Adventures in the Orgasmatron (36 page)

By the summer of 1939 Kinsey had grilled 350 people about their private practices, the majority of them university students. He began supplementing these repetitive “baby histories,” as he dismissed them, by making trips to Chicago, some two hundred miles away, in search of people to interview. Kinsey brought the collecting mania that characterized his gall wasp research to his first field trips there: he took five to seven histories a day, many of them from members of the city’s gay subculture—several of his interviewees, he wrote excitedly to a former graduate student, had enjoyed as many as two thousand to three thousand partners each. “[I’ve] been to Halloween parties, taverns, clubs, etc. which would have been unbelievable if realized by the rest of the world,” he wrote.
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By the end of 1940 he had collected 1,692 sex histories at a personal cost of $1,000, which was over a fifth of his salary.

The marriage class, though popular with students, disturbed many of Kinsey’s colleagues. Thurman Rice, a member of the medical school who had previously been responsible for sex education, lobbied against the course and complained about the pornographic nature of the illustrations that accompanied Kinsey’s lectures, confessing that one of the slides “was even stimulating to me.”
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In 1941 the Ministerial Association, a church organization, petitioned Herman Wells, the president of the university, to put a stop to the course. Wells forced Kinsey to choose between teaching it and collecting sexual histories. Three years after he began the marriage course, Kinsey decided to abandon two decades of work on gall wasps—to which he often dreamed of returning, but never did—and to give over his taxonomic expertise wholly to the field of sex research.

Thanks to a research grant that came through later that year from the Rockefeller Foundation, Kinsey was able to set up the Institute for Sex Research and hire young colleagues to help him amass many more sex histories. Kinsey and his new colleagues—the statistician Clyde Martin, the psychologist Wardell Pomeroy, and the anthropologist Paul Gebhard—set themselves the ambitious task of eliciting one hundred thousand sexual histories (the longest of which took seventeen hours to extract). Between 1938 and 1956 they managed only eighteen thousand—eight thousand were obtained by Kinsey himself.

Kinsey’s team crisscrossed America with their boss like a team of traveling salesmen. Kinsey said that his researchers must have “the qualities of Fuller brush men”—in effect, their product was the sexual revolution. As they traveled they conducted interviews on planes, on trains, in cars, in library stacks, in diners, in bars, and in hotels, mapping the country in a new way. They recorded the nation’s sex life in their secret code, the key to which took them six months to learn. It had never been written down; when they flew, they did so separately, so there would always be a survivor who knew the code. This code could even distinguish tonal inflection—YES, Yes, and Y-e-e-e-s. They communicated in a private language, for example: “My last history liked Z better than Cm, although Go in Cx madder him very er,” Pomeroy said to Kinsey in a crowded elevator, which translated as “My last history liked intercourse with animals better than with his wife, but mouth-genital contact with an extramarital partner was very arousing.”
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Gebhard compared the team to astronauts, pioneers who were sealed off from the world they studied: “We were kept so busy that, if you combined our home lives with the Institute, we didn’t have much time left over for any other kind of socialization. For example, our interviewing trips would be two weeks long and we’d come home for two weeks, and during that period you’d have to teach. So it was a very confined life.” (Someone joked that Mrs. Kinsey complained that she didn’t see much of her husband anymore ever since he took up sex.) Vincent Nowlis, who did a brief stint of interviewing, described the endless car journeys and motel existence as like being in a submarine: “We were in a very isolated, self-contained world, sliding through dangerous waters on a difficult mission, desperate for time, moving in a self-contained world with a commander directing every movement, and the crew utterly dependent on him and on each other because the craft was so vulnerable. No one could afford to make a mistake.”
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The Rockefeller Foundation would remain Kinsey’s principal backer until 1954, when it ceased funding sex research, by which time Kinsey had been granted hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many critics have seen in the Rockefeller support of Kinsey’s sex research an attempt by the ruling classes to manipulate human behavior by trying to find the means by which sex could be controlled. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the neurasthenic son of the richest man in America, became interested in the study of sex when he was invited to head a 1910 New York City grand jury impaneled to investigate the city’s prostitution rings. Rockefeller, whose only independent achievement to date had been to lead a Bible group in the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, was inspired by his jury experience to throw himself into public service; he went on to use his huge fortune to support the campaign to wipe out this “social evil.”

In 1909, the year of Freud’s visit, panic about the “white slave trade” had swept across America. Sensationalist books on the subject such as
The Great War on White Slavery
and
The Cruel and Inhuman Treatment of White Slaves
were bestsellers, taking readers on titillating armchair tours of the nation’s vice districts. Prostitution was a dominant issue in national politics; Theodore Roosevelt called for “the most relentless war on commercialized vice,” by which he meant organized prostitution, and in 1910 Congress passed the Mann Act, which made it illegal to transport a woman across state lines for “immoral” purposes. The Immigration Act passed that same year gave police the power to arrest any foreign-born women found at dance halls and other places that were “frequented by prostitutes.”
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Rockefeller joined forces with progessive reformers and in 1911 founded the Bureau of Social Hygiene, a charitable organization devoted to the “study, amelioration, and prevention of those social conditions, crimes, and diseases which adversely affect the well-being of society, with special reference to prostitution and the evils associated therewith.” This allowed him to feel, as his father’s biographer Ron Chernow put it, “politically liberal and modern while clinging to an old-fashioned aversion to gambling, prostitution, alcohol, and other vices traditionally shunned by Baptists.”
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The educational arm of his organization distributed millions of free pamphlets with titles such as
Social Hygiene vs. the Sexual Plagues
(1913). This last, which warned of the dangers of prostitution and venereal disease, was full of misinformation and judgment. It recommended that male infants be circumcised as a precaution against syphilis and warned that “excessive intercourse is silly, vulgar, brutal, and destructive.”
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One of the bureau’s first projects was to fund the Laboratory of Social Hygiene, an annex to a women’s prison run by the pioneering sociologist Katharine Bement Davis, whom Rockefeller thought was the cleverest woman he’d ever met (Davis would go on to become the first woman to hold a cabinet post in the state of New York, and in 1915 was voted one of the three most famous women in America). Three-quarters of the inmates at Davis’s overcrowded reformatory in Bedford Hills, New York, were prostitutes who had been arrested in New York and incarcerated for sex offenses, a prison population that had swelled as a result of the draconian measures made in an attempt to suppress the trade. The prison was designed to be a kind of university that would rehabilitate prostitutes, yet it made stringent proposals for those it deemed impossible to save.

Davis’s laboratory conducted “a scientific study of the types of women psychologically and physiologically who enter upon the life of vice and crime.”
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The aim was to weed out the “moral imbeciles”—girls of “bad heredity” who simply could not “distinguish between right and wrong”—from those who might be reclaimed by society. Davis estimated that 20 percent of her charges exhibited “degenerate strains,” with family histories of alcoholism, venereal disease, epilepsy, insanity, and tuberculosis. Davis’s prisoners underwent three months of physical, mental, and sociological tests. They were kept in solitary confinement while they were subjected to Binet (intelligence) and Wassermann (syphilis) tests, humiliating medical examinations and an intrusive grilling about their sex lives. Fieldworkers would even visit their families to further determine their “social and moral condition.”

The laboratory not only aimed to gain a more comprehensive knowledge of the social conditions that led women to prostitution but also promised to function as a kind of eugenics board. Davis didn’t just think that the “feeble-minded” should be segregated from other prisoners because they might distract from the process of reform. She thought that they should be placed in permanent custodial care, at least during their childbearing years, to prevent them from bringing “into the world children who, if there is anything in heredity, have only to look forward to a life of hopeless misery.”
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Rockefeller, like Davis, Kinsey, and many other reformers at the time, was a firm believer in eugenics. The family’s interest in eugenics and sex research overlapped in the Rockefellers’ concern with good breeding, reproducing their own class, and the campaign against prostitution and venereal disease. Rockefeller inherited his belief in eugenics from his father, who preached the survival of the fittest in business and rationalized his own meteoric rise as the result of superior biology. Rockefeller senior funded Charles B. Davenport’s Eugenics Record Office, which opened in October 1910 in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island (in 1920, benefiting from funds from another tycoon, the Eugenics Record Office became the Carnegie Institution Department of Genetics). Rocke feller senior paid the salaries of six researchers there to compile a huge number of family genealogies.

Davenport’s team visited prisons and mental asylums, as well as the homes of the relatives of these inmates, in the hope of identifying the so-called submerged tenth, the 10 percent of the population that was thought to be dragging down the national gene pool. (Rockefeller senior attempted to redress this trend by having five children; his son had six.) The family trees Davenport collected were annotated with various social and physical characteristics written in a special code (“sx” stood for sexual pervert, “im” for immoral), much as Kinsey’s later compilations of American sex life would be. By the time of his retirement in 1935, Davenport had completed eugenic assessments of thirty-five thousand names.

Davenport thought that if the feeble-minded were sexually segregated or sterilized, most “defectives” could be wiped out within fifteen to thirty years. “The most progressive revolution in history” he wrote, could be achieved if “human matings could be placed upon the same high plane as horse breeding.”
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To Rockefeller junior, who supported the establishment of the American Eugenics Society, Davis’s proposed laboratory at the Bedford Hills reformatory gave eugenics an acceptable scientific gloss and, because each case would be judged by a panel of experts, a modicum of academic respectability (Rockefeller reassigned one of the eugenics workers whom his father sponsored at the Eugenics Record Office to Bedford Hills). He hoped that by bankrolling the laboratory for the state, he would prove its viability and that after five years the legislature would take it over and expand it.

Rockefeller junior’s efforts and Davenport’s work became part of a campaign to introduce sterilization laws, which came into effect in New York in 1912 and resulted in the compulsory sterilization of forty-five people, all inmates of mental asylums. The practice was declared unconstitutional six years later.

Over the next four decades of his life, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., would funnel almost six million dollars of his family foundation’s money into sex research, including such large-scale projects as Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood. Sanger, also a believer in eugenics, would go on to become heavily involved in the research that led to the contraceptive pill. Indeed, according to the historian of sexology Vern Bullough, the Rockefellers were “about the sole supporters of sex research” in that period.
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The Rockefellers were indispensable shapers of the field into which Reich brought his ideas about psychoanalysis and repression. Reich applied for Rockefeller grants in 1936 and 1941, but never received one—a rejection he took bitterly.