gymnastic exercise.28 It also helped them demonstrate a

strong, united front against Nativist aggression. After the Civil War, attitudes toward Germans

shifted. However, long before New Englanders finally came to accept German immigrants as

some of their own, the first gymnasia of America were opened under the supervision of German

27 Leonard, A Guide, v-vi 28 Green, Fit for America, 98 20

refugees, namely Karl Beck and Karl Follen, students of the father of German gymnastics,

Friedrich Ludwig Jahn.

German gymnastics, as it was known in America, was first developed by Jahn during

Napoleon’s occupation of the German States after the Prussian army’s defeat in the early

nineteenth-century.29 Militarist and romantic nationalism were hallmarks of German gymnastics

from the time of its inception. Jahn sought to revive the vitality and fighting fitness of the

Prussian people to resist their French invaders. His system of gymnastics was the method with which he proposed to accomplish this. Jahn combined elements of sport and exercise with

German traditions and history into his gymnastics, and instructed his pupils to spread these teachings to others. Karl Beck and Karl Follen, two German educators who emigrated to the

United States, were some of Jahn’s first students. Of the two, Beck was chiefly responsible for the success of the first physical education program in American that incorporated gymnastics.

At the school known as Round Hill, established in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1825,

Beck implemented what contemporary historians recognize as the first formal physical education program for students in the United States.30 The program was based upon the German

gymnastics of Jahn, and as Beck taught it, discipline and morality were primary benefits of this

movement practice. On gymnastics, physical education, and their effects on the bodies and

spirits of young people, Beck had this to say:

If in the addition to regularity in the use of exercise, the kinds of it are so arranged that the several powers of the body may successively be brought into action and gradually led to greater exertions, it will not be long before the physical being assumes a new appearance, and in addition to the acquisition of a control of the body, beneficial results

29 Jahn developed his system by adapting the gymnastics theories of Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths (1759- 1839) 30 Leonard, A Guide, 233; Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful, 71-81. 21

will be visible in general industry, deportment, and morals. The attempt, therefore, to provide the various means for gymnastic exercises merits to be encouraged.31 The gymnasium Beck assembled for this task was an outdoor replica of the Turnplatz, an open-

air gymnasium designed from Jahn’s treatise, the Deutsche Turnkunst or German Art of Turning

(1816).32

Beck eventually left Round Hill, but he and gymnastics found a lasting home at Harvard

University. There, Beck took a position as a professor of Latin and reunited with his fellow

gymnastics enthusiast Karl Follen. Follen had arrived in 1825 and became Harvard’s first

professor of the German language. Together, Follen and Beck established the first college

gymnasium in United States history in 1826, converting one of the dining halls of Harvard into a

training facility.33 Beck and Follen found support among the faculty at Harvard, many of whom

studied in Germany and returned to the United States strongly enamored with the German

peoples’ physical and romantic ideals. As health reform swept through New England cities in

the following years, the university’s medical professors strongly urged their students to follow

Beck and Follen’s instructions. Likely, these physicians were integral to the spread of

gymnastics exercise through the universities of the eastern United States. Without belief in the

scientific foundations of the German System, the regimen might not have gained the traction it

did. Historian Harvey Green points out that few physicians or educational reformers—whose

training was far less rigorous than now—put any stock in systematized exercise for health, but

almost all of those who did had studied in Europe, and were familiar with German and Swedish

gymnastics. More importantly, the students who studied at Harvard also studied German

31 Karl Beck from “Some Souvenirs of Round Hill School,” as quoted from Leonard’s A Guide to the History of Physical Education, 233 32 Leonard, A Guide, 234 33 Green, Fit for American, 90 22

Gymnastics, and with it, entertained theories connecting physical training with moral improvement.

German Gymnastics

In 1828, Beck published a translated version of Jahn’s Deutches Turnkunst. This was the first true iteration of German gymnastics in the United States, and its pages contained more than just exercises. The book encapsulated the training practice Jahn spread throughout Germany and described how Beck and Follen instructed the students at Harvard, and the components of its training system demonstrate not only how Jahn thought students needed to train, but also the aggressive elements of gymnastics that Americans found appealing. In the preface, Beck was self-deprecating, apologizing for any liberties he might have taken when translating Jahn’s words, but maintaining that what he produced was an attempt to convey the true meaning behind

Jahn’s teachings, some of which might have been lost. Whatever remained, however, the positive reception German gymnastics received in New England reveal how it reflected contemporary American values surrounding the relatively new concept of fitness.

As Jahn taught it, region, religion, politics, and even climate would effect the “art” of gymnastics, but the essence would remain the same: the culture of the body, which was true across all borders and in all languages. German gymnastics were always intended to restore the proportion of the moral and physical education in man, the latter of which Jahn considered neglected. It was, according to Jahn, a man’s duty to cultivate his body as well as his mind.

National days, celebrating the formation of a country and the loss of life claiming, “that blessing with their heart’s blood, might be proper occasions to shew [sic] to the nation that her sons are 23

able to preserve what their fathers have obtained.”34 The text makes it clear that the role of

gymnastics was to improve men’s bodies and to give them the strength and skills to defend the

land of their ancestors from foreign invaders. Given the concerns for the sustainability of the

United States in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, gymnastics, as Jahn described them,

would have appealed to educators and patriots concerned with the continued health and the

continued existence of their country.

Jahn’s gymnastics focused on developing students’ ability to perform tasks. Through

learning and executing the exercises he prescribed, students would also develop their bodies. Of

the exercises themselves, Jahn wrote, “All exercise has its law and rule, method and discipline,

measure and end. In gymnastick [sic] exercises one thing follows from the other; the single

exercises supply and complete each other, and must be practiced by turns.”35 Students were to

strive for perfection in an exercise before progressing to the next. However, they were

discouraged from constantly practicing only one exercise, as this would ruin the culture and

balance of their body. Progression was the organizing principle of the training and it was Jahn’s

intention to be as orderly as possible. At the time, he considered gymnastics too new to

approach its instruction flippantly. He advised instructors to make accurate accounts of each

student’s frequency of practice and their progress, both in skill and bodily development. He

wrote that, “it is well that the inferences, drawn from observation, should be founded upon

certain facts, not vague suppositions. The duty towards the public, and the cause of physical

education, demands such an accuracy.”36 Jahn’s instructions to track students’ progress continued through the nineteenth century and influenced the gymnastics that followed his

34 Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, A Treatise on Gymnasticks, Taken Chiefly from the German of F.L. Jahn. Translated by Charles Beck, (Northampton: Simeon Butler, 1828), 151,152. 35 Jahn, A Treatise, 153. 36 Ibid, 156. 24

system. There are also many other elements of German gymnastics that can be observed in later systems in the United States.

Similarities between German gymnastics and other systems included the use of preparatory exercises. Students performed previously dictated drills before carrying out a single

exercise on the equipment or performing free gymnastics.37 Besides learning to run, jump, climb, raise oneself up by the arms on horizontal and parallel bars, and vault a wooden horse,

Jahn’s gymnastics included common activities of labor. Carrying, both of “inanimate bodies,” and various objects was a highly prized drill. Jahn wrote that, “The chief excellence [in carrying] consists in the ability to continue for a long time; and to have strength for other movements, at the same time.”38 Students carried bags filled with various weights, poles, and

they also carried one other. But these seemingly mundane tasks were tinged with the militarism

for which Jahn was known. Within the carrying exercises, Jahn explicitly instructs his students in

the proper manner of transporting guns.39 The physical education of German gymnastics was a

curriculum full of elements of combat.

From the instructions and even the descriptions in the text, it was clear Jahn wanted his

students prepared to fight and Beck translated these ideas from German to English and included

them in his training of students. Among the classes of exercises were those classified as

“Throwing Exercises.” These included shooting various weapons including bows, crossbows,

and firearms. Practice with the rifle was especially encouraged, not because the aim was to train

crack marksmen, but, “[because] every one ought to have a familiar acquaintance with firearms

37 The apparatus included parallel bars, horizontal bars, poles and ropes for climbing, vaulting horses, and dumbbells. However, there were also more eclectic tools for special drills. 38 Jahn, A Treatise, 121. 39 Ibid, 122. 25

and know how to use them.”40 Throwing, as Jahn, or rather Beck, wrote, was deemed one of the most important kinds of exercises, “both for strengthening the arms and sharpening the eyesight.” The manual included preparatory exercises for “Throwing,” and instructions for charging, loading, and aiming rifles, bows, and crossbows in case the reader was not familiar with such apparatus. Another throwing exercise was the forerunner of the modern shotput:

“Throwing By Stretching The Arm Which Was Before Bent.”41 Students held cannonballs from

six to twenty-four pounds at their neck, hurling them across a field. Since Jahn thought it

impossible to hit anything accurately with such weights, he recommended it primarily for

developing the strength of the arm. Unlike modern competition, there was no mention of

measuring students’ distances to decide a winner. Indeed, while these drills were certainly

martial in their nature, Beck’s translation emphasized their physical training aspect over

competition.

There were, however, contests of various kinds, all tinged with martial character, but all

explicitly recommended for bodily development. There were group and pair competitions in

“drawing,” a sixty-foot rope that were precursors to the simple game of tug of war. There were

also several forms of wrestling. Jahn allowed matches of one on one, two, three, and contests of

many against many opponents. These could take place on apparatuses of all kinds, from the

vaulting horse to the parallel bars. In one contest, students even hopped about on one foot

attempting to knock their opponent to the ground. However, Jahn did not seek to breed

animosity between his students. He wrote that, “It ought especially to be borne in mind, that

every wrestle is a contest of strength, with the object of measuring and increasing strength and

40 Jahn, A Treatise, 105. 41 Ibid, 105. 26

activity, not injuring the opponent.”42 Elements of the self-control so prized by later physical educators were present in the rules for conduct during drills. When at the gymnasium for instance, no talk but what related to the exercises was allowed, and fights of a non-gymnastic

nature were never tolerated. Jahn wrote that, “Whenever one of the wrestlers begins to become

angry, the wrestle should be immediately stopped.”43 However, just because Jahn did not want

his students fighting did not mean he would allow them to abstain from practice. Wrestling was

not a negotiable exercise. Rule number forty-four in the chapter, “Management of a

Gymnasium,” stated that, “No one shall refuse a challenge for wrestling, unless when unwell,

tired, or prevented by some evil; dress shall not be an excuse.”44 If Jahn’s gymnastic training

was meant to prepare students to defend their country, then they could not refuse a chance to test

their limits or develop strength.

For strength training with weights, German gymnastics made special use of leverage and

shifts in the center of mass of an object to supply additional resistance. Lifting weights with the

arms held perpendicular to the body was considered particularly strengthening to the arms, and

indispensable for gymnastic work. Describing the challenge of lifting a staff loaded at one end

with metal rings, Jahn wrote, “To lift a weight of two pounds at a distance of 50 inches from the

hand, requires a considerable degree of strength. It increases the difficulty of the exercises, to

keep the staff stiff for some time, when it has reached the horizontal line.”45 As for dumbbell

exercises, Jahn favored a curved-handled bell over the common straight-handled variety. He warned the reader to ensure the “gymnick,” as he described his pupils, was well practiced with the light-weight dumbbells and the preparatory exercises before attempting heavier weights.

42 Jahn, A Treatise, 115. 43 Ibid, 117-118, 125, 127. 44 Ibid, 161. 45 Ibid, 120. 27

What would appear a relatively obvious warning was accompanied by a note that light could be

exchanged for heavy, “after an apparent increase of strength…If this is not observed, the muscles

will be exerted too much, and weakness, instead of increase of strength, be the consequence of

this exercise.”46 In fact, the preparatory arm movements for the dumbbell drills were simply the

unweighted version of the drill. Once the student achieved competency they could begin with

the lightest bells, and gradually increase in weight, adding to their workload whenever the bells

they were using did not exhaust them. Again, here is the simple but all-important element of

progression. Students also had to demonstrate self-control to avoid training beyond their abilities, which might stall or even reverse their progress.

Jahn’s German gymnastics was about developing strength, adaptability, and courage. His students did not just need to be healthy, they needed to prepare to fight an enemy. It is no wonder the contemporary government officials in German grew wary of the elderly Jahn and his teachings. After all, his manual could be used to train an army. However, even armies need diversion. Jahn included several gymnastic games for his students, both to add variety, but also to further instill martial ideals in their training.47 The “A.” game on page 142, one of the first

games in Jahn’s treatise, called for one student to stand opposite some twenty to one-hundred students and ask, “[A]re you afraid of your enemy?”48 The crowd would attempt to run past the

student to the other side of the field without being touched and becoming, “prisoners.” The

object of the game was to test fleetness of foot and quick wit in evading capture, but the question

the student asks the crowd demonstrates that Jahn was preoccupied with thoughts of battle. In

fact, one of the other games was a mock skirmish. In a wooded area, preferably with young

46 Jahn, A Treatise, 121, 123. 47 Ibid, 141. 48 Ibid, 142. 28

pines, thick underwood, small hills, and ditches, students would organize into “garrisons” of

towns and castles, and through bouts of wrestling between different garrisons, take enough of the

opposing side prisoner until they could no longer, “resist in open field and battle.”49 Instructions followed to avoid open battles whenever success was not guaranteed, advice on scouting an enemy, and how to conduct an ambush. Jahn wrote that only gymnicks experienced in wrestling, and often only older students of 16 and 17 years, should play this game.

Jahn’s training was entirely utilitarian and designed to replicate situations of war and martial preparedness. There were even exercises to prevent dizziness and fear of heights. Jahn’s method for accomplishing this was simple, just like his proscription against refusing to wrestle.

He inoculated his gymnicks to their fears and discomforts by making them face them head on.50

Exercises for dizziness included somersaults and cartwheels, and climbing towers and ropes

would cure fear of heights. However, some of the other exercises were almost baffling in their

execution and purpose, such as number ten of the Single Exercises in the appendix: “Taking up a

coin, or something like it, with the mouth from the earth, at a distance little less than one’s own

length, without touching the ground with the body.”51 The drill might have been used to develop

dexterity, but it is also conceivable that Jahn would give his students such a difficult task to test

their minds. For the flexible gymnick who could bend at the waist and put their head between

their heels, it would still strain their limbs, but the less dexterous students would have to exercise

their powers of creativity. In this way, everyone was forced to grow.

There was an element of community that suffused the gymnastics work as well. Jahn

wrote that while the gymnasium, “is not theatre, and no one has a right to expect a spectacle,”

49 Jahn, A Treatise, 145. 50 Ibid, 133-134. 51 Ibid, 133. 29 spectators looking to educate themselves in gymnastics were always welcome, as was their critique of any student’s ill conduct. “Thus the whole publick [sic] discharges the office of overseers of morals.” On morals and laws, Jahn wrote that in the gymnasium they must hold more power than in any sovereign land. Jahn also supplied his readers with plans to establish a gymnasium, as well as a code of conduct for instructors. The instructor was a moral and physical role model to his students. He should, “carefully avoid becoming ridiculous to the younger boys on account of striking awkwardness and indexterity [sic],” and busy himself with studying the principles of all parts of gymnastics so as to have a working knowledge of the exercises, even those he was no longer capable of performing.52

While Jahn’s life of training and organizing gymnastic societies throughout the German

States ended in 1852 at Freyburg after a brief bout of illness, his students, Beck and Follen would continue his work in New England. However, it could have been Jahn himself teaching the classes. In 1827, while Beck continued his instruction as both professor and head of

Harvard’s gymnasium, Follen resigned his position as head of the Boston Gymnasium against much protest from his students. Follen wrote to his students, crediting them with “the patriotic views to which the Boston Gymnasium owes it existence, and the efficient zeal, with which these exercises have been carried on.”53 A member of the Boston Gymnasium, Dr. Warren, solicited

Jahn himself to travel to America and replace Follen, and was sorely disappointed when the expense of such a relocation proved too great.” Beck remained a staunch proponent of gymnastics and many of the political ideals of his teacher, and was an active member of the community. Throughout the remainder of his life, Beck supported the abolition and Unionist

52 Jahn, A Treatise, 152. 53 Leonard, A Guide, 238. 30

causes. He even founded and drilled with a private volunteer militia, the Twelfth Unattached

Company until his death in 1866, when he suffered a stroke while horseback riding with his

daughter and the Harvard riding master. Beck’s impact on the community of Cambridge was

evident on the day of his funeral. All the stores in the city were closed, and Harvard President

Thomas Hill and Cambridge Mayor J. Warren Merrill served as Beck’s pallbearers.”54

Jahn pupils delivered his gymnastics to the United States. Their work in Boston and

Cambridge laid the foundation for gymnastics’ growth and development as a system of physical training over the nineteenth century. Beck’s translation of Jahn’s treatise also tied the concepts of progression, practical strength, and discipline to its practice in the United States. The first

Americans to look for physical training to improve themselves took these concepts to heart, drawn in as they were by the patriot implication that they had to be prepared to fight off enemies at any moment. However, other German immigrants traveling to America in the nineteenth century also contributed to American’s perception of gymnastics and physical culture, including

its connections with law, peace, social order and national prosperity.

The Next Gymnastic Movement

Beck and Follen were not the only German-American immigrants to train with gymnastics in America, and their students were not the only people to benefit from gymnastics.

As Harvard students and new fitness associations were forming, inspired by German gymnastics, augmenting their American identity, others used gymnastics to preserve their traditions.

Germans were one of many groups forced to flee their homeland during one of the most

turbulent periods for continental Europe in the nineteenth century: the revolutions of 1848.

54 “Warren House: Charles Beck,” The Committee on Degrees in Folklore & Mythology, Harvard University, accessed October 1, 2016, http://folkmyth.fas.harvard.edu/warren-house-charles-beck. 31

German immigrants to the United States organized into societies much like those of their

homeland. In these new Turnvereine they practiced Deutsche Turnkunst to acclimatize to their

new home and preserve their cultural identities, organizing around shared social and political

ideals. They practiced activities that extolled the virtues of the Prussian people: strength,

adaptability, and quite often, drinking beer. One such activity was “Turning,” as they referred to

gymnastics. However, their political activities, their status as immigrants—and their training

with Jahn’s gymnastics—made them many enemies. Since German gymnastics encouraged their

militaristic traditions, often quite publically, military drill and uniforms were common at

Turnfests, gatherings of the Turnverein, and a cause for concern for many Nativists.

By the 1850s, more than seventy Turnverein clubs were established in the United States.

They organized picnics, parades, athletic competitions, and maintained their own Turnplätze and

indoor gymnasiums. They were not by any means the only immigrant group to bring physical

culture to the United States. Other immigrant groups organized athletic events to reinforce their

ties of kinship so far from home. For example, Scottish immigrants formed Caledonian Club

contests to celebrate their heritage. These contests included such displays of strength as the

caber toss and stone throw, reminiscent of the circus attractions of the era. By 1860, almost

every circus had some kind of strength act, further imprinting the concept of strength in the

culture of America.55 These exhibitions of strength and large body size in the mid-century

coincided with reports of the effective training methods of Parisian gyms that utilized heavy

weights, garnering the attention of American physicians who began to examine the role of bodily

development in creating and maintaining healthy bodies more seriously.56

55 Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful, 185. 56 See Hippolyte Triat’s upper-class Parisian gymnasium for further reference, Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful, 185. 32

Though Americans admired Germans and Scots for their physical prowess, their status as

immigrants caused native-born Americans to view them with suspicion, even if they did try to replicate their feats of fitness in university gymnasiums and entrepreneurial health spas. German

Turners came from militant backgrounds, and proudly advertised their loyalty to the old country

by marching in old military uniforms and carrying weapons. Occasionally this resulted in

violent encounters with Nativists and rival labor groups.57 Historian Harvey Green writes that in

1855 the central committee of the Turnvereine, the Turnerbund, formally announced its

opposition and the expected opposition of all its members to slavery, to Temperance and the

prohibition of alcohol, and to Nativist groups such as the violent Know-Nothing Party.58 Turners

also had the opportunity to exercise their military heritage during the Civil War. Many Germans,

and many of those Turners, fought in the conflict, mostly for the Union. Their service in war,

along with changes in American educational institutions reflecting a more German model of both

intellectual and physical development, aided in German assimilation. However, the German

Turnerbund had little direct influence on physical education until Dr. Hartwell took note of their

existence after an educational trip to Europe and formally requested their presence at the annual

meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education at Brooklyn in

1886.59

Gymnastics and Physical Culture

While new generations of Germans were becoming culturally acceptable to Americans,

universities and health reformers modified and reverse engineered their gymnastics for their own

use. Due to Beck and Follen’s early efforts, some physicians and fitness advocates of the mid-

57 Green, Fit for America, 98. 58 Ibid, 99. 59 Leonard, A Guide, 329. 33 to-late nineteenth century even thought gymnastics had an appeal of nostalgia. In his contributing chapter to The Harvard Book, published in 1875, Thomas W. Higginson recounted one of his earliest memories of Cambridge. He wrote, “I looked out timidly from my father’s gateway on what is now Kirkland Street, in Cambridge, and saw the forms of young men climbing, swinging, and twirling aloft in the open playground opposite…this early recollection must date as far back as 1830.”60 Beck and Follen left a lasting mark on their students, who took their ideas and made them their own.

Higginson was a Boston Brahmin and spokesman for Muscular Christianity, a movement that envisioned a strong, powerful Jesus figure with a fit congregation to match His muscular and moral ideal. An enemy of weakness in all its forms, Higginson chastised the American protestant clergy in an 1858 essay entitled, “Saints and Their Bodies.” Higginson perceived a disconnection between the spirit of the average American and the priestly caste. He wrote that,

“One of the most potent causes of the ill-concealed alienation between the clergy and the people, in our community, is the supposed deficiency, on the part of the former, of a vigorous, manly life.” Clergy, he noted, were known to be puny and sedentary, even from a very young age.

Despite their role as spiritual role models, their physical condition left their congregations unimpressed with the results of virtuous life, forcing them to turn to secular powers for ways to obtain their earthly desires. Higginson wrote:

Physical health is a necessary condition for all permanent success. To the American people it has a stupendous importance, because it is the only attribute of power in which they are losing ground. Guarantee us against physical degeneracy, and we can risk all other perils,-

60 Leonard, A Guide, 236 34

-financial crisis, Slavery, Romanism, Mormonism, Border Ruffians, and New York assassins.61 American clergy could either shape up—literally—or ship out their flocks to other shepherds,

namely Catholic and Mormon ministers. Higginson’s remedies were sport and gymnastic

exercise. He thought clergymen should try lowering and raising themselves on a horizontal bar

and hanging from a rope each day for a few months. This was classic gymnastics. It would not

only reinvigorate the clergymen physically, but also revive the passion and energy of boyhood so many men dismissed in the pursuit of secular success. Higginson lamented over the loss of sport after the age of youth. “American men,” he wrote, “how few carry athletic habits into manhood!

The great hindrance, no doubt, is absorption in business.”62 Higginson thought the men of his

generation were forgetting the benefits of gymnastics, but if he knew how physical education in

New England would change in the coming decades, he might have cautioned that not all

gymnastics were created equal.

New Gymnastics for Man, Woman, and Child

From 1860 to the 1890s, the port city of Boston was the most receptive and enthusiastic

city concerning the physical culture that men like Higginson thought the American people so

desperately needed.63 This was in large part due to Harvard University and its Department of

Medicine. Boston and Cambridge had long been nesting grounds for some of the most popular

exercise and medical systems developed in the nineteenth century. By the 1860s, a popular

exercise craze for women and schoolchildren, known as New Gymnastics, was sweeping the

city. Its creator was Diocletian Lewis, and his system showed a backlash against the German

61 Thomas W. Higginson, “Saints and Their Bodies,” in Atlantic Monthly 1, (1858), 82-95, in Major Problems in American Sport History, ed. Steven A. Reiss, (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 84 62 Higginson, “Saints and their Bodies,” 85 63 Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful, 219 35

gymnastics of the past, using Americans’ desire for less-disciplined activity in the aftermath of

domestic war to argue against the ideals of the system that laid the foundation for its existence.

Dio Lewis, as he preferred to be called, was an advocate of exercise and a pioneer of the

Movement Cure in the United States during the 1860s. However, though he was a practicing

doctor of homeopathic medicine, he was not a full-fledged physician.64 Lewis began work as a

teacher, and developed a reputation for avoiding corporal punishment with his students. Instead,

he sang with them and led them on long treks into the woods near their Fremont, Ohio

schoolhouse. He gave up his teaching position after he was bitten by a malaria-carrying

mosquito, perhaps on one of these outdoor excursions. His subsequent battle with ague sparked

a newfound interest in medicine and in 1845 he traveled to Boston and attended Harvard Medical

School for a short time. Ultimately, he was unable to complete his degree for want of money.

Lack of formal education, however, did not stop Lewis from practicing medicine.

Lewis decided to approach medicine in a less formal fashion. He took an interest in

homeopathic medicine after studying it under his temporary partner, Dr. Lewis McCarthy.

Together, they established a practice in Buffalo, New York. In 1851, Lewis was awarded an

honorary Doctorate of Medicine from the Homeopathic Hospital College of Cleveland, Ohio,

legitimizing his practice after many years.65 After experimenting with exercise as medicine for

his wife, Helen, Lewis sold his medical practice and toured Paris. There, he secured materials

for his lectures on physiology, attended clinics at the city’s hospitals, and toured Parisian

64 Homeopathy itself was developed in Germany around 1800. This method of treatment was to inoculate the patient to an illness by introducing them to a similar, weaker stimulus that mimicked its symptoms. The practice spread to the United States in 1835 when Dr. William Wesselhoeft established the first school of homeopathic medicine in Bath, Pennsylvania, Green, Fit for America, 7-8. 65The institution was only two years old, but they appreciated Lewis’ work as editor of the The Homeopathist, Leonard, A Guide, 253-254 36

gymnasiums. Lewis’ lecture tours in the United States and his time in Europe impacted his

theories on physical education. He observed that:

The old, or German gymnastics, the one so common throughout our country, was obviously not adapted to the classes most needing artificial training. Athletic young men, who alone succeeded in the feats of that gymnasium, were already provided for. But old men, fat men, feeble men, young boys, and females of all ages—the classes most needing physical training—were not drawn to the old-fashioned gymnasium. The few attempts that had been made to introduce these classes to that institution had uniformly and signally failed. The system itself was wrong.66 Lewis’ New Gymnastics was an attempt to cater to the unwell masses who could not—or would not—attempt the German style introduced earlier in the nineteenth century by Beck, Follen, and

the Turnverein. The solution, according to Lewis, was to give the old system a fresh flavor of

fun.

Lewis’s New Gymnastics was almost entirely based on games and dance, drastically

differing from German gymnastics. It included several free gymnastics and dumbbell exercises

that Lewis put to music, but these were the greatest similarity between his system and Jahn’s.

Unlike German gymnastics of the early nineteenth-century, which included martial contests,

Lewis’s games were entirely fanciful. Whereas Jahn and Beck gave their students’ tools to make

war if necessary, in his 1862 manual, The New Gymnastics for Men, Women, and Children,

Lewis showed his pupils that exercise equipment made excellent toys. Exercises in the manual

were not divided by their function, but rather what piece of equipment was used. Lewis gave

little scientific explanation for his methods. He only devoted page space to issues of a medical

basis when praising his own system. At the end of the “Rings” section, he wrote that the twenty

pages of instructions detailed not even a quarter of the possible exercises with the rings, but “this

66 Leonard, A Guide, 255. 37

series is admirably calculated to develop those particular muscles which are almost universally

deficient in the people of the United States.”67 How such calculations were done was left to the

reader’s imagination. Lewis provided no explanation beyond stating that the present state of the

country demanded his exercises.

Throughout New Gymnastics, Lewis made mention of the public’s physical deficiencies,

and how he designed New Gymnastics to be, “A system of training adapted to the American

people.”68 However, to read the text, it would appear that the most important element of the

training was how it was adapted to music, the scores for which Lewis would gladly sell to his

readers. The most precise and scientific instructions Lewis included were that during compound

exercises, “involving the action of the arms and legs, the wand is always held at an angle of 45

degrees above the horizontal…Without this it would be impossible to keep time to the music.”69

Historians have unfortunately misinterpreted some of Lewis’s exercises. Harvey Green, author

of Fit for America, described Lewis’s sixty-eight wand exercises as “akin to modern barbell lifts.”70 In fact, the wand exercises, many involving deep lunges, planting one end of the wand

on the floor and “charging” it—lunging and thrusting the hips forward and back—were clearly

movements proposed for dance. There were even wand exercises that replicated the rifle drills

illustrated in contemporary military training manuals. Another example of confusion in the

literature is Lewis “pangymnastikon.” This apparatus, often attributed to Lewis, was nothing

more than a set of gymnastic rings with added stirrups for the feet, and used in ways that would

make a Turner cringe. In fact, it was a German invention, designed by German physician and

67 Dio Lewis, The New Gymnastics for Men, Women, and Children With A Translation of Prof. Kloss’s Dumb-Bell Instructor and Prof. Schreber’s Pangymnastikon, (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), 41. 68 Lewis, New Gymnastics, 43. 69 Ibid, 49. 70 Green, Fit for America, 188. 38

physical educator D.G.M Schreber.71 Anyone with passing knowledge of dumbbell exercise,

military training, gymnastics, or calisthenics should be startled to hear that Lewis claimed his

exercises were in any way original.

New Gymnastics was popular nonetheless. For some twenty-five years Lewis’s system was the favorite of the schoolteachers and gymnastic trainers of New England, and his manual earned ten new editions over that time.72 However, although this is not often discussed, Lewis

borrowed heavily from others’ work. The 1862 manual, for instance, contained a translated

manual on dumbbell training by a Dr. Kloss and the pangymnastikon training from, “the

distinguished Schreber,” whom Lewis often used as an obscure medical reference.73 Lewis even

relied on other physical educators for his training theories. For example, Lewis advocated using

light weights. However, he allows that in his early years of teaching gymnastics, he advocated

the use of heavy dumbbells, even up to one hundred pounds, and even trained with them himself.

He noted that, “As my success had always been with heavy weights, pride led me to continue

their use, long after I doubted the wisdom of such a course. For some years I have employed

only those made of wood.”74 However, except for a reference to Schreber, who condemned

heavy weights in favor of lighter dumbbells, Lewis offered no explanation for such a change. He

only argued that if one were to use lighter weights by his methods, “assuming a hundred graceful

attitudes, and bringing the muscles into use in every direction, requiring skill and followed by a

71 Lewis, New Gymnastics, 172. 72 Green, Fit for America, 184. 73 Lewis, New Gymnastics, 59, 102; This was Professor Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber, a German physical educator who, before his death in 1861, concerned himself with the problems of children growing up in urban settings at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Schreber left behind a troubling legacy. He was virulently against masturbation, designing several apparatus to prevent it, and despite his overt concern for the welfare of children, ruled his own with an iron fist. 74 Ibid, 60. 39 harmonious development,” then a light bell was enough.75 Lewis made the parabolic argument that if one forced a carriage horse to draw a heavy cart, the animal would soon become stiff.

This effect was comparable to what happened when someone lifted heavy weights. This was similar to recommendations from Swedish gymnastics to maintain flexibility, and it was no coincidence. Lewis knew of the Swedish Movement Cure, as well, and said that it matched his slow, light movements quite well and was suited for invalids.76

Where Lewis differed from German and Swedish gymnastic instructors was his zeal for business. New Gymnastics required a number of novelty exercise pieces, including bean bags, swing sets, prescribed musical accompaniment, and even rosewood rings—carefully polished to a sheen to entice genteel girls to join in the fun, or so Lewis believed. Part of the items appeal was that they could be used in a variety of settings, not just the gymnasium. Schoolteachers could pass out beanbags and rings to their students, play them some music, and direct the practice, but the cost could be substantial. Unlike Lewis’s pricey playthings, Swedish and

German gymnastics used equipment that was cheap to construct.77 Their equipment was congruent with the goals of their training. Ladders, ropes, parallel bars, and wooden horses simulated any of countless obstacles a man could encounter in the outside world. Nils Posse shared the Germans’ affinity for utility and ubiquity in their choice of the equipment and considered that equipment should be cheap to construct as a rule. Training in New Gymnastics was likely anything but inexpensive, and seemed more designed for escapism than physical preparedness.

75 Lewis, New Gymnastics, 61. 76 Ibid, 69. 77 Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness, 272-273. 40

Lewis’s equipment included clubs, wands, rings (both suspended from the ceiling and

free), a special device called a “shoulder pusher,” birds’ nests (possible a predecessor of a

basketball hoop), a metal gymnastic crown, bags filled with dry beans, and rubber balls.78 All of

the exercises required coordination and agility. New Gymnastics called for grace and flexibility,

following the comparison of the carriage horse to the draft animal. In the bag games, for

example, the student might throw the bag over his shoulder to his partner—from behind his or

her back. Students could perform relays, mass conducted free-exercises, and moderate tests of

strength with the bags—how many bags could a student balance on their forearms, folded across

their chest, for example. Gone was the wrestling and the games of war. While each movement

in a training—or rather, dance—sequence, be it club, dumbbell, wand, or rings, followed a

system of transitioning from one position to another, exercises were no longer progressive in their difficulty. However, Lewis could not keep all of Jahn’s theories out of his New

Gymnastics.

German gymnastics’ attention to weight leverage and the common theme of labor remained part of New Gymnastics. For example, the club exercises that Lewis prescribed included raising and holding the clubs out from the body.79 Holding the clubs horizontally

replicated German gymnastic exercise of raising weights on the end of a long pole. The

advantage, or rather mechanical disadvantage this gave the student, was the ability to use lighter

weights and still perform hard work. It also helped the students’ shoulder strength considerably,

which, according to Lewis, was of great importance to the future of the American people.

However, in providing challenging exercises, the clubs were exceptional. From Lewis’s cautious

78 Lewis, New Gymnastics, 18-28. 79 Ibid, 87. 41 instructions for pin running, it is clear he did not wish exercise would bring his students even the slightest discomfort.80 In one particular running game, a student was to run to a bag of beans between twenty-five and fifty pounds, bear it to their shoulder and run the gamut of the gymnasium hall. A small child could be substituted for the bag if necessary. But, Lewis cautioned, “it will be found a very severe exercise…the first few efforts will make the runners very lame. No person should run more than once on the first day. If in the enthusiasm this should be forgotten, a painful soreness will on the following day serve as a reminder.”81

Soreness, stiffness, or calluses of any kind were discouraged. Unlike Jahn’s tough training style,

Lewis allowed his students a considerable amount of freedom—at least, as long as they followed his advice.

In his written works, Lewis had a habit of denigrating those who did not share his philosophies, usually to prove a point. For instance, to warn against the use of heavy dumbbells, he described an episode, where he had occasion to laugh at a group of young men that came to his gym and asked to train with iron dumbbells. He advised they use light bells, but they would not accept the rosewood substitutes whatever Lewis’s protests. Therefore, he obliged them. One can detect a tone of satisfaction in his words when Lewis recounted what occurred: “they used them part of one evening, and when asked the following evening, which they would have, [the wood or the iron] replied, ‘the wooden ones will do.”82 Lewis not only included the story in his books, he also wrote about it in an article for the August 1862 edition of The Atlantic.

Lewis was deeply concerned with appearances. This is clear by the ways in which he wrote about gymnastics, his critics, and even with his explanation of his exercises with the

80 Lewis, New Gymnastics, 94. 81 Ibid, 95. 82 Ibid, 60. 42 rosewood rings, which he described as, “entirely new, and beyond all comparison, the best

[exercises] ever devised.”83 Partners provided resistance against the student’s movements with the rings, and assisted one another in various forms of stretching. Here, there is another aspect of

German gymnastics: the element of community. The games, free exercises, and ring drills were performed with fellow students and therefore, also with an audience. This partially explains why the ultimate purpose of Lewis’s exercises was to cultivate grace of movement. Of many exercises, Lewis wrote that they, “[present] a fine, animated appearance to the spectators, [and] brings all the muscles of the body and limbs into fine play.”84 New Gymnastics were a kind of play, an improvisation of German gymnastics and other systems of exercise Lewis had been exposed to in Europe. The manual was full of games and illustrated figures of partners engaged in what anyone would find difficult to call anything other than dance. Whereas Swedish and

German gymnastics stretched their trainees to ever more extreme ranges of motion and flexibility in pursuit of a balanced and battle-ready physique, Lewis’s dance routines moved students through veritable tangles of limbs in search of fun. It could be, given the turmoil of the Civil

War, that such diversion was preferable to harsh discipline. However, Lewis’s New Gymnastics was appealing not just because of its fanciful nature or its combination of several other training systems. Its popularity was due in no small part to Americans’ concerns about their health and the health of their children. Those concerns, however, would change once again near the end of the nineteenth century as some Americans felt the time for games was ending.

Swedish System Introduced in Boston

83 Lewis, New Gymnastics, 28. 84 Ibid, 33. 43

For middle-class Americans of the late nineteenth-century, the appeal of gymnastics was not the extra physical exertion or the opportunity to join in the cultural pastimes of European immigrants, especially those of the poorer classes, but its promise of physical regeneration and control. This ideal was best exemplified in the Swedish “Movement Cure.” This system, often erroneously attributed to Peter Henry Ling by historians and even later physical educators like

Posse, was a variant of Swedish gymnastics and practiced ostensibly to treat numerous medical conditions. It provided relief to the patient by increasing blood circulation to certain areas of the body through a series of motions including bending, pressing, twisting, and stretching.85

According to the mid-nineteenth century physician, its true creator, Charles Fayette Taylor, the

Swedish Movement Cure was successful in the treatment of lateral curvature of the spine

(scoliosis), paralysis, indigestion; constipation; consumption; diseases “incident to women”;

derangements of the nervous system, and other chronic illnesses.86 Health reformers considered

these conditions as almost pandemics throughout the United States, caused by the over-

specialization of labor and growing amount of mental work required by men, women, and

children. The Movement Cure—often erroneously connected with Swedish Gymnastics due to

the wrongful credit given to Ling—was one of many treatments with which middle-class

Americans experimented. However, German gymnastics and New Gymnastics were not

forgotten. Universities such as Harvard continued to foster German gymnastics, similar in

execution and principle to the Movement Cure. While their instructors preferred to differentiate

the systems from one another, they all related to Swedish gymnastics in their effects of restoring

85 Green, Fit for America, 94. 86 Charles Fayette Taylor, Theory and Practice of the Movement-Cure, Second Edition, (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1864), accessed 1/15/16, https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=MPANISv1mh0C&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS. PR1. 44

health and German gymnastics in their pursuit of strength. Swedish gymnastics, then, had a

significant scientific and medical legacy when Nils Posse began teaching it in 1889.

Posse’s first three years in Boston brought lackluster results considering his efforts. In

that time, Baron Posse wrote a pamphlet on medical gymnastics, completed an abridged Swedish

translation of an article on massage from a prominent physician, and translated the Swedish

physician Björnström’s history of hypnotism into English. The last endeavor gave him a

stunning fluency with the English language that greatly aided his gymnastic instructions in the

United States. Posse’s work was soon noticed. In 1888, Mary Hemenway, one of Boston's

wealthiest and most philanthropic women, offered him employment. The Hemenway family had

a history of involvement in physical education. Mary’s son had donated the funds for the new

gymnasium built at Harvard College in 1879. Hemenway perceived a weakness in Boston’s

children. A friend suggested she consult with Posse regarding Swedish gymnastics, and in 1888,

Hemenway asked Posse to demonstrate the system to more than two-dozen women teachers for the purpose of instructing their students. With his forceful personality, command of the English language, and professional training of Ling’s system, Posse executed her philanthropic wishes, providing instruction to teachers of the Massachusetts’s education system until 1890, when another instructor named Claës J. Enebuske replaced him at the Boston Normal School of

Gymnastics. A month later, Posse opened his own gymnasium on Irvington Street and that same year, Posse published his first full-length training manual detailing Ling’s teachings: The

Swedish System of Educational Gymnastics.

At his Irvington Street gymnasium, Posse led classes in educational gymnastics and continued to publish works dedicated to the subject of Ling’s Swedish gymnastics until his death in 1895. The early twenty-first century, physical education historian Fred Leonard considered 45

Posse’s manual the most complete compendium of Ling’s system published at the time in either

the English or the Swedish language.87 Posse authored a supplemented manual in 1894, a year

before his death, entitled The Special Kinesiology of Educational Gymnastics. The manual was

almost three times as long as the 1890 version, and contained 267 illustrations and an analytic

chart. It sold for $3.00. Posse’s greatest legacy, however, was to convince Mary Hemenway

that the Ling system could strengthen the children of Boston. From there, Posse’s influence

could be felt in several ways. His voice echoed about the walls of his studio. The force of his

words emanated from the pages of his manuals, as well as the articles he contributed to the Posse

Gymnasium Journal. After his death in 1895, his wife, Baroness Rose Posse, took over

editorship of the journal, continually extolled the virtues of gymnastics and advocated its

instruction into the early decades of the twentieth century.

Posse’s gymnasium and the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics produced hundreds of

gymnastics instructors trained in the teachings of Ling. The late patriarch of Swedish

gymnastics based his system on ideals of graceful human movement through all conceivable safe ranges of motion, always with an eye towards the symmetrical development of the body and the use of prescribed motions to attain this end. Ling’s gymnastics consisted of freestanding

movements, balancing on suspended beams, bodywork on the horizontal bar, maneuvers on

ropes and ladders, and lifting on the parallel bars. They differed from German gymnastics by

excluding weights, clubs, and rings entirely. However, similar to Jahn’s gymnastics, the

discipline of the Swedish system was created in the context of strife and concerns for the

continued health of its country of origin. This was to be ensured through the practice and

attainment of self-control, both in body and in temperament, not just martial strength. While

87 Leonard, A Guide, 326. 46

German and Swedish gymnastics were practiced, and often discussed, within the context of what

qualities constituted an efficient soldier, Swedish gymnastics in the United States appealed more

for what changes it promised to make on the students’ bodies, and how those adaptations would

improve their character.

Graceful Movement

Posse’s system progressed through movements from the starting position. The types of

exercises progressed as follows: Introductory exercises, Arch-flexions, Heaving-movements,

Balance-movements, Shoulder-blade movements, Abdominal exercises, Lateral trunk- movements, Slow leg-movements, Jumping and vaulting, and finally Respiratory exercises.88

The movements of Posse’s system, based on the teachings of Ling, were couched in the late

master gymnastic instructor’s attention to anatomical function. Quoting Ling, Posse wrote at the

start of the chapter explaining the movements, “Stretching a limb or making frictions along a

muscle, nerve, or [blood] vessel, in a direction and manner and with a velocity and force all

previously determined, and for a distinct purpose, are instances of gymnastic movements.”89

Although left to the very end of the progressions, respiratory ability was of the greatest

importance. Based upon sensibility and science once again, it was understood that increased

respiration occurred involuntarily before any physical activity, with heightened tension in the

muscles allowing more concentrated absorption of oxygen than when the body was at ease.

Thus, any movement or position that inhibited respiration was rejected from practice.90 The

more skillful a person was in utilizing their body for strength, the more out of breath they

88 Posse, The Swedish System, 5. 89 Ibid, 29. 90 Ibid, 30. 47 became when they fully exerted themselves. However, this was not the case with Swedish

Gymnastics, in which the goal was grace and bodily control.

Movement, Relative Strength, and Progression

Swedish educational gymnastics focused on two goals: the ideal development of the student’s body and the development of their character through application of movement.

Specifically, this referred to the student’s respiratory and digestive health, their posture, and their ability to perform certain feats of relative strength. Relative strength training revolves around performing physical actions of a difficulty measured by a student’s level of development, both in body and in skill.91 It also refers to using the weight of one’s own body for resistance, altering the challenge of a movement by shifting the position and mechanical advantage or disadvantage created by the student’s posture. This was similar to German and New gymnastics’ use of clubs or weighted poles to force students to perform more work, but through changing the students’ posture instead of handing them equipment. Hanging from a parallel bar by the hands can be difficult for a weak or overweight student. If, while hanging, they raised their feet and legs until they were suspended out in front of the body, forming a parallel line with the ground, the student would have shifted their center of mass and created what in physics is known as a moment arm.

Gravity acts as a force pulling the legs and feet, and the muscles of the midsection must remain contracted in order to resist lowering them. This greatly increased the difficulty of the original exercise, simply hanging from the bar. More practiced trainees at Posse’s gymnasium could hold this position for quite some time, while a new trainee might need to swing their legs back and forth to achieve the position for even an instant. While German and New gymnastics had a

91 Posse, The Swedish System, 3. 48

progression of weights and sequences of movements, Swedish gymnastics progression was

determined by the difficulty of a particular exercise.

Nils Posse drilled new students through the most basic exercises. According to Posse and

Ling’s standards, most Americans were incapable of even standing or breathing correctly. The

reasoning was that faulty postures fashioned over lifetimes made learning to maintain proper spinal alignment without conscious effort quite challenging for all but the naturally gifted. An advanced student with several years of practice in the gymnasia would have started with the same fundamental movements as the beginner, but then gradually cycled through more complicated progressions of movements, until—still under supervision—they performed the upside-down, serpentine, downward climb, perhaps even between two ropes instead of ladders.

This was a not only a simple and effective safety measure, preventing students from attempting movements before they were ready and possibly injuring themselves, it was also an important release of control to the instructor.

For middle-class men of the period whose life and work revolved around pushing themselves to the psychological breaking point in the fulfillment of their duties in the office, to

relinquish the choice of advancement to another was seen as both an act of submission and a

preservation of the vital forces. Nils Posse wrote that, “We should practise[sic] gymnastics with

health for aim, and not for the sake of excelling others in doing some particular exercise,—not for the sake of muscular development.”92 Vanity, like that of Lewis’s gymnastic dances, and

ambition, such as German gymnastics quest to acquire strength and overcome ones opponents,

were not only frowned upon in Swedish gymnastics, they were considered dangerous. No

92 Posse, The Swedish System, 3. 49

movement was to be attempted before the instructor deemed the student proficient in all the

preceding exercises, capable of demonstrating the appropriate level of anatomical balance. Even

the definition of what constituted a movement applied to this theory.

In gymnastics terms, a movement is simply a change from one bodily position to another.

What complicated the theory, and demonstrated the growing concern for bodily control in the

Swedish system, was that both positions had to be anatomically sound and the transition made

with ease.93 Gymnastics produced the ideal body, but performance in gymnastics was seen as dependent upon the student’s poise and control of movement. A student was not to strive merely to complete more difficult maneuvers, but to perform every movement with grace. The less

effort and strain a student required to execute even the most complex of movements, the more

skillful and capable they were in the eyes of their instructor and their peers.

In the gymnasium, the instructor was the ultimate arbiter of the student’s ability, and for

some, the discipline required to await and follow the teacher’s spoken “words of command,” was

too much to ask.94 Critics of gymnastics argued that obeying the instructor’s orders was too

militaristic for ordinary citizens. Posse contended that discipline should not be restricted to the

military, but should be taught to everyone to teach them the virtue of self-control. This could be

done without “any encroachment upon the pupil’s ‘rights as a free citizen of a free country,’” for

“[o]nly those who know what restriction means can truly appreciate liberty, and make good use of it.”95 With discipline and practice, a student could eventually obtain enough skill to advance

through the levels of exercises.

93 Posse, The Swedish System, 29. 94 Ibid, 19-25. 95 Ibid, 23. 50

Gymnastics, be they Swedish, German, or “New,” all used what was viewed as

anatomically scientific movement, or so they claimed, but were by no means interchangeable.

Each system had its idiosyncrasies and dogmas, but their purpose, result, and most fervent

advocates were similar, if not the same. Gymnastics were always taught in groups, meaning they

were generally organized around community and racial values and were supervised by an

instructor of some kind. They used movement patterns performed in a graceful, controlled

fashion with a variety of equipment that was supposed to be cheap, accessible, and would

simulate real-world situations. Finally, Americans of almost all ages and sexes could perform

gymnastics to create well-developed bodies that emulated the ideal forms represented by Greek statuary. The exercises helped teach self-control and poise, and aided in the health of the respiratory system. However, as Lewis complained in the 1860s, young men seemed the only group that naturally engaged in gymnastics training without coercion or enticements.

This presented an intellectual quandary. According to physical culturists such as

Higginson, Lewis, and Posse, men had to engage in physical activity to become whole and fully

functional. The type of physical activity required was the main source of debate among physical

culturists of the time. Posse was thought to have advocated mixed or “eclectic” systems of

training before his death. This endorsement was taken out of context from a debate on the merits

of Swedish, German, and the so-called American Gymnastics—but not New Gymnastics. This discussion was held in 1892 at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of

Physical Education in Philadelphia. When it came time for Baron Posse to speak, he was said to have professed not a preference for Swedish or German systems, but simply the practice of gymnastics in America as according to the needs of the individual or institution. Later in the

1897 edition of The Posse Gymnasium Journal, Baroness Posse corrected what she felt was a 51

misinterpretation of her husband’s words. She quoted his Special Kinesiology of Educational

Gymnastics in which he argued that Swedish gymnastics under the teachings of Ling would be

superior for the physical culture of any student, as long as they were, “not violated by narrow restrictions…”96 However, narrow restrictions were what most thought Swedish Gymnastics entailed.

Understanding why gymnastics became so popular in America over the last decades of the nineteenth-century cannot be done through labeling one system more important than another.

Gymnastics was introduced by European immigrants in the earliest part of the century, took root in the university system, and left an imprint for physical education in learning institutions across the country. It had its most powerful impact in New England cities such as Boston because they were already receptive to “scientific” disciplines that were purported to impart health, vitality, and moral progress. Gymnastics was therefore a progressive system of exercise that Americans of the upper and middle classes would adopt intermittently as present circumstances made the purported results of gymnastics training more desirable. Four appealing qualities of gymnastics were the development of self-control, the ideal of preserving vital forces, the physical action and performance of the drills, and the perception that positive action such as exercise could improve the health of white races. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, there was also a new enthusiasm for military-like or martial forms of training, which made German and Swedish gymnastics, with their rules of subordination and their ideals of national service, more appealing.

The merits of military service pervade Swedish and German gymnastics literature and history. Baron Nils Posse was a military officer before emigrating to the United States. Jahn

96 Rose Posse, “Editorial Comment,” in Posse Gymnasium Journal, Vol. V, November 1897, No. 10, (Boston: Posse Gymnasium Club, 1897), accessed July 20, 2016, http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.30000117678288;view=1up;seq=31, 11. 52

trained his pupils in military tactics and to increase their fitness for the purpose of combating

invaders. German immigrants such as Beck and the Turnvereine maintained their militant roots

through public marches, rifle drills, and their service during the Civil War. Even Lewis

demonstrated that his New Gymnastics produced healthier, stronger soldiers than standard

military drills during a meeting of the Massachusetts Legislature in 1864.97 Military service was also celebrated and connected with the practice of gymnastics and other physical activities in

1890s exercise literature. For example, the Posse Gymnasium Journal often contained articles featuring distinguished practitioners of Swedish gymnastics and these figures were quite often military officers and members of the German or Swedish nobility. Examples included Major

Victor Gustaf Balck, who according to the author—quite often Baroness Rose Posse, the major was a man possessing “something we call personal magnetism in a very high degree.” With regards to his character, the baroness noted that “One can understand how a body of men would willingly follow him wherever he might lead. Noble, honest and brave, he is honored and beloved by high and low.”98 The article details the major’s early interest and aptness for

gymnastics exercise in his student days in Sweden. It also mentions that there was no regular

order of promotion in the Swedish military. Men were bestowed with the rank that reflected

their self-control, their character, their experience, and their merit as soldiers.

97 In 1864, Dio Lewis persuaded the Massachusetts legislature to adopt his system of exercise for use in response to a bill that would have made military drills mandatory for all male students. He accomplished this by having one of his pupils, a young soldier, display both military drill and New Gymnastics for the legislature, and to attest that his robust health and flexibility were owed to the benefits of the latter system. His demonstration indicated that gymnastics not only trumped military drills for developing healthy men, but also that they were more effective more making good soldiers; Mary F. Eastman, Helen Cecelia Clarke Lewis, The Biography of Dio Lewis, accessed December 28, 2015, https://books.google.com/books?id=J67qXsLvJOQC&pg=PA285&dq=the+biography+of+dio+lewis&hl=en&sa=X &ved=0ahUKEwjxquDwl9DKAhVX1mMKHeEXCHIQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=the%20biography%20of%20 dio%20lewis&f=false, 87-88. 98 Rose Posse, “Major Victor Gustaf Balck,” in The Posse Gymnasium Journal, V. 3 January (1895), (Boston: Posse Gymnasium Club, 1895), accessed 1/12/16, http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.30000117678296;view=1up;seq=9. 53

Victorians, both English and American, have classically been characterized as neurotic in

the extreme.99 Since the early nineteenth-century, health and moral reformers wrote and spoke about the body as both a vehicle for salvation and the rawest of flesh, easily infected and corruptible. Certain historians such as Peter N. Stearns and James C. Whorton have written extensively on the flaws and foibles of American’s efforts to protect and purify the soul through paying careful attention to the state of the patient’s body. Rapid changes in temperature, unclean air, and games of chance conducted in dank, low-lit drinking houses and theatres could lead even the most stalwart Christian soul astray through affecting the body’s fragile constitution. There existed a hypocrisy of American middle-class culture, with its simultaneous worship of sincere expression through posture and concealing one’s imperfections through highly intricate codes of polite conduct. Inherent in all of these features of American social consciousness was a highly tuned awareness of one’s body and position in space. The shield of an individual’s virtue was forged out of the intangible attribute of willpower.

Since middle class moralists saw temptation lurking around every corner, pervading the growing cities of the East and Midwest, it was imperative to educators, reformers, and philanthropists that people cultivate willpower to their fullest potential. Nils Posse maintained that gymnastics practice instilled willpower in the student through constantly testing their attention to form and forcing them to maintain control of their limbs in complicated sequence.

The popularity of gymnastics with women’s groups involved in Temperance organizations during the 1860s and 1870s, the same women to whom Dio Lewis marketed his New

Gymnastics, suggests that the reasoning was appealing enough when presented along with the

99 Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870, (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1982); Peter N. Stearns, Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America, (New York and London, 1999), Part II, Chapters 3, 4, and 5. 54

scientific tone of gymnastics’ theory.100 Once they saw gymnastics in practice, especially the

more complicated drills such as the handsprings, handstands, and traveling along the horizontal

bar, critics would have had difficulty arguing that gymnasts lacked control. Since the ultimate

goal was to perform each drill with grace and lack of visible strain, this would have heightened

the perception that gymnasts had reserves of mental and physical energy held in check.

Reformers and progressives had been searching for methods, both hygienic and preventative, to

protect the vitality and the character of the American people since the early nineteenth-century, and in the 1890s, they thought gymnastics accomplished this. German gymnastics gave

Americans their first taste of physical culture, a way to bolster their people with hard exercise that would ready them for conflict and keep them strong. New Gymnastics was a response to a desire for recreation over hard labor and thoughts of conflict, but also appealed to the ever- present concern over the health of the nation’s children. Swedish gymnastics arrived in time to teach those children, then grown and faced with the challenges of life in industrialized society, how to comport themselves with discipline and balance their own desires against the requirements of their community.

100 For more about Dio Lewis’s shrewd business acumen by tying his New Gymnastics to German Gymnastics and French Calisthenics, both systems by then notorious for their attention to physiology and so-called scientific theories of corrective exercise, refer to Chapter 8 of Jan Todd’s Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful, 212-236 55

Chapter Two: Military Gymnastics When Dudley Allen Sargent first took charge of the physical education program at

Harvard in 1882, he instituted the practice of administering a series of physical examinations on

all incoming male students. Sargent was interested in the boys’ bodies, but for purely scientific

purposes. He was an advocate of anthropometrics, the measurement of the human form to

establish optimum norms of function and to identify and correct any deviations. Among

Sargent’s observations, he noted that certain boys displayed marked imbalances of the shoulders,

left/right arm growth differences, and overdeveloped legs. Sargent, curious and interested in all things that could distort the body from his list of balanced, ideal measurements, inquired as to

where these boys were schooled. Having been from fairly well to do families, they were all

educated at public or private institutions. When Sargent investigated what kind of activity the

boys performed for physical training at their old institutions, he was unsurprised to find these

schools invariably employed common military drill instead of gymnastics for exercise. The

schools even went so far as to arm the students with empty rifles and put them through the

maneuvers of the popular Infantry Tactics, a guide to military training written by Brevet Major

General Emory Upton in 1866.

Disturbed by what he found, Sargent published an article that was read and discussed at

the annual meeting of the National Education Association in Buffalo, New York. In it, he

described the effects of military training on public school students. Sargent lauded Upton’s

contribution to military tactics. He praised the nation’s soldiers and the values instilled through drilling the youth with the late Upton’s routines. However, he then critiqued the practice. For

Sargent, it was clear that the imbalanced physiological effects of military drill could be just as 56

injurious to a boy’s morals as they were to their bodies.101 The implication was clear: if military

drills were injurious to the development and health of Man, then logically, the entire United

States Army could be compromised! Still, Sargent reassured his audience there was nothing

wrong with military training for young men that some corrective exercises could not fix. Free

gymnastics, he wrote, often associated with the Swedish system of gymnastics and Calisthenics,

could supplement the marching and standard “setting up,” routine of army drill in Upton’s

manual, thus preventing moral and physical deviancy. Sargent continued, stating that these

potential concerns, and their solution, was brought to the attention of military authorities years

before by one of their own so that they might correct the imbalances of their men and thus create

a better army.

Among the manly qualities Sargent and proponents of gymnastics thought were

beneficial to young men were discipline under harsh conditions and the ability to work in

concerted effort with other men to achieve some end. Soldiers needed more from physical

culture than coordination, however. “Young men could be taught to balance fours, waltz to the

right, glide to the left, or dance to the front in view of conquering the enemy and making

themselves graceful and well-poised at the same time. But this would hardly be the most direct

way of accomplishing the grand object of the soldier’s mission.”102 This mission, Sargent wrote

on, was the killing of as many of the enemy as possible while preserving the soldier’s own life

and the lives of his fellow soldiers, and to do so always in the service of his country. He added

that orders to fix bayonets and charge were not given for their healthful effects. This was

101 Dudley Allen Sargent, “Military Training in the Schools,” in Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Thirty- Fifth Annual Meeting of the National Education Association of the United States, accessed February 20, 2015, https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=AyAWAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GB S.PA920. 102 Sargent, “Military training,” 922. 57 precisely why physical training in the form of gymnastics was seen as important, not only to men like Sargent, but also to the officers of the United States Army. Gymnastics filled and corrected the gaps in general physical preparedness caused by military drill while inculcating moral and useful masculine values in young men.

In the late nineteenth-century American military, officers implemented gymnastics training alongside military drill to train their soldiers to possess complete control of their bodies while instilling manly virtues such as discipline, courage, and the ability to work in organized groups. Due to its past as a military training under Jahn’s methods and its perceived ability to cure soldiers and young men of fear, negligence, and uncivil behavior, gymnastics training was adapted after the Civil War from a physical education and health regimen into one of many activities thought capable of making men ready for military service. This can be seen in the popular literature of gymnastics organizations such as the Posse Gymnasium Journal, exercise manuals, and in military literature suggesting and approving of the incorporation of military exercise. Furthermore, political and moral reform rhetoric describing the necessity for bodily development in relation to military readiness and manly virtue around the turn of the century demonstrate the connection between the fit body of the soldier and the male spirit. Gymnastics training in the military was part of a larger effort to modernize the United States’ armed forces into a fighting force capable of competing and winning against industrialized world powers. The history of gymnastics training’s introduction into the military shows its lasting impact on the physical training of American military personnel, and reveals the social and manly values of the period. Gymnastics in the military made physical fitness and discipline the foci of soldiers’ training. Beyond the duty of service in the nation’s armed forces, masculinity also became defined with how soldiers’ conducted themselves and the strength of their bodies. However, 58 while the training systems enforced by the War Department reflected the emphasis on gymnastics, some officers did not find the training combative enough, and felt that competitive team sports such as baseball and football, as well as boxing and wrestling, were more in keeping with the militaristic manhood needed at the dawn of the twentieth century. While gymnastics left a profound influence on the military, on its ideals of discipline and fitness, the idea of the whole and balanced man could not compete with the sporting gladiator.

Military Drill versus Gymnastic Drill

Dr. Sargent was not the first physical culturist or advocate of gymnastics to argue against the purported health benefits of military drill. In 1864, at a meeting of the Massachusetts’s legislature, Dio Lewis gave a demonstration of two systems of exercise. Lewis led an army recruit fresh from basic training through a series military drills and then through a sequence of

New Gymnastics exercises. He did this to demonstrate that the first system produced imbalances in the soldier’s posture while the latter allowed the recruit to remain flexible and strong. While the details of what exact movements and drills Lewis used and his prior teaching of the army recruit are lost, the results are telling. The demonstration so impressed the Massachusetts legislature that they voted down two bills proposing the mandatory incorporation of military drill into public school curriculum in favor of the adoption of Lewis’ system of New Gymnastics.103

Lewis used the event as an advertisement for his own system, which was popular in most public schools in Massachusetts and in many schools throughout New England until the early 1880s.

Sargent’s later article against military drill shows that in the ensuing decades some public

103 Eastman and Lewis, The Biography of Dio Lewis, 80-88. 59

schools chose to incorporate military drill for their young male students in spite of Lewis’ demonstration.

Public favor for military drill in Lewis’ time was influenced by angst surrounding the

Civil War, just as political rhetoric regarding manliness and the need to demonstrate the physical fitness was used to spurn support for the Spanish-American War. Reformers and officials were desperate to find ways to reduce the number of killed and wounded young men. Making military training a part of a common school curriculum was meant to prepare them for war. Lewis’s demonstration argued that gymnastic exercise in the form of free movements that bestowed health and fitness in young men, and also prevented the amoral tendencies of an imbalanced body. While he might have persuaded the Massachusetts legislature that gymnastics was better for this than military drill, he may have also set a precedent to Sargent’s later point: that gymnastics could make soldiers better at their task.

Someone must have been listening to Lewis’ recommendations, or at least taking gymnastics’ benefits to heart. Upton’s Infantry Tactics was published for use by the United

States military in 1866, two years after Lewis’ demonstration. At the time of its publication,

Upton’s manual was the first revision to the federal army’s tactics and training in over thirty years, and it remained in circulation for all active military units from its first publication until

1891. At that time, a new standard of tactics was introduced, drafted by a board of military experts. In the preface to the new manual, the current Secretary of War, Redfield Proctor, declared the efficacy of the manual and his faith in the directions of the board of military experts that drafted it. In order to ensure uniformity of training within the army, Proctor wrote, all 60

exercises and maneuvers not listed in the new manual were prohibited.104 Although based on

Infantry Tactics, the same manual Sargent would later critique, the new manual established not

only the army’s intention to systematize their soldiers’ training, but also a recognized validity for

the methods and movement systems included for physical training, gymnastics among them.

One key change between the 1866 and 1891 manuals was the inclusion of more free

gymnastics exercises in the later version. Upton had dedicated a portion of his manual to the

“setting up,” of the soldiers. This was a practice of four free-gymnastics movements, exercises

for flexing and extending the arms and legs, combined with marching. Upton included these

drills to correct bodily imbalances and increase the strength of weak muscles, as well as to

encourage suppleness in the soldiers’ movements, expand their chests, and invigorate their

respiratory organs, thus increasing their fitness and coordination for future military drills and

combat maneuvers. However, four exercises were not enough for the War Department. The

1891 manual expanded on Upton’s “setting up” drills, more than quadrupling the number of

exercises from four to seventeen.105 This increase corroborates Sargent’s statement that the

military had begun to take the issue of physical training seriously. The army was not only aware

of the malformations caused by solely practicing military drill, but also the benefits of

gymnastics exercises to supplement their training regimens. The new manual even advocated

more systematic gymnastics training. After the description of the seventeenth drill, the raising of

the body by elevating the heels, the manual states that, “Whenever there is a regular system of

gymnastic instruction it may replace the setting up exercises.”106 This was a convenient way to

104Redfield Proctor, preface in Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, (New York: Army and Navy Journal, 1898), accessed March 25, 2016, https://play.google.com/books/reader?printsec=frontcover&output=reader&id=jfInAAAAYAAJ&pg=GBS.PA1. 105 Infantry Drill Regulations, 14-19. 106 Ibid, 19. 61

allow officers to train their men in full gymnastics routines without taking up more space in the

manual for military tactics and still following Secretary Proctor’s directive.

Upton’s manual and the 1891 standards of tactics provide an excellent measure of tracking gymnastics’ growing popularity and the perception of its effectiveness for training better young men and soldiers. Both manuals were read widespread throughout the United States

armed forces and in many public institutions. While Upton’s drills included firearms and

fencing, its fundamental movements began with free exercises.

Military Innovation

Physical training was not the only innovation that the United States military incorporated into their procedures in the late nineteenth-century. The Army, Navy, and all their constituents underwent changes to meet the rising standards of strength and technological capacity required by contemporary nations. Not only was this a time for producing better armaments, but also for training better soldiers, specifically those that could follow orders. Military historians Millet and

Maslowski note that, “By the 1890s the thrust of professionalization was toward creating a modern Army prepared for war, and the money and men allegedly needed to control the ‘White

Savages’ could be used for this primary mission.” This need to control the ‘White Savages’ of the United States, from a military command point of view, arose from the perceived lack of discipline in members of the National Guard, which had seen an increase of membership in the preceding years. The appeal of the volunteer service in the National Guard, according to Millet and Maslowski, was “Spontaneous martial enthusiasm, the social prestige of belonging to an elite group, and the appeal of physical fitness, discipline, and duty.” All of these factors sparked 62

a desire for military service near the end of the nineteenth century.107 General Sherman, commanding general between 1869 and 1883 was one figure who epitomized the progressive spirit in the military leadership of this period. Sherman also had a protégé who greatly influenced military affairs of education and training: Emory Upton.108

In 1875, Sherman appointed Upton, previously Commandant of Cadets at West Point, to

a commission assigned to propose Army reforms based upon study of foreign military systems,

which they did, extensively. Upton desired professionalism to be the rule of the day with the

military. America at this time relied too much on citizen-soldiers. Upton considered the

National Guard and state militias to be undisciplined, undertrained, and ultimately a liability to

the security of the nation.109 During a stint of studying military units in Europe, Upton was

exposed to the German military model of training and tactics and left for the United States

greatly impressed by the German armed forces. While he explicitly stated that the American

military should not become German to defeat their enemies, several of Upton’s proposed reforms mirrored the German’s decentralized organization and fierce national militarism. His manuals, and his time spent leading cadets at West Point, had a profound effect on the United States military and the mentality of its officers. So too, did gymnastics.

Sherman, and Upton with him, believed West Point was, as military historians Millet and

Maslowski write, “the Base of a Pyramid,” of military education.110 Sherman and Upton were

also instrumental in the formation of the Military Service Institution and its journal. Sherman

encouraged Upton’s work and pushed him to publish articles and manuals. Upton’s work

107 Millet and Maslowski, For the Common Defense, 264. 108 Ibid, 271. 109 Ibid, 272. 110 Ibid, 271. 63

dominated Army thought throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and well into the

twentieth.111 The War Department of this period established new practice, but it might be more accurate to describe their policies on military organization and training as efforts to legitimize the innovations spread by Sherman, Upton, and their followers. Many of the ideals coming out of West Point Military Academy and European militaries were spread to Army leadership through the articles and essays of the Military Service Institution Journal, including ideas

regarding physical training and its benefits for troops’ discipline, morality, and combat performance. Given the widespread acceptance of these ideas, the War Department selected those polices and training models it considered most effective, and most affordable.

Formerly, there were arguments against gymnastics or any other form of physical training grouped with military drill. Most of this resistance came from older soldiers. During the 1880s and 1890s, Civil War veterans expressed their consternation over the lack of martial qualities in younger men that they perceived warfare had granted them. Their solution, rather than a substitution of physical activity for combat to purge the man of excess energy and preserve his mental powers, was simply to have another war.112 However, these thoughts were not

universally shared. Some Civil War veterans did not recall the conflict as beneficial. As the

activities of the Arbitrationist movement and President McKinley’s reluctance to throw the

country into war with Spain demonstrate, American feelings over the “divine message” of war

cannot be generalized. Similarly, just because older generations perceived greater benefit from

111 Millet and Maslowski, For the Common Defense, 272. 112 Rotundo, American Manhood, 233-234; for more on the subject of jingoism in the late nineteenth-century, refer back to the seminal work of Kristen Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood. 64

pure military drill to instill martial virtues such as courage, strength, endurance, duty, and

principled sacrifice, that did not mean that the military leaders of the 1880s and 1890s agreed.113

One officer who succeeded in incorporating gymnastic drill and athletic training into soldierly culture despite the reluctance of the veterans was Lieutenant Colonel Herman Koehler.

Koehler was a contemporary of Sargent, an army officer, Master of the Sword, and the instructor

in gymnastics at West Point Military Academy from 1885 to the early 1900s. Koehler was

instrumental in the inclusion of gymnastics into cadets’ military drill in the late nineteenth-

century. Under the authority of the Secretary of War, he drafted a manual of free gymnastics that

was adopted by the United States Army in 1885. Similar to Sargent, Koehler performed

systematized anthropometric examinations on new recruits. For years before World War I,

Koehler restructured his training regimens to include more and more equipment and instruction

for the training of large groups of soldiers in gymnastics. The academy directors granted him extra training facilities and funds to procure the necessary wooden horses, rings, clubs, dumbbells, and barbells necessary to instruct hundreds of cadets. This allocation of resources

would indicate that the directors were impressed with the results of Koehler’s training.

While Koehler was considered by many to be the father of physical education at West

Point, he was far from the only military officer to encourage gymnastics and other physical

training in the United States Military.114 Many officers shared his belief in the power of physical

training. Several articles in the 1895 compendium for the Journal of the Military Institution of

the United States detailed important subjects related to the physical training of the American

113 Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood, 234. 114 Captain David J. Yebra, “Colonel Herman J. Koehler: The Father of Physical Education at West Point,” for The American Military Experience and the United States Military Academy, November 23, 1998, accessed February 28, 2016, http://digital-library.usma.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p16919coll1/id/14 65 soldier. These articles discussed topics including the perceived lack of physical fitness in the average soldier, the ruinous effects of unsystematic training, and the benefits to discipline, health, and moral fiber from athletic training. One such article, “Physical Training of the

American Solider,” by Lieutenant Edmund Luther Butts, related the physical training for enlisted men as opposed to Koehler’s cadets.

Between November 1893 and June 1894, Lieutenant Edmund Luther Butts took over gymnastics training at Columbus Barracks in Ohio. He noted that prior to his instatement as an instructor of gymnastics, enlisted men had been thrown into the gymnasium without proper instruction, “and the results could not but be more harmful than beneficial.”115 The lieutenant described how he transformed the simple barracks into a fair gymnasium and explained the system of instruction he used to train the men under his charge. He began and ended his training cycles with anthropometric measurements, much in the style of Sargent, Posse, and other physical culturists of the period. He included a table of the average changes in chest size, upper arm girth, waist circumference, and the soldiers’ high jump and broad jump improvements in feet.116 The training regime consisted of calisthenics, gymnastics, swinging Indian clubs, and hefting dumbbells in various exercises. While Lieutenant Butts made note that many recruits had an abundance of strength, having come from farm or labor backgrounds, he made the point of training these men in gymnastics to connect their bodies with their minds. Gymnastics was able to promote the balanced physiques valued by military and lay physicians while putting the strength of the common enlisted man to good use under the direction of a focused mind.

115 Lieutenant Edmund I. Butts, “Physical Training of the American Soldier,” in Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, accessed February 27, 2016, https://play.google.com/books/reader?printsec=frontcover&output=reader&id=Rto9AQAAMAAJ&pg=GBS.PR3, 499. 116 Butts, “Physical Training of the American Soldier,” 502. 66

Gymnastics was not just seen as a way to renovate the American soldier; it was an

important engine of modernization for the entire military. The military innovation pioneered by

Sherman and Upton was continued and encouraged by the officers that followed them.

Lieutenant Butts, for instance, wrote wholeheartedly regarding how modern ideas and tools had

replaced antiquated implements of war and antiquated customs, much to the improvement of the

service.117 These new innovations, especially in the realm of physical training with gymnastics,

had changed the shape and role of army drill to quell the “old soldier kick, against any

innovation in the usual tenor of his life,” as physical education training became a central piece of

the military experience, both for officer cadets at West Point and enlisted men across the

country.118 Officers like Colonel Koehler and Lieutenant Butts were at the forefront of that

innovation with their advocacy of gymnastics training, especially in their written work, on which

they occasionally collaborated.

Over the course of his career, Colonel Herman J. Koehler fashioned a physical education

program that required professional instructors, systematic programming and progressive

exercise, advocated for the funding of adequate gymnasia, and wrote several instructional

manuals that were in use until after WWI.119 These manuals had clear influence on how other officers trained their troops. In “Physical Training,” Lieutenant Butts even wrote of his correspondence with Koehler. He sought the senior physical educators’ advice in the proper instruction of the soldiers and included Koehler’s reply. Koehler listed five essential qualities of fitness and capability that physical training bequeathed the soldier, but the last concisely summarized their benefits: “To enable him to make his muscles subservient to his will. The

117 Butts, “Physical Training of the American Soldier,” 499. 118 Yebra, “Colonel Herman J. Koehler,” 1. 119 Ibid, 1. 67

importance of this education of mind over matter is one of the essential features of

gymnastics.”120 Courage, willpower, and discipline were the byproducts of physical training that

the military desired.

The Measure of Man

There are clear connections between gymnastics training, the perceived flaws in military training that might result with impaired performance on the battlefield, and the supplementation of gymnastics drills to increase soldiers’ fighting fitness and health. This shows a relationship between gymnastics and civic participation, specifically, civil service by defending the United

States from foreign enemies’ moral and secular attacks. There was also a connection between military service and manliness in the last years of the nineteenth century. One seminal work on

American masculinity and military service in the late nineteenth century is Kristen L.

Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood. While sometimes reductive in her examinations of

political rhetoric, Hoganson effectively demonstrates that politicians believed they could gain

public approval through appealing to American men’s martial appetites. Hoganson explains that,

“Because American men commonly associated the civic virtue necessary for democracy with the

manly character exemplified by soldiers, the dwindling number of Civil War veterans led a wide

range of men to fear that unless the nation forged a new generation of soldier-heroes through

war, U.S. politics would be marked by divisiveness, corruption, and weakness.”121 If, as

according to Hoganson, corruption and weakness were diseases in the eyes of American men,

then the training and service of the citizen soldier, especially the physically fit one, could provide

numerous manly qualities to admire.

120 Butts, “Physical Training of the American Soldier,” 505. 121 Kristen Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 10. 68

Advice manuals and reform literature of the 1890s supported this connection between

military service for one’s nation with the ideals of physical strength, and manhood. In the eighth

edition of his book, True Manhood, A Manual for Young Men: A Guide to Physical Strength,

Moral Excellence, Force of Character, and Manly Purity, author and member of the Purity

Reform movement, E.R. Shepherd, compared the physically fit man with the highest moral

representation of manhood he could imagine: the soldier. He also related the prowess of a

soldier’s body to his use as a warrior. Shepherd wrote, “The consciousness of strength and

agility makes a man courageous. He is like a soldier with his armor on, ready for battle. In time

of danger he is cool and ready for action; his nerves are under his control and quick to carry the

messages of the brain to the muscles, which are equally quick to respond.”122 Activists and

politicians lauded the soldier for manliness because of his readiness to serve his nation, and for

the public support they expected this stance to bring. Preparedness for action was a common

theme in many fields of public discourse, especially politics. In the introduction to a compilation

of Teddy Roosevelt’s speeches from 1901-1905, Alfred Henry Lewis, wrote this about American

men’s participation in the Spanish American War: “In war the sword supplants the reaping hook,

and the first duty of the citizen is to shed blood.”123 At this time, only men were citizens with full suffrage in government. Men had to know when to lay down the tools of their chosen trade and take up the rifle. In the 1880s and 1890s, however, not everyone thought the average American man was capable of good military service.

122 E.R. Shepherd, True Manhood, A Manual for Young Men: A Guide to Physical Strength, Moral Excellence, Force of Character, and Manly Purity, Also the Write Cross, Its Origin and Progress, (Chicago: A.B. Stockham & Company, 1891), accessed March 5, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=6cqEglwcHpQC, 325. 123Theodore Roosevelt; Alfred Henry Lewis, “Introduction,” in A Compilation of the Messages and Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, 1901-1905, (Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1906), accessed July 10, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=1eDcWfVfz6MC, xxxiii. 69

Memorial Day celebrations were held in increasing numbers throughout the country

during the 1880s and 1890s as veterans and their dead comrades were lauded for their service

and as examples of male virtue.124 As discussed in chapter one, in the late nineteenth-century,

there was great debate over the role of men and women’s participation in certain activities and their effects on their character. Leading up to the Spanish-American War, there were also concerns regarding men’s readiness to fight. In a section of his 1916 autobiography titled, “The

War of America the Unready,” Roosevelt wrote explicitly about the connection between civic virtue and military readiness. He also mentioned several qualities he found American men lacking. Recalling the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt wrote that, “In a regiment the prime need is to have fighting men; the prime virtue is to be able and eager to fight with the utmost effectiveness. I have never believed that this was incompatible with other virtues. On the contrary, while there are of course exceptions, I believe that on the average the best fighting men are also the best citizens.”125 The other virtues Roosevelt referred to are those of self-control, faith, fairness, good hygiene, and manners. Exercise and sport were two ways Roosevelt himself practiced and advocated to obtain these qualities. Historians such as Hoganson have examined the concerns surrounding manliness and its connection to activity, but few have understood or fully explored the connection between performing actions such as going to war or participating in exercise.126 Americans of the late nineteenth-century certainly did.

124 Rotundo, American Manhood, 234. 125 Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, (New York: MacMillan Company, 1916) Accessed March 24, 2016, https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=0D8OAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS .PA253. 126 For more, see Whorton’s Crusaders for Fitness and Stearns Battleground of Desire. Both with their more speculative and flamboyant style of writing alluded to possible connections between bodybuilding, gymnastics, and imperialism. However, their positions were of speculation. Whorton lacked the primary source materials to back up his assertions, and Stearns dealt more with the changing activities and relationships of the nuclear family. My research will demonstrate the clear connection between gymnastics training, perceived flaws in military training that might result with impaired performance on the battlefield (but also the acknowledgment that military needs are not 70

This was especially true in the case of many physical culturists. For example, Horace

Fletcher, a respected nutritionist and physical culturist who joined the National Council of the

Boy Scouts of America in 1911, recounted how his athletic activities influenced his civic participation in quite a militaristic way. In a letter to the BSA’s chief executive, he recalled that,

“At the time of the Sand Lot Riots in San Francisco I was president of the famous Olympic

Gymnastic Athletic Club…of that city, and raised a company of athletes and gymnasts within the club which was immediately added to the National Guard of the State.”127 As historian Harvey

Green noted, “The association of gymnastics and athletics with the maintenance of order was no longer a new idea at the turn of the century, but it took on added significance as middle-class and wealthy Americans tried to respond to the profound social and cultural unrest that had been in the making for decades but that seemed to have burst upon them in the 1890s.”128 One of those social changes was the perceived need for the country to prepare itself, and its citizens, for war or at least to present an air of national defense against foreign powers. This coincided with progressive reforms that utilized the latest scientific techniques and theories in an effort to engineer the perfect society. This society would need men capable of protecting it. Although some educators and patriots believed standard military drill provided sufficient exercise, physical culturists and military officials believed this left the nation’s men ill-suited for battle, because it hindered the soldier’s body, but through distorting their body, compromising their discipline.

Without discipline, Americans could not even maintain social order in their own lands.

During the nationwide labor riots of 1877, the National Guard and militia of several states were called to break strikes on railroad work and in urban manufacturing areas. Often, strikers turned

always fulfilled through bodily training, “The soldier’s duty is to kill.”) and the supplementation of gymnastics drills to increase soldier’s fighting fitness and health. 127 Green, Fit for America, 219. 128 Ibid, 219-222. 71

violent, hurling stones at the volunteer troops along with their insults. Unable to maintain poise

under such conditions, police and National Guardsmen killed 100 strikers in that year alone.129

Capitalists eventually appealed to the federal government for aid, and President Rutherford B.

Hayes ordered army regulars to resolve the labor disputes, hoping that federal troops would not only remove the strikers, but also avoid needless bloodshed. Some of these troops arrived at rioting cities following forced marches through Indian country, tired and covered in road dust.

Despite their weariness and the antagonism of rioters, Army regular troops acted with restraint and poise, refusing to answer violence and abuse with force. Whereas in 1877 the police and

National Guardsmen’s rash actions resulted in casualties and an escalation of violence, Army regulars demonstrated their training and discipline, restored order, and broke strikes, all without killing one man.130 As federal troops were repeatedly called between the 1870s and 1890s to

quell civil unrest, officers perceived that the discipline imposed on regular troops through their

training aided them in maintaining social order. Part of this training for discipline was physical

training with gymnastics.

Gymnastics training appealed to military officers for the qualities they thought it granted

their soldiers. These were both physical and psychological. Several military texts and training

manuals equate the good physiological action of the nerves with the moral military action of the

man. The two most important attributes for a man besides physical capacity were discipline and

courage. The concepts of progression and practice, of taking an untrained man and through the

application of methodical movements, to mold him into a soldier whose fitness must be

maintained through diligent work, were also taken from gymnastics.

129 Millet and Maslowski, For the Common Defense, 263. 130 Ibid, 263. 72

In 1895, the Journal of the Military Service Institution published a “Prize Essay” on the

paramount quality to the ideals of the military and the practice of gymnastics: Discipline.131

According to Captain Ellis, the essay’s author, discipline was “a limited and restricted idea, and

may be expressed by the synonyms ‘military training’ or ‘drill.’”132 Even more importantly,

Ellis continues, the physical context of these words must, by necessity, be adjoined to the moral.

The parallel between the goals of gymnastics and military drill in Ellis’ mind could not be better

demonstrated than with his statement that, “The perfect work is obtained only when the disciple

or learner is developed both in mind and body.”133 To take the theme of discipline as described

in chapter one further, the concept of progression was inherent in the development of discipline,

similar to the training regimens of Lieutenant Butts, Colonel Koehler, and all derivatives of

German and Swedish gymnastics, because discipline was required to adhere to the process of

progressive exercise. They had to seek perfection while knowing they could never obtain it.

Ellis wrote that the soldier’s preparation for battle, both in mind and body is never finished, stating that “In these days of progress and education no one presumes to declare himself complete master of the art of war; but one and all remain learners to the end of their lives.”134

Training soldiers to be disciplined involved not just ensuring they followed orders, although this,

but that, similar to many gymnastics’ training methods and drills, men who were disciplined

could demonstrate the differentiation between a unit and a mob. An individual, in Ellis’ mind,

could follow orders well enough, but it was more important for the good of the whole company,

and the country as a whole, for the men to “see in the first, order, regularity, subordination,

131 Captain Eugene A. Ellis, “Discipline:--Its Importance to an Armed Force, and the Best Means of Promoting and Maintaining it in the U.S. Army,” in The Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, Vol XVI, No. LXXIV, March 1895, accessed February 28, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=Rto9AQAAMAAJ, 211-250. 132 Ellis, “Discipline,” 211. 133 Ibid, 212. 134 Ibid, 212. 73

respect for law and regulations, and devotion to established government.”135 The obedience and

discipline so desired by military officers and authors of the military ideal did not belong to the

individual, but to the unit as a whole, and by extension, all of American men.

This was not just an important ideal for military men, but all men of the United States.

After the seemingly mythical success of Roosevelt’s “splendid little war” in Cuba, suddenly the post-Civil War angst over American men’s manliness was replaced with an overwhelming enthusiasm for empire. Coupled with this renewed bellicosity was the increased perception that military figures such as Roosevelt and President McKinley were paragons of manly virtue for their military service, and by extension, that all soldiers were as well.136 However, not all men of

the period saw the military as idyllic. Some critics of military manliness thought soldiers’

willingness to follow orders was un-American. One such critic was Ernst Howard Crosby, who

in his 1901 article, “The Military Idea of Manliness,” wrote that, “Absolute obedience, readiness

to obey orders, to do anything, these are necessary military qualities.”137 But, Crosby noted, this

willingness to follow orders could also be a weakness, as it undermined American ideals—manly

ideals—of independence and free-thinking, replacing them with a brutish ruthlessness that was

sure to sweep the nation with the new craze for tabasco sauce. Instead of indicting gymnastics

training, however, when Crosby mentioned West Point and Annapolis as heralds of this new

masculinity, he wrote about the rumor that cadets used boxing as an excuse to pair the weakest

among them against the corps champion, with no option to refuse. Physical training such as

135 Ellis, “Discipline,” 213. 136 For more on this phenomenon refer to Kristen m. Hoganson’s The Fight for American Manhood, especially chapters 4 and 5, which discuss the shift in political rhetoric around McKinley’s “backbone” and the sudden rise of Teddy Roosevelt to national prominence through his exploits with the Rough Riders, 88-132. 137 Ernst Howard Crosby, “The Military Idea of Manliness,” in The Independent: Volume 53, Issues 2731-2743, (New York: The Independent, 1901), accessed March 31, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=gZ0eAQAAMAAJ&rdid=book-gZ0eAQAAMAAJ&rdot=1, 873- 875. 74

German and Swedish gymnastics might have been considered stifling in their restrictions, but

they lacked the violence Crosby abhorred, and it was not the training of corps that Crosby

critiqued, but the questionable actions of a few men. Still, many in the civilian world

commented that gymnastics was too regimented, too much like military service to be acceptable

to the public at large. This was part of the appeal of Dio Lewis’s New Gymnastics, loosening the

instructor’s hold over their students, but it was no impediment for Army officers. Rather, it

made the stricter Swedish and German gymnastics more appealing. They were willing to

sacrifice their own personal freedoms, and those of their men, in the quest to forge fighting men

fit to serve their country wherever needed. This was an idyllic vision indeed, and the trials

American soldiers faced abroad at the turn of the twentieth century challenged it.138

Due in large part to gymnastics theories of character growth, military trainers such as

Herman Koehler maintained their enthusiasm for calisthenics and gymnastics for their positive

effects on discipline and morals throughout a period when sport and play for play’s sake were growing in popularity. These qualities would allow soldiers to act in the best interests of their nation in conflicts at home and abroad, and this was patriotic enough for them, even while restricting the male virtue of self-determination so highly valued in American society. This is

one example of the strange blending of the concepts of Passionate and Self-Made Manhood as described by historian Anthony Rotundo in American Manhood. Passion for one’s nation in military service combined with the discipline and self-regulation required to prepare oneself, one’s body, for such service.

138 One cannot discuss the American military at the turn of the twentieth-century and ignore the perfidy surrounding the use of “the Water Cure,” for interrogation in the Philippine Islands. This practice brought intense scrutiny on the armed forces and a congressional investigation in 1902, and its effects have affect American military policy, and the public’s perception of American occupation forces to this day. 75

The appeal of gymnastics, or almost any training or innovation in health and exercise

during this period, was prefaced by scientific innovation that revealed (albeit inaccurately)

several formerly obscure workings of the human form. Gymnastics training provided one

possible bridge from which to view these concepts of American manliness: the strong,

independent man who follows his right and natural passions, and the soldierly figure, in control,

and sound of mind, body, and spirit for the good of his nation.

Guts and Discipline

During this period, military units were often described in terms of the body, with

discipline serving as its nourishment. Such was the case in Captain Ellis’ prize essay. He wrote

about the necessity of discipline in the same terms as any essential nutrient for the body, stating,

“If the stomach be deprived of food, the corporeal body will get weak, fade away, and die; when

deprived of discipline, the military body will perish in the same way.”139 Physical culture

manuals likewise described the body in terms of military division. The limbs, muscles, nerves,

digestion, and mind all acted in concert like units in a military body. For Ellis and many of these

physical culturists, one created discipline in a body of men and in one’s self by committing to

obey orders, and respect one’s superiors.140 The reasoning behind this was that the body of a

nation is composed of its people, and the organ that defends that body, the military, was

composed of men.

The theme of militarism in gymnastics training, in Ling and Jahn’s teachings, was also not just a reflection of values, but a purposeful inclusion of nationalist overtones. Gymnastics was built around concepts of discipline because discipline was required for men to properly serve

139 Ellis “Discipline,” 213. 140 Ibid, 217. 76

their country. As Ellis put it, “Military discipline consists in training the minds, bodies, and

tempers of officers and men so that each unit of the army shall, in peace or war, be of the greatest

use and credit to the country.”141 Discipline and military readiness were essential for men.

Physical, mental, and moral development ensured they could serve well in times of peace or war.

Connections between gymnastics’ systematic approach to balancing the practitioner’s body and temperament, combined with their structure of discipline and rank, and the officers leading the pupils through every drill, made it the perfect training system for the military, not just by standards of abstract masculine ideals, but also in physical terms.

In his article, “The Place of Physical Training in the Military Service,” Captain James E.

Pilcher, Assistant Surgeon of the U.S. Army in 1895, wrote of the importance of proper anatomical experience and education required to properly facilitate physical training in not only the populace, but in military personnel. Pilcher’s favored system of choice was the Swedish system of gymnastics designed by Ling. Picher placed, “the Swedish father of gymnastics,” in

“the better class of instructors in physical culture.”142 In a similar fashion to the structured and progressive methods of Ling, Pilcher divided physical training for military personnel into two categories: Preparatory and Conservative. The first was used to measure and systematically correct any imbalances or asymmetries in the build or strength of the trainee. The second was to preserve the balanced soldier’s physique while allowing for total improvement. The perfect man, however, was to Pilcher nothing more than a myth, and he wrote as much.143 Anthropometrics

141 Ellis, “Discipline,” 212. 142 Captain James E. Pilcher, “The Place of Physical Training in the Military Service.” In Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States Volume XVI, James C. Bush, editor, Governor’s Island, Military Service Institution, 1895, accessed March 24, 2016, https://play.google.com/books/reader?printsec=frontcover&output=reader&id=Rto9AQAAMAAJ&pg=GBS.PA296 143 For more on the rise and fall of some sample “perfect” men of this period, refer to John F. Kasson’s “Who is the Perfect Man? Eugene Sandow and the New Standard for America,” as well as Kasson’s Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (2001). 77

were in vogue all over the western world during the late nineteenth-century, a byproduct of the

industrial revolution, Taylorism, and the progressive air of the age. The military was all for

innovation if it meant better performance in battle. As Lieutenant Butts and historians such as

Donald J. Mrozek have noted, contemporary reformers and the War Department made several

changes to military procedure during the 1890s.144 Systematic physical training was but one of

several innovations, and it was held to the scientific standards of the age. Pilcher’s labeled his form of bodily measurement as Mensuration. However, the differences between other physical educators systems and Pilcher’s would have been difficult to detect.145 Similar to other physical

culturists, Pilcher had a list of important measurements he determined to represent the physical

capacity and completeness of the trainee, and cited Sargent as one of the most prolific sources for

comparative mensuration literature.146 Pilcher also noted the importance and significance of the

existence of “The setting up” drill. He determined that while the contemporary iteration of the

setting up drill did well to correct the “vicious attitudes imposed by certain phases of military

duty,” it was insufficient. Athletic sports, outdoor activity, and exercises both free and with

apparatus were necessary to provide the infinite variability necessary to render physical culture

effective.

Since the mind and the will had to be employed in order for the trainee to benefit, adding such elements as variable exercise allowed for constant stimulation and the necessity to adapt.

Even more helpful, Pilcher wrote, was introducing competition into all aspects of physical training, as long as exercise was not subsequently subordinated to sporting contests. Like

coaxing a student into any game, Pilcher noted, this was accomplished by teaching the soldiers

144 Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 41-42. 145 Pilcher, “The Place of Physical Training in the Military Service,” 298. 146 Ibid, 299. 78

how to utilize their training as an opportunity for both growth and recreation, otherwise they

would lose interest. However, Pilcher wrote, while the cadets and soldiers will immediately

appreciate the physical benefits of exercise, will watch as their chests expand, their muscles

grow, it was, as yet, impossible to quantify or measure the development of the character and

mental faculties resulting from physical training. “The quickened sympathy between the brain and the muscles cannot be shown by any test. The suppleness, the agility, the self confidence that have developed, cannot be represented by figures. The added keenness of perception, the comfort and satisfaction contributed to existence itself cannot be estimated, much less represented.”147

Such attributes would have been indispensable in the theatre of war.

Competition

With the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, the United States was truly

stepping onto a grander stage of international competition. As several historians of sport and

culture have noted, this period of American history saw a renaissance of competitive activities

throughout the United States and Europe. Certainly, international news covering pedestrian

races, comparisons in statistics for baseball and cricket, and of course, the anthropometric studies

of different ethic groups, encouraged Americans to seek higher levels of accomplishment as

records were set and quite often surpassed.148 The military was no different. Several articles in the Journal of the Military Institution of the United States detailed changes in the equipment and training of foreign militaries and the need to keep up.149 American military procedure was heavily influenced by the standards of other nations, and physical training was no exception.

147 Pilcher, “The Place of Physical Training in the Military Service,” 301. 148 This phenomenon, known as the Athletic Revival and the American past with sport and competitive activity have been studied extensively in the work of historians such as Donald, J. Mrozek, Richard D. Mandell, Benjamin Rader, Richard O. Davies, Nancy L. Struna, and David K. Wiggins. 149 The Journal included articles dedicated to military notes on “New Normal Attack in French Army,” “Changes of Uniform in Germany,” “Military Matters in Russia,” “Marine Artillery in France,” etc, iv-vi. 79

Lieutenant Butts wrote that, “One innovation which is still in its infancy, and of which but little

is known, in a practical sense, by the majority of the army, is the physical training of the soldier.

We turn to the German and English armies for many of our new ideas in military science.”150

This military science of physical training for the German and English armies included German

gymnastics and calisthenics training respectively. Both were adopted in American soldiers’ training. However, at the turn of the nineteenth century, another kind of training was taking hold on Army units.

Between the Spanish-American War and “the Great War,” something changed in

American military training: it began to not only adopt, but also openly embrace sports. While

the Journal of the Military Service Institution had several articles on gymnastics, some officers

also regaled their readers with compliments on the military value of sport. So have many sports

historians. In Sport and American Mentality, Donald J. Mrozek makes note of several officers in

the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that advocated the inclusion of myriad sports in

military training. One Captain Samuel Miles of the 5th Artillery saw sport as a means to increase efficiency in the execution of military duties. Another, Lieutenant Charles R. Noyes of the 9th

Infantry, claimed football was especially suitable as it developed what he called, “team action,

that is, united aggressive effort under control of a leader or commander.”151 Mrozek notes,

correctly, that sports were chosen and practiced primarily if they were combative in nature or

required teamwork.152 There was also the recreational benefit that sport brought the soldiers.

The same discipline and moral virtue of gymnastics training that supposedly delivered soldiers

150 Butts, “Physical Training of the American Soldier,” 499. 151 Mrozek, 56. Both quoted from Sport and American Mentality. 152 Ibid, 55. 80

from temptation and dissertation could be replaced with the camaraderie and team-pride that

sports encouraged in the troops.

Military officers also valued combative sports such as boxing and mounted wrestling for

their utility in the field, and the lack of need to request additional funds. The War Department

was leery of funding physical education facilities such as fully equipped gymnasiums and

playing fields. This is likely why the gymnastics and calisthenics in Upton’s Tactics and the

following manuals from the War Department relied on freestanding gymnastics exercises and

sports with limited equipment. Some officers, such as Lieutenant A.B. Donworth of the 14th

Infantry, sought ways to compensate for this, encouraging troops to substitute dumbbells with dowels, metal rods, and of course, rifles to deal with lack of funds. Donworth’s recommendations show that officers saw the value of gymnastics training for their troops and took measures to supply it. However, sports such as boxing would always be more accessible to the common soldier, and more entertaining, especially higher up the chain of command. Boxing and fencing were favorite sports of Rear Admiral Robley D. Evans, Commander in Chief of the

North Atlantic Fleet. He considered team sports and the two combative contests “part of [the sailors’] drill.” As Donald Mrozek points out, this made sports a military duty in the Navy.153

The same was true for gymnastics with the Army. Sports and gymnastics training would always

be restricted by lack of funding from the War Department and limited space at certain posts,

however. Besides, a boxing match between two men on the deck of a ship, surrounded by their

crewmates, was more appealing than mass gymnastics.

The American Military adopted gymnastics training as part of a complete restructuring of

their physical education programs for the purposes of improving the physical and moral state of

153 Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 59 81

the American soldier. Gymnastics reflected values of military manliness such as discipline, the

willingness to follow orders, and sustaining the body for the service of the nation. There is

ample evidence of the military’s adoption of gymnastics exercise and its increasing presence in

the training of both officers and enlisted men. However, sometime around the dawn of the

twentieth century something changed. Sports and athletics were becoming increasingly valued

over the systematic adherence to gymnastic and callisthenic drills in soldiers’ physical training.

While Koehler, Pilcher, and Butts all noted the improvements to soldiers’ fitness,

anthropometrics, and discipline, they also noted that significant variation of the drills was

necessary to maintain men’s interest. In a 1904 article included in his Manual of Gymnastic

Exercises entitled, “The Physical Training in the army,” Koehler noted that several members of

the War Department had begun advocating, “that athletics, competitive athletics exclusively,

should be fostered.”154 Koehler was aggravated by what he perceived as a favoritism for sport

that was undermining the effectiveness of instructors to properly prepare their men for combat.

He wrote that, “Sight is not lost of the fact that the tendency of the age is toward competition,

even in physical training, which confronts is with a condition where the few are benefited at the

expense of the many.”155 By 1917, it is clear he had begun, in a limited extent, to concede the

point.

That year, the War Department published an updated manual on physical training for the

American soldier. The manual was based upon the syllabus for Captain Koehler’s training regimen as Master of Sword and instructor of gymnastics at the United States Military Academy.

Koehler’s argument for the benefit of gymnastics training had not changed. If anything, it

154 First Lieutenant Herman Koehler, “Physical Training in the Army,” in Manual of Gymnastics, Prepared for Use in Service Gymnasiums, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904) accessed April 2, 2016 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b281801;view=1up;seq=13. 155 Koehler, “Physical Training in the Army,” 11. 82

became more nuanced. He noted that the demands of war had bent every power of science

against man in order to defeat him. Man had need of physical training more than ever, despite

advances in technology and changes in tactics, for, “the efficiency of a military establishment is

in a direct ratio to the physical fitness of its individual units has never before been demonstrated

so forcibly as it has been during the present war.”156 The science of human development had

changed slightly to accommodate this fact.

The last section of the forty-six page manual, after sections devoted to regulations,

instruction, hints to instructors, and gymnastics drills designed to bring, “every individual’s

physical attributes to the fullest extent of their possibilities,” discussed the role of gymnastic

contests in training.157 Koehler allowed for athletics and games, provided they involved large

numbers of troops and physical contact were the predominate course of action. However,

according to Koehler, every session of physical drill should terminate with one or more of the

contests included in the manual. Indeed, almost every set of instructions for recruits had a section, “G. Gymnastics Contests,” before, “H. Concluding Exercises.”158 The contests were variations of wrestling performed in sequence, sometimes with equipment, sometimes without.

The object was to either wrest an object from one’s opponent or to push them off balance, or in the case of the “’Squatting’ tug,” to pull him to his feet.159 The goals of the contests were to call

into action all the muscles of the body, to display the effects of the preceding gymnastics, and, of

course, to encourage the martial spirit, quite similar to Jahn’s German gymnastics. These were

156 United States War Department; Captain Herman J. Koehler, Field Physical Training of the Soldier, Special Regulations No. 23. (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917), accessed September 20, 2016, https://archive.org/details/fieldphysicaltra00unitiala. 157 War Department; Captain Koehler, Field Physical Training, 7. 158 Ibid, 21-31. 159 Ibid, 39-42. 83

not competitions on one particular gymnastics drill, but, like sports, a test of numerous skills and

attributes while also a form of recreation.

By 1896 and into the early twentieth-century, gymnastics experienced another transition from a discipline of physical culture into the sort of competitive activity that Koehler and advocates of gymnastics training frowned upon. While athletic competition drew the majority of men and young boys’ attention from physical culture to sport culture in the early twentieth century, the military retained an affinity for exercise such as gymnastics for their scientific philosophies and progressive training models. Officers such as Upton and Koehler saw to that.

Their gymnastics helped transform American military training from the simple arming of part-

time citizen soldiers into the forging of hardened, disciplined fighting men, even if they did set

aside time for popular athletics. 84

Chapter Three: Competitive Gymnastics In 1901, the Spalding sports company published and released the 124th installment of

their athletic library collection.160 This particular volume, part of the red book series, so known

for their crimson covers, was written by Robert Stoll, a member of the New York Athletic Club

and amateur champion in the flying rings event from 1885 to 1892. It was entitled Gymnastics

and Rope Climbing: How to Become an Expert in the Gymnasium.161 This book represented the dichotomy of gymnastics as a healthful physical practice and as a competition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite his status as a champion of gymnastic competition, Stoll drew a distinct separation between the purpose of athletic contests and gymnastic practice and like so many Philhellenes of his time, looked to history to support his semantics.

Stoll believed the ancient Greeks and Romans were the forerunners of Western

Civilization and the progenitors of sport. The Greek city-states, he wrote, competed in the religious ceremonies at the base of Mount Olympus, pitting their strongest, fastest, and most agile warriors against one another to please their gods. The Romans entertained their populace with races of horse and chariot, staged theatrical and gladiatorial combats, and trained their bodies with leaping, weight lifting, and javelin throwing before submerging in cleansing pools at their public bathhouses. Gymnastics, meanwhile, began as a humble, medical art, “for the purpose of counteracting the sad effects of luxury and indolence, which at that time were greatly

160 The library was part of an inclusive collection of how-to manuals on all manner of sports and exercise activities, both foreign and American. Besides the profits accrued from soliciting and advertising Spalding brand equipment in the books, they contributed to the growing interest in sports spreading throughout the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century. 161 Robert Stoll, Gymnastics and Rope Climbing: How to Become an Expert in the Gymnasium, (New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1901), accessed June 1, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=_1bzAAAAMAAJ&rdid=book-_1bzAAAAMAAJ&rdot=1. 85

increasing.”162 Gymnastics training had both immediate and long-term benefits on its practitioners, wrote Stoll, increasing muscle size, improving vigor, and even allowing for, “more prolonged application to the various and necessary branches of education.”163 As many a

romantic of his time, Stoll noted that the ancients saw exercise, bodily control, and physical

health as connected to the health of the mind: mens sana in corpore sano—a sound mind in a

sound body. Sport, however, went beyond this ideal, overdeveloping and overtaxing an athlete’s

powers to a degree that contemporary medical authorities condemned. Stoll’s unique status as a

gymnastics champion, however, reveals a new element to gymnastics practice at the dawn of the

twentieth century: the acceptance of competition.

At this time, there was intense debate among the medical, educational, and sporting

professionals of the world regarding what part athletics should play in young men’s lives. Many

wondered whether sports were a necessary component of education and collegiate life, or if they

were a distraction from study. In 1903, a speech delivered by Professor Calvin M. Woodward of

Washington University in St. Louis was printed as an article for the popular physical-culture journal Mind and Body’s March edition, entitled, “Domestic and Intercollegiate Athletics.”164

The article was one of many discussing the perceived connection between the physical body and

the moral character, and shared page space with essays on such subjects such as the appropriate

progression of bodily growth in the nation’s youth, injury treatment in football, and the Army

Officer’s Athletic Association at West Point Military Academy. The professor did not declaim

162 Stoll, Gymnastics and Rope Climbing, 3. 163 Ibid, 4. 164 This was shortly before the announcement that the 1904 Olympic Games, the first Olympic Games in America, were to be held in St. Louis Missouri instead of Chicago as previously thought. 86

the inclusion of sports in universities; rather, he merely took exception to how American

institutions of higher learning went about it.

Woodward thought it was deplorable to see that the standards of scholarly work varied

between universities depending on how valuable a student was to their college’s athletic victory.

At one college, a student athlete might be disqualified from rowing in crew if they dropped below a seventy percent performance report, while at another, “he is allowed to ‘pass’ on an average of thirty or forty per cent.”165 However, much as Woodward disliked the moral

degradation sports brought to higher learning, physical activity could not be excluded from

college education as the ideals of Muscular Christianity and manly sport were now the

expectation, not the exception of culture.166 Woodward added that the marked distinction

between gymnastics and manly sport was the importance each placed on exercise as opposed to

competition. But, “There is no antagonism between them; one supplements the other. Every

participator in field sports should bring to his games a body well developed by judicious

gymnastic training. On the other hand the trained gymnast is entitled to the particular delights

and rewards of athletic games.”167 The truth, however, perhaps unbeknownst to Woodward, was

that by the early twentieth-century gymnastics had become almost as much a sport as football,

although not nearly as popular.

The 1896 Summer Olympic Games at Athens could be easily mistaken for the first

instance of gymnastic competition for American athletes.168 By the time of the Olympic revival,

165 Calvin M. Woodward, “Domestic and Intercollegiate Athletics,” in Mind and Body, Volume 10 March, 1903, Accessed July 6, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=fKUaAQAAMAAJ&rdid=book- fKUaAQAAMAAJ&rdot=1, 10-13, 38-43. 166 Woodward, “Domestic and Intercollegiate Athletics,” 11. 167 Ibid, 12 168 There was a small contingent of American gymnasts who attended, although the German and Swedish athletes took home the gold, silver, and bronze awards for those events. 87

however, there had been gymnastics contests held throughout the northeastern United States for

more than a decade, and at least one other international competition in which American

gymnasts crossed the Atlantic to perform against European opponents. In 1881, a group of

Turners from the North American Gymnastics Union traveled to Frankfurt to compete in a

German Turnfest, a massive gymnastics festival.169 These Turners returned with several honors

for their skill and brought back an enthusiasm for the sport of gymnastics that quickly spread

among their societies. The following national Turner convention of 1885 in the States began the

tradition of competitive gymnastics for American Turners.170

Despite prior emphasis in gymnastics coaching against competition between students for

reasons of both safety and differences in skill, the contests drew an undeniable amount of

attention. The next half-dozen Turnfests saw an increase in attendance and participation from

200-300 men to include thousands.171 Membership in the Turnerbund, the larger collective of

the American Turner societies, increased until the early twentieth-century with a high point of

3,380 participants at the Milwaukee Turnfest of 1893 and a low of 1,400 at Cincinnati in 1910.172

To Turners, the organizing committee of the 1896 Olympics, and the rest of the American public

interested in physical activity, gymnastics was no longer just a means to physical and mental

health, it was a legitimate sport, although one which would come to compete against other

athletic events for relevance in the early twentieth-century.

169 Henry Christian Anton Metzner, A Brief History of the North American Gymnastic Union, translated by Theo. Stempfel Jr, (Indianapolis: The National Executive Committee of the North American Gymnastic Union, 1911), accessed June 28, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=6vKfAAAAMAAJ&rdid=book- 6vKfAAAAMAAJ&rdot=1, 46-47. 170 Metzner, A Brief History of the North American Gymnastic Union, 47. 171 Previously, the financial requirements of Turnerbund membership and the cost of travel discouraged participation in the pure exhibition-formatted festivals, but the addition of competitive events with honors for the best performing society appears to have been enough motivation to overcome these obstacles. 172 Metzner, A Brief History of the North American Gymnastic Union, 47-48. 88

While gymnastics was part of the first modern Olympic Games in Athens and a treasured

movement practice of several European nations, Americans in middle-class New England culture

began to favor track and field competitions and American-made sports for their recreation. The

most poignant example of this was the subordination of gymnastics to a “minor” event in the

1904 Games in St. Louis. Similarly, the growing appetite for sport, and the international

competition of the Olympic Games transformed gymnastics from a scientific, progressive system

of physical improvement into an athletic event. However, popular sports such as football and

baseball became the preferred method of developing manhood and morality, and similar to

“manly sports,” gymnastics existed somewhere between a healthful exercise practice and a

means to compete. Gymnastics was no longer a European influence on American manhood, but

a part of popular culture that could not help but be influenced by the twentieth century

competitive spirit, despite the intentions of its earliest practitioners. It entered into the world of

competitive sport through the Olympics, as well as contests between the amateur gymnastics

organizations. However, just as some in the military detracted from gymnastics for its lack of

combativeness, sports enthusiasts balked at its un-American origins and non-competitive emphasis. Gymnastics emphasis on disciplined, progressive movement could not provide the solution to the needs of American physical culture at large, even as it contributed to its status as a leading nation at the 1904 St. Louis Games.

Manly Sport vs. Gymnastics

In the early 1900s, gymnastics had to compete with sports defined as “American,” for its role as the most effective movement practice for instilling health and moral virtue. There was no doubt in American middle-class minds that people needed healthful recreation to deal with the challenges of life at the end of the nineteenth century. Outdoor athletics were almost universally 89

accepted as a cure for the overworked mind and underused body. Training manuals, self-help books, and journals of physical culture, education, and athletics proliferated in New England and several Midwestern states. Nearly all their authors agreed that there was little that a bout of exercise or a bit of sport could not cure. However, there were still disagreements. In sport, for example, debate raged over the distinction between what constituted fair and amicable play, what was a worthwhile sport, who should participate, and under what conditions.

Following British universities’ emphasis on amateur athletics, American colleges and sporting organizations declared rules against “professionalism,” the immoral scourge of contemporary athletics. British universities, originally attended only by the children of the aristocracy, excluded common laborers and tradesmen from competing in their sporting events by barring anyone but amateur athletes from participating. They defined an amateur as anyone who did not hold a profession from which they earned their living, hence the derogatory label of a “professional” in sporting literature of the period. Americans in their yeoman ideals, however, defined professionalism in sport as the taking or earning of money through competition or through collecting a percentage of the admittance charge to an athletic event.173 However, this

distinction created more problems than opportunities for convivial play in the United States. For

example, trainers and judges—or authors like Stoll—could be considered professionals if paid

for their services, which they often expected.

173 Athletic programs at colleges such as Harvard blurred this line considerably by hiring professional coaches for their teams, selling admission for games hosted in the 40,000 seat capacity, steel reinforced stadium, built in 1903, a structure which brought the university scorn from purist amateur-athlete organizations, but much acclaim and revenue in the long run; Ronald A. Smith, “History of Amateurism in Men’s Intercollegiate Athletics: The Continuance of a 19th-Century Anachronism in America,” In Quest, November 1993, Vol. 45 Issue 4, p 430 18p, accessed July 6, 2016, https://web-b-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.csusm.edu/ehost/detail/detail?sid=26dc453a-9c76- 4324-b897- 05f7f60aa9b8%40sessionmgr104&vid=0&hid=125&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=94040501 99&db=s3h, 435. 90

Throughout the nineteenth century, American colleges and clubs violated the taboos of

amateurism repeatedly and creatively. Universities and athletes alike developed several

loopholes or otherwise blatantly disregarded the ideals of amateurism, and when they did, they

often caused greater public appeal than outcry, especially once universities began turning

sporting events into popular spectacles. Still, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, a

renewed effort to create an upright American society had put the “shamatuerism” of universities

and professional sports teams under moral attack.174 The Amateur Athletics Union (AAU),

formed in 1888 by William Buckingham Curtis, sought to scour the blight of professional sports

from universities and American cities by creating an organization dedicated to the

monopolization of moral sport and physical activity in the United States. Their method was simple: recruit and ally with as many athletic associations as possible, establish rules of competition, define common guidelines for rules of sportsmanlike conduct, and condemn any institution that allowed professionalism by their definition or deviated from their accepted means of play. While gymnastic instructors such as Nils Posse and Herman Koehler dismissed the concepts of play and competition from their training, gymnastics as a whole could not stay

uncompetitive forever. A sure sign of gymnastics’ status as an amateur sport was the AAU’s

alliance with the Turnerbund (then known as the National American Gymnastic Union [NAGU])

in 1902, and the recognition of the NAGU’s exercises and standards for the national gymnastic

174 “Shamateurism” was a derogatory term for the American play of nominally-termed amateur games for prize money, “the pot,” or grants, and can be tied to crew, track and field, and football competitions of the 1870s-1880s; Smith’s, “History of Amateurism,” 434; When Coubertin traveled to American in 1893 to seek athletes and support for the 1896 games, he discovered a war for amateur sports between the AAU and collegiate athletic programs, John J. MacAloon, This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games, (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1981), 165 91

rules for the United States.175 Unfortunately, just because both the Spalding sport equipment

company and the AAU recognized gymnastics as a sport did not necessarily mean it was popular.

Football and baseball grew in popularity in the nationalist culture of the turn of the

twentieth century. This was because of both their American origins and their promotion as the

most effective tools to achieve manhood and morality through physical competition.176

According to sport historian Donald Mrozek, football and baseball were not only considered

superior to German and Swedish gymnastic systems by the majority of Americans, but also by

some physical educators of the period. Partly, this was because baseball and football were

learned through spontaneous, unrehearsed competition as opposed to gradual study. This focus

on learning by simply doing as opposed to slow progression appealed to the contemporary

American male ideal of action over self-control, even though self-control—specifically learning

how to keep calm under pressure—was another reported benefit to football training according to

Edward Hitchcock and American football’s founder, Walter Chauncey Camp.177 Football was

one of the most scrutinized sports, as its play at American universities was less than pristine by

the standards of the AAU.

Prior to football and baseball, American universities took their sports from other cultures.

Besides copying the sport of rowing or “crew” from Britain, gymnastics and track and field

sports originated with the German Turnverein and Scottish Caledonian festival games practiced

in the United States. Harvard and Yale both adopted crew clubs and organized races from as

175Amateur Athletic Union, Official Handbook of the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States, (New York, American Sports Publishing Company, 1902), accessed June 28, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=DJ0uAQAAIAAJ&rdid=book-DJ0uAQAAIAAJ&rdot=1, 84-85; the gymnastic rules of competition are included on page 99. 176 Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 166-168 177 Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 169; Green, Fit for America, 233 92 early as 1851, although Harvard had a Turnplatz-style gymnasium since 1826.178 Track, field, and gymnastics gained widespread legitimacy only after 1860 when the socioeconomic and ideological climate or the nation was favorable to German, Swedish, and Scottish immigrants, in no small part due to their service in the Civil War.179 By the 1890s, these sports, characterized by individual performance and arbitrary judging, lost out against quantitative team games such as football and baseball. Gymnastics, however, was not without its fans, especially in Europe, partially explaining its inclusion in the Summer Olympics of 1896.

Gymnastics became an international sport through its mutual presence and practice in

America, Britain, Germany, and Sweden. It was one of the three types of physical training recognized throughout Europe in the late nineteenth-century including the Turnverein system of

Germany and America, the field sports and games of England’s public schools and universities, and the school gymnastics of Germany and Sweden.180 These nations held international competitions in gymnastics prior to the 1896 Olympic revival through conventions and meets of

European gymnastic federations. In 1881, the president of the Fédéation belge de Gymnastique,

Nicolas Jan Cupérus of Antwerp, helped unify the various national organizations of gymnastics in Europe, with its first convention in July of that year, the very convention the American

Turners attended which sparked their interest in competition. The new International Gymnastics

Federation, later renamed the European Gymnastics Federation, was composed of members from gymnastics societies with representatives of Czech, French, British, Irish, Scottish, Italian,

Hungarian, Netherlandish, Norwegian, and Swedish origin.181 Its’ second meeting was held in

178 Smith, “History of Amateurism,” 432. 179 Green, Fit for America, 204-206. 180 Leonard, A Guide, 215. 181 Ibid, 215. 93

July of 1896, perhaps to solidify its primacy over gymnastic matters after the April Olympic revival.

American gymnastic games bore little resemblance to the German or Swedish systems of exercise and only vaguely alluded to Dio Lewis’s New Gymnastics with their use of handballs, hoops, and jumping ropes; however, they retained their status as a tools for moral, physical, and mental training.182 Where gymnastic games converted simple movements into games, team

sports combined several skills and players into conflicts thought to simulate the chaos of modern

life. Part of what made sports such as football and baseball so appealing to educators and the

public was there combination of several activities into one, each sport viewed almost as a

decathlon in their own right, forcing each member of a team to train and integrate a variety of

skills to one end: victory. Ironically, the need for victory in the new “elite culture,” led

universities and sporting organizations to hire specialists to train their athletes, against ideals of

amateurism that forbade taking pay for play or for skill.183 It was in this milieu of manly ideals, of amateurism and team sports and the need for victory, that gymnastics converted to a competitive event, both in the United States and abroad.

Gymnastics and Athletics

The rules and grading methods established for gymnastics sport show that even as

gymnasts adapted to the new climate of competitive sport, they retained much of the original

values of earlier, non-competitive gymnastics. However, they also show how American based

athletics groups were biased against gymnastics as sport. Several organizations engaged in

182 Ethel Perrin, One Hundred and Fifty Gymnastic Games, (Boston, Geo. H. Ellis Co., Printers, 1912), accessed May 28, 2016, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32435054248752;view=1up;seq=13, v 183 Green, Fit for America, 207-208 94

gymnastic activity for sport in the late nineteenth-century. The largest such organizations were

the public schools along the eastern and northeastern United States, the Military Athletic League,

the Turnverein (Later called the North American Gymnastic Union), and the Young Men’s

Christian Association (YMCA), specifically their Athletic League. Since both the YMCA and

the NAGU allied with the Amateur Athletic Union by 1902, conforming their rules and judging

standards of gymnastics events to those of the NAGU, their standards reveal how American

gymnasts competed. Popular physical education literature, such as magazines and journals, can

also provide context for the individual interpretations of gymnastics competitions during this

time.

The AAU was concise and deferential to the standards of the North American Gymnastic

Union (NAGU) in its creation of the Union’s gymnastic rules. The Official Handbook of the

Amateur Athletic Union of the United States devoted only one page to list the events and their standards of performance.184 There were three main events. First, a display of three combined exercises into a routine; second, an Indian club swinging routine; and finally a rope climbing competition. At the beginning of the competition, contestants drew lots to determine their order of rotation. Three proctors placed on both sides of the contestants, “in order to observe their general form,” judged all the events, grading the exercises on a ratio of up to five points for a perfect performance based upon the difficulty of the exercises chosen, the grace of the combination, and “the general form of the contestant.”185 These exercises were taken from a

small selection of apparatus taught in German-American gymnastics.

184 Amateur Athletic Union, Official Handbook, 99. 185 Ibid, 99. 95

The contestants had their pick of horizontal bar, parallel bars, flying rings, vaulting horse and the clubs. A five-minute exhibition of individual club swinging routines followed. The

AAU regulations did not dictate how the routines should be evaluated or on what point basis, likely deferring to the combination event standard of a five-point ratio. The final event, the rope climb, was the simplest event of all. The contestant sat on the ground, legs splayed out, hands grasping the end of a twenty-five foot rope, or a rope as long as the ceiling would allow. At the firing of a pistol shot, the gymnast would scale the rope, either with the aid of his legs or relying solely on the strength of his arms, and strike a bell or tambourine secured at the top of the rope, at which point his time was taken. Each contestant was allowed three trials and presumably, the gymnast with the fastest time won the event. There were contests on individual pieces of apparatus and awards for the best competitor, thus allowing for such titles as Robert Stoll’s

“Champion of the Flying Rings.” As a sport, then, gymnastics took its cues from the athletic events included in track and field sports, emphasizing the individual’s performance in a single task measured against the performances of others, most unlike early gymnastics, except for

Jahn’s wrestling.

The succinctness of the AAU’s gymnastic rules indicates either a lack of interest or a well-established system of grading and organizing gymnastics competitions within the NAGU and other American athletic institutions. Certainly, the NAGU, previously a disparate collection of Turner Societies, had established a unilaterally agreed-upon system of “German-American

Gymnastics” for use in their gymnasiums by the time of their alliance with the AAU. This system was outlined in a textbook published in 1895. It contained chapters contributed by seventeen gymnastics teachers from different gymnasiums of the NAGU in New York, St. Louis, 96

Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, Carbondale, Philadelphia, Boston, and Davenport.186 Its

selection of exercises and activities were as varied as the text’s contributors, and contained far

more than the three events detailed in the AAU handbook.

One key difference between the AAU guidelines and the German-American gymnastics

system was that the latter made use of several apparatus not listed in the former’s handbook.

These included javelins and various weights for throwing contests. The contests were nearly

indistinguishable from the Olympic events except that the contestants threw their spears at a

head-shaped target. Other equipment included “whipple ladders” (a ladder balanced on a

suspended rope, on which pupils hung in pairs, rising and falling much like a see-saw), as well as

dumbbells and the earliest iterations of the standardized barbell for modern Olympic lifts.187

Several of the gymnastic games also had a distinctive combative tone, pitting pupils’ brute

strength against one another. Examples of these games include simple tug-of-war with a rope, wrestling circles, “Pulling Over The Line,” and “Pushing With The Wand.”188 The object of each game was to force one’s opponents either across a line, off-balance to the floor, or colliding into an off-limits object such as a standing Indian club or stack of hats. They accomplished this with strength and deception, combining several elements of play into a test of each gymnasts’

186 The system, although composed of separate articles, was derived from an older German gymnastic system known as the Spiess system, published in 1840 by Adolf Spiess in Germany and Switzerland; William Fleck, “System and Method of German-American Gymnastics,” in Gymnastics, A Textbook of the German-American System of Gymnastics, Specially Adapted to the Use of Teachers and Pupils in Public and Private Schools and Gymnasiums, (Boston, Lothrol, Lee & Shepard CO, 1895), edited by W.A. Stecher, accessed July 27, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=pSUAAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book-pSUAAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1, 1-2. 187 Fleck, Gymnastics, A Textbook of the German-American System, “Whipple ladders,” 269; “Javelin throwing,” weight lifting, and “Putting the Shot,” 293-298; the modern Olympic lifts refers to the snatch and clean-and-jerk exercises. Each requires raising a loaded barbell from the ground to either the shoulders or over the athlete’s head. Another drill was a strict press from the shoulder that was discontinued from Olympic lifting competitions due to judges’ inability to agree on proper form. 188 Karl Kroh, “Gymnastic Games,” in Gymnastics, A Textbook of the German-American System of Gymnastics, Specially Adapted to the Use of Teachers and Pupils in Public and Private Schools and Gymnasiums, (Boston, Lothrol, Lee & Shepard CO, 1895), edited by W.A. Stecher, accessed July 27, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=pSUAAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book-pSUAAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1, 299 97

overall fitness and quick wit, not unlike a game of football.189 More importantly, many of the gymnastics games, “field,” and “companion” exercises were taken directly from track and field sports (“athletics” as they were known in Britain), or from the individual throwing and strength events from the Scottish Caledonian games.190 This shows that gymnastics at the turn of the

century began to adopt several elements of the competitive games its advocates once denounced.

However, while contradicting the fundamental principles of early gymnastics theory, these

events highlighted the system’s capability to develop athletes.

Contests, however, facilitated specialization and encouraged athletes to value victory

over rules of competition, a hallmark of professionalism and vitriol to gymnastic purists of the

age. Just as the AAU and NAGU had regulations for their contests, American universities were

attempting, if ineffectively, to develop their own. While the AAU and its allies critiqued the

performance of university athletes, even as they covered and praised individual teams’ victories

in their periodicals, members of the Intercollegiate Gymnastics Association, a relatively new

organization of the early twentieth century, also had some choice words regarding how

gymnastics competitions were conducted. At least some athletic directors and gymnasium

instructors working at universities shared the AAU’s disdain for students who shirked their

scholastic responsibilities in favor of sport practice or exploited the ambiguity of rules to gain

advantage in competition.

189 In fact, German Turner Societies seemed as intrigued by American sports such as football and baseball as they were in gymnastics. At NAGU Turnfests and Austria-Hungarian Sokols (gymnastics and athletic festivals held by certain groups of Eastern-European Immigrants), there was a blending of gymnastics exhibitions, competitions, mass marches, martial drills, and even American games such as baseball; Green, Fit for America, 242. 190 British “athletics” were performed at the 1850 Olympian Games of Much Wenlock in Shropshire England by Dr. W.P. Brookes; Allen Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 9; many of the throwing events in track and field sports could be considered variations of the Scottish Caledonian games organized by Scottish immigrants in the USA; Green, Fit for America, 205. 98

The American Gymnasia and Athletic Record of 1905 reported on the Intercollegiate

Gymnastic Championship meeting at Princeton in 1904, held by the Intercollegiate Gymnastic

Association (IGA). It noted that competitive gymnastics was gaining popularity in American

colleges. However, the author, J. Mason, a gymnasium instructor at the University of

Pennsylvania, took exception to the organization of the event. Clearly, he thought the style of

competition ran counter to the German-American model, as evidenced by the articles critique of

the club-swinging contest.191 The main point of his critique was the complete disregard for any

standard of equipment or routine:

[T]here is no uniformity of conditions, either in style of club or in its weight. The contestants are, indeed, allowed, if they please, to substitute almost anything for the Indian club; even strips of light metal fastened to wooden discs, with a handle attached, as used by some at the Princeton meet. Such "clubs," while they may have a place in spectacular exhibitions, are out of order in a competition of proper—that is to say Indian—club swinging.192 Mason’s concerns for the type of equipment, for their weights and the ostentatious styles of the

flashing clubs, show a fear that spectacle was worth more in collegiate contests than sporting

prowess. He went on to state that club-swinging contests should display the same endurance, strength, and self-control that tumbling or apparatus drills required. Furthermore, if the contestant did not possess the strength to handle the three-pound standard club, then they had no business representing their university, nor distracting an inexperienced judge with “the glitter of the tinseled club.”193 He continued with recommendations for standardizing the Indian club

competition. These included the use of a regulation three-pound club, a full five-minute duration

191 J. Leonard Mason, “Club Swinging in College Contests: How It Might Be Improved,” in American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Volume 2, No. 2, October, 1905, (Boston: American Gymnasia Co., 1905), accessed July 27, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=QNY9AQAAMAAJ, 28. 192 Mason, “Club Swinging,” 28. 193 Ibid, 28. 99

for each routine to display students’ endurance, and the rule that each swinging motion should

incorporate the full extension of the arms—and to be comprised of arm movements only, barring

the contestant from moving on the competition platform. Mason also noted that he had received several letters from other collegiate gymnastics judges who shared his concern that different exercises were incredibly difficult to evaluate, and that the particular tastes of the proctors often decided contests.194 Unlike football, baseball, and track and field sports, gymnastics was highly

qualitative in its grading of performance and this might have affected its popularity.

If gymnastics, the system of exercise based upon a logical, supposedly scientific process

of progression could not be judged as uniformly as it could be applied to physical education, its

value as a competitive sport was suspect. The Posse Gymnasium Journal addressed the issue of games and competitive gymnastics in several issues from 1899 to 1910, and occasionally covered the organization and judging of gymnastic events in the Summer Olympics. Baroness

Rose Posse, wife of the late Baron Nils Posse of the popular Boston school of Swedish

Gymnastics and the editor of his gymnasium’s periodical, often authored articles and reprinted the writings of her husband that despaired over gymnastics’ transformation into sport. As ever for the Posses, gymnastics was a movement practice for the improvement and maintenance of health. To see gymnastics become part of the larger trend of commercial sports was most vexing. As early as 1899, Rose Posse wrote against it:

While we continue to propagate the idea that gymnastics is a good thing to have fun with we shall find it hard to get a serious consideration of it. I do not believe in abolishing games and sports. I do not believe it is wrong for contestants under certain conditions to

194 Leonard, A Guide, 37. 100

establish new records. But I do believe that all these things are entirely wrong when presented to the public as a form of entertainment or as a means of making money.195 Besides the new “professional” aspect of gymnastic sport, Rose Posse had qualms concerning

how high-exertion sports and competitions affected the condition of the heart and the mind. In

contrast to Robert Stoll’s high praise of the ancient Greeks and Roman’s games, Rose Posse

vilified them. She wrote that,

If in the days of Homer and Virgil the people glorified the athletic games and looked upon them as the great event of the year, it was because the people lived for pleasure, and the games gave them the most amusement. The instinct of blood-thirstiness was strong in those days. It is a race instinct that will probably never be wholly eradicated. Women have progressed more than men since the days of turned-down thumbs.196 She still believed there was benefit to gymnastics for athletes, and that gymnastics could improve

athletic performance. Unfortunately, there was worry that athletics, and that training with

gymnastics to prepare for events such as running, jumping, and throwing, would eventually

exclude the weak from physical training. If a student was found to be weak, the reasoning went,

then what was the point in training them? After all, they would not be able to compete well in

athletic events. This sort of all-or-nothing mentality, Rose Posse wrote, was counterproductive

to the goal of physical training as her late husband saw it: the building up of all students,

especially those considered weak. However, that did not mean that the strong could not benefit

from gymnastics.

The value of gymnastics training for the innately strong was to guide them towards a

balanced temperament. The student who takes gymnastic training, Rose Posse wrote, “has

improved his disposition, has lost his bad temper, has gained presence of mind, has become

195 Rose Posse, “The Value of Competitive Gymnastics,” in The Posse Gymnasium Journal, Volume VII, No. 7, July 1899, (Boston: Posse Gymnasium Club, 1899), accessed July 28, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=R5saAQAAMAAJ&rdid=book-R5saAQAAMAAJ&rdot=1, 5. 196 Rose Posse, “Competitive Gymnastics,” 5. 101

thoughtful of others, has begun to question whether the opinion of others is not at least as good

as his own. Such as one will wish to have his neighbor derive the same benefits that he himself

has obtained.” She continued, writing that, “There is one way in which competitions may be

really glorious…when all are competing to further a cause, and when any one[sic] who does

much — not the most, there should never be a question of most — is encouraged by the plaudits

and sympathy of his fellow-workers to persevere to something still better. Such a competition

accompanies every science that is great and noble.”197 Both the December 1903 edition of

School Science and The American Physical Education Review reprinted Rose Posse’s article on

the dangers of competitive gymnastics to the general approval of their readers. Baroness Posse

hit upon the point of contemporary amateur athletics; the purpose of sport and physical education

was to raise the whole of society up through shared activity and civilized growth. It was in this

spirit that gymnastics and track and field sports were included in the first modern Olympics, and

likely contributed to its decline amidst the American-centric focus of future sports and athletics.

Gymnastics as International Sport

In 1889, a French aristocrat was touring America, visiting several universities and athletic associations to sample their sporting culture and gauge their willingness to participate in the modern revival of the ancient Olympic Games. His name was Pierre de Coubertin, and despite his affable personality and boundless determination, he found little support in America for his venture, but left with an admiration for the fledgling nation’s sporting behavior, which he thought similar to the rugby and crew culture of Britain, but with less class conflict.198

197 Rose Posse, “Competitive Gymnastics,” 5. 198 For more information of the influence of Britain’s Rugby School on Pierre de Coubertin’s interest in athletics, refer to John J. MacAloon’s This Great Symbol, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 43-82; for Coubertin’s opinion of American athletics and for information regarding the few influential contacts he made during his 1889 visit, please refer to pages 120-128. 102

Once a fervent nationalist who despised the Prussians for defeating the French armies of

Napoleon III in 1870, as Coubertin studied the physical cultures of other nations, his ire over his

countrymen’s defeat was replaced by a desire to unite the Western World through international

competition. A crafty self-promoter, by the time of his visit to the United States, Coubertin had

already thwarted a rival French organization’s attempt to revive the Olympic Games and created

an athletic club of his closest friends from which he would eventually form the first International

Olympic Committee in Sorbonne. He admired the physical culture of the Germans—while

denying the moral and ethical virtues of their gymnastics—and could not speak more highly of

the athletic and sporting reforms of the English.199 Coubertin searched for the salvation of his

people—and all nations of western civilization—through convivial sport. He believed

Napoleon’s defeat lay in large part at the well-developed feet of Germans trained in the physical culture of Jahn and the English sportsmen of Eton.200 In 1890, while musing over the revival of

the Olympic Games, he sought out Dr. W.P. Brookes, the creator of one of the first Olympic revivals (there were several in Europe throughout the nineteenth century) in 1849 near Much

Wenlock in Shropshire England, who included track and field games, what the British called

“athletics.”201 He became fixated on the idea of an Olympic Revival and sought allies for his

cause in America, whose peoples he had heard praised and jeered for their competitive, fractious

natures.

During his 1889 trip, Coubertin traveled to America and attended a conference on

physical training in Boston at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He wrote a report on

the debates surrounding professionalism and heard several lectures on the importance of

199 For Coubertin’s opinion of German gymnastics, MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 119; For his love of Britain’s athletics and “the Arnold legend” of the 1880s, MacAloon, 60-82; Guttmann, The Olympics, 8-9. 200 Guttmann, The Olympics, 8-9. 201 Ibid, 9. 103

gymnastics training in American education. Many of the nation’s most elite physical educators

gave speeches espousing the benefits of their respective gymnastics systems: Nils Posse, Dr.

Dudley A. Sargent, Dr. Hartwell, Dr. Hitchcock, and Heinrick Metzner (Principal of the New

York Turnverein).202 All of these men cautioned against the growing enthusiasm for sports,

which Dr. Hartwell described as mere, “Pleasurable activity for the sake of recreation,” impeding

the work of scientific training to produce, “Pleasure, health, and skill.”203 The importance of gymnastics was not in question at the end of the conference. The greater debate was over what system of gymnastics to use in public schools. As Olympic historian John MacAloon so adroitly points out, the anti-athletic motif of the conference reveals the growing popularity of sports in

American culture to match the educators’ growing concerns. It also shows that at this time, despite the Turnverein’s competitions at American Turnfests, most physical educators still saw gymnastics only useful for physical and moral education, and not to be practiced for competition.

For his part, Coubertin gave a small speech as an official emissary of the French government. Coubertin opined that the German system of gymnastics, or any gymnastics for that matter, was not the sole moral-enhancing system of worth. Instead, Coubertin gave a hearty endorsement of the British athletic reforms of Thomas Arnold of the Rugby School, that

Coubertin claimed—exaggeratedly—the French Educational Association Reform Association, (a

fictitious name for the Comité pour la propagation des exercises physiques) had been founded

on.204 He allowed that gymnastics was a wonderful system for boys under the age of twelve, and

for girls, but it was unsuitable to the task of molding men of high-moral character. Coubertin’s

mission to the conference had been to entice America’s physical educators to the prospect of the

202 MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 114-118. 203 Ibid, 115. 204 Ibid, 119. 104

Olympic Games. Instead, he found a group of men and women bent on limiting games’ influence on the development of their nation’s youth. However, Coubertin left the United States with an indelible sense of the nations, “sporting” character.

As historian John MacAloon notes, “[Coubertin] saw sport as a dominant emblem and instrument of the vitality, democracy, and happy blending of tradition and modern innovation which he found distinctive of the United States.”205 Indeed, Coubertin had succeeded in finding some influential supporters to his Olympic vision while he was there, including William M.

Sloane, a Princeton history professor and organizer of an American expedition to Athens.

Sloane, of all the university faculty who met with this sport-fevered Frenchman, best reflected and reciprocated Coubertin’s intentions for the restoration of the Olympic Games in his history of the ancient and modern games. Another man whom Coubertin admired for his sporting temperament and manly virtues was the Teddy Roosevelt.206 The athletic future president would endorse Coubertin’s intentions to restore the Games even before his time as a man of international politics. Roosevelt and Coubertin shared a kindly correspondence for several decades and Roosevelt even accepted the title of Honorary President of the 1904 Olympic Games at St. Louis. Sport-minded men such as Roosevelt and Sloane populate the list of Coubertin’s friends in America, as opposed to gymnasts and physical educators. The very inclusion of gymnastics in the games, besides its basic history, having originated with the Greeks, almost seems strange. Indeed, there were many Europeans who believed gymnastics should not be part of the Olympics at all.

205 MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 125. 206 Ibid, 127. 105

Coubertin and the first International Olympic Committee met with several challenges during the organization of the first Games. Much of their difficulty stemmed from determining which events would be included and deciding whose rules and regulations to follow. However, as historian Allen Guttmann notes in his book, The Olympics, Coubertin was more interested in the international symbolism of the games themselves than an internationally accepted rulebook.

Scholars of Olympic history tend not to delve too deeply into how or why Coubertin selected the list of events for the first modern games besides pointing out his idealized view of British athletics.207 Instead, they tend to focus on the conflicts and troubles surrounding the games and their performance. For example, how Coubertin’s indifference to each nation’s sympathy to their favored sports became a significant obstacle to ensuring nations’ attendance.

Indeed, it is unclear how Coubertin and his Olympic organizers decided on their events, but given that one of the vice presidents for the first International Olympic Congress was Viktor

Balke, professor of the Central Gymnastic Institute of Sweden, gymnastics events seemed a forgone conclusion.208 However, there were those who believed gymnastics should not be part of the Games at all, and some who argued to what degree they should be showcased. In 1893, the president of the Union of Belgian Gymnastic Societies wrote to Coubertin that his federation,

“’had always believed and still believed that gymnastics and sports are two contrary things and has always fought against the latter as incompatible with its principles.’”209 Few German gymnasts of the Deutsche Turnerschaft seemed willing to attend either. Many Turners claimed their German sensibilities could not stand what they viewed as, “French shenanigans,” and even

French gymnasts resented Coubertin for including contests on rings and horizontal bar apparatus

207 Guttmann, The Olympics, 16. 208 MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 168. 209 Ibid, 169. 106

in place of noncompetitive mass exhibitions.210 However, in the end, Coubertin’s choice of

events for the first modern Olympic Games were taken from several sources, including

gymnastic drills and track and field contests that were practiced in one form or another in

England, France, Germany, Eastern Europe, and the United States.

The first modern Olympic Games took place from April 6th to the 15th at the Panathenaic

Stadium in Athens, Greece, in 1896. Despite Coubertin’s best efforts to spread word of the

Games, most of the forty-thousand spectators were locals. The Greeks had hosted their own

versions of the Olympic Games several times in the preceding decades, but even with their

experience and rate of attendance, their athletes were far outnumbered by foreigners, and

therefore outcompeted.211 The gymnastics events for the first Olympiad included rings, the

vaulting horse, pommel horse, parallel bars, horizontal bar, rope climb, team parallel bars, and

team horizontal bar. In fitting homage to the legendary past of their gymnastic ancestors, two

Greeks, Ioannis Mitropoulos and Nikolaos Andriakopoulos, took gold for the rings and rope

climbing events. This was accomplished despite the Greek committee’s humble statement in the

Olympic Report that, “Athletic and gymnastic sports had hitherto not arrived at such a degree of

development in our country as to put…Athens in a position to train sportsmen competent to

represent their country.”212 This was true only to the extent that Germans earned the majority of

the honors for gymnastics. A fitting result given the competition was organized with their

preferred apparatus and that of their American-Turnverein cousins. Unfortunately, familiarity

210 Guttmann, The Olympics, 17. 211 Ibid, 18; The Greeks of the later nineteenth-century did not practice German or Swedish gymnastics, but they did have a gymnasia. One such structure was built in memory of Evanghelos Zappas, a man of Epirus who organized an “Olympic Games” in 1859 which included the rope climb event. In this small way, one could argue the Greeks knew gymnastics, MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 151. 212 “Gymnastics 1896,” accessed August 16, 2016, http://users.skynet.be/hermandw/olymp/gym1896.html; Lampros, Spyridon, Organising Committee for the Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, The Olympic Games in Ancien Times, (Athens: Ch. Beck, 1896), accessed August 16, 2016, http://doc.rero.ch/record/32169?ln=en. 107

with the Games’ equipment would have been the closest participation that American athletes

could have shown for those first Games.

Discussion of American involvement with gymnastics at the Olympic Games of 1896

must be brief for the simple fact that America had no representatives for those events. The same

is true of the Olympic Games of Paris in 1900. It seems that American gymnasts were more

averse to the concept of gymnastic competition or to the travel expenses of a journey to Greece

than their European counterparts. The 1904 Games were the first that Americans participated in

the gymnastics events, and there was not another American gymnast who competed at the

Olympics until 1920 at Antwerp, Belgium. Until the St. Louis World’s Fair and Exhibition, no

American was awarded medals for any gymnastics events, which, excepting the 1900 Games at

Paris, remained the original eight events first used in 1896.213 Often, Olympic scholars do not

note this in their histories, instead focusing on the number of medals American athletes earned in

other events. One exception to this is an article entitled, “A History of United States Artistic

Gymnastics,” by Abie Grossfeld, but even she does not attempt to explain why American

gymnasts failed or refused to attend.214 The most important Olympic Games for understanding

the state of gymnastics in America and its connections with morality is that of the 1904 Olympic

Games conjoined to the World’s Fair at St. Louis Missouri.

Many notable historians have devoted whole book chapters and contributed to

anthologies relating to the controversies surrounding the hosting of the 1904 Games. For the

213 “Gymnastics 1896,” http://users.skynet.be/hermandw/olymp/gym1896.html. 214 Abie Grossfeld, “A History of United States Artistic Gymnastics,” in Science of Gymnastics Journal, Jun 2010, Vol. 2, Issue 2, p5-28, accessed August 18, 2016, https://web-b-ebscohost- com.ezproxy.csusm.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=8f635382-b7b4-420a-92d0- 0ab1e4e2cf97%40sessionmgr102&hid=115&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=55424844&db=s 3h; http://users.skynet.be/hermandw/olymp/gym1900.html 108

purposes of understanding American gymnastics’ role at the St. Louis exposition, the key facts

are the alliance of the AAU and the NAGU in 1902, and the continued struggle of physical

educators and amateurs against the growing prevalence of professional athletes, of which a

portion of this chapter has already explored. Nationalism at the 1904 Games has also been

thoroughly explored. For example, nationalism at the World’s Fair and German-American

immigrant populations (Turnverein) affinity for the German Olympic gymnastic athletes has

been explored by Suzuko Mousel Knott.215 For the purposes of this thesis, the 1904 Louisiana

Purchase Exposition and Olympic Games demonstrates the distinct state of gymnastics in

America in relation to its moral and social purposes. Organizers for the 1904 Exposition and

Olympic Games considered gymnastics part of the Olympic Games, but also separate from

athletics and sport. It was outshined by more popular sports and athletics, and following the

1904 Games, the American Olympic Committee divested itself of responsibility for sending

gymnasts to the Olympics.

The 1904 Louisiana Purchase World’s Fair and Exposition

Three years after Robert Stoll’s book was published through Spalding, James E. Sullivan,

the chancellor of the Olympic Games and the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, compiled a

roster of athletic competitions to be held. The St. Louis Olympic Games, consecrated by

Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, in conjunction with the World’s Fair, enlarged with additional

national championships for the YMCA, and featuring scholastic and professional contests was

the full expression and celebration of the American Strenuous Life.216 Historians such as David

215 Suzuko Mousel Knott, “Germans and Others at the ‘American Games,” in The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sports, Race and American Imperialism, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), edited by Susan Brownell. 216 David Lunt and Mark Dyreson, “The 1904 Olympic Games: Triumph or Nadir?” in The Palgrave Handbook of Olympic Studies, edited by Helen Jefferson Lenskyj and Stephen Wagg, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 46-47. 109

Lunt and Mark Dyreson noted that while the 1904 Games were not unique in their chauvinism,

ethnocentrism, and national boosterism when compared to the Paris fair in 1900 or the Franco-

British games of London in 1908, they were special in a different way for Americans. They

argue that James E. Sullivan’s combination of the World’s Fair and Olympics was an attempt to

prove that the frontier ideals of the Louisiana Purchase and Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier

Thesis could be supplemented, if not replaced, by the new sporting culture of the Industrial

Age.217 The organization of the Olympic Games and the Physical Culture Expositions of the

Fair show how gymnastics, though often overlooked, fit into this new paradigm.

James Sullivan’s separation of events from minor to “Olympic games proper” replaced

most of the original 1896 and 1900 competitions with American track and field events.218 It is a generally accepted opinion among sports historians that Sullivan held athletics in higher esteem than gymnastics. In 1905, Sullivan authored a book entitled, Athletics in the West and the Far

West, in which he argued that competitive athletics should have greater precedence than gymnastics training in public schools and the latter should be curtailed for the benefit of the students.219 This alone would not be sufficient for Sullivan to deemphasize the Olympics over

the World’s Fair. He also harbored an intense dislike of Coubertin, whom he met in 1893 when

Coubertin visited Princeton as part of a second tour across the United States to inspire athletes to

attend the 1896 Games. All reports of their meeting indicated the two men despised one another

instantly, and as Sullivan was at the time the secretary of the Amateur Athletic Union of the

217 Lunt and Dyreson, “The 1904 Olympic Games,” 44-47. 218 Ibid., 50 219 “Some Recent Books and Articles Relating to Physical Training,” in American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 2 October 1905, No. 2, (Boston: American Gymnasia Co., 1905) https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=QNY9AQAAMAAJ,39 110

United States, it was a dark foreshadowing for Sullivan’s behavior when he was made

Chancellor of the 1904 Olympic Games in conjunction with the St. Louis World’s Fair.220

American athletes flooded the games while many nations such as Germany, Austria,

Cuba and others could only send token teams for only a select number of events. France had no

representative athletes at all. This imbalance of participants, along with the professional training

of the American athletes—once again with the bending of amateur ideals—won the United

States seventy gold medals, seventy-five silver, and sixty-four bronze, while the next highest

scoring nation, Cuba, won only five gold, two silver, and five bronze medals.221 As for

gymnastics, the 1904 Games were the first and only time the United States outdid their foreign

competitors, taking thirty-one of the thirty-six medals. Olympic Historian Allen Guttmann adroitly observes that any claim the United States has to winning the most medals of any nation in the Games was only possible through the sheer overwhelming numbers of American athletes on their native soil.222 The incredible bias towards American athletes and track and field events,

combined with disjointed co-scheduling of the 1904 Games with the World’s Fair, nearly toppled

Coubertin’s noble dream of a sustained Olympic Revival. Of course, for Americans, especially

in terms of athletic exhibitions, the whole affair was a resounding success.

To read Sullivan’s Official Report of the 1904 Olympic Games, one would be hard

pressed to detect any overt contempt towards any sport or event in the chancellor’s organization

of the games, or any rude opinion of Coubertin. In the reports’ introduction, Sullivan gave

220 Guttmann, The Olympics, 13 221 Lunt and Dyreson, “The 1904 Olympic Games,” 52. 222 Guttmann, The Olympics, 26. 111

Coubertin singular credit for the Olympic Revival, and wrote that he could not be more thrilled

for the overall result of “the greatest athletic games ever held in the world.”223

We have had in St. Louis under the Olympic banner, handicap athletic meets, interscholastic meets, Turners’ mass exercises, base ball[sic], international gymnastic championship competitions, championships for public schoolboys, lacrosse championships, swimming champioqships [sic], basket ball championships, one of the best rowing regattas ever contested, bicycle championships, rouque turnaments [sic], fencing tournament, a special week for the Olympic Young Men’s Christian Association championships, tennis tournament, golf tournament; archery tournament, wrestling, boxing and gymnastic, championships tournaments, as well as the Olympic games, that decided the world’s championships at track and field sports.224 Americans athletes, both in playing against one another and outperforming foreigners—when

they were able to attend—surely enjoyed sport, and specifically, amateur sport. The number and

variety of events was staggering. To further compound the number of games held during the

months of athletic proceedings the YMCA athletic clubs and the American military were each

allotted several days to compete in all their sporting activities. In the Anthropology Days

exhibition, non-European ethnic groups such as African Pigmies, Filipino Moro, and Japanese

Ainu, demonstrated their cultural athletics.225 Gymnastics were a component of the

Anthropology Days, but not in the form of horizontal bar work. Part of the purpose of the

exhibit was to measure different non-white ethnic groups’ physical capabilities against American

athletes. Shot put, tug of war, jumping, vaulting, and rope climbing for time and distance were

part of the evaluations because their results could be easily compared to others. According to

Sullivan’s official report, “There was not the slightest hitch; everything was carried on in a high

223 John E. Sullivan, “Review of the Olympic Games of 1904,” in Spalding’s Official Athletic Almanac, (New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1905), accessed August 10, 2016, http://www.la84foundation.org/6oic/OfficialReports/1904/1904Spal.pdf, 157. 224 John E. Sullivan, “Review of the Olympic Games of 1904,” 157. 225 Otto J. Schantz, “Pierre de Coubertin’s Concepts of Race, Nation, and Civilization,” in The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), edited by Susan Brownell, 159. 112

class manner, and purely in an amateur way, and more has been accomplished for the future of

athletics in this country than could ever be accomplished by any other method.”226 Despite the

grumbling of foreign athletes, most Americans able to attend the World’s Fair would have

agreed with Sullivan.

American newspapers touted the nation’s success in the Games as proof not only of

Americans’ athletic prowess, but also their credentials for global leadership.227 Even the program

for the events of the 1904 Games tailored its descriptions of past American performance to make

it appear as though American athletes routinely outperformed other nations’. The truth was that

they tended to overwhelm their competition through sheer numbers. The description preceding

the event schedule for the 1904 Games painted a rose-hued picture of past American

representatives’ achievements. Describing the 1896 and 1900 Games, the schedule read, “an

American astonished the world by winning the discus throwing championship. The second series

of Olympic Games was held at Paris in 1900, in connection with the Paris Exposition, where

they were a world's attraction, and where American athletes won nine-tenths of the prizes.”228

The same could not be said about their performance in gymnastics, not until 1904. The athletic

competitions at St. Louis included two days of Turners’ societies’ individual and team contests,

as well as several days for mass exercises conducted by 3500 Turners on a nearby field, a

gathering larger even than the Milwaukee Turnfest of 1893.229 Amateur gymnasts were also

invited to compete during a two-day period along with wrestlers for Olympic honors.230 October

226 Sullivan, “Review of the Olympic Games,” 161. 227 Lunt and Dyreson, “The 1904 Olympic Games,” 54 228 “Programme of Olympic Games and World’s Championship Contests,” (St. Louis: Department of Physical Culture, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 1904), accessed 5/20/16, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015005090207;view=plaintext;seq=11;page=root;size=100;orient=0, 5 229 Sullivan, “Official Report,” 163. 230 “Programme of Olympic Games,” 5. 113

28th was devoted to the AAU’s gymnastic championships, and October 29th was allocated for a

non-specific gymnastic championship.231

The organization of the events in conjunction with the World’s Fair was highly

confusing. Except for the AAU’s championship and the nondescript gymnastic championship,

each of the gymnastics events were separated by weeks or months. There were even Olympic

events which had no precedent, such as the World’s Basketball Championship, Olympic College

Championships, and Olympic Cricket Championships. Likely, the only factor that made these

events “Olympic” was their label on the program. The week of August 29th was dedicated to the

Olympic Games proper, and consisted almost entirely of track and field athletics, with the

exception of the marathon race and the tug-of-war on dirt.232 With few exceptions, there seems

to have been no backlash amongst physical culturists and gymnasts for this dividing of

gymnastics and other forms of physical training from the Olympic Games Week. At least once,

the gymnasts and physical educators that contributed to Mind and Body protested against the

preliminary program of the Fair on the grounds that it contained no provisions for educational

and school gymnastics. Their protests fell on deaf ears. Later, Mind and Body reported on J.E.

Sullivan’s appointment to the chief of physical culture for the World’s Fair. While they wrote

that Mr. Sullivan’s work on the arrangements of sports and athletics was above criticism, he too had excluded gymnastics from the program. Mind and Body concluded in the same article that the Fair authorities were perhaps not to blame, as some committee members were unable to distinguish between athletics and school gymnastics.233 They felt it was the duty of societies

231 Charles M. Kurtz, The Saint Louis World’s Fair of 1904: In Commemoration of the Acquisition of the Louisiana Territory. Saint Louis: Gottschalk Printing Company, 1903. Accessed August 12, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=n0U6AAAAMAAJ&rdid=book-n0U6AAAAMAAJ&rdot=1, 118. 232 Kurtz, The Saint Louis World’s Fair, 119. 233 “Physical Culture Department at St. Louis World’s Fair Under Control of Secretary of A.A.U.” in Mind and Body: A Monthly Journal Devoted to Physical Education, Vol. 10, August, 1903, No. 114, accessed November 11, 114

such as the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education or the NAGU to

secure gymnastics part in the Fair. This shows a disconnect between the members of the AAU,

such as Sullivan, who allowed the NAGU to compete within their established amateur

guidelines, but did not feel obligated to include gymnastics within the Olympic Games. Instead,

it was sufficient to relegate gymnastics to its former position as a mean of physical education.

This can be seen at the physical culture exhibitions at the St. Louis fair.

In 1904, the November and December issues of The Posse Gymnasium Journal ran two

articles written by Elsa Pohl, director of the girls’ gymnasium at McKinley High School. Her

articles described the physical training exhibits in the physical training department of the exhibit.

It gratified her to observe that nations the world over had accepted the importance of physical

training and the incredible strides in education accomplished by its inclusion in curriculum. She

went on to describe exhibitions showing the effect of gymnastics on several maladies, writing,

“Here we are shown the application of gymnastics to the normal child, the feeble-minded, insane

and incorrigible, and are familiarized with the new inventions and devices which stand for

progress.”234 The exhibits in the Physical Culture Hall of Washington University consisted of

“physical training as taught in the schools, colleges, universities, normal schools, athletic clubs,

Young Men's Christian Associations and Turner societies of this country.”235 She noted with satisfaction her frequent sightings of Swedish gymnastics training and allowed that the German gymnastics system helped pioneer the practice of physical training in America when she saw a

2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=3xdBAQAAMAAJ&rdid=book-3xdBAQAAMAAJ&rdot=1, 164-165. 234 Elsa Pohl, “Physical Training Exhibits in the Physical Training Department of the Exposition,” in Posse Gymnasium Journal, Vol.XII November 1904 No. 10, (Boston: Posse Gymnasium Club, 1904), https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=PO8yAQAAIAAJ, 7. 235 Pohl, “Physical Training Exhibits,” 8. 115

Turner hall decorated with paintings of instructors from both systems.236 Pohl’s reaction, and

Rose Posse’s publication and praise of what Pohl saw the exhibitions, shows that many gymnasts

and physical educators in the early twentieth-century were content with gymnastics’ role as a

method for physical and moral training. Instead of discussing the American gymnasts, who for

the first time in the Modern Olympic Games’ history, had both participated in and won all of the

gymnastics events, they applauded the work of physical educators.

The attention given to the awards for the physical culture exhibitions demonstrates a

renewed emphasis on the training aspect of gymnastics following in the midst of its attempts to

accommodate competition and its separation from sport at the World’s Fair. The Journal ran a

piece from American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, listing the gold, silver, and bronze medals

of achievement awarded to various physical educators who provided installations for the

exhibition. The awards given for the equipment provided and the attractiveness of the

installation. A.G. Spalding and Bros. were awarded the grand prize for providing a full

gymnasium with a model playground and various sets of the company’s athletic supplies.237

Gold medals were also awarded to Dr. and Mrs. Luther Halsey Gulick of the New York YMCA,

the North American Gymnastic Union of Indianapolis, and the Posse Normal School of Physical

Training in Boston.238 As opposed to Sullivan and American sports enthusiasts’ bias for team sports and athletics over gymnastics, the exhibition was a resounding success for physical educators that taught gymnastics for its healthful and moral benefits. In this way the 1904

World’s Fair was not a denial of gymnastics as a sport, but its full acceptance as a means of

236 Pohl, “Physical Training Exhibits,” 5-7. 237 “Medals and Honors to Exhibitors,” in Posse Gymnasium Journal, Vol. XII December 1904, No. 11, ed. Rose Posse, (Boston: Posse Gymnasium Club, 1904), https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=PO8yAQAAIAAJ, 11. 238 “Medals and Honors to Exhibitors,” 11. 116

attaining physical health, albeit not as crucial for the manhood or competitive legacy of the

nation as other activities. It was also a poignant suggestion that gymnastics belonged firmly in

the realm of physical education, despite its adaptations to sport. Furthermore, it foreshadows a

continued separation between the American Olympic Games Committee and gymnastics

organizations such as the NAGU.

This disconnect can be seen in the formation of the American Olympic team for the next

Games, two years later. In an effort to gain full control over the Modern Olympics, the Greeks

organized their own “Intercalated Games” in the April and May of 1906, once again at Athens.

The closing ceremony on May 2nd included gymnastic demonstrations by schoolchildren from

the city of Athens.239 Of the thirty-eight American athletes that attended, none participated in

the gymnastics events, with most competing in the track and field athletics, referring to track and

field sports, and a handful in swimming, diving, wrestling, and tennis.240 One might mistakenly assume Americans were unaware of the gymnastic portion of the events, but that would seem to be impossible. Both the American Gymnasia and Athletic Record and the Posse Gymnasium

Journal reported on the Games. The American Gymnasia and Athletic Record even published a list of the events at Athens, including gymnastics.241 While the majority of American media

reported an overwhelming victory for the Americans, an article in American Gymnasia and

Athletic Record: “Did America win Olympic Games,” referring to the 1906 Olympic Games in

Athens disagreed. The author’s opinion was that they clearly did not, given that Americans did

239 Karl Lennartz, “The 2nd International Olympic Games in Athens 1906,” in Journal of Olympic History, Vol 10, December 2001/January 2002, International Society of Olympic Historians, accessed August 9, 2016, library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/JOH/JOHv10n1/JOHv10n1i.pdf. 240 “United States at the 1906 Athina Summer Games,” accessed August 8, 2016, http://www.sports- reference.com/olympics/countries/USA/summer/1906/. 241 “Olympic Games of 1906,” in American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 2 November 1905, (Boston: American Gymnasia Co., 1905), No. 3, accessed August 5, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=QNY9AQAAMAAJ, 55. 117

not receive honors in any event not part of conventional “American Athletics.”242 Even more

striking, another article in American Gymnasia reported after the Games that when asked why

America sent no gymnasts as representatives, a member of the Olympic Committee explained

that the committee had focused on athletics, assuming that the NAGU might send a team, “but

conceiving, in any event, that athletics were of paramount importance.”243 This shows that not

only did the committee know the difference between athletics and gymnastics, they purposefully emphasized the former, not concerning themselves whether Americans sent any representatives to compete in the gymnastics events. This trend continued for the next fourteen years.

The 1908 Olympic Games in London, England hosted the “Heptathlon,” a combination of seven gymnastic events and a team competition. Essentially, it was the same set of eight events,

and similar to past Games, none of the American athletes in attendance took part in the

gymnastics portion. The gold medal for the heptathlon went to an Italian gymnast named

Braglia, and this was the first time in the modern Olympics’ relatively short history that Italy

won a gymnastics event over Germans, Swedes, Frenchmen, Greeks, or Americans. Physical

educators back in the U.S. complained about almost anything besides the lack of American

gymnasts. For example, Rose Posse published an article in the Posse Gymnasium Journal

entitled, “Sport or ‘Sport’” denouncing the gambling that occurred at the London Games.244 The

baroness also applauded the addition of women to the Danish gymnastics team, apparently a

242 “Did America Win Olympic Games,” in America Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 3 September 1906, No. 1, accessed August 10, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details/American_Gymnasia_and_Athletic_Record?id=HHgyAQAAIAAJ, 18. 243 “America At Olympic Games,” in America Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 2 September 1906, No. 8, (Boston: American Gymnasia Co., 1906), accessed August 10, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details/American_Gymnasia_and_Athletic_Record?id=HHgyAQAAIAAJ. 184. 244 Rose Posse, “Sport and ‘Sport’,” in Posse Gymnasium Journal, Vol. XVI, October 1908, No. 9, ed. Rose Posse, (Boston: Posse Gymnasium Club, 1908), accessed August 16, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=y2g3AQAAMAAJ&rdid=book-y2g3AQAAMAAJ&rdot=1, 4. 118

gesture of respect for Queen Alexandria of England, who was born a princess of Denmark.245 If

anything, physical educators seemed secure in the knowledge that Americans at least did not

rush headlong into gymnastic competition, at least on an international stage. However, while

Posse and other instructors of gymnastics, especially for the Swedish System, turned up their

noses at competitive gymnastics, other organizations that practiced German gymnastics fully

embraced them, but not on the stage of international competition.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, Americans desired a place of

prominence over other nations. This was true in the realm of sports as well as that of military

power. The primacy of competitive sport in military training was an effort to inculcate American

combative spirit in the troops, just as the rise of competitive sport in America was part of a

broader cultural movement to encourage Americans to rise above other nations. Gymnastics became part of a broader cultural conflict surrounding this rise of sport in the United States and the struggle between what constituted legitimate sport and athletics. While gymnasts in the

NAGU and proponents of the Swedish system made allowances for competition, recognizing

American youths’ desire to prove themselves through contest, they could not fully make the shift from a popular fitness system to a popular, nationally-recognized sport. This was in part due to their foreign origins, and perceived un-American style of performance that valued grace of movement over sheer displays of dominating power. As organizations such as the AAU and the

American Olympic Committee focused on furthering America’s position as a head of international competition, pushing the importance of track and field and team sports in which

245 Rose Posse, “Notes on the Olympic Games,” in Posse Gymnasium Journal, Vol. XVI, October 1908, No. 9, ed. Rose Posse, (Boston: Posse Gymnasium Club, 1908), accessed August 16, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=y2g3AQAAMAAJ&rdid=book-y2g3AQAAMAAJ&rdot=1, 3. 119 they excelled, American gymnasts consolidated their positions as the trainers of American bodies, and the protectors of their moral character. 120

Conclusion: Finding Balance in the Twentieth Century In 1905, the YMCA held an Interstate Gymnasium meet in Somerville, Massachusetts.

The meet held to the AAU standards established in 1902, but with previously announced

apparatus, limiting the variability of the contest. A team trophy was awarded for performance in

three events: the German Triathlon of the parallel bars, side horse, and horizontal bar.246 The

YMCA offered gymnastics as one of its many activities to promote Muscular Christianity, even allowing competition as long as their members kept to the ambiguous tenets of amateurism.

Both the selection of equipment and the reduction of events show a refinement in competitive standards. With fewer variations possible in exercise, and no individual awards for events, the contests were easier to proctor and remained strictly amateur by dividing the honors amongst the winning team and not recognizing a single participant over his teammates. By 1905, the YMCA

had begun establishing rules and regulations for the education of gymnastic leaders in their

organization. Similar to the NAGU, the YMCA wished to make gymnastics training and

competition uniform throughout the various clubs and gymnasia in America.247

Physical training in public schools remained a key concern for gymnasts following the

1904 St. Louis Exposition, and leading into the twentieth century competition became more

acceptable. In 1914, in the city of St. Louis no less, a midwinter high school gymnastics meet

was organized between four schools.248 The tournament combined the elements of amateurism

and professionalism through its support of team competition and the use of professional

246 “Interstate Y.M.C.A. Gymnasium Meet,” in American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 2 November 1905, No. 3, Accessed August 10, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=QNY9AQAAMAAJ, 54. 247 C.R.H. Jackson, “How to Organize and Conduct A Gymnasium Leaders’ Corps,” in America Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 2 September 1905, No. 1, accessed August 10, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details/American_Gymnasia_and_Athletic_Record?id=HHgyAQAAIAAJ, 13- 14. 248 A.E. Kindervater, “High School Gymnastic Tournament,” in Mind and Body, May 1913 Vol. 20, No. 219 (Milwaukee: Freidenker Publishing Co., 1913), accessed August 1, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=4KYaAQAAMAAJ, 143-147. 121

gymnasts to judge the apparatus events. The gymnastics competition primarily served, not to

create well-balanced athletes or moral students, but to act as a bridging activity between the football games of the fall and the track and field events of spring.249 By the 1910s, gymnasts

accepted that gymnastics had become a sport, even subordinating its purpose as a general fitness

system in American public schools to its competitive form, the same schools that physical

educators had fought to keep free of athletics for so long. The allure of sport, even for gymnasts,

was too strong and facilities designed for gymnastics training bent to the purpose of athletics.

This preference for sport did not necessarily decrease gymnastic training at high schools

and YMCA facilities, but it did overshadow it. Judging by the gymnasium photos in the 1905

issue of American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, the YMCA in New York City held true to the

German-American system. It contained pommel horses, parallel bars, rings, climbing ropes,

ladders, and a second-story running track that haloed the exercise floor below.250 The same article included photos and building plans for the St. Morris high school gymnasia and the

Teachers’ College gymnasia, both in New York City.251 St. Morris also had a separate girls’

gymnasium that included more Swedish gymnastics equipment. Posse and Jahn might have been

proud to know their exercise regimens were still in use, if not exactly held to the strictest

standards.

There was some question about the effectiveness of training at public schools among the

most influential gymnastics organizations of the time. At the Turnverein meeting of 1906, club

leaders and instructors discussed gymnastics training in Philadelphian schools, which had

249 Kindervater, “High School Gymnastic Tournament,” 143. 250 “Gymnasium Equipment,” ,” in American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 2 November 1905, No. 3, Accessed August 10, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=QNY9AQAAMAAJ, 41. 251 “Gymnasium Equipment,” 41-46. 122

become mandatory under state law.252 The Turnverein leaders of the “German-American

Alliance,” were concerned that gymnastics training was not given its due attention in schools,

and that educators would only provide the bare minimum of instruction if left unmonitored.

They recommended that all future schools in the state have accompanying playground and

gymnasia to serve the needs of the students for physical activity.253 However, there was no call

for hiring additional gymnastics instructors. Training was left to the teachers and athletic

coaches of the schools. These gymnasia, built in German style, also adopted the relatively new

Turnverein affinity for competition. No longer was gymnastics merely for building a strong

social body, disciplined and mindful of the community, but also for displaying the prowess of the

individual.

Some physical educators such as Dr. Dudley Sargent had begun to argue that in the first

few decades of the twentieth century, the goal for gymnasium work aught to be to develop and improve the individual trainee’s personal abilities, as opposed to performing mass gymnastics work. Sargent stated that, “the test of all practical effort in life is ‘what is this doing for the individual man?’”254 In America, the focus had shifted in athletics from how to train men and

women to support the republic, to how sports made each man and woman their own sort of champion. European observers of American culture observed this as well. Writing on the exhibition of German Gymnastics and the Olympic Games in 1912, Professor Albert Siebert of

Berlin gave his assessment of Americans’ mindset towards sports, stating, “America is the land

252 “Turnverein Notes,” in America Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 2 September 1905, No. 1, accessed August 10, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details/American_Gymnasia_and_Athletic_Record?id=HHgyAQAAIAAJ, 16. 253 “Turnverein Notes,” 16. 254 Dudley A. Sargent, “Doing More for the Individual Man and Woman,” in America Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 3 September 1906, No. 1, accessed August 10, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details/American_Gymnasia_and_Athletic_Record?id=HHgyAQAAIAAJ, 2. 123

of records, of championships. This is comprehensible in a land of restless, onward[-]striving, of unlimited business competition, of tremendous economic possibilities, where all progress is measured by figures. Sport, like everything else, had to become a measurable championship performance.”255 So, too, in the early decades of the twentieth century, had gymnastics.

Unfortunately for gymnastics in American sport and fitness, it made that transition not as

successfully, or as enthusiastically, as other sports.

From its introduction in America during the early nineteenth-century to the 1904 St.

Louis Olympic Games, gymnastics served as a moral and physical training system. Since

gymnastics valued progression, self-control, community spirit, and self-improvement over

dashing towards the limits of one’s abilities, breaking records, or receiving honors, it appealed to

many Americans during a period when they felt threatened by not only outside forces, but also

internal strife. For some such as Dio Lewis and Rose Posse, who wrote vehemently against their

intellectual opponents, gymnastics was also a way to signal their virtue to others. For military

officers it was a way to prepare their men for both combat and life within the organized structure

of the United States Armed Forces. Finally, once gymnasts began representing America at the

Olympics in 1920, their performance could demonstrate to the world the caliber of athletes their country could produce, making even the most difficult and challenging maneuvers on the platform seem simple.

Moving to the twentieth-first century, gymnastics in the U.S. has taken on many new forms. The public is aware of gymnastics, but mostly because of the U.S. Olympic women’s gymnastics team’s dominating performance in the last eight years. Gymnastics has become, in

255 Albert Siebert, “German and American Folk Festivals and International Olympic Games,” in Mind and Body: Volume 20, (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Friedenker Publishing Company, 1914), https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=4KYaAQAAMAAJ&rdid=book-4KYaAQAAMAAJ&rdot=1, 440. 124

many ways, a women’s sport. Though, despite the overt connection to aesthetic performance in

artistic gymnastics, female gymnasts’ competitions are largely contests of who can come closest

to perfect execution in their routines. However, in the last few Olympic Games, the true struggle

for most is over who can take silver. The sweeping victory of American gymnast Simone Biles,

favored athlete and winner of several gold medals at the 2016 Rio Olympics, has revolutionized the expectations of not only the international sport of gymnastics, but also the athletic expression of the female body. 256 Several maneuvers on the vault or in tumbling routines bear the names of

the gymnasts that first performed them in international competition, and “the Biles” is one of

them. Biles even reported that some of the elite male gymnasts who train with her cannot

execute her signature tumbling move. They get upset that they cannot perform a maneuver she invented by accident, trying to train while nursing a sore ankle.257 While female gymnastics

does not include contests for the rings or the parallel bars, competing on uneven bars instead,

Biles’ incredible performances have put the spotlight on women athletes in the sport. They are

seen not only as experts in their chosen sport, but also as paragons of female beauty, inspiring a

new generation of young women to pursue athletic careers. This is a significant change from

gymnastics’ original purpose of building young men’s bodies and training them for war, and

reflects the needs of contemporary American society: to recognize the merits and contributions

of women in the United States.

Historically, gymnastics served as a provider of moral and physical qualities that

Americans thought they lacked. In the twentieth-first century, American gymnasts at the

Olympics provide a new moral awakening for the nation and a redrawing of physical boundaries

256 Chloe Angyal, “Queen Simone Biles Claims Her Olympic Crown at Last: Bow Down,” The Huffington Post, last updated August 16, 2016, accessed November 1, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/simone-biles-all- around-gold_us_57abbf02e4b06e52746f3e71. 257 “Queen Simone Biles.” 125

for the human body. Young female gymnasts dominated the 2016 Rio Olympic Games with

performances said to occur only once every hundred years. Instead of the image of the starting

position in Swedish and German gymnastics—a symbol of stoic masculine strength and

stability—Simone Biles and teammate Aly Raisman, the American gold and silver medalists in

artistic gymnastics, celebrated their victory with an emotional embrace amidst the roar of the crowd. The impact of their performances and their outstanding careers can only be appreciated

with an accompanying understanding of sport and exercise in America’s history.

Research on exercise systems and sports are anything but simple, however. It requires

understanding not just the context surrounding their creation, influence, and practice, but also a

working knowledge of the actions within the sport or training regimen as well. There are also

several questions that can be raised through such study that invite new historical inquiry. For example, instead of examining how culture is affected by the presence of new exercise, it is important to understand how cultures within cultures affect what kinds of exercise are in vogue.

Given the United States’ lack of participation in gymnastics events at the modern Olympic

Games until 1920, it would be of benefit to Olympic and American sport historians to study the reasons surrounding American gymnasts’ reticence prior to the Antwerp Games, and what circumstances prompted their eventual performance.

Gymnastics remains a part of America’s physical culture. It exists in many forms to this day, and its influence can be seen in many activities and systems of training, especially within competitive sports such as Olympic gymnastics and CrossFit. After a long dormant period, it is possible that gymnastics is once again on the rise, and as it serves to usher in a new wave of physical culture in the United States, it is a reminder of Americans’ recurring desire to improve

themselves. 126

Bibliography Manuals, Articles, and Documents “America At Olympic Games.” In America Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 2 September 1906, No. 8. Boston: American Gymnasia Co., 1906. Accessed August 10, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details/American_Gymnasia_and_Athletic_Record?i d=HHgyAQAAIAAJ. pp. 184. “Did America Win Olympic Games.” In America Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 3 September 1906, No. 1. Boston: American Gymnasia Co., 1906. Accessed August 10, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details/American_Gymnasia_and_Athletic_Record?i d=HHgyAQAAIAAJ. “Gymnasium Equipment.” In American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 2 November 1905, No. 3. Boston: American Gymnasia Co., 1905. Accessed August 10, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=QNY9AQAAMAAJ, 41. “Gymnastics at the 1904 St. Louis Summer Games.” Accessed October 3, 2016. http://www.sports-reference.com/olympics/summer/1904/GYM/. “Interstate Y.M.C.A. Gymnasium Meet.” In American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 2 November 1905, No. 3. Boston: American Gymnasia Co., 1905. Accessed August 10, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=QNY9AQAAMAAJ. pp. 54. “Medals and Honors to Exhibitors.” In Posse Gymnasium Journal, Vol. XII December 1904, No. 11. Edited by Rose Posse. Boston: Posse Gymnasium Club, 1904. Accessed August 7, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=PO8yAQAAIAAJ. pp. 11. “Olympic Games of 1906.” In American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 2 November 1905, No. 3. Boston: American Gymnasia Co., 1905. Accessed August 5, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=QNY9AQAAMAAJ. pp. 55. “Physical Culture Department at St. Louis World’s Fair Under Control of Secretary of A.A.U.” In Mind and Body: A Monthly Journal Devoted to Physical Education, Vol. 10, August, 1903, No. 114. Accessed November 11, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=3xdBAQAAMAAJ&rdid=book- 3xdBAQAAMAAJ&rdot=1. pp. 164-165. “Programme of Olympic Games and World’s Championship Contests.” St. Louis: Department of Physical Culture, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 1904. Accessed May 20, 2016. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015005090207;view=plaintext;seq=11;page =root;size=100;orient=0. “Some Recent Books and Articles Relating to Physical Training,” in American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 2 October 1905, No. 2. Boston: American Gymnasia Co., 1905. 127

Accessed August 5, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=QNY9AQAAMAAJ. 39. “Some Recent German Literature on Physical Education.” In The Journal of Genetic Psychology: The Pedagogical Seminary Vol. II. Edited by Hall, G. Stanley. Worchester: J.H. Orpha, 1892. Accessed June 28, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=yGwVAAAAIAAJ&rdid=book- yGwVAAAAIAAJ&rdot=1. “Turnverein Notes.” In America Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 2 September 1905, No. 1. Accessed August 10, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details/American_Gymnasia_and_Athletic_Record?i d=HHgyAQAAIAAJ. Alcott, William. The Young Man’s Guide 2nd Edition. Boston: Lilly, Wait, Colman, and Holden, 1834. Accessed April 17, 2015. http://books.google.com/books?id=ey9WAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=alcott+ young+man%27s+guide&hl=en&ei=rxlcToyWI- izsAKJh3k&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=on epage&q&f=false. Amateur Athletic Union. Official Handbook of the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States. New York, American Sports Publishing Company, 1902. Accessed June 28, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=DJ0uAQAAIAAJ&rdid=book- DJ0uAQAAIAAJ&rdot=1. Beale, Alfred; Spedon, S.M. Calisthenics and Light Gymnastics for Home and School. New York: Excelsior Publishing House, 1888. Accessed October 4, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=8wETAAAAIAAJ&source=gbs_slider_cls_metadata _7_mylibrary. Beecher, Henry Ward. The Vices; or Lectures to Young Men. London: Clarke, Beeton, and Co., Fleet Street, 1851. Accessed April 17, 2015. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433068175276;view=1up;seq=8. Bell, John M.D.; Condie, Francis D. M.D. editors. The Journal of Health and Recreation. Philadelphia: Samuel C. Atkinson, 1832-1833. Accessed April 17, 2015. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/010552882. Black, Jonathan. Making the American Body: The Remarkable Saga of the Men and Women Whose Feats, Feuds, and Passions Shaped Fitness History. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Bolin, Jakob. “On Group Contests.” In American Physical Education Review: Volume 3. Cambridge: American Association for the advancement of Physical Education, 1898. Accessed June 27, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=yxmgAAAAMAAJ. 128

Bowen, Wilbur Pardon. Teachers’ Course in Physical Training: A Brief Study of the Fundamental Principles of Gymnastic Training, Designed for Teachers of the Public Schools. Ann Arbor: George Wahr, 1899. Accessed October 4, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=1SAAAAAAYAAJ&source=gbs_slider_cls_metadata _7_mylibrary. Burnap, Reverend. “The Body Must Be Duly Regarded In All The Movements For The Renovation of Man.” In The Graham Journal of Health and Longevity, Vol. III. David Cambell, ed. Boston: David Cambell, 1837-1839. Accessed April 17, 2015. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011570135. Butler, D.P. Butler’s System of Physical Training, The Lifting Cure: An Original, Scientific Application of the Laws of Motion or Mechanical Action to Physical Culture and the Cure of Disease, With A Discussion of True and False Methods of Physical Training. Boston: D.P. Butler, 1868. Google Books. Accessed August 10, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=nFZZAAAAcAAJ. Butts, Edmund Luther, Lieu. Manual of Physical Drill, United States Army. New York: Appleton and Company, 1897. Accessed March 3, 2016. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=zcNHAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&outpu t=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PR1. Butts, Edmund Luther, Lieu, “Physical Training of the American Soldier.” In Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, accessed February 27, 2016. https://play.google.com/books/reader?printsec=frontcover&output=reader&id=Rto9AQA AMAAJ&pg=GBS.PR3. Caldwell, Charles. Autobiography of Charles Caldwell, M.D. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1855. Accessed April 17, 2015. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/Sabin?dd=0&af=RN&locID=sanmarcoscsu&srchtp= a&c=1&ste=11&stp=Author&dc=flc&d4=0.33&docNum=CY105618252&ae=CY10561 8252&tiPG=1&an=SABCP04067800. Cambell, David. The Graham Journal of Health and Longevity, Vol. III. Boston: David Cambell, 1837-1839. Accessed April 17, 2015. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/01157013. Camp, Walter. “The Olympic Games of 1912: A Preliminary Survey of the Fifth Modern Olympiad Now Being Held at Stockholm, Sweden.” In Collier’s: Volume 49. New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1912. Accessed June 12, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=A1wwAQAAMAAJ. Checkley, Edwin. A Natural Method of Physical Training: Making Muscle and Reducing Flesh Without Apparatus. Revised Edition. New York: William C. Bryant & CO, 1892. Google Books. Accessed August 10, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=hs IVAAAAYAAJ. 129

Chiosso, James. Gymnastics, an Essential Branch of National Education, Both Public and Private: The Only Remedy to Improve the Present Physical Condition of Man. New York: Walton & Maberly, 1854. Accessed October 4, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=JOVCAAAAIAAJ&source=gbs_slider_cls_metadata _7_mylibrary. Combe, Andrew. Principles of Physiology Applied to the Preservation of Health, and to the Improvement of Physical and Mental Education. Edinburgh: Fowlers and Wells, 1842. Accessed October 6, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=3bM6CsDpmpEC&source=gbs_slider_cls_metadata _7_mylibrary. Crosby, Ernst Howard. “The Military Idea of Manliness.” In The Independent, Volume 53, Issues 2731-2743. New York: The Independent, 1901. Cunningham, Duncan. Calisthenics and Drilling Simplified: For Schools and Families. London: Haughton & CO., 186*. Accessed October 6, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=10ACAAAAQAAJ&source=gbs_slider_cls_metadat a_7_mylibrary. Eastman, Mary F.; Lewis, Helen Cecelia Clarke. The Biography of Dio Lewis. Accessed December 28, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=J67qXsLvJOQC&pg=PA285&dq=the+biography+of +dio+lewis&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj- 9aesmdDKAhULyGMKHW5sBrIQ6AEIKDAA. Ellis, Eugene A. Capt. “Discipline:--Its Importance to an Armed Force, and the Best Means of Promoting and Maintaining it in the U.S. Army.” In The Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, Vol XVI, No. LXXIV, March 1895. Accessed February 28. 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=Rto9AQAAMAAJ. E.M. “Moral and Physical Reform Identical.” In The Graham Journal of Health and Longevity, Vol. III. Boston: David Cambell, 1837-1839. David Cambell, ed. Accessed April 17, 2015. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011570135. Enebuske, Claës, J. Progressive Gymnastic Day’s Orders, According to the Principles of the Ling System. New York, Boston, Chicago: Silver, Burdett & Company, 1892. Accessed July 5, 2015. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4503959;view=1up;seq=7. Fleck, William. “System and Method of German-American Gymnastics.” In Gymnastics, A Textbook of the German-American System of Gymnastics, Specially Adapted to the Use of Teachers and Pupils in Public and Private Schools and Gymnasiums. Boston, Lothrol, Lee & Shepard CO, 1895. Edited by W.A. Stecher. Accessed July 27, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=pSUAAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book- pSUAAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1. 130

Graham, Sylvester. Lectures on the Science of Human Life. Battle Creek: Sylvester Graham, 1872. Accessed August 13, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=FElrAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs _ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Grant, Percy Stickney. “Physical Deterioration among the Poor in America and One Way of Checking It.” The North American Review, Vol. 184, No. 608 (Feb 1, 1907), pp 254-267. Accessed September 15, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25105776. Gulick, Luther. The Efficient Life. Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913. Accessed May 16, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=fw0LAAAAIAAJ&rdid=book- fw0LAAAAIAAJ&rdot=1. Gulick, Luther. “Report of Luther Gulick: Secretary Physical Department.” In YMCA Yearbook and Official Rosters. New York: YMCA International Committee, 1899. Accessed June 25, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=MPlCAQAAMAAJ&rdid=book- MPlCAQAAMAAJ&rdot=1. Gulick, Luther. “Report of Luther Gulick: Secretary Physical Department.” In YMCA Yearbook and Official Rosters. New York: YMCA International Committee, 1900. Accessed June 25, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=MPlCAQAAMAAJ&rdid=book- MPlCAQAAMAAJ&rdot=1. Hardwell, Edward Hussey. Report of the Director of Physical Training, December, 1891. Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, City Printers, 1891. Accessed January 6, 2016. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=fkcXAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&outpu t=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA4. Hepbron, George T. “Report of George T. Hepbron: Secretary Physical Department.” In YMCA Yearbook and Official Rosters. New York: YMCA International Committee, 1900. Accessed June 25, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=MPlCAQAAMAAJ&rdid=book- MPlCAQAAMAAJ&rdot=1. Higginson, Thomas W. Massachusetts in the Army and Navy During the War of 1861-1865. Boston: Wright & Potter Co., State Printers, 1896. Accessed March 3, 2016. https://archive.org/details/massachusettsina01higg. Higginson, Thomas W. “Saints and Their Bodies.” In Atlantic Monthly 1 (1858): 82-95. In Major Problems in American Sport History. Edited by Steven A. Reiss. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Irwin, Will. “The Olympic Games: The Dramatic and Picturesque Contest in which America’s Team Won the Flower of the Athletic World.” In Collier’s: Volume 49. New York: P.F. 131

Collier and Son, 1912. Accessed June 12, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=A1wwAQAAMAAJ. Jackson, C.R.H. “How to Organize and Conduct A Gymnasium Leaders’ Corps.” In America Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 2 September 1905, No. 1. Accessed August 10, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details/American_Gymnasia_and_Athletic_Record?i d=HHgyAQAAIAAJ. Pp. 13-14. Jacques, Daniel Harrison. Hints Toward Physical Perfection. New York: Fowler and Wells, 1859. Accessed September 12, 2015. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015064792008;view=1up;seq=11. Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig. A Treatise on Gymnasticks, Taken Chiefly from the German of F.L. Jahn. Translated by Charles Beck. Northampton: Simeon Butler, 1828. Kennard, June A. “The Posse Gymnasium.” In The Journal of Physical Education, Recreation, & Dance, March 1, 1994. Accessed January 8, 2016. https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-15414951.html. Kindervater, A.E. “High School Gymnastic Tournament.” In Mind and Body, May 1913 Vol. 20, No. 219. Milwaukee: Freidenker Publishing Co., 1913. Accessed August 1, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=4KYaAQAAMAAJ, 143-147. Koehler, Herman J. Captain. Field Physical Training of the Soldier. Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917. Accessed September 20, 2016. https://archive.org/details/fieldphysicaltra00unitiala. Koehler, Herman J. Captain. “Physical Training in the Army.” In Manual of Gymnastics, Prepared for Use in Service Gymnasiums. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904. Accessed April 2, 2016 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b281801;view=1up;seq=13. Kroh, Carl J. “Physical Training.” In The Elementary School Teacher and Course of Study, Vol 3, No. 1 (July, 1902), pp 47-53. University of Chicago Press. Accessed October 24, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/992288. Kroh, Karl. “Gymnastic Games.” In Gymnastics, A Textbook of the German-American System of Gymnastics, Specially Adapted to the Use of Teachers and Pupils in Public and Private Schools and Gymnasiums. Boston, Lothrol, Lee & Shepard CO, 1895. Edited by W.A. Stecher. Accessed July 27, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=pSUAAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book- pSUAAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1. Kurtz, Charles M. The Saint Louis World’s Fair of 1904: In Commemoration of the Acquisition of the Louisiana Territory. Saint Louis: Gottschalk Printing Company, 1903. Accessed August 12, 2016. 132

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=n0U6AAAAMAAJ&rdid=book- n0U6AAAAMAAJ&rdot=1. Lennox, David; Sturrock, Alexander. The Elements of Physical Education, A Teacher’s Manual. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1898. Accessed October 4, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=v6RAAQAAIAAJ&source=gbs_slider_cls_metadata _7_mylibrary. Leonard, Fred Eugene. A Guide to the History of Physical Education. Philadelphia and New York: Lea & Febiger, 1923. Accessed January 13, 2016. https://archive.org/details/guidetohistoryof00leon. Lewis, Dio. “The New Gymnastics.” In The Atlantic, Volume 8, 1862. Accessed January 6, 2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/08/the-new- gymnastics/305408/. Ling, P.H. “Educational Gymnastics.” In American Physical Education Review. Translated by Richard J. Cyriax. Springfield, Committee on Publication and Information of the Council of the A.A.A.P.E., 1913. Accessed June 7, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=3I5IAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book- 3I5IAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1. Livermore, A.A. Physical Education. A Lecture Delivered Before the Teachers of Hamilton And Butler Co. Ohio, On Several Different Occasions. Cincinnati: Stanhope S. Rowe, Daily Columbian Office, 1855. Accessed April 17, 2015. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044028756039;view=1up;seq=12. Mahan, Asa. “Intimate Relation Between Moral, Mental and Physical Law.” In The Graham Journal of Health and Longevity, Vol. III. Boston: David Cambell, 1837-1839. David Cambell, ed. Accessed April 17, 2015. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011570135. Martin, George Malcolm. The Grading of Gymnastic Exercises. New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1913. Accessed May 31, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=piI6AQAAMAAJ. Mason, J. Leonard. “Club Swinging in College Contests: How It Might Be Improved.” In American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Volume 2, No. 2, October, 1905. Boston: American Gymnasia Co., 1905. Accessed July 27, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=QNY9AQAAMAAJ. McGrew, Charles B. A Gymnasium and Stadium for the Olympic Games. Illinois: University of Illinois, College of Engineering, 1913. Accessed June 2, 2016. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiuo.ark:/13960/t22c1gc96;view=1up;seq=5. Metzner, Henry. A Brief History of the North American Gymnastic Union. Translated by Theo. Stempfel Jr. Indianapolis: The National Executive Committee of the North American Gymnastic Union, 1911. Accessed June 28, 2016. 133

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=6vKfAAAAMAAJ&rdid=book- 6vKfAAAAMAAJ&rdot=1. Perrin, Ethel. One Hundred and Fifty Gymnastic Games. Boston, Geo. H. Ellis Co., Printers, 1912. Accessed May 28, 2016. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32435054248752;view=1up;seq=13 Pilcher, James E. Cpt. “The Place of Physical Training in the Military Service.” In Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States Volume XVI. James C. Bush, editor. Governor’s Island, Military Service Institution, 1895. Accessed March 24, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=Rto9AQAAMAAJ. Pohl, Elsa. “Physical Training Exhibits in the Physical Training Department of the Exposition.” In Posse Gymnasium Journal, Vol.XII, December 1904, No. 11. Boston: Posse Gymnasium Club, 1904. Accessed July 20, 2016. https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=PO8yAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&outp ut=reader&pg=GBS.PA11. Posse, Nils. Columbian Collection of Essays on Swedish Gymnastics. Boston: Posse Gymnasium, 1893. Accessed March 10, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=kyk5AQAAMAAJ&rdid=book- kyk5AQAAMAAJ&rdot=1. Posse, Nils. The Special Kinesiology of Educational Gymnastics. Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1894. Accessed January 12, 2016. https://play.google.com/books/reader?printsec=frontcover&output=reader&id=iFiEAAA AIAAJ&pg=GBS.PP6. Posse, Nils. The Swedish System of Educational Gymnastics. Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1890. Accessed August 13, 2015. http://babel.hathitrust.org.ezproxy.csusm.edu/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t41r6pf5k;view=1 up;seq=5. Posse, Rose. “Major Victor Gustaf Balck.” In The Posse Gymnasium Journal, V. 3 January (1895). Boston: Posse Gymnasium Club, 1895. Accessed January 12, 2016. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.30000117678296;view=1up;seq=9. Posse, Rose. “Notes on the Olympic Games.” In Posse Gymnasium Journal, Vol. XVI, October 1908, No. 9. Edited by Rose Posse. Boston: Posse Gymnasium Club, 1908. Accessed August 16, 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=y2g3AQAAMAAJ&rdid=book- y2g3AQAAMAAJ&rdot=1. Posse, Rose. “Sport and ‘Sport’.” In Posse Gymnasium Journal, Vol. XVI, October 1908, No. 9. Edited by Rose Posse. Boston: Posse Gymnasium Club, 1908. Accessed August 16, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=y2g3AQAAMAAJ&rdid=book- y2g3AQAAMAAJ&rdot=1. 134

Posse, Rose. “The Value of Competitive Gymnastics.” In The Posse Gymnasium Journal, Volume VII, No. 7, July 1899. Boston: Posse Gymnasium Club, 1899. Accessed July 28, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=R5saAQAAMAAJ&rdid=book- R5saAQAAMAAJ&rdot=1. Posse, Rose. “Editorial Comment.” In Posse Gymnasium Journal, Vol. V, November 1897, No. 10. Boston: Posse Gymnasium Club, 1897. Accessed July 20, 2016. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.30000117678288;view=1up;seq=31. Pratt-Chadwick, Mara Louise. The New Calisthenics: A Manual of Health and Beauty. New York: Educational Publishing Co., 1889. Accessed October 6, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=6K5iAAAAMAAJ&source=gbs_slider_cls_metadata _7_mylibrary. Proctor, Redfield. Preface in Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Arm. New York: Army and Navy Journal, 1898. Accessed March 25, 2016. https://play.google.com/books/reader?printsec=frontcover&output=reader&id=jfInAAA AYAAJ&pg=GBS.PA1. Richards, J.H. editor. The Nation Volume 59, January 1, 1894. New York: The Evening Post Publishing Company, 1894. Accessed May 8, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=hg4cAQAAMAAJ. Roosevelt, Theodore. Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography. New York: MacMillan Company, 1916. Accessed March 24, 2016. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=0D8OAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&outpu t=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PR3. Roosevelt, Theodore. The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses. New York: The Century CO., 1902. Accessed October 6, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=ZwAiAAAAMAAJ&source=gbs_slider_cls_metadat a_7_mylibrary. Roosevelt Theodore; Lewis, Alfred Henry. A Compilation of the Messages and Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, 1901-1905. Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1906. Accessed July 10, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=1eDcWfVfz6MC. Sandow, Eugene. Strength and How to Obtain It. London: Gale & Polden, Ltd. 1897. Accessed October 4, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=BTyeEqAIpuEC&source=gbs_slider_cls_metadata_ 7_mylibrary. Sandow, Eugene; Adam, G. Mercer. Sandow on Physical Training. New York: J. Selwin Tait & Sons. Accessed October 4, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=rSQAAAAAYAAJ&source=gbs_slider_cls_metadat a_7_mylibrary. 135

Sargent, Dudley A. “Doing More for the Individual Man and Woman.” In America Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol. 3 September 1906, No. 1. Accessed August 10, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details/American_Gymnasia_and_Athletic_Record?i d=HHgyAQAAIAAJ. Sargent, Dudley A. Physical Education. Boston: The Athenaeum Press, 1906. Accessed July 6, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=WdoNAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book- WdoNAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1. Shepherd, E.R. True Manhood: A Manual for Young Men. A Guide to Physical Strength, Moral Excellence, Force of Character, and Manly Purity. Also the Write Cross, Its Origin and Progress. Chicago: A.B. Stockham & Company, 1891. Accessed March 5, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=6cqEglwcHpQC. Spyridon, Lampros; Organising Committee for the Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. The Olympic Games in Ancien Times. Athens: Ch. Beck, 1896. Accessed August 16, 2016. http://doc.rero.ch/record/32169?ln=en. Stoll, Robert. Gymnastics and Rope Climbing: How to Become an Expert in the Gym. New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1901. Accessed June 1, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=_1bzAAAAMAAJ&rdid=book- _1bzAAAAMAAJ&rdot=1. Sullivan, John E. “Review of the Olympic Games of 1904.” In Spalding’s Official Athletic Almanac. New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1905. Accessed August 10, 2016. http://www.la84foundation.org/6oic/OfficialReports/1904/1904Spal.pdf. Sullivan, John Lawrence; Sargent, Dudley Allen. Life and Reminiscences of a 19th Century Gladiator. Boston: J.A. Hearn & Co., 1892. Accessed November 1, 2015. https://archive.org/details/lifeandreminisc00sarggoog. Taylor, Charles Fayette. Theory and Practice of the Movement-Cure, Second Edition. Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1864. Accessed 1/15/16. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=MPANISv1mh0C&printsec=frontcover&output =reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PR1. Trall, Russell Thatcher (R.T.). The Illustrated Family Gymnasium. New York: Fowler and Wells, 1857. Accessed August 10, 2015. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t56d6q21h;view=1up;seq=9. Trall, R.T. The True Healing Art. New York: Fowler & Wells, 1880. Reprint, Pomeroy: Health Research, 1993. United States War Department. Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, Adopted Oct. 3, 1891. New York: Army and Navy Journal, Appleton and Company, 1898. Accessed March 3, 2016. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=jfInAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output =reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP7. 136

Warren, John Collins. Physical Education and the Preservation of Health. Boston: William D. Ticknor & Company, 1846. Accessed October 6, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=Fa9YCsGfg2YC&source=gbs_slider_cls_metadata_ 7_mylibrary. Westerblad, Carl August. Ling, the Founder of Swedish Gymnastics. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co. Limited, 1909. Accessed August 10, 2015. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101063695017;view=1up;seq=5. Woodward, Calvin M. “Domestic and Intercollegiate Athletics.” In Mind and Body, Volume 10 March, 1903. Accessed July 6, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=fKUaAQAAMAAJ&rdid=book- fKUaAQAAMAAJ&rdot=1. Secondary Sources “Gymnastics 1896.” Accessed August 16, 2016. http://users.skynet.be/hermandw/olymp/gym1896.html. “United States at the 1906 Athina Summer Games.” S/R Olympic Sports. Accessed August 8, 2016. http://www.sports-reference.com/olympics/countries/USA/summer/1906/. Angyal, Chloe. “Queen Simone Biles Claims Her Olympic Crown at Last: Bow Down.” The Huffington Post. Last Updated August 16, 2016. Accessed November 1, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/simone-biles-all-around- gold_us_57abbf02e4b06e52746f3e71. Borish, Linda J. “Catherine Beecher and Thomas W. Higginson on the Need for Physical Fitness.” In Major Problems in American Sport History. Edited by Steven A. Riess, 94- 103. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Chapman, David L. Sandow the Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Chisholm, Ann. “Nineteenth-Century Gymnastics for U.S. Women and Incorporations of Buoyancy: Contouring Femininity, Shaping Sex, and Regulating Middle-Class Consumption.” Journal of Women's History 20.3 (2008): 84-112,219. Accessed August 31, 2015. https://muse-jhu-edu.ezproxy.csusm.edu/journals/journal_of_womens_ history /v020/20.3.chisholm.html. Chudacoff, Howard P. The Age of the Bachelor, Creating an American Subculture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Dencker, Berit Elisabeth. “Popular Gymnastics and the Military Spirit in Germany, 1848-1871.” In Central European History, Vol. 34, No. 4 (2001), pp. 503-530. Accessed October 2, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4547117. Duane, Daniel. “How the Other Half Lifts: What Your Workout Says About Your Social Class, Why Can’t Triathletes and Weightlifters Get Along?” Pacific Standard. Posted July 23, 137

2014. Accessed October 3, 2015. http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/half-lifts- workout-says-social-class-85221. Duffy, John. The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Dyreson, Mark. “Regulating the Body and the Body Politic: American Sport, Bourgeois Culture and the Language of Progress, 1880-1920.” In The New American Sport History: Recent Approaches and Perspectives. S.W. Pope, editor. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. 121-144. Gorn, Elliot J.; Oriard, Michael. “Taking Sports Seriously.” In Major Problems in American Sport History. Steven A. Riess, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Griffith, R. Marie. Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. Accessed July 20, 2015. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=acls;idno=heb30759. Griffith, R. Marie. “The Gospel of Born-Again Bodies: Fitness Culture and Religion.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan 21, 2005 (20). Accessed July 20, 2015. http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?sid=da3201dd-0ece-4c64-9710- 661e8eb292a5%40sessionmgr4005&crlhashurl=login.aspx%253fdirect%253dtrue%2526 scope%253dsite%2526db%253daph%2526AN%253d15859247%2526msid%253d- 419407188&hid=4109&vid=0&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=158 59247&db=aph. Grozzbroehmer, Rainer. “The North American Gymnastic Union (NAGU) Normal College as an Example of the Influences of the German System of Gymnastics Teachers’ Training on the North American System of Gymnastics Teachers’ Training.” In NASSH Proceedings, January 7, 2011. Accessed October 31, 2016. library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/NASSH_Proceedings/NP1990/NP1990u.pdf. Grossfeld, Abie. “A History of United States Artistic Gymnastics.” In Science of Gymnastics Journal, Jun 2010, Vol. 2, Issue 2, p5-28. Accessed August 18, 2016. https://web-b- ebscohost-com.ezproxy.csusm.edu/ehost/detail/detail?. Guttmann, Allen. “Capitalism, Protestantism, and the Rise of Modern Sport.” In Major Problems in American Sport History. Steven A. Riess, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. 5-15. Guttmann, Allen. The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games. University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago, 1992. Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1982. Hardy, Stephen. “Entrepreneurs, Organizations, and the Sports Marketplace.” In The New American Sport History. S.W. Pope, ed. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. 341-365 138

Hardy, Stephen. “Urbanization and the Rise of Sport.” In Major Problems in American Sport History. Edited by Steven A. Riess, 15-19. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Hoganson, Kristin L. Fighting for American Manhood, How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. Oxford University Press, 2007. Accessed August 5, 2015. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=10317770. Hoy, Suellen. Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Hunt, Thomas C.; Mullins, Monalisa McCurry. Moral Education in America’s Schools: The Continuing Challenge. Greenwich, Connecticut: Information Age Publishing, 2005. Kett, Joseph F. Merit: The History of a Founding Ideal from the American Revolution to the Twenty-First Century. Cornell University Press, 2013. Accessed October 9, 2015. http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.csusm.edu/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=10639741. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America, A Cultural History. New York: The Free Press, 1996. King, Charles R. Children’s Health in America, A History. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. Knapik, Joseph J., East, Whitfield B. “History of United States Army Physical Fitness and Physical Readiness Testing.” The United States Army Medical Department Journal (April-June 2014). Accessed September 9, 2015. http://www.cs.amedd.army.mil/amedd_journal.aspx. Knott, Suzuko Mousel. “Germans and Others at the ‘American Games.” In The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sports, Race and American Imperialism. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Edited by Susan Brownell. Pp. 278-300. Lennartz, Karl. “The 2nd International Olympic Games in Athens 1906.” In Journal of Olympic History, Vol 10, December 2001/January 2002. International Society of Olympic Historians. Accessed August 9, 2016. library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/JOH/JOHv10n1/JOHv10n1i.pdf. Lenskyj, Helen Jefferson; Wagg, Stephen, editors. The Palgrave Handbook of Olympic Studies. Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2012. MacAloon, John J. This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Mandell, Richard D. Sport: A Cultural History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. 139

Mckenzie, Shelly. Getting Physical: The Rise of the Fitness Culture in America. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2013. Millet, Alan R; Maslowski, Peter. For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States, Revised and Expanded. New York: The Free Press, A Division of MacMillan, Inc., 1994. Money, John. The Destroying Angel: Sex, Fitness & Food in the Legacy of Degeneracy Theory, Graham Crackers, Kellog’s Corn Flakes & American Health History. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1985. Mrozek, Donald J. Sport and American Mentality, 1880-1910. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1983. Park, Roberta J. “Physiology and Anatomy are Destiny!?: Brains, Bodies and Exercise in Nineteenth Century American Thought.” In Journal of Sport History, Vol 18, No. 1, Spring, 1991. Accessed December 20, 2015. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact =8&ved=0ahUKEwjrhJHNv5jLAhUK3GMKHb7oC8oQFggdMAA&url=http%3A%2F %2Flibrary.la84.org%2FSportsLibrary%2FJSH%2FJSH1991%2FJSH1801%2Fjsh1801d .pdf&usg=AFQjCNF- VmljvyyKeepVoPxbqV20GX3sWg&sig2=VDHjSUFRcc8wDuEzKjtMWQ. Paul, Boyer. Urban Masses and Moral Order in American, 1820-1920. Harvard University Press, 1978. Accessed July 19, 2015. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=10331321. De la Peña, Carolyn. “Dudley Allen Sargent: Health Machines and the Energized Male Body.” In Iron Game History, October, Volume 8, Number 2, 2003, pp 3-19. Accessed November 1, 2015. www.starkcenter.org/static/quest_for_victory/timeline/documents/sargent.pdf. Pope, S.W. “An Army of Athletes: Playing Fields, Battlefields, and the American Military Sport Experience, 1890-1920.” In The Journal of Military History, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Jul., 1995), pp. 435-456. Accessed September 22, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2944617. Pope, S.W. Editor. The New American Sport History. Urbana and Chicago” University of Illinois Press, 1997. Rader, Benjamin G. American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Spectators. Englewood: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1983. Reel, Guy. National Police Gazette and the Making of the Modern American Man, 1879-1906. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Accessed October 13, 2015. http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.csusm.edu/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=10155131. Reeve, Patricia A. “The ‘Bone and Sinew of the Nation’: Antebellum Workingmen on Health and Sovereignty.” In Bodily Subjects: Essays on Gender and Health, 1800-2000, edited 140

by Tracey Penny Light, Barbara Brookes, and Wendy Mitchinson, 25-52. Montreal & Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. Richardson, Ruth. The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy: Bodies, Books, Fortune, and Fame. Oxford University Press, 2008. Accessed September 11, 2015. http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.csusm.edu/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=10288464. Riess, Steven A. editor. Major Problems in American Sport History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Rosen, Daniel M. Dope: The History of Performance Enhancement in Sports from the Nineteenth Century to Today. Praeger: Westport, London, 2008. Rotundo, Anthony, E. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Ruyter, Nancy Lee Chalta. Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-Century American Delsartism. Greenwood Press, 1999. Accessed August 10, 2015. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=10020818. Salazar, James. Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Samuels, Shirley, editor. The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Schantz, Otto J. “Pierre de Coubertin’s Concepts of Race, Nation, and Civilization.” In The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Edited by Susan Brownell. 156-188. Siebert, Albert. “German and American Folk Festivals and International Olympic Games.” In Mind and Body: Volume 20. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Friedenker Publishing Company, 1914. Accessed August 12, 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=4KYaAQAAMAAJ&rdid=book- 4KYaAQAAMAAJ&rdot=1. Smith, Ronald A. Sport and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics. New York, Oxford University Press, 1990. Accessed July 6, 2016. http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.csusm.edu/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=10087210. Smith, Ronald A. “History of Amateurism in Men’s Intercollegiate Athletics: The Continuance of a 19th-Century Anachronism in America.” In Quest, November 1993, Vol. 45 Issue 4, p 430 18p. Accessed July 6, 2016. https://web-b-ebscohost- com.ezproxy.csusm.edu/ehost/detail/detail?sid=26dc453a-9c76-4324-b897- 05f7f60aa9b8%40sessionmgr104&vid=0&hid=125&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2Z Q%3d%3d#AN=9404050199&db=s3h. Stearns, Peter N. Battleground of Desire, The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America. New York and London: New York University Press, 1999. 141

Struna, Nancy L. People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America. Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1996. Teetor, Paul. “The Story of How Crossfit Went From Zero to 10,000 Locations.” Accessed October 14, 2016. http://www.laweekly.com/arts/the-story-of-how-crossfit-went-from- zero-to-10-000-locations-5005604. 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 Weight Training Boom.” In Iron Game History (Volume 3, No. 1) September, 1993. Watson, Harry L. Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994. Whorton, James C. Crusader’s for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982. Wilson, Brian C. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic Living. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014. Wilson, Erin. “The End of Sensibility: The Nervous Body in the Early Nineteenth Century.” In Literature and Medicine, Volume 30, Number 2, Fall 2012, pp. 276-291. Published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Updated 2013. Accessed March 24, 2015. https://muse-jhu- edu.ezproxy.csusm.edu/journals/literature_and_medicine/v030/30.2 .wilson.html. Winkle, Timothy. “Brother Washington’s Apron: A Masonic Mystery.” Accessed August 20, 2015. http://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/2011/02/brother-washingtons-apron-a-masonic- mystery-part-1-of-3.html. Yebra, David. “Colonel Herman J. Koehler: The Father of Physical Education at West Point.” In The American Military Experience and the United States Military Academy. Accessed February 28, 2016. http://digital- library.usma.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p16919coll1/id/14.