Why some of America's most prominent minds fell for the wildly eccentric ideas of Wilhelm Reich

By HENRY ALLEN

The spiritual hysteria that Reich inspired in the America of the 1940s and early '50s is as hard to explain now as the madness that 1920s crowds felt hearing Bix Beiderbecke play the cornet, especially when you consider that most Reichians were supposed to be educated skeptics and cultural critics. Even—or especially—intellectuals are not immune to America's chronic and recurring religious revivals in their various forms.

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Reich was big, handsome and sexy, with a frenetic innocence about him, along with a martyred air that was emphasized by the stigmata of severe psoriasis. The German accent helped—would any American have paid attention to Freud if he'd been Seth Hawkins from Brattleboro, Vt.? Reich was greeted as a rogue saint by educated progressives who had been inspired to rebel against puritans and Victorians by sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and by birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger.