MAKING PRIVATE PARTS PUBLIC: AMERICAN NUDISM AND THE POLITICS OF NAKEDNES, 1929-1963

ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2009

Dissertation

Author: Brian Scott Hoffman

Abstract:

The nudist movement's struggle to make private parts public reveals the multiple and contradictory conceptions of the naked body in the modern United States. Beginning in 1929, nudists championed the therapeutic benefits of exposing the body to the sun and fresh air in gymnasiums, on beaches, and at secluded rustic camps. Over the next three decades, the movement attracted health enthusiasts, titillated men and women of all sexualities, and clashed with moral reformers intent on preserving the boundaries of decency in American Society. This dissertation argues that the nudist movement opened new spaces for sexual expression in American society and culture by making it difficult to distinguish the erotic from the therapeutic and the illicit from the respectable. Celebrating the mental, physical, and moral benefits of going naked while also tempting the public with its attractive magazines and films, nudists developed a sprawling network of clubs across the country and, by the late 1950s, after several drawn-out legal battles, the movement won the right to distribute its magazines through the mails and screen its films in almost any theater in the United States. A critical analysis of the leadership, organization, principles, and legal conflicts that defined nudism as a movement provides a lens to examine social and cultural assumptions about the body normally hidden from public view and historical interpretation. This dissertation contributes to historical studies of sexuality that have documented the emergence of a more open sexual culture in the United States by analyzing previously unrecognized cultural developments and movements.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: “The Nude of the Nudists did not go on as Scheduled:” The Emergence of Nudism in the American Metropolis, 1929-1939 15 “24 Seized in Raid on Nudist Cult Here” 18 Rogers Park 25 Burke v. New York 34 The McCall Anti-Nudism Bill 43 Conclusion 53 Figures 55 CHAPTER 2: “A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body:” Rural Life, Respectability, and the American Nudist Park, 1933-1940 57 “Zoro Nature Park” 60 The Sun Sports League 68 The International Nudist Conference 80 The Fifth Annual International Nudist Conference 97 Figures 102 CHAPTER 3: “Letters from Men Far Afield:” Sexual Politics, Nudist Representation, and the Second World War, 1934-1947" 107 “It cannot be assumed that nudity is obscene perse”" 110 “"Brash Mr. Dies” 119 “It is good to be an American; it's grand to be a nudist” 133 “A False Front for Unleashed Passion” 139 Conclusion 158 Figures 160 CHAPTER 4: “They might have been any group of people:” Family Values, Race, and the Rise of the American Nudist Resort, 1945-1958 166 “The Single Man Problem” 169 “National Negro Sunbathing Association” 183 “A Nudist Mecca” 187 “Michigan v. Hildabridle” 201 Conclusion 215 Figures 217 CHAPTER 5: “A Certain Amount of Prudishness:” Making a Legal Space for American Nudism, 1947-58" 219 “It is easier to sell pictures of naked women” 224 “It is filthy, it is foul, it is obscene” 229 “We are a clothed people” 237 “A prudish legal strategy” 241 “Garden of Eden” 249 v “What's My Line?” 259 Figures 261 CONCLUSION: “Gray can be a very drab and dirty color:” American Nudism and the Commercialization of Sex, 1958-1963 267 Sundial 269 “Nude on the Moon” 274 “Do You Ever Find Any Perversion Among Your Nudists?” 279 Figures 283 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 287 CURRICULUM VITAE 305 VI

INTRODUCTION The nudist movement's struggle to make private parts public reveals the multiple and contradictory conceptions of the naked body in the modern United States. Beginning in 1929, nudists championed the therapeutic benefits of exposing the body to the sun and fresh air in gymnasiums, on beaches, and at secluded rustic camps. Over the next three decades, the movement attracted health enthusiasts, titillated men and women of all sexualities, and clashed with moral reformers intent on preserving the boundaries of decency in American Society. The nudist movement, I argue, carved out a space in American society and culture by making it difficult to distinguish the erotic from the therapeutic and the illicit from the respectable. By carefully navigating the changing moral, legal, and social constructions of nakedness, nudists developed a sprawling network of clubs across the country and, by the late 1950s, after several drawn-out legal battles, the movement won the right to distribute its magazines through the mails and screen its films in almost any theater in the United States. This dissertation contributes to historical studies of sexuality that have documented the emergence of a more open sexual culture by analyzing previously unrecognized cultural developments and movements. Building on the work of Michel Foucault, historians of the nineteenth century argued that the repeated attempts to suppress sexuality by moral reformers, religious organizations, and state officials actually represented an unceasing desire to publicly discuss sex.1 Scholars of the early twentieth 1 Thomas Walter Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002); Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Judith R Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990); Kathy Peiss, 1

century documented the successful efforts of free lovers, birth control advocates, and socialists to defeat the legal and social barriers that denied women access to sexual knowledge and restricted sexual expression. Other historians of sexuality showed the ways that the gay, lesbian, and transsexual communities survived and even prospered in the dense urban neighborhoods of major American cities and through a culture of respectability that redefined gender and racial norms as well as middle-class values by conforming to these very same ideals. A critical analysis of the leadership, organization, principles, and legal conflicts that defined nudism as a movement adds to this growing literature by providing a lens to examine social and cultural assumptions about the body normally hidden from public view and historical interpretation. By surveying the major turning points of the nudist movement, this study historically analyzes the public exposure of the body that would otherwise remain underneath clothes, behind closed doors, or on the banks of isolated streams and lakes. A history of the nudist movement's many clashes with local authorities, public Christina Simmons, and Robert Padug eds., Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Walter M. Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (New York: Viking, 1987). 2 Lisa Duggan, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006); John D'Emilio, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Kathy Lee Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in New York City, 1880 to 1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920's (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman, 1976) 3 John D'Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003); Marc Stein, “Boutilier and the U.S. Supreme Court's Sexual Revolution,” Law and History Review 23, no. 3 (2005): 491-536; Joanne J. Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002); Martin Meeker, “Behind the Mask of Respectability: Reconsidering the Mattachine Society and Male Homophile Practice, 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10, no. 1 (2001): 78-116; Leisa D Meyer, Creating GUane: Sexuality and Power in the Women's Army Corps During World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 2

officials, and state censors also moves beyond legal studies that tend to ignore the important social, cultural, and political debates revolving around the question of obscenity.4 Social and cultural historians have analyzed the emergence of a modern obscenity regime in the twentieth century that regulated the boundaries of sexual liberalism by tolerating some normative forms of heterosexual pleasure while excluding threatening, violent, or non-conforming forms of sexuality.5 An analysis of the legal battles over the decency of nudist magazines, films and clubs, however, shows that this modern obscenity regime quickly broke down as judges and juries found it increasingly difficult to disentangle so-called deviant materials from examples of morally acceptable heterosexual display and behavior. The failure of anti-obscenity activists in the 1940s and 50s to suppress nudist activities, publications, and films as obscene laid the foundation 4 Max Ernst and Alan Schwartz, Censorship: The Search for the Obscene (New York: Macmillan, 1964); Ira Carmen, Movies, Censorship, and the Law (Anne Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966); Richard Kuh, Foolish Figleaves? Pornography In and Out of Court (New York: Macmillan, 1967); Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York: Vintage, 1992); David J. Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1994); Richard Hixson, Pornography and the Justices: The Supreme Court and the Intractable Obscenity Problem (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996). 5 Whitney Strub, "Black and White and Banned All Over: Race, Censorship and Obscenity in Post War Memphis," Journal of Social History 40, no. 3 (2007): 685-715; John E. Semonche, Censoring Sex: A Historical Journey Through American Media (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Leigh Ann Wheeler, Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873-1935 (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth Century America; Molly McGarry, "Spectral Sexualities: Nineteenth Century Spiritualism, Moral Panics, and the Making of U.S. Obscenity Law," Journal of Women's History 12, no. 2 (2000): 8-29; Nicole Biesal, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997); Rochelle Gurstein, The Repeal of Reticence: A History of America's Cultural and Legal Struggles Over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art (New'York: Hill and Wang, 1996); John M Craig, ""The Sex Side of Life": The Obscenity Case of Mary Ware Dennett," Frontiers 15, no. 3 (1995): 145-166; Paul S. Boyer, Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children: "Indecency," Censorship and the Innocence of Youth (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Alison M. Parker, Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873-1933 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters, 222-274; Leigh Gilmore, “Obscenity, Modernity, Identity, Legalizing the Well of Loneliness and Nightwood,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4 no. 4 (1994): 603-624; Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right. 3

for the explosion of sexual display in the last decades of the twentieth century. The contradictory discourses that defined American nudism allow for multiple interpretations and contribute to feminist scholarship that attempts to define what did and did not constitute pornography.6 The visual images produced by the nudist movement represent a valuable source to analyze American attitudes toward bodies that rarely appeared in mainstream publications or even in borderline materials. Rather than analyze these images as part of the debate over female sexual obj edification or liberation, I argue that the movement's representations had the potential to appeal to a wide range of sexualities and offered new paradigms for sexual normality as well as transgression. From 1933 to 1963, Sunshine and Health (initially titled The Nudist) introduced nudist principles, activities, and camps through thousands of illustrations of naked men, women, and children. Alongside images of young women with small waists, large bosoms, and long legs stood the bodies of middle-aged naked men and women, young children, and people of color. Placed on covers, in monthly photo collages, and scattered throughout the magazine's text, the range of images in the long-running flagship nudist publication attracted individuals who had many reasons for seeking out nude representations. American nudism originated in Germany beginning in 1905 and came to the 6 Carrie Pitzulo, "The Battle in Every Man's Bed: Playboy and the Fiery Feminists" Journal of the History of Sexuality, 17 No. 2 (May 2008): 258-288; Maria Elena Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter eds., Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006). Bill Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-Style in Modern America (New York: Berg Press, 2001); Matthew Lasar, “The Triumph of the Visual: Stages and Cycles in the Pornography Controversy From the McCarthy Era to the Present,” Journal of Policy History 7, no. 2 (1995): 181-207; Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Duphne Read, “(De)Constructing Pornography: Feminisms in Conflict” in Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons eds., Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1989); Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (New York: Viking Press, 1987); Barabara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1983):42-52. 4

United States with German immigrants. As part of a larger movement for national regeneration, German nudists promoted an ideology of Nacktkultur that sought to reform the body through strenuous exercise, and a rigid, often vegetarian, diet, and required abstinence from alcohol and tobacco.7 Practiced by the elite and upper middle classes as well as reformist and revolutionary groups, the German nudist movement grew rapidly until Hitler came to power in 1933 and suppressed all socialist activity, and indirectly, most nudist organizations. Immigrants hoping to recreate Nacktkultur in the United States, began setting up small organizations like the American League for Physical Culture in 1929 and the International Nudist Conference in 1933. Over the next three decades, nudism would transform into a distinctly American phenomenon centered on health, spiritual morality, and recreation. The first men and women to go naked as part of an organized movement in the United States reflected emerging conceptions of health, sexuality, and the body. Nudists first gathered in urban gymnasiums where they built on the popularity of previous physical training systems by asserting that clothing was unhygienic. Engaging in rigorous callisthenic routines and swimming exercises, nudists believed that clothing became dirty as it collected perspiration, and, by clinging to the body, hindered the natural movements needed to properly exercise. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the increasing social acceptance of more revealing fashions, such as the one-piece bathing suit, also 7Brandon Taylor and Wilfred van der Will eds., The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich (Winchester, Hampshire: Winchester Press, Winchester School of Art, 1990); John Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900-1940 (Stanford University Press, 2007); Chad Ross, Naked Germany: Health, Race and the Nation (Oxford: Berg, 2005); Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2005); Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890-1930 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003); Karl Eric Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 5

helped to pave the way for the introduction of organized nudism in the United States. In addition, nudist contentions that exposing the body to the sun and fresh air was therapeutic paralleled the growing popularity of tanned skin tones as a sign of youth, beauty, and health among white Americans.8 Beginning in urban gymnasiums, nudists developed a “program of exercise and life in the open” designed to reap the “"maximum physical and mental benefits” of going naked.9 To gain the most benefits from the fresh air and sun, American nudists represented the wide open spaces of the American countryside as innocent and natural settings to go naked. My analysis of rural nudist camps builds on the recent work of Beth Bailey and John Howard by showing that the sparsely populated American countryside proved more than hospitable to the therapeutic principles of the nudist movement.10 The rural nudist camp allowed urban residents to escape the noise, pollution, and stresses of the city and removed the barriers that separated the individual from nature. Large camps offering rolling hills, open fields, expansive lakes, lush vegetation, and towering trees, allowed nudists to take full advantage of all the physical benefits that outdoor sports had to offer the naked man or woman. Far away from prying neighbors and local police, nudists enjoyed hiking, numerous athletic games, swimming, rowing, and, of course, sunbathing. The movement's commitment to healing the body in the natural setting of the nudist camp helped give nudism legitimacy and allowed the movement to establish itself 8Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Kathy Lee Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998); Angela J. Latham, “Packaging Woman: The Concurrent Rise of Beauty Pageants, Public Bathing, and Oher Performances of Female 'Nudity,'” Journal of Popular Culture 29, no. 3 (1995): 149-167; Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 9 "I.N.C.," The Nudist, May 1933, 2. 10 John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999). 6

in American society and culture. Analyzing nudism as a health movement makes two significant contributions to the history of alternative medicine. First, it builds on the work of scholars who have challenged the existence of a therapeutic consensus during the so- called golden age of medicine from the 1930s through the 1960s.11 The natural healing approaches of American nudism helped the movement to carve out a social space in the United States. This adds to a growing literature that examines the ways that twentieth century alternative healing systems maintained their identities and institutions despite the hostility of conventional medicine.12 Second, the therapeutic principles of the nudist movement, which integrated the body, mind, and spirit, put the recent popularity of holistic medicine in historical perspective. Studies such as Mathew Schneirov and Johnathan Gecik's 2003 A Diagnosis for Our Times: Alternative Health, From Life World to Politics link the rise of holistic medicine to the social movements of the 1960s which demanded healing approaches that considered the whole patient, that focused on preventative care, and encouraged individuals to assume more responsibility in managing 1' Robert Johnson, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald Numbers, eds., Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1997); For studies that present the emergence of a therapeutic consensus in the first part of the twentieth century see, Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Hans A. Baer, Biomedicine and Alternative Healing Systems in America: Issues of Class, Race, Ethnicity and Gender (Masison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconson Press, 2001). 12Due to the growing popularity of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) in the last three decades of the twentieth century a number of studies have emphasized the continuity of nineteenth century systems of healing see Mary Ruggie, From Marginal to Mainstream: Alternative Medicine in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Robert D. Johnston ed, The Politics of Healing: Histories of Alternative Medicine in Twentieth Century North America (New York: Routledge, 2004); Eric S. Juhnke, Quacks and Crusaders: The Fabulous Careers of John Brinkley, Norman Baker, and Harry Hoxsey (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2002); James C. Whorton, Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Robert C. Fuller, Alternative Medicine and American Religious Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Norman Gevitz, ed. Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in America (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1988). 7

their own health. Yet, expanding on the work of James Whorton and Robert Johnson, my analysis of the nudist movement's natural healing philosophy shows that these holistic approaches to health were also rooted in earlier alternative medical traditions.14 From the 1930s through the 1960s, the American nudist movement questioned morally repressive approaches to health and medicine. I argue that nudists provided an alternative to healing approaches that attributed illness to moral failings and sexual indiscretion by asserting that the exposure of the body to the opposite sex freed men and women from feelings of shame and unhealthy curiosities about sexual matters. The sexual openness advocated by the nudist movement helps explain the emergence of late twentieth-century holistic healing philosophies that embraced the eroticism of the body. Historians of medicine have documented a prolonged effort by conventional and unconventional physicians to differentiate the erotic from the therapeutic.15 Nineteenth- century health reformers like William Andrus Alcott and Sylvester Graham, for example, urged individuals to abstain from stimulation, especially sexual activity, to achieve health.16 In addition, the prominence of female physicians in hydropathy and homeopathy 13 Amy Sue Bix, “Engendering Alternatives: Women's Health Care Choices and Feminist Medical Rebellions” in Robert Johnson ed., The Politics of Healing: Histories of Alternative Medicine in Twentieth Century North America (New York: Routledge, 2004); Mathew Schneirov and Jonathan David Geczik, A Diagnosis for Our Times: Alternative Health, From Lifeworld to Politics (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2003); Sandra Morgen, Into Our Hands: The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969-1990 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 14 Robert D. Johnston ed., The Politics of Healing; James Whorton, Nature Cures. 15 Leslie J. Reagan, “Projecting Breast Cancer: Self Examination Films and the Making of a New Cultural Practice,” in Leslie J. Reagan, Nancy Tomes, and Paula A. Triecher eds., Medicine's Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health, and Bodies in American Film and Television (Rochester, N. Y. University of Rochester Press, 2007), 163-195; Carolyn Herbst Lewis, "Waking Sleeping Beauty: The Premarital Pelvic Exam and Heterosexuality During the Cold War," Journal of Women's History, 17, No. 4 (2005); Barron H. Lerner, The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 41-68; Terri Kapsalis, Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 16 Martha Verbrugge, Abie-Bodied Womanhood: Personal Health and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Boston (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 194; James C. Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (New Jersey: Princeton University 8

attracted women who felt uncomfortable with the invasive techniques of an almost entirely male medical profession.17 The acceptance of female physicians in alternative medicine did not necessarily redefine the moral doubts raised by the unhealthy body. Ronald L. Numbers and Ronnie Shoepflin have shown that the central role women played in establishing the Seventh Day Adventist movement and Christian Science did not alter doctrines that linked physical debility and disease to moral failings and the violation of Christian doctrine.18 Attempts to use medicine to regulate morality continued throughout the twentieth century as physicians used science to condemn homosexuality, abortion, and many other behaviors and practices.1 The central role religion played in defining the nudist movement's spiritual effort to liberate the body from shame and sexual repression contrasts with recent scholarship that explains the physical and moral disciplining of the body through religion. R. Marie Griffith's 2004 Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity argued that American Christians, from Cotton Mather to Father Divine, fulfilled and perpetuated a “basic religious obligation to cultivate correct bodily practice and create a proper looking Press, 1982): 7; Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980): 96. 17Anne Taylor Kirschmann, A Vital Force: Women in American Homeopathy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Susan E. Cayleff, Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement and Women's Health (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Jane B. Donegan, “Hydropathic Highway to Health”: Women and Water-Cure in Antebellum America (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986); Kathryn Kish Sklar, “All Hail to Pure Cold Water” in Judith Walzer ed., Women and Health in America, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). 18 Ronnie B. Schoepfin, Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2003); Ronald L. Numbers, Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White (New York: Harper and Row, 1976). 19 Jenifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Margaret Gibson, “Clitoral Corruption. Body Metaphors and American Doctors' Constructions of Female Homosexuality, 1870-1900," in Vernon Rosario, ed. Science and Homosexualities (NY: Routledge, 1997): 108-132; George Chauncey, “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War One Era.” Journal of Social History, 19:2 (1985), 189-211. 9

body.” Griffith's argument leaves little room for dissent and alternative understandings of the body. My examination of American nudism, on the other hand, explores the central role religion played in defining the nudist movement in the United States. Nudist leaders like the Baptist Minister, Reverend Ilsley Boone, presented a strain of liberal Protestantism that accepted a body free from clothes, shame, and artificiality. Although American nudists certainly did not advocate free love and they did promote health regimens, an analysis of the spiritual morality outlined by American nudists reveals that many Liberal Protestants sought and helped create a modern sexual ethic that accepted the body as healthy and natural. Confirming the work of previous historians, my dissertation also shows that homosexuality in the 1940s, along with other forms of sexual deviance such as abortion and nudism, was equated with communism. I argue that the success of nudism leading up to and during the Second World War empowered the movement to resist the censoring of its publications while also provoking Texas Congressmen, like Rep. Martin Dies, and postal officials to target the movement as a politically subversive organization that appealed to men of all sexualities. As nudist magazines and books increasingly exhibited content that appealed to the forlorn heterosexual soldier as much as a gay male readership, state authorities linked the movement with political radicalism and R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 239. 21 Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime; John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Allan B6rube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990); Meeker, “Behind the Mask of Respectability”; Andrea Friedman, “The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics,” American Quarterly 51, no. 4 (2005): 1105-1129; David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago, 111: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Shane Phelan, Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001). 10