1936: Days of Physical Culture
December 28, 2018
By AHNZ
November/December, 1936: Jack Lovelock (died today, 1949) tours New Zealand on the back of his success at the Berlin Olympics (August ’36.) He has made a great celebrity of himself for his achievement during a time when The West was in the midst of one of our periodic romances with Physical Culture.
Physical Culture
“In Action at Wellington… Just look at the crowds”
“You don’t see crowds like that pretty much at most live sporting events like that today except the Olympics or the Com games”
Comments, Richard’s New Zealand
Those days will come again. It’s a big crowd because these people are in the midst of one of our ‘Physical Culture Crazes’ that pop up every 20 years or so.
Currently we’re in a prior phase that will dovetail into times like the above again. During a time of Physical Culture there is an emphasis on masculinity and femininity and emphasising the physical differences. Right now, 2018, the mainstream discourse emphasises the sameness of everyone. What we have now is so unprecedented, even to the point of pretending men and women are interchangeable, that the counter-culture to come will be equally and oppositely extreme.
In a future post I’ll be exploring a couple of these historic phases by exploring the previous cycle to the above (Sandow) and the one from our living memory (Schwarzenegger.) Looking forward to that.
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Image ref. Auckland Weekly News; Wikipedia; Mad on Collections
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