Adventures in the Orgasmatron (65 page)

On June 9, 1954, McCarthy lost the fearful grip he’d held over the country during the earlier fifties. In the Army-McCarthy hearings, in which McCarthy was accused of exploiting his position to get special privileges for one of his assistants, who had been drafted, the army’s lawyer, Joe Welch, struck the killing blow. The hearings were televised, and the coup de grâce was watched by many in the twenty million households that had TV sets at the time. McCarthy was clearly drunk—he kept a bottle of boubon in his briefcase and started drinking in the morning—and his inebriated, red-faced, bullying ugliness was plain for all to see.

When Welch challenged McCarthy to give the attorney general a list of the one hundred thirty Communists who, he claimed, worked in military defense plants, the senator tried to undermine him by pointing out that someone from his Boston law office was a former member of the National Lawyers Guild, which he accused of being “the legal bulwark of the Communist Party,” and therefore a Communist. Welch, in defense of a member of his law firm, uttered his now legendary putdown: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy continued his character assassination of the young man, who was fresh out of Harvard Law School and was in fact the secretary of the Young Republicans League and not a Communist, Welch famously exclaimed, “’Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
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“In one black second,” reported
The Wisconsin State Journal
, the normally supportive newspaper in the senator’s home state, “McCarthy…wrecked it all. He blew his angry head of steam and cast out an ugly smear on a young man who had no connection with the case. It was worse than reckless. It was worse than cruel. It was reprehensible.”
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The fledgling lawyer McCarthy had attacked was Fred Fisher. Welch told McCarthy that he feared that Fisher would always “bear a scar” needlessly inflicted by him. That December, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy by a two-thirds majority. His credibility was finished.

The following year Fred Fisher served as Reich’s lawyer, appearing at the hearing in Maine in the prelude to Reich’s trial for contempt of the injunction. Even though Reich hated Communists, or “red fascists,” as he commonly called them, Fischer’s McCarthy-inflicted “scar” would have been less a black mark to him than a badge of honor. Reich thought that McCarthy was inspired by the same red fascism as the FDA—Stalin, Reich wrote, was “the father of both the Hitlers and McCarthys”—and he never supported him.
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A. S. Neill thought it unlikely that Senator McCarthy was a “red fascist” and wondered whether McCarthy could investigate the FDA, as he had so many other institutions, to reveal the Communist plot against Reich. “HE IS!” Reich scrawled in the margin of the letter, certain in his assessment.
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Peter Reich once compared his father to the senator from Wisconsin: both saw Communists everywhere, and Reich often seemed to engage in McCarthyite tactics by demanding that his lovers and colleagues sign endless confessional protocols. Reich objected to the comparison. He told his son that McCarthy offered no solutions to the world’s problems, whereas he had “made a discovery with which to fight evil.”
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Fisher traveled from Boston up to Reich’s hearing in Portland, Maine. He argued that criminal charges against his client should be dropped because the injunction exceeded the powers of the court that had issued it. There was no way, Fisher said, that Reich could carry out the recall of accumulators and literature the injunction demanded of him. He advised Reich to plead not guilty.

Reich then took center stage to address the judge directly. He spoke for half an hour, trying to summon up all his old powers of oratory. He objected that his accumulators and books were now so far out into the world that it was impossible for him to stop the spreading of his ideas. He also complained that the box on show as a courtroom exhibit was an old, badly maintained device that the FDA had deliberately chosen to make him look a charlatan (it had been delivered to the court on April Fool’s Day). Reich maintained that neither the FDA nor the judiciary had any authority to decide whether orgone energy existed or not—it was purely a scientific matter.

Reich’s paranoia and delusions of grandeur were evident in his discussions of space travel and UFOs and in his allusions to his high-powered friends in government and to the top secret nature of his research. An effort was being made, he said, to steal his equations, which explained the workings of the universe. Reich concluded his talk with a description of the fate of Giordano Bruno, the alchemist who had been burned at the stake by the Inquisition because of his heretical scientific ideas. Hundreds of years later a pope had apologized at his tomb. He implied that he was a similar martyr to free thought, as history would prove.

“He bellowed and raged and at times was cautioned by both defense attorneys,” wrote Joseph Maguire, who was representing the government in the case. “He talked about how humble he is. In the next breath [he] indicated that he was one of the greatest scientists of the time.”
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On the journey back to Boston, Fisher told Myron Sharaf that he’d never witnessed a day in court like it. He maintained, again, that the only way he could keep Reich out of prison, and his writing in print, would be if Reich disassociated himself from the accumulator business. Reich refused to do this as a matter of principle, because that would mean accepting the FDA’s characterization of the box as a fraudulent device. Fisher later resigned from the case when Reich, bolstered by his court appearance, insisted on his right to cross-examine witnesses alongside his attorney. When the motion to dismiss his case was denied, Reich subsequently acted as the “counsel for the discoverer of life energy,” proposing to represent himself in the trial that was tentatively scheduled for that December.

Twelve

In the early 1950s the United States produced half the world’s goods and possessed two thirds of its machinery; the resulting prosperity and automation increased standards of living and swelled the middle class.
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Sociologists such as David Riesman and C. Wright Mills began to worry less about poverty than about the conformist, suburban nature of the American dream and the corrupting and alienating results of affluence. The “new little men,” wrote Mills in
White Collar: The American Middle Classes
(1951), were “cheerful robots” and “political eunuchs,” cogs in a bureaucratic machine that they were powerless to change. In
The Lonely Crowd
(1950), Riesman painted a similar portrait of an apathetic, status-obsessed, socially anxious citizenry dominated by the “marketing mentality.”

Advertisers honed methods to exploit these anxieties and feed the fifties’ orgy of consumption. The sexual revolution was accompanied and intertwined with a marketing revolution that reflected the postwar surge in standards of living in America. Since 1940 America’s gross national product had soared more than 400 percent, and the average citizen had five times as many discretionary dollars to spend on luxuries as in the previous decade. By the late 1950s, to compete for this spending power, corporations blew nearly $12 billion on advertising (up from $2 billion in 1939) and three-fourths of the largest advertising companies used “depth techniques”: in a crowded marketplace, businesses came to rely on methods inspired by psychoanalysis to make their products more seductive to the masses, co-opting Reich’s message of sexual liberation in order to sell things. If ego psychologists thought of the id as something to be tamed, and radical analysts wanted to set it free, advertisers sought to exploit its repressed forces to ignite customers’ desires and make them buy things that they didn’t really need or even know they wanted. Just as Reich was being prosecuted for “false labeling,” libidos were being freed not to liberate people, as he hoped, but further to enmesh them in the capitalist system.

In the United States, psychoanalysis had long had a fluid relationship with business and commerce. Indeed, you might say that psychoanalysis first came to America coupled with its commercial usage. Freud’s Vienna-born American nephew, the publicist Edward Bernays—whose mother was Freud’s sister, and whose father was Freud’s wife’s brother—founded the country’s first public relations firm in 1919, and consciously used Freud’s idea of a latent but powerful sexuality as a form of subliminal seduction to manipulate the masses. Freud spent time with Bernays during his 1909 tour of America and became fond of him, but Ernest Jones dismissed him as “an American ‘sharper’ and quite unscrupulous.”
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Bernays was instrumental in the publication of American editions of Freud’s writings, and he was always on the lookout for different ways that psychoanalysis might be popularized and exploited for profit—for example, he tried, unsuccessfully, to get his uncle to write a column for
Cosmopolitan
magazine. During his stay Freud had been exposed to, and amused by, the aggressive marketing that Bernays was to make his own specialty. He saw an advertisement outside an undertaker’s shop that read, “Why live, when you can be buried for $10?”
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Bernays visited Freud after the First World War and proved a quick study. He returned determined to adapt his uncle’s ideas about sex to the realm of American commerce, setting up a public relations office and creating campaigns that were designed to appeal directly to the unconscious desires of consumers. In 1929 he employed the analyst A. A. Brill to come up with a sales strategy for the American Tobacco Company aimed at recruiting female smokers. Bernays boasted in his autobiography that this “may have been the first instance of [psychoanalysis’s] application to advertising.”
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Brill advised casting cigarettes as “torches of freedom” in the battle for women’s liberation, and Bernays staged a march of debutante smokers down Fifth Avenue to impress this idea on the public mind. It was the first of many such campaigns of mass suggestion. With his office on Wall Street, Bernays successfully bridged the old and new worlds of psychoanalysis. In 1933
Life
magazine joked that he had “probably made more money out of applied psychoanalysis than all Vienna ever saw.”
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By the mid-1950s the corporate hero of applied psychoanalysis was Ernest Dichter, a man who, like Reich, had fled Europe to escape the Nazis. He went on to turn the commercialization of dreams into a fine science. Indeed, Dichter was described as “the Freud of Madison Avenue,” “one of the great mass psychoanalysts of our era,” and “Mr. Mass Motivations Himself.” Through his psycho-detective work, Dichter promised the “mobilization and manipulation of human needs as they exist in the consumer,” or, put bluntly, the “translation of sex into sales.” Dichter, who came up with the Esso slogan “Put a Tiger in Your Tank,” has been credited with inventing focus groups, overdraft facilities for checking accounts, and the idea of placing sweets near supermarket checkouts.
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In a 1956 article, “Put the Libido Back into Advertising,” Dichter wrote, “Libido is a basic life force, a pulsating, virulent, invisible power which is the very stuff of our inner lives.”
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Dichter was born in Vienna in 1907 to a working-class family who lived in an apartment across the street from Freud. His carrot-red hair, he later said, made him predestined to be a psychologist because it always made him feel like an outsider, concerned with what people thought of him. A decade younger than Reich, whom he never met, he was shaped by his childhood in Vienna in very different ways. His father was a “spectacularly unsuccessful salesman,” he wrote in his memoir,
Getting Motivated
(1979), a traveling haberdasher and peddler of textiles for whom Dichter grew up to have little respect. He was sometimes unable to provide for the family, and during the severe shortages of post–World War One Vienna the family ate bread made of flour and sawdust. Sometimes they starved, Dichter recalled, “with nothing to eat for three days in a row.” But where Reich turned to socialism and then communism in response to these experiences, Dichter became an enthusiastic capitalist.

At fourteen, to help support the family, Dichter left school and went to work for his uncle Leopold, who owned the Dichter Department Store on Brunnengasse. Dichter worked there as a secretary and then a window dresser and was soon the family’s principal breadwinner. His uncle became a substitute father figure, and while his two younger brothers became militant Communists, Dichter became an advocate of conspicuous consumption. He read American magazines and imported U.S. sales techniques, such as piped-in music and kinetic displays, and enjoyed his first, hurried sexual experiences with “a dark-haired, somewhat cross-eyed girl” in the company’s storerooms: “behind rows of kitchen utensils and sundry chinaware, glasses, and, around Christmas time, behind dolls and electric trains, waiting to be given a place in the visible shelves at the front of the store.”
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Sex and commodities were inextricably intertwined, in Dichter’s view.