Adventures in the Orgasmatron (35 page)

Reich’s hope was that he would be granted a fresh start in the United States, and that his ideas about sex and politics would be embraced there. Briehl and Wolfe had personally put up the five thousand dollars needed to guarantee Reich’s visa, and had arranged for him to teach a course called “Biological Aspects of Character Formation” at the New School for Social Research, which offered Reich a much-longed-for academic affiliation. The affidavits they’d provided to the Immigration and Naturalization Service were laudatory to the point of hyperbole—they declared Reich the inventor of a therapy that would revolutionize the world and hailed him as a new Pasteur. Having been on the intellectual fringes in Europe, Reich was now a colleague of the scholarly elite: nearly two hundred European academics—including Hannah Arendt, Bronislaw Malinowski, Erich Fromm, and Leo Strauss—had sought refuge from Nazism at the New School, which was known as the “University in Exile.”

Reich rented a large ivy-clad, Lutyens-style house with a ski jump of a roof in Forest Hills, Queens. It was a wealthy, leafy suburb half an hour from the center of the city that appealed to the nostalgia of many émigrés because it resembled certain suburbs of Vienna and Berlin. He put up a picture of Elsa Lindenberg on his study wall between photographs of his mother and Freud, and imagined, as he wrote to Elsa in a letter, that she might walk in at any moment.

Reich’s house was only a short walk from Flushing Meadow Park, the 1,200-acre site of the 1939 World’s Fair. Attended by 45 million people, the fair was dedicated to “The World of Tomorrow”; visitors could take a simulated rocket trip to London, be televised on one of the first-ever small screens, and watch a seven-foot golden robot called Elektro as it walked, told jokes, and smoked cigarettes. America was emerging from the Great Depression, and Roosevelt’s anti-business policies, with its attacks on monopoly power and endorsement of strikes, was thought by many businessmen to be slowing recovery. The large corporations that contributed to the fair sought to represent themselves, rather than a paternalistic government, as the confident custodians of the future. One of the fair’s attractions symbolized this hoped-for convergence of citizen and consumer: a monumental cash register the size of a three-story house.

There was no German pavilion in Flushing, but there was a Czechoslovak one—it stood unfinished as a reminder of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia that March. A “Freedom Pavilion” that would highlight the plight of all those whom Hitler had exiled had been proposed but was never built. When he opened the fair, President Roosevelt delivered what the
Herald Tribune
called “a polite but pointed lecture to Chancellor Adolf Hitler on the advisability of peaceful co-operation among nations.”
³
Like many of his European peers, Reich held President Roosevelt in extremely high regard (Thomas Mann enthusiastically described the president as “a match for the dictators of Europe”).
⁴
Roosevelt was, according to the historian Anthony Heilbut, virtually canonized by refugees who generally regarded themselves as instinctive skeptics.

Roosevelt’s domestic enemies on the right represented the New Deal as a breeding ground for radicals and Communists. Many on the left asked whether the New Deal was Roosevelt’s solution to fascism or a sign of contamination by it. Nazi propaganda portrayed Roosevelt as an authoritarian leader who was following a trail Hitler had blazed. In November 1940, Reich wrote to a shocked A. S. Neill: “I feel myself completely confused and inclined to revise most of the things I learnt in Europe about what socialism should be. If you hear socialists and communists who have come over here claiming that Roosevelt is a dictator or fascist, then your stomach turns around. I have started to hate them.” Reich thought Roosevelt had “done more in the field of social security than any communist in Russia would dream of getting.”
⁵

Since Hitler’s takeover in 1933, America’s most famous German émigré, Albert Einstein, had been living in Princeton, where an institute had been set up in his honor. He also gave a short talk at the World’s Fair on its opening day. In a heavy German accent, Einstein spoke for five minutes about cosmic rays, subatomic particles that bombard the earth with energy. It was promised that at the end of Einstein’s presentation ten rays from outer space would be harnessed by a device in the Hayden Planetarium, but when the great physicist switched on what should have been a dramatic light display, the electrics overloaded and the power failed.

The most popular attraction at the fair was Futurama, which had hour-long queues up the spiraling ramp to the tall, narrow cleft that served as an entrance. Inside, visitors stepped onto a moving platform and sat on pewlike seats before being taken on a gentle roller coaster ride over a utopian vision of 1960s America: “You somehow get an almost perfect illusion of flying,”
The New Yorker
reported.
⁶
A loudspeaker built into the winged headrest of each seat boomed, “All eyes to the future!” as people were launched out over what was claimed to be the largest model ever built, a monumental landscape punctuated by glass domes, elevated walkways, revolving airports, and clusters of skyscrapers, all crisscrossed with seven-lane super-highways (Futurama was sponsored by General Motors). “Atomic energy,” the ride’s relentlessly optimistic narrator told the time travelers, “is being used cautiously.”
⁷

One can imagine Reich, a newcomer to America, looking down over Futurama’s idealized United States, enraptured by the utopia depicted and daydreaming of the people who might inhabit it. (He visited the World’s Fair at least three times.) Did he imagine it to be neurosis and disease-free, populated by the sexually liberated? What did he make of cosmic and atomic rays, which must have seemed to him no more likely to power the future than the orgone energy he’d discovered? As the ride ended, the train deposited visitors on a full-scale mock-up of an imagined metropolitan street intersection in two decades’ time. Suddenly, it was the spring of 1960: the dawn of a decade that would be propelled by the aftershocks of Reich’s ideas, in ways no one in 1939 could have guessed. As people stepped off the moving platform, they were handed a blue and white lapel pin that boasted
I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE
.

On September 1, German tanks rolled into Poland and World War II began. “Because of the enormous distance,” Reich wrote to Lindenberg, “the war in Europe appears to us like an unreal dream. I still feel that I am part of Europe, although I am already beginning to take root in American soil.”
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Needless to say, however, this transition wasn’t without its difficulties, and Reich felt the emotional anxiety and strain experienced by many émigrés as he mourned the old world and sought yet another beginning. Reich’s teaching at the New School wasn’t to begin until the next semester, and in the meantime he suffered what he described as an “enormous depression.”

Devastated by the political situation in Europe, Reich visited his children for the first time in four years. They had moved to New York with Annie and Arnold Rubenstein the previous year. Reich found Eva and Lore “reserved” and “uneasy” around him, “‘well brought up,’ restrained, and superficially cheerful”; their mother would not let them visit him, and he felt, he wrote, “spiritually and intellectually alone.”
⁹

Reich became increasingly reclusive in Forest Hills. His diary portrays his first few weeks there as a period of “gigantic metamorphosis”; it was a time of creative brooding similar to his weeks of isolation at the alpine sanatorium in Davos.
¹⁰
Reich’s moods swung between feelings of “worry, doubt, hesitation…sleepless nights…worthlessness” and moments of elation in which he seemed absolutely sure of his genius and heroic destiny: “Oh yes, I will have many pupils,” he wrote to Lindenberg. “I will be honored, loved; after years of hard work I will have rebuilt a group around me that will fight for what is naturally right.”
¹¹

Reich’s home was entirely given over to his science. The ground floor became a laboratory, cluttered with microscopes, electroscopes, and other scientific instruments; his office on the first floor doubled as the dining room and living room; and the spare room was used for therapy. The house had a large basement, a former playroom where Reich installed benches to seat thirty people, anticipating a new following. It was there that he reassembled his Faraday cage. The mesh box stood at center stage, the only prop in an empty subterranean theater.

Freud thought Americans to be tremendous prudes when he made his only visit to the land of the dollar barbarians, as he called it, in 1909; he wrote to Jung that they had “no time for libido” and in a letter to Jones he complained of America’s virtuousness, lamenting “the strictness of American chastity.”
¹²
However, by the time Reich arrived in Freud’s “anti-paradise” exactly thirty years later, Alfred Kinsey, a forty-four-year old professor of zoology at Indiana University, had already started collecting interviews for his monumental study of American sexuality, which would document in enormous and controversial detail a country with licentiousness seething below its prim façade.

In June 1938, Kinsey, an expert on gall wasps (he collected over a million specimens), began teaching what was quaintly referred to in the university curriculum as the “marriage course.” Raised a strict Methodist, with a bullying puritanical father, Kinsey had once suffered the naïveté he now saw in his pupils. He told friends that his own lack of sex education had left him scarred and guilt-ridden, and he made it his mission to correct this in future generations. “In an uninhibited society”—Kinsey began the marriage class with a reference to the Trobriand Islanders—“a twelve-year-old would know most of the biology which I will have to give you in formal lectures.”
¹³
Kinsey offered direct, graphically illustrated descriptions of sex; his course was nicknamed “the copulating class.”

Kinsey married the first girl he ever dated, Clara McMillen, a chemistry student he met at a zoology department picnic soon after he arrived in Bloomington (he nicknamed her Mac; he was called Prok, short for Professor Kinsey). Both were virgins when they wed, and they would have four children together. Kinsey, his biographer James Jones has written, “thought that the best way to produce well-adjusted adults was to rear children who did not feel guilty about their sexuality.”
¹⁴
Nudism, Kinsey wrote in a letter to a friend in 1934, enclosing two books on the nudist movement, has “been a healthy part of our children’s education.”
¹⁵
Future parents who took the marriage course were advised not to try to prevent their children’s attempts at bodily exploration and were encouraged to include open talk about sexuality in front of their children “as part of the average dinner table conversation, as part of the average discussion of an average day.”
¹⁶

While researching material for the marriage course, Kinsey was surprised by the dearth of scientific literature available on sex—most of it, he said, was “morals masquerading under the name of science.” He wanted to fill that void by collecting people’s sexual histories, in order to build up a better portrait of the nation’s sexual practices. In
The Modernization of Sex
, the historian Paul Robinson describes Kinsey’s interview technique as “his most brilliant creation, an authentic tour de force in which every scrap of sexual information available to memory was wrenched from the subject in less than two hours.”
¹⁷
Kinsey asked 350 to 521 questions (it took him twenty minutes to get to the first explicitly sexual question), and by using a unique secret code he estimated that he was able to concentrate what would have taken twenty to twenty-five pages of narrative onto a one-page grid. It was, his colleague Paul Gebhard commented, an amazingly “compact, efficient (and, to a neophyte, diabolic) system.”
¹⁸

Kinsey quite deliberately made no moral evaluations of his subjects and guaranteed them complete confidentiality; he avoided euphemism, maintained eye contact, and rattled off his questions, employing subtle cross-checks to evaluate the reliability of his data. “We always assume that everyone has engaged in every type of activity,” Kinsey wrote of his technique, which placed the burden of denial squarely on the subject. “Consequently we always begin by asking when they engaged in such activity.”
¹⁹
The psychologist Frank Beach, who submitted to Kinsey’s questioning, reported, “It wasn’t ‘Have you ever?,’ it was ‘When did you last make love to a pig?’ You said ‘Never!’ OK—but he had you hooked if you were a pig lover” (Kinsey found that 17 percent of rural farmhands had engaged in bestiality).
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Kinsey, like Reich, wanted to change society, which he sought to do by presenting empirical proof that mores were out of sync with reality. The two men evidently never met, but they certainly corresponded: in 1943, only a couple of months after the English edition of
The Function of the Orgasm
was published, Kinsey wrote to Reich to request a copy (he also took out a subscription to Reich’s newly founded
Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone Research
), including one of his own articles on homosexuality in scholarly exchange. As the copious marginalia in his copy of the book confirm, Kinsey shared Reich’s celebration of the orgasm and his belief in the evils of sexual repression. In many ways they spoke the same language: Kinsey catalogued different kinds of orgasms with Reichian enthusiasm (he counted only experiences that led to orgasm in his statistical scheme), was against abstinence, maintained that masturbation was both healthy and necessary for alleviating nervous tension, and believed that there were “social values to be obtained by premarital experience in intercourse.”
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For Kinsey, as for Reich, sex held within it a utopian possibility, and he followed Reich in thinking that a Victorian morality present in twentieth-century America conspired to stifle it.