FITNESS AND FREEDOM

What does it mean to be "fit"? Is it to have the physical stamina and skills necessary to excel in competitive athletics? To have succeeded in developing an extraordinarily muscled physique? To have a general sense of well-being, in mind as well as body? Or simply to be long-lived? Such issues are raised in the two books under review and, if not actually resolved, at least thoughtfully examined and partly clarified. Harvey Green's Fit for America deals with "ideas, realities, and the solutions offered to problems of health and fitness as they changed over a century" (p. x)-that is, from the 1820s-1830s to the 1920s-1930s. His focus is on middleclass America, which he characterizes as people "above the level of subsistence but below the realm of great wealth, who participated in a market economy and bought many if not most of their goods and services" (p. x). Actually Green's middle class seems to include anybody who could read newspapers, magazines, and books and who sought to find explanations, aids, remedies, inspirations, and assurances about prospects for gaining (frequently regaining) and holding on to some version of good health. Green divides his study into three periods. For the thirty years preceding the Civil War, he contends, health-consciousness was an outgrowth of the revivalist and millennialist enthusiasms of those decades, as well as widespread fears that the Republic no longer possessed the mental and physical vitality of the Revolutionary Generation. In the postwar decades renewed quests for health and fitness drew on new fears, especially related to a rapidly growing nonrural, nonfarming population. From the 1890s on, Green sees "a profound sense of cultural pessimism" (p. xi) about the ability of Americans