The Injunction, the Prison, and the Burned Books

The Food and Drug Administration began investigating the orgone accumulator as a medical device sold across state lines. In 1954 the agency obtained an injunction in the federal district court in Maine prohibiting the interstate shipment of accumulators and of the literature that described them. Reich did not contest the case on its merits. He wrote to the court that a scientific question cannot be settled by a judge, declined to appear, and the injunction was entered by default. When an associate subsequently moved accumulator parts across a state line, Reich was prosecuted for contempt, convicted in 1956, and sentenced to two years. He died of heart failure in the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg in November 1957, days before he was eligible to apply for parole.

Under the terms of the injunction, quantities of his books and journals were destroyed, some of them burned in an incinerator in New York, and that act has been condemned since by people with no sympathy for orgone at all, including civil liberties writers who treat it as a straightforward instance of a government destroying a body of published work. Both halves of the case are usually reported badly. The accumulator does not work and the FDA was right about the device. Burning the books was a separate act and a different kind of error.