Reich also refused the FDA’s request for the names and addresses of patients on
the grounds that this was privileged information. Here he was supported by his lawyer, who
stated that since the privilege belonged to the patient alone, it could not be waived by Reich.
Unbeknown to Reich or his lawyer, the FDA had its own source of information for the
names and addresses of accumulator users.
By the winter of 1947-48, Reich was reaching the end of his tether. A statement he
wrote in December and mailed to accumulator users and colleagues conveyed his state of
mind. His first written protest was formally entitled “Statement Regarding Competence in
Matters of Orgone Energy”:
I would like to plead for my right to investigate natural phenomena with-
out having any guns pointed at me. I also ask for the right to be wrong without
being hanged for it.
I am angry:
I am angry because there is so much talk of free speech and fair play. True,
there is much freedom and fair play in regard to everyday matters. But, to my great
surprise, I found that newspapers and magazines were open to smearing attacks on
my work and my name;that one writer after another copied Brady’s slanderous
statements, without first trying to find out the truth in our literature, and that the
same newspapers and periodicals seemed unwilling to publish a simple correction
of misstatements.
I am angry because a Government agency which is supposed to safeguard
human health didtake affidavits from people who professed not to have been
helped by the accumulator but did nottake affidavits from others who told them
they had beenhelped.
I am angry because smearing can do anything and truth can do so little to
prevail, as it seems at the moment.
I am angry because once again the political plague knifed hardworking
people in the back^18.Reich was wrong in one regard: the FDA files do not contain any affidavit from any
accumulator use indicating dissatisfaction. From time to time the FDA would lament its
inability to obtain such affidavits.
The statement also contained a line of attack which, unfortunately, Reich was to
elaborate in increasing detail, namely, the idea that he had been knifed by the “political
plague.” Here Reich was referring only in part to the FDA. More importantly, he meant
Mildred Edie Brady. The idea was growing in his mind that Brady was more than a fellow
traveler; she was a Stalinist, and may well have been acting on direct instructions from the
Communist Party. Brady’s Stalinism became a firm conviction. The evidence about Brady
was scant—the tone ofher article, its appearance in The New Republicunder Wallace’s editor-
ship, and some hearsay about her politics. A friend of Reich’s wrote him that in 1936 Brady
340 Myron SharafFury On Earth