Psychiatric Professionalism and Sexual Liberalism in the Age of McCarthy

Speaking at NYU on “the problem of the sex offender,” the psychiatrist Karl M. Bowman began by reminding his medical school audience: “The ancient Egyptians favored incest in the royal families as did the Incas. The Greeks made a cult of homosexuality.” Bowman went on to criticize punitive, legalistic approaches to harmless forms of sexual deviance, noting that even contemporary science disagreed about the range of “normal” sexual behavior. What makes this lecture so noteworthy is that Bowman delivered it in 1951, at a time when homosexuals were being excluded as security risks from government jobs and when media reports were fostering the illusion of a sex-crime epidemic in the United States. Exactly why did Karl Murdock Bowman— native of Topeka and one-time Washburn College quarterback; World War One U.S. Army medical officer; two-term, wartime president of the American Psychiatric Association; and father of four sons— emerge in the early 1950s as a leading authority and liberal voice on topics such as intersexuality, transvestism and sexual psychopathy?

This paper begins by describing Bowman’s participation in two science-oriented movements: the mental hygiene movement and the “science and society” movement of the 1930s. In doing so, it calls attention to important connections between Bowman’s evolving views on sex and his views on alcohol consumption. The paper concludes with a discussion of Bowman’s career as a paradigmatic episode in the medicalization of social policy in the United States. It argues that the medical perspective often served as a kind of halfway house for mid-twentieth-century Americans, a critical transitional stage between the moralizing tactics of the Victorian era and the libertarian openness of the 1960s and beyond.