Five days before a brand new Maine institution called the Christian Civic League of Maine (CCLM) pledged to encourage all the people of Maine in good citizenship Wilhelm Reich joined the human race in what is now Ukraine.  Reich was born on March 24, 1897.  Since that time the CCLM has worked to enact good laws, provide for their impartial enforcement, and elect honest and competent public officials.

The President of the Farmington State Normal School (Now the University of Maine at Farmington), Maine’s college for public school teachers, joined with the President of Bowdoin College to create the CCLM in 1897.  Forty three years later Reich discovered the latent atmospheric power of sexual orgasms while camped on the shore of a Maine lake near Rangely.  He was thirty miles from Farmington.  He was on the same rural dirt road — Bald Mountain Road — on which my grandfather created Wildwind Camps one year later in 1941.

Reich would return to Maine many times in the 1940s and 50s, going so far as to purchase a one hundred and thirty acre farm in 1942 that he used as a laboratory for his experiments.    He died in a Pennsylvania prison in 1957.

Wilhelm Reich matters.  He literally wrote the book on the sexual revolution … in 1930.  You think the crisis started in the U.S. in the 1960s.

According to Manus.im:

“The Sexual Revolution” was originally published in German in 1930 by Muenster Verlag under the title “Geschlechtsreife, Enthaltsamkeit, Ehemoral” (Sexual Maturity, Abstinence, Marriage Morality). It was later republished by Sexpol Verlag in 1936, and then translated into English and published by the Orgone Institute Press in 1945 and 1949. The book has been republished multiple times since, including by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1962 and most recently by the Wilhelm Reich Museum Press in 2023.

Reich is a major, if not THE major, thinker inspiring the rise of sexual libertinism in Maine and the West.  After being thrown out of Europe he headquartered his work out of New York City and Western, Maine.

Maine’s current Governor, Janet Mills, is daughter to the lawyer who both legalized — and later criminalized — Reich’s work in the United States of America.  The Governor is locked in a pitched political battle of international import with Donald Trump over the latest expression of Reich’s ideology.

Her brother Paul, also a lawyer, is directly tied into an illegal Chinese marijuana grow operation that affects nearly three hundred properties in Maine.  Paul’s father, Peter, served as Wilhelm Reich’s personal lawyer during the 1940s.  He then pivoted to prosecuting the controversial Jewish European immigrant when he became the Federal US Attorney.  Reich died in prison in 1957.  Mills had six tons of Reich’s books destroyed.

Reich’s theories about sexual orgasms were aimed at undermining the authority of religion, especially the Roman Catholic Church.  He argued that only good can come from following one’s sexual impulses wherever they lead.  He hated all forms of authority and traditional marriage.

Under the leadership of Janet Mills Maine erased civil marriage in the first decade of the new millennium.  And she is a forceful advocate for Reich’s rubrics related to sexuality.

Reich invented a device that he believed was capable of absorbing and concentrating sexual orgasmic energy from the atmosphere in such a way that he could affect the weather.

Ideas have consequences.  I’ll be exploring the fascinating life and work of Wilhelm Reich in blog posts going forward.

Amen.