Naturism

NATURISM. As elements of the radicalized 1970s youth culture set out to liberate their bodies and minds from imposed clothing, “free beach groups” emerged to defend enclaves of nudism on sea and lake shores from Austin, San Diego, Vancouver, and Minneapolis to Cape Cod and Miami. They coordinated only after 1975 by means of the annual Free Beaches Sun, a free national news tabloid, and a small annual summit meeting in California. These projects were largely created by Lee Baxandall (1935-2008), who affiliated the groups in 1980 by starting the Naturist Society of Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Baxandall, an Oshkosh native, was an editor of Studies on the Left in Madison and New York from 1959 to 1967; wrote for and about theater; and advocated, sometimes translating, the playwrights Bertolt Brecht and Peter Weiss and the authors Wilhelm Reich, Stefan Morawski, and Georg Lukács. Later, he would insist that his activities began as an Eagle Scout and at a nude beach Cape Cod, while on a family vacation. There, he would meet other founders of the movement to be called Beachfront, USA. The successor to his family’s publishing company, he split his time between Wisconsin and Cape Cod, later relocating to the village of Truro until disability in older age. From 1978, he published Free Beaches magazine and organized a data base of nudist beaches around the world, publishing Lee Baxandall’s World Guide to Nude Beaches and Recreation, updated several times, with an acclaimed sales of over 200,000. He also led the formation of a Naturist Action Committee, to organize against legislative attempts to legislate naturism out of existence, the first group to hire a lobbyist to get public attention to the historical heritage and importance of body awareness, and to form the Naturist Education Foundation to perpetuate the message. As the political Right took the stage in many states, these efforts staved off many of the most repressive legislation.

Diagnosed with Parkinsons disease in 1996, Baxandall returned to the Oshkosh region, and continued activity out of the public eye until his passing in 2008. Widely regarded as a pioneering figure, he was commemorated with a bridge named after him at a resort in Palm Springs, California. Sad to say, the consolidation of Christian conservatives closed down formal and informal nudist spaces in many areas, part of an ongoing conflict in the twenty-first century.

Baxandall himself, as a self-trained scholar in nudism’s history, offered a narrative now widely accepted. In an earlier America, Benjamin Franklin had extolled what he called “air bathing,” and President John Q. Adams swam nude daily from the banks of the Potomac River. Outdoor nakedness was exemplified by Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Thomas Eakins. Influential anarchists defended nude bathing in the Agitator, a magazine they published from the Home colony, founded in 1896 on Washington’s Puget Sound. And, indeed, “skinny-dipping” was widely practiced in a frugal and individualistic rural America. Later, the radicals Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, John Reed, Louise Bryant, Eugene O’Neill, Dwight Macdonald, and Roger Baldwin (founder of the American Civil Liberties Union) all praised and enjoyed nude beaches as havens of joyous paganism.

The New Gymnosophy (1927), the earliest American book on a better-theorized and -organized European nudism, was written by Columbia University Ph.D. Maurice Parmelee, a leftist sociology professor and world federalist. In 1942, denounced by Chairman Martin Dies of the House Committee on Un-American Activities for allegedly undermining America through nudism, Parmelee was fired from his federal war board post. In 1952 Parmelee sought to launch an American Gymnosophical Society; when it failed, his far-reaching ideas regarding nudism had no more chance to take hold.

While domiciled in Germany during much of the 1920s, Parmelee was inspired by its Nacktkultur health movement, which had arisen in response to urban squalor bred of heartless industrial capitalism. This socialist and proletarian Verband Volksgesundheit, led in Berlin and other cities by Adolf Koch, offered to workers and unemployed families the salubrious, liberating experience of unclad mixed-gender gymnastics and outings to greenbelt beaches, communal bathing facilities, and family sex education in recuperation of dismal sunless lives in crowded slums. When the Nazis came to power, however, all nudism was banned in Germany. The following year, 1934, the middle-class Reichsband für Freikörperkultur was resurrected as a Nazi affiliate, its orientation Aryan, gymnastic, and anti-Koch.

In Soviet Russia a naked culture developed mostly within the Proletcult, taking guidance from Koch’s example and writings, until all proletarian culture was ended by the Stalin regime. In France, England, and the United States, meanwhile, radical-Left social nudist values were diluted and usually ignored. The business development of nudist clubs after 1952 of what had earlier been mostly a cooperative movement served also to lower members’ proactivity. Only an elite culture, presented in the name of nude antiquity (the French gymnosophie of Marcel Kiénné de Mongeot), or a sociable but politically devalorized nudism—tolerated only as a putative “safe outlet for social deviancy”—would have had standing in living memory to influence subsequent culture, were it not for Koch’s many successes, culminated by a celebratory international gathering in November 1929 with a public performance of Nacktkultur in the huge Volksbühne theater.

The questioning of civilization’s arbitrary social codes is inherent in perceiving natural nakedness—and nudists of all political stripes assert this populism while pointing to an absence of social distinctions while naked. College youth of the 1970s also reacted against clothing codes in the course of reinvigorating a radical culture that had been sapped by the mid-century’s hot and cold wars. A ruling class, they agreed, dominates popular culture more by the manipulation of hegemonic symbols than by any power of ideas. They saw the disempowerment of populist instincts as in part due to mandated concealment of the egalitarian body: alienated from nature and costumed, individuals are divided and pitted one against another in defense of their incommensurate rags of self-esteem.

The radical content that abides in nudism—better, naturism—is perhaps conveyed by the International Naturist Federation in its 1974 definition: “Naturism is a way of life in harmony with nature characterized by the practice of communal nudity, with the intention of encouraging self-respect, respect for others and for the environment.”

After the death of Baxandall, Nude and Natural disappeared and it may be said that the generation of the 1960s-70s vital to Naturism as an organized movement faded. Familiar, in some places annual activities such as “topless days” and “naked bike rides” continued in communities with (often aging) cohorts of the Vietnam generations and immediate successors, while the right to bare breasts (sometimes interpreted as the right to reveal nipples, in public or on the web) remained a cause of popular street events.

Meanwhile, nudism most definitely entered a new phase with younger generations. Nude public protests, as sporadic events, often organized through flash mob techniques (to deflect repression), seemed to grow exponentially in purpose as well as number, across the world. Animal rights, climate crisis, war and militarization, misogynist repressive laws, Brexit and assertion of the rights of sex workers among other issues stirred women and men to bare themselves in crowds, albeit more in Europe than in the US or the global South. Mostly ignored in practice by political populists, labor unions, and parties, likewise denied theoretical historical or theoretical significance by Marxists and other traditionalists of the Left, naturists perhaps re-introduced varieties of anarchism in new ways, likewise a pacifism of “no protection.” That younger generations sought influence “beyond politics,” beyond existing political parties through direct and dramatic action, drove home the point.
Those of an intellectual bent insisted that they provided a radical dimension of remedy to capitalist-consumerist authoritarian society. They pointed out that Karl Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts describe an alienation of man from nature as well as in society, while Frederick Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England portrays the very hell of urbanized family life from which the early nudist movement sprang.

Andritzky/Rautenberg. “Wir sind nackt und nennen uns du”: Eine Geschichte der Freikörperkultur. Giessen, Germany: Anabas Verlag, 1989.

Clapham/Constable. As Nature Intended. Los Angeles: Elysium Growth Press, 1986.

Brian Hoffman. Naked: A Cultural History of American Nudism. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Naturist Society. Lee Baxandall’s World Guide to Nude Beaches and Resorts. 4th rev. ed. Oshkosh, Wis.: Naturist Society, 1995.