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
