Confessor,” Harper's called True Story the “first of the ‘confessions,’” and the cultural historian Ann Fabian credits Macfadden's True Story with “turning the compulsion to confess into a glorious commercial enterprise.” A “commercial enterprise” it certainly was. Fabian notes that True Story transformed Macfadden from an “eccentric health advocate to [a] millionaire.”4
However, while Macfadden's wealth did not last his lifetime, his reputation as “Father Confessor to the American masses” was largely a posthumous designation.5 Although the sheer financial success of True Story ensured that it registered on the cultural landscape almost immediately, it was not initially recognized as a confession magazine. Before it was a decade old, the New Yorker, The Nation, the Atlantic Monthly, a variety of trade journals, and Hygeia, the journal of the American Medical Association, had each devoted ample space to Macfadden's True Story. Yet none of these periodicals saw anything particularly confessional about it. In 1924, for example, the Detroit Saturday Night published one of the longest, most vindictive critiques of Macfadden that would appear in the 1920s. In it, True Story was decried as a “magazine for morons,” designed for “the undeveloped, semi-literate, half-baked mentalities that can find no pabulum in real literature.”6 Despite the general thoroughness of the attack, the Detroit Saturday Night never once described True Story as a confession magazine. On the other end of the spectrum, the New Yorker used a 1925 column to praise the “God-driven pen of Bernarr Macfadden.” Although it took pains to introduce True Story's eccentric publisher, explain its unprecedented mechanism for securing manuscripts, and describe its bizarre criteria for publishing them, it, too, never once described True Story as a confession magazine—it never even used the word.7 Similarly, a year later the Atlantic Monthly suggested that although True Story was stylistically similar to the confession magazines, it nonetheless occupied its own discrete category.8 In sum, True Story was a lot of things in the 1920s: it was wildly successful and, depending on the reader, suggestive, uplifting, pornographic, “God-driven,” moralistic, yellow, enlightened, pulpy, or authentic. But it was rarely—if ever—confessional.
Despite this, nearly every invocation of True Story since the 1940s remembers its founding in confessional terms. In 1950, for example, the New Yorker published a second series of articles on Bernarr Macfadden, this time arguing that Macfadden's “climactic achievement” could be traced to May 1919—the beginnings of his “fantastic success with ‘confession’ magazines.” A similar pattern can be seen in Time: a 1927 article on Macfadden and his magazines nowhere mentions the word confession; thirty years later a 1957 article made confession the definitive characteristic of True Story.9 This is nothing less than historical revisionism; it took until the 1950s for the 1920s True Story to become a confession magazine.
This revisionism is particularly conspicuous in the academic literature. In 1958 George Gerbner published his influential “Social Role of the Confession Magazine,” which provided social scientific justification for the conclusions of the Saturday Evening Post. According to Gerbner, the confession magazine was “born” with True Story. In 1964 Theodore White followed suit: “In 1919, Macfadden fathered True Story, first of the confession magazines.”10 Then, in 1968, the historian William Taft: “In 1919, Macfadden turned his attention elsewhere, creating the ‘confessions’ business with True Story.”11 More recently still, Roseann M. Mandziuk has identified the first five years of True Story as a site par excellence to interrogate the commodification of confession.12
More surprising than the revisionism of popular journalism or academic literature, however, is the revisionism of True Story itself. Although the 1920s True Story largely avoided the term confession, in 1948 True Story recalled its own origins in explicitly confessional terms.13 Ernest V. Heyn, then the editor of True Story, argued that the May 1919 appearance of True Story was simply the latest “offspring” in a “long line of first-person revelatory literature.” Heyn then positioned True Story as the rhetorical “offspring” of Augustine, Benvenuto Cellini, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas de Quincey—confession writers all. Although his mid-century readers may have been surprised by Heyn's suggestion that Augustine was the “world's first writer of a true story,” they would certainly not have been surprised by the suggestion that True Story was a confession magazine.14 For, as I hope is clear, in the middle years of the twentieth century there was a concerted effort—carried out by popular monthlies, brown quarterlies, and True Story itself—to revise the historical record and establish thereby that True Story always was what it later, indisputably became: a confession magazine.
This revisionism has been staggeringly successful. If there exists a single essay, article, blog, monograph, or book that challenges the Saturday Evening Post's 1941 claim that True Story founded the confession industry in 1919, I am unaware of it. However, if we are to understand the politics of confession, it is imperative that we recover the initial cultural uncertainty that attended Macfadden's True Story. As the original articles in Time, the New Yorker, and the Detroit Saturday Night suggest, before True Story was self-evidently a confession magazine, it was the object of a confessional crisis: a very public debate over the meaning of True Story, its generic classification, and its proper place in American life. By bracketing our lately born certainty that True Story has always been a confession magazine, we will be able to tell a story that has never been told: the story of the remarkable energy Macfadden expended refining the genre of confession and deploying it as a political weapon in American cultural politics—the story, ultimately, of how, why, and for whom True Story became a confession magazine.
By telling this story over the course of the first two chapters of Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America, I argue that it is possible to understand how the genre of confession became ingredient in American conceptions of sexuality (chapter 1) and the working class (chapter 2). From its founding in 1919 through its 1926 editorial change, True Story's primary political obstacle was the still-lurking specter of Anthony Comstock. The “Great Mogul of American Morals,” the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and a sexual puritan of the most austere type, Comstock was Bernarr Macfadden's sworn enemy.15 Macfadden's antagonism to Comstock's sexual politics was fundamental to True Story's founding and, mutatis mutandis, fundamental to the development of the “confessions business.” Indeed, sexual politics were so integral to the rise of True Story that they defined the genre of the “true story” and recast the boundaries the “confession”—genres that Macfadden used interchangeably—turning both of them into rhetorical genres inherently dedicated to the preservation of a conservative sexual politics. Were it not for his preoccupation with American sexuality, Macfadden would have had no interest in the confessional genre and his magazine would have never dominated the birth and development of the “confessions industry.” In very material ways, the United States owes its confessional culture to the conservative, oftentimes contradictory, always-extreme sexual politics of Bernarr Macfadden.
1905–1919: Anthony Comstock, Bernarr Macfadden, and the Prehistory of True Story
True Story Magazine was, in a very concrete sense, a direct response to Anthony Comstock's crusade to protect American moral purity. Although Comstock died four years before True Story began, Macfadden's 1905 quarrel with the self-proclaimed “weeder [of] God's Garden” would leave an indelible mark on Macfadden. Indeed, Macfadden's later moralism—his insistence that True Story contributes to the moral improvement of its readers—can be traced directly to his early conflict with Comstock. The occasion was Macfadden's “Monster Physical Culture Exhibition” at New York's Madison Square Garden. Half beauty pageant and half athletic competition, the exhibition drew twenty thousand New Yorkers to opening night on October 9, 1905—five thousand of whom were turned away by the fire inspector.16 Although Macfadden had
