Gulick, Luther Halsey

1865–1918

Physical Educator and Author

Luther Halsey Gulick contributed to the field of physical education and helped redefine middle-class manhood during the Progressive Era (1890–1915). Born into a family of Congregational ministers, Gulick devoted his life to promoting and intertwining physical education and male spirituality.

Gulick held several influential positions in the field of physical education. He headed the gymnasium department at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts (1887–1900); served as director of physical education in the public schools of New York City (1903–08); held the presidencies of the American Physical Education Association (1903–06) and the Public School Physical Training Society (1905–08); and cofounded the Playground Association of America with educator Joseph Lee in 1906 (and served as its first president).

Central to Gulick's thinking on masculinity and physical education were the concept of organic memory and the socalled recapitulation theory of play. According to the concept of organic memory, each individual inherits the history of his or her own race. Gulick asserted that only white men have the ability to fully establish control of mind over body. According to recapitulation theory, as a child grows to maturity it relives past stages of evolution, moving from primitive forms of behavior to civilized forms of social organization by learning to take control of the atavistic layers of its personality.

Central to the concepts of white manhood in the early twentieth century was the ability to shape this civilized self-possession during a child's adolescent years. Proponents of recapitulation theory argued that manhood could be shaped through physical exercise. Gulick believed that training the body's motor reflexes and subjecting them to conscious control of the mind would build the necessary moral reflexes of an individual.

Gulick shared the definition of manhood and the concerns with the male physique espoused by advocates of the “strenuous life,” but he rejected an exclusive emphasis on the body as a symbol of self-confident manliness. Achieving manhood, Gulick believed, required not simply muscle building, but a symmetrical development of body, mind, and spirit—as represented by the inverted red triangle that he persuaded the YMCA to adopt as its symbol in 1891. Gulick favored team sports such as basketball and volleyball because they promoted the moral principles of loyalty, self-control, self-sacrifice, and teamwork, which he considered to be the foundations of Christianity and an altruistic Christian manhood.

Although Gulick advocated a “muscular Christianity” that emphasized a greater balance between body and spirit, his emphasis on making the male physique an expression of Christian manhood ultimately led him to place sexuality and sexual difference at the center of male gender identity. In The Dynamic of Manhood (1918), Gulick followed a path charted earlier by his friend Granville Stanley Hall and urged men to channel their sexual impulses and reproductive energies into emotional expressions as a part of their outwardly directed, embodied selves. Gulick's prescription for establishing manliness by externalizing physical desires and functions contributed to the cultural separation of sexuality from reproduction.

Gulick made lasting contributions to ideas about masculinity and physical exercise. His ideas about manhood contributed to a body-centered definition of male gender identity. [Page 198]He also helped to pioneer calisthenics, an early form of aerobics, and each year the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance awards a medal in his name to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to the field of physical education.

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