Читать книгу Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America - Dave Tell - Страница 5

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CONFESSION AND SEXUALITY: TRUE STORY VERSUS ANTHONY COMSTOCK

In May 1919, the eccentric American health crusader, sexologist, and entrepreneur Bernarr Macfadden published the first issue of True Story Magazine—and thus “the modern confessions industry came into being.”¹ Within years True Story had dozens of imitators; George Gerbner reports that by mid-century the confession magazine industry boasted some forty titles.² The eventual ubiquity of the industry, however, must not occlude the fundamental importance of True Story. As the Saturday Evening Post put it, “The $10,000,000-a-year, I'm-Ruined! I'm Ruined! school of belles-lettres owes everything to Macfadden.”³ The Post is hardly alone in this estimate: Scribner's christened Macfadden “Father Confessor,” Harper's called True Story the “first of the ‘confessions,’” and the cultural historian Ann Fabian credits Macfadden's True Story with “turning the compulsion to confess into a glorious commercial enterprise.” A “commercial enterprise” it certainly was. Fabian notes that True Story transformed Macfadden from an “eccentric health advocate to [a] millionaire.”⁴

However, while Macfadden's wealth did not last his lifetime, his reputation as “Father Confessor to the American masses” was largely a posthumous designation.⁵ Although the sheer financial success of True Story ensured that it registered on the cultural landscape almost immediately, it was not initially recognized as a confession magazine. Before it was a decade old, the New Yorker, The Nation, the Atlantic Monthly, a variety of trade journals, and Hygeia, the journal of the American Medical Association, had each devoted ample space to Macfadden's True Story. Yet none of these periodicals saw anything particularly confessional about it. In 1924, for example, the Detroit Saturday Night published one of the longest, most vindictive critiques of Macfadden that would appear in the 1920s. In it, True Story was decried as a “magazine for morons,” designed for “the undeveloped, semi-literate, half-baked mentalities that can find no pabulum in real literature.”⁶ Despite the general thoroughness of the attack, the Detroit Saturday Night never once described True Story as a confession magazine. On the other end of the spectrum, the New Yorker used a 1925 column to praise the “God-driven pen of Bernarr Macfadden.” Although it took pains to introduce True Story's eccentric publisher, explain its unprecedented mechanism for securing manuscripts, and describe its bizarre criteria for publishing them, it, too, never once described True Story as a confession magazine—it never even used the word.⁷ Similarly, a year later the Atlantic Monthly suggested that although True Story was stylistically similar to the confession magazines, it nonetheless occupied its own discrete category.⁸ In sum, True Story was a lot of things in the 1920s: it was wildly successful and, depending on the reader, suggestive, uplifting, pornographic, “God-driven,” moralistic, yellow, enlightened, pulpy, or authentic. But it was rarely—if ever—confessional.

Despite this, nearly every invocation of True Story since the 1940s remembers its founding in confessional terms. In 1950, for example, the New Yorker published a second series of articles on Bernarr Macfadden, this time arguing that Macfadden's “climactic achievement” could be traced to May 1919—the beginnings of his “fantastic success with ‘confession’ magazines.” A similar pattern can be seen in Time: a 1927 article on Macfadden and his magazines nowhere mentions the word confession; thirty years later a 1957 article made confession the definitive characteristic of True Story.⁹ This is nothing less than historical revisionism; it took until the 1950s for the 1920s True Story to become a confession magazine.

This revisionism is particularly conspicuous in the academic literature. In 1958 George Gerbner published his influential “Social Role of the Confession Magazine,” which provided social scientific justification for the conclusions of the Saturday Evening Post. According to Gerbner, the confession magazine was “born” with True Story. In 1964 Theodore White followed suit: “In 1919, Macfadden fathered True Story, first of the confession magazines.”¹⁰ Then, in 1968, the historian William Taft: “In 1919, Macfadden turned his attention elsewhere, creating the ‘confessions’ business with True Story.”¹¹ More recently still, Roseann M. Mandziuk has identified the first five years of True Story as a site par excellence to interrogate the commodification of confession.¹²

More surprising than the revisionism of popular journalism or academic literature, however, is the revisionism of True Story itself. Although the 1920s True Story largely avoided the term confession, in 1948 True Story recalled its own origins in explicitly confessional terms.¹³ Ernest V. Heyn, then the editor of True Story, argued that the May 1919 appearance of True Story was simply the latest “offspring” in a “long line of first-person revelatory literature.” Heyn then positioned True Story as the rhetorical “offspring” of Augustine, Benvenuto Cellini, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas de Quincey—confession writers all. Although his mid-century readers may have been surprised by Heyn's suggestion that Augustine was the “world's first writer of a true story,” they would certainly not have been surprised by the suggestion that True Story was a confession magazine.¹⁴ For, as I hope is clear, in the middle years of the twentieth century there was a concerted effort—carried out by popular monthlies, brown quarterlies, and True Story itself—to revise the historical record and establish thereby that True Story always was what it later, indisputably became: a confession magazine.

This revisionism has been staggeringly successful. If there exists a single essay, article, blog, monograph, or book that challenges the Saturday Evening Post's 1941 claim that True Story founded the confession industry in 1919, I am unaware of it. However, if we are to understand the politics of confession, it is imperative that we recover the initial cultural uncertainty that attended Macfadden's True Story. As the original articles in Time, the New Yorker, and the Detroit Saturday Night suggest, before True Story was self-evidently a confession magazine, it was the object of a confessional crisis: a very public debate over the meaning of True Story, its generic classification, and its proper place in American life. By bracketing our lately born certainty that True Story has always been a confession magazine, we will be able to tell a story that has never been told: the story of the remarkable energy Macfadden expended refining the genre of confession and deploying it as a political weapon in American cultural politics—the story, ultimately, of how, why, and for whom True Story became a confession magazine.

By telling this story over the course of the first two chapters of Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America, I argue that it is possible to understand how the genre of confession became ingredient in American conceptions of sexuality (chapter 1) and the working class (chapter 2). From its founding in 1919 through its 1926 editorial change, True Story's primary political obstacle was the still-lurking specter of Anthony Comstock. The “Great Mogul of American Morals,” the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and a sexual puritan of the most austere type, Comstock was Bernarr Macfadden's sworn enemy.¹⁵ Macfadden's antagonism to Comstock's sexual politics was fundamental to True Story's founding and, mutatis mutandis, fundamental to the development of the “confessions business.” Indeed, sexual politics were so integral to the rise of True Story that they defined the genre of the “true story” and recast the boundaries the “confession”—genres that Macfadden used interchangeably—turning both of them into rhetorical genres inherently dedicated to the preservation of a conservative sexual politics. Were it not for his preoccupation with American sexuality, Macfadden would have had no interest in the confessional genre and his magazine would have never dominated the birth and development of the “confessions industry.” In very material ways, the United States owes its confessional culture to the conservative, oftentimes contradictory, always-extreme sexual politics of Bernarr Macfadden.

1905–1919: Anthony Comstock, Bernarr Macfadden, and the Prehistory of True Story

True Story Magazine was, in a very concrete sense, a direct response to Anthony Comstock's crusade to protect American moral purity. Although Comstock died four years before True Story began, Macfadden's 1905 quarrel with the self-proclaimed “weeder [of] God's Garden” would leave an indelible mark on Macfadden. Indeed, Macfadden's later moralism—his insistence that True Story contributes to the moral improvement of its readers—can be traced directly to his early conflict with Comstock. The occasion was Macfadden's “Monster Physical Culture Exhibition” at New York's Madison Square Garden. Half beauty pageant and half athletic competition, the exhibition drew twenty thousand New Yorkers to opening night on October 9, 1905—five thousand of whom were turned away by the fire inspector.¹⁶ Although Macfadden had advertised throughout the city, distributing posters of union-suited women and leopard-skinned men, the most effective advertisement was the fact that Comstock, by then infamous for his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, regarded these posters as “the height of pornography and public impudence.”¹⁷ Four days before opening night, acting as a “Special Agent for the United States Post Office Department,” Comstock confiscated five hundred pounds of the “vile handbills” (posters) and arrested Macfadden.¹⁸ Curious to see what could provoke such an action, New Yorkers turned out en masse to see a show that was in fact quite tame. The historian William Hunt reports that there were “no nudes. No erotic dances. Nothing titillating.”¹⁹ Compared to Macfadden's Physical Culture Magazine, which had since 1899 featured photos of topless women and loin-clothed men as specimens of bodily excellence, the exhibition proceeded along rather puritanical lines.²⁰

Although, legally speaking, nothing came of Macfadden's 1905 arrest, historians agree that it inspired his lifelong crusade against prudery in general and Anthony Comstock in particular.²¹ This crusade, which would culminate fourteen years later in the publication of True Story, received its opening salvo with a series of editorials in Physical Culture. Titled “Comstock, King of the Prudes,” Macfadden's editorials argued that Comstock was responsible for prudery, which was, in turn, responsible for American “moral perversion,” the “mental and physical decay” of its citizens, and the “pitiful deterioration of the race that you see on every hand.” Treating “Comstockery” and “prudery” as convertible terms, Macfadden explained their meaning: “‘Comstockery’ has been added to our vocabulary as meaning the sniffing out of evil where no evil exists.” As evidence, Macfadden pointed to the contested posters of the Physical Culture Exhibition. The posters, which Macfadden insisted were “simply representations of very perfect human forms,” triggered in Comstock's mind “the grossest suggestions that the human mind could possibly conceive.” If anything was “impure, salacious, and obscene,” Macfadden countered, it was the mind of Comstock, which was little more than a “sewer for mental filth.” Prudery was the product of Comstock's inability to distinguish the filth of his mind from the objects of his attention: “His perverted imagination finds vulgar and depraved meanings in a most inspiring sentence, or contorts the outlines of the most beautiful picture or statue into a semblance of vileness.” We should not be surprised, Macfadden concluded, that a “perverted imagination” finds perversion everywhere it looks.²²

Macfadden, however, was concerned with more than the subjective character of obscenity and the contested purity of his own posters. Indeed, the exhibition and its posters soon vanished entirely from Macfadden's editorials. From his perspective, the larger issue was methodological. Although Macfadden professed (but did not practice) a sexual austerity as conservative as Comstock's, he disagreed sharply with Comstock's method for achieving that austerity. As a drawing that prefaced one of his editorials made plain, Macfadden's primary objection was Comstock's belief that censorship and suppression produced moral purity. In the Foucauldian terminology fashionable today, Macfadden accused Comstock of subscribing to the “repressive hypothesis”: the belief that power controls sexuality by repression, censorship, or obstruction.²³ The drawing pictured Comstock tying blindfolds on American children only to see them stumble blindly off cliffs labeled “excess” and “secret vice.”²⁴ In case the moral was not self-evident, Macfadden laid it bare: Comstock “seem[s] to think that by simply hiding, by merely refraining from discussing the important subject of sex, that [parents] eliminate all thoughts on the subject from the minds of their offspring.” Otherwise put, Comstock “cries out emphatically against knowledge and in favor of ignorance.”²⁵

Although Macfadden was obviously without the insight of Foucault (he was, for that matter, without the insight of any intellectual thought), he responded in a Foucauldian manner. He argued that in order for power to better control sexuality (a goal he shared with Comstock), it must work with knowledge rather than against it. From Macfadden's perspective, Comstock was simply naïve: no matter how severe the censorship, ignorance was not an option. Either American youth would be taught sexual morals by their parents or they would be taught by “evil companions”: “Take your choice, Mr. Comstock. There is no dividing line.” Thus, for the sake of the country, and with a rationale that would later become a monotonous refrain in the pages of True Story, Macfadden argued that moral virtue required an open, frank discussion of the human body, its vulnerabilities, and its capacities: “If you want your boy or girl to have pure thoughts in reference to themselves and their bodily functions, teach them the truth, in all its details. Teach them the wonders of the sex principle. Teach them the objects and the divinity of sex. Let them learn that fatherhood and motherhood exist solely because of sex. That the world owes everything to sex.”²⁶ Thus did “power and knowledge directly imply one another.”²⁷ The knowledge of the body was an essential ingredient in the power that Macfadden hoped would control the body.

In a pithy phrase that nicely captures the theory underwriting Macfadden's moralism, Clifford Waugh explains that, for Macfadden, “nakedness stood for truth undefiled.” To portray the human body, omitting none of its details, was to speak the truth. Because prudery/Comstockery relied on the blindfold, Macfadden made “prudery … public enemy number one among the curses to be annihilated by Physical Culture.”²⁸ Waugh explains the logic: “The only answer was education, which, in [Macfadden's] mind, automatically necessitated the total elimination of prudery. To control, if not to eliminate venereal disease, the public needed knowledge, and Macfadden was determined to meet that challenge. From the lecture platform, in his books, and through editorials and articles, the Father of Physical Culture spoke out against venereal disease and prostitution. Insisting that knowledge was power, he attempted to ‘lift the veil’ which he believed was ‘shrouding subjects of the utmost importance to humanity.’”²⁹ And this, Macfadden explained, was why the exhibition and its posters required scantily clad participants: for how could the excellencies of the human body be demonstrated “if the exhibitors are dressed with clothing.”³⁰

The First Confession

In the fall of 1906, Macfadden took a decisive step. Working on the assumption that “realism was necessary in order to awaken the public,” he decided to use a “confession” as a technique in his moralistic crusade against Comstockery.³¹ At Macfadden's urging, Physical Culture editor (and future True Story editor) John R. Coryell wrote a six-installment serial titled “Growing to Manhood in Civilized (?) Society: The Personal Confessions of the Victim.”³² The serial was little more than Macfadden's anti-Comstock editorials translated into the confessional form. It told the story of the adolescent son of wealthy, syphilitic parents who “neglected to tell him the facts of life.”³³ Kept in ignorance by his “parents and teachers,” the unnamed protagonist confessed that he learned of sex “not by the parent or responsible teacher, but by a class of purveyors whose work is all done in darkness and secrecy.” Relying on the subjugated knowledge of the stable, the boy learned “lewd words” and “obscene stories” by the end of the first installment.³⁴ The remaining five installments then charted the boy's moral degeneration: stolen caresses, drunkenness, sexual liaisons, pornography, venereal diseases, prostitution, and extortion—all told in the first person.

All of this was expressly calculated to dramatize the social consequences of Comstockery. Indeed, the most interesting aspect of the story is that, at regular intervals spread throughout the story, the author breaks from the narrative and interjects a meta-level commentary on it. It is as if Macfadden had learned from his experience with Comstock and the posters that portions of the reading public, unless they are properly coached, will see “nakedness” as obscenity rather than as “truth undefiled.” This time around, Macfadden was taking no chances. Although “Growing to Manhood” was only slightly more suggestive than the Physical Culture Exhibition—there were descriptions of caresses and allusions to much more—Macfadden surrounded these descriptions and allusions with a running commentary that sought to restrict their range of meaning. “I cannot say enough to make it clear that under the system of suppression of truth about the facts of sex life, all boys become little ravening sex-wolves; little beasts.” The descriptions and allusions, in other words, were designed to demonstrate the futility of a system that would ensure morality via censorship: “Plain speech is sometimes necessary.” Indeed, had sex been discussed in a “frank, open manner,” the morality of the confessant might have been preserved:³⁵ “But for the foul stream into which I had been thrown at the behest of immemorial custom, my soul might have been as white as hers [a girl on the verge of yielding to his temptations].”³⁶

If it was too late to rescue the protagonist of “Growing to Manhood,” the protagonist insisted that is was not too late to save others. Indeed, the telling of the story was motivated by the sense that the protagonist was just one of the numberless victims of a repressive society: “I am but the mouthpiece of thousands upon thousands of the victims of your wicked, wicked system of life.” Against this wicked system of life, premised as it was on censorship and hypocrisy, stood the confession, premised on frank disclosure: “I am daring to tear the veil from the hypocrisy of our lives. I am daring to say that we are growing up a race of erotomaniacs. We think of nothing but sex, we talk of nothing but sex.”³⁷ Although Comstock was not mentioned by name, it is not difficult to read the story—both in its form and in its content—as an attack on the “Great Mogul of American Morals.” In language that explicitly recalls Macfadden's editorials against Comstock, the protagonist concluded that his self-described debauched existence “was the natural product of the scheme of life which is based upon pretence, upon systematic hypocrisy and upon that prurient prudery which converts the beautiful, natural sex attraction into a nervous disorder.”³⁸

“Growing to Manhood” quickly landed Macfadden a $2,000 fine and two years of “hard labor.” After an unknown person directed the attention of the post office inspector to the confession, the federal grand jury of New Jersey found the story “obscene, lewd, and lascivious” and convicted Macfadden of “sending improper literature through the mails.”³⁹ Countering that “Growing to Manhood” contained a “most valuable moral lesson,” Macfadden protested vigorously.⁴⁰ Beyond the legal appeals (which he filed), and beyond the efforts of the Free Speech League (which carried his cause all the way to the Supreme Court), Macfadden took his case to the American public, declaring his innocence in Physical Culture editorials and public lectures across the eastern United States. Supportive crowds turned out en masse in Baltimore, Boston, Cincinnati, and Washington. For the most part, these crowds could hardly have been surprised by what they heard. Macfadden rehearsed his well-worn arguments about the subjectivity of obscenity, the moral imperative of frank speech, and the virtue of his own prose.

However, Macfadden's defense of “Growing to Manhood” included one very new argument. He defended not only the content of the confession and the purpose behind it, but also the form itself. Although the day was still a long ways off when he would consistently deploy the confession as a technique in cultural politics, he was already convinced that true stories were a powerful weapon in sexual politics. As he wrote in Physical Culture, “The day will come when the laws of this land, I fully believe, will encourage the publication of literature of this kind, because the evils so faithfully described in it, are ruining young men and young women everywhere by the thousands, simply because of their ignorance of the former.”⁴¹

Thus did Macfadden use the controversy incited by “Growing to Manhood” to argue a rhetorical point. Indeed, unlike his defense of the exhibition posters, his defense of “Growing to Manhood” was defined less by its opposition to Anthony Comstock and more by its support of a rhetorical style marked by openness, truth, and exposure. As he put it in a 1908 booklet released in defense of “Growing to Manhood,” “Plain speaking is the best remedy” for immorality. In the case at hand, Macfadden argued that his “confession” was “designed to serve as a warning against [erotic impulses]—instead of stimulating immoral passion it tended to arouse loathing and disgust.” In a critical, instructive line, Macfadden concluded, “Neither in language nor in purpose was there any obscenity.”⁴² Macfadden, of course, had long insisted on his spotless motivations; now, in a move that presaged his later defenses of True Story, he argued that the language of “Growing to Manhood”—which he described as “plain speaking”—was itself a moral good. Not because it provided the absolution of sins, but because it was an important tool in his fight for austere sexual norms.

If Macfadden believed that the American people needed a moral reeducation, he believed just as insistently that they needed a rhetorical reeducation. Although he referred to his style as “plain speaking,” and although his lawyer Henry Earle judged the virtue of “Growing to Manhood” to be “too obvious to require comment,” Macfadden knew full well that there was nothing plain about the plain style.⁴³ Indeed, when we consider not only the meta-commentary inserted into the text of “Growing to Manhood,” but also the editorials, booklets, and speaking tour that explained and defended it, it becomes clear that, at least for Macfadden, the plain style could never stand alone. Its very plainness rendered it vulnerable to misinterpretation by men like Anthony Comstock. Macfadden's lawyer complained, “There are men in the community to whose minds the mere presence of a woman, however chaste in bearing, will cause impure thoughts, and so may a book, picture or statue which is not in fact obscene.”⁴⁴ What was needed was not simply the plain style, but a shared set of protocols for reading the plain style. Thus he beseeched his Physical Culture readership, “Help me in the education of the public…. Help each person realize the necessity for exposing these depraved conditions in order to finally destroy them.” This is nothing less than a rhetorical education—a set of instructions for interpreting true stories and plain styles. The public must realize, he intoned, that the exposure of “sexual affairs” was an essential step toward “clean morals.”⁴⁵

Macfadden lost his argument regarding “Growing to Manhood.” The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied his appeal and the Supreme Court declined to hear it. Although the newly elected William Howard Taft granted Macfadden a presidential pardon and spared him the “hard labor,” he was still required to pay a $2,000 fine for his first confession.⁴⁶ Though he lost his battle for “Growing to Manhood,” he never gave up his crusade for a “literature of its kind.” Although it would have to wait ten years, Macfadden never lost his conviction that moral reform required rhetorical reform. By 1918 Macfadden was explicit: moral reform went hand in hand with confessions—provided, of course, that these were surrounded by a set of reading protocols that restricted their range of meaning.

From Comstock to True Story

According to Fulton Oursler, the origins of True Story can be traced to a conversation between Macfadden and Coryell in the winter of 1918. Oursler reports that Macfadden had “never forgotten the public interest” raised by Coryell's “Growing to Manhood.” Whatever Comstock or the Third Circuit may have thought, “the public had understood its intention and recognized its sincerity.” The proof of this was the scores of letters that began arriving in the offices of Physical Culture Magazine. These letters, most of which “had the conscious ring of public confession,” confirmed over and again the importance of Coryell's story.⁴⁷ As Macfadden recalled, “Some of these confessions were so charged with the drama of human hearts, so gripping in their intensity, so thrilling in the amazing combination of circumstances which they described, that reading this mail became a most interesting, and intensely thrilling undertaking.”⁴⁸

More than simply thrilling and interesting, however, the letters were also didactic. Like Coryell's “Growing to Manhood,” they preached “the folly of transgression, the terrible effects of ignorance, [and] the [tragedy of] girls who had not been warned by wise parents.”⁴⁹ Macfadden described these spontaneous confessions as “documents written in the tears of strong men and beautiful women, documents which bared the hope and sorrow, the joys and the disappointments, the broken faith and the dreams that came true, of thousands of human beings like ourselves—documents that were somehow written on the parchment of human nature, a part of the fabric of life, and, above all, documents containing lessons from our own days and years, lessons conveyed through episodes which had seared their meaning into the souls of people with the white-hot brand of personal experience.”⁵⁰ Although it is unclear whether it was Macfadden or his third wife who first thought of making these letters the basis of a new magazine (both partners claim exclusive credit), all agree that they were the origin of True Story Magazine. The value of these letters resided in both their form (confessional) and their function (didactic); they were, as Oursler would put it, both “confessions” and “parables.”⁵¹

It is important to note that from its very inception, True Story was a didactic, moralistic enterprise and that the success of this enterprise—from the perspective of Macfadden and his associates—was tied directly to the confessional form. Consider the narrative of Fulton Oursler; he argued that True Story is best understood as the institutionalization of the didactic project begun with “Growing to Manhood.” He argued that the original impetus behind “Growing to Manhood” was Macfadden's frustration with the editorial genre. Realizing that editorials were ineffectual in “his campaign against prudery,” Macfadden searched for a better way to instruct the masses. “What could he do to wake up the public?” Oursler asked. The idea of using a firsthand confession to instruct and elevate the masses then appeared to Macfadden “with all the force and brightness of an inspiration. The greatest teachers of mankind had found in the parable the direct and the most potent weapon. The human mind responded to the story more quickly than to any other appeal. Why not show, in story form, the tragic consequences of ‘Wild Oats.’”⁵²

This is what Coryell did with “Growing to Manhood,” and it is what Macfadden did with True Story. Using precisely the same language he used to describe Coryell's story, Oursler claimed that True Story was “an entire magazine devoted to confessions, to modern parables.”⁵³ The only difference between Coryell's “Growing to Manhood” and Macfadden's True Story was that the latter was an “entire magazine.” And just as “Growing to Manhood” was intended as an attack on the moral theory of Comstock, so, too, was True Story. Although True Story never mentioned Comstock by name, it is often difficult not to read it as a direct response to Comstockery. Consider, for example, this 1925 editorial: “Life is filled with realities and the only way to face realities is to face them—to know the TRUTH. It is the prudes and puritans who are afraid to face realities, who are ashamed to know the truth. And it was the prudes and puritans who burned poor, defenseless old women in Salem as witches.”⁵⁴ Oursler makes the anti-Comstock politics of True Story explicit: “Out of his conviction that frankness would end such misery, Macfadden had long ago invented an epithet. To him it had all the force of an imprecation. That epithet was ‘Comstockery!’ This True Story Magazine was his answer to ‘Comstockery’ and all for which, in his mind, the epithet stands.”⁵⁵

The “origin of True Story,” then, “lies directly in Macfadden's previous physical culture career.”⁵⁶ That career had pitted him against Anthony Comstock. And although Comstock had been dead three years by the time the idea of True Story was broached, the magazine was nonetheless conceived as a response to the sexual moralism that was still carried on in his name.

Just as surely as Macfadden remembered the power of Coryell's confession and its public resonance, he also remembered the bitter fight it engendered (he did not stop appealing his $2,000 fine until 1939).⁵⁷ Oursler reports that Macfadden was fully cognizant that True Story would “stir up the old antagonisms” with those who had inherited Comstock's mantle. For, as he had written in 1905, Comstock “stands for mystery, secrecy, ignorance, [and] superstition.”⁵⁸ Now, preparing to launch an entire magazine based on plain speaking, a frank style, and true stories—a magazine, moreover, designed expressly as an attack on Comstockery—Macfadden knew that “it would be the old fight all over again”: “If he dared to offer in the pages of a magazine, the lessons of life dramatized in the form of realistic stories, their moral implications made plain, the world would question his sincerity, and all the battalions of prudery would soon be on the march against him.”⁵⁹

Thus Macfadden designed True Story in such a way that he could defend himself from these battalions. He surrounded his true stories with constant reminders of True Story's didactic purpose and moral foundations. These reminders functioned as a rhetorical primer—coaching True Story's readership in the protocols of reading confessions, teaching them to place promiscuity, suggestiveness, and sexuality itself in the service of a conservative politics. As Oursler put it, “The millions who buy the magazine, and who think by its precepts and advice, believe that it is just what it offers itself to be—a book of modern parables.”⁶⁰

1919–1926: True Story as a “Great Moral Force”

From 1919 to 1926, True Story sold itself as precisely this: a book of modern parables. This is no small accomplishment. In an era that witnessed the Christian Endeavor Society, legislation regulating the maximum distance between ankle and hem (three inches), and, of course, the continued flourishing of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, now under the leadership of John Saxton Sumner, the sheer fact that a magazine designed to speak openly of sexuality could be marketed as an outpost of moral rectitude is itself a significant feat.

Selling “nakedness” as “truth undefiled,” however, required far more than confessions and an editorial policy that prescribed that the “shadow of a bed” must fall on “every page.”⁶¹ As Macfadden was painfully aware, these were all too susceptible to co-optation by those for whom they were obscene. Thus True Story literally surrounded its confessions with explanations and rationalizations. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about the early years of True Story is its sheer fascination with itself. The first fourteen volumes (1919–26) dedicated incredible amounts of ink and space to explaining the “true story idea.” While I interrogate and explain this “idea” below, I begin by simply stressing the sheer effort expended to ensure that no reader of True Story could miss the nearly puritanical morality of the confession.

True Story as a Rhetorical Primer

True Story's 1925 editorial comment that “it is well every now and then to emphasize the purpose of our policy in publishing only true-to-life stories” is a massive understatement.⁶² Alongside its true stories, True Story constantly emphasized its policies, explained its convictions, and demarcated itself from the wider run of American magazines. All of these emphases, explanations, and comparisons served as a rhetorical primer, teaching its readership how to read a confession. It was an education advanced by numerous mechanisms.

First, from its inception in 1919 until it was printing two million copies of each issue in 1926, True Story reserved a page-length sidebar on page 2 of each issue for explaining the “true story idea.” In November 1924 True Story gave this sidebar to an advertisement for the American Red Cross, and in the years that followed the space would occasionally be used to advertise future issues of the magazine. In every issue until November 1924, however, and the vast majority of issues thereafter, the page 2 sidebar was wholly dedicated to explaining the mission and mechanics of True Story. These columns explained how the magazine collected its material, announced increasingly lucrative prizes for the best story submitted in a particular year, and, above all, laid out the criteria that determined which submissions measured up to the “true story idea.”

Second, in addition to the page 2 sidebars, each issue of True Story contained numerous invitations for readers to submit their own true stories. These invitations often took the form of full-page advertisements, in which, after a prize was briefly but conspicuously announced, the requirements, philosophy, and morals of True Story were explained at length. Complementing these full-page invitations, the early issues of True Story were littered with sidebar-sized invitations. Often filling the blank space between the end of a story and the bottom of a page, these smaller invitations performed a similar function: announcing prizes, the criteria according to which they could be won, and the moral undergirding of True Story.

Third, in addition to the page 2 sidebars and the ubiquitous solicitations, the “true story idea” was disseminated through monthly editorials. Beginning in August 1921, Bernarr Macfadden wrote a one-page editorial for each issue. Most often, these editorials were trite, cliché-filled meditations on banal topics—the product, as Robert Ernst put it, of “the simple intensity of a believer who had no fear of the obvious.”⁶³ About twice a year, however, interposed between these cliché-ridden rehearsals of Benjamin Franklin–style truisms—such as “honesty is the best policy”—Macfadden used his editorial column to explain the “true story idea,” to defend the magazine against its competitors, to celebrate its accomplishments, and to explain its morality.⁶⁴ These editorials were in substance virtually indistinguishable from the page 2 sidebars and the solicitations for manuscripts that filled the pages of True Story.

Finally, the success of True Story imitators forced Macfadden to dedicate even more space to explaining and defending the “true story idea.” In 1922 W. H. Fawcett introduced True Confessions, which sold out its first issue and was “for years second only to True Story in circulation.”⁶⁵ Although the competition did not immediately register in True Story's pages, by the spring of 1924, True Story apparently felt the need to defend itself. “The public is being deceived today by magazines being produced in imitation of True Story,” the editors of True Story protested. This deceit, they continued, constituted “one of the most contemptible literary frauds in the history of American journalism, and the editors of True Story Magazine feel that they have a responsibility in exposing this condition.”⁶⁶ Expose it they did. From April 1924 forward, True Story marshaled all its resources in order to defend its home ground against impostors. In addition to using the page-two sidebar and Macfadden's editorials to parse True Story and its imitators, Macfadden published selected letters to the editor and a number of feature articles all dedicated to the comparative superiority of True Story. In addition to defending True Story, these defenses functioned, once again, to explain True Story to its readership: its philosophy was laid bare and its moral virtue rehearsed.

The cumulative result of all these interventions—the sidebars, invitations, editorials, and comparisons—was a highly self-referential magazine. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that for every true story published, True Story also published a corresponding rationale explaining why they published it. It is almost as if, between and beneath every confession, the editors of True Story felt compelled to make their editorial criteria explicit. If they couldn't do so using a full-page explanation, they certainly could (and did) use several sidebars per issue. I trust by this point the reason they did so is clear: True Story was a direct outgrowth of Macfadden's lifelong battle with Comstockery—a battle that had forced on Macfadden the realization that nakedness, rhetorical or otherwise, was almost by definition liable to be misunderstood. To counter this possibility, True Story refused to allow true stories to speak for themselves. Despite True Story's much-rehearsed claim that it was simply an unfiltered conduit of the American working-class experience, the sidebars, the ever-present solicitations, the carefully selected and dutifully printed letters to the editor, and the denunciations of the broader confession industry all served to filter the American experience and ensure that no one could miss the purportedly obvious fact that True Story—like the confessions that filled it—was a moral venture.

Authenticity and True Story

At the heart of the “true story idea” was Macfadden's insistence that True Story was written by its readers, for its readers, and of its readers.⁶⁷ Inspired by the letters he received in response to Coryell's confession, Macfadden offered one cent per word for confessions. He solicited manuscripts thus: “Simply describe as directly as you can, without omitting necessary details, what you consider the most interesting experience of your life.” Typewriting helpful but not imperative. The cultural historian Ann Fabian underscores the importance of this fact: “Macfadden's great innovation was to offer his readers a hand in the production of the artifacts they so happily consumed, to urge them at every turn to become writers as well as readers, producers as well as consumers.”⁶⁸ The editors of True Story knew as much. As they put it in May 1920, True Story is a “unique and distinctive magazine because its method of obtaining its material is unique and distinctive. It depends upon folk just like yourself to provide the stories, short and long, that appear in its pages—rather than upon a relatively small group of professional writers.”⁶⁹ In a 1922 article titled “What Is the True Story Idea?” the editors argued that the “success” of the magazine was “chiefly due to its readers' response to its invitation to bare their life stories on the printed page.”⁷⁰ One year later, the editors were even more emphatic: “The very corner-stone upon which True Story is built—the True Story idea itself—is its encouragement to everyday men and women, and not to professional writers alone, to set down their life-stories in black and white.”⁷¹

True Story's insistence that it is written by its readers justified the vernacular style of its prose. This is Macfadden: “It was the purpose of this new magazine to present, not the highly colored imaginative plots of men who made story writing a business … but to take the unvarnished, rude, and sometimes even illiterate words and phrases of people who were not selling their imaginations, but who were giving memories to the world for whatever these memories might be worth.”⁷² Almost every call for manuscripts emphasized that rhetorical skill, grammatical facility, and literary training were not required. Consider this 1922 advertisement: “True Story, you know, is unique among other things for the opportunities it affords the untrained and unexperienced [sic] writer. One who has a story to tell need have no misgivings as to his brain-child failing of recognition because its parent lacks literary experience.”⁷³ Four years later, the line is the same: “We do not want the fiction of professional writers. We want throbbing dramas from the hearts and lives of people who have lived them.”⁷⁴ In sum, True Story's claim that it was written by its readers was indistinguishable from its “unpolished,” vernacular style.

True Story's relentless pursuit of unvarnished prose led H. L. Mencken to envision the “perfect” Macfadden magazine as follows: “There will be no word of more than one syllable, and no word at all that might be a picture. The news of the day will be told precisely as the gory fictions of the comic strips are not told—in a series of graphs, with an occasional balloon. And the vocabulary of the balloons will be restricted to such terms as even infants of three are hep to: blaah, bang, boom, shhhh, wow, woof, hell, damn, and so on.”⁷⁵ For Mencken and his American Mercury readership, the monosyllabic character of True Story was evidence of thoughtlessness, immaturity, and infantilization. For True Story, however, “unvarnished prose” was evidence of authenticity and an essential step in turning True Story into a parable.

Indeed, it is impossible to understand True Story without stressing that the “unvarnished, rude and … illiterate” prose of the people was not merely tolerated by True Story in order to secure more manuscripts. Illiteracy was itself a positive good. It both testified to the authenticity of the working class and distinguished confessional prose from that composed by professional writers. According to Fulton Oursler's recollection, Macfadden expressly forbid his first editor, John Brennan, from “using a fancy pencil on a True Story manuscript”: “I don't want these stories to have any polish that doesn't naturally belong to them.” Oursler explained Macfadden's logic: “He did not care how crudely [the stories] might be expressed. In that very crudity he sensed the qualities of strength and conviction.”⁷⁶ In George Gerbner's account, True Story required a disregard for proper grammar; he quotes an unnamed confession writer thus: “In the breathless rush of words, grammar, syntax, correct antecedents went overboard. Where they didn't, I went back and threw them out. The story sold.”⁷⁷ The reason the story sold is that, according to the “true story idea,” grammar, syntax, and antecedents undermine what Gerbner called the “flavor of authenticity.”⁷⁸ Although Gerbner did not make this explicit, Macfadden did:

Fiction stories are inventions of the author's brain. The manuscripts which find their way to True Story's pages are not inventions at all, and they were not born in the brain but in the heart. They reflect life because they are life. The fiction story is only what the individual author thinks of life. The True Story is taken right out of the life of the man or woman who sends it to us. The fiction writer in his eagerness colors the truth. He tries to add more reality but by his very effort he takes away reality. Because truth is stranger than fiction and the imagination cannot begin to compete with life.⁷⁹

There could hardly be a more compact synopsis of the True Story conceit: professional writers invent fictions; True Story writers, strictly speaking, do not invent anything at all. They simply, as it were, transcribe life onto the written page, a task for which the paucity of their rhetorical skill suited them perfectly. The imperfections of their prose guaranteed the authenticity of their confession.

To ensure that True Story retained its “flavor of authenticity,” Macfadden assembled an editorial board wholly ignorant of “ideas on structure, on technique, [and] … artistic narrative quality.” Oursler recalls that Macfadden filled his storied “Reading Department” with “girls and boys who knew nothing whatever about the publishing business.”⁸⁰ The Saturday Evening Post caricatured Macfadden's Reading Department as a “corps of editors consisting of cooks, housemaids, office boys, chauffeurs, janitors, filing clerks, housewives, night-club hostesses, stenographers, elevator men and typewriter repairers.”⁸¹ A well-documented legend even holds that Macfadden fired two of his editors for taking courses in journalism.⁸² According to Macfadden's third wife, one member of his editorial board even wrote an essay titled “How I Was Demoted to Editor of True Story and Worked My Way up to Elevator Man Again!”⁸³ Finally, when True Story turned into an unprecedented success, the Saturday Evening Post concluded that Macfadden “was on the verge of proving that illiteracy was the highest culture and that blank minds should be ruling the world.”⁸⁴

As amusing as these anecdotes are, it is important that we not lose sight of their function. If Macfadden insisted on his editors' rhetorical ignorance, it is because this ignorance could guarantee the authenticity of the confessions he published. This much Macfadden made explicit. He argued that the fact that his stories were written by “folk who will write but one story in all their existence … serves as a guarantee of their truth.”⁸⁵ Similarly, in an undated (but likely 1930s) speech given by Dorothy Kemble to explain the inner workings of Macfadden Publications, she explained how, precisely, the public could be sure that True Story printed true stories: “If you could see the manner in which hundreds of these stories are submitted, I think that your question would be answered. Sometimes they are submitted on old school pads, the type we used in grammar school, sometimes in note books or on the back of scrap paper. I have even seen some stories written on plain brown wrapping paper. But in order to make doubly sure of their authenticity, an affidavit is required.”⁸⁶ For Kemble, the affidavit is repetitive. The unpolished presentation of the submissions—the fact that they are scribbled on school pads and scrap paper—is Kemble's primary evidence for the truth of True Story. It is as if the nuanced prose of the legal contract was made unnecessary by the unvarnished prose of the stories themselves. Mark Adams got it completely right when he claimed that Macfadden “equated crudity with verisimilitude.”⁸⁷

Thus far, the “true story idea” is this: the magazine prints only the rude prose of its readers, the quality of the prose guaranteeing True Story's claim to be an unfiltered conduit of the American working-class experience. The equation of rude prose and authentic truth, however, was only half of the “true story idea.” The other half was the equation of authenticity and Macfadden's own sexual politics. It is to this troublesome equation I now turn.

Authenticity, Moralism, and Sexuality

There is, of course, nothing self-evident about the equation of authenticity and sexual morality. In fact, many of Macfadden's detractors conceded that True Story may be an authentic reflection of American culture, but they were not about to conclude on these grounds that it was, as Macfadden claimed, a “great moral force.”⁸⁸ To ensure not only that his readers would perceive True Story's confessions as authentic, but that they would also understand authenticity in the proper sense, Macfadden deployed once more his endless sidebars, solicitations, and editorials. All of these were placed in the service of restricting the range of authenticity, of governing the scales on which it could register, and of assuring that it was placed in the service of a conservative sexual politics.

At this point it is essential to recall Macfadden's particular brand of morality. At the turn of the century, Macfadden's primary argument against Comstock was that social morality required that the truth of the “sex principle” be expounded in “all its details.”⁸⁹ In the 1920s, Macfadden understood True Story in precisely these terms: it was an unflinching register of true life, and for this reason an unparalleled source of moral instruction. For example, in a 1925 editorial that recalls the argument of Coryell's “Growing to Manhood,” Macfadden argued that American children will learn about sexuality one way or another: “If you refuse to satisfy youthful curiosity by giving them the truth properly and reverently presented, they often absorb from questionable associates vulgar and vile distortions of some of the most divine phases of life.” And such “vile distortions” gleaned from the subjugated knowledges of “questionable associates” had grave social consequences: “They have made a hell on earth for literally millions of poor victims who have been reared amidst falsehoods.” From this point, it is a short step to True Story's moral value. As an antidote to the danger of such “vulgar and vile distortions,” Macfadden celebrated True Story as a didactic source of “naked truth, reverently presented”: “If you are armed with the truth you cannot be deceived by evil. You know the nature of its influence, and you have only yourself to blame if you fall by the wayside. True Story is a great beacon of light which sheds a brilliant radiance upon life's pathway. It shows you the way. It warns you of your dangers. It is a school of experience from which you can learn without suffering the tortures of the poor struggling victims that are caught in its meshes.”⁹⁰ Macfadden's claim that True Story is a “school of experience” perfectly captures the magazine's moral conceit. It was a “great beacon of light” precisely because it set the “naked truth” in bold relief.

Throughout the pages of True Story, Macfadden returned over and again to the claim that experience, unfiltered and reverently presented, was an intrinsic moral guide for disillusioned American youth. In 1922, for example, he dramatized the instructive character of authentic experience by telling the story of a fiction reader's brush with death. The reader in question had patterned her life on ideals taken from novels and subsequently “paid the price that comes with ideals that are false.” In True Story fashion, Macfadden then made the moral of the story explicit: because novels do not “teach life as it is,” they are an unworthy source of ideals. True Story, by contrast, because its confessions have “truth for a background,” will provide ideals that will “stand the storms and stress of life.”⁹¹

A year later, Macfadden argued that although experience is unquestionably the “greatest teacher,” there are some situations in which the price exacted by experience is simply too high. He provided the example of poison. Although lessons from experience are more powerful than lessons from books, it is not worth learning about poison firsthand. This, Macfadden argued, is the virtue of True Story: through it you can “learn from the faults and failures of other people.” It provides all the benefits of learning from experience without the burden of experience itself. This is Macfadden: “Experience as it is dramatically presented to you in True Story is indeed an invaluable teacher. While you read with fascinating interest the dramatic details of the trials and struggles of the characters presented therein, you are learning from others through their personal experiences—the greatest of all teachers, and it is a fascinating pastime. True Story fills an invaluable need. It presents the truth as it is lived by those in your own sphere of life.”⁹² In short, Macfadden claimed, “True Story Magazine came into being with the sole ideal of living up to its name, to tell the truth about life, so that others might learn its lessons without enduring the suffering consequent upon so many of these personal experiences.”⁹³

The years made Macfadden only more insistent and more explicit about the moral value of True Story. In April 1924, he penned a two-page editorial titled “True Story Magazine: A Great Moral Force,” in which he laid out the “high ideals back of this publication.” He argued that True Story “readers are made better morally, mentally, spiritually and even physically through the influence of the stories published herein.”⁹⁴ Rehearsing arguments forged in his early battles with Comstock, Macfadden argued that ignorance facilitates personal and cultural decay: “The Evils that were everywhere devitalizing the race, the tragedies that have crushed human lives often beyond recall were presented in such great detail that I could not fail to see the truth in all its appalling aspects. And standing out from these mountains of human catastrophes was the ever present excuse: ‘I DID NOT KNOW!’” Americans “fell into Evil,” Macfadden concluded, because “they did not recognize its character.”⁹⁵

Against the power of a misrecognized evil, “True Story lights life's pathway. It sheds brilliant rays of knowledge upon the road that everyone must travel.” It “sets up warning signs,” it decries “selfishness and greed,” and it exposes the “tremendous force” of the “sex instinct.” On this last, volatile subject, Macfadden emphasized that True Story “clearly indicat[es] the necessity of living in conformity with the great moral law laid down by Jesus of Nazareth”: “THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.” True Story Magazine, Macfadden concluded, “clearly and emphatically put forth this great Biblical truth.” By putting this truth in the form of “strikingly dramatic, intensely interesting stories,” True Story provided “education in the form of entertainment.” And, I might add, entertainment in the form of confessions in which no moral was left to the imagination of the reader.

So confident was Macfadden in the high moral calling of True Story that he set up a “ministerial advisory board.” Composed of clergymen from a variety of faiths, the board was given full authority over every article slotted for publication in True Story. Although there is no way to verify this, Oursler claimed in 1929 that since the board's constitution not an article had been printed in True Story without the full approval of the ministers.⁹⁶ What can be verified is the energy Macfadden spent reminding his readers that each true story had already received clerical sanction. To publicize his ministerial board, Macfadden occasionally dedicated a page or two of True Story to reprinting quotations culled from ministers and other readers. Typically arranged in two columns under an oversized title that announced True Story as a “Great Moral Force,” these quotations were presented as evidence of True Story's moral virtue and they functioned as a constant reminder of how the bed shadows that filled the pages of True Story were to be read.⁹⁷ The quotations themselves are deeply repetitive; a small selection may stand in for the lot. A certain Mrs. O. H. England wrote, “The stories are morally refreshing, for while they take us through the tunnels of life, they always bring us safely back to the sunlight of duty's path. There is an uplifting afterthought and theme in its stories which distinguish them from and make them superior to any other stories of sex and life. After one reads some of the magazines of sex stories, there follows a feeling mental degradation and an inclination to conceal them from the eyes of our associates. But I am always proud to have my copy of True Story lying in a conspicuous place.”⁹⁸

Surrounding Mrs. England's excerpted opinion were twelve other quotations of similar length and similar substance. From a broader perspective, this page of quotations testifying to True Story's “moral force” was itself surrounded, in the proximate issues, by more quotation-filled, minister-laden pages bearing witness to the “sunlit path” of True Story. Taken together, these quotations provide True Story's readership with a massive and intrusive rhetorical primer. They provide instructions for reading authenticity. Lest authentic stories of human sexuality be interpreted as salacious or lewd, the rhetorical primer—provided by True Story in the form of ministerial letters to the editor—provided a hermeneutic according to which the bed shadows testified to their own darkness and pushed the reader toward duty's “sunlit path.”

Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, Macfadden used the shortcomings of the other confession magazines as an opportunity to teach his readers about the genre of the true story and how it was to be read. In May 1924 he carefully distinguished True Story from its competition on the basis of its moral rigor. Given the “extraordinary demand” for true stories, Macfadden noted that imitators were inevitable. Moreover, he insisted, “we have no objection to them when their efforts are imbued by the high ideals that inspire our True Story product.” Unfortunately, Macfadden noted that the competition was “unwholesome,” “lewd and obscene”: “Their idea of a true story is an all-around filthy tale that presents lascivious details of various kinds.” Macfadden, for his part, claimed a very different definition of a true story, and a different definition of authenticity: “We believe that [true] stories should be made to assume an attitude of respect towards the highest type of morality, and that the outworkings of human instincts and emotions should be portrayed naturally, cleanly as well as dramatically. For twenty-five years the publishers of True Story have been engaged in publishing literature that has had a distinctly upbuilding influence upon its readers. It has helped to make their lives more wholesome, more satisfying and more successful.”⁹⁹ Macfadden's claim—made in 1924, five years into True Story's life—that he had been publishing “upbuilding” literature for twenty-five years is telling. It reveals that, from Macfadden's perspective, True Story was a continuation of Physical Culture, which, besides being founded in 1899, was expressly dedicated to fighting Comstock's morality by censorship.¹⁰⁰

This is the “true story idea”: the unvarnished prose guarantees the authenticity of the tales, and the authenticity of tales guarantees the propagation of moral virtue. If both of these equations were rehearsed ad nauseam, it is because both were highly contested. Macfadden was fighting not only the likes of Mencken, who argued that unrefined prose was a signal of unrefined thought, but also a Comstock-inspired reaction that decried True Story as lewd, suggestive, and even pornographic.¹⁰¹ With such opponents as these, and with the meaning of confession in the balance, is it any surprise that Macfadden took extra care to ensure that the two million readers in his charge understood clearly the genre of confession and the sexual politics it served?

Conclusion: Confession and Sexuality

Lurking in the founding and development of True Story Magazine are three important lessons for rhetorical critics. First, in the 1920s the boundaries of the confession were redrawn along political lines. Why did Macfadden bar his first editor from using a “fancy pencil”? Why did he insist on unvarnished prose and stories composed of monosyllabic words? Answer: His own sexual politics. Macfadden's crusade against Comstock required him to emphasize the truth of his stories, and the unvarnished, monosyllabic form of his confessions was a powerful means of doing so. If, as I have elsewhere suggested, the equation of inarticulacy and authenticity has become a standard marker of our contemporary confessional culture, it is important to remember that this equation is never self-evident.¹⁰² In the case of Macfadden and True Story, it was driven by his political agenda.

Second, if cultural politics influenced the very form of the confession, the development of the genre was itself ingredient in the shaping of American sexual mores. Greg Mullins has insightfully called Macfadden's Physical Culture a “well-muscled closet.” On his reading, the magazine displayed erotic pictures of the nude male body, but diffused the erotic charge by restricting the range of the nude body's meaning to aesthetic or medical values.¹⁰³ Following the same logic, it is possible to understand True Story as a “confessional closet.” It was a place where the confessional form itself was placed in the service of conservative sexual politics. Lest his readership miss this point, Macfadden surrounded every illicit story with sidebars, explanations, and rationalizations aplenty—all designed to reinforce the association between nakedness and Christian virtue. So long as Macfadden had his way, bed shadows, stories of sexual deviancy, and even experience itself confirmed the legitimacy of the most austere sexual politics. When we consider the reach of Macfadden's influence—that he reached two million, mostly undereducated, working-class readers throughout the 1920s—it is hard to fathom that his twin claims of providing both an unfiltered conduit of the American experience and a Christian moral primer did not collude with each other and thereby become ingredient in the production of the heteronormative sexual culture that was twentieth-century America. Although I do not know how we might measure True Story's influence on this score, I do know how we can judge Macfadden: he turned his bountiful resources toward the naturalization of his own sexual politics, and for this he remains culpable. That Macfadden's most powerful instrument of naturalization was the confession stands as a reminder to rhetorical critics that genres and genre criticism must not be taken lightly. It stands also as a rejection of Rod Hart's trivialization of genre criticism. Hart put it this way: “To my way of thinking, no particularly exalted intellectual function is served by tucking each of the world's little speeches into its own little generic bed.”¹⁰⁴ However, to Macfadden's way of thinking, the categorization of his magazine served an exalted political function. And to my way of thinking, the suggestion that the categorization of texts is innocent, pedantic, or trivial amounts to a studied refusal to look at a major form of cultural politics.

Finally, one of the most remarkable things about the development of True Story from 1905 forward, is Macfadden's keen awareness of what we might call the emptiness of authenticity. Although he never articulated it quite this way, on some level Macfadden knew that the meaning of authenticity was neither self-evident nor transcendent. Put rhetorically, he knew that no matter the context, it was insufficient simply to defend his magazine as authentic. In addition to such a defense, Macfadden carried the further burden of making authenticity serve his own politics. This is the reason why the early years of True Story are overrun with sidebars, editorials, and explanations. Macfadden knew that he had to not only provide confessions, but also provide a protocol for reading them correctly.

There is a general lesson here. Confession, like Macfadden's authenticity, is not a transcendent genre, the contours of which could be adduced equally well from any number of situations. Quite the opposite. Confession might be called an empty signifier. It means different things at different times as different people put it to different ends. The task for rhetorical critics, then, is not the delineation of the form; it is, rather, in charting how various delineations have served various partisan agendas. What is needed—and what I've tried to provide—is a political economy of confession: an analysis of the genre that grants primary importance to the political commitments that provoked and defined the genre of confession in a particular instance. For the moment we lift any confession out of the political economy which required and defined it, we risk thinking that there exists some transcendent form of confession against which particular performances can be judged. While such criticism may be able to explicate formal changes in the genre over time—and here I have Foucault in my sights—it could not, as a matter of course, explain the politics of confession.

In the 1920s, the genre of confession was situated vis-à-vis the development of True Story and Macfadden's lifelong crusade against Anthony Comstock's sexual politics. In this political economy, confession was defined in a very particular way and according to the strictest of politics. As a hedge against mistaking this 1920s vision of confession for confession in general, in the next chapter I chart the changes in confession, authenticity, and True Story that resulted from Macfadden's 1930s preoccupation with American class politics. As we shall see, when confession is situated in a new political economy, torn from its 1920s alliance with sexuality and articulated instead to a particular class politics, the form itself will dramatically change.