Justice Voelker did not find the defendants sexually threatening. He asserted, “except for the fact that they were entirely unclothed, they might have been any group of people enjoying a rural weekend outing.”228 Feeling it “pertinent to further identify these defendants,” the judge took notice of the “working class people” arrested at Sunshine Gardens. The police took custody of a sixty-two-year-old man who had worked at an automobile factory for “42 years continuously,” a childless married woman who “worked in an Ohio supermarket,” her forty-three-year-old husband, who had “worked 16 years as a machinist for the same employer,” and a father of three children whose wife later died, who had “worked as an inspector in an automobile factory for 26 years.”229 With none of the defendants previously convicted for serious crimes, “sexual or otherwise,” he saw the four defendants as hardworking citizens rather than sexual perverts.230
Recognizing the respectability of the defendants, Justice Voelker failed to see how the viewing of their naked bodies constituted a crime. Subscribing to the role the family played within the ideology of sexual liberalism in containing deviant sexuality, he did not assume that the mixing of naked adults and children in the space of the nudist resort represented or suggested an immoral sexual act. Rather, he implied that the state imposed this association on nudist activities. According to him, the presence of children at the camp, “far from accentuating any indecency, was itself additionally proof and insurance that no indecency or immorality was contemplated or intended by these defendants.”231 He found it “particularly monstrous to think” that the parents at the nudist camp intentionally and indecently exposed themselves to their own children.232 This opinion reflected the accepted psychological approach toward nudity and childhood sexuality in the twentieth century. Inspired by Sigmund Freud’s critique of Victorian culture and his contention that less shame and secrecy would lead to a more wholesome generation, popular psychologists such as Dr. Benjamin Spock wrote detailed articles in mainstream women’s magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal to assure parents that nudity within the family posed no intrinsic threat to the child.233 While Dr. Spock fell far short of endorsing nudism, he advised readers to avoid overemphasizing the “‘badness’ of nudity,” which produces “morbid shame and, sometimes, morbid curiosity,” but also to practice nudity according to the parents’ own modesty and comfort with their own naked bodies.234 Echoing Dr. Spock, Justice Voelker concluded that the prosecution’s claim that family nudity constituted a form of indecency was actually “gratuitously invest[ing] childhood with evil and erotic tendencies.”235
By the late 1950s, it became possible to reexamine the intent behind public nudity. Justice Voelker asserted that where the “exposure is neither meant nor taken as indecent,” it did not violate public decency.236 He listed several hypothetical examples of public nakedness that did not intend to offend or shock the general public. Citing the case of a boy in a marching band whose penis pops out of his tight marching pants during a halftime performance, a naked sleepwalker who keeps bumping into people at night, and a scenario where the police use a ladder to look into a second-floor window of a private residence only to find an entire family naked in front of a sun lamp, he ruled that these examples of public exposure did not intend to shock the public. In this case, rather than parading “down the main street of Battle Creek,” the defendants restricted their exposure to the grounds of Sunshine Gardens, far away from the public.237
Michigan v. Hildabridle represented both a practical and a symbolic achievement for American nudism. Declaring a “major victory” in the long battle to secure nudists’ civil liberties, the ACLU praised Justice Voelker’s opinion for explicitly detailing the logic and reasoning behind his dramatic ruling.238 In addition, the ACLU’s staff council declared Justice Voelker’s opinion “so devastating” that it would ensure that “Michigan nudists [would] be left in peace for a while.”239 While Justice Voelker felt compelled by the issues of the case to write an impassioned opinion and while the decision represented a monumental victory for nudists around the country, the case received little attention from the national media or legal scholars.240 Over a hundred camps had been operating successfully and largely without legal interference around the country for decades by the late 1950s. Overturning the outdated Ring case reflected larger legal trends, such as the expansion of federal protections against search and seizure at the state level. However, it did not represent a crucial turning point in the practice of nudism in the United States.241 Rather, the verdict unceremoniously confirmed the acceptance of the postwar American nudist resort as a form of family recreation as opposed to a symbol of explicit eroticism.
Conclusion
The conservative ideology of domesticity during the early Cold War years provided an opening for American nudism to expand and prosper. The recreational character of nudist resorts fit seamlessly into a tourist boom fueled by the private family car, the availability of gas, and a booming economy. Here, with middle-aged men and women and their young children playing volleyball, sunbathing next to a lake or pool, or hiking through sprawling scenic grounds, the naked body’s eroticism could be controlled and contained. Eliminating the possible uncontrolled eroticism of single men through exclusion and the recruitment of the heterosexual female body while also keeping the organization white by instituting a policy of segregation based on racist assumptions about the hypersexual racial other, nudism experienced enormous growth during a period otherwise known for its hostility to marginal lifestyles and ideas.
5
Pornography versus Nudism
The Contradictions of Twentieth-Century Sexual Liberalism
In March 1947, the U.S. Post Office seized Sunshine and Health (S&H) from the mails in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and several cities in Ohio. The coordinated actions by local post offices across the country signaled an unprecedented effort to remove the flagship nudist magazine from the mails. While officials had long tolerated nudist representations that resembled the young attractive Vargas Girls of Esquire or the nude female centerfolds in Playboy, they objected to the recent effort by the magazine to show the genitalia of naked men, women, and children as well as a range of body types not normally revealed in commercial publications. Officials asserted that permitting the magazine unrestricted access to American homes would be tantamount to accepting the “rights of all kinds of pornography” to use the “mails to destroy public morals.”1 Facing “complete financial ruin” but unwilling to censor the images, the editors of S&H declared the looming court battle a “challenge to every nudist, to every reader of this page, to every lover of freedom.”2 The legal debates that erupted around nudist magazines in 1947 and culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 1958 to stop the Post Office’s censorship of S&H redefined what constituted obscenity in the United States.
The ACLU saw the defense of S&H as an ideal way to expand civil liberties despite the anticommunist politics of the Cold War. The institution of the Federal Loyalty Program on March 21, 1947, along with the sensational trials of suspected Soviet spies and political radicals made the ACLU vulnerable to anticommunist attacks from organizations such as the American Legion. To avoid controversy and political persecution, ACLU leaders such as Roger Baldwin and Morris Ernst shifted the organization’s focus away from the defense of political radicals to an agenda centered on civil rights, the separation of church and state, and the issue of censorship.3 Yet the vocal resistance to public forms of sexuality in midcentury America also made the defense of S&H a risky endeavor. Several leaders within the organization feared that an extreme position in favor of sexual expression would produce adverse reactions from local community groups already hostile to the ACLU. As a result, the ACLU followed the path of respectability that many other organizations and individuals deployed to publicly address issues of sexuality in postwar America.4 Although free speech advocates and nudists demanded that all forms of sexual display be protected under the First Amendment, the moderate
leadership of the ACLU used the therapeutic principles that defined American nudism to avoid the issue of communism and to distance S&H from commercial sexual display. The attempts by the ACLU to distinguish good representations from bad representations of sex ultimately exposed the inability of the courts to maintain the contradictions of twentieth-century sexual liberalism.
In the years after the nudist movement’s legal victories, the understated sensuality that had long played a role in defining nudism exploded in the United States. New magazines and films—all claiming to represent nudist ideals and principles—flooded newsstands and pornographic theaters. Magazine publishers and film producers, some with only slim ties to the movement, used the familial character and health-oriented principles of nudism to exhibit erotic images and content. The nudist movement’s efforts to define public nudity as healthy, natural, and respectable made the display of the nude body and sex more widely available, and in the process, it undermined the heteronormative boundaries of sexual liberalism. Ultimately, the years of legal struggle linked nudism to the increasing commercialization of sex in the United States. The nudist movement’s claims to respectability and propriety made the enormous expansion of the sex industry and the availability of sexually explicit materials in the 1960s and 1970s possible.
“It Is Easier to Sell Pictures of Naked Women”
The transformation of S&H’s content and appearance during and after the war caught the attention of the U.S. Post Office. In 1947, letter carriers began seizing the magazine at various points of delivery around the nation. Ilsley Boone immediately demanded a hearing to determine the mailability of S&H, and the Post Office appointed a trial examiner to evaluate the decency of the flagship nudist magazine. At these hearings, postal officials argued that the promotion of nudist principles in S&H concealed its commercial appeal to both heterosexual and homosexual readers. Calvin Hassell, who represented the Post Office, observed that with the “exception of an occasional volleyball game and people gathered around a swimming pool,” the images showed “little activity—just naked people sitting or standing around.” He concluded that “without the nude pictures the publication would have little if any sales appeal.”5
The Post Office targeted S&H because its content appealed to the illicit desires of men. During the Cold War, antiobscenity activists shifted their attention from the “most vulnerable viewer,” who was usually a child, to adult men due to a perceived “crisis in masculinity.” According to many experts, moral reformers, and social commentators, men struggled to maintain a “soft” masculinity suitable for the home and a conformist society as well as a “hard” masculinity essential for defending the nation from foreign threats. The anxieties surrounding masculinity during the Cold War renewed campaigns against visual representations such as pornography and comic books because they eroticized male violence or implicitly encouraged homosexuality.6 The many pictures of naked women displayed in nudist magazines raised similar concerns about male sexuality with postal officials. Hassell estimated the proportion of women to men displayed in S&H to be “four to one,” which led him to assert that the “great bulk of subscribers are men” since “it is easier to sell pictures of naked women to men than it is to sell pictures to women who may not care for this sort of publication.”7 The relatively small nudist membership and the much-larger sales of S&H also implied that the magazine catered to a male consumer base. Boone testified that in 1948 he published forty thousand to ninety thousand copies of the magazine each month. Of these, six thousand to eight thousand went directly to mail subscribers, while newsstands distributed thirty thousand to sixty thousand issues each month.8 For the Post Office, the large number of issues sold on newsstands signaled the availability of the magazine to a male audience that likely had very little interest in nudist principles. The Post Office voiced its concerns about the excess of sexualized males rather than the “vulnerable viewer” in order to justify the removal of nudist magazines from the U.S. mail system.
Hassell also targeted the subtle ways that homosexual men communicated with each other through the magazine’s many classified advertisements. He believed the magazine acted as a “clearinghouse for obscene matter” because it provided readers “information directly and indirectly” about obtaining “obscene, lewd, lascivious and indecent matter” in “blind advertisements,” “pen pal advertisements,” and “photo lab advertisements.”9 Hassell singled out the wording of the photo-developing advertisements because he suspected that homosexuals used coded language to establish sexual contacts. He believed ads for “nude art photos” offering “confidential” service and promising readers that no pictures “would be altered or refused” revealed the “intentions of the advertisers” to exchange photos more graphic than those displayed in the magazine.10 S&H posed a threat as a form of pornography that appealed to heterosexual excess as well as homosexual desire.
Postal inspectors also portrayed the sexual frankness promoted by nudists as evidence of the movement’s effort to profit from erotica. Echoing liberal promoters of sex education in the twentieth century, many nudist leaders believed that sex represented a source of personal fulfillment and pleasure that was critical to establishing healthy relationships and a healthy family life. This view contradicted popular postwar sex-education policies that avoided controversy by deemphasizing open and honest instruction about sex and instead focused on preparing young adults for the practical challenges of family life.11 Nudist leaders’ unwillingness to be discreet when it came to sex education invited attacks from postal officials. Hassell cited an editorial that Boone wrote in the January 1947 issue of S&H in which he stated that the “sex urge” is the “most powerful urge to which mankind is subject” and that “sex always has been and always will be the ruler of life” as evidence of the longtime nudist leader’s obsession with sex. Hassell then used Boone’s admission that he exhibited “human sperm to the women at Sunshine Park and that one of the slides of sperm made was his own” to portray him as a pervert rather than a promoter of sex education.12 The fact that he had sold numerous sex books in S&H, distributed pamphlets about sexual positions, and authored a review of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male provided additional evidence of Boone’s unwavering interest in sex. Hassell went on to question why Boone sold a pamphlet titled The Perfect Embrace: A Comparative Study of Coital Posture and advertised several sex books including The Sex Life of the Unmarried Adult and Bust Culture by Karl Peters. He concluded that the titles suggested “illicit sex relations” to consumers and pointed to “Boone’s chief interest—sex.”13
According to postal officials, the emphasis on sex in S&H encouraged and promoted aberrant sexual behaviors. The image of the sexual psychopath in postwar society haunted communities fearful that the era’s domestic ideals could not contain male sexual desire. The Post Office exploited these anxieties when officials unearthed the “details of a controversy that raged within the nudist ranks about eight years ago.”14 The incident involved a young female nudist who charged “acts of intimacy—though not sexual relationship—on the part of Mr. Boone.”15 Just as many other nudists and club owners had done over the years, Rev. Boone had avoided legal troubles and public opprobrium by taking refuge in the public’s unwillingness to confront intergenerational sex and the assumption within sexual liberalism that the family precluded illicit sexual contact. Seeking to break this silence, for seven days, the court heard testimony from the girl’s father, mother, and husband regarding the incident. Hassell corroborated their testimony with a letter from Boone that “tacitly admits his immoral acts and both urges and threatens the [family] in an effort to prevent their testifying.”16 Hassell then lambasted Boone’s attorney for “frantically” trying to keep the “evidence of the immorality of the chief originator and prophet of so-called ‘nudism’ in our fair land out of this record.”17 Boone’s attorneys considered this testimony “legally irrelevant” but acknowledged that it constituted a “somewhat embarrassing” incident fo
r Boone, and they felt that the “odor of herring is still unfortunate.”18 Like much of the legislation passed by politicians since the 1930s in response to a public panicked by the sexual psychopath, the accusations leveled against Boone by the Post Office aroused fear and suspicion just as much as they represented compelling evidence of the indecency of S&H.19
The alleged power of S&H to arouse violent male sexuality placed the long-running nudist publication outside the acceptable boundaries of sexual liberalism. Echoing the gendered arguments of postal officials, the hearing examiner asserted that the “displays of naked femininity” might not arouse the committed nudist, but they would surely “stir the sex impulses of and constitute sexual provocation to the average male person viewing them.”20 The hearing examiner focused on the excessive heterosexuality that S&H might provoke from what he assumed were heterosexual men who wanted to view images of naked women. Adding that adherents to the “cult of nudism . . . constitute an exceedingly small minority,” the examiner stated that it required “little more than common sense” to conclude that the display of the naked body was “not acceptable to the aggregate community conscience and currently prevailing standards of morality in this country.”21
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