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

by Turner, Christopher

  “Dr. Reich,” Wood’s subsequent report in the FDA archive in Washington states, “is fifty years old, speaks with a German accent, and was dressed in blue dungarees and a work shirt at the time of the visit. His greeting was cordial.” When Reich asked Wood how he’d heard about the box, he said a friend had sent him the Brady article; Reich complained about its “red-fascist” origin and called it “rotten” and “bitchy.”67

  Wood was visiting to determine whether the accumulator might be classed as a medical device and would therefore be under FDA jurisdiction; applications had to be filed with the FDA for all medical or therapeutic devices shipped in interstate commerce. The Consumers Union had played an active role in securing the passage of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, one of the last measures of Roosevelt’s New Deal, in 1938. As one judge explained the act, “The purpose of the law is to protect the public, the vast multitude of which includes the ignorant, the unthinking, and the credulous who, when making a purchase, do not stop to analyze.”68 (Wood was already working on the Hoxsey cancer case, helping to gather evidence against Harry Hoxsey, who sold a dark brown herbal remedy that he claimed could cure cancer.)

  Reich took Wood into the orgone room, an enormous accumulator lined with sheet iron, to show him the two accumulators kept inside. “It is a small cabinet affair, large enough to hold a small chair for the patient to sit in,” Wood reported to Charles Wharton, chief of the eastern division of the FDA, evidently unimpressed. “Dr. Reich readily admitted that his ‘Orgone Accumulator’ was a device (in experimental stages) for the treatment of many diseases, including cancer.”69 The accumulator, Reich told him, was only ever used under a doctor’s supervision, and volunteered the names of the five doctors who were working with him at that time. Patients paid a small rental fee. Having already gotten into trouble with the American Medical Association, Reich had scaled back his claims; he now asked patients to sign an affidavit in the presence of a notary that stated that they were participating in an experiment and that no cures were promised.

  The Orgone Institute also sold as well as rented accumulators. One of the large devices retailed for $216, and a tabletop model, the shooter, cost $75. These were shipped by rail through Boston to New York City and on to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and California. Reich gave Wood some examples of the literature that was sent out with each box. An instruction sheet, “How to Use the Orgone Accumulator,” addressed the “pioneers” who had volunteered to test Reich’s new machine: “We do not promise any cures,” users were told. “No mystical influence should be expected. No profit interest is behind the distribution of Orgone Accumulators. The chief aim is to define in the course of 2 to 4 years how many people who use the Akku regularly will still develop chronic colds, severe sinus trouble, pneumonia and diseases of the life system, (cancer, etc.).” Patients were instructed to sit in the box every day, preferably in the nude, until they’d “had enough” or felt there was “nothing happening any longer.”70

  A thirty-eight-year-old woman called Clista Templeton manufactured the boxes in Oquossoc, a small hamlet a few miles from Orgonon. Templeton told Wood, who visited her immediately after he met Reich, that she had been making accumulators since her father, Herman Templeton, died three years earlier. Herman Templeton had been a guide in the area and Reich had become friends with him on his first holiday in Maine (Reich had been staying in a cabin built by Templeton, which he then bought from him). Templeton started making rental accumulators for Reich on a one-off basis in 1942. By the end of the following year there were 20 accumulators in official use, most of them built by him, and he built the same number again in 1944. As Reich became better known after the war, demand shot up: in 1946, 56 new devices were constructed; the next year, when Brady’s article came out, 65. By the time of Wood’s visit, Templeton and his daughter had built 171 large accumulators and 85 smaller “shooters” between them. (Of course, many users, like Rosenfeld and Burroughs, simply built their own.)

  When Templeton, sixty-nine, was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, Reich recommended he use an orgone accumulator. Templeton built his own box, becoming the first of Reich’s patients to use one at home rather than in Reich’s clinic in Forest Hills. Reich spent the summer of 1942 as Herman Templeton’s informal physician, taking away urine samples to examine under the microscope and reappearing with reports of the residues of dead cancer cells that he had observed, proof that the tumors were being destroyed by sessions in the box. That summer, Clista Templeton told Wood, “Reich was much enthused over the possible development of the production of Accumulators on [a] big scale and that he indicated the need of all kinds of assistants, etc., to take care of the throngs of sufferers that were sure to crowd the gates of Orgonon.”71 Apparently he even made large road signs to direct people to Orgonon and put them up in the Rangeley Lakes region.

  Templeton had been given six months to a year to live, but, as Reich reported in The Cancer Biopathy (1948), when he started using the accumulator his pains left him, he gained seven pounds, and his bedsores dried out. He lived for a further three years. Clista Templeton considered these statements to be “exaggerated or completely false.”72 According to Wood, Clista Templeton felt that her father had been exploited by Reich and planned to stop production in the near future. Her father, Clista said, had built himself an accumulator only after Reich’s “consistent urging, and…against his better judgment.”73 She thought that Reich’s enthusiasm, and his hopes that Orgonon would become a new Lourdes, had given the family “false hopes.” Though Templeton seemed to think the accumulator helped him in the fall and winter of 1942, Clista thought that these were probably the slow results of his earlier hospital treatment. Her father’s health slumped early the next year and he died twenty-five months (not three years) after his cancer was diagnosed. Toward the end of his life, Clista said, her father “lost confidence in the Accumulator, and at one time told Dr. Reich that it was ineffective like all of the rest of the ‘cure-alls.’”74

  Before her father’s death, his accumulator had been relegated to a shed, where lumber was piled on top of it, and it was now warped out of shape. It was about five and a half feet high and “a very crude affair,” in Wood’s description, “but probably as effective as any and a good exhibit of a worthless device.” Wood thought it looked like a privy. “I told Clista that a slight alteration would make it a good back yard annex to a camp,” he joked.75

  After reading Wood’s account of his visit to see Reich, Charles Wharton concluded that the orgone accumulator was “a fraud of the first magnitude being perpetrated by a very able individual fortified to a considerable degree by men of science.”76 Wharton, certain that Reich was cheating his customers with false medical claims, decided that the agency would pursue the investigation, and he instructed Wood to collect the names and addresses of every consignee, and of anyone who returned a box, so that the agency might identify potential “dissatisfied users” who might testify against Reich in court.

  A month later Wood was back in Oquossoc on the first of several more covert investigations that he made before the year was out. In an effort to gauge the extent and modus operandi of Reich’s business, Wood made trips to the local bank, to the postmaster, to the Railway Express office and the county registry. Wood also paid frequent visits to Clista Templeton’s home; she was his key and most enthusiastic informant, and he kept his conspicuous government car hidden in her garage so that it wouldn’t be seen by anyone connected with Orgonon.

  Using Clista Templeton’s records, Wood was able to collect a lengthy list of over one hundred consignees. It reads like a blacklist of names. Twenty of the devices had been shipped to doctors (Reich insisted that they use the device every day if they were to prescribe it to others), the others went to patients who paid ten dollars a month for a minimum period of three months for the privilege of “testing” it. According to Clista Templeton, the accumulators cost forty dollars to make, half for labor and half for materials. Wood estimate
d Reich’s annual income from accumulators to be in the region of twenty thousand dollars. One Berkeley woman—perhaps Mildred Brady’s friend—had returned her accumulator after three months. She might be a dissatisfied user, Wood wrote hopefully.

  A week after his first visit, Wood visited Reich for a second time. Reich was examining a patient who was using the accumulator to treat his leg ulcers. “The Dr. was dressed in blue dungarees and heavy wool shirt. He looked anything but professional,” Wood noted. “He is thick set with a ruddy complexion and at his time, as previously, his red face showed evidence of peeling skin with light colored skin around the left eye.”77 Wood adds that this skin condition was “probably caused by accumulator research activities,” which seems an odd assertion if he was so sure the box was worthless.

  Reich was warned that his accumulator was definitely classed as a device by the FDA and that therefore Wood would have to carry out a factory inspection. “Dr. Reich,” apparently flustered by this news, “answered most questions by asking questions.”78

  Because it was the end of the summer and the Reichs were about to return to New York, much of the equipment in the Student Laboratory had been dismantled. Wood took down the serial numbers of all the remaining instruments. Two accumulators in the orgone room were marked with small labels reading orgone energy ACCUMULATOR / MADE IN USA / ORGONON, RANGELEY, MAINE, and stamped with a production number and a wishbone-like symbol.

  Wires ran from one of these boxes out into the laboratory to a Geiger-Müller counter. Reich explained that he was perfecting a “free energy machine, a motor powered by orgone energy,” and told his patient that he hoped that it would be an even better device than the orgone accumulator for helping “suffering humanity.”79 (Saying that mankind was not ready for such a momentous discovery, Reich dropped the project in 1949 after one of his laboratory assistants allegedly absconded with the machine; he alerted the FBI that the student might be a Russian spy.)

  After Reich’s patient had left, Wood brought up Reich’s conflict with Freud. Reich “completely exploded” and refused to answer any questions on the topic, declaring the dispute none of the FDA’s business. “The newspaper campaign directed against him [in Norway] was another touchy subject he refused to discuss,” Wood said. “His investigation by the FBI was not discussed as Reich was becoming very excited in relation to all of the troubles he confronted in his ‘strife for the advancement of science.’”80

  Reich complained to his lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays, who was general counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union:

  Our work is being confused with some pornographic…activities. It is too bad that inspectors in such a responsible position are not capable of distinguishing between science and pornography, and they never heard the name Sigmund Freud, and that they feel justified in asking hidden questions as, for instance, what kind of women we are employing or what we are doing with our women, etc. The implication is clearly that of indecent, smutty, pornographic behavior on our part. They should know with whom they are dealing. They seem to be disturbed by the insinuation in Miss Brady’s article that the orgone accumulator gives the patient orgastic potency. I wished it did, but it does not. But to the average human mind, used to smutty sex activities going on everywhere, the word orgastic potency has a different meaning.81

  There are certainly frequent indications in Wood’s reports that he felt the FDA had stumbled across a vice ring or free-love cult in Rangeley. Wood said to one Orgone Institute employee when he interviewed her about the box, “Oh, since you’re not married, you don’t need one, do you?” Lois Wyvell at the Orgone Institute Press was asked if she handled “sex books.”82 Dr. Simeon Tropp, who as head of the Orgone Institute Research Laboratories in New York had taken over production of accumulators from Clista Templeton, was told by FDA inspectors that they were looking for a “sexy racket, mixed up with a strange box.” Tropp’s medical partner had agreed to cooperate with the FDA because he felt that Tropp “had come under the influence of Reich to such an extent that he appeared to be in a hypnotic state.”83

  Clista Templeton had a sketch made by Reich of a glass tube to be inserted into the vagina that she’d picked up by mistake from Reich’s desk along with some other drawings, which seemed to hint at the accumulator’s being some kind of masturbatory device. The glass tube was filled with steel wool and attached to the shooter hose for use with nasal and vaginal disturbances. According to the instructions, the tube was to be “inserted…gently and not for more than 2 minutes at a time, or until a slight burning sensation is felt.”84

  With Reich safely back in New York until the next summer, Wood, using Clista Templeton’s list of people to whom accumulators had been sent, began interviewing Reich’s patients in the Rangeley area. He discovered that there was a good deal of local enthusiasm for the box. A lady who worked at the Rangeley Tavern used one “in the nude [to]…overcome fatigue.”85 The police were called out one night to investigate a disturbance at the tavern and found a party in full swing. The chef had been locked in her orgone accumulator.

  Reich hoped that one day every household might have an accumulator, which might be used to prevent cancer and other ailments, and to keep the nation charged up with bioenergy. In The Cancer Biopathy he imagined a whole city using it in a large-scale trial, so social workers could compare the incidences of cancer with those in similar places that didn’t have the benefits of the box. “If it is possible to mobilize the populations of an entire planet for purposes of war, then it must be possible to mobilize a district of 10,000 inhabitants for the purposes of a crucial experiment,” Reich wrote. “It must not be left undone.”86 But in the meantime, he used the Rangeley area as the testing ground for his theories.

  Though you could rent or buy an accumulator, most of Reich’s clients in this rural part of Maine were charity patients who got them on loan free of charge. “Like water and air, orgone energy can be obtained for nothing and is available in unending quantities,” Reich wrote in 1948. “The purpose of collecting it in the accumulator (a process similar to filling a wash basin with water) is to supply it in concentrated form. It is important to provide a means of access to concentrated orgone energy for even the poorest people.”87 Some of his patients in Maine were so tearfully grateful for their orgone treatment, Reich wrote in The Cancer Biopathy, that he sometimes felt like “one of those mystical faith healers.”88

  Sylvester Brackett, a seventy-year-old who claimed the accumulator was a miracle cure for his arthritis, was described by Wood as Reich’s “chief booster” in the Rangeley Lakes area. It was Brackett whom Reich had been examining when Wood last visited Orgonon. “Dr. Reich’s treatment of Mr. Brackett,” Wood reported, “consisted of having him repeat the miraculous benefits derived from the orgone accumulator several times for my benefit.” (Wood warned his superiors that Brackett “was the real ‘testimonial’ type.”)89 Later, when Wood visited his home, Brackett told him that he had suffered crippling arthritis for over a decade; he used a small shooter on his joints, legs, and hands and sat in a large accumulator for about an hour a day, a habit he credited with his being able to walk again.

  Both devices were set up in his living room, just outside his bedroom, but Brackett admitted that (against Reich’s advice) he hadn’t used either accumulator for the few months between his last meeting with Reich and Wood’s visit, because he hadn’t been suffering any excessive stiffness. But, Wood wrote, he stated that “he would under no circumstances be deprived of the use of the Accumulators and probably would resume treatments, if his condition became any worse.”90

  George Garland, Brackett’s seventy-year-old brother-in-law, had used the accumulator to combat his asthma. He paid Reich five dollars a month and sat in it for fifteen to forty-five minutes each night, but he returned the box after about six months, feeling that it was not beneficial in his case. Another relation, Samson Brackett, who Wood thought looked like Rip van Winkle, had used an accumulator for leg sores for about a year, again
free of charge, but returned it after deciding that it had “lost its power.” A Mr. Beckworth, whose son married Brackett’s daughter, sat in his accumulator to treat his asthma and arthritis. Also a charity patient, he claimed to have achieved good results with the device. He stored it in pieces in a corner of his bedroom, not having used it for several months, but said he planned to use it again in the spring.

  Though several people had discontinued using or dismantled their accumulators, none would declare themselves dissatisfied with the device. No one would admit that they had been suckered. For example, Oscar Tubbs, sixty-one, lived on his own on a small farm and used the accumulator for “asthma, leg lameness, piles, ear and nose troubles” (“Aside from his belief in Orgone Accumulators,” Wood wrote, “he appears to be intelligent”). Tubbs found sitting in it nude “rather harsh treatment in cold weather” and got Reich’s permission to use it “lightly clad.” He kept the shooter by his bed; Wood noticed dust in the larger accumulator and Tubbs admitted that he, too, was not using it, though he hung on to it in case of emergencies. He’d had a letter from Reich warning him of the FDA investigation and “was concerned over the possibility of being classed as a fraud victim and apparently put up a strong defense for three years’ use of the boxes.”91

  Wood was aware that his findings would disappoint his Boston bosses. He had interviewed twelve of Reich’s accumulator patients. “No dissatisfied users were located,” Wood wrote to the FDA’s central office on January 5, 1948.

  The users seem to be either satisfied with results or take the attitude that nothing was promised so they are not dissatisfied that no benefits were received…This entire Orgone Accumulator set up is a peculiar one and quite different from anything else I ever worked on. None of the Maine users have any literature put out by Reich or the Institute and most of them wouldn’t understand it if they had it. The boxes are either loaned free of charge or rented at a low rate ($15 a month) to local people.92