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Inspired by the letters he received in response to Coryell's confession, Macfadden offered one cent per word for confessions. He solicited manuscripts thus: “Simply describe as directly as you can, without omitting necessary details, what you consider the most interesting experience of your life.” Typewriting helpful but not imperative. The cultural historian Ann Fabian underscores the importance of this fact: “Macfadden's great innovation was to offer his readers a hand in the production of the artifacts they so happily consumed, to urge them at every turn to become writers as well as readers, producers as well as consumers.”⁶⁸ The editors of True Story knew as much. As they put it in May 1920, True Story is a “unique and distinctive magazine because its method of obtaining its material is unique and distinctive. It depends upon folk just like yourself to provide the stories, short and long, that appear in its pages—rather than upon a relatively small group of professional writers.”⁶⁹ In a 1922 article titled “What Is the True Story Idea?” the editors argued that the “success” of the magazine was “chiefly due to its readers' response to its invitation to bare their life stories on the printed page.”⁷⁰ One year later, the editors were even more emphatic: “The very corner-stone upon which True Story is built—the True Story idea itself—is its encouragement to everyday men and women, and not to professional writers alone, to set down their life-stories in black and white.”⁷¹

      True Story's insistence that it is written by its readers justified the vernacular style of its prose. This is Macfadden: “It was the purpose of this new magazine to present, not the highly colored imaginative plots of men who made story writing a business … but to take the unvarnished, rude, and sometimes even illiterate words and phrases of people who were not selling their imaginations, but who were giving memories to the world for whatever these memories might be worth.”⁷² Almost every call for manuscripts emphasized that rhetorical skill, grammatical facility, and literary training were not required. Consider this 1922 advertisement: “True Story, you know, is unique among other things for the opportunities it affords the untrained and unexperienced [sic] writer. One who has a story to tell need have no misgivings as to his brain-child failing of recognition because its parent lacks literary experience.”⁷³ Four years later, the line is the same: “We do not want the fiction of professional writers. We want throbbing dramas from the hearts and lives of people who have lived them.”⁷⁴ In sum, True Story's claim that it was written by its readers was indistinguishable from its “unpolished,” vernacular style.

      True Story's relentless pursuit of unvarnished prose led H. L. Mencken to envision the “perfect” Macfadden magazine as follows: “There will be no word of more than one syllable, and no word at all that might be a picture. The news of the day will be told precisely as the gory fictions of the comic strips are not told—in a series of graphs, with an occasional balloon. And the vocabulary of the balloons will be restricted to such terms as even infants of three are hep to: blaah, bang, boom, shhhh, wow, woof, hell, damn, and so on.”⁷⁵ For Mencken and his American Mercury readership, the monosyllabic character of True Story was evidence of thoughtlessness, immaturity, and infantilization. For True Story, however, “unvarnished prose” was evidence of authenticity and an essential step in turning True Story into a parable.

      Indeed, it is impossible to understand True Story without stressing that the “unvarnished, rude and … illiterate” prose of the people was not merely tolerated by True Story in order to secure more manuscripts. Illiteracy was itself a positive good. It both testified to the authenticity of the working class and distinguished confessional prose from that composed by professional writers. According to Fulton Oursler's recollection, Macfadden expressly forbid his first editor, John Brennan, from “using a fancy pencil on a True Story manuscript”: “I don't want these stories to have any polish that doesn't naturally belong to them.” Oursler explained Macfadden's logic: “He did not care how crudely [the stories] might be expressed. In that very crudity he sensed the qualities of strength and conviction.”⁷⁶ In George Gerbner's account, True Story required a disregard for proper grammar; he quotes an unnamed confession writer thus: “In the breathless rush of words, grammar, syntax, correct antecedents went overboard. Where they didn't, I went back and threw them out. The story sold.”⁷⁷ The reason the story sold is that, according to the “true story idea,” grammar, syntax, and antecedents undermine what Gerbner called the “flavor of authenticity.”⁷⁸ Although Gerbner did not make this explicit, Macfadden did:

      Fiction stories are inventions of the author's brain. The manuscripts which find their way to True Story's pages are not inventions at all, and they were not born in the brain but in the heart. They reflect life because they are life. The fiction story is only what the individual author thinks of life. The True Story is taken right out of the life of the man or woman who sends it to us. The fiction writer in his eagerness colors the truth. He tries to add more reality but by his very effort he takes away reality. Because truth is stranger than fiction and the imagination cannot begin to compete with life.⁷⁹

      There could hardly be a more compact synopsis of the True Story conceit: professional writers invent fictions; True Story writers, strictly speaking, do not invent anything at all. They simply, as it were, transcribe life onto the written page, a task for which the paucity of their rhetorical skill suited them perfectly. The imperfections of their prose guaranteed the authenticity of their confession.

      To ensure that True Story retained its “flavor of authenticity,” Macfadden assembled an editorial board wholly ignorant of “ideas on structure, on technique, [and] … artistic narrative quality.” Oursler recalls that Macfadden filled his storied “Reading Department” with “girls and boys who knew nothing whatever about the publishing business.”⁸⁰ The Saturday Evening Post caricatured Macfadden's Reading Department as a “corps of editors consisting of cooks, housemaids, office boys, chauffeurs, janitors, filing clerks, housewives, night-club hostesses, stenographers, elevator men and typewriter repairers.”⁸¹ A well-documented legend even holds that Macfadden fired two of his editors for taking courses in journalism.⁸² According to Macfadden's third wife, one member of his editorial board even wrote an essay titled “How I Was Demoted to Editor of True Story and Worked My Way up to Elevator Man Again!”⁸³ Finally, when True Story turned into an unprecedented success, the Saturday Evening Post concluded that Macfadden “was on the verge of proving that illiteracy was the highest culture and that blank minds should be ruling the world.”⁸⁴

      As amusing as these anecdotes are, it is important that we not lose sight of their function. If Macfadden insisted on his editors' rhetorical ignorance, it is because this ignorance could guarantee the authenticity of the confessions he published. This much Macfadden made explicit. He argued that the fact that his stories were written by “folk who will write but one story in all their existence … serves as a guarantee of their truth.”⁸⁵ Similarly, in an undated (but likely 1930s) speech given by Dorothy Kemble to explain the inner workings of Macfadden Publications, she explained how, precisely, the public could be sure that True Story printed true stories: “If you could see the manner in which hundreds of these stories are submitted, I think that your question would be answered. Sometimes they are submitted on old school pads, the type we used in grammar school, sometimes in note books or on the back of scrap paper. I have even seen some stories written on plain brown wrapping paper. But in order to make doubly sure of their authenticity, an affidavit is required.”⁸⁶ For Kemble, the affidavit is repetitive. The unpolished presentation of the submissions—the fact that they are scribbled on school pads and scrap paper—is Kemble's primary evidence for the truth of True Story. It is as if the nuanced prose of the legal contract was made unnecessary by the unvarnished prose of the stories themselves. Mark Adams got it completely right when he claimed that Macfadden “equated crudity with verisimilitude.”⁸⁷

      Thus far, the “true story idea” is this: the magazine prints only the rude prose of its readers, the quality of the prose guaranteeing True Story's claim to be an unfiltered conduit of the American working-class experience. The equation of rude prose and authentic truth, however, was only half of the “true story

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