The Strongest Men on Earth

by Graeme Kent

  While he was pursuing his itinerant life, Carkeek paused long enough to write an obituary in the Mirror of Life for Matsada Sorakichi, the former sumo wrestler who had tried to break into the catch-as-catch-can scene. The Japanese died penniless at the age of thirty-two, discarded by his manager and associates. Little attention was paid to weight divisions in the early days of wrestling, which favoured the bigger contestants. Carkeek wrote in the New York Times of his efforts: ‘The plucky little Jap suffered numerous defeats because he tackled all the best men of the day, no matter what their size or weight might be.’

  There was one brief resurgence at the end of the golden age of the strength athletes. It concerned a performer who, with the benefit of hindsight, could almost be called the last of the strongmen. His name was Zisha Breitbart and he was a Polish Jew, born in Lodz in 1883. His entry into show business mirrored that of many other ambitious youths. He was apprenticed to a blacksmith but at the age of thirteen ran away to join a passing circus. He grew to be large and strong, and embarked upon a career as a professional strongman. During the First World War, he entertained German troops with his act and continued as a circus star in the postwar era.

  Soon he was starring in Vienna, with the usual, if well-presented, strongman tricks of weightlifting, chain breaking and boulder smashing. Often he appeared onstage in the costume of a Roman gladiator. He was billed modestly as the Superman of the Ages.

  What marked Breitbart out from his contemporaries was his immense pride in his Jewish heritage and his fascination with Zionism. Whether he was wearing a Roman tunic or a blacksmith’s apron for his public appearances his costumes were always embellished with the Star of David. Whenever possible he included references to the Biblical Samson in his act.

  In 1923, billed as ‘the Jewish Superman’, Breitbart took part in a highly successful tour of the USA. He became an American citizen and sponsored a postal bodybuilding course. At the peak of his fame he returned to appear in Poland again. In the city of Radom he was performing one of his lesser tricks of pounding a nail with his fist into a plank. The nail, which was rusty, went through the wooden board and penetrated Breitbart’s knee. Blood poisoning set in and both of the strongman’s legs had to be amputated. He died in a Berlin hospital after ten operations in 1925.

  Zisha was the last strongman to top a music hall or vaudeville bill but it wasn’t quite the end. After Breitbart’s death there were few out-and-out strongman acts left to parade on the vaudeville and music hall stages, but the legacy of Eugen Sandow was still apparent in the proliferation of postal bodybuilding courses available in the 1920s to the 1940s. Chief among those offering such courses was the ubiquitous Charles Atlas. He received his imprimatur from Bernarr Macfadden who, in turn, had been inspired by the public performances of Eugen Sandow on his tour of the USA in the 1890s.

  Born in Italy in 1892, Angelo Siciliano emigrated to Brooklyn with his parents. He started developing his body from a young age, with a picture of Eugen Sandow pasted to his bedroom mirror to inspire him. By 1921, he was so well developed that he won the title of the world’s most perfectly developed man, sponsored by Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine. He changed his name to Charles Atlas, linked up with a British physician and health writer called Frederick Tilney and started his enormously successful postal bodybuilding course, which costed $29.95, avowedly aimed at ‘97lb weaklings’ accustomed to getting sand kicked into their faces by beach bullies. He employed slogans which spread around the world – ‘You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine’. Tens of thousands of young men signed up for the course and by the time of his death in 1972 at the age of eighty, Atlas had a massive business empire.

  A few other bodybuilders, usually former weightlifters, achieved fame, this time on the big screen. At the peak of his fame the highestpaid actor in Europe, Steve Reeves became the star of a few sword and sandal epics, while Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger parlayed a number of bodybuilding titles into a successful Hollywood career and even took office as Governor of California.

  Despite these later successes, the great age of the stage strongman was over. From Eugen Sandow’s leap on to the stage of the Imperial Theatre to challenge Charles Sampson in 1889 until the advent of world war in 1914, the strongman heyday lasted less than twenty-five years. But those years were fascinating ones. Some of their number were rogues and others charlatans, but most of the strongmen were both brave and resourceful. Their attitude to danger is best summed up in the words of the Polish-born strongman-juggler Paul Cinquevalli, who worked the halls in the 1890s. For the climax of his act he spun a huge cartwheel on a pole, knocked the support away with a flourish, stooped and caught it – still revolving – on the spike of a helmet he was wearing. A reporter once asked him if this hurt. Cinquevalli’s response entered the lexicon of show business one-liners.

  ‘Hurt?’ he asked. Pausing, he shook his head. ‘No, I just lose consciousness for a few seconds!’

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Books and booklets

  Adam, G. Mercer, Sandow on Physical Training (London: Gale & Polden, 1894)

  Alltree, George W., Footlight Memories: Recollections of Music Hall and Stage Life (London: Sampson Low & Co., 1932)

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  2000) Radley, Allan Stuart, The Illustrated History of Physical Culture, Vol. I: The Muscular Ideal (Blackpool: Radley, 2001)

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  Periodicals

  Apollo’s Magazine

  Baltimore Sun

  Bodybuilder

  Boston Globe

  Brain and Brawn

  Californian Daily Alta

  C. B. Fry’s Magazine

  Chicago Tribune

  Cleveland News

  Daily News

  The Era

  Health and Strength

  Iron Game History

  Iron Man

  Journal of Sports History

  Klein’s Bell

  Manx Advertiser

  Milo

  Montreal Gazette

  Montreal Star

  Mr America

  Muscle Builder

  Muscle Power

  National Police Gazette

  New York Dramatic Mirror

  New York Sun

  Physical Culture

  Sandow’s Magazine

  Sporting Life

  The Strand Magazine

  Strength

  Strength and Health

  The Strongman

  Sydney Morning Herald

  Taranaki Herald

  The Times

  Western Mail

  Your Physique

  Academic Theses

  The Operational Aesthetic in the Performance of Professional Wrestling

  William P. Lipscomb III

  Ph.D. thesis, Louisiana State University, 2004

  An Exploration of Weightlifting as a Reflection of the Major Socio-Political Events and Trends of the 20th Century

  Mark Kodya

  MA thesis, State University of New York Empire State College, 2003

  Building Strength: Alan Calvert, the Milo Barbell Company and the Modernization of American Weight Training

  Kimberley Ayn Beckwith

  Ph.D. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2006

  Archives

  Evanion Catalogue (British Library)

  National Fairground Archives (Sheffield University)

  INDEX

  Abbey, Henry S. 1, 2

  Abbott, Annie (the Georgia Magnet) 1, 2

  Abbs, Carl (Karl) 1

  Acton, (Little) Joe 1

  Adam, G. Mercer 1

  ‘Adonis’ stage show 1

  Alexander, George 1

  Alhambra Theatre 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

  American Civil War 1

  Arco, Otto (Otto Nowosielsky) 1, 2

  Arniotis, Mlle. 1

  Aston, Edward 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

  Athaldo, Don x, 1, 2

  Ath
leta 1

  Atilla, Louis (Louis Durlacher) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

  Atlas, Charles (Angelo Siciliano) 1

  Bankier, William (Apollon, the Scottish Hercules) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

  Barker, Anthony (the Herculean Comedian) 1

  Barnum, P. T. 1, 2

  Barsabas 1

  bartitsu 1

  Barton-Wright, Edward 1

  Bauer, Theodore 1, 2

  Bell, Alexander Graham 1

  Belzoni, Giovanni (the Great Belzoni, the Patagonian Samson) 1

  Benjamin, R.B. 1, 2, 3

  Bibby, Edwin 1, 2, 3

  Bigham, Mr Justice 1

  Bienkowski, Franz (Cyclops) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

  Blondin, Charles 1

  Bly, Nelly 1

  bodybuilding courses 1, 2, 3, 4

  Boer War army physical rejects 1

  Boisette, Frank 1

  Borra, Luigi (Milo, the Cannonball King) 1, 2, 3, 4

  Bovril 1

  Bowen, Andy 1

  Brady, William A. 1

  Breitbart, Zisha, 1

  British Blondes 1

  Brothers Griffith 1

  Bruce, Robert the 1

  Brumbach, Kate (Sandwina) 1, 2

  Bulletproof Man, the 1

  Burns, Martin (Farmer) 1, 2

  Burrows, Tom (the King of Clubs) 1, 2, 3, 4

  Cannon, Tom 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  Carkeek, Jack 1, 2, 3

  Central Vigilance Society for the Repression of Immorality 1