Slouch, p.1
Slouch, page 1
Slouch
Slouch
Posture Panic in Modern America
Beth Linker
Princeton University Press
Princeton & Oxford
Copyright © 2024 by Beth Linker
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Linker, Beth, author.
Title: Slouch : posture panic in modern America / Beth Linker.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023036266 (print) | LCCN 2023036267 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691235493 (hardback)
eISBN 9780691235509 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Posture—United States—History—20th century. | Posture—United States—History—21st century. | Posture—Social aspects—United States—History—20th century. | Posture—Social aspects—United States—History—21st century. | Human body—Social aspects—United States—History—20th century. | Human body—Social aspects—United States—History—21st century.
Classification: LCC RA781.5 .L56 2024 (print) | LCC RA781.5 (ebook) | DDC 613.7/80973—dc23/eng/20230929
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036266
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036267
Version 1.0
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Editorial: Eric Crahan, Whitney Rauenhorst
Jacket: Chris Ferrante
Production: Danielle Amatucci
Publicity: Alyssa Sanford (US); Carmen Jimenez (UK)
Copyeditor: David Heath
Jacket Credit: a-yun / Shutterstock
For Mark and Katie Rose
Contents
Introduction 1
1 The Making of a Posture Science 15
2 Posture Epidemic 43
3 Posture Commercialization 79
4 Posture Queens and Fitness Regimes 129
5 The Geopolitics of Posture 160
6 The Perils of Posture Perfection 195
7 The Posture Photo Scandal 226
Epilogue: iPosture 257
Acknowledgments 269
Illustration Credits 275
Notes 279
Bibliography 329
Index 363
Slouch
Introduction
READERS WHO opened the New York Times Magazine on the morning of January 15, 1995, learned something surprising and sensational. Thousands of nude photographs, including those of prominent public figures such as George H. W. Bush, Bob Woodward, Meryl Streep, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Diane Sawyer existed in the Smithsonian Archives, readily available for public viewing. Adding fuel to the fire, Ron Rosenbaum, the journalist who broke the story, claimed that the photos were part of a nefarious eugenics-inspired plot, research undertaken at the nation’s universities that evoked “the specter of the Third Reich.”1
The nude photos that Rosenbaum discovered were taken decades earlier, when the pictured individuals were young adults attending college. For much of the twentieth century, a remarkable number of U.S. institutions of higher education mandated that their students undergo an annual physical exam, including a posture evaluation. By the mid-twentieth century, most schools had adopted camera photography to assess human posture, requiring students to pose nude or seminude for the pictures. What had become a ritual on nearly every college campus in the United States would come to an end by the early 1970s.
Written twenty years after the closure of these programs, Rosenbaum’s piece sparked outrage among alumni across the nation, placing university administrators and lawyers on the defensive. Soon after the exposé, most of those named—and even unnamed—universities and colleges ordered their archivists to destroy institutional holdings related to the practice. Within a matter of months, decades of recorded history had either been shredded beyond recognition or gone up in smoke. It was a decisive and, to many onlookers, triumphant end to an ostensibly dark chapter of U.S. history. Since then, most journalists and scholars have remained silent on the matter, seemingly content to lay an unsavory chapter of history to rest.2
Slouch revisits these events to gain a fuller and more nuanced perspective on the history of the posture sciences, of which posture photography was but a part. To get at this history requires close scrutiny of the ways in which culture and politics come to inform certain scientific endeavors and, in turn, how widely accepted scientific facts influence the social fabric of everyday life. It requires adopting a critical stance when faced with seemingly self-evident claims, such as Rosenbaum’s portrayal of mid-century posture examinations as “bizarre,” a “pseudo-science” even.3 If Rosenbaum was right, then how do we explain the fact that to this day, approximately $1.25 billion is spent annually worldwide on posture-enhancing devices and fitness programs.4
It turns out that the scientific concern for human posture has a long and complicated history, attracting a wide array of professionals in medicine, education, and biology, as well as myriad health culturists and journalists. Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, Americans were told that they were living through a poor posture epidemic that, if left unchecked, would lead to widespread illness, disability, and even death.
The first recorded study to report a poor posture epidemic—dubbed the “Harvard Slouch” study—appeared in 1917.5 University physicians found that 80 percent of students exhibited significant bodily misalignments and worried that the future leaders of America would end up chronically ill or permanently disabled. In the decades to follow, the U.S. military, secondary schools, industrial workplaces, and public health agencies would conduct similar studies, each coming to the same conclusion: that slouching was rampant in America.
This was not the first time that scientists and other social commentators expressed an interest in human posture. Since the time of Plato, naturalists, theologians, and philosophers in the West have remarked on the uniqueness of human posture and bipedalism. To many early Christian thinkers, human uprightness was understood to be a sign of divinity, an attribute that indicated proximity to angels, God, and the heavens. Enlightenment thinkers who saw the world through more secularized eyes believed that human posture was essential for rationality, right living, and self-discipline. Yet while anatomical erectness was important to the very definition of humanness, few scientists devoted their entire careers to studying it.6
This would change by the turn of the twentieth century, when poor posture became medicalized, in large part due to the new interest in the evolutionary sciences. After the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), human posture took on a new relevance. Prior to Darwin, it was widely accepted that the human brain—and thus human intellect—drove human evolution. The nineteenth-century ubiquity of skull collecting reflects the pre-Darwinian assumption that human cranial growth dictated all other advancements and development, including the acquisition of upright standing and bipedalism. Darwin, by contrast, believed that humans descended directly from simians through a gradual process of natural selection, and argued that upright human posture preceded the evolution of all other distinctive human characteristics.7
Darwin’s posture-first theory of evolution created both intrigue and fear. If human intellect was no longer the prime mover that distinguished human and nonhuman animals, then it appeared that only a mere physical difference, located in the spine and feet, separated humankind from the apes. Human superiority seemed more fragile than ever. Though controversial, Darwin’s explanation held an appeal, especially to those trained in anatomy and medicine. It was a Dutch physician-turned-paleoanthropologist, after all, who would become one of the most well-known scientists to offer material proof of Darwin’s posture-first theory. In 1891, on the Indonesian island of Java, Eugène Dubois discovered human fossil remains that would come to be known to the scientific world as Pithecanthropus erectus, later redesignated Homo erectus.8
Applying the scientific study of nonliving fossil remains to current-day living populations of people—what would become the study of evolutionary medicine—early twentieth-century scientists began to argue that the human body was poorly adapted to the modern industrialized world, an evolutionary weakness that resulted in musculoskeletal pain, prolapses, and chronic disease.9 While theories abounded as to why the human race seemed to be struggling with this most basic of species attributes, many agreed that the demands of modern, civilized life were to blame. From the introduction of mandatory schooling and assembly-line production to increasing urbanization and motorized travel, a large number of Americans appeared to be more sedentary than ever, hunched over workstations, slumped in school desks, and dependent on trains and cars for transport rather than their own two feet. Sedentariness did not mean
Hence, unlike earlier eras when faulty posture was seen as low class, rude, or an indicator of a lack of civility, by the early twentieth century it became a quintessential marker of civility, albeit one that pointed to the negative consequences of too much civilization, or “overcivilization,” as contemporaries put it.10 Moving beyond manners and breeding, posture maintenance became a problem for anyone touched by modern industrialized life.
Such a dire outlook on the state of human health in the industrialized world led certain physicians and educators in the United States to create the American Posture League (APL) in 1914, an association that would grow in membership and public visibility well into the mid-twentieth century. The APL married the theoretical findings from evolutionary scientists to the practical tools of the then “new public health” movement. New public health proponents, medical historians have shown, privileged prevention over cure, and utilized top-down surveillance in order to track individuals who exhibited early-stage disease or disability. The shift in emphasis to preventive medicine made a lot of sense in the wake of the late nineteenth-century discovery that microscopic germs spread diseases such as tuberculosis and other contagious infections. In the absence of effective therapeutics such as antibiotics, many practitioners put their efforts into disease prevention since cures seemed so elusive. These new public health systems created such a level of public fear, historian Nancy Tomes argues, that “germ panic” became commonplace within U.S. culture.11
What is striking about the poor posture epidemic is that it gained legitimacy and public support without evidence of a contagion. The epidemic was thus defined more by lifestyle and individual behavior than germ transmission. While the germ theory brought about a reductionistic clarity concerning the spread of contagious disease, it did little to explain why certain individuals, when exposed to infectious microorganisms, would fall ill while others would not. The APL stood at the forefront of the post–germ theory medical effort that emphasized holistic health, insisting that postural health was necessary to the proper functioning of the musculoskeletal system and inner organs.12 The scientists of the APL maintained that slumping shoulders and a protruding abdomen could indicate a wide variety of health conditions, ranging in severity from a deadly case of tuberculosis to scoliosis and generalized effects of old age.13
Slouch thus tracks an epidemic pathology that was defined as a disability rather than an acute disease. Unlike the majority of epidemics found in recorded history, the detection of a widespread problem of poor posture did not come about because of mass deaths. No one died due to slouching. And yet, posture experts argued, people who did not adequately attend to their own physique risked an early demise, for poor physical form made it more likely for infectious disease to take root. In short, postural defects begot disease, which could then result in lifelong disability. Though not a communicable disease itself, the slouching epidemic was built on the notion of social contagion, on the idea that deleterious norms, practices, and beliefs about bodily comportment could be passed from person to person if not corrected through proper measures.
In this context, the physical exam became paramount. And unlike height and weight measurements, posture assessments proved to be one of the quickest and least expensive tools in the new public health arsenal. With a trained gaze acutely attuned to even the slightest anatomical misalignment, health experts readily diagnosed extant and potential disease states based on a simple and quick full-body view of the examinee. In many settings, the posture exam served as a litmus test to distinguish the able-bodied from the disabled.14
* * *
It is little wonder that one of the first reports of the poor posture epidemic would come from Harvard University. These students, after all, were inundated by the overcivilizing influences of modern society; they were white men with the social and economic capital to pursue book learning and an advanced education rather than engage in hard labor. Yet despite their many advantages, white middle- and upper-class Anglo-Saxon men at the time lived in fear of disabling weakness. The perceived threats were many. Women were making concrete political gains, earning the right to vote with the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Immigrants and Black American men donned military uniforms during the Great War, leading to a victory for the Allied forces. Talk of white race suicide filled the lecture halls and the pages of the daily newspapers. The popularity of social Darwinism and eugenics fueled the white masculinity crisis of the early twentieth century.15
But white men of privilege were not alone in their fear of physical weakness and disability. Anxious to dispel the notion that theirs was the “weaker” sex, women physicians and physical educators encouraged college co-eds and school girls to take up physical fitness classes, where posture work and measurement became a mainstay. African American doctors fretted about widespread posture faults among poorer Black Americans, incorporating posture health examination and education into the National Negro Health Week program. Similarly, Jewish American physicians who assessed the posture of Eastern European garment workers insisted that industrialists provide laborers with “posture-right” chairs and workspaces.
The posture crusade, in other words, cut across racial and ethnic categorizations. Men and women of all races lived with the possible fate of acquiring a defective posture. In this respect, all of these groups shared a common goal of separating themselves from the ultimate other—namely, the disabled.16 Disability historian Michael Rembis notes that while scholars have written at length about the racism of the American eugenics movement, they have paid far less attention to how the movement was also “infused with virulent ableism.” “Eugenics at heart,” he concludes, “was a politics of normalization … and optimization.”17
Normalization was central to the American anti-slouching campaign. The demand to stand straight carried immense moral and medical weight. Straightness signified health and youthful vitality, but also upright character and sexual chasteness. It is no accident that by the early 1940s in the United States, “straight” connoted heterosexuality, while “bent” signified homosexuality. Linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson contend that at the deepest levels of conception and understanding, the notion that “up is good” and “down is bad” shapes our language and the way humans make meaning out of the wider world around us. In other words, the inherent positive valuation of “up” is rooted in human bipedalism.18
Determining the degree to which the anti-slouching campaign was eugenic or neo-eugenic requires careful study. Posture scientists featured in this book did not speak in terms of Mendelian genetics, heredity, or controlling reproduction—the kind of “hard” eugenics associated with the American Eugenics Society and Nazi Germany, where forced sterilization and genocide, respectively, were used as methods of ridding society of “undesirable” traits and human beings. Rather, the posture crusade appealed more to a theory of “euthenics,” defined as “right living,” which is sometimes characterized as “soft” eugenics. Soft eugenics is often portrayed as unique to Latin American history, but the U.S. poor posture epidemic suggests otherwise.19
As Slouch demonstrates, the manufacture of posture panic served as a powerful motivator and a ready-made disciplinary tool, deployed for multiple political ends in the United States throughout the twentieth century. Arising at a time when the nation was attempting to become a global military and industrial power, posture surveillance was taken up by the U.S. Public Health Service, the military, and educational institutions as a way not only to colonize other peoples, but also to regulate “deviant” bodies and “abnormal” behavior internal to the nation.20 Posture crusaders promised that their work would control disease and political unrest, maintain industrial supremacy, and promote physical, aesthetic, and behavioral homogeneity. In this respect, the anti-slouching campaign reconceptualized centuries-old hygiene concerns regarding dress and exercise, making human posture an indicator of national strength, population health, and fitness.21
