Читать книгу Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America - Dave Tell - Страница 6

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CONFESSION AND CLASS: A NEW TRUE STORY

By 1936, when the New Masses put an effeminate, busted, brassiered, fingernail-polished, phallus-fondling caricature of Macfadden on its cover, it had become commonplace to decry True Story as pornographic. To be sure, Macfadden's True Story was the subject of much debate. But, as chapter 1 demonstrated, in the early years of True Story this debate was restricted to issues of sexuality. By 1936, however, a new set of terms had been introduced into the debate over Macfadden's True Story. Tellingly subtitled “From Pornography to Politics,” the New Masses article was less about sexuality than about class: “Millions of working-class and lower middle-class citizens absorb [Macfadden's] reactionary editorials and wallow in the politely-dressed filth of his confessionals.”¹

True Story's shift from being defined by its opposition to the sexual politics of Comstock to its later concerns with class politics started in 1926. In that year, William Jourdan Rapp began his sixteen-year tenure as editor of True Story and, by historical consensus, fundamentally altered the magazine. It was a momentous shift. No longer the haven of Macfadden's “anonymous, amateur, illiterates,” True Story now recruited and published such writers as Henry Ford, Edward Corsi, and the YMCA figurehead Mrs. Frederic M. Paist.² Although the stories still “taught a strong moral lesson,” that morality was no longer grounded in stories authenticated by unrefined prose. Rapp reasoned that public education was improving public literacy and thus gave his editors license to exercise a “heavier hand.”³ All these, however, were incremental changes. The biggest shift in the administration of True Story was its newfound pursuit of mainstream advertising. Until that point, the advertising in True Story was scarce and as unrefined as its prose. Seven years after its founding, and two years after achieving a circulation of two million readers, True Story still “carried less than a dozen full-page or half-page ads for national advertisers.”⁴ The advertising it did carry was hardly capable of generating revenue. Filled with advertisements for alternative medicines, self-help books, public speaking lessons, violet rays, and Macfadden's eight-volume Encyclopedia of Health, True Story was filled with products that would generate neither mass interest nor mass revenue.

Beginning in 1926 and continuing through mid-century, True Story campaigned for mainstream advertising dollars. It did so by taking the “true story idea” to American business leaders and advertising executives. This campaign, which Roland Marchand has aptly characterized as a “series of sociological sermons to the trade,” took a number of different forms: from advertisements in mainstream newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and the Boston Herald Traveler, to trade journals such as Printer's Ink, to a number of short books published by Macfadden Publications.⁵ Whatever the outlet, True Story's campaign for advertising dollars aimed to convince American executives that whatever their personal misgivings about True Story or its working-class readership, the magazine was nonetheless an essential advertising space. As one advertisement put it, “Socially these people are strangers to you. Culturally, their tastes are quite different from your own. But economically they are your bread and butter.”⁶ The campaign was wildly successful. The pages that were once filled with marginal products incapable of generating revenue were by the 1930s filled with products of mass culture: the Fleischmann Company, Eastman Kodak, Lever Bros., Jell-O, Listerine, and Lux Toilet Soap.⁷

Aspects of this campaign were conventional. It will surprise no one, for example, to learn that True Story emphasized its circulation numbers, which by 1926 could compete with any monthly in the land. Beyond the numbers, True Story argued that because it was designed by and for a working-class audience, an advertisement placed in its pages would be particularly effective. A Printer's Ink advertisement put it this way: “To reach them, to sell them, advertisers need use ONLY ONE great national magazine, True Story.” While “wage earners” “can't comprehend the more sophisticated ‘silk worm’ magazines written for the white collars,” True Story's “democracy of editorial appeal has made it the only great national magazine tapping 86% of America.”⁸ True Story even created new slogans and new logos to foreground its penetration of the “wage earning market”: “True Story: The Only Magazine They Read” and “True Story: The NEW Market.”⁹

Yet we must not take True Story's claim to access a working-class readership at face value. This access was built on two mutually constitutive fictions: first, the fiction of a happy, docile, politically passive working class with expendable income, and second, the fiction of a magazine that perfectly expressed the deepest desires of this class. Macfadden Publications developed both fictions with vigor, dedicating countless columns to redescribing America's working class in self-serving terms. Beyond securing advertising dollars, the results of this campaign were twofold. First, these two fictions combined to solidify True Story's status as a confession magazine. Macfadden Publications argued that because True Story was written by its readers, it functioned as an ideal connection between consumers and producers. In addition to carrying products to the masses, it also carried the masses—their subconscious desires, anxieties, and consumer impulses—back to business executives. This redescription of True Story eliminated any lingering doubts about the confessional status of True Story, for in the middle decades of twentieth-century America, a discourse that expressed subconscious desires could register only as a confession. It is no coincidence that it was in these years that the Saturday Evening Post—and the New Yorker, and Time, and virtually every other cultural organ—now instinctively saw true stories as confessions. In this chapter I stress that this widely shared mid-century instinct to see Macfadden's true stories as confessions was not instinctual at all: it was provided for by a particular political economy, the product of an advertising campaign that redescribed both True Story and its readership.

Second, and perhaps more important, this redescription of True Story and its attendant reification as a confession magazine had consequences on the well-being of the American working class. Indeed, I suggest that the progressive immiseration of the working class can be indexed to the progressive certainty with which True Story was understood as a confession magazine. Here's why: True Story was gradually reified as a confession magazine to the degree that Macfadden's two fictions were believed. And to the extent that his fictions were believed, that segment of the working class that remained discontent and impoverished was hidden from view. It was hidden by the well-funded and widely deployed fiction of a happy, well-remunerated working class, the desires of which True Story perfectly expressed. In other words, because True Story claimed to be the organ par excellence of the working class, and because it fundamentally misrepresented this class, whatever portions of the actually existing working class that did not match Macfadden's fiction were cut off from all sources of power, left to defend themselves in a world that—if Macfadden had his way—would not even know they existed.

True Story's Fictional Working Class

Macfadden Publications rested its argument for advertising dollars on the existence and purchasing power of what Macfadden referred to as a “new market” of consumers.¹⁰ He titled this class of consumers “wage earners.” “Wage earners” were so central to True Story's advertising campaign that Macfadden Publications released two books dedicated to establishing their existence and explaining their relevance. In 1927 Macfadden Publications released 86% of America and followed it three years later with The American Economic Evolution. These are fascinating texts. Both were addressed to “Business Executives” and both comprised short vignettes of the so-called wage-earning class. Sometimes these vignettes were anonymous, at other times—especially in 86% of America—they were attributed to such personalities as Walter Chrysler, Henry Ford, Herbert Hoover, and Andrew Mellon. On a descriptive level, both claimed simply to explain the relevant contours of the class: their purchasing patterns and political tendencies, of course, but also their aesthetic sensibilities and economic ambitions. While The American Economic Evolution explicitly used these descriptions as evidence of the value of True Story's advertising space, 86% of America relied on ads in Printer's Ink to connect its analysis of the wage-earning class to the conclusion that “magazine advertisers MUST use True Story.”¹¹

In both the books and their accompanying newspaper advertisements, Macfadden Publications argued that an economic revolution had transformed the working class: “Almost without our being conscious of the fact, a revolution in industry has been taking place that is raising all classes of the population to a more equal participation in the fruits of industry, and thus, by the natural operation of economic law, bringing to a nearer realization the dreams of those Utopians who looked to the day when poverty would be banished and all men could enjoy a greater share of the good things in life.”¹² Because the “good things in life” were now broadcast, Macfadden imagined an American citizen rebuking a “Frenchman” as follows: “There are no peasants here. Our proletariat are more prosperous than your bourgeoisie.”¹³ Despite the language of economic law, classless societies, and the rising of the proletariat, True Story's “economic revolution” should not be confused with Marx's never-quite-materialized revolution. According to True Story's model, the economic revolution had already happened—albeit “without our being conscious of the fact”—and equality was a present reality rather than a motivating ideal. Macfadden himself recognized the difference: “To-day, the New World offers the spectacle of a proletariat so prosperous that the term, itself, is paradoxical.”¹⁴ With no acknowledgment of enduring inequalities, Macfadden argued that contemporary America marks “the closest approach to absolute equality that the human race or any other form of animal life has ever known.”¹⁵

Macfadden illustrated this purported equality with the story of a certain Jim Smith. Ten years ago “any Jim Smith” working in “any American factory” came home “sour and tired,” he “joined strikes and threw brickbats.” He was unhappy, exploited, and politically active. As the reference to “brickbats” suggests, this unreconstructed Jim Smith criticized authority and “along the way,” Macfadden writes, “Coxeys and Debses sprang up.” “Then came tremendous economic change” and a corresponding “miraculous change in the life of Jim Smith.” Ten years later, his workday had been cut nearly in half, his earnings multiplied sevenfold, his body fresher, his leisure longer, his comportment more genial, and his political engagement tempered if not altogether eliminated. The new Jim Smith drives an automobile home to the suburbs, “he goes to shows, he studies, he reads and writes.” No longer the brickbat-throwing, Eugene Debs–producing agitator, the new Jim Smith “has learned moderation.”¹⁶ Like “Jim Smith,” “the Missus” had once “risked her manicure in the Monday wash tub; now she threw the switch and let George Washing Machine do it.” Likewise, the doughboy now “found that his new job paid enough to shift the family quite a bit uptown.”¹⁷

Between the two books, there are countless “Jim Smiths,” “Missuses,” and “doughboys,” who together constitute Macfadden's “wage-earning class.” As a class, they are happy, leisured, suburban, blue-collar commuters who have been transformed by their newfound disposable income. Macfadden concludes, “A great upsurge of the common people of America has found itself on an economic level never even hoped for out of all its past.”¹⁸ And if common people are surging upward, this is a signal that the worker's labor is both intellectually and financially lucrative: “We have, in short, released labor from much of the drudgery, conserved its energy for tasks requiring higher intelligence and in effect made of each worker a foreman of mechanical forces who earns and can be paid a foreman's wages.”¹⁹

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, it is obvious that a classless society of intellectually stimulated, well-paid wage earners was a fiction designed to sell advertising. It is important to remember, however, that it was a fiction that once captivated an age. In 1926 the J. Walter Thompson Company—the “leading advertising agency in the country”—proclaimed the working class the “New National Market”: “Millions of families regarded almost as recently as a few months ago as poor prospects for many kinds of merchandise, are now the best sort of prospects.”²⁰ Likewise the Chevrolet Motor Company proclaimed in 1937 that “tens of thousand of [working-class] men on one single payroll have money for themselves and their families to spend.”²¹ Propped up by the likes massive advertising agencies and national brands like Chevrolet, the well-paid, eager-to-spend laborer proved a resilient image. The historian Lizabeth Cohen explains that while “hard times forced many Americans to struggle to find and keep work, to feed their families, and to hold on to their homes or pay their rent,” the working class was nonetheless increasingly envisioned—by themselves as much as by policy makers—as a consumer class.²² After all, as Richard H. Pells has noted in Radical Visions and American Dreams, in the 1920s “American society began to take on the look of a white-collar paradise, complete with chain stores, suburban housing booms, the dependence on recreation as an escape from work and on advertising as a guide to life.”²³ So many were taken in by these appearances that by mid-century it became almost a sociological commonplace to celebrate the death of classes in American society.²⁴ Even the New Republic—along with The Nation the leading liberal organ of 1920s America—proclaimed in 1929, “To believe that a proletarian philosophy may be brought into being in this country where the germs of class-consciousness are scarcely discernible is to submit to self-delusion.”²⁵

The image of a spending, liberated working class may have been resilient, but historians agree that it was one-part fiction. Commenting on “True Story's version of the fate of the factory worker,” Cohen insists that “a truer story” needs to be told. Contrary to the mythology of The American Economic Evolution, Cohen argues that workers “did not enjoy nearly the prosperity that advertisers and sales promoters assumed they did.” Addressing True Story's narrative, Cohen continues, “If factory workers could have depended on these slowly rising wages from year to year and year round, they might have consumed more like Jim Smith. Instead, unemployment remained high throughout the decade, even for people with so-called steady work.”²⁶ Likewise, Richard Pells writes:

Largely hidden from view were the more unpleasant realities of life in the 1920s, particularly the rise in technological unemployment as machines replaced men in the factory, together with the decade-long depression in agriculture, mining, and textiles. For most Americans the 1920s was a period not so much of prosperity as of sheer survival, with little money left over after the bills were paid to enjoy the party others seemed to be throwing. And as the years wore on, it became increasingly difficult for the average man to consume what the economy could produce—an ominous sign which the pitchmen of the “new era” chose to ignore.²⁷

All ominous signs were certainly ignored by Macfadden Publications. In 86% of America and The American Economic Evolution, 1920s America was an unqualified, classless paradise.

Although the “wage earner” was certainly fictitious, Macfadden and True Story refined this immensely popular fiction to full effect. In the pursuit of advertising dollars, the most important characteristic of the “wage earner” was his disposable income (the worker was always cast as masculine). “The real money of America has finally landed in the pockets of several million pairs of overalls,” Macfadden proclaimed.²⁸ In 1926 alone, he reported, the “wage earners” grossed $3.6 billion.²⁹ And this money did not stay overalled for long; it went straight to “radios, motor cars, and up-to-date appliances”:³⁰ “With bricklayers making $14 a day and other trades in proportion, it is easy to understand why their wives can afford to spend 41 billions of dollars a year for foodstuffs, nearly 6 billions of dollars a year for house furnishings, and proportionate amounts for other staples and moderately priced luxuries.”³¹ A True Story ad in the Chicago Tribune put it this way: “Money is everywhere. More money than America has ever known before. And more widespread. And deeper down. This present prosperity has penetrated and permeated stratum after stratum of American Society until today that great mass of millions once casually known as ‘labor’ now controls the destinies of every factory in the land.” They control the factories, not only because of “an economic equality that has never been equaled,” but also because their disposable income has provided them the purchasing power that keeps the “whir of production … at concert pitch.”³² For these reasons, the “wage earners” are “unquestionably the richest and readiest market to any manufacturer whose fortune rests on selling.”³³ In short, they are the “great consuming outlet.”³⁴

True Story thus defined its readership as the ideal American consumer: leisured enough to desire the amenities of mass culture, moneyed enough to buy them, and temperamentally disposed not to challenge authority. That such a demographic did not in fact exist was, from the perspective of True Story, a problem easily solved. True Story's solution was to redefine true stories themselves, to turn authenticity, truthfulness, and experience—all of which were catalogued monthly in the pages of True Story—into documentable evidence of a fictional class. If, in the 1920s, true stories advanced a moral lesson, in the 1930s the same stories were made to serve class politics by establishing the existence of a docile, spending working class.

The Mirror Function of True Stories

If True Story's sheer circulation and its “democratic editorial appeal” guaranteed that it could carry the news of products from the classes to the masses, the fact that it was written by its readers guaranteed the return trip.³⁵ In other words, because True Story was written by its readers, and because its readers were defined as consumers (wage earners), the articles in True Story provided a picture of the very consumers who were the object of the producers' attention. In this way, Macfadden suggested, advertising in True Story was more valuable than advertising elsewhere, for the nature of the magazine ensured that the products filling the advertising pages could be uniquely calibrated to the desires of its readers: “Here at True Story Magazine, the people not only tell us what they want but they also give it to us. We can't make any mistake. If their emotions are changing, they change them. If they lean toward mystery stories, they give them to us. But that is not the best of it. When they get tired of mystery stories, they stop writing them. We never have to guess what they want nor when they are sick of it.” Macfadden concluded that True Story reflected social and economic change “as perfectly as a rock or a tree is reflected in a clear, still lake.”³⁶

Macfadden thus defined True Story as the collective self-expression of the fictional wage-earning class. To make this case he reminded his readers that True Story “never has been what might be called an ‘edited’ publication.” For Macfadden, “editing” was a devil term, a synonym for tampering or falsifying. Rather than tamper with “the great mass of personal experiences,” True Story simply “printed them”: “Wherever you have any personal expression from a cross-section of hundreds of thousands of individuals, you have a great human composite that is telling the story of its age more clearly than any historian could ever do. For self-expression is always true expression when you let it alone.” True Story thus constituted a “perfect mirror” of “human affairs.” Indeed, what we might call the mirror function of True Story was itself the grounds of Macfadden's fictional economic narrative. While the early submissions to True Story had once recorded tales of “misery and privation and struggle,” the more recent stories, “which come flowing in to us in an ever endless stream, are ending happily”: “In the last decade the very character of these True Stories has so completely changed that we ourselves do not recognize our own publication.”³⁷

Macfadden was extraordinarily committed to the “mirror function” of True Story. A decade after The American Economic Evolution, he made the conceit the basis for his 1941 History and Magazines. This richly decorated coffee-table book begins with the premise that “magazines never ‘just happen.’”³⁸ Rather, they are a reflection of the “social forces at work in America.” To illustrate the point, History and Magazines provided a two-page chart that calibrated fifty-five prominent magazines to the social forces that “created” them. For example, the New American Magazine was a response to the American Revolution; the American Review was a product of nationalism; the Saturday Evening Post was created by the Civil War; The Nation by Reconstruction; Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping by industrialization; and True Story by World War I. “That is why,” Macfadden concluded, “through magazines, it is possible to see a dimension in history beyond a chronological presentation of events, an insight into the effects of these forces upon the people who figured in them.” In this sense, True Story was something of a first among equals. Although all magazines reflected history, only True Story was written by its readers, and thus, to a greater extent than the others, it placed in bold relief the “hopes, fears, troubles, [and] ambitions” of its readers. Unlike the other fifty-four magazines on the chart, True Story was not simply created by a particular social force; it was a register on which shifting social forces were rendered legible. And this, Macfadden argued, made True Story an invaluable tool for the American manufacturer: “For this reason the pages of True Story—as they change with America's great Wage Earner Group—offer a monthly insight into the history of that group—an insight more revealing than the statistics of their wages, bank balances or purchases. A few great writers of advertising copy have discovered that truth for themselves and use True Story as a guide to the contemporary desires of its readers.”³⁹ It is difficult to overestimate the consistency with which the True Story advertising campaign returned to the magazine's “mirror function.” The Chicago Tribune emphasized the certainty of the wage earner's new wealth. Because True Story provided “the perfect reflection of this entire new cultural development,” it argued, “there is no more question about it than there is about the nature of man.”⁴⁰ Similarly, in The American Economic Evolution, Macfadden argued, “Today, the true stories in True Story Magazine are so different from the same true stories of ten years ago that it is hard to recognize them as the self-expression of the same people.”⁴¹

All this is a very different picture of True Story than the one developed at length in the 1920s True Story as a response to Anthony Comstock. Two easy points of comparison will dramatize the point. While both the 1920s True Story and the later advertising campaign talked endlessly about the “true story idea” and the magazine's astronomical circulation, these two things had very different meanings in different contexts. Consider first the relative fate of the “true story idea”—the fact that it was written by its readers. In the 1920s, this meant that the magazine was didactic, educational, and corrective; an intervention into sexual politics. The fact that it was written by its readers guaranteed that it recorded actual experiences, and actual experiences were valuable primarily for their moral function. As Macfadden put it in 1924, “We want to help others to a safe passage by showing them the pitfalls that beset life's paths. That is our supreme purpose.”⁴² By contrast, while the advertising campaign rehearsed the fact that True Story was written by its readers with as much monotony as the first fourteen volumes of the magazine, this fact now meant something rather different. No longer a guarantee of True Story's moral uplift, it functioned now to guarantee that True Story was a reflection of society rather than an instrument in its reform. In short, True Story now revealed rather than reformed America. And as its function shifted from reformation to revelation, True Story was increasingly recognized in confessional terms.

Or consider True Story's record-setting rise to a circulation of two million in only five years. Both the 1920s magazine and the 1930s advertising campaign boasted of this achievement endlessly, but they drew very different lessons from it. In the magazine, it was evidence of the popularity of moral instruction. In a May 1924 article titled “Two Million,” for example, Macfadden interpreted the achievement as a “gigantic testimonial to the popularity of truth as an entertainer.” But not just as an entertainer: “The little lives of ordinary folks have built a new literature. They are teaching a moral lesson which our young folks need, and we will be a better people because we learn from the experiences of others.”⁴³ The account in History and Magazines could not have been more different. After noting that the quick rise to two million was still honored well after the fact, it explained the achievement thus: “We believe that these achievements have been possible because True Story presents to its readers a true picture of current life—a picture they find interesting, illuminating, and inspiring.”⁴⁴ Thus was the didactic moralism of True Story in its early years replaced by romantic sentiments of national self-expression.

On an empirical level, Macfadden's claim that True Story provides a “true picture of current life” is simply not true. Here I am not concerned with any of the particular stories, and I have no stake in the much-rehearsed debate over whether the true stories were forged. Rather, I simply wish to stress that, as Pells and Cohen remind us, Macfadden's so-called wage earners were a fiction. Historically speaking, the American working class was never relieved of drudgery and never found itself plagued with too many amenities. Thus, even granting Macfadden's claim that his editors never touched up a story or hired a professional writer, it is still impossible that his true stories could bear witness to the historical veracity of a fictional class. Yet Macfadden needed this class. For, regardless of whether they actually existed, wage earners were the picture-perfect consumer, and as such, Macfadden's case for advertising dollars rested on their existence. Macfadden's solution was ingenious. He had learned from his bouts with Comstock that confessions were empty signifiers—they were always liable to misinterpretation. That is why he had turned True Story into a rhetorical primer, why in the 1920s he had surrounded each true story with a set of directions for interpreting it as a guide to moral virtue. Why not give advertising executives a similar lesson? Why not teach them to see in true stories the exact thing he wanted them to see—the ideal consumer? He thus, as it were, inserted the wage earner behind the confession. Without changing a single editorial policy, he told executives that if they squinted just right, if they learned to read True Story properly, they could see between the lines of his true stories millions of affluent, docile, and eager consumers.

This, however, was no simple task. On its surface, True Story was just so many stories of promises broken and kept, rendezvous arranged and regretted. Thus, with as much intensity as the early True Story provided a never-ending commentary alongside the true stories it told, the advertising campaign insisted that business executives must learn to reread True Story. A Printer's Ink ad for True Story was titled “Do You Know How to Read Your Newspaper?”⁴⁵ The implied answer was no. Consider The American Economic Evolution. True Story may “fairly shout” its reflection of American culture, the book argued, but such shouting will be audible only “if one will take the trouble to read between the lines.” This was imperative. If only the printed lines were considered, “one story may be about sex and one about money. Another about chastity and another about divorce. But when you lay them out together at the end of any period, as any good sociologist would do, and then look underneath them for the impelling motive—the factor that caused the story, you get a picture of the true conditions of the time that could not be written in any other way.” Macfadden constantly urged business executives to be sociologists; to be “student-minded”; to ignore the surface content of the stories; to “take the settings of these True Stories instead of the stories themselves”; to see the fortunes of the American worker “in big type, between the lines”; to “take the underlay” of true stories, “not by what they tell, but by what they do not even realize they are telling.” Macfadden was insistent on this: “You have to have wisdom enough to read between the lines to see what is going on. The writers of these stories themselves do not realize what is going on except as they have personal wisdom, here and there, to read between their own lines.”⁴⁶

Literally speaking, of course, there was nothing but blank space between the lines. But Macfadden used this blank space to his great advantage. Rather than rely on business executives to read between the lines correctly, he was quick to fill in that blank space with his fictional wage-earning class. Consider again Macfadden's History and Magazines. This book claimed to document the shifting anxieties of the wage-earning class by providing lengthy excerpts from True Story Magazine and a meta-commentary explaining the meaning of the excerpts. Initially, stories like “Haunting Memories” revealed that the wage earners were anxious about the “changing moral code.” Later, stories like “Rotten Riches” demonstrated that the “problems created by too much money replaced … the problems created 5 years before by the changing moral code.” In the depression years, stories like “Desperate Days” revealed the problems of “too little money,” and stories like “When I Needed Her Most” revealed that wage earners had rediscovered the “power of faith and the strength of family life.” When we remember that History and Magazines was written for advertising executives, it will come as no surprise that the most recent anxieties of the wage-earning class stemmed from the superabundance of consumables—“refrigerators, radios, nylon plastics … [and] fortified bread”—and a “Wage Earner Group” whose education, earnings, and employment “are at new highs.”⁴⁷