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a massive and intrusive rhetorical primer. They provide instructions for reading authenticity. Lest authentic stories of human sexuality be interpreted as salacious or lewd, the rhetorical primer—provided by True Story in the form of ministerial letters to the editor—provided a hermeneutic according to which the bed shadows testified to their own darkness and pushed the reader toward duty's “sunlit path.”

      Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, Macfadden used the shortcomings of the other confession magazines as an opportunity to teach his readers about the genre of the true story and how it was to be read. In May 1924 he carefully distinguished True Story from its competition on the basis of its moral rigor. Given the “extraordinary demand” for true stories, Macfadden noted that imitators were inevitable. Moreover, he insisted, “we have no objection to them when their efforts are imbued by the high ideals that inspire our True Story product.” Unfortunately, Macfadden noted that the competition was “unwholesome,” “lewd and obscene”: “Their idea of a true story is an all-around filthy tale that presents lascivious details of various kinds.” Macfadden, for his part, claimed a very different definition of a true story, and a different definition of authenticity: “We believe that [true] stories should be made to assume an attitude of respect towards the highest type of morality, and that the outworkings of human instincts and emotions should be portrayed naturally, cleanly as well as dramatically. For twenty-five years the publishers of True Story have been engaged in publishing literature that has had a distinctly upbuilding influence upon its readers. It has helped to make their lives more wholesome, more satisfying and more successful.”⁹⁹ Macfadden's claim—made in 1924, five years into True Story's life—that he had been publishing “upbuilding” literature for twenty-five years is telling. It reveals that, from Macfadden's perspective, True Story was a continuation of Physical Culture, which, besides being founded in 1899, was expressly dedicated to fighting Comstock's morality by censorship.¹⁰⁰

      This is the “true story idea”: the unvarnished prose guarantees the authenticity of the tales, and the authenticity of tales guarantees the propagation of moral virtue. If both of these equations were rehearsed ad nauseam, it is because both were highly contested. Macfadden was fighting not only the likes of Mencken, who argued that unrefined prose was a signal of unrefined thought, but also a Comstock-inspired reaction that decried True Story as lewd, suggestive, and even pornographic.¹⁰¹ With such opponents as these, and with the meaning of confession in the balance, is it any surprise that Macfadden took extra care to ensure that the two million readers in his charge understood clearly the genre of confession and the sexual politics it served?

      Conclusion: Confession and Sexuality

      Lurking in the founding and development of True Story Magazine are three important lessons for rhetorical critics. First, in the 1920s the boundaries of the confession were redrawn along political lines. Why did Macfadden bar his first editor from using a “fancy pencil”? Why did he insist on unvarnished prose and stories composed of monosyllabic words? Answer: His own sexual politics. Macfadden's crusade against Comstock required him to emphasize the truth of his stories, and the unvarnished, monosyllabic form of his confessions was a powerful means of doing so. If, as I have elsewhere suggested, the equation of inarticulacy and authenticity has become a standard marker of our contemporary confessional culture, it is important to remember that this equation is never self-evident.¹⁰² In the case of Macfadden and True Story, it was driven by his political agenda.

      Second, if cultural politics influenced the very form of the confession, the development of the genre was itself ingredient in the shaping of American sexual mores. Greg Mullins has insightfully called Macfadden's Physical Culture a “well-muscled closet.” On his reading, the magazine displayed erotic pictures of the nude male body, but diffused the erotic charge by restricting the range of the nude body's meaning to aesthetic or medical values.¹⁰³ Following the same logic, it is possible to understand True Story as a “confessional closet.” It was a place where the confessional form itself was placed in the service of conservative sexual politics. Lest his readership miss this point, Macfadden surrounded every illicit story with sidebars, explanations, and rationalizations aplenty—all designed to reinforce the association between nakedness and Christian virtue. So long as Macfadden had his way, bed shadows, stories of sexual deviancy, and even experience itself confirmed the legitimacy of the most austere sexual politics. When we consider the reach of Macfadden's influence—that he reached two million, mostly undereducated, working-class readers throughout the 1920s—it is hard to fathom that his twin claims of providing both an unfiltered conduit of the American experience and a Christian moral primer did not collude with each other and thereby become ingredient in the production of the heteronormative sexual culture that was twentieth-century America. Although I do not know how we might measure True Story's influence on this score, I do know how we can judge Macfadden: he turned his bountiful resources toward the naturalization of his own sexual politics, and for this he remains culpable. That Macfadden's most powerful instrument of naturalization was the confession stands as a reminder to rhetorical critics that genres and genre criticism must not be taken lightly. It stands also as a rejection of Rod Hart's trivialization of genre criticism. Hart put it this way: “To my way of thinking, no particularly exalted intellectual function is served by tucking each of the world's little speeches into its own little generic bed.”¹⁰⁴ However, to Macfadden's way of thinking, the categorization of his magazine served an exalted political function. And to my way of thinking, the suggestion that the categorization of texts is innocent, pedantic, or trivial amounts to a studied refusal to look at a major form of cultural politics.

      Finally, one of the most remarkable things about the development of True Story from 1905 forward, is Macfadden's keen awareness of what we might call the emptiness of authenticity. Although he never articulated it quite this way, on some level Macfadden knew that the meaning of authenticity was neither self-evident nor transcendent. Put rhetorically, he knew that no matter the context, it was insufficient simply to defend his magazine as authentic. In addition to such a defense, Macfadden carried the further burden of making authenticity serve his own politics. This is the reason why the early years of True Story are overrun with sidebars, editorials, and explanations. Macfadden knew that he had to not only provide confessions, but also provide a protocol for reading them correctly.

      There is a general lesson here. Confession, like Macfadden's authenticity, is not a transcendent genre, the contours of which could be adduced equally well from any number of situations. Quite the opposite. Confession might be called an empty signifier. It means different things at different times as different people put it to different ends. The task for rhetorical critics, then, is not the delineation of the form; it is, rather, in charting how various delineations have served various partisan agendas. What is needed—and what I've tried to provide—is a political economy of confession: an analysis of the genre that grants primary importance to the political commitments that provoked and defined the genre of confession in a particular instance. For the moment we lift any confession out of the political economy which required and defined it, we risk thinking that there exists some transcendent form of confession against which particular performances can be judged. While such criticism may be able to explicate formal changes in the genre over time—and here I have Foucault in my sights—it could not, as a matter of course, explain the politics of confession.

      In the 1920s, the genre of confession was situated vis-à-vis the development of True Story and Macfadden's lifelong crusade against Anthony Comstock's sexual politics. In this political economy, confession was defined in a very particular way and according to the strictest of politics. As a hedge against mistaking this 1920s vision of confession for confession in general, in the next chapter I chart the changes in confession, authenticity, and True Story that resulted from Macfadden's 1930s preoccupation with American class politics. As we shall see, when confession is situated in a new political economy, torn from its 1920s alliance with sexuality and articulated instead to a particular class politics, the form itself will dramatically change.

      2

      CONFESSION AND CLASS: A NEW TRUE STORY

      By 1936, when the New Masses put an effeminate, busted, brassiered, fingernail-polished, phallus-fondling

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