Behind the Bastards - Part Two: How the First Fitness Influencer Doomed Us All

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

Robert is joined again by Caitlin Durante to continue to discuss Bernarr MacFadden. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Podcasting. Are you recording, Robert? We have to make sure professional podcaster Robert Evans, are you podcasting? I don't know. I don't know. But I know that this is the opening of part two of this episode. Podcasting.

This is how we're doing it. This is what we're doing. This is started. The episode started 37 seconds ago, according to my recorder. We're in it now, Sophie. There's no pulling back. There's no going back to a world before we open to the podcast this way. Sophie, what is this show? Who are we? I'm Robert Evans. I enter a few states in between episodes. I'm Robert Evans. You're Sophie Lichterman. This is Bastards the Behind.

I feel like being Sophie Lichterman sounds like a really difficult job. It's really hard. I would much rather be the other guy. Let's do it that way. Let's do it that way and then I just have to read this story. You're Robert Evans. I'm Sophie Lichterman and I'm going to go cry. Okay. Well, Caitlin Durante, how are you doing today? You did. Oh my gosh. How are you doing on this Durante?

Wow. Oh my God. I am doing well. I just had a snack, so I'm not taking the advice of Bernard McFadden. Which would be don't eat or go to doctors. I eat food and well, I do try to avoid doctors, but not for the same reasons that he did. I believe in science, but I've had some problems with doctors in the past.

Go ahead and listen to Sludge, an American healthcare story if anyone wants to hear my experience. Check out Sludge. I have more of a problem with just the institution of the American healthcare system than individual doctors. I've known a lot of great doctors. I avoid medical care like the plague. Although right now, that is on the advice of several medical professionals I know who have repeatedly told me there is no, the hospitals are completely past capacity. We have no equipment. We have no room to help anybody stay healthy.

Yes. Don't go to the doctor. You can't go to the hospital now. There's nothing for you here. You should avoid them because of the plague. Try to eat well, everybody. Be careful on the street. Just exercise and then you won't have to go to the doctor. It's not that you shouldn't go to the doctor. It's that we have systematically destroyed large aspects of our healthcare system.

There may not be a doctor for you to go to. Happy Halloween, everybody. It's after Halloween. I don't know what I'm doing, Caitlin. In 1912, Bernard McFadden has just come off of the failure of physical culture city, which I cannot get over as the name, unbelievable. After all those people committed physical culture. Culture treason. Physical culture treason.

You know, 1912 is also the year that the Titanic sank. A lot of tragedies happened in America. Thank you. Thank you, Caitlin. I'm so impressed that you didn't get a Titanic mentioned in part one. I'm proud of you. Well, Robert, you said Titanic. I did. I did. As an adjective for something else,

and I really did think about interrupting you and just saying, hang on a minute. Talk about Titanic. I decided to respect you. Thank you. You did not commit physical culture treason. I did not, and you're welcome. You're welcome also to me.

So, by the way, the Titanic disaster could have been avoided if people had had better physical culture. And you know what? Swimming. Learn how to swim, mother fuckers. You dead assholes. That's what I say. According to the movie, which James Cameron took, you know,

He does his research. And to making that movie pretty accurate, there is a scene that takes place in a gymnasium that was on the Titanic. Yeah. I've never watched it. Don't tend to. Robert, I can't believe that you don't want to watch Titanic. I watch one movie and it's the mummy.

And I would watch Titanic, but it's giving me some serious mummy vibes. So I feel like I've already seen it. Look, you have one of those many ripoffs of the mummy, like saving Private Ryan or the crying game, all shades of the mummy. While we're on movies, I did want to bring up how the story of,

what's his name? Bernard. Bernard. It's a ridiculous name to make for yourself. Bernard. That would be like if I just was like, I'm going to go by Kate Lee from now on. Kate Laher.

I was just taking out the last letter. Rabar. It's very funny. So the narrative, the story of Bernard's life, sounds remarkably similar to that of Charles Foster Kane, of Citizen Kane, where he's, you know, dragged away from his mother, that he becomes this like, you know,

well, I don't know if Bernard, how wealthy he gets, but... Super. He, I suspect, is almost certain he was one of the men who was kind of the inspiration for Charles Foster Kane, because another man who was an inspiration for Charles Foster Kane was William Randolph Hearst. Right, yes.

And at his height, Bernard McFadden is a much more popular publisher than Hearst. Really? His magazines outsell Hearst's publications. Whoa. He is, he is, we're getting to this, but he is, for a time, the number one publisher in the United States of magazines.

Like, no one else is even, I don't think, even all that close. He's hugely successful. We are building to that. Okay. So, in 1912, the Titanic has sank because motherfuckers didn't do enough crunches. And his relationship with Suzie has fallen apart.

The lady that he leaves his wife for in physical culture city. Oh, Suzie. In physical culture city. Another film relationship. So, he's hurting, right? You know, he's in this like, rebound period when you're extra vulnerable. And, you know, we all make decisions

that maybe aren't the things we're proudest of when we're in that like, a relationship that's kind of ended badly. I think we can all be vulnerable enough to admit everybody makes decisions that maybe aren't the things they would most want to like, celebrate in their lives in that period of time. And Bernard is no different.

But because he's the guy he is, he does this in a somewhat grander fashion. He goes on a tour of Europe with an ulterior motive to find himself a wife. Now, the way he does this is fucking incredible. He travels to the UK to go on a speaking tour because he's incredibly popular in the United Kingdom, right? People, every time he does a speech there, it's sold out.

He auditoriums full of people. And his books, which have been banned in the United States, sell like hotcakes over there because he's like, hey, he's got banned in the US for being too obscene, but you English people, you're advanced and like, urbane enough to appreciate this work. So, as a major celebrity, he announces a contest. Great Britain's Perfect Woman.

Now, he frames this as, this is a health contest, right? To see like, who is the fittest woman in Great Britain? Like, who is the healthiest woman in Great Britain? I already hate this. Yeah, you're not going to like it anymore after this point, Sophie. So, obviously, since he's the one running the test and is the great expert on physical culture, he gets to choose the winner.

And the prize that the winner wins is a job offer from Bernard McFadden. And I'm going to quote from a write-up by Esquire here. She soon settled into her new career as the co-star of McFadden's Traveling Physical Fitness Show. Built as the world's healthiest man and woman, the pair performed feats of physical prowess, the highlight of which was Williamson, the woman that he picks out,

Williamson's nightly jump from a seven-foot platform onto McFadden's stomach. It wasn't long before Mary Williamson discovered her biggest prize and the secret reason for the contest. McFadden was searching for his third wife and she was the lucky winner. One day, while the pair was halfway through a 10-mile run, he proposed.

When she accepted, she later recalled, he stood on his head for me for one minute and four seconds. Fucking incredible guy. That doesn't do it for you, Caitlin. A guy five miles into a run standing on his head for a minute to celebrate. I mean, the bar has been set. Now that I know this, don't you dare anyone to propose to me

unless you're able to stand on your head for 64 seconds. A minute and five seconds. Yeah, 65 seconds. You got to beat him now. Like, that's the one to beat. Right. All right. Get practicing, assholes.

It is like, it's easier than I have to think because she's like, wow, he's not, again, actively dying of typhus. What a catch. He could stand on his head and didn't cough up a lung because he's been eating cigars 19 times a day for the last 30 years. I mean, isn't that how like peacocks select their mate?

They're like, ooh, this is the sexiest one. So I'm going to mate with that one. I mean, I think that's more than peacocks do that. But yeah. So as soon as they were married, Bernard started pumping babies into his new bride. As a eugenicist. What?

Look, this is no place for prudery, Caitlin. You're absolutely right. That was a prudish response for me. And you worded that perfectly. Thank you. Thank you, Caitlin. No notes. Thank you.

As a eugenicist, Bernard believed that he had, that the fit had a responsibility to breed in order to fill the world with more genetically perfect children. Oh, no. He lived his creed by giving his wife seven children in 12 years, which is too many. I would say too many.

I mean, it's better than 12 children in seven years. That is better than 12 and also more possible. I guess you might be able to make it. That would be real tricky. It would be hard. You would have to really time that shit out careful. He gave them insufferable names. And he may have been the guy who invented insufferable names

for your celebrity kids. Oh, Bernice, but spelled B Y R in E C E. Hate it. Absolutely hate it. Burwin spelled B E R W Y N. And yeah, just like Bryce, he has a Bryce like these fucking. So they're all like vaguely derivatives of his name. Yes, of course.

Because they're vaguely derivative of off of him. Yeah. Yeah. His children, he only has these kids. So that number one, he can publish magazines about raising kids and so that he can make his kids into celebrities in physical culture magazine and talk about all of his, how, because he's using,

he's had all of these different health ideas, right? That he's written about like, you eat this or you don't eat this or you do this every day and it'll do this and he's testing them on his kids. Oh no. And he's like putting them in the magazine and being like, look, when you starve your child,

look at how strong my boy is and like all of this kind of shit. The irony there is alarming because he was starving as a child and he knows that that didn't work out for him. Yeah. You know, he's, look, people do things. Our brains work in mysterious ways.

Bad ways. Our brains mostly work in bad ways. Yeah. So, yeah, he believed baldness for an example of the kind of things that he believed and I should note that while he is testing a bunch of health theories on his children, he also tests all this on himself.

Like in fairness, he's not... Oh good. Not testing on himself too. So he believed baldness could be cured by tugging on one's hair, which he did regularly. This made his permanent pompadour look unkempt and vaguely crazy. So his hair is like always shooting out everywhere

because he's pulling on it constantly. Like a man with a scalp condition. He went barefoot at all times, convinced that this kept him in contact with the Earth's magnetic forces. So he's like super rich, he's a millionaire but he's going to all of these business meetings and political meetings and stuff like barefoot

in the middle of like 1900s New York. So he basically has the Edward from Twilight first movie hair. Yeah. Yeah. And look, I run barefoot. I'm a big advocate of barefoot stuff. There are some places in the world

that I was not willing to go barefoot and those included downtown South New Delhi, India. Just because like it didn't seem like a good idea. In New York, I have to think like, I don't think it's a good idea to necessarily always be barefoot when horseshit is 80% of what's on the street, which in New York in like 1910, it absolutely is. But whatever, he's fine.

Yeah. It seems to work for him. Yeah. And despite being incredibly rich, he didn't believe you should get rid of clothing. So he wore his suits until they were literally rotting off of him. So this man is a millionaire and extremely successful

and physically fit. But he also looks like a super swole hobo. His clothing is falling apart. His hair is all shooting out everywhere and he's barefoot. And he also has a habit of challenging other men to fistfights for like no reason at all, constantly, sometimes on a daily basis. He'll try to get into fistfights with people.

So a lot of folks who see him don't realize, oh, that's wealthy publisher Bernard McFadden. They're like, oh, that is a mentally ill vagrant. Like this is a man who needs medical attention because he's not well. Which he would refuse to get. Which he would refuse to get. He also launched a variety of different health foods.

My favorite. Oh my God. I have to. I don't want to read this to you. I want to show you the ad and you can describe this to our audience because it is... Hey. I got you.

How do I... Oh, thank you, Sophie. I think you just moved in allegedly. Caitlin, can you see it? Yes. Look at that. Look at that. Okay.

Here we go. It's called Strength. I believe it's just probably pronounced food. Strength food? But it's spelled... Food is spelled F-U-D-E. Strength food. Strength...

I don't like it... Upon first glance, I thought it said fudge. Yeah. So strength fudge sort of, let's see. It's cause- The logo is under strength foot is, it's different. It's different. Another tagline seems to be, don't be a weakling.

Yeah. And I think that's Bernard on the front of the food. Doing the weird like hand. Showing off his biceps. Don't be a weakling on top of the box. Doing a Schwarzenegger pose with the muscles. He's not even that slow by today's standards is the thing. By today's standards, come on man.

You gotta look at like how recently though, today's standards happened. Like you watch them action movies from like the 80s and like it's fucking mid like overweight dudes in their late 40s. Like you look at, you know, a good example of like how recently what the definition of being jacked has changed in the second Indiana Jones movie.

The one that everybody prefers to forget because of all the racism. Right. There was going to be like this shirtless scene for Harrison Ford. So he got super, they talk about this and like the behind the scenes that he had to get like in crazy good shape in order to like do this scene.

And he just looks like, like- I know very well what you're talking about in that. You would cast him today as the guy is like the stoner who doesn't exercise in your movie. If he was going to be opposite of like the average looking man who was Kumeil Nagyani with 90 pounds of muscle packed on. I do like that there's a tagline,

famous authority on food and hygiene. Hygiene was a big word in this period of time. The Nazis talk about hygiene all the time, racial hygiene. You're supposed to have strength food with cream. I'm so confused. I don't know what it is. I think it's like some sort of porridge. I don't want it, Caitlin.

I wonder if this is like kind of the original protein powder cause it says that you can serve it with cream or sugar or sliced bananas and cream. So it sounds like you just like put it into your smoothie. Yeah. Well, it's not really, I don't think smoothies science has really been invented yet. But he is like, this is definitely like the precursor

to like protein powder to muscle milk. Literally says berries and cream on there. And I'm like, yeah. Berries, bananas and cream. Like what is a smoothie besides of those things? The commercial, the berries and cream guy. There would be people in this period of time who would argue with him that like, no, fruit's bad for you.

So he, again, he's this mix of like absolutely dangerously wrong stuff and also being like, no, you should mostly eat vegetables and fruit and like, you know, maybe avoid red meat, which is good health advice, generally good health advice. Unless you have an iron deficiency or whatever, but like most people who eat red meat eat more of it than is good for their health, including me.

So I judge it, good. You're probably much healthier as a result. I tracked down and slaughtered an entire cow earlier today. And I'm currently wearing its body like a cape and eating it slowly. I was going to ask about that. Yeah, my doctor says I have to stop because I've picked up a ton of different kinds of worms.

But you know, Caitlin, what's life without worms, huh? That's what I have to ask. That's what I say every day. That's what I know. I know. That's my magazine, worm culture. Well, hopefully no one commits worm culture treason against you.

Oh, you do not want to know the punishment for worm culture treason, Caitlin. It is, it's ivermectin. It's actually just ivermectin. Oh, OK, all right, yeah. Yeah. So he's tearing right along. Business is growing at a very fast pace.

And then tragedy strikes. World War I, which is bad for Bernard McFadden and no one else. Otherwise, a great time, right? I know it's very shocking here about World War I being bad for somebody, but it's not great for his business. Interesting. So we finally found one bad thing

to say about World War I, which, you know, has been a very pro the first World War podcast. So this is hard for me. So yeah, his disposable income, people have less money to spend on magazines, right? And a lot of the young men who are going to be most interested in consuming his content are getting shot with machine guns repeatedly on the Western front.

But Bernard weathered the storm. And in 1919, on the advice of his wife, Mary, he launched a magazine called True Story. Now, this is, yet again, Bernard inventing something that would prove to be one of the most influential cultural decisions in history. Like, it is hard to overstate the influence of this magazine. And in order to help me adequately

explain why this is important, I am going to read a quote from American Heritage Magazine. True Story was the originator and exemplar of the Confession Magazine. Under the credo, Truth is Stranger Than Fiction, the cover of the first issue featured such titles as, A Wife Who Awoke in Time, and My Battle with John Barley Corn, An X Convicts Climbed to Millions,

and How I Learned to Hate My Parents. Basically, the True Story formula consisted of first-person accounts written in an untutored but clear style of sin and redemption. The sin, usually carnal, was described in some detail. But the actual consummation nearly always seemed to take place between paragraphs and was invariably dressed up as a moral lesson.

McFadden manipulated the formula masterfully. He knew the illusion of authenticity was essential. So instead of hiring what he called art artists to illustrate the stories, he used staged photographs, featuring such models as the then-unknown Friedrich Marsh, Gene Arthur, and Norma Scherer. And he made every contributor sign an affidavit stating that his or her story was indeed true.

In 1927, however, after a peace title to the revealing kiss, used the names of eight actual residents of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who sued McFadden for half a million dollars, he found himself somewhat sheepishly contending that maybe every story wasn't all that true. McFadden turned out to be a cracker jack businessman. His initial inspiration was to charge $0.20 for the magazine, a dime more than the going rate, the first issue sold out.

I think, feel confident saying, the majority of digital content today is in some way descended from true story magazine. This is like half of the internet at least, right? This is half of television. This is reality TV. This is Jerry Springer and Dear Abby. I mean, Dear Abby is like a magazine. This is like everything, this like true confessionals

about like scandalous things that happen in real life. That's like most of culture. Yeah. And he's invents this. He's the first person to figure out, there is a hunger for this that will never be sated. And I can publish this forever. He makes millions of this like instantly.

And within the year, he's already spinning this magazine off into other magazines that are just like more focused. He creates true romance, true experiences, true ghost stories, true detective and dream world. So here's how it worked. When Bernard had a major hit with a type of story, so he publishes a couple of different romantic true stories and an issue of true story, and that issue

sells really well, he spins off an entire magazine devoted to like true romantic stories. It's basically like the Playboy Confessionals or whatever, the Hustler, whatever one it was. American Heritage goes into more detail here. Quote, and this is about how he like runs his publishing empire. A flag flew on the McFadden building

for each McFadden publication, and employees would go up to the roof first thing each morning to see if they still had a job. Among the short-lived flags were ones that bore the legend beautiful womanhood, whose undoing was an ill-conceived scathing attack on spinsters and brainpower, whose title apparently suggested to readers that they were somehow lacking in that department.

So he's like A-B testing. So he puts up a flag for every different magazine he launches, and if it doesn't sell well, he takes it out, and that's how you know you've lost your job, that like this magazine has been canceled. Like, but he's doing like, again, what every publisher does today.

He is effectively running a massive internet publication. He's doing Buzzfeed in like 1920. Like that's like what this is effectively. He's just launching different verticals. He's like, I don't know, I worked for years in an industry that was largely defined by Bernard McFadden without ever knowing his name. And it sounds like, yeah, this is all like very click-baity stuff

too by the sounds of it. Bernard McFadden would have made all of the money in the world off of the internet. Yeah. Wow. He would be eating, he would be on Joe Rogan's podcast twice a fucking week. Or he would have just eaten Joe Rogan to gain his powers.

So my projection of him just being like an Abercrombie model of Jim Brough, that was not right. He, wow. No, he's actually, he's like business man. He's closer to the Gawker guys, except for I think he probably would have been friends with Hulk Hogan rather than getting into a legal fight with him. Yeah.

Now, Bernard's personal life was seemingly more stable at this point, but his obsessive need to test his theories, paired with his reckless belief in his own ideas, led to tragedy in his personal life. This is the baby killing. This is it. Yeah. I knew it.

I see that excitement just lighting up your face, Katelyn. We all love a good dead baby. I am ecstatic. No. In the spring of 1921, Mary got pregnant with yet another child. Now, Bernard had written articles earlier about several theories he had on sex determination, right? How to make, determine the sex of your child.

And then this is like, historically, right? This is a constant thing people have these theories about. Like, if you do this, if you make her lay this way or eat this kind of food, you know, she'll have a boy or a daughter. Like, this is a whole, he's not the first person who tries to do this, you know, this goes back as long as there have been the idea of patrilineal, whatever,

like passing on a property and shit. One of his ideas was that boys were more often born to mothers who were starving. So during all of her previous pregnancies, he'd starved his wife, but she'd kept having girls. Gee whiz. Yeah, isn't that a bummer? Nope, I wasn't even, I'm not going to make the joke

I was going to make, go on. He comes to the conclusion that all of the starving he'd done previously was cumulative. And he'd probably primed her to have a boy at this point. So now he made her eat a bunch of roast beef during this pregnancy. So that's at least like better than starving her, right? Yeah.

Force feeding your pregnant wife roast beef instead of making her starve, that's an improvement. He's grown. He's demonstrating growth. He is not at all. In late December, with the baby near due, Bernard was so happy with both the fact that he was about to have another kid

and with the success of True Story that he held a company holiday party, allowing his employees to smoke and drink to their heart's content, even during prohibition. He was, I'll say this, he doesn't drink, he thinks no one should, but he's also like a libertarian. So he hates prohibition. He doesn't think the government should be telling people

what to do, which I can respect that as like a, anyway, we're about to talk about how maybe he killed his baby, so whatever. When he came home from the party, he found his wife in labor. And since he couldn't reach a midwife, and again, there are phones, not a lot of people are phone connected at this point.

Like it, he can't really. He's a millionaire, you'd imagine. You'd imagine he could have set this up, right? But he can't get a midwife on the horn, and obviously he's not gonna call a fucking doctor. So he delivers the child himself. His wife gives birth to a boy named Byron, which Bernard confusingly claimed meant that his theory

about starving pregnant women was correct, because he'd starved her so much before. Even though he hadn't starved her for this baby. Right. He's not really scientific. Wait. I would say maybe that's questionable logic. So he forced an immediate announcement

of the boy's birth into physical culture magazine. And he only grudgingly allowed a doctor to enter his home and put 15 stitches in his wife after she repeatedly begged him. So for hours, she's bleeding in an agony. And it's like, please let me have a fucking doctor. I'm ripped open. Let me like, please.

And finally, because he, I mean, for one thing, he doesn't want anyone to know that he'd have a doctor for anything, right? You shouldn't get torn open. You should, if you're doing enough physical culture, if you're doing enough dumbbell squats or whatever, you shouldn't rip open, you know, when you're pregnant. That's what he's saying, obviously.

So yeah, he eventually does like yield to his screaming wife. Like screaming, not as in like hectoring, but as in like dying of blood loss and allows a doctor to come in and put 15 stitches in her. He refuses though, to allow her any anesthetic or pain killer. No. Yeah, I know, right? Kind of sucks, right?

What a piece of shit. No. Oh. Look, this is a sympathetic start to the Bernard McFadden story. We are past the point of sympathy now. Yes. So for almost a year, things are okay though.

And he's like, he puts this kid, this son of his, he's so proud to have a son. Every week, there's an article about how strong and like good and like, look, he's growing up so much stronger than other boys. And like, I'm doing this and I'm doing this. He's gonna be the healthiest boy and he's gonna be the healthiest man who ever lived.

And like, this is like a huge fact of that. He almost pivots the magazine to focus on his son's development. So a year later, the December of the next year after his kid's born, when Byron is about one year old, tragedy strikes. And I'm gonna quote from the biography, Mr. America here. 11 month old Byron, known within the family as Billy,

was seated on his mother's lap. Suddenly, Billy tensed up, threw his head back and began to contort his body as if overcome by a seizure. Bernard demanded that the infant be stripped and dunked in a steaming hot bath. Mary recalled that the water's temperature was so hot that she couldn't keep her hand submerged. Though it is impossible to know the cause of Billy's fit,

many common childhood seizures are now known to be brought on by fever, so a hot bath as treatment was probably ill-advised at best. The baby's spasms continued. Mary snatched him out of the water and screamed, Byron, for the love of Christ, call a doctor. Billy died in her arms. Yeah, and again, this is the 1920s, right?

So a baby having a seizure, it is entirely possible by the time that baby started seizing, it was already essentially dead because medical science may be not great, but also a lot of babies had different kinds of seizure disorders and have or have seizures because of a fever and get better. There was medicine, especially that a rich person

could have gotten, like if he had taken his child to the best medical care available, there's a good chance that the baby would have survived. It's absolutely guaranteed that dunking a seizureing baby in almost boiling hot water is not going to help. So I think we can safely say that he may be killed a baby. He may be killed his baby. He definitely, probably, definitely killed his baby.

We can't say for certain that he killed his baby. We can say for certain that he made that 11-month-old child's last moments be of horrible confusion and pain submerged in near-boiling water. Yeah, yes, for sure. I would say bad parenting. I'm not an expert. I don't have a kid.

I try not to talk about what you should do with your kids, but I feel like, and again, excuse me, parents in the audience who are going out on a limb here, it's bad to dunk your baby in steaming water while they're having a seizure. Sure. I think most people would agree with that. Yeah, I know, I know.

I'm going, I'm getting into Joe Rogan territory, given health advice I'm not qualified to give, but that's my opinion. Don't force your baby into steaming water while it's having a seizure. Maybe not a good idea. You know who else forces babies into, wait, who doesn't? You know who doesn't ever do the thing

that I just talked about? Oh, Robert. Who? I don't know. The products and services that support this podcast, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe, maybe. Sophie, what?

Did you heard me? I think what I said was heard. Well, we'll be back after these messages from our sponsors. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted

before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become

the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back.

So if he's very proud of me, everything's fine. So Bernard McFadden, if you know Bernard at this point, Caitlin, and I think we know Bernard at this point. I feel like he's a close personal friend. He's got his ideas about things, right? He's got ideas about everything. He had ideas about how to deal with the kids' health issues,

and he has ideas about how to deal with grieving. Do you know what... I would guess he would think that the best way to deal with grieving is to starve yourself. Kind of. He definitely doesn't want people to eat much, but no, it's walking for hours at a time in the freezing snow. Oh. His whole family.

He's changing it up. Yeah, his whole family. So he just has them walk for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. And yeah, now, again, he had spent the better part of a year writing articles about how healthy his son was and how this is all due to his different nutrition theories. So the fact that his son had died, that's bad for business. You know? Yeah.

That's not going to go good for you. Well, yeah, that's not going to go good for you. So I... Jesus, this is such a bleak story. So he doesn't publish anything. And in fact, he just like stops working. And you know Bernard at this point, like that's not something he does. So he stops putting in articles.

He stops doing anything like his editors are just running the magazines for a while. And he forces his wife to walk 200 miles to Manhattan with him, carrying their luggage all the way in the snow. That's how he... That's how not... It's one thing if that's how you deal with grieving. That's actually I can... I could honestly see like I...

The last time I was heavily grieving, I would run like 80 miles a week. Like I get that idea, forcing your wife to walk 200 miles in the snow so that because she has to grieve the same way, that's the fucked up. And the fact that he probably killed his baby. Yeah. So when he in the middle of this 200 mile walk, they get to Greenwich, Connecticut, and he convinces his wife to try again for a son. So he's like as she's grieving and exhausted as like,

I got to make another, put another boy into you. So eventually they get back to the office and he writes an editorial about his son's death. You going to guess who he blames for it? I would guess his wife. Oh, Caitlin, it's like you have a lot of experience with toxic men. Here's what he wrote. Billy was often overfed.

I protested on numerous occasions, but my protest was not vigorous enough. Anyway, I believe the boy was so strong that he would overcome mistakes of that nature. And it is so hard to combat the tendencies of mother love. I also somewhat blame myself for neglecting his exercises. So he blames his wife for feeding their baby too much. Yep. Yeah, he didn't starve that baby enough.

Gosh. And also he's making his baby do exercises. Yeah, he makes everything do exercises. Can a baby at that age, 11 months? I mean, I don't know. They probably should. I mean, to the extent that like crawling is an exercise. Yeah, it's good for them to exercise.

Like in terms of like it's good for babies to like move and learn how to use their body slowly. Sure. But like I don't know their babies. They're not. They don't really have bones for the most part. Yeah, their motor skills aren't great. Their organs, I feel like, are still kind of developed.

Yeah. You know. Yeah, I feel like exercise. I feel like if you're trying to make a baby exercise, the odds are good that you will wind up hurting the baby. Sure. Definitely. Yeah, because they're babies.

They're little babies. Because they're babies. They're mostly just supposed to like roll around and poop and occasionally crawl and be babies. And be babies. They're not supposed to hit the gym. Get under that bench. But it does make you feel real.

You're deadlifted. You can barely deadlift. What the fuck is wrong with you, baby? You baby. Keep your back straight. Wow. They're babies. They don't do that.

Stuffings are soft. Look at how shitty this baby's pull-ups are. He's barely getting halfway to the bar. I mean, like how embarrassing that like a baby would be better at pull-ups, though, than like, say me, you know. Well, they don't have a lot of like body, so that would make it easier. But also their arms are not really muscles yet.

They're just kind of like noodles. So that would make it harder. Noodly little baby. I don't know. I'll start a gym for babies. We'll see if it's a good idea. Yeah. So within a decade, by the late 1920s,

Bernard had amassed a fortune of more than $30 million, which today would be like $400 million. So he makes a shitload of money. Yeah. He was at the absolute height of his success. But after time, this too grew frustrating. Bernard was the peak of publishing influence. He had more readers on a monthly basis

than anyone else in the United States, including William Randolph Hearst. But being on top also means you've kind of reached the limit, right? There's really nowhere for him to grow. He's the biggest publisher. Yeah. So the only thing he could think of to do to expand his audience and become even more influential

was become the president of the United States. What? I did not see that he was going to try to run for president. We talk about this in the John McAfee episodes with the great Lacey Mosley. But like, you know, when you are a certain kind of white man who has had one of those careers where no one ever says no and you just keep doing ridiculous things

and being successful at them, you will eventually try to become the president. I mean, I look at what happened recently. Yeah, I mean, look at what's going to happen when I run in 2024 on a platform of making America like the unnamed island nation that I rule with an iron fist. It's going to be great, Caitlin. Yeah, I can't wait.

Neither can America. So he decides he's going to become the president. Now, his wife later claimed that he started to dream of this career in 1914 when at the eve of World War One, he suggested that wrestling would be a good way to solve political conflicts, which I actually think would be incredible. I'm 100% in agreements with Bernard about this.

He says, quote, political contests that derive their support through advocating physical culture reforms will, I believe, become a reality in the not far distant future. And he's wrong about this, but my god, it would have been so good if like Kaiser Wilhelm and fucking Zarr Nicholas and whatever the French president's name and the fucking king of England had all had to like fistfight. That would have been so much better.

If every war, if George Bush in like Saddam Hussein had had a cage match, I feel confident saying we would think fondly on the Iraq war. Yeah, it was that time George Bush got stabbed in the eye by Saddam Hussein. That was funny as hell. Can you believe he thought Saddam wouldn't pull a knife in a fistfight?

What an idiot. Wow. Barack Hussein Obama and John McCain, just like street fighting. Just wailing on each other while fucking Joe Biden and what's her name? The governor of Alaska, Sarah Perry. Yeah, like have a chain fight. My god.

Oh, it would be so much better. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Everything would be better. Okay, good. I see your point. I see your point.

Yeah. Yeah. World War II might have gone worse because I do not think FDR would have been able to beat Hitler in a street fight. Yeah. So there's limits to this. We would have needed to elect Bernard McFadden president. Exactly.

He could have taken on Hitler. Although he might not have wanted to as we'll get to. So Bernard decides he's going to become president and in the mid-1920s, so at first he thinks like inevitably the progress of physical culture because I'm getting so popular so quickly. By in another 10 years, everyone will agree that the strongest man in the country should be president and then I'll be president because I'm the strongest man. That does not happen.

And so in the mid-1920s, Bernard decides to launch a magazine dedicated to making him into a serious intellectual and political figure. So he's very successful at this point, but he is not a serious person. He is seen as like a silly tabloid publisher. He's putting out kind of sleazy material and that is how he's viewed. There are people like within the exercise world who take his health ideas somewhat seriously, but he generally like the mainstream media kind of laughs at him and again, not unlike Donald Trump to be honest.

In 1924, he launches another magazine. This one is dedicated to make him into a serious political figure and it's called the New York Graphic. Though he was attempting to, you know, again, kind of establish like a New York Times analog that will give him respect, the New York Graphic immediately becomes like the tackiest scandal sheet in the country. That said, it also employs some of the biggest names in American media history at early stages of their career.

Walter Winschel and Ed Sullivan both get their start writing for the graphic and Sullivan who like helps to know those people and Sullivan like almost helps to create. He's like a precursor to Carson. Like he helps to create the idea of like the late night kind of variety show type thing. A lot of like the biggest musicians in the rock and roll era get their start on the Ed Sullivan show. Most of the titles of graphic articles were lurid to say the least. One was Two Women in Fight, One Stripped, Other Eats, Bad Check, I kind of love that

one. Don't really know what to expect from that article, but it sounds fascinating. My favorite thing about the graphic is that it's yet another example of Bernard inventing something that would later become hugely influential. The Bernard creates Photoshop kind of. He invents for his magazine a graphic design technique called Composographs. These are staged composite photos where he'll have celebrities, you know, he's had celebrities or he's had people posing for photos and articles about like true crime, which you

can see is kind of a precursor to like reenactments and like unsolved mysteries and stuff. So a big part of the New York graphic is like stories about celebrities getting in like legal trouble or having divorces or all this stuff. And in order to illustrate these, because he can't get photos of the celebrities, he hires models and he has them pose as whatever the celebrities were doing. And then he basically has a picture of the face of that celebrity superimposed over the head of the model. Okay.

Yeah. He's like photoshopping celebrities into like like lurid scenes in order to sell newspapers. Yeah. And he invents this new technique for the first time to cover a celebrity divorce trial. Leonard Kip Rhinelander was a millionaire who was suing his bride of one month over the fact that she'd hidden that she was part black. This is the twenties, you know, because this was a racist time, her response to this was to deny the charges in court by stripping to the waist.

Obviously, number one, these are famous people. Number two, a woman has stripped in court. This is big news, right? Sure. This is a huge story and the graphic used its first composite graph to illustrate the moment where this famous woman strips in court without actually having photographs of it. And circulation leaps to a hundred thousand people like over or by a hundred thousand people overnight as a result of this.

Now the graphic was influential and popular, but it was also too trashy to get much purchase among advertisers. It was a lot of people bought it, but it wasn't profitable because it was expensive to make and no one would advertise in it. And by the time it ended in 1932, Bernard had lost more than eleven million dollars on the venture. And this gives you an idea of how much money he's willing to light on fire in the hope of establishing a political career for himself.

That is like half of the money in the world at this point. Yeah, what an investment that miserably failed for him. He doesn't give up though. In 1929, he commissions three biographies about himself. Now this was a new idea at the time, a wannabe presidential candidate paying to have a biography written by a ghost writer in order to drum up interest in his campaign. Every single candidate does that now, right? Like a hundred percent of people who run for president have a book published about them

like that they supposedly write, you know, Bernard invents the site. As far as I can tell, he's the first guy to do this, again, a visionary, he is living in the 21st century in 19-fucking-29. Oh, I mean, good for him. Yeah, unfortunately, he's not living in any of the good parts of the 20th century. So, these books were obviously trash. One invited readers to, quote, study him as he governs a whole community of employees that is like a little city.

See, he can run a magazine, so he's clearly ready to run the country. I mean, he did run that one little city. Yeah, but not well. Until everyone committed treason against him. Yeah, physical culture treason. So these are not well regarded by reviewers, these books. The American Heritage article that I've been reading from cites an H.L. Minkin review, quote, the authors of these brochures do not spare the goose grease.

Poor McFadden chokes and gurgles on it in every one of their 825 pages. I can recall no more passionate anointing of a living man. He appears as a hero without a wart, spiritual or temporal, sworn only to save us from the medical trust and make us strong enough to lift a piano with our bare hands. Wait, one of these biographies is over 800 pages long. Yeah. He's, again, they'll dial it in. By the time Pete Buttigieg is getting his vanity biography published, we've gotten much better

at it, you know? Great. While the graphic had no luck establishing Bernard as a political name, it was influential in getting Jimmy Walker elected mayor of New York City. Unfortunately for Bernard, Mayor Walker refused to appoint McFadden city commissioner of health, which Bernard was hoping would jumpstart his political career. The new mayor argued that while Bernard's ideas on health were good, nobody actually wanted to live that way.

Despite this, by the mid 1930s, Bernard was more successful than ever. One of his magazines topped 7.3 million people, which again beats every other publisher in the country. As time went on, some of the most influential people in world history would write columns for Bernard's magazines. Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, Mahatma Gandhi, and Adolf Hitler. Oh, well, all right. Okay.

Well, the Hitler article was not technically a column, his editor had interviewed Hitler in 1923, and when Hitler started rising to power in the early 30s, they published this interview as a column because that's like the sexier way to advertise it, and the column, it's titled as if Hitler wrote it, it's titled, When I Take Charge of Germany. By the way, for an example of again, the way Bernard does this sort of thing, so the article that Gandhi writes, or quote unquote writes, is titled, My Sex Life by Mahatma Gandhi. It's about celibacy, but like that's not how you sell that article, like. Right.

Yeah. Wow. Fucking amazing. He knows how to really spin a story. You know who else talks a lot about Mahatma Gandhi's sex life, Caitlin? Is it the products and services that? We will not, not, period, bring in a sponsor if they don't talk to us for solid 30 minutes about how they think Mahatma Gandhi might have fucked.

That's the behind the bastard's guarantee. It is not. This is why we have so few sponsors, they just can't hang. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what to say about it. There's nothing to say.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. That season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good, bad-ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't

a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Uh, we're back. And we're just having a great time. How are you doing, Caitlin? I'm doing well, I've heard a lot of information about Bernard. He's a fascinating man. He's a fascinating fellow, and it keeps, you know, there's peaks and valleys as far as,

you know, his conduct in his life, but I continue to be amazed at some of his choices. So you're keeping me on the edge of my seat. Yep. Well, let's talk about how he got Franklin Delano Roosevelt elected. So in 1931, he bought an existing magazine called Liberty, which was, compared to his other publications, fairly respectable, like it's a politics and culture publication. So he immediately starts writing editorial columns for this on topics as broad as organized crime and the importance of returning Americans to farming.

In 1932, in the wake in the midst of the Great Depression, FDR starts his run for president. In Liberty magazine backs FDR's candidacy. Now one of the chief questions of the election was whether or not the aging polio victim was capable of handling the physical strains of the presidency, right? Like that is a big question. Can he do the job? He's dying of polio, post-polia or whatever. As America's best known fitness nut, Bernard McFadden was in a unique position to allay

people's suspicions because people do listen to what he has to say about fitness. So if one of his publications gives FDR a clean bill of health, that means something. As Liberty's publisher, he had the magazine sponsor a medical examination of Roosevelt by several doctors, even though Bernard is on record of saying that doctors are awful of shit. In this case, they might have been because they said FDR was in perfect health, which he absolutely was not in. But this article saying that FDR was in great health has a significant role in the election.

Mark Adams, Bernard's biographer writes, the biggest doubt about the Roosevelt campaign vanished almost overnight. And that is, broadly speaking, I don't know, probably good. I mean, FDR complicated history, shall we say, to say the least in a number of ways. But within the context of Bernard's career, I will say this is a positive moment because we're about to talk about how big a fan he was of fascism. See, Bernard McFet, yeah, oopsie toodles. Another thing, I mean, I guess I could have, you know, the threads are there to, to, to

arrive at this point, but I am still a little surprised. So once again, thanks for keeping me on the edge of my seat. No, it's all, it's all thanks to Bernard. So Bernard is both a product of his culture and a culture creator. And as the US went, you know, real into Eugenics in the 20s and 30s, so did he. He had his paid columnists write glowing articles about Eugenics, one of which included this paragraph. Eugenics is the mightiest comet that ever came skidding into the little solar system

of human thought. Suppose we are breeding for a sound mind and a sound body and have formulated a scheme of judging the applicants with a score system, not unlike that which they glade the Orpingtons at the country fair. Here is a one, her score is 95 and three quarters, the best applicant in the lot for the high and holy functions of motherhood. In essence, he's saying we ought to judge ladies like we judge pigs, which fine by me. Yeah, not at all problematic feminist icon, Bernard McFadden.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. And specifically on like the criteria of like how good they would be at like bearing children. Yeah. Well, what else is there? Well, what else is it? If you've got it. Exactly.

Yeah. What other function can you serve? That's what Bernard McFadden would probably shout at you while using an exercise bike. I found a paper by the Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports Studies at the University of Texas. They describe McFadden's beliefs as soft eugenics because he's not, he doesn't spend a lot of time, he's not talking about like races, he's not spending a lot of time being like the Aryans need to do you, we need to get rid of the Jews, like that's not really his thing.

His thing is more healthy people need to breed and we need to raise up people to be healthy and strong so that they can breed more healthy and strong people. So it's a very ableist eugenics. Yes, it's not good. I'm just like, it's not, there's different kinds of eugenics, that's kind of the one that he lands on. In his hatred of modernity, and he blames modernity for all of the health problems that people have, and in his obsession with perfect bodies, he lands right in the crosshairs of

a lot of fascist theory. When Benito Mussolini took power in Italy, he emphasized physical training as a way to prepare young people for all the fighting they were going to have to do as foot soldiers of fascism. Italy's war record shows how successful this plan was. Bernard absolutely loved this idea. From the Stark Center, quote, In 1932, readers of Physical Culture magazine, then with a circulation in the hundreds of thousands, were greeted with an unusual interview.

Past magazine issues featured everyone from George Bernard Shaw to Upton Sinclair, but this was the first time a self-proclaimed fascist appeared. The man was Benito Mussolini, the leader of Italy. Since Mussolini's rise to power in 1922, McFadden had kept a close eye on Il Duce's love of sport. Mussolini was detailed a subject deemed to be of utmost national importance, physical culture. On this point, Mussolini found a captive audience.

Throughout the 1930s, Bernard McFadden attempted ultimately in vain to enter American politics through a presidential bid. His guiding focus was a belief in the importance of personal hygiene, health and strength. This quest, which ultimately proved unsuccessful, explained Mussolini's appearance in Physical Culture magazine. Months prior to Il Duce's article, McFadden traveled to Europe as part of President Hoover's conference on child health and protection. McFadden himself seems to have had no solid set of political beliefs, focusing primarily

on issues of health above all else. He unsuccessfully ran as a Republican candidate in 1936, but later attempted to gain a position in Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's office. It was during this trip to Europe that McFadden crossed paths with Mussolini, united at sea, and their appreciation for fitness, a deal was struck, the contents of which were revealed to Physical Cultures readers. So he's political in that he thinks everyone should be jacked all the time, and he likes fascism because fascism also wants everyone to be jacked all the time.

That's his entry, and that's his article that he lets Benito Mussolini write is on the importance of physical culture for national identity, and they enter into a deal, which they detail in this article. And the deal is that Benito gives Bernard personal responsibility for training 40 Italian naval cadets. These men are brought to New York, they're trained under McFadden, and they're inculcated in American popular culture. The experiment lasts six months, and it's the subject of a number of articles in physical

culture. The ultimate message of the experiment in McFadden's eyes is that fascism builds healthier, stronger people through good physical culture, and the US should emulate Italy in this. The Italian cadets are often used as a foil, they're contrasted with lazy Americans who have unhealthy diets. Now after six months in the United States, these Italian naval cadets all showed improvements in strength and the growth of muscles. Bernard claimed that this was evidence fascism could work its wondrous physical effects

even in the United States. From the Stark Center. McFadden stopped short of saying Italy was superior to the United States, but his writings included wishful appraisals of the Italian state and claims that America had much to learn. According to McFadden, his Italian sojourn was a success. This explained, or so it was claimed, why the Portuguese government extended a similar invitation to McFadden in 1932, the same year Antonio de Oliveira Salazar assumed control

of the state. A military dictatorship existed in Portugal from 1926, but Salazar's rise to power marked an intensification of authoritarianism alongside a growing cult of personality. Salazar's government shared at least somewhat Mussolini's admiration of strong and healthy bodies. Mauricio Drummond's study of sport in Salazar's regime explained that, although Salazar rarely expressed an interest in sport, he used it for political purposes. So he winds up working for two different fascist dictators, establishing like a physical culture

for their young people. And in Portugal, Salazar, this dictator, gives him a few dozen children, which he's able to put on a compound, which he calls McFadden Children's Colony, and he sets them up with a vegetarian diet and a workout program. And Bernard claims again in his magazine that this is so successful, it turns their, quote, noll and stupid little faces alert and interested. What? Okay.

Let me just take a moment to, to just comprehend all of that. Oh, Kido-Ki. Lot going on there, huh? There's a lot to unpack. And I don't know if my brain can do it at this time, but yeah, there's a lot going on with this, with this episode. The twists, the turns. They keep coming.

They keep coming. I can barely keep up. Oh. There's actually another one at the end of this paragraph. Oh, goodness. So he's so happy with how this Portugal experiment goes that he co-authors a book about the experiment with a, we'll call a prominent author. Do you want to guess who it is?

I, what's 30s author do you think he'd pick? Oh, my, uh, Falkner, I don't know. Does the name Thomas Dixon mean anything to you? No. Thomas Dixon wrote a book called The Clansmen, which was the basis of DW Griffith's birth of a nation. Also, what I'm, amazing, was Falkner writing stuff in the 30s or am I not, am I, do I not know anything?

Cause I've been. Oh geez. I don't know. I'm bad at. He's, I'm bad at authors. It's the same. Clearly. He was, he was dead by then, right?

Who knows. Um, okay. So the guy who wrote the thing that, um, birth of a nation was adapted from. He writes a book about how good it is to train fascist kids to be fascists. Uh-huh. Through exercise and vegetarianism. Oopsies. Oopsies.

As the 1930s war on McFadden became an anti-war activist, which, you know, is a positive connotation now, but if you're an anti-war activist in the 30s, it means you don't think that anything should be done to stop fascism. Like that's, that's what the anti-war movement in the US generally is in this period is like, why would we go to war against Hitler? He seems like a good chap. He's doing just great and we should not challenge him. Yeah.

Now, by 1938 to his somewhat credit, Bernard comes around on the issue likely because he sees public opinion shifting and he becomes pro war, turning out monthly calls for his readers to exercise in order to defend their nation. 1941, the year that the US gets into the war is the year things fall apart for Bernard. Minority stakeholders in his company charged that he's used company funds to pay for his political campaigns. He's forced to sell all of his interest in the business and step down as president. Political culture was turned into a woman's magazine as he left.

I didn't do particularly. Okay, sorry. He doesn't like that. It also doesn't do very well. But the media landscapes changed a bit by this point. By the end of the war, McFadden's marriage to Mary was also at its end. A wedge had been driven between them when he blamed her for their son's tragic death. She divorced him and a long and brutal legal battle ensued.

At the end of it, she published a book about how much her ex-husband sucked. In a final middle finger to him, she dedicated her autobiography to the doctors who had helped ease the pain of childbirth, which is the meanest thing you could do to Bernard. Yeah. She thanked a doctor? Brutal. After I let her get stitches eventually. I mean, I like that for her.

The book contains a number of allegations, including that Bernard caused her a miscarriage by forcing her to work out incessantly while she was pregnant. So good guy. A write-up from American Heritage ably describes the remainder of the former publishing Titan's life. Alden later wrote of Edward Lear that he became a land, Bernard McFadden became a press release. In the last 18 years of his life, he was featured in Time, which dubbed him body love, or Newsweek 18 times.

He ran for the Senate in Florida. He conducted innumerable fasts and hikes. He offered a prize for the best biographical play about his life. In 1949, at the age of 81, he took up parachuting and thereafter tried to make a jump each year on his birthday. Claiming that his third wife had humiliated him by losing her figure, he married a woman of 42. She later had the marriage annulled.

In 1953, he declared his acceptance of the nomination of the Honest Party for Mayor. He pledged a business administration that would make sales tax unnecessary, eliminate traffic congestion, and obtained double-deck subway cars. He also promised to purge the city of communists. So he keeps doing the same thing his whole life, but he's less influential. He doesn't have a bunch of magazines. Nobody really gives a shit. Sure.

Also, he lives quite long. He lives a long life. Look, he's not wrong about all of the things that he's saying. There's some things he gets very right, and he lives a long, healthy life as a result of it. He ends in good health into his early 80s, which suggests that again, some of the stuff he's saying is not bullshit. He celebrated his 81st birthday by jumping out of an airplane while wearing a full suit.

He repeated this stunt on his 82nd and 83rd birthdays. By 1955, though, age had started to take its toll. In October, he came down with a urinary blockage, which he tried to cure by fasting. This did not work, and he resigned himself to going to a hospital. Where he died. Oh. Yep. That's it.

That's the end. That's all the Brunner family gets. What an anti-climactic ending for Brunner. Well, I know, right? Most people, it's generally, not everybody has the whole Hitler, you know? He's like, all right, I'll go to the hospital. All right, I'm dead. All right, bye.

Well, he was proved right in the end. Going to the hospital got him killed real quick. And that's the message of today's episode. Don't go to the hospital. That's not the message of today's episode, Robert. I think that is the message of today's hospital episode. Hospitals are bad. No.

Don't go to them. I am befuddled about everything I've learned here today. Yeah. And on that note, Caitlin, plugables? Okay. Yep. Yeah. Well, since I brought it up earlier, you can listen to a podcast that I did a little bit

of and then abandoned because I'm not nearly as ambitious as Brunner, but I did do a podcast called Sludge, an American healthcare story in which the first season is me detailing my experience with having gallstones, aka sludge balls, and all the chaos that ensued from that. And then I did a few other episodes about other people's stories, but then I got too busy and I abandoned that effort. But the podcast I haven't abandoned is the Bechtelcast, so check that out. It's a movie podcast because I am able to talk way, I'm better at talking about movies

than I am about healthcare stuff. And then you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Caitlin Durante. Yay. Yay. Well, that's everything we have to say about everything forever. This has been the last episode of Behind the Bastards. I am quitting in order to start my own magazine about how if you do enough crunches and stop your wife from eating, all of your babies will be supermen.

No. Sophie, you could have a cush gig as the executive publisher of my new magazine. Starve Your Baby Digest. Yeah. I'm not going to politely say. All right. No, you just turned out a million dollars, but okay. That's okay.

My morals are worth more. Well, mine aren't. I know that. Oh, have a good night, everybody. Bye. Bye-bye. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. He didn't inside his hearse with like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.