Fifties (45 page)

His greatest passion was his work. He approached it with an intensity that was rooted in the Calvinist zeal of his forefathers. As a young man he had gone on vacation with friends but complained later that the time might have been better spent working, and in fact he generally worked every day of the year except Christmas Day. He had always been, his biographer Pomeroy shrewdly noted, a
collector.
As a boy he collected stamps, but it was the only collection he ever made that was not designed to be useful. Sickly as a child from rheumatic fever, he had not been able to play among his peers; instead, he became a student of nature. He wrote his first book in his teens, a small monograph entitled, “What Do Birds Do When It Rains?” By the time he was in college at Bowdoin, he had come to love collecting plants and animals; the Bowdoin College yearbook notes that “on entering his room one never knows whether Mr. Kinsey or a large able-bodied snake is going to greet him.”

As a graduate student at Harvard, he won a fellowship that allowed him to travel around the country. He later wrote a high school teacher of the pleasure of that fellowship: “In all, counting the summertime that I spent at either end of the trip, I got fifteen solid months out-of-doors! Think of that—for a life! I am more and more satisfied that no other occupation in the world could give me the pleasure that this job of bug-hunting is giving. I shall never cease to thank you for leading me into it!” From the start he had proven to be a first-rate scholar, and he never failed to see the beauty in plants and in animals. Earle March, a San Francisco gynecologist, once spoke of his rare ability to “look through the ugliness to something lovely beyond. I often,” Marsh added, “thought about him as an athlete of the spirit.”

He seemed by this time to be the least likely candidate to become one of the most controversial figures of his generation. During the early forties he published
Edible Wild Plants of North America,
which was voted the most important book of the year by the trustees of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. He was a highly respected professor of zoology in a good department at Indiana University. Esteemed by his colleagues for his world-class collection of gall wasps, he was also popular with his students, a kind and humane teacher who was always generous with his time.

Then, in 1938, a group of his students came to him and asked
questions about marriage. He was touched by their innocence. At first he refrained from answering, fearing he knew too little. He went out and read everything he could on the subject and was appalled by the inadequate available material—both in quantity and quality. Some of the students petitioned the university to start a course on sexuality and marriage. From the start it was Kinsey’s course. He was one of eight faculty members who taught it and he gave three of the basic lectures. The course was a huge success. It soon became his obsession. Clara Kinsey was known on occasion to tell friends, “I hardly see him at night anymore since he took up sex.” What was probably true, some of his colleagues thought, was that he was already a little restless with the study of insects and was looking for a larger challenge—a new area in which to start collecting.

When he began his studies of human sexuality, one of his oldest friends, Edgar Anderson, by then the director of Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, wrote him: “It was heartwarming to see you settling down into what I suppose will be your real life work. One would never have believed that all sides of you could have found a project big enough to need them all. I was amused to see how the Scotch Presbyterian reformer in you had finally got together with the scientific fanatic with his zeal for masses of neat data in orderly boxes and drawers. The monographer Kinsey, the naturalist Kinsey, and the camp counsellor Kinsey all rolling into one at last and going full steam ahead. Well, I am glad to have a seat for the performance. It’s great to have it done, and great to know that you are doing it.”

He began by taking sexual histories of his students. He conducted the interviews in his tiny office, locked the door, and sent his assistant elsewhere. The enrollment for the class grew every year, and first juniors and then freshmen and sophomores were allowed in. Soon four hundred students were signing up for it. But more and more his heart was in the research. By 1939 he wrote to a friend that the interviews were “a scientific gold mine.” Soon he was taking the sexual histories of not only his students but traveling out of town on weekends, at first to Chicago and then to other communities in the Midwest, to find additional subjects. As the project took an increasing amount of his time, there was an inevitable conservative reaction against him in Indiana. Complaints began to come in, from parents and local ministers. One of his early critics, Professor Thurman Rice of the University of Indiana Medical School, was enraged because Kinsey had not, in the course of teaching, denounced premarital sex.

In 1940 Herman Wells, the president of Indiana University, who was largely sympathetic to Kinsey and his work, called in Kinsey
and, citing complaints from local ministers, told him that he would have to make a choice: He could either teach the course or take his histories, but he could not do both. Wells assumed, since he loved the course, that he would give up the case histories. Kinsey, sure that his critics feared the research more than the sex-education course, resigned from the course. Those who thought he would do otherwise, he noted, “do not know me.” From then on, he devoted himself exclusively to his research.

The study of American sexual habits was a delicate business. Kinsey wanted a certain bland neutrality to his researchers. He did not want them to wear beards and mustaches, and he worried when one of them looked too young and therefore might not inspire the proper amount of confidence. Though he was a generous, abidingly tolerant man, he did not hire Jews or blacks or those with names that were not distinctly Anglo-Saxon. He was sensitive to the prejudices of the time and wanted his interviewers to cause no distractions among the subjects from whom they were eliciting such sensitive information.

During the forties, while much of the rest of the country was going off to war, Alfred Kinsey and a handful of assistants set off to interview as many men and women as they could on their sexual habits. At first they had limited resources: Kinsey used part of his own small salary to hire others. The war made things harder, and he worried whether he could get enough miles from the thinning treads of his tires (“I am well fixed for tires right now. I think I can get perhaps 30 or 40,000 out of what I have, but if retreads are not available then, my traveling after case histories will be at an end ...”).

In 1941 he got his first grant from a foundation, for $1,600; in 1943 he received his first grant from the Medical Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, a gift of $23,000; by 1947 that figure was $40,000. The foundation thereby became the principal financial backer of his studies. By 1947 he was preparing to publish the first book of his results—a simple report on the human animal studied in one of its highest-priority biologic acts. His conclusions do not seem startling today: that healthy sex led to a healthy marriage; that there was more extramarital sex on the part of both men and women than they wanted to admit; that petting and premarital sex tended to produce better marriages; that masturbation did not cause mental problems as superstition held; that there was more homosexuality than people wanted to admit.

Herman Wells, the president of Indiana University, had made a
few minor requests of him: He asked Kinsey not to publish during the sixty-one days that the Indiana legislature was in session—or for that matter immediately before it convened—and he asked him to use a medical publisher, in order to minimize sensationalism. Kinsey chose W. B. Saunders, an old-line firm in Philadelphia. The original printing was slated for 10,000, but as prepublication interest grew, Saunders increased it to 25,000. The book cost $6.50, which made it expensive for those days, had 804 pages, and weighed three pounds. Kinsey had received no advance against royalties from the publisher, and whatever money he made, he turned back to his own think tank, which by then was known as the Institute for Sex Research of Indiana University.

Though he continued to sign himself on letters “Alfred Kinsey, professor of zoology,” his days as a mere professor were behind him. His name was suddenly a household word; everyone knew of him as the sex doctor. There was a famous Peter Arno cartoon in
The New Yorker
showing a woman reading the report and asking her husband with a horrified expression, “Is there a
Mrs.
Kinsey?” Within ten days of the book’s release, the publisher had to order a sixth printing, making a phenomenal 185,000 copies in print. To the astonishment of everyone, particularly Kinsey, the book roared up the best-seller lists, a fact somewhat embarrassing to
The New York Times,
which at first neither accepted advertising for Kinsey’s book nor reviewed it. The early critical response was good. The first reviews saw his samples adequate, his scientific judgments modest, his tone serious. Polls taken of ordinary Americans showed that not only did they agree with his evidence, but they believed such studies were helpful.

Then his critics weighed in. They furiously disagreed with almost everything: his figures on premarital sex; his figures on extramarital sex; his figures on homosexuality; above all, his failure to condemn what he had found. Not only had he angered the traditional conservative bastions of social mores—the Protestant churches on the right and the Catholic Church—but to his surprise, he had enraged the most powerful voices in the liberal Protestant clergy as well. Henry Pitney Van Dusen, the head of Union Theological Seminary, and Reinhold Niebuhr attacked. Harry Emerson Fosdick, the head of Riverside Church and the brother of the head of the Rockefeller Foundation, complained that the advertising for the book was not sufficiently sedate. Harold Dodds, the president of Princeton, said, “Perhaps the undergraduate newspaper that likened the report to the work of small boys writing dirty words on fences touched a more profound scientific truth than is revealed in the
surfeit of rather trivial graphs with which the reports are loaded.” By trying to study our sexual patterns, he was accused instead of trying to lower our moral standards.

Kinsey was at first stunned, then angered by the response, but he was never embittered. He was appalled by the failure of other scientists and doctors to come to his defense. He sensed in certain cases that the lack of support stemmed from professional jealousy. In time, as the attacks grew more strident, he did not hesitate, when talking with friends, to compare himself with such scientists as Galileo, who had been pilloried in the past for challenging the myths and the ignorance of their age. What surprised him most was the absence of scientific standards in most of the assaults. His critics were, he noted, merely “exposing their emotional (not their scientific) selves in their attacks.”

Soon his friends began to worry about his reaction to criticism. It was as if even the mildest dissent in a review bothered him—someone either supported him completely or had become an enemy. But he held back from revealing his dismay in public. He treated most critics the way he treated one would-be heckler at a lecture at Berkeley. It was a marvelous moment: Several thousand people had turned out to hear him. As he reached the most delicate part of his lecture—that a person might need a sexual outlet as many as seven times a week—a long, low wolf-whistle came from someone in the audience. “And then there are some whose outlet is as low as that of the man who just whistled.” The audience roared with laughter. It was his last interruption of the night.

The attacks wounded Kinsey, yet he refused to show it in public. Besides, there was a second book to finish. His biggest fear was that he might lose his key source of support, the Rockefeller Foundation. Unfortunately, Henry Pitney Van Dusen was not just the head of Union Theological, he was a member of the Rockefeller Foundation board. It seemed to Kinsey that a systematic attack was being aimed toward the Rockefeller people, designed to get them to cut off their support to him.

At first the Rockefeller Foundation stood firm. The criticism from Van Dusen, Fosdick, and the others had not damaged Kinsey’s standing there. Alan Gregg, who was in effect Kinsey’s man at the foundation, congratulated Kinsey for handling himself so well in the face of such venomous criticism. But soon Gregg’s tone began to change, reflecting, Kinsey was sure, mounting pressures on the foundation. Gregg started suggesting that Kinsey show more statistical evidence in the next volume. Soon there were warnings from Gregg
that it might be harder than he had expected to sustain the funding. Perhaps the royalties from the book could pay for the research, Gregg suggested. To Kinsey that was a spurious argument. If the Rockefeller people wavered in their support or cut it back, Kinsey wrote Gregg, it would be the equivalent of a vote of no confidence in him. There was only a limited amount the royalties could do in terms of support. If anything, Kinsey wanted to expand the budget—there was always so much more to do.

The trouble, Kinsey learned, was the new head of the Rockefeller Foundation, Dean Rusk. Rusk had come over after serving as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs. Cautious to a fault, wary of the power of conservatives in Congress, he was not anxious to take serious political risks on behalf of something that must have seemed as peripheral to him as Kinsey’s sex research. B. Carroll Reece, a conservative Republican from Tennessee, was threatening to investigate the Rockefeller Foundation and one of the reasons was the Kinsey report. Kinsey sensed that Rusk was quietly distancing himself from the institute.

The second book,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,
was published in the fall of 1953. Kinsey was well aware that it was even more explosive than the first—he was, after all, discussing wives, mothers, and daughters. As a precaution, Kinsey invited journalists to come to Bloomington for several days to have the data explained and interpreted. Ed Murrow asked Kinsey to come on his television program
Person to Person.
Kinsey turned him down, noting in a letter to
Edgar
R. Murrow that it was the policy of the institute not to appear on radio, television, or in the movies.