undereducated, working-class readers throughout the 1920s—it is hard to fathom that his twin claims of providing both an unfiltered conduit of the American experience and a Christian moral primer did not collude with each other and thereby become ingredient in the production of the heteronormative sexual culture that was twentieth-century America. Although I do not know how we might measure True Story's influence on this score, I do know how we can judge Macfadden: he turned his bountiful resources toward the naturalization of his own sexual politics, and for this he remains culpable. That Macfadden's most powerful instrument of naturalization was the confession stands as a reminder to rhetorical critics that genres and genre criticism must not be taken lightly. It stands also as a rejection of Rod Hart's trivialization of genre criticism. Hart put it this way: “To my way of thinking, no particularly exalted intellectual function is served by tucking each of the world's little speeches into its own little generic bed.”104 However, to Macfadden's way of thinking, the categorization of his magazine served an exalted political function. And to my way of thinking, the suggestion that the categorization of texts is innocent, pedantic, or trivial amounts to a studied refusal to look at a major form of cultural politics.
Finally, one of the most remarkable things about the development of True Story from 1905 forward, is Macfadden's keen awareness of what we might call the emptiness of authenticity. Although he never articulated it quite this way, on some level Macfadden knew that the meaning of authenticity was neither self-evident nor transcendent. Put rhetorically, he knew that no matter the context, it was insufficient simply to defend his magazine as authentic. In addition to such a defense, Macfadden carried the further burden of making authenticity serve his own politics. This is the reason why the early years of True Story are overrun with sidebars, editorials, and explanations. Macfadden knew that he had to not only provide confessions, but also provide a protocol for reading them correctly.
There is a general lesson here. Confession, like Macfadden's authenticity, is not a transcendent genre, the contours of which could be adduced equally well from any number of situations. Quite the opposite. Confession might be called an empty signifier. It means different things at different times as different people put it to different ends. The task for rhetorical critics, then, is not the delineation of the form; it is, rather, in charting how various delineations have served various partisan agendas. What is needed—and what I've tried to provide—is a political economy of confession: an analysis of the genre that grants primary importance to the political commitments that provoked and defined the genre of confession in a particular instance. For the moment we lift any confession out of the political economy which required and defined it, we risk thinking that there exists some transcendent form of confession against which particular performances can be judged. While such criticism may be able to explicate formal changes in the genre over time—and here I have Foucault in my sights—it could not, as a matter of course, explain the politics of confession.
In the 1920s, the genre of confession was situated vis-à-vis the development of True Story and Macfadden's lifelong crusade against Anthony Comstock's sexual politics. In this political economy, confession was defined in a very particular way and according to the strictest of politics. As a hedge against mistaking this 1920s vision of confession for confession in general, in the next chapter I chart the changes in confession, authenticity, and True Story that resulted from Macfadden's 1930s preoccupation with American class politics. As we shall see, when confession is situated in a new political economy, torn from its 1920s alliance with sexuality and articulated instead to a particular class politics, the form itself will dramatically change.
2
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
