In February 1952, during two days of HUAC open hearings in Washington, the twenty-eight-year-old ex-Communist Harvey Matusow testified that Communists were cultivating and exploiting an atmosphere of sexual permissiveness to try to attract young members to the party. Matusow was, according to one observer, arrogant, grossly overweight, brash, and “talkative to the point of garrulousness.”1 He was also one of the FBI’s most celebrated informers, employed by McCarthyite committees as a paid witness; in a second wave of Smith Act trials, he would go on to point the finger at Communists, most of whom had been his former friends in the party.
Matusow’s mother was Russian-born and his father ran a cigar store in the Bronx where, Matusow claimed, Leon Trotsky had once bought ice cream from his grandfather. He joined the Communist Party in 1946 as a young World War II veteran; he said he found the same “esprit de corps” there as he had in the army. Matusow was soon on the payroll, working in party bookstores, offices, and summer camps. In 1948 his junior party cell joined Youth for Wallace to support the former editor of The New Republic in his presidential bid; in photographs of Wallace’s concession speech, Matusow is pictured standing alongside him. As if to confirm the extent of Communist infiltration, Matusow would boast that he had been a member of forty-five Communist front organizations.
The month after McCarthy made his famous allegation that the State Department was riddled with Communists, Matusow visited the New York office of the FBI and volunteered his services. He was angry because the party had recently demoted him, having accused him of “white chauvinism” when he took a job at a Harlem debt collection agency. A few days before the Korean War began, the FBI signed him up as an informer at seventy-five dollars a month. At the time the American Communist Party’s leadership was on trial under the Smith Act. The party was revealed in court to be riddled with FBI infiltrators; thirteen ex-Communists—including Louis Budenz, who recruited William Reich, the man confused with Wilhelm by the FBI—testified that they had been taught that revolution was achievable only through violence. The party crumbled under the financial pressure of mounting a legal defense, and became so wary of spies that it stopped recruiting new members and instead purged thousands as a result of its own loyalty checks.
Matusow was expelled from the party in 1951, accused of being “an enemy agent”; he enlisted in the air force. He had a nervous breakdown during his second stint in the military, and was diagnosed as a manic-depressive “schizoid personality…manifested by nomadism, eccentricity, seclusiveness, [and] moderate stress of a break with the Communist Party.”2
Matusow got over his period of depression by immersing himself more deeply in anticommunism. He was keen to join the ranks of Communists turned celebrity informants such as Matt Cvetic (author of I Was a Communist for the FBI), the “spy queen” Elizabeth Bentley, and the Time writer Whittaker Chambers, who had exposed Alger Hiss as a Communist. All three made a living from their former party affiliation and had been hailed in the press as national heroes.
Matusow realized, by his own admission, that he needed a “gimmick” if he was to make a career of the McCarthy hearings like these other professional and well-paid informers. He consciously decided to make his inside knowledge of the overlooked Communist youth movement his area of useful expertise. By making “something sinister out of much that was innocent,” as he put it, Matusow persuaded America of a Communist plot to indoctrinate American youth.3
Before the Ohio Un-American Activities Commission, Matusow explained how the Communist Party had tried to infiltrate the Boy Scouts movement and stated that there were 3,500 Communists teaching in the New York City school system and that Communists taught toddlers politicized Mother Goose rhymes. A newspaper quoted one of these: “Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean. Because the Congress done them in and picked their pockets clean.”4 But he garnered the biggest headlines when he warned how Communists preyed on sexual weakness to recruit the young.
Matusow told HUAC that sexual immorality was rampant among the Communists of Greenwich Village and Camp Unity, a Communist youth camp in Wingdale, New York. Matusow recounted tales of the sexual permissiveness that was encouraged there: young campers made love openly in the grass by Lenin’s Rock, a sculpted boulder of the Russian leader that made joking reference to Mount Rushmore. American youths were lured to the party, Matusow claimed, with promises of sexual promiscuity. The headline of the February 7, 1952, New York Daily Mirror proclaimed: “FBI Aide Says Reds Employ Sex as Snare.” The editorial read: “The Matusow revelations about Communist use of intellectual and of sexual appeals to rope young people into the party’s lower echelons pose a new light on the brutishly immoral and completely conscienceless strategies of the red traitors.”5 It was exactly the kind of connection between sexual immorality and radical politics that the FDA and other investigatory bodies saw in Reich’s and Kinsey’s work.
Matusow was catapulted into McCarthy’s inner circle as a result of his testimony. He became assistant to the editor of Counterattack, a four-page weekly started by three former FBI men that published an ever-evolving blacklist and fed information from J. Edgar Hoover to McCarthy. He campaigned for his hero, Senator McCarthy, in the 1952 elections, delivering anti-Communist speeches in Wisconsin, Utah, Montana, Idaho, and Washington in which he detailed the “Communist plot against McCarthy.”
Matusow was a “publicity addict,” hooked, he later wrote, on the “narcotic of newsprint.”6 He named more than two hundred people as Communists and was a key witness in several high-profile cases. But he was so keen to incriminate Communists that he made false accusations and perjured himself in the process. He lied to help convict Clinton Jencks—whom he’d met in a left-leaning artists’ colony near Taos presided over by the former Greenwich Village bohemian Mabel Dodge and D. H. Lawrence’s widow, Frieda. Jencks led mineworkers in New Mexico in a strike depicted in the classic movie Salt of the Earth (1954), directed by the blacklisted director Herbert Biberman (Jencks played himself in the film), which was later banned as “Communist propaganda.” Jencks stood accused of falsely signing an affidavit stating he was not a Communist, as was required of all union officials under the Taft-Hartley Act, and because of Matusow’s false testimony he was sentenced to five years in prison.
In 1953 Matusow, riding high on his celebrity, married one of McCarthy’s wealthy backers, the millionaire Arvilla Bentley, who had an oil portrait of McCarthy prominently displayed in her house. The couple had fallen in love when Matusow chaperoned her out of the country to the Bahamas Country Club so that she could dodge a subpoena that would have forced her to reveal that she’d given McCarthy’s campaign more money than was allowed under the law. He was only twenty-six; “the Duchess,” as he called her, was forty-three.
Matusow’s marriage lasted only four months. In August 1953 he wrote to McCarthy from Reno, where they’d gotten divorced: “When I testified at the trial of the 16 Communist Leaders in New York, the defense said, ‘You’d do anything for a buck.’ I denied it, but he was right.”7 Matusow, a self-described “mess,” went around telling everyone that he had lied under oath and wanted absolution. A Communist publisher, hoping to provide evidence that would necessitate a retrial of Jencks and others, persuaded him to write a book confessing to having been a false witness. Matusow himself was sentenced to five years for obstructing justice.
When Kinsey’s second volume cataloguing American sexuality, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, appeared in August 1953, it played right into the McCarthyite fears about sex and communism. (The Soviets had just tested their first H-bomb.) To those on the right, Kinsey seemed to be speeding up the deteriorating respectability of America by making controversial moral judgments that masqueraded as science. He reported, for example, that 50 percent of his interviewees had had sex before marriage, and went on to explain how he was in favor of premarital experimentation, arguing that those who enjoyed early sexual experiences adjusted more easily and happily to married sexual life.
Kinsey noted that there was “a marked correlation between experience in orgasm obtained from pre-marital coitus, and the capacity to reach orgasm after marriage.”8 Ten percent of women never did, for which Kinsey blamed the pernicious Judeo-Christian tradition of abstinence outside of wedlock. The orgasm remained his sole unit of measurement of sexual experience, and in the final chapter, “Anatomy and Physiology of Sexual Response and Orgasm,” he provided a graphic description of climax, distilled from the many hours of secret footage he’d shot of the members of his inner circle having sex in his attic.
Conservatives furiously attacked Kinsey for eroding the sacred institution of the American family, on which so much of 1950s America’s romanticized image of itself was based. Catholics and Protestants were in an uproar and there was a very public eruption of disapproval and disgust. One Baptist minister attacked Kinsey as a “deranged Nebuchadnezzar.”9 Louis Heller, the Democratic congressman for New York, tried to get the post office to ban the book (three years earlier the post office had confiscated some photographs that Kinsey had acquired for his collection, and it took several years of legal battles to win them back). Even the journal Science dismissed the book as propaganda for Kinsey’s own subversive views.
Kinsey was not a sexual anarchist or Communist and he insisted that all his researchers be happily married (though this was largely for appearances’ sake). Kinsey argued for sexual liberation ostensibly to safeguard the institution of the family rather than to subvert it. In America, Kinsey said, it took years to resolve the sexual repression that had been inculcated from childhood, and he thought that the delay in sexual activity until marriage was directly responsible for the high rate of divorce. “Judged by the departure from the physiologic normal and the damage wrought on the home and society,” Kinsey argued, “the great distortions of sex are the cultural perversions of celibacy, delayed marriage, and asceticism.”10
However, the Kinsey Reports reflected and fueled a new mood. The reports inspired Hugh Hefner to launch Playboy, which appeared, complete with Marilyn Monroe centerfold, in December of that year to mock America’s puritan pretensions. (Within two years Playboy was selling 500,000 copies a month, at fifty cents a peek; by the end of the decade this figure had doubled.) One of Hefner’s student papers, “Sex Behavior and the U.S. Law,” was the basis for what would become the Playboy philosophy. “If Kinsey had done the research,” Hefner reflected years later, “I was the pamphleteer, spreading the news of sexual liberation through a monthly magazine.”11
The magazine Washington Confidential used Kinsey’s national averages to calculate that 21 congressmen must be gay and 192 other politicians “bad behavior risks,” which perhaps stirred Congressman B. Carroll Reece, Republican of Tennessee and later chairman of the Republican National Committee, to attack the Rockefeller Foundation for funding Kinsey’s allegedly Communist-inspired efforts at “weakening American morality.” The Reece Committee (the House Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt and Other Comparable Organizations), established in 1952, was a sideshow to the McCarthy hearings. It aimed to prove that there was “a Moscow-directed, specific plot to penetrate the American foundations and to use their funds for communist propaganda and communist influence upon our society.”12
The committee asked to see the Rockefeller Foundation’s files. In right-wing circles it was commonly believed that the United States had recognized the Soviet Union in the early 1930s only under pressure from the Rockefeller Foundation, which wanted to help Rockefeller’s Standard Oil negotiate energy contracts with Russia’s revolutionary leaders. The Rockefeller Foundation, and others like it, were seen as forming an “unofficial state department,” and it was thought that they should be subject to the same scrutiny as government.13 It was suspected that even if the trustees themselves were beyond reproach, the foundation staff was riddled with Communists. Reece dismissed the Kinsey Reports the foundation had funded as “a bunch of claptrap” and believed they were part of the Communists’ “diabolical conspiracy” to undermine the American home.14
Even if he wasn’t a Communist, Kinsey seemed to share the Communists’ view of human nature and morality. Subversion, Reece said, “does not refer to outright revolution, but to a promotion of tendencies which lead, in their inevitable consequences, to the destruction of principles through perversion or alienation. Subversion, in modern society, is not a sudden, cataclysmic explosion, but a gradual undermining, a persistent chipping away at foundations upon which beliefs rest.”15 The Kinsey Reports did precisely that, negatively impacting on social mores, and Kinsey’s case illustrated, for Reece, how “comparatively small donations may have big repercussions in the realm of ideas.”16
In 1951, Kinsey had won another round of Rockefeller funding by a single vote. Now the foundation, keen to remain behind the scenes and not to have its dirty laundry aired in public, bowed to public prudery and cut off its support. Instead it awarded Union Theological Seminary $525,000, which was considerably more than its total support of Kinsey over thirteen years. (Henry Pitney Van Dusen, head of the seminary and Kinsey’s fiercest critic, was a member of the Rockefeller board.) John Foster Dulles, a Rockefeller Foundation trustee (later Eisenhower’s secretary of state), believed that the foundation should steer clear of the controversial subject of sex.
In 1953, Margaret Sanger, then sixty-eight, whose Planned Parenthood enjoyed the enthusiastic patronage of the Rockefellers, arranged for the seventy-six-year-old philanthropist Katharine McCormick, with whom she had become friends in the late 1920s, to meet the scientist Gregory Pincus, the man who would become known as “the father of the Pill.” McCormick, who was the second woman to graduate from MIT, with a degree in biology, had become interested in endocrinology when seeking a cure for her husband’s schizophrenia. Stanley McCormick, the youngest son of the inventor of the mechanical reaper and the founder of International Harvester, had been institutionalized two years after they married (his older brother married John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s sister, Edith, who was Carl Jung’s chief enthusiast and patron). According to the Harvard gynecologist John Rock, who conducted the first human trials of the contraceptive pill, Katharine McCormick “was as rich as Croesus. She has a vast fortune…she couldn’t even spend the interest on her interest.” McCormick would put two million dollars of her inherited fortune into Pincus’s research.17 McCormick and Sanger, veterans of the first sexual revolution, would coordinate and fund the second.
As early as 1912 Margaret Sanger had envisioned a “magic pill” for contraception, so that sex might be freed from procreation. The founder and editor of The Woman Rebel, imprisoned in 1917 for distributing birth control devices, Sanger was described by Mabel Dodge as “an ardent propagandist for the joys of the flesh.” She was married twice and had numerous lovers, enjoying, she said, “being ravaged by romances.”18 Sanger, a keen eugenicist, also saw birth control as an urgent imperative, predicting in 1950 that “the world and almost all our civilization for the next twenty-five years is going to depend upon a simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums and jungles, and among the most ignorant people.”19 It was because of their shared interest in eugenics that Sanger’s Planned Parenthood organization enjoyed the enthusiastic patronage of the Rockefellers.
In 1952, in response to contemporary anxieties about the population explosion, John D. Rockefeller III started the Population Council, which was directed by Frederick Osborn, the leader of the American Eugenics Society. Populations were growing twice as fast in “developing” countries as in the United States and Europe, and this “population bomb,” as one eugenicist called it, threatened to create breeding grounds for communism around the world.20 John Rock, who conducted the first human trials of the contraceptive pill in 1954, wrote that “the greatest menace to world peace and decent standards of life today is not atomic energy but sexual energy.”21 Overpopulation and communism were, in Rock’s words, “more than synchronous.” The technological breakthrough of the Pill
offered a means to control this swarm, and it is interesting that Kinsey’s avenue of research was closed down just as the Pill offered a means to achieve the goals to which the Rockefellers had hoped Kinsey would contribute.
When the Reece Committee submitted its final report in December 1954, the two Democrats on the committee appended a minority report denouncing the enterprise as a “complete waste of public money.” They attributed its trumped-up charges to “the cloud of fear so evident in all phases of our national life in recent years.” By then McCarthy’s star was beginning to wane. The minority report diagnosed the era over which he’d reigned as characterized by “fear-sickness.”22
Kinsey never got replacement funding, though after his death, in 1956, Hugh Hefner gave a grant to his institute in return for free access to its extensive collection of pornographic films. Like Reich, Kinsey publicly identified with scientists such as Copernicus and Galileo who had been persecuted for their discoveries. Kinsey embarked on a swan-song tour of Europe, visiting many places where Reich had left his mark. He interviewed Scandinavian transvestites and visited London brothels in his quest to collect impressions of European attitudes to sex. He found Scandinavia to be an enlightened sexual paradise, which had eluded Reich when he was there before the war.
In November 1953 an agent from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) visited Reich at Orgonon to try to get information on two suspected Communists and to check Reich’s own political beliefs. One of these men was the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, the man who financed Bertolt Brecht’s escape to America from Norway; Feuchtwanger was now living in Pacific Palisades, California. The INS thought Reich might have known him in Berlin.
Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America Page 42