Despite being free, Reich’s name was still kept on what was referred to by the Enemy Alien Control Unit as the “key figures list.” He was reclassified by Internal Security as Group B: “Individuals believed to be somewhat less dangerous but whose activities should be restricted.” He was therefore still kept under surveillance. Reich got wind of these subsequent investigations after he discovered that two “policemen” had been making inquiries about him with his neighbors, which seemed to justify his sense of persecution. He was removed from the key figures list in July 1943, when the attorney general declared the danger classifications unconstitutional, by which time half of the ten thousand internees had been released.
Reich was sure that it was his ex-wife and Dr. Lawrence Kubie, then secretary of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, who had informed on him to the FBI, representing him as an active Communist and potential spy; this allegation was based on something Lore Reich had said to him several months before his arrest: “Watch out, Willie,” she warned him. “Annie has been discussing something negative about you with Dr. Kubie.”97 However, no doubt Lore was referring to the unpleasant rumors, mainly concerning Reich’s mental health, that were circulating in the psychoanalytic community, of which he himself was all too aware.
It turned out that Reich had been the victim of an extraordinary mix-up. There was a William Robert Reich living in Newark, New Jersey, who operated a small bookstore that was used as a distribution center for Communist propaganda. William (Bill) Reich, born the same year as Wilhelm, was also state literature director of the Communist Party of New Jersey and taught political economy on Friday evenings at the Workers’ School at 35 East Twelfth Street in Manhattan, only a few blocks from the New School at 66 West Twelfth Street.
In 1950, during the HUAC investigation titled “The American Aspects of [the] Assassination of Leon Trotsky,” it was revealed that Bill Reich had worked as a Stalinist plant, recruited by agents of the Soviet secret police to infiltrate Trotsky’s American supporters. In March 1936, when Trotsky was still in Norway, Bill Reich had written an article in the Western Worker under the headline “Johnson, Hallett, Reich Repudiate Trotsky”; he was recruited the following year by Louis Francis Budenz, managing editor of the Daily Worker and a colleague at the Workers’ School. Budenz was head of the Buben group of spies, as it was known by Soviet intelligence, until he left the party in 1945 and became an FBI informant, a publisher of anti-Communist exposés, and a HUAC star witness.
It was Budenz who outed Bill Reich to HUAC as one of the most “prominent…concealed Stalinists acting as Trotskyites.”98 He also revealed that another of the Soviet secret police’s plants among Trotsky’s American supporters, Ruby Weil, introduced Ramón Mercader to Trotsky’s secretary, Sylvia Ageloff. They began a whirlwind affair, which gained Mercader access to Trotsky’s heavily fortified Mexico City compound, where he penetrated Trotsky’s skull with an ice pick. What role Bill Reich played in the plotting that lead to Trotsky’s assassination, if any, is unknown. In 1960 Reich found himself before HUAC and, presented with solid proof of his Communist affiliations, chose to take the Fifth Amendment on almost every question. (Even though members of the Communist Party were still being brought to trial in the sixties under the Smith Act, in 1963 the U.S. attorney declined prosecution in Bill Reich’s case.)
Soon after Wilhelm Reich was released, William “Bill” Reich left the East Coast to take up a teaching post in San Diego, where the FBI began keeping tabs on him. On November 2, 1943, acknowledging the error in the classified files, J. Edgar Hoover declared Wilhelm Reich’s case formally closed.
Seven
The sociologist and writer Paul Goodman was dismissed from his teaching post at the University of Chicago in 1940 for his open bisexuality and multiple affairs with students. He returned to his birthplace, New York City, where he soon became one of Greenwich Village’s best-known bohemian personalities. He was an anarchist and self-proclaimed enfant terrible with, the literary critic Alfred Kazin wrote, “a deep apostolic sense of himself.”1 In his memoir, New York Jew, Kazin confessed to having envied the “scandalous” Goodman of the early 1940s:
He was open about his pickups, his hopes and disasters, his love of boys; I was awed by his hungry searching and the unashamed naïve egomania with which he celebrated his desires. He seemed to press his self-declared difference as a writer and his boldness as a lover into everything he said and wrote. He was as assertive as Robespierre, Napoleon, Trotsky. Anything I picked up of his always seemed to me as roughly written as a leaflet.2
Goodman, who would become famous in 1960 for his bestselling study of adolescent delinquency, Growing Up Absurd, was a prolific writer who by the age of thirty-five already had a dozen books under his belt. He had published two volumes of his Empire City trilogy—which he described as “An Almanac of Alienation”—as well as books of literary criticism, community planning, and psychoanalysis, and he was working on Parents’ Day (1947), a fictional account of his firing in 1944 from the progressive Manumit School in upstate New York. His sexual libertarianism and insistence on his right to pursue relationships with students had, once again, gotten him into trouble.
In the late summer of 1945, Goodman received a phone call from Wilhelm Reich, who asked him to come and visit him in Forest Hills. “I was pleased and puzzled,” Goodman later wrote, “and fondly hoped that this remarkable man would put me to some activity.”3 He had just published an article about Reich in Dwight Macdonald’s influential anarchist-pacifist magazine, Politics. “The Political Meaning of Some Recent Revisions of Freud,” published in July 1945, a month before the atomic bomb was dropped, would introduce Reich to a new and deeply receptive audience: America’s avant-garde.
In the ideological confusion of the postwar period, before the entrenched politics of the cold war took root, Reich’s ideas swiftly became popular among the American intelligentsia. Goodman became one of Reich’s most vocal torchbearers and Reich was upheld by a younger generation as the leader of a new sexual movement. His ideas reached larger audiences than he could ever have imagined in Europe. Elsworth Baker, one of Reich’s most prominent American disciples, acknowledged, “Orgonomy in America first became popular in Greenwich Village among the Bohemians and beatniks, where it was hailed as a free sex philosophy and the accumulator as a device that would build up potency. It was perceived to a great extent as a place in which to masturbate.”4
In his Politics essay, Goodman favorably contrasted Reich’s ideas with those of the then-successful neo-Freudian analysts, Karen Horney and her former lover Erich Fromm, who had published a bestselling book, Escape from Freedom (1941), in which he had liberally borrowed from Reich in order to explain why people sought refuge from their own responsibilities in authority figures. (Fromm told Fenichel that he hadn’t acknowledged his debt to Reich in the book because he was sick of Reich’s megalomania, “pathological self-love and arrogance.”)5 Goodman maintained that neither analyst was as politically progressive as he thought he was.
Despite Horney and Fromm’s superficial use of the rhetoric of freedom, Goodman wrote, all that their therapeutic innovations promised was the reintegration of sick and neurotic patients into the status quo. “What a fantastic proposal,” Goodman wrote in mockery of this goal, “when a society creates emotional tensions, to reorientate not the society but the people!” Essentially the revisionists proposed “the continued and more efficient working, without nervous breakdowns, of the modern industrial system, war and peace.”6
In contrast to the subtle conformism of the neo-Freudians, Goodman argued, Reich looked beyond the humble parameters of one-on-one treatment to propose a different world to set against the one that was currently consumed by war. Deeply disenchanted with communism, Reich now called for the “abolishment of politics” and referred to the sexual utopia of his imagination as a “work democracy.” Where politicians and bureaucrats had once again led the world to the brink of apocalypse, Reich proposed a new self-organiz
ing structure in which politics would take place at a grassroots level. Reich, who had turned away from communism, now had a new slogan with which he prefaced all his books: “Love, work and knowledge are the wellsprings of life. They should also govern it.”
Goodman celebrated Reich as the author of the manifesto of a much-needed “psychology of the revolution.” Reich promised, Goodman enthused, to restore a repressed populace “to sexual health and animal spirits” with apocalyptic orgasms, a condition of sexual bliss in which they would no longer be able to “tolerate the mechanical and routine jobs they have been working at, but turn (at whatever general inconvenience) to work that is spontaneous and directly meaningful.”7 Goodman was inspired by Reich’s vision of what he interpreted as eroticized anarchy. “Unrepressed people,” Goodman promised, “will provide for themselves a society that is peaceable and orderly enough.”8
Goodman rang the doorbell of Reich’s Forest Hills home with fantasies that Reich would thank him for his propagandist efforts or employ him on some intellectual collaboration. What Reich really wanted was to demand that Goodman stop linking his name with “anarchists or libertarians.” Reich was, it seems, a reluctant figurehead, wary of nihilistic interpretations of his work.
When he read Goodman’s essay, Reich noted in his diary that Goodman had carried out a “dangerous derailment” of his thinking. Goodman promoted Reich as the architect of the “psychology of the revolution” but then argued that after the big push, the “psychology of the post-revolution” should be essentially Freudian. Reich provided the directions, Goodman implied in a parenthesis, but his map of the future was “excessively simple and Rousseauian,” and Freud was a better guide to its actual terrain. Reich, of course, thought that he had gone beyond Freud with his scheme of orgasmic liberation and he suspected Goodman of a loss of nerve in failing to fully imagine the future as he did. “Since there are millions of Goodmans,” Reich wrote, “every revolutionary movement fails.”
Goodman was stunned by Reich’s reaction, and replied, “Really, Dr. Reich, what is it to you if we younger folk call you an anarchist or not?” A. S. Neill had often warned Reich against allowing himself to be held up as an anarchist mascot: when the Freedom Press wanted to publish Reich in Britain, Neill warned, “If they publish you then your public will be limited and the big public will be suspicious…Some anarchists are claiming you already, so be careful.”9 This advice, which proved prescient, was obviously on Reich’s mind when he summoned Goodman because he explained that if Goodman persisted in portraying his sexual philosophy as anarchist, then A. S. Neill would find it hard to keep his middle-class pupils in Summerhill, an argument that failed to convince Goodman: “My guess was that the doctor was suffering from the understandable paranoia of the refugee from Hitler,” he wrote later.10
An unsent letter by Reich to Goodman, written after that visit, does indeed record Reich’s besieged thinking: “Restriction of this work to a definite political group by way of a label is only apt to impede its general influence on the social process,” Reich lectured his admirer. “As I once tried to formulate it, I am neither left nor right, but forward.” He added, by way of justification, “I am fighting a human disease, called emotional pestilence by me, which has ravaged human society for more than four thousand years…I have been standing ‘on the firing line’ for about twenty years.”11
By 1946, Reich had self-published translations by Theodore Wolfe of three of his books—The Function of the Orgasm (1942), Character Analysis, and The Sexual Revolution (both 1945)—all of which had been extensively revised to include the story of his discovery of orgone energy and to reflect his new politics. (In the new editions Reich also substituted “progressive” for “Communist” and “social responsibility” for “class consciousness.”) By 1947 the Orgone Institute Press was selling four to five hundred books a week, allowing Reich to boast that “‘everyone’ in New York is talking about my work” and that his writings were selling “like warm bread.”12 His work appealed to intellectuals and bohemians on both coasts. In his biography of Saul Bellow, James Atlas wrote, “Reich’s Function of the Orgasm was as widely read in progressive circles as Trotsky’s Art and Revolution had been a decade before.”13
After the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Moscow trials, Reich’s updated theory of sexual repression seemed to offer the disenchanted left a convincing explanation both for large numbers of people having submitted to fascism and for communism’s failure to be a viable alternative to it. Reich presented guilty-feeling ex-Stalinists and Trotskyites with an alternative program of sexual freedom with which to combat those totalitarian threats. In creating a morality out of pleasure, Reich allowed postwar radicals—many of them GIs returning from a Europe perceived as sexually loose (fifty million condoms had been sent overseas with the military; eight per man a month)—to view their promiscuity as political activism. Reich made them feel part of the sexual elite, superior to the “frozen,” gray, corporate consensus. He showed them how they might lead more authentic, unfettered lives against the grain of an increasingly affluent society.
The sociologist Philip Rieff noted in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1961) that Reich flattered creative types, whom he described as closest to his “genital character.” He offered bohemians and intellectuals who had lost faith in Marxism, but who didn’t want to resign themselves to Freudian pessimism, a language of opposition: “The artists and writers who followed Reich,” Rieff observed, “were, like him, defeated men of the left; for the defeated who, nevertheless, retained their pride of alienation, Reich’s brave announcements of an end of politics turned failure itself into a kind of victory.”14 For Reich, artists were revolutionaries by virtue of their chosen career: “All that…is genuinely revolutionary, all genuine art,” Reich wrote in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, “stems from the natural biological nucleus”—and many followed him in believing that they were forging a new world with their anarchic orgasms.15
Dwight Macdonald, the editor of Politics, had warned of home-grown totalitarianism in his book Fascism and the American Scene, published the year before Reich emigrated to America, and he was struck by Reich’s connection of sexual and social repression. In response he tried to be as sexually liberated as possible, embarking on an open marriage and numerous affairs for apparently ideological reasons. The nude cocktail parties and orgies in the dunes that Macdonald presided over at his Cape Cod retreat—attended by Goodman, Fritz Perls, Norman Mailer, and others—were, as he saw it, a form of politics. There was a responsibility in hedonism. As Michael Wreszin put it in his 1994 biography of Macdonald, “In the gloom of the cold war years, intellectuals whose historicism had been shaken faced the choice of either accommodating themselves to a prosperous anti-Communist society or taking a stand directly on what Mailer, citing Reich, called ‘the rebellious imperatives of the self.’”16
In celebrating the anarchy of the orgasm, in trying to explode their sense of alienation with pleasure, the left were able to justify their retreat from traditional politics. Macdonald’s antiestablishment set were, he later admitted, “ever hopeful, ever disillusioned.”17 After they lost faith in communism, Reich was their next enthusiasm. The orgone box’s empty chamber reflected the political vacuum in which members of the radical left then found themselves.
“We were looking to break out,” Mailer explained when I asked him why Reich was such an influence on his generation of postwar intellectuals. “We were living in an ideological box and a great many ideas appealed to us. Anything that would enable us to break out, to break loose, and find some better way to live. Naturally those ideas appealed only to people who lived in the Village, but we were a pretty free generation in the sense that we were ready to try pretty much anything—all kinds of sex, drugs, just about anything. Orgies were a big notion for us at the time: maybe that freedom was to be found in the orgy. There were very few orgies compared to how much talk there was about it, but still.”18
Mailer was impressed with Reich
the theorist but dismissed his clunky prose: in The List (1959) Mailer placed “Wilhelm Reich as a mind” under “Hip,” whereas “Wilhelm Reich as a stylist” was under “Square.”19 “It gave a certain charm,” Mailer said, “that he had such outrageous and hip things to say in that very formal, almost ugly, teutonic style.” Goodman was no better a stylist. George Orwell, in his essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946), selected a passage from Goodman’s article on Reich to illustrate bad, jargon-ridden, and convoluted writing. But Orwell, despite his criticism of Goodman’s use of the medium, was evidently also fascinated by the message.
In 1984 (1949) Orwell made the Reichian link between sexual deprivation and totalitarianism, taking those ideas into the mainstream. In the novel, a spokesman for the oppressive New Order states, “The sex instinct will be eradicated…We shall abolish the orgasm.” Julia, the free-spirited heroine of 1984, explains why the authorities impose what they call antisexualism: “When you make love you’re using up energy. And afterward you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and Three Year Plans and all the rest of that bollocks?”20
Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America Page 29