expendable income, and second, the fiction of a magazine that perfectly expressed the deepest desires of this class. Macfadden Publications developed both fictions with vigor, dedicating countless columns to redescribing America's working class in self-serving terms. Beyond securing advertising dollars, the results of this campaign were twofold. First, these two fictions combined to solidify True Story's status as a confession magazine. Macfadden Publications argued that because True Story was written by its readers, it functioned as an ideal connection between consumers and producers. In addition to carrying products to the masses, it also carried the masses—their subconscious desires, anxieties, and consumer impulses—back to business executives. This redescription of True Story eliminated any lingering doubts about the confessional status of True Story, for in the middle decades of twentieth-century America, a discourse that expressed subconscious desires could register only as a confession. It is no coincidence that it was in these years that the Saturday Evening Post—and the New Yorker, and Time, and virtually every other cultural organ—now instinctively saw true stories as confessions. In this chapter I stress that this widely shared mid-century instinct to see Macfadden's true stories as confessions was not instinctual at all: it was provided for by a particular political economy, the product of an advertising campaign that redescribed both True Story and its readership.
Second, and perhaps more important, this redescription of True Story and its attendant reification as a confession magazine had consequences on the well-being of the American working class. Indeed, I suggest that the progressive immiseration of the working class can be indexed to the progressive certainty with which True Story was understood as a confession magazine. Here's why: True Story was gradually reified as a confession magazine to the degree that Macfadden's two fictions were believed. And to the extent that his fictions were believed, that segment of the working class that remained discontent and impoverished was hidden from view. It was hidden by the well-funded and widely deployed fiction of a happy, well-remunerated working class, the desires of which True Story perfectly expressed. In other words, because True Story claimed to be the organ par excellence of the working class, and because it fundamentally misrepresented this class, whatever portions of the actually existing working class that did not match Macfadden's fiction were cut off from all sources of power, left to defend themselves in a world that—if Macfadden had his way—would not even know they existed.
True Story's Fictional Working Class
Macfadden Publications rested its argument for advertising dollars on the existence and purchasing power of what Macfadden referred to as a “new market” of consumers.10 He titled this class of consumers “wage earners.” “Wage earners” were so central to True Story's advertising campaign that Macfadden Publications released two books dedicated to establishing their existence and explaining their relevance. In 1927 Macfadden Publications released 86% of America and followed it three years later with The American Economic Evolution. These are fascinating texts. Both were addressed to “Business Executives” and both comprised short vignettes of the so-called wage-earning class. Sometimes these vignettes were anonymous, at other times—especially in 86% of America—they were attributed to such personalities as Walter Chrysler, Henry Ford, Herbert Hoover, and Andrew Mellon. On a descriptive level, both claimed simply to explain the relevant contours of the class: their purchasing patterns and political tendencies, of course, but also their aesthetic sensibilities and economic ambitions. While The American Economic Evolution explicitly used these descriptions as evidence of the value of True Story's advertising space, 86% of America relied on ads in Printer's Ink to connect its analysis of the wage-earning class to the conclusion that “magazine advertisers MUST use True Story.”11
In both the books and their accompanying newspaper advertisements, Macfadden Publications argued that an economic revolution had transformed the working class: “Almost without our being conscious of the fact, a revolution in industry has been taking place that is raising all classes of the population to a more equal participation in the fruits of industry, and thus, by the natural operation of economic law, bringing to a nearer realization the dreams of those Utopians who looked to the day when poverty would be banished and all men could enjoy a greater share of the good things in life.”12 Because the “good things in life” were now broadcast, Macfadden imagined an American citizen rebuking a “Frenchman” as follows: “There are no peasants here. Our proletariat are more prosperous than your bourgeoisie.”13 Despite the language of economic law, classless societies, and the rising of the proletariat, True Story's “economic revolution” should not be confused with Marx's never-quite-materialized revolution. According to True Story's model, the economic revolution had already happened—albeit “without our being conscious of the fact”—and equality was a present reality rather than a motivating ideal. Macfadden himself recognized the difference: “To-day, the New World offers the spectacle of a proletariat so prosperous that the term, itself, is paradoxical.”14 With no acknowledgment of enduring inequalities, Macfadden argued that contemporary America marks “the closest approach to absolute equality that the human race or any other form of animal life has ever known.”15
Macfadden illustrated this purported equality with the story of a certain Jim Smith. Ten years ago “any Jim Smith” working in “any American factory” came home “sour and tired,” he “joined strikes and threw brickbats.” He was unhappy, exploited, and politically active. As the reference to “brickbats” suggests, this unreconstructed Jim Smith criticized authority and “along the way,” Macfadden writes, “Coxeys and Debses sprang up.” “Then came tremendous economic change” and a corresponding “miraculous change in the life of Jim Smith.” Ten years later, his workday had been cut nearly in half, his earnings multiplied sevenfold, his body fresher, his leisure longer, his comportment more genial, and his political engagement tempered if not altogether eliminated. The new Jim Smith drives an automobile home to the suburbs, “he goes to shows, he studies, he reads and writes.” No longer the brickbat-throwing, Eugene Debs–producing agitator, the new Jim Smith “has learned moderation.”16 Like “Jim Smith,” “the Missus” had once “risked her manicure in the Monday wash tub; now she threw the switch and let George Washing Machine do it.” Likewise, the doughboy now “found that his new job paid enough to shift the family quite a bit uptown.”17
Between the two books, there are countless “Jim Smiths,” “Missuses,” and “doughboys,” who together constitute Macfadden's “wage-earning class.” As a class, they are happy, leisured, suburban, blue-collar commuters who have been transformed by their newfound disposable income. Macfadden concludes, “A great upsurge of the common people of America has found itself on an economic level never even hoped for out of all its past.”18 And if common people are surging upward, this is a signal that the worker's labor is both intellectually and financially lucrative: “We have, in short, released labor from much of the drudgery, conserved its energy for tasks requiring higher intelligence and in effect made of each worker a foreman of mechanical forces who earns and can be paid a foreman's wages.”19
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, it is obvious that a classless society of intellectually stimulated, well-paid wage earners was a fiction designed to sell advertising. It is important to remember, however, that it was a fiction that once captivated an age. In 1926 the J. Walter Thompson Company—the “leading advertising agency in the country”—proclaimed the working class the “New National Market”: “Millions of families regarded almost as recently as a few months ago as poor prospects for many kinds of merchandise, are now the best sort of prospects.”20 Likewise the Chevrolet Motor Company proclaimed in 1937 that “tens of thousand of [working-class] men on one single payroll have money for themselves and their families to spend.”21 Propped up by the likes massive advertising agencies and national brands like Chevrolet, the well-paid, eager-to-spend laborer proved a resilient image. The historian Lizabeth Cohen explains that while “hard times forced many Americans to struggle to find and keep work, to feed their families, and to hold on
