The rest of Fred Ring’s defense depended on showing that the lifestyle and activities of the Sun Sports League served the “purpose of improving the health” of members, treating disease, and “improving their mental condition, their morality.”63 To these ends, the defense began by calling Dr. John R. C. Carter, a practicing physician since 1902, who had made a “special study of the effect of sunlight and air on the human body and on the mind.” Carter was also the official epidemiologist for the Michigan Department of Health, and over the preceding ten years, had traveled throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and even North Africa to further his research.64 The judge, however, quickly ruled that the testimony should not be allowed since the expert did not visit the Sun Sports League and could only speak in general regarding the effect of the “sun’s rays on health.”65 The judge explained that he would only allow the “medical testimony” if it addressed the “beneficial effect of a man being naked in the presence of women.”66 The court then added that even if the sun did benefit individual members’ health, that still would not “excuse the promiscuous exposure of the nude, naked person to members of the opposite sex.”67 The court assumed that the interaction of naked male and female bodies necessarily entailed sexual activity. According to the judge, the immodesty of bringing naked men and women together overshadowed any health benefits claimed by the defendants at trial and negated their right to privacy.
The arguments made against Fred Ring by the prosecution reflected an unwillingness to accept the emergence of sexual liberalism and an approach to moral regulation that depended less on suppression and more on education and access to sexual knowledge. Ring testified that the Sun Sports League guarded against illicit desires and behaviors by allowing children to view naked bodies. He believed that young women had a “great desire to know just what the male sex looked like” and that denying this curiosity created a greater interest in sex.68 Ring also assumed the inherent innocence and purity of the family, and he used his own daughters, a seventeen-year-old and a young child, as an example of the moral benefits of sexual liberalism. Ignoring the possibility of intergenerational sex, Ring asserted that his young children “didn’t care anything” about the opposite sex after they had the “opportunity to see [men] whenever they wanted.”69 The sheriff and the prosecutor, however, clung to a nineteenth-century approach to moral regulation that depended on suppression to protect the household from immorality. The sheriff considered Ring’s acceptance of his daughter’s sexual curiosity a radical departure from “anything about morals as [he] understood them.”70 Despite the admission of almost all the witnesses that they did not see “any acts of immorality,” the prosecution’s rejection of the values of sexual liberalism led to accusations of illicit behavior and sexual impropriety.71
The sheriff’s testimony proved controversial and dramatic, as he had originally chosen not to include a disputed incident in his first appearance on the stand. Sheriff Miller reluctantly testified that in the moments before he raided the camp, he had witnessed the illicit actions of a male and female nudist “half-way down the bank.”72 The sheriff recalled that he saw a woman walk down from the top of a bank, where a man “came out of the bushes” about a third of the way down and then “took his hand and felt of her private parts.”73 The couple then “turned out and went over in the bushes.”74 The reason for this original omission remained unclear. The Chicago Tribune’s detailed description of the sheriff’s testimony suggested his unease in recalling the events of the raid on such a public stage. In chronicling his “embarrassed recital,” the newspaper noted his “glumly” demeanor and the way his body “halted here and shifted uneasily, . . . eyes on the floor.”75 However, the newspaper’s description of the prosecutor’s appearance—“a youngish man whose pink cheeks, possibly heightened in color by the necessity of urging the reluctant sheriff on,” and whose “dry nasal voice took on a rasping quality” during the trial—suggested that the young state attorney may have been overzealous in such a highly publicized case.76 Perhaps, enjoying the media attention, the young prosecutor pressured the sheriff to elaborate on his testimony to ensure a dramatic victory. With Fred Ring watching the testimony with an “expression of hurt astonishment,” Hoffman immediately began to challenge what he sardonically labeled the prosecution’s “ace in the whole.”77 On cross-examination, the sheriff admitted that he hesitated in “bringing that up” because he did not want to discuss sex so publicly and explained that he decided to testify about the incident only after the prosecutor told him that he “ought to tell it, explain it” to the court.78 Although it remained uncertain if the incident actually transpired the day of the raid, it proved that the visibility of the grounds made the camp vulnerable to accusations of sexual impropriety.
The prosecution used the Ring trial to reject the values of sexual liberalism. The prosecutor found it particularly disturbing that Ring “exposed himself naked” in the “presence of his wife and daughters and other men, women, and children assembled” at the camp.79 He found little credence in the belief that access to sexual knowledge and experience might lessen illicit desires and behaviors. He also remained skeptical that the innocence and purity of the family insulated the camp from indecency. Since Ring exposed himself “not only in camp but on adjoining land,” the prosecutor concluded his case by declaring “organized nakedness” to be about the “exploitation of sex.”80 The visibility of the camp to non-nudists allowed the prosecution to equate the activities of the Sun Sports League with the burlesque shows that reformers campaigned against in New York City and Chicago. A stand against nudism went beyond regulating questionable theatrical performances, though. As for nudist opponents in the city, it represented the last line of defense for appropriate behavior between the sexes. Implying that the lack of clothing at a nudist camp led to random acts of sexual intercourse, the prosecutor declared the open social interaction of men and women in the nude to be a “reversion to the animal state.” He then expressed concern that Ring “advertised for members to join in this dangerous fad” and asserted that the movement represented a “menace to society, and especially to the peaceable and law abiding people of Allegan County.”81 Any association with nature, health, and morality that Fred and Ophelia Ring hoped to benefit from was lost when they upset traditional notions of modesty by visibly bringing naked men and women together in the same space.
The prosecution’s effort to present nudism as another indecent sexual perversion proved far more persuasive than Fred Ring’s defense of an individual’s right to privacy. On November 18, 1933, Judge Fred T. Miles sentenced Ring to sixty days in the county jail and fined him $300 plus court costs of $53.79. When the judge issued his sentence, he defended the town of Allegan, Michigan, by chastising Ring for entering a “quiet, decent, and law abiding community” where he undoubtedly “shock[ed] everybody’s sense of decency.” By imposing this strict sentence, he hoped to produce a public reaction that would prevent a person, “be he ever so degenerate,” from attempting to follow Ring’s example.82 On June 20, 1934, after all of Fred Ring’s appeals had run their course, Ophelia, in a separate legal proceeding independent of her husband’s trial, pleaded guilty to indecent exposure and received two years probation.83
The International Nudist Conference
After unfavorable trials and legislation in New York City, Chicago, and Allegan, Michigan, nudists realized the need for a national organization that could give voice to the movement’s ideals and activities, positively shape American conceptions of nudism, and provide legal protection for its network of camps. Until the spring of 1933, nudists lacked such an organization. Although Kurt Barthal, a German immigrant who had practiced Nacktkultur in Europe, founded the American League for Physical Culture in 1929, most nudist activities continued to depend mostly on the efforts of isolated individuals, couples, and groups. This left nudists vulnerable to raids, sensational press coverage, and antiobscenity activists who wanted to use nudism to fight the rapidly expanding tol
erance of sexual expression. Further limiting the effectiveness of Barthal’s American League for Physical Culture was its status as a “foreign born importation.”84 Hoping that the group would “become American,” Barthal selected the Reverend Ilsley Boone as vice president in 1931.85 Boone appeared to be the perfect choice to reshape nudism’s image to reflect American moral and cultural values. He had graduated from Brown University as an ordained Baptist minister, was a married man with children, and was “an accomplished orator.”86 Over the next decade, Rev. Boone crafted nudist principles and ideals around the values of health, morality, and psychological well-being in an effort to bring much-needed respectability to the still-obscure social movement.
In 1933, Boone broke away from Barthal’s organization to found the International Nudist Council (INC) in order to address the problems impeding nudism’s development in the United States. Aware of the uncoordinated efforts of nudists across the country, Boone wanted the INC to provide a forum that “place[d] the experience of each group at the disposal of all.”87 To do this, Boone established an inclusive organizational structure that accepted active “groups” and allowed “cooperative” memberships for individuals who lived in areas that lacked an active local association.88 The INC also sought to counter the scandals involving nudism by actively influencing the “formation of an informed and understanding public opinion” on the physical and mental benefits of going naked.89 Finally, the INC pledged to provide aid to resolve the “legal or legislative problems” that might arise with local authorities and the courts.90
The INC set out to accomplish these goals, in large part, through the monthly publication and distribution of the Nudist, which began its publication in May 1933. Boone designed the Nudist as a resource for organizational news, as a forum for members to communicate with one another across the United States, and as a medium through which the movement might shape the public’s impression of nudism. A variety of articles, editorials, and letters to the editor advertised the movement’s growing network of rural camps and instructed readers about nudist ideals and principles. The large, glossy pages that displayed numerous photos of naked men, women, and children enjoying the sun, light, and air at camps scattered around the country also appealed to a wider audience that consumed the magazine as a form of pornography. The distribution of the magazine through the mail and on the newsstands in many cities allowed the publication to profit from readers who wanted to view naked bodies as erotica. The Nudist achieved success as a source for sexual arousal while also publicizing nudism’s goal of creating a “healthy mind in a healthy body.”91
The strong emphasis on health in nudism caused many journalists to dismiss the movement as another cult or fad. “Doctors Call Nudism Loony,” a Chicago Tribune headline declared, “Warn Cultists to Don Bathing Suits to Resist Sun, Citing the Neanderthaler’s Hairy Hide.” The reference to cavemen and the declaration that the movement was “loony” portrayed nudism as reminiscent of animal behavior and therefore irrational. In the featured Sunday-magazine article, a prominent doctor advised health enthusiasts to “get enough sun but not too much” since “one extreme can be just as bad as another.”92 Addressing the “psychological influence of going nude,” he suggested readers “follow tradition and common sense, and stick to clothing” until society reached a “higher plane of morality.”93 Gretta Palmer, in the Commentator, equated nudists with “addicts of Yogi breathing exercises [who] almost inevitably let their beards grow,” “anti-vivisection groups [that] overlap with opponents of vaccination,” the “Live Food fan, who eats turnips raw,” and the “practicing numerologist.” She mockingly lamented that “no American . . . can join one cult and call it a day.”94 Similarly, Anthony Turano, in the American Mercury, labeled nudists as “escapist[s]” and dismissed their “new faith” as “neurotic psychology.”95 To prosper in the United States, nudism would have to overcome intensely critical scrutiny in the popular press.
Skeptical journalists and critical medical professionals interpreted the health claims of nudism as another one of the many drugless healing systems emerging in the early twentieth century. Natural healing approaches such as naturopathy resonated with a public that was unsatisfied with the harsh and ineffective medicines prescribed by poorly trained doctors. They also appealed to a public that was anxious about the ill effects of an increasingly urban society and the growth of white-collar professions that separated middle-class men and women from the natural environment. Naturopaths believed that all diseases originated from within the body and that nature, rather than drugs, needed to be harnessed to restore health. According to James Whorton, this amounted to a “therapeutic universalism” that included “a virtual infinity of healing agents” such as diet, exercise programs, massage, sunbathing, and herbal treatments.96 The methods of naturopathy overlapped with the goals of nudism. At Yungborn, a naturopathic health resort located in New Jersey’s Ramapo Mountains, guests went for long hikes in the mountains and then separated into sex-segregated groups, disrobed, took a swim in a lake, and finished by sunbathing in the nude. By the early 1930s, almost a dozen naturopathic schools awarded degrees, numerous health resorts operated across the country, and journals espousing the group’s natural healing principles proliferated on magazine stands. Bernarr Macfadden, the popular health reformer who pushed the boundaries of acceptable display in his physical-fitness and bodybuilding magazines and books, frequently promoted the naturopathic message as well. Physicians, however, considered naturopathy a “medical cess-pool” that was nothing more than a “cult [with] no basic idea but to be rather a nature-cure hodgepodge.”97 Even though naturopathy proved popular with the public and endorsed nudity as a therapeutic experience, it also threatened to further marginalize nudism as another cult.
Nudists felt that the scientific methods and clinical practice of physicians and medicine would give credibility to the movement.98 The emerging field of heliotherapy, in the first decades of the twentieth century especially, validated the natural healing approaches of American nudism. In Europe and the United States, heliotherapists designed therapeutic strategies that dictated how patients exposed their body to the sun to cure diseases such as tuberculosis as well as skin lesions and rashes. In many ways, heliotherapy applied scientific and clinical approaches to customs and traditions that had long used the sun and fresh air as a natural disinfectant. Throughout the nineteenth century, according to the historian Nancy Tomes, doctors and public health reformers encouraged families to build homes in sunny spots and to air out the dirty laundry to eliminate diseases and frequently advised patients to visit warm, sunny locales to recuperate from illnesses such as tuberculosis that many physicians attributed to darkness, poor ventilation, and damp spaces.99 In the twentieth century, the acceptance of swimming pools paralleled a surge in the popularity of suntanning in the mid-1920s. Previously, tanned skin had been associated with field labor, but with the growing popularity of outdoor recreation, it began to communicate youth, health, and beauty, while pale, white skin signaled factory labor. The well-established association of the sun and fresh air with health represented a boon to heliotherapy and allowed nudism to build on its success.
By the 1920s, Dr. Augustus Rollier had established his “air cure” clinic in the Swiss Alps, which drew the attention of the wider medical community to the benefits of heliotherapy. There, Rollier broke the body down into zones and designed an exact therapeutic procedure that directed his patients to expose their entire bodies to the sun and fresh air. Each zone, beginning with the feet, would be exposed to the sun on the first day for three short intervals of five minutes. The next day, the doctor exposed the legs using the same short five-minute intervals, while the patient’s feet remained uncovered for three ten-minute periods. By the fifth day, when the doctor unveiled the thorax, the whole body lay exposed to the sun. After the fifteenth day of treatment, the entire body could remain uncovered for a period of three or four hours. In 1928, a New York Times article praised Rollier’s clini
c as the “mecca for those suffering from tuberculosis of the skin, bones and joints” and mentioned that many physicians believed that it was “destined to become one of the landmarks of modern medicine.”100
American nudists made an effort to embrace the clinical methods and precautions of heliotherapy. Far removed from the physician’s office or the grounds of a sanitarium, nudists still considered Rollier an “apostle of a new therapy.”101 They felt that his willingness to use surgery “whenever necessary,” the presence of “orthopedic apparatus of the most modern type” in his clinic, his reliance on “diet, massage, and appropriate medication,” and his “fractional method” proved that he was “not a faddist.”102 They also agreed that therapeutic nudity “must be used intelligently and with discretion.”103 Articles in the Nudist warned sunbathers to avoid the midday sun since its heat rays “enervate, destroy our body cells, promote fever, and therefore are devitalizing.”104 They added that “excessive sun tanning may be the means of seriously injuring the skin.”105 Nudists promoted a moderate approach to nude sunbathing by suggesting that neophytes disrobe for half an hour to start and then increase the time of exposure to an hour as they built up their tolerance. They also felt “alternating day by day” between the chest and back would leave the sunbather “invigorated, feeling fine, and strong.”106 The absence of a trained physician did not stop nudists from implementing regimented approaches to sunbathing that were designed to limit injuries while increasing the therapeutic benefits of going naked.
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