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by the thousands, simply because of their ignorance of the former.”⁴¹

      Thus did Macfadden use the controversy incited by “Growing to Manhood” to argue a rhetorical point. Indeed, unlike his defense of the exhibition posters, his defense of “Growing to Manhood” was defined less by its opposition to Anthony Comstock and more by its support of a rhetorical style marked by openness, truth, and exposure. As he put it in a 1908 booklet released in defense of “Growing to Manhood,” “Plain speaking is the best remedy” for immorality. In the case at hand, Macfadden argued that his “confession” was “designed to serve as a warning against [erotic impulses]—instead of stimulating immoral passion it tended to arouse loathing and disgust.” In a critical, instructive line, Macfadden concluded, “Neither in language nor in purpose was there any obscenity.”⁴² Macfadden, of course, had long insisted on his spotless motivations; now, in a move that presaged his later defenses of True Story, he argued that the language of “Growing to Manhood”—which he described as “plain speaking”—was itself a moral good. Not because it provided the absolution of sins, but because it was an important tool in his fight for austere sexual norms.

      If Macfadden believed that the American people needed a moral reeducation, he believed just as insistently that they needed a rhetorical reeducation. Although he referred to his style as “plain speaking,” and although his lawyer Henry Earle judged the virtue of “Growing to Manhood” to be “too obvious to require comment,” Macfadden knew full well that there was nothing plain about the plain style.⁴³ Indeed, when we consider not only the meta-commentary inserted into the text of “Growing to Manhood,” but also the editorials, booklets, and speaking tour that explained and defended it, it becomes clear that, at least for Macfadden, the plain style could never stand alone. Its very plainness rendered it vulnerable to misinterpretation by men like Anthony Comstock. Macfadden's lawyer complained, “There are men in the community to whose minds the mere presence of a woman, however chaste in bearing, will cause impure thoughts, and so may a book, picture or statue which is not in fact obscene.”⁴⁴ What was needed was not simply the plain style, but a shared set of protocols for reading the plain style. Thus he beseeched his Physical Culture readership, “Help me in the education of the public…. Help each person realize the necessity for exposing these depraved conditions in order to finally destroy them.” This is nothing less than a rhetorical education—a set of instructions for interpreting true stories and plain styles. The public must realize, he intoned, that the exposure of “sexual affairs” was an essential step toward “clean morals.”⁴⁵

      Macfadden lost his argument regarding “Growing to Manhood.” The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied his appeal and the Supreme Court declined to hear it. Although the newly elected William Howard Taft granted Macfadden a presidential pardon and spared him the “hard labor,” he was still required to pay a $2,000 fine for his first confession.⁴⁶ Though he lost his battle for “Growing to Manhood,” he never gave up his crusade for a “literature of its kind.” Although it would have to wait ten years, Macfadden never lost his conviction that moral reform required rhetorical reform. By 1918 Macfadden was explicit: moral reform went hand in hand with confessions—provided, of course, that these were surrounded by a set of reading protocols that restricted their range of meaning.

      From Comstock to True Story

      According to Fulton Oursler, the origins of True Story can be traced to a conversation between Macfadden and Coryell in the winter of 1918. Oursler reports that Macfadden had “never forgotten the public interest” raised by Coryell's “Growing to Manhood.” Whatever Comstock or the Third Circuit may have thought, “the public had understood its intention and recognized its sincerity.” The proof of this was the scores of letters that began arriving in the offices of Physical Culture Magazine. These letters, most of which “had the conscious ring of public confession,” confirmed over and again the importance of Coryell's story.⁴⁷ As Macfadden recalled, “Some of these confessions were so charged with the drama of human hearts, so gripping in their intensity, so thrilling in the amazing combination of circumstances which they described, that reading this mail became a most interesting, and intensely thrilling undertaking.”⁴⁸

      More than simply thrilling and interesting, however, the letters were also didactic. Like Coryell's “Growing to Manhood,” they preached “the folly of transgression, the terrible effects of ignorance, [and] the [tragedy of] girls who had not been warned by wise parents.”⁴⁹ Macfadden described these spontaneous confessions as “documents written in the tears of strong men and beautiful women, documents which bared the hope and sorrow, the joys and the disappointments, the broken faith and the dreams that came true, of thousands of human beings like ourselves—documents that were somehow written on the parchment of human nature, a part of the fabric of life, and, above all, documents containing lessons from our own days and years, lessons conveyed through episodes which had seared their meaning into the souls of people with the white-hot brand of personal experience.”⁵⁰ Although it is unclear whether it was Macfadden or his third wife who first thought of making these letters the basis of a new magazine (both partners claim exclusive credit), all agree that they were the origin of True Story Magazine. The value of these letters resided in both their form (confessional) and their function (didactic); they were, as Oursler would put it, both “confessions” and “parables.”⁵¹

      It is important to note that from its very inception, True Story was a didactic, moralistic enterprise and that the success of this enterprise—from the perspective of Macfadden and his associates—was tied directly to the confessional form. Consider the narrative of Fulton Oursler; he argued that True Story is best understood as the institutionalization of the didactic project begun with “Growing to Manhood.” He argued that the original impetus behind “Growing to Manhood” was Macfadden's frustration with the editorial genre. Realizing that editorials were ineffectual in “his campaign against prudery,” Macfadden searched for a better way to instruct the masses. “What could he do to wake up the public?” Oursler asked. The idea of using a firsthand confession to instruct and elevate the masses then appeared to Macfadden “with all the force and brightness of an inspiration. The greatest teachers of mankind had found in the parable the direct and the most potent weapon. The human mind responded to the story more quickly than to any other appeal. Why not show, in story form, the tragic consequences of ‘Wild Oats.’”⁵²

      This is what Coryell did with “Growing to Manhood,” and it is what Macfadden did with True Story. Using precisely the same language he used to describe Coryell's story, Oursler claimed that True Story was “an entire magazine devoted to confessions, to modern parables.”⁵³ The only difference between Coryell's “Growing to Manhood” and Macfadden's True Story was that the latter was an “entire magazine.” And just as “Growing to Manhood” was intended as an attack on the moral theory of Comstock, so, too, was True Story. Although True Story never mentioned Comstock by name, it is often difficult not to read it as a direct response to Comstockery. Consider, for example, this 1925 editorial: “Life is filled with realities and the only way to face realities is to face them—to know the TRUTH. It is the prudes and puritans who are afraid to face realities, who are ashamed to know the truth. And it was the prudes and puritans who burned poor, defenseless old women in Salem as witches.”⁵⁴ Oursler makes the anti-Comstock politics of True Story explicit: “Out of his conviction that frankness would end such misery, Macfadden had long ago invented an epithet. To him it had all the force of an imprecation. That epithet was ‘Comstockery!’ This True Story Magazine was his answer to ‘Comstockery’ and all for which, in his mind, the epithet stands.”⁵⁵

      The “origin of True Story,” then, “lies directly in Macfadden's previous physical culture career.”⁵⁶ That career had pitted him against Anthony Comstock. And although Comstock had been dead three years by the time the idea of True Story was broached, the magazine was nonetheless conceived as a response to the sexual moralism that was still carried on in his name.

      Just as surely as Macfadden remembered the power of Coryell's confession and its public resonance,

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