George Jowett, Ottley Coulter David Willoughby and the Organization of American Weightlifting – Iron Game History – May, 1993

In the early 1920s a new era was dawning in American athletics. “Free from Europe’s struggle to recover from the effects of war,” writes a leading sport historian, “Americans enjoyed a golden age of sport.” Although those observations apply chiefly to such major spectator sports as baseball and football, weightlifting was undergoing a metamorphosis from the strongmanism of an earlier era to a more regulated and respectable status.