Adventures in the Orgasmatron (50 page)

Before her father’s death, his accumulator had been relegated to a shed, where lumber was piled on top of it, and it was now warped out of shape. It was about five and a half feet high and “a very crude affair,” in Wood’s description, “but probably as effective as any and a good exhibit of a worthless device.” Wood thought it looked like a privy. “I told Clista that a slight alteration would make it a good back yard annex to a camp,” he joked.
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After reading Wood’s account of his visit to see Reich, Charles Wharton concluded that the orgone accumulator was “a fraud of the first magnitude being perpetrated by a very able individual fortified to a considerable degree by men of science.”
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Wharton, certain that Reich was cheating his customers with false medical claims, decided that the agency would pursue the investigation, and he instructed Wood to collect the names and addresses of every consignee, and of anyone who returned a box, so that the agency might identify potential “dissatisfied users” who might testify against Reich in court.

A month later Wood was back in Oquossoc on the first of several more covert investigations that he made before the year was out. In an effort to gauge the extent and modus operandi of Reich’s business, Wood made trips to the local bank, to the postmaster, to the Railway Express office and the county registry. Wood also paid frequent visits to Clista Templeton’s home; she was his key and most enthusiastic informant, and he kept his conspicuous government car hidden in her garage so that it wouldn’t be seen by anyone connected with Orgonon.

Using Clista Templeton’s records, Wood was able to collect a lengthy list of over one hundred consignees. It reads like a blacklist of names. Twenty of the devices had been shipped to doctors (Reich insisted that they use the device every day if they were to prescribe it to others), the others went to patients who paid ten dollars a month for a minimum period of three months for the privilege of “testing” it. According to Clista Templeton, the accumulators cost forty dollars to make, half for labor and half for materials. Wood estimated Reich’s annual income from accumulators to be in the region of twenty thousand dollars. One Berkeley woman—perhaps Mildred Brady’s friend—had returned her accumulator after three months. She might be a dissatisfied user, Wood wrote hopefully.

A week after his first visit, Wood visited Reich for a second time. Reich was examining a patient who was using the accumulator to treat his leg ulcers. “The Dr. was dressed in blue dungarees and heavy wool shirt. He looked anything but professional,” Wood noted. “He is thick set with a ruddy complexion and at his time, as previously, his red face showed evidence of peeling skin with light colored skin around the left eye.”
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Wood adds that this skin condition was “probably caused by accumulator research activities,” which seems an odd assertion if he was so sure the box was worthless.

Reich was warned that his accumulator was definitely classed as a device by the FDA and that therefore Wood would have to carry out a factory inspection. “Dr. Reich,” apparently flustered by this news, “answered most questions by asking questions.”
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Because it was the end of the summer and the Reichs were about to return to New York, much of the equipment in the Student Laboratory had been dismantled. Wood took down the serial numbers of all the remaining instruments. Two accumulators in the orgone room were marked with small labels reading orgone energy
ACCUMULATOR / MADE IN USA / ORGONON, RANGELEY, MAINE
, and stamped with a production number and a wishbone-like symbol.

Wires ran from one of these boxes out into the laboratory to a Geiger-Müller counter. Reich explained that he was perfecting a “free energy machine, a motor powered by orgone energy,” and told his patient that he hoped that it would be an even better device than the orgone accumulator for helping “suffering humanity.”
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(Saying that mankind was not ready for such a momentous discovery, Reich dropped the project in 1949 after one of his laboratory assistants allegedly absconded with the machine; he alerted the FBI that the student might be a Russian spy.)

After Reich’s patient had left, Wood brought up Reich’s conflict with Freud. Reich “completely exploded” and refused to answer any questions on the topic, declaring the dispute none of the FDA’s business. “The newspaper campaign directed against him [in Norway] was another touchy subject he refused to discuss,” Wood said. “His investigation by the FBI was not discussed as Reich was becoming very excited in relation to all of the troubles he confronted in his ‘strife for the advancement of science.’”
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Reich complained to his lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays, who was general counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union:

Our work is being confused with some pornographic…activities. It is too bad that inspectors in such a responsible position are not capable of distinguishing between science and pornography, and they never heard the name Sigmund Freud, and that they feel justified in asking hidden questions as, for instance, what kind of women we are employing or what we are doing with our women, etc. The implication is clearly that of indecent, smutty, pornographic behavior on our part. They should know with whom they are dealing. They seem to be disturbed by the insinuation in Miss Brady’s article that the orgone accumulator gives the patient orgastic potency. I wished it did, but it does not. But to the average human mind, used to smutty sex activities going on everywhere, the word orgastic potency has a different meaning.
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There are certainly frequent indications in Wood’s reports that he felt the FDA had stumbled across a vice ring or free-love cult in Rangeley. Wood said to one Orgone Institute employee when he interviewed her about the box, “Oh, since you’re not married, you don’t need one, do you?” Lois Wyvell at the Orgone Institute Press was asked if she handled “sex books.”
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Dr. Simeon Tropp, who as head of the Orgone Institute Research Laboratories in New York had taken over production of accumulators from Clista Templeton, was told by FDA inspectors that they were looking for a “sexy racket, mixed up with a strange box.” Tropp’s medical partner had agreed to cooperate with the FDA because he felt that Tropp “had come under the influence of Reich to such an extent that he appeared to be in a hypnotic state.”
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Clista Templeton had a sketch made by Reich of a glass tube to be inserted into the vagina that she’d picked up by mistake from Reich’s desk along with some other drawings, which seemed to hint at the accumulator’s being some kind of masturbatory device. The glass tube was filled with steel wool and attached to the shooter hose for use with nasal and vaginal disturbances. According to the instructions, the tube was to be “inserted…gently and not for more than 2 minutes at a time, or until a slight burning sensation is felt.”
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With Reich safely back in New York until the next summer, Wood, using Clista Templeton’s list of people to whom accumulators had been sent, began interviewing Reich’s patients in the Rangeley area. He discovered that there was a good deal of local enthusiasm for the box. A lady who worked at the Rangeley Tavern used one “in the nude [to]…overcome fatigue.”
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The police were called out one night to investigate a disturbance at the tavern and found a party in full swing. The chef had been locked in her orgone accumulator.

Reich hoped that one day every household might have an accumulator, which might be used to prevent cancer and other ailments, and to keep the nation charged up with bioenergy. In
The Cancer Biopathy
he imagined a whole city using it in a large-scale trial, so social workers could compare the incidences of cancer with those in similar places that didn’t have the benefits of the box. “If it is possible to mobilize the populations of an entire planet for purposes of war, then it must be possible to mobilize a district of 10,000 inhabitants for the purposes of a crucial experiment,” Reich wrote. “It must not be left undone.”
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But in the meantime, he used the Rangeley area as the testing ground for his theories.

Though you could rent or buy an accumulator, most of Reich’s clients in this rural part of Maine were charity patients who got them on loan free of charge. “Like water and air, orgone energy can be obtained for nothing and is available in unending quantities,” Reich wrote in 1948. “The purpose of collecting it in the accumulator (a process similar to filling a wash basin with water) is to supply it in concentrated form. It is important to provide a means of access to concentrated orgone energy for even the poorest people.”
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Some of his patients in Maine were so tearfully grateful for their orgone treatment, Reich wrote in
The Cancer Biopathy
, that he sometimes felt like “one of those mystical faith healers.”
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Sylvester Brackett, a seventy-year-old who claimed the accumulator was a miracle cure for his arthritis, was described by Wood as Reich’s “chief booster” in the Rangeley Lakes area. It was Brackett whom Reich had been examining when Wood last visited Orgonon. “Dr. Reich’s treatment of Mr. Brackett,” Wood reported, “consisted of having him repeat the miraculous benefits derived from the orgone accumulator several times for my benefit.” (Wood warned his superiors that Brackett “was the real ‘testimonial’ type.”)
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Later, when Wood visited his home, Brackett told him that he had suffered crippling arthritis for over a decade; he used a small shooter on his joints, legs, and hands and sat in a large accumulator for about an hour a day, a habit he credited with his being able to walk again.

Both devices were set up in his living room, just outside his bedroom, but Brackett admitted that (against Reich’s advice) he hadn’t used either accumulator for the few months between his last meeting with Reich and Wood’s visit, because he hadn’t been suffering any excessive stiffness. But, Wood wrote, he stated that “he would under no circumstances be deprived of the use of the Accumulators and probably would resume treatments, if his condition became any worse.”
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George Garland, Brackett’s seventy-year-old brother-in-law, had used the accumulator to combat his asthma. He paid Reich five dollars a month and sat in it for fifteen to forty-five minutes each night, but he returned the box after about six months, feeling that it was not beneficial in his case. Another relation, Samson Brackett, who Wood thought looked like Rip van Winkle, had used an accumulator for leg sores for about a year, again free of charge, but returned it after deciding that it had “lost its power.” A Mr. Beckworth, whose son married Brackett’s daughter, sat in his accumulator to treat his asthma and arthritis. Also a charity patient, he claimed to have achieved good results with the device. He stored it in pieces in a corner of his bedroom, not having used it for several months, but said he planned to use it again in the spring.

Though several people had discontinued using or dismantled their accumulators, none would declare themselves dissatisfied with the device. No one would admit that they had been suckered. For example, Oscar Tubbs, sixty-one, lived on his own on a small farm and used the accumulator for “asthma, leg lameness, piles, ear and nose troubles” (“Aside from his belief in Orgone Accumulators,” Wood wrote, “he appears to be intelligent”). Tubbs found sitting in it nude “rather harsh treatment in cold weather” and got Reich’s permission to use it “lightly clad.” He kept the shooter by his bed; Wood noticed dust in the larger accumulator and Tubbs admitted that he, too, was not using it, though he hung on to it in case of emergencies. He’d had a letter from Reich warning him of the FDA investigation and “was concerned over the possibility of being classed as a fraud victim and apparently put up a strong defense for three years’ use of the boxes.”
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Wood was aware that his findings would disappoint his Boston bosses. He had interviewed twelve of Reich’s accumulator patients. “No dissatisfied users were located,” Wood wrote to the FDA’s central office on January 5, 1948.

The users seem to be either satisfied with results or take the attitude that nothing was promised so they are not dissatisfied that no benefits were received…This entire Orgone Accumulator set up is a peculiar one and quite different from anything else I ever worked on. None of the Maine users have any literature put out by Reich or the Institute and most of them wouldn’t understand it if they had it. The boxes are either loaned free of charge or rented at a low rate ($15 a month) to local people.
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A few months later Wood reported that it seemed as though the “orgone box business was petering out” in Reich’s absence; it seemed almost as though most people planned to use their box only in the summer months when they could enjoy the free medical attention Reich extended to them.
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The following August, when Reich returned to Maine, Wood reported to Wharton that production of orgone accumulators had been resumed. Reich certainly made no secret about his inventory, which was painstakingly documented in Ollendorff’s “Report on Orgone Energy Accumulators in the USA” (
Journal of Orgonomy
, 1950). At the time of writing, Ollendorff wrote, there were 322 accumulators in “official” use in the United States, which had earned the Wilhelm Reich Foundation (established in 1949 by Reich’s supporters) a total of $23,000—a much more modest sum than Wood had estimated.