Macfadden's Family

HE WAGES WAR ON WEAKNESS

How A Puny Orphan Through His Own Winning Fight For Strength, Developed the World's Most Vital Editorial Technique.

Back in the nineties a pamphlet appeared--a circular, nothing more--recom-mending an exerciser owned by an obscure health enthusiast named Macfadden. On it were emblazoned the words, "Weakness a Crime: Don't Be a Criminal!" . . . In this humble beginning, the world first met the editorial technique of Macfadden. . . . Few people think of Macfadden as the great editor. The world knows Macfadden, the crusader, because of his fights against weakness, against prudery, for sane foods, for sane living. Macfadden today inspires more people than any other magazine editor. His followers are millions. . . . By its own right each Macfadden Magazine is a constructive force with worth-while people--because it mirrors life as it is lived today.

"Sponsored by Physical Culture, the first of the family of Macfadden Magazines," this full-page self-eulogy of Bernarr ("Body Love") Macfadden appeared in the New York Times & Herald Tribune and the Chicago Tribune last week. For many of the 130,000,000 U. S. citizens who do not read his Physical Culture, Liberty, True Story, True Romances, Love and Romance, True Experiences, Movie Mirror, Radio Mirror, Photoplay, True Detective Mysteries, Famous Detective Cases and Master Detective, the advertisement was the first occasion on which this wiry-haired, wrinkle-faced little character had made a major splash since Depression, during which he lost his wife through divorce and his tabloid newspaper. Nevertheless, as many of the 8,241,546 people who do patronize Macfadden publications were well aware, Bernarr Macfadden at 68 was going better and stronger than at any time since he stopped peddling a patent muscle-developer and began exploiting his genius for the common touch in the publishing business. In the past five years Bernarr Macfadden has profitably continued to mirror life as he sees it on a number of fronts.

Hard times merely put Bernarr Macfadden on his mettle. In 1931, at the depth of Depression, he opened the first of five Penny Restaurants in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Washington, D. C. First promulgated by Macfadden in the 1907 Panic, the chain sells minimum victuals at minimum prices. Last week Macfadden restaurant figures showed a deficit of only $5,610.40 for the first half of 1936. Also acquired in 1931 was Liberty, now the big fac,ade of the Macfadden publishing structure. Publishers Joseph Medill Patterson and Robert Rutherford McCormick could not make it pay. Under the direction of kinetic Editor Charles Fulton Oursler,* who runs the magazine mostly by teletype from West Falmouth, Mass., Liberty (circulation: 2,505,302) is now believed to be in the black.

In the 1932 Presidential campaign, Liberty was almost a house organ for Nominee Franklin Roosevelt. That year 17 Roosevelt articles appeared in Liberty, culminating in a post-election Rooseveltian "message to the public" called The Election--An Interpretation. This year Publisher Macfadden, who no longer approves of Contributor Roosevelt's policies, came forward in his own person as a Republican possibility, announced with no false modesty that, if elected, he would annul "fool laws," put down "racketeers." Before the Cleveland Convention in June, Candidate Macfadden was briefly touted by friends, including Novelist Thomas Dixon. Depth of Mr. Macfadden's political thinking is indicated by his belief that Russia and Japan are planning early attacks on the U. S.

Last year Publisher Macfadden acquired one of the handsomest of cinema fan magazines in the late James R. Quirk's Photoplay. Since going under the Macfadden banner, Photoplay has lost circulation, but continues to make money.

In his Manhattan tabloid, the Evening Graphic, Publisher Macfadden thought he had the beginning of a chain of mass newspapers to rival that of William Randolph Hearst. To newsmen's surprise, the Graphic never caught on, though it did set alltime journalistic marks for sensational incoherence. In 1932, after a scheme to unload the failing sheet on its employes had been abandoned, Publisher Macfadden regretfully jettisoned the Graphic. Main money-makers for Mr. Macfadden have been the pioneer sex-confession magazine True Story, for which he claims the largest monthly newsstand circulation of any magazine on earth (total: 2,135,006), his detective magazines which feature pictures of real crooks and his "Women's Group" (True Romances, Love and Romance, True Experiences, Movie Mirror, Radio Mirror). So fat did the Macfadden fortune grow that in 1931 its proprietor was able to make the large but some-what vague gesture of organizing the charitable Bernarr Macfadden Foundation with the income from publishing properties which he described as "of the value of approximately $5,000,000."

Avowed purpose of the Foundation is "to propagate the principles of health building." Its various health institutes charge substantial fees, cash in advance. A Macfadden Foundation patron might conceivably place his son in Educator Macfadden's Castle Heights Military Academy at Lebanon, Tenn. (tuition $650), spend the winter at Host Macfadden's New Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach, and so debilitate himself in that winter sporting capital as to require a season at "Physcultopathist" Macfadden's Physical Culture Hotel at Dansville, N. Y. (rates $33.50 to $80 per week, with extras). There he might choose a Macfadden diet-&-exercise cure which is supposed to correct 150 human miseries, including acidosis, alcoholism, apoplexy, gout, impotence, lowered vitality, masturbation, ptomaine poisoning, sleepwalking, sterility and writer's cramp. Patrons showing up in "trances" are warned that they must pay their own attendants.

*Like his wife Grace Perkins, Editor Oursler is also a Macfadden biographer. Miss Perkins' book is Chats with the Macfadden Family; Mr. Oursler's, The True Story of Bernarr Macfadden--A Study in Success, similar in tone, title and treatment to Author Clement Wood's Bernarr Macfadden--A Study in Success.

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