Every 100 Years America Produces a Robert Kennedy Jr.

The wrestling champion Bernarr Macfadden loved raw milk and cold plunges. He hated vaccines and despised white flour, which he called “dead food.” His greatest enemy after white flour was the American Medical Association. He thought that the sedentary weakness of the American people was a crime and that overeating was wicked, writing, “Hardly a home exists that is not made unhappy, to a greater or less extent, by this habit,” in a book called “Strength From Eating.”

“Strength From Eating” features a photograph of the muscleman flexing his veiny, highly articulated arm right before the preface, with the phrase “yours for health,” written in Macfadden’s distinctive cursive underneath the photo. Mr. Macfadden was a genius of self-promotion — he understood that flooding the zone with his ideas and his own scantily clad body via tabloids, magazines and radio was key to spreading his gospel.

A fit body like his own, his thinking went, was a moral body. A person could ward off all manner of deadly diseases without medical intervention as long as they took care of their individual health. According to a biography of Mr. Macfadden called “Mr. America” by Mark Adams, “Vaccination, or as Mr. Macfadden saw it, the unnecessary pumping of dead germs into the bloodstream, was lunacy.”

Mr. Macfadden’s ideas are served to millions of people every day via social media health influencers in the year 2025, but he is not of the internet era. He was born in 1868, and he was arguably the most prominent proponent of alternative health practices from around 1900 until after World War II. He found common ground with politicians like Franklin Roosevelt and Hollywood celebrities like Rudolph Valentino. It is impossible to read about Mr. Macfadden — who was using the term “medical freedom” in 1920 — without thinking about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our new secretary of health and human services, and the raw-milk-drinking, vaccine-skeptical, psychedelic-loving Make America Healthy Again movement that has coalesced around him.

On the first day of his confirmation hearings, Mr. Kennedy described battling the ill health of our nation’s children in much the same way Mr. Macfadden did, as a moral crusade: “It is a spiritual issue and it is a moral issue. We cannot live up to our role as an exemplary nation, as a moral authority around the world, and we’re writing off an entire generation of kids.”

For a long time, I thought the MAHA movement was simply anti-institutional. But that explanation falls apart upon examination, because the medical establishment has long argued for clean air, clean water and better access to healthy food. I have never met a doctor who doesn’t stress regular exercise. Many people have pointed out that Michelle Obama was concerned about childhood obesity just as Mr. Kennedy is and used her platform to encourage Americans to eat healthily and move their bodies.