The first introduction of the Jahn gymnastics into the United States, in the years 1825-1828, we owe to Follen, Beck, Lieber, and Völker, men who had been associated with the German Turnvater or had come under his influence during their university days in Europe and who fled from their native land to America or England in consequence of the reactionary measures adopted by the Holy Alliance after the murder of Kotzebue by Karl Sand in 1819. Although Prussia’s example in suppressing public Turnen was followed by other German states, the procedure was by no means universal, so that between 1820 and 1840 not only did the old organizations continue without interruption in certain cities, but a number of new societies of older boys or young men, who met regularly for exercise, were formed here and there. One sign of the quickened political life which followed the accession of Frederick-William IV to the Prussian throne in 1840 was a general revival of the Jahn gymnastics, we have seen (p. 102). New societies sprang up everywhere, until at the close of the decade they numbered nearly three hundred. The desire for union which early showed itself was met by holding district conventions (Turntage) and gatherings for gymnastic exercises (Turnfeste). Agitation for reform in state and nation found many bold and able adherents among these later disciples of Jahn, and Saxon and South German turners, especially, took an active part in the revolutionary movements of 1848 and 1849. The prompt suppression of all such popular outbreaks and the new reactionary policy pursued by the various governments led to an exodus of thousands of disappointed patriots to the United States, and these brought with them, together with other institutions and customs of the fatherland, the German Turnen.

The Cincinnati Turngemeinde, the oldest German-American gymnastic society in this country, was organized November 21, 1848, at the temporary home and with the coöperation of Friedrich Hecker, now an exile, but the popular hero of a republican uprising in South Germany earlier in the same year. He had been one of the foremost leaders of the advanced revolutionary party. A week later another group of men, most of them turners before their migration and former followers of Hecker and Struve, met in Hoboken and organized the New York Turngemeinde. Other societies followed in rapid succession, so that within three years there were 25 or more in existence, with an aggregate membership of nearly 2000. These were scattered all the way from New England (Boston), New York (New York, Brooklyn, Poughkeepsie, Utica, and Rochester), New Jersey (Newark), Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Reading, Pittsburgh, and Allegheny), and Maryland (Baltimore), to Ohio (Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland), Kentucky (Louisville), Indiana (Indianapolis), Illinois (Peoria), and Missouri (St. Louis) in the west, and as far as New Orleans in the southwest. Four societies, in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Cincinnati, contained about half of the total membership.

The first steps looking toward union through the formation of a national Turnerbund were taken in New York as early as July of 1850, and at Philadelphia on the 5th of the following October delegates from Boston, New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Baltimore effected a provisional organization, under the name of the “United Turnvereine of North America.” The next August (1851) the Philadelphia Turngemeinde invited all the societies in the country to join in a general Turnfest (the first) in that city on September 29 and 30. Between six and seven hundred turners responded, and at a second convention held on October 1 and 2 delegates from nine societies completed the details of permanent organization. The name was now changed to the “Socialistic Turnerbund.” New York was made the headquarters of the Executive Committee (Vorort), the members of which were to be chosen by the New York Socialistischer Turnverein. The first number of the monthly Turnzeitung, the official organ of the Bund, was issued November 15, 1851, and reported that 11 societies, with 1072 members, had already joined.

By October of 1853, when Philadelphia became the seat of the Executive Committee, the number of societies had increased to about 60, and 10 others, recently organized, were expected to announce their accession shortly. Seven years later there were altogether above 150 societies, and the total membership had risen to between 9000 and 10,000. A list of all those in existence at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 reveals the following distribution: Massachusetts (4 societies), Connecticut (5), Rhode Island (1), New York (12), New Jersey (13), Pennsylvania (7), Delaware (1), Maryland (1), District of Columbia (2), Virginia (1), West Virginia (1), Ohio (11), Indiana (8), Michigan (3), Illinois (29), Wisconsin (13), Minnesota (7), Iowa (11), Missouri (6), Kansas (5), Kentucky (4), Tennessee (2), South Carolina (1), Alabama (2), Louisiana (2), Texas (1), and California (4)—a total of 157 societies in 27 states of the Union.

These early societies, most of whose members had been profoundly stirred by the popular uprising in Germany, did not confine their activity to the practise of gymnastic exercises. On the other hand, leavened by men of education, character, and superior ability, they were centers of agitation for a great variety of reforms. American socialism, for example, found here its first home. The “Statutes” adopted by the Convention in Philadelphia October 5, 1850, announce that the organization aims to secure the most complete independence of the individual, along with his physical development, and declare the promotion of socialism and the efforts of the Social-democratic Party a matter of supreme importance. The Turnerbund sought to assist each member to a clear understanding of proposed political, social, and religious reforms, to the end that in a spirit of radical progress he might lend them effective aid, either individually or through the agency of the Bund. The shadow of approaching Civil War helped to give to love of freedom immediate objects of thought and endeavor. The Buffalo Convention of 1855 (September 24-27) put itself on record as opposed to slavery, and especially to its extension into free territories; to the so-called American Party or Know-nothings, and to any other body of similar spirit; and to all temperance legislation, which was deemed undemocratic in principle and unjust and unpractical in operation.

In view of this multiplicity of interests it is not strange that the history of physical training in the early societies was a checkered one. For a time the official Turnzeitung contained excellent articles on gymnastics by Magnus Gross and Eduard Müller. The first Executive Committee of the Turnerbund distributed drawings of pyramids, and employed Louis Winter, an expert turner from Leipzig, to visit the smaller societies as itinerant teacher and to assist them in fitting up outdoor gymnasia. Among the members of the larger societies were usually to be found men able to direct the exercises of adults and older boys. At the Cincinnati Convention of 1852 the Committee was asked to arrange for the preparation of a suitable manual of gymnastics. The task was committed to Eduard Müller (1803-1886), who completed it before the end of the year.⁠[268] Müller was born in Mainz, and becoming acquainted with the Jahn Turnen while a student of drawing and painting at the Munich Academy organized a Turnverein in his native city, and later became its leader, city teacher of gymnastics, and editor and publisher of the Mainzer Turnzeitung (p. 103). When the disturbances of 1848 drove him to America he continued his activity in the New York Turnverein, and until 1858 was teacher of gymnastics in its school. His manual of nearly 350 pages was illustrated with numerous lithographed plates. It did not prove as satisfactory a guide as had been hoped, partly on account of the clumsy terminology adopted, and not half of the thousand copies printed were sold at the published price (seventy-five cents).

A few years later a period of decline set in. Membership fell off, for the older turners began to discontinue their gymnastic practice and the young German-Americans, trained in this country, did not always sympathize with the ideals of their parents. Turnen in Germany was suffering from the reactionary measures which followed the events of 1848-1849, so that good gymnasts were less numerous among recent immigrants, and this continued to be the case until the marked revival of interest in the sixties. The Executive Committee was absorbed in politics and aside from offering prizes to the victors in Turnfest competitions did little or nothing to make physical training other than a subordinate phase of society life. The same retrogression was manifest in the pages of the Turnzeitung and the proceedings of the national Conventions. Only the larger societies employed professional teachers of gymnastics, and nothing was done to recruit their ranks or to provide well trained assistants. An attempt was made to remedy the latter condition in 1858 by establishing Vorturner schools in various cities, but it met with slight success. By this time, as a result of dissensions, the Bund was divided into two mutually suspicious and unfriendly groups of societies, an Eastern and a Western, each with its own Executive Committee. One noteworthy feature of the report of the Western Committee, presented at a Convention in Indianapolis (September 4-8, 1858), was the statement that fifteen gymnastic societies had been organized by native Americans (in Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Louisville, and New Orleans, for example) after the German model and were in flourishing condition, and that these had held their first Turnfest, with competition for prizes, in Oxford, Ohio (June 29, 1858. See p. 267).

A list of national Turnfeste held by the societies of the Turnerbund between 1851 and 1860 is added here, as a matter of record:

As early as 1851, at the Philadelphia Convention, the Turnerbund had announced itself in favor of the Free-soil party platform. The delegates to the Pittsburgh Convention in September of 1856 announced their adhesion to the platform of the new Republican party and to its candidates, Fremont and Dayton. In October of 1860 the Executive Committee, now located in Baltimore, sent out letters calling upon societies everywhere to support the Republican platform and vote for Lincoln in the coming election. This advice was generally followed, even in the slave states. The next spring, during the riot of April 19 and 20, a mob sacked the hall of the Baltimore society when their demand that the national flag floating above it be replaced by the state one was refused, and on the 22nd the office of the Turnzeitung met a like fate. The editor and most of the members of the Turnverein were forced to flee from the city. The Turnerbund was therefore left without headquarters or official organ, and since no attempt at recovery could prove effective in the face of the approaching struggle, which engrossed all attention, each society was left to shift for itself throughout the years of Civil War as best it could.

President Lincoln’s call for volunteers, issued just before these events in Baltimore, met with an immediate response among the German-Americans, whose actions at this time demonstrate beyond question the sincerity of their enthusiasm for freedom and human rights. Exact figures are not available, but it seems tolerably certain that out of the total membership of nine or ten thousand at the outbreak of the war between five and six thousand turners joined the Union army, and to this number should be added about two thousand more who had formerly belonged to societies and now fought side by side with their old comrades. In the St. Louis Turnverein three full companies, well drilled and completely equipped, were ready to take the field at once. The Seventeenth Missouri Regiment was made up chiefly of members of societies in the Southwest and was therefore known as the Western Turnregiment. The Twentieth New York State Volunteer Regiment, twelve hundred strong, contained three companies of New York turners, two from Williamsburg, one from Newark, and others from societies along the Hudson and in the interior of the state, with some men from Boston and Philadelphia. More than half the membership of the Cincinnati Turngemeinde enlisted at the first call, and these and other turners from neighboring cities composed a large part of the Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry. On the evening that the Philadelphia Turngemeinde decided to raise a battalion of volunteers 86 men out of a membership of about 260 signed their names to the roll, and within eight days four companies were formed. These were attached to the Twenty-ninth New York or Astor Regiment. The Chicago Turngemeinde met in extra session the day following Lincoln’s summons to hear the excuses of such members as were unable to enlist, and had a company of 105 men ready to march by the night of April 17. A second company was organized immediately afterwards. Turners from the Milwaukee and other Wisconsin societies were incorporated in the Fifth Wisconsin Regiment as Company C, known as the “Turner Rifles.” Many societies were so reduced in numbers by enlistment that they found it necessary to disband, and effort was everywhere centered on the support of those who were hastening to the field, or had already gone. The roll of turner dead is a long and honorable one.

During the years of the Civil War the Turnerbund retained only a nominal existence. The old Executive Committee remained in office, but few societies kept up their connection with this central body and it received no financial support. Immigration from Germany, where Turnen was now making rapid strides forward, had given an impetus to gymnastics in the larger societies meanwhile, and Turnvereine in and near New York City had effected a district organization, with monthly conventions and Turnfeste. At their suggestion the New York Turnverein undertook to manage a general Turnfest, in which societies all over the country were invited to share, and after which the matter of reorganizing the Bund was to be discussed. On September 14, 1864, accordingly, delegates from twenty-two societies outside the New York district met with their hosts in a sort of improvised national convention, which reaffirmed the former platform and appointed a provisional central committee. In less than five months six other district organizations, after the New York plan, had reported their existence. The next spring at Washington (1865, April 3-5) fifty-eight societies were represented by delegates in regular convention, and on the first day the details of reorganization were completed under the name Nordamerikanischer Turnerbund (North American Gymnastic Union).⁠[269] The headquarters of the Executive Committee were established in New York, and its members were to be chosen by the New York district (Turnbezirk). Physical training was declared to be the first object of the societies. All active members were to take part in the gymnastic exercises up to their thirtieth year, after a uniform system based on the Jahn-Eiselen model and the “free exercises” of Spiess, and suitable classes for boys and girls were also to be provided.

The following table reveals the progress made in the next two decades:

During the same period national Turnfeste were held as follows:

A paragraph added to the by-laws of the Turnerbund at the Convention held in Pittsburgh September 1-5, 1856, provided that a school for the complete preparation of teachers in the theory and practice of physical training should be established in the city where the Executive Committee was located. This was almost five years before Dio Lewis opened his Normal Institute for Physical Education in Boston. The next September the Executive Committee, whose headquarters at that time were in Cincinnati, reported to the Detroit Convention that lack of means had prevented the carrying out of the provision. At the Rochester Convention in 1860 (July 30 to August 2) the Committee reaffirmed the necessity of establishing a central normal school, at the same time that it acknowledged the want of success which had hitherto attended its efforts. Soon after the reorganization of the Turnerbund in 1865 the new Executive Committee, in New York City, took up the matter again, and worked out a plan to be laid before the next national convention. Resolutions adopted by a conference of teachers of gymnastics which followed the Cincinnati Turnfest of 1865 also recommended that the step be taken. Both actions were reported to the St. Louis Convention of 1866 (April 1-4), and it was decided to open such an institution at once, with a one-year course which should include lectures on the history and aims of German Turnen, anatomy and aesthetics in their relation to gymnastics, and first aid, together with gymnastic nomenclature, the theory of the different systems, and practical instruction with special regard to the training of boys and girls. Only persons whose qualifications as teachers were attested by some Turnverein were to be admitted, and certificates of attendance and proficiency were to be awarded to pupils who were successful in examinations given at the close of the course. The direction of instruction was entrusted to three persons to be appointed by the Executive Committee.

In accordance with this decision the normal school was opened in New York City, November 22, 1866, ten years after the original proposal, with an attendance of nineteen men from different parts of the country. The practical instruction was given by Wilhelm Heeseler, formerly a pupil at Hermann Otto Kluge’s gymnasium in Berlin, and the lecturers were Dr. H. Balser, Dr. Julius Hofmann, Eduard Müller, and Heinrich Metzner. Nine men remained for the final examinations, on February 13, 1867, and five of these received diplomas. The second course was opened in New York January 3, 1869, and at its close on July 2 of the same year diplomas of the first grade were granted to five pupils and those of the second grade to three. At the Pittsburgh Convention of 1870 (May 29 to June 1) it was voted to move the normal school from New York to Chicago. The third course (six months, beginning in January, 1871), conducted in that city under the direction of August Lang, John Gloy, and George Brosius, fell short of expectations, although there were ten participants, of whom four obtained diplomas as teachers and two as Vorturner. The great fire of October 8-10, 1871, made another change necessary, and the fourth course was therefore held in New York City again, from October 27, 1872, to the end of May, 1873. Seven diplomas of the first grade and four of the second were granted, and three pupils received certificates as Vorturner. The Rochester Convention of 1874 (May 24-27) transferred the school to Milwaukee, and there in the years 1875-1888 ten courses were completed.

The technical director of the Normal School during all these years in Milwaukee was George Brosius, who becomes therefore the most important single figure in the earlier history of Turnvereine of the German type in America. His father was born in Hesse-Darmstadt in 1815 and his mother near Leipsic in 1818, but both came to this country with their parents in the early thirties, and settled in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Here they met and married, and here the boy was born, September 9, 1839. In 1842 the family moved to Milwaukee, which was thenceforward to be his home except for a few brief intervals. He was educated first in the public schools and afterwards in the Engelmann School, now known as the German-English Academy. Eduard Schulz, a political fugitive from Berlin, was conducting a private gymnasium in the city, and this the boy attended. When the Turnverein “Milwaukee” opened its classes for children in 1854 he joined one of them, becoming a junior member (Zögling) of the society soon after and entering into full membership in 1858. Already he had developed such great ability as a gymnast that he was able to win the first prize for juniors at the Turnfest of the Western societies held in Milwaukee in 1857. In that year he was also admitted to the militia company commanded by his father. After the latter’s death (1859) he moved to St. Louis, and was following there the trade of painter and decorator at the outbreak of the Civil War. Although married only a few months before, he immediately returned to Milwaukee, enlisted as a volunteer for the three-year term, and was made sergeant in Company E of the Ninth Wisconsin Regiment, later receiving a commission as second lieutenant in the Thirty-fifth Regiment of Wisconsin Volunteers.

The career of Brosius as a teacher of gymnastics, which was to continue without interruption for fifty fruitful years, began in the autumn of 1864, when he undertook the direction of the various classes of Turnverein “Milwaukee.” The regular exercise soon restored his former degree of strength and skill, and a long list of successful appearances in local, district, and national Turnfeste gave evidence of his own merit as a practical gymnast and of his gift for developing a corresponding proficiency in his pupils. In 1866 the Engelmann School, one of the first to introduce physical training into its curriculum, secured a part of his time as teacher, and during the same period he was also conducting the exercises at the Milwaukee Gymnasium, frequented chiefly by native Americans. Then followed a year in Chicago (1870-1871), in the service of the “Aurora” and Scandinavian societies. When the third course of the Turnerbund’s Normal School was opened there, in January of 1871, he became one of the three teachers who directed it. But the great fire of October sent him back to Milwaukee, to open a private gymnasium and take up again his work at the Engelmann School, and in 1873 to resume his former position at Turnverein “Milwaukee.”

The next period of his life, and the most fruitful one, opens in 1875, with the transfer of the Normal School of the Turnerbund to Turnverein “Milwaukee.” Brosius became its technical director, as we have seen, and in the ten courses held between 1875 and 1888 more than a hundred teachers of gymnastics were graduated from the institution, to become leaders in Turnvereine all over the country, and many of them to undertake the direction of physical training in important city school systems or in other positions of large influence. From 1875 to 1883 Brosius himself served as superintendent of physical training in the public schools of Milwaukee, and after 1878 as instructor in the National German-American Teachers College (Lehrerseminar), which had been established there.⁠[270] The rules in force at the time the ninth course was given in Milwaukee (1885-1886) required that it should last not less than ten months, and should include systematic instruction in the following subjects: Practical gymnastics, gymnastic nomenclature, the value and uses of the different pieces of apparatus, the preparation of series of graded lessons in gymnastics; the history and literature of physical training, including systems and methods, with special attention to modern times; the history of civilization, in connection with the preceding course; the essentials of anatomy and physiology; hygiene, medical gymnastics, and first aid; the principles of education, and practical hints derived from them; the German and English languages and literature; simple popular and Turner songs; foil, sabre, and bayonet fencing; swimming. There was also to be frequent observation of classes in gymnastics, for adults and for school children, and practice in conducting them. It was deemed desirable that every graduate should be able to use the English language in his teaching.

Some idea of the organization and activities of the Turnerbund as it was in January of 1886 may be gathered from the annual statistical summary published by the Executive Committee in that year. This shows 231 societies, grouped in 30 districts (Turnbezirke). The total membership reported was 23,823, of which number 18,164 were citizens of the United States, 5562 were on the list of active turners, and 3201 actually took part in the gymnastic exercises. Ninety-five professional teachers of gymnastics were employed. There were 1028 members in the junior societies (Zöglingsvereine), and 587 had passed from these into the regular Turnvereine during the preceding year; 13,161 boys and 3888 girls were enrolled in the classes for children; 436 members took part in fencing, and 399 in rifle-shooting; 1722 belonged to singing sections. The society libraries contained 44,139 volumes; 224 lectures had been delivered and 283 debates conducted, and during a single month 109 meetings for intellectual improvement were held. The attendance at day schools supported by the societies was 1921, at night schools 428, and at Sunday schools 1482. One hundred and forty-four societies occupied buildings of their own, and the total value of society property was $2,556,018, of which amount $1,662,583 was free from debt.

The year 1886 may be regarded as a turning point in the history of the German-American gymnastic societies, and there is some reason for calling the period which precedes this date the German one, and that which follows the American. The immigrants not unnaturally gravitated toward cities or sections where communities of fellow-countrymen were already established. They continued to use the mother-tongue among themselves, and the consequent imperfect command of English, together with certain continental customs which they retained, serve to explain the fact that few Americans outside of their own ranks appreciated the aims of the Turnvereine or knew how much they were doing to provide physical training for children and adults. For example, Dr. E. M. Hartwell, for two years a resident of Cincinnati, and director of the gymnasium at Johns Hopkins University at the time he was asked to prepare for the Bureau of Education a report on physical training in American colleges and universities, had travelled widely in states east of the Mississippi before completing his manuscript in the spring of 1885, and yet did not learn of the existence of Turnvereine in the United States until his visit to Germany that summer. Two pages of the appendix to the report, added after his return, are devoted to the North American Turnerbund.

At its national convention in Boston in the summer of 1886 the Turnerbund authorized its executive committee to appoint delegates to the second annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education, and before this body, in Brooklyn on the 26th of November following, three papers were accordingly read by representatives thus named, and an exhibition of German gymnastics was given by classes from New York and Brooklyn societies. This was the beginning of a systematic campaign undertaken to acquaint American educators and the public in general with the claims and merits of the German system. Representation by delegates at the annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education was continued, and at Philadelphia in 1892 a paper by William A. Stecher made an especially favorable impression; a special committee of well-known men (Doctors Hitchcock, Sargent, and Hartwell) was invited to attend the national Turnfest in Milwaukee in 1893 as guests of the Turnerbund, and other similar committees were appointed at several succeeding Turnfeste; there were demonstrations and exhibits at the World’s Fair in Chicago (1893), together with the distribution of great quantities of printed matter; a monthly periodical, Mind and Body, started in March, 1894, has been issued regularly ever since;⁠[271] a summer school was held at Milwaukee under the auspices of the Turnerbund in 1895 and the three years following; and a “Text-book of German-American Gymnastics” was published in 1896.⁠[272]

For years the Turnvereine had provided classes for children of school age, directed by their own teachers of gymnastics and held in their own gymnasia. These enrolled 13,161 boys and 3888 girls in January of 1886, and ten years later the numbers had risen to 18,582 boys and 10,274 girls. But within the same decade of expansion (1886-1896) falls the introduction of physical training into the public school systems of many cities under the supervision of graduates from the Normal School of the Turnerbund. Among the very first to take such a step was Kansas City, Missouri, in 1885, and the career of Carl Betz, the man who proposed the action and himself directed the work during the next thirteen years, may be taken as typical of this phase of the second period in the history of German-American gymnastics.

His father and mother, both natives of Bavaria, came to America in 1843 and 1844, and were married at Baltimore in the latter year. Their second home was Belleville, Illinois, where the boy was born June 1, 1854. Two years afterwards they moved again, to St. Paul, and in this young capital the father’s social and political activity made him member of the common council and of the school-board, United States assessor, one of Minnesota’s Presidential electors, and a speaker (in German) in the Greeley campaign of 1872. Carl was educated in the public schools, and took one year of the high school course, but then discontinued his studies to enter a bank as office boy. Four years later he had advanced to the position of general bookkeeper and assistant teller. In April of 1875 he was employed as teacher of gymnastics by the St. Paul Turnverein, and the next autumn decided to fit himself further for the work by attending the Normal School of the Turnerbund, which had just been transferred to Milwaukee. The four-months’ course there was completed early in 1876, and for most of the decade following he was actively engaged in the practice of his new profession in various western societies—at South Bend, Indiana (1876-1877), Louisville, Kentucky (1877-1882), Terre Haute, Indiana (1882-1883), St. Paul again (1883-1884), and finally in the Socialer Turnverein of Kansas City, Missouri, beginning in January of 1885.

At a meeting of the Kansas City Teachers’ Institute on May 2, 1885, Mr. Betz was present with a class of a dozen girls and led them in a series of exercises with wands and Indian clubs which excited much interest. In the discussion that followed, the need of some sort of physical education in the schools was generally recognized. He assured the teachers that he could work out a plan which might be successfully introduced, and a motion was carried requesting him to do so. The result was a little pamphlet of eighteen pages, published by the Socialer Turnverein. The next October the School Board accepted his proposal to conduct gymnastic exercises in the public schools for three months without pay. Before the end of that period, however, on December 5, 1885, they appointed him director of physical training, and thus he was launched upon the career which ended only with his death, on April 28, 1898. During the last two years of his life he was also supervisor of music in the city schools. The executive committee of the Turnerbund made him a member of the committee which represented the German-American gymnastic societies at the second meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education (November 26, 1886, in Brooklyn), but the paper which he presented there, on the introduction of gymnastics into the public schools, does not appear in the published Proceedings of that year. Another, read at the sixth annual meeting (April 4, 1891, in Boston) describes the system and methods employed in Kansas City, and will be found, much abridged, in the corresponding volume of Proceedings. Mr. Betz was also director of the first summer school conducted under the auspices of the national Turnerbund, at its Normal School in Milwaukee (July 1 to August 10, 1895).

A letter written in 1887 explains his plan of instruction as follows: “On every Saturday the director of physical training drills the principals of the different ward schools. These in turn drill their assistants, the regular teachers, on every Monday. The assistants take up the new drill for the week on every Tuesday. The drill is obligatory, and is taken as any of the other studies. At ten o’clock all principals strike a gong, and at this signal all teachers take up the drill at once (daily). Thus at the same time all school children throughout the city have the same exercise. Each teacher is furnished with a manual of instruction, which clearly marks the work to be accomplished. The scholars, of course, do not leave the schoolroom.... As yet we have only free gymnastics, but as soon as possible dumb-bells, wands, poles, rings, and clubs will follow. Then gymnastic games and popular gymnastics will be taken up, and lastly heavy gymnastics on apparatus.” The little manual of instruction to which he refers was afterwards expanded into a System of Physical Culture in a Series of Four Books, i.e., Free Gymnastics (Kansas City, 1887), Gymnastic Tactics (1887), Light Gymnastics (1887), and Popular Gymnastics: Athletics and Sports of the Playground (1893). Later editions of these books, all more or less revised, were published in Chicago (A. Flanagan Co.). Additional volumes were planned, and even announced as “in preparation,” but never completed. The ones named were adopted as guides in the schools of numerous other cities, and also served as models for similar works prepared by fellow-graduates of the Normal School who occupied corresponding positions elsewhere.

Among the considerable number of cities which soon followed the example of Kansas City in introducing systematic instruction in gymnastics into the public schools under the direction of graduates from the Normal School of the Turnerbund were Chicago, in 1886, under Henry Suder (class of ’75); Davenport, Iowa, 1887, under William Reuter (’78); Cleveland, Ohio, 1887, under Karl Zapp (’75); St. Louis, 1890, under George Wittich (’82); Sandusky, Ohio, 1890, under Hans Ballin (’90); Columbus, Ohio, 1892, under Anton Leibold (’77); Cincinnati, Ohio, 1892, under Carl Ziegler (’86); Milwaukee, 1892, under Hans Rasmussen (’88); and Dayton, Ohio, 1892, under Robert Nohr (’90). Schoolroom manuals like those of Betz were published by Ballin, Leibold, and Rasmussen.⁠[273] Karl Kroh (’79) was head of the department of physical training in the Cook County, Illinois, Normal School 1891-1899, and in the University of Chicago School of Education 1901-1907. William A. Stecher (’81), after three years as supervisor of physical training in the public schools of Indianapolis (1904-1906), was appointed director of physical education in the Philadelphia schools in January of 1907; and in the same year George Wittich (’82), who had been successor to Brosius at the Normal School of the Turnerbund, became supervisor of physical training in the Milwaukee schools. Reports from societies to the National Executive Committee under date of January 1, 1920, show that in 51 cities 171 men and 91 women graduated from the Normal School of the Turnerbund (now known as the Normal College of the American Gymnastic Union) were employed as teachers in the public schools.

The varying fortunes of the Turnerbund since 1886 are suggested by the following table, compiled from statistical reports which reveal conditions in the constituent societies on January 1 of the year mentioned.

On January 1, 1920, there were also 2760 juniors (boys fourteen to eighteen years of age), 1904 older men, and 6565 women enrolled in classes; 123 in fencing, 971 in singing, and 283 in dramatic sections; and 6404 in the Women’s Auxiliary, organized at the time of the Twenty-seventh National Convention of the Turnerbund, held in Louisville, Kentucky, June 22-24, 1919, and intended to “unify as much as possible the efforts of the women’s societies connected with the gymnastic societies, and to increase their efficiency.” One hundred and forty-two societies owned their gymnasia, and the total value of the property of all societies was $6,842,224, of which amount $4,995,718 was free from debt.