Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America

by Turner, Christopher

  After much campaigning, the Consumers Union became the only organization to be taken off HUAC’s list of subversive organizations in 1954, but though no connection to the Communist Party was ever proved, Mildred and Robert Brady were still under suspicion. That same year, Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the A-bomb,” who was recruited to the Consumers Union by the Bradys, was questioned by the FBI about his relationship with the couple. The Bradys were close friends with Alger Hiss and Haakon Chevalier, the man Oppenheimer claimed had tried to recruit him as a Soviet agent in 1942.

  In 1949, Dwight Macdonald told Reich’s student Myron Sharaf that Robert Brady “was definitely a Communist,” a fact that was duly reported to Reich.40 Macdonald, who renounced his own Trotskyism in 1942, also said that Fredric Wertham, Reich’s other critic in the ranks of The New Republic, was a leading luminary of the American-Soviet Friendship League and a fellow traveler. Wertham may have had more pressing reasons for his negative review of Reich’s work. He was a vocal crusader against children’s comics (“the 10¢ plague”), which he considered a breeding ground for “un-healthy sexual attitudes” and juvenile delinquency, all of which Reich, too, seemed to encourage.41

  Reich had been aware of The New Republic’s dislike of his politics for some time. In 1945 Paul Goodman, whom Macdonald had commissioned to write about Reich for Politics, had been commissioned to review translations of The Sexual Revolution and The Mass Psychology of Fascism for The New Republic. Goodman celebrated Reich’s “enormous libertarian dynamism” and his call for the sexual freedom of children and adolescents. The editors rejected the review, writing back, “We cannot subject our readers to such opinions on your authority.”42 Goodman communicated this rejection to Reich, and instead published the article that November in View. The New Republic commissioned Wertham to write his scathing review instead, which labeled Reich’s thinking “neo-fascist”; it came out six months before Brady’s article.

  Wertham thought that Reich’s concept of “work democracy” was dangerously reactionary and called for “the intellectuals in our time…to combat the kind of psycho-fascism which Reich’s book exemplifies.”43 Brady took up Wertham’s baton in Harper’s, making an uncharitable comparison between the new cult of sex and anarchy—with its deliberate assault on the state, church, and family—and the Volk-worshipping, proto-fascist circle that grew up around the German poet Stefan George in pre-Hitler Germany, “where a number of the Nazi leaders-to-be drank in the poet’s songs of the divine power which manifests itself, ‘not in the persons of the many…but only in the creative personality.’”44 Brady argued that Miller and Rexroth’s followers, steeped in Reich’s thinking, shared George’s elitist glorification of the instincts along with his sexual mysticism, and might therefore be construed as “neo-fascist.”

  In his diary Reich put the parenthesis “Wallace-Stalinist” after a reference to The New Republic.45 Henry Wallace, who had been Roosevelt’s vice president, became the editor of The New Republic in September 1946 after Truman sacked him as secretary of commerce for criticizing his foreign policy. Wallace used The New Republic as a vehicle to oppose Truman’s cold war ideology and the escalating arms race that accompanied it, and he frequently defended the Soviet Union against what he considered to be Truman’s overhysterical attacks. Brady’s article might, indeed, be interpreted in this context; she wrote that Reich considered Russia “sex-reactionary” and “anti-sex,” and seemed to defend the country’s family values.

  In the congressional elections at the end of 1946, the Republican Party picked up fifty-five seats and won a majority by linking communism with Truman’s lingering New Dealism—it was the first time they’d controlled Congress since 1930. Though President Truman didn’t think the “bugaboo of communism” was a significant threat, he had to take a convincing anti-Communist stand if he was going to win the presidential election two years later. In March 1947, hoping to silence his critics, he introduced the loyalty program, which required that 2.5 million federal employees be investigated by an expanded FBI to see if they had Communist sympathies (785 resigned; only 102 were fired).

  In December 1947, when Wallace was contemplating running for president as head of the Progressive Party, The New Republic’s offices were “as crowded as Grand Central Station with Communist-controlled delegations falling over each other to entreat [Wallace], and tell him he had three million fans.”46 Truman argued that the Communists were trying to split the Democratic vote so as to get a Republican elected president, which would “lead to the confusion and strife on which Communism thrives.”47 He narrowly beat Dewey to serve a second term. Wallace had mistaken Communist support for popular appeal: the Progressive Party received no electoral votes and only 3 percent of the popular vote, mostly in New York; it represented, wrote Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “the last hurrah of the era of the Popular Front of the 1930s.”48

  Laurence Duggan and Harry Dexter White, whom Wallace planned to appoint his secretary of state and secretary of the treasury, respectively, were revealed later to have been Soviet agents.49 In 1952 Wallace published an article, “Why I Was Wrong,” in which he explained that his too-trusting stance toward the Soviet Union and Stalin stemmed from inadequate information about Stalin’s excesses and that he, too, now considered himself an anti-Communist.

  The New Republic’s publisher when Brady’s article came out was Michael Straight, a son of the New York banker Willard Straight and the heiress Dorothy Whitney, who were close friends of the Roosevelts. In 1948, when Wallace left to resume his political career, Straight became the magazine’s editor. Straight had been recruited to the NKVD by Anthony Blunt in 1937 when he was an economics student at Cambridge. Under the code name Nigel, Straight passed secrets to the Soviets when he had a job at the State Department in 1938, and he recommended Alger Hiss as a possible recruit (Hiss is thought to have been an agent already), and he assisted in getting press credentials from The New Republic for someone he knew to be a Communist spy. “We were among the last of the utopians,” he explained of these actions in his memoir, After Long Silence.50

  Interestingly, the man who recruited Straight’s contact, Anthony Blunt, and the other members of the notorious Cambridge Five (Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, and Donald Maclean) was the stocky, charismatic Austrian psychologist Arnold Deutsch, known to them as “Otto.”51 He had been a collaborator of Wilhelm Reich’s in the late twenties and early thirties, when he’d been an active member of Sex-Pol. At twenty-five, already engaged in undercover work for the Comintern, Deutsch ran Reich’s Vienna publishing house, the Münster Verlag, which brought out two of Reich’s booklets on sexual repression in 1929 and 1930 (Deutsch attracted the attention of the Viennese police’s antipornography squad for his role in these publications). Reich was expelled from the Communist Party in 1933, by which time Deutsch was back in Moscow being trained as an NKVD agent, or “illegal.” Reich was conveniently forgotten. Christopher Andrew, a historian of espionage, writes in The Sword and the Shield that Deutsch omitted all references to his youthful fad for Reich in his KGB-sponsored memoir, as did the Soviet intelligence agency in its official hagiography of Deutsch.52

  Deutsch’s enthusiasm for sexual liberation, a cornerstone of his politics, no doubt appealed to the Cambridge Five. Deutsch painted for them a picture of the Soviet Union as a land of equality and sexual tolerance, a vision that Reich had shared but that he disowned in The Sexual Revolution. Guy Burgess always insisted that Stalin’s views on homosexuality were more liberal than “American propaganda” implied. Cairncross later wrote a history of polygamy, After Polygamy Was Made a Sin: The Social History of Christian Polygamy (1974), in which he boastfully quoted George Bernard Shaw: “Women will always prefer a 10 percent share of a first-rate man to sole ownership of a mediocre man.”53

  In 1947, the year the Brady piece came out, Donald Maclean was working as a double agent in the United States, where he was rumored to be passing atomic secrets to the Russians under the code nam
e Homer (a pun on his bisexuality). But Straight had quit the “great game” by then; he refused to cooperate with Soviet intelligence after 1942, apparently disenchanted with the Soviet attack on Finland. Also in 1942 Deutsch drowned en route to New York, when his ship was sunk by a German torpedo.

  Under Straight’s editorship The New Republic supported Truman in 1948 rather than its former editor, Wallace. Straight eventually outed Blunt as a spy in 1963, by which time Philby, Burgess, and Maclean were already living in the Soviet Union. Philby had an affair with Maclean’s wife there in the early sixties. A book he gave to Melinda Maclean at that time, Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex, later turned up in a Sotheby’s auction (Comfort, a British anarchist and poet, had been a regular contributor to George Leite’s Circle). Philby’s inscription neatly summarized Reich’s philosophy: “An orgasm a day keeps the doctor away.”54

  Reich, who did not approve of marriage, lived with Ilse Ollendorff for five years before tying the knot. He wrote that he only agreed to do so because his lawyer, Arthur Garfield Hays, told him that the judge in the Naturalization Court would disapprove of their having a child out of wedlock and that this might affect their application for citizenship (Peter was a year old). “When I left the courthouse,” Reich wrote in his journal the day they collected their marriage license, “I could have puked! My wife too!”55

  The judge did question Reich about his having been found in 1941 with volumes by Lenin and Trotsky in his library: “And what has politics to do with biology?” he asked Reich.56 Reich told the judge all his distinguished qualifications, mentioning that he was a member of the International Society of Plasmogeny. The stenographer made a Freudian slip and transcribed: “International Society of Polygamy.” Reich and Ollendorff were subsequently granted citizenship in 1946, when Reich was forty-nine.

  Ilse Ollendorff thought that a “Moscow-directed conspiracy” against Reich—which her husband, whom she describes as prone to paranoia, suspected—was a little far-fetched. Undoubtedly nothing so systematic was in process, but interestingly Kenneth Rexroth, the “Father of the Beats” who had been a member of the Communist Party, also saw in Brady’s attack the hallmark of party influence. Referring to the Harper’s article on Reich and his anarchist circle in his autobiography, Rexroth wrote: “It didn’t take the Communist Party long to attack us.”57 At the time the Communist Party was in crisis. In 1946 Earl Browder, the leader of the American Communist Party, who wanted to take American communism in a more moderate and mainstream direction (“Communism is Americanism,” he said), was accused of being a “social imperialist” and expelled from the party under orders from Moscow. His close associates were also purged for “petit bourgeois anarchism.”

  Rexroth thought that the Communist Party, weakened after the Second World War, was trying to make the anarchists look ridiculous by hitching their wagon to Reich’s star in the public’s imagination. In comparison with the Communists’ withering group, the anarchists were thriving, largely because of their popular pacifist stance during the war. In Autobiographical Novel, so titled to avoid libel suits, Rexroth described a meeting in San Francisco held by his anarchist group, the Libertarian Circle. Devoted to the topic “Sex and Anarchy,” the event became a legend that might have provided the title for Brady’s article. “You couldn’t get in the doors,” Rexroth wrote. “People were standing on one another’s shoulders, and we had to have two meetings, the overflow in the downstairs meeting hall.”58

  Before Brady’s article appeared, Rexroth claimed, Henry Miller and many other supposed “Reichites” had never heard of Reich. “I have never met anybody in this circle who was a devotee of the dubious notions of the psychologist Wilhelm Reich,” Rexroth wrote in response to Brady’s claims. “In fact, few of them have ever read him, and those who have consider him a charlatan.”59 This is a highly doubtful claim in light of his enthusiastic promotion by anarchists such as George Leite, Paul Goodman, and Marie Louise Berneri. Reich was also on Rexroth’s own reading list and was much discussed at the Libertarian Circle.

  With the benefit of hindsight, Rexroth compared the orgone box to an earlier quack medical device, the Abrams box:

  The whole Socialist movement after the First War, led by Frank Harris and Upton Sinclair, embraced the Abrams electronic diagnosis machine [the Abrams box could supposedly diagnose and treat diseased tissue with electrical vibrations]. Twenty years later, after the Second War, the reborn Anarchist movement committed suicide in the orgone boxes of Wilhelm Reich. Anyone who had taken a course in high school physics would have known that this stuff was arrant nonsense but the trouble was that these people had lost belief in high school physics along with their belief in capitalism or religion. It was all one fraud to them. Dr. Abrams had been San Francisco’s leading diagnostician. He almost certainly was self-deluded. The same is true of Wilhelm Reich, who before he was persecuted first by Freud, then by the Nazis, then by the Stalinists, was one of the more valuable of the second generation of psychoanalysts. Both Abrams and Reich were taken up by criminal promoters who used their madness to defraud thousands of people and to make hundreds of American radicals ridiculous.60

  Other anarchists also tried to distance themselves from Reich’s controversial invention after Brady’s attack. In 1949, when he outed Brady as a Communist to Sharaf, Dwight Macdonald was making daily trips to Reich’s New York office for irradiations in the orgone box. According to Macdonald’s Austrian friend and neighbor, the biologist and cancer specialist Theodore Hauschka, who was interviewed by the FDA in February 1953, Macdonald would sit in the box for “one-half hour each day in the nude with his tongue protruded in order to get the full effect of Orgone radiation.”61

  While meditating inside the accumulator, and unbeknownst to Reich, Macdonald was plotting his own denunciation of Reich’s theories. He was researching an article he hoped to write for the radical magazine he edited, Politics, and in which he had previously allowed Goodman to so enthusiastically promote Reich. Provisionally titled “A Layman’s Opinion of the Reichian Theory and Orgone Accumulator,” it was to run alongside Hauschka’s damning professional opinion of the box. Politics folded in 1950, so Macdonald never wrote his article, but according to Hauschka the only benefit Macdonald claimed to have derived from Reich’s box was that he managed to finish reading War and Peace while sitting inside it.

  Macdonald commissioned Hauschka to write his medical opinion of the accumulator. Hauschka never used the box, but on the basis of his study of Reich’s books and the repetition of some of Reich’s experiments outlined in them, he concluded that Reich’s orgone theory was the “gibberish of a madman.” In his own paper, which was also never published (but was cited in Clara Thompson’s 1950 book on the neo-Freudians), Hauschka wrote that Reich’s theories were “the ultimate in schizoid experience”; Reich substituted “a billion ameboid individualities for [his] disintegrating ego.”62

  “I did not know,” Hauschka wrote, sarcastically quoting Reich, “that ‘many cancer cells have a tail and move in the manner of fish.’ Perhaps they are trying desperately to be spermatozoa, for cancer, according to Reich, is the direct consequence of sexual stasis and pleasure starvation.” He refuted Reich’s assumption with his own research on mice; according to Hauschka, 70 percent of the breeding females he studied died of breast tumors, whereas only 5 percent of the virgin mice developed cancer. He therefore concluded, “Sexual stasis does not cause malignancy but prevents it; but I should hesitate to let this finding tempt me into recommending nation-wide celibacy as a means of cancer-prevention.”63

  Hauschka thought Reich was sincere in his beliefs: “If Reich were a quack—and he most assuredly is not—he could never have dreamt up this nightmare of a book. What a tragic waste of enthusiasm and misdirected scientific curiosity! What a classic of systematized self-delusion, quite capable of deluding others as well!”64

  However, if Brady hoped to ridicule the anarchists by linking them with Reich, this strategy backfired—despite t
he reservations of important spokesmen such as Rexroth and Macdonald, the negative publicity Reich received only attracted more people to his ideas. In 1949 the newspaper PM noted that The Mass Psychology of Fascism was the most frequently requested item in the New York Public Library. Henry Miller reported that a number of people came to Big Sur saying, “I came to join the cult of sex and anarchy.”65 Elsworth Baker wrote in his memoir, My Eleven Years with Reich, “The appearance of emotional plague articles only resulted in a further spread of interest…The telephone rang almost constantly.”66

  On the August 28, 1947, Charles Wood, a Food and Drug Administration inspector for Maine, made an unannounced visit to Orgonon, Reich’s estate in Maine (named in honor of Reich’s discovery of orgone energy there several years earlier). Wood drove up the half-mile-long driveway lined with blueberry bushes, past handwritten signs reading no admittance, no trespassing, and no admission except on written appointment. Ilse Ollendorff came out of the Student Laboratory to greet the visitor and confirmed that Reich saw no one without prior arrangement. When Wood showed her his credentials she went back inside to confer with her husband, and Reich appeared.