In 1869, eighteen years after the introduction of the Young Men’s Christian Association into America, the first Association buildings to contain gymnasia were dedicated, in San Francisco and New York, and in the latter city William Wood took up his duties as the first director of an Association gymnasium. By the close of another eighteen years, when the number of gymnasia reported had increased to 168, and the paid directors to 50, it had become apparent that steps must be taken to provide adequately trained leaders for this phase of work in individual Associations and some sort of general oversight for the whole country. Accordingly in 1887 a department of physical training was added to the Young Men’s Christian Association Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, a summer school for gymnasium directors was opened at that institution, and the International Committee established a department for supervision of the physical work with a special secretary at its head. Luther H. Gulick, a young student who had just finished his first year in the medical department of New York University, was chosen to fill the office thus created, and was also made one of two instructors in the new department at the Springfield Training School. The other, Robert Jeffries Roberts, was a veteran of twelve years’ experience as director of the gymnasium at the Boston Young Men’s Christian Association, and at that period the most influential and widely known teacher of gymnastics engaged in Association work.

His colleagues in the earlier days had been drawn in many cases from the ranks of professional gymnasts, trained in difficult and showy feats of strength and skill. William Wood, an Englishman born in December, 1819, had conducted a private gymnasium in New York for thirty years before he was called upon to superintend the equipment and exercises in the new Twenty-third Street building (1869-1889).⁠[274] At the Brooklyn Association in the eighties was James Douglas Andrews, born in Kilmarnock, Scotland, July 25, 1839, who became proficient in gymnastics and athletics under the tuition of the Huguenins in London, and for nearly a score of years had been in charge of private and other gymnasia in Glasgow, Belfast, Ottawa, Toronto, and at various points on the Pacific coast. John C. Doldt, of the Providence Association, was the first manager and instructor at the Tremont Gymnasium, on the corner of Eliot and Tremont Streets in Boston (opened in 1859), and afterwards travelled about the country as a professional athlete. Roberts himself had come under the influence of Doldt and of Dr. George Barker Winship, a graduate of Harvard College and Medical School, who went about lecturing on physical culture and giving exhibitions of heavy lifting in the sixties, and whose interesting “Autobiographical Sketches of a Strength-Seeker,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, have already been mentioned (p. 258).

It was such models as these that Roberts sought to copy during his own years of apprenticeship. Born in England June 29, 1849, he was brought to America in early infancy, and thereafter resided in Boston with the exception of three years in Springfield and Utica (1887-1890). He nearly completed the course of study at the Phillips Street Grammar School, at fifteen entered the service of the Western Union Telegraph Company, first as messenger boy and afterwards as delivery clerk, and finally gave up this position to earn his living by the wood-turner’s trade. Primarily to escape from the evil influences of the streets, he joined the Tremont Gymnasium in 1864, and a few years later was both exercising and giving instruction at the Union Gymnasium, 300 Washington Street, and also visiting Dr. Winship’s gymnasium across the way, next door to the Boston Theater. When the Young Men’s Christian Association bought out the Tremont Gymnasium, in 1872, he continued his membership there, and now made it his practice to go two nights a week each, in regular rotation, to the Union, Association, and Winship gymnasia. In 1875, having determined to devote himself to the new calling, he asked to be made superintendent of the Association gymnasium, and on the first of July began to discharge the duties of that position.

A list of his best performances at about this time will serve to show the aims and results of the strenuous course of discipline to which Roberts had subjected himself hitherto. Although only five feet five inches high, he weighed 145 pounds and had a 43-inch chest, 32-inch waist, 23-inch thigh, 14½-inch calf, and 15-inch upper arm. With a yoke on his shoulders he lifted 2200 pounds, could rise from a lying to a sitting posture while holding a 100-pound weight back of his neck, push up a 120-pound dumb-bell with each hand, pull himself up to the chin 3 times with either hand and 35 times with both, had covered more than 12 feet in one broad jump and 35 feet in three, cleared 4 feet 6 inches in a standing high jump from either side, 5 feet 4 inches in a leap with running start, and 9 feet with the pole, put the 16-pound shot 35 feet right and left, threw the 16-pound hammer 70 feet, walked a mile in less than eight minutes and 6 miles an hour, ran 100 yards in eleven seconds and 5 miles in thirty minutes, had learned to box and wrestle, and was a good swimmer and oarsman.

But this is not the type of work which Roberts advocated in 1887, when he was called from Boston to Springfield, or for which he is remembered in Association circles today. After a few years of experience, he says, it began to dawn upon him that health did not necessarily improve as strength increased, and that the Winship plan of heavy lifting was not calculated to yield “the greatest good to the greatest number, physically speaking,” any more than the Dio Lewis exercises, which he considered too light and easy. “I noticed when I taught slow, heavy, fancy, and more advanced work in acrobatics, gymnastics, athletics, etc.,” he writes,⁠[275] “that I would have a very large membership at the first of the year, but that they would soon drop out because they could not do the work, and ... the weak members would not renew the next season.... I give most of my attention to those who need it most, the beginners and those who cannot for various reasons do the more advanced work. By ... pushing simple work I can get more men to go into it, and find it easier to find leaders to teach it, and also can run more classes in a day.... In competitive work and the harder kind of safe exercises ... the men leave the classes and become spectators, but when I teach easier work the crowd do the work and the few look on.” He was also led to emphasize trunk exercises rather than those of the legs and arms, in order to influence respiration and circulation favorably and keep the abdominal organs in a condition of healthy activity; and special attention was given to those muscles which expand the chest, draw back the head and shoulders, and hold the body erect.

According to the Roberts “platform,” as it came to be known, all exercises should be “safe, short, easy, beneficial, and pleasing.” They must be safe for the man who does them, i.e., well within the limits of his capacity at the time. When apparatus is employed such work must be selected that the members of the squad or class follow each other rapidly, without tedious waits. No exercise must represent more than a slight advance over others which have preceded it. Each “must serve some definite and useful end,” instead of being chosen at random and with nothing in mind beyond the mere desire to keep the class busy. It must give pleasure if it is to exert its full effect and not degenerate into a sort of monotonous and mechanical “grind.” These principles found illustration in the Roberts Dumb-bell Drill, the Home Dumb-bell Drill, and the little volume of Classified Gymnasium Exercises, with Notes,⁠[276] which were very generally used in Association gymnasia thirty years ago.

While he was still in Boston Roberts had been conducting a sort of training school, and during the years 1885-1887 25 or 30 men went out from his gymnasium to become instructors. At Springfield the summer session of 1887 (six weeks) was attended by 24 men, or 48 per cent of the whole number then engaged in Association work; that of 1888 (July 17 to August 21) by 50 men; and the third, in 1889 (June 30 to July 31), by 57 men. At the regular sessions of the Training School there were 5 juniors and 1 senior in the Gymnasium Department in the year 1887-1888, and 6 juniors and 2 seniors in 1888-1889. After two years in Springfield Roberts resigned to take charge of a new Association gymnasium in Utica, New York, but the next year (1890) accepted an invitation to return to his old position in Boston, where he continued his activities as teacher almost to the day of his death, December 22, 1920. Together with several assistants he conducted four-weeks summer courses there in July of 1893 and 1894, himself giving instruction in the system of floor work which he had made so widely popular.⁠[277]

Luther Halsey Gulick, associated with Roberts at the Springfield Training School in 1887-1889, was superintendent of its physical department for twelve years (1889-1900), and for sixteen years special secretary charged with supervision of the physical work in the Young Men’s Christian Associations of North America, under the International Committee—the first man to be appointed to such a position. He was the third son and fifth child of Dr. Luther Halsey Gulick, a missionary located for a time in the Hawaiian Islands, and was born in Honolulu December 4, 1865.⁠[278] The first fifteen years of the boy’s life were far from monotonous. In 1870 the father was called to New England, to act as a temporary district secretary of the American Board, and here his family soon joined him. Late in 1871, upon the Board’s decision to undertake missionary work in Roman Catholic countries, they sailed for Spain, to make their home in Barcelona for two years and a half. August of 1873 found them settled in Florence, but the closing of the mission in Italy the next year was followed by Dr. Gulick’s return to the United States, and in 1875 he accepted a call to become the agent of the American Bible Society in China and Japan, with headquarters in Yokohama. Meanwhile the family had remained in Europe for six months after his own departure for America, and now Mrs. Gulick and four of the children were left behind in California, and did not follow him to Japan until 1877. Three years later Luther Halsey, Jr., again crossed the Pacific, to make his home for a time with an older sister whose husband had just been appointed to a professorship in Oberlin College.

Two uncles had graduated from Williams College, and his two older brothers, Sidney Lewis and Edward Leeds, completed the course at Dartmouth in 1883, but his own desire for a college education was not to be gratified. Although he was enrolled in the preparatory department of Oberlin College during a part, at least, of the school years 1880-1882 and 1883-1884, severe headaches which now made their appearance rendered continuous application to study impossible and finally compelled a change of plan. He had entered the middle preparatory class in the fall of 1885, but was taking some work in the college department and rooming with a sophomore, Thomas D. Wood, now Dr. Wood of Teachers College, Columbia University. What happened just at this time may be told in his own words.⁠[279] “The advent of one of Dr. Sargent’s graduates, Miss Delphine Hanna, now Dr. Hanna, had brought to our minds in a more vivid way then ever before, that there was really such a thing as scientific teaching of gymnastics, genuine body building. We had both of us been very much interested in the gymnastics and athletics of the college, had identified ourselves thoroughly with all the work that was going on in these lines, and had read as far as we were able what had been written on the subject at that time. Blaikie’s How to Get Strong, particularly the chapter entitled ‘What a Gymnasium Might Be and Do,’ filled us with enthusiasm. One Sunday afternoon we took a long walk out into the woods, and sitting beside a rail fence (I can picture the situation even now), we looked forward to the future of physical training. We spoke of the relation of good bodies to good morals, we thought of the relation of bodily training to mental training.... The glimpse which we secured that day of the future has remained ... a prophecy of the work which each of us was to do....”

His own course thus determined upon, Gulick at once left Oberlin for Cambridge, Mass., to spend the winter in Dr. Sargent’s Normal School of Physical Training. On April first following (1886) he began his professional career, as superintendent of the gymnasium with the Young Men’s Christian Association of Jackson, Michigan; but withdrew from this position the next fall in order to take up the study of medicine at the University of New York, from which his father had graduated thirty-six years before. For six weeks in July and August of 1887, together with Robert J. Roberts, he conducted the first summer school for directors of Association gymnasia, at the Springfield, Massachusetts, Training School, and these two men constituted the special teaching staff of the department of physical training which was added to the school at this time and opened its first regular session on Armory Hill early in September of the same year. The next month the International Committee secured a part of his time for the task of supervising the physical side of Association work in the country at large. Meanwhile his medical studies in New York were continued, and completed in 1889. He also served in 1887-1888 as medical examiner at the Twenty-third Street Association, where William Wood was still superintendent of the gymnasium, and during a part of the New York period was in charge of the physical training at a girls’ school in Harlem.

For thirteen years, until the close of the school year 1899-1900, Dr. Gulick retained his position at the International Young Men’s Christian Association Training School in Springfield, after 1888 as superintendent of the physical department and during most of the time as instructor in the history and philosophy of physical training. The service under the International Committee was continuous from October of 1887 until his appointment as director of physical training in the public schools of Greater New York, in 1903. The problem that confronted him was twofold—first to find and train new men for the physical directorship and to unite and guide and stimulate those already in the field; and second to develop a type and methods of work suited to Association conditions. In 1887 there were only 50 “superintendents” and 3 assistants employed in the 168 gymnasia reported by American Associations. By 1900 the number had increased to 244 physical directors and 22 assistants, in 491 gymnasia, and nearly 80,000 men and 20,000 boys were being reached by physical agencies. The regular course at the Springfield Training School covered two years until 1895, when it was extended to three, and meanwhile, in 1890, a second and independent institution of similar sort had been incorporated in Chicago. For five years, from 1887 through 1891, summer courses, lasting from four to six weeks, were given at the Training School, and attended, respectively, by 25, 50, 57, 33, and 23 men. A western section, at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in July of 1890, had an attendance of 16. These were succeeded by summer “conferences,” more informal and intended for directors already in the work, which met for a week or ten days each year from 1892 through 1895. In 1896 and thereafter the conferences were held under the auspices of the International Committee. Additional educative means were the correspondence courses for physical directors, first offered by the Training School in the fall of 1891 and continued for four years, and the monthly Athletic League Letter, beginning in November of 1898. The Physical Directors’ Society of the Young Men’s Christian Associations of North America was organized during a conference held at Lakewood, on Chautauqua Lake, New York, June 16-18, 1903.

The relation of physical training to Association work as a whole, and the type and methods suited to Association conditions, Dr. Gulick considered in a paper on “Our New Gymnastics,” read at the Twenty-eighth International Convention (Philadelphia, May 11, 1889), and one on “The Distinctive Features of the Physical Work in the Association” at the Twenty-ninth Convention (Kansas City, May 9, 1891). He urged that man is a unit, that the Associations “are working for young men, not simply for their bodies, minds and souls, but for the salvation, development and training of the whole man complete as God made him,” and that physical education therefore forms a vital part of the Association program. The objects of exercise and the sorts needed in Association gymnasia were discussed at the first and second summer conferences of physical directors (1892 and 1893) and in the columns of Physical Education for May, 1892, and January and October, 1893. He furnished the chapter on the Physical Department for a “Hand-Book of the History, Organization and Methods of Work of Young Men’s Christian Associations,” issued by the International Committee in 1892 (pp. 297-339), and presented the claims of “The Physical Directorship of the Young Men’s Christian Association as a Life Work” in a pamphlet published by that body in 1890.

A desire to render anthropometric methods uniform and useful resulted in a “Manual for Physical Measurements in connection with Association Gymnasium Records,” which was ready in 1892. An anthropometric chart was also compiled and published. He read a paper on “The Value of Percentile Grades” before the American Statistical Association February 10, 1893, and for Volumes II and III of Physical Education (November, 1893, to January 1895), prepared a series of articles on “Physical Measurements and How They Are Studied.” In connection with the summer conferences various “hygienic drills” and lists of exercises on apparatus suitable for Association use were elaborated. James Naismith, an instructor at the Training School, invented basket ball in the autumn of 1891 to meet the need of a good indoor game, and it was described in the Triangle, the school paper, for January 15, 1892. To promote all-around development a Pentathlon, comprising the hundred-yard dash, throwing the twelve-pound hammer, the running high jump, the pole vault, and the mile run, was recommended, with a scheme for uniform scoring. Some years of agitation and discussion led in 1895 to the formation of the Athletic League of Young Men’s Christian Associations of North America, designed primarily “to band together those who feel that athletics are often large elements in the formation of character, and to arrange for them lines of coöperation;” and “to foster a better spirit of manliness in connection with these activities that will banish from them the discourtesy and dishonesty by which they have been too often disgraced.” The first official handbook of the League was issued in 1897.

Gymnastic therapeutics formed the subject of a course of lectures given at the Thousand Islands Conference in 1900, and a series of articles published in Volumes I and II of Physical Training (November, 1901, to April, 1903); and material prepared originally for classes at the Training School and for the Athletic League Letter appeared later under the title “Physical Education by Muscular Exercise” as Part II of the seventh volume (“Mechanotherapy”) in A System of Physiologic Therapeutics, edited by Dr. S. S. Cohen (Philadelphia, 1904). The duty and opportunity of the Association in its relation to boys was emphasized at the Mobile, Alabama, Convention in 1897, in Volumes VII and VIII of the Association Outlook (1897-1899), and before the Physical Directors’ Conference at Dayton, Ohio, in June of 1899. Other studies led to papers on “Some Psychical Aspects of Muscular Exercise” (Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly, October, 1898) and “Psychological, Pedagogical, and Religious Aspects of Group Games” (Pedagogical Seminary, March, 1899). How indefatigable was Dr. Gulick’s pen may be gathered from the bare enumeration of the periodicals which he employed successively as a regular means of expression: The Physical Department of the Young Men’s Era (1890, to September 1), the Triangle (February, 1891, to January 15, 1892), Physical Education (March, 1892, to July, 1896), International Training School Notes and Association Outlook (January to July, 1897), the Association Outlook and Training School Notes (October, 1898, to July, 1900, two volumes), and Physical Training (November, 1901, to June, 1903, two volumes). He was also editor of the American Physical Education Review from June of 1901 through 1903.⁠[280]

In the summer of 1890 the Springfield Training School, hitherto a department of Rev. David Allen Reed’s “School for Christian Workers,” was separately incorporated under the name “Young Men’s Christian Association Training School,” changed early the next year to “International Young Men’s Christian Association Training School,” and in the spring of 1891 thirty acres of land bordering on Massasoit Lake, on the outskirts of Springfield, were secured as a site for future buildings. A gymnasium, the first structure erected on the new grounds, was completed in the summer of 1894 and formally opened October 26, a dormitory and recitation hall was added in 1896, Woods Hall, a social center, in 1904, Pratt Field in 1910, the west gymnasium in 1911, and a library and a natatorium in 1913. Dr. James Huff McCurdy, who was to become Gulick’s successor as director of the physical course, joined the staff in the fall of 1895, and at that time the course of study and practice was extended to cover three years. In 1905 the Massachusetts Legislature authorized the school to confer the degrees bachelor and master of physical education (B.P.E. and M.P.E.), and in April, 1912, its name was changed to “International Young Men’s Christian Association College.” Three years later the trustees voted to make the course for physical directors a four-year one, beginning in September of 1916.

At a secretaries’ conference held in Montreal in June of 1884 the plan of a permanent summer camp and “institute” was proposed, and in August, while a number of Association men were together at Camp Collie, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, a committee settled upon that lake as the site of such a camp, adopting the name “Western Secretarial Institute.” Land was purchased in the spring of 1886 and on the 6th of October the institute was incorporated under the laws of Wisconsin. July 1-29, 1890, a summer school for physical directors was held on the camp grounds, under the auspices of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Training School and the direction of Dr. Luther H. Gulick. Meanwhile, on June 28 of the same year, the “Young Men’s Christian Association Training School” (Chicago) had been incorporated, with the object of training young men for the duties of general secretary, physical director, and other Association officers. It opened its first two-year course September 10th, in rooms of the Central Young Men’s Christian Association, 148 Madison Street, with Dr. E. L. Hayford “principal of the physical department,” and in 1891 and following summers conducted at Lake Geneva courses similar to those given there in July of 1890. In May of 1896 the Chicago school and the Lake Geneva Institute were consolidated under the title “Secretarial Institute and Training School of Young Men’s Christian Associations,” changed to “Institute and Training School of Young Men’s Christian Associations” in 1903, and ten years later to “Young Men’s Christian Association College.” The summer school at Lake Geneva was made an integral part of the Training School, i.e., a required summer term, in 1901, and the course for physical directors became a three-year one in the fall of 1908. The purchase of a block of land lying between Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth Streets and Drexel and Ingleside Avenues, as a site for an independent College home, was announced early in 1912, and the new building erected there (5315 Drexel Avenue) was formally dedicated November 30, 1915. George W. Ehler was principal of the physical department 1892-1897, John W. Shaw 1897-1900, and Dr. Winfield S. Hall 1900-1903. Dr. Henry F. Kallenberg, who had been assistant principal since 1896, then became director of the department of physical training, and retained the position until the fall of 1917, when he was succeeded by Martin I. Foss.

January 1, 1898, the International Committee added to the part-time services of Dr. Gulick as secretary for the Physical Department the whole time of George T. Hepbron, whose chief task was to promote the Athletic League. Hepbron resigned in 1905, and the next year Dr. George J. Fisher was called to the position from the physical directorship of the Brooklyn, New York, Association. He was already serving as president of the Physical Directors’ Society of the Young Men’s Christian Associations of North America and editor of its official organ, Physical Training, which had resumed publication under the new auspices in November of 1905 (Volume III. Volumes I and II had been published by Dr. Gulick at Springfield between November, 1901, and June, 1903). A second secretary, Dr. John Brown, Jr., was added to the department in June of 1910, and a third, William H. Ball, in November of the same year. Dr. Fisher resigned November 1, 1919, to become Deputy Scout Executive of the Boy Scouts of America, and Dr. Brown then became senior secretary. The years since 1900 have seen the influence of the Associations reaching beyond the bounds of their own membership into the community at large. Work for boys, as well as young men, has been organized, and leadership has been furnished to a great variety of social agencies providing physical training and working for health betterment—to playgrounds, Sunday-school athletic leagues, swimming campaigns, summer camps, etc., etc. A handbook of “Physical Work: Management and Methods” was compiled by a special committee of the Physical Directors’ Society and published in 1913 (New York, Association Press). This served as the basis of discussion at an eight-day conference held early in the following year, out of which grew a new volume, “Physical Education in the Young Men’s Christian Associations of North America,” issued in 1914 (New York, Association Press), and revised and republished under the same title in 1920 (New York, Association Press). Chapter ten in the latest revision describes briefly the very great service rendered by the physical department of the Young Men’s Christian Associations in organizing recreative work during the Great War, in army camps and naval stations at home and among the allied troops in Europe.⁠[281] The Physical Directors’ Society has held annual conferences since 1903 (except in 1917 and 1920), and has continued the publication of Physical Training (monthly, except July and August) since November of 1905.

The number of Associations reporting attention to physical training, through gymnasia or other means, the number of members participating, and the number of physical directors and assistants employed, as reported in the Year-Books, have been as follows:

The number of swimming pools increased from 151 in 1905 to 293 in 1910 and 610 in 1920; and the number of athletic fields from 143 in 1905 to 205 in 1920. The Year-Book covering the period from May 1, 1919, to April 30, 1920 reports 151,209 men and 157,772 boys enrolled in regular classes at the Association gymnasia, 2927 men and 6469 boys in leaders’ clubs, 916 leaders in community service, and 107,580 persons aided by this community service. Nine summer schools for physical directors were held in 1920, attended as follows: Springfield, Mass. (86 men); Silver Bay, N. Y. (101); Blue Ridge, N. C. (45); Lake Geneva, Wis. (100); Hollister, Mo. (14); Estes Park, Colo. (20); Asilomar, Calif. (34); Seabeck, Wash. (16); and Lake Couchiching, Ontario (43).