328 The Journal of American History
amounts in a few hospitals and pharmacies.
Except in rare circumstances, nobody was pre-
scribing heroin for anything after 1924.
Nobody was legally smoking opium, ei-
ther. The 1924 heroin ban amended a 1909
federal law barring imports of opium prepared
for smoking. As early as 1875, municipalities
had outlawed opium dens and smoking. By
1914 most states had imposed similar bans,
and significantly tightened their narcotic pre-
scription laws. One state, New York, placed so
many restrictions on cocaine that only minute
amounts could be legally distributed. By 1924
the federal government had also shuttered the
public “maintenance” clinics that provided
narcotics to addicts, thereby forcing them into
the black market. Looking at all levels of gov-
ernment, early twentieth-century drug policy
was more militant and more frankly grounded
in the police power than Frydl allows.
Put differently, America’s wars on non­
medical drug use, including the nonmedical
use of alcoholic beverages, were born in the
Progressive Era. Fast-forwarding through the
reform backstory to postwar bureaucratic and
diplomatic intrigues blurs foundational mo-
tives and legal continuities. Where Frydl suc-
ceeds is in reminding readers that policy for
drugs such as marijuana and heroin further
hardened during the mid-twentieth century in
ways that contributed to political ends broader
than those outlined in the statutes.
David T. Courtwright
University of North Florida
Jacksonville, Florida
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jau208
Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture
in America. By Shelly McKenzie. (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2013. x, 254 pp.
$34.95.)
Early twenty-first-century conceptions of
physical fitness are often assumed to be sci-
entific truths that individuals ignore at their
own peril. Shelly McKenzie’s Getting Physical
reveals that these truths have a specific cul-
tural history encompassing a range of un-
derstandings and experiences of the fit body
from the 1950s to the present. Focusing on
June 2014
the invention of fitness culture in the postwar
period, McKenzie details the racial, class, and
gendered conceptions of exercise across this
time—conceptions that have made fitness a
key part of American national identity. That
this history corresponds with an age of in-
creasing American affluence is no coincidence.
McKenzie identifies the growing social, politi-
cal, and cultural investment in physical well-
ness as a largely white, middle-class concern,
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stemming from sedentary postwar life-styles
and increasingly figured as an individualized
responsibility. Describing the problem these
Americans faced, she asks, “How could they
enjoy the fruits of postwar affluence while also
managing their bodies for optimal health?”
(p. 2).
Proceeding chronologically from initial
explorations of fitness through the present-
day interest in yoga, Getting Physical draws
upon a diverse archive to construct what can
be an elusive history. The papers of the Presi-
dent’s Council on Physical Fitness are central
to understanding the Cold War origins of fit-
ness culture, but McKenzie constructs most
of her analysis through mining the popular
press, including specialized publications such
as those directed at runners, as well as popu-
lar ephemera such as fitness books and televi-
sion programs. These materials help make fit-
ness culture as experienced by the American
public come alive. Paired chapters on mid­
century gendered differences in the promo-
tion of commercial exercise shed new light on
long-standing assumptions about the pressures
of physical attractiveness women faced and the
worries about men’s health born by both sex-
es. McKenzie’s analysis of the cultures of jog-
ging, running, and health clubs also offers new
insights: among them that jogging was an ac-
tivity of older adults in the 1960s well before
it became a popular trend among the young
in the 1970s, and that health club culture in
the 1980s became a crucial community space
for many, not least for gay men, connected
by concern for the body growing out of both
clone culture and the ravages of aids (acquired
immune deficiency syndrome).
These five chapters tell a detailed story,
beautifully illustrated with period photo-
graphs. Importantly, McKenzie offers repeated
reminders of the exclusionary nature of much
 Book Reviews
fitness culture, with those citizens who do not
fit white, middle-class ideals left out by gov-
ernment and commercial forces alike. One of
the most compelling insights in Getting Physi-
cal is the vast range of beliefs about physical
fitness, health, and exercise that held great
sway for a relatively brief period, demonstrat-
ing the variability of scientific expertise. Be-
cause of this, the epilogue, “The Future of Fit-
ness,” rings a bit false, presenting present-day
knowledge about exercise and health as uncon-
testable truth, whereas the historical perspec-
tive offered suggests this may not be so.
Elana Levine
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jau259
Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry,
and American Culture, 1945–1970. By Martin
Halliwell. (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press, 2013. xvi, 382 pp. $62.50.)
Martin Halliwell is a professor of American
studies at the University of Leicester, United
Kingdom, and was the eighteenth Chair of
the British Association for American Studies.
He has published widely in the field of Ameri-
can thought and culture, and he is well suited
to contribute to the field on the topic of medi-
cine, psychiatry, and culture. Focusing on the
years from 1945 to 1970, Halliwell traces the
“broad trend away from large, state-run hospi-
tals and normative models of health to a more
pluralistic model of health care and organic
interpersonal language to describe health and
illness” (p. 204). To make his case, he uses
films, poetry, and literature as well as influ-
ential publications in sociology, psychology,
psychiatry, and medicine. He contextualizes
the changes in health care, framing them in
relation to federal initiatives and presidential
goals for health care.
The book is organized chronologically and
laid out in three sections that trace postwar
“therapeutic revolutions.” Halliwell intention-
ally uses the plural to indicate two kinds of
change: one in which medical authority was
reinforced “in the name of helping individu-
als feel secure and content” and the other in
which that same authority was challenged (p.
329
5). This distinction is central to his argument
as he sees the two revolutions as “intersecting”
and “cyclical” (ibid.). He begins the book with
demobilization narratives and film noir, argu-
ing that the authority of medicine and govern-
ment grew in response to Cold War fears even
as a “seam of distrust for authority” opened si-
multaneously (p. 108). He then explores the
Dwight D. Eisenhower years, examining simi-
lar tensions created by the competing demands
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of a healthy work force and corporations, the
medicalization of the family, and rising fears
about delinquency. In the last section, which
covers the years 1961 to 1970, he describes
improvements and challenges to institutional
care, the rise of humanistic or person-centered
psychology with the work of Abraham Maslow
and Carl Rogers, and countercultural critiques
of psychiatry, including alternative therapeutic
communities such as free clinics.
In each case, Halliwell delineates the place
of medicine and psychiatry in American cul-
ture. He gives voice to medical professionals
in close readings of central works such as Erik
H. Erikson’s Identity and the Life Cycle (1959).
But he also illustrates the perception of medi-
cine and psychiatry by drawing examples from
film and literature such as Ken Kesey’s novel
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and its
critique of psychiatric institutions.
The breadth and depth of the research and
his command of the secondary literature are
prodigious, but two problems hamper the ef-
fectiveness of Halliwell’s argument. First, the
book is not tightly argued. Instead, Halliwell
lays out a series of related examples drawn
from a variety of perspectives—government
officials, medical professionals, novelists, or
film producers—that give a strong impres-
sion of his argument without making explicit
connections between ideas. Second, the book
would have benefitted from a more careful ed-
iting. Editorial errors detract from the experi-
ence of reading the book. Halliwell, nonethe-
less, makes an important contribution to our
understanding of medical authority and the
rise of a humanistic perspective in postwar
health care.
Susan E. Myers-Shirk
Middle Tennessee State University
Murfreesboro, Tennessee
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jau275