The messages of health, professionalism, and recreation that began to define nudism reached film audiences through the 1933 release of Elysia. One of nudism’s earliest movies, its format, content, and style resembled early exploitation films that used the narrative of health and medicine to offer audiences the spectacle of sex or nudity.107 The genre of exploitation films, according to the film historian Eric Schaefer, developed from “two of the hallmarks of progressivism—exposé and education.”108 Small, struggling film studios that were looking to make quick profits exploited the early efforts of Progressive Era reformers to inform audiences about the dangers of social evils such as venereal disease or prostitution through the exhibition of detailed and graphic exposés. Elysia, named after the nudist park founded by Hobart Glassey just outside Los Angeles, chronicled a fictional reporter’s efforts to investigate the headline-grabbing nudist phenomenon. After briefly visiting a bookstore and inquiring about the movement, the reporter is referred to a “Dr. King” for more information. Imparting respectability and paternal authority, the elderly physician, who wears a formal suit and sits in an ornate and spacious office, introduces nudism through the ancient Greek figures of Herodotus and Hippocrates. He continues his introduction to nudism by showing an anthropological-documentary-style collection of film clips exhibiting the “fine physical attributes” of the exotic naked bodies of “dark Africa.” Nudism provided an ideal premise for an exploitation film.109
Elysia made a case for American nudism through its capacity as a legitimate health measure and as an answer to the racial weaknesses of modern Depression Era society. In the 1920s, Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), along with the release of Robert Flaherty’s early ethnographic films Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926), greatly increased the public’s interest in fieldwork-based ethnography. After the stock market crash of 1929, it also gave rise to a genre of exotic exploitation films that offered “images of a way of life unconstrained by pressures of the modern consumer economy.”110 Documentary-style films set in the jungle or other exotic locales offered scenes of plenty, a sexual utopia with beautiful, half-naked women available for the taking. Further, the display of the abject black primitive reinforced the self-esteem of white workers. Similarly, in Elysia, the character of Dr. King promised audiences that the “exposure of the body to the sun was absolutely necessary to recuperate and build up the flesh” and critical to the “success of the civilized race.”111 To show the benefits of heliotherapy and nudism, he exhibited several short travelogues with naked nonwhite men, women, and children dancing, swimming, and working in the fields. The film echoed previous nudist books and magazines that explained how the practice of nudism strengthened the race since the removal of clothing exposed the weak and diseased while also empowering men and women to select mates with strong and healthy bodies.
American nudism repeated the eugenic rhetoric popular in the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century. The rise of National Socialism in Germany in 1933 gave voice to racists within the nudist movement, such as Richard Ungewitter, Heinrich Pudor, and Hans Suren, who had long participated in nationalist strains of nudism but now experienced greater prominence under an ideology of National Socialism; for them, nudity was another way to promote Aryan racial purity. In the United States, most nudists sought to distance the movement from its German origins and the unpopular Nazi ideology. Many, however, still subscribed to eugenic racial ideology. Just as the psychologist G. Stanley Hall had once sought to reverse the effects of overcivilization by urging white, middle-class children to behave like savages, so too did the actor playing Dr. King in Elysia when he argued that men and women should adopt “strictly natural measures” that gave primitive bodies the “muscular character of a thoroughbred race horse or perhaps a jungle animal.”112 Offering white men physical strength, virility, and triumph over a failed consumer society, the film relied on the same eugenic tropes that Gail Bederman argues defined white, middle-class manhood in the first part of the twentieth century.113 Dr. King promised mostly white, male audiences that abandoning the “unhealthy garments” worn “for the sake of . . . custom or convention” would build the necessary strength to “outdo the savage at any sort of game, pastime, sport or fight the savage might purpose.”114 Through the presentation of exotic peoples as racial inferiors but also as superior physical specimens, the film used the fears of overcivilization and race suicide to make a case for the therapeutic values of American nudism.
The reliance on medical authority persisted throughout the film with the continuing screen presence of Dr. King. Leaving the physician’s office, the film exhibits the camp’s physical distance from the city and social convention through a prolonged transition to the grounds of Elysia. The reporter, along with the audience, is transported by Dr. King’s secretary, via a long, twisting ride in a convertible, through the San Bernardino Mountains. The next day, the doctor graciously joins the skeptical reporter and disrobes, giving his guest the courage to also go without clothes. He then gives the reporter and the audience a tour of the facilities, all the while providing therapeutic justifications for going naked with other men and women in a natural setting. In one instance, the doctor again employs the image of the “exotic other” to rationalize nudism when he asserts that the “American Indian never caught colds until the white man put clothes on him.”115 Elysia introduced American nudism not only as a health movement but also as an answer to the racial weaknesses of modern Depression Era society.
Despite the film’s pretensions, Elysia failed to satisfactorily address the erotic and immoral associations attached to the exposure of the naked body in public spaces and to the opposite sex. Heliotherapists, not unlike their predecessors and other practicing physicians, labored to convince patients that nudity had a therapeutic purpose. Rollier expressed disappointment about social understandings of nudity. He acknowledged the “considerable prejudice against the reduction of clothing,” even in the case of small children, whom many people did not consider “‘decent’ unless they [were to] wear more clothes.” Furthermore, Rollier contended that the “habit of living naked in the open air not only does not provoke any sensuality, but suppresses the very raison d’être of the unhealthy curiosity which often troubles the mind of the child.”116 Other physicians specializing in heliotherapy expressed frustration with “ingrained ideas of modesty and dress,” in reference to the difficulty they had in getting patients to unclothe and appreciate “air baths.”117 Articles on heliotherapy suggested that physicians use “considerable tact” to convince patients that the “unconventional procedure” of the “full exposure of the body to air baths” could yield health benefits.118 Not even the setting of the doctor’s office and the authority of clinical medicine could fully answer the moral anxieties aroused by the public exposure of the naked body to the opposite sex.
The perceived immorality of bringing naked men and women together proved to be one of the main obstacles to nudism’s future success. Representing a resurgent effort within the Catholic Church to assert itself against the moral failings of a consumer society, Pope Pius XI, on March 5, 1935, “severely condemned” nudism. In an address to Lenten preachers, he asserted that the “cult of nudity . . . should be singled out amidst the pagan tendencies of our modern time.”119 The rise of organized nudism in Europe, especially in Germany, influenced the pope to see the movement as part of a larger “mania” occurring in society that made people want to “see everything and enjoy everything to the full[est].”120 Referring to the “cult of nudity” as a “horrible word and horribly blasphemy [sic],” the pope thought that nudism only concerned itself with the “quest after pleasure and . . . amusement” and “exhibited an immodesty that often exceeds that of ancient pagan life.”121 The growing tolerance of sexual expression in modern society motivated moral leaders such as Pope Pius XI to publicly oppose nudism in order to reestablish a boundary that demarcated the illicit from the respectable.
The Rever
end Ilsley Boone seized on the pope’s well-publicized comments to make a case for the spiritual and moral foundations of American nudism. He answered the pope’s harangue against the international movement by boldly asserting in the New York Times that “His Holiness” had been “misinformed” about the “Character of American Nudism.” Boone cited the “members of the Protestant clergy and Catholic laymen of unquestioned integrity” who participated in American nudism and maintained that, “from its inception,” the movement had been of a “uniformly high moral order.”122 The centrality of religion in nudism dated back to its founding in Europe. Richard Ungewitter, one of the founders of Nacktkultur in Germany in 1905, was a Lutheran minister, and the Reverend C. E. Norwood, a Congregational Church pastor, wrote the “best handbook on nudism in England.”123 In the United States, Rev. Boone and Rev. Henry Strong Huntington, a Unitarian minister, played a critical role in shaping nudism in the United States.124 Rev. Huntington served as the first president of the INC from 1933 to 1934, and in 1934, Rev. Boone assumed the position he was to hold for decades as the organization’s executive secretary. Rev. Boone declared that the presence of devout leaders in Germany, England, and the United States proved that nudism “cannot be very radically out of harmony with a Christian life nor contrary to the Scriptures.”125
The many religious leaders in the movement gave nudism a distinctly spiritual character. Between 1930 and 1940, numerous articles and even more letters, editorials, and commentaries appeared in the Nudist discussing the relationship between nudism and religion.126 Nudist leaders hoped to support Christian values by developing the moral character of participants through their naked lifestyle. Although the scriptures defined the body as the source of carnal desires, the disciple Paul also referred to it as the “temple of God.” Christian spiritual texts encouraged the “solicitous care” of the body and had taught worshipers that they had “no right to abuse [their] body or health.”127 Boone presented nudism as a resource for devout Christians to take care of their bodies in a spiritually sound manner. While there was no “‘converting power’ in nudism,” the social practice, according to Boone, would “change the moral character of a man” and provide a “powerful reinforcement to the inner Christian life.”128 He asserted that when the “sincerely minded nudists . . . experienced the truth of the all-cleanness of the human body in social nudism they know a freedom and mental liberation never before experienced.”129 For the Christian, Boone believed this feeling of revelation represented an “unquestionable confirmation of the rightness of nudism and its consonance with Christian idealism in the personal life.”130 Boone declared that the “Christian view of the body is in perfect harmony with the nudist conception of the body.”131
By incorporating religious and moral values into nudist principles and ideals, nudists also repositioned themselves in the ongoing battle to define the boundaries around sexual liberalism. Nudists asserted that physical attraction decreased by permitting men and women to see each other naked in a nonerotic setting rather than accentuating sexualized parts of the body as the bathing suit or burlesque show did. Rev. Huntington defined nudism as the “breaking of the taboo on the sight of the body.”132 Another congregational minister believed that nudist practices “hold the key to the solution of obscene plays, pictures, language and literature” because through nudism these “things cease to interest; they fall flat.”133 This did not mean, however, that nudists intended to “destroy sex interest.”134 They wanted to restore the “natural function of procreation stripped of obscene and salacious elements.”135 Many nudists maintained that the interaction of naked male and female bodies of all age groups would make sex morally healthy.
The effort to explain and present nudism through Christianity resonated with individuals searching for an alternative sexual ethic. Francis and Mason Merrill’s Nudism Comes to America surveyed over two hundred nudists and found devotees mostly from “liberal” Protestant sects, such as Unitarians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and “modernist Presbyterians.”136 The pope’s public hostility to nudism likely made many Catholics wary of the movement. Nevertheless, the authors felt that the “religious attitudes” of nudists were especially “significant” since “nakedness, sex, and the bible have for so long been made religious concerns.” In their survey, they found “three or four good Catholics” and “a half a dozen who put themselves down as belonging to the Jewish religion.” But they recorded an overwhelming presence of Protestant denominations that were “represented both by Church members in good standing and nominal Protestants who are not greatly concerned with religious duties.”137 While the range of Protestant denominations varied, the authors did not document any members of the “more exotic religious cults.” Rather, they declared, “our nudists are nothing out of the ordinary way of godliness.”138
Several prominent social reformers who fought to expand the boundaries restricting freedom of expression and access to sexual knowledge also turned to Christian values and morality to win support for their cause. Margaret Sanger, in addition to couching her arguments in socialism, feminism, eugenics, and medical science, appealed to Protestant perfectionism by arguing that once men and women abandoned an unclean conception of sex, healthy marriages and families would produce “a race that is morally and spiritually free.”139 Sanger blamed Christians for creating immorality by denying women access to sexual knowledge and birth control. She especially resented Roman Catholic organizations that fervently resisted making birth control available to women. Yet the growing popularity of companionate marriage, the success of the suffragist movement, and new consumption patterns helped Sanger successfully court Protestant groups that accepted the role that birth control and sexual knowledge played in promoting healthier, stable, and moral families.140 Hoping to make progress in the struggle to expand the boundaries of sexual expression, American nudists followed birth control advocates such as Sanger who built broad coalitions to win support for the open distribution of birth control.
Like many American psychologists who subscribed to the writings of Sigmund Freud, the religious leaders of nudism hoped to promote a healthy psychological state of mind by alleviating sexual repression. Rev. Huntington especially wanted to address the sexual repression of men and women who grew up in “Christian homes” and learned to “fight so-called evil thoughts” and “resist such temptations.”141 Since many Christians learned to “conquer the flesh with the sword of the spirit,” he lamented Christianity’s concealment of the body. As an alternative, Huntington claimed that the nudist lifestyle “produces quite remarkable psychological and social results and may have decided effects upon the character.”142 Covering the body, he argued, perverted the normal human interest in sex and produced sexual degeneracy.143
The efforts of American nudists to produce a healthier mind by bringing naked men and women together drew the attention of prominent academic psychologists. Howard C. Warren, the head of the Department of Psychology at Princeton University in 1903 and president of the American Psychological Association in 1913, took a strong interest in the nudist movement. As the editor of the Psychological Review, Warren not only recognized the emerging movement but endorsed nudism in an article that presented his experiences as a participant-observer in a German nudist camp. Warren’s “Nudism and the Body Taboo” corroborated nudists’ claims that their practice minimized eroticism.144 Although he admitted to an initial shock, he commented on how quickly he became comfortable in a social environment of naked men and women. He did not witness any “petting or flirting, no trace of ribaldry, no presumptuous behavior,” and certainly “nothing to suggest that social nudism induced the virile reflex.” In fact, he went so far as to declare that “social nudism does not in any way foster eroticism.” Instead, it promoted a “saner sex outlook and more natural relations between men and women, even during the years of early sexual maturity.”145 From his findings, he drew two conclusions of “considerable psychological importance.” He determined that the body ta
boo cannot be considered a “fundamental human trait” since it can be “broken without detrimental results.” Second, he did not accept that social nudism constituted indecency but rather argued that a “widespread and persistent social convention had made it so.”146 Endorsed by psychologists opposed to sexual repression, nudism framed its principles and ideals as morally, mentally, and physically beneficial to its members.
Alongside a leadership that built a national nudist organization around respectable therapeutic principles and religious ideals emerged another group of early nudist promoters who saw social nudity as part of a radical critique of modern life and as an opportunity to advocate for sexual freedom. In Nudism in Modern Life: The New Gymnosophy, Maurice Parmelee introduced a vision of nudism that grew out of his critiques of the capitalist system, his interest in eugenics, and his calls for sex reform. The radical, bohemian intellectual community that flourished in New York City’s Lower East Side shaped Parmelee’s worldview and writings. While working at a University Settlement House from 1904 to 1906, Parmelee associated with Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London and joined radical and liberal organizations such as the Collectivist Society and the Sunrise Club. He also frequented the Liberal Club, a favorite Greenwich Village locale where left-wing bohemian intellectuals, artists, and civil libertarians frequently gathered and debated the major issues of the day. These early associations and experiences shaped his career as an influential sociologist and later as a government bureaucrat. After graduating from Yale in 1904 and receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1909, Parmelee published numerous books on world politics, anthropology, criminology, and economic theory and held professorial chairs at the University of Kansas, the University of Missouri, the University of Minnesota, and the College of the City of New York before leaving academia during the First World War to serve as a government economist. Over the course of his academic career, Parmelee had developed a reputation as a socialist and a atheist and, he believed that this ultimately led to him being “shunted out of [academia] mainly by the fact that many of [his] ideas which [he] expressed in [his] writing were not acceptable to the powers that be in the American Academic World.”147
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