Adventures in the Orgasmatron (61 page)

In his report the INS agent noted the numerous paintings and sculptures of nudes that decorated the observatory, and the shotguns and rifles Reich kept propped up by the door, along with a supply of unboxed ammunition, “in position for instant use.” Reich was a prolific writer, to which he now devoted much of his day, and he would take breaks on the deck for target practice. A pistol in a holster was slung over the back of the study chair that Reich sat in for the interview, which gave him—dressed in dungarees and a checked jacket, with a red bandana tied around his neck—the air of a revolutionary leader.

Reich’s suspicious behavior led the agent to assume that their conversation was being recorded. He asked Reich how he felt about communism:

SUBJECT stated he had not engaged in Communist activity “in over 20 years,” that over six million Germans had been Communist [Party] members during his own membership, that he is opposed to Communism as Communism is against the three things that he considers most important in life, namely, “Love, Freedom and Babies,” that he was in favor of the execution of the Rosenbergs but would not have wanted to be the executioner, that he hated persons who “hid behind the Fifth Amendment,” and that his study of the face of Malenkov revealed Malenkov to be a psychopath. [Stalin had died that March, and Malenkov had become premier of the Soviet Union.]
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The INS kept tabs on Reich from 1948 to 1956, initiating their investigation after A. H. Crombie, the author of various right-wing Christian antisex pamphlets and
Communism and the Moral Breakdown in America
(1955), wrote to them questioning his political allegiance. (Reich had written a scathing critique of Crombie’s attempts at sex education.) Reich was, of course, violently anti-Communist by this time; like Kinsey, he voted Republican. On November 4, 1952, Eisenhower had been elected president with 55 percent of the vote, bringing a Republican into the White House for the first time in two decades. Reich voted for him not because he was the conqueror of the Nazis, having led the invasion of Europe, but because he thought he had an “honest face.” Eisenhower would be the last president to have been born, like Reich, in the nineteenth century. He had a ruddy complexion like Reich’s and radiated an inner strength. Reich thought this indicated “the simplicity, the close-fulness and contactfulness of the genital character. I do not know him, really, personally; but that is what I feel about him, also his wife. Now that is a sexual revolution.”
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All of Reich’s physicians were expected to follow him in voting Republican, which alienated some of them, as most were natural Democrats and would have preferred to support Adlai Stevenson. “None wished to buck Reich,” Baker said (only he, Duvall, and Silvert were already conservatives).
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After Eisenhower was elected, several boys, led by a local druggist, went on a victory parade through Rangeley. Orgonon had been evacuated after the Oranur experiment and Ilse Ollendorff had rented a house in the center of the town. As the parade passed their windows, Reich heard the group shout, “Orgy, Orgy, Orgy, Commie, Commie, come out, you Commie!”
²⁶
“I remember it vividly,” recalled Peter Reich, who was eight at the time. “This mob came to our house and they were shouting down with the Commies, down with the orgies.” Wilhelm Reich rushed out to confront them, and it was noticed that he held a gun behind his back as he harangued the group; this was subsequently reported to the FBI.

When the INS agent showed Reich photographs of the two “aliens” under suspicion of being Communists, Reich replied “almost instantly” that he didn’t know either of them:

SUBJECT then lost self-control. He paced the floor and pounded the table. His face reddened and his speech became at times incoherent. When asked if he had been offended in some way which caused his excitement, SUBJECT said he had been. SUBJECT then went on to say that in effect, he had been insulted in being asked to merely identify a suspected Communist, that I did not realize who he, SUBJECT, was, that I did not understand how minor was the importance of questioning him concerning individual Communists as he wanted it plainly understood that his personal knowledge of Communism extended beyond the “political field” of Communism and went deep into the heart of the philosophy of present day Communism—dictatorship as compared with Marxism.
²⁷

Reich had presumed that the agent hadn’t come all this way to ask him to snitch on two individuals, but to ask for his psychological ideas on how the United States might, as he shouted to the agent, “understand and get to the root of the ‘Communist disease.’”

Reich’s lifelong obsession with the curative powers of the orgasm no doubt played a part in the FBI, INS, and FDA’s dogged pursuit of him. In 1954 the American Medical Association, which had encouraged the FDA to bring Reich to court, had accused Kinsey of sparking a “wave of sexual hysteria” with the publication of his second volume.
²⁸
If Kinsey’s libertarianism was attracting attention, bringing Reich to trial held the potential to stem that tide; some popular magazines certainly fused the projects of the two men (see, for example, the December 1954 issue of
Uncensored
magazine).
²⁹
Reich once again became the scapegoat for the new morality because, as the guru of the “new cult of sex and anarchy,” he seemed to give a philosophical rationale to the data identified by Kinsey.

It is clear that the FDA did think of Reich’s box as a sexual device, something that Reich was increasingly adamant it wasn’t. Inspector Wood had always thought the accumulator business was the tip of the iceberg, a cover for some sort of vice ring: “I still think the accumulator is a smoke-screen proposition,” he advised his boss.
³⁰
When accumulator users were interviewed, the inspectors never failed to note a flirtatious demeanor or report a twinkling eye; sex was always seen to be bubbling under the surface of these encounters. Of course, many users who read about the accumulator in the magazines that ridiculed and popularized the machine did feel that the device would have libido-enhancing effects. One art student who was interviewed by the FDA—and who, it was noted with suspicion, at the time of the visit was reading
America and the Intellectuals
(1953), a transcript of a symposium organised by
The Partisan Review
—was especially embarrassed and nervous during questioning. Inspector Cassidy concluded his report: “I feel strongly that his interest in the accumulator pertained more to sex than to cancer.”
³¹

In 1953 the FDA, which had been unable to locate and tap into an anticipated reservoir of unhappy accumulator users, commissioned independent trials from several doctors and scientists. The accumulators that the FDA inspectors had bought from the Orgone Institute were photographed, initialed, and dated and then immediately sent to universities, laboratories, and hospitals around the country so that experts could test whether there was any energy emanating from them and, if so, whether it had any beneficial effect on health. Prestigious institutions such as the Mayo Clinic and MIT, where a physicist submitted a thesis-length rebuttal of Reich’s theories, were awarded grants by the FDA to do this. The University of Chicago put together a three-man committee on mathematical biophysics who found the accumulator to be “a gigantic hoax with no scientific basis.”
³²
Dr. Nicolas Rashevsky, who led the group, said: “The material is beneath any refutation. Practically every paragraph exhibits complete ignorance of well-established facts of science. Other paragraphs contain wild speculations made without any scientific basis whatsoever. Sometimes wild claims are made…The argument of the claimant in such cases is usually that scientists must admit they do not know everything.”
³³

Dr. Philip Thompson worked for the Maine General Hospital in 1953, when the FDA asked him to do tests on the accumulator. “They were selling them and saying that they had curative values,” he told me over the phone from his home in Portland. “We proved that they didn’t. We had two boxes down here, just as they were manufactured in Rangeley. My job was to test the orgone accumulator as a cure for arthritis—we observed six or seven patients for six months. We took it seriously, we followed Reich’s directions.”
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Another doctor at the hospital, Dr. Raymond Higgins, stuffed six glass vaginal tubes with steel wool and attached them with cable to a shooter box—as prescribed by the guidelines Clista Templeton had picked up by accident—and used them to do tests on twenty-two cases of trichomoniasis, the sexually transmitted disease known as “trich” caused by the protozoan
Trichomonas vaginalis
. Higgins described one case as an awkward “sore thumb” in the FDA’s case against Reich, as the infection seemed to have cleared up immediately after treatment. His superior rationalized that the introduction of a cold glass tube might temporarily immobilize the parasite.
³⁵

Although Dr. Thompson claims to have taken Reich’s procedures seriously when conducting his trial, most of the FDA tests weren’t particularly thorough, as the time-pressed experts thought the whole exercise slightly ridiculous. Some test subjects were treated only a few times with orgone devices. (Furthermore, Reich’s supporters later claimed the tests were invalidated by the close proximity of X-ray machines, which would have aggravated the orgone energy, turning it into therapeutically ineffective DOR.) Dr. Frank H. Krusen of the Mayo Clinic, who was testing for the accumulators’ effects on the user’s temperature, pulse, respiration, and blood pressure, appended the following covering note to his final report: “It was very difficult for me to bring myself to take the time to prepare this report because…this quackery is of such a fantastic nature that it seems hardly worthwhile to refute the ridiculous claims of its proponents.”
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If the scientists thought the accumulator so absurd, why, one might ask, did the FDA consider it such a threat? “It wasn’t a threat to the medical establishment,” Thompson explained. “The threat was financial gain. They were making money claiming that they could cure cancer. It was a financial and legal thing. We were more interested in seeing people weren’t buying a pig in a poke. I thought it was a complete hoax—and so it proved to be.” Thompson thought the box was being marketed as some kind of aphrodisiac: “They claimed to be harnessing the sexual energy of the cosmos that they obviously lacked at home. But the box didn’t seem to contain sexual energy or any other kind of energy. There are all sorts of hoaxes as far as sexual energy is concerned.” He added, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
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By the time the FDA was conducting its clinical trials of the orgone energy accumulator, Reich had ceased using one himself. In fact, A. S. Neill once admitted that he never actually saw Reich use an accumulator when he stayed at Orgonon, though he admitted that Reich might have been one of those “German five a.m.” early risers who used the box first thing. “He did use it,” Ilse Ollendorff told me. “Not in the last few years, but he did use it.”
³⁸

When Bernard Grad, a biologist at McGill University in Montreal, visited Orgonon in April 1951, he found that everyone had developed an aversion to the accumulator after Oranur and all the contaminated devices at Orgonon had been removed from the Student Laboratory and placed two hundred yards away in the woods. When Simeon Tropp took Grad to see them, he felt giddy and faint when standing near them. “I seemed to lose contact for a moment,” Grad said of their effect on him. He approached them again and “I almost keeled over.” These effects were contagious, Grad believed; his own accumulator became contaminated, and he could bear sitting in it for only a few minutes: “I was irradiated and I felt a bit remote from people and things for a couple of weeks.”
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Baker described Orgonon as under a cloud after Oranur, a “constant, heavy, dark mass.” Perhaps this cloud reflected Reich’s heightened emotional state.
⁴⁰
After Oranur, Reich came to believe that atomic explosions and tests had disturbed the orgone energy envelope around the earth and that DOR (deadly orgone) now floated around the atmosphere like a huge flotilla of airborne cancers. Baker wrote of his own first sighting of one of these billowing horsemen of the apocalypse:

It was an appalling sight, a dark cloud reaching clear to the ground. It was transparent but seemed like a mass of black specks. As it approached, the birds and insects became quiet, the leaves stopped their rustle and turned upside down. The sun could be seen, but it appeared that we were in shadow. Reich had us all crawl under pine trees which he said absorbed DOR and would protect us to some extent. We all developed headaches, a strong thirst, and a dusky skin. After half an hour, the cloud passed, and the world again became alive. The birds and insects became active, the leaves regained their luster, and the sun once more was bright. The shadow had gone. We soon recovered from our DOR effects.
⁴¹

In response to the “DOR emergency,” as Reich called it, the orgone box, his original “influencing machine,” began to develop and sprout new features. Reich planned to transform the accumulator into a more complicated, mad, and intricate device with which he could do battle with the ominous DOR clouds he watched looming over the hills of Orgonon.