The nudist movement’s struggle to conform to the boundaries of sexual liberalism revealed the eroticism that the family was suppose to, but perhaps was unable to, control. With its books, magazines, and films promoting the therapeutic and recreational character of the movement but also serving as sources of pornography, nudism attracted a variety of individuals and sexualities. Many nudists often found it difficult to distinguish members interested in health and familial recreation from those who wanted to ogle at the naked men, women, and children wandering nudist parks without clothes. Deciding who posed a threat and why proved to be a continual source of struggle within the movement. Without a wife or family to confirm heterosexuality or moral integrity, single men elicited fears of homosexuality, posed a threat as potential voyeurs, and represented individuals who might pursue intergenerational sex. Many visitors at nudist parks also echoed fears of the hypersexual black male body when they asserted that admitting people of color into nudist parks posed a threat to white female nudists and invited accusations of inappropriate sexual behavior.32 Nudists’ continuing struggle to limit threats to the movement’s respectability revealed how anxieties about gender, race, sex, and age defined nakedness in the United States.
The respectable character of nudism clashed with the many young men and women coming of age in the late 1960s who saw public nudity as a way to advocate for the politics of sexual liberation. The nudist movement’s legal victories in the late 1950s undermined the heteronormative boundaries of sexual liberalism and helped bring about a revolution in sexual attitudes and values. A new market of racy nudist magazines flooded newsstands, independent art theaters enticed audiences with uncensored nudist films, and more and more young men and women began throwing off their clothes at concerts, on beaches, and in protest marches. The men and women of the counterculture that emerged in the late 1960s saw public nudity as a way to challenge what they considered to be the hypocritical values and social customs of mainstream society. According to sociologist Sam Brinkley, they wanted to “loosen [themselves] from the strictures of tradition, overcome the fear of social sanction and opprobrium, and recover the immediacy, the sensuality, and the experience of a truly shared moment.”33 Yet an aging nudist membership preferred its private, secluded, rustic clubs and clung to rules restricting sexual behavior, and club owners maintained exclusionary policies based on race and gender. A more inclusive approach to nudism that emerged primarily on sandy beaches and in urban parks and that accepted single men, homosexuals, and people of color, as well as feminists, political dissidents, and a variety of eccentric personalities, ultimately remade nudism into a movement of sexual liberation.
Naked: A Cultural History of American Nudism analyzes a social movement as well as the larger cultural phenomenon of public nudity in the United States. Many leaders, editors, club owners, activists, regional affiliates, organizational strategies, and legal battles have shaped the development of organized nudism since it officially began in 1931. Rather than attempt to chronicle every internal struggle, leadership change, or shift in organizational policy, this book focuses on the events, people, and trials that reveal the hidden and often overlooked customs, values, and assumptions that shaped and defined American society and culture over the course of the twentieth century. It highlights particular discussions, debates, and conflicts within the movement that reflect the way gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality informed the way Americans understood the naked body. It selects particular gymnasiums, camps, clubs, resorts, and beaches that best represent the hundreds of others that have come and gone over the years and that demonstrate the way physical spaces and landscapes can both restrict and liberate sex, sexual expression, and sexual identity. It chronicles the legal battles that not only determined how nudism could be practiced and represented but also influenced what could be seen, experienced, and consumed in the United States.
Naked begins in the first years of the Great Depression by analyzing the hostile reception nudism received from antiobscenity activists, whose intent was to reverse the advances of sexual liberalism. Chapter 1 examines how local police, doctors, and community leaders in Chicago and New York campaigned against nudist activities held in urban gymnasiums, at beaches, and at public parks to reestablish a clear boundary that defined the illicit from the respectable. Chapter 2 explores a growing network of rural camps constructed around the therapeutic ideals of a religious leadership. Though nudists still chafed against instances of moral outrage in rural America, this chapter argues that the innocent settings and wide-open spaces surrounding the metropolis tempered the eroticism of going naked. The American countryside helped define the therapeutic, nature-oriented, and moral principles of nudism and gave the movement the respectability necessary to develop and prosper in the United States.
The next three chapters explore the shifting boundaries of sexual expression in the United States during and after the Second World War. Chapter 3 examines how nudists’ attempts to display the nude body in books and magazines provoked a repressive sexual politics that represented nudism as politically subversive and ultimately led to renewed censorship efforts by postal officials. Chapter 4 analyzes the role that race and gender played in positioning the postwar nudist resort within the exclusionary domestic ideals of early Cold War culture. By strictly managing or excluding naked bodies that evoked uncontrolled eroticism, such as the single man or the nonwhite body, nudists enforced a rigid form of corporeal heterosexuality based on family, marriage, middle-class status, and race. Chapter 5 outlines the legal strategy that freed nudist magazines and films from censorship to show that white, middle-class family values played a critical role in defeating postwar antipornography campaigns. It also documents how the movement’s legal victories ultimately contributed to the commercialization of sex occurring in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Chapter 6 examines how the fall of sexual liberalism transformed the American nudist movement in the last decades of the twentieth century. It analyzes the emergence of a more activist approach to nudism that embraced the values of sexual liberation and incorporated feminist antipornography advocates. The struggles to sustain these alliances reflected the divisive sexual politics of the 1980s and influenced nudists to refocus their efforts on promoting nude recreation.
This cultural history of American nudism reveals how a marginal social movement that started in a small New York café can help us understand many of the major themes and conflicts that have shaped modern American life.
1
Indecent Exposure
The Battle for Nudism in the American Metropolis
The first men and women to go naked in New York City for the purposes of improving their health grabbed headlines when police raided the Heart of New York Gymnasium on the night of December 8, 1931. However, no sooner had the New York Times announced the official arrival of nudism in the United States with the ominous headline “24 Seized in Raid on Nudist Cult Here”1 than it reported the dismissal of all the charges against the naked men and women.2 The article explained that Judge Jonah Goldstein did not necessarily agree with “nudity in a gymnasium,” but he recognized, “What is all right on the beach today would have meant arrest three years ago.”3 The introduction of American nudism to the United States in the first years of the Great Depression seemed to reflect emerging conceptions of sexuality and nudity, as much as the lifestyle clashed with persistent attempts to impose a repressive sexual ethic.
For a brief moment, American nudism seemed poised to expand the shifting boundaries of modern sexual liberalism. In the 1920s, the appearance of the one-piece bathing suit on beaches, at swimming pools, and in beauty pageants dramatically changed which parts of the body could be exposed in public.4 It remained unclear, however, if this line could be pushed further by bringing naked men, women, and children together to exercise in locked gymnasiums. Although the favorable Goldstein ruling suggested that nudism might establish itself in cities across the nation, many neighbors, police officers
, judges, and politicians saw the fledgling movement as the final threat to remaining standards of decency, modesty, and morality. They fought to remove nudist bodies from city beaches, parks, and gymnasiums to ensure the continued coverage of genitalia, breasts, and buttocks in American public space.
The nudist groups that began forming across the country encountered contrasting approaches to regulating sex and sexual expression. The emergence of sexual liberalism and the growing tolerance of heterosexual pleasure and leisure in the twentieth century did not immediately spell the demise of voluntary moral reform organizations that continued to advocate the moral absolutism of the nineteenth century. Well into the twentieth century, women’s clubs, moral purity organizations, and religious organizations implemented grassroots campaigns to influence local politicians to act against vice, pornography, and the distribution of birth control information. In Chicago, women’s groups and local politicians reacted with scorn to a proposal to build a nudist enclosure on Rogers Park Beach and waged a campaign against the immigrant groups that supported the nude-sunbathing enclosure. In New York City, however, the demise of elite Protestant vice societies such as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) in the first decades of the twentieth century led to the formation of a state-centered legal system that regulated sex and sexual display according to the values of the average person. Subjective and shifting, this approach to obscenity left the indecency or decency of nudism open to debate. Authorities found it difficult to convict nudists who never exhibited any “lewd” activities at their meetings other than naked men and women engaging in quotidian exercise routines. Rather than attempting to influence local politicians to stamp out nudist gatherings, antiobscenity activists in New York introduced state legislation that defined nudism as a commercial activity and a threat to public decency. In both Chicago and New York City, ethnic tensions, hostile political organizations, and the identification of the urban environment with commercial sexual activity and sex spectacle impeded the development of nudism in urban environments.5
The effort to crack down on public sexuality during the Depression alarmed anticensorship groups, which saw the campaign against nudism as part of a larger effort to suppress the discussion of sex and sexual expression. An anticensorship coalition, which included the ACLU, birth control advocates, and free speech activists, contended that the attack on nudism represented a serious threat to every individual’s right to privacy. Under the proposed New York State antinudist legislation, the presence of naked bodies transformed spaces that authorities otherwise considered private—such as a locked gymnasium or an enclosed beach—into public venues that potentially served illicit commercial purposes and required state regulation. Making nudism illegal, according to anticensorship advocates, gave state authorities the power to peer into almost any space that might contain naked bodies. By framing the proscription of nudism as a threat to personal privacy, nudist supporters spoke to the values of the average person and made nudism relevant to the wider public. The battle over the legality of nudism played a crucial role in determining the place that sex, sexual display, and public nakedness would occupy in modern American society and culture.
Rogers Park
A proposal to establish a place for nude sunbathing in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago revealed a willingness to experiment with therapeutic forms of nakedness as well as the existence of a vocal opposition rooted in the moral, ethnic, and class politics of the city. On March 10, 1932, Dr. Arne L. Suominen, a “distinguished American Naprapath” and “designated spokesman for a large group of citizens interested in sunbathing,” solicited the Forty-Ninth Ward alderman to introduce a resolution to the city council to build an enclosure for sunbathing. Suominen, who toured Germany’s clinics, colleges, and sanitariums in search of drugless physicians practicing hydrotherapy, heliotherapy, pythotherapy, and other diet systems, returned to the United States convinced of the “benefit of the sun rays, which build up the body.”6 He endeavored to create a venue where the many immigrant groups in Chicago could sunbathe without the hindrance of clothing.7 One 1923 survey of seven thousand Chicago patients suggested that Suominen’s proposal might very well find substantial support in the nation’s second-largest city. It revealed that almost 86 percent of Chicago’s residents had at some point “dabbled” in irregular medicine.8 Suominen drew support from ethnic organizations ranging from the “Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A.” to “Danish-American, Swedish-American, Finnish-American, Scandinavian, German, and other clubs,” as well as the promoter of physical culture Bernarr Macfadden. He asserted that “20,000 sunbathers” would frequent the enclosure on Rogers Park Beach and predicted that after its completion the number would “increase to 200,000.”9
The popularity of Bernarr Macfadden’s physical-culture publishing empire in the first decades of the twentieth century suggested that Americans might be willing to explore how nude sunbathing could improve one’s personal health and well-being. After transforming himself from a slender, weak youth to a muscular gymnastics teacher and amateur wrestler, Macfadden promoted the preventative health philosophy of physical culture in magazines and books and at various sanatoriums. For people to achieve strength and physical fitness, Macfadden offered the same advice that nineteenth-century health reformers such as Sylvester Graham and Andrus Alcott promoted in their books and pamphlets: an unstimulating diet, exercise, sunshine and fresh air, cleanliness, and no medicine. Unlike previous health reformers, however, Macfadden saw sexual virility as a sign of overall health and fitness, and he fought to expand the public discussion of sex. He displayed the benefits of his physical-culture program by posing nude while flexing his muscles in his magazines and books. He also celebrated the female bosom and published a series of photographs of bare-breasted women exercising in his book The Power and Beauty of Superb Womanhood (1901).10 While Macfadden frequently clashed with postal officials and the police, his magazines proved popular and financially successful. Suominen hoped that the success that Macfadden enjoyed in the first decades of the twentieth century would carry over to his proposal to create a place for nude sunbathing in Chicago.
Furthermore, many urban public facilities in the first decades of the twentieth century welcomed naked or scantily clad bodies to ensure proper hygiene and health. Suominen saw his sunbathing enclosure on Rogers Park Beach as an extension of Chicago’s network of municipal public baths. Since the late nineteenth century, the city’s many women’s clubs and settlement-house reformers urged city officials and leaders to construct public baths throughout the city. They worried that the lack of bathing facilities for the city’s growing immigrant population posed a major public health risk and threatened to undermine the poor’s moral character, which they closely associated with cleanliness. Only the most privileged residents of the city enjoyed the benefits of indoor plumbing. The vast majority of the city’s residents lived in cramped, poorly built tenements and often used buckets of water or wet rags to bathe. They rarely ever fully undressed and washed the entire body. By promoting good hygiene through regular bathing at municipal baths, many middle-class female reformers hoped to institute the domestic roles of the mother and homemaker and to make the city a clean, healthful, attractive, and moral place to live. In addition, female reformers such as Julie R. Lowe and Gertrude Gail Wellington, both of whom graduated from homeopathic colleges, saw municipal public baths as a space to apply natural healing methods.11 Water-cure centers, homeopathic colleges, and numerous other healing systems had long embraced women as practitioners, even though most regular medical schools denied admission to female students. In many ways, the effort at the beginning of the twentieth century to encourage immigrants to visit public baths where they undressed and washed their bodies to avoid disease and promote their moral and physical health shared the same goals and characteristics that defined the sunbathing enclosure in Rogers Park.
Suominen also believed that the popularity of public baths among Chicago’s immigrant communities would
carry over to his sunbathing enclosure. In 1894, city officials constructed the first public bath in Chicago using land donated by Jane Addams’s Hull House. Located on the city’s west side, it provided the mostly Italian-immigrant neighborhood with a small facility that consisted of dressing rooms, a small waiting area, and nearly thirty showers. Unlike New York City’s municipal baths, Chicago’s facilities lacked swimming pools or Turkish baths and only provided brief time allotments for bathing. In 1910, despite the lack of amenities and opportunities for recreation, city residents took 1,070,565 baths in Chicago’s fifteen bathhouses located in the city’s ethnic and working-class neighborhoods. The popularity of Chicago’s network of municipal baths, along with the participation of reformers who supported alternative healing, gave Suominen good reason to believe that two hundred thousand sunbathers would frequent his enclosure on Rogers Park Beach.12
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