constitutional issue regarding the literature. But he would have none of this. In his eyes, any
such appeal would have meant granting the constitutionality of the ban on the accumulator.
Reich’s tight linkage of his literature and the accumulator was understandable but
ill-advised. It was understandable because Reich had always stressed the unity of thought
and action. If birth control was desirable, for example, a true physician did not limit himself
to talking or writing about it; he did what Reich did in the 1920s and 1930s—he distributed
devices to those, unmarried or married, fourteen or forty, who sought them, whether such
distribution was legal or not. Similarly, one not only wrote about or experimented with
orgone energy; one made available a device that accumulated the energy’s healing properties
to those who wished to use it. Paraphrasing Marx, Reich wanted not only to understand the
world but to change it. As he wrote in 1942 in an issue of a journal destroyed by the FDA
and today a collector’s item:
... We cannot find consolation in the expectation that our work will
“somehow and some day” find general recognition. Our work is neither of the
other world, like that of the church, nor of some distant future, as people would
like to see it; no, it has its roots in contemporary life, here, today, and in a practical
way.We do not intend to wait until, fifty or a hundred years from now, the existence
of the orgone may finally be conceded. It is up to us, and not to any so-called
“authority,” to see that the existence of the biological energy is recognized^31.At the same time, Reich’s all-or-nothing approach was misconceived. The device for
which he claimed certain curative and preventive properties required a legal defense. He had
had his opportunity for a “day in court” and he had not taken it. There was no way for the
defendants to reopen the injunction decree banning the accumulator. Nevertheless, freedom
of speech and freedom of the press are constitutionally guaranteed save under the most
exceptional circumstances, such as disclosure of military secrets. Those aspects of the
injunction that called for the destruction or censorship oforgonomic literature were uncon-
stitutional and could have been fought on that ground. But Reich chose not to see it that
way.
Reich shifted his stance on one issue.Before that injunction he alone took respon-
sibility for the handling of the case; now he adopted the position that the accumulators were
the responsibility ofthe physicians who prescribed them. This led to a new development.
On May 15, 1954, fifteen orgonomic physicians moved to intervene in the govern-
ment’s case against Reich. They argued that their right to practice medicine as they deemed
wise was violated by the injunction since they could not prescribe the accumulator to
patients. The government had mailed copies of the injunction to them, thereby binding
them to its conditions.
“The Court held that the orgonomists did not have the absolute right to intervene
since the injunction was in personamagainst Reich, the foundation, and Isle Ollendorff.”^32
An extraordinary inconsistency had now crept into the government’s position—
28 : The FDA Injunction and Reich’s Responses: 1951-1955 395