Naked

by Brian S. Hoffman

  Rural Indiana was a haven for nudist clubs such as Zoro Nature Park and Lake O’ Woods because of the state’s laws regarding nudism. The passage of antinudist legislation in New York, as well as the hostile reception that nudism received in Chicago, taught nudist groups to search for states where the laws did not legislate against organized social nudity. In addition to Indiana, nudists identified favorable laws in Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, and Utah. Nudists did not object to indecency statutes that contained specific language intended to regulate behaviors unrelated to the practice of nudism. Several states’ indecency laws, for example, required “other persons to be offended or annoyed thereby” for individuals who exposed their genitalia to be guilty of a misdemeanor.26 Nudists argued that the men and women participating in nudist activities in a camp or at gymnasium could not be convicted of a misdemeanor under this statute because they did so willingly and the participants did not find it offensive or annoying. In addition, nudists approved of Florida’s indecency statutes, which strictly forbade the exposure of the body to the opposite sex but included an exception that made nudist camps explicitly legal. The Florida law concluded that this section should not be “construed to prohibit the exposure of such organs or the person in any place provided or set apart for that purpose.”27 Other states only required that nudists keep their activities private and away from the public eye. The Maryland Health Society, for example, became one of the first clubs to be incorporated by a state, with the Maryland state attorney general promising no interference from authorities as long as the organization did not have any “public demonstration,” denied admission to “outsiders,” and restricted its operations to its “members and their immediate families.”28 The Lake O’ Woods club also received a state charter as a nonprofit corporation in Indiana since the state used English common law to define exposure as indecent only if “practiced in a public place.”29 As long as nudist colonies such as Lake O’ Woods and Zoro Nature Park carefully constructed their grounds to avoid opening themselves to public view and actively managed their memberships, the risk that a state legislature might change the law to prosecute nudist activities remained low.30

  Alois and Lorena Knapp actively promoted the respectability of their camp by closely monitoring the selection of new members. To ensure that no undesirable characters infiltrated the group, Alois personally interviewed every application for membership to the camp. In this interview, he asked a “good many questions” to the applicant about his or her “family life, social attachments, religious preferences, and similar matters.”31 To gain access to the camp, applicants needed to prove the sincerity of their interest in nudism by demonstrating their moral character either as a responsible parent, as an active member of a church, or through their occupation. After observing this individual for a day, Alois either invited him or her to become a member or denied the applicant further invitations and did not allow the individual to return. Alois’s efforts to ensure that all members demonstrated the necessary maturity and high moral character to be nudists played a critical role in protecting Zoro Nature Park’s respectability.

  Regulating photography at nudist clubs represented another essential task for club owners hoping to attract new members and to avoid controversy. Frequent camera use at camps, especially by new members, suggested that the photographer might have illicit intentions in visiting the camp. One member who enjoyed photography as a hobby noted the “ever present attitude of suspicion” directed toward a “new member with a camera.”32 Many nudists feared that untrustworthy members might use photos from a nudist camp as personal pornography or even publish them in a disreputable magazine. In addition, many other visitors saw the camera as a threat to the anonymity promised by the distant location of a rural nudist camp. The dissemination of photos taken without a member’s permission and then displayed in a newsletter or magazine might ruin careers, relationships, and/or social standing. To protect members’ privacy and to guard against the risk that photos might be abused as erotic material, many camps issued “very strict rules governing the use of cameras” or appointed an “official photographer.”33 At Zoro Nature Park, for example, Alois forbade photography that did not have the consent of all individuals in the photo.34

  Alois and Lorena felt that the camp’s long-term success also depended on maintaining a strong relationship with the surrounding local community of Roselawn, Indiana. Even though the local residents knew that nudism was being practiced at the camp, they did not oppose the group since it attracted customers to local businesses.35 Rather than assuming local hostility and trying to hide, Zoro Nature Park integrated itself into the Roselawn community and avoided the raids and moral outrage that exploded in Chicago and New York City.

  Other rural nudist camps also made a conscious effort to reach out to surrounding communities. Hobart Glassey, founder of Elysia, a nudist park located nearly forty miles outside Los Angeles near Lake Elsinore in the Cleveland National Forest and surrounded by “conservative farmers from Iowa,” recommended that camp owners establish strong relationships with the community and local authorities.36 Glassey made it a point to announce the opening of his camp to the local newspapers. He established an open dialogue with a hostile attorney general, and he made financial contributions to local organizations.37 He also aggressively sought to shape the public’s opinion of nudism and won invitations to speak at the Lions Club in Elsinore and Riverside, the Los Angeles Elks, and the San Bernardino Twenty Thirty Club. Glassey eventually came to consider the “townspeople . . . uniformly well disposed and cordial” and felt that he had made the “position of Elysia secure in the community.”38 The operators of Zoro Nature Park, Lake O’ Woods, and Elysia all understood that an open and friendly relationship with the local community would add to the security of their camps’ future.

  The Sun Sports League

  The Sun Sports League in Allegan, Michigan, in contrast to these camps, failed to create friendly ties with the community; and within a year the camp was raided by local police. Fred Ring, a Kalamazoo dance instructor, and his wife, Ophelia, thought they had found the perfect location for their nudist camp. Located two miles away from the nearest highway and surrounded by thick woods, the members of the Sun Sports League never expected any problems with the local authorities. Nevertheless, on Labor Day, September 4, 1933, Mary Angier, the sixty-year-old owner of an adjacent lot, led the town sheriff, Fred Miller, two deputies disguised as fishermen, and the town prosecutor over a steep hill to raid twenty unsuspecting naked men, women, and children. The sheriff then arrested Fred and Ophelia and nineteen additional members on charges of indecent exposure. Although isolated in the rural backcountry of Michigan, Fred Ring’s camp, unlike Zoro Nature Park, Lake O’ Woods, and Elysia, failed to ingratiate itself with local residents and struggled to mold to its environment. This left the Sun Sports League vulnerable to suggestive newspaper coverage and accusations of sexual impropriety from local authorities.

  The Ring family and the members of the Sun Sports League searched for an isolated camp location that would avoid conflict and controversy; they had no intention of offending their neighbors. Most of the camp’s membership made the long trip to Michigan specifically to avoid the risks that came with going naked in dense urban spaces. Edward Murray, a Chicago man who visited the camp to help his “high blood pressure,” stated that he did not know of any places in Chicago where he could “take off clothes.”39 He added that his neighbor “would object” if he disrobed in his backyard. In order to “test [nudism] out,” he and his wife traveled to the camp, where he paid fifty cents for the “privilege of taking sun baths, nothing else.”40 Several other members arrested at the club also resided in Chicago. Of the nineteen people who gave their names and addresses the day of the raid, eleven listed Chicago residences, while four others, the Ring family, gave Kalamazoo, Michigan, as their place of residence.41

  The failed attempts of Arne Suominen to establish a
n enclosure for nude sunbathing in Chicago forced nudists there to look to the countryside to continue practicing nudism. The moral outrage that greeted attempts to establish nudism in Rogers Park and in the New York State legislature, however, also emerged in the small town of Allegan, Michigan. Mary Angier had recently moved from Chicago, where she had done a “great deal of welfare work.” She was an active reformer, and her husband worried that she would try to “run the town” when they retired to Allegan.42 Sure enough, “much disturbed by the noise” and “afraid of fire,” she began “wondering what was going on up there.”43 But she made it clear that she did not really care about fire, noise, or even trespassing. She simply did not “consider people who strip themselves naked in a community like that as the right kind of people.”44 For the retired welfare worker, it was the “idea” of them living in “absolute nudity” that did not “appear . . . to be the right thing.”45

  The partial visibility of the grounds to outsiders made the Sun Sports League vulnerable. Ring knew that Mary Angier’s proximity to his property and the views through the surrounding vegetation put him at risk. He offered to buy her land and compensate her for building a dock on her property, and he began planting evergreens along the bank of the creek to block potential views into the camp.46 Ring was unable to follow through with these attempts, and Mary, along with the prosecuting attorney and the town sheriff, stood on the branch of a fallen tree to look over at the adjacent lot, where they saw the camps’ residents in the nude.47 At the ensuing trial, Mary and the sheriff testified that they could see naked men and women along a sandy dirt road leading into the camp grounds and around a small creek at the edge of her property.48 The sanctuary that Fred and Ophelia Ring had envisioned for their nudist activities had been jeopardized.

  Scandal stories, inspired by incidents such as the raid of the Sun Sports League, provided national and local newspapers with the opportunity to publicly comment on otherwise hidden or taboo behaviors.49 The trial of Fred Ring featured prominently in the Chicago Tribune and several Michigan daily newspapers and even in the more distant Washington Post, which ran the headline “Court Battle in Nudist Camp Case Promised.” The Los Angeles Times ran a front-page article with the header “Nudist Colony Heads into Court.”50 Newspaper coverage of sex scandals, Lisa Duggan has argued, create moments for “public voyeurism and intervention” because they represent “violations of . . . respectable normalcy.” She asserts that these incidents allowed newspapers to establish and reinforce public expectations of normal behavior through “moral lessons” while also providing audiences with the “subversive pleasure” of seeing that “life was not always what it seemed beneath the patina of bourgeois respectability.”51 Through the exhibition of the Ring trial, the national press presented the wearing of clothes as expected, decent, and, if violated, worthy of intervention. The reporting of the Ring trial came replete with numerous naked pictures of the defendants, key witnesses, and the grounds of the Sun Sports League. The spectacle both reinforced the appropriateness of wearing clothes and fed the public’s appetite for sexual scandal.

  The images that brought the Ring trial to life gave newspaper readers permission to stand in judgment of the unsavory secrets of the seemingly wholesome Ring family while also looking at suggestive photos and following its pornographic details. The Chicago Tribune recognized that readers might feel uncomfortable with the subject matter of the trial, and to allay these anxieties, the daily paper included images that would sanction readers’ interest in the scandal. In recording the opening day of the trial, the Chicago Tribune juxtaposed a picture of the young Ring family next to a scene that included a “throng of spectators, most of them men with gray or thinning hair” and “fewer than a dozen women, most of them bespectacled and elderly.” To further comfort readers, the caption below the latter image read, “Eager crowd listens to the testimony in Michigan Nudist Trial.” The Tribune also included a close-up portrait of a spectacled, tight-lipped, gray-haired Mary Angier displaying her respectability and middle-class status with a fur coat and beret. The photo of a moral reformer alongside a courtroom audience of elderly local residents, who “nudged each other gently” and “sat forward” with their “hands cupped behind ears,” allowed audiences to borrow the moral authority of an aging generation of antiobscenity activists who stood in opposition to the increasing acceptance of sexual display while still consuming the trial’s scintillating details.52 Ironically, efforts to regulate obscenity—from Anthony Comstock’s battles with Victoria Woodall to the trial of Mary Ware Dennett in 1928 (and in the many confrontations with Margaret Sanger)—often resulted in the greater publicizing of sex via a scandal-driven media.53 The photo of Fred Ring wearing a suit and embraced lovingly by his smiling teenage daughter and wife in a “high necked sports dress and brown felt hat” titillated readers’ interest further by suggesting that hidden beneath the image of the respectable American family lay sordid secrets requiring public intervention.54

  The pictures displaying the grounds of the Sun Sports League provided a stark contrast with everyday life and enabled readers to enjoy the “sensual pleasures” that came with escaping accepted social norms. To satisfy the curiosity of readers, many of whom were likely unaware of the growing network of rural nudist clubs, the Chicago Tribune re-created the setting of the raid through a series of pictures of the Sun Sports League. The newspaper highlighted nudism’s radical departure from modern urban life by contrasting an image of distant nudists wandering naked with a picture of the jury fully clothed and immersed in the camp’s dense vegetation. Other images left it to the readers’ imagination to determine what infidelities might have occurred on the rustic grounds. One photo of a small shack used for changing suggested that the camp provided just enough privacy for members to engage in possible sexual trysts. In another photo, the newspaper encouraged the reader to imagine the naked bodies of nudists showering under makeshift bathing facilities that consisted of elevated barrels filled with water. Although the Chicago Tribune stopped short of featuring close-up images of naked bodies, it relied heavily on suggestion to illustrate the prosecution’s arguments that nudist camps functioned as a site for illicit sexual behavior.

  The Ring trial created another battleground in the long-running debate over the boundaries of decency and indecency in the United States. After dismissing the charges against the other nineteen members arrested at the camp, the state prosecutors used Section 335 of the Michigan Penal Code to charge Fred and Ophelia Ring with “lewd and lascivious cohabitation, gross lewdness, and indecent exposure.”55 Unlike New York’s antinudist legislation, the Michigan statute did not require the exposure of the body to be lewd, and it failed to specify if those who were present at the time of the exposure needed to claim distress or outrage. It stated that “any man or woman, married or unmarried, who shall be guilty of open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior or shall designedly make any open or indecent or obscene exposure of his or her person, or of the person of another, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.” The subjective terms of the law—“open,” “indecent,” and “designedly”—left it unclear what constituted illegal behavior and failed to differentiate public from private.56 In fact, the vagueness of Section 335 of the Michigan Penal Code made it potentially illegal for a husband and wife to undress in front of each other or their children in the privacy of their own home.

  As in the debates over the antinudist legislation in New York, the arguments of the defense and the prosecution at the Ring trial focused on the issue of privacy. The attorneys representing Fred Ring maintained that he and his wife practiced nakedness for their mental and physical health far away from the public eye and on their own private property.57 The issue of privacy allowed Ring to present the raid on his camp as a threat to the rights of all Michigan residents—not just those practicing nudism. In the city, police raided abortion clinics and gay bathhouses and bars to humiliate and intimidate clients, patients, and patrons who frequented these spaces.58 Femin
ists, joined by the ACLU, often framed their attempts to win legal protection for birth control and abortion in terms of a family’s, a patient’s, or a doctor’s right to privacy.59 This shifted courts’ focus away from a single woman’s morality to a discussion of what any individual should have the right to do or see. Although this legal approach did not yield tangible results until the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut, Ring’s attorney, Carl Hoffman, attempted to suppress the sheriff’s testimony because the sheriff’s actions abrogated Ring’s Fourth Amendment rights, the privileges of private property, not to mention the defendant’s dignity. Allowing the sheriff’s testimony, Hoffman argued, permitted an officer, “whatever [his] motives may be,” to “force his way into a home, into the private bedroom of a man and there, if he sees men and women naked,” to arrest and then convict them on the basis of this wrongfully obtained evidence. Hoffman felt the state had no right to convict Ring for exposing himself “on his own property, to those to whom his conduct is not offensive, [and] for no ill purpose.”60

  In support of a defense built on the right to privacy, Hoffman pleaded with the court to allow the jury to visit the camp as evidence of its isolated locale, far away from public view. The judge asserted, however, that the camp’s location was irrelevant, seeing as it only mattered that Ring exposed himself to other men, women, and children.61 Hoffman replied that the jury had to understand the “circumstances, the place, the purposes” to determine the intent behind the exposure. He asserted that “whether it was a camp, a hospital, or a public square . . . the purpose for which [a space] was made” determined the decency or indecency of public exposure.62 For Ring, spaces open to individuals to visit and see—such as the town square—constituted a public space where naked bodies should not be exposed or displayed. Other sites that served a specific purpose, especially a health-related one, and did not invite observation, such as a physician’s office in a hospital or a nudist camp, should be classified as private. Hoffman argued that allowing the jury to see the seclusion of the camp, specifically its distance from the adjacent road and the density of the vegetation, might help them decide if the nudist camp constituted a public or private space. The judge reluctantly gave in to Hoffman’s arguments and allowed the jury to visit the infamous camp site.