Strongman, Inc.

In his article about the strongman Brian Shaw and the Arnold Strongman Classic, Burkhard Bilger mentions the role that Bob Hoffman, the founder of the York Barbell Company, played in making the United States the dominant force in Olympic weightlifting in the nineteen-thirties and forties:

Early on, to get around rules restricting Olympic participation to amateurs, Hoffman would hire the lifters at his factory for as little as ten dollars a week and let them train on-site. They would also promote York products in Strength and Health—the house organ, “edited in an atmosphere of perspiration and horseplay,” as Fortune put it in 1946. “Bob took a bunch of nobodies and turned them into the greatest team in the world,” Arthur Drechsler, the chair of USA Weightlifting, told me recently.

Hoffman, and the burgeoning “physical culture” business, were featured in Carlton Brown’s 1937 Onward & Upward article, “The Coming Age of Applied Myology.” At the heart of the piece was the contentious rivalry between Hoffman and the famed bodybuilder Charles Atlas. Atlas, who was named “America’s Most Perfectly Developed Man” in 1922, spun his celebrity into a lucrative mail-order business. Unlike Hoffman, who advocated physical development through the use of weights, Atlas had created a system called Dynamic Tension, built, as Atlas explained, on the principle of “pitting each muscle against each other, like animals do.” Brown reported that Atlas’s advertising included “humorous cartoons in which misguided physical culturists are shown dropping dumbbells on their toes and being assaulted by elastic exercisers gone wild.” By contrast, Hoffman’s Strength and Health “sings the praises of such articles as the Giant Crusher Grip, a steel-spring device to develop the ‘crushing, heaving, and pushing muscles,’” and the Head Gear, which enables the athlete to suspend weights from his head and thus produce a neck whose owner is “quickly recognized as a powerful, virile man.”

The competition became so heated that, in 1936, the Federal Trade Commission summoned Hoffman to appear at a hearing to address derisive comments he’d made about Atlas (Hoffman had called Atlas’s system “dynamic hooey.”) According to Brown, Hoffman arrived at the hearing with “a troupe of heavyweights and personally stood on his thumbs.” Nevertheless, he was ordered to cease and desist from printing such comments in the future.

Another physical-culture entrepreneur included in Brown’s article was George F. Jowett, who offered a “Complete Heath and Muscle Building Course” for thirty-seven dollars. Jowett promised that the average weakling, following his methods, could eventually achieve a list of feats that would be at home in the Arnold Strongman Classic:

1. Lift a man of your own body weight overhead with one hand.
2. Lift 1500 lbs. to a ton of weight.
3. Tear a deck of cards or a telephone directory in two halves.
4. Walk with a couple of hundred pounds in each hand.
5. Bend spikes with two or with one hand.
6. Break spikes with the hands or jaw. _The entire article—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issue.

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Illustration by Barry Blitt.