Adventures in the Orgasmatron (48 page)

If Reich described Brady as a “Communist sniper,” his suspicions seemed to be confirmed when his old friend, the psychologist Karl Frank, a card-carrying Communist in the 1920s and ’30s, told him that he’d met the Bradys in California in 1936 and that they were definitely “fellow travelers.”
³⁶
Robert Brady was a known Communist, Frank told Reich, and “Mildred did not leave any doubt in her conversation that her Communist sympathies were stronger than her husband’s.”
³⁷
Frank, who renamed himself Paul Hagen when he moved to the States, had done antifascist work for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in New York during the war and was himself under suspicion by the FBI of being a closet Communist (in Europe he had been a faithful party member and even served a prison sentence for kidnapping a political rival). “No other German exile was the subject of so many reports from American intelligence between 1941 and 1943” as Hagen, wrote Christof Mauch in his 2005 history of the OSS,
The Shadow War Against Hitler
.
³⁸

Joan Brady, Mildred’s daughter, told me that although they were to the left, neither of her parents was ever a Communist or sexually repressed. They maintained a very open attitude to sex: her mother “lived a very adventurous sex life” (Joan Brady herself married Dexter Masters, the man with whom her mother had enjoyed an affair in the 1930s).
³⁹
But it was not the first time the Bradys had been suspect. As early as 1939, the Consumers Union had been accused by HUAC of using its activities and publications to sabotage and destroy the capitalist system. Both Brady and her husband were singled out by Martin Dies as individuals who “don’t believe in the American form of Government or the American economic system.” Dies even read to the House of Representatives a passage from Robert Brady’s
Spirit and Structure of German Fascism
(1937), in which Brady expresses his hope that America will turn its back on “fascist-inclined capitalism.”

After much campaigning, the Consumers Union became the only organization to be taken off HUAC’s list of subversive organizations in 1954, but though no connection to the Communist Party was ever proved, Mildred and Robert Brady were still under suspicion. That same year, Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the A-bomb,” who was recruited to the Consumers Union by the Bradys, was questioned by the FBI about his relationship with the couple. The Bradys were close friends with Alger Hiss and Haakon Chevalier, the man Oppenheimer claimed had tried to recruit him as a Soviet agent in 1942.

In 1949, Dwight Macdonald told Reich’s student Myron Sharaf that Robert Brady “was definitely a Communist,” a fact that was duly reported to Reich.
⁴⁰
Macdonald, who renounced his own Trotskyism in 1942, also said that Fredric Wertham, Reich’s other critic in the ranks of
The New Republic
, was a leading luminary of the American-Soviet Friendship League and a fellow traveler. Wertham may have had more pressing reasons for his negative review of Reich’s work. He was a vocal crusader against children’s comics (“the 10¢ plague”), which he considered a breeding ground for “un-healthy sexual attitudes” and juvenile delinquency, all of which Reich, too, seemed to encourage.
⁴¹

Reich had been aware of
The New Republic
’s dislike of his politics for some time. In 1945 Paul Goodman, whom Macdonald had commissioned to write about Reich for
Politics
, had been commissioned to review translations of
The Sexual Revolution
and
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
for
The New Republic
. Goodman celebrated Reich’s “enormous libertarian dynamism” and his call for the sexual freedom of children and adolescents. The editors rejected the review, writing back, “We cannot subject our readers to such opinions on your authority.”
⁴²
Goodman communicated this rejection to Reich, and instead published the article that November in
View
.
The New Republic
commissioned Wertham to write his scathing review instead, which labeled Reich’s thinking “neo-fascist”; it came out six months before Brady’s article.

Wertham thought that Reich’s concept of “work democracy” was dangerously reactionary and called for “the intellectuals in our time…to combat the kind of psycho-fascism which Reich’s book exemplifies.”
⁴³
Brady took up Wertham’s baton in
Harper’s
, making an uncharitable comparison between the new cult of sex and anarchy—with its deliberate assault on the state, church, and family—and the
Volk
-worshipping, proto-fascist circle that grew up around the German poet Stefan George in pre-Hitler Germany, “where a number of the Nazi leaders-to-be drank in the poet’s songs of the divine power which manifests itself, ‘not in the persons of the many…but only in the creative personality.’”
⁴⁴
Brady argued that Miller and Rexroth’s followers, steeped in Reich’s thinking, shared George’s elitist glorification of the instincts along with his sexual mysticism, and might therefore be construed as “neo-fascist.”

In his diary Reich put the parenthesis “Wallace-Stalinist” after a reference to
The New Republic
.
⁴⁵
Henry Wallace, who had been Roosevelt’s vice president, became the editor of
The New Republic
in September 1946 after Truman sacked him as secretary of commerce for criticizing his foreign policy. Wallace used
The New Republic
as a vehicle to oppose Truman’s cold war ideology and the escalating arms race that accompanied it, and he frequently defended the Soviet Union against what he considered to be Truman’s overhysterical attacks. Brady’s article might, indeed, be interpreted in this context; she wrote that Reich considered Russia “sex-reactionary” and “anti-sex,” and seemed to defend the country’s family values.

In the congressional elections at the end of 1946, the Republican Party picked up fifty-five seats and won a majority by linking communism with Truman’s lingering New Dealism—it was the first time they’d controlled Congress since 1930. Though President Truman didn’t think the “bugaboo of communism” was a significant threat, he had to take a convincing anti-Communist stand if he was going to win the presidential election two years later. In March 1947, hoping to silence his critics, he introduced the loyalty program, which required that 2.5 million federal employees be investigated by an expanded FBI to see if they had Communist sympathies (785 resigned; only 102 were fired).

In December 1947, when Wallace was contemplating running for president as head of the Progressive Party,
The New Republic
’s offices were “as crowded as Grand Central Station with Communist-controlled delegations falling over each other to entreat [Wallace], and tell him he had three million fans.”
⁴⁶
Truman argued that the Communists were trying to split the Democratic vote so as to get a Republican elected president, which would “lead to the confusion and strife on which Communism thrives.”
⁴⁷
He narrowly beat Dewey to serve a second term. Wallace had mistaken Communist support for popular appeal: the Progressive Party received no electoral votes and only 3 percent of the popular vote, mostly in New York; it represented, wrote Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “the last hurrah of the era of the Popular Front of the 1930s.”
⁴⁸

Laurence Duggan and Harry Dexter White, whom Wallace planned to appoint his secretary of state and secretary of the treasury, respectively, were revealed later to have been Soviet agents.
⁴⁹
In 1952 Wallace published an article, “Why I Was Wrong,” in which he explained that his too-trusting stance toward the Soviet Union and Stalin stemmed from inadequate information about Stalin’s excesses and that he, too, now considered himself an anti-Communist.

The New Republic
’s publisher when Brady’s article came out was Michael Straight, a son of the New York banker Willard Straight and the heiress Dorothy Whitney, who were close friends of the Roosevelts. In 1948, when Wallace left to resume his political career, Straight became the magazine’s editor. Straight had been recruited to the NKVD by Anthony Blunt in 1937 when he was an economics student at Cambridge. Under the code name Nigel, Straight passed secrets to the Soviets when he had a job at the State Department in 1938, and he recommended Alger Hiss as a possible recruit (Hiss is thought to have been an agent already), and he assisted in getting press credentials from
The New Republic
for someone he knew to be a Communist spy. “We were among the last of the utopians,” he explained of these actions in his memoir,
After Long Silence
.
⁵⁰

Interestingly, the man who recruited Straight’s contact, Anthony Blunt, and the other members of the notorious Cambridge Five (Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, and Donald Maclean) was the stocky, charismatic Austrian psychologist Arnold Deutsch, known to them as “Otto.”
⁵¹
He had been a collaborator of Wilhelm Reich’s in the late twenties and early thirties, when he’d been an active member of Sex-Pol. At twenty-five, already engaged in undercover work for the Comintern, Deutsch ran Reich’s Vienna publishing house, the Münster Verlag, which brought out two of Reich’s booklets on sexual repression in 1929 and 1930 (Deutsch attracted the attention of the Viennese police’s antipornography squad for his role in these publications). Reich was expelled from the Communist Party in 1933, by which time Deutsch was back in Moscow being trained as an NKVD agent, or “illegal.” Reich was conveniently forgotten. Christopher Andrew, a historian of espionage, writes in
The Sword and the Shield
that Deutsch omitted all references to his youthful fad for Reich in his KGB-sponsored memoir, as did the Soviet intelligence agency in its official hagiography of Deutsch.
⁵²

Deutsch’s enthusiasm for sexual liberation, a cornerstone of his politics, no doubt appealed to the Cambridge Five. Deutsch painted for them a picture of the Soviet Union as a land of equality and sexual tolerance, a vision that Reich had shared but that he disowned in
The Sexual Revolution
. Guy Burgess always insisted that Stalin’s views on homosexuality were more liberal than “American propaganda” implied. Cairncross later wrote a history of polygamy,
After Polygamy Was Made a Sin: The Social History of Christian Polygamy
(1974), in which he boastfully quoted George Bernard Shaw: “Women will always prefer a 10 percent share of a first-rate man to sole ownership of a mediocre man.”
⁵³

In 1947, the year the Brady piece came out, Donald Maclean was working as a double agent in the United States, where he was rumored to be passing atomic secrets to the Russians under the code name Homer (a pun on his bisexuality). But Straight had quit the “great game” by then; he refused to cooperate with Soviet intelligence after 1942, apparently disenchanted with the Soviet attack on Finland. Also in 1942 Deutsch drowned en route to New York, when his ship was sunk by a German torpedo.

Under Straight’s editorship
The New Republic
supported Truman in 1948 rather than its former editor, Wallace. Straight eventually outed Blunt as a spy in 1963, by which time Philby, Burgess, and Maclean were already living in the Soviet Union. Philby had an affair with Maclean’s wife there in the early sixties. A book he gave to Melinda Maclean at that time, Alex Comfort’s
The Joy of Sex
, later turned up in a Sotheby’s auction (Comfort, a British anarchist and poet, had been a regular contributor to George Leite’s
Circle
). Philby’s inscription neatly summarized Reich’s philosophy: “An orgasm a day keeps the doctor away.”
⁵⁴

Reich, who did not approve of marriage, lived with Ilse Ollendorff for five years before tying the knot. He wrote that he only agreed to do so because his lawyer, Arthur Garfield Hays, told him that the judge in the Naturalization Court would disapprove of their having a child out of wedlock and that this might affect their application for citizenship (Peter was a year old). “When I left the courthouse,” Reich wrote in his journal the day they collected their marriage license, “I could have puked! My wife too!”
⁵⁵

The judge did question Reich about his having been found in 1941 with volumes by Lenin and Trotsky in his library: “And what has politics to do with biology?” he asked Reich.
⁵⁶
Reich told the judge all his distinguished qualifications, mentioning that he was a member of the International Society of Plasmogeny. The stenographer made a Freudian slip and transcribed: “International Society of Polygamy.” Reich and Ollendorff were subsequently granted citizenship in 1946, when Reich was forty-nine.

Ilse Ollendorff thought that a “Moscow-directed conspiracy” against Reich—which her husband, whom she describes as prone to paranoia, suspected—was a little far-fetched. Undoubtedly nothing so systematic was in process, but interestingly Kenneth Rexroth, the “Father of the Beats” who had been a member of the Communist Party, also saw in Brady’s attack the hallmark of party influence. Referring to the
Harper’s
article on Reich and his anarchist circle in his autobiography, Rexroth wrote: “It didn’t take the Communist Party long to attack us.”
⁵⁷
At the time the Communist Party was in crisis. In 1946 Earl Browder, the leader of the American Communist Party, who wanted to take American communism in a more moderate and mainstream direction (“Communism is Americanism,” he said), was accused of being a “social imperialist” and expelled from the party under orders from Moscow. His close associates were also purged for “petit bourgeois anarchism.”