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
