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
