Bill Bryson’s a most entertaining writer. Recently I spotted his One Summer (2013), subtitled “America, 1927,” at the library and I had to pick it up. I’ve only read a few chapters so far, with accounts of Lindbergh’s flight, Babe Ruth’s season, the Great Mississippi Flood and much more still ahead (which reminds me, I want to read Rising Tide).

So far I’m enjoying it. Among other things early in the book, Bryson discusses the rise of the tabloid in America during the 1920s, kicked off by the Illustrated Daily News in New York, which Col. McCormack had a hand in creating. The following is about a clearly colorful character I’ve never heard of.

“Such success inevitably inspired imitators. First came the New York Daily Mirror from William Randolph Hearst in June 1924, followed three months later by the wondrously dreadful Evening Graphic. The Graphic was the creation of an eccentric, bushy-haired businessman named Bernarr Macfadden…

“Macfadden was a man of strong an exotic beliefs. He didn’t like doctors, lawyers, or clothing. He was powerfully devoted to bodybuilding, vegetarianism, the rights of commuters to a decent railroad service, and getting naked. He and wife wife frequently bemused their neighbors in Englewood, New Jersey by exercising naked on the lawn…

“As a businessman, he seems to have dedicated himself to the proposition that where selling to the public is concerned, no idea is too stupid…. When tabloids became all the rage, Macfadden launched the Evening Graphic. Its most distinguishing feature was that it had almost no attachment to the truth or even, often, a recognizable reality. It conducted imaginary interviews with people it had not met and ran stories by figures who could not possibly have written them… The New Yorker called the Graphic a ‘grotesque fungus,’ but it was a phenomenally successful fungus. By 1927, it’s circulation was nearing six hundred thousand.”

That’s only a small part of the strangeness of Bernarr Macfadden. He even had a go at running for president, though it isn’t clear how seriously. Sounds like a man who liked to hear himself talk. Under just the right circumstances — as we’ve all been reminded of recently — that can get you pretty far.