that censorship and suppression produced moral purity. In the Foucauldian terminology fashionable today, Macfadden accused Comstock of subscribing to the “repressive hypothesis”: the belief that power controls sexuality by repression, censorship, or obstruction.23 The drawing pictured Comstock tying blindfolds on American children only to see them stumble blindly off cliffs labeled “excess” and “secret vice.”24 In case the moral was not self-evident, Macfadden laid it bare: Comstock “seem[s] to think that by simply hiding, by merely refraining from discussing the important subject of sex, that [parents] eliminate all thoughts on the subject from the minds of their offspring.” Otherwise put, Comstock “cries out emphatically against knowledge and in favor of ignorance.”25
Although Macfadden was obviously without the insight of Foucault (he was, for that matter, without the insight of any intellectual thought), he responded in a Foucauldian manner. He argued that in order for power to better control sexuality (a goal he shared with Comstock), it must work with knowledge rather than against it. From Macfadden's perspective, Comstock was simply naïve: no matter how severe the censorship, ignorance was not an option. Either American youth would be taught sexual morals by their parents or they would be taught by “evil companions”: “Take your choice, Mr. Comstock. There is no dividing line.” Thus, for the sake of the country, and with a rationale that would later become a monotonous refrain in the pages of True Story, Macfadden argued that moral virtue required an open, frank discussion of the human body, its vulnerabilities, and its capacities: “If you want your boy or girl to have pure thoughts in reference to themselves and their bodily functions, teach them the truth, in all its details. Teach them the wonders of the sex principle. Teach them the objects and the divinity of sex. Let them learn that fatherhood and motherhood exist solely because of sex. That the world owes everything to sex.”26 Thus did “power and knowledge directly imply one another.”27 The knowledge of the body was an essential ingredient in the power that Macfadden hoped would control the body.
In a pithy phrase that nicely captures the theory underwriting Macfadden's moralism, Clifford Waugh explains that, for Macfadden, “nakedness stood for truth undefiled.” To portray the human body, omitting none of its details, was to speak the truth. Because prudery/Comstockery relied on the blindfold, Macfadden made “prudery … public enemy number one among the curses to be annihilated by Physical Culture.”28 Waugh explains the logic: “The only answer was education, which, in [Macfadden's] mind, automatically necessitated the total elimination of prudery. To control, if not to eliminate venereal disease, the public needed knowledge, and Macfadden was determined to meet that challenge. From the lecture platform, in his books, and through editorials and articles, the Father of Physical Culture spoke out against venereal disease and prostitution. Insisting that knowledge was power, he attempted to ‘lift the veil’ which he believed was ‘shrouding subjects of the utmost importance to humanity.’”29 And this, Macfadden explained, was why the exhibition and its posters required scantily clad participants: for how could the excellencies of the human body be demonstrated “if the exhibitors are dressed with clothing.”30
The First Confession
In the fall of 1906, Macfadden took a decisive step. Working on the assumption that “realism was necessary in order to awaken the public,” he decided to use a “confession” as a technique in his moralistic crusade against Comstockery.31 At Macfadden's urging, Physical Culture editor (and future True Story editor) John R. Coryell wrote a six-installment serial titled “Growing to Manhood in Civilized (?) Society: The Personal Confessions of the Victim.”32 The serial was little more than Macfadden's anti-Comstock editorials translated into the confessional form. It told the story of the adolescent son of wealthy, syphilitic parents who “neglected to tell him the facts of life.”33 Kept in ignorance by his “parents and teachers,” the unnamed protagonist confessed that he learned of sex “not by the parent or responsible teacher, but by a class of purveyors whose work is all done in darkness and secrecy.” Relying on the subjugated knowledge of the stable, the boy learned “lewd words” and “obscene stories” by the end of the first installment.34 The remaining five installments then charted the boy's moral degeneration: stolen caresses, drunkenness, sexual liaisons, pornography, venereal diseases, prostitution, and extortion—all told in the first person.
All of this was expressly calculated to dramatize the social consequences of Comstockery. Indeed, the most interesting aspect of the story is that, at regular intervals spread throughout the story, the author breaks from the narrative and interjects a meta-level commentary on it. It is as if Macfadden had learned from his experience with Comstock and the posters that portions of the reading public, unless they are properly coached, will see “nakedness” as obscenity rather than as “truth undefiled.” This time around, Macfadden was taking no chances. Although “Growing to Manhood” was only slightly more suggestive than the Physical Culture Exhibition—there were descriptions of caresses and allusions to much more—Macfadden surrounded these descriptions and allusions with a running commentary that sought to restrict their range of meaning. “I cannot say enough to make it clear that under the system of suppression of truth about the facts of sex life, all boys become little ravening sex-wolves; little beasts.” The descriptions and allusions, in other words, were designed to demonstrate the futility of a system that would ensure morality via censorship: “Plain speech is sometimes necessary.” Indeed, had sex been discussed in a “frank, open manner,” the morality of the confessant might have been preserved:35 “But for the foul stream into which I had been thrown at the behest of immemorial custom, my soul might have been as white as hers [a girl on the verge of yielding to his temptations].”36
If it was too late to rescue the protagonist of “Growing to Manhood,” the protagonist insisted that is was not too late to save others. Indeed, the telling of the story was motivated by the sense that the protagonist was just one of the numberless victims of a repressive society: “I am but the mouthpiece of thousands upon thousands of the victims of your wicked, wicked system of life.” Against this wicked system of life, premised as it was on censorship and hypocrisy, stood the confession, premised on frank disclosure: “I am daring to tear the veil from the hypocrisy of our lives. I am daring to say that we are growing up a race of erotomaniacs. We think of nothing but sex, we talk of nothing but sex.”37 Although Comstock was not mentioned by name, it is not difficult to read the story—both in its form and in its content—as an attack on the “Great Mogul of American Morals.” In language that explicitly recalls Macfadden's editorials against Comstock, the protagonist concluded that his self-described debauched existence “was the natural product of the scheme of life which is based upon pretence, upon systematic hypocrisy and upon that prurient prudery which converts the beautiful, natural sex attraction into a nervous disorder.”38
“Growing to Manhood” quickly landed Macfadden a $2,000 fine and two years of “hard labor.” After an unknown person directed the attention of the post office inspector to the confession, the federal grand jury of New Jersey found the story “obscene, lewd, and lascivious” and convicted Macfadden of “sending improper literature through the mails.”39 Countering that “Growing to Manhood” contained a “most valuable moral lesson,” Macfadden protested vigorously.40 Beyond the legal appeals (which he filed), and beyond the efforts of the Free Speech League (which carried his cause all the way to the Supreme Court), Macfadden took his case to the American public, declaring his innocence in Physical Culture editorials and public lectures across the eastern United States. Supportive crowds turned out en masse in Baltimore, Boston, Cincinnati, and Washington. For the most part, these crowds could hardly have been surprised by what they heard. Macfadden rehearsed his well-worn arguments about the subjectivity of obscenity, the moral imperative of frank speech, and the virtue of his own prose.
However, Macfadden's defense of “Growing to Manhood” included one very new argument. He defended not only the content of the confession and the purpose behind it, but also the form itself. Although the day was still a long ways off when he would consistently deploy the confession as a technique in cultural politics, he was already convinced that true stories were a powerful weapon in sexual politics. As he wrote in Physical Culture,