Harry Kemp: The first physical culturist

Exploring the life and legacy of Harry Kemp, the pioneering 'vagabond poet' and early advocate of social nudity

Editor’s note: Carl Hild, PhD, has had a distinguished career as an influential naturist, contributing to N Magazine and The AANR Bulletin for many years. As a historian of early naturism, Carl is working on a series of articles on early nudist pre-history for Planet Nude, with this article on Harry Kemp being the latest installment.

Another version of this article first appeared in The Naturist Society’s journal Nude & Natural, 37.4 2018, pp 39-43. This version is used with their permission and has been modified and expanded upon by the author.

Harry Kemp | Library of Congress

Before Mark Storey (1990s - current), before Lee Baxandall (1970s), before John Ball/Donald Johnson (1950s), before Jan Gay (1932), before Frances and Mason Merrill (1931), before Dr. Maurice Parmelee (1924), there was, roaming around North America a young man, the “vagabond poet,” Harry Kemp. What a life he lived, what he experienced, and how he did so much of it without his clothes is remarkable and memorable. He wrote about his life in poems and published autobiographical prose starting in 1914. He proposed a religion of the spirit of the body in nature and promoted the creative life of Greenwich Village, foreshadowing the Beat generation up until his death in 1960. 

Born in 1883, as a child Harry Hibbard Kemp was introduced to mixed skinny-dipping by a female cousin in Kansas. Physical Culture magazine was being published in his youth, around 1898. As a teenager, Harry came across Physical Culture and wanted to become a healthy, strong man, so he took up the advice of Bernarr Macfadden.¹ So enamored of the physical culture way of living, Harry became one of the first full-time recruits to the lifestyle. He first experimented with the practices while at Elbert Hubbard’s East Aurora, NY, community of Roycroft.

Kemp, in defiance of convention, never wore a hat, and it was at this time that he began a lifelong habit of never wearing an overcoat. He went around during the cold winter of 1904 with sandals and no socks, no undershirt, a shirt open at the neck, and no overcoat or hat. When possible, Kemp wore no clothes at all, another lifetime practice. His philosophy was that “as one grew in strength and health through nude contact with the living sun and air and water, the body would gradually attain the power to keep itself warm from the health and strength that was in it.”

It brought him attention

Harry Kemp never fully understood the distinction between fame and notoriety. For him, there was no such distinction.² He traveled across the country and visited the Home community in Oregon, where in the early 1900s, nude activities were commented upon in their newspaper “Clothed With the Sun”: 

Many, like the three founders, had tried more formal communal experiments and were seeking greater freedom, yet in compatible surroundings. Richard Bowle came to Home from Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft Community at East Aurora, New York (where Harry Kemp had lived).³

Harry Kemp also visited. Known as the “hobo poet,” he fictionalized life at several communal societies in autobiographical novels, but none is clearly recognizable as Home.⁴

I think of all the visitors who passed across the long and steep switchback of stairways to Municipal Dock. Some of them were notable in their day: anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, hobo poet Harry Kemp, and Wobbly leaders “Big Bill” Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.⁵

Bernarr Macfadden

When Macfadden announced in his Beauty and Health (Vol. 10, No. 2 of May 1905), and likely in all of his other publications of that month, that he had in April purchased 1,900 acres of land (five miles by two miles) an hour’s train ride, 40 miles, from New York City in Spotswood, NJ, and was looking for residents, Harry was on his way to sign up to be a citizen of the brand-spanking-new Physical Culture City (PCC). He was one of the very first to move to the wooded site and was hired to help with laying out the city’s streets and the lots that would be available for 99-year leases.

Beauty and Health proclaimed that at PCC:

Women here shall be free to dress as she may choose, to live as she may select, and she will have the opportunity to indulge in such open air games, exercises and health-building pursuits as have hither to been denied to her by a bigoted, narrow, unthinking and selfish world.⁶

One pioneering woman leased a lot on the shore of the newly renamed 70-acre “Lake Marguerite” after Macfadden’s wife. The woman who leased the lake-side lot, shortly needed to return to her home due to the severity of her health problems, but as she found the young worker so friendly and enthusiastic, she turned the lease over to Harry for his continued use. This was to prove very fortuitous over the coming years for the penniless poet who bounced back and forth between PCC and NYC. Sometimes seeking solace and quiet to write, sometimes needing the community and stimulation of the big city. Sometimes seeking the inexpensive life of the country, sometimes seeking the generosity of his city friends. Always looking for new experiences, especially those that did not require clothes.

Welcome to The Jungle

Author Upton Sinclair visited PCC and met Kemp:

More inclined at that time to dissipation than discipline, Kemp had been a self-described ‘ailing, red-eyed wreck’ when he showed up at PC City. His spirits were revitalized not by Macfaddens’ strict rules governing diet and alcohol but by his nonchalant acceptance of nudity.⁷

Sinclair also wrote, “the semi-lunatics of Physical Culture City were going around in breech cloths, men and women and getting themselves arrested by rural constables before even the word Nacktkulture was imported.”⁸ He recognized that PCC was a pioneer in social nudity in North America. Sinclair also stated that his experiences at PCC influenced his concerns with food quality and sparked his energies that lead to his self-publishing The Jungle the following year, which changed the meat processing industry in the United States.

Kemp wrote Tramping on Life—An Autobiographical Narrative, which was published in 1922.⁹ He followed it with More Miles—An Autobiographic Novel that was published in 1926.¹⁰ In these two books, he eloquently describes his world and how he moved through it as a radical, all the while weaving a network of friends who offered him more opportunities to experience many aspects of life. Kemp appears to have taken every opportunity to engage his friends in social nudity. Harry, often taking such moments to open the oysters a bit more, was searching for any hidden pearls that may reside within the slim and sometimes odiferous settings in which he found himself, all too often.

Photo by the author

Kemp wrote for Macfadden and anyone who would buy his poems. Kemp also met and lived in an experimental community, Helicon Hall in Englewood, NJ, hosted by Upton Sinclair. Sinclair, who had visited PCC, later also wrote for Macfadden. When Macfadden opened his Health Home in Battle Creek, Michigan, in direct competition to the Kellogg Sanitarium, Sinclair and his wife and child were invited to stay, courtesy of Macfadden and in exchange for articles by the then well-known author for Physical Culture. It was in Battle Creek that Sinclair and Kemp crossed paths again. The outcome of that event became a national sensation. This aspect of Kemp’s life is covered well in Anthony Arthur’s 2006 Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair.¹¹

Sinclair had long stated that marriage was just another name for slavery for women. Upton and his wife, Meta, were living in experimental communities such as his Helicon Hall and anticipated that open relationships were just women and men gaining equal footing in any long-term agreement they may have. What exactly was monogamy? Was it only ever being with one partner, or having others with whom to be intimate, but having a home base to which to return, or just to live in a series of evolving personal spheres. This was taking place over a century ago in about 1910, long before the swinging 1960s, open marriages of the 1970s, and the polyamorous 2000s.

Arthur quotes Macfadden as instructing participants of his “Health Home” in Battle Creek, “Leave your old-fogy notions of restraint and conventionality at home.” The single object of all the participants’ efforts should be to “develop the powers, the intensity and beauties of youth. All sorts of active games will be encouraged.”

The world took notice when the famous author of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair, had his wife walk off with the youthful penniless poet, Harry Kemp. The newspapers found this revelation shocking and yet prophetic in that Sinclair had been promoting this concept of open marriage and non-monogamous relationships. Meta, Harry, and a mutual friend Mary Craig Kimbrough, whom Upton later married, sunbathed in the nude and skinny-dipped together, reportedly while reading aloud Havelock Ellis’s Sex In Relation to Society while hiding from the press at West Point Pleasant, NJ, in 1911.

After a relatively short time, Mrs. Sinclair moved on from Harry Kemp’s company, and Mr. Sinclair moved from his embarrassed stance to one of an aggrieved husband and filed for divorce, which was eventually granted. He later remarried none other than their mutual friend, Mary Craig Kimbrough. However, before Meta moved on from Harry, and during those intervening months, there was social nudity being practiced by more than just the happy couple. There are reports of friends joining Harry and Meta for sunbathing, skinny-dipping, and nude dancing in fields. There were a growing number of secluded places found in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut that were used to escape the hot, dirty confines of NYC, the Hudson River Valley being one site mentioned by both William Calhoun Walker, founder of the first American nudist organization the Common Sense Club, and Macfadden’s body-positive author John Russell Coryell, who lived nearby.

In Kemp’s words

Kemp’s writing is personal and reflective of his adventurer’s view of the world. He frequently talks of his physical culture roots, of clothes-free exercise, of sleeping in the nude with the windows open, of going without shoes but wearing Macfadden’s recommended open sandals, even in winter. There are numerous occasions of sunbathing in mixed-sex groups, of skinny-dipping, and even moon-bathing one hot summer night. When alarmed during the night, he talks about defending himself stark naked, just as he was when he jumped out of bed. Whenever he could take a break on a sunny day, it appears he was very quickly in a place where he would remove his clothes.

There are also many more lyrical accounts. For example, even as restrictions were being placed on the citizens of PCC to not be so blatant in their social nudity:

We decided to become more cautious, in spite of a few hotheads who advised defiance to the hilt.

And the beautiful girl that possessed such fine breasts could no longer row about on our little lake, naked to the waist.  And we were requested to go far in among the trees for our nude sun-baths.¹²

There is also a most specific proselytizing diatribe on the value of being naked:

One morning, at breakfast, a few days before Jim’s departure to the City to see Bennett Whellen, with his manuscript, we took up the topic of mixed sun-bathing.

I spoke of how the Radical Germans went on sun-bathing parties in the fields, absolutely nude; I spoke of the anarchist colonies in Switzerland and in Holland that went practically naked, the year ‘round, esteeming clothes the cause of all men’s physical ills…

It was also a fact, I said, that those tribes, according to ethnologist, that went naked were the most moral, in the ascetic, accepted sense of the conventional definition of the word “morality.”

I told of our sun-bathing parties up The Hudson; and of the sun-baths Darrie, Hildreth and I took down in Jersey… about which there was nothing—outside of the nudity—that Comstock himself could object to.

I was proselytizing—with missionary fervor.

“Suppose we begin sun-bathing together, right after breakfast?”

“Yes, why not?” Jessie responded receptively.

“It’s the most wonderful thing in the world for health,” I urged eagerly, “and besides, it’s the Higher Decency that a better world must learn—put into practice by us, its pioneers… pioneers in a movement to bring the world back to the aesthetic of the naked body—the Greeks”

“You mean,” asked Jim practically, “that when you lay about that way, up on the Hudson  - down in Jersey, that you shared no different feelings toward each other than when you were clothed?”

“Not exactly that, but we knew we were doing something fine and radical, something emancipative from the stupid codes and conventions or ordinary life that’s ashamed and afraid of the body... there was a species of religious exaltation in that.”¹³

These accounts are now based on ideas shared over a century ago, c. 1918.

Kemp’s travels took him to Cape Cod, where he spent summers writing while living nude in the dunes with kindred spirits of the Provincetown Players. During this time, he reflected on more than playing in the sun, playing in stage productions, and playing with drugs, but turned his thoughts to how his body played with the spiritual world in what he called The Golden Word.¹⁴ He drafted language that offered a rationale for how the well-cared-for, sun-drenched nude body was the ultimate form of communion with God.

The Nude Golden Word

Thomas Jefferson made an effort to understand the man Jesus and what he was reported to have said and done prior to Paul and others deifying him. Jefferson went through the entire Bible and wrote down the versus that supported the ideas and recounted the words of the person who was known as Jesus. The Jefferson Bible reads very differently than the canon regularly used by the Christian “church.” It contains the distilled essence of the spirit of Jesus, whom some now believe honed his philosophy while traveling through Asia from the age of twelve to thirty. (That is another remarkable story of what was documented in ancient Buddhist scrolls.)

Emulating Jefferson, what follows is the distilled essence of the spirit of Harry Kemp as expressed in his book The Golden Word. These words are those that specifically address Kemp’s ideas, practices, and writings that target a major emphasis of his life: social nakedness in nature, i.e., “The Nude Golden Word.”

An earlier poem that had previously been published in 1920 in Kemp’s Chanteys and Ballads on page 119 as “Blind”, sets the stage for his thoughts on what more there is than what we can deduce with our five senses.¹⁵ The following quotes are then from the pages listed in The Golden Word.¹⁶

The spring blew trumpets of color,
Her green sang in my brain…
I heard a blind man groping
Tap-tap with his cane.
I pitied him his blindness – 
But can I boast I see?
Perhaps there is a spirit
Nearby, who pities me
As I myself go tapping
My five-sensed cane of mind
Amid such unguessed glories
That I am worse than blind!

Hence the Senses and the Body should be looked upon as holy, not as “pagan” and apart from God….

All moving forms of beauty, all the contours, motions, and colours of the passing seasons, all art, all bodily pleasures and voluptuousness, - may now be apprehended from a spiritual viewpoint.¹⁷

The Soul progressed, step by pageant step, with the introduction of later physical forms, toward this glorious Body of Woman and Man.¹⁸

It is on beautiful, sun-browned, passionate flesh that the true and lasting kingdom of the spirit is to be built.

Let us return to life, - not backward, but forward.  Let us have no outward shell of life, but the living, shining glory, reality, and substance of it.

Let Man return to himself, and go forward to God.

Salvation is as concretely necessary as ever – but men and women shall save themselves through knowledge, science, art, inspiration, and the flesh….

The highest life of all is the life of the flesh in God.¹⁹

The flesh is an unfolder of souls, not a destroyer of them.

This world is literally a part of the kingdom of heaven.

Cherish chaste abandonment to the world and the flesh: neither as the ascetic does, nor yet as does the debauchee.

What seeds of gladness the body sows in time, the soul reaps in eternity….

Be free in the worship of God through the senses – rouse yourselves from the sad and pallid negations of life.

I boldly proclaim the Flesh, and through it, Salvation!

The dungeon of the flesh they have said; but I say, the heavenly palace of the flesh!²⁰

Not to be fully alive physically is to be in great spiritual danger….

Be your natural self and your very existence will become a worshipping of God!²¹

I announce the flesh, finally and ultimately; and through it Salvation!

The flesh is holy; and there is nothing more holy and beautiful than a cared-for, naked body!²²

Man’s highest duty toward himself is Man’s highest duty toward God.

Do not sin against the world and the flesh – for the flesh is the home of the soul, and the world is one of the sun-lamped sky-canopied rooms in the million-roomed mansion of God.

Enter children of the earth (children as well as the worlds and of infinity) enter into your rightful inheritance of the kingdom of earth and heavens!

Exquisite are the senses! exquisite is the eyesight, the hearing; exquisite is each thrill and touch of every nerve of the body! – for it is the soul that feels, not the nerves, nor the brain!

For these last are but mediums and channels of passage for the soul’s experience.  The soul, sitting within, accepts all sensations to its own use, profit, and spiritual growth.²³

Back of the laws of nature stands the nature of God.  Anything contrary to nature is contrary to God.  The laws of nature are the laws of God.

When we speak of our natural world we mean our present perception of God through the five senses and in three dimensions.

In hell both saint and debaucher sit, astonished, opposite each other and gazing each other in the face.  For one neglected the natural delights of life.  The other abused them.  Both have the hell they deserve. The irony of God makes it the same hell!

Love and the Adequate Life are Salvation.²⁴

In conclusion

Kemp’s religion was focused on a daily ongoing communion with God. This is not dissimilar from the analysis of the fictional boy in the play Equus. His naked and regular communion with God was through horses. Through the human body, that zenith of evolution, we each must appreciate the one we have been offered within which to live life. We owe it to the creator and/or just ourselves to honor and provide ultimate care for our own bodies. Our thoughts need to reflect the purity and remarkable aspects of all components and capacities of our physical form, as none are bad, nor should they be hidden. We should celebrate every sensation and embark constantly on activities that keep the celebration of our naked being as each of our priorities in honoring the supreme spirit.

From the spiritual and physical highs of nude summer life on Cape Cod, winters were spent in NYC, where Kemp became a keystone of Greenwich Village life, with Emma Goldman’s socialist activities, Coryell’s progressive school, the birth of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) defending Margaret Sanger’s right to circulate birth control information, and the conception of the minimalist “beat” generation that preceded the hippies of the 1960s.²⁵ Kemp could be called the progenitor of American nudism as well as the Beatniks. He was the person who had forgone material things, immersed himself in nude expression, promoted a belief in the goodness of social nakedness in nature, and posed it all in practice, poetry, and prose.

While fun reading, Kemp’s autobiographical novels do change the names of people, places, and publications.²⁶ Knowing the history from other sources, such as well-researched histories and biographies of the ALCU, Greenwich Village, Goldman, Kemp, Macfadden, and Sinclair, allows the pieces to fall into place. Kemp has produced a personal and historic account that is placed in a fictional environment, most likely to protect himself from legal issues and accusations, of which his life was abundant. It also offered some flexibility in creating composite scenarios and dialogue to set the desired atmosphere for a budding social world of change.

Years before the reports of organized nudist or naturist activities were to trickle back to the USA from Europe at the ends of the pens of Parmelee, the Merrills, and Gay, a native American son was already writing local accounts of the experimental socially naked radicals of this nation and having them published in books. We should applaud Harry Kemp for his early adaption of the physical culture way of life and for recording his experiences with social nudity during the first two decades of the 20^th century. The first book was published when he was just thirty-nine and he lived into the height of the Beatnik era at its very heart in Greenwich Village within the amazing atmosphere of New York City. 🪐

1. Hild, Carl. (2016). Bernarr Macfadden: Early American champion of nudists, or naturists, or not? N, 36(1), 48-52.

2. Brevda, William. (1986). Harry Kemp – The last Bohemian. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, p. 26.

3. LeWarne, Charles Pierce. (1995). Utopias on Puget Sound 1885-1915. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, p. 194.

4. LeWarne, Charles Pierce. (1995). Utopias on Puget Sound 1885-1915. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, p. 199.

5. Wadland, Justin. (2014). Trying Home – The Rise and Fall of an Anarchist Utopia on Puget Sound. Corvallis, OR: University of Oregon Press.

6. Beauty and Health. (1905). Vol. 10, No. 4, p. 128.

7. Arthur, Anthony. (2006). Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair. New York, NY: Random House.

8. Ibid.

9. Kemp, Harry. (1922). Tramping on Life – An Autobiographical Narrative. Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing Co. Inc.

10. Kemp, Harry. (1926). More Miles – An Autobiographical Novel. New York, NY: Boni and Liveright.

11. Arthur. (2006). Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair. New York, NY: Random House.

12. Kemp, Harry. (1922). Tramping on Life – An Autobiographical Narrative. Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing Co. Inc., p. 169.

13. Kemp, Harry. (1926). More Miles – An Autobiographical Novel. New York, NY: Boni and Liveright, p. 309.

14. Kemp, Harry. (1930). The Golden Word – A Religion for All Creators of Beauty. Provincetown, MA: Privately printed.

15. Kemp, Harry. (1920). Chanteys and Ballads – Sea-Chanteys, Tramp-Ballads and Other Ballads and Poems. New York, NY: Brentano’s.

16. Kemp, Harry. (1930). The Golden Word – A Religion for All Creators of Beauty. Provincetown, MA: Privately printed.

17. Ibid., p. 10.

18. Ibid., p. 11.

19. Ibid., p. 31.

20. Ibid., p. 32.

21. Ibid., p. 33.

22. Ibid., p. 34.

23. Ibid., p. 35.

24. Ibid., p. 36.

25. Brevda, W. (1986). Harry Kemp – The Last Bohemian. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses.

Wheeler, L. A. (2013). How Sex Became a Civil Liberty. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

26. Kemp, H. (1914). The Cry of Youth. New York, NY: Mitchell Kennerley.

Kemp, H. (1914). The Thresher’s Wife. New York, NY: Albert and Charles Boni.

Kemp, H. (1919). The Passing God, Songs for Lovers. Norwood, MA: The Plimpton Press, Brentano’s NY.

Kemp, H. (1926). The Sea and the Dunes – And Other Poems. New York, NY: Brentano’s.

Kemp, H. (1929). Don Juan’s Note-Book. New York, NY: S. A. Jacobs.