Washington — Of all the learned and authoritative
nationally-syndicated columnists in the country, I am willing to
bet not one, aside from me, is going to tackle the vexed topic of
nudism this week. Read George Will. He will not touch the topic.
Read Ellen Goodman and Maureen Dowd. Both are famously provocative
and even playful, but you can be sure they will find nudism too hot
to handle, especially as it is floriferous Springtime, the sap is
rising and the birds and bees return. Yet, my thoughts do turn to
nudism: nudists, human body parts leaping and dancing under the
sun. Simultaneously, I think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New
Deal. The New Deal, you ask? What does the New Deal have to do with
nudism? Well there is a significant connection between nudism and
the New Deal, as came to mind when I read that another great
university is dumbing down its curriculum, the University of
Chicago — more on that anon.
Nudism has its place in contemporary times. The various sexual
liberation movements of recent decades have unfortunately
overshadowed nudism, but its place remains whether one be
conservative or liberal. Conservative nudists, such as myself,
heartily approve of and even advocate nudism in the shower; or, if
one is daring, the bath. Liberals, when they think of nudism (which
is to say if they can get their minds off necrophilia or whatever
their latest sexual liberation movement might be), approve of
nudism everywhere else. They approve of it on public beaches, in
national forests, and probably at the suburban supermarket. As you
know, liberals approve of anything that disturbs conventional
people. Probably the only reason they do not talk much nowadays
about nudism is that it causes much less disturbance than their
other enthusiasms.
Yet there might be another reason Liberals do not talk much
about nudism. It played a role in the New Deal. Thanks to research
in the Soviet archives we now know that there were Communists in
the New Deal, for instance Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, and
Laurence Duggan. There were also nudists, and from time to time
they brought Franklin and Eleanor’s project to grief. One of the
leading nudists in the New Deal, as erudite readers will recall,
was Dr. Maurice Parmelee, a very learned man, draped or undraped.
He was a Ph.D., a member of the Institut International de
Sociologie, a fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, and a member of the American
Anthropological Society. He was also in the early 1940s an employee
of Vice President Henry Wallace’s Board of Economic Warfare, where
he advocated “universal nudism” both at work and at play, until, at
the behest of Congress, Wallace’s right-hand man, Milo Perkins,
fired him.
Parmelee was not a minor figure who wandered into government. He
had been the butt of fun in the 1920s from many sophisticates. The
writer and editor, George Jean Nathan, mocked Parmelee in a
pleasant 1929 book, Monks Are Monks, for writing such
silliness as “Nudity aids materially in bringing mankind closer to
nature and in promoting more genuine and sincere relations between
the sexes.” Nathan jeered, “One shudders to think what the world
will be like when Dr. Parmelee’s great undressing scheme is
universally adopted.” Nonetheless a dozen years later and at the
height of World War II, with America’s future in the balance, the
New Dealers placed this zany at an important position in one of
their great bureaucracies. When in 1942, Congressman Martin Dies
called for the naked Ph.D.’s removal, FDR got off a pretty good
witticism in Parmelee’s defense, telling a press conference that
Dies was worse than a nudist. He was an “exhibitionist.”
All of which brings us to the University of Chicago’s dumbing
down of its curriculum. It proposes to replace most of its
illuminating and demanding Western civilization core classes with
European civilization courses. These courses will begin Western
civilization at the Middle Ages. The foundations of our
civilization among the Greeks, the Jews, and the early Christians,
will be obscured. The development of Western reason and
spirituality, law and human rights, will get short shrift. What
generations of civilized Americans have found laughable will become
a mystery to growing numbers of supposedly educated Americans.
It is well known that American universities are becoming
sanctuaries for grimly earnest disseminators of the dubious:
women’s studies programs, ethnic studies, sex studies — most of
which are not far removed from the silliness of Dr. Parmelee. All
of these propaganda courses arrive in the curriculum at the expense
of serious studies in history, literature, and philosophy that are
at once intellectually stimulating and that inform students of the
origins of the way we live. They also have for generations
developed discriminating minds. That is the mark of an educated
person, the ability to analyze right from wrong, seriousness from
absurdity, good sense from nudism. Wherever Dr. Parmelee is today,
who doubts that he sides with those university officials now
driving core courses in Western civilization out?
