tent^4. But the most outrageous use of the article was by a well-regarded psychiatric journal,
the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic^5 , which simply reprinted Brady’s piece in its entirety as the
Bulletin’s official position on Reich, about whom the editors had had inquiries. This intellec-
tual laziness on the part of a professional journal is a good example of how contemptuous-
ly Reich was regarded by the establishment: one did not have to study his writings, one need
only republish a hatchet job by a free-lance writer. Brady wove the slander together; others
kept repeating it.
The most dangerous result of the article was that it alerted the Food and Drug
Administration to the “Reich problem.” About two months after the article appeared, on
July 23, Dr. J. J. Durrett, director of the Medical Advisory Division of the Federal Trade
Commission, sent the following letter to the FDA:
Attached is a photostatic copy of an article by Mildred Edie Brady which
deals with Wilhelm Reich.... We have not investigated Reich and his activities. From
the article it appears that he has set himself up as a local practitioner of psychia-
try.... The reason I am sending this to you is that he appears to be supplying his
patients with a gadget which will capture the seemingly fantastic substance
“orgone” and accumulate it for the benefit of the person who occupies the space
within this device. I thought you might want to look into this^6.“Wharton* has been variously described by FDA people who worked with him as
‘ruthless’ and ‘dictatorial’ as well as one of the five most powerful men in the agency at that
time.’‡When Wharton eventually obtained an accumulator for study, he kept it in his office
and “joked about it as a means ofgaining sexual prowess, a la Brady. This is a box,’ Wharton
wrote on August 26,‘in which a man is placed and thereby becomes permeated with orgone,
which is a progenitor of orgasm ...’ Charles A. Wood, resident FDA inspector for the state
ofMaine and the first FDA agent to ‘investigate’ Reich and his work, said of Wharton many
years later: ‘He was crazy about that Reich case and didn’t think of anything else during the
whole time.He built it way out of proportion.’”^8
Wharton directed Wood to launch a preliminary investigation of Reich and his
Maine headquarters. On August 27, Wood went to Orgonon to meet Reich. “Dr. Reich is
fifty years old, speaks with a German accent, and was dressed in blue dungarees and a work
shirt at the time of the visit,” Wood later reported. He added an editorial comment: “He
looked anything but professional.”^9
Greenfield has described how Wood “was greeted cordially by Reich, to whom he
explained that he had come to find out whether the accumulator might be classified as a
device according to FDA law.” Reich asked Wood how he had found out about the accumu-
25 : The American Campaign Against Orgonomy The Beginnings: 1947-1948 337
*R.M.Wharton was chief of the Eastern Division of the FDA.
‡For this and other material about the investigation in general, I am indebted to Jerome Greenfield’s fine study,
Wilhelm Reich Vs. the U.S.A.(New York: W.W. Norton, 1974).^7