I actually have to somewhat echo Stephanie's concerns about this Substack post. Namely, the origin story of Eugen Sandow's name as an intended connection to the word "eugenics" seems speculative; and even the linking of Sandow to modern yoga's origins seems like a big stretch. It would be really, really nice to have specific citations to non speculative sources for this.
Honestly, given the time when he lived it would even be weird if he wasn't eventually held up (by himself or by others) as some aspirational model for eugenics; but what I am questioning is this very concrete link made here of his stage name as being prompted by an intended connection to the word eugenics. I could even see the link made ex post facto; but that wouldn't be the same as «He created "Eugen" as shorthand for eugenics» (if anything, it *is* a Germanic male name and it is not so weird that it would be taken up by a Germanic man). It's a bad sign when searching Google for «"Eugen Sandow" "eugenics"» gives top links that are connected to this very Substack post.
To begin with, it looks like the very term was only coined by Sir Francis Galton in 1883; whereas timelines I have seen suggest the Eugen Sandow stage name for Friedrich Wilhelm Müller appears to have been created only 4 years later in 1887 (see https://starkcenter.org/igh/igh-v2/igh-v2-n4/igh0204f.pdf ). Would the term even have been sufficiently popularized in 1887 for Sandow to think it clever to try to associate himself with it?
Maybe my Google-fu is simply failing me, but I have found very few references to this alleged connection and the references I have found seem speculative and poorly cited. For instance, I have found it in an online explanation of a plaque found in London (at https://www.londonremembers.com/subjects/eugen-sandow —though the earlier versions of this did not have it) but it's speculative and has no reference to justify the speculation. For instance, I have found the claim with *Eugen Sandow: Performing New Masculinities* (at https://eidos.uw.edu.pl/files/pdf/eidos/2021-04/eidos_18_wood.pdf ) and it in turn cites a biography (giving the wrong page number for the relevant passages but poorly accessible at https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sandow_the_Magnificent/79QappH54EYC?gbpv=1 ) which does not seem to have anything justifying the claim.
I can also see that the author, Derek Beres, has another piece in Rolling Stone (see https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/ball-testicle-tanning-far-right-tucker-carlson-1339809/ ) where he makes the connection and seems to be trying to reference Sandow's own work, *Strength and how to Obtain It*, seemingly to support how Sandow "believed that his impressive muscularity reflected his strong, white roots". Not only does this book seem to not indicate a reason for Sandow's choice of "Eugen" as a part of his stage name, it also doesn't seem to have any references at all to "white roots" (or "white race" or "breeding" or anything like that). The closest it comes to this, is basically the opposite of attribution to strong roots and even seems to be almost the opposite of eugenics as we normally think of it (though this interpretation is also is considered "environmental eugenics") where he writes:
«But that is not the aim of physical culture. Its ultimate object is to raise the average standard of the race as a whole. That is, no doubt, a stupendous task, and one which it may take many lifetimes to accomplish. But everything must have its beginning, and unless we set about improving the physique of the present generation, we cannot hope to benefit those who come after us. Healthier and more perfect men and women will beget children with better constitutions and more free from hereditary taint. They in their turn, if the principles and the duty of physical culture are early instilled into them, will grow up more perfect types of men and women than were their mothers and fathers. So the happy progression will go on, until, who knows, if in the days to come there will not be a race of mortals walking this earth of ours even surpassing those who, according to the old myth, were the offspring of the union of the sons of the gods with the daughters of men! That is, perhaps, an almost impossible ideal, but it is well to set one’s ideals high. Surely what has been done for the horse and the dog cannot be impossible of accomplishment in the case of man. At all events, it is worth trying.”»
So this refers to an improvement of the "race" by effort and training which is, as indicated by the last sentence, heritable as per a Lamarkian model of inheritance (and it isn't even clear that with "race" here he's not referring to humanity rather than to a specific, elite subgroup). Indeed, where he introduces the story of his life on the first chapter of the second part of this book on page 86, he claims to have been born and to have been, as a child, weak and "exceedingly delicate" and to have developed his strength via the application of training:
«It is not necessary, as some may think, to be born strong in order to become strong. Unlike the poet, who, we are told, has to be born a poet, the strong man can make himself. As a child, I was myself exceedingly delicate. More than once, indeed, my life was despaired of. Until I was in my tenth year I scarcely knew what strength was. Then it happened that I saw it in bronze and stone. My father took me with him to Italy, and in the art galleries of Rome and Florence I was struck with admiration for the finely developed forms of the sculptured figures of the athletes of old. I remember asking my father if people were as well developed in these modern times. He pointed out that they were not, and explained that these were the figures of men who lived when might was right, when men’s own arms were their weapons, and often their lives depended upon their physical strength. Moreover, they knew nothing of the modern luxuries of civilization, and, besides their training and exercise, their muscles, in the ordinary course of daily life, were always being brought prominently into play.
The memory of these muscular figures were ever present, and when we returned home to Konigsberg I wanted to become strong like them. But though I used to try my strength and attend the gymnasium, nothing came of my desire for some years.
So until I was eighteen I remained delicate. At that age I began to study anatomy. It was thus I ascertained the best means of developing the body, and invented the system of giving each individual muscle a movement, and of so arranging the form of the exercises that when some muscles are brought into play others are relaxed and left without strain.
About fifteen minutes every day was the average time devoted to special exercise at this period. It may be useful to remark here that no particular form of diet was adopted. I ate and drank in the ordinary way. It may be said at once that I have no belief in special diet; I have always eaten and drunk that which my fancy dictated, but I have always taken care to avoid anything in the nature of excess. There is no better guide to good living than moderation. That is a fact I am always anxious to impress upon my pupils. Let them be moderate in all things, and they need fear no interruption in gaining strength by my system of training.»
As to the notion of modern yoga owing a debt specifically to Eugen Sandow, this too seems suspect. The development of Sandow's strength & physique has invariably been attributed, by Sandow himself, to more or less the sort of strength training exercises that we would imagine (specifically, resistance training with dumbbells). This has to make one wonder how Sandow could allegedly be so instrumental to the development of modern yoga as I am unaware of external weight based exercises playing any significant role in modern yoga? All I have been able to find is a book by Joseph S. Alter, *The Body Between Science and Philosophy: Yoga in Modern India* where we find the following passage:
«There can be no doubt that Vivekananda and Aurobindo-and to a lesser degree, and in a much more oblique sense, Mahatma Gandhi defined the broader intellectual context within which there was a renaissance in the practice of Yoga āsanas, kriyās, and prānāyāma. But the history of this renaissance seems to "slip past" these men, since there is a much more direct link between innovative Indian experimentation in the 1920s and transnational ideas about health, strength, and physical fitness all over the world in the mid- to late nineteenth century and early in the twentieth. At the risk of sounding heretical, I think Eugene Sandow, the father of modern body building, has had a greater influence on the form and practice of modern Yoga-and most certainly modern Hatha Yoga than either Aurobindo or Vivekananda. In fact, given this history it would be possible to undertake a revisionist study of Vivekanand's "muscular Hinduism." Perhaps even Aurobindo's seemingly abstract philosophy of evolved consciousness needs to be rethought on the basis of what he an.d "The Mother" had to say about the importance of physical fitness and physical education: "Physical culture is the best way of developing the consciousness of the body, and the more the body is conscious, the more it is capable of receiving the divine forces that are at work to transform it and give birth to the new race" (1979: 205). In other words, with regard to the present state of knowledge —which tends to be bound by the narrow framework of institutionalized religion and nationalistic philosophy —Vivekananda and Aurobindo could be considered marginal to the historical development of modern Yoga in India. However iconoclastic it may seem, the history of Yoga slips past spirituality and intellectual philosophy. It is unambiguously linked to rules that apply to nature and the body.»
I think this is not a bad case to make but I do not think that this passage is meant to be taken literally. This is meant to point out that the physical culture movement which was present around the time when modern yoga arose created the conditions for modern yoga to thrive and was likely essential to its early growth. It is pretty clear to me that when Alter writes «At the risk of sounding heretical, I think Eugene Sandow, the father of modern body building, has had a greater influence on the form and practice of modern Yoga-and most certainly modern Hatha Yoga than either Aurobindo or Vivekananda» he is being metaphorical rather than trying to establish any specific link. Alter here is using Eugen Sandow as a stand in for the entire physical culture movement because he happened to be the most visible person embodying it. In fact, I do not think that any other interpretation is reasonable when considering the entire passage and the cultural context of the time.
Unfortunately, you've failed to cite the works of Daley, Lovett, and Budd, along with a few dozen other works we've cited in our chapter on Sandow and India, all of which are in the footnotes in our book, and of which is too cumbersome for a simple Q&A on a mainstream publication.
Let's make it clear that I am no scholar of this (this is far, far out of my wheelhouse). However, these things I am stuck on I am stuck on because I want to believe them and I want to believe them because they are surprising to me (so I don't want to be accepting them merely because they might be reinforcing my priors). I still feel like it would be good if you were more specific as I have no idea what any of these sources are and can only guess for some.
For instance, I'm assuming the Daley reference is in reference to the reason for Friedrich Wilhelm Müller picking the name "Eugen"? I did find a book titled _Leisure and Pleasure: Reshaping and Revealing the New Zealand Body 1900–1960_. If that is what is meant by that reference, Caroline Daley, as a stated opinion, actually contradicts the claim by calling it "questionable" but does so by citing a source which supports the claim. Namely, she writes:
«Whether Sandow actually went to Italy as a young man, or studied anatomy, is debatable. Also questionable is the claim that he took the stage name Eugen (he was born Friedrich Wilhelm Müller) in ‘admiration for Francis Galton’s new science of Eugenics’. Many stories about Sandow –especially ones he told about himself– may be more grounded in fiction than fact, but beyond dispute is the impact he had on early twentieth-century leisure.»
The source she cites is actually a footnote in _The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire_ by Michael Anton Budd (is this the Budd source that you are referring to?). The footnote is actually unattributed and is as follows:
«Atilla (1844-1924), also German, was born Louis Durlacher. The young Müller's Lutheran parents had held early hopes for his pursuit of a career in the church, but his presumed 'preaching' abilities took him elsewhere. He began a medical course in Belgium and spent what little energy he chose to devote to his studies solely on anatomy. Once in Brussels, he discovered the gymnastic school of 'Professor' Oscard Atilla and began his first money-making appearances as a strength performer in circuses and music halls in nearby Antwerp and Leyden in 1887. At the same time, they hired themselves out to train students. It was then that Muller adopted the surname of Sandow (an anglicization of his mother's maiden name of Sandov), and the first name Eugen, which he later explained was chosen as a symbol of his admiration for Francis Galton's new science of Eugenics.»
So this is ultimately the source for Daley (which Daley finds "questionable") and we don't know where it came from. Did it come directly from Sandow? Was it something that someone else recorded Sandow saying? This is important because I suspect it may have been one of those stories that showmen tell about themselves and likely something that was a retroactive explanation (what people nowadays call retconning).
Why do I believe this? For a couple of reasons. Strongmen would have been a dime a dozen those days and this is how his career started (along with challenges or contests with other strongmen). There would have been nothing that notable about Sandow being another strongman. What made Sandow unique was in the development and display of his physique as the main part of the spectacle but that would come later. It would be this which would elicit the comparisons to idealized Greek and Roman statues and to Renaissance statues with the same classical themes. It would be this which would set him up in a role as an idealized man harking back to those times. It would be this, when eugenics came more into vogue, that would make his body into an actualization of eugenics (if perhaps the environmental version). If I am right, then it would not make sense for him to have chosen his name on account of this since all of this would be years into his future.
The other reason is that I am just not sure that eugenics would have been a big thing that early on. If we use Google Engram to get a rough idea about this, it looks very much like a trend for the word coming into wider use (as recorded in digitized works) doesn't even start until 1903 becoming bigger to peak in the ngrams chart around 1913. I just have a hard time buying that Sandow was the hipster (liked the cool band before it was cool) of eugenics.
It is also interesting how Daley brings up the nature vs. nurture divide and to note how Sandow fell on the side of what others call "environmental eugenics" which is the nurture side of the divide:
«‘Racial fitness’ and ‘race suicide’ were topical issues. It was a eugenic era, but what contemporaries like Sandow meant by eugenics should not be confused with the Nazis’ understanding of the concept in the 1930s and 1940s. Eugenics has come to be widely understood as a belief in the power of nature over nurture. In the early twentieth century, though, it was not necessarily a language of genetic determinism. Sandow was a eugenicist, but he did not believe that heredity defined the man. Like many of his contemporaries, Sandow was an environmental eugenicist. He insisted that the racial stock had to be improved, but he believed in the power of nurture to overcome any natural defects. The Sandow System was his contribution to the nurturing of modern man.»
Basically, this is the same nonsense that every generation says about "kids these days", that they are soft and don't know how good they've got it, etc. (much unlike previous generations —specially if you go back to the ancient Greeks and Romans which you can clearly see if you just look at their statues!). The difference here is that the physical culture movement provides a solution (newer generations are also always alleged to be lacking in work ethic, dumber & more morally deprived, of course —but I digress).
As to Lovett, I can't even guess what the work might be (heck I don't even have a first name).
«Modern yoga is based on white supremacy and eugenics?»
I don't think that they are saying that at all. I do think, however, that it is an attempt at poisoning the well and that it is very much a cheap shot and not relevant to the main points and observations of the interview (which is why it is poisoning the well).
I also think that it appears to be poorly researched and that the premises may very well be false (he has certainly not attempted to back it up with credible sources that back his interpretation). That is, we can't even say that even of we don't like it it happens to be true (it seems none of it may be true in any meaningful way). See my two comments elsewhere where I expand on this.
> Why Are So Many Popular Wellness Influencers Red-Pilled?
Because a healthy body and healthy mind leads to healthy politics.
I actually have to somewhat echo Stephanie's concerns about this Substack post. Namely, the origin story of Eugen Sandow's name as an intended connection to the word "eugenics" seems speculative; and even the linking of Sandow to modern yoga's origins seems like a big stretch. It would be really, really nice to have specific citations to non speculative sources for this.
Honestly, given the time when he lived it would even be weird if he wasn't eventually held up (by himself or by others) as some aspirational model for eugenics; but what I am questioning is this very concrete link made here of his stage name as being prompted by an intended connection to the word eugenics. I could even see the link made ex post facto; but that wouldn't be the same as «He created "Eugen" as shorthand for eugenics» (if anything, it *is* a Germanic male name and it is not so weird that it would be taken up by a Germanic man). It's a bad sign when searching Google for «"Eugen Sandow" "eugenics"» gives top links that are connected to this very Substack post.
To begin with, it looks like the very term was only coined by Sir Francis Galton in 1883; whereas timelines I have seen suggest the Eugen Sandow stage name for Friedrich Wilhelm Müller appears to have been created only 4 years later in 1887 (see https://starkcenter.org/igh/igh-v2/igh-v2-n4/igh0204f.pdf ). Would the term even have been sufficiently popularized in 1887 for Sandow to think it clever to try to associate himself with it?
Maybe my Google-fu is simply failing me, but I have found very few references to this alleged connection and the references I have found seem speculative and poorly cited. For instance, I have found it in an online explanation of a plaque found in London (at https://www.londonremembers.com/subjects/eugen-sandow —though the earlier versions of this did not have it) but it's speculative and has no reference to justify the speculation. For instance, I have found the claim with *Eugen Sandow: Performing New Masculinities* (at https://eidos.uw.edu.pl/files/pdf/eidos/2021-04/eidos_18_wood.pdf ) and it in turn cites a biography (giving the wrong page number for the relevant passages but poorly accessible at https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sandow_the_Magnificent/79QappH54EYC?gbpv=1 ) which does not seem to have anything justifying the claim.
I can also see that the author, Derek Beres, has another piece in Rolling Stone (see https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/ball-testicle-tanning-far-right-tucker-carlson-1339809/ ) where he makes the connection and seems to be trying to reference Sandow's own work, *Strength and how to Obtain It*, seemingly to support how Sandow "believed that his impressive muscularity reflected his strong, white roots". Not only does this book seem to not indicate a reason for Sandow's choice of "Eugen" as a part of his stage name, it also doesn't seem to have any references at all to "white roots" (or "white race" or "breeding" or anything like that). The closest it comes to this, is basically the opposite of attribution to strong roots and even seems to be almost the opposite of eugenics as we normally think of it (though this interpretation is also is considered "environmental eugenics") where he writes:
«But that is not the aim of physical culture. Its ultimate object is to raise the average standard of the race as a whole. That is, no doubt, a stupendous task, and one which it may take many lifetimes to accomplish. But everything must have its beginning, and unless we set about improving the physique of the present generation, we cannot hope to benefit those who come after us. Healthier and more perfect men and women will beget children with better constitutions and more free from hereditary taint. They in their turn, if the principles and the duty of physical culture are early instilled into them, will grow up more perfect types of men and women than were their mothers and fathers. So the happy progression will go on, until, who knows, if in the days to come there will not be a race of mortals walking this earth of ours even surpassing those who, according to the old myth, were the offspring of the union of the sons of the gods with the daughters of men! That is, perhaps, an almost impossible ideal, but it is well to set one’s ideals high. Surely what has been done for the horse and the dog cannot be impossible of accomplishment in the case of man. At all events, it is worth trying.”»
So this refers to an improvement of the "race" by effort and training which is, as indicated by the last sentence, heritable as per a Lamarkian model of inheritance (and it isn't even clear that with "race" here he's not referring to humanity rather than to a specific, elite subgroup). Indeed, where he introduces the story of his life on the first chapter of the second part of this book on page 86, he claims to have been born and to have been, as a child, weak and "exceedingly delicate" and to have developed his strength via the application of training:
«It is not necessary, as some may think, to be born strong in order to become strong. Unlike the poet, who, we are told, has to be born a poet, the strong man can make himself. As a child, I was myself exceedingly delicate. More than once, indeed, my life was despaired of. Until I was in my tenth year I scarcely knew what strength was. Then it happened that I saw it in bronze and stone. My father took me with him to Italy, and in the art galleries of Rome and Florence I was struck with admiration for the finely developed forms of the sculptured figures of the athletes of old. I remember asking my father if people were as well developed in these modern times. He pointed out that they were not, and explained that these were the figures of men who lived when might was right, when men’s own arms were their weapons, and often their lives depended upon their physical strength. Moreover, they knew nothing of the modern luxuries of civilization, and, besides their training and exercise, their muscles, in the ordinary course of daily life, were always being brought prominently into play.
The memory of these muscular figures were ever present, and when we returned home to Konigsberg I wanted to become strong like them. But though I used to try my strength and attend the gymnasium, nothing came of my desire for some years.
So until I was eighteen I remained delicate. At that age I began to study anatomy. It was thus I ascertained the best means of developing the body, and invented the system of giving each individual muscle a movement, and of so arranging the form of the exercises that when some muscles are brought into play others are relaxed and left without strain.
About fifteen minutes every day was the average time devoted to special exercise at this period. It may be useful to remark here that no particular form of diet was adopted. I ate and drank in the ordinary way. It may be said at once that I have no belief in special diet; I have always eaten and drunk that which my fancy dictated, but I have always taken care to avoid anything in the nature of excess. There is no better guide to good living than moderation. That is a fact I am always anxious to impress upon my pupils. Let them be moderate in all things, and they need fear no interruption in gaining strength by my system of training.»
As to the notion of modern yoga owing a debt specifically to Eugen Sandow, this too seems suspect. The development of Sandow's strength & physique has invariably been attributed, by Sandow himself, to more or less the sort of strength training exercises that we would imagine (specifically, resistance training with dumbbells). This has to make one wonder how Sandow could allegedly be so instrumental to the development of modern yoga as I am unaware of external weight based exercises playing any significant role in modern yoga? All I have been able to find is a book by Joseph S. Alter, *The Body Between Science and Philosophy: Yoga in Modern India* where we find the following passage:
«There can be no doubt that Vivekananda and Aurobindo-and to a lesser degree, and in a much more oblique sense, Mahatma Gandhi defined the broader intellectual context within which there was a renaissance in the practice of Yoga āsanas, kriyās, and prānāyāma. But the history of this renaissance seems to "slip past" these men, since there is a much more direct link between innovative Indian experimentation in the 1920s and transnational ideas about health, strength, and physical fitness all over the world in the mid- to late nineteenth century and early in the twentieth. At the risk of sounding heretical, I think Eugene Sandow, the father of modern body building, has had a greater influence on the form and practice of modern Yoga-and most certainly modern Hatha Yoga than either Aurobindo or Vivekananda. In fact, given this history it would be possible to undertake a revisionist study of Vivekanand's "muscular Hinduism." Perhaps even Aurobindo's seemingly abstract philosophy of evolved consciousness needs to be rethought on the basis of what he an.d "The Mother" had to say about the importance of physical fitness and physical education: "Physical culture is the best way of developing the consciousness of the body, and the more the body is conscious, the more it is capable of receiving the divine forces that are at work to transform it and give birth to the new race" (1979: 205). In other words, with regard to the present state of knowledge —which tends to be bound by the narrow framework of institutionalized religion and nationalistic philosophy —Vivekananda and Aurobindo could be considered marginal to the historical development of modern Yoga in India. However iconoclastic it may seem, the history of Yoga slips past spirituality and intellectual philosophy. It is unambiguously linked to rules that apply to nature and the body.»
I think this is not a bad case to make but I do not think that this passage is meant to be taken literally. This is meant to point out that the physical culture movement which was present around the time when modern yoga arose created the conditions for modern yoga to thrive and was likely essential to its early growth. It is pretty clear to me that when Alter writes «At the risk of sounding heretical, I think Eugene Sandow, the father of modern body building, has had a greater influence on the form and practice of modern Yoga-and most certainly modern Hatha Yoga than either Aurobindo or Vivekananda» he is being metaphorical rather than trying to establish any specific link. Alter here is using Eugen Sandow as a stand in for the entire physical culture movement because he happened to be the most visible person embodying it. In fact, I do not think that any other interpretation is reasonable when considering the entire passage and the cultural context of the time.
Unfortunately, you've failed to cite the works of Daley, Lovett, and Budd, along with a few dozen other works we've cited in our chapter on Sandow and India, all of which are in the footnotes in our book, and of which is too cumbersome for a simple Q&A on a mainstream publication.
Let's make it clear that I am no scholar of this (this is far, far out of my wheelhouse). However, these things I am stuck on I am stuck on because I want to believe them and I want to believe them because they are surprising to me (so I don't want to be accepting them merely because they might be reinforcing my priors). I still feel like it would be good if you were more specific as I have no idea what any of these sources are and can only guess for some.
For instance, I'm assuming the Daley reference is in reference to the reason for Friedrich Wilhelm Müller picking the name "Eugen"? I did find a book titled _Leisure and Pleasure: Reshaping and Revealing the New Zealand Body 1900–1960_. If that is what is meant by that reference, Caroline Daley, as a stated opinion, actually contradicts the claim by calling it "questionable" but does so by citing a source which supports the claim. Namely, she writes:
«Whether Sandow actually went to Italy as a young man, or studied anatomy, is debatable. Also questionable is the claim that he took the stage name Eugen (he was born Friedrich Wilhelm Müller) in ‘admiration for Francis Galton’s new science of Eugenics’. Many stories about Sandow –especially ones he told about himself– may be more grounded in fiction than fact, but beyond dispute is the impact he had on early twentieth-century leisure.»
The source she cites is actually a footnote in _The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire_ by Michael Anton Budd (is this the Budd source that you are referring to?). The footnote is actually unattributed and is as follows:
«Atilla (1844-1924), also German, was born Louis Durlacher. The young Müller's Lutheran parents had held early hopes for his pursuit of a career in the church, but his presumed 'preaching' abilities took him elsewhere. He began a medical course in Belgium and spent what little energy he chose to devote to his studies solely on anatomy. Once in Brussels, he discovered the gymnastic school of 'Professor' Oscard Atilla and began his first money-making appearances as a strength performer in circuses and music halls in nearby Antwerp and Leyden in 1887. At the same time, they hired themselves out to train students. It was then that Muller adopted the surname of Sandow (an anglicization of his mother's maiden name of Sandov), and the first name Eugen, which he later explained was chosen as a symbol of his admiration for Francis Galton's new science of Eugenics.»
So this is ultimately the source for Daley (which Daley finds "questionable") and we don't know where it came from. Did it come directly from Sandow? Was it something that someone else recorded Sandow saying? This is important because I suspect it may have been one of those stories that showmen tell about themselves and likely something that was a retroactive explanation (what people nowadays call retconning).
Why do I believe this? For a couple of reasons. Strongmen would have been a dime a dozen those days and this is how his career started (along with challenges or contests with other strongmen). There would have been nothing that notable about Sandow being another strongman. What made Sandow unique was in the development and display of his physique as the main part of the spectacle but that would come later. It would be this which would elicit the comparisons to idealized Greek and Roman statues and to Renaissance statues with the same classical themes. It would be this which would set him up in a role as an idealized man harking back to those times. It would be this, when eugenics came more into vogue, that would make his body into an actualization of eugenics (if perhaps the environmental version). If I am right, then it would not make sense for him to have chosen his name on account of this since all of this would be years into his future.
The other reason is that I am just not sure that eugenics would have been a big thing that early on. If we use Google Engram to get a rough idea about this, it looks very much like a trend for the word coming into wider use (as recorded in digitized works) doesn't even start until 1903 becoming bigger to peak in the ngrams chart around 1913. I just have a hard time buying that Sandow was the hipster (liked the cool band before it was cool) of eugenics.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=eugenics&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=0
It is also interesting how Daley brings up the nature vs. nurture divide and to note how Sandow fell on the side of what others call "environmental eugenics" which is the nurture side of the divide:
«‘Racial fitness’ and ‘race suicide’ were topical issues. It was a eugenic era, but what contemporaries like Sandow meant by eugenics should not be confused with the Nazis’ understanding of the concept in the 1930s and 1940s. Eugenics has come to be widely understood as a belief in the power of nature over nurture. In the early twentieth century, though, it was not necessarily a language of genetic determinism. Sandow was a eugenicist, but he did not believe that heredity defined the man. Like many of his contemporaries, Sandow was an environmental eugenicist. He insisted that the racial stock had to be improved, but he believed in the power of nurture to overcome any natural defects. The Sandow System was his contribution to the nurturing of modern man.»
Basically, this is the same nonsense that every generation says about "kids these days", that they are soft and don't know how good they've got it, etc. (much unlike previous generations —specially if you go back to the ancient Greeks and Romans which you can clearly see if you just look at their statues!). The difference here is that the physical culture movement provides a solution (newer generations are also always alleged to be lacking in work ethic, dumber & more morally deprived, of course —but I digress).
As to Lovett, I can't even guess what the work might be (heck I don't even have a first name).
Congrats! I can't wait to read the book!
See, that comment (now invisible) was just dumb and demonstrating Beres' points.
Stephanie Brail writes:
«Modern yoga is based on white supremacy and eugenics?»
I don't think that they are saying that at all. I do think, however, that it is an attempt at poisoning the well and that it is very much a cheap shot and not relevant to the main points and observations of the interview (which is why it is poisoning the well).
I also think that it appears to be poorly researched and that the premises may very well be false (he has certainly not attempted to back it up with credible sources that back his interpretation). That is, we can't even say that even of we don't like it it happens to be true (it seems none of it may be true in any meaningful way). See my two comments elsewhere where I expand on this.