Health and Fitness. The pursuit of health and fitness in America has long connoted more than a desire for the absence of illness or
disease; it implied a search for the strength, energy, and vitality that were believed to occur naturally in human beings in a right relationship with nature, or appear by way of divine intervention, and to result in a profound sense of well‐being and spiritual harmony. Whereas medication and the ministrations of a physician suggested the need for some external and “unnatural” agent, advocates of health and fitness typically embraced self‐reliance mediated through spiritual law in their search for an idealized state in which mind, body, and spirit united in perfect harmony. Health, therefore, became not only the prerequisite but the justification for an abundant life on earth or in some future realm.
Colonial Era and Nineteenth Century.
The quest for health in early America unfolded within a worldview that intertwined the natural and supernatural worlds. This conjunction, described in such works as Cotton
Mather's
Angel of Bethesda (1724) and
Primitive Physick (1747) by the British Methodist leader John Wesley, manifested itself most obviously through a belief in a direct connection between sin and sickness, morality and health. Health came not only through a correct balance of the bodily fluid, or humor; and proper attention to hygiene, but also by maintaining a proper relationship to God and ascertaining the divine purposes for one's life.
The Second
Great Awakening, beginning in the late eighteenth century, witnessed waves of religious fervor that by the mid‐nineteenth century found
revivalism and reform linked in a kaleidoscope of social movements struggling against not only
poverty,
slavery, and war but also against meat,
alcohol, and unhealthful dress. Fed by millennial enthusiasm, armed with “science for the common man,” and appealing to a widespread desire for improvement through
education and self‐control, reformers set about to perfect the United States by saving bodies as well as souls.
Food and dietary reform loomed large in this effort. Antebellum Americans drank vast quantities of alcohol and consumed appallingly rich, fatty meals of meats and heavy desserts washed down with coffee. Fruits and green vegetables were a rarity. Corn and pork formed the staples of the rural diet, whereas urban populations relied more on bread and beef. Potatoes, turnips, cabbage, and later, tomatoes completed the basic American diet.
Dismayed by these food‐and‐drink habits, reformers launched a
temperance movement and sought to change eating patterns. In the 1830s the Presbyterian preacher and health reformer Sylvester Graham (1794–1851) attacked the American diet, warning that intoxicating drink, stimulating spices, coffee, tea, and meat should be avoided because they debilitated mind and body and overstimulated the gross and sensual side of human nature. Both as remedy for and prevention of the sickness and immorality of society, Graham advocated coarse whole‐wheat bread, pure water, and a vegetarian diet. Three technological innovations—the ice cutter, refrigerated railroad cars, and canning—made such dietary reforms increasingly feasible by improving the distribution and year‐round availability of perishable and seasonal foods.
Beginning in the 1840s Grahamite health reformers forged links with water‐cure enthusiasts, who sought to cure bodily ills with various water treatments and who believed they were following nature's way of maintaining health. During the middle decades of the century, more than 200 water‐cure establishments catered to a wide public, including many women in search of better health, social exchange, and cures for a wide range of “female complaints.” Hydropaths believed that the sick body's self‐curative powers could be vitalized by copious amounts of water, taken internally and externally, a non‐stimulating diet, sunlight, exercise, and relaxation. In the words of the hydropathic reformer Russell T. Trall, who built a “hygienic system” on such principles, “All healing or remedial power is inherent in the living system” and “health is found only in obedience” to the divinely ordained laws of nature (
The Hygienic System, 1872).
The spiritual impulse underlying the nineteenth‐century crusade for health became explicit among the adherents of
Mormonism and
Seventh‐day Adventism, who not only aspired to a purity of spirit that would enable good to triumph over evil, but also believed that much sickness could be prevented by righteous living and self‐discipline. Advocating natural remedies and eschewing alcohol, coffee, tea, tobacco, and all stimulants, which polluted the body and corrupted the spirit, Adventists and Mormons spiritualized their rules of healthful living. Later studies demonstrated the health benefits of these practices, documenting a correlation between the Mormon and Adventist lifestyles and a lower incidence of
cancer,
heart disease, and other life‐shortening
diseases.
Numerous nineteenth‐century reformers popularized the many dimensions of health reform. Dioclesian Lewis (1823–1886) preached the power of physical exercise and gymnastics; Catharine
Beecher warned of the dangers of corsets and tight lacing; Horace Fletcher (1849–1919) attributed his prodigious physical strength to the thorough chewing of food; and the Adventist John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) invented flaked breakfast cereals, founded a medical school, and established numerous sanitariums devoted to the gospel of healthful living, most notably at Battle Creek, Michigan.
The Twentieth Century.
The health and fitness impulses of nineteenth‐century Americans reached a zenith with the turn‐of‐the‐century progressive movement. Allying
scientific management, education,
public health, and
religion with their middle‐ and upper‐class sensibilities, progressives worked to reform corrupt city governments, improve the infrastructure of urban social services, reduce
venereal disease by combating
prostitution, enact a constitutional amendment imposing nationwide prohibition, and save the immigrant masses from their sordid ways. Their often paternalistic efforts to instruct working‐class Americans, especially recent immigrants, in matters of personal hygiene, the principles of scientific nutrition, and the dangers of intemperance demonstrated their commitment to matters of health. But other ideological currents of the
Gilded Age and beyond revealed a changing understanding of “fitness” as no longer simply evidence of divine favor and spiritual well‐being, but as a marker of an individual's ability to survive the competitive Darwinian struggle for existence in urban‐industrial America.
The post–
World War II years witnessed an epidemiological shift from infectious diseases to ailments related to lifestyle and old age. This shift resulted in part from the impact of antibiotics on infectious diseases, but the increasing number of Americans holding white‐collar jobs and leading sedentary lives contributed to obesity and its associated debilities. Moreover, scientific investigators began to produce compelling evidence of the health benefits of exercise, a proper diet, and the avoidance of tobacco.
In response to these developments, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower in 1956 established the President's Council on Youth Fitness (after 1968, the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports) to combat the lack of physical fitness among children and young people. In the 1960s the federal government began to warn citizens of the health dangers of cigarettes. But these efforts lacked the religious overtones that had characterized many earlier health‐reform movements. Science and secular morality had replaced religion and virtue as the primary motivators for health reform; and physical health, greater longevity, and economic productivity had replaced moral perfection as the primary purpose of healthful living.
Much of the explosive interest in health, diet, and fitness that characterized the late twentieth century was concentrated among aging members of the so‐called baby‐boom generation. However, the increase in physical‐fitness activities and the decline in smoking were not uniform; white, affluent Americans with a post‐secondary education embraced those behaviors more often than did the poor and blue‐collar workers, the less well educated, and members of ethnic minority groups.
The continuing popularity of the vogue for jogging that began in the 1970s, the health and fitness clubs that proliferated in the 1980s, and the mountain biking enthusiasm of the 1990s all illustrated the faddish side of the late twentieth‐century exercise and fitness movement, revealed the increasingly commercial and technological aspect of the quest for health and fitness, and highlighted the way these goals, so deeply rooted in America's religious and cultural history, had become as much badges of status as a means to a better life either here or in the hereafter.
See also
Americanization Movement;
Industrial Diseases and Hazards;
Medicine;
Post–Cold War Era;
Progressive Era;
Sexual Morality and Sex Reform;
Social Class;
Social Darwinism;
Sports: Amateur Sports and Recreation;
Tobacco Industry;
Tobacco Products.
Bibliography
James C. Whorton , Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers, 1982.
Harvey Green , Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport and American Society, 1986.
Ronald L. Numbers and Darrel W. Amundsen, eds., Caring and Curing: Health and Medicine in the Western Religious Traditions, 1986.
Susan E. Cayleff , Wash and Be Healed: The Water‐Cure Movement and Women's Health, 1987.
Harvey A. Levenstein , Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet, 1988.
Martha H. Verbrugge , Able‐Bodied Womanhood, 1988.
Michael S. Goldstein , The Health Movement: Promoting Fitness in America, 1992.
Richard Kluger , Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred‐Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris, 1996.
Allan M. Brandt and Paul Rozin, eds., Morality and Health, 1997.
Rennie B. Schoepflin
