Adventures in the Orgasmatron (49 page)

Rexroth thought that the Communist Party, weakened after the Second World War, was trying to make the anarchists look ridiculous by hitching their wagon to Reich’s star in the public’s imagination. In comparison with the Communists’ withering group, the anarchists were thriving, largely because of their popular pacifist stance during the war. In
Autobiographical Novel
, so titled to avoid libel suits, Rexroth described a meeting in San Francisco held by his anarchist group, the Libertarian Circle. Devoted to the topic “Sex and Anarchy,” the event became a legend that might have provided the title for Brady’s article. “You couldn’t get in the doors,” Rexroth wrote. “People were standing on one another’s shoulders, and we had to have two meetings, the overflow in the downstairs meeting hall.”
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Before Brady’s article appeared, Rexroth claimed, Henry Miller and many other supposed “Reichites” had never heard of Reich. “I have never met anybody in this circle who was a devotee of the dubious notions of the psychologist Wilhelm Reich,” Rexroth wrote in response to Brady’s claims. “In fact, few of them have ever read him, and those who have consider him a charlatan.”
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This is a highly doubtful claim in light of his enthusiastic promotion by anarchists such as George Leite, Paul Goodman, and Marie Louise Berneri. Reich was also on Rexroth’s own reading list and was much discussed at the Libertarian Circle.

With the benefit of hindsight, Rexroth compared the orgone box to an earlier quack medical device, the Abrams box:

The whole Socialist movement after the First War, led by Frank Harris and Upton Sinclair, embraced the Abrams electronic diagnosis machine [the Abrams box could supposedly diagnose and treat diseased tissue with electrical vibrations]. Twenty years later, after the Second War, the reborn Anarchist movement committed suicide in the orgone boxes of Wilhelm Reich. Anyone who had taken a course in high school physics would have known that this stuff was arrant nonsense but the trouble was that these people had lost belief in high school physics along with their belief in capitalism or religion. It was all one fraud to them. Dr. Abrams had been San Francisco’s leading diagnostician. He almost certainly was self-deluded. The same is true of Wilhelm Reich, who before he was persecuted first by Freud, then by the Nazis, then by the Stalinists, was one of the more valuable of the second generation of psychoanalysts. Both Abrams and Reich were taken up by criminal promoters who used their madness to defraud thousands of people and to make hundreds of American radicals ridiculous.
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Other anarchists also tried to distance themselves from Reich’s controversial invention after Brady’s attack. In 1949, when he outed Brady as a Communist to Sharaf, Dwight Macdonald was making daily trips to Reich’s New York office for irradiations in the orgone box. According to Macdonald’s Austrian friend and neighbor, the biologist and cancer specialist Theodore Hauschka, who was interviewed by the FDA in February 1953, Macdonald would sit in the box for “one-half hour each day in the nude with his tongue protruded in order to get the full effect of Orgone radiation.”
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While meditating inside the accumulator, and unbeknownst to Reich, Macdonald was plotting his own denunciation of Reich’s theories. He was researching an article he hoped to write for the radical magazine he edited,
Politics
, and in which he had previously allowed Goodman to so enthusiastically promote Reich. Provisionally titled “A Layman’s Opinion of the Reichian Theory and Orgone Accumulator,” it was to run alongside Hauschka’s damning professional opinion of the box.
Politics
folded in 1950, so Macdonald never wrote his article, but according to Hauschka the only benefit Macdonald claimed to have derived from Reich’s box was that he managed to finish reading
War and Peace
while sitting inside it.

Macdonald commissioned Hauschka to write his medical opinion of the accumulator. Hauschka never used the box, but on the basis of his study of Reich’s books and the repetition of some of Reich’s experiments outlined in them, he concluded that Reich’s orgone theory was the “gibberish of a madman.” In his own paper, which was also never published (but was cited in Clara Thompson’s 1950 book on the neo-Freudians), Hauschka wrote that Reich’s theories were “the ultimate in schizoid experience”; Reich substituted “a billion ameboid individualities for [his] disintegrating ego.”
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“I did not know,” Hauschka wrote, sarcastically quoting Reich, “that ‘many cancer cells have a tail and move in the manner of fish.’ Perhaps they are trying desperately to be spermatozoa, for cancer, according to Reich, is the direct consequence of sexual stasis and pleasure starvation.” He refuted Reich’s assumption with his own research on mice; according to Hauschka, 70 percent of the breeding females he studied died of breast tumors, whereas only 5 percent of the virgin mice developed cancer. He therefore concluded, “Sexual stasis does not cause malignancy but prevents it; but I should hesitate to let this finding tempt me into recommending nation-wide celibacy as a means of cancer-prevention.”
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Hauschka thought Reich was sincere in his beliefs: “If Reich were a quack—and he most assuredly is not—he could never have dreamt up this nightmare of a book. What a tragic waste of enthusiasm and misdirected scientific curiosity! What a classic of systematized self-delusion, quite capable of deluding others as well!”
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However, if Brady hoped to ridicule the anarchists by linking them with Reich, this strategy backfired—despite the reservations of important spokesmen such as Rexroth and Macdonald, the negative publicity Reich received only attracted more people to his ideas. In 1949 the newspaper
PM
noted that
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
was the most frequently requested item in the New York Public Library. Henry Miller reported that a number of people came to Big Sur saying, “I came to join the cult of sex and anarchy.”
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Elsworth Baker wrote in his memoir,
My Eleven Years with Reich
, “The appearance of emotional plague articles only resulted in a further spread of interest…The telephone rang almost constantly.”
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On the August 28, 1947, Charles Wood, a Food and Drug Administration inspector for Maine, made an unannounced visit to Orgonon, Reich’s estate in Maine (named in honor of Reich’s discovery of orgone energy there several years earlier). Wood drove up the half-mile-long driveway lined with blueberry bushes, past handwritten signs reading no admittance, no trespassing, and no admission except on written appointment. Ilse Ollendorff came out of the Student Laboratory to greet the visitor and confirmed that Reich saw no one without prior arrangement. When Wood showed her his credentials she went back inside to confer with her husband, and Reich appeared.

“Dr. Reich,” Wood’s subsequent report in the FDA archive in Washington states, “is fifty years old, speaks with a German accent, and was dressed in blue dungarees and a work shirt at the time of the visit. His greeting was cordial.” When Reich asked Wood how he’d heard about the box, he said a friend had sent him the Brady article; Reich complained about its “red-fascist” origin and called it “rotten” and “bitchy.”
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Wood was visiting to determine whether the accumulator might be classed as a medical device and would therefore be under FDA jurisdiction; applications had to be filed with the FDA for all medical or therapeutic devices shipped in interstate commerce. The Consumers Union had played an active role in securing the passage of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, one of the last measures of Roosevelt’s New Deal, in 1938. As one judge explained the act, “The purpose of the law is to protect the public, the vast multitude of which includes the ignorant, the unthinking, and the credulous who, when making a purchase, do not stop to analyze.”
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(Wood was already working on the Hoxsey cancer case, helping to gather evidence against Harry Hoxsey, who sold a dark brown herbal remedy that he claimed could cure cancer.)

Reich took Wood into the orgone room, an enormous accumulator lined with sheet iron, to show him the two accumulators kept inside. “It is a small cabinet affair, large enough to hold a small chair for the patient to sit in,” Wood reported to Charles Wharton, chief of the eastern division of the FDA, evidently unimpressed. “Dr. Reich readily admitted that his ‘Orgone Accumulator’ was a device (in experimental stages) for the treatment of many diseases, including cancer.”
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The accumulator, Reich told him, was only ever used under a doctor’s supervision, and volunteered the names of the five doctors who were working with him at that time. Patients paid a small rental fee. Having already gotten into trouble with the American Medical Association, Reich had scaled back his claims; he now asked patients to sign an affidavit in the presence of a notary that stated that they were participating in an experiment and that no cures were promised.

The Orgone Institute also sold as well as rented accumulators. One of the large devices retailed for $216, and a tabletop model, the shooter, cost $75. These were shipped by rail through Boston to New York City and on to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and California. Reich gave Wood some examples of the literature that was sent out with each box. An instruction sheet, “How to Use the Orgone Accumulator,” addressed the “pioneers” who had volunteered to test Reich’s new machine: “We do not promise any cures,” users were told. “No mystical influence should be expected. No profit interest is behind the distribution of Orgone Accumulators. The chief aim is to define in the course of 2 to 4 years how many people who use the Akku regularly will still develop chronic colds, severe sinus trouble, pneumonia and diseases of the life system, (cancer, etc.).” Patients were instructed to sit in the box every day, preferably in the nude, until they’d “had enough” or felt there was “nothing happening any longer.”
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A thirty-eight-year-old woman called Clista Templeton manufactured the boxes in Oquossoc, a small hamlet a few miles from Orgonon. Templeton told Wood, who visited her immediately after he met Reich, that she had been making accumulators since her father, Herman Templeton, died three years earlier. Herman Templeton had been a guide in the area and Reich had become friends with him on his first holiday in Maine (Reich had been staying in a cabin built by Templeton, which he then bought from him). Templeton started making rental accumulators for Reich on a one-off basis in 1942. By the end of the following year there were 20 accumulators in official use, most of them built by him, and he built the same number again in 1944. As Reich became better known after the war, demand shot up: in 1946, 56 new devices were constructed; the next year, when Brady’s article came out, 65. By the time of Wood’s visit, Templeton and his daughter had built 171 large accumulators and 85 smaller “shooters” between them. (Of course, many users, like Rosenfeld and Burroughs, simply built their own.)

When Templeton, sixty-nine, was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, Reich recommended he use an orgone accumulator. Templeton built his own box, becoming the first of Reich’s patients to use one at home rather than in Reich’s clinic in Forest Hills. Reich spent the summer of 1942 as Herman Templeton’s informal physician, taking away urine samples to examine under the microscope and reappearing with reports of the residues of dead cancer cells that he had observed, proof that the tumors were being destroyed by sessions in the box. That summer, Clista Templeton told Wood, “Reich was much enthused over the possible development of the production of Accumulators on [a] big scale and that he indicated the need of all kinds of assistants, etc., to take care of the throngs of sufferers that were sure to crowd the gates of Orgonon.”
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Apparently he even made large road signs to direct people to Orgonon and put them up in the Rangeley Lakes region.

Templeton had been given six months to a year to live, but, as Reich reported in
The Cancer Biopathy
(1948), when he started using the accumulator his pains left him, he gained seven pounds, and his bedsores dried out. He lived for a further three years. Clista Templeton considered these statements to be “exaggerated or completely false.”
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According to Wood, Clista Templeton felt that her father had been exploited by Reich and planned to stop production in the near future. Her father, Clista said, had built himself an accumulator only after Reich’s “consistent urging, and…against his better judgment.”
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She thought that Reich’s enthusiasm, and his hopes that Orgonon would become a new Lourdes, had given the family “false hopes.” Though Templeton seemed to think the accumulator helped him in the fall and winter of 1942, Clista thought that these were probably the slow results of his earlier hospital treatment. Her father’s health slumped early the next year and he died twenty-five months (not three years) after his cancer was diagnosed. Toward the end of his life, Clista said, her father “lost confidence in the Accumulator, and at one time told Dr. Reich that it was ineffective like all of the rest of the ‘cure-alls.’”
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