Adventures in the Orgasmatron (55 page)

Reich’s message about sexual liberation was undoubtedly a little overwhelming for the children at which it was aimed, and on whom he placed the burden of his utopian hopes. A childhood friend of Peter Heller’s, Edith Kramer, who later became a therapist and whose mother attempted suicide at the bohemian playground of Grundslee, later commented, “The atmosphere in that bygone era,” with its flaunting of sexual freedom, had perhaps “been too seductive for children.”
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Lore Reich may have no proof of her allegations against her father, but when she was growing up she certainly felt threatened by his constant emphasis on children’s sexuality. Before they separated, Reich and Annie kept a diary on their children’s sex education, informing them at about age four of the facts of life; sexuality, as one might expect, was a constant topic in their household. In
The Sexual Revolution
Reich argued that the only plausible reason one might give for not letting your children watch you have sex would be that it might interfere with your own pleasure, prompting speculation that he’d experimented with such a performance.

Reich was radically flawed in his judgment of Silvert and Duvall; it transpired that numerous other members of ORIC, whether Reich heard about it or not, did sexually abuse children. Susanna Steig, the niece of Reich’s follower William Steig (a
New Yorker
cartoonist, who did the illustrations for Reich’s
Listen, Little Man
), has published an online memoir, “My Childhood Experiences with Reichian Therapy,” in which she claims to have been masturbated in vegetotherapy sessions with her Reichian therapist, “a gypsy-like woman dressed in shiny silks, with her breasts hanging out of her blouse.” Steig wrote that she was also tortured by Elsworth Baker, who practiced a particularly rough vegetotherapeutic technique (he “pressed on my back so hard that I couldn’t breathe,” she remembered). She tells of another Reichian who repeatedly raped an eleven-year-old patient for months; apparently, the unnamed analyst was later put into a mental institution.
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On a holiday in Maine, when she was six or seven, Steig claims to have been encouraged by Sharaf and his wife, Grethe Hoff, to sleep with Peter Reich (“Peter knows everything about the act of mating since the age of three,” Reich wrote in an unpublished paper called “The Silent Observer” [1952]. “He has had already his intimate genital experiences with girls of his own age group.”)
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On her return home Baker gripped Steig’s leg in a session and said, “Is this where you feel it when you think of Peter?” That he knew of Hoff’s sexual encouragement made Steig think that she “was part of an experiment.”

“I have spent a lifetime dealing with the aftermath of my traumatic childhood, full of abuse and betrayal,” Susanna Steig wrote. “I think the Reichians were megalomaniacs, true believers, and elitists. Not one of them had a bit of empathy or sympathy for children. Many of them were sadists. I really hope the truth of what happened to us becomes well known…This is a cautionary tale about true believers and the evil that they do.”
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Two years after Reich’s failed demonstration with Wright in the Forest Hills basement, Albert Duvall was investigated by the Department of Education for running Orgonomic Infant Research Center without the required New York medical license; he was licensed to practice only in New Jersey and Tennessee. The New York Medical Society had received a complaint accusing Duvall of running a “sexual racket involving children” at the clinic. The original complainant, a nurse from New Jersey, alleged that Duvall had done inestimable damage to her five-year-old son, who was mute, by teaching him how to “satisfy himself.” Duvall had seen him for three months before his mother submitted to a few therapy sessions herself, in which she claimed Duvall made sexual advances to her. Duvall responded to the complaint by saying that she had “developed genital feelings she could not tolerate and had become plaguey.”
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In March 1952 the Department of Education of New York City sent a special investigator, Helen Blau, to visit the clinic. She arrived for a therapy session with Duvall, “flashily dressed, heavily perfumed, and flirtatious,” according to Baker, and “she complained of constant fatigue, dizziness, and loss of love for her husband.”
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He had her disrobe, lie on her back, and breathe deeply while he strategically pressed parts of her body. On another visit she was accompanied by her “husband,” who asked to see the accumulator and to have its workings explained to him. The following week the “couple,” accompanied by two other inspectors, returned to arrest Duvall on a “morals charge against children.”

Reich agreed to close OIRC, and the case against Duvall was subsequently dropped. Duvall moved to California, where he set up a practice in Los Angeles. Judy Garland sent her daughter Lorna Luft to see him there.
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Ten

On September 23, 1949, President Truman announced the news that America’s four-year monopoly on the atomic bomb had ended. The Soviets had exploded their first atomic weapon on August 29, 1949, two years before the CIA expected them to have this capability. In the wake of the new threat, fears about the dangers of radiation and spying entered the popular imagination. David Bradley, an army doctor from Wisconsin who had witnessed the atomic tests in the Bikini Atoll, published a bestselling book that warned of radiation’s invisible and all-pervasive effects; it was ominously titled
No Place to Hide
(1949), a title that encapsulated the fear of the era. The cold war quickly escalated: the United States had 200 A-bombs in 1949 and 290 in 1950, and by 1952 it had stockpiled 841 devices. Truman also ordered the development of the considerably more powerful hydrogen bomb.

In 1949 Alger Hiss was indicted for perjury, suspected of lying in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee when he denied he was a Soviet spy—a young Richard Nixon, for one, didn’t believe him. A senior official in the State Department who had attended the Yalta Conference and helped draw up the UN charter, Hiss had been accused of being a Communist and of passing sensitive information to the Russians by a former party member, Whittaker Chambers. This high-profile case was a year in the courts and became a focal point for the wildly escalating cold war climate of suspicion and distrust. That year anticommunism reached new heights when the Alien Registration Act of 1940, or Smith Act, was used to prosecute Communist leaders. They were classed as dangerous subversives intent on overthrowing the U.S. government, and the party was effectively bankrupted and outlawed, its remaining members forced to go underground.

Hiss was convicted in January 1950 and sentenced to five years in prison. Two weeks after he was sentenced, Klaus Fuchs, a physicist who worked at Los Alamos, confessed to stealing the atomic secrets that helped the Soviets develop the bomb, and that summer Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested, accused of doing the same. The following month, sensing an inroad for the Republicans—who hadn’t held the presidential reins since 1933—Senator Joseph McCarthy lent his name to an era when he burst onto the national stage with his dramatic but unfounded claim that there were 205 “known” Communists in the State Department. McCarthy later dropped this number to 57. Though lots of people lost their jobs, he never proved a single charge. McCarthy gave voice to the panic and uncertainty of a new political era. The CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow later said of McCarthy, “He didn’t create the situation of fear; he merely exploited it, and rather successfully.”
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In 1950, Margaret Chase Smith, a moderate Republican senator for Maine, criticized McCarthy’s “totalitarian techniques.” McCarthy, she said, was cynically trying to ride “the Republican Party to victory through the selfish exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance, and intolerance.”
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In this new atmosphere of fear, the members of Reich’s circle, secreted away in Maine, were looked upon with suspicion by many local residents. They called them the “orgies” and portrayed the thickly accented Reich as a Dr. Caligari figure. When Tom Ross left his job at the local laundry to go and work for Reich as a caretaker, he said that everyone told him, “Gee, if you go and work for him, he’ll have you in one of those boxes and you’ll never see daylight again.”
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Reich’s books were barred from the Rangeley Public Library because they advocated fostering children’s sexual impulses; the FBI files are full of handwritten letters from people living nearby—their names blacked out—informing the bureau of the strange goings-on up at Orgonon.

Unsubstantiated rumors were circulating in Rangeley that Reich was building an atomic bomb on his estate, that the Reichians were a “Communist outfit,” and that they used the box for “perverse sexual purposes.” One local store owner said that there was “a lot of sexuality” going on at Orgonon. “They’re interested in nudism and a lot of funny business.”
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Furthermore, it was alleged that Rolling Hill Farm, a summer camp run according to Neill’s ideas and attended by Reich’s son, Peter, was “a children’s nudist camp connected with Reich’s operations” and a “feeding center” for the pedophilic Reichians. One overimaginative correspondent even suggested that an amber light he’d seen shining at Orgonon one night—from the farm two miles away—was an illicit signal system.

In October 1949 the FBI dispatched an agent to investigate. The agent found no truth to any of the allegations—though he spotted an accumulator in the Rolling Hill Farm school’s playroom. An FDA inspector who later visited the school was surprised to find the children fully clothed and the camp to be “a rather high-class place.” In his report to the bureau the agent concluded, “Recent experience in Maine has indicated that the residents of rural areas in that state are particularly concerned about the current international situation and inclined to regard all persons residing in or passing through the area who are not lifelong residents with suspicion.”
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In August 1950, at the close of a summer convention devoted to the topic “The Children of the Future,” Reich asked Elsworth Baker, head of the American Association for Medical Orgonomy, to give a talk to the local townspeople he had invited up to an open day at Orgonon, in the hope that he might dispel some of the rumors that were circulating. “I am sure that, to many of you, Orgonon has an air of mystery and secrecy about it and that you have heard many rumors concerning it,” Baker told the group that assembled in the Student Laboratory. “For example, the telescope that many of you saw in the room of the Orgone Energy Observatory today has been said to be a machine gun; Dr. Reich is said to have developed a miraculous cancer cure; and there has been a lot of questioning about the idea that a lot of sex is going on or a lot that concerns sex. The purpose of today’s lecture is to try and clarify some of those questions.”
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He evidently failed. In a letter sent to thirty Rangeley citizens that November and copied to the FBI, the “nine workers at Orgonon” sought to dispel the rumors that had been multiplied by Baker’s talk:

Now, after the upheaval around the lecture given by Dr. Elsworth F. Baker at Orgonon in the end of August has blown over, we may be permitted to tell you the following…We do not run a brothel as the Fowlers with their rumors imply; we have nothing to hide, we do not conduct sexual orgies and we are not “communists.” Mr. Sharaf did not run after girls in town at night, and Peter Reich did not expose himself in school; he was forced to do so by a group of boys on the school grounds. We do not seduce small children and we do not commit sexual crimes on adolescent boys and girls. We do not “feed” patients to doctors; we do not sleep with another partner every night. We have no machine guns but only a telescope and scientific instruments in our observatory, and when there are lights in the windows at 3 or 4 in the morning, someone is sitting at his desk and taking readings or doing some writing or calculating.
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