Summertime is upon us, and for many that entails family barbecues, beach getaways, and plenty of outdoor festivals. For others, the thought of this time of year brings body anxiety and a perceived urgent desire to get in shape, bikini-ready, or become summertime fine. And no matter where you turn, there are fitness narratives and discourses influencing you to eat less and exercise more. But where did those idealized “beach bodies” come from, and which bodies get labeled “summertime fine”? Would it surprise you to know that those images we have in our minds stem from a racist history?

We have spent our careers studying the history of fitness in the United States. What we have found in our research is that our nation’s obsession with fitness did not come out of thin air; rather, we can trace it back to late 19th century physical education teachings.

By the turn of the 20th century, the term “fitness” was doing some heavy cultural work. During this time, as historian Shannon Walsh demonstrates, the “fitness” of American society was of utmost concern to many politicians, Progressive Era reformers, educators, and physicians, and was a core concern of the eugenics movement. Eugenic ideology positioned white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans of Northern European descent as the nation’s ideal “genetic stock,” whose reproduction should be encouraged and whose traits should define human excellence. Conversely, Black Americans, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Indigenous peoples, poor whites, and disabled individuals were constructed as threats to this racial purity, their bodies marked as degenerate and their reproduction as a danger to civilization.

The hygiene movement blended the language of public health with social reform and eugenics to improve the human race by promoting racial “purity” and limiting the breeding of the “unfit,” including through involuntary sterilization and segregationist policies.

The concept of fitness took on particular cultural relevance amidst fears about the purity of the white Anglo-Saxon population in relation to major demographic shifts happening across the country at that time. The influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and Asia, the emancipation of newly freed Black people, and the migration of rural Americans to cities all fed a growing concern that “old-stock” Americans would lose their majority status. This concern had a name: race suicide. The idea was that the more “civilized” race of native-born, Anglo-Saxon white Americans was allowing itself to be wiped out simply by not reproducing enough “old-stock” children. President Theodore Roosevelt popularized the notion of race suicide and gave speeches that promoted ways to avoid it. For instance, in 1905, Roosevelt gave a speech before the National Congress of Mothers, in which he encouraged mothers, with emphasis on college educated women, to avoid birth control and give birth to children to evade the perils of race suicide. However, it wasn’t simply the act of having babies that was being encouraged—the push was to have better white babies and fitter white families. Fitness practices were thus promoted for varying groups of Americans, with the activities advocated often mapping onto ranked beliefs about appropriate societal roles (by gender, social class, age, race) with the goal of cultivating a strong and “pure” American populace, one that was Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and white.

Our research shows that the emphasis on fitness became a primary site of scientific exploration, especially in the field of physical education. Early physical education (PE) leaders designed fitness curricula and research informed, in part, by the imperative of countering race suicide and preserving the status of whiteness. This goal was pursued in three ways: 1) promoting fitness as a practice of hygiene, 2) shaping fitness as a requirement for full membership in society, and 3) stitching fitness into the project of race betterment itself.

The first method of countering race suicide, promoting fitness as hygiene, was rooted in a broader Progressive Era campaign concerned with controlling disease, sickness, and the moral decay of the white Anglo-Saxon population through medicine, sanitation, behavioral regulation, and education. The hygiene movement blended the language of public health with social reform and eugenics to improve the human race by promoting racial “purity” and limiting the breeding of the “unfit,” including through involuntary sterilization and segregationist policies. Some early PE leaders, such as Stuart Rowe, Wiliam Burnham, and Thomas Storey, wrote on the importance of hygienic teaching and physical instruction and provided guidelines for efficient and competent training. Such rules included: separating the “abnormal and deficient” children from the normal ones until they are able to “cope with the work of their schoolmates”; exercising students in sanitized environments; and allowing time in physical education for “unhurried eating,” “the care of excretions,” and bathing. While these guidelines are seemingly race-neutral and arguably not “bad advice,” undertones of racial difference and Social Darwinism infused many discussions of hygiene as illustrated by Burnham’s statement that “physical education should be considered in the perspective of racial history, and appeal should be made to the fundamental instincts and to the interests that have developed out of them.” Dean of the Normal School of Physical Education, William Hastings, was even more explicit in his connection of racial hygiene and PE. He wrote on and lectured about “Racial Hygiene and Vigor,” framing racial hygiene as crucial to physical health and physical fitness as the foundation on which racial destiny is built. Hastings discussed how, for example, the Persians owed their greatness to “racial stock,” pride, and traditions of physical prowess. The Greeks, he claimed, channeled physical excellence and were praised for their muscular strength and skill. In comparison, he expressed grave concern about the racial mixing occurring in the US during this time, arguing that it would not produce strength, but an “unharmonious” and “unstable” individual who would become a “menace to society.” In his view, the role of the physical educators was to teach others about these dangers and advocate necessary preventive measures, including muscular exercise to sustain the organic vigor, racial hygiene, intellectuality, and moral capacity of white Anglo-Saxon Americans. In short, many physical educators designed the practice of fitness to complement and bolster the perceived biological superiority of the Anglo-Saxon population.

These fitness spaces were not born from a desire for universal health—they were born from fears of racial mixing, race degeneration, and race suicide, and they functioned to maintain the existing racial hierarchy.

The second way to avoid race suicide was by shaping fitness as a requirement to fully participate in civilization. During this period, Black Americans were rarely included in physical education research, and on the rare occasions they were, the focus was on whether their bodies could survive civilized life. At the time, it was widely presumed that human races evolved from “simple savagery” to advanced civilization, with only the white race having reached that civilized stage and Black people placed at the lowest rung of the evolutionary ladder. Drawing on these beliefs, physical educators leaned on scientific claims that Black people were naturally unfit and therefore unable to be fully integrated into society.

The final method of evading race suicide was rooted in the “Race Betterment” movement itself, a eugenic campaign that drew on biology, psychology, anthropology, and sociology to provide scientific ideas about how to improve the fitness of the race. Physical educators were key figures in this movement and regularly presented at Race Betterment conferences. Harvard professor and three-time president of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education, Dudley Sargent, for instance, argued that exercise for young white women was essential for building a larger pelvis, which he believed would determine whether a large, brainy child could be born. Similarly, Luther Gulick, the first president of the Playground Association of America and founding superintendent of physical training at the YMCA, championed bodily movement and play as crucial to the development of children. His mantra of “play for all” may sound inclusive, but it was rooted in Progressive Era solutions to race degeneracy. In practice, Gulick’s vision of “wholesomeness” and “universal betterment” was deeply exclusionary. For decades, the YMCA, the Boy Scouts of America, and the Camp Fire Girls were highly segregated institutions, and full integration did not come until after the civil rights movement. These fitness spaces were not born from a desire for universal health—they were born from fears of racial mixing, race degeneration, and race suicide, and they functioned to maintain the existing racial hierarchy.

What our findings make clear is that fitness, from its very inception, was never a neutral idea. It was born from deep anxieties about reversing what many believed to be the natural social order. Being fit was not about being slim, muscular, athletic, or even healthy—it was the answer to a perceived “race problem.” Through the measuring, standardizing, and teaching of fitness, early physical educators helped legitimize ideas about whose bodies were worthy, who deserved full participation in society, and ultimately, who counted as fully human. That is a heavy legacy. And while the overt racial language of eugenics has largely disappeared from fitness culture, the ideals, standards, and exclusions it produced have not. The next time you feel the pressure to get “beach ready” or measure yourself against some standard of physical perfection, it is worth asking: who created that standard, and who was it really made for? Fitness has always been political. It has always been racial. And until we reckon with that history, we will keep inheriting it.

This Futures Forum essay is a summary from original research conducted by Cornell University Postdoctoral Associate Tori Justin and University of Maryland Associate Professor Shannon Jette.