Naked
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The sunbathing proposal also drew strength from the popularity of swimming pools in the 1920s and 1930s. Attendance at public baths began to decline as cities passed laws and building ordinances that required new tenement apartments to include private toilets and bathtubs.13 At the same time, city officials began to support the construction of municipal swimming pools, often converting outdated public bathing facilities, in order to promote public cleanliness as well as recreation. The tremendous popularity of swimming pools resulted first from a period of economic prosperity that increased the demand for recreation and subsequently as a form of relief from the hard times of the Depression. These often-massive venues, accompanied by sandy beaches, grassy lawns, and broad concrete decks, catered to a wide range of people hoping to sunbathe and socialize with their friends, family, and members of the opposite sex. Although pool officials sought to encourage family activities, according to the historian Jeff Wiltse, they quickly saw the “downsizing of swimsuits” and the creation of a place where males and females came to view “one another mostly unclothed.”14 With swimmers and spectators “visually consuming” their bodies, Wiltse argues that the venue of the swimming pool contributed to making the “public objectification of female and male bodies” acceptable and helped define public decency as the exhibition of an “attractive appearance rather than protecting one’s modesty.”15 The proposal to create a place where men and women could sunbathe in the nude as a health measure did not seem as far-fetched given the popularity of swimming pools as places where both the middle and working classes came to display and consume the body in addition to enjoying a swim.
Suominen proposed that his sunbathing enclosure follow the same rules and precautions practiced in municipal public baths. European nudist camps encouraged men and women to participate in nudist activities in each other’s company in order to satisfy the individual’s curiosity about the body. Suominen, however, understood that he needed to take precautions against the “sniflish ladies and gentlemen who have sniffed at the carryings on of nudist cults in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.”16 In the United States, the municipal public baths served as a useful model: they encouraged attendees to disrobe in order to improve their physical and mental health, and they avoided accusations of moral impropriety by strictly separating men from women. The popularity of municipal baths and the support Suominen hoped to receive from middle-class female reformers who previously called for public baths influenced him to propose that his sunbathing enclosure have “separate spaces for men and women.” He also included plans to construct walls that would “obstruct any view of the interior from nearby buildings or other vantage points.”17 Suominen hoped that compromising nudist ideals that encouraged men and women to go naked together would make his sunbathing enclosure as acceptable as the one-piece bathing suit, the municipal public bath, or the swimming pools of the 1930s.
Suominen’s proposal for a nude-sunbathing enclosure on Rogers Park Beach collided with a local system of censorship shaped by the many moral purity organizations active in Chicago. Censorship in Chicago received support from a broad coalition of conservative women’s groups and progressive reformers including the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Juvenile Protection Association (JPA), the City Club, the Chicago’s Woman’s Club, Hull House, Chicago Commons and the Northwestern University Settlement, the Vice Commission, and the Committee of Fifteen.18 Since the late nineteenth century, groups such as the WCTU, the Young Woman’s Christian Association (YWCA), and numerous other conservative women’s clubs sought to protect so-called vulnerable members of society—namely, young women and children—from the sexual dangers of the urban environment.
Through grassroots campaigns and movements, these organizations pushed local police and politicians to take action against prostitution, burlesque shows, and questionable films. In 1907, for example, the city enacted a censorship ordinance that gave the police chief the power to cut or prohibit any film prior to its first screening. When the police chief ignored the law, the Juvenile Protective Association conducted a survey of nickel theaters that aroused civic reformers who demanded enforcement and, beginning in 1909, made police officials eliminate scenes of murder, robbery, and abduction.19 The close relationship between the coalition of moral purity organizations, women’s clubs, and civic groups and local police and politicians defined Chicago’s system of censorship in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Just as WCTU club women campaigned against a variety of social vices in the Chicago area, they played a key role in opposing the establishment of the nudist enclosure on Rogers Park Beach.20 The WCTU established its national headquarters only a few miles north of Rogers Park in the suburb of Evanston, where it directed its broad moral reform agenda at the national and local levels. The Chicago Tribune labeled the residents who opposed the sunbathing enclosure the “conservative Roger Parkers,” in part because they employed the methods of the nearby WCTU. The Rogers Park Woman’s Club president, Mrs. Earl G. Whittaker, declared, “It’s absurd to think that the club women of this district would sanction such a thing,” since, according to her, the Roger Park residents were “much too conservative for such a plan.”21 To preserve the moral character of the neighborhood, these women employed the “petition drives and political lobbying” strategies that the historian Alison Parker argues allowed the WCTU to “pass stricter censorship laws at the federal and state levels.”22 They immediately began organizing “several councils of war,” in which they drafted a resolution in protest against the sunbathing proposal.23 The group also distributed fifty thousand circulars decrying nudism and submitted letters of protest to Mayor Anton Cermak and Alderman George A. Williston of the Forty-Ninth Ward.24 If Suominen’s proposal for a nude-sunbathing enclosure was to be successful, he needed to overcome Chicago’s local system of censorship.
The support that the sunbathing enclosure received from several immigrant groups also upset members of the Rogers Park community. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Rogers Park transformed from a middle-class, suburban community with large houses on sizable lots into an urban, multiethnic neighborhood. After the Northwestern Elevated Railroad Company opened its Howard station in 1908, the neighborhood’s population grew dramatically, from 7,000 in 1910 to 26,857 in 1920, and then doubled again over the course of the next decade.25 Multiunit buildings quickly replaced single-family homes and attracted German, Irish, Russian, Welsh, and Swedish immigrants. By 1930, 15 percent of the residents of Rogers Park were first-generation American born, and another 34 percent were second generation. The growing German-immigrant community in Rogers Park made it an ideal location for Suominen to establish his nude-sunbathing enclosure. Yet in the Rogers Park Hotel, led by James White, the secretary of the Forty-Ninth Ward Republican Civic League and an alderman candidate in the upcoming local primary, residents expressed concern that Suominen’s sunbathers resembled the Nacktkultur groups gaining popularity in Germany and declared that they desperately wanted to “halt this sunbathing movement before it starts.”26 The residents remained convinced that permitting individuals to “indulge themselves in moronic exhibitions” transcended the “limits of morality and seriously endanger[ed] the standards of decency” that they had “cherished in this part of Chicago.”27 They feared that the enclosure would attract “undesirables” who would “destroy the wholesome residential atmosphere that . . . surrounded [their] homes and hold this splendid community up to scorn and ridicule by clean people of the city.” This would, of course, lower property values as well.28 Unwilling to tolerate an influx of socially undesirable immigrants practicing nudism, White dismissively suggested that the sunbathers build their “nudist cult stockade on the banks of the drainage canal, where the sun is just as hot and the opposition is cooler.”29
Suominen’s nude-sunbathing enclosure quickly succumbed to the protests of Chicago’s many voluntary moral reform organizations and the city’s local system of censorship. The socially conservative resid
ents of Rogers Park used letters and their political influence to persuade the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, to oppose Suominen’s proposal, even though he depended heavily on the political support of immigrant groups across the city.30 Mayor Cermak, reacting to the “protests of the residents of Rogers Park,” asked Alderman John Wilson, chairman of the council committee on playgrounds, to “pigeonhole” the proposal for the beach enclosure.31 After receiving “letters of the most insulting kind,” he remarked, “[The] whole thing makes me sick.”32 Cermak went so far as to repeat the nativist rhetoric of the Rogers Park residents by bluntly asserting, “Nude sunbathing is not done in this country and the city never intended that it should be started in Chicago.”33 Unwilling to challenge the power and influence of the WCTU and the Rogers Park community, Mayor Cermak suppressed the proposal for a nudist stockade on Lake Michigan.
The mayor’s public response to the Rogers Park protests did not immediately end interest in nudism in Chicago. Cermak originally anticipated support for the enclosure and thought he would introduce the measure to “ascertain if people had any objections.”34 Although not “advocating nude sunbathing,” Cermak acknowledged his private support for Suominen’s sunbathing proposal and accepted responsibility for the ensuing controversy. Confessing that he regularly took “sunbaths,” Cermak made sure to point out that he did not think it was “necessary to be nude to get the healthful ultra-violet rays.”35 After the controversy dissipated, however, Cermak maintained his interest in nudist parks. In the summer, the mayor and his staff made a trip to Germany to publicize Chicago, to encourage financial investment in the city, and to promote the Chicago World’s Fair. As Cermak tried to counter the image of a crime-ridden Chicago, his advisers took the time to visit two nudist camps.36 The county commissioner Charles H. Weber and Mathias (Paddy) Bauler, a Democratic ward committeeman, visited a “city operated” park and a nudist camp “run by communists.”37 Stunned that the city managed the park “just like Lincoln Park in Chicago,” the two advisers recalled being taken to an observation gallery where they witnessed children “running around bare” with their “fat mammas and papas.”38 At the communist-run park, they witnessed five hundred men, women, and children “running around without any clothes.”39 Mayor Cermak’s interest in the sunbathing enclosure and his staff’s visits to German nudist parks demonstrated the continued ethnic support for nudism in Chicago and a willingness to experiment with the therapeutic possibilities of exposing the body to the fresh air.
A year after Suominen’s first attempt, he tried again to establish another space for nudism and quickly encountered resistance from local politicians and moral reformers in the heart of Chicago. Reintroduced by the Chicago Tribune as a “nature cure specialist” and the “friend of . . . Mayor Cermak,” Suominen submitted a petition signed by ten thousand persons requesting an enclosure for nude sunbathing in Lincoln Park.40 The new proposal called for nine-foot-high walls lined with sheet metal, shutting off views from the high-rise building next to the park.41 Invoking the influence of the WCTU, the president of the park board remarked that he had already received several “protests from north side residents.” As Suominen did with his Rogers Park sunbathing proposal, he sought to mute potential accusations of indecency that might emerge from men and women undressing in the same space. He introduced a regimen that scheduled men to “bask in the sun for a period” and then, at a different time, allowed female sunbathers to enter the facility. Rejecting “mixed nudism,” he understood the need for caution since “such experiments” needed to be practiced only by the “most highest-minded persons without inhibitions.”42 Suominen hoped that his petition, along with his plans to strictly separate men and women, would be enough to convince the Chicago city council to allow a sunbathing area in Lincoln Park.
By then, however, political circumstances had changed. Mayor Cermak was assassinated on March 6, 1933, and without strong support from the mayor’s office, Lincoln Park commissioners did not take the proposal seriously.43 While making a tour of the park to evaluate possible sites for the stockade, the commissioners “waxed hilarious over the proposal.”44 One official stated that he opposed it on “esthetic grounds,” especially “now that everybody is drinking 3.2 beer [sic].”45 Officially, the commission cited the excessive costs of the high-quality lumber required to construct the walls of the enclosure.46 Designed with towering walls to prevent “an epidemic of peeping Toms,” the enclosure’s cost and its limited appeal to “members of a small cult” led city officials to the conclusion that it did not constitute an appropriate use of funds or park space.47 Although nudism received a great deal of support from immigrant groups that embraced alternative forms of healing, the grassroots campaigns of Chicago’s many voluntary moral reform organizations stifled any discussion of the merits of nudist activities and influenced municipal politicians to reject proposals for a sunbathing enclosure on Rogers Park Beach.
“24 Seized in Raid on Nudist Cult Here”
The various attempts to go naked in New York City gymnasiums tested the boundaries of an emerging state-centered approach to regulating obscenity and sexual expression. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the vice societies and women’s voluntary organizations that had campaigned for strict censorship laws and repressive legislation came under attack from working-class groups, middle-class moderns, civil libertarians, and members of the entertainment industry. Men and women began to demand and fight for access to birth control information while also affirming “self-expression and pleasure seeking as individual and social goods.” By the 1930s, according to historian Andrea Friedman, a new system of obscenity regulation emerged that established a democratic structure to determine the decency of sexual representations. New Yorkers rejected the voluntary moral purity organization in favor of a “state-centered system of criminal prosecution” that judged questionable materials and activities according to the standards of the average person and guaranteed the right to trial by jury.48 In contrast to Chicago’s local system of censorship, the democratic processes that defined New York’s modern regime of obscenity regulation afforded nudists and their supporters the opportunity to dispute accusations of immorality, to present their therapeutic principles, and to assert their right to privacy. It also required antiobscenity activists to introduce legislation that linked nudist activities to commercial sexuality in order to expand the state’s power to regulate naked bodies in nearly any space or venue.
Judge Goldstein intended to uphold New York’s emerging democratic regime of obscenity regulation when he dismissed the public indecency charges against the men and women who went naked in the “Heart of New York Gymnasium” on the night of December 8, 1931. In the first decades of the twentieth century, many Americans gradually began to accept fashion trends that displayed parts of the body that had previously remained hidden under heavy skirts and restrictive bodices.49 The 1907 introduction of the one-piece bathing suit by Annette Kellerman, revealing, for the first time, women’s legs, shoulders, and arms, immediately provoked reprisal, debate, and enormous public interest.50 The police arrested Kellerman for indecent exposure when she wore her bathing suit on a promotional campaign in Massachusetts. In the coming years, however, the suit gradually gained acceptance across the country. The growing leisure time enjoyed by the affluent led couples and families to seaside resorts, where they found the lighter material of the one-piece swimsuit far more appropriate for actual swimming than the bulky full-length bathing suits of the nineteenth century. By the 1930s, clothing companies began to use nudism to convey the feeling of nakedness when promoting the one-piece bathing suit. One 1934 advertisement in the New York Times for “Bathing Suits of Stocking Silk” boasted that the suit was “so light that you will find yourself glancing down occasionally to reassure yourself that you have not absent-mindedly gone nudist.”51 The clothing advertisement used nudism to refer to the growing popularity of less restrictive and more revealing styles of female fashion in the 1920s and 1930s whil
e also using humor to communicate the importance of covering the body.
Nudists differentiated themselves from these questionable commercial exploitations of the body by shunning audiences and requiring men to be as naked as women during exercise routines. Nudism did not alarm advertisers or Judge Goldstein, if it stood apart from the increasingly popular and morally dubious spectacle of the swimsuit competition. Commercial entrepreneurs in Atlantic City, New Jersey, sought to profit from the more revealing fashion trends when they began the Miss America Beauty Pageant in the early 1920s. The end-of-summer event relied on the bathing-suit competition, which celebrated the scantily clad adolescent female body, to attract large male audiences.52 The unwillingness of the beauty pageant’s promoters to mute the underlying eroticism of parading young, partially nude women in front of a crowd of ogling men eventually forced the popular end-of-summer event to close in 1928.53 The absence of men who were present for the primary purpose of viewing the naked female body made it difficult for Judge Goldstein to condemn nudist activities that seemed to extend current fashion trends more than they resembled the commercial spectacle of the bathing-suit competition.
Nudists also built on the popularity of previous physical-training programs that offered health through strenuous activity and specially designed machines and apparatuses. Many of the first nudist meetings occurred in gymnasiums, where health reformers had urged urban dwellers to exercise underused muscles in order to ward off disease, to relax the nervous system, and to strengthen moral behavior.54 In response to Progressive Era fears that the rapid pace of urbanization caused physical and moral degeneration, educators encouraged men and women to frequent gymnasiums, where they participated in callisthenic routines, used specially designed exercise equipment, or did gymnastics. By the turn of the century, hundreds of gymnasiums affiliated with schools, universities, athletic clubs, hospitals, and various other institutions offered individuals the opportunity to exercise the whole year.55 Building on this tradition, nudists gathered at gymnasiums, where they tossed the medicine ball, engaged in rigorous callisthenic routines, and participated in exacting swimming exercises. In contrast to previous gymnastic training systems, such as Muscular Christianity, which attempted to correct aberrant sexual behavior through physical fitness, nudists contended that wearing clothes hindered movement and was patently unhygienic in collecting perspiration while exercising. Nudist activities appeared to be an eccentric extension of previous popular physical-training systems.