New Year's Resolutions of Yore: Before Everyone Resolved to Lose Weight

It's ok, really. All of the celebrating and resolving is rooted in ancient religious ceremonies. Our predecessors cleansed themselves with spirits and then pledged to do better.

Now admittedly losing weight was probably not the priority it is today given that they often did not have enough to eat and, depending on the era, were as likely to be the meal as to eat it.

All those good intentions take their psycho-social inspiration from impulses that may well be genetic. And to be perfectly honest, the inability to live up to many of them is historic, as well. It was a way of showing that we were not divine creatures, being humble before our makers and all that.

So, as you pull out the leftovers from the past week's worth of overindulging and promise to begin tomorrow - really, it's a promise, you mean it this time - understand that you are part of a great human tradition that shows no signs of flagging - or ever being attainable. JL

Olga Khazan reports in The Atlantic:

So, what did people resolve before we had the scourge of cellulite and the temptation of McRib to stir us to action?
"Did you make any New Year's resolution? Of course you did! Who doesn't? There is something irresistibly magnetic about the first day of the New Year — something that compels a new channel of thought ... One looks back with regret for the things that might have been done, and deplores things that have been done, and forthwith makes a resolution to remedy the omissions this year."
So wrote a reporter, who seems to have been getting paid by the word, for the British Exeter and Plymouth Gazette on January 4, 1913.

Wikimedia Commons

This year, most Americans will resolve forthwith to do some permutation of "getting fit" or "losing weight."
But New Year's resolutions predate our modern-day weight concerns by centuries.

The answer: just to be a better person, apparently. Resolutions from the early 20th century ranged from swearing less, to having a more cheerful disposition, to recommitting to God.
New Year's postcards from the early 1900s, for example, reveal a touchier, feelier time for goal-setting, encouraging their recipients to dedicate themselves to living a "sincere and serene life" and "repelling promptly every thought of discontent, anxiety, discouragement, impurity, and self-seeking." Others said to smile when you "fall down and out" or to simply keep a diary.
Swearing off vices such as foul language and flirting might also have been popular, judging from the cartoonist Walter McDougall's “Old Mr. Profanity Makes a New Year's Resolution," from 1903, as well as a 1911 cigarette ad suggesting men "Stop kissing other peoples' girls."

In 1927, the professor and author John Erskine published an essay in The Century Magazine resolving to vote in upcoming elections for "the candidate who insults the other fellow least," to stop supporting biased newspapers, to "work for the peace of the world," and to "teach nothing that I do not believe." That last one, he mentioned, "should be a fairly easy ideal to reach."

The journalist and social reformer Ida Wells made a renewed commitment to God and Christian living her New Year's resolution in 1887. "I am so overwhelmed with the little I have done for the one who has done so much for me & I resolve to ... work for the master," she wrote in her diary at the time. She apparently stuck with it, too, teaching Sunday school in her hometown of Memphis for much of her life.
It was also not uncommon to, uh, strongly suggest resolutions for other people to take up.
In January 1936, Chester Washington, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, asked the local YMCA to "resolve" to allow supervised dancing after basketball games so that "young folks would get clean recreation."
In 1920, the National Cash Register company did what any beneficent employer would: It suggested resolutions for its own district managers.

American Stationer and Office Outfitter, 1920

The intentions ranged from practical:
"I will analyze my territory and find out its possibilities."
"I will use up-to-date selling methods"
...to existential: "I will give more attention to the future and stop living in the past."
In a 1919 newspaper comic strip, a wife persuades her husband to swear off smoking. ("Everybudy swears off somethin' fer New Years!") And it works ... until the man rigs up some pipes that run behind the sofa and force smoke up the chimney.

Cliff Sterrett/Library of Congress

The Nottingham (U.K.) Evening Post created a list in 1889 of suggested resolutions for politicians of the day. For Lord Salisbury, the prime minister, they recommended, "to be more cautious in my expressions, to be more temperate in my judgements, and generally more reticent all around" — perhaps because Salisbury had recently caused a stir by suggesting that a non-white Briton would never be elected to Parliament.
To be fair, the fact that the goals seemed more virtuous back then didn't seem to make them any easier to keep. As the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette concluded in its article on resolutions, "The mischief is that this fascination doesn't as a rule last longer than the first twenty-four hours! ... Frail is human nature!"