his absence.”27 Swaggart was thus in a fix. On the one hand, he faced the photo-armed Marvin Gorman, who was demanding a public confession. On the other hand, the disclosures involved in a traditional, Christian confession threatened the economic stability of his ministry and, by extension, the spiritual vitality of numberless souls. How Swaggart negotiated this situation is the question of chapter 5. I argue that his response has much to teach us about the secularization of confession and, more generally, the place of religious discourse in public life.
Confession and Democracy: Bill Clinton Versus Kenneth Starr
By September 1998, Bill Clinton had confessed to an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky so many times that the news media began listing the confessions catalogue style. The listing of confessions, however, is never an innocent exercise. For, as I demonstrate in this chapter, the political debate over the guilt or innocence of Bill Clinton was indexed to a rhetorical debate over the definition of confession. For this reason, the seemingly innocent activity of listing certain texts as confessions was weighted with a new importance: to choose which texts counted as confessions was, in effect, to weigh in on Clinton's guilt. Chapter 6 asks which political positions required which texts to count as confessions. I argue that the Clinton administration radically expanded the list of texts that counted as confessions. It then aligned particular types of confession with the needs of a democratic polity and condemned other types of confession as a product of the invasive politics of Kenneth Starr. The result was not only the exoneration of Bill Clinton, but also a compelling redescription of public confession undertaken in the name of democracy itself.
Conclusion: Confessional Crises and Citizen Critics
Taken together, these six case studies bear witness to the power of the genre of confession. In each instance, the simple act of labeling an otherwise non-confessional text as a confession was an important (and always contested) tactic in American cultural politics. The sheer diversity of texts that have been turned into confessions is a trenchant reminder that the cultural power of public confession cannot be explained with recourse to textual characteristics or formal properties. The only way to study the politics of confession in twentieth-century America is to study what people call a confession, no matter how unlikely a candidate it seems. For no established formal definition of confession—not Augustine's, not Rousseau's, not Freud's, not Foucault's—could possibly encompass Styron's novel or Starr's report. Each of these texts became confessions because confessional hermeneutics was driven not by academic questions regarding recurrent formal characteristics, but by patently political motives. This suggests that although the temptation to posit a substantive definition of confession is strong, it is a temptation that must be resisted. By determining in advance what counts as a confession, we will be closing ourselves off to the mainspring of confession's cultural power, a power that includes the ability to turn virtually any text into a confession.
In the pages that follow, I tell the stories of how and why politically motivated journalists, celebrities, writers, politicians, and ordinary citizens turned themselves into ad hoc literary critics, or what Rosa A. Eberly has called “citizen critics.”28 These “citizen critics” recognized clearly that confessional hermeneutics was an activity fraught with political ramifications. For this reason, these citizen critics have repeatedly refused the proprietary claims of the academy over the practice of genre criticism. At least when it comes to the genre of confession, there has simply been too much at stake to leave such demarcations to academics. As few academics have, these activists understood that confession is a product of its political economy and, accordingly, that the re- or declassification of a text as a confession is a particularly powerful mode of intervening in that economy.
As a means of reflecting on this last point, the conclusion to Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America examines the twenty-first-century confessional crisis incited by James Frey's Million Little Pieces—a brouhaha about which the New York Times' Frank Rich was fantastically wrong. Wrote Rich, “No one except pesky nitpickers much cares whether Mr. Frey's autobiography is true or not, or whether it sits on a fiction or nonfiction shelf at Barnes & Noble.”29 The fact of the matter, of course, is that nearly everyone cared. The controversy over Frey's so-called memoir was no different from the confessional crises that on six occasions punctuated twentieth-century American life. In every instance, the genre of confession demonstrated an incredible capacity for transforming political activists into literary critics and making virtually everyone care about the shelf on which a text is placed. I close with the story of Frey and the competing ways his book was classified as a concrete reminder that confessional politics are present politics. The rhetorical strategy of advancing partisan aims by controlling which texts count as confessions is alive and well. If, however, we are to understand Frey and the contemporary confessional crisis for which he has so often been made to stand, it is imperative that we look first to our twentieth-century history of confessional crises.
1
CONFESSION AND SEXUALITY: TRUE STORY VERSUS ANTHONY COMSTOCK
In May 1919, the eccentric American health crusader, sexologist, and entrepreneur Bernarr Macfadden published the first issue of True Story Magazine—and thus “the modern confessions industry came into being.”1 Within years True Story had dozens of imitators; George Gerbner reports that by mid-century the confession magazine industry boasted some forty titles.2 The eventual ubiquity of the industry, however, must not occlude the fundamental importance of True Story. As the Saturday Evening Post put it, “The $10,000,000-a-year, I'm-Ruined! I'm Ruined! school of belles-lettres owes everything to Macfadden.”3 The Post is hardly alone in this estimate: Scribner's christened Macfadden “Father Confessor,” Harper's called True Story the “first of the ‘confessions,’” and the cultural historian Ann Fabian credits Macfadden's True Story with “turning the compulsion to confess into a glorious commercial enterprise.” A “commercial enterprise” it certainly was. Fabian notes that True Story transformed Macfadden from an “eccentric health advocate to [a] millionaire.”4
However, while Macfadden's wealth did not last his lifetime, his reputation as “Father Confessor to the American masses” was largely a posthumous designation.5 Although the sheer financial success of True Story ensured that it registered on the cultural landscape almost immediately, it was not initially recognized as a confession magazine. Before it was a decade old, the New Yorker, The Nation, the Atlantic Monthly, a variety of trade journals, and Hygeia, the journal of the American Medical Association, had each devoted ample space to Macfadden's True Story. Yet none of these periodicals saw anything particularly confessional about it. In 1924, for example, the Detroit Saturday Night published one of the longest, most vindictive critiques of Macfadden that would appear in the 1920s. In it, True Story was decried as a “magazine for morons,” designed for “the undeveloped, semi-literate, half-baked mentalities that can find no pabulum in real literature.”6 Despite the general thoroughness of the attack, the Detroit Saturday Night never once described True Story as a confession magazine. On the other end of the spectrum, the New Yorker used a 1925 column to praise the “God-driven pen of Bernarr Macfadden.” Although it took pains to introduce True Story's eccentric publisher, explain its unprecedented mechanism for securing manuscripts, and describe its bizarre criteria for publishing them, it, too, never once described True Story as a confession magazine—it never even used the word.7 Similarly, a year later the Atlantic Monthly suggested that although True Story was stylistically similar to the confession magazines, it nonetheless occupied its own discrete category.8 In sum, True Story was a lot of things in the 1920s: it was wildly successful and, depending on the reader, suggestive, uplifting, pornographic, “God-driven,” moralistic, yellow, enlightened, pulpy, or authentic. But it was rarely—if ever—confessional.
Despite this, nearly every invocation of True Story since the 1940s remembers its founding in confessional terms. In 1950, for example, the New Yorker published a second series of articles on Bernarr Macfadden, this time arguing that Macfadden's “climactic achievement” could be traced to May 1919—the beginnings