Publishing magnate Bernarr Adolphus Macfadden (1868-1955) built an empire on working-class mass-circulation confessional magazines and a multiplicity of other publishing ventures. In addition to the wildly popular True Story Magazine and True Romances, he published Physical Culture Magazine and the five-volume Encyclopedia of Physical Culture, which featured his ideas about "physcultopathy," or healing through physical culture. As a boy, Macfadden had himself been tubercular.
The Coolidge-Consumerism collection contains the first two issues of one of Macfadden's rarer publications, Your Car: A Magazine of Romance, Fact and Fiction, whose tone manages to be both idealistic and lurid. Your Car offers sensationalized romantic stories that capitalize on automobile fantasies, as well as articles, pictorials, some of them linking Hollywood movie stars and cars, and advertisements. As is usual with Macfadden publications, the fiction is illustrated with photographs rather than drawings, as though to suggest that these are "true stories," rather than make-believe. Published monthly for just six months, from May 1925 to October 1925, the readership targeted was somewhat above a working-class audience -- possibly a reason that the magazine did not succeed.
While it may be easy to dismiss Macfadden for his sensationalism, this notable eccentric was in the vanguard of many of the trends that held sway during the twenties. Some of them command attention today. A body-builder with a philosophy, Macfadden can be thought of, in modern terms, as a cross between Jack La Lane and Dr. Ruth. He pioneered not only the physical culture, or physical fitness, movement of his time, but the abolition of prudery, the creed of healthy sexuality in the context of love and marriage, getting back to nature, a health-conscious diet, fasting, and health foods. Macfadden's Exercising for Health (1929) features photographs of exercises that closely resemble yoga postures.
Macfadden hired premier public relations counsel Edward L. Bernays (DIRECTORY NOTE Edward L. Bernays Papers), who wrote tellingly about his unusual client in Bernays Typescript on Publicizing the Physical Culture Industry, 1927. (INTRO NOTE Advertising)