Fear of Yoga

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In the 1930s and 1940s, a truce settled on the land. The cult connection still hung on for headline writers, and crimes were still attributed to immoral yogis, but a softening could be felt in the media's stance. With Bernard and his yoga-and-baseball ashram prospering on the East Coast and Yogananda's yoga-of-the-will thriving on the West, a kind of amused toleration began to invade newsrooms. Yoga no longer qualified as a novelty; it wasn't going away, but it wasn't stealing the country's women, either, and it appealed mostly to rubber-legged, brown-rice-and-green-tea types.

The 1930s brought the rise of gossip columnists, many of whom wrote six days a week and relied to an inordinate degree on movie stars' predilections, which began to involve yoga. In 1938 Cole Porter was back in the hospital, a year after his legs were crushed in a riding accident. He was studying yoga, reported Leonard Lyons in the Washington Post, 'to attain complete control of his system.' Lyons had previously outed Greta Garbo as a lonely yogini; Maureen O'Sullivan was mentioned by the beauty columnist Ida Jean Kain in an article titled 'Yoga Exercises Finding Favor with Women in America.' Yoga was by this time, if not totally American, a harmless pastime.

In the 1940s, the first homegrown celebrity yogi since Pierre Bernard turned out to be his nephew Theos Bernard, a lawyer and graduate student who completed his master's thesis, 'Introduction to Tantrik Ritual,' at Columbia University in 1936. Theos traveled to India to study yoga and made his way to Tibet; he arrived at Lhasa on an auspicious day, and so was welcomed and venerated as the first White Lama. His account of his initiation into secret Buddhist rites, Penthouse of the Gods, was published by Scribner's in 1939. Theos, with his matinee-idol looks and eager-to-please disposition, was an instant success on the lecture circuit. By 1944 he had married a wealthy opera star and settled in his own mountaintop ashram in California, built with his wife's money. In 1947, on a return trip to Tibet, he was apparently caught up in sectarian crossfire and killed, his body never found.

As you might expect, the 1950s were for yoga a decade of denial and paranoia. 'It Wasn't Yoga, Mrs. FDR Says,' announced a headline in the Chicago Defender. Eleanor Roosevelt, responding to a written report that she practiced yoga in the White House, admitted that although she liked to do headstands, 'I did not know they were called yoga exercises.' Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India, prompted by Cold War worries, denied reports that his nation would supply the Soviet Union with yogis to help cosmonauts breathe easier in outer space.

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