Margo Gray

It became a national public health campaign.

Posters went up in schools, doctors' offices, factories.

One poster read, poor posture encourages tuberculosis.

Erect carriage combats it.

This wasn't fringe thinking.

It was being promoted by academics at some of the most elite campuses in the country.

There was even an organization called the American Posture League that was made up largely of Ivy League professors.

At Yale, one prominent professor blamed his own tuberculosis on his hunched back.

And at Harvard in 1917, a physician led the first large-scale systematic study of posture.

It was called the Harvard Slouch Study.

The Harvard slouch study helped spark a full-blown posture obsession on college campuses.

And that obsession outlasted the threat of tuberculosis.

Even after antibiotics became widely available in the mid-1940s, the focus on posture didn't fade.

The thinking around it just changed.

In other words, good posture became something of a shorthand for being physically fit.

And in the mid-20th century, physical fitness mattered a lot.

The country had just survived two world wars and was now heading into the Cold War.

National strength and military readiness were being talked about in terms of physical preparedness.

Universities had a crucial role to play.

They were raising the future leaders of the free world, leaders who needed to be physically prepared.