Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet

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Mr. America
How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet

Chapter One

Little Orphan Bernie

Winston Churchill has said that all the famous men of his acquaintance were the products of an unhappy childhood. Macfadden cannot remember having had even a moderately cheerful day before he was twenty.
...Robert Lewis Taylor, New Yorker, October 14, 1950

No one in the tiny Ozark town of Mill Springs, Missouri, was likely to have been surprised when William McFadden decided to drink himself blind one day in 1873. McFadden, a Union Army veteran with a menacing face and bushy beard, was a sometime farmer with only three interests in life: hunting deer, drinking corn whiskey, and playing the horses. In between these pursuits he would sometimes endure a few hours with his family, which consisted of his young wife, Mary, and their three children, the newborn baby Alma, three-year-old Mary, and four-year-old Bernard.

Gregarious in his few sober moments, William McFadden was transformed by alcohol into a monster. Years later, his famous son would recall the unhappy cycle of life in the two-room McFadden home. William would begrudgingly earn a few dollars from farm labor, invest his earnings in whiskey and long shots at the racetrack, then return home to the farmhouse on the Black River to beat his family.

What surely did surprise the residents of Mill Spring on that day in 1873 was that Mary had decided her marriage was over. She was not a strong woman, and at age twenty-seven she was thirteen years younger than her large, powerful husband. Once already she had run away to her parents' house with her two eldest children to escape William's abuse and give birth to Alma. This time, though, Mary had reason to believe she was leaving for good. She was ill with tuberculosis, a near-certain death sentence.

Mary packed up the children and crossed the Black River in the family's small skiff for the last time, pulling hand over hand on a rope strung across the water. She moved back in with her parents, the Millers, who lived in Ironton, forty miles upstate. A penitent William occasionally sobered up long enough to make the journey north and lurk outside the Millers' log fence, in hopes of rekindling his relationship with his wife. Instead, Mary sued for divorce. Bernard and his sisters never saw their father again. Within a year of their separation, he was dead from delirium tremens.

The Ozarks were a particularly bleak place in the 1870s. Missouri was bogged down in Civil War debt and battered by an economic recession, one of the worst in U.S. history. Missouri had, essentially, endured its own civil war. A large chunk of the state was taken and held by Confederates until 1862, and while Missouri nominally owed its loyalty to the Union, an estimated twenty-five to thirty thousand of its men fought for the Southern cause, including Frank and Jesse James, whose daylight robberies would terrorize the region into the 1880s. Its already poor roads were trampled by soldiers on the march, its draft horses had been conscripted by armies on both sides, and its rich farmland, where countless anonymous battles took place, needed to be reclaimed after years of disuse. Mill Springs was hit by a cholera epidemic the same year as Mary's final escape to Ironton. Two summers later, the state's crops were devastated by a plague of grasshoppers.

Against this backdrop, little Bernard grew into something of a mama's boy, a delicate child whom the local boys took malicious glee in dunking mercilessly in the local rivers. The earliest known photograph of Bernard, taken at around age four, shows a passive child with a weak mouth. He appears to be waiting for someone to take him by the hand and lead him somewhere. Perhaps he'd had a premonition of the childhood odyssey that lay before him.

Five years of suffering began at around age seven, when Bernard, who remembered being ill for most of his childhood, was vaccinated for smallpox in the manner standard at the time...by having a scab from a smallpox lesion applied to a cut in his arm. The price of immunity in his case was six months in bed from blood poisoning.

One morning not long after Bernard had recovered, his mother took him to St. Louis. They were met at the Mississippi River docks by a strange gentleman. Mary explained to her son that the man was going to take him away on a steamship. She did not mention a return trip. Long after the boy had grown up and reinvented himself as Bernarr Macfadden, he recalled the resulting scene as being "torn screaming and clawing and kicking in a frantic agony of fear" from his mother's arms. The man managed to pull Bernard from Mary and lead him toward the wharf, but the boy broke free and ran back to his mother, tears running down his face. Mary told her eight-year-old son the cold truth. Hopeless and nearly destitute, wasting away from late-stage tuberculosis, she no longer had the energy or means to care for a growing boy. She was sending him off to the cheapest boarding school she could find.

Bernard wouldn't learn much at the school, whose name is unknown but which Macfadden later referred to as an "orphan's home" and "the Starvation School." In his opinion, the gruel-fed orphans in Oliver Twist were overstuffed gluttons compared to his classmates, one of whom took him aside upon his arrival and whispered, "You'll find out. They never feed us nothin'." In truth, the headmaster did feed them something, and that something was peanuts. In the years before George Washington Carver alchemized goobers into everything from soap to axle grease, the legumes were sold as hog feed at about a dollar a ton. If a boy at the Starvation School found himself in possession of a nickel, it was often invested in more peanuts, which would be consumed "shells and all," Macfadden said. Were one of the students blessed with the bounty of an entire apple, "no boy ever asked for the core, for there was no core to give away."