LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

reports that Macfadden was fully cognizant that True Story would “stir up the old antagonisms” with those who had inherited Comstock's mantle. For, as he had written in 1905, Comstock “stands for mystery, secrecy, ignorance, [and] superstition.”⁵⁸ Now, preparing to launch an entire magazine based on plain speaking, a frank style, and true stories—a magazine, moreover, designed expressly as an attack on Comstockery—Macfadden knew that “it would be the old fight all over again”: “If he dared to offer in the pages of a magazine, the lessons of life dramatized in the form of realistic stories, their moral implications made plain, the world would question his sincerity, and all the battalions of prudery would soon be on the march against him.”⁵⁹

      Thus Macfadden designed True Story in such a way that he could defend himself from these battalions. He surrounded his true stories with constant reminders of True Story's didactic purpose and moral foundations. These reminders functioned as a rhetorical primer—coaching True Story's readership in the protocols of reading confessions, teaching them to place promiscuity, suggestiveness, and sexuality itself in the service of a conservative politics. As Oursler put it, “The millions who buy the magazine, and who think by its precepts and advice, believe that it is just what it offers itself to be—a book of modern parables.”⁶⁰

      1919–1926: True Story as a “Great Moral Force”

      From 1919 to 1926, True Story sold itself as precisely this: a book of modern parables. This is no small accomplishment. In an era that witnessed the Christian Endeavor Society, legislation regulating the maximum distance between ankle and hem (three inches), and, of course, the continued flourishing of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, now under the leadership of John Saxton Sumner, the sheer fact that a magazine designed to speak openly of sexuality could be marketed as an outpost of moral rectitude is itself a significant feat.

      Selling “nakedness” as “truth undefiled,” however, required far more than confessions and an editorial policy that prescribed that the “shadow of a bed” must fall on “every page.”⁶¹ As Macfadden was painfully aware, these were all too susceptible to co-optation by those for whom they were obscene. Thus True Story literally surrounded its confessions with explanations and rationalizations. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about the early years of True Story is its sheer fascination with itself. The first fourteen volumes (1919–26) dedicated incredible amounts of ink and space to explaining the “true story idea.” While I interrogate and explain this “idea” below, I begin by simply stressing the sheer effort expended to ensure that no reader of True Story could miss the nearly puritanical morality of the confession.

      True Story as a Rhetorical Primer

      True Story's 1925 editorial comment that “it is well every now and then to emphasize the purpose of our policy in publishing only true-to-life stories” is a massive understatement.⁶² Alongside its true stories, True Story constantly emphasized its policies, explained its convictions, and demarcated itself from the wider run of American magazines. All of these emphases, explanations, and comparisons served as a rhetorical primer, teaching its readership how to read a confession. It was an education advanced by numerous mechanisms.

      First, from its inception in 1919 until it was printing two million copies of each issue in 1926, True Story reserved a page-length sidebar on page 2 of each issue for explaining the “true story idea.” In November 1924 True Story gave this sidebar to an advertisement for the American Red Cross, and in the years that followed the space would occasionally be used to advertise future issues of the magazine. In every issue until November 1924, however, and the vast majority of issues thereafter, the page 2 sidebar was wholly dedicated to explaining the mission and mechanics of True Story. These columns explained how the magazine collected its material, announced increasingly lucrative prizes for the best story submitted in a particular year, and, above all, laid out the criteria that determined which submissions measured up to the “true story idea.”

      Second, in addition to the page 2 sidebars, each issue of True Story contained numerous invitations for readers to submit their own true stories. These invitations often took the form of full-page advertisements, in which, after a prize was briefly but conspicuously announced, the requirements, philosophy, and morals of True Story were explained at length. Complementing these full-page invitations, the early issues of True Story were littered with sidebar-sized invitations. Often filling the blank space between the end of a story and the bottom of a page, these smaller invitations performed a similar function: announcing prizes, the criteria according to which they could be won, and the moral undergirding of True Story.

      Third, in addition to the page 2 sidebars and the ubiquitous solicitations, the “true story idea” was disseminated through monthly editorials. Beginning in August 1921, Bernarr Macfadden wrote a one-page editorial for each issue. Most often, these editorials were trite, cliché-filled meditations on banal topics—the product, as Robert Ernst put it, of “the simple intensity of a believer who had no fear of the obvious.”⁶³ About twice a year, however, interposed between these cliché-ridden rehearsals of Benjamin Franklin–style truisms—such as “honesty is the best policy”—Macfadden used his editorial column to explain the “true story idea,” to defend the magazine against its competitors, to celebrate its accomplishments, and to explain its morality.⁶⁴ These editorials were in substance virtually indistinguishable from the page 2 sidebars and the solicitations for manuscripts that filled the pages of True Story.

      Finally, the success of True Story imitators forced Macfadden to dedicate even more space to explaining and defending the “true story idea.” In 1922 W. H. Fawcett introduced True Confessions, which sold out its first issue and was “for years second only to True Story in circulation.”⁶⁵ Although the competition did not immediately register in True Story's pages, by the spring of 1924, True Story apparently felt the need to defend itself. “The public is being deceived today by magazines being produced in imitation of True Story,” the editors of True Story protested. This deceit, they continued, constituted “one of the most contemptible literary frauds in the history of American journalism, and the editors of True Story Magazine feel that they have a responsibility in exposing this condition.”⁶⁶ Expose it they did. From April 1924 forward, True Story marshaled all its resources in order to defend its home ground against impostors. In addition to using the page-two sidebar and Macfadden's editorials to parse True Story and its imitators, Macfadden published selected letters to the editor and a number of feature articles all dedicated to the comparative superiority of True Story. In addition to defending True Story, these defenses functioned, once again, to explain True Story to its readership: its philosophy was laid bare and its moral virtue rehearsed.

      The cumulative result of all these interventions—the sidebars, invitations, editorials, and comparisons—was a highly self-referential magazine. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that for every true story published, True Story also published a corresponding rationale explaining why they published it. It is almost as if, between and beneath every confession, the editors of True Story felt compelled to make their editorial criteria explicit. If they couldn't do so using a full-page explanation, they certainly could (and did) use several sidebars per issue. I trust by this point the reason they did so is clear: True Story was a direct outgrowth of Macfadden's lifelong battle with Comstockery—a battle that had forced on Macfadden the realization that nakedness, rhetorical or otherwise, was almost by definition liable to be misunderstood. To counter this possibility, True Story refused to allow true stories to speak for themselves. Despite True Story's much-rehearsed claim that it was simply an unfiltered conduit of the American working-class experience, the sidebars, the ever-present solicitations, the carefully selected and dutifully printed letters to the editor, and the denunciations of the broader confession industry all served to filter the American experience and ensure that no one could miss the purportedly obvious fact that True Story—like the confessions that filled it—was a moral venture.

      Authenticity and True Story

      At the heart of the “true story idea”

Скачать книгу