Naked

by Brian S. Hoffman

  Governor Lehman ignored the many calls to veto the bill when he also equated nudist activities with the commercial exploitation of sexuality. Lehman feared the “professional exploitation of nudism for profit,” especially after the appeals court ruled in favor of Burke, Topel, and Maniscalco.148 On May 1, 1935, he signed the bill into law.149 The governor explained, “Irrespective of the merits of the sincere practice of nudism,” there could be no “justification for some of the so-called nudist gymnasiums or colonies where the general public is admitted on the payment of an admission fee.”150 He maintained that the “failure to enact such a statute at this point would lead to widespread use of exhibitionism for financial gain which our present laws would be ineffective to prevent.”151 Governor Lehman found the arguments made by a few “sincere” nudists unpersuasive in a censorship system that relied on democratic processes and the values of the average person. Rather, he believed that the average New Yorker associated the naked body with commercial sexuality and that permitting nudist activities in New York City posed a serious threat to the remaining boundaries of public decency.

  Conclusion

  The 1935 passage of the McCall antinudism bill in New York linked nudist activities to the lewd exposure of the body. Nudism no longer referred to naked men and women gathering in a gymnasium for callisthenic exercises. At the 1939 World’s Fair held in New York City, Robert Nevins, Samuel J. Friedman, and Harry R. Dash attempted to publicize the Cuban Village by setting up a “Miss Nude of 1939” contest. The men did not have any relationship with the nudist activities that had been banned from the state a few years earlier, but they wanted to use the spectacle of parading two women with their “breasts exposed” to bring in large audiences, just as the Miss America Pageant and burlesques houses had done throughout the Depression. With the antinudism bill in place, however, Sheriff Maurice Fitzgerald did not hesitate to arrest Marge Berk of the Frozen Alive Show and Dolores of the Cuban Village when he “raided” the event. After charging the two women with indecent exposure, a police officer conflated their attempt to exploit female sexual display with nudism—just as the governor had equated nudist meetings with burlesque performances. The officer bragged, “The Nude of the Nudists did not go on as scheduled.”152 The next day, the New York Times echoed the officer’s equation of nudism with commercial eroticism when it announced the creation of a special investigative commission by New York City’s Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia with the headline “Mayor Puts Curb on Nudist Bakers.”153 The police, the press, and the mayor now used “nudism” to refer to the erotic display of the female body for a paying male audience.

  This had not always been the case. Nudism came to the United States at a moment when public attitudes toward sexuality, nudity, and display were shifting away from repression and exhibited an unprecedented willingness to experiment with exposure of the body. The first nudists arrested in New York City saw the charges against them dismissed because the judge recognized the dramatic changes occurring in public attitudes. The movement also received substantial support from immigrants, especially from Germany, who wanted to re-create the Nacktkultur they had enjoyed in their homeland. Nevertheless, equating nudism with commercial sex, concerned citizens, progressive reformers, and politicians saw the open interaction of men and women as a direct threat to remaining standards of decency that required their immediate efforts to permanently remove nudists from city beaches, parks, and gymnasiums. Unwelcome in Chicago and New York City, the thousands of American men and women who enjoyed nudism set out in search of a space free of the assumptions and prejudices that made nakedness a crime.

  2

  Out in the Open

  Rural Life, Respectability, and the Nudist Park

  After attending a showing of This Nude World at the Castle Theater in Chicago, Alois Knapp and his wife, Lorena, decided to convert their two-hundred-acre farm located in Roselawn, Indiana, into a nudist camp. Although they had never dreamed that they would go into the “nakedness business,” the idyllic scenes that they had seen on screen—of nude men and women frolicking naked in Germany, France, and the United States—profoundly affected the couple, who had privately enjoyed “sunbaths for over ten years.”1 Witnessing the unfriendly reception that nudist proposals received in Rogers Park, the couple thought that Lorena’s family farm, located fifty-five miles south of Chicago and surrounded by thick woods, could avoid controversy by providing privacy and thereby creating the perfect weekend escape for men, women, and children to enjoy nature, sunbathing, and fresh air in the nude. They did not worry about the local community since Lorena had spent “practically all of her life among the people of Roselawn.”2 Instead, the middle-aged couple gave “Zoro Nature Park,” founded on July 16, 1933, a distinctly mom-and-pop character. In little more than a month, the small group grew to over fifty members. By October, Alois and Lorena limited the membership to two hundred in order to preserve the “community spirit among them.”3

  The history of nudism’s emergence in the United States reveals that the sparsely populated rural areas of the United States proved more hospitable to the fledgling movement than did the major cities. Until recently, migration into the cities in the twentieth century influenced historians of sexuality to focus primarily on the urban landscape. Scholars have examined the many ways urban life expanded or restricted the expression of human sexuality in the United States.4 This analysis has created a rich and complex narrative and unearthed numerous sources that have given voice and agency to working-class men and women, African Americans, and the gay and lesbian community. Yet it has often overlooked the rural communities surrounding the American metropolis. In Men Like That, John Howard addressed this omission by detailing the everyday practice of homosexuality in small towns across rural Mississippi. Analyzing private residences, local swimming holes, truck stops, and diners, he noted how “notions of propriety and transgression . . . shift with the site.”5 As Howard observes, “some sites enabled homosex; others hindered it.”6 Nudists discovered that urban spaces, and the repressive movements and authorities there, accentuated the eroticism of the naked body, while rural locations allowed for multiple and contradictory conceptions of nakedness that could be molded and constructed around nudist ideals. Though nudists still chafed against instances of moral outrage in rural America, the movement defined the wide-open spaces surrounding the metropolis as innocent in order to temper the eroticism of going naked. The American countryside provided the ideal setting for the healthy, nature-oriented, and moral principles of nudism and gave the movement the respectability necessary to develop and prosper in the United States.

  Emerging around small towns scattered across the country, many nudist camps gained a fragile hold on respectability by embracing an idealized rural conception of nudity linked closely with nature, health, and recreation. Amid rapid urbanization and the rise of a consumer-oriented economy dominated by giant corporations and white-collar work, many intellectuals, physical-culture promoters, and urban reformers thought that Americans’ increasing disconnection with their natural environment threatened to weaken the nation. These anxieties fueled efforts during the Progressive Era to preserve the natural environment through a national park system,7 to support youth organizations such as the Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls,8 and to encourage the public’s fascination with cultural primitivism, as evidenced by the popularity of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes books and the curiosity generated by the discovery of Ishi, the “last wild Indian.”9 The rural nudist camp both allowed urban residents to escape the noise, pollution, and stresses of the city and removed the barriers that separated the individual from nature.

  The problems that plagued nudists’ efforts in Chicago and New York also reemerged in rural Indiana and Michigan. Going naked at a local lake or stream on a hot day remained part of everyday rural life, but the isolation and secrecy of some nudist camps bred suspicion and put the group’s moral character in doubt. The interaction of nude men and women in large numbers pa
rticularly upset gendered notions of modesty and sexuality. As a result, the same debates over the boundaries of sexual liberalism triggered by nudist activities in the city exploded in small rural towns.

  The nudist movement’s tenuous claims to respectability depended on blurring the erotic and the therapeutic. Nudists responded to a hostile public and an unfriendly court system by unifying scattered groups across the country into a national organization that worked to reframe nudism in accordance with American moral and ethical values. In addition to stressing the therapeutic value of going naked, nudist leaders such as the Reverend Ilsley Boone and the Reverend Henry Huntington attempted to communicate a moral understanding of nakedness that might make social nudity more palatable to American society. Yet a reticent nudist leadership also embraced the participation and contributions of committed political radicals, sex researchers, and civil libertarians, many of whom participated in the bohemian communities of New York City’s Greenwich Village. Maurice Parmelee’s Nudism in Modern Life: The New Gymnosophy (1931) and Jan Gay’s On Going Naked (1932) helped introduce nudism to the United States while also critiquing the modern capitalist economy, promoting sexual freedom, and appealing to emerging gay and lesbian communities. The therapeutic, familial, and rural character of nudism sheltered a number of liberal-minded activists who approved of the erotic possibilities of social nudity and advocated for radical change. The coexistence of the erotic and the therapeutic put nudists’ claims to respectability at risk. However, it also allowed the movement to build on the natural settings of its camps, to grow its membership, and to sustain a place in American society and culture.

  Zoro Nature Park

  In 1933, Alois and Lorena Knapp’s family farm seemed to provide the perfect setting for Zoro Nature Park, but to make the nudist camp respectable, the couple still needed to manage its grounds, to shape its membership, and to cultivate its relationship with the surrounding community. A lawyer and a writer, respectively, by occupation, Alois and Lorena lacked both extensive experience organizing a nudist camp and financial resources to invest in the project. And still, with only Jan Gay’s On Going Naked and Francis and Mason Merrill’s Among the Nudists to guide them, Alois and Lorena set out to establish and operate one of the first active nudist camps in the United States. Even without comprehensive resources or organizing experience, the camp benefited from the unique geographical features of the Midwest and soon stood out as an example for nudists around the country to follow and emulate. Alois and Lorena Knapp projected respectability in managing a rustic setting where members enjoyed the sun, fresh air, and physical activity without disrupting the moral sensibilities of the local community.

  In the decades prior to the founding of Zoro Nature Park, the removal of clothing in the wilderness had come to symbolize an idealized and nostalgic relationship with nature. In 1912, Joseph Knowles grabbed headlines in the Boston area when he went naked into the woods to prove that he could survive for two months without relying on any element of civilization.10 As urbanization took hold on the United States, the obscure woodsman obtained celebrity status across the nation. In 1919, the Boy Scouts of America re-created Knowles’s experience in the woods in the first of a series of five books titled Boy Scouts in the Wilderness. The two main characters of the novel prove their worth to the scouting movement when they go naked into the wilderness to live off the land for an entire month.11 Kenneth Webb, one of the main promoters of organized camping in the United States, considered nudity the “fifth freedom” in an Eden-like setting that would grant freedom from fear, want, hunger, and religious persecution.12 Independent of Progressive Era reforms, in rural small towns throughout the United States, the habit of taking a swim in the local lake or river sans clothing remained so common that the practice occurred across racial lines and doubled as a site for homosexual experimentation.13 The idea of bringing urban dwellers to Zoro Nature Park may have been unusual, but it was neither unprecedented nor out of line with the rural values of America’s small towns.

  Far away from Greenwich Village, burlesque theaters, and dance halls, America’s rural heartland provided many physical advantages for those who were interested in starting a small nudist colony. The Northeast region saw open spaces disappear and land prices rise. The Midwest, on the other hand, still had plenty of available flat, open, and affordable land near major cities such as Chicago, Columbus, and Detroit. Expecting to spend between $3,000 and $12,000 for fifty or more acres, nudists valued the surrounding areas of middle-sized cities, where the “open country [lay] much closer to the heart of the city and large farm acreages [were] much more readily found.”14 The success of these distant camps depended on the growing availability of the car and the development of an expanding network of roads to transport interested members to far-off locations where they could wander freely without having to worry about neighbors making unflattering insinuations. Using their cars, many families and individuals by the 1930s began visiting national parks, enjoying weekend sojourns into the country, and participating in the affordable practice of “auto-camping.”15 Located close to Chicago, where nudism had recently been suppressed, and just off the interstate highway, Zoro Nature Park was positioned for success.

  For Alois and Lorena to link their nudist activities to a desexualized and idealized conception of rural nudity, they needed to create a bucolic environment that lent itself to recreation, relaxation, and health. The woods that circled their farm had the makings of a place where men and women could sunbathe in privacy, participate in athletic activities, and take a break under tall trees that offered reprieve from the sun. Alois, cognizant of the current financial crisis, felt strongly that the natural setting of Zoro Nature Park would provide men and women with the “relaxation and repose” necessary during this “time of stress and strain.”16 The rustic grounds of Zoro Nature Park, which were soon developed into baseball fields, volleyball courts, and “woodsy walks, trails, and bridle paths,” satisfied many of the ideal requirements of a nudist camp. Nudists preferred a “sandy loam” that remained “soft and resilient” to the feet, “ample” play fields “well laid out in open meadows,” and the proportion between cleared and forested land to be “one to three or one to four.”17 The grounds of nudist camps not only provided a site where members could participate in group recreation but also minimized suspicions concerning sexual activity.

  The construction of a swimming pool, a mess hall, and dormitory buildings over the years at Zoro Nature Park further cultivated the recreational character of the grounds and set the bar for nudist camps around the country. The boom in the construction of swimming pools in the 1920s and 1930s18 and a membership skilled in a wide range of occupations contributed to the development of the camp’s built environment. Lacking ample funds, Alois and Lorena relied on the “cooperation of [their] members” to begin the building process “without going into debt.”19 For this reason, the camp recruited members who were willing to “plan and work” and who felt bound to “promote and to protect, to beautify and to love, their nature home which they [could] not help loving.”20 Alois and Lorena claimed that almost “every trade [was] represented among [the] membership,” including a minister whom they placed “in charge of [the] playground,” a plumber who took “care of [the] sanitation needs,” and a carpenter who did the building.21 Not wanting the camp to “become a commercial project,” however, the owners set yearly dues at the affordable rate of ten dollars to pay for the grounds’ “taxes and to put in the most essential improvements.”22

  The Lake O’ Woods club, also in rural Indiana, followed a similar path of development to Alois and Lorena Knapp’s Zoro Nature Park. It began with only a few members who sought out the perfect location to go naked. After an extensive search, they located the vast and secluded grounds near Valparaiso, Indiana, and in 1933 signed a lease in considerable “excess of [their] club income” in the hope that the expansive grounds would attract future members.23 The property, however, required a “number of safeguards
and improvements,” and the founding members often had to rely on their own personal funds to maintain the lease agreement.24 With far fewer members than Zoro Nature Park, the improvements made to the Lake O’ Woods grounds created a great deal of debt for the founding members. By 1935, the club had accumulated a $2,500 balance and had not even attracted enough members to cover its operating expenses. On the verge of collapse, the club decided to follow the Knapps’ decision to reduce its membership rates to attract more interest. Originally charging a twenty-five-dollar entrance fee and five-dollar monthly dues, the club reduced its rates to ten dollars for admission and three-dollar monthly dues. Soon after this adjustment, membership began to grow.25 With the club capable of paying down its debt, it now began exploring the possibility of purchasing the grounds.