A Lion in Zion

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2024

A lion in Zion

On “All About Herzl: The Exhibition” at the Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica, New York.

The raid on the town can only be described as an atrocity. Terrorists from across the border descended on the remote village and quickly overran its defenses. Trained and supported by a hostile state, which had planned the attack as part of a larger proxy war, tribal mercenaries went door to door “with horrid shouting and yelling,” according to one eyewitness account, “like a flood upon us.”

Over the course of the day, the attackers brutalized and murdered as many residents as they could find. They bludgeoned and burned the townspeople in their homes. People of all races and backgrounds fell victim to the assault. Anyone the terrorists could not round up to take back across the border as either a hostage or domestic slave was slaughtered. Women and infants, along with the infirm, were specifically targeted.

By the next day, ten men, nine women, and twenty-five children lay dead out of a population of 291, with more than a hundred people taken hostage. Nearly half the town was reduced to ashes as the attackers looted what remained. Even if they survived the initial onslaught, husbands and fathers had to watch as their wives and children were slain for not keeping pace on the forced march back to enemy territory.

Meanwhile, those who survived back home attempted to raise the funds to pay the kidnappers for the return of their kin—often in vain. Negotiations dragged on for years while the participants in the raiding party fought over the booty. Hostages had to renounce their faith as they were forced to live with their attackers. Half the captives never made it home. Eventually, one survivor gave witness to the massacre in a book that galvanized public opinion. Its title was The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion.

The Deerfield Massacre of February 29, 1704, described above, is a reminder of the brutalities Americans endured in the creation of what became the United States. The attack on a remote village in the Connecticut River Valley by Mohawk Indians and their allies, crossing the border from Canada along with their French enablers, was just one episode in what historians know as Queen Anne’s War (1702–13), part of the greater War of the Spanish Succession.

Nation-building is a difficult business. Often the outsize burden of cultivating a wilderness and taming a border can only be endured through faith. America’s early settlers, persecuted across the Atlantic, found power in their belief in the City upon a Hill, in creating the New Jerusalem that would become their Manifest Destiny. Some three centuries on, a similar faith in a Promised Land, a Zion, inspired Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) to envision what became, just a few decades after his death at age forty-four, the modern State of Israel.

A small but potent exhibition now on view at New York’s Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica called “All About Herzl” delivers on its promise to reveal this latter-day nation-builder through primary documents and the iconography that came to surround him.1 Drawing on the Central Zionist Archives of the World Zionist Organization (here mostly in facsimile) and the David Matlow Collection of (original) Herzl memorabilia, the fascinating exhibition curated by Warren Klein presents the Zionist behind Zion and the cultural artifacts he and others deployed to inspire Israel’s creation.

A delegate card from the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

The exhibition begins on East Sixty-fifth Street, where a banner for the show depicts Herzl in profile, hands clasped together beneath his Assyrian beard, leaning over a railing and gazing out at the Fifth Avenue façade of Temple Emanu-El and the Brooklyn Bridge. As with much Herzl iconography, this image represents a wishful concatenation. Herzl never visited the United States. The picture is rather a combination of Ephraim Moses Lilien’s 1901 photograph of Herzl overlooking the Rhine from his hotel balcony in Basel, Switzerland, taken as he attended the fifth Zionist Congress, with modern images of New York. For the exhibition-goer, a further opportunity to be seen in Herzl’s shadow continues just inside the lobby. Here visitors can stand beside a life-size statue of Herzl, arms folded, positioned in front of a backdrop of a Zionist Congress.

Trigger warning! These early chances to see yourself beside the founding father of the State of Israel, even the option to take a selfie with him, reveal a show that is unabashedly pro-Herzl, pro-Zionist, and upbeat about his nationalist vision. Like the energized state he inspired, Herzl understood the joys that could be released from Jewish sorrow, a fact reflected in the show’s sometimes lighthearted application of Herzl-iana. The mascot for David Matlow’s own “Herzl Project,” for example, based in Toronto, Canada, and established “to inspire people to be a little like Herzl and pursue their dreams,” is a Herzl-faced hockey player. At a moment when Israel’s frontiers are under vicious assault and cosplaying Mohawks are attacking America through its ally, the absence of doubt here for Herzl’s vision is refreshing. For those looking for a counterpoint, there is always Columbia University.

Whatever else you think of him, Theodor Herzl must be the most consequential theater critic in modern history. The Austrian-born playwright went from working as a cultural correspondent in Paris to inspiring what has become a nuclear-armed state. In the final eight years of his life, Herzl foresaw the descent of liberal Western Europe into barbarism as well as his own reburial in his future nation (by design, he was initially interred in Vienna in a transportable metal casket).

Herzl identified the mechanisms to turn his vision into a groundswell and to set its gears in motion. He mapped out a state that would serve as a beacon and bulwark for the region. In his utopian novel of 1902, Altneuland (The Old New Land), he envisioned a desert transformed into a Jewish metropolis. One translation of this book’s title provided the name for the city of Tel Aviv.

Herzl was not your obvious nation-builder. Born into an affluent, assimilated Jewish family in what is now Budapest, he attended a Protestant high school, where he studied German literature and poetry and at first looked down on “shameful Jewish characteristics.” The exhibition includes such artifacts as Herzl’s second-grade report card (in facsimile, ca. 1867) from the Israelitische Hauptschule Pest along with a rare photograph of him clean-shaven (ca. 1880).

When his family relocated to Vienna, Herzl joined a German nationalist fraternity and remained a member despite its growing anti-Semitism. In 1891, he moved to Paris as a correspondent for Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse at a moment of populist turmoil in the French Third Republic. Three years later, anti-Jewish sentiment came to a head in the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer falsely accused of spying for the German Empire. The exhibition contains several illustrations from this trial and the subsequent degradation ceremony that divided French opinion. If liberal Western Europe could turn so fiercely against its Jews, Herzl reasoned, no amount of assimilation would solve what he called the “Jewish problem.” The only solution, he argued, could be found in the title of his 1896 manifesto, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). Several editions, including English, Spanish, Hungarian, Yiddish, Polish, and Arabic translations, are here on display.

A bust of Theodor Herzl, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

Calling in his preface for the “restoration of the Jewish State,” Herzl maintains that the “world resounds with outcries against the Jews, and these outcries have awakened the slumbering idea.” The “misery of the Jews,” he continues, can be turned into a new nation’s “propelling force.” History has shown that “the absorption of Jews by means of their prosperity is unlikely to occur,” since the hatred directed at them by their host nations—of “vulgar sport, of common trade jealousy, of inherited prejudice, of religious intolerance, and also of pretended self-defense”—is a “remnant of the Middle Ages, which civilized nations do not even yet seem able to shake off, try as they will.” In fact, the “longer Anti-Semitism lies in abeyance the more fiercely will it break out,” Herzl continues, since the “world is provoked somehow by our prosperity, because it has for many centuries been accustomed to consider us as the most contemptible among the poverty-stricken.” On the question of where this new Jewish state should be established, in one famous passage, Herzl weighs the two areas of recent settlement—“Palestine and Argentine:”

Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency. If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.

Driven by necessity, Herzl concludes that the “Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question, which can only be solved by making it a political world-question.”

By expanding Judaism from a shared ancestry and religion into a “political world-question,” Herzl found his earliest critics in assimilated Jews. They saw his Zionist call (a term he did not invent but deployed in a new way) as unnecessarily tendentious. At the same time, many orthodox observers believed that only Hashem, and not man, should aspire to return the Jews to Jerusalem (a handful of their descendants can today be seen joining the campus Hamas-niks). It was in the unreformed East, where Jews lived with no pretense of assimilation, that Herzl found his most fervent believers and the misery to shape his nation’s “propelling force.”

A bas-relief portrait of Theodor Herzl, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

As Herzl devotes much of his book to the mechanics of nation-building—the handling and reselling of assets, the corporate and social entities that must be created, the use of negotiorum gestio, that “noble masterpiece . . . the Romans, with their marvelous sense of justice, produced”—The Jewish State can be a dry read. Yet the manifesto’s arid structure proved to be the kindling that ignited the movement.

As Herzl traveled to Constantinople to negotiate (unsuccessfully) for a parcel from the Ottoman sultan, his followers flocked to see him at the rail stops. Zionist chapters formed in cities across Europe and (to a lesser extent, at first) America. With the paintings, posters, photographs, pamphlets, books, medals, and statues that came to represent him, “All About Herzl” picks up with the abundant memorabilia produced around the early meetings of the Zionist Congress, the annual black-tie affairs that Herzl produced with enough pomp and circumstance to make his vision a reality. “If you will it, it is no dream,” he proselytized. The second Zionist Congress created the Jewish Colonial Trust and its Anglo-Palestine Bank, which went on to become Israel’s Bank Leumi. The fifth Zionist Congress created the Jewish National Fund for the purchase of land, with the suggestion (made by a Galician bank clerk) that a collection box be placed in every Jewish home.

Herzl gave his life for his cause, dying from the fevered urgency of his dream. In death he became a political martyr, his image an icon, as represented in the exhibition’s final, salon-style hanging of twentieth-century depictions of him, which are inventively varied. In a Rudi Weissenstein photograph from Tel Aviv in 1949, a year after Israel’s founding, we see Herzl’s casket lying in state before its reinterment in Jerusalem—another redeemed captive returning to Zion.

1. “All About Herzl: The Exhibition” opened at the Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica, New York, on September 17, 2024, and remains on view through January 23, 2025. ↩

The Boston Perry

THE NEW CRITERION, October 2024

The Boston Perry

On In the Company of Art: A Museum Director’s Private Journals by Perry T. Rathbone, edited by Belinda Rathbone.

Back before “connoisseurship” became a dirty word, a generation of museum directors learned to “know by the senses” through a Harvard course prosaically titled “Museum Work and Museum Problems.” Created and taught by Paul Sachs (1878–1965), a scion of both Goldman and Sachs and a former Wall Street investor himself, the postgraduate course educated its “scholar-connoisseurs” on matters of quality through visits with art dealers in New York and object lessons and dinners at Sachs’s Cambridge home Shady Hill. The instruction was hands-on, from the study of Greek coinage, to the maintenance of an institution’s physical plant, to the cultivation of museum benefactors. In every case, students honed their powers of discernment while learning how to flip the coin, turn the switch, and seal the deal.

Perry T. Rathbone (1911–2000) was a Sachs graduate who applied these lessons con brio. In the Company of Art presents this museum director’s newly published “private journals” as selected and introduced by his daughter Belinda Rathbone. Beginning in the early 1950s, when he was the director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, but focused on his subsequent and transformative seventeen-year tenure at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the journals and letters collected here find Rathbone “writing in earnest” as he took the helm of a large and luffing institution on the flood tide of postwar expansion. “What dreary galleries, what gloom! And what a behemoth it is!” he wrote to his wife, Euretta de Cosson Rathbone, a highborn British ski racer whom he variously addresses as Rettles, Ret, and Rett, upon arrival in Boston in May 1955.

The journals of many a not-for-profit manager might have limited appeal, even ones documenting important moments, but Rathbone’s were never weighed down with meetings and memos. “My father’s journals are filled with his feelings,” notes Belinda, a New Criterion contributor who has written about Sachs for these pages (“Museum work & museum problems,” December 2018). In the Company of Art locates her father “at the peak of his powers, at the crest of his career, old enough to look back as far as he could look forward.”

The journals convey the observations of a seasoned connoisseur—not just of art, but also of the many famous figures he encountered and occasionally even of himself. Attached to the “educated eye” Rathbone developed through Sachs was an aptitude for concision. Intended for his readership alone, these discerning journals impart their own literary lessons in the elegant powers of description.

Elegance is the stock-in-trade of museum directorship, of course, especially as it comes to the dark arts of benefaction, but Rathbone cut his high polish with just enough world-weariness to make his personality revealing. He drove a 1936 Ford Phaeton, a memento from his sandbox days as a curator in Detroit, well into the 1960s. “Trained in the courtship of the rich,” writes Belinda, “he also learned to see through them.”

Rathbone’s observations could be frank, but they were rarely biting, at least as selected here in these breezy two hundred pages. The appreciation he showed for his own life’s good fortunes conveys an honest ease that grounded his judgment. “I know my life is rich,” he wrote on October 1, 1962, reflecting on “how omnivorous time swallows up the detail of our lives,” but, as he continues, “to read about it makes it seem richer than I could ever remember it to have been.”

Latter-day readers of these journals will be drawn to Rathbone’s character sketches, especially as they concern the notable and quotable. (As the editor, Belinda provides footnotes to better our understanding of person and place.) “After giving him the benefit of the doubt for two days, decided he was a man of limited intelligence,” he writes of Willem de Kooning, after serving on an awards jury with the painter at the Chicago Art Institute. “Quite expressionless. And a staccato monotony of speech I found rather tiring” (October 1, 1953).

“His quite unassuming behavior won me at once, never permitting me to feel odd or even self-conscious,” he notes of a visit to the museum by Aldous Huxley. “He walks with a curious bending gait, a sort of lope, and he looks at the world through the palest of blue eyes, almost as if veiled with mist” (October 14, 1960).

“He’s a sharp observer and a quick, rather tart, talker,” he says of his time with Kenneth Clark, the wartime director of London’s National Gallery and soon to become the television host of Civilisation. “He does look extraordinarily like a turtle . . . not only round the nose and mouth, but even in the eye. And he’s a bit snappy too; even knows and admits he’s been rude” (April 4, 1962).

“Picasso’s eyes are unforgettable and also his delicate tapered fingers,” he writes to Ret from Peggy Guggenheim’s Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, after a visit to Cannes. “He was like a child in the studio, following all our interests and enthusiasms and bringing out his special treasures for us to enjoy—Degas pastels and the two tiny portraits by Douanier Rousseau” (July 6, 1964).

“Of all the sculptors I have known—Moore, Marini, Calder, Milles, Lipchitz, Marcks,” he notes on a visit to Japan, “Noguchi is the only one who lacks basic kindliness” (March 26–April 14, 1974).

Along the way, we learn about the sticky business of museum acquisition (“a repellant creature,” he writes of one dealer who tried to cut him in on a sale, which he declines, “but he cannot be ignored”; October 18, 1953). There are the expected grievances around the museum board (“an admirable man of the law but possessing not a fiber of aesthetic sensibility,” he says of one trustee; October 13, 1960). Difficult donors conspire to take up his time (“She has a way of detaining her guests—more like a jailer than a hostess”; letter to Ret, June 20, 1964). Museum renovations keep him awake at night (“I can see these galleries as if I were in them, every detail. It is inimical to sleep”; October 26, 1961). Loans are to be pursued even if beyond reach (“Seems to be no hope of bringing the Gioconda to Boston, but at least the effort has been made. . . . Now we can relax”; December 19, 1962). At the same time, the prerogatives of modern art confound him (“I am more at sea than ever over how to formulate a policy of acquisition in the field of modern art for a great museum of historical art like the MFA”; January 31, 1964).

Readers might appreciate Rathbone’s astringent comments on modern architects and urban planners, especially as compared to the lust for anti-contextual additions at today’s institutions. “Americans in the middle of the twentieth century live at the mercy of highway engineers and ‘traffic experts,’” he laments (January 31, 1964). Meanwhile, “Harvard only builds ‘centers’ today,” he writes of the university’s brutalist new home for contemporary art, which features a highway-like ramp. “Nor has this tortured pile of concrete designed by Corbusier any apparent logic within or without” (December 18, 1962).

At the crux of this volume are Rathbone’s interactions with the Kennedy administration and in particular his time with the First Lady. For this head of Massachusetts’s flagship museum, Camelot came calling in a way that might otherwise have been reserved for Washington’s National Gallery. At first, Rathbone begs off his invitation to the inauguration. “Who wants to be swallowed up amidst thousands”? (January 16, 1961). In the end, a blizzard and a railroad strike conspire to keep him away. Nevertheless, three weeks later, “Mrs. Kennedy telephoned me this morning from the White House! I couldn’t have been more surprised and thought for an instant that someone was pulling my leg” (February 4, 1961).

After lending a suite of American watercolors, the Rathbones travel to the White House to see these works by Sargent, Homer, Prendergast, and Hopper hanging in the West Sitting Room. “The charming Mrs. Kennedy soon appeared. Her ultra simple attire made me feel that I belonged to a different generation. In a way it stated the triumph of the proletariat” (April 18, 1961). Later that year, Rathbone returns for a concert in the East Room by Pablo Casals: “a glittering company all around absorbing great sonorous music from a great artist, I was conscious of my privilege every moment” (November 17, 1961).

Museum directors must be acquisitive by nature, especially those leading American institutions in times of growth. Rathbone was a treasure hunter out of necessity, a swashbuckler who enjoyed collecting personalities and far-flung experiences perhaps even more than the art itself, at least judging by the attention paid to each in these journals. “I am always surprised at my success” (October 1, 1960).

The happy disposition revealed here conveys an innocence on the subject of Rathbone’s ultimate denouement and serves in part to exonerate his fateful lapse in judgment. The matter concerned “The Boston Raphael,” the title of Belinda’s previous book on her father and the cause of his resignation from the MFA. Charged with landing the big one in honor of his museum’s centenary year, Rathbone acquired a Raphael portrait from Italy that proved to be anything but—“maybe Lorenzo Costa on a good day,” said one expert. After much fanfare, the means of its acquisition were challenged and the painting restituted to Italy, where it now resides off-view.

Of this “greatest of all adventures,” he writes to Rett in the days after negotiating its purchase on the Italian Riviera, “I spent the afternoon sunbathing and I swam and swam again from the rocks.” Although he lived for another thirty years after this letter from the Hotel Porta Rossa, Firenze, of July 15, 1969, Rathbone’s charmed journals, at least as collected here, had just about reached their end.

Marx of the Libido

CITY JOURNAL, Summer 2024

Marx of the Libido

The destructive influence of Wilhelm Reich, father of the sexual revolution

The sexual revolution has proved as historically significant as the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, though many of its details—its battlefields, generals, soldiers, and casualties—remain largely unknown.

In “Annus Mirabilis,” English poet Philip Larkin regarded this new age with irony: “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me) / Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.” More generally, it’s a revolution regarded as a liberation from a prudish, ill-informed culture. How fortunate we are, we’re told, to live in an era of sexual experimentation, where the only limit is our own inhibitions. Entire industries of sex educators, social scientists, and popular entertainers are available to assuage any doubts as to the revolution’s benign intentions and wondrous possibilities.

Yet this revolution has a history worth uncovering. A century ago, sexual politics began as an activated front of cultural Marxism. Sex education and sex consciousness were designed to liberate the libido from “bourgeois repression.” Taboos against philandering and divorce were suppressed; the nearly universal expectation to “settle down” and wed dissipated.

Statistically, the separation of sex from committed love and familial ties has correlated with alarming social shifts. According to the United Nations Population Division, between 1960 and 2020, the world’s fertility rate cratered from 5.0 to 2.4 births per woman. In Europe and North America, respectively, the rate fell to 1.2 and 1.6, well below the population replacement rate of 2.1 births. In the U.S., for those 1.6 births, the rate of children born out of wedlock has gone from 3 percent in 1965 to a stunning 40 percent today. For Hispanic and black women, respectively, the rates are now 52 percent and 69 percent.

As marriage rates plummeted, experts sought to guide younger generations into a progressive future of sexual self-actualization. “We really need to get over this love affair with the fetus,” said Joycelyn Elders, Bill Clinton’s surgeon general, who suggested that masturbation be taught in schools. More recently, Rachel (born Richard) Levine, Joe Biden’s assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, has called for tech firms to censor debate about the contemporary practice of gender-reassignment surgery, which leaves patients castrated and infertile. “The positive value of gender-affirming care for youth and adults is not in scientific or medical dispute,” Levine declared in 2022.

For the culture warriors, the results have been a kind of Malthusian triumph. For many others, an atomized, and now technologically commodified, sexual dynamic has brought despair, anger, and sociological desolation.

To succeed, progressivism must present itself as an inevitability—an irreversible march of history. Yet these ideas were choices, their success anything but inevitable. And the sexual revolution does, in fact, have an identifiable beginning, which can be traced to a Karl Marx of the libido, whose influence far exceeds his name recognition: Wilhelm Reich. A follower of Sigmund Freud, Reich matched the methods of psychoanalysis with the liberationist worldview of the Communist Left. In the 1920s, he coined the term “sexual revolution,” just as he wrote about the activation of sexual politics for revolutionary ends—what he called “sex-pol.” Though Reich’s thinking, even at its best, is of dubious value, and the man himself descended into madness, his ideas on rescuing “infantile and pubertal genital functioning” from the “ruinous sexual regulation of our society” have been incredibly influential. They lead directly to the gender politics and social disruptions of today.

Born into a striving Jewish family in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, in 1897, Reich became Freud’s star pupil and moved in the intellectual circles of Europe in the years before the start of World War II. He then escaped to New York, eventually decamping to the remote lake town of Rangeley, Maine. There, he and his followers established Orgonon, a research center on a 200-acre estate dedicated to sexual-energy experiments and the exploration of theories of “cloud control,” “invisible propulsion,” and “orgastic power.”

By the time he was convicted in 1956 for peddling false cures, Reich was viewed as a mad scientist holed up in his lair, supported only by a small circle of true believers. But it would be a mistake to regard his influential earlier work on sexuality with any less skepticism. Dubbed the “prophet of the better orgasm” and the “founder of a genital Utopia,” Reich led a life defined by charlatanism.

“Once in a thousand years, nay once in two thousand years, such a man comes upon this earth to change the destiny of the human race.” This is how Elsworth F. Baker described his mentor Reich after Reich died in his jail cell in 1957. Messianic, megalomaniacal, and mentally disturbed, Reich saw society as infected by a sexual plague that only he and his initiates could diagnose and cure. Reich’s loathing for man’s ordinary sensibilities, combined with his hatred for the society into which he was born and to which he would do much damage, establishes him as the guru of today’s sexual politics.

Reich’s personal sexual obsessions began early. As a young child, he spied on his maid as she had intercourse with her boyfriend. He then propositioned the maid to engage in sex play with him, as he recalls, lying on top of her and playing with her pubic hair. “Reich clearly attributed great importance to his relationship with this peasant girl,” writes his biographer Myron Sharaf. “He once said that by the time he was four there were no secrets for him about sex, and he related this clarity in part to his sexual play with his nursemaid.”

By his own proud admission, Reich was having sex daily at age 11 with the family cook. “She was the first to teach me the thrusting motion necessary for ejaculation, and at that time it had been an accident,” he wrote. “From then on I had intercourse almost every day for years—it was always in the afternoon, when my parents were napping.” At 15, he started attending the local brothel. “I was pure sensual lust; I had ceased to be—I was all penis! I bit, scratched, thrust, and the girl had quite a time with me! I thought I would have to crawl inside her.”

Reich’s sexual adventurism extended even to his parents. As a boy, he witnessed his mother having an affair. “The thought came to me to plunge into the room,” Reich recounted in his journal, “and to have intercourse with my mother with the threat that if she didn’t I would tell my father.” His father did find out (most likely thanks to Reich himself), and his mother subsequently committed suicide by poison. “Twice,” Reich continued, “I masturbated while consciously fantasizing about my mother.” Shortly before Reich turned 17, in 1914, his father took out a large insurance policy, stood outside by a frozen pond, and deliberately contracted a respiratory illness, leading to his death.

After serving in the Austrian army in World War I, Reich moved to Vienna to begin his professional education. He studied law briefly before switching to medical school at the University of Vienna. His obsession with human sexuality soon brought him into Freud’s orbit. “I have become convinced that sexuality is the center around which revolves the whole of social life as well as the inner life of the individual,” Reich wrote in his journal in 1919. At Freud’s recommendation—and without completing his formal training—Reich began seeing patients as a psychoanalyst and was admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society as a guest member in 1920. His first-year lab partner, Lia Laszky, described the young Reich as both “fascinating and abhorrent.”

Based on his own early sexual experiences, Reich believed that children possessed a pure, innate sexual drive that must be protected from suppression by family and society. “Between the ages of five and twelve,” he wrote, “psychic dams and reaction formations are constructed against culturally unacceptable partial drives [i.e., oral, anal/sadistic, and genital]; disgust counters anal eroticism, shame counters exhibition, and, in general, every morally pertinent concept begins here.”

In quick succession in the 1920s and 1930s, Reich produced a series of papers and books on childhood sexuality and the supposed fascistic origins of sexual repression. These works have had lasting influence not only on Western psychology but also on European and American elite culture. Their titles tell us much about Reich and his beliefs: “About a Case of Breaching the Incest Taboo” (1920); “Concerning Specific Forms of Masturbation” (1922); “The Role of Genitality in the Treatment of Neurosis” (1923); and “The Therapeutic Importance of Genital Libido” (1924).

Through his translator, Theodore P. Wolfe, Reich’s German books and essay collections of the 1930s entered English circulation in the 1940s as The Function of the Orgasm (1942), Character Analysis and The Sexual Revolution (both in 1945), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1946), and Listen, Little Man! (1948), a harangue against so-called conventional wisdom.

Through his treatments, Reich often had his patients strip nude while forcefully pressing soft parts of their bodies, willfully violating a psychoanalytic taboo. He would also regularly dig his thumb or palm into a patient’s jaw, neck, or thigh until the patient cried, maintaining that such interventions were necessary to penetrate a person’s resistance to treatment.

Reich counseled his patients to see their innate inhibitions as an “armor” and a “plague” in need of eradication. “Mankind is biologically sick,” he wrote. “Man’s biopathic character structure is, as it were, the fossilization of the authoritarian process of history. It is the biophysical reproduction of mass suppression.” He argued that it was perfectly appropriate for children to witness their parents’ own sexual congress.

In his emphasis on what he called childhood “genitality,” he also stressed “the need for affirming childhood masturbation,” writes Sharaf. “Throughout his life, Reich put considerable emphasis on the distinction between affirming childhood sexuality and tolerating it. Toleration was insufficient to counteract a generally sex-negative culture.” Reich believed that social liberation was possible only through sexual enlightenment at youth. “The younger the boy or girl concerned was,” he once said, “the more quickly and more fully they swung around after listening to only a few clarifying sentences.”

As part of his efforts to disconnect sex from marriage and procreation, and linked to the liberation of adolescent sexuality, Reich became a zealous advocate for contraception and abortion—radical ideas even in psychiatric circles of the time. He regularly arranged abortions for his patients, and he pushed abortions on his many lovers, mistresses, wives, and patients, who were often one and the same. One of Reich’s young patient-girlfriends died after he pressured her to have an abortion. Her mother ended up dying from grief, as well.

In the early 1930s, the Communist Party tapped Reich to direct its German Association for Proletarian Sex-Politics (GAPSP). For Reich, the great obstructor of childhood sexuality was the family. In a series of proclamations, he advocated for dismantling the family in favor of collectivist child-rearing and reeducation, which he believed necessary for revolution. Contraception, abortion, and the destruction of marriage were central to this platform. As Reich wrote in the platform for the first Congress of GAPSP in Düsseldorf in 1931:

1. Free distribution of contraceptives to those who could not obtain them through normal channels; massive propaganda for birth control.

2. Abolition of laws against abortion. Provision for free abortions at public clinics; financial and medical safeguards for pregnant women and nursing mothers.

3. Abolition of any legal distinctions between the married and the unmarried. Freedom of divorce.

“The prevention of neuroses,” he maintained elsewhere, “begins by excluding from the education of the child his or her own parents who have proven themselves to be the most unqualified educators. The sexual education of the small child will be put instead into the hands of specially trained personnel who will be less biased.”

Reich believed that the continuation of the family paved the way to fascistic government. “At first the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination of the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and sexual anxiety.” Philip Rieff’s 1966 book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, which includes a sharp critique of Reich’s Freudo-Marxism, notes: “Sex education becomes the main weapon in an ideological war against the family; its aim is to divest the parents of their moral authority.”

Through Germany’s Communist networks in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Reich spread his radical philosophies to a large audience. He distributed thousands of his “sex-pol” pamphlets through the Communist Party and other radical left-wing organizations, while training a cadre of “youth leaders” to promote his sexual agenda. He lamented that there was “still no law for the protection of newborn infants against the parents’ inability to bring up children or against the parents’ neurotic influences.” He believed that “every physician, teacher or social worker who will have to deal with children must show proof that he or she . . . is sex-economically healthy and that he has acquired an exact knowledge of infantile and adolescent sexuality. That is, training in sex-economy must be obligatory for physicians and teachers.”

As Reich relocated from one European country to another in the 1930s, his role as a political instigator and the leader of a school of psychosexual treatment attained ever wider reach. In Norway, one volunteer for his experiments was a young Willy Brandt, who went on to become chancellor of West Germany 30 years later.

As Reich’s influence expanded, his radical views transcended Communism and psychiatry. His fellow psychoanalysts increasingly viewed him as a psychopath because of his advocacy of adolescent sexuality. In 1934, one colleague diagnosed him as suffering from an “insidious psychotic process.”

Communist leaders also began viewing Reich as too extreme. After Reich published The Sexual Struggle of Youth in 1932, he found himself excluded from the Communist Party and deemed a “counterrevolutionary” who “discredited Marxism.” In a bit of dry Communist wit, party leaders concluded that “there were no orgasm disturbances among the proletariat, only among the bourgeoisie.” In 1939, settled in Norway but politically and professionally under increasing threat, Reich took up an invitation from his American acolytes to teach and practice in the United States, where he soon found a new audience.

In a more moderate postwar culture, Reich carefully updated his terminology, having learned well how to conceal his intentions: “Communist” and “socialist” became “progressive.” “Class consciousness” became “work consciousness” and “social responsibility.” Here his writing and fieldwork started to influence a new group of writers and educators, including Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and William S. Burroughs. Goodman lauded the translations of The Sexual Revolution and Character Analysis in Dwight Macdonald’s magazine Politics. Bellow was even in therapy with one of Reich’s students. His novels The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King were tied to Reich’s work, in particular.

In American psychology, Reich’s belief in a “muscular armor” influenced Lowen’s bioenergetics, Perls’s Gestalt therapy, and Arthur Janov’s primal therapy. His metaphors of a man in the trap of his own armor “pervaded the therapeutic ambiance of the 1970s,” writes Sharaf. “His work should be connected with the broad sweep of our century’s progressive educational development, a development he both influenced and reflected.”

An obsession with childhood sexuality infused Reich’s work, which dwelled on the “orgasm reflex” in breastfeeding infants. Once in America, Reich established an “infant research center” so that he could study the so-called sexual freezing process from birth. He even directed that the bulk of his estate should be given to the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust for “the care of infants everywhere.” The organization, based out of the Reich compound in Rangeley, Maine, still functions as a nonprofit today.

Orgonon, Reich’s post-war headquarters in Rangley, Maine.

Revolutionary theory is always based on a belief in invisible forces that need to be identified and redirected. This belief is held as an article of faith, and evidence to the contrary cannot shake it. Marxism has its commodity fetish and its faith in hidden power relations. Critical race theory believes in systemic yet concealed racial dynamics. The more sinister these forces are, the more complicit in them you must be if you are not actively working to counter them.

So it was for Reich and his harnessing of mankind’s sexual energy. He believed that the human orgasm represented not just a biological phenomenon but also the transformation of bioelectrical energy that could be measured, channeled, and even weaponized. Reich called this power “orgone” and dedicated Orgonon, his estate in Rangeley, to its research. He wrote to Albert Einstein to share his discovery of this invisible sexual force. The physicist agreed to meet Reich in Princeton. Einstein, however, quickly saw through Reich’s experiments, which involved attaching electrodes to subjects’ tongues and nipples as they masturbated. He ignored Reich’s subsequent letters.

Reich also commissioned the construction of special upright chests, called “orgone accumulators,” in which to enclose a patient and focus their orgone energy in treatment (the orgone box promised to cure cancer, among other ills). Reich was specific in their construction: alternating layers of Celotex, sheet iron, glass wool, and steel wool lined with a metal wall. As his practice spread, he sold and leased these boxes out, with the profits kicking up to Orgonon.

Reich saw orgone as the hidden power of the universe. He believed that UFOs traveled by orgone propulsion. He also maintained that the U.S. government was secretly aware of orgone’s energy potential and that the Air Force was sending flights over Orgonon to protect him and his work.

For all his extreme theories and practices, it was the orgone box, particularly its sale and rental across state lines, that put Reich on a collision course with the authorities—here, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In May 1947, a freelance writer, Mildred Edie Brady, wrote an exposé, “The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich,” for The New Republic. Reich and his followers denounced the article’s damning portrayal—Brady and The New Republic were Stalinist agents, they maintained. The story nevertheless contained more than mere half-truths:

Orgone, named after the sexual orgasm, is, according to Reich, a cosmic energy. It is, in fact, the cosmic energy. Reich has not only discovered it; he has seen it, demonstrated it and named a town—Orgonon, Maine—after it. Here he builds accumulators of it which are rented out to patients, who presumably derive “orgastic potency” from it.

The article caught the attention of an FDA field officer, who believed that a “very able individual fortified to a considerable degree by men of science” was perpetrating a “fraud of the first magnitude.” In 1953, the FDA issued a 27-page complaint against Reich. Physician Frank Krusen of the Mayo Clinic wrote to the FDA: “It was very difficult for me to bring myself to take the time to prepare this report because of the fact that this quackery is of such a fantastic nature that it hardly seems worthwhile to refute the ridiculous claims of its proponents.”

Reich responded by firing up his orgone “cloudbuster”—an artillery-like contraption of tubes and pipes resembling a prop from a cheap science-fiction film—and threatening to inundate the country with rain. “Consequences of this action are all your responsibility and that of Federal Judge Clifford of Portland, Maine,” he shot back in a telegram to the U.S. Weather Bureau. “We are flooding the East as you are drying out the Southwest. You do not play with serious natural-scientific research.”

When the FDA ruled against him, his boxes were ordered destroyed. So were his books and journals that made mention of orgone. Over multiple raids, the federal government rounded up and burned Reich’s materials. Later, having been found in contempt of court for violating an injunction against shipping orgone boxes across state lines, Reich was sent to a federal penitentiary. An evaluating physician there determined that he was exhibiting “paranoia manifested by delusions of grandiosity and persecution.”

In 1957, Reich died of heart failure in prison while awaiting trial. His silencing and death fueled his martyrdom in progressive circles. In the ensuing decades, Roger Straus Jr. of Farrar, Straus and Giroux saw to it that all of Reich’s writings were reissued. The publisher has released about two dozen works by Reich between 1960 and today. According to the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust, his books are now available in 21 languages.

Reich’s beliefs—in particular, his theories on the “unarmored life” of the “children of the future” and the “affirmation of childhood and adolescent genitality”—have spread far and wide, even as we no longer recognize their source.

One of Reich’s remaining orgone energy accumulators or “orgone box.”

Beat writer Burroughs never forgot. He wrote about “All the Accumulators I Have Owned” and the “spontaneous orgasm” he achieved, “no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas.” The editor Dwight Macdonald promoted Reich through his influential magazines, as well as through nude cocktail parties and orgies. In 1964, Time observed, “Dr. Wilhelm Reich may have been a prophet. For now it sometimes seems that all America is one big orgone box.” Writing in the Guardian, Christopher Turner noted: “The hipster—stoked up with marijuana, existentialism and Reich . . . was the prototype of the countercultural figure that emerged in the 1960s.” Yet with today’s model of orgone box, he continued,

it is no longer necessary to sit in cramped quarters for a specific time. Improved and enlarged to encompass the continent, the big machine works on its subjects continuously, day and night. From innumerable screens and stages, posters and pages, it flashes larger-than-life-size images of sex. From countless racks and shelves, it pushes the books that a few years ago were considered pornography. From myriad loudspeakers, it broadcasts the words and rhythms of pop-music erotica. And constantly, over the intellectual Muzak, comes the message that sex will save you. Libido makes you free.

Reich’s sexual revolution has been so total, and so totalizing in its demands, that it now wages its desperate battles over a scorched landscape. With diminishing marriage rates across the developed world, sex has turned inward, to pornography and onanism. Popular culture has become, as Turner observed, one big orgone box, isolating society from the genuinely fulfilling connections of faithfulness and family. The Summer of Love launched a culture of self-love, the culmination of Reichian liberation.

In Sex-Pol: Essays, 1929–1934, Reich wrote in “Politicizing the Sexual Problem of Youth”:

This future order cannot and will not be other than, as Lenin put it, a full love-life yielding joy and strength. Little as we can say about the details of such a life, it is nevertheless certain that in the Communist society the sexual needs of human beings will once more come into their own. . . . Evidence that socialism alone can bring about sexual liberation is on our side. Therefore under capitalism we must use all our energies to convince the oppressed masses of this truth, too, and mobilize them for a merciless struggle against everything that impedes such liberation.

Reich’s later-life obsessions were not exceptions to his earlier sexual radicalism but rather manifestations of the same delusion. The failures of his experiments and popular opposition to his ideas only reconfirmed his faith in the genius of his beliefs—of the need, for example, to liberate the children of the future from the “emotional plague” of civilization. Like the hidden forces he identified in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich fell prey to his own grandiosity.

“There is a sinister anti-intellectualism about Reich’s theory of the origin of repression,” Rieff observed in The Triumph of the Therapeutic. As the Left has carried on his sexual revolution, its adherents have fallen for their own forms of deluded psychology. Cloud-busting and orgone boxes have given way to “gender-affirming” surgeries and the sidelining of parents from the care and protection of their own children. Reich’s Freudo-Marxism explains why sex education in schools, especially when performed against the will of parents, has taken on a maniacal urgency.

“We may be physically destroyed tomorrow,” Reich observed to his presiding judge as he awaited trial, but “we shall live in human memory as long as this planet is afloat in the endless Cosmic Energy Ocean, as the Fathers of the cosmic, technological age.” Our present challenge is to confront this fantastical quackery before it breaks what remains of the bonds of love and family.