The rustic and secluded early nudist camps of the 1930s had come a long way by the 1950s. After an “uncertain beginning,” when “singles and hesitant couples . . . making an unprecedented break in tradition” characterized most early visitors, nudists demanded “more and more of nudist parks.” Over the decades, nudists transformed these once humble spaces into the “nudist resort” that had “come to be best represented by the family group.”178 With advertisements for Sunshine Park enticing “congenial couples and families” to “enjoy the benefits of sunbathing” and to partake in “sports, swimming, and boating” while staying in cabins and dormitory accommodations at “reasonable rates,”179 it came as no surprise that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in the summer of 1950 attempted to collect a 20 percent tax on the membership fees and dues of several California nudist camps. Previously, the nudist park had been considered a nonprofit organization, since “any social, athletic, or sporting features are merely incidental” to the main purpose of promoting nudism, which Norval Packwood defined broadly as an organization that fostered public health, fought against the “body taboo,” and worked to reform obscenity laws.180 However, in 1953 the IRS “changed its view” and decreed in the Internal Revenue Bulletin that a “club that ‘promotes’ nudism” should pay taxes like any other resort or club.181 For better and for the worse, American nudism had emerged as an official form of recreation in the United States.
Michigan v. Hildabridle
The familial character promoted at nudist resorts and enforced through restrictive policies that excluded single men and people of color put the movement in a position to challenge local authorities who had previously raided camps and arbitrarily arrested members. Emblematic of many of the nudist clubs that emerged after the Second World War, Sunshine Gardens Health Resort, located near Battle Creek, Michigan, set the stage for one of the crucial legal battles in the history of American nudism. While nudist parks sprang up across the country in the 1950s, practicing nudism in the state of Michigan remained a risky proposition since the headline-grabbing Ring trial banned the lifestyle from the state in 1934. In the past, nudists had taken a nonconfrontational approach to early restrictive legal precedents and community outrage. In response to the hostile reaction of the residents of Chicago’s Rogers Park (1931), the Ring decision (1934), and New York’s McCall antinudist bill (1935), nudists chose to relocate to nearby areas that tolerated the practice. The headquarters of the ASA moved from New York City to New Jersey in the late 1930s, and Alois Knapp, a Chicago native, avoided controversy by establishing Zoro Nature Park in Roselawn, Indiana. In 1946, however, emboldened by the growth of resorts across the country and embracing the familial character of the movement, Elmer and Lucille Adams founded their nudist park nine miles outside Battle Creek, Michigan.
Like the naked man and woman who stood next to the gates of the ASA headquarters in New Jersey, Elmer and Lucille promoted their resort as husband and wife. The development of their camp resembled “more or less the same routine that most camps have undergone.”182 Satisfying their own personal interest in nudism, the couple acquired 140 sprawling acres with several ponds, numerous trees, and no buildings. Over the next ten years, they built a fence around the entire grounds, a recreational lodge measuring ninety-two feet long and thirty-two feet wide, a dormitory, a large pool, and an open area designated for volleyball, shuffleboard, and a variety of other athletic activities.183 By the mid-1950s, the camp had added six more cabins and even an airstrip that allowed guests to travel to the isolated rural location by plane.184 With the park quickly becoming a favorite spot of nudists around the country, Elmer and Lucille made sure that it projected the mom-and-pop character of American nudism by making it a rule that every man must be accompanied by his wife if he wished to visit or join the club.185 Hosts to the Central Sunbathing Association Convention and the National Nudist Convention in 1953, Sunshine Gardens Health Resort rose to prominence with an appeal to married couples and families.
Despite the movement’s best efforts to control the naked bodies at their camps and the growth of nudist resorts across the country, American nudism continued to attract critics. The Reverend Braxton Sawyer, an Arkansas radio evangelist, made it his personal mission to expose the evils of the movement. After hearing Rev. Sawyer “thundering” against nudism on his radio program, Norval Packwood invited the evangelical preacher to the ASA national convention being held in Battle Creek to “learn the real truth about nudism.”186 The preacher, “armed with a movie camera, color film, a tape recorder, and a public address system,” drove his station wagon into the camp.187 In so doing, he grabbed national headlines. Two male nudists and June Lange, the convention’s press agent, asked the reverend to disrobe. When he refused, he attempted to force his way in, only to have his “burly bulk (5ft. 11 in., 225 lbs.) hit the dust.”188 Revived with a first-aid kit, a chair, and a sandwich, he again tried to enter the camp, only to fall “even harder.”189 Several national magazines, including Time, recorded the humorous event alongside a picture of Rev. Sawyer lying on his backside.190 Although the media made the radio evangelist appear foolish and fanatical, the increased attention made the small community of Battle Creek take notice of its unusual neighbors.
On June 15, 1956, two police officers visited Sunshine Gardens. Seeing two or three people nude, they acquired their names and obtained warrants for their arrests. Two weeks later, accompanied by three other police cars, the same officers returned to Sunshine Gardens. Unable to find the people they had obtained warrants for, the police proceeded to raid the entire camp.191 Seeing adults sunbathing among several children, the police charged Marvin Weissenborn, fifty-one; Earl Hildabridle, sixty-two; Harold Carter, forty-two; and Harold’s wife, Ruth Carter, thirty-seven, with indecent exposure.192 The four nudists were arrested using a statute based on the Ring decision, which read “any person who shall knowingly make any open or indecent exposure of his or her person or of the person of another shall be guilty of a misdemeanor,” and the circuit court quickly found them guilty and sentenced them to thirty days in jail, two years probation, a fine of $250, and costs of $100 each.193 For the judge and the jury, the defendants committed an obvious offense to public morals. As the case came to a close, the judge instructed the jury that a “common sense of morality which most people entertain is sufficient to apply the statute in this particular case.”194 Despite these nudists being middle-aged and white, despite their marital status, and despite the presence of their families, their public nakedness was found to be illicit and illegal.
Nudists immediately took steps to appeal what they felt constituted a grave miscarriage of justice.195 Hildabridle argued that the Ring statute did not provide any “fixed standards of guilt upon which the penalty can be assessed,” and as a result, it violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.196 The statute did not require the exposure to be lewd, to be in the presence of anyone or of someone of the opposite sex, to be in a public place, or to be motivated by any criminal intent. The definition of “open” and “indecent” also remained unclear. In a concealed enclosure, nudists only came in contact with the public when the police entered the camp grounds. If upheld, the decision would allow police officers to enter a home arbitrarily in order to observe suspected instances of public nudity. Enlisting the help of the ACLU, which considered the lack of a warrant a “civil liberties issue,” and setting up a separate defense fund intended to raise $10,000, the ASA sought the reversal of what it considered an arbitrary statute.197
While Hildabridle appealed on the grounds that the Ring precedent denied his right to due process, the success of the case rested on the defense’s ability to distinguish nudism from the violent male sexuality that had underscored the moral panics of the postwar period. According to Hildabridle, nudists had to overcome the public’s inability to “separate indecency from nudity or immorality from exposure” and American society’s “failure to realize that there is a distinction between the two,” in or
der to demonstrate that nudists should not be equated with sex exhibitionists and voyeurs. He urged the court to “distinguish the nudist . . . from any and all persons who advocate the practice to satisfy erotic or immoral desires.”198 Rather than attempting to challenge all obscenity statutes outright, nudists tried to overturn the lower court’s unfavorable verdict by distancing the movement from explicit forms of eroticism. They hoped to convince the Michigan Supreme Court that the exposure of the body among heterosexual, white families seeking health, relaxation, and recreation did not constitute a sexual act.
The controlled setting of the nudist resort as a vacationing experience and the moral character of its middle-class membership served as evidence that public nudity might not be inherently sexual. In an amicus curiae brief filed by the ASA, the organization portrayed the nudist lifestyle as a “form of recreation; a sport, much the same as bowling, skiing, golf, dancing, horseback riding, or a dozen others.”199 Aware that “it will not appeal to all,” they saw “nude sunbathing as a form of relaxation” that a minority of people in the United States found enjoyable.200 The ASA also sought to show that the organization did not condone sexual immorality. Referring to the “sex exhibitionist,” the ASA lamented that this “type of exposure and impurity of motive is . . . reprehensible.”201 Noting that the organization put all applications through a rigorous screening process, it asserted that “every effort is made . . . to maintain high moral standards.”202 As a result, the ASA claimed that in its twenty-five-year history there had “not been one known or reported case of juvenile delinquency among children of nudist families.”203
For the state, the presence of several families on the day of the raid exhibited the essential sordidness of public nudity. Naked adult bodies standing next to children’s bodies within the gates of a nudist resort did not communicate innocent family fun to the local police and the prosecution. The explosion of young families after the war combined with the shifting boundaries of sexual liberalism to inspire widespread fears that children might be the victims of sexual predators.204 Making repeated references to the presence of “four little girls of the respective ages of 8, 9, 11 and 12, and a 17 year old boy,”205 the state accused nudists of an “impure motive” when they appeared naked in front of young children.206 The state attorney focused his concern on the interaction of naked adult men with young girls. The shared experience of nudity between men and boys may not have been as threatening in the small town of Battle Creek, Michigan; as discussed in chapter 2, in rural areas, men of all ages and races frequently skinny-dipped in the local lake or river on a hot day. This experience, according to John Howard, remained so common that it doubled as a site for homosexual experimentation.207 While the prosecutor may have been reluctant to upset the boundaries of sexual liberalism by publicly discussing the clandestine homosexual activity that occurred at rural lakes and streams, he did not hesitate to assert that the “exposure by mature men of their private parts to small girls would corrupt the morals of such children.”208 The fact that exposure occurred within the grounds of a nudist resort, according to the prosecuting attorney, had no relevance since the four young children “were not free agents . . . capable of embracing a belief” in nudism.209 The state attorney declared it the “duty” of Michigan to “protect the children of this state.”210 The prosecution depicted the family-oriented nudist resort as a sign of moral decay, in the hope of holding the lower-court victory.
In addition, the state questioned the likelihood that the eroticism of naked bodies could be controlled at nudist resorts. The state attorney challenged the assumption that marriage sufficiently testified to the moral behavior of nudists. The defense had used the testimony of Lucille Adams and her husband, the owners of Sunshine Gardens, to introduce the way that a “high class nudist place” operated. The prosecution, however, took this opportunity to attack the rules of the nudist resort. After assuring the court that “married people were not allowed out there [Sunshine Gardens] without their spouses,” the prosecution cross-examined Adams about an incident involving a married man and a single woman.211 With Adams unable to identify this guest fully or explain why the police came to arrest the couple, the prosecuting attorney concluded his cross-examination of Adams by muttering under his breath, “We will have other witnesses.”212 Having listened to the prosecutor’s “inferences and innuendoes” throughout the trial, Hildabridle’s attorney then moved for a mistrial.213 The prosecution’s line of questioning and off-the-cuff statements, Hildabridle’s attorney argued, deliberately tried to create a sense that “there is something behind the scenes here” since he had been unable to refute Adams’s testimony about the “morality of the people together out there.”214 Although the judge instructed the jury to disregard any muttered inferences, he dismissed Hildabridle’s motion for a mistrial and allowed the prosecutor to continue to inquire about the marital status of the visitors at Sunshine Gardens because the interaction of nude male and female bodies raised the possibility for illicit behavior as much as family recreation.
Several legal developments in the late 1950s favored the nudist movement’s appeal of the lower court’s unfavorable ruling. The legal legitimacy of the sexual-psychopath laws had been losing ground. Many experts considered the laws, passed over the course of the previous two decades, a failure brought on by politicians hoping to benefit politically from widespread public fear and anxiety.215 The vague laws simply did not reduce crime or address the truly violent criminals. In this context, Justice John D. Voelker, presiding over the Michigan Supreme Court and Michigan v. Hildabridle, struck down the Ring precedent as another example of panic legislation. He asserted that the “Ring Case is less a legal opinion than an exercise in moral indignation.” Suggesting that the lower-court judge was “aroused” by the details of the Ring trial, Justice Voelker dismissed the decision because it constituted a “platform from which to tell the world what he thinks about such queer newfangled shenanigans as nudism.”216 He thought that the lower-court judge was “so determined to smite nudism” that he “flatly assumed guilt” and completely ignored the “question of illegal search and arrest.”217 The issue of illegal search and seizure had also undergone dramatic changes in the postwar period. Several decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1950s and 1960s established that federal criminal procedures outlined in the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights should also protect individuals from state-level authorities.218 Empowered by these decisions, Justice Voelker argued that “moral indignation is a poor substitute for due process” and declared that the “embarrassing Ring Case” be “nominated for oblivion.”219
Justice Voelker’s long, detailed, and often colorfully written opinion contrasted starkly with the usually dry and objective tone of most legal decisions. The justice brought a unique approach to his legal writing. In 1958, he published Anatomy of a Murder, which critics still regard as “one of the classic courtroom novels of the time,”220 and in 1960, he resigned from the bench to write courtroom dramatic fiction. Justice Voelker later based a chapter of his book The Jealous Mistress on the Hildabridle decision.221 Using sarcasm, emotional phrases, and even indignation, legal scholars, almost fifty years later, recognized the literary style and tone from the Hildabridle decision not as a “paragon, but as a nonpareil.”222
Despite Justice Voelker’s colorfully written opinion, he still understood the need for caution in an earlier unpublished draft of his written decision that warned his fellow justices that concurring with his controversial defense of indecent exposure might be unpopular.223 To maintain his own morality and the court’s, he made it clear that his decision did not endorse the practice or merits of nudism. He prefaced his opinion by stating that he had never been a “disciple of the cult of nudism” and made it a point to say that the idea of going naked before others “revolts and horrifies” him.224 Writing at a time when the majority of American society saw the naked body as private and intimate, Justice Voelker, despite his lengthy and animated defense
of nudist rights, sought to maintain the impartiality of the court by distinguishing his moral values from those of individuals who subscribed to the ideals of American nudism.
Nevertheless, Justice Voelker did not shy away from asserting his position in a rapidly changing legal context. After a period of panic and fear that led to dramatic congressional persecutions, frequent violations of civil liberties, and unprecedented limits on free speech in the early Cold War years, enormous legal transformations began occurring by the close of the 1950s. From 1954 to 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court, influenced by organizations such as the ACLU and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), issued a series of decisions that favored the advancement of civil liberties. The Court attacked racial segregation, ended religious exercises in the public schools, undermined censorship efforts, protected freedom of association, and introduced constitutional standards of due process.225 Justice Voelker very much allied himself with this effort to expand civil liberties. Joining Justice John Talbot Smith and Justice Eugene Black as advocates of a “new philosophy” in the Michigan Supreme Court, Voelker and his two allies wrote numerous dissents that steadfastly “oppose[d] the forces of conservatism.”226 Furthermore, recognizing that the “world [is] locked in a death struggle between the David of democracy and the Goliath of giant totalitarianism,” he argued in his Hildabridle decision that it was a bad time for the court to put its “stamp of approval on such a dubious departure from our traditional procedures and historic safeguards against invasion of our individual rights.”227
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