The acknowledgment that nudity had a place in American society by the Court of Appeals, the second-highest court in the country, impacted obscenity law beyond granting legal protection to nudist books. The justices declared, “it cannot be assumed that nudity is obscene per se and under all circumstances.”29 In defending this statement, the court acknowledged the subjective experience of nakedness. The justices quoted Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex, in which he asserted that clothing, rather than complete nudity, causes eroticism, and referenced extensively William Graham Sumner’s anthropological work Folkways in order to compare the different taboos toward nudity from around the world. By 1940, the justices believed that “no reasonable person at the present time” would object to medical treatises that displayed the nude figure. Although the justices did not necessarily endorse nudism, they maintained that “normal, intelligent persons” would recognize that a need exists for the scientific study, exposition, and picturization” of nudist ideas.30 They felt that “civilization has advanced far enough, at last, to permit the picturization of the human body for scientific and educational purposes.”31 The Parmelee decision established that any work with scholarly or academic merit could legally display the naked body.
The significance of the appellate ruling did not escape the national media. Newspapers covered the decision as another example of changing obscenity laws that no longer could be used to ban literary and artistic works that conveyed sexual themes. The New York Times pointed out the obvious in its headline “Nudity in Art Upheld as Proper by Court,” and the Washington Post placed the decision in the context of the landmark Ulysses decision.32 Yet the decision also raised concerns. On February 25, 1942, the Washington Times-Herald published an article by Frank Waldrop that brought attention to Parmelee’s other books and suggested that “some gentleman in Congress might take a peek into these and find out the shadow of coming events, as foreseen by a public servant of Mr. Parmelee’s temper.”33 Waldrop had a reputation for being a “sort of journalistic spokesman” for Congressman Martin Dies, the chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities.34
“Brash Mr. Dies”
On March 30, 1942, a month after Frank Waldrop’s column, the Chicago Tribune ran the front-page headline “Dies Hits 35 U.S. Officials as Reds.”35 Dies declared that Parmelee was “outstanding among these officials” because he had written Nudism in Modern Life.36 In a letter to Vice President Henry Wallace, Dies condemned Parmelee’s recent appointment as the chief economic adviser to the Board of Economic Warfare along with his three-hundred-page nudist treatise as “an attack upon the moral structure of our society.”37
Despite Parmelee’s reputation within American academia as a radical, he worked as a government bureaucrat for a number of years prior to his appointment to the Board of Economic Warfare. Even though he had become “persona non grata in the academic world mainly because the suspicion had arisen that [he] was a severe critic of the capitalist system,” Parmelee took advantage of the fact that “no one concerned with [his] early appointments in the government service had any acquaintance with [his] writings.”38 In 1918, Parmelee accepted a position on the War Trade Board, which oversaw the domestic and foreign commerce of the United States. He then participated in the administration of the Allied blockade by monitoring the surplus rations provided to the nations bordering Germany. This work caught the attention of the Department of State, which hired him in 1920 as a special assistant responsible for assessing the postwar economic situation in western and central Europe. When the United States entered the Second World War, Parmelee’s experience as a government bureaucrat during the First World War made him a logical choice to serve as the chief economic adviser on the Board of Economic Warfare.
The legal controversy surrounding Nudism in Modern Life, however, drew the attention of government officials to Parmelee’s unconventional views and radical critiques. In 1938, when Judge Wheat ruled against Nudism in Modern Life, Parmelee was working for the Department of Agriculture. Not long after the decision had been announced in the press, Parmelee received a warning from the head of his division that the “Department of Agriculture would tolerate no socialist in its service.” Four months later, he was terminated due to “reorganization.” It then became very difficult for Parmelee to maintain government employment. He received an appointment in the Treasury Department in the Division of Monetary Research, only to be terminated a few months later. Another temporary position in the Department of the Interior ended in early 1941. After ten months of unemployment, he joined the Board of Economic Warfare. Although Parmelee’s experience with the War Trade Board during the First World War made him “peculiarly suitable” for the position, the U.S. Court of Appeals decision made him particularly vulnerable to political attack and persecution.39
The rapidly shifting political climate of the Second World War called for new tactics and methods from conservative politicians. The growth of union activity, government programs, and the Communist Party during the Depression years had led to an upsurge in anticommunist hysteria from the political Right in the United States. Beginning in 1938, HUAC held sensational public hearings where congressmen accused union leaders, New Deal agencies, and a multitude of other organizations of being under communist influence.40 The beginning of the Second World War shifted public attention and support away from fears of foreign radicalism. Americans stood united behind the war effort. Citizens not only dramatically mobilized to support the troops but rallied behind the leadership of the Roosevelt administration. The United States even allied itself with the Soviet Union. For Martin Dies, these new alliances threatened to undermine his campaign to find and root out radical subversive forces in the United States. To justify appropriating more funds to his controversial committee, he needed sensational headlines to rally the public behind his anticommunist agenda. Employing individuals’ private behavior to undermine their public authority, Dies’s persecution of Parmelee proved to be the perfect spectacle to recapture the public’s attention and to justify the continued financial support of his recently overshadowed HUAC.
The nonthreatening character of nudism in the public eye made it an ideal platform to use people’s intimate sexual behavior to undermine their public authority. Nudism did not carry the same gravity as homosexuality. After the end of Prohibition, states such as New York passed a series of laws designed to exclude homosexuals from previously underground bars and cabarets and censored theaters that featured gender-impersonation performances. In addition, in the 1934 Motion Picture Production Code, Hollywood studios banned any references to homosexuals or “sex perversion” in films. In contrast, the media presented the nudist movement as more of an oddity than a threat to the strained gender norms of Depression Era American society. Throughout the 1930s, newspapers across the country regularly printed stories covering nudist raids, trials, and conventions. Since nudism could be discussed freely, Dies did not hesitate to condemn Parmelee’s work on the nudist movement. He asserted that Parmelee “advocates the widespread practice of nudism in this country,” including in the home, in the office, and in the factory. He courted more controversy when he quoted Parmelee’s speculation that sex differences would abate in a nudist society to the point that the “convent and monastery, harem and military barrack, clubs and schools exclusively for each sex will disappear, and the sexes will live a more normal and happier life together.”41
With nudism providing the necessary headlines, Dies employed the same tactics he had used to persecute alleged communist subversives in the late 1930s. In the first HUAC hearings in 1938, congressmen linked witnesses to communism by accusing them of engaging in lawful activities with suspected subversive organizations. They then dramatically concluded that this participation showed the witnesses’ commitment to the communist cause. Dies employed this same tactic when he revealed that Parmelee’s name had appeared on the list of members of the American League for Peace and Democracy. To associate Parmelee with Euro
pean radicalism, Dies also made it a point to depict the sociologist as a foreign national. Parmelee, the son of missionaries from Vermont, had been born in Constantinople and had traveled extensively in Europe, the Soviet Union, India, and China. Twisting this information, Dies failed to mention that Parmelee’s parents were born in the United States and, instead, implied that he had “spent several years in Nudist camps in Europe.”42
Parmelee’s many academic works also provided an opportunity for Dies to offer the public additional incriminating evidence. After receiving a Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1909, Parmelee quickly became a prominent figure in the emerging field of sociology. The Principles of Anthropology and Sociology in Their Relations to Criminal Procedure (1908), Inebriety in Boston (1909), Poverty and Social Progress (1916), and Criminology (1918) all established Parmelee as an expert in the field of sociological criminology. His other works, titled Farewell to Poverty (1935), Bolshevism, Fascism, and the Liberal Democratic State (1934), and of course, Nudism in Modern Life (1933), caught the attention of Dies.43
Dies contended that “any one of thousands of passages could be cited from these volumes to show the communist viewpoint of the author.”44 Dies then singled out a passage in which Parmelee explained that “customary nudity is impossible under the existing undemocratic social, economic and political organization.” To further link communism and nudism, Dies referenced another passage in Nudism in Modern Life, which stated, “While gymnosophists [nudists] are not necessarily socialists or communists, these colonies furnish excellent opportunities for experiments along communistic lines.”45 Dies used Parmelee’s radicalism to characterize all nudists as a threat to social convention, sex differences, and the existing political and economic system.
In calling for Parmelee’s resignation, the congressman from Texas challenged the entire Roosevelt administration in the first months of the Second World War. Dies questioned how Parmelee received his appointment under Vice President Wallace.46 The congressman wondered how someone who “advocates such a crackpot and immoral plan,” who clearly had a “warped and unhealthy mind,” could receive such an important appointment. Dies, referring to Parmelee’s prominent role in successfully appealing the Customs Service’s seizure of Nudism in Modern Life, asserted, “It cannot be said . . . that the government did not have notice of Mr. Parmelee’s background.”47 Dies attacked Parmelee’s credentials further when he questioned why Wallace did not fill this important post with someone whose “outlook in life is wholesomely American and not embellished with crackpot ideas of nudism, technocracy, communism, or any other brand of revolution.”48
Extending beyond the halls of Congress, the effort to use Parmelee and the nudist movement to attack New Deal policies and the Roosevelt administration made its way into popular culture. The Chicago Daily Tribune, which voiced the conservative ideology of its editor, Colonel Robert McCormick, joined Dies’s cause by mocking potential postwar nudist colonies. McCormick, who resented the increase of federal power under the Roosevelt administration and opposed the United States’ entry into the Second World War, was a more-than-willing ally to Congressman Dies. An editorial cartoon titled “An Appropriate Haven” used nudism to critique the New Deal coalition. Under a sign that reads, “post-war economy Nudist Camp,” a smiling, skinny, bespectacled, pointy-mustached Maurice Parmelee stands with a sash that reads, “Nude Dealer,” while he bellows, “Welcome Comrade!” The cartoon then mocks the size and waste of the federal government by picturing a fat, sloppy tax collector who holds a long list that reads, “Waste, Bungling, and Boon-Doggling.” Just outside the colony stands a short, meek taxpayer who has lost his shirt and possibly will lose his pants next.49 The title of the cartoon combined with the high fence in the image to compare New Deal policies to the secretive, illicit, and shameful activities of the nudist camp.
Editorial cartoons in the Chicago Tribune used Martin Dies’s attack on Maurice Parmelee to link the secretive and illicit activities of the nudist camp with New Deal policies. (“An Appropriate Haven,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 31, 1942, 10)
In a letter that appeared in the nation’s newspapers alongside articles announcing Dies’s accusations, Vice President Wallace attacked the representative from Texas as a threat to public morale.50 Challenging Dies’s patriotism in “these days of crisis and tension,” Wallace asserted that the congressman’s actions “might as well come from Goebbels himself.”51 Wallace saw the congressman as a “greater danger to . . . national safety than thousands of Axis soldiers within [America’s] borders.”52 Because Wallace believed that most Americans considered nudism either harmless or insignificant, he denounced Dies’s tactics as a threat to national unity and the war effort.
Wallace’s defense of Parmelee implied that nudism remained so marginal that it posed little threat to American morality. The small number of people practicing nudism in the United States allowed the vice president to argue that Dies’s tactics would be “overlooked as the product of a witchcraft mind” or “would make him the laughing stock of the country.”53 Wallace asserted that Dies’s “intense itch for publicity” was the main source of the current controversy, since “not one person in 100,000 in this country is interested in nudism.”54 While he had “never heard of the gentleman [Parmelee] until last Saturday morning,” he promised that the Federal Bureau of Investigation would investigate the matter and stated that the accused would be dismissed if Dies’s accusations turned out to be true.55 Wallace nevertheless called for a “public apology to the men whose reputations Mr. Dies has smeared without giving them a chance to be heard.”56 The vice president then defended Parmelee’s reputation by pointing out that Alfred Knopf, “one of the established publishing houses in this country,” published Nudism in Modern Life and by noting Parmelee’s standing as a sociologist whose “textbooks have been long known and used in the colleges and universities of this country.”57 For Wallace, the Texas congressman’s actions represented a “malicious distortion of facts” meant to “inflame the public mind.”58
Many liberal members of Congress followed Wallace’s lead by treating nudism as harmless or insignificant, by focusing on Dies’s impact on morale, and by suggesting that the congressman desperately sought publicity. James O’Connor, representative from Montana, who had previously supported HUAC, found it disturbing that Dies would attack the Board of Economic Warfare when he should be rooting out the “numerous agents and sympathizers” of Germany and Japan.59 O’Connor then introduced an editorial printed in the typically conservative Washington Post under the heading “Brash Mr. Dies” to reject the self-serving motives of Dies.60 The editorial described Wallace’s “tongue lashing of Martin Dies” as a “thoroughly workmanlike job” that the “brash congressman from Texas had . . . coming to him.”61 Questioning why Dies “chose this moment to assail these persons,” the editorial speculated that the congressman sought out “headlines” that would help him “overcome the reluctance of the Appropriations Committee to approve funds for the continuation of the Dies Committee.”62
The Nation objected to Dies’s new tactic, which “combines politics with sex,” and denounced the “Texan’s unsavory methods.”63 The liberal magazine presented the same argument as Wallace and his supporters, but it did not avoid the sex angle. Dies’s turn to sex through his persecution of Parmelee revealed the struggling congressman’s desperate efforts to regain headlines with subject matter that captured the public’s attention through titillation. The magazine found that Dies’s tactics and methods also relied on deliberate inaccuracies. It noted that Parmelee happened to be born in Constantinople only because his parents left their home state of Vermont as Congregationalist missionaries to Turkey. It then pointed out that Dies neglected to mention that the lower court’s unfavorable verdict was reversed by the Court of Appeals, “which paid tribute to Parmelee as a writer.”64 The weekly periodical then defended Parmelee’s long career as a government bureaucrat. Dies ignored the fact that Parmelee left academia for go
vernment service in 1918. Beginning with the First World War, Parmelee worked for the War Trade Board administering the Allied blockade in London and later served as special assistant to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes.65 Far from the image of a roving foreign radical presented by Dies, the Nation presented Parmelee as a long-serving government bureaucrat with a distinguished record of service. The Nation saw this incident as another attempt by Dies to “hound progressives out of the government” and called on its readers to “fight now against the grant of an appropriation to him by Congress, and to defend the Board of Economic Warfare.”66
Nudists saw Congressman Dies as another example of modern American Puritanism. Referring to Parmelee as a “gentleman and a scholar,” the editors of Sunshine and Health maintained that there was “nothing subversive or revolutionary” in Nudism in Modern Life.67 Nudists saw Dies as “prejudiced, and ignorant in matters of everyday cleanmindedness and healthful living.”68 They felt, like Wallace and the Nation, that Dies represented a “cheap politician . . . trying to promote his own self aggrandizement by way of the social, business or political injury of another.”69 They believed that Dies had overestimated the popular prejudice against nudism and contended that most politicians, like the general public, were “either sympathetic or at the worst indifferent” toward nudism.70 Nudists presented the incident as an anomaly and took pleasure in Wallace’s rebuke of Dies and in the fact that attacks against nudism were “now so infrequent.”71
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