of the genre and the cultural politics of an age, I argue that the reclassification, declassification, and circulation of texts as confessions has been a potent means of influencing American cultural politics.
Confession and Authenticity
In addition to providing a history of texts that have been reclassified and circulated as confessions, Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America provides insight into why activists have so consistently turned to confessional hermeneutics as a technique of cultural intervention. One answer stands out from the lot: the sheer power of authenticity. It has driven both the reclassification of texts as confessions and the refusal to acknowledge the confessional status of a given text. Although Peter Brooks has claimed that the confession bears a “special stamp of authenticity,” the reality is more complex.23 Confessional Crises suggests that the simple act of labeling a text as a confession can either endow a text with an aura of authenticity or divest a text of authenticity. On the one hand, from the onset of the “modern confession industry” in 1919 forward, politically motivated citizens have been turning the unlikeliest of texts into confessions simply to cash in on the political cachet of the authentic. There is perhaps no better, more concise evidence of the political power of the link between authenticity and confession than this: when Twentieth Century-Fox sought to turn William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner into a feature-length film, the Black Anti-Defamation Association insisted only that the film “must not bear the title of William Styron's book lest it lend validity to his falsification of history.”24 Fox complied.
On the other hand, while the political cachet of confession's “special stamp of authenticity” may be lucrative, it is also fragile. To the extent a confession is compelled or coerced, it is disqualified as an authentic expression. The very fact of the Miranda rights—not to mention their prominence in American popular culture—is evidence of just how tenuous is the link between confession and authenticity. Legally speaking, if a confession is not obtained in the proper manner, if the proper rituals are not observed, a confession will not be treated as authentic. Indeed, a coerced confession is definitively inauthentic, the product of an abusive power relation rather than an authentic expression of the self. On this score, labeling a text a confession de-authorizes both the text in question and the abusive power that produced it. The best evidence for the cultural power of the coerced confession is, again, the confessional crises of twentieth-century America. These demonstrate that, with as much intensity as partisan actors turned texts into confessions to cash in on the power of the authentic, they also turned texts into confessions to cash in on the power of the conspicuously inauthentic. Thus it was that the New York Times called on, of all people, the playwright Arthur Miller to explain the Starr Report—the choice itself suggesting that Starr's seven volumes constituted a forced confession and, as such, were inauthentic and could not be trusted.
Confession, then, is a volatile genre, and confessional hermeneutics is a dangerous activity. Labeling a text a confession may either endow it with an unmatched aura of authenticity or divest the text of authenticity and suggest that the power that compelled it is abusive. In either case, however, the power of the genre is calibrated not to textual features or recurrent formal characteristics, but rather to the sheer act of classifying a text as a confession. In each of the following chapters, we will see how confessional hermeneutics lends the power of authenticity, or sometimes the stigma of inauthenticity, to the embattled actors of American cultural politics.
Confessional Crises
There have been at least six confessional crises in twentieth-century America. In the pages that follow, I dedicate a chapter to each of them. Here I briefly introduce each one, and indicate the specific political questions that turned debates over whether particular texts count as confessions into large-scale political brouhahas.
Confession and Sexuality: True Story Magazine Versus Anthony Comstock
The first confessional crisis I examine was incited by the publication of Bernarr Macfadden's True Story Magazine. When the magazine first hit the newsstands in May 1919, it was the culmination of Macfadden's lifelong crusade against his sworn enemy, Anthony Comstock, the “Great Mogul of American Morals.” Macfadden detested no one as much as he did Comstock, and True Story was designed as Macfadden's ultimate rebuttal of Comstock's pernicious influence over American sexuality. To Macfadden's mind, the confessions he published monthly in True Story, if they could only be properly understood, harbored the capacity to revolutionize conceptions of American sexuality. For this reason, Macfadden expended countless columns refining the genre of confession, educating the public on its proper deployment, and ensuring that the form itself could be placed in the service of his own, restrictive sexual politics.
Confession and Class: A New True Story
In chapter 2 I interrogate Bernarr Macfadden's 1930s claim that True Story constituted an ideal connection between producers and consumers. Because it was written by its readers, Macfadden explained, True Story not only carried advertisements to the masses, it also carried the masses—their subconscious desires, anxieties, and consumer impulses—back to business executives. Although this argument was an essential component in the gradual recognition of True Story as a distinctively confessional magazine, it must not be taken at face value. To make this claim, Macfadden redescribed the working class, telling business executives that workers were now defined by their expendable income, political docility, and overall contentedness. Macfadden, in other words, turned the working class into picture-perfect American consumers. The results were immediate: in addition to True Story becoming widely recognized as a confession magazine, the advertising dollars now flowed in. Yet—and this is my point—the very same strategy that turned True Story into a confession magazine and a commercial success also blinded a wide swath of Americans to the actual conditions of the working class. Because they were rendered invisible by Macfadden's rhetorical strategy, the actually existing working class paid the price of True Story becoming a confession magazine.
Confession and Race: Look's “Shocking Story” of Emmett Till
On October 28, 1955, the journalist William Bradford Huie signed a series of contracts with the murderers of Emmett Till. The contracts gave Huie the right to publish the killers' story of Till's murder in Look magazine, to quote the murderers at length, and to accuse them publicly of abduction and murder. However, the contracts did not give Huie the right to publish the killers' story as a confession. Because of this last point, Huie's “Shocking Story of Approved Murder in Mississippi” does not read as a confession. And yet nearly every reader of Huie's “Shocking Story” has followed the judgment of the renowned African American journalist James L. Hicks. Writing for The Afro-American, Hicks claimed that “in the magazine article [the killers] simply confess that they killed Emmett Till.”25 How is it that “Shocking Story” is nearly universally remembered as a confession? More pressing still, why did both the NAACP and Mississippi's Citizens' Councils—two organizations that were deeply antagonistic, even offensive, to each other—both argue that Huie's “Shocking Story” was a confession?
These are the questions that animate chapter 3. Their answer lies in the combustible mixture of confession and the politics of the Second Reconstruction. For civil rights activists, if the “Shocking Story” was a confession, it provided them the leverage they needed to advocate for President Eisenhower's proposed Civil Rights Commission. For segregationists and southern apologists, the “Shocking Story” performed a different, but equally vital, service: it provided a sanitized version of Till's murder and a much-needed response to Brown v. Board. Thus with all parties standing to gain from Huie's rendering of the murder, how could it not become a confession? The South saw in the “Shocking Story” a chance to consign to oblivion the extent of the violence visited upon Emmett Till; the north saw documentable evidence of southern hypocrisy. For these reasons both sides had a stake in turning the article into a confession to better authorize the story and better advance
