Earle Liederman

11 January 1886 – 13 December 1970 · New York City

Earle Liederman ran the largest mail-order strength training business in the United States in the 1920s, with subscriber numbers in the high hundreds of thousands at the peak. He was a competent stage strongman, an entrepreneur of uneven scruple, and the figure against whom Charles Atlas's career was largely defined.

Origins

Liederman was born in New York in January 1886. He performed as a vaudeville hand-balancer and strongman in his twenties, opened a small training studio in midtown Manhattan, and from around 1915 began advertising correspondence courses in the back pages of pulp magazines. The business expanded rapidly through the 1920s as the mail-order pulp magazine market itself expanded.

The work

Liederman's courses — with names like Endurance, Muscular Development, and the flagship Liederman's Course in Muscle Building — were sold by direct mail through display advertisements in popular magazines. The format was standard: a small initial booklet, follow-up lessons by post, and graded testimonial photographs of pupils. Liederman claimed at the height of the business in the late 1920s to have over 600,000 subscribers; the number is unverifiable and is likely promotional, but the business was undeniably very large.

Notable contributions

• Operator of the largest American mail-order strength business in the 1920s.
• Author of Endurance (1926), Muscular Power and Beauty (1923), and several other books-as-courses.
• Direct competitor to Charles Atlas; Atlas's eventual dominance was substantially at Liederman's expense after the 1929 crash and the legal disputes that followed.
• Editor and publisher of Muscle Builder magazine in the 1920s.

Method

Liederman's courses combined progressive callisthenic exercises, light dumbbell drill, and dietary recommendations. The instructional content was conventional for the period; the business was the achievement, not the method. The courses were directed at the underweight or unconditioned amateur rather than at the serious lifter.

Legacy

Liederman's commercial career is the principal example of how the 1920s mail-order strength business worked at scale and how it collapsed: the 1929 crash devastated his subscriber base, a series of legal disputes with the Federal Trade Commission and with disgruntled customers depleted reserves, and by the mid-1930s the business was a fraction of its peak. Liederman wrote occasionally for the strength press into the 1950s and lived to eighty-four. He died in December 1970.

Disputed and unresolved

Liederman's claimed subscriber numbers vary widely; the most reliable figure, from a 1929 court filing, is approximately 100,000 active subscribers at that point, considerably below the 600,000 of his publicity but still a very large operation. His relationship with Atlas was overtly hostile and the two men's accounts of their dispute disagree at almost every point.