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

by Turner, Christopher

  Mangravite asked me, “Do you have any impression that he had a Christ complex and that he wanted to be persecuted? There are so many things, the more I think about it, the more stupid they were. It was almost like he didn’t want to defend himself.”

  The three-day trial was well covered in the Portland papers, which reveled in Reich’s eccentricities and the science fiction appeal of devices like orgone energy accumulators and DOR-busters, and the court was filled to capacity during each session. One local paper’s headline read, as if it were a film to review, plot is lousy, cast is great, paying tribute to the trial’s “colorful personalities.” The article described how Reich scribbled notes on a yellow legal pad, shook and bobbed his head animatedly as he listened to witnesses, and frequently slid his fingers anxiously “through the somewhat thin white hair that draws a sharply defined border to the florid complexion.” When his turn came to cross-examine, he was quick to jump from his seat to the stand, where “his examination was sometimes hampered by his accent.”33

  The government used several witnesses to outline in painstaking detail every single violation of the injunction. The first of these was Ilse Ollendorff, who hadn’t seen Reich since they separated two years before. When quizzing her, Joseph Maguire, the government’s lawyer, tried to paint a picture of Reich as the head of an underworld gang. He repeatedly referred to “the business,” called Reich the “big boss,” and used sinister-sounding terms like “drop in New York.” Though Ollendorff admitted that rental payments had continued to be collected after the injunction, she took every opportunity to correct Maguire’s misrepresentations: “She was a fine witness,” Sharaf recalled in an article on the trial written two years later, “perhaps the clearest and most secure of any that took the stand during the trial.”34

  When it was Reich’s term to question Ollendorff, he asked only what the money that he got from the sale of accumulators was used for. Ollendorff replied that it all went into research, such as Reich’s desert operations. Reich said that that would be all, as if to counter Maguire’s insinuations by simply showing the selfless nobility of his enterprise.

  The next witness was Paul Berman, an accumulator user from New York, whom Sharaf described as “the epitome of a deeply sick neurotic.”35 He had been in treatment with Dr. John Pierakkos, who with Alexander Lowen later that year founded the Institute of Bioenergetics, a splinter group that developed Lowen’s vegetotherapeutic gymnastics. Berman told Maguire that Pierakkos had suggested he begin using the box and that he had continued to pay rental payments after the injunction; no efforts had been made to recall his device. Reich asked him if the accumulator had helped him. Berman said it had, but his answer was ordered struck from the record. Judge Sweeney ruled that questions about the efficacy of the device should have been the subject of the earlier trial; this one was solely to determine the narrower question as to whether Reich had broken the injunction.

  Maguire’s questioning of his witnesses took two days. He sought to establish beyond doubt that Silvert had acted in concert with Reich in transporting accumulators in interstate commerce by showing how the accumulators had been sold or rented for Reich’s financial benefit. Reich complained of the “sleepy-making” quality of Maguire’s examinations; on one occasion, when Maguire was going into minute detail about how Reich had spent Silvert’s illegally gotten gains, even the judge became impatient and interrupted him: “How far are you going in this thing—buying cigarettes, cigars and such things?”36 Reich pointed out that he’d contributed $350,000 of his own earnings to orgone research, so it was ridiculous for Maguire to quibble over who might have paid a $21.50 bill.

  On the third day of the trial it was Reich’s turn to call up witnesses. He spent only an hour and a half questioning them, and his flamboyant amateurism, modeled on films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, made a lively contrast to Maguire’s dour professionalism. The only physician to give evidence was Albert Duvall, who told the court that he wouldn’t have asked his patients to return their accumulators even if Reich had asked him to. However, Reich didn’t pursue the idea of the injunction being impossible to enforce. He instead sought to prove the absolute necessity of breaking the injunction in his examinations. Judge Sweeney was bemused by this tactic. “If you have admitted that you have disobeyed this injunction, then you are really wasting our time here,” the judge told him. “I cannot listen to why you disobeyed it or why you had to. The fact is that if you admitted you disobeyed it your case is about over.”37 But Reich insisted he was not guilty and the judge, granting him a greater degree of laxity than he would have granted a lawyer, allowed him to proceed with his questioning.

  Reich hinted at classified secrets he was unable to divulge, the threat of espionage, and the supporters he had in high places (the White House, the air force, the CIA). He told the court that FDA spies had to be kept out of Orgonon at all costs because they were intent on stealing his secret equations, and that his workers had been instructed to carry firearms to ensure that agents stayed out. When McCullough, who had been to Arizona with Reich, was asked by the judge if he was willing to shoot an FDA official, he answered that “under certain conditions” he would.38 To assert the deadly seriousness of his work and to show how he was prepared to die protecting his secrets, Reich called Tom Ross to the stand and asked him to tell the court how he had instructed Ross to dig him a grave at Orgonon.

  The only real embarrassment inflicted on the prosecution was when U.S. Attorney Mills was questioned by Reich about why he had crossed over from being Reich’s lawyer to prosecuting the case against him. Mills claimed that he’d stopped working for Reich in 1952, before the FDA’s complaint was issued, and that in any case he had only notarized a few documents for Reich. In fact, he had been present at meetings where the business of Reich’s conflict with the FDA was discussed, as minutes show. Mills argued that he’d assigned Maguire as a special prosecutor on the case to settle any question of a conflict of interest. When Reich claimed they’d been friends, Mills claimed that their social interaction had consisted of only the occasional cup of coffee, to which the judge asked, “With milk and sugar in it?”39 The judge pointed out that Mills could have removed himself completely from the case if he’d wished.

  In a recess, Judge Sweeney suggested to Ollendorff that Reich have a psychiatric evaluation, as he thought an insanity claim was the only way he could avoid a guilty verdict. There were clear signs in his testimony that he had lost traction with reality. And indeed, in some intergalactic Oedipal struggle, Reich now supposed that his father might have been a visitor from outer space. In the posthumously published Contact with Space, Reich wrote:

  On March 20th, 1956 at 10 PM, a thought of a very remote possibility entered my mind which I fear will never leave me again: Am I a spaceman? Do I belong to a new race on earth, bred by men from outer space in embraces with earth women? Are my children offspring of the first interplanetary race? Has the melting pot of interplanetary society already been created on our planet, as the melting pot of all earth nations was established in the U.S.A. 190 years ago? Or, is this thought related to things to come in the future? I request my right and privilege to have such thoughts and to ask such questions without being threatened to be jailed by any administrative agency of society.40

  However, Ollendorff never communicated the judge’s recommendation to Reich:

  I very vigorously advised against a psychiatric examination. First, because it would have infuriated Reich and all his friends to a great extent, and second, because whatever Reich’s delusions may have been in regard to the conspiracy or to the secret nature of his work, I felt that he was absolutely rational in the conduct of the trial so far as his basic premises were concerned, namely that scientific research should be free of political interference, that he had a duty to expose the biased and malevolent intentions of the FDA investigation which he felt to be against the public interest.41

  The jury, which included an African-American for the first time i
n the history of that court, deliberated for only ten to fifteen minutes before announcing their verdict: guilty. In the notes on the case that he made at the time, Sharaf compared the scene to a passion play, and Reich to Christ: “Reflected in his face [was] a note of a bottomlessly deep hurt.”42 Reich stoically packed his papers into a briefcase. On the steps of the courthouse he declared that a “legal scandal” had been committed that day. His disciples, who had thought him invincible, felt “depressed and helpless” at the verdict. Some cried. “The sentence marked at least the end of one phase of an experiment,” wrote Sharaf:

  The situation with the “followers” was a bad one…But to hang around in guilt-ridden circles wasn’t much help either…All the mysticism was there—Reich will find a way out, he “knows” things we don’t know, we don’t understand it all. This was partially rational, but it was also deeply sick. At one point during the judge’s summation, one person in the audience said: “It looks good, Reich is smiling,” and he genuinely expected that the outcome would be different than it was…I think Reich himself contributed to this atmosphere because he was clinging staunchly to his own line.43

  Sharaf heard Reich “speak sharply” to Mangravite on the steps outside of the court—“Look at him!” Reich told Silvert, indicating that Mangrivite looked emotionally sick, or “DOR-ish.” (Reich later commented that Sharaf also looked “blackish” and asked him whether he was also a spy.) When Mangravite begged to be able to speak to Reich, he replied, “Yes, but the truth, please!” implying that Mangravite had lied when giving his evidence in court.44

  I told Mangravite that during my research I’d discovered that, before their sentencing, Reich and Silvert had lodged a complaint of perjury against him. “What!” Mangravite exclaimed in disbelief. “I never heard about that. That’s amazing!” It seems that Silvert was trying to save his own skin in Reich’s eyes by buying into the paranoid fantasy that Mangravite, who had been dragged into all this by Silvert, was actually an FDA stooge. “Dr. Silvert has conceded that [Mangravite] may well have been unknowingly induced [to ship accumulators from Rangeley to New York] by subversive conspirators,” Reich wrote in the brief for his later Supreme Judicial Court appeal, “in order to provide ‘proof’ of interstate shipment after the injunction was issued.”45

  “He knew me as a patient and as a friend,” Mangravite said of Silvert’s betrayal, “and he knew who I was and what I was, and we worked so closely together. I built all the accumulators, I stored all the books, he saw me practically every day and had known me as a therapist, and now he’d decided that I was some sort of evil left-wing spy?” Mangravite told me that Silvert began collecting denunciations about him from his friends and that he became an outcast from orgonomy, the science to which he’d devoted so much of his time, which left him feeling confused and resentful. “I assume that what was written about me was that I was ‘plaguey.’ Anybody that did anything wrong was plaguey—this was the emotional plague that was attacking Reich.”

  Two weeks later, Reich was sentenced to two years in prison and Silvert to one year and a day, and the Wilhelm Reich Foundation was fined $10,000. All remaining accumulators and Reich’s paperback books that referred to orgone energy were to be destroyed under FDA supervision. “We have lost, technically only, to an incomprehensible procedure treadmill,” Reich wrote in a speech that the judge read the court after he had passed sentence. “I and my fellow workers have, however, won our case in the true, historical sense. We may be destroyed physically tomorrow; we shall live in human memory as long as this planet is afloat in the endless Cosmic Energy Ocean as the ‘Fathers’ of the cosmic, technological age.”46

  On hearing of the several years of detective work that secured Reich’s sentence, the writer Mildred Edie Brady, whose publications had initiated the investigation, wrote to John Cain of the FDA:

  There is a kind of journalistic excitement in learning that an article you wrote years ago has been instrumental in bearing such fruit. The more I think about it, the more my fingers itch to do a book on the whole case…It would be a fine tale of really true adventure that ought to outsell any detective story…Let me give you the heartiest congratulations on a very tough job, very well done.

  Sincerely,

  Mildred E. Brady47

  Peter Reich was there on June 5, 1956, when the FDA agents Kenyon and Niss arrived at Orgonon to supervise the destruction of the accumulators banned by the injunction. As their dusty black car passed the twelve-year-old Peter, who was standing by the Student Laboratory, the deputy marshal escorting the agents flashed him his badge before they drove up the steep hill to the observatory. Peter phoned ahead to raise the alarm and ran as fast as he could after the government car. When he caught up with them, the two FDA inspectors were standing opposite Reich’s desk. They were wearing narrow shiny ties, white shirts, and black suits and referred, Peter remembered, to Orgonon as “Orgynon.”

  Reich, who was seated, was wearing a red-and-black-checked shirt and fidgeted with a pencil. They were discussing who would have to carry out the destruction: the inspectors were arguing that the defendants were supposed to do it under the supervision of the FDA. Reich refused to destroy his own work—to him, it was no less than an act of iconoclasm. “Mr. Ross,” he eventually said to Tom Ross, not dropping his angry stare at the “red fascist” interlopers, “take Peter and go to the lab. Start dismantling the accumulators. Get some axes out.”48

  Tom Ross and Peter unscrewed the three accumulators in the Student Laboratory and built a pyre out of the fiberglass insulation on the grass at the bottom of the observatory’s driveway. They then started wielding the axes, chopping gashes in the panels. When they had finished, Peter recalled, “the pile was crumpled and broken, and steel wool was hanging out of the panels all frothy and gray.”49

  “Well, gentlemen. Are you satisfied?” Reich asked the inspectors sarcastically. “We have gasoline! It would make a nice fire, no?” He asked them if they wanted to destroy the rest of his scientific equipment or burn his books. As they left, one of the officials, evidently embarrassed, said they were sorry that it had come to this. Reich replied, “Yes, you’re sorry. Of course. Aren’t we all. Good-bye, gentlemen. Someday you will understand.”50

  According to the FDA report written later that day, Silvert and Moise were also present at this meeting, along with two attorneys that Reich had hired. Although there were only a few accumulators left at Orgonon, Silvert admitted to having ten more devices in New York stored in a Thompson Street warehouse along with panels for twenty-five or thirty more. Reich had sold eighty-two other accumulators to the people who had rented them (earning $8,264.75), and his lawyers were arguing that he had no way of forcing the new owners to return them to Rangeley for destruction, as the injunction specified. “The defendants were quite civil and cautious,” the report stated. “On a few occasions Dr. Reich became somewhat agitated and strode out of the room, only to return in a moment or two. Their attitude seemed to be that of martyrs. The Food and Drug Administration could take and destroy everything they had.”51

  According to this official account, there was an attempt to burn the accumulators, but they wouldn’t ignite, so they had to be finished off with axes. Reich put an American flag atop the rubble and wreckage of the chopped-up accumulators as if he were commemorating the dead.

  A few weeks later the inspectors returned to Orgonon to preside over a book burning. Reich took them down to the Student Laboratory and said, “There they are, burn them.” As Inspector Niss was doing a count, Reich advised him to air himself occasionally, as the lab was contaminated, a warning that went unheeded. Reich had arranged for someone from Collins’s workshop to carry out the job, which involved piling 251 volumes of Reich’s writings on the bonfire. “During the burning,” Niss wrote in his report, “Dr. Reich found himself just about to throw some of the literature on the fire. He stopped short and remarked, ‘I promised myself that I would have nothing to do with the burning of this literature.’
”52 He told Niss that his books had also been burned by the Nazis, and that he couldn’t believe that book burning could also happen in America.

  In fact, in the early 1950s numerous “subversive” books were banned from schools and libraries, and thirty thousand books, by authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Langston Hughes, that were considered pro-Communist by McCarthy’s henchmen were withdrawn from information centers in embassies and consulates abroad. Ironically, some of these same books had been burned in Germany. One senator pointed out that the term “book burning” was “symbolic of any effort to remove books from libraries,” and quarantining books in basements and warehouses was just as bad as incinerating them. In June 1953, Eisenhower, who hated McCarthy—he thought him “a pimple in the path of progress”—made a speech condemning these actions: “Don’t join the book burners,” he told the graduating class at Dartmouth College. “Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.”53

  In late August the FDA destroyed the literature that was ware-housed at the Orgone Institute Press in Greenwich Village. Silvert was there with Paki Wright’s mother, Miriam Sheppard, and a few other hired helpers. Six tons of literature, valued at fifteen thousand dollars, was taken to the New York City Sanitation Department’s Gansevoort Street incinerator. Included in the inventory were over twenty thousand journals as well as hardback volumes that should have been saved, according to the terms of the injunction (though not sold until references to orgone energy were struck out), including copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Sexual Revolution, both of which made only passing reference to orgone energy. The FDA looked on: “The truck dumped the material in the dumping area and the overhead crane picked it up and dumped it into the fire.”54