Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America
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On September 1, German tanks rolled into Poland and World War II began. “Because of the enormous distance,” Reich wrote to Lindenberg, “the war in Europe appears to us like an unreal dream. I still feel that I am part of Europe, although I am already beginning to take root in American soil.”8 Needless to say, however, this transition wasn’t without its difficulties, and Reich felt the emotional anxiety and strain experienced by many émigrés as he mourned the old world and sought yet another beginning. Reich’s teaching at the New School wasn’t to begin until the next semester, and in the meantime he suffered what he described as an “enormous depression.”
Devastated by the political situation in Europe, Reich visited his children for the first time in four years. They had moved to New York with Annie and Arnold Rubenstein the previous year. Reich found Eva and Lore “reserved” and “uneasy” around him, “‘well brought up,’ restrained, and superficially cheerful”; their mother would not let them visit him, and he felt, he wrote, “spiritually and intellectually alone.”9
Reich became increasingly reclusive in Forest Hills. His diary portrays his first few weeks there as a period of “gigantic metamorphosis”; it was a time of creative brooding similar to his weeks of isolation at the alpine sanatorium in Davos.10 Reich’s moods swung between feelings of “worry, doubt, hesitation…sleepless nights…worthlessness” and moments of elation in which he seemed absolutely sure of his genius and heroic destiny: “Oh yes, I will have many pupils,” he wrote to Lindenberg. “I will be honored, loved; after years of hard work I will have rebuilt a group around me that will fight for what is naturally right.”11
Reich’s home was entirely given over to his science. The ground floor became a laboratory, cluttered with microscopes, electroscopes, and other scientific instruments; his office on the first floor doubled as the dining room and living room; and the spare room was used for therapy. The house had a large basement, a former playroom where Reich installed benches to seat thirty people, anticipating a new following. It was there that he reassembled his Faraday cage. The mesh box stood at center stage, the only prop in an empty subterranean theater.
Freud thought Americans to be tremendous prudes when he made his only visit to the land of the dollar barbarians, as he called it, in 1909; he wrote to Jung that they had “no time for libido” and in a letter to Jones he complained of America’s virtuousness, lamenting “the strictness of American chastity.”12 However, by the time Reich arrived in Freud’s “anti-paradise” exactly thirty years later, Alfred Kinsey, a forty-four-year old professor of zoology at Indiana University, had already started collecting interviews for his monumental study of American sexuality, which would document in enormous and controversial detail a country with licentiousness seething below its prim façade.
In June 1938, Kinsey, an expert on gall wasps (he collected over a million specimens), began teaching what was quaintly referred to in the university curriculum as the “marriage course.” Raised a strict Methodist, with a bullying puritanical father, Kinsey had once suffered the naïveté he now saw in his pupils. He told friends that his own lack of sex education had left him scarred and guilt-ridden, and he made it his mission to correct this in future generations. “In an uninhibited society”—Kinsey began the marriage class with a reference to the Trobriand Islanders—“a twelve-year-old would know most of the biology which I will have to give you in formal lectures.”13 Kinsey offered direct, graphically illustrated descriptions of sex; his course was nicknamed “the copulating class.”
Kinsey married the first girl he ever dated, Clara McMillen, a chemistry student he met at a zoology department picnic soon after he arrived in Bloomington (he nicknamed her Mac; he was called Prok, short for Professor Kinsey). Both were virgins when they wed, and they would have four children together. Kinsey, his biographer James Jones has written, “thought that the best way to produce well-adjusted adults was to rear children who did not feel guilty about their sexuality.”14 Nudism, Kinsey wrote in a letter to a friend in 1934, enclosing two books on the nudist movement, has “been a healthy part of our children’s education.”15 Future parents who took the marriage course were advised not to try to prevent their children’s attempts at bodily exploration and were encouraged to include open talk about sexuality in front of their children “as part of the average dinner table conversation, as part of the average discussion of an average day.”16
While researching material for the marriage course, Kinsey was surprised by the dearth of scientific literature available on sex—most of it, he said, was “morals masquerading under the name of science.” He wanted to fill that void by collecting people’s sexual histories, in order to build up a better portrait of the nation’s sexual practices. In The Modernization of Sex, the historian Paul Robinson describes Kinsey’s interview technique as “his most brilliant creation, an authentic tour de force in which every scrap of sexual information available to memory was wrenched from the subject in less than two hours.”17 Kinsey asked 350 to 521 questions (it took him twenty minutes to get to the first explicitly sexual question), and by using a unique secret code he estimated that he was able to concentrate what would have taken twenty to twenty-five pages of narrative onto a one-page grid. It was, his colleague Paul Gebhard commented, an amazingly “compact, efficient (and, to a neophyte, diabolic) system.”18
Kinsey quite deliberately made no moral evaluations of his subjects and guaranteed them complete confidentiality; he avoided euphemism, maintained eye contact, and rattled off his questions, employing subtle cross-checks to evaluate the reliability of his data. “We always assume that everyone has engaged in every type of activity,” Kinsey wrote of his technique, which placed the burden of denial squarely on the subject. “Consequently we always begin by asking when they engaged in such activity.”19 The psychologist Frank Beach, who submitted to Kinsey’s questioning, reported, “It wasn’t ‘Have you ever?,’ it was ‘When did you last make love to a pig?’ You said ‘Never!’ OK—but he had you hooked if you were a pig lover” (Kinsey found that 17 percent of rural farmhands had engaged in bestiality).20
Kinsey, like Reich, wanted to change society, which he sought to do by presenting empirical proof that mores were out of sync with reality. The two men evidently never met, but they certainly corresponded: in 1943, only a couple of months after the English edition of The Function of the Orgasm was published, Kinsey wrote to Reich to request a copy (he also took out a subscription to Reich’s newly founded Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone Research), including one of his own articles on homosexuality in scholarly exchange. As the copious marginalia in his copy of the book confirm, Kinsey shared Reich’s celebration of the orgasm and his belief in the evils of sexual repression. In many ways they spoke the same language: Kinsey catalogued different kinds of orgasms with Reichian enthusiasm (he counted only experiences that led to orgasm in his statistical scheme), was against abstinence, maintained that masturbation was both healthy and necessary for alleviating nervous tension, and believed that there were “social values to be obtained by premarital experience in intercourse.”21 For Kinsey, as for Reich, sex held within it a utopian possibility, and he followed Reich in thinking that a Victorian morality present in twentieth-century America conspired to stifle it.
By the summer of 1939 Kinsey had grilled 350 people about their private practices, the majority of them university students. He began supplementing these repetitive “baby histories,” as he dismissed them, by making trips to Chicago, some two hundred miles away, in search of people to interview. Kinsey brought the collecting mania that characterized his gall wasp research to his first field trips there: he took five to seven histories a day, many of them from members of the city’s gay subculture—several of his interviewees, he wrote excitedly to a former graduate student, had enjoyed as many as two thousand to three thousand partners each. “[I’ve] been to Halloween parties, taverns, clubs, etc. which would have been unbelievable if realized by the rest of the world,” he wrote.22 By t
he end of 1940 he had collected 1,692 sex histories at a personal cost of $1,000, which was over a fifth of his salary.
The marriage class, though popular with students, disturbed many of Kinsey’s colleagues. Thurman Rice, a member of the medical school who had previously been responsible for sex education, lobbied against the course and complained about the pornographic nature of the illustrations that accompanied Kinsey’s lectures, confessing that one of the slides “was even stimulating to me.”23 In 1941 the Ministerial Association, a church organization, petitioned Herman Wells, the president of the university, to put a stop to the course. Wells forced Kinsey to choose between teaching it and collecting sexual histories. Three years after he began the marriage course, Kinsey decided to abandon two decades of work on gall wasps—to which he often dreamed of returning, but never did—and to give over his taxonomic expertise wholly to the field of sex research.
Thanks to a research grant that came through later that year from the Rockefeller Foundation, Kinsey was able to set up the Institute for Sex Research and hire young colleagues to help him amass many more sex histories. Kinsey and his new colleagues—the statistician Clyde Martin, the psychologist Wardell Pomeroy, and the anthropologist Paul Gebhard—set themselves the ambitious task of eliciting one hundred thousand sexual histories (the longest of which took seventeen hours to extract). Between 1938 and 1956 they managed only eighteen thousand—eight thousand were obtained by Kinsey himself.
Kinsey’s team crisscrossed America with their boss like a team of traveling salesmen. Kinsey said that his researchers must have “the qualities of Fuller brush men”—in effect, their product was the sexual revolution. As they traveled they conducted interviews on planes, on trains, in cars, in library stacks, in diners, in bars, and in hotels, mapping the country in a new way. They recorded the nation’s sex life in their secret code, the key to which took them six months to learn. It had never been written down; when they flew, they did so separately, so there would always be a survivor who knew the code. This code could even distinguish tonal inflection—YES, Yes, and Y-e-e-e-s. They communicated in a private language, for example: “My last history liked Z better than Cm, although Go in Cx madder him very er,” Pomeroy said to Kinsey in a crowded elevator, which translated as “My last history liked intercourse with animals better than with his wife, but mouth-genital contact with an extramarital partner was very arousing.”24
Gebhard compared the team to astronauts, pioneers who were sealed off from the world they studied: “We were kept so busy that, if you combined our home lives with the Institute, we didn’t have much time left over for any other kind of socialization. For example, our interviewing trips would be two weeks long and we’d come home for two weeks, and during that period you’d have to teach. So it was a very confined life.” (Someone joked that Mrs. Kinsey complained that she didn’t see much of her husband anymore ever since he took up sex.) Vincent Nowlis, who did a brief stint of interviewing, described the endless car journeys and motel existence as like being in a submarine: “We were in a very isolated, self-contained world, sliding through dangerous waters on a difficult mission, desperate for time, moving in a self-contained world with a commander directing every movement, and the crew utterly dependent on him and on each other because the craft was so vulnerable. No one could afford to make a mistake.”25
The Rockefeller Foundation would remain Kinsey’s principal backer until 1954, when it ceased funding sex research, by which time Kinsey had been granted hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many critics have seen in the Rockefeller support of Kinsey’s sex research an attempt by the ruling classes to manipulate human behavior by trying to find the means by which sex could be controlled. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the neurasthenic son of the richest man in America, became interested in the study of sex when he was invited to head a 1910 New York City grand jury impaneled to investigate the city’s prostitution rings. Rockefeller, whose only independent achievement to date had been to lead a Bible group in the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, was inspired by his jury experience to throw himself into public service; he went on to use his huge fortune to support the campaign to wipe out this “social evil.”
In 1909, the year of Freud’s visit, panic about the “white slave trade” had swept across America. Sensationalist books on the subject such as The Great War on White Slavery and The Cruel and Inhuman Treatment of White Slaves were bestsellers, taking readers on titillating armchair tours of the nation’s vice districts. Prostitution was a dominant issue in national politics; Theodore Roosevelt called for “the most relentless war on commercialized vice,” by which he meant organized prostitution, and in 1910 Congress passed the Mann Act, which made it illegal to transport a woman across state lines for “immoral” purposes. The Immigration Act passed that same year gave police the power to arrest any foreign-born women found at dance halls and other places that were “frequented by prostitutes.”26
Rockefeller joined forces with progessive reformers and in 1911 founded the Bureau of Social Hygiene, a charitable organization devoted to the “study, amelioration, and prevention of those social conditions, crimes, and diseases which adversely affect the well-being of society, with special reference to prostitution and the evils associated therewith.” This allowed him to feel, as his father’s biographer Ron Chernow put it, “politically liberal and modern while clinging to an old-fashioned aversion to gambling, prostitution, alcohol, and other vices traditionally shunned by Baptists.”27 The educational arm of his organization distributed millions of free pamphlets with titles such as Social Hygiene vs. the Sexual Plagues (1913). This last, which warned of the dangers of prostitution and venereal disease, was full of misinformation and judgment. It recommended that male infants be circumcised as a precaution against syphilis and warned that “excessive intercourse is silly, vulgar, brutal, and destructive.”28
One of the bureau’s first projects was to fund the Laboratory of Social Hygiene, an annex to a women’s prison run by the pioneering sociologist Katharine Bement Davis, whom Rockefeller thought was the cleverest woman he’d ever met (Davis would go on to become the first woman to hold a cabinet post in the state of New York, and in 1915 was voted one of the three most famous women in America). Three-quarters of the inmates at Davis’s overcrowded reformatory in Bedford Hills, New York, were prostitutes who had been arrested in New York and incarcerated for sex offenses, a prison population that had swelled as a result of the draconian measures made in an attempt to suppress the trade. The prison was designed to be a kind of university that would rehabilitate prostitutes, yet it made stringent proposals for those it deemed impossible to save.
Davis’s laboratory conducted “a scientific study of the types of women psychologically and physiologically who enter upon the life of vice and crime.”29 The aim was to weed out the “moral imbeciles”—girls of “bad heredity” who simply could not “distinguish between right and wrong”—from those who might be reclaimed by society. Davis estimated that 20 percent of her charges exhibited “degenerate strains,” with family histories of alcoholism, venereal disease, epilepsy, insanity, and tuberculosis. Davis’s prisoners underwent three months of physical, mental, and sociological tests. They were kept in solitary confinement while they were subjected to Binet (intelligence) and Wassermann (syphilis) tests, humiliating medical examinations and an intrusive grilling about their sex lives. Fieldworkers would even visit their families to further determine their “social and moral condition.”
The laboratory not only aimed to gain a more comprehensive knowledge of the social conditions that led women to prostitution but also promised to function as a kind of eugenics board. Davis didn’t just think that the “feeble-minded” should be segregated from other prisoners because they might distract from the process of reform. She thought that they should be placed in permanent custodial care, at least during their childbearing years, to prevent them from bringing “into the world children who, if there is anything in heredity, have only to look forward
to a life of hopeless misery.”30
Rockefeller, like Davis, Kinsey, and many other reformers at the time, was a firm believer in eugenics. The family’s interest in eugenics and sex research overlapped in the Rockefellers’ concern with good breeding, reproducing their own class, and the campaign against prostitution and venereal disease. Rockefeller inherited his belief in eugenics from his father, who preached the survival of the fittest in business and rationalized his own meteoric rise as the result of superior biology. Rockefeller senior funded Charles B. Davenport’s Eugenics Record Office, which opened in October 1910 in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island (in 1920, benefiting from funds from another tycoon, the Eugenics Record Office became the Carnegie Institution Department of Genetics). Rocke feller senior paid the salaries of six researchers there to compile a huge number of family genealogies.
Davenport’s team visited prisons and mental asylums, as well as the homes of the relatives of these inmates, in the hope of identifying the so-called submerged tenth, the 10 percent of the population that was thought to be dragging down the national gene pool. (Rockefeller senior attempted to redress this trend by having five children; his son had six.) The family trees Davenport collected were annotated with various social and physical characteristics written in a special code (“sx” stood for sexual pervert, “im” for immoral), much as Kinsey’s later compilations of American sex life would be. By the time of his retirement in 1935, Davenport had completed eugenic assessments of thirty-five thousand names.