York Society for the Suppression of Vice, regarded these posters as “the height of pornography and public impudence.”17 Four days before opening night, acting as a “Special Agent for the United States Post Office Department,” Comstock confiscated five hundred pounds of the “vile handbills” (posters) and arrested Macfadden.18 Curious to see what could provoke such an action, New Yorkers turned out en masse to see a show that was in fact quite tame. The historian William Hunt reports that there were “no nudes. No erotic dances. Nothing titillating.”19 Compared to Macfadden's Physical Culture Magazine, which had since 1899 featured photos of topless women and loin-clothed men as specimens of bodily excellence, the exhibition proceeded along rather puritanical lines.20
Although, legally speaking, nothing came of Macfadden's 1905 arrest, historians agree that it inspired his lifelong crusade against prudery in general and Anthony Comstock in particular.21 This crusade, which would culminate fourteen years later in the publication of True Story, received its opening salvo with a series of editorials in Physical Culture. Titled “Comstock, King of the Prudes,” Macfadden's editorials argued that Comstock was responsible for prudery, which was, in turn, responsible for American “moral perversion,” the “mental and physical decay” of its citizens, and the “pitiful deterioration of the race that you see on every hand.” Treating “Comstockery” and “prudery” as convertible terms, Macfadden explained their meaning: “‘Comstockery’ has been added to our vocabulary as meaning the sniffing out of evil where no evil exists.” As evidence, Macfadden pointed to the contested posters of the Physical Culture Exhibition. The posters, which Macfadden insisted were “simply representations of very perfect human forms,” triggered in Comstock's mind “the grossest suggestions that the human mind could possibly conceive.” If anything was “impure, salacious, and obscene,” Macfadden countered, it was the mind of Comstock, which was little more than a “sewer for mental filth.” Prudery was the product of Comstock's inability to distinguish the filth of his mind from the objects of his attention: “His perverted imagination finds vulgar and depraved meanings in a most inspiring sentence, or contorts the outlines of the most beautiful picture or statue into a semblance of vileness.” We should not be surprised, Macfadden concluded, that a “perverted imagination” finds perversion everywhere it looks.22
Macfadden, however, was concerned with more than the subjective character of obscenity and the contested purity of his own posters. Indeed, the exhibition and its posters soon vanished entirely from Macfadden's editorials. From his perspective, the larger issue was methodological. Although Macfadden professed (but did not practice) a sexual austerity as conservative as Comstock's, he disagreed sharply with Comstock's method for achieving that austerity. As a drawing that prefaced one of his editorials made plain, Macfadden's primary objection was Comstock's belief that censorship and suppression produced moral purity. In the Foucauldian terminology fashionable today, Macfadden accused Comstock of subscribing to the “repressive hypothesis”: the belief that power controls sexuality by repression, censorship, or obstruction.23 The drawing pictured Comstock tying blindfolds on American children only to see them stumble blindly off cliffs labeled “excess” and “secret vice.”24 In case the moral was not self-evident, Macfadden laid it bare: Comstock “seem[s] to think that by simply hiding, by merely refraining from discussing the important subject of sex, that [parents] eliminate all thoughts on the subject from the minds of their offspring.” Otherwise put, Comstock “cries out emphatically against knowledge and in favor of ignorance.”25
Although Macfadden was obviously without the insight of Foucault (he was, for that matter, without the insight of any intellectual thought), he responded in a Foucauldian manner. He argued that in order for power to better control sexuality (a goal he shared with Comstock), it must work with knowledge rather than against it. From Macfadden's perspective, Comstock was simply naïve: no matter how severe the censorship, ignorance was not an option. Either American youth would be taught sexual morals by their parents or they would be taught by “evil companions”: “Take your choice, Mr. Comstock. There is no dividing line.” Thus, for the sake of the country, and with a rationale that would later become a monotonous refrain in the pages of True Story, Macfadden argued that moral virtue required an open, frank discussion of the human body, its vulnerabilities, and its capacities: “If you want your boy or girl to have pure thoughts in reference to themselves and their bodily functions, teach them the truth, in all its details. Teach them the wonders of the sex principle. Teach them the objects and the divinity of sex. Let them learn that fatherhood and motherhood exist solely because of sex. That the world owes everything to sex.”26 Thus did “power and knowledge directly imply one another.”27 The knowledge of the body was an essential ingredient in the power that Macfadden hoped would control the body.
In a pithy phrase that nicely captures the theory underwriting Macfadden's moralism, Clifford Waugh explains that, for Macfadden, “nakedness stood for truth undefiled.” To portray the human body, omitting none of its details, was to speak the truth. Because prudery/Comstockery relied on the blindfold, Macfadden made “prudery … public enemy number one among the curses to be annihilated by Physical Culture.”28 Waugh explains the logic: “The only answer was education, which, in [Macfadden's] mind, automatically necessitated the total elimination of prudery. To control, if not to eliminate venereal disease, the public needed knowledge, and Macfadden was determined to meet that challenge. From the lecture platform, in his books, and through editorials and articles, the Father of Physical Culture spoke out against venereal disease and prostitution. Insisting that knowledge was power, he attempted to ‘lift the veil’ which he believed was ‘shrouding subjects of the utmost importance to humanity.’”29 And this, Macfadden explained, was why the exhibition and its posters required scantily clad participants: for how could the excellencies of the human body be demonstrated “if the exhibitors are dressed with clothing.”30
The First Confession
In the fall of 1906, Macfadden took a decisive step. Working on the assumption that “realism was necessary in order to awaken the public,” he decided to use a “confession” as a technique in his moralistic crusade against Comstockery.31 At Macfadden's urging, Physical Culture editor (and future True Story editor) John R. Coryell wrote a six-installment serial titled “Growing to Manhood in Civilized (?) Society: The Personal Confessions of the Victim.”32 The serial was little more than Macfadden's anti-Comstock editorials translated into the confessional form. It told the story of the adolescent son of wealthy, syphilitic parents who “neglected to tell him the facts of life.”33 Kept in ignorance by his “parents and teachers,” the unnamed protagonist confessed that he learned of sex “not by the parent or responsible teacher, but by a class of purveyors whose work is all done in darkness and secrecy.” Relying on the subjugated knowledge of the stable, the boy learned “lewd words” and “obscene stories” by the end of the first installment.34 The remaining five installments then charted the boy's moral degeneration: stolen caresses, drunkenness, sexual liaisons, pornography, venereal diseases, prostitution, and extortion—all told in the first person.
All of this was expressly calculated to dramatize the social consequences of Comstockery. Indeed, the most interesting aspect of the story is that, at regular intervals spread throughout the story, the author breaks from the narrative and interjects a meta-level commentary on it. It is as if Macfadden had learned from his experience with Comstock and the posters that portions of the reading public, unless they are properly coached, will see “nakedness” as obscenity rather than as “truth undefiled.” This time around, Macfadden was taking no chances. Although “Growing to Manhood” was only slightly more suggestive than the Physical Culture Exhibition—there were descriptions of caresses and allusions to much more—Macfadden surrounded these descriptions and allusions with a running commentary that sought to restrict their range of meaning. “I cannot say enough to make it clear that under the system of suppression of truth about the facts of sex life, all boys become little ravening sex-wolves; little beasts.” The descriptions and allusions, in other words, were
