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The Pie and Theory Reading Group has been a breath of fresh air. Kansas librarian Julie Petr deserves standout recognition; without her capacity to find rare documents I would have been lost. Finally, thanks go to KU's General Research Fund, whose consistent support made summertime research possible.

      At the center of my Kansas experience has been the Hall Center for the Humanities, which provided me a residential fellowship and two semester-long workshops to refine my argument under the best conditions possible. Here my debts extend to Victor Bailey, Kristine Latta, Jeanie Wulfkuhle, and Cindy Lynn.

      The Humanities Grant Development Office at KU has done more for the intellectual narrative of Confessional Crises than I ever dreamed possible for an institutionalized office. HDGO is far more than grant support—it is also thought support. Without the supportive resistance of the HGDO, Confessional Crises would have been underfunded and underdeveloped. Thanks go to Kathy Porsche and Sally Utech.

      Kendra Boileau and the whole team at Penn State University Press have been fantastic. Freelance copyeditor Nicholas Taylor was a pleasure to work with.

      Very few friends outside the academy ever asked me about the specifics of what I was writing. But I'm quite thankful for the few that did: Jamie and Darcy Kidd, Matt and Kori Podszus, Marc and Jenea Havener, Bill and Sue Tell (my parents!), and Jeff and Aubrey Tell.

      Finally, Confessional Crises is dedicated to Hannah, Jack, and Ashlyn. Even if Confessional Crises becomes a best seller, it could never compensate these three for the endless support, encouragement, and relief they have provided.

      INTRODUCTION:

      CONFESSIONAL CRISES AND CULTURAL POLITICS

      In contemporary America, the rise of reality TV, the proliferation of daytime talk shows, the endless parade of celebrity confessions, and the insatiable market for fake memoirs such as James Frey's Million Little Pieces have pushed the genre of confession to the forefront of the public mind. Writing in the January 2010 issue of the New Yorker, the distinguished cultural critic Daniel Mendelsohn suggested that the outrage over the recent “onslaught” of Frey-styled “phony” confessions indicates a “large and genuinely new anxiety” about what sorts of texts should count as confessions.¹ Thus did Mendelsohn add his voice to what has become a widespread sentiment: we no longer live simply in a confessional culture. This much is well known and well documented.² Rather, we live in a culture defined by confessional anxiety: an anxiety born of an uncertainty about which texts should count as confessions, and compounded by the conviction that such classifications matter a great deal.

      Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America demonstrates that these anxieties are nothing new. In fact, anxieties over precisely which texts qualify as confessions have been a staple of twentieth-century American life. They have manifested themselves in what I call confessional crises. Confessional crises are the public debates incited when a text that contains no apparent confessional characteristics is labeled a confession for patently political purposes. For example, in 1956 NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins argued that Look magazine's story on the racially charged murder of Emmett Till was a confession. Despite the fact that the story was written in the third person, that it contained no apology, no remorse, no admission of sinfulness, and, in short, none of the standard markers by which a text is typically identified as a confession, Wilkins recognized that if the Look story circulated as a confession, it would provide him leverage with which to pressure Mississippi Governor-Elect J. P. Coleman to reconvene a grand jury.

      Wilkins thus acted on a central assumption of Confessional Crises: that the classification of a text as a confession is not an idle, academic task. To the contrary, at least to Wilkins's mind (and mine), to call a text a confession or to deny the same is always a political act (i.e., an act that stresses or reinforces the established social order). In the case at hand, the possibility of justice for Emmett Till turned on the question of whether the Look story counted as a confession. And conversely, the Look story counted as a confession for Wilkins only because of his racial politics. In these respects, the January 1956 debate over the Look article was a paradigmatic confessional crisis: because cultural politics were inextricably interwoven with the contested classification of Look's story, it instigated a widespread discussion of confession, its boundaries, and its proper place in public life.³

      Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America is about precisely this imbrication of confession and cultural politics. As we shall see, the two will simply not leave each other alone. I argue that six recurrent issues in American cultural politics—sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy—have been deeply informed by the genre of confession, and the genre of confession, in turn, is a product of its historical allegiances with these same issues. The strength of the bond joining confession to cultural politics is best judged by the sheer time, energy, and expense activists like Wilkins have spent ensuring that only the correct texts are called confessions. And here Wilkins is only a type. In the pages that follow, I tell the stories of countless partisan actors who—from all points on the political spectrum—have redefined the genre of confession in order to make it better serve their political needs. Their efforts have been pursued with such vigor and such passion that they have transformed both the nature of genre criticism and American culture writ large. Genre criticism, the once-staid activity of deciding how texts should be classified and what such classifications mean, has over the course of the twentieth century been invested with the pathos, energy, and hostility familiar to students of cultural politics. On a wider level, as I document in the conclusion, twenty-first-century American culture is now shot-through with confessional anxieties and hyper-attuned to the political stakes of labeling texts as confessions.

      I pursue these arguments by examining the controversy over the Look article and five similar episodes in which partisan political investments sparked public debates over whether particular texts counted as confessions. The first two were incited by the 1919 publication of Bernarr Macfadden's True Story Magazine. Although True Story is now widely recognized as the founding text in the confession industry, its origins in cultural politics have been all but forgotten. True Story, and the confessions that once filled its pages, were a direct result of Macfadden's conviction that “confessions” were a powerful weapon—both in his lifelong feud with Anthony Comstock over sexual politics, and in the development of capitalism. These articulations of confession with sexuality and class sparked widespread public debates over True Story Magazine, the genre of confession, and its place in public life. Over the course of the century, at least four more events triggered similar crises. In October 1955, Emmett Till's acquitted killers sold their story to Look for $4,000; in 1967 the white Anglo-Saxon southern Protestant William Styron claimed that he “entered the consciousness” of a black slave to write The Confessions of Nat Turner; in 1988 the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart's church (the Assemblies of God) fought to control the meaning and dissemination of his confession; and in 1998 the Clinton administration and Kenneth Starr's Office of the Independent Counsel publicly debated whether Clinton's various speeches on Monica Lewinsky counted as legitimate confessions.

      Despite all the differences among these episodes, they share decisive commonalities. In each instance, cultural politics demanded the reclassification of a text as a confession. Further, in each instance this reclassification sparked vigorous public debates over what we might call confessional hermeneutics, a shorthand term I use to designate the collaborative but always contested activity of deciding which texts do, and which texts do not, qualify as confessions. Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America is premised on the belief that these debates—or in my terms, these confessional crises—teach us four specific lessons about the politics of confession.

      First, these debates underscore the intense political power of labeling a text as a confession. Simply by repeating Wilkins's strategy of claiming politically convenient texts as confessions, scores of partisan advocates have brought new force to their arguments. Thus it is hardly surprising that confessional crises have been clustered around twentieth-century America's most intractable issues—not only race, but also sexuality, class, violence, religion, and democracy. Indeed, the central argument

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