by his wrath than any desire to accommodate unwelcome visitors. The FDA men later
reportedhis bellowing: “What right do you people have to come here and ask me whether
my secretary has a lover? What do you think we are up here, bums?”^2
To my knowledge, this was the only time Reich met face to face with an FDA physi-
cian and physicist. However, little of substance seems to have been said at this tense meet-
ing. Reich made it a precondition of any interaction that they first read his writings. Finally
he told the men to leave.
Reich’s point about the accumulator not being a “device” represented a shift in his
thinking. A year earlier he had acknowledged the FDA’s right, if it acted in good faith, to
“investigate all devices at the manufacturing plant” to make sure they were correctly labeled.
A week after the visit of the FDA men, Reich wrote: “I am contemplating to sug-
gest that orgone accumulators be built within the respective states and not be shipped in
interstate commerce.”^3 Reich’s idea not to ship accumulators in interstate commerce would
have helped to protect him legally, but it would have meant acknowledging some validity to
the FDA’s position. He never pursued it.
The recurrence of the FDA investigation, added to Reich’s other strains, led him to
return slander with slander. When the FDA accused him of fraud, of racketeering, Reich
began to call the FDA agents Higs (an acronym for “Hoodlums in government”). He also
called them Modjus, a term he had begun using in The Murder of Christto describe especial-
ly virulent emotional plague characters *. Even worse, he accused FDA agents of being the
conscious or unconscious tools of Red Fascists.
Ironically, Reich made his wild accusations at the very time Senator Joseph
McCarthy was riding high on similar accusations. McCarthy and his mentality of course con-
tributed to the atmosphere of fear and suspicion that made the attack on Reich possible in
the America of the early 1950s, and McCarthy used the very tactics Reich was analyzing as
characteristic of the emotional plague. McCarthy relied on the ordinary citizen’s fear of
being attacked to ensure that no one would stand up against him in his wild assaults. At no
time did Reich support McCarthy; but at times he engaged in McCarthyism.
It is a great tragedy that with all the facts in hand, Reich began to emphasize the
least factual part ofhis entire case, and that he stooped to such name-calling. In Reich’s
emphasis on the “Red Fascists” as instigators of the campaign against his work, we see once
again a desperate effort on his part to make contact with a hostile world. At times he
382 Myron SharafFury On Earth
*Reich devised the term by combining the first letters of the name Mocenigo, the man who betrayed Giordano
Bruno to the Inquisition, and the first letters of Stalin’s original name,Djugashvili. Reich always had a penchant for
acronyms, but his coinage of them grew in the last desperate years. In part, their usage reflected his desire to over-
whelm his opponents with a verbal barrage and to rally his supporters to blind allegiance. George Orwell has per-
ceptively commented on the use of similar abbreviations in the “Newspeak” of 1984 :“In abbreviating a word one
narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it.
...Cominternis a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist Internationalis a phrase
over which one is obliged to linger at least temporarily” George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949),
310.