Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America

1. Confession and Sexuality: True Story Versus Anthony Comstock

In May 1919, the eccentric American health crusader, sexologist, and entrepreneur Bernarr Macfadden published the first issue of True Story Magazine— and thus “the modern confessions industry came into being.”1 Within years True Story had dozens of imitators; George Gerbner reports that by mid-century the confession magazine industry boasted some forty titles.2 The eventual ubiquity of the industry, however, must not occlude the fundamental importance of True Story. As the Saturday Evening Post put it, “The $10,000,000-a-year, I’m-Ruined! I’m Ruined! school of belles-lettres owes everything to Macfadden.”3 The Post is hardly alone in this estimate: Scribner’s christened Macfadden “Father 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 1 confession and sexuality: true story versus anthony comstock 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, halfbaked 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 confession and sexuality 21 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...