America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation

by Joshua Kendall

  By 1930, Dewey also faced a host of financial problems. The Florida Lake Placid was not doing well. Dewey had hoped that the other Lake Placid—which by then had grown to ten thousand acres—could be counted on to bail it out, but the board of the sister club balked. As the Great Depression worsened, so did Dewey’s woes. The following year, occupancy at the original Lake Placid was down by 15 percent, and the one in Florida was barely surviving. That winter, just two guests signed up for its two hundred places, and the Deweys were having trouble meeting their payroll. Amid the stress and uncertainty, on December 10, 1931, Dewey penned a birthday letter, which he sent out to “a fu” friends across the country. “Today,” he wrote, “starts my 9th decade.” He didn’t yet feel old; old age, he believed, “has kept about 10 years ahead of me.” Calling himself an “80 year-old machine,” he declared that “I am bizi and hapi…because my mind is skoold not to wori.” He was proud that he could still throw himself into his work and “get qualiti and quantiti results.” He then went on to list some of those numbers. The DDC, he noted, was now in “96% of public libraries and 89% of collej libraries.”

  Over the next few days, Dewey was feted. The former head of the alumni association of his library school sent a bound volume of letters from one hundred colleagues across the country who hailed his achievements. He received one hundred congratulatory telegrams from forty countries. The ex-president of the Florida Library Association also drove a small group of librarians over “100 myls” to pay him a visit.

  Dewey felt compelled to note these various multiples of ten in a postscript to his birthday letter, in which he also expressed his hope to “retyr at 100.” Having finished jotting down his thoughts, he added: “For 60 years known as leading apostl of decimals, 10 seems to pursue me for even my 8 paje letr has grown to the mistik 10.”

  Dewey died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage half a month later—just one and a half months before American skater Irving Jaffee nabbed the gold medal in the ten-thousand-meter race at the Lake Placid Olympics.

  Kinsey poses alongside his cabinets full of sexual histories. With him are his three coauthors on Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Clyde Martin (standing in back), Paul Gebhard (the man with a moustache), and Wardell Pomeroy (facing away from the camera). According to Gebhard, Kinsey encouraged “interstaff sex.” While Gebhard had a steamy affair with Martin’s wife, Kinsey would have sex with both Pomeroy and Martin, with whom he also fell in love. And Martin, in turn, was also a regular sex partner of Kinsey’s wife, Clara.

  (Photo source: Alfred Kinsey with Clyde Martin, Paul Gebhard, and Wardell Pomeroy. Ca. 1953. Photographed by William Dallenback. Reprinted by permission of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction.)

  4.

  Sexuality: Alfred Kinsey

  The Rabid Orgasm Counter

  There is, moreover, a reality involved in any such summation of orgasms, for all orgasms appear to be physiologically similar quantities, whether they are derived from masturbatory, heterosexual, homosexual, or other sorts of activity.…For most females and males…the sum total of such orgasms may constitute a significant entity in the life of an individual.

  —Alfred Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)

  On the morning of Thursday, June 22, 1916, a day before his twenty-second birthday, Alfred Kinsey was slated to do one of the things that came naturally to him—deliver a lecture. The future academic, who, that fall, would begin graduate study in biology at Harvard—where he would also develop his penchant for bow ties, rumpled suits, and scuffed loafers—was about to give a valedictory address at the Bowdoin College commencement. The tall, blond, and blue-eyed psychology major was one of four seniors to receive this honor (and one of only two to graduate magna cum laude). Like Melvil Dewey a generation earlier, this straight-A man had also found his calling in a part-time classification gig that he stumbled upon as a junior; rather than organizing the books in Amherst’s library, Kinsey organized the plant and animal specimens in Bowdoin’s biology museum. Since arriving in Brunswick, Maine, two years earlier, the junior transfer had spent most of his waking hours—at least sixteen hours a week on both zoology and psychology, and four hours on biology—in laboratories and classrooms. His superlative scholarship dazzled his professors; the Harvard-educated zoologist Alfred Gross, a fixture at Maine’s premier liberal arts institution for more than a generation, would later call Kinsey his best student ever. But his classmates weren’t sure quite what to make of the loner who kept more than twenty types of snakes in his dorm room. According to the Bowdoin Bugle, the college yearbook, Kinsey was a “dignified non-committal individual who stalked about the campus with little to say to anyone. On entering his room, one never knows whether Mr. Kinsey or a large able-bodied snake is going to greet him.”

  Though shy in most social settings, Kinsey was not nervous. The outgoing president of the college’s Debating Council, he had won numerous awards for his excellence as a public speaker. In front of an audience, Kinsey felt more comfortable than he did just about anywhere else. He liked being the person in charge—and much preferred monologuing to dialoguing—and he also feasted on the attention. But on this occasion, despite his self-confident manner and his facility with words, Kinsey would embarrass himself; in fact, with his ill-conceived remarks, he would inadvertently add a touch of levity to the solemn occasion.

  For most of graduation week, the mood had been somber, as the carnage then taking place in Europe was on everyone’s mind. In his baccalaureate sermon delivered the previous Sunday, Bowdoin president William DeWitt Hyde noted that “the great war has made impossible the isolation of the United States” and stressed the importance of “military preparedness.” Additionally, the night before commencement, at the end of a performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, fifty members of the class of 1911, back in Brunswick for their fifth reunion, terrified the audience by darting around campus clad in Ku Klux Klan uniforms. (Since the release of the movie The Birth of a Nation the previous February, the KKK was undergoing a boomlet in the virulently anti-Catholic Maine.)

  After the first student speaker finished his talk on the “morbidly tragic personality” of Edgar Allan Poe, all eyes turned to Kinsey. Pointing to another part of the rustic campus, he began, “I owned a friend in a gray squirrel, yonder.”

  Much to the surprise of his classmates and their families, Kinsey’s farewell address, entitled, “Art and Science—Companions,” was to focus on his star-crossed liaison with a rodent.

  “We met first by chance. When I threw an acorn at him, he perched on an upper limb and scolded in a dozen ways. He coughed and choked with invective; he mispronounced all he said. But my squirrel and I found, as time went on, that our paths were often to cross. We talked; we confided our troubles. Each was a mystery to the other, but we were friends.”

  The philosophical points that Kinsey was trying to make about the relation between art and science were muddled. “Art, the guardian of beauty…had taken [my squirrel] out of a disorderly superabundance of things, had made it a unit,” he declared. “Science, seeking a different end, individualizes the squirrel in a different way.”

  But what did come through loud and clear was that this academic superstar did not yet know the ABCs of how to connect with any other sentient being. “Great truths of trust and fear, of troubles and delights, of delightful peculiarities, of friendship, I learned from my squirrel, the individual of beauty. And when, one morning, I found that the car had struck the life from the gray thing, I felt the loss of a particularly personal possession I had cherished. I was glad for the laws it had taught, glad for the love it had inspired.” For Kinsey, his favorite squirrel was less an animal that had met its own tragic end than an object that he had lost. The socially obtuse scholar-in-the-making was thus on full display; Kinsey was indeed prone to forgetting that other creatures existed independently of himself.

  Born into a family that neither understood nor appreciated
him, Kinsey had always had trouble connecting. In his high school yearbook, he rendered his assessment of both his parents and all humankind by citing a line from Hamlet, “Man delights not me; no, nor woman either.” And neither Kinsey’s mother nor his father, a hard-driving engineering professor who had recently disowned the late adolescent for pursuing a career in some other field besides engineering, attended the graduation. Instead of becoming a connector, Kinsey became a collector—a not uncommon move for loners with a similar early history. As the late art historian Werner Muensterberger argues in his landmark work, Collecting: An Unruly Passion (1994), children who can’t or won’t “grasp and cling” to their parents often turn to objects as “symbolic substitutes” for human contact.

  But Kinsey, unlike Jefferson or Heinz, was no ordinary collector. He was, concluded Wardell Pomeroy, a clinical psychologist who coauthored both of his bestselling sex surveys, “perhaps the most unusual one this nation of collectors has ever seen.” As a child, Kinsey started with stamps before moving on to pancake disks—the CDs of the early 1900s—of classical music. “If your collection is larger, even a shade larger than any other like it in the world,” the adult Kinsey philosophized, “that greatly increases your happiness.” At Harvard, he would focus on an insect—the gall wasp—and he gathered some five million specimens during his two decades as a field biologist. In his home in Bloomington, where Kinsey settled after obtaining his first teaching job at Indiana University in 1920, he mounted his extensive knife and sword collection on a wall in an upstairs bedroom.

  And in the late 1930s, Kinsey would start a collection that would change the course of American history. Turning from biology to sexology, he began compiling sex histories of thousands of men and women, fact-filled documents that pivoted around mountains of raw orgasm data. As he noted in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), before marriage, the average American female experienced a total of 223, just one-seventh of the corresponding figure for males, which he had reported in his first survey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948). And at his new place of employment, Indiana University’s Institute for Sex Research, which he set up in 1947, he also amassed the world’s largest collection of sex books. The Dewey Decimal Classification System, this iconoclast decided, would not do, so he devised his own. Kinsey placed brown tape at the bottom of the spines upon which he wrote in white ink one of his thirty designations—say, FM for modern fiction and AN for anthropology. He also stashed away in the institute every erotic artifact and factoid he could lay his hands on, including ceramic art from Peru, bathroom graffiti, and some 5,200 penis measurements. This chase consumed him right up until his death. “It is a shame,” he noted in 1956, after gathering his final two sex histories—Numbers 7984 and 7985—“there comes a time that you have to work up data and publish it instead of continuing the gathering. Frankly, I very much enjoy the gathering.”

  The magic formula that produced America’s pioneering sexologist was a mania for collecting, counting, and organizing, fueled by a trinity of sexual perversions, namely exhibitionism, voyeurism, and sadomasochism. Thanks to Kinsey, S/M—the shorthand he invented—has entered the everyday lexicon. “In sex research,” as Paul Gebhard, the now ninety-something anthropologist who coauthored the female volume, explained to me not long ago, “perversions come in handy. They are the name of the game.” After all, the preeminent early-twentieth-century German sexologist Hans Magnus Hirschfeld was a transvestite, and Havelock Ellis, his British counterpart, suffered from undinism (he was turned on by the sight of women urinating). Besides these perversions, Kinsey’s personal tastes also veered toward gay sex, which he tried hard to keep under wraps until his midthirties, and frequent action of all sorts. Such was the makeup of this sex maniac, who, “by getting people to think and talk about sex,” as Bill Condon, writer and director of the 2004 biopic Kinsey, has put it, “had a staggering effect on the culture.” The “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960s is unthinkable without the big assist from the Indiana University orgasm counter. “[Hugh] Hefner,” wrote a biographer of Playboy’s founder, “recognized Kinsey as the incontrovertible word of the new God based on the new holy writ—demonstrable evidence.”

  But while Kinsey’s obsessions and compulsions jump-started his scholarly success, they also ended up killing him. In August 1956, just three years after the release of his much-anticipated female volume—the “mistress piece” that would be the companion to his “masterpiece,” as the Indianapolis Star put it—he died a broken man. He was just sixty-two.

  Kinsey’s sudden demise was not entirely due to his own self-destructive bent. A changing of the political winds also played a role. In the summer of 1954, a conservative backlash succeeded in convincing the Rockefeller Foundation, which had underwritten his research for a decade, to cut off his funding. A year earlier, Billy Graham had led the charge with an influential sermon, “The Bible and Dr. Kinsey,” which was soon transformed into a widely circulating booklet. Of the recently published female volume, the reverend warned, “It is impossible to estimate the damage this book will do to the already deteriorating morals of America.” With McCarthyism in full swing, in the fall of 1953, Carroll Reece, a Republican from Tennessee, also launched a congressional investigation into nonprofit foundations in order to tell “the story of how Communists and socialists are financed in the United States.” While the Reece Committee elicited some fierce opposition—the New York Post would dub its report “a manifesto of Neanderthals”—its high-profile activities exerted enormous influence. A worried Dean Rusk—the future secretary of state then headed the Rockefeller Foundation—soon concluded that he had no choice but to dump his most controversial investigator.

  But Kinsey’s life was already spinning out of control before these politically motivated attacks ever got under way. In June 1953, he collapsed from nervous exhaustion and was forced to check himself into a hospital. Visiting Kinsey at his bedside, Edgar Anderson, who had attended graduate school with him at Harvard, was startled to see “his face lined, slowed down by drugs.” A chronic insomniac, Kinsey was by then a walking pharmacy who, just to keep chugging along at all, had to take powerful sedatives at night and both tranquilizers and amphetamines during the day.

  As he neared sixty, his many eccentricities were leading not to productivity but to paralysis. Emotionally spent, he often felt tired and listless. He also began struggling with impotence; this was a particularly vexing development for someone who measured out his life not “with coffee spoons,” as did many of his contemporaries—to cite a line from T. S. Eliot’s 1915 poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—but with orgasm numbers. In contrast, throughout his first decade and a half in the sex business, Kinsey had maintained a frantic pace. As his wife, Clara McMillen—known as Mac—complained to Life in 1948, “I hardly ever see him at night any more since he took up sex.” While Mac, whom he had married in 1921 and with whom he raised three children, was ostensibly referring to his scientific concerns, her comment also applies to his active pursuit of his numerous sexual fantasies. By the mid-1940s, Kinsey, who had once enjoyed a satisfying sex life with Mac, slept in his own bedroom, as he preferred experimenting with other “sexual outlets,” to borrow the central concept from his reports, in which he identified five royal roads to the orgasm besides heterosexual sex—masturbation, nocturnal emissions, heterosexual petting, homosexual sex, and animal contacts. According to Paul Gebhard, who took his sex history, Kinsey then rated himself as a 4 on his famous scale (with 0 being exclusively heterosexual and 6 being exclusively homosexual). He ended up with several steady male partners, whom he had first met while conducting their histories. He also participated in orgies in his home, which featured both male staff members and their wives; those shenanigans, which he initiated, were about the only occasions when he was still intimate with Mac.

  And he did not shy away from the risky and the kinky. In 1938, Kinsey began frequenting “tea rooms” (public urinals), where he could indulge in as much anonym
ous gay sex as he wished. A decade later, when fame disqualified him from these encounters, he lamented with a smile the loss of “a lot of valuable research opportunities.” Perhaps to compensate, in the late 1940s, Kinsey became addicted to a sadomasochistic masturbatory ritual, whereby he would stick a swizzle stick up his urethra and tie a rope around his scrotum, according to Kinsey biographer James Jones, who also claimed that Kinsey had first experimented with this technique as an adolescent. As the years went on, to achieve his requisite thrill, he would continually up the ante—that is, inflict an ever-increasing amount of pain on himself. As an exhibitionist proud of his “very large genitalia,” to quote a collaborator who got a good view, Kinsey had himself filmed while masturbating, though in a slight bow to modesty, his head did not appear on camera. The voyeur within also watched intently as his full-time photographer, William Dellenback, would, at his behest, shoot some of the other sexual goings-on in his attic, including S/M sessions between gays and dozens of other men and women engaging in masturbation. With the highly responsive women who were capable of lightning-quick orgasms, Kinsey got in a little extra action in between takes. Ever the dutiful wife, Mac—which also stood for “Mrs. Alfred C.”—passed around cookies and persimmon pudding to the naked participants as they attempted to relax after the filming.