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1Boris Sidis was born in 1867 in Berdichev, a town near Kiev in the Russian Ukraine. His lineage could be traced back eight hundred years, and it was the family legend that each generation produced one brilliant man. Boris Sidis, his kin said, was that man. Boris was one of five children born to Moses and Mary Sidis. Moses was a well-off merchant, and an intellectual who read Darwin and Huxley. The boy showed intellectual promise early. At eight, he knew several languages, was well read in history, and composed poetry that was put to music by the townspeople of Berdichev. Boris’s early years were pleasant, or as pleasant as life could be for any Jew growing up in the terrible climate of anti-Semitism that pervaded the Ukraine of the 1800s. At the time of Boris’s birth, Russia was under the severe, autocratic rule of Tsar Nicolas II. The Ukraine, a portion of southwestern Russia with a population of nearly twenty million, was part of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, established by Catherine the Great in 1791. Nearly two million Jews inhabited this area, and few were allowed to move “beyond the Pale.” By the mid-1800s the prevailing attitude of Russians toward their large Jewish population was intensely hostile. A long history of persecution made the Jews easy prey for mass hysteria whipped up by the government; Jewish economic success and land ownership was a threat to many Russians, who claimed that the Christian population was being exploited. Rumors circulated that Jews used the blood of Christian babies in their religious ceremonies. In 1881, under the rule of the reactionary Tsar Alexander III, the wave of hatred broke. The first of a vicious series of pogroms occurred in southern Russia. Jews were assaulted in the streets, robbed, raped, and murdered. The pogroms spread, and in 1882 the Tsar ordered anti-Jewish tribunals, ultimately passing the notorious “temporary” May Laws. These forbade Jews within the Pale to leave their villages, and forced multitudes of other Jews into the dense, overcrowded cities. Existence for the average Jewish family was at best a struggle. The situation grew increasingly grim, with little hope of improvement. The Russian authorities were pressing Jews to emigrate, and Jews were anxious to leave. America was now the promised land. It was in the midst of this tumult that Boris Sidis grew up, though his own town, Berdichev, had not suffered a pogrom. As a handsome, healthy, intense teenager, Boris had already developed the values that would guide his life—a hatred of ignorance and tyranny, a passion for learning and teaching. His friends nicknamed him “The Little Father.” Although it was strictly against the law, at sixteen Boris organized a small group of friends and embarked on his first mission—teaching peasants to read. Compared to the Russian population as a whole, the Jewish literacy rate was high, but not high enough for these idealistic boys, who were willing to assume a great risk in the service of their ideals. When Boris was seventeen he and his friends enrolled in a preparatory school—the equivalent of junior college—in Keshnev, south of their hometown. There they continued teaching peasants, trekking to the countryside every Sunday afternoon. After only three weeks in school, their rooms were raided by Tsarist police. Their landlady, sympathetic to their work, heard of the raid in advance and burned all the books she could find in Boris’s room, destroying anything else that might implicate him. To no avail. The twelve boys were arrested. Two were hanged as an example to the others. Nine were marched barefoot in the snow to Siberia. Boris, who was discovered to be the leader, was clapped in a dungeon. The governor of Keshnev released Boris for one night, and wined and dined the fiery-eyed dissident in his own home. Offered freedom if he would confess the details of his “plot,” Boris insisted that there was no plot to confess. He was returned to his shackles, to solitary confinement and torture. His cell was body-sized, and he was unable to recline except with his knees pressed against the wall. He spent the next two years in this cell. He was allowed neither books nor paper and pencil—he lived in a total vacuum. This utter emptiness, which would have driven an ordinary man insane, had an extraordinary effect on Boris. These vile years gave him something precious. He owed to them, he said, his courage and his ability to reason. By concentrating on ideas, he left his bodily anguish behind. He later regarded it as one of his greatest creative periods. He could not be broken, because in his stinking, wretched cell he had learned to think. For two years, Moses Sidis had fought desperately to get his son paroled. He finally struck a deal with the authorities: If Boris agreed never again to leave his hometown, to report regularly to parole officers, and to renounce all education as teacher or student, he would be freed. On these conditions, Boris was released from solitary confinement and returned to Berdichev. The conditions of his release, primarily the edict against learning, were agony to Boris. He prevailed upon his father to help him escape from Russia. The arrangements were made, and two other boys who had been paroled and placed under house arrest made plans to leave with him. Many Russians believed the rumors that the streets of America were paved with gold. Young Boris was probably not so gullible. He believed, more likely, in other rumors: that in America, jobs were abundant; that all immigrants were welcomed with open arms; and that if one worked honestly and hard, a life of plenty was there for the taking. In 1886, Boris and two friends took the usual immigrant route out of the Ukraine. They crossed the Austro-Hungarian border illegally, traveled by train to Vienna and from there to Hamburg. There they boarded a ship that would take them to New York City. Few immigrants had a clue to the horror of the voyage ahead. The sheer misery of the trip, with people herded together in filthy steerage compartments, could last anywhere from three to fourteen weeks. Awaiting the frayed and weary immigrants was Castle Garden. A huge, circular fort on the lower tip of Manhattan, it had been built in 1811 and used as a theater in the 1850s—such greats as Jenny Lind and Lola Montez performed there. Now, in 1886, it served as the main port of entry for throngs of immigrants. After passing the interrogations of customs officials, Boris and his friends were released into the maw of New York City. At that time, the Lower East Side had an estimated 522 inhabitants per acre. Some areas were more crowded than the worst parts of Bombay. Its tenements were infamous. The most profound shock to greet the immigrants was the noise, the chaos, the pushing and shoving, the hurry and intensity of the Lower East Side, where four thousand people lived in a single block. For a peasant who had never been in a busier spot than the market square of his village, it was a far cry from the America of his dreams. Like most Jews, Boris found his way to the Lower East Side, where he rented a room for less than five dollars a week. In one respect at least, Boris was far more fortunate than the average immigrant: He and his two friends had several hundred dollars between them. Only a small percentage of immigrants entered with over twenty dollars—the average was eight dollars—and many had nothing at all. With no money, and not a word of English at their command, New York was a terrifying shock. The harshness of life on the Lower East Side was combined for most immigrants with a feeling of profound dismay that life in the land of the free was, in many ways, as difficult as life in Russia had been. Boris, at least, was able to get his bearings, free of the necessity to find work immediately. His first job was with the Singer Sewing Machine Company at five dollars a week. The average working day in a sweatshop or factory was thirteen hours; for many it was more. Conditions were grim. Boris Sidis was poor at manual labor, and he kept his factory job for only a week. He stretched the money for two weeks, subsisting on a diet of herring (a herring could be bought for a penny or two) and stale black bread (two cents a pound). Boris escaped misery and despair by feeding his mind. He spent his every free moment in the public library. His wife later wrote, “This was Boris’s idea of a good life.” After a mere four months in America, he learned to speak and write English. His next job was in a New Jersey hat-pressing factory. By now he had formulated a plan: Work one week, study for two weeks. After a few months of living by this plan, Boris made a crucial decision. He moved to Boston. The slums were nearly as bad, the jobs paid no better, but for Boris it had a kind of glamour. He had heard that Boston was the American city where the mind was most revered, the city where intellect thrived. Boris Sidis arrived in winter and rented a room for one dollar a week, a room so frigid that a glass of water left out overnight turned to ice. But Boris was happy. “When I first set foot in the Boston Public Library,” he said, “I felt as though the gates of heaven had opened to me.” Boris Sidis was enthralled with his life centered around the library. At first, he followed his “Work one week, study for two weeks” program, and found time to write, publishing his first article in the Boston Transcript. Then, once he had mastered English, Boris’s landlord suggested he tutor young Russian immigrants. His students paid him for an hour in the evening, but usually they all talked late into the night, until the last streetcar had run, and then walked happily home with their brimming minds. During that first freezing winter, Boris had only the light coat he’d brought from Russia. In desperate need of winter clothes, he entered a shop near his home run by a Russian tailor. The cheapest coat was too expensive for Boris, but the men fell to chatting. The tailor revealed his single burning ambition, which he thought impossible to achieve. He wanted to learn to read in order to study Spinoza. A bargain was struck: Boris taught the illiterate tailor to read Spinoza, and that winter he kept warm in a heavy coat. Sarah Mandelbaum was born on October 2, 1874, in Stara Constantine, a small but prosperous village in the southern Ukraine. Her mother, Fannie Rich, had been the village beauty, and at fourteen she married a sixteen-year-old student, Bernard Mandelbaum. In keeping with Russian custom, Fannie and Bernard lived with their parents until Bernard finished school and started a business as a grain merchant. Bernard’s business was moderately successful. Fannie had fifteen children and three miscarriages. Sarah was the fifth child, and at the age of five was already helping her older sister, Ida, with household tasks. Her father built a footstool for Sarah to stand on while she made the beds and dusted. Worn down by childbearing, Fannie did no housework. She was, in Sarah’s words, “a pet.” And thus, by the age of eight, Sarah was doing all the housecleaning while Ida did the cooking. The two girls tended their younger siblings full-time, calling them “our babies.” Then, as a present, Sarah’s father gave her a sewing machine, and soon she was making all the family clothes. So she could help him with his accounts, he taught her to add, subtract, and multiply. Sarah didn’t seem to resent all the burdens placed upon her. Her parents never spoke a harsh word, nor did they punish their large brood in any way. And Sarah noticed that if she treated “her babies” gently and kindly, they obeyed her properly. The first seeds of a philosophy of child rearing were thus taking root. Suddenly, when Sarah was thirteen, her orderly, busy life was turned topsy-turvy. Until then, her family had been spared the assaults of the vicious pogroms. But one ugly day in 1887, a band of thugs attacked the household. Bernard Mandelbaum stood in his doorway wielding a pitchfork and shouting to his children, “Run! Escape! Fly!” The robbers overpowered him, caving in his front teeth. Fannie was knocked unconscious, and the baby she held in her arms was picked up and dashed to the floor. It was killed instantly. Sarah, Ida, and their brother Harry ran out the back door and into snow-covered fields. They found a nearby brickyard, crawled into the warm oven where bricks had been baking, and fell asleep. The robbers stole everything, and partially razed the house. All that Bernard Mandelbaum had struggled so hard for had been destroyed. He drew his family around him and announced, “We must leave a country where such things can happen.” He could raise only enough money for two to go to America. According to Sarah’s unpublished memoirs, Bernard said, “I will take Sarah with me, she is the brightest.” It was left to Ida and her grandparents to take over the rest of the housekeeping chores and the care of her mother and six brothers and sisters. Bernard and Sarah traveled to Germany, where they planned to board a ship for New York, but as they were about to embark, they discovered they had only enough money for a fare and a half. Sarah was too old to travel half fare. Bernard saw no solution. “We must go back to Russia and wait until we can raise more money.” Sarah, not to be daunted, pleaded with the captain of an English ship, who finally let her board for half fare. Once on board, she was overcome with anticipation. “We are going to America, where I can learn everything!” Had she remained in Russia, she reflected, her fate would have been to marry the jeweler’s son who had courted her, and by the time she was twenty, “there would have been nothing for me for the rest of my life except an endless grind of chores, childbearing, housework, living in ignorance, and eventually a premature death. This was the lot of all Russian women.” Certainly, she would escape her mother’s lot in life. It was on the boat that she made her momentous decision: “In America I will become a doctor…. The most outrageously improbable thing for me to become, the goal furthest from my reach in Russia.” When the boat landed at Castle Garden, Bernard had fifty cents in his pocket and two tickets for the Fall River Line to Boston. But to disembark, he would have to show sufficient money to prove that he and his daughter would not be destitute. Bernard borrowed the money from other immigrants on the vessel, returning it after he and Sarah had safely passed customs. Armed with a letter of introduction to a friend of a friend, they took the overnight steamship to Boston. Their host took the weary travelers in, put them up for three weeks, and would not accept payment. This same benefactress bought Sarah a corset, made her throw away her peasant scarf, and replaced it with a hat. After this immigrant rite of passage was completed, Sarah got her first job, sewing buttons on jackets twelve hours a day, for three dollars a week. Working conditions in the sweatshops of Boston’s North and West ends were somewhat less severe than in New York; nonetheless, Sarah was crammed into a small, filthy room without sunlight or fresh air with ten other laborers. Sarah recalled her first year in America as the worst year of her life. Her father got a job as a garment presser. Eventually, their combined salaries grew to fifteen dollars a week. Saving every penny, they were able to bring Ida over in a year. The next year they struggled to bring the rest of the Mandelbaums to America. Sarah next got a job with the Singer Sewing Machine Company, glad of her previous experience with her sewing machine. She worked a ten-hour day, going to customers’ houses and teaching them to use their new machines. As a money-saving scheme, she made this rule for herself: If the distance between customers was under two miles, she would walk and save the three cents carfare, an economy measure employed by many immigrants. Two years after her arrival in America, Sarah’s whole family was reunited in Boston. Bernard opened a homemade candy and ice cream store, and everyone in the family (except, of course, Fanny) worked. Sarah now had a job as a seamstress in an expensive dress shop. Sarah and Ida still did all the cooking and cleaning. But even with all this activity, their thirst for knowledge was unassuaged. For a small fee, they persuaded two Russian immigrant college students to tutor them in reading and math. Both tutors fell in love with Sarah. She did not reciprocate the boys’ feelings, and dissolved the class. She was suspicious of marriage, and had had enough of raising children and cleaning house. In 1891, when she was seventeen, she heard of a young man reputed to be a genius who made his living teaching English at one dollar for three lessons. “I cannot afford three lessons a week,” thought Sarah, “but perhaps he will give me two for sixty-five cents.” And so Sarah began to study with Boris Sidis. She was awestruck by him. He seemed to her infinitely wise, learned, and kind. Two evenings a week they met and studied; afternoons they met on the Boston Commons and talked for hours about their plans and aspirations. Under Boris’s tutelage, Sarah nurtured her dream of becoming a doctor. Medical school was the favorite ambition of European immigrants, and the schools’ tuition fees were payable in installments, bringing the dream within reach of a dedicated few. Still, in 1891, only a few dozen European immigrants had become doctors in New York, and none of them were women. When Boris suggested Sarah go to college, it was all the impetus she needed to formulate a plan. She would take night classes for two years, get her high school diploma, and enter the Boston University School of Medicine. But when the perky, pigtailed seventeen-year-old approached the admissions director of a Boston high school she was met with an unexpected and stern rebuff. She was told, “You are being absurd. You have never been to primary school or high school, and you expect to graduate in two years! It is ridiculous, and we cannot admit you. Nobody has ever done it.” Cowed, Sarah told Boris of her humiliation. Boris replied, “Maybe it is better this way. You can take the New York state board examinations for high school students in three weeks. Pass them, and you won’t have to go to high school.” Sarah, who knew little math, despaired of learning algebra and geometry in three weeks. But Boris remained confident. He asked her for twenty-five cents, and purchased a secondhand Euclid. He explained the first five theorems in geometry, then said, “Use your good mind to work out the rest of them just as Euclid did. Don’t try to memorize. Just try to understand, and then you can’t help remembering.” She propped Euclid up above the sink, and studied while she washed the dishes. Sarah was severely ridiculed by her family, with the exception of her sister Ida. They told her that if she took the exams she would look foolish and embarrass them. “Nobody,” they said, “does such things. Who do you think you are?” Sarah bore the insults, secure in the knowledge that Boris was her ally. She quit her job at Singer and went to New York on the same Fall River Line that had originally brought her to Boston. For one dollar a friend let her sleep on a cot in her room during the week of the tests. When Sarah returned home, she was ridiculed further. But soon she received her test results—and she had passed with honors. Now more confident, she began to study Latin and physics for her Boston University School of Medicine exams. Meanwhile, Sarah urged Boris to attend Harvard University. Boris refused, saying, “What can they teach me? They will enmesh me in scholastic red tape.” “What good is being the most brilliant man in the world,” Sarah replied, “if you meet only the four walls?” Sarah persisted. And soon Boris was enrolled in Harvard as a special student, taking physics, Latin, economics, and philosophy. While Boris never got over his hatred of “bureaucratic red tape,” he fell in love with the rich intellectual life of Harvard, and in 1892, Harvard was a glorious place to be. It was the heyday of the long reign of President Charles William Eliot, a vigorous and controversial man of legendary accomplishments, including the appointment of a stellar group of intellectuals to his faculty—a group who would become Boris’s teachers. Foremost among these was the philosopher /psychologist / scientist William James, who was to figure heavily in the Sidises’ lives. James, then fifty years old, was intense and energetic. He had overcome youthful years of severe depression and was in his prime as full professor of philosophy. His work was being read, and hotly debated, throughout America and Europe. In addition to his philosophy course he offered a course in psychology. The birth of the American movement in psychology was taking place at Harvard in the eleven rooms of the Psychological Laboratory founded by James in 1891. It was the first of its kind in America. There was no psychology department as such—students drawn to this novel and experimental field came largely from the science and philosophy departments. Not all of James’s students appreciated their mentor’s psychological leanings. Morris Raphael Cohen, who went on to become a Harvard philosophy professor, wrote, “I could not… share James’ psychologic approach to philosophy. His psychologic explanations of necessary truth did not seem to me to bear on their logical nature.… Our intellectual disagreements were often violent.” Yet, like so many of James’s students, Cohen found him “a never-failing source of warm inspiration” and “a trusted counselor in all my difficulties of health and finance.” The California-born philosopher Josiah Royce, recruited for Harvard by James, fit perfectly the stereotype of the philosopher. Pudgy, quiet, learned, and diligent, his disorderly appearance caused students to mistake him for the janitor of Sever Hall. Royce and James remained intimate associates for years, though their views were quite different and they argued frequently. Together these two formed the cornerstone of the Harvard psychology “department,” drawing recognition of American philosophy from Europe. While Boris took his first courses at Harvard, Sarah worked as a waitress in a resort hotel in the White Mountains. To her surprise, Boris appeared one day on her doorstep. He confessed that he had fallen in love with her at first sight, and had always suffered taking her money. “But,” he said, “I thought that if I did not take it, you wouldn’t come back, and I would never see you again. Please come home. I can’t sleep. I can’t go home without you.” Sarah returned to Boston with Boris, and they decided to marry, but not immediately. Sarah’s family disapproved of Boris, a poor student with no money and no interest in making any. And when it came to money, Boris was adamant. He told his bride-to-be, “Making money and living the life I want to live don’t go together. No man can read and study and think and write deeply and honestly, and think about making money. I promise you this, we won’t have any.” “Don’t ever worry about it,” Sarah insisted. “I can live on very little. I can make you silk shirts out of cheap remnants. I can take care of myself. A lack of money will never bother us.” According to Sarah, her irate mother secretly approached Boris, saying, “Look, why don’t you leave Sarah alone? Why do you bother her? What can you offer her, a penniless student like yourself? Leave her alone, for there are young men who want her in marriage who can bring her a nice, easy life.” Without visible rancor, Boris replied, “Let’s let Sarah decide that.” To Sarah he said only, “Your mother does what she thinks is best for you.” Sarah entered Boston University School of Medicine in 1892. A skinny girl in pigtails (her friends nicknamed her “The Toothpick”), she barely looked eighteen—her parents had to go to the school and swear she was of age. Her first semester’s tuition was forty dollars, which she had to borrow from a rabbi friend of Boris’s; she couldn’t raise the money for the second semester, so she went to the dean and requested a leave of absence until she had earned the necessary funds. The dean had heard of her industry and gave her a scholarship on the spot. She never paid tuition again. But even without that expense, it still cost Sarah no small effort to support herself. She worked as a waitress in the school cafeteria in trade for her lunches, and as a nurse two nights a week. Her nursing shift was twelve hours straight, and after staying up all night she still managed to drag herself to classes the next day. In addition to her work and studies, she cleaned her parents’ house every Sunday. Never timid, Sarah pluckily approached Boris’s philosophy professor, the revered Josiah Royce. She asked him to use his influence to get Boris to enroll in Harvard for a degree. Though Boris was enjoying life as a special student, and had received superb grades, he was reluctant to enter school officially—as Sarah put it, “attaching degrees to learning annoyed him.” But in the end he did enroll, and that pivotal year he studied psychology, ethics, and philosophy with a pantheon of stimulating minds. If Boris was pleasantly surprised by Harvard, Harvard’s professors were astounded by the fiery young Russian. Once again, Sarah pressured Boris, urging him to speak to his teachers to see if he could graduate Harvard in two years instead of the normal four. The faculty did her suggestion one better—Boris was graduated in one year, magna cum laude. As usual, he had received all A’s. That Christmas vacation Boris and Sarah slipped off quietly to Providence, Rhode Island, where they were married by a judge. After a week’s honeymoon in Providence, they returned to Boston and to their life of learning. The following year, Boris received a fellowship through the J. P. Morgan Fund. He was given $750, and this, combined with his teaching and Sarah’s earnings, was just enough to support the young couple. They rented two cheap attic rooms. They bought day-old bread and drank black coffee, joked about whether they would ever be able to afford cream. And every Sunday afternoon the impoverished young couple entertained. They hosted scores of students and revered teachers who came to discuss philosophy and psychology. The most renowned of them all, William James, frequently climbed the many stairs to their attic. “Pray tell me,” James would gently ask Sarah, “how can two people who are so poor be so happy?” At the turn of the century, the field of psychology was still in a primitive state. In Europe, Sigmund Freud was gaining a small reputation among scientists, but lay Americans had never heard of him. The French psychologist Pierre Janet then dominated the field. Janet, taking the banner from his own teacher, Jean-Martin Charcot, was making inroads in “mental medicine” that were read of and admired intensely by the Boston group. (In years to come, Boris Sidis would be dubbed “the Janet of America” for his pioneering studies in hypnosis and mental illness.) None of the eager Bostonians gathered in the Sidises’ attic could have guessed that a bitter feud would soon split the budding American psychoanalytic community into angry factions. Those Sunday afternoons in the Sidises’ attic were more than stimulating to the participants—they were to lay the cornerstones of American psychology. The guests experimented on each other with cards, numbers, squares, and patterns to study the effects of suggestion. And they hypnotized each other. One afternoon James and Boris hypnotized one of the students, and James gave the boy this command: “Behave as Mr. Sidis does.” Immediately the hypnotized student jumped up, went to the tiny closet that was Sarah’s kitchen, lit the kerosene stove, and put the kettle on. “You will have tea, won’t you? Everybody wants tea, don’t they?” he asked. The guests roared with laughter—the boy was Boris to perfection. The aim of these studies and experiments was to understand the previously unexplored subconscious, or what Sidis and James called “the subwaking mind.” Under what conditions is the mind most suggestible? Could long-lost memories be recovered? Did suggestions given to a patient in a hypnotic trance last? And could this hypnotic state—which Sidis called “the hypnoidal state”—be used in healing mental and physical ills? Boris had gained sufficient reputation at this point for a representative of the Tsar who was visiting Boston and being entertained by James to offer the expatriate full permission to return to Russia with a college position, laboratories, and research facilities placed at his disposal. Boris refused angrily, preferring to be poor and free in America over returning to Russia under even the best of conditions. He had lost the overcoat made by the tailor who loved Spinoza, and James and Harvard’s philosophy professor Herbert Palmer were disturbed to see their prize student coming to classes without a proper coat in the freezing Boston winter. James told Boris, “Look, you know I have a little money of my own, and I don’t spend all they pay me at Harvard, so that I have a small fund to help students. Let me loan you two hundred dollars and you can repay me without interest when you begin to make money. Get yourself an overcoat.” Boris replied hotly, “I don’t need any money, and there are students here who do. Also, there are other students who want to come to Harvard who don’t because they can’t pay the tuition. Loan your money to them. They need it. I don’t.” James reported his lack of success to Palmer. Palmer, a master of discreet benevolence who had helped countless poor students through Harvard, replied, “Ha, you tried to loan him too much. I’ll make it a smaller amount, and he’ll take it.” To Palmer’s dismay, Boris refused his money too. Palmer later told Sarah he had never met a man so proudly independent and so little concerned by the lack of material things that most people consider necessities. The years 1896 and 1897 were important years for the Sidises. Boris taught Aristotelian logic for Royce at Harvard and published his second article, “A Study of the Mob,” in the Atlantic Monthly. His third, “The Study of Mental Epidemics,” was published in Century Magazine, for which Boris was paid one hundred dollars, a good deal of money at the time. As if this were not enough for a man who only a few years before had arrived as a political exile, something still more exciting occurred. Sarah recalled the incident fifty years later: “Boris came up the stairs into the apartment. He seemed all excited. ‘James called me into his office today,’ he said. I knew that Boris and James were great friends and saw each other constantly, so this bit of news didn’t impress me very much. “ ‘Well, go on,’ I said. ‘What did he say?’ “ ‘He wants me to see Teddy Roosevelt. I walked into James’s office. He made me sit down. He said he and Palmer and Royce had had a long talk about me. First, James asked me what my plans were after I got my degree. I told him that I had applied for several teaching positions in the West and the South. He said, “You don’t want to teach. You’ll get in a rut. Look at me—I’m in a rut. I have too little time to study, I’m not contributing anything to the world. We can’t have this happen to you. I’m going to give you a letter to Teddy Roosevelt. He’ll only be in New York for a short time before he goes to the White House.” ’ ” Roosevelt was then governor of New York, and neither Boris nor Sarah knew what to expect of the meeting, or what the possibilities were. Nevertheless, Boris soon left for Albany, and, presenting a letter from James, requested a fifteen-minute interview with the governor. The men talked for two hours, and Roosevelt, delighted with Boris, urged him to stay on in New York where he, Roosevelt, would find a position for him. Despite Boris’s protests that he had work to attend to in Boston, Roosevelt persuaded him to remain. The New York State legislature had just formed a novel department, a Pathological Institute that was intended as an annex to the state hospital system, providing “instruction in brain pathology and other subjects for the medical officers of the state hospitals.” The institute experimented with patients from state hospitals for the insane, and later on treated private patients. An innovative, brilliant physician, Dr. Ira van Gieson, was appointed director. He selected Boris as one of his staff of specialists, and, in 1896, work at the institute began in earnest. An appropriation of fifty thousand dollars was made by the state, and a laboratory was set up on the top floor of New York’s new Metropolitan Building—a far cry from the New York of slums and sweatshops Boris had known only a few years before. Boris’s appointment was greeted with some disdain by New York professionals, who thought that at twenty-nine he was too young. Furthermore, he had neither an M.D. nor a Ph.D. Boris had received his B.A. when he was twenty-three, a year after entering Harvard, and his M.A. when he was twenty-four, scoffing at both—he regarded them as meaningless, these pieces of paper so universally coveted and struggled for. To Boris Sidis, degrees were never the proper symbols of a man’s accomplishments. Then, while Boris was in New York, Harvard requested that he submit a thesis for his Ph.D. His professors suggested The Psychology of Suggestion, the brainchild over which he had been slaving. He refused vehemently—no school, not even Harvard, was going to get credit for his work. When they realized he was refusing to submit this or any other thesis, the university officials relented, asking him to come to Boston for an oral examination. Boris again declined. “Red tape! Red tape!” he ranted. “Letters! What do they mean!” Again, Sarah appealed to Professor Royce. “I’ll meet with the faculty and discuss it,” Royce replied. Harvard mailed Boris his Ph.D. in June, waiving all ordinary formalities. James told Sarah, “They wouldn’t do this much for me…. If they call me a genius, what superlative have they saved for this husband of yours?” Meanwhile, Sarah too had taken a degree: She was one of a handful of women to graduate from medical school before the turn of the century. As soon as she had graduated she joined Boris in New York. Though they missed their circle of friends in Boston, Boris kept in touch with James, and besides, his work at the institute was absorbing. He was perfecting his hypnosis for hysterical patients, putting the finishing touches on his first book, and evolving new theories of treatment. And Sarah was pregnant. Certainly, it seemed, Boris was destined to be famous, to have a name that would make headlines. But it was their baby boy, born on April Fool’s Day, 1898, who would completely eclipse his father both in fame and notoriety. 2 April Fool Billy Sidis’s birth, on April 1, 1898, was a perfectly normal one. He weighed seven pounds, six ounces, and according to his mother was “fat and happy and full of the devil.” He was named after William James, who presented the baby with a silver cup bearing the inscription “To William James Sidis, from William James his godfather.” Sarah Sidis, in her unpublished book How to Make Your Child a Genius, wrote in the third person about the restrictions her son’s arrival placed on her: “It was Sarah who first became a doctor and she encouraged her husband to get his degree. Her plan was to go along with him on cases to aid him in his studies. One of the incidents which restrained her somewhat in this capacity was the birth of their son, Billy.” Despite the sour note of disappointment in her remark, she insisted that Billy was a carefully planned baby, his arrival a welcome event. Of Boris’s reaction, she wrote: “In all his brilliant life, you would have thought the most brilliant and marvelous thing he ever did was to have a son.” The couple was living on Central Park West, and when their first New York summer came, the oppressive heat would send them out of their apartment. At three in the morning they took Billy strolling in his carriage in Central Park, enjoying the cool hours until dawn. In the quiet morning they discussed their ideas for bringing up their boy. Sarah wrote, “The most important thing we agreed on was that we should always agree. We decided that we would always stand together in our decisions, and not pull and haul this infant between us in conflict. We agreed on discipline—the only discipline worth a rip in building a worthwhile and upright person was the desire to please. If we brought Billy up to love us, by our love and gentleness, then he would want to please us. And if we were always pleased by good conduct, he would be a good boy. “We decided from the start that we would treat Billy just like a grown-up. Children all want to be treated on equal footing with their elders. So many parents I’ve seen have been completely contradictory in their approach to their children. They treat them like babies, and then spank them for not behaving like grandfathers.” Boris told his wife, “Before a baby can talk, his mind is there, it is a tool that may be sharpened if his parents are always reasonable and truthful and logical with him. Minds are built with use. Muscles are not built by lying in bed. Encourage this baby of ours to think, to walk down every path his fancy dictates as long as he is interested. Answer all his questions as far as you can go and as long as he asks.” Besides their ideas about feeding Billy’s mind and satisfying his intellectual curiosity at every turn, Sarah attempted to apply some of Boris’s psychological principles to child rearing. Boris’s studies of sleep indicated that the period just before falling asleep is a highly suggestible one, during which the mind is particularly receptive. This information bred in Sarah a concern about Billy’s bedtime stories. “I always felt that it was very important not to tell him stories that were trite or commonplace or ugly. So much of the Grimm brothers’ tales I found ugly, and Hans Christian Andersen seemed sad and melancholy, so I turned to the Greek myths for Billy’s first bedtime stories.” In her early writings, Sarah claimed that in the beginning, she goo-goo’ed and ga-ga’ed as much as any mother, although both parents later declared that they disapproved of baby talk and always spoke to Billy as though he were an adult. Be that as it may, Boris showed an unexpected playful side. Sarah recalled coming home one day and hearing noise coming from the kitchen: the crash of a broken cup, “an extraordinarily happy laugh from Billy,” and the crash of another cup. Sarah hurried in just in time to see Boris handing the baby a third cup. “What do you do?!” demanded Sarah. “But he laughs so marvelously when he breaks the cups,” Boris replied shamefacedly. When Billy was six months old his parents bought him a high chair. Boris insisted, “I don’t care if the King of England comes to dinner. Billy will sit with us.” Sarah wrote: “He had all his meals with us from the time he was six months old. He couldn’t creep, and he couldn’t walk and he couldn’t talk, but he could observe.” They gave him a spoon, and “for two months he hit his ear and his eye with the spoon, and sometimes his food landed on his head. And I would guide the spoon to his mouth. But after two months, lo, he hit his mouth. Such a crowing, such triumph! He crowed so that I thought at first he had burnt his mouth, but his face was radiant with success. After that he fed himself. “ ‘See,’ said Boris, ‘he has learned to coordinate those muscles. In the same way he can learn to think, by using his mind. Keep on feeding him like some mothers do, he will still be eating from your hand when he is three years old. A baby is never too young to start learning anything.’ ” Sarah claimed she was happy to stay home and take care of Billy, saying, “At the time of Billy’s birth the current fad was to practically desert your child, to refuse him any affection or love. We thought this whole idea was monstrous.” As the Sidises’ second winter in New York approached, Boris insisted that Sarah buy herself a new winter coat with twenty dollars she had saved (winter coats were a consistent problem for the Sidises). Sarah, however, was longing to buy things for Billy to play with, and that twenty dollars was all the extra cash they had. Secretly, she went to a remnant shop in downtown New York and for sixty cents bought three pounds of cotton batting and a few dollars’ worth of material and, using her old spring coat as the lining, sewed a winter coat for herself. She did it all on the sly, and the ruse worked—Boris didn’t find out until years later. Sarah at last had money to spend on Billy. She bought blocks, books, maps, and a little globe. Boris couldn’t figure out where she’d gotten the money, but she just said mysteriously, “I saved.” Education began. Boris took two alphabet blocks—”A” and “B” —first holding them up in turn over Billy’s crib, then forming a syllable until the baby said his first “ba-ba.” Then Boris reversed the order of the blocks, so his son learned to say “ab.” Soon Boris was making words with the blocks and pointing to the objects they represented. Sarah and Billy too would play in this way by the hour, cluttering the floor with words. At six months, he spoke his first word, “door.” A few months later, when he had increased his vocabulary enough to explain, Sarah asked, “Why do you like the door so much?” “Door moves. People come,” was Billy’s answer. Billy was seven months old when he pointed to the moon and called it by name. That, Sarah later told a relative, was when she realized her son was a genius. She wrote, “The first thing my April Fool’s boy wanted from the great outside world was the moon. We stood at the window of the apartment together in the evening, with Billy in Boris’s arms, and admired the moon over Central Park. Billy chuckled and reached for it. The next night when he found that the moon was not in the same place, he seemed disturbed. Trips to the window became a nightly ritual, and he was always pleased when he could see the ‘moon.’ “This led to Billy’s mastering higher mathematics and planetary revolutions by the time he was eleven, and if that seems to be a ridiculous statement I can only say, ‘Well, it did.’ ” Billy played constantly with his maps and globe. He was not even a year old, but was learning to spell at a remarkable rate. Boris and Sarah named the letters to him for hours on end, and he grew proficient at combining and arranging them. He would toddle around carrying a red tin bucket filled with blocks, then plop himself down on his stomach to spell out “physiological psychology” or “effects of anesthesia” (titles on the lower shelf of his father’s bookcase). At eighteen months he was reading The New York Times, and he could pluck from the bookshelf any book a visitor requested. At the same time that he was spelling, reading, and talking, Billy learned to count, also using blocks. He greeted visitors by telling them how many buttons they had on their dress or suit. When his parents pushed his carriage through Central Park, a crowd of children gathered round, asking him to count to one hundred, a feat he easily performed; the children were all older, but could not yet count. Sarah bought Billy a child’s encyclopedia, and when he encountered something he didn’t know, they looked it up together. One day, after they had done this a few times, he asked Sarah a question, then told her, “But you will say, ‘Let’s look it up!’ and I can look it up myself!” “That,” wrote Sarah, “is the last lesson I gave Billy. During the day he would go occasionally to his room and close the door and read. He never studied.” By the time Billy turned three, his voracity for learning was in full swing, and it became apparent that he was not even an ordinarily precocious little boy. One day, as Sarah sat in her kitchen, she heard “the slow, purposeful thumping of the typewriter” from her husband’s study. She recalled, “I didn’t interrupt, and Billy brought me out a letter he had written. It was to Macy’s, ordering toys. He addressed the envelope correctly and sealed the letter. “ ‘Now I am very old, like Daddy, because I can typewrite. Maybe I am a hundred or two hundred years old.’ “He was delighted by my surprise, and proud to show me how he had pulled his high chair up to the typewriter when he found he couldn’t reach it from his daddy’s chair. ‘Won’t Daddy be surprised!’ he crowed. His father’s surprise was his greatest incentive.” Billy was always in the company of Boris and Sarah and their friends. Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus (they owned Macy’s) were especially fond of little Billy, and Mrs. Straus often asked Sarah if she could “borrow” the boy, whom she took home to tea or for walks and drives around New York. Mrs. Straus invited the Sidises and Billy to a costume ball. Billy, dressed in a little Russian costume Sarah had made, crawled under the magnificent dining room table and tickled the guests’ toes during dinner. The amused adults picked him up and set him in the middle of the table. Mrs. Straus explained to the assemblage who Billy was and described his remarkable abilities. Billy held court, playing guessing games with the company, answering questions, and astonishing them by reciting railroad and bus timetables as if they were children’s rhymes. It was the beginning of two decades of being onstage. From then on Billy was a regular at the Straus parties, holding the floor and entertaining the guests. One can only assume that, at the age of three, the blue-eyed, apple-cheeked boy reveled in the appreciative attention of so many enraptured adults. Billy’s proficiency in spelling was at that time his most extraordinary talent. Sarah and Boris stressed the roles of reason and logic to Billy—they never made him do any memorizing. He was a quick study when it came to learning prefixes and suffixes. There seemed to be no stopping him. Once, as a test of Billy’s powers, a friend of the family spelled out “Prince Maurocordatos, a friend of Byron,” with alphabet blocks. Two weeks later she asked him, “What was the name of Byron’s friend I spelled for you?” Billy immediately produced the phrase. Billy’s next coup occurred one evening when Boris had returned from a business trip to Chicago to celebrate his birthday, and the Sidises were entertaining company. Billy slipped into the room with a book hidden behind his back, waiting for a break in the conversation. “Does anyone here happen to know Latin?” he asked innocently. “Yes, I know a little,” someone replied. “Here,” said Billy, thrusting a copy of Caesar’s Gallic Wars into the visitor’s hands. “I can read it, let me show you!” Billy read the first page, then said, “Oh, Daddy, aren’t you surprised?” Billy had taught himself Latin as a birthday present for his father by studying his mother’s old Latin primer and matching the English words with the Latin ones. A few months later, poking around in his father’s books, he peeked into Plato and asked, “Daddy, why are these letters different from regular letters?” Following his philosophy of answering all Billy’s questions, Boris taught his three-year-old the Greek alphabet. Then, with the aid of a Greek primer, Billy taught himself to read Homer. Boris, who was not a Greek scholar himself, was truly awestruck. At four, Billy was typing proficiently and chattering away on difficult subjects. The following year, his abilities had so expanded that no one who encountered the child could fail to be astounded. Over the next few years, assisted by his father’s own considerable knowledge of languages, Billy inhaled Russian, French, German, and Hebrew, and he soon added Turkish and Armenian to his repertoire. When Billy was six, Boris gave his boy several calendars and explained them in detail. His affection for calendars and dates was so great that he quickly devised a game for himself, a game no adult was bright enough to match him in: He could calculate on what day of the week any given date would fall. Now at Mrs. Straus’s dinner parties, he was able to amaze the guests by telling them what day of the week they had been born on, simply by being told the date and the year. Sarah continued to insist on the normalcy of Billy’s activities. “The real secret was that at first when he learned he wanted to please and surprise the daddy he worshiped. And like all normal little fellows, he wanted often to be the center of attention. He found that learning new things made him the center, and this was his stimulant. Afterward he needed no stimulant, learning was in itself a pleasure.” Although Sarah later claimed that Billy played with other children, there is no evidence that this was so, and it is hard to imagine with whom he could have played. How many other toddlers like to discuss Caesar’s Gallic Wars in the original Latin? With a possible rare exception, he was always in the company of adults. The family spent the summers on Mount Hurricane in the Adirondacks. William James introduced them to the Davidson colony, a small, inexpensive summer resort. Intellectuals gathered there to go mountain climbing and to deliver informal lectures over tea. Boris’s visits were brief, but Sarah and Billy stayed entire summers, relaxing with the James family and a variety of artists, professors, and scholars. Prominent members of the colony were John Dewey (then head of the Department of Education at the University of Chicago) and his family. Sarah was fascinated and appalled by Mrs. Dewey’s approach to child rearing. Mrs. Dewey was a believer in “self-expression and complete freedom for her children,” who were, Sarah decided, “nice honest children with no formal manners, but pleasant.” Sarah was horrified to see them running barefoot near perilous ravines and getting scratched by briars. Certainly, little Billy never ran barefoot. Despite Dewey’s vast influence in the field of child education, none of it rubbed off on the Sidises. Said Sarah, “I could not see how falling off a cliff could be educational, and since there are many cliffs in this world I did not go along with Mrs. Dewey’s ideas.” In any case, the five-year-old Billy had other amusements besides physical play. He was made mail clerk and allowed to distribute the letters each day. One summer evening at the colony, Billy complained of a toothache, but there was no dentist within miles. To distract Billy from the pain, Boris took him for an after-dinner walk in the lush New England countryside and explained Aristotelian logic, since the boy had been expressing interest in his father’s Harvard lectures on the subject. After an hour, father and son returned. Radiant, Billy announced to his mother, “Now I know all about logic!” A few years later he told a friend, “I’m sorry I put off logic so long. If I had studied it sooner it would have helped me a great deal.” It was at Mount Hurricane that Billy had his first encounter with a journalist—the first of hundreds. This astute reporter jotted down his observations in a diary, publishing them two years later in the North American Review. It was the first reporter’s-eye view of Billy, and it casts him in a slightly different light from his mother’s reportage: “At a hotel in the mountains, it was the custom of the infant prodigy to read the menu with infinite care, looking about the room to see if all the dishes mentioned were represented on the tables and to inquire anxiously for those he did not see. Once he chanced to be brought in early to breakfast, namely, at 7:45, when upon consulting the menu he found that breakfast was served from 8 to 9. He was seized by perfect panic when the waiter brought in the breakfast ahead of time; he required that it be taken back at once, and finally was borne shrieking from the room, calling out like an irate Hebrew prophet: ‘It is from 8 to 9. It has been written.’ ” The Review is the first publication to give testament to Billy’s amazing memory: A lady coming in with an armful of joe-pye, gathered along the road, proffered some slight data concerning the flower, only to rouse the eager little listener to a sudden contradiction. “It is not so; consult Mrs. Dana, page 252.” It was quite true that he not only remembered all he read, but the numbers of the pages upon which he read given information. It was his pleasing custom to speak of all the guests in the house, in which he spent his summers, by the numbers of the rooms they occupied. A lady and a little girl passing him, he would absentmindedly comment, “Two No. 33’s,” or a gentleman and a dog going by, he would comment, “No. 57, the dog from kennel 4.” His most notable trait was that he could not be turned aside from any purpose or diverted as other children are. He had very little interest in humanity, and the only way to see an exhibition of his unusual knowledge was to feign ignorance. He already, at five years old, knew something of English, Russian, French and German. If one asked him to count in German, one would be met by a stony gaze of abstraction, so detached, so distant, that it was truly humiliating. If however, one came to him in the spirit of thirst for knowledge, saying, “I suppose the Germans count just as we do,” he was lavish with instruction. Unfortunately, Billy had virtually no physical activity to complement his intellectual gymnastics. His parents disdained sports; “football player” was one of Boris’s favorite terms of disparagement. William James had tried to influence Boris, writing to him in the fall of 1902, “I congratulate you on W.J.S.—what you tell of him is wonderful. Exercise his motor activities exclusively for many years now. His intellect takes care of itself.” This advice was promptly ignored, and Billy never had the slightest exposure to any childish outdoor games. Billy’s next interest was anatomy. Boris, who was studying for his M.D., despised memorizing and grumbled over his Gray’s Anatomy. Billy kindly offered to help him, and occasionally drilled his father and the other medical students who dropped over to study. Sarah wrote, “I can hear his small, clear voice crowing triumphantly, ‘Aha, you forgot the fifth cranial nerve!’ ” For years, the Sidises literally kept a skeleton in their closet, which they used for their anatomy studies. Billy found it and, not the least bit frightened, studied it for hours. One day, a friend of Sarah’s approached her in a tizzy, with this story: “You and Boris were both out, and Billy invited me in to wait for you. He had out that skeleton and was sitting on the floor poring over a big book. I saw that it was a textbook on obstetrics. ‘What are you doing, Billy?’ I asked. And he told me, ‘I’m trying to find out how the baby comes out. With the skeleton and a Gray’s Anatomy, Billy learned so much about physiology that, as Boris later told a reporter, “He could pass a medical student’s examination at six years of age.” Billy also became preoccupied with the constant bus and street-car rides his parents took him on to museums, libraries, parks, and zoos. He began avidly to collect streetcar transfers, with which he amused himself for hours at a time. He also took up stargazing, and began to make maps—the beginning of one of his greatest lifelong passions. Only once, during his early childhood, did Billy leave Sarah at a loss for words. One evening, Billy walked Mr. and Mrs. Addington Bruce, close friends of the Sidises, to their car. Mr. Bruce handed the boy a quarter and instructed him to buy himself a treat with it. Billy returned to the house upset, and asked his mother, “Why did he do that?” “Ah, Mr. Bruce thought it would please you,” she replied. “What did you do?” “I didn’t want to take it, but I didn’t want him to feel bad. So I took it, and after he drove off, I threw it in the gutter.” Sarah wrote in her memoirs, “He’s Boris all over again, with his savage contempt for largesse, for the padrone. What could I say to this son of mine who threw quarters in the gutter, without seeming to criticize his father, whose bone-deep scorn of money Billy had already absorbed? It was a problem for me, so I said nothing.… He was his father at six. Perhaps it was because he was so much like me in undiscriminating devotion to his father that he absorbed every shade and variation of Boris’s attitude toward the world.” Boris did not like to accept payment for his services. Bewildered patients sought out Sarah because Boris had refused to take their money. He had an ever growing list of people who were not to be charged for his services: professors, students, and, especially, ministers, priests, and rabbis. This latter group was curious, because Boris was an atheist. Sarah saw his view of organized religion as a mixture of contradictions. He numbered among his friends many men of the cloth who knew of his atheism. And yet he was a student of the Bible, the Talmud, and Hindu religious books. He read religious tomes in Arabic, Armenian, Persian, Greek, Hebrew, and Sanskrit, and whole shelves of his library were given over to these texts, which he discussed by the hour with priests and rabbis. But though these books fascinated him, he despised established religion. When he published his most controversial book a number of years later he wrote, “A rabbi came to ask my advice about the education of his little boy. My advice was: ‘Teach him not to be a Jew.’ The man of God departed and never came again. The rabbi did not care for education, but for faith. He did not wish his boy to become a man, but to be a Jew.” By the age of six, Billy was a confirmed atheist. Showpiece that he was, Billy was hardly all that occupied the Sidises in the years between 1898 and 1904. Though both parents spent a great deal of time with their boy, they also managed to lead remarkably active lives outside of their home. In 1898, the year of Billy’s birth, Boris too gave birth to a beloved child. It was his first book, the one he had refused to submit as a thesis, The Psychology of Suggestion, with an introduction by William James. James wrote to Boris, “The whole thing is bold, original and radical like yourself and I like it.” His second book, The Nature of Hallucinations, was published two years later. Two years after that he published his third. Like most writers, Boris found the process of writing arduous: After the completion of each book he grumbled that he never wanted to write another. He was to write seventeen books and fifty-two articles. While Sarah entertained and took the greater part in raising Billy day to day, she prided herself on maintaining the Sidis household and managing the family’s financial affairs single-handedly. This arrangement suited Boris, who simply gave her any money he made and let her oversee the budgeting. “That none of my family except myself was ever practical one iota about the mechanics of living is perhaps due to vanity on my part,” wrote Sarah. “Boris couldn’t drive a nail, and the only time I ever saw [William] James try to drive a nail, he hit his thumb. So, naturally, Billy couldn’t drive a nail. Since every creature must have a forte, it was my vanity to drive the nails for my two brilliant men. In 1901 James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the Herald Tribune, helped to endow Boris with a hospital, which Boris dubbed the Psychopathological Hospital and Psychopathic Laboratory. Boris continued his work at the Pathological Institute, curing difficult cases—and saving them from brutal asylums—with his method of “hypnoidization,” a form of hypnotism. He traveled extensively around New York State, initiating reforms and lecturing to heads of hospitals about the barbaric conditions of New York’s insane asylums. His work was so impressive that in 1910 American Magazine could justly rank Boris Sidis with three other “masters of the mind”: Pierre Janet of Paris, Morton Prince of Boston, and Sigmund Freud of Vienna. This same article propounded Boris’s theory of “reserve energy” and its role in the creation of the boy genius: “According to this doctrine, each of us possesses a stored-up fund of energy, of which we ordinarily do not make any use, but which we could be trained to use habitually to our great advantage. Dr. Sidis contends that it is by arousing this potential energy that the patients whom he treats are cured; and he further insists that, by the remarkable results he has obtained in educating his boy, he has demonstrated the possibility of training people to draw readily and helpfully on their hidden energies.” William James claimed to have discovered this energy concurrently with Boris; in ten years, Billy would produce a startling expansion of his father’s theory. Though Boris’s research was progressing well, he was running into difficulties at the Pathological Institute, and, after only three years, it was shut down by state authorities who were opposed to its emphasis on experimental research. With this disappointment, the Sidises decided to leave New York. Despite the friends they had made, they longed to return to Boston. They could now afford to live in Brookline, a suburb that was attracting an influx of up-and-coming professionals. And Boris, surprisingly, had decided to acquire his M.D. at Harvard--perhaps as the result of Sarah’s constant pressure, perhaps because he regarded the M.D. as one degree with real practical value. Sarah contended that “he wanted to study medicine so that he might distinguish with more assurance between those cases which he wished to treat and those which should be turned over to medicine, for by now he wished only to practice psychiatry.” Harvard had been keeping up with New York in the field of psychology. The philosophy department now had its own building, Emerson Hall, built in 1903, complete with a laboratory specially equipped for experimental psychology. In 1904 the Sidis family moved to Brookline. Boris studied at Harvard Medical School, maintained a private practice, and worked closely with other scientists. Most importantly, he published Multiple Personalities, a book that enhanced his reputation enormously. In the ponderous style that had come to characterize Boris’s writing, Multiple Personalities recounts the cure of an amnesia victim, Reverend Thomas Hanna. In the spring of 1897, Hanna, a twenty-five-year-old Baptist minister, fell out of a carriage and landed on his head. He was knocked unconscious, and awoke with total amnesia, reduced to the mental state of a newborn infant. Boris and a colleague, Dr. Simon Goodhart, taught him to speak, to eat, to go to the bathroom, as if he were a child. He learned quickly, and in a few weeks he could talk; but he had no memory of his former life. Soon, Hanna began to have vivid dreams. They were scenes from his past, but he didn’t recognize them. Boris and Goodhart alternated between hypnotizing Hanna and “stimulating” him, using such scientific methods as pinching, shouting, and throwing cold water in his face; they also tried a substantial dose of cannabis indica, which induced in the patient—not so surprisingly—a state of “euphoria, inner joyousness and mental buoyancy.” They took Hanna to the theater, to the zoo, and to dinner with his family, attempting to “jog his memory” by re-creating scenes from his pre-accident life. For two months his pre-and post-accident personalities alternated within him, fought for dominance. Finally, Hanna experienced a moment of crisis: He was aware of both past and present simultaneously. He recovered completely. Despite its style, Multiple Personalities was widely read and widely reviewed. Critics were of several minds. One writer actually suggested that the book should “be carried along by tourists to note the dual personalities with which they may come in contact.” Boris Sidis had become fatuous, and the family that had left New York for a fine Boston suburb appeared to be on its way to a magnificent future. 3 The Little Professor Billy liked Brookline. He liked best climbing the hill behind the Sidises’ big house at night, lying on his back, and gazing at the stars. He loved the night, and he loved the constellations. “I used to go with him to his hilltop,” wrote Sarah, “but he soon told me he could see better and think more clearly when he was alone.” Billy had reached legal school age. Despite the fact that he could now speak and read at least eight languages, he would have to attend classes with other six-year-olds who did not yet read English or know how to print their names. His parents chose the Runkle School, a public school on Fisher Hill near their home. Sarah took Billy for a pre-enrollment test to determine whether the boy knew his letters. When asked if he knew how to read, Billy suggested a spot of Shakespeare; he carried a volume of the bard with him wherever he went. To the teacher’s bewilderment Billy delivered, with full expression, the first scene of the first act of Julius Caesar. Having satisfied the entrance requirements, Billy began grammar school. Popular myth has it that he arrived at school the first day at 9:00 A.M., and when his mother came to pick him up at lunchtime he was in the third grade. This is a slight exaggeration—it actually took him three days to go from first grade to third. When his mother did pick him up that first day, however, he was instructing his teacher in a new way to do fractions. An excellent account of his grammar-school days appeared in the Boston Transcript: Naturally the teachers of the primary school felt weighed down with the responsibility for so rare a child—and were not a little embarrassed in managing him in class. While others were reaching a given point he had always soared miles beyond them and was fidgeting, wearily waiting for them to catch up. It seemed as if he could not bear to hear a second time what he had been taught or told. It was evident torture for him to sit by and listen to the plodding routine of the day’s work in the school, and when a physically healthy boy of six or seven is in torture the teacher is likely to be so likewise. Even the repetition of the morning hymns and school songs seemed to cause the child intense exasperation and he would put his fingers into his ears, as he did when the conjugations in grammar were being drilled into the rest of the class—also at prayers, against which he had certain conscientious scruples of his own. But if he was difficult to provide for in the class work he was still more of a problem at recess, on the playground. He took no part or interest in any of the games; never wrestled, ran or played tag with either girls or boys. His chief desire when out among the children, if he had anything at all to do with his schoolmates, seemed to be to instruct them in natural sciences. His teachers overheard him once expounding the nebular hypothesis to his school fellows on the playground. Naturally the boys being forbidden to haze him gave him a wide berth with his lectures. The poor little genius was forlornly isolated and lonely. Then the teachers enlisted some of the bigger girls to take the phenomenon in hand and dutifully they rose to the emergency, as their sex always does. But before long they too struck against the prodigy. They came to the teacher and complained that William would not walk, or run, or play at any game. The seven-year-old wanted only to stand about and talk with them; he seemed to be absorbed and beset with the purpose of making them understand about the revolutions of the planets, the phases of the moon, and the probable elements of the incandescent atmosphere of the sun and such things. William’s year in primary school was interrupted by an attack of typhoid fever, yet the record from the school register of his advance runs: FIRST GRADE—Only a day or two. SECOND GRADE—A few days. THIRD GRADE—Three months. FOURTH GRADE—One week. FIFTH GRADE—Fifteen weeks. SIXTH AND SEVENTH GRADES—Five and a half weeks. The Boston Transcript continued: Equal in all to about one-half year of schooling. Himself a grammarian in a way, William James Sidis could not abide the grammar-school grammar. At seven years of age he had his original ideas of a grammar of three languages running abreast, already in part typewritten (he writes in no other way, and this bothers, again, in school, of course), and the grammar taught in the schools was full of those exasperating sounds against which he covers up his ears. He despised it, and also the history which he had learned all about years before. On the other hand, whenever he was at all interested, the teacher’s problem was to suppress him; he wanted to take her task out of her hands and talk all the time. Started on any such question or allusion coming up in the class, he was full and ready to speak, and if allowed to have his way, would keep the children busy and entertained to the exclusion of all else set down in the school curriculum. In the shop-room he was intensely curious, busy and eager, and the greatest care had to be taken lest he cut himself with rash handling of edged tools. His nervous rapidity in accomplishing whatever he was set to do made him a much greater care for the instructors than the slowest dullards. Care had to be taken, too, not to feed his vanity with the wonder and admiration which the stupefied teachers often could not conceal at his performances. They seemed to have been wholly conscientious and even tender with the wonder child. They had one boy trained to look specially after him to see that he did not injure himself by his obliviousness to sublunary things—as for instance to follow him up at the end of school and see that he did not get out and start for home, as he was liable to do, without putting on either hat or overcoat. As one might imagine, Billy’s classroom antics were aggravating his teachers, who were already intimidated by the fact that he knew more than they did. Billy graduated after a mere seven months. In the words of the Boston Herald: “He told his teachers he’d just as soon leave school. He knew all they could teach him anyway. He said this without self-pride, as one states a simple truth—and it was the truth. He added that it was very inconvenient for his mother to bring him to school each day, and take him home again, but that she had to do it, because he was horribly afraid of dogs.” (Perhaps Billy’s fear of dogs was inherited from his mother. So strong was her phobia that in her seventies she wrote, “In my childhood I got two ideas that shaped my life: I thought I could do anything, and I was afraid of nothing but dogs.” Billy did have a pet cat, which he adored.) In spite of Billy’s advancement in nearly every academic field, there was one curious omission: mathematics. According to H. Addington Bruce, the writer who was a close friend of the Sidises, Billy had developed an aversion to mathematics during his stint in grammar school. Bruce wrote that “no subject could possibly have been more distasteful to him,” that he seemed “unable … or unwilling” to grasp it. This contradicts later newspaper accounts that have Billy showing mathematical brilliance at six. However, since Bruce was very close to the Sidises, he is probably an accurate source on this important point. Boris and Sarah did not react to Billy’s aversion by overtly pushing him to study arithmetic. Instead they bought toys—dominoes and marbles—and invented games requiring a knowledge of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. For a few hours every night, Boris and Sarah played with their son, according to Bruce, “deftly managing matters so that his interest in time shifted from the toys to the principles underlying their use.” Boris also “in the boy’s presence … continually discussed with Mrs. Sidis questions involving the practical application of arithmetic, and ‘suggesting’ its importance in the affairs of everyday life.” This technique must have worked well. Billy’s plunge into the realm of numbers began at the age of seven and a half and followed a meteoric course for the next decade. Although Boris and Sarah did not technically “push” Billy to study math, for the first time they had exerted pressure. Previously—if we are to believe their reports—they had nurtured, nudged, and guided Billy’s explorations and passions, but had never before steered him toward something he hated. Despite their success in interesting him in math, this “steering” may have been responsible for disastrous consequences that would not manifest for years to come. In a short time, Billy surpassed his father in mathematical ability. At the age of eight, he accomplished the spectacular feat of devising a new table of logarithms using a base of twelve instead of the normal ten—a favorite anecdote of the press in future years. One evening when the Sidises were entertaining a Harvard mathematics professor, Dr. E. V. Huntington, Billy whiled away the time by reading the galleys of the professor’s latest book. The boy noted several errors in the text and pointed them out to Dr. Huntington, who duly revised his work. Math, astronomy, languages, anatomy, map- and calendar-making, and grammar were not the only subjects occupying Billy’s eight-year-old mind. He had developed an avid interest in politics—an unusual interest for a mathematical and linguistic prodigy. He frequently wandered into Brookline stores to discuss politics with the shopkeepers; every day he retreated into his room with the morning newspapers, paying particular attention to political events. (He had developed his own speed-reading system, and had total recall of all that he read.) Between the ages of six and eight, Billy wrote at least four books. Two of these, textbooks on anatomy and astronomy, are lost. The remaining two represent his feats in the fields of grammar, linguistics, and mathematics. They are written in textbook style, with all the childish charm of imitation schoolbooks. The first, a grammar, begins with this announcement of authorship: MR. PROF. (DR.) WILLIAM JAMES SIDIS Prof. (Professor in calendars and talker of English, Latin and Greek grammar) born, 1898, and began his books on Nov. 24(better July 1), 1905, when he was less than 7 and 1/2 years, and wrote books on Astronomy, Calendars, English Grammar, and compends on it. This is followed by the pun: INTRODUCTION My book, the reader—the reader, my book. But the rest is no-nonsense—a reduction of the principles and forms of grammar to a succinct forty-one pages. The book differs from other grammars primarily in its brevity and minimum of repetition. While Billy invented nothing in this book, it is still a remarkable achievement. How many intelligent adults have mastered the rules of English? Curiously, though, while the abstract principles of grammar are clear and accurate, Billy occasionally slips and makes a grammatical error himself. For example: “The SUBJECT part is what is the sentence about.” His selection of examples range from the cute: Conjunctions join the words together as rain AND sunshine, wind OR weather. Conjunctions sentences unite as kittens scratch AND puppies bite. to the unexpected as in this example of the third person: “POPE GREGORY THIRTEENTH was the greatest man.” While most children would choose George Washington or Buffalo Bill, Billy’s interests already lay elsewhere. His examples of interjections are particularly charming: An interjection shows surprise as OH, how pretty, AH, how wise! PRINCIPAL ONES.—the principal interjections are: aha, ah, alas, alack, hey, hurrah, huzza, hah, ho, hallo, hist, hush, lo, fe, mum, O (oh), pshaw, tush, woe, &c. The following is the only reference to fathers, used to illustrate pronouns: (I) am sorry that papa left (I) am sorry that (HE) left. The only reference to mothers is strikingly different: THE PERSONS ARE NAMED: first, second, third. The first person is the speaker, as, I PAUL have written it. The second person is the hearer, as, MOTHER, what is the trouble with YOUR brain. Billy’s most ambitious product in this period was the invention of a new language, Vendergood. Again written in the manner of a school text, the forty-page Book of Vendergood outlines the basic rules, structure, and pronunciation of a language that is Latin-based but draws on German, French (of which Billy was particularly fond), and several other Romance languages. Reading it creates the same strange effect of Billy’s other books: This marvelous, sophisticated achievement is tinged throughout with a childish fascination with form and pomposity; the adult reader feels constantly bounced between the work of a genius and that of a little boy. Billy’s fascination with order went to such extremes that he actually made up new elements of grammar, as if the topic weren’t difficult enough. For example: “There are 8 Modes, the indicative, potential, imperative absolute, strongeable, subjunctive, optative, imperative & infinitive [emphasis added].” Chapters bear such intimidating titles as “Imperfect and Future Indicative Active”—hardly layman’s lingo. One painfully difficult page contains a breakdown of the word “the” into an off-putting array of gender and inflection variations. He has made a simple article more complex than a Japanese verb, in the interest of exactitude of expression. Other parts of Vendergood are refreshingly clear and simple, such as the explanation of the origin of Roman numerals. This, along with several pages of hard mathematics, is injected into the Book of Vendergood in the interest of promoting a mass move to base twelve, instead of base ten. Billy offers this explanation for the change: Roman numerals are not all founded on the same principal [sic]. The first 3 are founded on the fingers. I, one, is the shape of one finger, V, five, is nearly the shape of a hand, which has five fingers; X, ten, is the shape of two hands crossing each other at the elbow, in which the hands together [sic] ten fingers, C, a hundred, is from Latin centum; M, a thousand, from Latin mille. The use of the Denary scale is easily seen for we have ten fingers. The reason of introducing the Duodenary Scale in Vendergood is seen as follows: The unit in selling things is 12 of those things and 12 is the smallest number that has four factors! The numbers in Vendergood are then given in base 12: Eis – one duet – two tre – three guar – four quin – five sex –six sep – seven OO (oe?) – eight non – nine ecem – ten elevenos – eleven dec – twelve eidec (eis, dec) – thirteen Most examples are presented in the form of tests: TRANSLATE INTO VENDERGOOD: 1. Do I love the young man? 2. The bowman obscures. 3. I am learning Vendergood. 4. What do you learn? (sing.) 5. I obscure ten farmers. The answers to this quiz, placed at the back of the book, are as follows: 1. Amevo (-)ne the neania? 2. The toxoteis obscurit. 3. (Euni) disceuo Vendergood. 4. Quen diseois-nar? 5. Obscureuo ecem agrieolai. Vendergood is simpler than Esperanto, the only comparable language. Its limitations are that it is difficult to pronounce and is too streamlined to allow for many contractions. Vendergood would be an impressive achievement coming from an adult. It came from a seven-year-old. When he was five, Billy had devised his method for instantly calculating the day of the week on which any given date, past or future, would fall. When he was seven and a half he wrote a two-part book on calendars. Only the first part, describing how to make a normal calendar, has survived. The title page reads: FIRST BOOK ON CALENDARS By WILLIAM JAMES (SD) (SIDIS)? THECALENDARMAKER? YES! NOTE—This book is for people to know what their own calendars are, and how to make one themselves. This is an excellently written little book, lucid, concise, and amusing. With only a smidgeon of editing, it would make an excellent primer for schoolchildren. Billy first clearly describes time zones, lunar phases, seasons (“Without the sun there would be no such thing as season,”), leap years, months, etc. He stresses the underlying principles involved, leaving little to rote memorization. In the same way that his father taught his mother Euclid (study the first three theorems, and figure out the rest), Billy teaches his readers. Midway through the book is a list of “the principal holidays” comprising Washington’s Birthday, St. Patrick’s Day, etc. Displaying his growing taste for unusual bits of trivia, Billy also lists the Battle of Lexington, Decoration Day, the Yorktown Surrender, and the day the Pilgrims landed. The most charming of all the special days is “A holiday discovered in 1905—On Oct. 3rd, 1905, the first Tuesday in October, William James Sidis had a calendar on his bookcase, and put it on his bureau, &c. and since then it was called Calendar Moving day.” Billy racked up two more precocious feats in his seventh and eighth years: He passed the Harvard Medical School anatomy exam and the entrance examination for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Clearly, he was ready for high school. But was the Brookline public school ready to have on its hands a little boy whose intellectual abilities would surpass those of its best teachers? The school superintendent, Professor Aldrich, met with Boris Sidis, William James, and several other prominent professors to discuss the matter. James pronounced his godson the most remarkable prodigy he had ever known of. This greatly impressed Aldrich, who decided to overlook his anxieties and accept Billy as a pupil, if he first passed an entrance exam. Asked to multiply 12 by 12 by 12, he gave the answer instantly. Having passed this and other tests, he was admitted to Brookline High. Now that Billy was the world’s youngest high school freshman, the press descended on him in earnest. To the boy’s horror, reporters lay in wait for him near his house; if they succeeded in finding him alone, one would pounce and hold him while another took his picture. Since Billy loathed journalists, Headmaster Hitchcock arranged for a reporter from the Boston Transcript to spy on Billy at school, rather than interview him. The reporter hovered with Hitchcock just inside a doorway and watched a troop of students parade from one class to the next. Dressed in Russian peasant clothes, Billy couldn’t have been hard to spot. The reporter observed the passage of: …tall young fellows and girls twice the age of the wonder-child we were looking for: then, characteristically enough, the Sidis boy went all by himself. Presently we followed him up stairs to his assigned place between his algebra lesson and the coming hour in Latin and found him in the physics laboratory. At the end of the long room … we saw the lonely infant bending over his table. He had been putting together, according to printed instructions, the parts of a Dutch clock, one of the regular exercises of this department. He was just finishing as we came up, and when the clock was triumphantly hung ticking on the wall, we left him skipping and dancing about the many-windowed room like a child in his nursery. His high-pitched voice, “in childish treble,” is the most infantile thing about him. His body seems strong, his color good; and altogether he looks the ordinary boy in normal health. His head is large, especially in the rear at the top, and his ears are of generous size. There is something weird and “intense” in his gray eyes and the way he looks out from under his eyebrows. His mouth is well-shaped, with a large and firm upper lip —altogether a face that, if one caught the knit brows and sharp glance of the eye, one would look at twice. Boris and Sarah arranged for Billy to attend school for a maximum of two hours a day—Sarah didn’t want “to waste his brain capacities with too much cramming.” She claimed that Billy “was somewhat disappointed at what he considered his ‘slow’ progress in high school.” This “slow progress” consisted of completing the four-year curriculum in six weeks, and serving as a teachers’ aide for another six, helping correct the seniors’ papers. Billy was always eager to help his fellow students with their academic problems, and they nicknamed him “Professor.” In fact, he taught seniors how to tackle physics problems before he had officially studied their branch of that science. For all this, he was still a little boy. Though jaws dropped when he demonstrated an equation at the blackboard (for which he had to stand on a stool), his feet didn’t touch the floor when he returned to his seat. In fact, he was bubbling over with energy and so full of antics and pranks that he seriously disrupted the classroom. Commented H. Addington Bruce, “In some respects he is more childlike than the average youngster.” His uncurbed enthusiasm was not the only problem. The atheism that had so disturbed his grammar-school teachers was no less horrifying to the faculty of Brookline High. On one occasion, Headmaster Hitchcock began reading the Bible at a school assembly. Billy leaped out of his seat in front of a thousand students, pressed his hands over his ears, and exclaimed, “I don’t believe in that. I don’t want to hear that.” When his teachers began to complain that he didn’t do his lessons, John C. Packard, the submaster and teacher of physics, investigated. “William, is it true that you did only nine out of the twelve algebra problems?” “That’s all,” replied Billy with a grin. “Didn’t you know how to do the others?” “Of course!” the boy answered. “That’s why I didn’t do them.” Mr. Packard looked puzzled. “Why should I spend my time on things I know,” asked Billy, “when there are things I don’t know?” To his credit, Packard saw the point, and took Billy on as his special pupil. They invented problems in algebra and physics, trying to outwit each other. After three months Packard gave Billy the MIT entrance examination. Once again he passed with flying colors, scoring 100 in physics and mathematics. At the end of three months Billy’s parents withdrew him from high school. Despite Packard’s appreciation of the boy, the rest of his teachers were relieved to see him go. An orgy of inaccurate newsprint had followed Billy through his abbreviated high school career. The Washington Herald quoted Boris as bemoaning, “Where is my boy going to stop? … At first his mother and I were alarmed at his precocity.… At the outset, we did all we could to discourage him from studying.… We wanted him to go out and play like other children.… He exercises regularly.” Harper’s Weekly announced that “already the precocious boy’s eyes are failing, and he has to wear double-lens glasses. In other respects his physical health is causing his father some anxiety.” The Harper’s piece was followed by rebuttals in the papers, chastising Harper’s sloppiness, pointing out that Billy did not wear glasses and was in fine health. After all, both his parents were doctors. Other papers jubilantly pro-claimed Billy “the most remarkable boy in the United States,” and the North American Review uttered this stern injunction: “It is to be hoped that the premature development will not stop short, but that the boy’s disinterested love of knowledge and of law may solve some of this world’s scientific problems.” It was the first public request that William James Sidis live up to his potential. For the next two years, Billy received little press. He stayed at home, mastering trigonometry, geometry, and differential calculus. He was reading Einstein and checking for possible errors, and his sister believes that he and the great scientist corresponded. Billy’s interest in politics continued to grow as he read the paper religiously. And he began to draw sophisticated maps, first of Brookline and then of Boston. His early years of bus riding and walking had crystallized in him a passion for the details of transportation and city layouts. Despite his active schedule, Billy always had time to give a little helpful advice to a fellow intellectual in need. Boris was fond of telling this story: One evening in 1908, Harvard’s venerable logic professor Josiah Royce stopped in for a visit with the Sidises. He was on his way to Europe and carried with him the manuscript of his latest, soon-to-be-published book. After reading it, Boris gave it to Billy, who perused it and declared to Professor Royce, “There are a few passages here I think you ought to delete. They’re wrong.” Not surprisingly, Royce, one of Harvard’s most revered scholars, chose to ignore the advice of a nine-year-old. In a few weeks, Boris received a cable from Europe: “I took Billy’s advice.” The Boston Herald ran this amusing anecdote about the nine-year-old prodigy: One afternoon he met a friend who was in the second year at Technology. Under his arm the friend carried a standard mathematical work over which Tech sophomores groan. “Let’s see it,” said Sidis. He turned the pages rapidly for a few minutes, muttering to himself. “Any good?” said his friend ironically. “Extremely comprehensive,” answered the nine-year-old, graduating from monosyllables to polysyllables, as he always does with a transition from childish to erudite subjects. “I am not familiar with the author, but it is a comprehensive work. I think, though, that if the author had employed my theory of logarithms he would have been wiser. You know, I have a theory—” and into the astounded ears of the college man he poured his demonstrable system based on twelve instead of ten. “They ought not to let you cram like that!” exclaimed the man in sheer self-defence. “I am never compelled to study,” replied William with dignity, “my parents allow me to stop studying whenever I desire. It is foolish to cram. The mind of youth can retain only so much, and when you crowd more in, you crowd out what was there before. And so you are back where you started.” Boris decided to enroll his nine-year-old son at Harvard. Despite the boy’s obvious intellectual qualifications, the faculty balked at admitting a child not yet in puberty. A second try met with similar results. Finally, when Billy was eleven, one faculty member argued that it would be an honor to Harvard to accept the lad the newspapers were calling “the most wonderful boy in the world”—he was certain one day to reflect glory on his alma mater. Billy was accepted as a “special student.” The last few years had been momentous for the Sidis family. On February 26, 1910, Boris had received his M.D. Two weeks earlier, on February 12, their daughter, Helena, was born. Helena had been a carefully planned baby. Because of Boris’s intensive work schedule, he and Sarah had decided to wait over a decade after Billy’s birth, until Sarah was thirty-five, to have a second child. Effie Perkins, Sarah’s best friend from her school days, came to Brookline to see Sarah through the delivery. Sarah had a difficult labor. In her pain, she strode up and down, exclaiming stridently, “I will not have this baby! I refuse to have this baby!” Boris shouted back at her, “You have to have it!” The adult Helena, who heard the story from Effie, did not find it at all extraordinary. “It was very much in the order of what my mother would do. She would go along with something or other, some plan, and then she’d just throw it all up. Decide it was no good. Well, of course, you can’t do that with a baby.” Helena was premature, and the delivery was a difficult one. In her memoirs, Sarah wrote only briefly of her daughter’s birth and babyhood, claiming that, “Billy was always my boy in physique and temperament. But my tiny titian-haired Helena, from the moment she was born, was a Sidis. She grew up with that artistry and elegance of thought that was her father’s.” Sarah added, “The relationship between Billy and Boris in those years when Helena was a baby was one of dear companionship. By then, it was Billy who sat on the foot of the bed and talked his father to sleep.” Naturally, Boris had not been idle since his return to the Boston area. Between 1904 and 1910 he published eight books and a steady stream of articles. And he continued to study at Harvard Medical School, where he received unusual privileges. He was exempted completely from attending lectures and was required to take only anatomy, dissection, and obstetrics. He had already begun a private practice as a psychologist, with an office on Beacon Hill. Boris continued his experimental research, working with several prominent figures in the academic community—most importantly, the energetic and likable Morton Prince, professor of neurology at Tufts College Medical School. Prince and Boris grew close, researching and writing articles together. They shared a profound interest in the study of hypnosis, multiple personalities, and the subconscious. When Boris suggested to Prince the need for a publication devoted solely to abnormal psychology, they began to brainstorm, and in February 1906, the influential Journal of Abnormal Psychology was born. It was the first English-language journal devoted solely to psychotherapy: The premiere issue introduced the word psychoanalysis to America. Prince was the editor, and Boris one of the associate editors. In the Journal’s second issue, Boris reviewed Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life—it was one of Freud’s first reviews in America. Sidis had recently recommended the book to William James, although he had reservations about Freud’s theories. By 1910 Freud and Sidis were at odds. Freud wrote to G. Stanley Hall, “I cannot suppress a certain unholy joy that you and Dr. Putnam have rejected Boris Sidis, who is neither very honest nor very intelligent. I mean he deserved nothing else.” A few years later, Boris wrote, “Psychoanalysis is a conscious and more often a subconscious or unconscious debauching of the patient. Nothing is so diabolically calculated to suggest sexual perversion as psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis … is a menace to the community.… Better Christian Science than psycho-analysis!” To what extent little William kept abreast of his father’s psychoanalytic battles we do not know. He did not appear to be developing any interest whatsoever in the subject. But then, he may have had other things on his mind—the year was 1909, William was eleven, and he was about to become the youngest student ever to enroll at Harvard University. 4 Sidis an Avatar On October 11, 1909, Billy made the front page of The New York Times—the first of many such occasions. The article, “Harvard’s Child Prodigy,” was riddled with inaccuracies (giving his age as thirteen and noting that he had spent two years at Tufts College), but it launched national attention. Six days later The New York Times Magazine ran a four-column splash entitled “A Savant at Thirteen, Young Sidis on Entering Harvard Knows More Than Many on Leaving. A Scholar at Three.” The same errors were made again. In the article, the normal requirements for entrance to Harvard were dramatically contrasted with Billy’s achievements. An entering freshman was required to know algebra and plane geometry; Billy had mastered integral calculus and was preparing to study quaternions, “a pinnacle few ever attain.” A freshman needed to know his Xenophon and a smattering of Homer; Billy’s Greek was flawless. He spoke twice as many languages as were required. The Times speculated that after graduating, Billy would “go abroad for his degree in Philosophy, and specialize in something profound and then—Well, then what? What will become of the wonder child? Will he go the way commonly supposed to be that of most boy prodigies, or will he make a name for himself? It will be interesting to watch.” The article was peppered with quotes from Billy, ostensibly obtained through a “friend.” Reported the Times, “He did not see why people should have to pay bills. He proclaimed the use of money ridiculous. ‘It all amounts to this,’ he said, ‘that a man might need something badly and not be able to get it merely because he had not money. You can’t persuade me that’s not ridiculous.’ “On Lincoln’s birthday some years ago he said to a friend, ‘I wonder if some day there will be a holiday for school children and they will be told that it is a holiday, because years ago on that date I began to experiment in my laboratory.’ ” (Boris had built him a small lab where he made thermometers and recorded daily meteorological observations.) The Times proclaimed him to be free of conceit, saying, “He escaped, somehow, being a prig”; he was a “normal boy.” He wasn’t athletically inclined, they admitted, but he would surely cheer on the Harvard athletes like any other all-American lad. After explaining Boris and James’s theory of reserve energy and its place in Billy’s training, the Times wrote, “Dr. Sidis is, in fact, rather impatient of the theory that the boy’s heredity accounts for his development, and will have it that this system of education has more to do with the matter. Keep your child from slip-shod thinking, he says, and develop his ‘hidden energy,’ and the result will be startling. All the same, one may be pardoned for doubting if with any amount of education there would be a William Sidis,” The Times proposed that much of Billy’s ability could be attributed to his Russian Jewish heritage. The very next day, October 18, the Times published two more articles on Billy. The first, “Sidis of Harvard,” was a dull, speculative rehash of why President Lowell (he had just succeeded President Eliot) might want to enroll younger students. On the other hand, the second piece, “Sidis Could Read at Two Years Old,” was a stimulating chronology of his childhood achievements. Declaring Billy to be the most learned undergraduate ever to enter Harvard, the Times was the first paper to give voice to what was to become the press party line: “Sidis is a wonderfully successful result of a scientific forcing experiment, and as such furnishes one of the most interesting mental phenomena in history.” Boris insisted that no “forcing” took place; that, rather, his son had learned to master his reserve energy as any child could with equally dramatic results. The debate raged. The most expansive article yet, taking up a full two pages—six columns of newsprint and a picture—ran in the Boston Sunday Herald magazine section on November 7, 1909. It was the biggest, splashiest spread on Billy to date, its very size bespeaking the boy’s growing fame and controversial status. The accompanying photograph spoke those famous thousand words. The guileless, gap-toothed boy of previous photos was gone. In his place was a lad of wary, riveting gaze; that “something weird and ‘intense’ in his gray eye,” observed by one writer a few years before was plainly evident. The face radiated a searing intelligence, a fall from innocence, suspicion. He seemed to be looking beyond both photographer and reader with chilling gaze, surrounded by rows and rows of newsprint chronicling his relentless achievements. The Herald article opened with an accounting of Billy’s mathematical feats—his logarithmic tables, his theory of a “straight” curve, his proposition that there can be no perfect parabola, his studies in vector analysis (in which he was about to surpass his professor). Dr. Daniel F. Comstock, professor of physics at MIT, had high words of praise for the prodigy: “His method of thinking is real intellect. It is not automatic. He does not cram his head with facts. He reasons. Karl Friedrich Gauss is the only example in history, of all prodigies, whom Sidis resembles. I predict that young Sidis will be a great astronomical mathematician. He will evolve new theories and invent new ways of calculating astronomical phenomena. I believe he will be a great mathematician, the leader in that science in the future.” The Herald pointed out that Billy was no mere mathematical whiz. He now composed original verse in Greek and Latin, and “is an astute historian and compiles lists of the 10 or 12 vital events in a nation’s history.… In modern politics he takes a great interest.… But the boy is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. And he can, with great force and clearness, tell you why he is neither, and why you don’t know why you are either. But Sidis is no pale, bespectacled abnormality. His cheeks are a healthy pink, his gray eyes are clear and bright, and his frequent squinting is a racial characteristic—his parents are Russian Jews—not a sign of weakness. His knicker-bockered legs carry him with most boyish and unacademic friskiness across the yard at Harvard and two steps at a time up into Sever Hall.” Sarah still accompanied him to school on the streetcar, taking him as far as the Harvard gate and meeting him there after school. The Herald noted the incongruity of this—why couldn’t such a savant find his own way? And Billy protested, “But I don’t like to have her come with me. She is afraid I’ll get lost. I wouldn’t. It really isn’t necessary for her to come.” Billy was anxious to be by himself on the streetcar —his only precious time alone was that which he spent in the evenings lying on the hill in back of the Brookline house. Billy wanted to be alone to think, but he had learned how to do so even when forced to share a streetcar with his ever present mother. The Herald observed, “It is one of his peculiar characteristics that when his fingers are occupied with trivialities, his mind is treading profundities. It was while he was building castles with his blocks when he was a little boy that he evolved a theory of building arches and bridges. All his apparently idle moments, while riding to and fro in cars, or walking from the end of the street to his home, he spends in thinking.” Thinking—analyzing, pondering abstractions—was his refuge, his place of privacy and play. The more he hungered for privacy, the more famous he became, and the more reporters hounded him. His father seemed insensitive to his boy’s plight as he busily flaunted his theories and named Billy as an example of what could be done with any child. His mother, equally indifferent to her boy’s discomfort, did nothing to shield him from reporters. Billy’s only refuge was in learning. For all the pressure (and more was to come), Billy never entirely lost his good humor. The Herald reported, “In a conversation with him the other day mention was made of his extraordinary career, and the yet more extraordinary career that lies before him. Young Sidis seemed not unduly elated—it was rather a matter of course. But in the midst of the conversation he chuckled so heartily that he almost dropped his fat green bag filled with books. “Utterly without self-conceit, but still with a broad grin for the humor of the situation—It’s very strange,’ he remarked in his high, clear voice, ‘but you know, I was born on April Fool’s day!’ ” All this press coverage disturbed the Harvard faculty. George W. Evans, a retired professor and close friend of the Sidises, tried to set the record straight in the Harvard Graduate Magazine. He wrote a letter to the editor intended to clear up all the “mistaken and sensational comment” Billy’s arrival at Harvard had caused. He pointed out that Billy was a special student who did not live on campus and took only two math courses. His parents, explained Evans, were not trying to parade their creation before the public, but had sent Billy to Harvard that he might find intellectual companionship. The letter was a veiled plea for Harvard men and women to accept the boy wonder into their fold, or at least to stop treating him like a freak. Evans insisted that Billy was the product of a new system of education, not a genetic oddity. Though the boy was “happy, cheerful, and full of fun,” contact with Harvard men would mature him intellectually and emotionally. “Harvard University is the one place where such a mind should find its home. Harvard should possess a mind of his caliber among its claims to distinction … [along with] a Sir Isaac Newton, a Blaise Pascal, a Sir William Hamilton.…” If Billy was the child of the future, it was Harvard’s duty to “do its best for the preservation and protection of that new type.” Billy was not the only child prodigy at Harvard, but since he was the most amazing and the youngest, he got nearly all the press. The others were Cedric Wing Houghton, who died before his graduation; Roger Sessions, a fifteen-year-old musical prodigy and already a Ph.D. candidate; the fourteen-year-old Adolf A. Berle, whose brother and sisters were also prodigies; and Norbert Wiener, the future father of cybernetics. The Berles’ parents, like the Sidises, had trained their children to reason rather than memorize, and to think of learning as play. Like the Sidises they believed that training, not heredity, was responsible for their children’s precocity. However, Adolf differed from Billy in that he was somewhat interested in athletics (having a little brother to box with helped) and was considerably more outgoing. Furthermore, his parents had emphasized the importance of the social graces: Adolf was courteous and poised. His father was raising him to be a statesman: He did become Assistant Secretary of State under Franklin Roosevelt. It was Norbert Wiener, born in 1894, who was most often compared to Billy in the papers—and the similarities were striking. Norbert’s father, Leo, was also a Russian Jew and a disciplined, self-made man, a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Harvard. Formidable and dominating, Leo Wiener undertook to raise his son on principles very like those of Boris Sidis. By the time he was three Norbert was reading and writing, and at six he was familiar with the works of Darwin. William James had written to Boris in 1902: “He [William] can apparently pair off with Wiener’s infant prodigy, who at the age of seven, has done all the common school work, and of course can’t get into high school, so that his father is perplexed what to do with him, since they make difficulties about admitting him to the manual training school at Cambridge.” Leo Wiener’s approach to his son’s education was far more severe in method than Boris and Sarah’s. When Norbert made an error reciting his lessons, his father rained invective on his head, shouting “Fool! Donkey! Ass!” and reducing his son to tears. (In interviews, he said his method called for “a certain amount of tactful compulsion by the parent” administered “in a kindly manner.”) Leo Wiener was not all harshness, however—when Norbert was accused of cheating on his Harvard exams, his father rushed to defend him. Despite generally oppressive treatment, Norbert continued to crave his father’s praise and approval well into adulthood. At eleven, Norbert graduated from public high school at the head of his class, then enrolled in Tufts College, majoring in mathematics and classics and receiving his B.A. at fourteen. He moved on to Harvard for graduate work in 1909, the same year Billy Sidis entered as a special student. Like Boris Sidis, Leo Wiener attributed 100 percent of his son’s successes to his training, labeling all talk of heredity “nonsense.” Thus, in some important ways, the two fathers were similar. But while Boris decried “meaningless games and silly, objectless sports,” Leo Wiener often took his son hiking in the Adirondacks and on long nature walks where they identified flora and fauna. Norbert developed an enduring passion for nature, and discovered a means of getting exercise (he couldn’t play basketball with the other boys because his thick glasses were often crushed). Despite his father’s efforts, by the time little Norbert reached Harvard he was painfully maladjusted socially. Short and dumpy, clumsy and bespectacled, he wrote in Ex-Prodigy, his memoirs, “I had no proper idea of personal cleanliness and personal neatness, and I myself never knew when I was to blurt out some unpardonable rudeness.” He was shocked to see “poise and sense of social protocol” in the fourteen-year-old Adolf Berle, who carried kid gloves and presented Norbert with a formal visiting card. More distressing still, Norbert’s parents had concealed from him that he was a Jew, leaving him completely unprepared for the anti-Semitism he encountered at Harvard. But if poor, tubby, myopic Norbert felt himself an outcast, even he had someone to look askance at: Billy Sidis. “Sidis,” he wrote in his memoirs, “was too young to be a companion for me, and much too eccentric, although we were in one class together in postulate theory and I respected the work he did…. He was considerably behind the majority of children of his age in social development and social adaptability. I was certainly no model of the social graces; but it was clear to me that no other child of his age would have gone down Brattle Street wildly swinging a pigskin bag, without either order or cleanliness. He was an infant with a full share of the infractuosities of a grown-up Dr. Johnson.” The New York Times had its own, fictional version of the relationship between the two prodigies: “While at Tufts he [William] met and became acquainted with Norbert Wiener…. They became fast friends and continue their acquaintance at Harvard, visiting each other occasionally at their homes.” Wiener did not dislike Billy—he liked him well enough. But contrary to the popular opinion of the time, high IQs were not a basis for friendship. Norbert did try to form a “prodigy club” for the five Harvard boys, but had to admit that “the attempt was ridiculous … we were not cut from the same piece of cloth.” The fact that they were all precocious “was no more a basis for social unity than the wearing of glasses or the possession of false teeth.” Norbert Wiener and Adolf Berle had little more to talk about than Norbert and Sidis did, though they did plot a literary hoax together (planning to “find” a Shakespearean manuscript) and went bowling a few times. It is surprising that Berle and Sidis didn’t spend time together, since they had similar bizarre hobbies. “Sidis,” Wiener wrote, had his collection of streetcar transfers to amuse him, and Berle had a fad almost as individual. He was interested in the various underground passages of Boston, such as the subways and the sewers and various forgotten bolt-holes.” Yet Norbert, himself a mathematical prodigy, had not failed to be impressed by Billy’s genius. Billy was continuing his special courses in the most advanced mathematics Harvard had to offer, subjects reserved for a handful of seniors. His professor in vector analysis was the only person at Harvard who knew more about the subject than Billy. At 8:15 P.M. on January 5, 1910, in Conant Hall at Harvard, William James Sidis delivered his celebrated two-hour lecture to the Harvard Mathematical Club. The talk was sponsored by Griffith Evans, one of Harvard’s eminent mathematics professors and the son of the Sidis family friend George Evans. Billy arrived accompanied by his father, stepped to the front, and with a childish laugh began to speak. The paper was titled “Four-Dimensional Bodies.” As The New York Times reported the next day: Sidis opened his lecture by saying that he had not expected to be asked to lecture so early in his life, and then easily dropped into the regular arts and methods of the college professor, gestures and all. The easy manner in which, in his discussions, he approached and passed over the word “paralleloppedon” made the professors gasp, and when he began to coin a few words and between breaths slipped out such words as “hecatonicosihedrigon” the president of the society had to open the windows to give the audience more air. After drawing figures and proving theories until everyone in the room was amazed, young Sidis suddenly glanced at his watch in true platform style and brought his lecture to a close. Then the professors asked him questions for a half hour. At least some of the unwary ones did, and it was a shame what he did to them. One of his questioners who wore the bow of his dress tie under his ear, the true symbol that he was a professor of mathematics, started to ask some questions and young Sidis, after a rapid-fire explanation of the problem involved, stopped at its conclusion and calmly asked, “Is that any plainer now?” The undergraduates who attended were in deep water most of the time and it is doubtful if any of them gained many new ideas.… But every one of them enjoyed two or three hearty chuckles at the sight of his own beloved instructor asking questions and hearing the boy Sidis only joke them gently, but often listening to their supposed apropos questions with raised eyebrows and saying with a rising inflection, “Huh?” Another writer cited Billy’s “lack of respect for older persons.… A question was asked, and one of the older professors answered it by explaining in different terms than those the boy had used; whereupon young Sidis turned to him saying: ‘I cannot see that you have added anything to the discussion.’ ” Norbert Wiener remembered the event well, writing forty-three years later, “The talk would have done credit to a first- or second-year graduate student of any age, although all the material it contained was known elsewhere and was available in literature.… I am convinced that Sidis had no access to existing sources, and the talk represented the triumph of the unaided efforts of a very brilliant child.” Altogether, ninety-three men were present, representing not only Harvard’s finest but distinguished math professors from all over New England. One can only imagine how awestruck they must have been at the rosy-cheeked eleven-year-old in short pants and a red kerchief, the uniform of boys in grade school. The Math Club lecture spawned a rash of articles and editorials in newspapers all around America; many magazine pieces appeared in publications such as Harper’s Weekly, The Independent, and Current Literature. The Boston Transcript christened Billy the intellectual prodigy of the age. The day after the lecture The New York Times ran a front-page story, followed the next day by an editorial under the heading “Topics of the Times” that described Boris’s educational theories. Letters poured in debating the wisdom of Boris’s methods (Sarah was rarely mentioned) and predicting the prodigy’s future. Two days after the lecture, the Times ran this poem by one Luran W. Sheldon: To Get the Fourth Dimension of Space As understood after reading article headed, ‘Boy of Ten Addresses Harvard Teachers.’ Take a hecatonicosihedrigon and multiply by four, A sexicosihedrigon plus half as many more: Put in some polyhedrigons where gaps suggest a minus And you’ll have a polyhedral-perpendodicahedrinus. Wilmer C. Powick of New York had a letter published in the Times under the heading “Sidis an Avatar?”: “For some days past I have been interested in the accounts of young Sidis, the boy prodigy; also somewhat wearied by the attempts to ascribe his unusual development to some special system of education. The whole thing is fully explained by the Oriental doctrine of reincarnation, which asserts that present ability is the result of work done in past earth lives, and that we are determining to-day our condition in earth lives to come.” Some of the Boston papers were able to get the first-person reports of people who claimed to have met the child sensation. Dr. Jessie T. Bogle, a severe, prune-faced woman, claimed to have met the Sidises through her cousin. A Boston paper told her story with these ominous headlines: SHE PITIES PRODIGY WHO NEVER LEARNED TO PLAY SHE DOUBTS ROSY CHEEKS OF THE LITTLE SIMS BOY Remembers Him at Age of Six, a Bespectacled, Thin-Legged Child, Sprawled on the Floor Beside Fire, Studying Geometry. Dour Dr. Bogle, who was herself studying the ailments of children, blamed adult mediocrity “in professions or business” on childhood “cramming.” She predicted, at best, a nervous breakdown for little Billy, adding ominously, “There has never been a record kept of those children who have died of overstudy, but there are many.” Dr. Jessie Bogle admonished any parents who might be inspired by Billy’s achievements: “No matter what most parents think about their own particular prodigies, the modern child is neither a John Stuart Mill nor a Macaulay, and its education should begin and end with that fact in mind.” William compared favorably with history’s greatest child prodigies. He was in a class apart from the average mathematical prodigy, or “lightning calculators” as they were called. One of the most famous of these was Zerah Colburn, born in Vermont in 1804. When he was six, his surprised parents (who had thought their son a little backward), overheard him muttering multiplication tables though he had had virtually no schooling. The child could perform amazing mental calculations, and his father exhibited him in America and Europe, where the seven-year-old answered such questions as “Can you name the cube root of 413,993,348,677?” Zerah delivered the right answer—7,453—in five seconds. When asked, “Admitting the distance between Concord and Boston to be sixty-five miles, how many steps must I take in going this distance, allowing that I go three feet at a step?” He gave the correct answer-114,400—in ten seconds. The boy insisted that he didn’t know how he arrived at his answers, and he was unable to perform even the simplest multiplication and division on paper. By the time he was ten, Zerah began to lose his calculating ability; by adulthood it was gone completely. Other children performed equally amazing mathematical feats but were backward or even stupid in all other areas. Henri Mondeux, an illiterate sheeptender’s son, taught himself arithmetic by playing with pebbles. When presented to the Paris Academy of Science at the age of fourteen, Henri was asked, “How many minutes are there in fifty-two years?” After a few moments’ thought he correctly answered, “Fifty-two years of 365 days each are composed of 27,331,200 minutes and of 1,639,872,000 seconds.” Jacques Inaudi, the famous Italian wunderkind, was born in 1867. At seven, he could name the day of the week on which a given date fell (one of Billy Sidis’s abilities). He exhibited this skill in Europe and America along with his mathematical abilities, which included multi-plying five figures by five figures in his head. Like Sidis, many prodigies had photographic memories. Antonio da Marco Magliabechi, born in Italy in 1633, read with extraordinary speed and recall. Once, after reading a manuscript, the boy wrote it out in its entirety without missing a comma. When he was asked for a certain rare volume, Antonio replied, “There is but one copy in the world; and that is in the Grand Signor’s library in Constantinople, where it is the seventh book on the second shelf on the right hand as you go in.” Though most prodigies are limited to a single talent, William Sidis ranked with the handful who are well rounded and acquainted with the principles underlying their studies. One of the most famous such prodigies died in childhood. Christian Friedrich Heinecken, born in 1721 in Germany, was known throughout Europe as the Infant of Liibeck. It was said that when he was a year old he knew basic mathematics and all of the main events in the Bible. At three he was conversant with world history and geography and knew Latin and French. Shortly after an audience with the King of Denmark, Christian fell ill. He died at the age of four, soon after predicting his own death. Billy Sidis was often compared to one of the greatest mathematicians in history, Carl Friedrich Gauss—born in Germany in 1777—who ranked beside Archimedes and Newton. Gauss’s circumstances could hardly have been more different from Billy’s. His father was a poor, uncouth laborer who had no interest in raising a prodigy. It was with reluctance that he allowed his amazing son to be educated; he had wanted him to be a gardener or a bricklayer. Gauss’s mother was proud of her son, but only his uncle encouraged the growth of the boy’s mind. At three Gauss showed his precocity, correcting his father’s payroll computations. He soon coaxed his parents into revealing the letters of the alphabet, then taught himself to read. In adulthood, he liked to joke that he knew how to reckon before he could talk. Possessed of a brilliant gift for swift calculation, and the photographic memory so common to prodigies, Gauss stunned his teachers and flew through school. He soon mastered classical languages, literature, and philosophy. Gauss’s adulthood was a series of intellectual triumphs in both pure and applied mathematics and astronomy. What set him apart from so many prodigies (and caused Sidis-watchers to compare the two) was his spectacular ability to reason, to grasp principles, and to invent solutions to problems. Of all the child prodigies in history, though, one bears the most interesting comparison with Billy Sidis: John Stuart Mill, the renowned philosopher and economist. Mill was born in London in 1806, the son of the historian-economist-philosopher James Mill, who, like Boris Sidis, set out to educate his son according to his own theories. Those theories were similar to the Sidises’; cramming a child’s mind full of facts was anathema, stressing the value of reason and understanding was paramount. But the methods were vastly different. James Mill was a harsh, severe authoritarian who constantly criticized his wife and children. John Mill’s classical education began at three utilizing a method commonly used today but unknown in 1809—flash cards. His father wrote common Greek words with their English meanings on cards, and displayed them next to the actual things they represented. When John had mastered Greek vocabulary, he was given Aesop’s fables to translate (like Sarah Sidis, James Mill did not approve of fairy tales). Little John was soon reading heady material in voluminous quantities. Occasionally he was allowed a break from Plato, and then he would devour Robinson Crusoe. By the time he was eight he was writing steadily, reading Latin, and teaching his younger siblings—a task he hated, for he was accountable to his father for their failures. Mathematics followed, along with strict instruction in rhetoric and elocution. James Mill kept his son to a tight schedule, spending fully four hours each day working with him apart from the seven hours a day John studied alone. John was kept away from boys his own age, and he knew nothing of sports or games, prompting him to remark in later life, “I never was a boy.” John would eventually attribute to this lack of contact with other boys his physical awkwardness, lack of manual dexterity, and general lameness in dealing with the practical aspects of daily life. Surpassing even Leo Wiener in his sarcasm and relentless demands on his son, James Mill was the ultimate “creator parent.” He ruled his brood through fear, demanding the impossible and losing his temper when John did not perform up to his standard. James Mill wrote to his friend Jeremy Bentham, “If I were to die any time before this poor boy is a man, one of the things that would pinch me most sorely, would be the being obliged to leave his mind unmade to the degree of excellence of which I hope to make it.” James Mill showed his son no tenderness or love, and John’s mother was wrapped up in domestic chores. John wrote in his famous Autobiography, “I thus grew up in the absence of love and in the presence of fear.” The constant criticism left John with the feeling that he was a backward child who failed repeatedly. Small wonder then that when James Mill took his fourteen-year-old son for a walk in Hyde Park, the boy was shocked to be told that he was a prodigy. His father had carefully guarded him from all praise, and John never knew that he was in any way unusual. James Mill now enlightened the boy, at the same time telling him that he was to take no credit for his abilities. It had merely been John’s good fortune to have such an unusual father, one willing to take so much time and trouble over him. In sum, James Mill said, John should feel no pride when he knew more than others, only shame when he did not. Since John had no sense that he was special, he was surprised to find that people who had known him as a child had found him conceited. He wrote that this must have been because he was “disputatious,” never hesitating to argue. In this he was much like William Sidis. Mill claimed no one had ever planted in him the “usual respect” for adults. “My father did not correct this ill-breeding and impertinence.” Like Sidis, Mill could be dogmatic, a logical arguing machine with no sense of social graces. Like Sidis, he was unconcerned with his manners and appearance. John Stuart Mill dutifully performed the tasks of a prodigy: He wrote voluminously and effectively, he spoke impressively in debating societies. But in 1826, at the age of twenty, he broke down. He fell into a state of intense depression, a gloom so grim that he intended to commit suicide if he could not conquer it in a year. Mill’s nervous breakdown has been the subject of much speculation and analysis, with most biographers attributing it to the severe nervous strain he had been under since infancy and his suppressed feelings of rebellion toward his father. He told no one about his condition, and continued with the affairs of his daily life. Years later, he wrote this touching passage: “If I had loved anyone sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was. I felt, too, that mine was not an interesting, or in any way respectable distress. Advice, if I had known where to seek it, would have been most precious.… My father, to whom it would have been natural to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person to whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help.… My education, which was wholly his work, had been conducted without any regard to the possibility of its ending in this result; and I saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his plans had failed.” Mill’s depression lasted for six months. He conquered it with the mighty resolve to reject his father’s joyless, utilitarian outlook and to strive for the experience and expression of his emotions—long suppressed—as well as his intellect. He found his greatest inspiration and relief in the poetry of Wordsworth. John Stuart Mill went on to lead an influential life as a thinker and reformer, having thrown off to some extent the yoke of his father’s training. In his Autobiography, he is equivocal about the effects of his education. Though he did not love his father, he wrote, “I was always loyally devoted to him. As regards my own education, I hesitate to pronounce whether I was more a gainer or a loser by his severity.” Elsewhere, he took a stronger stand, saying that he owed all he had accomplished to his early training, which gave him “an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries.” Like his father, and like Boris and Sarah Sidis, he insisted that any normal child could duplicate his intellectual feats. At first glance the similarities between Mill and William Sidis may seem few: Boris was never the cruel taskmaster that James Mill was. But William, like John Mill, was to experience a crisis, and at nearly the same age; and William’s trauma, like Mill’s, would be resolved by a separation from the bondage of parental expectations. Is this merely the crisis of any adolescent? Perhaps. But John Stuart Mill and William James Sidis were two of history’s most extraordinary youths, their lives extreme, overblown versions of what millions of ordinary adolescents have experienced. They were both products of well-intentioned parents who saw their children’s achievements as extensions of their own success, whose children were their achievements to an exceptional degree. For William Sidis, it was Sarah rather than Boris who increasingly began to take on the oppressive role, who drove him further and further into the exercises of the mind and its manifold pleasures as an escape. 5 Utopian Dreams Immediately after the Math Club lecture William came down with flu. He was so newsworthy that his runny nose merited two stories in a single edition of The New York Times, one of them on the front page: SIDIS, Boy Prodigy Ill Attacked with Grip After His Lecture on “The Fourth Dimension” … The boy caught cold, and as he is frail and of an extremely nervous temperament, he took to his bed. It is thought that he will recover in another week or two, though he is gaining more slowly than the average boy. He had been weakened recently by overstudy in connection with a Latin and Greek grammar, which he was writing in addition to carrying on his work at Harvard. On page eight, a longer story of a more sinister cast: YOUNG SIDIS SUFFERS A BREAKDOWN From Boston comes the news—sure to excite a loud chorus of “I told you so!”—that young Sidis, the marvelous boy of Harvard, the astonishing product of a new and better system of education, has broken down from overwork and is now in a state of nervous prostration seriously alarming his family and friends. [If this report was not an exaggeration] the Sidis method … is fatally bad and the inventor stands condemned of something worse than failure. But it is not yet time to reach a conclusion. Young Sidis’s breakdown may be due less to the ardor of his studying or the extent of his precocious attainments than to the morbid excitements and excessive attention to which he has been subjected ever since he leaped into fame as a result of his lecture… It is not improbable that these people [Boris and Sarah] have pestered the child into a condition of psychasthenia that had nothing at all to do with his work, and that the mistake was not in teaching or letting him learn too much, but in not protecting him from the wearisome exclamations and admirations of injudicious observers. Indeed, no one had shielded William from the enormous publicity that attended his lecture. Reporters dogged his every step, pried into his personal life, pressured him to behave wondrously and perform marvels on command. Had his parents been wiser, they would have begun long ago to guard him from the detestable reporters. Now it was almost too late: The juggernaut of his fame was careening too wildly to be stopped. Boris told Billy about a time-honored method for dealing with reporters. “I have developed the perfect technique for handling these young men of the press, and it is unfortunate that you are too young to use it. They come to interview me, and I start them talking about themselves. I interview them. They go away in a glow, look me up in a newspaper morgue or in Who’s Who, and write a nice story about me.” Billy was too young to manage such a stunt. He may have been a genius, but he was not an adult emotionally. Furthermore, at least one of his character traits was already completely formed: He was an honest, straightforward boy, with not an iota of the ability to charm by manipulation. Public attention was wearing him down, and he had no notion of how to keep it at bay. The day after the “nervous breakdown” article appeared, The New York Times incredibly ran a third: FEAR Is FELT FOR SIDIS Harvard’s Boy Scientist May Never Resume His University Work William James Sidis … is still confined to the house. There are rumors in Cambridge that he will never return to his studies. His illness has been officially declared to be a severe attack of grip, but friends of the family have asserted that too great mental exertion has had a great deal to do with the boy’s sudden collapse. “My son is getting along all right,” said his father, Dr. Boris Sidis … “but I am not prepared to say when he will be able to return to his studies.” Dr. Sidis has been consistently non-commital [sic] regarding the boy’s illness, and has refused indignantly to discuss his son’s mental condition. Indeed, William did not return to school for several months. And by the time he did, the damage was done. It was widely believed that he had had a nervous breakdown, and when he returned to Harvard he was more of an anomaly than ever. From then on, any vacation William took was suspected to be evidence of another breakdown. The students whispered behind his back. These rumors were impossible to correct—the newspapers fed them gleefully, since they provided them with delicious copy rife with righteous choruses of I-told-you-so’s. Boris made a feeble, ineffectual attempt to clear up the matter when he addressed the Harvard Summer School Association and said, “Mental labor never results in nervous prostration; it is rather the lack of interest that causes a nervous breakdown.” He did not speak directly about his son, and did nothing more to correct the rumor that was to dog William Sidis for the rest of his life. William had taken only one course his first term at Harvard: advanced mathematics. Curiously, he received a mere B. He was having the same problem he’d had in grade school and high school—he was too smart. When lessons were slow for him, William just couldn’t sit quietly while his fellow students, all twenty-year-olds, sweated and struggled. In the words of one journalist, “In a class at Harvard where a formula was being explained the boy became bored and began to entertain himself by balancing his hat upside down on his head. This so distracted the rest of the class that he was asked to refrain. When asked to remain after class he said he couldn’t do it; so the class was excused ten minutes early and the professor made an effort to have the youth see that he had no right to do anything which interfered with the best conditions for the whole class. But the boy would not see it in that light, and would only say, ‘My father never told me that.’ To him, it was merely an infringement upon his rights.” Billy could not seem to understand that the “greatest intellect of the age” should not balance his hat upside down on his head in class. He believed he had a right to do as he pleased, provided he didn’t hurt anyone else. The concept of individual liberty fascinated him, particularly in its application to politics. Some of William’s early political thoughts appeared in newsprint. One Boston paper ran this story: HARVARD’S Boy WONDER WOULD CURB TRUSTS Eleven-Year-Old W. J. Sidis Discusses Relation of Gold Output to High Cost of Living Looking at it from a purely scientific and businesslike point of view, I agree with Professor Fisher of Yale, and Professor T. N. Carver, of Harvard, that the gold output had much to do with bringing on the present situation. But looking at it from the point of view of humanity this explanation offers but little solace to the man with an empty stomach and hungry family. The present big combinations … know no law or humanity in their attempt to line their pocketbooks at the expense of their less fortunate brothers. A financial panic is bound to come and very shortly, too, unless the Government steps in and brings to an abrupt stop the depredations of these so-called trusts and adopts drastic measures to prevent them from future lawless feeding on the resources of the whole people. While most eleven-year-olds were playing with train sets, William Sidis was theorizing about the economy and the fourth dimension. Over the next few years, the increasing breadth of his interests continued to set William apart from other prodigies—from politics to mathematics, languages to astronomy, streetcars to anatomy—it appeared that William was rapidly becoming a one-of-a-kind prodigy. At age thirteen, he composed an ode to the opening of the Cambridge-to-Boston subway. While public transit is certainly an odd choice of topic for verse, it must be remembered that the opening of the Boston subway was a much more important event than the average person today can imagine. Around 1913, only one in a hundred Americans had a car—and only two Harvard students out of a student body of 700. Buckminster Fuller, who entered Harvard that year, remembered the event sixty-nine years later as “the most fundamentally indicative of the technical changes occurring in the human environment.… It took only seven minutes to reach Park Street, Boston (then the end of that line). This was phenomenal … as compared to my grandfather’s and father’s all-day trips from Cambridge to Boston by horse and buggy or on foot.… I was tempted by and frequently sought entrance into the new age. I invented the HCKP Club, named for the Boston-bound subway’s terminals and way stations—Harvard, Central, Kendall, and Park.” Fuller and William Sidis crossed paths only briefly at Harvard. Had they known each other better they might have made fast friends, with their passionate shared interest in rapid transit. Certainly Fuller’s HCKP Club was the only Harvard club that could possibly have interested—or accepted—an oddity like William. Meanwhile, Billy was writing a serious political document, a constitution for a utopian society dubbed “Hesperia.” Fifty densely typed pages, consisting of “eight articles, fifty-nine sections, and five hundred and eighty-four provisions,” are written in a legalese so ponderous one would think only a certified lawyer could have produced it. Billy was becoming as fluent in the lingo of the law as he was in Greek, Russian, or Armenian. Structurally, Billy’s paper utopia is reminiscent of the United States Constitution. Philosophically, it is a complete departure from the vision of the founding fathers. Billy’s best of all possible worlds emerges as rigidly totalitarian, though he never uses that term. Nor did he explain why he named his utopia Hesperia. In both Latin and Greek, Hesperia refers to western lands—to the ancient Greeks, this meant Italy; and later, to the Romans, it meant Spain or regions beyond. The word was adopted into English, and came to be a poetic term for any idyllic, western locale. Its root word, hesperos, is Greek for “the evening star.” Billy was evidently indulging in a little word play—sidus is Latin for “star,” “constellation,” and “heavenly body,” as well as “fame,” “glory,” and “destiny.” Like any constitution worthy of the name, Hesperia’s begins with a preamble: We, the people of Hesperia, desiring that the law should allow full personal liberty to every person in all cases where the personal property rights of others are not violated, and wishing to organize a government to the end that this liberty may be better obtained, do hereby form the Community of Hesperia and establish this Constitution therefor. After this rather ordinary start, the eccentricity developed in true Sidis style. The Constitution, we are told, was completed “on this twenty-ninth of November in this year of the solar calendar one thousand nine hundred and fifty-eight, at thirty minutes after twenty-two o’clock.” Next is the legal definition of a day in Hesperia—it contains twenty-four hours, ends at midnight, and so on. Hesperian weeks are not so conventional. Instead of seven-day slices, Hesperia has five-day “quintads,” its days being named Primo, Altro, Trito, Quarto, and Quinto. Considerable space is devoted to the laws governing the proper construction of calendars and to naming the legal holidays—two of Billy’s childhood obsessions that persisted into adolescence. After these basics are set forth, an Orwellian tone begins to tinge the laws. Each inhabitant of Hesperia is designated a “name-number,” odd for men and even for women. Billy signed the Constitution, in his still-childish scrawl, “C Forty-One,” for reasons that remain obscure—it is unlikely that he had recruited forty Hesperian pilgrims from among his Harvard classmates. It was not easy to become a citizen of Billy’s utopia—naturalization policies were severe. A visitor who violated even a single law was ineligible for citizenship. Nor was being law-abiding enough—an aspirant to Hesperian citizenship had to pass an intelligence test, proving his familiarity with the Constitution’s laws and his ability to read and write English. Beyond these stipulations, the contents of this important test remain murky. Billy wrote: “The term ‘intelligence test’ shall denote any means whatever for finding out the amount of particular specified kinds of information or of reasoning ability, or both, possessed by a person.” In order to vote one took an expanded test, which required knowledge of still more laws. Any citizen who couldn’t pass the voting intelligence test was called a minor. Along with minors, “idiots and insane persons” were barred from voting. Elections in Hesperia are quirky. Anyone could nominate themselves for an office “and all voluntary candidates shall file a motto of not more than fifteen words expressing what they intend to do if elected, said motto being placed on the ballot below the name of the candidate who filed it.” Billy’s totalitarian leanings showed themselves throughout the Constitution. When a citizen dies, his property becomes that of “the Government of the Community.” Virtually everyone works in a Government Union—there are unions of every imaginable trade and occupation. All goods produced by an employee are therefore government property. Should a citizen start his own business, he risks losing it at a whim of the Government, which is empowered to “buy any business which profits the owner.” In return, the Government must pay the former owner forty times the average yearly net profit the business had earned. The employees are then required to join the appropriate union, where they are paid on a sliding scale in Government-issued “labor certificates,” the purpose of the sliding scale being to reward good work with higher pay. Other attempts at free enterprise are doomed to failure in Hesperia: the Government of the Community receives 80 percent of the royalties on a patented invention. Authors fare better than scientists, since they are allowed to retain 70 percent of their own royalties. If the Government approves an instructional book of any kind, the author may apply to the Government for a job teaching his specialty. Presumably, authors of novels or books of subway poetry receive no such privileges. Throughout the Constitution Billy vents his spleen at his favorite peeve, religion. Having long ago decided upon atheism, he remained as irascible as his father on the subject. “Religious beliefs,” he asserted, “are defined as beliefs, opinions, or creeds, which are in any way dogmatic or otherwise authoritative or which are in any way to be taken on faith or otherwise without criticism.” Billy does not discuss the separation of church and state in his constitution, since churches are simply not recognized. In the courtroom, religious beliefs provide no defense for a criminal. Here and there, in the midst of the dense field of provisions, articles, and bylaws, the occasional peculiar Sidisism pops up: The legislature is empowered to make laws “to prevent explosions of any unreasonable noise or disagreeable smell.” Out of the blue it is written: “No titles of nobility shall be granted by the Community of Hesperia.” Also, no law could regulate the choice of dress, except for prison uniforms and certain Union workers, who were required to wear “special Union badges, not to be more than thirty centimeters in height nor more than twenty centimeters in width.” And there is the irresistibly odd Article 3 of Section IV, which states simply, “No person shall be compelled by law to do impossibilities.” By far the strangest articles in the Constitution of Hesperia are those pertaining to sex, marriage, and the family. In William Sidis’s utopia, marriage is forbidden. No legal contracts between couples are binding, there is no community property, polygamy is completely legal. What is more, the Government has the right to prevent cohabitation provided “one of the parties is insane or criminal, or has not proper health conditions.” Those with “improper conditions”—venereal diseases—are dealt with in the following extraordinary manner: for such cases the men and women shall be placed in separate portions of the reserved land, the persons quarantined shall be excluded from cohabitation, and the Physicians’ Union shall be authorized to make such operations of any of such persons operated on incapable of producing a birth. Billy’s medieval solution to the problem of venereal disease was not motivated by sadism, but by naiveté. As he played happily at the vast game of creating rules for utopia, the citizens of utopia were only so many ants to be dealt with in whatever way best served the state. That enforced sterilization is inhumane probably never crossed Billy’s mind as he fit together the pieces of his jigsaw puzzle. This blindness is even more clearly illustrated in the Constitution’s dictates about child rearing: All minors shall, at some age less than eighteen months which may be specified by the Legislature, be given to the individual charge of some member of the Guardians’ Union, assigned in such a manner as the Board of Trade may provide. Male children shall be assigned to the charge of male guardians, and female children to the charge of female guardians. To qualify for the Guardians’ Union, one must have had experience caring for and training children, and “have a knowledge of subjects in general somewhat more than that required for the intelligence test for voting.” The child’s blood mother receives a “birth payment” for two years; guardians receive housing and salary for raising children, in addition to their regular Union wages. Minors also receive an allowance from the Government. It is the guardian’s job to take full charge of his minor and to prepare him to pass the intelligence test for voting. The teaching of religious beliefs to minors is strictly forbidden. Minors are not required to perform any services for their guardians, and the guardians are not allowed “to use authority in any way.” Dissatisfied minors may apply for a change of guardian. When a minor has passed the voting test (apparently this can be done at any age—child prodigies are allowed in Hesperia) or when his guardian has vouched for his ability to pass it, the minor is entitled to eight years of free education and / or trade school. Not surprisingly, Billy’s laws concerning sex crimes are eccentric. For example, “Any person who forces a man and a woman to cohabit … shall be punished by imprisonment for six years.” If a man rapes a woman, the punishment is the same. On the other hand, “Any woman who cohabits or attempts to cohabit with a man without his consent shall be punished by imprisonment for three years, and, in the case of a birth resulting therefrom, shall be deprived of the right to draw the regular disability insurance or birth payment … the child shall not be deprived of any money or other privileges.” So strong are Billy’s feelings on the subject of marriage that he cannot resist a parting salvo in his Constitution, an adamant, officious summing-up to protect future generations from the horrors of the nuclear family. From the height of his eleven-year-old soapbox, he pronounces: 7. No amendments shall be passed before the year of the solar calendar two thousand one hundred which shall in any way or manner make valid any agreements for cohabitation of a man with a woman, or which shall in any way or manner affect, change, or alter the fifth clause of Section VIII of the third Article of this Constitution, or which shall in any way regulate or restrict or authorize the regulation or restriction of cohabitation of a man with a woman except as mentioned in clauses 19, 20, and 21 of Section VII of the second Article and in clause 13 of Section VII of the third Article of this Constitution. In Billy Sidis’s utopia, there would be no binding agreements between the sexes, no shared property, no nuclear family. Boys like Billy would not be subjected to bothersome mothers, as long as there were male guardians to replace them. In utopia, there is no Harvard University, where proud parents could send their brilliant children. And presumably, in utopia, there are no reporters. By 1911, William was teetering on the edge of his endurance to public exposure. The average thirteen-year-old is awkward enough. William, constantly in the spotlight against his will, was more so. During this crucial period, the time of Billy’s delicate adolescence, Boris made a foolish move. He published a book that drew even more attention to his son. The controversial work, Philistine and Genius, was a scathing indictment of institutional education. Using his son as an illustration of his theories, Boris urged parents to teach their children themselves, rather than subject them to the dulling routines of the classroom. The message was strong, motivated by Boris’s profound social conscience; but in his determination to present his theories to the world, he ignored any damage he might do to his son. Now Billy appeared even more a guinea pig. The book caused a sensation. It was virulent and unrelenting in its criticism of every facet of grade school, high school, and university education. The present-day school system, railed Boris, should be abolished completely, America should be rid of “petty bureaucrats animated with a hatred towards talent and genius,” “the goody-goody school ma’am,” and “the educator with his pseudo-scientific pseudo-psychological pseudogogics…. Never in the history of mankind have teachers fallen to such a low level of mediocrity as in our times and in our country…. The time is at hand when we shall be justified in writing over the gates of our school-shops, ‘Mediocrity made here!’ ” Even worse than the system’s fostering of mediocrity was its suppression of genius. “We should remember that there is genius in every healthy, normal child.… Like savages, we are afraid of genius, especially when it is manifested as ‘precocity in children.’ ” Boris charged that schools regarded genius as a disruptive element. Educators expelled brilliant pupils because their presence upset the status quo. Quoting John Stuart Mill, Boris implored parents to “aim at something noble.” Regarding exactly how children could be raised to fulfill their latent nobility, Philistine and Genius was less specific than readers might have wished. However, Boris did lay down some basic guidelines: Children should be taught early the difference between good and evil. Reality should never be obfuscated: The child’s critical judgment and the courage of his convictions are paramount values. Fairy tales were a pet peeve of Boris and Sarah’s, promoting, they felt, a belief in the unreal and the mystical and making of the child’s soul “a dunghill full of superstitions and fear.” There should be no “jingles and gibberish, memorization of Mother Goose wisdom, repetition of incomprehensible prayers and articles of creed, unintelligent aping of good manners, silly games, and fears of the supernatural.” The most controversial question to be answered, of course, was when to begin teaching the child. The crucial period, Boris claimed, was between the second and third years. “To delay is a mistake and a wrong to the child.” The child who is badgering his parents with constant questions (no matter how embarrassing) should be indulged completely. “Nothing should be suppressed and tabooed as too sacred for examination.” “We claim we are afraid to force the child’s mind. We claim we are afraid to strain his brain prematurely. This is an error. In directing the course of the use of the child’s energies we do not force the child. If you do not direct the energies in the right course, the child will waste them in the wrong direction.… “We do not care to develop a love of knowledge in their early life for fear of brain injury, and then when it is too late to acquire the interest, we force them to study, and we cram them and feed them like geese. What you often get is fatty degeneration of the mental liver.” “The wrong direction” was that of “meaningless games and objectless sports.” If Boris hated fairy tales, he detested “silly games.” If he detested games, he despised sports. “The brutalities of football and prize-fights” were his greatest bugaboo, lowering Americans to the level of bloodthirsty spectators at a Roman circus. Finally, Boris stressed avoiding routines and habits, cultivating variety. In this way the child’s reserve energy would be stimulated. Ultimately, proper training could produce “a great race of geniuses, with powers of rational control of their latent, potential reserve energy. Without mentioning William by name, Philistine and Genius described a boy “brought up in the love and enjoyment of knowledge for its own sake.” After listing many of the boy’s accomplishments, Boris concluded: At the age of twelve the boy has a fair understanding of comparative philology and mythology. He is well versed in logic, ancient history, American history and has a general insight into our politics and the groundwork of our Constitution. At the same time he is of extremely happy disposition, brimming over with humor and fun. His physical condition is splendid, his cheeks glow with health. Many a girl would envy his complexion. Being above five feet four he towers above the average boy of his age. His physical constitution, weight, form and hardihood of organs far surpasses that of the ordinary schoolboy. He looks like a boy of sixteen. He is healthy, strong and sturdy. In an angry tirade Boris refuted the accusations that the boy had had a nervous breakdown, ranting about those conditions he felt do cause children to “crack”: “No doubt, the cramming, the routine, the mental and moral tyranny of the principal and school-superintendent do tend to nervous degeneracy and mental break-down. Poor old college owls, academic barn-yard-fowls and worn out sickly school-bats, you are panic-stricken by the power of sunlight, you are in agonizing, in mortal terror of critical, reflective thought, you dread and suppress the genius of the young.” In a veiled reference to William, Boris went so far as to admonish college professors who “expel promising students from the lecture-room for ‘the good of the class as a whole,’ because the students happen to handle their hats in the middle of a lecture.” Naturally, readers and reviewers recognized the son in the father’s prose—Boris was by now more famous as William’s father than he was for his own pioneering work. Sarah reflected forty years later: “Boris pulled down upon his stout head, and upon Billy who was so very young, the anger that comes from hurt pride. Educators, psychologists, editorial writers and newspaper readers were furious with him. And their fury was a factor in Billy’s life upon which we had not counted.” The publication of Philistine and Genius was not the only thing to put Boris’s name in the papers. Another remarkable event occurred in the Sidises’ busy lives, bringing them into the public eye. 6 Portsmouth With Boris’s growing reputation and prosperity had come an office on Beacon Hill and a burgeoning clientele that included several prestigious, wealthy citizens come to shed their neuroses, among them Martha Jones, the widow of an ale baron. Frank Jones, a rags-to-riches multimillionaire, had owned most of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In the manner of J. P. Morgan and Rockefeller, Jones had built a financial empire out of nothing. He owned booming businesses and hotels all over New England, but it was his brewery that was the foundation of his fortune. When he died in 1902, he left an estate valued at more than five million dollars. According to Helena Sidis, her father had successfully treated the entire Jones family, who were all “very nervous.” One of these grateful patients was Jones’s granddaughter, Mrs. Buck Whittemore, a Bostonian who socialized frequently with the Sidises. One evening in 1909, Martha Jones and her granddaughter offered an unsuspecting Boris and Sarah a unique gift as an expression of their appreciation—Maplewood Farms, the fabulous late-Victorian family estate in New Hampshire. The estate, if Boris and Sarah accepted it, was to become a unique sanctuary for patients beset with nervous ills, run entirely on Boris’s principles. Nothing of the kind had ever existed in America. After making their offer, the hostesses left Boris and Sarah alone to confer. Boris was adamant: “I will not take it. What do I know about running such a place? When would I find time to read or work or study if I had this big elephant to think of? What a headache it would be!” Sarah, who moments before had “felt like Cinderella when her fairy godmother turned the pumpkin into a coach,” was crushed by her husband’s obstinacy. Despondent, she gave the morose verdict to Mrs. Whittemore and Mrs. Jones. But the ladies would not take no for an answer. They gave Sarah a rousing pep talk, appealing to her boundless energy. “We know you, you can run it and never bother him. You can make a marvelous place for him to work and study, you can do it.” Still cowed by Boris’s reaction, Sarah wanted to know how many servants Frank Jones had required to run the estate. The task appeared to be financially beyond her. The Sidises had but six hundred dollars in the bank. “Sixty-five,” replied Mrs. Whittemore. “But I’ll show you how to run it with five. Let your husband stay in Boston for a month, and I’ll teach you everything.” Sarah returned to the dubious Boris and implored him to accept the estate, promising he need never give a moment’s thought to running it. Finally, Boris relented on one condition. “You will really give me your solemn word that I will never be bothered by it for one second?” Maplewood Farms was deeded to the Sidises for one dollar. They were to remain in Portsmouth for fifteen years. The donation of the estate was a newsworthy event. The newspapers called it “a sanitarium to cure the blues,” alternately describing Boris as “a psychological savant” and as “the father of the twelve-year-old prodigy”; and for one brief period, father and son were equally renowned. The purpose of the sanatorium, Boris told the press, was to treat a few of the “thousands upon thousands of persons in New England who are neither sane nor insane, neither well nor sick in the strict interpretation of these terms. These are cases of people who are not actually insane, but who are on the verge of that condition. As things are now, such cases are often sent to an insane asylum of a hospital.” The papers were intrigued by his plan “to treat persons who are suffering from obsessions and insistent ideas, in other words, persons who are hobby-ridden.” Boris announced his intention to begin with a dozen patients, confident that more would follow since “slight mental troubles are probably the most frequent of all American afflictions.” The first advertisement for the sanatorium ran in a 1910 issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology: DR. SIDIS’ MAPLEWOOD FARMS For the Treatment of Nervous Patients Only Under the personal care of DR. BORIS SIDIS, applying his special psychopathological and clinical methods of examination, observation, and treatment. Beautiful grounds, private parks, rare trees, greenhouses, sun parlors, palatial rooms, luxuriously furnished home-like surroundings, own milk supply and vegetables. One hour and a half from North Station, Boston, Mass. An attractive fifteen-page pamphlet was printed, featuring pictures of the estate’s thirty acres of fabulous ponds, statuary, and ornate interiors, and “a large, beautiful solarium for nervous patients.” It also promised crisp New Hampshire air, ocean views, and the magnificent White Mountains; a superb collection of flora and fauna, including trees imported from around the world; miles of walks spotted with ponds, fountains, and summer houses. What rich nervous patient could have resisted such a haven? Small wonder that Sarah, so recently a peasant in backwoods Russia, felt like Cinderella. Explaining his form of treatment in the pamphlet, Boris was nebulous as usual, promising “the latest methods” and “hygienic and dietetic regulation, electrotherapy and hydrotherapy.” A patient could go to Maplewood Farms to be cured of fears and anxieties, disturbances of memory, or psychosomatic maladies of the heart, stomach, intestines, or any other internal organ. The pamphlet concluded on a strikingly modern note: “The Sidis Psychopathic Institute has about it little of the atmosphere of the hospital. Full privacy is given to the patient, who can have the feeling of life in a country house, combined with the rest, care, and medical attendance afforded by a modern psychotherapeutic hospital and health resort.” The Institute readily attracted applicants, but Boris had decided to take on only eight or nine patients at a time. He wished to devote himself to each one, have time to enjoy their company and still leave himself leisure for research and writing. Boris chose carefully. Portsmouth was his home, and if a patient didn’t fit in, he would be treated in Boston instead. Only rarely was a patient turned out once admitted. Recalled Helena, “My father was very selective. He had his choice—or no one. He took people of above-average intelligence—he did not like stupid people. I never really knew any nuts until I got out in the world.” Naturally, treatment at the Institute was costly, upward of fifty to one hundred dollars a week for a minimum of four weeks. But Boris’s patients could easily afford it, and while he always had his pick of wealthy applicants, he often accepted a patient he liked free of charge. He was forever adding to the list of people who didn’t have to pay and absentmindedly neglecting to charge those who could, much to his wife’s dismay. His free-treatment list included professors, students, and again, numerous priests and rabbis. The Institute sported a colorful collection of characters. Mixed in with the nervous rabbis and students was a dazzling array of the nervous rich. All of the Sidises’ living relatives are reluctant to disclose the names of Boris’s patients—but all say they were powerful, famous, influential, “leaders of the world.” Sarah fondly remembered learning the stock market from patients who were nationally known brokers and bankers, and the dinner conversation with writers, historians, teachers, and philosophers was bracing. One nephew, Jack Goldwyn, remembered the visits of Dr. Herbert T. Kalmus, the man who invented the Technicolor process. Said Goldwyn, “He used to see Boris occasionally. He would always bring him a box of cigars and in it he’d put a couple of hundred dollar bills. And my aunt Sarah used to see that it was properly cared for. She was the brains. They had the leading minds of the country visiting them.” Many of Boris’s patients, once cured, remained devoted friends and returned to Portsmouth as guests. In addition to patients and visiting friends, a steady stream of relatives rolled through. All of the members of Sarah’s huge family had by then emigrated to the United States and had families of their own. Even in Brookline, Sarah had thrived on guests, and now she opened the gates of Portsmouth to her favorite siblings, nephews, nieces, and cousins. One and all, they were awestruck by the splendor of Portsmouth. Waxing fondly about his visits, Jack Goldwyn remembered “carpets that were almost up to your knees. We used to have our own cows and would make buttermilk; all kinds of fruits. A solarium with thick glass, about fifty feet tall. If Aunt Sarah had had a hundred people, she couldn’t have kept it up! Forty-four rooms and fourteen bathrooms! She usually had only one maid and one guy outside, and a cook.” Another nephew, William Fadiman, said, “It had one of the most beautiful greenhouses I’ve ever seen. Enormous. It had a grass tennis court—elegant in those days. Five or ten acres of walks. Lovely croquet grounds. The bedrooms had gold-leafed ceilings, they were not gilded. The beds were enormous. It was a palace of its kind.” The relatives’ feelings about the Sidises were mixed. Certainly they had “made good” in an extraordinary way, and were a source of pride to the Mandelbaums. While most of Sarah’s relatives were living typically impoverished immigrant lives, struggling to eat and to go to college, Boris and Sarah had achieved the highest academic honors, lived in a magical mansion, and hobnobbed with patients and friends who wore fur coats and drove steam-powered cars. Recalling his first visit, nephew Clifton Fadiman, later to become a well-known author and celebrity, said, “We were overwhelmed that three regular meals a day were served!” Naturally, Billy’s fame and achievements were a source of family pride as well, although privately some of the relatives nurtured their doubts. They speculated that his upbringing had made him into a freak and no good would come of it. Others were jealous as they watched their own sons and daughters go through the normal paces of childhood. What misgivings they had about Billy they kept to themselves. William and Clifton Fadiman, the sons of Sarah’s sister Bessie, came up from Brookline to stay at Portsmouth on several occasions. Clifton Fadiman described his family’s attitude toward his aunt and uncle: “Our relationship with the Sidises was a peculiar one for this reason—we stood in great awe of them. Because we understood that Boris was a good friend of William James. Our curiosity was largely the curiosity that poor people have about rich people. We were kind of proud of having such oddities in the family. They made good and he was a poor professor and they had this strange child.… And in a way we boasted about it. After all, we had nothing else to boast about. Having distinguished relatives of this sort awed us. There was a lot of family conversation about Billy—What will this poor Billy do now?’ and so forth. “Sarah was disliked by the whole family, but maybe because she was rich and all the rest of us were poor. But I think they disliked her because she had no kindness in her. She was one of five sisters, and the others, like my mother, were simple, kindly people. Whereas Sarah was an imperialist. My mother and Sarah disliked each other, though my mother, who was a pacific person, would never get into a fury of rage about it. She just didn’t like her. And she was afraid of her. So was I. So were we all. Because she seemed to have a hold on life that we didn’t have. Domineering. Pushy. Ill-mannered. Push her way into the conversation and take it over.” William Fadiman, now a successful film producer and novelist, agreed: “She was not the gentlest of people. She was a nervous, tense, busy person. She was short. She was assiduous. She was harried, and harassed, in running this establishment. Because they were dealing with people who were off their rockers and it wasn’t easy to know what the hell to do to please them at all times.” Another nephew, Joe Mandell, had similar memories of his aunt: “Her personality was absolutely … unbounded, if I may use the expression. She was autocratic, and very strong-willed. She was stronger than any other person I knew in my entire history. And I’m seventy-nine years old.” Especially offensive was Sarah’s insistence that her sisters raise geniuses too. This was a tribulation for Sarah’s nephew, Elliot Sagall, who first visited Portsmouth as a toddler. “I remember Sarah well,” he said more than sixty years later, “because I disliked her for some time. My mother would help me read the comic strips and Sarah came down once, when I was four or five, and said to me, ‘How ridiculous that she’s reading you the newspaper! Why don’t you read it yourself? Don’t you know how to read?’ ” Sarah launched a campaign to raise Elliot properly. She gave her sister a trunk full of toys that had belonged to Billy and Helena; they were early educational toys, building blocks with an architectural slant, very sophisticated for 1910. Sarah railed against the slowness with which Elliot was learning to read, and finally persuaded her sister to raise him according to Boris’s ideas. Her sister had scant defenses against Sarah. As Elliot put it, “She used to come over and my mother would quake. Mother would shiver with Sarah. She took command of the house. You couldn’t talk to her.” Sarah prevailed. “My mother, influenced by my aunt, taught me to read and write and do arithmetic before I was in the first grade. And I went into the first grade and I was bored. I’ve got memories of being in the back row of the first grade and doing crossword puzzles. I knew what was going on. And they would ask me to count on my fingers and I said no, I could count without my fingers. One of Sarah’s hang-ups about a child was that he shouldn’t learn how to count on his fingers, he should just go right into it.” When Dr. Sagall grew up and had his own children, he maintained contact with the Sidises. Sarah pressured him about the raising of his children, telling him not to waste time with baby talk. The subject became a source of intense conflict between them. “I was always frightened by the specter of William and his sister, Helena,” Elliot said adamantly. “I think that their parents’ theories ruined both of these children. My wife always said she hoped our children would be normal and not geniuses.” The same nieces and nephews who remember Sarah so vividly have but dim memories of Boris. According to William Fadiman, “The relationship between Boris and Sarah was remote and ambiguous. They were rarely seen together in what we called the public or living room. She was always busy doing something and so was he. Usually in his study. And she and he rarely appeared together as man and wife.… Boris had nothing whatsoever to do with anything which involved making the household run effectively, efficiently, or economically. He was an artist, scientist, practitioner at all times. She called him Dr. Science, and said, ‘Dr. Science, what would you like for dinner?’ God. He was a god figure. And of course, he was a god in the sense that he cured human beings. In those days particularly, long before good psychiatry and psychoanalysis, he was in there.” Jack Goldwyn had a unique relationship with Boris. Jack was two years younger than Billy, and Boris treated him as a second son, tutoring him and eventually putting him through medical school. During Jack’s first idyllic vacations at Portsmouth, he rarely saw Billy, who was away at Harvard. He remembers a Boris that no one else spoke of, certainly not Billy or Helena. “My uncle was so affectionate. We used to greet each other with a hug. My aunt never could show affection. Some people are not too demonstrative. But my uncle was so tender with me. He was the kindest man I’ve ever known, and the most brilliant.… He always used to come up with little stories and jokes. He autographed a couple of books ‘to my dearest boy.’ We used to make up songs and sing them together. We had a hell of a lot of fun.… We used to go walking through the parks, with gorgeous statues from all over the world, made with the finest imported marble. We’d walk through these parks and discuss logic, and do problems in geometry. We discussed his total disagreement with Freud’s ideas, and I got interested in psychiatry. And we’d sing little Russian songs. And then he’d say, ‘Now, Jack, keep away from your aunt because if she sees you she’ll put you to work. So we’ll keep away from her. You let her alone. Let her do what she wants.’ Jack, like the rest of his cousins, was expected to be a playmate to Billy when he was home from school. But most of them found him unapproachable. Recalled William Fadiman, “I never saw him playing games. He was always reading. He was a very serious kid. He was a genius, and to be a genius you have to do a lot of work too, you know.” As often as not, the cousins wound up as playmates to the patients of Maplewood Farms instead. They swam with them, took walks, and played croquet and tennis. Most of the patients were so pleasant, cultured, and witty that an outsider might easily mistake them for guests at an exclusive country club. Sarah was once taken aside by a judge who had been a patient for a week; he whispered to her, “I don’t mean to be impertinent, but do you mind telling me where you keep your other patients?” The patients were not without their eccentricities, however. William Fadiman recalled the portly Bostonian who suffered from an imaginary pregnancy. Each time Boris cured her of the symptoms, they recurred four months later. She was a puzzle to William: “She never ate any food, and she was quite fat. I was a little boy, and couldn’t ,quite understand how she existed, until one day I got to her bedroom out of curiosity. There was a very famous candymaker called Page and Shaw in Boston, and this woman used to order by mail eight-, ten-, twelve-pound boxes of candy which she ate night and day. There were many odd people there but none of them were of a nature that would cause any fear. They weren’t lunatics in our sense of the word. They weren’t even psychotic, they were neurotics, and a lot of them were rich women who had nothing to do with their lives. It was kind of a weird place—even weird for Portsmouth, New Hampshire.” Presiding over this bizarre country club cum sanatorium was Sarah, who seemed always to be in ten places at once. “New England and I,” she pronounced, “were made for each other.” The Whittemores and Joneses had been as good as their word, instructing Sarah in every detail of Portsmouth’s upkeep. They gave the Sidises a pair of horses and a carriage, a little money, and a Ukrainian hired hand named Vasil. Vasil was as much a workaholic as Sarah, and the two of them combined forces to keep the vast estate afloat. Vasil taught Sarah to upholster sofas, prune trees, paint houses, and can fruit. In return, Boris taught Vasil to read and Billy taught him math. Sarah wrote in her memoirs, “There are times when I doubted that Billy Sidis had any claim to genius, and I have never doubted that Vasil was a genius.” Sarah managed all of Portsmouth’s finances. She governed the estate with the same indomitable energy she had used to run her family’s home in Russia. She was up at five every morning, working in the greenhouses, supervising the groundskeeping, the stables, the canning, the cleaning, the cooking, the patients’ needs. In the opinion of Jack Goldwyn, “My aunt was an absolute genius. She harvested Boris’ talents properly—she had him organized. I remember that they had one cook and a maid. And they both walked out while my aunt was entertaining fifteen people for dinner. And she got in that kitchen and dissected all those chickens. She prepared the whole thing for these very important people. And not a bit of dirt in the kitchen.” Jack Goldwyn’s wife told similar tales: “Auntie came in one day when we were just married and visiting Portsmouth. I was dusting something and she said to me, ‘Now Polly, I want to show you the quickest and best way to dust.’ I said, ‘Of course.’ She said, ‘Now don’t go to the right of the room when you first start. Go to the left and go all the way around.’ Now, I didn’t know whether it was true—it didn’t matter, I did it that way. And then I was cleaning some green beans that night for dinner, she took them from me and said, ‘I’m going to show you how to clean those quickly.’ She had short cuts to everything. You never saw a woman as quick. The cook would be thinking about making a pie, and Auntie had picked the fresh strawberries and rhubarb and had it in the oven. And you never in your life tasted a pie like that!” Mrs. Whittemore taught Sarah to drive, and soon she was buzzing into town in her new Reo. Boris was rarely seen by the locals, who regarded him with a mixture of awe and resentment. They whispered that the Sidis Psychopathic Institute was “a nuthouse” run by a Jew, and they had heard rumors about his strange son. Unlike the estate’s previous owner, Boris employed only a few of the townspeople, which led to some sour feeling. Sarah was oblivious to any such tensions. She socialized with members of Portsmouth’s high society, and felt confident that her New England virtues made her popular: “They said that I could sweep five miles of walk before breakfast,” she wrote. “They liked it when I pruned our trees. They liked it when I painted the City Club’s big hall in which we staged plays.” One of the Sidises’ immediate neighbors remembered Sarah as ‘just an average middle-aged woman. She didn’t dress up. She wasn’t at all stylish. It was apparent she was a Jewish lady—her hair was dark. I’d often see her working, digging up the garden.” All of Sarah’s efforts to the contrary, no one in Portsmouth could have failed to notice that the Sidises were an odd family. Boris Sidis hypnotized rich neurotics; his son discussed vector analysis and subway transfers; his wife had the disconcerting habit of sitting on coffee tables. “She never sat on chairs,” groaned a nephew, “I was always afraid that the coffee table would collapse.” They really were a most unusual family. Boris was not greatly interested in Portsmouth’s social life. He was very hard at work. He slept little. When not treating patients or writing, he studied Einstein’s equations or advanced Euclidean geometry, which he and Billy discussed for hours, although Boris was not up to his son’s level. Boris’s literary output continued unabated. In 1909, he published An Experimental Study of Sleep, a technical work that described his further inquiries into the nature of his pet “hypnoidal state,” and in 1911, Philistine and Genius appeared. In 1913, he brought out one of his most popular and widely reviewed books, The Psychology of Laughter. Boris’s steady stream of scholarly works were read widely by his peers. As irascible as ever, he continued to inveigh against Freud. A review of his 1914 book, Symptomatology, Psychognosis and Diagnosis of Psychopathic Diseases, in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology concluded: “Sidis knows what he wants to say. He knows how to say it. He makes sure you understand him. There is no ambiguity. He strikes straight out from the shoulder. He deals hammer blows. He pounds his ideas into you. For fear that you may fail to grasp his meaning, he beats his more important conclusions into you in italics. The reader can almost imagine him delivering his propositions in true Rooseveltian style.” Despite his prodigious output, Boris was frustrated creatively. He longed to write philosophy; he still read Plato and Aristotle late into the night. But he could never have supported his family as a professional philosopher; and he was beginning to have trouble with Sarah because he devoted so much time to writing. There was a certain dichotomy in her thinking about Boris. On the one hand, she worshiped “Dr. Science”; on the other, as Helena put it, “She had no appreciation of writing—though she would never have said that. Her idea of work was physical labor. Mowing the grass tennis courts. If my father wrote a book, that wasn’t work. She wanted him not only to write all those books, to treat the patients, and do all the work connected with it; she also wanted him to supervise the groundwork, the house, etc. She actually complained that he didn’t work. But I think she was envious of the fact that he wrote—she never liked taking a backseat.” Sarah’s promise to Boris—that he would never lift a finger to oversee the running of Portsmouth—was being observed, but with a certain bitterness. If she didn’t dare ask her husband to do the yard-work, she had no qualms about asking others. Her sister Bessie Fadiman arrived with a group of relatives and friends one summer, and in no time Sarah had them weeding the driveway. When Boris hired a group of local Russians and Lithuanians to work on the house, he would chat with them during their break in Russian—until Sarah’s appearance put the inevitable damper on the conversation. As Helena described it, “My mother was the one that bossed them around. That spoiled it—as soon as she got around anyone she’d start to give orders, make them do the dirty work. People didn’t want to put up with it. She had difficulty getting along with the patients, too.” Sarah had painted herself into an unfortunate corner. She probably thought that nothing would get done without her overseeing, that this enormous estate would go to seed—and indeed, she was probably right. Boris was hardly the type to manage the money and the estate properly; the job did call for a human dynamo like Sarah. But her abrasive, nagging, complaining manner offended almost everyone. Sarah had changed. The high-spirited, charming schoolgirl in pigtails was long vanished, reappearing only at dinner parties and social functions. Maplewood Farms was in many ways the fulfillment of Sarah’s dreams, but the strain of running the estate had taken a toll. Increasingly, she lost her temper at anyone and everyone. Helena recalled, “I was afraid of her. She would fly off into these rages, about little things. It took so much out of me. It took a lot out of everybody. My brother would say that she just completely wore him out. And the next minute, she would be perfectly calm. She had wonderful blood pressure. And she never had ulcers. She would be able to go into these rages, tire everybody else out, and she would be perfectly calm at the end. Then she would sit down and play solitaire, or go out driving. A friend once told me my mother reminded her of William James’ two classifications of people—one is strenuous and the other is everybody else. And she said, ‘Your mother is a strenuous.’ ” A lot of Sarah’s steam blew off in Billy’s direction. She nagged and criticized him over trivialities, increasing the strain between them. To observers they appeared remote, rarely speaking to each other. When she was old enough, Billy confided in Helena that it made him miserable to listen to Sarah’s complaints about their father. As she scrubbed the floors of the estate, she complained that she hated the drudgery, that Boris didn’t work. All Billy could think of as a reply was that Sarah Sidis, M.D., didn’t have to scrub floors. Considerable tension was created by Boris and Sarah’s attitudes toward “woman’s work.” Although the couple had met over books, and although Boris had taught his wife, he took a dim view of women’s education. Surprisingly, Sarah at times agreed with this point of view. “Time after time,” said Helena, “I’d hear my mother talking with a woman friend, saying that if a woman stoops to professional work, it affects her husband. He doesn’t work as hard.” (Perhaps this is why, despite Sarah’s extraordinary accomplishment—becoming a doctor at Boston University—she never chose to practice medicine. But Helena claimed that she never really cared for it. Furthermore, she was envious of Boris and Billy for having gone to Harvard, while she had gone to B.U.) These factors led to a peculiar choice on Boris and Sarah’s part. Although they had raised a genius and preached that all children should be reared as Billy had been, they did not educate Helena. She was not sent to school, had no tutors, and received meager education at home. While this was not uncharacteristic of typical parents in the first decades of the century, it was astonishing in the context of their freethinking, outspoken idealism. The parents of Billy’s prodigy class-mate Norbert Wiener raised their two girls exactly the way they raised Norbert, and with similar, if less spectacular, results. Adolf Berle, the third Harvard prodigy, had two sisters who were also raised to be prodigies. His sister Lina, for example, was educated in several languages by the age of three. Ironically, Adolf Berle, Sr., told the press, “Mind you, there was no ‘forcing.’ We simply acted on the principle that Dr. Sidis has set forth—namely, that the child is essentially a thinking animal.” Why, then, was Helena so singularly ignored as an intellectual being? Her parents offered little explanation. The usual rationalization they gave was her delicate health. As a premature baby, she began life precariously and led a sickly childhood plagued with operations, the first at the age of six. Indeed, Boris was advised by his friend Teddy Roosevelt to treat Helena as Roosevelt’s own father had treated him —to encourage her to play outside and be as active as possible instead of studying. She could always make up the book work, Roosevelt had insisted. Sarah wrote: “The woods around Portsmouth, the snow on which she so gracefully skiied, and her father’s library, were Helena’s school. The school superintendent was a friend of ours, and he used to ask it as a favor that we send Helena to school, if only for a few hours a day. But we told him she had been a frail baby, and we thought that a life out-of-doors was best for her.” So while Billy spent no time outdoors, Helena became a tomboy. Boris told his daughter that if she had not been born a woman, she would have been very intelligent. And Helena was exceptionally bright. With Billy’s help she taught herself to read, and Boris encouraged her to choose advanced books. Occasionally she read children’s books, though Boris disapproved: “You want to read that? Well, it’s up to you.” Sarah gave her daughter a few lessons in geography and history, and made a slight attempt to teach her mathematics. But when Helena told her parents, “I hate arithmetic worse than prunes,” they let it go at that. Helena enjoyed her situation enormously—she did whatever she wanted. Aside from her frail health, her mother’s nagging was her only source of woe. Boris was usually there to defend her against Sarah, and little Helena sometimes returned the favor. When Boris burned his hand and swore vehemently, Sarah reprimanded him. Helena rushed to his defense, saying, “You mustn’t blame him for swearing, Mother. He is a man and can’t cry!” From a very early age, Helena and Billy formed an alliance that would last a lifetime. Billy taught his six-year-old sister to write, regaled her with tales of Harvard, and explained theories of physics to her that she could not possibly have understood. When Helena was six and Billy sixteen, he asked her for advice about something. She replied, “But, Billy, I’m a child. Why do you ask me?” He answered, “You have good common sense.” And so Helena’s education advanced haphazardly. When she was eight, Boris asked her to write a composition for him. Then he asked her to write another and decreed, “That’s very good. You don’t have to study anymore, because you can write.” He suggested a few books —Aristotle, Plato, and Rousseau’s Emile—and seemed satisfied that she was garnering a suitable liberal education. In spite of the fact that he didn’t see fit to educate her, Boris and Helena had a close relationship. Helena remembers: “My father was very strict when I was sick in bed so many times, and he would be rather stern. He would say, You must learn to depend on yourself. I don’t want you to be like your mother.’ My mother came from an enormous family, and she had a lot of people around.” Helena duly became an independent little girl. Billy, Helena, and Boris would discuss politics, languages, mathematics, ideas. “My father and brother used to have a lot of talks together, and my mother was left out … she just didn’t fit in. And I did even though I was much younger.” The more her family regarded Sarah as a harridan, the more they clung to their solitary pursuits or their common intellectual amusements to avoid her nagging. Helena remembers a vicious cycle beginning when she was very young: The more they excluded Sarah, the more irritating she became; the more she irritated them, the more they excluded her. “We should have included my mother,” said Helena. “We just didn’t. We assumed that she didn’t have a sense of humor. Years later I realized that in her own way, she did have one.… It wasn’t quite the sense of humor that my father, my brother, and I had, but it was a sense of humor.” In her memoirs, Sarah wrote nothing of this. She made but one brief comment about family life at Portsmouth. “None of us were ever anything but happy in our life at the Institute. Those New Hampshire woods and gardens, snows and summers, are the background for memories that were for us unalloyed love.… The full summer of my life were those years at Portsmouth.” 7 The Perfect Life In his thirteenth year, Billy went to board at a Harvard dorm. It was probably a move based largely on practicality, aimed at saving Billy the long commute from New Hampshire to Boston. Very little is known about his experiences in the dorm, but they must have been hellish. He had never been on his own before, and everything was against him. A complete freak in the eyes of his fellow students, he had none of the social graces, no interest in sports or girls, and was several years younger. Furthermore, Harvard itself oozed a special brand of snobbery. In the words of Norbert Wiener: “I had felt myself to be a misfit [at Harvard] from the first. Harvard impressed me as being overwhelmingly right-thinking. In such an atmosphere, a prodigy is likely to be regarded as an insolence toward the gods. My father’s publicly announced attitude toward my education had aroused hostility among his colleagues which made my lot no easier. “I had hoped to find a free intellectual life among my fellow students…. But in the Harvard order of things, a gentlemanly indifference, a studious coldness, an intellectual imperturbability joined with the graces of society made the ideal Harvard man.” How much the worse for Billy, in the brighter glare of publicity his father attracted—and how he differed from the ideal Harvard man. Disaster seemed certain. To make matters worse, rumors of Billy’s nervous breakdown had continued to dog him since his return to Harvard. Now that his permanent home was in a sanatorium, the confusion grew greater. When Billy went home to Portsmouth at vacation time, it was generally rumored that he was being committed to an asylum. In response to all these pressures, Billy was growing increasingly eccentric. Thought to be subject to fits of insanity and recurrent nervous breakdowns, he was horribly ostracized. Not surprisingly, he became the butt of practical jokes. Radcliffe girls pretended to flirt with him, and the hapless genius would brag about it to his classmates. A few practical jokers even composed fake love letters proposing marriage; he never caught on to the gag. One of Billy’s roommates was the playwright S. N. Behrman. Forty years later, Behrman still remembered that a group of boys had ridiculed Billy because the young Einstein couldn’t make change for a phone call. This incident so severely humiliated and angered Billy that Boris decided it was time to move his son out of the dormitory and into an apartment of his own near the college. Sarah would drive down to Boston on Fridays, pick Billy up, and bring him back to Portsmouth for the weekends. He was out of the dorms, but his trials were hardly over. Some fifty years later another renowned classmate, Buckminster Fuller, recalled: “Most students considered him a freak… His family put the young man at a considerable disadvantage by insisting on dressing him in very short kids’ pants even though he was my height at eleven. Our class used to boast about him, because he regularly lectured to the Harvard Mathematics Department. Some of us thought he was being dangerously overloaded, and he showed some signs of distress, but no one imagined anything but the greatest success for him.” During his sophomore year, Billy donned his first pair of long pants. The newspapers called it “a college event.” Derisive articles continued to appear in the press throughout Billy’s stay at Harvard. One of the harshest appeared in 1912 in a prominent educational journal, the Pedagogical Seminary. Written by Katherine Dolbear, the article attacked Harvard’s trio of prodigies, relying heavily on interviews with their peers. Dolbear attacked Billy for being disrespectful of his elders, egotistical, and high-strung: That he is egotistical is shown from the fact of his remarking: “I wonder whether the school children in future generations will celebrate this as a holiday because it was the day on which I began the study of the physical sciences.” That he is of an imaginative and nervous temperament was shown in his early childhood. It is reported that a guest was sitting in the room near the boy, and she thoughtlessly started to tear up a piece of paper, when the child sprang upon her fiercely. His mother explained that to him all things were alive and that tearing paper was hurting something. The effect of his education seems to have been to produce a boy who can do wonderful, even brilliant reasoning in mathematics but has difficulty in transferring that reasoning power to everyday affairs. Norbert Wiener, who received similar treatment in his segment, was completely humiliated. In adulthood he wrote, I had long been aware that my social development was far behind my intellectual progress, but I was mortified to find how much of a bore, boor and nuisance Miss Dolbear’s record made me out to be. I had thought that I was well on my way to the solution of my problems. Miss Dolbear’s article made me feel like the player of Parcheesi whom an unfortunate cast of the dice has sent back to the beginning of the board. I showed the article to my father, who was as furious as I had been humiliated. Father sent a letter of protest to be published in the next number of the Pedagogical Seminary, although this did not serve any particular end. Our family lawyer was unable to give us much satisfaction in the matter. An attempt to seek a legal remedy would have subjected me to publicity far more dangerous and vicious than anything to which I had yet been exposed. Humiliation followed the boy geniuses everywhere, dogged the steps of their every intellectual triumph. Not the least of their problems was Harvard’s anti-Semitism, which was considerable. Many undergraduates favored the quotas limiting the number of Jews. As one student put it, “In harmony with their policy of getting all they can for as little as possible, Jews incidentally take a majority of the scholarships. They deprive many worthy men of other races a chance.” Jews were considered too intelligent—they kept the level of scholarship too high, did too well on exams, and made the best grades. Jews were barred from membership in many of the prestigious Harvard clubs, and were regarded with bitterness and envy. As caricatures of those despised Jewish traits—intellectual competence and academic achievement—the prodigies were doubly shunned. As Norbert and Billy suffered toward graduation, they were never allowed to forget that there was to be no rest for the weary. As The New York Times pointed out, “Even after they complete their college careers the eyes of the world will be upon them, and the effect of the several theories involved in their education will be universally studied.” What Boris and Sarah thought of their son’s life in this period, or how much they understood it, is not known. Billy never spoke of it for the rest of his life, nor did Boris. Sarah gave the Harvard years scant attention in her memoirs, writing only: “About a college education, Boris had very definite and violent theories, as he did about primary education. And Billy was a straight product of these theories. Boris’s phobia was specializing. He said, ‘We teach our doctors medicine and our lawyers law, and we set our poor little musical prodigies to practice six hours a day so they may delight roomfuls of people. We don’t seem to care that we make them educated boobs.’ “Though the publicity embarrassed Billy he enjoyed his four years at Harvard. He took much mathematics under his and our friend Huntington, and he studied a good deal of Greek. But his favorite subject became American history, and he announced before he got his B.A. degree that he wanted to be a lawyer.” Billy’s grades are the only continuous record of his years as a Harvard undergraduate. In his first year, 1909-1910, he took only math, and received a B. The next year, when he was twelve, he got two A’s—in astronomy and math—and four B’s, in math, philology, and two astronomy courses. The following year, 1911-1912, he shifted the balance with three A’s in physics, math, and French, and only two B’s, in astronomy and math. His junior year, when Billy was fourteen, he assumed a massive course load—seven subjects—and his grades took a strange turn. As usual, he picked up two A’s in his best subjects, mathematics and French. But for the first time he received C’s, four of them. He got a C in English; and it is difficult to guess why, unless he was trying to teach an unreceptive professor his method of revising English grammar. His C in Economics 1 may have had similar origins—perhaps he was trying to impress upon the class his unorthodox views of a utopian society, or maybe recruiting members for a Hesperian club. Especially bizarre were his mediocre philosophy grades, two C’s and a B. For a lad more learned in the Greek philosophers than any of his fellow students, it is hard to understand what Billy could have done to avoid racking up A’s. Perhaps it was one of these classes in which, utterly bored, he balanced his hat on his head. But in his senior year he was back on familiar ground, taking A’s in French, math, and physics, and a B in the History of Science. He completed his last year’s coursework extraordinarily quickly, but had to wait for his class to catch up before he could graduate and receive his B.A. Despite his heavy course load, Billy found time for constant reading and writing, which he still executed in his strangely childish scrawl. In 1914, at age sixteen, he published his first piece, and it did not disappoint the prodigy-followers. His eight-page essay, “Unconscious Intelligence,” appeared as an appendix to his father’s book, Symptomatology, Psychognosis and Diagnosis of Psychopathic Diseases. It was Billy’s sole venture into his father’s field. The essay championed the then popular theory that the sub-conscious was an “unconscious intelligence.” With staggering sophistication, Billy used brilliant semantics to prove that the subconscious is conscious. The perfection of his logical thinking is shown in the article’s second paragraph, wherein he discusses the question of conscious versus unconscious intelligence: The first of these methods [for proving that the subconscious is an “unconscious intelligence”] is the method of isomorphism. This depends on the supposition that, if in two hypotheses the consequences are the same, the two hypotheses may be considered as identical for all purposes of further reasoning. In other words, there is no use in drawing arbitrary distinctions where none really exist. When we reason from a hypothesis, its consequences come into play at every step of the reasoning; and if those consequences are the same, all reasoning will be the same, and therefore no difference can really be drawn. Again, a question of decision between two theories whose consequences are and must be the same must necessarily be one where no evidence is obtainable, and is therefore a question which cannot be discussed at all. It is like the old question of the man and the monkey: “If a monkey is on a pole, constantly facing a man who walks round the pole, has the man gone round the monkey?” On June 24, 1914, William James Sidis graduated cum laude from Harvard University (rumor had it that his mother was furious it was not a magna cum laude). Though the papers now dubbed him “the most remarkable youth in the world,” Billy had no intention of flaunting it. Acidly he told reporters, “I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life is to live it in seclusion. I have always hated crowds.” Shortly after his graduation, Billy did something highly uncharacteristic—he granted an in-depth interview to a reporter from the Boston Herald. Perhaps he wanted to set the record straight at last. The Herald story took up two full pages; it flourished an enormous reproduction of his Harvard graduation photo showing a well-groomed, stocky, good-looking Billy with warm eyes and a Mona Lisa smile—the very picture of wholesome all-American youth. Gone was the skinny, suspicious boy of previous photographs. In his place was a sturdy, apparently self-confident young man. He was William now, not Billy (except to his family); and despite all his trials and humiliations, he seemed to have his mind made up about life. This fellow would not buckle. He would seek out his “perfect life” in seclusion, living by rules of his own making, a code that he revealed in all sincerity. The headlines read: HARVARD’S BOY PRODIGY VOWS NEVER TO MARRY Sidis Pledges Celibacy Beneath Sturdy Oak, Has 154 Rules Which Govern His Life, “Women Do Not Appeal To Me” He Says; He Is 16. On either side of the photograph were large cartoons: William beneath a tree pledging never to marry; William riding a trolley; William munching crackers and milk; William in his room hanging his ties on the Venus de Milo. William hated the cartoons. He had finally been reduced literally to a comic character, a freak so bizarre he merited his own cartoon strip. Yet despite its sensational presentation, the article is enormously revealing—for once, something of the real William James Sidis peeks from the quotes. William received the reporter in his third-floor apartment at 51 Brattle Street. “The newspapers,” he explained, “have said a great many things about me, most of which have been untrue. I have never talked for publication. I am averse to it.” The piece is bursting with fascinating Sidis trivia. The child marvel relaxes by holding a pillow against his cheek; he eats crackers and milk for breakfast, crackers and cheese for lunch, and crackers and milk for dinner; he dislikes flowers and music; his favorite diversion is “trolling,” riding around on a trolley car. ( Just for the record, when asked on what day Christmas would fall in the year 2011, Billy put his hands to his head, paced a moment, and gave the correct answer.) He was, in the reporter’s opinion, “an egoist.” But it was not tidbits like these that gave the article its sensational value and caused it to be much quoted. It was the boy wonder’s sex life revealed. William told the reporter of a solemn vow of celibacy; of the medal he had struck to commemorate his decision, which he wore suspended from his coat. Once a year, he explained, he returned to the oak in Cambridge beneath which he had taken his vow. He displayed a photograph of the tree, which he carried in his pocket. His pockets must have been bulging, for he was never without the code of rules (154!) that he had written to guide his conduct. All this he explained in detail: “I resolved never to marry following a certain episode that took place in my life. A woman had something to do with it. My oath was taken beneath an oak tree, after I had reasoned the whole thing out.” The mathematical marvel drew from his pocket a silver medal bearing a large star in the centre with the words around the outer edge of the coin: AUGUST SIXTEENTH. That was the date in 1912 when the vow was made. “In addition I have many other things to remind me of my pledge,” he said. “For instance, see that automobile number plate,” he pointed to an ordinary plate resting on the marble mantel with the blue enamel number conspicuous. “That number plate,” he said, “is another reminder of my vow. These rules help me to keep this pledge, which is the most important of all. I was not too young to realize its importance when I made it. In fact, by making the pledge at an early age and safeguarding it with so many different rules and reminders, I have easily fixed it in my consciousness as a fundamental rule of life. Of course before I made it I became fully satisfied that it was the best thing for my happiness. Thus far it has proven so. I have no desire to marry and have children. “Many of my rules are checks rather than hard and fast laws. They act as safety valves. They can be evaded without harm. Yet each one is valuable in helping maintain my individual theories. “For instance, one rule declares that I shall never call upon a girl. On the other hand, I can call upon a girl’s brother. No rule is so arbitrary as to be irksome. “When I am in doubt about anything I draw out my rules and glance them over. The guidance is sure to be there.” Young Sidis admits that his rule code, though invaluable to his own conduct, may be of little or no value to others. “Reason and inclination play synonymous parts in our lives,” he declared. “The reason I decided upon celibacy was because I had made up my mind that sentiment would make too much of an upset in my life. I have tried to strengthen my resolve in many ways; I have not the least fear I shall break it.” In proof of his strength of mind, young Sidis declared that he has already declined six proposals of marriage since he made the vow and will heartlessly refuse all that are forthcoming in the future. “Women do not appeal to me,” he said. “You speak of a pretty woman and it seems to mean something to you, it means nothing to me. I cannot understand what a person has in mind when declaiming on what they term beauty. “The word art means very little to me. Why will people waste so much energy on statuary, painting, drawing, etching and the like? I fail to comprehend the reason for art because I know absolutely nothing of the thing that is termed artistic in art.” When reminded that there are two statues in his apartments, one of a Venus de Milo, the other of a Psyche, the youth shrugged his shoulders in scorn. “This is my mother’s apartment,” he said. “At least she leases it and pays for it so she has the right to bring such things here. They have no interest to me—they mean nothing. I use that one (indicating the Venus) to hang my neckties on.” William went on to explain more of his philosophy and “rules “I do not believe in smoking or drinking; not because they are wrong, but because they have no particular interest to me. I have never read the Bible. I don’t swear, but I can’t see why others should not if they choose to do so. It doesn’t mean anything, anyway…. “I have a quick temper; ergo, I will not mingle a great deal with the fellows around me, then I shall not have occasion to lose my temper.” He follows the rule. He is naturally shy of strangers; yet his convictions are so deep-rooted that it takes a great deal of convincing to make him change an opinion. “To make me believe a thing,” he said, “you must show me.” Young Sidis is completely opposed to all forms of athletic play. It is what he terms unnecessary work. One of his rules is against all “unnecessary work.” On politics: “In a way I am a Socialist; that is on the same principle that a man belonging to a labor union is a Socialist. No one should be dependent upon the good-will of others for support when too young to support himself.” On education: “The superman can be produced, not so much by our plans for eugenics as by changing our system of education. The superman would develop himself automatically providing we start human beings right—that is stop forcing children in the early stages of their education.” On the family: “I am not at all a believer in home life. I think it subverts and detracts from our natural progress; there is too much restriction in the home, particularly for the child.” And finally, William let drop this puzzling remark: “I am not in the least interested in the Fourth Dimension, though there was no faking about it when I lectured before the scientific club that heard me talk.” Of his future, he said simply, “My only plan and purpose for the future is to live near Boston as much as possible and seek happiness in my own way.” 8 Rice The New York Times got hold of William’s revealing interview in the Boston Herald. It was irresistible. With his sex life, or lack of it, now on parade, his remarks about marriage and women inspired gleeful jibes. In an editorial entitled “This Plan Is Full of Promise,” the Times sarcastically remarked that the child prodigy was now “viewing life from the mature standpoint of seventeen.” The Times quoted a writer from the Chicago Journal who “opined that young Sidis is ‘an intolerable prig,’ and advised the following course of treatment: What W. J. Sidis needs is not proposals of marriage, but incitements to propose. He ought to be introduced to some charming widow of about twenty-eight, some handsome, accomplished woman whose mourning has kept her out of the world just long enough to make her hungry to test her powers of conquest … she could teach him to sit up, roll over, fetch, carry and jump through a hoop.… It wouldn’t take more than three weeks, and any woman can spare that much time in a good cause.” The Times went on, “The profoundest psychotherapist could not prescribe a more promising treatment for anybody suffering as this wonder youth is said to be. And if he isn’t—and is half as wise as his advertisers claim—he will just smile broadly with the rest of us at the recipe suggested by the Chicago expert.” Most likely, William didn’t smile broadly. He took his “Constitution” seriously. If he had had any hopes that speaking frankly to a member of the press would make his public image more bearable, they were dashed by this latest flurry of snide editorials reviling his most personal thoughts. It was the last interview he ever gave freely. One day after school—William had enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences—the inevitable finally occurred. A gang of Harvard boys took William outside and threatened to beat him up. Though his mother was fond of saying he was “built like a truck driver,” the boy was outnumbered; and besides, what did William James Sidis know about fist fighting? He confided his rage and humiliation only to his five-year-old sister. However, Boris suspected things were going badly for his son; he was irritable, had few friends, and suffered the agonies of a hunted man. So Boris and Sarah decided that William needed to leave the hostile environment of the Harvard campus. To this end, they enlisted the help of Griffith Evans, the Harvard professor who had sponsored William’s Math Club lecture. Evans was then head of the mathematics department at the new Rice Institute, later Rice University, in faraway Houston. He secured a position for William as professor of mathematics with a stipend of $750 per annum. Officially, William was a Graduate Fellow working toward his doctorate degree. He was to teach three courses: freshman math, and Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry. He wrote his own textbook for the class in Euclidean geometry—in Greek. William arrived at Rice in December 1915, a stocky lad of seventeen, socially awkward, and a stranger in a very strange land. Houston in 1915 was undergoing a rapid transformation from a lazy Southern city to a center of industry. Its population had just passed 100,000; oil, cotton, and lumber had become lucrative exports; Houston was a town on the rise. But not literally—one of the most striking things about it, for a visitor from the East, was its implacable flatness. One suburb was known as Houston Heights because it was eight feet higher than the center of town. Though Houston was on the move industrially, it must have seemed backward to a boy like William, a true son of Boston. Rice Institute, however, could boast considerable brain power. President Edgar Odell Lovett had filled his faculty with a superlative hand-picked collection of intellectuals. Established in 1912 with a vast endowment from the late, eccentric philanthropist William Marsh Rice, the Institute had spared nothing in preparing for a tenure of splendor, and it was welcomed enthusiastically by the community as a proud symbol of modernization and culture. And what the grounds lost in topographical monotony, they made up in abundance, consisting as they did of three hundred acres. The students were few and scrupulously selected. In Rice’s first year (three years before William’s arrival), only fifty-nine freshmen were enrolled. The body count was only slightly higher in 1915, and William was facing a small, intimate coterie of Texans—surely a shock for a boy who had been accustomed to hiding himself among Harvard’s throngs. Evans decided that it would be wise to have William lodge with him and two other professors in the Bachelor House—”the bach”—a residence nearly a mile from campus, set prettily among sugar pines. At first glance, it seemed the Bachelor House was the ideal place for the boy prodigy. Obviously, he could not have survived another dormitory, especially with students older than himself who were his pupils. And his three companions at “the bach” were intelligent, fascinating men. Griffith Evans, of course, was a distinguished mathematician. Harvard was forever trying to lure him back to their fold. He was well read and musically inclined, attributes he shared with the second resident, A. L. Hughes, a Welsh physicist. The third in the house was the brilliant Julian Huxley, who headed up the biology department. Huxley, recruited from England, came from a pedigreed family that seemed unable to produce mediocre men. (Something of a child prodigy himself, he had at seven corrected his grandfather, the distinguished scientist T. H. Huxley, regarding the vagaries of parental behavior among fishes. His younger brother too had shown prodigious ability in mathematics, but was subject to fits of melancholia that eventually ended in suicide. Huxley himself was subject to extreme changes of mood. But certainly, he seemed well fitted out to understand a prodigy). And across the street from “the bach” was the home of the much-beloved Bulgarian philosophy professor, Radoslav Andrea Tsanoff. Griffith Evans felt certain that William, surrounded by men of substance, far from the persecutions of Boston and of Harvard and of family strife, would thrive. His hopes were soon dashed. Any young man expected to instruct, and discipline, students older than himself might be sore pressed, even if his manner and bearing were impeccable. Billy’s were anything but. The Boston Herald photo notwithstanding, he had become quite slovenly in the last year or two, and he was so weird socially that next to no one befriended him. To make matters worse, although William’s arrival at Rice had not been overplayed in the press, his reputation naturally preceded him. Nor was the matter of culture shock to be taken lightly; William had never before left New England. Classes proved impossible. In the words of Blakely Smith, a Rice alumnus: “I took freshman trig from Sidis, but we never studied math because at the beginning of every class two or three boys would tease him about girls and his hands would start to shake. He would put his hands over his face or hold his arms out in front of him and his hands and arms would tremble violently. I think he had a crush on Camille Waggaman, a real blonde beauty, but didn’t have the brains to do anything about it.” (If William did have a crush on Camille Waggaman, he had chosen far beyond his reach. Camille was a glamorous and self-assured tennis star, so appealing that she sometimes escorted important visitors at the university. It was rumored that she once had asked the Archbishop of Canterbury, “May I call you Archie?”) Like the Radcliffe girls, Rice coeds took up the game of mad crushes on their ungainly math professor. One alumna admitted, “I was one of the girls who ran after him. It was a joke. We didn’t really want to hurt him, we simply wanted him to come out of his shell.” Reported another graduate, “People always played jokes on him. The girls pretended to be in love with him. And he kept his watch set on Eastern time, so people always asked him the time as a joke.” According to another report, he carried two watches, one with Boston time and one with Houston time. Although this was probably a sentimental gesture, students gossiped that the genius couldn’t calculate a two-hour time change. Other grads commented on Sidis’s reprehensible appearance: “He mostly stayed to himself, but occasionally tried to mingle with the rest of us. He only had one suit of clothes, the sort of heavy, rough woolens worn by Englishmen. Most of us felt sorry for him. He was absentminded, not a man about town. Dr. Evans had to make him shave and bathe, and his hair needed cutting.” Misfit that he was, William found but a single social pursuit at Rice, one that would color the rest of his life. It was radical political organizing. Only one brief reference to this student activity survives. The December/January 1915-1916 issue of The Intercollegiate Socialist reported: “W. J. Sidis and H. W. Freeman are making efforts to organize a Chapter at Rice Institute. In all probability Rice will soon fall in line.” Where and when William joined the Socialist party is a mystery. He may have been introduced to it at Harvard, one of the first universities to have a chapter of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, a group founded by Upton Sinclair for “intellectuals and professionals.” Jack London was the society’s first president; at Harvard, activist Walter Lippmann became the group’s president in 1908, just before William’s arrival. By the next academic year, that of William’s Math Club lecture, the Harvard branch boasted fifty members out of two hundred undergraduates. The organization received the blessing of William James and other luminaries, and grew rapidly in the next few years, influencing both the college and the community. Chapters sprang up around the country, though Rice never did “fall in line.” In 1915, Woodrow Wilson was President and America teetered on the verge of war. Industrial Workers of the World (“Wobblies”) organizer Joe Hill had recently been executed by firing squad, wiring “Big Bill” Haywood on the eve of his death, “Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.” A radical mood was rippling through America, particularly in intellectual centers such as New York and Boston. Labor organizing, the special province of the Wobblies, no longer satisfied a large segment of American leftists, who dreamed not merely of reforms, but of a complete proletarian revolution. The ranks of the American Socialist party, founded in 1901, had swelled mightily in the last decade, inspired in great part by the charismatic Eugene Debs, Socialist candidate for President. The party was by no means composed of a unified membership. A hodgepodge of intellectuals, blue-collar workers, farmers, ethnic minorities, and all manner of radicals, it was neither wild nor anarchistic, but basically moderate, good-natured, and loosely organized. It possessed nothing of the rigidity that would later characterize the Communist party. Debs was symbolic of its temper—humble, beloved, the Dale Carnegie of radicalism. Socialists found the IWW too militant, and did not support it. Mired in a mess of mixed premises, the IWW dreamed of the collapse of American capitalism while never veering so far to the left as to be classed with the bomb-throwing anarchists. The division between moderates (who envisioned reform within the capitalist system), middle-of-the-roaders (who accepted the notion of reforms as a path to a fully Socialist government of the future), and radicals (who had no truck with reform and pacifism and dreamed of violent overthrow of the government) kept the party continuously split, and kept vast numbers of Socialists busier with intrafraternal squabbling than with furthering the cause. Exactly where William stood in the fray in 1915 is unknown. His utopia on paper, Hesperia, was not a Socialist document. Perhaps, in the years since he wrote it, he had moved away from his totalitarian vision, or perhaps he simply interpreted socialism creatively. So fluid was the Socialist movement, and so varied and complex the beliefs of its leaders, that it is useless to speculate with whom and with what beliefs William had aligned himself, except to say that like the majority of American Socialists he was adamantly antiwar. The antiwar sentiments that William had begun to vocalize so freely offended his roommates at the Bachelor House. And that was not all they found off-putting. Houston was a social town, and Rice’s president, Dr. Lovett, encouraged mingling between his faculty and the local society. Albert Leon Guerard, the chairman of the department of Romance languages, was so fond of Houston’s social whirl that he considered it a return to an eighteenth-century utopia, to “an age where sociability was the supreme art.… In such a world, shabbiness is a sin.… Within the charmed circle, the first rule is courtesy.” When the men of Bachelor House entertained, the presence of young Sidis was an excruciating embarrassment. It was bad enough that he aired his radical politics—worse still, he had no social instincts. A student who attended one of these awkward evenings recalled, “He behaved like a child—he ate his dinner and dessert quickly, then left. Evans talked to him like he was a little boy.” For such was the dichotomy inherent in the task of managing his young ward: Evans could not help but patronize the boy whose genius in mathematics, Evans’s own field—vastly surpassed his own best efforts. One faculty wife who occasionally visited “the back” declared, “Sidis’s behavior was very much to be criticized, and he didn’t make a great many friends.… He was very spoiled, a tragic person.” At last the situation came to a head. Whenever there was company, William would leave. One professor’s daughter, Kathleen Wilson Henderson, was fascinated by his quirks: “Sidis lived by a constitution that regulated when he got up and when he went to bed, etc. When the faculty were invited to my parents’ house, Sidis would sometimes take a knife and divide the cake on the tea table in half and eat the whole half. I don’t know if that was in his constitution or not!” William made a sufficient impression on Julian Huxley to appear in his memoirs many, many years later. “He was brilliant at mathematics, but in all other subjects he was childishly ignorant; he spent his time mooning about and prattling to the Tsanoffs’ infant daughter. He was also untidy and rather dirty.” The Rice yearbook, The Campanile, summed up the state of affairs at the Bachelor House when it published this poem, undoubtedly mortifying to its subject: HEARD AT THE BACHELOR’S HOME William, put down that knife. William, it is time to go to bed. William, you really need a shave and clean collar William, you haven’t gone calling in a long time. One of William’s few sympathizers on the faculty was Dr. Guerard, chairman of the department of Romance languages. William had always excelled in French, and he joined the French Club because it offered the only chance to converse in that language in Houston. Perhaps this common passion engendered a kinship between Guerard and Sidis. In any case, one of the most benevolent and astute of all observations made about William James Sidis appeared in Guerard’s memoirs: “The boy was healthy, sane, and, I believe, normal in every respect. He was the victim not of intensive education given him by his father, Dr. Boris Sidis, nor of the romantic curse called Genius, but of the thoughtless cruelty of the public. He was treated like a two-headed calf. His boyish singularities—and what lad of seventeen is a pattern of mellow wisdom—were mercilessly exposed and amplified. Because he blurted out that he had never kissed a girl, he was made the butt of endless practical jokes.” It was Dr. Guerard’s son, novelist Albert Joseph Guerard, who recalled how his family took in the bereft genius: Sidis lived across the street from us. My mother felt maternal toward Sidis, who was very shy. He would not indulge in any entertainment, but was willing to have a good time in an academic ambience: he played charades with the French Club. Once he refused normal refreshments, but my mother felt he wanted something. She offered him porridge, which he welcomed. At one gathering he came out to the kitchen to play with me and my sisters, perhaps aged four and eight. The family legends: (1) He pumped us up in our swing, using a different language for each number; (2) He borrowed the book on international languages my father had written and the next day returned with a long essay in Esperanto, showing how American culture reached Europe or vice-versa via Atlantis. My parents’ memories were indulgent and affectionate. No amount of emotional trauma could dampen William’s boundless intellectual curiosity—if anything, it enhanced it. The world of ideas was not a world that envied, that ridiculed, that lived by uncertain or foreign rules. The more human beings proved to be disappointing, the greater the pull of the mind. He wrote constantly. According to the research of Ruth Reynolds, a New York Sunday News reporter, “[William] kept a diary which he wrote in three or four languages, and then, because he was suspicious, assigned new meanings to his alien words so that no one could possibly translate his entries.” His essay on the lost continent of Atlantis, which he had given Guerard (in Esperanto), would later become the subject of an entire book and the foundation of some of William’s most important historical theories. He had recently developed an intense fascination with geographic and meteorological conditions and their effects on populations; he was especially intrigued by the Galveston flood of 1900 (in which six thousand people were drowned under a million tons of waves), and during those hours when he left Bachelor House an outcast, he sought out survivors for conversation. In addition, William had begun to take notes on what in just a few years would become an outstanding contribution to science and cosmological theory. He apparently did not discuss this work often, but in 1916, from Portsmouth, he wrote to Julian Huxley: “How has everything been this summer with you? I myself have been writing out that theory of mine regarding the second law of thermodynamics.” After eight months at Rice, Billy returned to Boston. Griffith Evans wrote Huxley saying that he had found another Harvard man to “take WJS’s place on the stem of the rose” as mathematics professor. For the rest of his life, William rarely spoke of Rice. His friends didn’t like to bring up the subject. When one finally dared to ask him why he had left, he replied flatly, “I never knew why they gave me the job in the first place—I’m not much of a teacher. I didn’t leave—I was asked to go.” 9 Too Radical for the Radicals If William thought he could slip quietly back to Boston, leaving his memories of Rice Institute behind, he was sorely mistaken. His arrival was greeted with a flurry of news articles so embarrassing, so widely syndicated, that William could only watch in despair as he was mercilessly ridiculed yet again. None of his escapades at Rice were lost on the rapacious reporters of Boston and New York. William’s sexual blunders at Rice made exciting news. “Puritanical Boston,” wrote the New York Evening Telegram, “was shocked a few days ago when William James Sidis returned to that centre of culture and codfish from Houston, Texas … and told his friends he was practically forced to resign his professor-ship and flee from Texas because the girls of the Lone Star State were besieging him with proposals of marriage.” He was quoted nationwide as saying, “It’s terrible in Texas. They want to naturalize you, and the best way they can think of is to get you married to one of their girls. Gosh, it’s fierce!” “ ‘Do you mean,’ asked a friend, ‘that they were making matches for you?’ “ ‘Worse!’ ejaculated Sidis. ‘The girls even proposed to me in public. It was awful. The newspapers got hold of it and I had a dreadful time.’ “ ‘How do you like the Texas girls?’ someone asked. “ ‘I don’t,’ was the decisive reply. ‘They flirt too much. It was very annoying. But I am happy to say that Article 22 of my constitution which prohibits kissing or familiarity with females is still unblemished.’ ” A full-page broadside in a Boston paper was illustrated with the now de rigueur cartoons of William, this time fleeing a lariat-slinging Texas belle on horseback with preacher in tow; and repulsing the advances of other smooch-hungry young ladies. The headline read: “WHY WON’T GIRLS LEAVE ME ALONE?” HE’S A WOMAN HATER, THAT’S WHY! How the Bold Young Women of Boston and Texas by Constantly Proposing Marriage to the Wary William James Sidis, Prove the Old Belief That the Feminine Heart Longs to Conquer Masculine Indifference. The article painted William as a diehard misogynist, distorting the now infamous interview from the Boston Herald: “At fifteen he graduated from Harvard University and gave to the world his woman-hater’s code. He prided himself upon scorn of femininity. No girl could approach him if he could avoid it. He hated to ride on street cars because he had to be jostled and be seated alongside them. He said it wasn’t that he was afraid of them, merely that he didn’t see anything attractive about them. They bored him, they were flippant and destructive to real accomplishment. He just simply didn’t want anything to do with them.” The author concluded that the cause of William’s unnatural condition was his mathematical genius. Surely brilliance and mental health could never go hand in hand. The brouhaha did not end there. Not only was William “unnatural,” he had another flaw—no sense of humor. He was upbraided for not being a sport, as if it came naturally to any adolescent to be made a national laughingstock. The New York Morning Telegraph wrote an editorial on this failing: A “KID PHENOMENON” TAKES IT ALL TOO SERIOUSLY WHEN TEXAS GIRLS “KID” HIM In this era of co-ordination we seem to have overlooked the necessity of a Defense League to defend infant prodigies against the machinations of designing females. There is not general understanding of the infant prodigy. The general run of just plain folk do not realize that although he is so richly endowed in other respects by some strange trick of fate he has been denied a sense of humor…. If he were natural he would know, probably, that the girls of Texas were merely having fun with him because of the fact that he has been heralded as a beardless Solomon. Regarding him as a “kid phenomenon” they “kidded” him. However, there seems to be a dent in his cranium where the bump of humor develops in normal persons, and he took their overtures seriously…. Our advice to this unblemished young person’s friends is that they get him in a corner and put him wise to the comedy features of his complaint. When the syndicated stories reached Texas, they caused a violent stink. One Rice student snapped at Julian Huxley, “The little toad, he isn’t worth noticing, even the fact that one has to ignore him is too much!” The Houston Post felt obliged to enter the fray. Well, maybe young Sidis had made those remarks, but the Boston papers had behaved irresponsibly in printing them. Infant prodigies, after all, were unbalanced and apt to say foolish things. Rice Institute’s campus paper, The Thresher, responded with a gentle defense of their erstwhile professor. Why, it was all a hoot—wasn’t Sidis already bragging of proposals from Boston females when he arrived in Texas? If The Thresher was inclined to forgive, Della Rains, a twenty-year-old Dallas art student, was not. An interview with this important personage was syndicated throughout the country; the headline read “Unkissed High Brows a Joke to Texas Girls; No Harvard Types for Them,” and the piece was illustrated with a picture of a vivacious brunette. “A meeting between these two people,” opined the reporter, {{would be the most interesting event of the day.” Miss Rains, just returned from a horseback ride, cuddled into her couch, batted her long eyelashes, and delivered a salvo against the boy who had dared insult Texas womanhood: “My candid opinion is that this professor will never recover from his infant prodigy days. I have lived in Texas all my life, and I never saw a girl chase a man to marry him. We marry when we are ready, and when we do take a husband we take one that has not been raised on dead languages and Harvard etiquette. Harvard is all right, I suppose, but if young Mr. Sidis is a typical example of its output it is educating in the wrong direction. “Oh, if I could only catch that gentleman in Texas sometime, I’d put up a job on him. What would I do? I’d take him horseback riding. I’d tie him to the wildest horse I could find, and I’d make him see that Texas women could do more than flirt. “I bet that he is a sissy, sports a wristwatch and wears his handkerchief in his sleeve. The truth is that Texas girls discovered he was a ‘Nancy’ who had never been kissed, and they kidded him and he took it seriously. “If you should see William James Sidis,” said Miss Rains in parting, “give him my regards and tell him not to forget to let his wristwatch run down. And tell him I hope to meet him —in Texas.” William enrolled in Harvard Law School in September 1916, somewhat to the consternation of his mother, who had hoped he would become a doctor. Most of his relatives doubted he had the social graces to become a successful attorney. If he had ambitions to practice, he kept them to himself. Law was well suited to William’s mind—orderly, precise, and at the same time complex and challenging. With his photographic memory, he found the work simple; simple enough to leave him time for a myriad of other activities. To avoid incidents, William was permitted to live alone, visiting Portsmouth periodically. His parents found an apartment in Cambridge, so that his beloved libraries would be a mere stride away. Though he was now the same age as his fellow students, he was more isolated from them than ever. He lived completely outside the Harvard world of clubs, athletics, school magazines, and dorm life. Despite its general tolerance and sympathy for the Harvard Socialist Club, Harvard was pro-war, and by the time William entered law school in 1916, pacifists and antiwar radicals on campus were being ostracized. Even the Harvard Socialist Club’s founder, Walter Lippmann, was now sympathetic to the Allies. By 1917, there was no antiwar movement left at Harvard, and William was one of a sprinkling of stray pacifists. Mercifully, the press was beginning to die down. William was scrupulously careful not to make printable remarks to anyone who might betray him, and for once his life was one of relative peace and solitude. He responded to the quiet and isolation by making ever greater intellectual leaps. He was preparing the foundation for his masterwork on physics, which would not emerge for several years. Simultaneously, he became deeply absorbed in the study of Boston history, having told acquaintances upon his return from Rice that he was a diehard “New England Yankee.” He made maps of the city, pondered its streetcar routes, and lost himself in the tales of its founding fathers. During his visits to Portsmouth, he and his father brainstormed about physics, plumbing Einstein’s latest theories. Few people, including Boris, could discuss mathematics or physics at William’s level. His reputation as a math genius kept William in the constant service of his beleaguered cousins, who struggled with their home-work. Jack Goldwyn, who was suffering the pains of geometry in high school, said, “I was a C student. I got hold of Billy and he taught me geometry and I went from a C to an A—my teacher couldn’t under-stand what had happened.” Elliot Sagall recalled, “As fast as I could write my algebra problems, he could do them. And I remember the time I was interested in seeing how many words I could make out of the letters of Constantinople. And he sat down and—broomp!—column after column. Whatever problem I had in school, he could handle it with no difficulty and no time out even to think. As fast as he could talk, or as fast as he could write… the problem would come into him, and the answer would come out of him.” William also amused himself by producing a few translations from his favorite languages. His incomparable grasp of linguistics had not lessened, and now he was explaining Chinese pictographs and Bantu dialects to his seven-year-old sister. William could learn a language in a day. According to Helena, “Billy knew all the languages in the world, while my father only knew twenty-seven. I wonder if there were any Billy didn’t know.” William’s favorite languages were English, Russian, and French. One of his most amusing exercises was a translation of Mark Twain’s famous essay “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” into “proper” French—that is, French without slang or colloquialisms of any kind —and back again, into “proper” English. If collecting streetcar transfers seems odd, at first glance this effort appears to be a waste of time bordering on the aberrant. In fact, besides being terrifically funny, it illustrates a point William was fond of making throughout his life: that slang and dialect give language its color and joie de vivre; and that when it is removed, after the stifling manner of traditional classroom translations, the lifeblood seeps from the writing. William wrote numerous dictionaries and “textbooks” of American slang and “lingo,” as he called it. Of William’s Russian translations, few remain except two one-act plays by Anton Chekhov. Both concern the plight of henpecked husbands, a matter of apparent interest to William. Busy as he was, William found time to pen yet another book, of an entirely frivolous nature and born of a most unusual source—the Ouija board. Boris and Sarah frowned on anything “psychic” and refused to join Helena, William, and friends in their explorations of the age-old party game. Whereas Helena and other hopefuls never succeeded in rousing the spirits to anything more than a half-hearted “yes” or “no,” William and the disembodied denizens of other worlds had an easy rapport. Under his touch, the heart-shaped pointer fairly flew across the board, spelling out words and sentences almost faster than they could be read. When the spirits of the Ouija board declared themselves to be citizens of the planet Venus, William and Helena took the news in stride and began to take careful notes, scrupulously avoiding telling their parents about this turn of events. (In 1917, it was widely believed that Venus was a sister planet to Earth, with the same atmospheric conditions and capable of supporting life.) William started to use a planchette, a pointer with a pencil attached to it, so he could take spiritual dictation at length. Soon the Venusians were communicating with William in their own language, which he ably decoded. Helena recalls the language as a blend of the multitude of tongues William had mastered, akin to Esperanto or his own Vendergood. In his usual methodical manner, William concocted a full grammar in Venusian. He posed questions about Venusian civilization and recorded the answers (decoded) in a little book in tiny handwriting. When his notebook was full, he spun the material into his first science-fiction novel, now lost. The plot, as Helena remembers it, was sketchy—a simple structure upon which to hang a study of Venusian culture. The tribulations of hero and heroine, thwarted in their efforts to get together but ultimately overcoming all obstacles, warranted a minimum of ink. William saved his loving detail for an accounting of their social customs, morals, and mores. On Venus (as in Hesperia) there was no such thing as an illegitimate child, no such thing as a nuclear family. If a couple chose to part, they were free to do so. The products of their union were legitimate in the eyes of society, and were raised communally, rather in the style of an Israeli kibbutz. The novel was nearly two hundred pages of typescript. Curious about the appearance of the Venusians, William “channeled” drawings, this time without the help of the planchette or the Ouija board, simply sketching figures as they appeared to him and regarding them as psychic transmissions. According to Helena, the Venusians looked just like Earthlings, except that Venusians wore very little in the way of clothing. William’s interest in the Ouija board persisted for several years, puzzling the few acquaintances who observed it. They were unable to account for this attack of mysticism in a young man whose rational mind was his very calling card. But in time, William put away his board and planchette, and with them his interest in spirits and Venusians. More compelling to William than any of his other pursuits was politics. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson was running for President promising to keep America out of the war. But as the conflict escalated, the tenor of popular opinion shifted, and the Socialist party became the single remaining organization that was antiwar. Even so, there was considerable dissension in its ranks over the war issue. When America entered the fray on April 6, 1917, the party held an emergency convention and publicly restated its pacifist stance; virtually all of the big-name intellectuals deserted en masse. Though it gained twelve thousand new members in the first two months of the war, the party had lost its intellectual backbone. Many of the new members were Democrats disappointed with Wilson who joined only to cast an antiwar vote, not because they believed in socialism. On June 5, 1917, the federal government passed the Espionage Act, which made opposition to the draft or to enlistment punishable by a fine of up to ten thousand dollars and twenty years in prison, and gave the government the power to censor and ban radical literature from the mails. The act was soon broadened to include such crimes as “profane, scurrilous, and abusive language,” and any activities that could be construed as anti-American. A civilian from Tulsa, Oklahoma, stated the prevailing mood most graphically: “The first step in the whipping of Germany is to strangle the IWWs. Don’t scotch ’em.… Kill ’em dead. It is not time to waste money on trials.… All that is necessary is the evidence and a firing squad.” In addition to the government crackdown, there was rampant mob violence. Anyone remotely “radical” was subject to being beaten or horsewhipped. Socialist meetings and offices were raided, Socialist journals were banned from the mails, professors were dismissed if they criticized government policy. Religious pacifists were jailed and tortured. Two thousand people were tried under the Espionage Act. Nearly every major Socialist party leader was indicted during the war; Socialists were rarely acquitted, and a case against a leftist was a sure notch in the Justice Department’s belt. The antiradical hysteria culminated in the arrest of Eugene Debs after a two-hour speech in Canton, Ohio. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. Conscientious objection began with many Americans refusing to register. Many didn’t appear for their physicals or gave their draft boards false addresses, registering only to get draft cards. In New York City, so many draftees-70 percent—filed exemption claims that the government couldn’t keep up with the demand for exemption forms. Other protesters stole draft lists, and a few protested violently by attacking soldiers. When the Russian Revolution occurred in November 1917, its effect on American radicals was exhilarating. Matters were grim on the leftist home front, what with poor electoral showings for Socialists and persecution from mobs and the government. Socialism had begun to take on a difficult, plodding, compromising air to many of the party members, while all-out communism had a glamorous appeal. If revolution could happen in Russia, the most backward of countries, why couldn’t it happen here? So reasoned American Socialists, bursting with wishful thinking. Since they received little information about what was actually going on in Russia, their romantic dreams seemed all the more feasible. William spent a fair amount of time in Portsmouth during these years, and he and his father discussed politics at length. On certain major issues, they were in accord—the right of the individual to speak freely and to protest, for example. They frequently aired their mutual disgust with the poor reportage of political events in the news. But Boris was not a Socialist, and the two disagreed on numerous matters of principle. In 1918, William published his second article, which appeared in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. It dealt with the topic of revolts, revolutions, and wars. Boris wrote a brief introduction to his son’s article, a generalized ramble about the grimness of the World War, now nearing its close, and the value of William’s contribution to the understanding of the causes of revolts. The article, “A Remark on the Occurrence of Revolutions,” proposes that when a people are strained and oppressed by a myriad of conditions, a drastic change in environment such as severe cold or heat, with resultant crop failures and similar disasters, can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The result is an uprising. “Revolutions,” William wrote, “and revolts in general (a revolt being a revolution that has not quite succeeded) are connected in some way or other with direct, obvious, physical discomfort, especially hunger, and possible lack of clothing and fuel.” Periodicity in the climate, he observed, seems to cause these changes in conditions, and that periodicity occurs in the number of spots on the sun. Sun-spots are rifts in the surface of the sun, exposing a lower layer. This lower layer gives less light and heat than the surface, and therefore, the more spots there are on the sun, the less heat the sun will give, and the cooler will be the climate.… The last sun-spot minimum was in 1911. Thus it appears that revolts and revolutions take place in warm countries near the minimum of sun-spots; in each case, when the weather is such as to tend to poor crops. However, I do not wish to be understood as saying that the sun-spots cause revolutions. An appearance of sun-spots could not, by itself, produce revolution unless other circumstances are already such as to cause the revolution. All such revolutions would occur anyway, even without the sun-spot variations; but these sun-spot variations superadd natural extremes of climate, causing not only physical discomfort but danger to life and health, thus hastening a revolt that might otherwise have waited for a very long time. A government not based on the will of the people must, in the nature of things, rule by fear, by keeping the people in constant subjection; and the people will be kept in subjection as long as they can be made to fear. The tendency of such oppression is to exasperate the people and excite them to desperate measures, especially if the oppression affects their means of livelihood. But if circumstances suddenly become such that many lives, or the health of many people, are seriously threatened as by extreme cold, famine, etc., this superadds the instinct of self-preservation, and the fear is entirely counteracted. The power of the government to keep the people in subjection is weakened, and the rebellious tendencies come to the foreground, resulting in open revolt. This will happen especially if there is a poor crop; and this probably takes place every eleven years, in accordance with the sun-spot variations. This rule would, therefore, apply only to the date of the beginning of a revolt; therefore all revolts included in my list were dated from the time of the outbreak, and not of the culmination. The list, yet another example of William’s awesome scholarship, traces thirty-three revolts and their respective minimum or maximum of sunspots, providing impressive evidence to support his case. This essay was clearer than William’s previous efforts, and as original as ever. In emphasizing the role of fear and the “fear instinct,” he is echoing one of his father’s pet theories—that the fear instinct is the cornerstone of all mass hysteria, neurosis, and human trouble, a subject on which Boris had written at great length. Father and son appeared to have been enjoying stimulating intellectual repartee, and a sharing of certain sophisticated ideas. But terrible trouble lurked around the corner, and Boris’s and William’s names side by side on the Journal’s contents page were no omen of things to come. By 1918 William was of age—old enough to register for the draft. He claimed exemption as a conscientious objector, and it was only the armistice of 1918 that spared him a prison term. Boris and Sarah began to worry about their son’s activities, afraid he would suffer the same harsh punishments Boris had undergone as a dissident in Russia. And so they recruited William’s cousin Jack Goldwyn, a great favorite of Boris’s, to keep an eye on him. Jack was fond of William, and thought of him as “a terrific person, a little bit odd, but as honest as you make ’em. No subterfuge. No conniving. No dishonesty. But not too practical and he was very naive.” Jack, who was presumably less naive, accompanied William to his radical haunts. Jack recalled, “There was a little rift in the family … so I was in touch with William as much as possible to keep him out of trouble. I joined the Party, and I went with him to Socialist Party meetings in Boston, and met a lot of people. Because he was honest, he thought everybody else was honest. So I pointed out flaws that I saw. I’d say ‘This guy is good,’ or ‘That girl’s a phony.’ I didn’t trust any of them. I wasn’t a Socialist. But I joined the party to be with him. I was there to see that he didn’t get hurt. Billy was such an idealist.” But for his part, Billy was growing disgusted with Socialists. He found the interparty bickering distasteful, and he had a reputation among the membership as being “too radical for the radicals.” After the Russian Revolution, the Soviets lent their support only to the Socialist Party’s left wing, disowning the rest. When the party underwent its Great Rift in 1919, William predictably veered to the left. In many ways he was a typical member of that left—born of Russian parents, nearly twenty at the time of the revolution in Russia, and fiery in his beliefs. Most young leftists were in favor of an American uprising like the Russian, with a vanguard party, violence, and a dictatorship of the proletariat. The older, more conservative Socialists who had worked for years with the party—the right wing —resented these young upstarts, so recently joined, who told them fiercely what true socialism was. The American public was indifferent to these altercations that held so much meaning for the radicals. When the war ended on November 11, 1918, antiradical hysteria in America did not abate—it intensified. An advertisement that ran in two Washington newspapers expressed the common point of view, however crudely: “We must smash every un-American and anti-American organization in the land. We must put to death the leaders of this gigantic conspiracy of murder, pillage and revolution. We must imprison for life all its aiders and abettors of native birth. We must deport all aliens.” Boris and Sarah had good reason to fear for their son. 10 May Day It was 1918, year of the great Spanish flu epidemic that killed more than twenty-one million people —over twice the number killed in World War I. As flu swept through New England in the fall, Boris fell ill. In those years before antibiotics, he failed to make a complete recovery. According to Sarah’s memoirs, her married life had been a perfect one up to this point. Then, she bemoaned, “The first frost touched this life. It was a bad time. My mother and father died in the flu epidemic. My baby brother, Jack, who lived with us as one of the family for many years, got pneumonia. Helena had flu twice. Billy and I never got sick.” Boris’s doctors advised a move to a warmer climate. It was decided that the Institute should be closed for the winter, and the family departed for California. Boris, Sarah, Helena, and Jack made plans to rent a home in San Diego. William stayed in Boston. He had been studying at Harvard Law School since 1916. Now, for some mysterious reason of his own, he quit in his last semester although in good standing academically, thus failing to earn a law degree. Sarah was furious. Her son had disappointed her once by opting for law rather than medicine; now he was throwing away his chances for entering a solid, respectable profession. For the rest of her life—and in her memoirs—she said that the war closed down the law school, and that was the only reason William left. In fact, the Harvard Law School did not close down, although two-thirds of the student body went to war. Out of school at last, William got his first job through a family friend, Professor Daniel Comstock of MIT, who needed an assistant in his laboratory, which was developing a submarine-detection program. Comstock explained to Sarah that he was hiring William for two reasons—he needed a brilliant mind, and he hoped to keep the boy out of jail for his refusal to go to war. Comstock gave the young radical some advanced theoretical problems without telling him of their military applications. William, blissfully at work in the higher reaches of theoretical physics, had no idea that he was contributing to the war effort. When he finally found out several months later, he was extremely indignant and resigned immediately. Entirely free of his family, William began to expand his social life. He was meeting a great many radicals, and he threw himself deeply into political activities. Meanwhile, Boris, Sarah, Helena, and Jack had arrived in San Diego. They were greeted by a welcoming committee comprised of the city’s finest doctors and were escorted to a hotel. “It was strange and moving to me,” Sarah wrote, “and I was remembering the money my father and I had borrowed when we arrived at Castle Gardens from Russia so many years before. To be thus unexpectedly welcomed to California pleased me as it would a child.” Sarah was delighted with San Diego. The Sidises rented a beautiful home, Helena happily played front-yard football with the local boys, and Sarah and Boris socialized with the crème of California’s intellectuals and influential citizens. Their comfortable stay was interrupted by shocking news from home. Wrote Sarah, “It was while we were in California that Billy began to grow up—the Sidis way. We received a long-distance call one day saying that he had spent some hours in a Boston jail. The charge was ‘incitement to riot.’ While we were enjoying California Republicans, Billy had become a Communist of purest ray serene!” Technically speaking, William was not actually a Communist—yet. There was no American Communist party until June 1919, when the troubled Socialist party split. The bitterness, the backbiting, and the slandering that characterized the growing rift within the party were repugnant to William, though he was to be embroiled in similar disputes for the rest of his life. William became involved with Boston’s most dogmatic young Socialist radicals, who had been infected with a slavish devotion to anything Russian. These firebrands felt certain the American working-man’s instincts would lead him away from the drudgery of electoral progress (which the old-time Socialists still believed in) and toward insurrection—violent, if necessary. The Socialist party of 1919 was heavily dominated by groups that spoke a foreign language as their native tongue. The Eastern European groups—Ukrainians, Letts (Latvians), Poles, etc.—were strongly pro-Bolshevik, wanting above all else to see an American October Revolution. (William, with his superhuman abilities to speak and read any language perfectly, was in the unique position of being able to communicate with members of all of the foreign-language federations, and to translate propagandist tracts.) To the modern eye the Bolshevik leftists seem extraordinarily deluded and more than a trifle absurd in their grasp of American life, and in their failure to see that America was nothing like Russia in spirit and circumstance; or to see that they were a despised minority, and not a moving force in American politics; and that a proletarian revolution was virtually impossible in America in 1919. One of the things that fed the radicals’ confidence was the degree of terror Americans felt about them, a degree disproportionate to their actual power. Postwar America was in a confused condition, ripe for the mass hysteria that would come to be known as the “Red Scare.” Americans were exhausted from wartime sacrifices, ready to enjoy a period of prosperity, and unprepared to meet extreme inflation. For the average family the cost of living in 1919 was 99 percent higher than in 1914. The world that had been made “Safe for Democracy” was not as fruitful as Americans had dreamed it would be. America had depended on its industrialists and businessmen during the war—they had shouldered the burden of operating America’s factories, producing the steel ore and the financial creativity that fueled the war effort. Now, as organized labor demanded higher wages and collective bargaining—and painted America’s businessmen as robber barons—hostilities reached a boiling point. The result of these tensions was a period of massive strikes. In 1919, there were 3,600 strikes with more than four million participants. By and large, the strikers were not Russian sympathizers, although leftists tried desperately to recruit them. In the confused mind of the public, abetted by hints from the press, strikers were equated with the hated Bolsheviks, and America itself seemed infected by the Red Menace. The most feared and hated Reds in America were the aliens—and though they composed a large part of the radical movement (53 percent of the Socialist party in 1919), they were but a tiny part of the alien population. In their fear Americans saw a bomb-wielding, bushy-haired, fiery-eyed Jewish anarchist in every alien, and there to nurture this stereotype were certain branches of the government. Rallied by Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer, the Department of Defense and the FBI devoted themselves passionately to crushing the Bolshevik menace. Palmer was operating in a situation well suited to the development of his infamous anti-Red crackdowns, the “Palmer raids.” The Espionage Act laid the groundwork for the suppression of leftists. In October 1918, another discriminatory law was passed, this one aimed at aliens: Any alien who was an anarchist was denied admission to the United States, and any alien who became an anarchist or radical of any stripe was to be deported. Palmer zealously engineered mass deportations, beginning in the fall of 1919. Palmerized Americans, drenched in hysterical newspaper reports and struggling financially, succumbed to mass hysteria. When Boris Sidis labeled the American state of mind in these years a mental epidemic, a fear complex, he was quite correct. The true power of the radicals was insufficient to warrant the suppression they received. The American public honored the disorganized, strife-ridden group with a competence and influence it did not possess, and went on a rampage against its members. An Indiana jury took two minutes to acquit a man who shot and killed an alien who had shouted, “To hell with the United States!” Aliens merely suspected of subversive activity were deported en masse. For all the fussing the radicals made about which group they belonged to, and whether it was the left or right faction of that group, the American public made no such distinctions. An anarchist was as evil as a pacifist, a Socialist was no better than a Communist. It was in this electrically charged atmosphere that William Sidis found himself in the months preceding his Great Trouble. May Day was approaching, and Boston radicals, like their brethren across the country, were determined to make the most of it. Traditionally, May 1 had been a day of marches and protests throughout the world, with the exception of the United States. American radicals were determined to change all that. Inspired by the Russian Revolution, they planned rallies, parades, and meetings. Heightening the pre-May Day tension was a series of frightening bomb threats that were terrorizing the country. As Americans read their morning papers with alarm, the May Day melees had begun. Not surprisingly, the violence that blackened demonstrations throughout America was not, for the most part, instigated by radicals. American servicemen were so enraged by the pro-Bolshevik demonstrations that they lost all control. In New York, citizens, soldiers, and sailors went on a rampage attacking radicals and smashing their meeting halls. In Cleveland there was terrible violence. A large Red Flag parade was disrupted, and in the ensuing riot twenty Socialists were hurt. Two other major riots occurred at the same time, and one person was killed and more than forty injured. Only radicals were arrested. Boston was the third city hit hard by May Day riots. It was at the same time one of America’s most patriotic cities and one of its most radical. Its Socialist activity was dominated by the pro-Bolshevik Lettish Workmen’s Association, an immigrant group that owned a meeting hall and a printing press in Roxbury, where William now lived. The Roxbury Letts had applied to the city for a permit to hold a May Day parade. Their request was denied. In defiance of the permit refusal, more than five hundred Socialists held a meeting at the Dudley Street Opera House, then proceeded from there toward another meeting hall in Roxbury. Waving red flags and shouting “To hell with the permit!” they marched, with twenty-one-year-old William James Sidis at their helm, carrying a red flag and wearing a red necktie. Civilians glared balefully at the women in red dresses and the men with red flowers in their buttonholes. The spectators’ ranks were peppered with soldiers and sailors who began to jeer, hissing, “Bolshevik!” According to the police, a police officer who asked the marchers if they had a permit was attacked. A patrol car was speedily dispatched to the scene, which was fast dissolving into brutal chaos. The police descended on the marchers with drawn guns, ordering the rebels to disperse. Their commands were met with jeers, and the incensed police yanked the red flags from the protesters’ hands. In minutes Warren Street was a maelstrom of fists, sticks and stones, billy-clubs, knives, and gunshots. Policemen from five stations poured onto the scene, and wild-eyed spectators joined the riot. A passerby was shot in the foot, as was a policeman; another lost a finger, and a police captain suffered a fatal heart attack. Clubs split heads and faces gushed blood. Fleeing protesters were pursued by civilians and police, and soon the neighborhood was a battlefield of mini-riots. Socialists were rounded up and dragged off to the Dudley Street and Roxbury Crossing police stations, where an armed mob of two thousand enraged, hysterical civilians and soldiers lay in wait. The police pulled their prisoners past a bloodthirsty gauntlet, to screams of “Down with the Bolsheviks!” and “Kill them! Kill them!” The riots raged into the night, and any unlucky onlooker who expressed sympathy for the marchers was swarmed by the mob. Many were taken into police custody for safety. These unfortunates had to leave the station house by the rear exit to escape attack. The police machine-gun squad waited in abeyance, but the riot was finally quelled after midnight. Arrests totaled 114. William was one of the first to be arrested. He had been badly beaten up, and he was not alone. At Roxbury Police Station #9, the walls and booking desk were already splashed with blood, and a doctor hurriedly attended to the steady stream of maimed rioters being brought in. William was booked and installed in a cell. In a nearby cell was a fiery young Socialist named Martha Foley. A twenty-year-old Irish girl who had grown up in Boston, Martha had caught William’s eye. Though she was hardly what anyone would call pretty—five feet tall, too skinny, and wearing spectacles on what she referred to as her “blob of a nose”—she possessed a radiant charisma that dazzled William. It was the first time feminine charms had touched him, and he fell hard. The following day, Martha would share headlines with William. She was already well known in the Socialist movement, in which there were relatively few prominent female activists, among them Helen Keller, Margaret Singer, and “Mother” Jones.