America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (20 page)

On Sunday, October 12, 1919, Kinsey was back in South Orange to gather his belongings. Having just raced through Harvard’s Bussey Institute—a now-d
efunct
wing of the university, which once housed its graduate program in applied biology—in three years to obtain his Sc.D., he was about to begin his career as a research scientist.

  The recipient of a postdoctoral research fellowship from Harvard, Kinsey was getting ready to travel across America in pursuit of what would emerge as his all-time favorite bug—the gall wasp. (A gall is the abnormal growth on trees or bushes in which the wasp’s eggs grow; it’s produced in response to a poison secreted by this tiny insect, which is typically the size of a small ant.) In his 250-page dissertation, “Life Histories of American Cynipidae,” based on his examination of thousands of gall wasps in the Northeast, Kinsey had identified sixteen new species, but he was far from satisfied. Seeking to live up to the nickname bestowed on him at Harvard—“Get a million Kinsey”—he aimed to break still more new ground by tracking down hundreds of thousands of additional specimens in the South and West. “I have taken some time to prepare, as completely as possible, the details of equipment, etc. for my trip,” he wrote that day to his advisor, the world-renowned Harvard entomologist and classification expert William Morton Wheeler. “And I anticipate that, in consequence, my time will be very largely free for actual collecting.” The expert organizer had indeed thought of everything; he set up an elaborate protocol whereby he would send ahead his suitcase by train, thus allowing him to carry only the necessary provisions in his backpack. Signing off, Kinsey added, “I shall think very often of the Bussey and of the good friendships there!” Who exactly Kinsey was referring to here is hard to determine. While Wheeler considered Kinsey’s recently submitted thesis “a remarkably fine piece of work,” he had hardly ever spent any time with his star pupil. As at Bowdoin, Kinsey had led a monastic existence, spending much more time in the company of animals than people. In three years, he had made exactly one friend, Edgar Anderson, who did not arrive until his last semester. While the future director of the Missouri Botanical Garden could not help but notice Kinsey’s “almost professional perfectionism,” he enjoyed picking the brain of his older colleague on natural history expeditions.

On Monday, October 13, the same day the discovery of America was celebrated in various pockets of the country—the national holiday was not on the books until 1937—this Christopher Columbus of the insect world set off. A week and a half later, Kinsey sent Wheeler an update from Big Stone Gap, a small town on the western edge of Virginia: “Collecting has begun very satisfactorily.” Having already traveled through southern New Jersey and eastern Virginia, he had begun shipping galls back to Boston in carefully packed crates. “I am having,” he added, “a very profitable time in seeing these new sorts of country. The birds are very interesting, the mountains being full of birds in migration. I am becoming acquainted with many new plants.” For the natural history geek, this was as close to heaven as one could get. Over the next ten months, Kinsey would travel a total of eighteen thousand miles—twenty-five hundred on foot—in thirty-six states. The compulsive counter kept track of all the numbers, especially the most critical one—his final haul of galls, which came to an even three hundred thousand. In May, during a brief break from his isolation—hiking mostly in the mountains, he often did not see another soul for several days—Kinsey met his father, then on the college lecture circuit, in Columbus, Ohio. Alfred Seguine passed on an urgent message from Wheeler notifying Kinsey that Indiana University was interested in hiring him as an assistant professor of zoology. That August, following a month in Boston in which he reconnected with his abandoned galls, the twenty-six-year-old moved to Bloomington to take up the relatively well-paying $2,000-a-year job ($75,000 today), which came with another $800 to tend to his tiny companions. “I am more and more satisfied,” he wrote to Natalie Roeth, as he settled into his basement office in I.U.’s Biology Hall, “that no other occupation in this world could give me the pleasure that this job of bug hunting is giving. I shall never cease to thank you for leading me into it!”

Hooked, Kinsey did everything he could to assure himself a steady supply of the dopamine rush provided by his bug of choice. Year after year, he kept collecting, organizing, examining—he took twenty-eight microscopic measurements—and labeling his gall wasps. Aided by a few research assistants and a light teaching load, he soon amassed “quantities never dreamed of by any previous investigator,” according to Edgar Anderson, who was floored by the exactitude with which he conducted his research. “Each insect was glued to a snippet of stiff paper and impaled on a steel pin. Minute paper labels…were affixed to the same pin and thousands upon thousands of these exquisitely prepared specimens were pinned in insect-proof boxes.” Using India ink, Kinsey’s staff recorded in his own specially developed lettering style a slew of data for each insect such as species, place and date of collection, and sex (the females were infinitesimally bigger). When properly crafted, these tiny labels—no more than three-eighths of an inch by five-eighths—often left the boss “beam[ing]…[with] pleasure,” as one former student recalled. With all this data to crunch, Kinsey began publishing up a storm. In the 1920s, he came out with a half dozen major papers, which were followed by a six-hundred-page doorstop,
The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips: A Study in the Origin of Species
(1930). As the title indicates, Kinsey, whose belief system by then had shifted from Methodism to Darwinism, emphasized the theoretical implications of his findings. Having identified fifty new species, many of which he named after himself—we now have gall wasps such as Advene Kinsey and Anda Kinsey—he offered a series of speculations about the nature of evolution itself. As usual, he bragged about his numbers, noting that since 1917 he had traveled thirty-two thousand miles and had managed to label seventeen thousand wasps.

After finishing a magnum opus, many researchers take a minute to catch their breath, but not Kinsey. Doing without his galls—his raison d’être—for any length of time was unthinkable. On January 30, 1930, just as his first bug book was about to be published, the soon-to-be thirty-six-year-old typed a memo, “Major Research Problems,” in which he listed thirteen additional studies that he wished to complete. Next to each, he estimated in pencil the number of years it was likely to take; the total came to thirty. Thus, as he noted at the bottom of the page, he was unofficially booked until the age of sixty-six. The two most ambitious projects were a book on the biology of gall wasps, which he anticipated would take four years, and a three-volume critique of taxonomy [the science of classification]—a six-year job. He went to work right away on the former, which would eventually take him, accompanied by several graduate students, to Arizona, Mexico, and Guatemala in both 1931 and 1935. As with his traveling fellowship from Harvard, he planned these extended field trips with a military precision. To collect his galls, he insisted on specially sewn cloth bags because “they are much stronger, take up less room and may be more securely tied at the top than paper bags.” In 1936, Kinsey published a follow-up book,
The Origin of Higher Categories in Cynips
. Like its predecessor, it elicited a half dozen good reviews by specialists but was ignored by the larger scientific community. Eager to make a mark, Kinsey worked at a feverish pace, churning out nine more papers for leading entomology journals over the next two years.

But Kinsey never did write that megatome on taxonomy, as by the late 1930s his attention had turned from crawling critters to climaxes. Surprisingly, though his object of study was now radically different, his overall approach remained the same. Kinsey said as much in the introduction to his male report, where he explained how his sexual research “was born out of the senior author’s long-time experience with a problem in insect taxonomy. The transfer from insect to human material is not illogical.” For Kinsey, distinguishing between different species of gall wasps was no different from distinguishing between different types of human sexual behavior. Repeatedly referring to the “human animal” in his two reports, this sexologist would attempt to erase the distinctions between human beings and all other animals. In his framework, human sexuality, like the mating patterns of insects, is severed from any relational context; both men and women are biologically driven orgasm machines pump-primed to get their next fix.

Just as Kinsey experienced little love during his childhood and adolescence—except perhaps for the occasional furtive glance exchanged with a squirrel or a snake—there is little love in his surveys. This glaring absence led renowned Columbia University English professor Lionel Trilling to note in his review of the first survey that the chapter on human-animal contacts “is, oddly, the only chapter in the book which hints that sex may be touched with tenderness.” Likewise, anthropologist Margaret Mead complained in 1948 that Kinsey “suggests no way of choosing between a woman and a sheep.” “Because of their convenient size,” sheep actually figure prominently at the end of the male volume, where he flashed his data about sex between men and animals. “What is there to prevent,” Kinsey asked innocently, “insects of one species from mating with insects of another species?…Why should mammals mate only with mammals of their own kind?” As he relayed to an America in equal parts stunned and titillated, according to his research, about 17 percent of farm boys experience orgasm as a result of sex with an animal. Noting that besides sheep, “practically every other type of mammal that has ever been kept on a farm enters into the record,” he also reported that vaginal coitus is the “most frequent technique,” though fellatio and anal intercourse are not uncommon. The female volume would contain an analogous chapter where he reported that 0.4% of adult women achieved an orgasm as a result of contact with an animal—dogs and cats were the favored partners. Kinsey tracked down a “shy” sixty-eight-year-old widow who had engaged in weekly sex with her dog, named Tony, for eight years. While this caninophile was an outlier, she wasn’t the record setter; one woman in his sample reached orgasm about nine hundred times via animal contacts. With coitus rarely doable, these women, Kinsey reported, tended to be on the receiving end of oral sex.

Upon arriving in Bloomington in the summer of 1920, Kinsey made sure that his whole life revolved around bugs. Nothing else mattered, even when it came to selecting a wife. While the assistant professor of zoology, as the authors of the two major Kinsey biographies both argue, had experienced frequent homosexual fantasies since adolescence, in his midtwenties, the only path to success he could envision was as a conventional family man. Clara McMillen, I.U.’s top undergraduate chemistry major, whom he had first met during his interview the previous April, proved irresistible mate material. She had all the requisite qualifications. As a child, she had chased butterflies and moths; so devoted was this Brookville, Indiana, girl to insects that she had once paid for a newspaper ad in the hope of expanding her caterpillar collection. And the dark-eyed tomboy, who did not care for makeup, liked to go on nature walks. While Clara pursued the still shy but handsome Kinsey, she initially worried about their compatibility, considering him “too churchy.” His tone-deaf gifts that first Christmas—hiking boots, a compass, and a hunting knife—also led her to have some second thoughts.

But in February 1921, after a courtship of less than two months, the couple was engaged. At their wedding a few months later at the Brookville home of Mac’s grandparents, Kinsey did not have a single friend (human or animal) in attendance. Of his bride, an elated Kinsey rhapsodized to Miss Roeth, “She is a very brilliant scholar.…She knows the birds better than I do, knows the flowers and the trees, etc., is a capable hiker and camper, a champion swimmer.…So you see I am even more certainly headed into a life with the open.” And to the outdoors they went on their honeymoon. With his permanent hiking partner often lagging far behind, Kinsey marched to the top of the White Mountains of New Hampshire. At his insistence, they took a fire warden’s trail that, as a terrified Clara—a Midwesterner who had never been near any patch of earth much steeper than a pancake—later put it, “went straight up.” As they recuperated in their tent at night, the professor lectured on plants and animals and taught her how to cuddle a gentle grass snake. From the get-go, their marriage was a ménage à trois. Long before Kinsey’s sexual escapades, Clara would have to learn how to coexist with a mistress. “I always realized,” she acknowledged later, “that his work would come first. You can’t ask a man to give up what is the driving force of his life because he is your husband.”

With the easygoing Clara becoming the eternal student of Kinseyana—she cut short her own promising academic career after just a semester of graduate school—the early years of their marriage worked out just as Kinsey drew them up. “He wanted a helpmate and that’s what he got,” recalled Paul Gebhard. “He felt it was the wife’s job to keep the house tidy, raise the children, serve healthy, nutritious meals on time, and that was about it.” Practical, resourceful, and kind, Clara evolved into a nurturing mother and an efficient household manager. She also became the “greatest of cooks,” according to Glenway Wescott—the novelist was a longtime friend and occasional sex partner of Kinsey—who once noted that “if Alfred were not the hardest-worker of men, he would be the fattest.” To be fair to Kinsey, though his need for control was extreme, his ideas about how the sexes should divvy up the labor were not all that out of step with his times. And to his credit, despite occasional outbursts of temper, he did not become a tyrant like his father. Doing his best to treat both his wife and children with respect, he aimed to resolve family conflict through dialogue rather than diktat. While delegating most of the child care to Clara, Kinsey did pitch in, taking charge of the nightly baths—as a neatnik, this was a temptation that he could not resist—and bedtime stories. But he drafted the children into the bug business, taking them along with Clara on several extended research trips. One year, Kinsey sent out Christmas cards featuring a picture of his son Bruce toting bags of galls.