LITMIR.BIZ

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as authentic. Indeed, a coerced confession is definitively inauthentic, the product of an abusive power relation rather than an authentic expression of the self. On this score, labeling a text a confession de-authorizes both the text in question and the abusive power that produced it. The best evidence for the cultural power of the coerced confession is, again, the confessional crises of twentieth-century America. These demonstrate that, with as much intensity as partisan actors turned texts into confessions to cash in on the power of the authentic, they also turned texts into confessions to cash in on the power of the conspicuously inauthentic. Thus it was that the New York Times called on, of all people, the playwright Arthur Miller to explain the Starr Report—the choice itself suggesting that Starr's seven volumes constituted a forced confession and, as such, were inauthentic and could not be trusted.

      Confession, then, is a volatile genre, and confessional hermeneutics is a dangerous activity. Labeling a text a confession may either endow it with an unmatched aura of authenticity or divest the text of authenticity and suggest that the power that compelled it is abusive. In either case, however, the power of the genre is calibrated not to textual features or recurrent formal characteristics, but rather to the sheer act of classifying a text as a confession. In each of the following chapters, we will see how confessional hermeneutics lends the power of authenticity, or sometimes the stigma of inauthenticity, to the embattled actors of American cultural politics.

      Confessional Crises

      There have been at least six confessional crises in twentieth-century America. In the pages that follow, I dedicate a chapter to each of them. Here I briefly introduce each one, and indicate the specific political questions that turned debates over whether particular texts count as confessions into large-scale political brouhahas.

      Confession and Sexuality: True Story Magazine Versus Anthony Comstock

      The first confessional crisis I examine was incited by the publication of Bernarr Macfadden's True Story Magazine. When the magazine first hit the newsstands in May 1919, it was the culmination of Macfadden's lifelong crusade against his sworn enemy, Anthony Comstock, the “Great Mogul of American Morals.” Macfadden detested no one as much as he did Comstock, and True Story was designed as Macfadden's ultimate rebuttal of Comstock's pernicious influence over American sexuality. To Macfadden's mind, the confessions he published monthly in True Story, if they could only be properly understood, harbored the capacity to revolutionize conceptions of American sexuality. For this reason, Macfadden expended countless columns refining the genre of confession, educating the public on its proper deployment, and ensuring that the form itself could be placed in the service of his own, restrictive sexual politics.

      Confession and Class: A New True Story

      In chapter 2 I interrogate Bernarr Macfadden's 1930s claim that True Story constituted an ideal connection between producers and consumers. Because it was written by its readers, Macfadden explained, True Story not only carried advertisements to the masses, it also carried the masses—their subconscious desires, anxieties, and consumer impulses—back to business executives. Although this argument was an essential component in the gradual recognition of True Story as a distinctively confessional magazine, it must not be taken at face value. To make this claim, Macfadden redescribed the working class, telling business executives that workers were now defined by their expendable income, political docility, and overall contentedness. Macfadden, in other words, turned the working class into picture-perfect American consumers. The results were immediate: in addition to True Story becoming widely recognized as a confession magazine, the advertising dollars now flowed in. Yet—and this is my point—the very same strategy that turned True Story into a confession magazine and a commercial success also blinded a wide swath of Americans to the actual conditions of the working class. Because they were rendered invisible by Macfadden's rhetorical strategy, the actually existing working class paid the price of True Story becoming a confession magazine.

      Confession and Race: Look's “Shocking Story” of Emmett Till

      On October 28, 1955, the journalist William Bradford Huie signed a series of contracts with the murderers of Emmett Till. The contracts gave Huie the right to publish the killers' story of Till's murder in Look magazine, to quote the murderers at length, and to accuse them publicly of abduction and murder. However, the contracts did not give Huie the right to publish the killers' story as a confession. Because of this last point, Huie's “Shocking Story of Approved Murder in Mississippi” does not read as a confession. And yet nearly every reader of Huie's “Shocking Story” has followed the judgment of the renowned African American journalist James L. Hicks. Writing for The Afro-American, Hicks claimed that “in the magazine article [the killers] simply confess that they killed Emmett Till.”²⁵ How is it that “Shocking Story” is nearly universally remembered as a confession? More pressing still, why did both the NAACP and Mississippi's Citizens' Councils—two organizations that were deeply antagonistic, even offensive, to each other—both argue that Huie's “Shocking Story” was a confession?

      These are the questions that animate chapter 3. Their answer lies in the combustible mixture of confession and the politics of the Second Reconstruction. For civil rights activists, if the “Shocking Story” was a confession, it provided them the leverage they needed to advocate for President Eisenhower's proposed Civil Rights Commission. For segregationists and southern apologists, the “Shocking Story” performed a different, but equally vital, service: it provided a sanitized version of Till's murder and a much-needed response to Brown v. Board. Thus with all parties standing to gain from Huie's rendering of the murder, how could it not become a confession? The South saw in the “Shocking Story” a chance to consign to oblivion the extent of the violence visited upon Emmett Till; the north saw documentable evidence of southern hypocrisy. For these reasons both sides had a stake in turning the article into a confession to better authorize the story and better advance their politics. The result was that, despite its manifold inaccuracies and partisan origins, Huie's version of Till's story became the authoritative account for nearly fifty years.

      Confession and Violence: William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner

      Twelve years after the death of Emmett Till, the question of confession was once again at the center of American racial politics. On October 9, 1967, William Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner, a historical novel based on Nat Turner's 1831 insurrection. Styron's white critics argued that his novel was a confession, his black critics argued it was not, but both sides returned to the generic question repeatedly, approached it from a variety of angles, and marshaled a wide range of resources to support their generic claims. The question I pursue in chapter 4 is why? Why were both sides preoccupied with the genre of the novel, and what does this preoccupation teach us about the genre of confession and the question of violence? In order to answer these questions I suggest the following: In the context of the 1960s, to take a position on the genre of the novel was, simultaneously, to take a position on two hotly contested, racially coded debates: first, a historiographical debate over the relative violence of American slaves; second, a postcolonial debate over the capacities of rhetoric to bridge the experiences of black and white Americans. Chapter 4 thus demonstrates how the genre of Styron's novel came to function as a heuristic within these larger debates over the role of violence in America's past and present.

       Confession and Religion: Jimmy Swaggart's Apology

      Twenty-one years after Styron's novel was released, Jimmy Swaggart incited another confessional crisis when, on February 21, 1988, he publicly confessed to the more than eight thousand people crowded into his Baton Rouge Family Worship Center. Although thousands may have witnessed Swaggart confess, precious few knew precisely why he chose February 21 to do so. Reverend Marvin Gorman, the across-town pastor whom Swaggart had publicly disgraced two years earlier, was getting his revenge by blackmailing Swaggart into making a confession. It might have played out in a church, but this was old-fashioned power politics. Armed with pictures of an escorted Swaggart entering and leaving a pay-by-the-hour motel, Gorman demanded Swaggart's confession.

      Yet Swaggart had financial incentive not to confess. By 1988 he was raising more money than any other televangelist.²⁶ Moreover, his

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