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

by Turner, Christopher

  A few months later Wood reported that it seemed as though the “orgone box business was petering out” in Reich’s absence; it seemed almost as though most people planned to use their box only in the summer months when they could enjoy the free medical attention Reich extended to them.93

  The following August, when Reich returned to Maine, Wood reported to Wharton that production of orgone accumulators had been resumed. Reich certainly made no secret about his inventory, which was painstakingly documented in Ollendorff’s “Report on Orgone Energy Accumulators in the USA” (Journal of Orgonomy, 1950). At the time of writing, Ollendorff wrote, there were 322 accumulators in “official” use in the United States, which had earned the Wilhelm Reich Foundation (established in 1949 by Reich’s supporters) a total of $23,000—a much more modest sum than Wood had estimated.

  Charles Wharton’s war on Reich became an obsession for him. “He was crazy about that Reich case and didn’t think of anything else during the whole time,” Wood recalled. “He built it way up out of proportion.”94 Wharton was evidently sex-obsessed; according to Jerome Greenfield, author of Wilhelm Reich vs. U.S.A., he kept a ceramic phallus in a drawer of his desk, which he used to take out to try to distract his secretary when she came in to take dictation. But this exhibitionistic streak masked an inner prudery. He suggested tipping off the post office to postal deliveries of The Sexual Revolution, thinking that they might have the grounds for an obscenity case, and he helpfully marked all the pages that spoke of adult and infantile masturbation for them. He kept an accumulator in the corner of his office. “This is a box,” wrote Wharton, “in which a man is placed and thereby becomes permeated with orgone, which is a progenitor of orgasm…No kidding.”95

  Wood’s own interest in the case was also somewhat personal. He was fifty-two and recently widowed. In December 1947, three months after his first visit to her workshop, he married Clista Templeton—which explains his excessive concern to paint her in a good light with his superiors in Boston. Several times in his reports, Wood refers to the importance of guarding the information she supplied to him so that Reich—who had quizzed her about Wood’s initial visit—wouldn’t find out that she was working to betray him. He repeatedly states her deep regret that she ever became involved with Reich and that she planned to discontinue working for him soon. Convinced by Wood that Orgonon was a criminal operation, Clista Templeton did hand in her notice, and the manufacture of accumulators was moved to New York. Nevertheless, by then it would have been difficult to argue that she was an independent witness in any potential case against Reich; Wood’s quest had ended in love and compromise.

  Nine

  Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published in January 1948. It ran to 804 pages, with 162 tables and 173 graphs, and was published by a serious medical textbook house, W. B. Saunders. Nevertheless, as Time magazine commented, not since Gone With the Wind had there been such literary excitement: 200,000 copies were sold in two months. The media compared its appearance to the atomic bomb that had been dropped three years before, and anticipated its having as devastating a social effect. The head of the Salvation Army condemned the report as a “weapon for temptation,” thinking it would legitimize sexual extremes.

  Kinsey’s Hollerith machine crunched a range of famously startling and revolutionary statistics from the mass of raw data he collected all around America. The press reveled in the book’s salacious details, transforming “Dr. Sex,” as Kinsey came to be known, into an instant celebrity: 92 percent of men masturbated; 85 percent had premarital coitus; 50 percent had extramarital coitus; and 69 percent had visited prostitutes. The most shocking facts at the time were those concerning the incidence of homosexuality: 37 percent of men had enjoyed a homosexual experience leading to orgasm (“more than one male in three,” Kinsey emphasized), and 4 percent were exclusively homosexual.

  Kinsey’s book desentimentalized sex, looking at it outside of the rhetoric of love and the institution of marriage; he claimed to be dispassionately presenting his findings. “This is first of all a report on what people do,” he wrote, “which raises no questions of what they should do.”1 But Kinsey was a lot more prescriptive than he liked to admit, and underneath his cool scientific detachment was a crusading humanitarianism that bubbled up between the lines of everything he wrote. The literary critic Lionel Trilling, for one, criticized the report for being “full of assumption and conclusion; it makes very positive statements on highly debatable matters and it editorializes very freely.”2

  Clara Kinsey later said that her husband’s work represented “an unvoiced plea for tolerance.” Kinsey hoped his data would encourage ridicule of the existing sex laws: “At least 85 percent of the younger male population,” he wrote in an introduction, “could be convicted as sex offenders if law enforcement officials were as efficient as most people expect them to be” (as it stood, 3 percent of all prison inmates were sex offenders, and in some states, including California, the figure was as high as 10 percent).3 In the face of the evidence of such wide sexual variation, Kinsey called for the dismantling of antiquated laws against homosexuality, prostitution, oral sex, sodomy, and bestiality. Nature, he argued, would always triumph over the moral restrictions men tried to impose on it.

  Kinsey’s book was, his biographer James Jones wrote, “an ode to Eros…a celebration of the ‘human animal’s’ ability to find sexual outlets in a society obsessed with controlling and restricting sexual freedom.”4 Kinsey was dismissive of the Rockefellers’ attempts at sex reform. “Millions of dollars have been spent by certain organizations” to curb prostitution, he said with reference to their antivice efforts, which had only resulted in a “transference of…premarital intercourse from prostitutes to girls who are not prostitutes.”5 The Rockefellers sought to legislate morality and control reproduction, but Kinsey thought that, with the exception of sexual violence, the only workable law in relation to sex was to have no laws at all.

  “If society’s only interest in controlling sex behavior were to protect persons,” Kinsey wrote, “then the criminal codes concerned with assault and battery should provide adequate protection.”6 America’s sex laws, he concluded, were not really about protecting people but about upholding custom, which is why, he thought, they were defended with so much emotion. (The sexual revolution that Kinsey inspired was also a legal revolution: in 1955 the American Law Institute drafted an influential Model Penal Code, which, drawing on Kinsey’s study, rejected the concept of “deviant sexual behavior” and led to the reform of the sex laws.)

  The Kinsey book came out in an election year, one in which Henry Wallace was running as the leader of a third party endorsed and sponsored by the Communists. The wartime alliance between East and West had crumbled that summer when the Soviet Union blockaded West Berlin. The blockade was bypassed with a massive 462-day airlift operation organized by the Western Allies, and the anticommunism that defined the next decade was just taking root. Truman’s loyalty oath saw government workers scrutinized for their sexual practices, and “sex deviants” were sacked because they were thought to be potential targets of blackmail by Soviet agents.

  J. Edgar Hoover, whose FBI had expanded so that it could carry out the loyalty screenings Truman had introduced, associated Kinsey and all sexual licentiousness with communism. According to Clara Kinsey, her husband voted Republican. “Revolutionary Russia hasn’t got far,” he wrote in his biology textbook, “for it tried to secure wealth and leisure without working for them, and the millions who have consequently starved to death in that country bear testimony to the truth of the scientific conviction that we can’t get something for nothing.”7 But when Kinsey wanted to collect histories from senior members of the Communist Party in New York, he took the precaution of having his attorney get an assurance from the FBI director that there would be no attempt to secure the information obtained in these interviews, which cast him in Hoover’s eyes as a sympathetic “fellow traveler.”

  The FBI—which
was, in James Jones’s memorable phrase, “possibly the only American institution more obsessed with sex than [Kinsey’s] Institute for Sex Research”—assigned an agent to review Kinsey’s book at J. Edgar Hoover’s personal request. The agent declared the report to be “not as scientific as it is prejudicious” and thought it might “do incalculable harm in the hands of adolescents who read it as justification for their own sexual habits.”8 Hoover, who saw himself as a white knight upholding America’s sense of decency, wrote an article for Reader’s Digest warning of the possible impact of Kinsey’s work: “It is important to the very future of our national life that we hold fast to our faith. Man’s sense of decency declares what is normal and what is not. Whenever the American people, young or old, come to believe there is no such thing as right or wrong, normal or abnormal, those who would destroy civilization will applaud a major victory over our way of life.”9

  In 1949, the year after the publication of his report, Kinsey made a speech before the Marriage Counselors Association in New York City in which he was critical of the FBI’s policies on sex crimes, especially their entrapment of homosexuals, and someone communicated to the bureau that Kinsey was “anti-FBI.” Hoover launched an investigation into Kinsey—“What do we know of Kinsey’s background?” he asked, initiating a large file on the scientist. They never found out that Kinsey, in creating his own sexual utopia, fostered a culture of wife swapping and bisexuality. He also filmed orgies within the inner circle of his senior staff and their spouses in the supposed interest of science. Hoover ordered that someone should “tackle Kinsey…and make him put up or shut up,” which was exactly what Hoover requested be done when people were reported to have questioned his own sexuality.10 A lifelong bachelor, he was widely thought to be in a long-term homosexual relationship with his deputy, Clyde Tolson. Truman Capote would nickname them Johnny and Clyde, which got him, he joked, “about 200 pages in an FBI file.”11

  Since 1925, the FBI had maintained an extensive “obscene publications file,” to which Hoover denied access when Kinsey’s researchers requested it in the late 1950s; and in 1951, as part of McCarthy’s attempt to flush out Reds from under beds, the FBI would start collecting their own version of Kinsey’s sexual histories. Hoover initiated a Sex Deviates Program that collected potentially embarrassing sexual details on a wide variety of people, with secret dossiers on presidents, a former first lady, members of the cabinet, and members of Congress. When it was destroyed in 1977 it contained 300,000 pages.12 Hoover’s sex files were used to opposite ends to Kinsey’s: namely, to consolidate his power and to purge federal government of homosexuals and other “sex deviants,” who were deemed security risks, a policy Hoover pursued with perhaps over-compensatory gusto.

  A Gallup poll conducted at the time found that 78 percent thought the Kinsey study a good thing, but the 10 percent who disapproved were a vocal minority. The psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie, known for his uncompromising stance on homosexuality, wrote one of the most devastating critiques of the report (Kubie, Reich’s nemesis, was Tennessee Williams’s analyst and so disapproved of the writer’s homosexuality that he apparently advised him to give up writing and practice abstinence). He criticized Kinsey for ignoring psychological factors in sexuality, and in trusting that his subjects’ memories could evade the forces of repression, for justifying sexual perversions, and for his statistical technique.

  Kinsey hadn’t operated with a random sample because of the impossibility of forcing people to offer up their sexual histories; as a result, he was accused by Kubie of relying on volunteers who were less inhibited than the rest of the populace, which skewed his statistics and presented the country as sexually dissolute. Kinsey sought to address this lack of random sampling by what he called the “100 percent sample,” whereby he’d get all the members of a Rotary Club or college fraternity to give their histories.

  It was this accusation that the Rockefeller Foundation took most seriously as they tried to extricate themselves from their relationship with Kinsey. President Harold Dodds of Princeton University, a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, compared the report to “small boys writing dirty words on fences,” and the Rockefeller-funded American Social Hygiene Association criticized the report on religious and moral grounds.13 The foundation’s board asked whether Kinsey’s work fitted with their program to uphold “moral and spiritual values” and debated whether his funding should be continued.14 Kinsey was arrogantly dismissive of all criticism, accusing his detractors of falling short of scientific thinking and of being “sex shy.”

  Two months after the Kinsey book was published, Reich, whose Function of the Orgasm was quoted in it, wrote to A. S. Neill, “Here Kinsey’s book, which has sold 600,000 copies [an exaggeration] and deals with the orgastic function in the human male, has helped quite a bit to break through the Chinese wall which had been erected [around discussions of sexuality] and is being kept up by psychoanalytic merchants and red fascist politicians in unison.”15 Reich perhaps had Kubie’s criticisms in mind when he wrote about how psychoanalysts buttressed the wall of repression.

  But Reich, like many others, criticized Kinsey for his cold scientific detachment in regard to sex. A frequent accusation against Kinsey, leveled by, among others, the psychiatrist Karl Menninger, was that Kinsey studied sexual behavior and not love, things that many—including Reich—thought to be inseparable. The anthropologist Margaret Mead, for example, regretted that Kinsey “atomized” sex, reducing it “to the category of a simple act of elimination,” and criticized Kinsey for his residual puritanism: “Nowhere have I been able to find a single suggestion that sex is any fun,” she said.16

  For Kinsey, heterosexual coitus was only one of six possible sexual “outlets” (his word), along with masturbation, petting, nocturnal dreams, homosexual contacts, and bestiality—all of which were equally acceptable to him. Margaret Mead: “The book suggests no way of choosing between a man and a sheep.”17 Reich followed Freud in thinking that genital union was the only mature form of sexual behavior; orgastic potency, for him, was intimately bound up with heterosexual love, and every other avenue for pleasure was a perversion (unlike Kinsey, Reich thought homosexuality an aberration and, according to Ollendorff, never knowingly treated a gay man). Reich differentiated between the orgasm enjoyed when “making love,” in which the opposite sex partner “is felt as ‘somebody else,’ if not as completely alien and foreign,” and the more profound and rejuvenatingly potent orgasm enjoyed when you “fall in love,” when you are totally “lost in the experience…ONE organism, as if united or melted into each other.”18

  “Now they want us to consider love,” Kinsey once told his colleague Wardell Pomeroy with characteristic dryness. “If we started in on that, we’d never finish.”19

  In the summer of 1948, at the height of this debate about the nation’s sex life, Reich organized the First International Orgonomic Convention, held in Maine and clearly modeled on the psychoanalytic congresses he had attended in the 1920s and 1930s. The FDA investigation seemed to have gone quiet, and Reich assumed—falsely, it turned out—that it had been abandoned. The “Chinese wall” of sexual repression seemed to be crumbling and the focus was on the role orgonomy might play in a liberated future. Reich had posters printed for the occasion with a slogan that reflected the optimistic spirit: it can be done.

  There were thirty-five participants at the convention, including representatives from Norway, Israel, Argentina, and Britain. A. S. Neill came over from Summerhill; before traveling to Maine he gave a lecture to a packed auditorium at the New School for Social Research, where his frequent references to Reich were greeted with thunderous applause. “It was a wonderful, exciting time,” remembered the vegetotherapist Morton Herskowitz. “There was a joie de vivre there. We felt like we were in the front ranks of people who were going to make a change.”20

  The orgonomists inspected the foundations for the substantial Orgone Energy Observatory, at the crest of a hill overlooking Dodge Pond, which t
hey had all helped finance and which would be finished the following year; it was to house a laboratory, a study, and a telescope that would enable Reich to further pursue his biophysical investigations uninterrupted (at the time Reich was working on a series of “Basic Orgonomic Functional Equations” to explain the workings of his free energy machine).

  The modernist structure, with two-foot-thick walls constructed of multicolored fieldstones, had an aggressive, stocky design that seemed almost an extension of Reich’s personality. Reich had helped to design it, and had further ambitious but ultimately unrealized plans for Orgonon: an Orgone Research Hospital, an Orgone Research University, and an Orgone Energy Accumulator Factory. He had an architect create some designs and even had some woodland cleared to make way for them, still referred to as Hospital Field. One of his favorite hobbies was to pace out his property, putting red flags up to mark out where these buildings would be.

  In recordings of Reich lecturing to his assembled orgonomists, he comes across as authoritarian, commanding, persistent—with a loud, thickly accented voice. “Is that right? Is that clear?” he said, giving them the time to catch up with his train of thought. When he asked a question, they groped like schoolchildren for the answer, and he encouraged them: “Yes, you’re very close!…Give me a concrete example! Go ahead, jump!”21 Because most of them had submitted to Reich physically in treatment, it was perhaps easier for them to submit to him intellectually. “Frankly, Reich, in 1948 I had the impression that hardly one of the assembled workers had the faintest idea of what you were talking about,” Neill wrote to Reich after the summer conference, “myself included.”22