Earle Liederman

c. 1886 – 1970 · Brooklyn, New York

Earle E. Liederman was a former vaudeville strongman who became, in the mid-1920s, the best-known seller of mail-order muscle-building courses in the United States — the most prominent figure in the business before Charles Atlas came to dominate it.

Origins

Liederman was born in Brooklyn; the year is usually given as 1886, though 1888 also appears, and even his exact birthdate is not known for certain. By the account of Benjamin Pollack and Jan Todd, he grew up poor and was a sickly, thin child, trained to become a physical-education teacher, worked briefly for the New York Board of Education, and then toured the vaudeville stage as a strongman and acrobat, without reaching the first rank.

The work

Liederman began selling his first mail-order course in 1917, advertising it in Bernarr Macfadden's Physical Culture; the original course cost $37 for a ninety-day programme. Through the 1920s he advertised heavily in popular magazines, built a large New York office, and by the late 1920s ran the best-known mail-order fitness course in the country; in 1929 his publishing business is reported to have taken more than $1 million. The courses relied on chest expanders and bodyweight exercise, which needed little equipment and could be done at home.

The Federal Trade Commission eventually charged that his advertising was "palpably false" and issued a cease-and-desist order, which forced him to abandon some $100,000 of advertising already bought. After the mail-order years he turned to radio and then to journalism, and in later life he worked as an editor on Joe Weider's magazines, including Muscle Power.

Books

• Muscle Building (1924).
• Endurance (1926).
• Secrets of Strength, among several other titles published under his own imprint.

Legacy

Pollack and Todd describe Liederman as the first to use "the virile image of enhanced American masculinity" to sell a weekly course by post on a multimillion-dollar scale. The model he built — display advertising, before-and-after imagery and lessons by mail — was the one Charles Atlas would make famous.

Disputed and unresolved

Liederman's birth year (1886 or 1888) is uncertain, and his death is usually given as 1970 without a fuller date. Figures for the size of his subscriber base vary and mostly come from his own publicity.