thus, to a greater extent than the others, it placed in bold relief the “hopes, fears, troubles, [and] ambitions” of its readers. Unlike the other fifty-four magazines on the chart, True Story was not simply created by a particular social force; it was a register on which shifting social forces were rendered legible. And this, Macfadden argued, made True Story an invaluable tool for the American manufacturer: “For this reason the pages of True Story—as they change with America's great Wage Earner Group—offer a monthly insight into the history of that group—an insight more revealing than the statistics of their wages, bank balances or purchases. A few great writers of advertising copy have discovered that truth for themselves and use True Story as a guide to the contemporary desires of its readers.”39 It is difficult to overestimate the consistency with which the True Story advertising campaign returned to the magazine's “mirror function.” The Chicago Tribune emphasized the certainty of the wage earner's new wealth. Because True Story provided “the perfect reflection of this entire new cultural development,” it argued, “there is no more question about it than there is about the nature of man.”40 Similarly, in The American Economic Evolution, Macfadden argued, “Today, the true stories in True Story Magazine are so different from the same true stories of ten years ago that it is hard to recognize them as the self-expression of the same people.”41
All this is a very different picture of True Story than the one developed at length in the 1920s True Story as a response to Anthony Comstock. Two easy points of comparison will dramatize the point. While both the 1920s True Story and the later advertising campaign talked endlessly about the “true story idea” and the magazine's astronomical circulation, these two things had very different meanings in different contexts. Consider first the relative fate of the “true story idea”—the fact that it was written by its readers. In the 1920s, this meant that the magazine was didactic, educational, and corrective; an intervention into sexual politics. The fact that it was written by its readers guaranteed that it recorded actual experiences, and actual experiences were valuable primarily for their moral function. As Macfadden put it in 1924, “We want to help others to a safe passage by showing them the pitfalls that beset life's paths. That is our supreme purpose.”42 By contrast, while the advertising campaign rehearsed the fact that True Story was written by its readers with as much monotony as the first fourteen volumes of the magazine, this fact now meant something rather different. No longer a guarantee of True Story's moral uplift, it functioned now to guarantee that True Story was a reflection of society rather than an instrument in its reform. In short, True Story now revealed rather than reformed America. And as its function shifted from reformation to revelation, True Story was increasingly recognized in confessional terms.
Or consider True Story's record-setting rise to a circulation of two million in only five years. Both the 1920s magazine and the 1930s advertising campaign boasted of this achievement endlessly, but they drew very different lessons from it. In the magazine, it was evidence of the popularity of moral instruction. In a May 1924 article titled “Two Million,” for example, Macfadden interpreted the achievement as a “gigantic testimonial to the popularity of truth as an entertainer.” But not just as an entertainer: “The little lives of ordinary folks have built a new literature. They are teaching a moral lesson which our young folks need, and we will be a better people because we learn from the experiences of others.”43 The account in History and Magazines could not have been more different. After noting that the quick rise to two million was still honored well after the fact, it explained the achievement thus: “We believe that these achievements have been possible because True Story presents to its readers a true picture of current life—a picture they find interesting, illuminating, and inspiring.”44 Thus was the didactic moralism of True Story in its early years replaced by romantic sentiments of national self-expression.
On an empirical level, Macfadden's claim that True Story provides a “true picture of current life” is simply not true. Here I am not concerned with any of the particular stories, and I have no stake in the much-rehearsed debate over whether the true stories were forged. Rather, I simply wish to stress that, as Pells and Cohen remind us, Macfadden's so-called wage earners were a fiction. Historically speaking, the American working class was never relieved of drudgery and never found itself plagued with too many amenities. Thus, even granting Macfadden's claim that his editors never touched up a story or hired a professional writer, it is still impossible that his true stories could bear witness to the historical veracity of a fictional class. Yet Macfadden needed this class. For, regardless of whether they actually existed, wage earners were the picture-perfect consumer, and as such, Macfadden's case for advertising dollars rested on their existence. Macfadden's solution was ingenious. He had learned from his bouts with Comstock that confessions were empty signifiers—they were always liable to misinterpretation. That is why he had turned True Story into a rhetorical primer, why in the 1920s he had surrounded each true story with a set of directions for interpreting it as a guide to moral virtue. Why not give advertising executives a similar lesson? Why not teach them to see in true stories the exact thing he wanted them to see—the ideal consumer? He thus, as it were, inserted the wage earner behind the confession. Without changing a single editorial policy, he told executives that if they squinted just right, if they learned to read True Story properly, they could see between the lines of his true stories millions of affluent, docile, and eager consumers.
This, however, was no simple task. On its surface, True Story was just so many stories of promises broken and kept, rendezvous arranged and regretted. Thus, with as much intensity as the early True Story provided a never-ending commentary alongside the true stories it told, the advertising campaign insisted that business executives must learn to reread True Story. A Printer's Ink ad for True Story was titled “Do You Know How to Read Your Newspaper?”45 The implied answer was no. Consider The American Economic Evolution. True Story may “fairly shout” its reflection of American culture, the book argued, but such shouting will be audible only “if one will take the trouble to read between the lines.” This was imperative. If only the printed lines were considered, “one story may be about sex and one about money. Another about chastity and another about divorce. But when you lay them out together at the end of any period, as any good sociologist would do, and then look underneath them for the impelling motive—the factor that caused the story, you get a picture of the true conditions of the time that could not be written in any other way.” Macfadden constantly urged business executives to be sociologists; to be “student-minded”; to ignore the surface content of the stories; to “take the settings of these True Stories instead of the stories themselves”; to see the fortunes of the American worker “in big type, between the lines”; to “take the underlay” of true stories, “not by what they tell, but by what they do not even realize they are telling.” Macfadden was insistent on this: “You have to have wisdom enough to read between the lines to see what is going on. The writers of these stories themselves do not realize what is going on except as they have personal wisdom, here and there, to read between their own lines.”46
Literally speaking, of course, there was nothing but blank space between the lines. But Macfadden used this blank space to his great advantage. Rather than rely on business executives to read between the lines correctly, he was quick to fill in that blank space with his fictional wage-earning class. Consider again Macfadden's History and Magazines. This book claimed to document the shifting anxieties of the wage-earning class by providing lengthy excerpts from True Story Magazine and a meta-commentary explaining the meaning of the excerpts. Initially, stories like “Haunting Memories” revealed that the wage earners were anxious about the “changing moral code.” Later, stories like “Rotten Riches” demonstrated that the “problems created by too much money replaced … the problems created 5 years before by the changing moral code.” In the depression years, stories like “Desperate Days” revealed the problems of “too little money,” and stories like “When I Needed Her Most” revealed that wage earners had rediscovered the “power of faith and the strength of family life.” When we remember that History and Magazines was written
