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

by Turner, Christopher

  “I have spent a lifetime dealing with the aftermath of my traumatic childhood, full of abuse and betrayal,” Susanna Steig wrote. “I think the Reichians were megalomaniacs, true believers, and elitists. Not one of them had a bit of empathy or sympathy for children. Many of them were sadists. I really hope the truth of what happened to us becomes well known…This is a cautionary tale about true believers and the evil that they do.”58

  Two years after Reich’s failed demonstration with Wright in the Forest Hills basement, Albert Duvall was investigated by the Department of Education for running Orgonomic Infant Research Center without the required New York medical license; he was licensed to practice only in New Jersey and Tennessee. The New York Medical Society had received a complaint accusing Duvall of running a “sexual racket involving children” at the clinic. The original complainant, a nurse from New Jersey, alleged that Duvall had done inestimable damage to her five-year-old son, who was mute, by teaching him how to “satisfy himself.” Duvall had seen him for three months before his mother submitted to a few therapy sessions herself, in which she claimed Duvall made sexual advances to her. Duvall responded to the complaint by saying that she had “developed genital feelings she could not tolerate and had become plaguey.”59

  In March 1952 the Department of Education of New York City sent a special investigator, Helen Blau, to visit the clinic. She arrived for a therapy session with Duvall, “flashily dressed, heavily perfumed, and flirtatious,” according to Baker, and “she complained of constant fatigue, dizziness, and loss of love for her husband.”60 He had her disrobe, lie on her back, and breathe deeply while he strategically pressed parts of her body. On another visit she was accompanied by her “husband,” who asked to see the accumulator and to have its workings explained to him. The following week the “couple,” accompanied by two other inspectors, returned to arrest Duvall on a “morals charge against children.”

  Reich agreed to close OIRC, and the case against Duvall was subsequently dropped. Duvall moved to California, where he set up a practice in Los Angeles. Judy Garland sent her daughter Lorna Luft to see him there.61

  Ten

  On September 23, 1949, President Truman announced the news that America’s four-year monopoly on the atomic bomb had ended. The Soviets had exploded their first atomic weapon on August 29, 1949, two years before the CIA expected them to have this capability. In the wake of the new threat, fears about the dangers of radiation and spying entered the popular imagination. David Bradley, an army doctor from Wisconsin who had witnessed the atomic tests in the Bikini Atoll, published a bestselling book that warned of radiation’s invisible and all-pervasive effects; it was ominously titled No Place to Hide (1949), a title that encapsulated the fear of the era. The cold war quickly escalated: the United States had 200 A-bombs in 1949 and 290 in 1950, and by 1952 it had stockpiled 841 devices. Truman also ordered the development of the considerably more powerful hydrogen bomb.

  In 1949 Alger Hiss was indicted for perjury, suspected of lying in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee when he denied he was a Soviet spy—a young Richard Nixon, for one, didn’t believe him. A senior official in the State Department who had attended the Yalta Conference and helped draw up the UN charter, Hiss had been accused of being a Communist and of passing sensitive information to the Russians by a former party member, Whittaker Chambers. This high-profile case was a year in the courts and became a focal point for the wildly escalating cold war climate of suspicion and distrust. That year anticommunism reached new heights when the Alien Registration Act of 1940, or Smith Act, was used to prosecute Communist leaders. They were classed as dangerous subversives intent on overthrowing the U.S. government, and the party was effectively bankrupted and outlawed, its remaining members forced to go underground.

  Hiss was convicted in January 1950 and sentenced to five years in prison. Two weeks after he was sentenced, Klaus Fuchs, a physicist who worked at Los Alamos, confessed to stealing the atomic secrets that helped the Soviets develop the bomb, and that summer Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested, accused of doing the same. The following month, sensing an inroad for the Republicans—who hadn’t held the presidential reins since 1933—Senator Joseph McCarthy lent his name to an era when he burst onto the national stage with his dramatic but unfounded claim that there were 205 “known” Communists in the State Department. McCarthy later dropped this number to 57. Though lots of people lost their jobs, he never proved a single charge. McCarthy gave voice to the panic and uncertainty of a new political era. The CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow later said of McCarthy, “He didn’t create the situation of fear; he merely exploited it, and rather successfully.”1

  In 1950, Margaret Chase Smith, a moderate Republican senator for Maine, criticized McCarthy’s “totalitarian techniques.” McCarthy, she said, was cynically trying to ride “the Republican Party to victory through the selfish exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance, and intolerance.”2 In this new atmosphere of fear, the members of Reich’s circle, secreted away in Maine, were looked upon with suspicion by many local residents. They called them the “orgies” and portrayed the thickly accented Reich as a Dr. Caligari figure. When Tom Ross left his job at the local laundry to go and work for Reich as a caretaker, he said that everyone told him, “Gee, if you go and work for him, he’ll have you in one of those boxes and you’ll never see daylight again.”3 Reich’s books were barred from the Rangeley Public Library because they advocated fostering children’s sexual impulses; the FBI files are full of handwritten letters from people living nearby—their names blacked out—informing the bureau of the strange goings-on up at Orgonon.

  Unsubstantiated rumors were circulating in Rangeley that Reich was building an atomic bomb on his estate, that the Reichians were a “Communist outfit,” and that they used the box for “perverse sexual purposes.” One local store owner said that there was “a lot of sexuality” going on at Orgonon. “They’re interested in nudism and a lot of funny business.”4 Furthermore, it was alleged that Rolling Hill Farm, a summer camp run according to Neill’s ideas and attended by Reich’s son, Peter, was “a children’s nudist camp connected with Reich’s operations” and a “feeding center” for the pedophilic Reichians. One overimaginative correspondent even suggested that an amber light he’d seen shining at Orgonon one night—from the farm two miles away—was an illicit signal system.

  In October 1949 the FBI dispatched an agent to investigate. The agent found no truth to any of the allegations—though he spotted an accumulator in the Rolling Hill Farm school’s playroom. An FDA inspector who later visited the school was surprised to find the children fully clothed and the camp to be “a rather high-class place.” In his report to the bureau the agent concluded, “Recent experience in Maine has indicated that the residents of rural areas in that state are particularly concerned about the current international situation and inclined to regard all persons residing in or passing through the area who are not lifelong residents with suspicion.”5

  In August 1950, at the close of a summer convention devoted to the topic “The Children of the Future,” Reich asked Elsworth Baker, head of the American Association for Medical Orgonomy, to give a talk to the local townspeople he had invited up to an open day at Orgonon, in the hope that he might dispel some of the rumors that were circulating. “I am sure that, to many of you, Orgonon has an air of mystery and secrecy about it and that you have heard many rumors concerning it,” Baker told the group that assembled in the Student Laboratory. “For example, the telescope that many of you saw in the room of the Orgone Energy Observatory today has been said to be a machine gun; Dr. Reich is said to have developed a miraculous cancer cure; and there has been a lot of questioning about the idea that a lot of sex is going on or a lot that concerns sex. The purpose of today’s lecture is to try and clarify some of those questions.”6

  He evidently failed. In a letter sent to thirty Rangeley citizens that November and copied to the FBI, the “nine workers at Orgonon” s
ought to dispel the rumors that had been multiplied by Baker’s talk:

  Now, after the upheaval around the lecture given by Dr. Elsworth F. Baker at Orgonon in the end of August has blown over, we may be permitted to tell you the following…We do not run a brothel as the Fowlers with their rumors imply; we have nothing to hide, we do not conduct sexual orgies and we are not “communists.” Mr. Sharaf did not run after girls in town at night, and Peter Reich did not expose himself in school; he was forced to do so by a group of boys on the school grounds. We do not seduce small children and we do not commit sexual crimes on adolescent boys and girls. We do not “feed” patients to doctors; we do not sleep with another partner every night. We have no machine guns but only a telescope and scientific instruments in our observatory, and when there are lights in the windows at 3 or 4 in the morning, someone is sitting at his desk and taking readings or doing some writing or calculating.7

  Peter Reich described his upbringing in Maine as “pretty hard. I was really ostracized quite a bit and it was a very difficult time.” He was bullied at school in Rangeley, stripped, and pelted with stones. “I remember as a kid,” Peter told me, “before Playboy and the porn magazines, there were these magazines called Detective and things like that. I remember very vividly one of these magazines, where the women would have little black things across their eyes—it made it illicit and kind of prurient; there was an illustration, hand drawn, not a photograph, of a whole row of orgone accumulators with men in them, looking out of the windows, and a girl in a negligée is dancing in front of them. And they’re all beating off in these sex boxes. People really thought that if you got in this box you would have better orgasms and that was it. Imagine it, just think of it: here’s a local barbershop and here’s people reading a magazine about these guys four miles away, sitting in these boxes and jerking off. Jesus Christ! And this is the fifties, in a small rural town. Forget it—it’s a no-brainer!”8

  The Korean War, the first armed confrontation of the cold war, broke out in June 1950 and persisted for the next three years. With both superpowers possessing atomic weapons, and the race on to develop the H-bomb, there was wide-scale fear that the world was descending into global nuclear conflict: Armageddon. President Truman noted stoically in his diary: “It looks like World War III is here—I hope not—but we must meet whatever comes—and we will.”9

  Reich hoped that his orgone energy accumulator would play an important role in the war against what he now called “red fascism,” treating wounds and burns and immunizing Americans against radiation sickness. He proposed sending a medical unit to Korea to treat wounded troops with the accumulator and raised money for Korean children orphaned by the war. In December of that year, his band of medical orgonomists planned defense units in and around New York City; each unit consisted of two doctors, a nurse, a social worker, and at least two assistants, all armed with orgone devices in case of atomic attack.

  For the previous two years Reich had been trying to interest the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the orgone energy accumulator as a possible cure for radiation sickness. Reich also suggested that bomb shelters be built like huge orgone accumulators because he felt that the orgone energy field that built up inside might also deflect nuclear radiation. (One of these, built at the Hamilton School, was kitted out with copies of all Reich’s books.)10 The AEC decided then, as they reported to the FBI, that Reich’s “scientific theories and experiments are mentally unsound and meaningless.”11

  Reich now wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, who had a reputation as a champion of émigrés, to tell her about the benevolent role orgone energy might play in the war. She forwarded the letter and attached article to Robert Oppenheimer, the former head of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos who was now director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton as well as a consultant to the AEC and a fierce opponent of the H-bomb. He wrote back, “I am afraid that the evidence of the paper [on orgone energy] makes me suspect that this undertaking is a hoax. I have been unable to find anything about it that is reassuring.”12

  In response to the global emergency, and keen to show doubters that he had something to contribute, Reich embarked on another frenzy of experiments. He wrote once again to the AEC to request some test samples of radioactive phosphorus-32, hoping to prove the efficacy of the orgone energy accumulator in neutralizing nuclear radiation. When the AEC, which had already branded Reich a time waster, failed to respond to his request, he ordered two one-milligram vials of pure radium from a private laboratory. He wanted to expose mice to these radium needles until they developed radiation sickness and then attempt to cure them in mouse-sized accumulators.

  On January 5, 1951, Reich performed a preliminary test that he called, in keeping with his penchant for official-sounding acronyms, the Oranur (orgonomic antinuclear radiation) experiment. As the AEC conducted its atomic tests at Los Alamos, Reich felt as though he were doing parallel ones in Maine. He put one of the radium vials, still in its lead sheath, in an “orgone charger,” a coffee can wrapped in layers of steel wool, and placed it in an accumulator constructed of twenty alternating layers of steel and fiberglass insulation to increase its power. The accumulator was in turn placed in the orgone room in the Student Laboratory. The orgone devices, stacked in this way like Chinese boxes, were supposed to act as a kind of atomic shelter in reverse, and Reich expected the radiation to be contained and neutralized.

  However, it seemed to Reich that exactly the opposite happened: the radium was excited and aggravated and erupted with radioactive toxicity, spewing a dark and dangerous mushroom cloud over Orgonon. After five hours, according to his description, the atmosphere in the lab was still charged and oppressive, the walls seemed to be glowing, and the radioactivity levels were so high that his Geiger-Müller counter jammed.

  The radium was removed and the lab was aired, but this didn’t seem to clear it. Reich supposed that the orgone energy had been altered by the radioactivity into a dangerous pollutant that he called deadly orgone, or DOR: “angry, a killer itself, attempting to kill the irritating nuclear radiation.”13 Orgone energy, which until then had been exclusively a force for good, had somehow soured on him. “There is deadly orgone energy,” Reich wrote after 1951. “It is in the atmosphere. You can demonstrate it on devices such as the Geiger counter. It’s a swampy quality…Stagnant, deadly water which doesn’t flow, doesn’t metabolize.”14 The battle was no longer about how to accumulate the “life energy” but how to ward off its deathly aspect. In finding a place for Thanatos as well as Eros in his theory, Reich seemed to be finally embracing Freud’s death instinct, against which he’d fought so strongly in the early 1930s.

  According to Myron Sharaf, who was at Orgonon at the time, Reich was “tremendously excited” by the powerful reactions he was witnessing. “It was a terrible and at the same time exhilarating experience,” Reich wrote to Neill, “as if I had touched the bottom of the universe. It is still rather confused, but never in my 30 years of research career have I experienced such an upheaval.”15

  Undeterred by the supposed dangers, Reich repeated the Oranur experiment for an hour a day over the next six days. On the last day, only a few minutes after placing the radium in the accumulator, he could see from 250 feet away that the atmosphere inside the laboratory was clouded: “It was moving visibly and shined blue to purple through the glass.”16 According to Baker, who arrived with Allan Cott and Chester Raphael a week after the original experiment, even at that distance Reich and others claimed that they “became nauseated and faint…They felt pressure in the forehead and were pale.”17

  After his attack of nausea, Reich withdrew to the observatory, where he had a stiff drink and fell asleep. When he woke up, Baker recalled, Reich said he felt “particularly clear and sharply aware of his environment.”18 In this heightened state, Reich took the three visiting physicians into the contaminated lab, where, influenced by Reich’s descriptions of what had happened, they had the same sense of being pois
oned. Baker felt a “heavy atmosphere with a peculiar, sickening, acrid odor” at fifty feet away, and when they entered the building they all “immediately felt nausea, weak, and pressure on the forehead and in the epigastrium.”19 They still felt giddy an hour later, Baker reported, even though they’d had lots of air and a large whiskey.

  Reich had decided that alcohol, on which he was becoming increasingly dependent, might help alleviate what he called “Oranur sickness”: he prescribed “alcoholic drinks, in moderation, at the right time, to the point of a warm gentle glow.” All visitors were therefore “fortified with Whiskey,” Baker said (Reich was, he added, generous with his supply). Everyone wore winter coats inside the observatory, as the windows were left open to ventilate the place of DOR. Reich also prescribed prolonged baths, cold-water compresses over the eyes, and “regular orgastic discharge in the natural embrace” to alleviate the symptoms of DOR contamination.20

  Reich dispatched Baker, Raphael, and Cott to Washington, where they were instructed to report the dramatic results of the Oranur experiment to the Atomic Energy Commission. The physicians were disappointed when a representative of that agency gave them the brush-off. Baker wrote, “Though [the official] was schooled in diplomacy, I felt he was wracking his brain as to how he could politely get rid of these kooks.”21

  Sharaf recalled Reich repeatedly asking his coworkers who remained at Orgonon, “How do you feel now?” Every ailment was attributed to Oranur. The reactions described included a salty taste on the tongue, cramping and twitching of the muscles, hot and cold shivers, chronic fatigue, fainting spells, nausea, loss of appetite and balance, conjunctivitis, mottled skin, and a ringlike pressure around the forehead. The symptoms were so varied that Reich suspected that latent diseases—hidden fears and hatreds—had been brought to the surface as a result of exposure to Oranur, affecting each person in his or her Achilles’ heel, each person’s particular point of bioenergetic weakness.