The new council probably can’t do worse than the original council. The fitness test has its origins in a 1954 study that found that American children failed a suite of physical benchmarks about fifty-eight per cent of the time, compared with just nine per cent for children in Italy, Switzerland, and Austria. President Eisenhower was alarmed about what this meant for the health of the nation and its military. He formed the council by executive order; it met at West Point and, in 1958, rolled out the test. The original looked similar to the most recent version, though it also included softball-throwing, which was a rough analogue for lobbing a grenade. (The White House says that the new test will also be, in part, about “military readiness.”) In addition to the test, the council issued a report warning that “the existence of press-button gadgets and other devices tending toward habits of inactivity” were fuelling a countrywide problem of “softness.” Softness was thought to be a grave national danger. In 1960, then President-elect John F. Kennedy published an article in Sports Illustrated called “The Soft American.” “Our struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America,” he wrote. “In a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.” He issued another public-fitness challenge, which required marching fifty miles in twenty hours. Boy Scouts marched, as did fraternities, high-school classes, postmen, and newspaper columnists. Robert Kennedy did it in oxfords. (The sixty-third annual march will be on November 22nd.) Subsequent Presidents, meanwhile, periodically updated the Presidential Fitness Test. Lyndon Johnson added a flexed-arm hang for girls; Ford swapped a straight-leg sit-up for a bent-knee sit-up.
There were a few early critics of the test. One congressman from Missouri pointed out, in 1955, that the study that inspired the test purported that American kids were absurdly wimpy: it held that European kids were seven times more fit. “Simply on the mathematical surface, this is a ridiculous statement,” the congressman said. In fact, the study was investigating back pain among Americans, and was mostly a test of core strength and flexibility. It had little to do with over-all fitness. One exercise instructed participants to lie face down and lift their feet off the ground. Another had them reach down and touch their toes. European participants were drilled in exercises like these in school, which probably explained their superior performance. The council, anyway, showed little interest in finding out if the Presidential test was effective; they rarely collected any data to determine if kids were improving. There’s not much evidence to suggest that it promoted physical activity in the long term. Kids weren’t tripping over themselves to sit and reach in their free time. The Obama Administration gave this as a rationale for ending the program, in 2012. Few people complained.