all, as Richard H. Pells has noted in Radical Visions and American Dreams, in the 1920s “American society began to take on the look of a white-collar paradise, complete with chain stores, suburban housing booms, the dependence on recreation as an escape from work and on advertising as a guide to life.”23 So many were taken in by these appearances that by mid-century it became almost a sociological commonplace to celebrate the death of classes in American society.24 Even the New Republic—along with The Nation the leading liberal organ of 1920s America—proclaimed in 1929, “To believe that a proletarian philosophy may be brought into being in this country where the germs of class-consciousness are scarcely discernible is to submit to self-delusion.”25
The image of a spending, liberated working class may have been resilient, but historians agree that it was one-part fiction. Commenting on “True Story's version of the fate of the factory worker,” Cohen insists that “a truer story” needs to be told. Contrary to the mythology of The American Economic Evolution, Cohen argues that workers “did not enjoy nearly the prosperity that advertisers and sales promoters assumed they did.” Addressing True Story's narrative, Cohen continues, “If factory workers could have depended on these slowly rising wages from year to year and year round, they might have consumed more like Jim Smith. Instead, unemployment remained high throughout the decade, even for people with so-called steady work.”26 Likewise, Richard Pells writes:
Largely hidden from view were the more unpleasant realities of life in the 1920s, particularly the rise in technological unemployment as machines replaced men in the factory, together with the decade-long depression in agriculture, mining, and textiles. For most Americans the 1920s was a period not so much of prosperity as of sheer survival, with little money left over after the bills were paid to enjoy the party others seemed to be throwing. And as the years wore on, it became increasingly difficult for the average man to consume what the economy could produce—an ominous sign which the pitchmen of the “new era” chose to ignore.27
All ominous signs were certainly ignored by Macfadden Publications. In 86% of America and The American Economic Evolution, 1920s America was an unqualified, classless paradise.
Although the “wage earner” was certainly fictitious, Macfadden and True Story refined this immensely popular fiction to full effect. In the pursuit of advertising dollars, the most important characteristic of the “wage earner” was his disposable income (the worker was always cast as masculine). “The real money of America has finally landed in the pockets of several million pairs of overalls,” Macfadden proclaimed.28 In 1926 alone, he reported, the “wage earners” grossed $3.6 billion.29 And this money did not stay overalled for long; it went straight to “radios, motor cars, and up-to-date appliances”:30 “With bricklayers making $14 a day and other trades in proportion, it is easy to understand why their wives can afford to spend 41 billions of dollars a year for foodstuffs, nearly 6 billions of dollars a year for house furnishings, and proportionate amounts for other staples and moderately priced luxuries.”31 A True Story ad in the Chicago Tribune put it this way: “Money is everywhere. More money than America has ever known before. And more widespread. And deeper down. This present prosperity has penetrated and permeated stratum after stratum of American Society until today that great mass of millions once casually known as ‘labor’ now controls the destinies of every factory in the land.” They control the factories, not only because of “an economic equality that has never been equaled,” but also because their disposable income has provided them the purchasing power that keeps the “whir of production … at concert pitch.”32 For these reasons, the “wage earners” are “unquestionably the richest and readiest market to any manufacturer whose fortune rests on selling.”33 In short, they are the “great consuming outlet.”34
True Story thus defined its readership as the ideal American consumer: leisured enough to desire the amenities of mass culture, moneyed enough to buy them, and temperamentally disposed not to challenge authority. That such a demographic did not in fact exist was, from the perspective of True Story, a problem easily solved. True Story's solution was to redefine true stories themselves, to turn authenticity, truthfulness, and experience—all of which were catalogued monthly in the pages of True Story—into documentable evidence of a fictional class. If, in the 1920s, true stories advanced a moral lesson, in the 1930s the same stories were made to serve class politics by establishing the existence of a docile, spending working class.
The Mirror Function of True Stories
If True Story's sheer circulation and its “democratic editorial appeal” guaranteed that it could carry the news of products from the classes to the masses, the fact that it was written by its readers guaranteed the return trip.35 In other words, because True Story was written by its readers, and because its readers were defined as consumers (wage earners), the articles in True Story provided a picture of the very consumers who were the object of the producers' attention. In this way, Macfadden suggested, advertising in True Story was more valuable than advertising elsewhere, for the nature of the magazine ensured that the products filling the advertising pages could be uniquely calibrated to the desires of its readers: “Here at True Story Magazine, the people not only tell us what they want but they also give it to us. We can't make any mistake. If their emotions are changing, they change them. If they lean toward mystery stories, they give them to us. But that is not the best of it. When they get tired of mystery stories, they stop writing them. We never have to guess what they want nor when they are sick of it.” Macfadden concluded that True Story reflected social and economic change “as perfectly as a rock or a tree is reflected in a clear, still lake.”36
Macfadden thus defined True Story as the collective self-expression of the fictional wage-earning class. To make this case he reminded his readers that True Story “never has been what might be called an ‘edited’ publication.” For Macfadden, “editing” was a devil term, a synonym for tampering or falsifying. Rather than tamper with “the great mass of personal experiences,” True Story simply “printed them”: “Wherever you have any personal expression from a cross-section of hundreds of thousands of individuals, you have a great human composite that is telling the story of its age more clearly than any historian could ever do. For self-expression is always true expression when you let it alone.” True Story thus constituted a “perfect mirror” of “human affairs.” Indeed, what we might call the mirror function of True Story was itself the grounds of Macfadden's fictional economic narrative. While the early submissions to True Story had once recorded tales of “misery and privation and struggle,” the more recent stories, “which come flowing in to us in an ever endless stream, are ending happily”: “In the last decade the very character of these True Stories has so completely changed that we ourselves do not recognize our own publication.”37
Macfadden was extraordinarily committed to the “mirror function” of True Story. A decade after The American Economic Evolution, he made the conceit the basis for his 1941 History and Magazines. This richly decorated coffee-table book begins with the premise that “magazines never ‘just happen.’”38 Rather, they are a reflection of the “social forces at work in America.” To illustrate the point, History and Magazines provided a two-page chart that calibrated fifty-five prominent magazines to the social forces that “created” them. For example, the New American Magazine was a response to the American Revolution; the American Review was a product of nationalism; the Saturday Evening Post was created by the Civil War; The Nation by Reconstruction; Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping by industrialization; and True Story by World War I. “That is why,” Macfadden concluded, “through magazines, it is possible to see a dimension in history beyond a chronological presentation of events, an insight into the effects of these forces upon the people who figured in them.” In this sense, True
