Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America. Dave Tell

consumer, and as such, Macfadden's case for advertising dollars rested on their existence. Macfadden's solution was ingenious. He had learned from his bouts with Comstock that confessions were empty signifiers—they were always liable to misinterpretation. That is why he had turned True Story into a rhetorical primer, why in the 1920s he had surrounded each true story with a set of directions for interpreting it as a guide to moral virtue. Why not give advertising executives a similar lesson? Why not teach them to see in true stories the exact thing he wanted them to see—the ideal consumer? He thus, as it were, inserted the wage earner behind the confession. Without changing a single editorial policy, he told executives that if they squinted just right, if they learned to read True Story properly, they could see between the lines of his true stories millions of affluent, docile, and eager consumers.

      This, however, was no simple task. On its surface, True Story was just so many stories of promises broken and kept, rendezvous arranged and regretted. Thus, with as much intensity as the early True Story provided a never-ending commentary alongside the true stories it told, the advertising campaign insisted that business executives must learn to reread True Story. A Printer's Ink ad for True Story was titled “Do You Know How to Read Your Newspaper?”⁴⁵ The implied answer was no. Consider The American Economic Evolution. True Story may “fairly shout” its reflection of American culture, the book argued, but such shouting will be audible only “if one will take the trouble to read between the lines.” This was imperative. If only the printed lines were considered, “one story may be about sex and one about money. Another about chastity and another about divorce. But when you lay them out together at the end of any period, as any good sociologist would do, and then look underneath them for the impelling motive—the factor that caused the story, you get a picture of the true conditions of the time that could not be written in any other way.” Macfadden constantly urged business executives to be sociologists; to be “student-minded”; to ignore the surface content of the stories; to “take the settings of these True Stories instead of the stories themselves”; to see the fortunes of the American worker “in big type, between the lines”; to “take the underlay” of true stories, “not by what they tell, but by what they do not even realize they are telling.” Macfadden was insistent on this: “You have to have wisdom enough to read between the lines to see what is going on. The writers of these stories themselves do not realize what is going on except as they have personal wisdom, here and there, to read between their own lines.”⁴⁶

      Literally speaking, of course, there was nothing but blank space between the lines. But Macfadden used this blank space to his great advantage. Rather than rely on business executives to read between the lines correctly, he was quick to fill in that blank space with his fictional wage-earning class. Consider again Macfadden's History and Magazines. This book claimed to document the shifting anxieties of the wage-earning class by providing lengthy excerpts from True Story Magazine and a meta-commentary explaining the meaning of the excerpts. Initially, stories like “Haunting Memories” revealed that the wage earners were anxious about the “changing moral code.” Later, stories like “Rotten Riches” demonstrated that the “problems created by too much money replaced … the problems created 5 years before by the changing moral code.” In the depression years, stories like “Desperate Days” revealed the problems of “too little money,” and stories like “When I Needed Her Most” revealed that wage earners had rediscovered the “power of faith and the strength of family life.” When we remember that History and Magazines was written for advertising executives, it will come as no surprise that the most recent anxieties of the wage-earning class stemmed from the superabundance of consumables—“refrigerators, radios, nylon plastics … [and] fortified bread”—and a “Wage Earner Group” whose education, earnings, and employment “are at new highs.”⁴⁷