A guide to the history of physical education

In the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century four different systems of physical training had been brought forward for trial in the United States—the drill and discipline of the military academy, the Jahn gymnastics, manual labor on the farm or in the shop, and “calisthenics” for girls and women. The claims of each were pressed by enthusiastic advocates, and there was no lack of imitators of the educational institutions in which each had first become incorporated; but for various reasons not one of the four was generally adopted or won for itself more than temporary foothold. From 1835 until 1860, though educators were increasingly alive to the importance of physical training,⁠[222] no one appeared with anything that seemed more likely to meet the conditions and needs of the time. Then came Dio Lewis, with his “new gymnastics for men, women, and children,” something definite and practical. His contagious enthusiasm created a wave of popular interest that spread to all parts of the country, and the “Normal Institute of Physical Education” which he opened in Boston in the summer of 1861 was the first attempt in America to prepare teachers of a subject whose right to a place in the school curriculum had long been conceded.

Dioclesian, or, as he called himself in after life, Dio Lewis, came of vigorous Welsh stock and was born March 3, 1823, on a farm in Cayuga County, New York, within a few miles of Auburn. Loran L. Lewis, born two years later, who served two terms in the Senate of his native state, and from 1882 until 1896 was Justice of the New York Supreme Court, has written as follows regarding the early life of his elder brother:

“At the age of twelve Dio was as large and mature as ordinary boys of fifteen. His mind was remarkably active; so were his movements. He could do anything he desired to do with more rapidity than any person I ever knew. When accustomed to committing to memory he could read a page in a book once, close the book, and repeat it all. He had an investigating, inquisitive mind. He liked miscellaneous reading, but did not relish digging into study. He learned a great many facts, but did not read many books thoroughly. He was enthusiastic in everything in which he engaged. He developed as a child a talent for declaiming, even before he could read much, and as a youth he engaged in debates and talked on temperance.... He was cheerful and full of fun.... At the age of twelve Dio left school and went into a cotton factory in Clarksville, near Auburn, where he remained perhaps six months, working some sixteen hours a day and receiving from $1.25 to $2.50 a week in orders on stores in Auburn. After this he worked in Wadsworth’s hoe, axe, and scythe factory for about two years, attending school at intervals....

“At about the age of fifteen he began teaching school in our district. He surprised the patrons with novel ways of teaching and managing the school. Heretofore the masters had moved around the room with ferule in hand, always ready to deal a blow as occasion might offer. The young teacher discarded the whip and went to singing, and for a change he would march with the children into a piece of woods near the schoolhouse, and sometimes, after the children got tired, he would allow them to play hide-and-seek. Dio continued teaching near home for a year or two, and when eighteen years of age he went to what was then Lower Sandusky, now Fremont, Ohio, and organized a select school. Here he began the study of Latin and Greek, and the classes which he soon formed in them, as well as in algebra and geometry, kept him hard at work with his own studies in order to keep well ahead of his pupils. The school was patronized by most of the leading citizens, and gave so great satisfaction that in a few months some of them volunteered to erect a handsome school building. They obtained an act of incorporation, naming it, in compliment to Mr. Lewis, ‘The Dioclesian Institute,’ and the new quarters were occupied just before the close of the school year.”

A severe and prolonged attack of ague compelled the young teacher to give up his work in Fremont at the end of a year, and he did not return to it. Having made up his mind to study medicine, he now entered the office of the physician at the Auburn State Prison, Dr. Lansing Briggs, with whom he remained for three years, with the exception of one winter devoted to teaching. In 1845 he went to Boston and spent some time in the Medical Department of Harvard University, but seems to have been prevented from completing the course by lack of means, and therefore came back to Port Byron, not far from his home, to enter at once upon the practice of his profession. By his partner, Dr. Lewis McCarthy, he was won over to the new system of homeopathy, and a little later, after establishing himself in Buffalo in 1848, began to edit a monthly publication called The Homœopathist. The honorary degree of Doctor of Medicine was conferred upon him in 1851 by the Homœopathic Hospital College of Cleveland, Ohio, then only two years old.

A year after his removal to Buffalo Dr. Lewis married Miss Helen Cecelia Clarke, daughter of a physician whose country residence was in the neighborhood of Port Byron. Three of her sisters had died of consumption, and in the fall of 1851 she herself began to exhibit unmistakable symptoms of the same disease. Her husband, who was already urging in his medical journal the importance of preventive measures, at once undertook the treatment of her case by hygienic means. These appeared to be successful for a time; but in the fall of 1852 her cough reappeared, and Dr. Lewis thereupon determined to give up his practice and go South with her for the winter. Early in January they reached Fredericksburg, Virginia. It was not in the man’s nature to remain idle, and he was soon talking on health subjects to pupils in the schools. To identify himself with a cause which had excited his interest ever since boyhood he now joined “The Sons of Temperance,” but with a protest, his biographer⁠[223] tells us, “against the exclusion of women from membership. He urged upon the leaders that in failing to enlist woman in the work they were leaving out the element most essential and indispensable to success.... Meeting only indifference to his appeal for the admission of women to the organized temperance work, he wrote a paper on ‘The Influence of Christian Women in the Cause of Temperance,’ and read it in a hall in the old town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, the same year (1853). This was his first appearance on the public platform. Directly afterward he gave lectures on this subject and on health topics in Fredericksburg, Richmond, Petersburg, Norfolk, and Portsmouth, Virginia.” The two succeeding winters were also spent with his wife in the South, where among other places he lectured in Paris, Lexington, and Georgetown, Kentucky. The same occupation was continued in New York State in the intervening summers. At the end of this time, after renewed and more careful attention to the matter of dress and exercise, Mrs. Lewis found herself fully restored to health.

The next five years, until the summer of 1860, were devoted almost entirely to platform work in “the Middle and Northern United States and Canada.... It was his custom to speak on six evenings in the week on the laws of health, laying special stress on his favorite axiom, adapted to suit himself, ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure.’ On Sunday evenings he presented in the churches, or, by preference, in a large hall, when such could be obtained, his favorite subject, ‘The Duty of Christian Women in the Temperance Work.’” In 1856 he made a short visit to Paris, chiefly to secure material suitable for demonstration in his popular lectures on physiology, although he also improved the opportunity to attend clinics at some of the city hospitals. Referring to this period he speaks of himself as “burdened with what I felt to be my life-work, that of urging upon the people their right to ‘a sound mind in a sound body,’ and the introduction of a new system of physical training into the schools of the country ...;” and how his thoughts were turned to gymnastics is told in these words: “During the eight years of lecturing, the spare hours were devoted to the invention of a new system of gymnastics. The old, or German gymnastics, the one so common throughout our country,⁠[224] was obviously not adapted to the classes most needing artificial training. Athletic young men, who alone succeeded in the feats of that gymnasium, were already provided for. Boat clubs, ball clubs, and other sports⁠[225] furnished them in considerable part with the means of muscular training. But old men, fat men, feeble men, young boys, and females of all ages—the classes most needing physical training,—were not drawn to the old-fashioned gymnasium. The few attempts that had been made to introduce these classes to that institution had uniformly and signally failed. The system itself was wrong.”

After experimenting for some years with the new exercises he had devised Dr. Lewis determined to concentrate his efforts on the attempt to introduce them to the public, and in June of 1860 established his home in the vicinity of Boston for this purpose. “I thought,” he says, “that Boston would prove more hospitable to an educational innovation than any other city in the country;” and he was not disappointed. Evening classes in gymnastics were soon organized in West Newton, Newtonville, Newton, Newton Upper Falls, and Watertown. The English and classical school of Mr. N. T. Allen, in West Newton, was the first to introduce the new system, according to Dr. Lewis, and it was soon followed by the Normal School at Framingham, and in Boston by the institutions of Mr. Gannett in Pemberton Square and Madame de Maltchyce in Pinckney Street, the Concord Hall school, and many others in and near the city. A public gymnasium, also, for men, women, and children was opened at 20 Essex Street, in Boston. Among others, a class of clergymen and their wives met there regularly for an hour on Mondays—‘blue Monday’—to exercise with the proprietor and, as one of them expressed it, to “inhale hygiene in his presence, and in the atmosphere of his room.”

In August of 1860 the ‘new system’ was all at once brought to the notice of leading educators gathered from the length and breadth of the United States. Dr. Lewis himself related the circumstances to a Boston audience, several years afterward,⁠[226] as follows: “I may remark that the hour of my coming was most fortunate for my cause. Just then the American Institute of Instruction held its great Convention—the largest ever held in this country—in this city. I was so fortunate as to be invited to appear before that most august of all educational bodies, to explain and illustrate the new system of gymnastics. They told me ‘You may have half an hour on the second morning; we have the business so arranged that we cannot give you more.’ But when the half-hour had expired they said, ‘Go on;’ and I went on until two hours had passed, and then they voted that the next morning they would meet at half past eight (having announced important business for nine o’clock), to hear more about the new gymnastics. The next morning was foggy and dark, but the hall (Tremont Temple) was full, and they passed over their important business and gave me nearly two hours more, and at noon another hour. With such an opening as this, it is not remarkable that the interest spread over the entire country.”⁠[227]

One of Dr. Lewis’s objects in coming to Boston had been the establishment of a training school for teachers of the “New System,” and in the spring of 1861 the Normal Institute for Physical Education was incorporated. President Cornelius C. Felton, of Harvard College, readily consented to serve as its president, and continued to take an active interest in the enterprise until his death, a year later. Upon the list of twenty-eight Directors appear the names of Governor John A. Andrew, Hon. George S. Boutwell, Dr. H. I. Bowditch, Rev. James Freeman Clarke, Rev. E. E. Hale, N. T. Allen, Prof. A. Crosby, and others of recognized standing. The members of the first faculty were Thomas H. Hoskins, M.D., Professor of Anatomy; Josiah Curtis, M.D., Professor of Physiology (the instruction in this subject, as well as in anatomy, was later given by Dr. Hoskins); Walter Channing, M.D., Professor of Hygiene; and Dio Lewis, M.D., Professor of Gymnastics. The next year a department of Elocution was created, and Professor T. F. Leonard was called to the new chair. The first course opened July 5, 1861, and continued ten weeks. Other similar courses were to be given twice each year thereafter, beginning regularly on the second of January and the fifth of July.

This Institute was not, as Dr. Lewis supposed, “the first ever established to educate guides in Physical Culture,” since normal schools of gymnastics had already been opened in Europe, e.g., at Stockholm (1814), Dresden (1850), and Berlin (1851); but it was the first attempt of the sort to be made in the United States, and as such merits more than passing notice. A report of the first course and announcement of the second, published in pamphlet form at Boston in 1861, yields the following: “Readers of our educational journals are, to some extent, familiar with Dr. Lewis’s system of Gymnastics, since in connection with his appearance before the American Institute of Instruction last year these journals, as also large numbers of the daily press, gave somewhat full accounts of the principal features of that system.⁠[228] It is a novel system, novel alike in its philosophy and in its practical details. Dispensing with the whole cumbrous apparatus of the ordinary gymnasium, its implements are all light, easily managed, and designed less to impart mere strength of muscle than to give flexibleness, agility, and grace of movement. The exercises are accompanied by music, and all of them so arranged that both sexes participate in each....

“The second course of the Institute will open on the second day of January, 1862, and continue ten weeks. Many peculiar and marked advantages will be enjoyed by the pupils of the winter term. D. B. Hagar, Esq., Ex-President of the American Institute of Instruction, Hon. Geo. Bradburn, Rev. Warren Burton, Rev. T. W. Higginson, and several other well known gentlemen, will deliver lectures before the class of the Institute....” In addition to the regular instruction in anatomy, physiology, hygiene, and gymnastics, the class will be taught “the principles of the ‘Swedish Movement-Cure,’⁠[229] a department of the institution devoted to the treatment of curvature of the spine, paralysis, and other chronic maladies, affording rare opportunities to study in detail the application of Ling’s methods in treating such forms of chronic disease.... Each pupil, on being received into the Institute, will be critically examined with reference to strength, form, and health; and any deficiency thus disclosed will be at once placed under the most thorough treatment.... Each will be drilled by Dr. Lewis in person, with such care that he or she cannot fail to become a competent teacher of gymnastics. And each will have two drills a day.... All will be made familiar with at least two hundred different exercises ... and will be allowed, every one in turn, to lead a small class....”

At this point a bit of contemporary testimony from a well-informed, but more impartial, source may be introduced. During the years 1858-1862 Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson contributed to the Atlantic Monthly a series of vigorous and stimulating articles, full of good sense and literary charm, which were afterward collected and published in book form under the title “Outdoor Papers” (Boston, 1863; New York, 1894). One of them, on “Gymnastics,” which appeared in March of 1861, contains this reference to the ‘New System:’ “It would be unpardonable, in this connection, not to speak a good word for the favorite hobby of the day,—Dr. Lewis, and his system of gymnastics, or, more properly, of calisthenics. Dr. Winship⁠[230] had done all that was needed in apostleship of severe exercises, and there was wanting some man with a milder hobby, perfectly safe for a lady to drive. The Fates provided that man, also, in Dr. Lewis,—so hale and hearty, so profoundly confident in the omnipotence of his own methods and the uselessness of all others, with such a ready invention, and such an inundation of animal spirits that he could flood any company, no matter how starched or listless, with an unbounded appetite for ball-games and bean-games. How long it will last in the hands of others than the projector remains to be seen, especially as some of his feats are more exhausting than average gymnastics; but, in the mean time, it is just what is wanted for multitudes of persons who find or fancy the real gymnasium to be unsuited to them. It will especially render service to female pupils, so far as they practise it; for the accustomed gymnastic exercises seem never yet to have been rendered attractive to them, on any large scale, and with any permanency.”

In a volume published in 1868 Dr. Lewis says that more than two hundred and fifty persons had taken the diploma of the Normal Institute in the nine sessions which had been held. His biographer, on the other hand, makes this statement: “During the next seven years (after its establishment) four hundred and twenty-one ladies and gentlemen, in about equal numbers, were graduated from it. These were able to answer the demand for instructors in the ‘new gymnastics’ which soon came from the schools and from private classes in the larger cities of New England, and later from the remoter parts of the country, until at length the system was taught in every State of the Union.”

Dio Lewis was a voluminous writer, but only two of his books require particular mention here—“The New Gymnastics for Men, Women, and Children,” first issued in 1862; and the tenth edition, practically a new work although it bears the same title, which appeared in 1868. Both were published in Boston, by Ticknor and Fields. The leading article, “The New Gymnastics,” in the Atlantic Monthly for August of 1862 (Vol. X, pp. 129-148) is from his pen, and another of sixty-five pages was published in two instalments in Barnard’s American Journal of Education for June and December of the same year (Vol. XI, pp. 531-562; Vol. XII, pp. 665-700). Of the 275 profusely illustrated pages in the book of 1862 only a little more than a third are filled with material of the author’s own devising. Pp. 102-115 (“Free Gymnastics”) contain exercises selected from Schreber’s “Aerztliche Zimmer-Gymnastik;”⁠[231] on pp. 117-164 “The Dumb Bell Instructor for Parlor Gymnasts,” by Maurice Kloss,⁠[232] is given in condensed form and free translation; and pp. 165-255 are occupied with a similar translation of Schreber’s “The Pangymnastikon; or All Gymnastic Exercises brought within the Compass of a Single Piece of Apparatus.”⁠[233] The first portion of the book begins with ten pages of introductory discussion relating to the need of special gymnastic training for children, the inadequacy of military drills and other forms of exercise commonly employed, the use of music with gymnastics, the gymnasium, and the gymnastic dress. Then follow (pp. 18-101) Lewis’s own exercises, grouped as follows: Bag exercises (30), exercises with rings (54), exercises with wands (68), dumb-bell exercises (34), club exercises (22), pin running (a game with clubs), games with birds’ nests (played with bean-bags), the arm pull, the gymnastic crown, and the shoulder pusher.

In the tenth edition of “The New Gymnastics” (1868) the translations from German authors are omitted. In the words of the preface, “their places have been supplied by original exercises, now for the first time published. At the same time changes have been made in that portion of the book which was devoted to an illustration of the author’s system of Gymnastics. In the constant practice of the system for the past five years, among thousands of pupils, a multitude of new exercises have been added, and the entire method has been improved in many respects. This edition is an attempt to reflect upon the pages of a book the changes which have taken place in actual practice.” A few of the introductory pages are worth quoting here, since they contain Dr. Lewis’s own statement of the advantages of his system, his claims to originality, and the order in which the exercises were developed.

“The advantages of the New System of physical culture are, in part the following: (1) The varied movements of the New System give opportunity for the full play of every muscle in the body, resulting in an all-sided development. (2) The exercises are constantly changed from one set of muscles to another, thus obviating weariness and undue disturbance of the circulation. (3) The centrifugal impulse of the predominating series secures a completeness and grace attained by no other means, while the centripetal character of the old or German method has long been the opprobrium of physical culture, with the philosophical. (4) In the New System the exercises are subordinated to personal or individual wants, while in the old the person is entirely subordinated to the performance of difficult feats. (5) The physiological purpose of all muscle training is to perfect the intermarriage between nerve and muscle. The skill exacted by the accurate lines, changing attitudes, and difficult combinations of the new methods compels the most complete interaction between soul and body. (6) The New School employs apparatus which cannot strain and stiffen the muscles, not even in the extremely old and young or feeble, while the old school sanctions weights which must produce the slow, inelastic muscles of the cart-horse. (7) The New Gymnasium invites to its free and social life persons of both sexes and all ages, while every attempt that has been made to introduce the old, or the very young, or women, to the Old Gymnasium has failed. (8) In the New Gymnasium persons of both sexes unite in all the exercises with great social enjoyment, thus adding indefinitely to the attractions of the place, while the attractions of the Old Gymnasium are about equal to those of a ballroom from which ladies are excluded. (9) In the New Gymnasium everything is set to music. Marches, free movements, dumb-bells, wands, rings, mutual-help exercises. No apathy can resist the delightful stimulus. The one hundred persons on the floor join in the evolutions inspired by one common impulse. Under the old system each individual works by himself, deprived of the sympathy and energy evoked by music and the associated movement.”

For three years, 1864-1867, Dr. Lewis conducted at Lexington, Massachusetts, a school for girls, in which Theodore Dwight Weld, once the confident advocate of manual labor as a system of exercise, was a leading teacher, and Catharine Beecher was for a time one of the lecturers.⁠[234] In September of 1867 the school building was burned, and although temporary quarters were at once secured in a summer hotel at Spy Pond the project was abandoned at the close of another year. The number of pupils rose to 140 in the third year, drawn from all over the country, and nearly 300 were enrolled during the whole period. In the words of Dr. Lewis, “The character of the announcement, with what the public knew of my interest in physical education, drew together a company of bright girls, with delicate constitutions, such girls as could not bear the exclusively mental pressure of the ordinary school.... The girls went to bed at half-past eight every evening. They rose early in the morning and went out to walk, which walk was repeated during the day. They ate only twice a day, and of very plain, nourishing food. They took off their corsets. They exercised twice a day, half an hour, in gymnastics, and danced an hour about three times a week. This was the general course, and upon this regimen they rapidly improved. The gymnastic exercises proved invaluable, but the nine hours in bed, I believe, played a still more important part.” The Eastman biography states that “On entering the school pupils were measured about the chest, under the arms, about the waist, and around the arm and forearm. The average gain for eight months was in chest measure, two and a half inches; waist measure, five inches; size of arm, one and a half inches; of forearm, about one inch. The work was so hard that with all this remarkable development the weight of the pupils was often lessened.”

The closing of his school for girls, in 1868, may be said to mark the end of Dio Lewis’s greatest activity in the interest of physical training. He had never relinquished altogether the lecture field, and now found more leisure for the work, speaking in Massachusetts and New Hampshire on his favorite topics, physical education and temperance. The winter of 1873-1874 was given up to an extensive course of lyceum lectures in the West, under the auspices of a lecture bureau, and again, as in the fifties, he devoted Sundays to the cause of Temperance, “always keeping in mind what he had for twenty years desired to see inaugurated, a practical movement on the part of women to close the saloons.” The balance of the year 1874 was filled with temperance work exclusively, and out of the “Women’s Crusades” which he inspired and helped to organize at this time was developed the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, formed at Cleveland in November. In 1875 he was obliged to heed the signs of approaching physical collapse, and went to California for three years of outdoor life.⁠[235] The year 1884 saw him located on a farm at Smithtown, Long Island, in search of rest and trying meanwhile to “concentrate his attention on chickens,” but in July able to deliver a course of lectures and teach gymnastics at the Martha’s Vineyard Summer Institute. His death occurred at Yonkers, May 21, 1886.⁠[236]

Mr. James C. Boykin pays the following just tribute to Dio Lewis: “It may be true that ‘he was unconventional, sympathetic, plausible, oracular, and self-sufficient,’ and ‘not a scientist in any proper sense,’ as one writer has said.⁠[237] But, notwithstanding all this, he rendered a real service. Even if he had nothing in his favor but the undoubted fact that he gave gymnastics in America a greater impulse than any man before him had done, that would be sufficient to earn for him the gratitude of all interested in physical training. But he did more. He first awakened the American public to the appreciation of the fact that the mere development of huge muscles is not the true idea of physical training. His contribution to the list of exercises and to gymnastic material was by no means insignificant, though, to be sure, his claims were out of all proportion to their value; but, more than all else, he lifted the gymnasium above the low plane it had occupied in the public mind as the resort of prize-fighters and bullies, and carried gymnastics into the schoolroom to an extent never before approached in this country, and into the home to an extent that no one else had ever attempted.”⁠[238] His so-called ‘system’ was not of a sort to survive for many years the loss of the founder’s energetic leadership, and yet he prepared the soil for the broader and more substantial type of work of a later day.