was “in sympathy” with the Communist Party, but later information was not available^19.
Regrettably I, too, contributed to the loose political characterization of Brady by repeating
to Reich a statement heard from Dwight Macdonald. Macdonald had casually mentioned
something about the fellow-traveling or Stalinist sympathies of Mildred and her husband,
and Reich exaggerated the significance of this vague remark.
His time eaten up by the FDA investigation, Reich was strongly tempted to turn the
whole matter over to the physicians working with him. On December 20, he informed
Culver that he was transferring all rights to the medical use of the accumulator to the
Orgone Institute Research Laboratories, the nonprofit corporation he had formed on April
30, 1945, to further his research.
Dr. Willie, Dr. Tropp, and Ilse Ollendorff would deal with the FDA and related
matters in the future. “I have done my part in discovering orgone energy, in elaborating
some of its qualities, and in constructing a device to accumulate it which, to my experience,
has shown great possibilities in being useful as a medical device,” he concluded^20.
Whenever one reads of Reich’s intention to divest himself of responsibility for the
accumulator, one can only fervently wish that he had executed this plan. Accumulator rentals
were helpful in supporting his research, as we know; yet he could have made more money
from his teaching and clinical activities in less time and with less aggravation than from the
accumulator and its administrative concerns. But the Reich who discovered orgone energy
could not abandon his “device,” as the FDA was forever describing the accumulator; he
could not abandon its practical implementation or function through others. Nor did he trust
his associates to fight for the accumulator in the proper way. They would follow legal advice
and give the accumulator to the FDA, which for Reich was tantamount to the Jews digging
their own graves in concentration camps. They would answer—they had answered—FDA
questions that had nothing to do with the accumulator in order to be “good guys” or out of
fear of having their medical licenses revoked. They would muddy up his clean discovery.
By the same token, in my view, they would not have made some of his mistakes.
They would not have referred to Brady as a “communist sniper,” as Reich did in a 1947 com-
munication.* Indeed,Reich could not get Wolfe—to Wolfe’s credit—to attack Brady for
being a Communist, when in 1948 Wolfe wrote a brilliant polemic,Emotional Plague versus
Orgone Biophysics^21 ,in response to her New Republicarticle and its aftermath. Nor would they
have become enmeshed in such issues as whether or not the FDA had jurisdiction over the
accumulator, In short, they would have been more likely to avoid Reich’s characteristic errors
when confronted with irrational, unacknowledged rage and contempt—his denial of any
25 : The American Campaign Against Orgonomy The Beginnings: 1947-1948 341
*In fairness to Reich,it should be noted that in recent years at least one astute observer of left-wing politics has
said that in 1947 Brady, whom he had met, parroted the Stalinist line of that time (cf. letter of August 12, 1982
from Jerome Greenfield to the author about this observer). This evidence is far from ironclad and it does not prove
that Brady was a member of the Communist Party, but it gives a sounder basis to some of Reich’s views that they
had in the late 19405. It should also be noted that we cannot peruse the files of communist parties to see what they
may have been planning against Reich and what persons they may have enlisted as hatchet men in the same way
that we can study the FDA’s file on Reich since the Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1971.