LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

to turn authenticity, truthfulness, and experience—all of which were catalogued monthly in the pages of True Story—into documentable evidence of a fictional class. If, in the 1920s, true stories advanced a moral lesson, in the 1930s the same stories were made to serve class politics by establishing the existence of a docile, spending working class.

      The Mirror Function of True Stories

      If True Story's sheer circulation and its “democratic editorial appeal” guaranteed that it could carry the news of products from the classes to the masses, the fact that it was written by its readers guaranteed the return trip.³⁵ In other words, because True Story was written by its readers, and because its readers were defined as consumers (wage earners), the articles in True Story provided a picture of the very consumers who were the object of the producers' attention. In this way, Macfadden suggested, advertising in True Story was more valuable than advertising elsewhere, for the nature of the magazine ensured that the products filling the advertising pages could be uniquely calibrated to the desires of its readers: “Here at True Story Magazine, the people not only tell us what they want but they also give it to us. We can't make any mistake. If their emotions are changing, they change them. If they lean toward mystery stories, they give them to us. But that is not the best of it. When they get tired of mystery stories, they stop writing them. We never have to guess what they want nor when they are sick of it.” Macfadden concluded that True Story reflected social and economic change “as perfectly as a rock or a tree is reflected in a clear, still lake.”³⁶

      Macfadden thus defined True Story as the collective self-expression of the fictional wage-earning class. To make this case he reminded his readers that True Story “never has been what might be called an ‘edited’ publication.” For Macfadden, “editing” was a devil term, a synonym for tampering or falsifying. Rather than tamper with “the great mass of personal experiences,” True Story simply “printed them”: “Wherever you have any personal expression from a cross-section of hundreds of thousands of individuals, you have a great human composite that is telling the story of its age more clearly than any historian could ever do. For self-expression is always true expression when you let it alone.” True Story thus constituted a “perfect mirror” of “human affairs.” Indeed, what we might call the mirror function of True Story was itself the grounds of Macfadden's fictional economic narrative. While the early submissions to True Story had once recorded tales of “misery and privation and struggle,” the more recent stories, “which come flowing in to us in an ever endless stream, are ending happily”: “In the last decade the very character of these True Stories has so completely changed that we ourselves do not recognize our own publication.”³⁷

      Macfadden was extraordinarily committed to the “mirror function” of True Story. A decade after The American Economic Evolution, he made the conceit the basis for his 1941 History and Magazines. This richly decorated coffee-table book begins with the premise that “magazines never ‘just happen.’”³⁸ Rather, they are a reflection of the “social forces at work in America.” To illustrate the point, History and Magazines provided a two-page chart that calibrated fifty-five prominent magazines to the social forces that “created” them. For example, the New American Magazine was a response to the American Revolution; the American Review was a product of nationalism; the Saturday Evening Post was created by the Civil War; The Nation by Reconstruction; Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping by industrialization; and True Story by World War I. “That is why,” Macfadden concluded, “through magazines, it is possible to see a dimension in history beyond a chronological presentation of events, an insight into the effects of these forces upon the people who figured in them.” In this sense, True Story was something of a first among equals. Although all magazines reflected history, only True Story was written by its readers, and thus, to a greater extent than the others, it placed in bold relief the “hopes, fears, troubles, [and] ambitions” of its readers. Unlike the other fifty-four magazines on the chart, True Story was not simply created by a particular social force; it was a register on which shifting social forces were rendered legible. And this, Macfadden argued, made True Story an invaluable tool for the American manufacturer: “For this reason the pages of True Story—as they change with America's great Wage Earner Group—offer a monthly insight into the history of that group—an insight more revealing than the statistics of their wages, bank balances or purchases. A few great writers of advertising copy have discovered that truth for themselves and use True Story as a guide to the contemporary desires of its readers.”³⁹ It is difficult to overestimate the consistency with which the True Story advertising campaign returned to the magazine's “mirror function.” The Chicago Tribune emphasized the certainty of the wage earner's new wealth. Because True Story provided “the perfect reflection of this entire new cultural development,” it argued, “there is no more question about it than there is about the nature of man.”⁴⁰ Similarly, in The American Economic Evolution, Macfadden argued, “Today, the true stories in True Story Magazine are so different from the same true stories of ten years ago that it is hard to recognize them as the self-expression of the same people.”⁴¹

      All this is a very different picture of True Story than the one developed at length in the 1920s True Story as a response to Anthony Comstock. Two easy points of comparison will dramatize the point. While both the 1920s True Story and the later advertising campaign talked endlessly about the “true story idea” and the magazine's astronomical circulation, these two things had very different meanings in different contexts. Consider first the relative fate of the “true story idea”—the fact that it was written by its readers. In the 1920s, this meant that the magazine was didactic, educational, and corrective; an intervention into sexual politics. The fact that it was written by its readers guaranteed that it recorded actual experiences, and actual experiences were valuable primarily for their moral function. As Macfadden put it in 1924, “We want to help others to a safe passage by showing them the pitfalls that beset life's paths. That is our supreme purpose.”⁴² By contrast, while the advertising campaign rehearsed the fact that True Story was written by its readers with as much monotony as the first fourteen volumes of the magazine, this fact now meant something rather different. No longer a guarantee of True Story's moral uplift, it functioned now to guarantee that True Story was a reflection of society rather than an instrument in its reform. In short, True Story now revealed rather than reformed America. And as its function shifted from reformation to revelation, True Story was increasingly recognized in confessional terms.

      Or consider True Story's record-setting rise to a circulation of two million in only five years. Both the 1920s magazine and the 1930s advertising campaign boasted of this achievement endlessly, but they drew very different lessons from it. In the magazine, it was evidence of the popularity of moral instruction. In a May 1924 article titled “Two Million,” for example, Macfadden interpreted the achievement as a “gigantic testimonial to the popularity of truth as an entertainer.” But not just as an entertainer: “The little lives of ordinary folks have built a new literature. They are teaching a moral lesson which our young folks need, and we will be a better people because we learn from the experiences of others.”⁴³ The account in History and Magazines could not have been more different. After noting that the quick rise to two million was still honored well after the fact, it explained the achievement thus: “We believe that these achievements have been possible because True Story presents to its readers a true picture of current life—a picture they find interesting, illuminating, and inspiring.”⁴⁴ Thus was the didactic moralism of True Story in its early years replaced by romantic sentiments of national self-expression.

      On an empirical level, Macfadden's claim that True Story provides a “true picture of current life” is simply not true. Here I am not concerned with any of the particular stories, and I have no stake in the much-rehearsed debate over whether the true stories were forged. Rather, I simply wish to stress that, as Pells and Cohen remind us, Macfadden's so-called wage earners were a fiction. Historically speaking, the American working class was never relieved of drudgery

Скачать книгу