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
