Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics

3. The Professionalization of Physical Culture: Making and Measuring Whiteness

55 • 3 The Professionalization of Physical Culture making and measuring whiteness Race is not an attribute that inheres in bodies, but rather attaches itself to bodies through the ideological and material work of things like law, medicine, science, economy, education, literature, social science, public policy, and popular culture. laura briggs “The Race of Hysteria: ‘overcivilization’ and the ‘Savage’ Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century obstetrics and gynecology” At the same time as Civil War physicians and statisticians were inscribing pathology onto the bodies of African Americans, midcentury physical culturalists took up spirometric measurement. Enmeshed in the spirit of religious revivalism, physical culture was a social movement centered on cultivation of the fitness of a white race that was beset with anxieties about mass immigration from ireland and southern and eastern Europe. According to historian David Roediger, “the state of ‘conclusive’ whiteness” that played out in various social domains “was approached gradually and messily.”1 What role did anthropometry and the physiological sciences play in ordering this messiness? for more than half a century, physical culturalists systematically collected data on lung capacity of male and female students, most of them white. in the domain of physical culture—later formalized as the ProfessIonalIzatIon of PhysIcal culture 56 • physical education—spirometric measurement focused on the measurement and hierarchical ordering of white bodies. guiding individual physical training plans and serving the lofty goal of measuring “the typical man”—of a decidedly Anglo-Saxon variety—anthropometry would be crucial to conferring scientific legitimacy on the field of physical education. Later in the century, lung capacity measurements would flourish at women’s colleges, measuring the “typical” woman—again understood to be of an Anglo-Saxon sort. The story of how and why spirometric measurement became part of the project of whiteness begins at midcentury with the promotion of physical culture at Amherst College in western Massachusetts. Physical culture and amherst college in 1854, the board of trustees of Amherst College persuaded William Augustus Stearns, pastor of the Church of Cambridgeport in eastern Massachusetts, to become the fourth president of this small rural college. During his tenure, Stearns would consolidate Amherst’s reputation as an educational center for the promotion of Christian piety , scientific excellence, and Anglo-Saxon manhood.2 His leadership saw the establishment of three new academic departments—biblical History and interpretation, Mathematics and Astronomy, and Hygiene and Physical Education—each supported by a new building dedicated to the discipline. Established in 1821 as an alternative to boston’s Unitarianism (especially at Harvard), Amherst College was for the next half century a site of religious orthodoxy, revivalism, and scientific innovation . Among the estimated eight revivals between 1855 and 1870, the “great Revival of 1858” had a particularly powerful impact at Amherst in spiritually aligning the faculty and students. in his History of Amherst College, W. S. Tyler quotes Stearns on the significance of this revival for faculty–student relations: The year past has been characterized, on the part of the students, by general good order, industry, docility, and a manifest disposition to do well. . . . The students appear not only more attentive to religious meetings, and more generally correct in Christian deportment , but to have much more confidence in the faculty and a greater desire to conform cheerfully to their requirements.3 Like other pious reformers, Stearns believed that full development of mind and body could not be trusted solely to prayer. Christian the ProfessIonalIzatIon of PhysIcal culture 57 • duty required care of the body as well as the soul. A systematic training of the minds, bodies, and souls of young men from local farms and artisan shops shaped his term in office.4 from the beginning of his presidency, Stearns expressed concern to the trustees about “breaking down of the health” of students during their sedentary college years. “No one thing,” Stearns told the trustees, “has demanded more of my anxious attention . . . the waning of the physical energies in the midway of the College course is almost the rule rather than the exception among us, and cases of complete breaking down are painfully numerous.” initially, he proposed a series of lectures on “the laws of health” to address the problem.5 by 1859, he argued that “immediate and efficient action on this subject” was necessary. in response to his 1859 report, a committee established by the board of trustees recommended the construction of an indoor gymnasium. The following year the trustees voted to establish...