Reich and Little Rock

     Brave young black students comprised the Little Rock Nine, a
group that integrated Central High School in Little Rock,
Arkansas in September 1957, flanked by jeering white racists on
one side and a cold military presence on the other. US president
Bill Clinton created a dramatic scene of his own last Thursday
when he greeted the now adult nine at the school with a grip and
a grin, and directed them through it's glass doors as a cheering
crowd looked on. The White House had orchestrated a warm
celebration of school integration, a social engineering triumph.
Dogs sniffing for bombs in Ryder trucks at nearby abortion
clinics, however, provided a measure of how the psychological,
emotional and social dimensions of racism in the US still have
been left unaddressed.
     The plight of the Little Rock Nine was not the only social
oppression that America suffered in 1957, of course. Wilhelm
Reich had been thrown in jail for daring to explore human energy
potential and therapeutic techniques not approved by the Food and
Drug Administration. He had been condemned as a medical quack,
his books had been burned and his orgone boxes were destroyed.
Reich had harmed no one and, indeed, had helped many with his
understanding and manipulation of "life energy." The FDA never
truly followed Reich's scientific protocols and convicted him
only on technical violation of its injunction to stop
distributing orgone boxes. Authorities threw him in a prison cell
in Lewisberg, PA from which he did not emerge alive.
     In memos to the prison chaplain before his death, however,
Reich continued to write passionately about the social situation
of his adopted homeland. His note from September 1957 even
includes reference to the disturbance at Little Rock Central High
School. He emphasized the very psychological and emotional
undercurrents he felt were being ignored in the broader social
arena of conspiratorial 1950s America:

"I am merely fulfilling my public duties as a U. S. citizen and
worker in planetary affairs if I continue to point out where the
true danger to our social and personal existence is placed: its
is Emotional Poisoning: disruption through sowing distrust
throughout our society, doping and drugging of our population,
espec. our YOUTH; draining us financially through areas
[...]race, a camouflage of the true menace, the Emotional
Poisoning a la Little Rock racial upheavals; keeping our high
placed officials at bay through fear of sexual scandals,
railroading efficient men and women into prisons or lunatic
asylums through [?] up there environments; subverting justice by
whispered little lies & frightening or using judges. Doing all
this destruction unnoticed as it were by all those responsible.
It was clear from the very beginning that [?] and now lyrics were
subverted by such use of stupidities & evasions on our part,
especially by the staid reluctance to talk bluntly and take the
bull by the horns. The bull is really no more tan a few slimy
tape worms eating away at our emotional guts. It is high time to
start giving social power to the established functions of Love,
Work & Learning as bastions against the tapeworms."

     (The prison memo form includes this banal and perhaps
prescient statement: "Your failure to specifically state your
problem may result in no action being taken.")

     Reich's imprisonment was in part the end result of mis-
reporting on him that appeared in the New Republic under the
editorial leadership of a now-confessed spy named Michael
Straight (see "Toxic Disinformation" below; for information on
Straight, see Steamshovel Press #8). New Republic made its own
pronouncement about Little Rock in its July 7, 1958 edition,
complaining about the Supreme Court's failure to stop legal
challenges that were slowing down the integration process. The
Supreme Court, opines New Republic, "must stand the ground they
themselves have assumed, or the grand experiment they inaugurated
will end in bitter farce, with consequences for the state of the
union that stagger the mind." Clearly the magazine had a better
view of the possible consequences of Supreme Court actions than
it did on its own.
     The consequences of Reich's work, on the other hand, and the
implications of the study of character structure on the
understanding of race issues has continued over the years.
Writing in a chapter called "Racism and Slavery" in The American
Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Connecticut:
Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972), historian George Rawick
notes the impact of "that great underground classic of modern
thought, Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, 3d ed. rev., first
published in German in 1933, and its less well-known but
significant companion, Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of
Fascism, first published in German in 1933. While I cannot
subscribe to all of Reich's system, this chapter could not have
been written without his monumental attempt to relate Marx and
Freud which loosened the ideological armouring of Western
rationalism for me and many others."

--Kenn Thomas

Steamshovel!