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as pornographic. To be sure, Macfadden's True Story was the subject of much debate. But, as chapter 1 demonstrated, in the early years of True Story this debate was restricted to issues of sexuality. By 1936, however, a new set of terms had been introduced into the debate over Macfadden's True Story. Tellingly subtitled “From Pornography to Politics,” the New Masses article was less about sexuality than about class: “Millions of working-class and lower middle-class citizens absorb [Macfadden's] reactionary editorials and wallow in the politely-dressed filth of his confessionals.”¹

      True Story's shift from being defined by its opposition to the sexual politics of Comstock to its later concerns with class politics started in 1926. In that year, William Jourdan Rapp began his sixteen-year tenure as editor of True Story and, by historical consensus, fundamentally altered the magazine. It was a momentous shift. No longer the haven of Macfadden's “anonymous, amateur, illiterates,” True Story now recruited and published such writers as Henry Ford, Edward Corsi, and the YMCA figurehead Mrs. Frederic M. Paist.² Although the stories still “taught a strong moral lesson,” that morality was no longer grounded in stories authenticated by unrefined prose. Rapp reasoned that public education was improving public literacy and thus gave his editors license to exercise a “heavier hand.”³ All these, however, were incremental changes. The biggest shift in the administration of True Story was its newfound pursuit of mainstream advertising. Until that point, the advertising in True Story was scarce and as unrefined as its prose. Seven years after its founding, and two years after achieving a circulation of two million readers, True Story still “carried less than a dozen full-page or half-page ads for national advertisers.”⁴ The advertising it did carry was hardly capable of generating revenue. Filled with advertisements for alternative medicines, self-help books, public speaking lessons, violet rays, and Macfadden's eight-volume Encyclopedia of Health, True Story was filled with products that would generate neither mass interest nor mass revenue.

      Beginning in 1926 and continuing through mid-century, True Story campaigned for mainstream advertising dollars. It did so by taking the “true story idea” to American business leaders and advertising executives. This campaign, which Roland Marchand has aptly characterized as a “series of sociological sermons to the trade,” took a number of different forms: from advertisements in mainstream newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and the Boston Herald Traveler, to trade journals such as Printer's Ink, to a number of short books published by Macfadden Publications.⁵ Whatever the outlet, True Story's campaign for advertising dollars aimed to convince American executives that whatever their personal misgivings about True Story or its working-class readership, the magazine was nonetheless an essential advertising space. As one advertisement put it, “Socially these people are strangers to you. Culturally, their tastes are quite different from your own. But economically they are your bread and butter.”⁶ The campaign was wildly successful. The pages that were once filled with marginal products incapable of generating revenue were by the 1930s filled with products of mass culture: the Fleischmann Company, Eastman Kodak, Lever Bros., Jell-O, Listerine, and Lux Toilet Soap.⁷

      Aspects of this campaign were conventional. It will surprise no one, for example, to learn that True Story emphasized its circulation numbers, which by 1926 could compete with any monthly in the land. Beyond the numbers, True Story argued that because it was designed by and for a working-class audience, an advertisement placed in its pages would be particularly effective. A Printer's Ink advertisement put it this way: “To reach them, to sell them, advertisers need use ONLY ONE great national magazine, True Story.” While “wage earners” “can't comprehend the more sophisticated ‘silk worm’ magazines written for the white collars,” True Story's “democracy of editorial appeal has made it the only great national magazine tapping 86% of America.”⁸ True Story even created new slogans and new logos to foreground its penetration of the “wage earning market”: “True Story: The Only Magazine They Read” and “True Story: The NEW Market.”⁹

      Yet we must not take True Story's claim to access a working-class readership at face value. This access was built on two mutually constitutive fictions: first, the fiction of a happy, docile, politically passive working class with expendable income, and second, the fiction of a magazine that perfectly expressed the deepest desires of this class. Macfadden Publications developed both fictions with vigor, dedicating countless columns to redescribing America's working class in self-serving terms. Beyond securing advertising dollars, the results of this campaign were twofold. First, these two fictions combined to solidify True Story's status as a confession magazine. Macfadden Publications argued that because True Story was written by its readers, it functioned as an ideal connection between consumers and producers. In addition to carrying products to the masses, it also carried the masses—their subconscious desires, anxieties, and consumer impulses—back to business executives. This redescription of True Story eliminated any lingering doubts about the confessional status of True Story, for in the middle decades of twentieth-century America, a discourse that expressed subconscious desires could register only as a confession. It is no coincidence that it was in these years that the Saturday Evening Post—and the New Yorker, and Time, and virtually every other cultural organ—now instinctively saw true stories as confessions. In this chapter I stress that this widely shared mid-century instinct to see Macfadden's true stories as confessions was not instinctual at all: it was provided for by a particular political economy, the product of an advertising campaign that redescribed both True Story and its readership.

      Second, and perhaps more important, this redescription of True Story and its attendant reification as a confession magazine had consequences on the well-being of the American working class. Indeed, I suggest that the progressive immiseration of the working class can be indexed to the progressive certainty with which True Story was understood as a confession magazine. Here's why: True Story was gradually reified as a confession magazine to the degree that Macfadden's two fictions were believed. And to the extent that his fictions were believed, that segment of the working class that remained discontent and impoverished was hidden from view. It was hidden by the well-funded and widely deployed fiction of a happy, well-remunerated working class, the desires of which True Story perfectly expressed. In other words, because True Story claimed to be the organ par excellence of the working class, and because it fundamentally misrepresented this class, whatever portions of the actually existing working class that did not match Macfadden's fiction were cut off from all sources of power, left to defend themselves in a world that—if Macfadden had his way—would not even know they existed.

      True Story's Fictional Working Class

      Macfadden Publications rested its argument for advertising dollars on the existence and purchasing power of what Macfadden referred to as a “new market” of consumers.¹⁰ He titled this class of consumers “wage earners.” “Wage earners” were so central to True Story's advertising campaign that Macfadden Publications released two books dedicated to establishing their existence and explaining their relevance. In 1927 Macfadden Publications released 86% of America and followed it three years later with The American Economic Evolution. These are fascinating texts. Both were addressed to “Business Executives” and both comprised short vignettes of the so-called wage-earning class. Sometimes these vignettes were anonymous, at other times—especially in 86% of America—they were attributed to such personalities as Walter Chrysler, Henry Ford, Herbert Hoover, and Andrew Mellon. On a descriptive level, both claimed simply to explain the relevant contours of the class: their purchasing patterns and political tendencies, of course, but also their aesthetic sensibilities and economic ambitions. While The American Economic Evolution explicitly used these descriptions as evidence of the value of True Story's advertising space, 86% of America relied on ads in Printer's Ink to connect its analysis of the wage-earning class to the conclusion that “magazine advertisers MUST use True Story.”¹¹

      In both the books and their accompanying newspaper advertisements, Macfadden Publications argued that an economic revolution had transformed the working class: “Almost without our

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