Getting Physical for Fun and Profit : WEAKNESS IS A CRIME: The Life of Bernarr Macfadden, <i> By Robert Ernst (Syracuse University Press: $34.95, cloth; $17.95, paper; 376 pp., illustrated)</i>

America always has been kind to cranks. It embraces their philosophies whether sound or fruity, it reads their books, watches them on television, and whenever possible makes them rich. And then, quite often, it forgets them when they’re dust.

Bernarr Macfadden--”Father of the Physical Culture Movement,” founder of a vast journalism empire and a crank of the very first order--deserves to be recollected. For half a century, he reviled the “Medical Trust,” white bread, tight clothing, shoes, censorship, poor muscle tone--and made it pay. At the peak, his fortune topped $30 million; during the 1920s and ‘30s, one of every four Americans was a reader of a Macfadden publication.

Robert Ernst, a professor emeritus of Adelphi University, has tried to resuscitate the Macfadden story, from its inauspicious beginnings to its soap-opera finish. Born in Missouri in 1868, Macfadden was the son of a no-account farmer who soon died of drink, and a weak-willed mother who shunted him among family relations after his father’s death.

He scarcely learned to read or write (no hindrance, please note, to his later success in journalism) and his native sickliness compounded his troubles; one fretful relative, anticipating young Bernarr’s early death, fobbed him off on a neighboring farmer as an indentured servant in hopes of avoiding his funeral bill.

Farm labor strengthened him, but the boy attributed his growing vigor to a “powerful magnetic force coming out of the earth” which entered his body through the soles of his feet. (Hence his life-long antipathy to shoes.) He struck out on his own at 14, carting a recently acquired set of dumbbells from town to town and job to job. As a pro wrestler in St. Louis, he gained enough fame to settle down, temporarily, and open a practice as a “kinestherapist, teacher of physical culture.”

Etymologically, of course, the word kinestherapist is a brazen bastard. In fact, none of Macfadden’s coinages (psychultopathy, healthatorium ) made sense. But to the untutored ears of Midwesterners in the 1890s, they conveyed the awesome and inscrutable hum of science. It was a propitious time for a showman exploiting “physical culture.” Industrial America had yanked boys off the farm and given them sit-down jobs; for the first time in history, average men and women were sufficiently prosperous to indulge the mindless worries of the upper classes: “Is this plate of boiled tripe really good for me?” and “Now tell the truth--am I putting on weight?”

The national interest in health might have been prudence, or it might have been a budding narcissism. Whichever, Macfadden addressed it with the elan of a sideshow barker. His migrations finally ended in New York, where his entrepreneurial energy found full expression. With minimal capital, he opened physical-culture resorts and studios, launched a chain of restaurants and dabbled in invention: His first device, a pully for weightlifting, was popular; another, a glass vacuum tube fitted for the male organ to extend it “to its greatest possible size,” was not. (Times change.)

His genius lay in publishing. He wrote an endless series of monographs on health: “Macfadden’s New Hair Culture,” for example, offered his forthright cure for baldness (grab your remaining hair and pull). The first of his magazines, Physical Culture, was a stupendous success, boasting 600,000 readers by its third anniversary.

His ideas (and their popularity) brought him first the wrath and then the ridicule of the medical establishment. Macfadden possessed almost no accurate information about physiology or nutrition, although he occasionally blundered into the truth--for instance, his preference for fresh fruit and vegetables. There was, he assured his physical culturists, but a single disease, “impurity of the blood,” and a single cure, fasting, to be followed by rigorous exercise and a strictly controlled diet (usually involving copious quantities of milk--Macfadden drank almost a gallon a day).

From this basic theory, much followed. Conventional medical treatment was in all cases either harmful or unnecessary. Macfadden warned against not only tobacco and alcohol but also ice water and pickles; bleached flour was the “staff of death.” Eyeglasses were a sign of personal weakness. The natural man should walk on all fours, Macfadden decided, preferably on his knuckles. (He himself often conducted business standing on his head.) He insisted that the sex of a child could be determined with precise coital timing. Et cetera.

Ernst makes the important point that Macfadden wasn’t a common mountebank: He believed what he advocated and guided his own life accordingly. His mission, in his phrase, was nothing less than the “physical emancipation of the human race.” From this distance, the sincerity is endearing, but it’s difficult to measure what harm his crankiness did. Ernst shows that the death of two of Macfadden’s children might have been prevented had their father permitted adequate medical care.

Macfadden’s unerring sense of public appetites, particularly among the newly literate class, inspired True Story, a magazine assembled almost entirely from readers’ submissions. Their relentlessly uplifting first-person accounts told of adversity overcome, real love found, kindness repaid. The magazine became the cornerstone of Macfadden’s publishing empire, which metastasized into True Detective, True Romances, Dream World and a dozen other magazines and newspapers.

Like all publishing moguls before and since, Macfadden used his sheets for self-aggrandizement. He was a shameless showboat, furthering his vague political ambitions with his notorious New York Graphic, a daily tabloid similar to our Weekly World News, although less tasteful. Through his friend, Eleanor Roosevelt, he sought appointment as secretary of a new “Department of Physical Culture” in F.D.R.’s cabinet. When he failed--his highest sinecure was with a Fishery Advisory Commission--he editorialized furiously against the New Deal.

Through it all, he sired an indeterminate number of children, legitimate and not, and steam-rolled through four marriages, the last to a physical culture enthusiast half his age. Fed up with his chronic philandering, she eventually left him; he was in his mid-80s at the time. He died a few years and several business reversals later, penniless and all but forgotten by his public, in 1955.

From this remarkable, thoroughly American tale Ernst has fashioned a not-so-remarkable book--informative but not lively, thorough but lacking in color and style. At some points, the narrative gets quite garbled: From Ernst’s accounting, it appears that one of Macfadden’s children gestated for 16 months--an amazing feat, even for the spawn of a health nut.

But for all the plodding, Ernst conveys the largeness of the man. Macfadden’s influence endures, sadly unacknowledged, wherever wheat germ and bean curd are sold in bulk. The type of reportage he pioneered still torments countless journalism professors--for which he deserves our undying gratitude.

Only his dream of a Cabinet-level Department of Physical Culture went unfulfilled. That’s fine. Arnold Schwarzenegger has too much power as it is.