Adventures in the Orgasmatron (59 page)

They drove up to the pavilion marked “Student Laboratory,” but no one answered when they knocked on the door. In fact, the place seemed deserted. There were danger signs everywhere (the laboratory had been quarantined after Oranur). The road to the observatory was also closed off. Suspended from the gate chain was a
NO TRESPASSING
sign. Another read, as it had when Wood first visited,
ADMITTANCE BY WRITTEN APPOINTMENT ONLY
. The inspectors ignored these warnings, dropped the chain, and drove in.

Reich had thought it now safe to move back into the building and Ilse Ollendorff came out to meet them—as always, she was Reich’s last line of defense. She told them that Reich was far too busy with his research to see them. But when Inspector Kenyon said that the two doctors had come from Washington and would not be available indefinitely, Reich yelled from his office on the first floor, “I can come down, I can come down, Ilse.” In a few moments, the FDA report states, “A large, robust man of plethoric appearance bounded down the steps.”
⁶⁰

Reich demanded he see the FDA agents’ credentials, and he took them into another room to examine them more closely. Reich suspected the men were really “pharmaceutic agents representing American industrial interests who were ready to sell out the country…via Moscow affiliations.”
⁶¹
He got this idea from the conspiracy theorist Emmanuel M. Josephson’s book
Rockefeller “Internationalist”: The Man Who Misrules the World
(1952), which accused Nelson Rockefeller—who as undersecretary in the Department of Health was in charge of the FDA—of being in secret alliance with the Soviets. (In another mad stream-of-consciousness work, Josephson suggested that Stalin had murdered FDR at Yalta and that a look-alike had been reelected in 1944.) Three years earlier Reich had greeted Inspector Wood cordially and had willingly allowed an inspection—perhaps he was getting official approval at last!—but now, according to the inspector’s later report, he was full of violently uncooperative rage. “After entering the front room, Reich became more violent in his speech and actions. He ordered the inspectors to sit down and then began a tirade concerning our investigation. This was accompanied by pacing and violent swinging of arms and pounding on a desk. He stated, in effect, that our investigation would create one of the greatest scandals in the country.” Reich then “went into an explosive discourse to the effect that we were Red Fascists who had come to his place with the idea of controlling Orgone energy. He indicated that our visit was prompted by the pharmaceutical industry.”
⁶²

After this paranoid tirade, Reich asked the doctors to tell him their qualifications; he was apparently taken aback when Dr. Heller said he was a specialist in nuclear physics. Reich showed him his Geiger-Müller counter, which was hooked up to an accumulator and was making audible clicks. Heller pretended to take a good look at it so as to expose his radiation testing equipment for as long as possible (no radiation was recorded that day), and Reich chastised him for not recognizing it immediately.

Reich yelled, arms flailing, that the earlier FDA campaign had cost him thousands of dollars, which could have been much better spent on developing his tremendous discoveries. He shouted that the accumulator wasn’t a device, as he had indicated three years earlier (he now thought it could be more accurately described as an atomic pile, and thought it should be under the juristiction of the Atomic Energy Commission and not the FDA). He shouted that Wood had asked his patients whether they masturbated: “What right do you people have to come here and ask me whether my secretary has a lover or whether other goings-on of this character exist around here? What do you think we are up here, bums?” There was no answer, but Reich thought Dr. Brimmer’s expression suggested that he thought just that and he charged at him with a threatening clenched fist, screaming in a high-pitched voice, “Take that smile off your face.”
⁶³

Reich calmed down a little after smashing an ashtray in anger; he said that he wanted the confusions of the earlier inspection “cleaned up” before he would permit another. He gave them a copy of his pamphlet
The Orgone Energy Accumulator: Its Medical and Scientific Use
and ordered them to “study” all of the publications in its bibliography. After they’d done this, they’d have to attend an “Oranur course” to update themselves on more recent developments before he would grant them an inspection. “Get out!” he yelled when his unwanted guests protested these requirements. “We are not in Hitleria or Modjuland yet.” (“Modju” was Reich’s own neologism; it fuses “Mo”—taken from the Venetian patrician Giovanni Mocenigo, who denounced the philosopher Giordano Bruno to the Inquisition—with Stalin’s real name, Djugashvili.)
⁶⁴

The three FDA men decided to cut their losses and instead inspect S. A. Collins & Sons, the Rangeley carpentry firm that manufactured accumulators for Reich. Reich had already phoned ahead and told Vernon Collins, the man who had built the observatory at Orgonon for him, not to allow the inspectors to touch any of the accumulators he had stored there. Collins complied with this request, but he did agree to be interviewed. Most of the accumulators Collins built for Reich, the inspectors learned, were built in the winter months, which was traditionally a slack period for the firm. The design was so simple that they followed not a blueprint but verbal instructions relayed by Reich. They built five accumulators at a time and had manufactured two to three hundred since production started a year and a half earlier. The boxes were marked with “CS” (Collins & Sons), and about 75 percent were shipped to New York and New Jersey; the company also made orgone blankets, “shooters,” and “hats.” A representative from the Orgone Institute, Collins said, came down to examine the boxes and other devices before they were crated.

In the FDA file in Washington, accompanying the inspectors’ report are six pages of photographs of the Collins shop, a small timber shed with double doors, whose fitting motto, considering the merchandise, was “Everything to Build Everything.” You can see the inspector’s sleek black automobile parked out front. There are several pictures of the messy interior, which are framed and labeled as if they were of the scene of a crime. There is a picture of a six-foot stack of old accumulator panels, boards salvaged from returned machines. Another image shows a corner piled up with bundles of the steel wool, fiberglass, and galvanized wire mesh used to make the machines. Crated accumulators lean against a back wall, flat-packed and ready to be shipped.

After the FDA’s unannounced call to Orgonon, Reich made official complaints to the FBI, asking them to verify the identities of the inspectors, and to the president, warning of the FDA’s red fascist threat to the United States. He began his letter to President Truman as if they were old friends: “I have been bothered again by the Food and Drug Administration.”
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Eleven

Senator Joseph McCarthy, in an effort to garner headlines, spiced his anticommunism with hints of sexual scandal, straying from his main line of inquiry to accuse various government employees of being “sexual deviants” and therefore potential “security risks.” Homosexuals were, it turned out, easier to identify than Communists. McCarthy soon broadened his antigay campaign to suggest that the loosening of sexual mores was a deliberate ruse by Communists to undermine the American family and way of life.

In February 1952, during two days of HUAC open hearings in Washington, the twenty-eight-year-old ex-Communist Harvey Matusow testified that Communists were cultivating and exploiting an atmosphere of sexual permissiveness to try to attract young members to the party. Matusow was, according to one observer, arrogant, grossly overweight, brash, and “talkative to the point of garrulousness.”
¹
He was also one of the FBI’s most celebrated informers, employed by McCarthyite committees as a paid witness; in a second wave of Smith Act trials, he would go on to point the finger at Communists, most of whom had been his former friends in the party.

Matusow’s mother was Russian-born and his father ran a cigar store in the Bronx where, Matusow claimed, Leon Trotsky had once bought ice cream from his grandfather. He joined the Communist Party in 1946 as a young World War II veteran; he said he found the same “esprit de corps” there as he had in the army. Matusow was soon on the payroll, working in party bookstores, offices, and summer camps. In 1948 his junior party cell joined Youth for Wallace to support the former editor of
The New Republic
in his presidential bid; in photographs of Wallace’s concession speech, Matusow is pictured standing alongside him. As if to confirm the extent of Communist infiltration, Matusow would boast that he had been a member of forty-five Communist front organizations.

The month after McCarthy made his famous allegation that the State Department was riddled with Communists, Matusow visited the New York office of the FBI and volunteered his services. He was angry because the party had recently demoted him, having accused him of “white chauvinism” when he took a job at a Harlem debt collection agency. A few days before the Korean War began, the FBI signed him up as an informer at seventy-five dollars a month. At the time the American Communist Party’s leadership was on trial under the Smith Act. The party was revealed in court to be riddled with FBI infiltrators; thirteen ex-Communists—including Louis Budenz, who recruited William Reich, the man confused with Wilhelm by the FBI—testified that they had been taught that revolution was achievable only through violence. The party crumbled under the financial pressure of mounting a legal defense, and became so wary of spies that it stopped recruiting new members and instead purged thousands as a result of its own loyalty checks.

Matusow was expelled from the party in 1951, accused of being “an enemy agent”; he enlisted in the air force. He had a nervous breakdown during his second stint in the military, and was diagnosed as a manic-depressive “schizoid personality…manifested by nomadism, eccentricity, seclusiveness, [and] moderate stress of a break with the Communist Party.”
²

Matusow got over his period of depression by immersing himself more deeply in anticommunism. He was keen to join the ranks of Communists turned celebrity informants such as Matt Cvetic (author of
I Was a Communist for the FBI
), the “spy queen” Elizabeth Bentley, and the
Time
writer Whittaker Chambers, who had exposed Alger Hiss as a Communist. All three made a living from their former party affiliation and had been hailed in the press as national heroes.

Matusow realized, by his own admission, that he needed a “gimmick” if he was to make a career of the McCarthy hearings like these other professional and well-paid informers. He consciously decided to make his inside knowledge of the overlooked Communist youth movement his area of useful expertise. By making “something sinister out of much that was innocent,” as he put it, Matusow persuaded America of a Communist plot to indoctrinate American youth.
³

Before the Ohio Un-American Activities Commission, Matusow explained how the Communist Party had tried to infiltrate the Boy Scouts movement and stated that there were 3,500 Communists teaching in the New York City school system and that Communists taught toddlers politicized Mother Goose rhymes. A newspaper quoted one of these: “Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean. Because the Congress done them in and picked their pockets clean.”
⁴
But he garnered the biggest headlines when he warned how Communists preyed on sexual weakness to recruit the young.

Matusow told HUAC that sexual immorality was rampant among the Communists of Greenwich Village and Camp Unity, a Communist youth camp in Wingdale, New York. Matusow recounted tales of the sexual permissiveness that was encouraged there: young campers made love openly in the grass by Lenin’s Rock, a sculpted boulder of the Russian leader that made joking reference to Mount Rushmore. American youths were lured to the party, Matusow claimed, with promises of sexual promiscuity. The headline of the February 7, 1952,
New York Daily Mirror
proclaimed: “FBI Aide Says Reds Employ Sex as Snare.” The editorial read: “The Matusow revelations about Communist use of intellectual and of sexual appeals to rope young people into the party’s lower echelons pose a new light on the brutishly immoral and completely conscienceless strategies of the red traitors.”
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It was exactly the kind of connection between sexual immorality and radical politics that the FDA and other investigatory bodies saw in Reich’s and Kinsey’s work.