‘id

AB iography of William James S is,

the World’ s Greatest Child Prodi
 ¢

William Sidis, 1897-1944, was the

world’s greatest child prodigy. His Ca)
was an estimated 50 to 100 points higher
than Einstein’s, the highest ever
recorded or estimated. His father, a
pioneer in the field of abnormal psy-
chology, believed that he and his wife
could create a genius in the cradle. They
hung alphabet blocks over the baby’ s
crib—and within six months little Billy
was speaking. At eighteen months he
was reading The New York Times; at
three, Homer in the original Greek. At _
six, he spoke at least seven Jangaages
fluently. &

By the time William entered Harvard

at eleven, he was also a mathematical
prodigy. He stunned America with his -
lecture on Four-Dimensional Bodies,
and articles about him appeared on the
front pages of the. country’s leading
newspapers. By the time he graduated
from Harvard at sixteen, he was despe-
rate for privacy. He.told the press: “The
only way to live the perfect life is to live it
in seclusion.”
William’s dramatic rebellion against
his parents, against academia, Bw |
- against the world’s expectations led him
first to a jail cell and a scandalous trial,
a (continued on back 7 E-Ve))
 C30 08847 10 34

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THE PRODIGY
 ALSO BY AMY WALLACE

The Book of Lists +41, 42, and 443

(coauthored with Irving Wallace, Sylvia Wallace,
and David Wallechinsky)

The Two
(coauthored with Irving Wallace)

The Book of Predictions

(coauthored with Irving Wallace and David Wallechinsky)

The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

(coauthored with Irving Wallace, Sylvia Wallace,
and David Wallechinsky)

Significa
(coauthored with Irving Wallace and David Wallechinsky)

The Psychic Healing Book

(coauthored with Bill Henkin)
THE PRODIGY
A Biography of William James Sidis,
the World’s Greatest Child Prodigy

AMY WALLACE
 a ere

SOUTHERN EDUCATION

AND LIBRARY BOARD

ACTS STE

ACC. No.
0884710
O) ab Fd

CLASS No. OR AUTHOR

220. S/O!

Copyright © 1986 by Amy Wallace

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint
excerpts from the following works:
The Hesperia Constitution by WilliamJ. Sidis. Reprinted by
permission of the Harvard University Archives.
The Come As You Are Masquerade Party by Samuel Rosenberg,
copyright © 1970 by Samuel Rosenberg. Reprinted by
permission of Prentice-Hall, Inc.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission ofthis
publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph
of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with
written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright
Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorized act in
relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution
and civil claims for damages.
First published in the United States of America
1986 by E. P Dutton
First published in Great Britam 1986 by
MACMILLAN LONDON LIMITED
4 Little Essex Street London WC2R 3LF
and Basingstoke
Associated companies in Auckland, Delhi, Dublin, Gaborone, Hamburg,
Harare, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur, Lagos, Manzini,
Melbourne, Mexico City, Nairobi, New York, Singapore and Tokyo.
ISBN 0-333-43223-1

Printed in the United States of America

DESIGNED BY MARK O’CONNOR

FOR JOSEF MARC
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/prodigybiographyOO00wall
 lam especially grateful to the fol-
lowing people, whose unremitting encouragement and support made
this book possible: Irving and Sylvia Wallace, Helena Sidis, Dan
Mahony, Jannika Hurwitt, Joseph Kanon, and Ed Victor.
For their work researching, editing, typing, and photographing,
I would like to thank: Helen Ginsburg, Elizabethe Kempthorne, Mark
Malkas, Liz Vaughan, and Paul Duffy.
For granting me their time, memories and materials, thanks go
to the following people and institutions (in alphabetical order): Muriel
Burbank, Julius Eichel, Clifton Fadiman, William Fadiman, Ann Rab
Feinzig, George Gloss, Dr. and Mrs. Jack Goldwyn, Harvard Univer-
sity, Margaret McGill, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Mandell, Bill Rab, Isaac

[ vii]
 Acknowledgments

Rabinowitz, Rice University, B. C. Robison, David Sachs, Dr. and

Mrs. Elliot Sagall, Dr. Paul Saunders, Shirley Smith, Dr. Abraham
Sperling, Grace Spinelli, and the Swarthmore College Peace Collec-
tion.

[ viii ]
 Contents

— The Little Father 1

April Fool 19

The Little Professor 34

Sidis an Avatar? il
Utopian Dreams 68
Portsmouth 83
The Perfect Life 100
Rice 114

tS
S92
ONS
ON
Sl
OO
NOE Too Radical for the Radicals 121

[ ix ]
 Contents

10 May Day 134

11 Rebellion, Romance, and Reversibility 147

12 In Search of Solitude 165

13 The Peridromophile 181
14 The Double Life 191
15 The Tribes and the States 200
16 Friends and Relatives 210
17 Invasion of Privacy 225
18 The Pacifist and the Transfer Wars 237
1? “America’s Greatest Brain” 251
20 A Superior Spirit 271
Epilogue 282

INDEX 287

TEN PAGES OF ILLUSTRATIONS FOLLOW PAGE 146.

You know the old saying—‘“‘As the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.”
Parents cannot too soon begin the work of bending the minds of their
children in the right direction, of training them so that they shall grow
up complete, efficient, really rational men and women.
—BORIS SIDIS, 1909

The newspapers never missed a chance to try and prove that he was
insane, or psychotic, or simply a freak. In truth, Billy was a completely
normal child in every respect.
—SARAH SIDIS, 1952

It is possible to construct figures of the Fourth Dimension with a

hundred and twenty sides called hecatonicosihedrigons, or figures with
six hundred sides called hexacosihedrigons. I attach great value in the
working out of my theories to the help given by polyhedral angles of
the dodesecahedron which enter into many of the problems. Some of
the things that I have found out about the Fourth Dimension will aid
in the solution of many of the problems of elliptical geometry.
—WILLIAM JAMES SIDIS, age 11, 1909

I often tried to talk to him about the fourth dimension, mathematics.

I was interested in mathematics myself at the time. I was about seven-
teen, he must have been about twenty-three. And he would turn upon
me furiously, he scared me, saying, “I don’t want to talk about that,
I don’t ever want to talk about that kind of thing!”
—CLIFTON FADIMAN, 1983
Pe

;
 The Little Father

B... 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

ee
 The Prodigy

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, autocra-
tic rule of Tsar Nicolas Il. 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 perse-
cution 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 Chris-
tian 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 orga-

[2]
 The Little Father

nized 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 Kesh-
nev, 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 dissiderit 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

[a7
 The Prodigy

be freed. On these conditions, Boris was released from solitary confine-

ment 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 ille-
gally, 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 tene-
ments were infamous. The most profound shock to greet the immi-
grants 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.

[4]
 The Little Father

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 Pub-
lic Library,” he said, “I felt as though the gates of heaven had opened
to me.”

|
 The Prodigy

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 chil-
dren 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

[6]
 The Little Father

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 de-
stroyed. 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 grandpar-
ents 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.”

[7]
 The Prodigy

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 improba-
ble 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

[8]
 -The Little Father

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 aspira-
tions.
Under Boris’s tutelage, Sarah nurtured her dream of becoming
a doctor. Medical school was the favorite ambition of European immi-
grants, and the schools’ tuition fees were payable in installments,
bringing the dream within reach of a dedicated few. Still, in 1891, only

[9]
 The Prodigy

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 ex-
plained 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 remem-
bering.”
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
ad

[ 10 ]
 The Little Father

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
99 66

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 gl rious 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 /scien-
tist 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 profes-
sor 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 psy-
chology. 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 ap-
preciated 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 philoso-
phy. 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

[11]
 The Prodigy

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 recog-
nition 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.”

[ 12 ]
 The Little Father

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 pro-
fessor, 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 reluc-
tant 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 profes-
sors 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.

[ 13 ]
 The Prodigy

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.

[ 14 ]
 The Little Father

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, labor&tories, and research facilities placed at his disposal. Boris
refused angrily, preferring to be poor and free in America over return-
ing 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.

[ts]
 The Prodigy

* * OX

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 depart-

[ 16 ]
 The Little Father

ment, 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 Metropoli-
tan 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

[a7]
 The Prodigy

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 absorb-
ing. 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. |
 April Fool

B.,, 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.”

[ 19 ]
 The Prodigy

Despite the sour note of disappointment in her remark, she in-

sisted 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
thripin 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 contradic-
tory 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 suggesti-
ble one, during which the mind is particularly -eceptive. This informa-

[ 20 ]
 April Fool

tion 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’ tales1
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

[21]
 The Prodigy

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,
melesaved.s
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 repre-
sented. 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

[ 22 ]
 April Fool

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 ‘moo-n.’
“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 anesthe-
sia” (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 encoun-
tered 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, hisvoracity 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

[ 23 ]
 The Prodigy

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 espe-
cially 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 guess-
ing 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 extraordi-
nary 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

[ 24 ]
 April Fool

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

[ 25 ]
 The Prodigy

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 chil-
dren, 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 Adiron-

dacks. 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 get-
ting 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

[ 26 ]
 April Fool

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 tooth-
ache, 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 mientioned 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 HBR ava 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 theeager little listener to a sudden contradiction. “It is not
so; consult Mrs. Dana, page 252.” It was quite true that he not

[ 27 ]
 The Prodigy

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 gentle-
man 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 com-

plement his intellectual gymnastics. His parents disdained sports; “foot-
ball player” was one of Boris’s favorite terms of disparagement.Wil-
liam James had tried to influence Boris, writing to himin the fall of
1902, “I congratulate you on W.J.S.—what you tell of him is wonder-
ful. 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,
“T 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,

[ 28 ]
 April Fool

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?”
“T 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.”

[ 29 |
 The Prodigy

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 contra-
dictions. 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 ofHallucinations, 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

[ 30 |
 April Fool

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 arrange-
ment 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 Psychopatho-
logical 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

Laid
 The Prodigy

training people to draw readily and helpfully on their hidden ener-

gies.”
William James claimed to have discovered this energy concur-
rently with Boris; in ten years, Billy would produce a startling expan-
sion 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 de-
cided to leave New York. Despite the friends they had made, they
longed to return to Boston. They could now afford to live in Brook-
line, a suburb that was attracting an influx of up-and-coming profes-
sionals. 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.

[ 32 ]
 April Fool

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 scien-
tific 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 joyous-
ness 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 preaccident life. For two months his pre-
and postaccident personalities alternated within him, fought for domi-
nance. 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 famous, and the family that had left New
York for a fine Boston suburb appeared to be on its way to a magnifi-
cent future.

[ 33 ]
 B:. 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.

[ 34 |
 The Little Professor

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 expres-
sion, 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 reach-
ing 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 exasper-
ation 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 conscien-
tious 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

[35]
 The Prodigy

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,

[ 36 |
 The Little Professor

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

74
 The Prodigy

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 child-
hood 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. Add-
ington 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

[ 38 ]
 The Little Professor

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 math-
ematics 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-mak-
ing, and grammar were not the only subjects occupying Billy’s eight-
year-old mind. He had developéd an avid interest in politics—an
unusual interest for a mathematical and linguistic prodigy. He fre-
quently 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

[ 39 |
 The Prodigy

(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 sen-
tence 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!

[ 40 |
 The Little Professor

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, IPAUL 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 lit-
tle 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, imper-
ative & 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

[ 41 ]
 The Prodigy

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 Vender-
good 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:

els one
duet two
tre three
quar four
quin five
sex six
sep seven
00 (oe?) eight
non nine
ecem ten
elevenos eleven
dec twelve
eidec (eis, dec) thirteen

[ 42 ]
 The Little Professor

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 lan-

guage. 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 calculat-
ing 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 calen-
dar, has survived. The title page reads:

FIRST BOOK ON CALENDARS

by
WILLIAM JAMES (SD) (SIDIS)? THE
CALENDARMAKER?
YES!
NoTE—This book is for people to know what their own calendars
are, and how to make one themselves.

[ 43 ]
 The Prodigy

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 Mov-
ing 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 Tech-
nology. 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

[ 44 |
 The Little Professor

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 instruc-
tions, 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 eye and the way he looks out from under his eye-
brows. 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 maxi-
mum 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

[ 45 ]
 The Prodigy

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 prob-
lem. 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

[ 46 |
 The Little Professor

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 Wil-
liam 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

[ 47 ]
 The Prodigy

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 afew 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 mathe-
matical 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 demon-
strable 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

[ 48 ]
 The Little Professor

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 com-

[ 49 ]
 The Prodigy

pletely 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 ofAbnormal Psychology was born. It was the first
English-language journal devoted solely to psychotherapy: The pre-
miere 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 Psychopa-
thology of Everyday Life —it was one of Freud’s first reviews in Amer-
ica. 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 intelli-
gent. I mean he deserved nothing else.” A few years later, Boris wrote,
“Psychoanalysis is a conscious and more often a subconscious or uncon-
scious 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 psy-
choanalytic battles we do not know. He did not appear to be develop-
ing 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.

[ so ]
 Sidis an Avatar?

(),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 Har-
vard 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

sel
 The Prodigy

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

[ s2 ]
 Sidis an Avatar?

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 “forc-
ing” 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 mathe-
matical 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.

[ 53 ]
 The Prodigy

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 iin history, of allprodigies, 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 abnormal-
ity. 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. 1 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 profundi-
ties. 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.

[ 54 ]
 Sidis an Avatar?

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

[55]
 The Prodigy

its home. Harvard should possess a mind of his calibre 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.”

[ 56 ]
 Sidis an Avatar?

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 rude-
ness.” He was shocked to see “poise and sense of social protocol” in
the fourteen-year-old Adolf Berle, who carried kid gloves and pre-
sented 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.

(57°|
 The Prodigy

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 rela-
tionship 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

[ 58 ]
 Sidis an Avatar?

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 profes-
sor 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

[ so ]
 The Prodigy

of the time and it is doubtful if any of them gained many new

ideas. . . . But everyone of them enjoyed two or three hearty
chuckles at the sight of his own beloved instructor asking ques-
tions and hearing the boy Sidis only joke them gently, but often
listening to their supposed apropos questions with raised eye-
brows and saying with a rising inflection, “Huh?”

Another writer cited Billy’s “lack of respect for older per-

sons. . . . 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 can not 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 theo-
ries. 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:

[ 60]
 Sidis an Avatar?

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 sexicosthedrigon 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 develop-
ment 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:

Sue Pities Propicy WHO Never LEARNED TO PLAY

SHE Dousts Rosy CHEEKS OF THE LITTLE Sip1is 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 chil-
dren, blamed adult mediocrity “in professions or business” on child-
hood “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

[ or |
 The Prodigy

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 calcu-
lations, 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 413,993,348,6772” Zerah delivered the right answer—7,453—
in five seconds. When asked, “Admitting the distance between Con-
cord 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 adult-
hood 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

[ 62 ]
 Sidis an Avatar?

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 mathemati-
cians 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

[ 63 ]
 The Prodigy

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 re-
nowned 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 understand-
ing 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. Mathemat-
ics 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

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 Sidis an Avatar?

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 hisabilities. It had merely been John’s good for-
tune 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 “disputa-
tious,” 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 imperti-
nence.” 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.

[ 65 ]
 The Prodigy

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 sup-
pressed—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

[ 66 |
 Sidis an Avatar?

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 achieve-
ments to an exceptional degree.
For William Sidis, it was Sarah rather than Boris who increas-
ingly 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.

[ 67 ]
 Utopian Dreams

| ae 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:

Sips, Boy Propicy, 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

[ 68|
 Utopian Dreams

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:

Younc Sipis SuFFERS A BREAKDOWN

From Boston comes the news—sure to excite a loud chorus of

“T told you so!”—that young Sidis, the marvelous boy of Har-
vard, 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 excite-
ments 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 injudi-
cious observers.

Indeed, no one had shielded William from the enormous public-

ity 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

[ 69 |
 The Prodigy

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-commi-
tal [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

[ 70 ]
 Utopian Dreams

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, ““Men-
tal 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, par-
ticularly in its application to politics. Some of William’s early po-
litical thoughts appeared in newsprint. One Boston paper ran this
story:

[7 ]
 The Prodigy

Harvarp’s Boy WonDER WouLp Curs 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, Wil-

liam Sidis was theorizing about the economy and the fourth dimen-
sion. 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 Ameri-
cans 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

[ 72 ]
 Utopian Dreams

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, Ken-
dall, 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 constitu-

tion 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:

ls]
 The Prodigy

We, the people of Hesperia, desiring that the law should allow
full personal liberty to every person in all cases where the per-
sonal 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 estab-
lish 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 ob-
scure—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—naturaliza-
tion 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, prov-
ing 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 partic-
ular specified kinds of information or of reasoning ability, or both,
possessed by a person.”

[ 74 ]
 Utopian Dreams

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 them-
selves 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 learnings 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 govern-
ment 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 Hes-
peria: 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

7s]
 The Prodigy

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 explo-
sions 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 impossibili-
ties
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 cohabita-
tion 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 oper-
ated on incapable of producing a birth.

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 Utopian Dreams

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 Constitu-
tion’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 guard-
ians, and female children to the charge of female guardians.

To qualify for the Guardians’ Union, one must have had experi-
ence caring for and training children, and “have a knowledge of
subjects in general somewhat more than that required for the intelli-
gence 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.

{7 ]
 The Prodigy

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,

[ 78 ]
 Utopian Dreams

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 sup-
pression 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

[ 79 |
 The Prodigy

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, repeti-
tion 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 en-
ergy.”

[ 80 ]
 Utopian Dreams

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 compara-

tive 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

[ 81 ]
 The Prodigy

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.

[ 82 ]
 Portsmouth

W.. 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

[ 83 ]
 The Prodigy

patients was Jones’s granddaughter, Mrs. Buck Whittemore, a Bos-

tonian 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 run-
ning 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.

[ 84 ]
 Portsmouth

The donation of the estate was a newsworthy event. The newspa-

pers 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 afflic-
tions.”
The first advertisement for the sanatorium ran in a 1910 issue of
the Journal ofAbnormal Psychology:

Dr. Sip1s’ 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 sur-
roundings, own milk supply and vegetables.
One hour and a half from North Station, Boston, Mass.

An attractive fifteen-page pamphlet was printed, featuring pic-

tures of the estate’s thirty acres of fabulous ponds, statuary, and ornate
interiors, and “a large, beautiful solarium for nervous patients.” It also

[ 85 ]
 The Prodigy

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, intes-
tines, 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. Ports-
mouth 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,

[ 86 |
 Portsmouth

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 in-
vented 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

[ 87 ]
 The Prodigy

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

[ 88 ]
 Portsmouth

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. I]]-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

[ 89 |
 The Prodigy

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-eount on
his fingers, he should just go right into it.”
When Dr. Sagall grew up and had his own children, he main-
tained 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,

[ 90 ]
 Portsmouth

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 coysins, 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. Wil-
liam 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

[ ox ]
 The Prodigy

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.”

[ 92 ]
 Portsmouth

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 strawber-
ries 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 buzz-
ing 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 confi-
dent 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’ immedi-
ate 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

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 The Prodigy

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 geome-
try, 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 con-
cluded: “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 Roosevel-
tian 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 profes-
sional 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 wor-
shiped “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

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 Portsmouth

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 proba-
bly 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

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 The Prodigy

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

[ 96 ]
 Portsmouth

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 lan-
guages 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 encour-
aged 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

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 The Prodigy

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, mathe-
matics, 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

[ 98 ]
 Portsmouth

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.”

[ 99 ]
 I.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 overwhelm-
ingly right-thinking. In such an atmosphere, a prodigy is likely to be

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 The Perfect Life

regarded as an insolence toward the gods. My father’s publicly an-

nounced 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 gener-
ally 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, re-
called: “Most students considered him a freak. . . . His family put the
young man at a considerable disadvantage by insisting on dressing him

[ ror]
 The Prodigy

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 newspa-
pers 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: “T

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 some-
thing.
The effect of his education seems to have been to produce
a boy who can do wonderful, even brilliant reasoning in mathe-
matics 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

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 The Perfect Life

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 parchesi 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 under-
graduates 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 scholar-
ships. 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

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 The Prodigy

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 educa-
tion, 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 medi-
cine 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 embarrasséd 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

[ 104]
 The Perfect Life

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, Symp-
tomatology, 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 sophisti-
cation, 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 con-
scious 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

| 105°]
 The Prodigy

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?”

OnJune 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 un-
characteristic—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 repro-
duction 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 humilia-
tions, 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:

Harvarp’s Boy Propicy 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;

[ 106|
 The Perfect Life

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:

“T 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

[ 107|
 The Prodigy

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
tule 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

[ 108|
 The Perfect Life

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 noth-
ing. I use that one (indicating the Venus) to hang my neck-
ties on.” a
William went on to explain more of his philosophy and
“rules”:
“T 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....
“T 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

[ 109|
 The Prodigy

principle that a man belonging to a labor union is a Socialist. No

one should be dependent upon the good-will of others for sup-
port 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.”

[ 110|
 « )

fe 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

[ x11 |
 The Prodigy

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 claam—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 “Consti-
tution” 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 Wil-
liam James Sidis know about fistfighting? 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

ere
 Rice

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; Hous-
ton 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, eccen-
tric philanthropist William Marsh-Rice, the Institute had spared noth-
ing 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 Har-
vard’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

Vents|
 The Prodigy

pupils. And his three companions at “the bach” were intelligent, fasci-
nating men. Griffith Evans, of course, was a distinguished mathemati-
cian. 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 depart-
ment. 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 distin-
guished 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 under-
stand a prodigy). And across the street from “the bach” was the home
of the much-beloved Bulgarian philosophy professor, Radoslav An-
drea 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 in-
struct, 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

[ 114]
 Rice

Waggaman, a real blonde beauty, but didn’t have the brains to do

anything about it.” (If William did have a crush on Camille Wagga-
man, he had chosen far beyond his reach. Camille was a glamorous and
self-assured tennis star, so appealing that she sometimes escorted impor-
tant 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.” Re-
ported 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.” Accord-
ing 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 absent-
minded, 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 profession-

Ens
 The Prodigy

als.” 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 Amer-
ica, 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 anarchis-
tic, 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, be-
loved, the Dale Carnegie of radicalism. Socialists found the [WW too
militant, and did not support it. Mired in a mess of mixed premises,
the [WW 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

[ 116|
 Rice

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 major-
ity 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 presi-
dent, Dr. Lovett, encouraged mingling between his faculty and the
local society. Albert Léon Guérard, 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 bach” declared,
“Sidis’s behavior was very much to be criticized, and he didn’t make

[117|
 The Prodigy

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 fas-
cinated 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 mathemat-
ics, 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, undoubt-
edly 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.

Guérard, 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 Guérard
and Sidis. In any case, one of the most benevolent and astute of all
observations made about William James Sidis appeared in Guérard’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

[ 118]
 Rice

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. Guérard’s son, novelist Albert Joseph Guérard, 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 aca-
demic 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 lan-
guages 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 Rey-
nolds, 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

[ 119|
 The Prodigy

Atlantis, which he had given Guérard (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 devel-
oped an intense fascination with geographic and meteorologic condi-
tions 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 conver-
sation. 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.”

[ 120]
 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

bea
 The Prodigy

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.’
oe
How do you like the Texas girls?’ someone asked.
““T 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 constitu-
tion which prohibits kissing or familiarity with females is still unblem-
ished.’ ”
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:

“Wry Won’t Girts LEAVE Me ALONE?”

He’s A Woman Hater, Tuat’s Wuy!

How the Bold Young Women of Boston and Texas by Con-

stantly 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 gradu-
ated 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

[ 122-]
 Too Radical for the Radicals

attractive about them. They bored him, they were flippant and destruc-
tive 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 “unnatu-
ral,” 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 “Kip PHENOMENON” Taxes IT ALL Too SERIOUSLY

Wuen Texas Giris “Kip” 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 un-
derstanding 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. Regard-
ing 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 serious-
ly. . . . 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

Dea
 The Prodigy

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 pro-
fessor. 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 some-
time, 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.
“T bet that he is a sissy, sports a wristwatch and wears his
handkerchief in his sleeve. The truth is that Texas girls discovered

[ 124]
 Too Radical for the Radicals

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 Cam-
bridge, 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 So-
cialist Club, Harvard was prowar, 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 Lipp-
mann, was now sympathetic to the Allies. By 1917, there was no
antiwar movement left at Harvard, and William was one of a sprin-
kling 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.

tates:|
 The Prodigy

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, includ-
ing 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 prob-
lems, 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 Constan-
tinople. And he sat down and—brooomp!—column after column.
Whatever problem I had in school, he could handle it with no diffi-
culty 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”

[265]
 Too Radical for the Radicals

French—that is, French without slang or colloquialisms of any kind

—and back again, into “proper” English. If collecting streetcar trans-
fers 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

jaar, |
 The Prodigy

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 “chan-
neled” 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 Venu-
sians.

More compelling to William than any of his other pursuits was

politics. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson was running for President promis-
ing to keep America out of the war. But as the conflict escalated, the
tenor of popular opinion shifted, and the Socialist party became the

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 Too Radical for the Radicals

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 conven-
tion and publicly restated its pacifist stance; virtually all of the big-
name intellectuals deserted en masse. Though it gained twelve thou-
sand new members in the first two months of the war, the party had
lost its intellectual backbone. Many of the new members were Demo-
crats 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 IW Ws. 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 tor-
tured. 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 cul-
minated 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

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 The Prodigy

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 revolu-
tion 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 prin-
ciple.
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

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 Too Radical
for the Radicals

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 exasper-
ate the people and excite them to desperate measures, especially
if the oppression affects their means of livelihood. But if circum-
stances 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

[agi]
 The Prodigy

is entirely counteracted. The power of the government to keep

the people in subjection is weakened, and the rebellious tenden-
cies 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 varia-
tions.
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 culmi-
nation.

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

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 Too Radical
for the Radicals

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 under-
went 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 newspa-
pers 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
abetters of native birth. We must deport all aliens.”
Boris and Sarah had good reason to fear for their son.

[ 133]
 1.was 1918, the 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

[ 134|
 May Day

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 pro-
gram. 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

135°]
 The Prodigy

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 créme 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 Revolu-
tion. (William, with his superhuman abilities to speak and read any
language perfectly, was in the unique position of being able to commu-
nicate 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

[ 136]
 May Day

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 dur-
ing 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, al-
though 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. Ral-
lied 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 develop-

[ 137]
 The Prodigy

ment 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 deporta-
tions, 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 coun-
try, 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

[ 138]
 May Day

Day melees had begun. Not surprisingly, the violence that blackened
demonstrations throughout America was not, for the most part, insti-
gated 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 meet-
ing 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, “Bol-
shevik!” 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

[ 139]
 The Prodigy

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 thou-
sand 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 +49, 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.
Martha and William had a number of things in common—her
father was a Harvard graduate and a doctor who had made her earn

[ 140]
 May Day

her allowance by memorizing poetry Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark”

was fifty cents, Milton’s “I] Penseroso” was seventy-five cents. She was
a bright child, and as with William, books had been her dearest
companions. She had attended Boston University for two years but
never graduated; her passions lay elsewhere, in writing and politics.
(She was later to devote herself to literary pursuits—founding Story
magazine and a well-known series of anthologies, Best American Stories. )
She joined the Socialist party, and three months before May Day had
picketed Boston’s State House when Woodrow Wilson spoke there.
The President was opposed to women’s suffrage, so Martha and
twenty-one members of the Women’s Party carried signs bearing such
slogans as Equat Ricuts and TaxaTION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION
Is TyRANNY. They were arrested and spent a well-publicized night in
jail. Martha had her first taste of front-line action, and she liked it. By
May Day she was ready for more.
Martha’s cell was near William’s, and they managed to shout to
each other over the din of the rapidly filling prison. The guards caught
on quickly to William’s shyness and awkward courting, and began to
tease him, saying that unless he behaved and stopped talking, they’d
put Martha Foley in the same cell with him. Under the stress and strain,
William’s sense of humor failed him, and he took the “threat” seri-
ously, shouting back angrily to the guards that they wouldn’t dare
insult him in that way—which, of course, they didn’t. As the evening
wore on, Martha was joined by a dozen more women, most of whom
did not really speak English. Nonetheless she managed to keep them
in high spirits, leading them in a militant suffragist singalong.
The Roxbury court convened the next day to consider 102 of
the cases. After being identified by his arresting officer, William
pleaded Not Guilty. While the average bail set for the prisoners was
$500 to $1,000, William’s alone was $5,000. His counsel protested, but
Judge Albert F. Hayden refused to lower it—Sidis, he believed, was
largely responsible for the riot. Martha too protested her bail—it was
high, at $1,000 in cash or $2,000 in property. She eventually obtained
a bail bond and was released.

[ 141 ]
 The Prodigy

Somehow, friends of the Sidises’ had discovered William’s plight

and arranged for his bail. One of his Harvard classmates, Leverett
Saltonstall, secured his release the following day. William’s trial was
set for May 13.

William’s dramatic arrest produced a flurry of headlines: “Young

Harvard Prodigy Among 114 Prisoners,” “Boy Prodigy Among Red
Flag Carriers,” “Sidis, Harvard “Boy Wonder’ in Dock—Said to Have
Borne Red Flag; Miss Foley, a Suffragette, Also Held.” The Houston
Post even remembered their city’s erstwhile teacher: “Will Sidis Again
in the Limelight—Former Rice Instructor Who Defamed Houston
Girls, Is Now Red Flagger.”
On May 13, Judge Hayden presided over the cases of sixteen of
the Boston May Day rioters. William’s testimony proved to be the
most sensational, and it made headlines throughout the country.
Judge Hayden regarded the demonstrators with extreme distaste.
For days he had been handing out jail sentences to immigrants with
names such as Frank Szyolofky and Deomid Potimsky, and like most
Americans probably believed the Red Menace would poison his coun-
try irreparably. Martha Foley had already been sentenced to an eigh-
teen-month term, which she somehow managed not to serve.
William was identified by several policemen as the man who had
carried the red flag at the head of the parade. A patrolman also testified
that during the demonstration, when he asked Sidis why he was not
carrying an American flag instead of a red flag, the boy wonder replied,
“To hell with the American flag!”
The Boston cases, especially that of the former Harvard prodigy,
excited enormous local interest, and the courtroom was packed with
spectators. William took the stand late in the afternoon. His first
questioner was the counsel for the defense, Thomas G. Connolly.
William, by all accounts, was sharp and quick—in the various
battles of wits that followed, he proved himself a tough adversary. One
reporter observed that while he was “nervous at times, he seemed to
be little concerned with the serious charges on which he was in court.”

[ 142]
 May Day

After dispensing with a few preliminaries, Connolly began in earnest:

“Were you carrying a red flag?”
“I was carrying a red flag, two by three feet; it was a piece of
red silk tacked to a piece of string.”
“Are you a Socialist?”
eves’
“Do you believe in the Soviet form of government?”
de.”
“Will you state briefly what the Soviet form of government is?”
“That will be a rather difficult thing to do.”
“Could you give his Honor a description in one hundred words?”
William did it in sixty-one: “The Soviet form of government is
the present revolutionary form of government in Russia. The word
Soviet is the Russian word for counsel. The general principle is that
those who do socially useful work are to control the government and
industries of the country as officials of government do in general. The
fundamental principle is that everybody is supposed to work.”
“Would you say in that respect only those who do socially useful
work?”
“T would state that only those who do work shall be entitled to
control the government, but those who are in nonessential industries
would not be counted.”
“Do you understand that they intend to get control through
industries in which they work?”
“So I understand.”
“By force if necessary?”
“T understand every government implies a certain power to sup-
press opposition.”
“That does not answer the question. You said before that the
people want control of the industries of the country. I want to know
whether you advocate ‘by force’ the control of the industries of the
country, or by use of the ballot.”
“T countenance the use of force only in case it should be necessary,
and I base my statement on a comparison of the Declaration of Inde-

[ 143]
 The Prodigy

pendence of the United States government, which states clearly that

the people shall be governed only with the consent of the governed.”
William had thrown the proceedings for a loop—no previous defen-
dant and Russian sympathizer had quoted the Declaration of Indepen-
dence during his trial.
Connolly pressed on: “Who decides? The majority or minority?”
“The majority.”
“Do you believe in economic evolution?”
Hikdow
“Do you believe in a God?”
SiINOs
At this shocking admission, Connolly turned to the judge and in
his client’s interest, asked that the court establish what was actually
meant by the word “God.” Hayden replied, “God Almighty,” casting
little illumination on the matter.
William attempted to explain his position further: He said that
the kind of a God he did not believe in was the “big boss of the
Christians,” but he did believe in something “that is in a way apart
from a human being.” To the further horror of Judge Hayden, Wil-
liam explained that he believed in the evolution of species as well as
economic evolution.
Connolly continued his interrogation. Did William believe that
Soviet ideals necessarily implied violence? No, replied William, there
should not be any violence on the road to that goal. The Bolsheviks,
he explained, believed in the control of industry, and the Socialists
believed in the ballot.
Now Connolly brought out a piece of evidence that would
become a regular part of trials such as these in the coming years: a red
flag, the one the defendant had carried. William declared that the red
stood for the common blood of humanity, as it does in the American
flag. What, pressed Connolly, does the red in the American flag
represent? “It stands for the common brotherhood of mankind,” re-
peated William, adding, “I do not believe we should have idolatry in

[ 144]
 May Day

the world. I do not idolize the red flag—it is just a piece of red silk.”
Connolly held up the flag and asked William if he cared whether it
was trampled and spat on. William repeated, “It is only a piece of red
silk.”
Next, William was cross-examined without event by the prose-
cution, whose questions were not nearly so probing as Connolly’s had
been. Connolly returned for redirect examination.
“For a man who believes in the Soviet form of government,” he
said, “you certainly did not use much force.”
“I do not believe in using force,” replied William simply. “And
I did not say “To hell with the American flag’—I never use such
language.” (This was true— William never swore, but when he wanted
to, he always invoked the name of a lake in New Hampshire: Lake
Chaugoggagoggamauchauggagoggchaubunagungamaug.)
“Do you,” demanded Judge Hayden, “believe in what the Ameri-
can flag stands for?”
William stood firm. “TI belieye in certain ways for what it stands,
in the sense of the Declaration of Independence.”
“Did you and Martha H. Foley, the militant suffragist, organize
the parade, or have charge of it?”
“T was not a leader of the parade—there were no leaders and as
far as I know no permit was asked for.”
“Didn’t you think there would be trouble when you went on the
street with a red flag?” persisted the judge.
“Tt did not occur to me. .. . Under the American flag I do not
stand for the lynching of Negroes without trial.”
Judge Hayden erupted, “We all know what the American flag
stands for.”
“Well I don’t,” interjected the feisty Connolly. “We have slavery
here, fighting of armed thugs and everything else.”
On this tense and confused note, the trial ended. The May Day
offenders received their sentences, an average of six months in the
house of correction. Only William and two others received eighteen

[ 145]
 The Prodigy

months each—six months for rioting and a year for assaulting an

officer, to be served at hard labor. William appealed, and was released
on five hundred dollars bail. His paradise of seclusion had been shat-
tered by his bold public protest, and he left the courtroom a notorious
man, front-page fodder once again.

[ 146]
 CN

. William in high school. He qualified for admission to Harvard at age

ine, but was not invited to attend until he was eleven.
2. After William’s return from the Rice Institute, a
Boston paper portrayed him being pursued by a
marriage-minded Texas female, with a preacher in
tow.
3. William at sixteen, in his Harvard graduation
photo.

4. This cartoon appeared in the Boston Herald

in 1914, shortly after William’s graduation from
Harvard.

5. William, Harvard Law School student, by the

statue ofJohn Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

6. Portrait ofWilliam during his Harvard years.

PU
YO
NE
LI

SIDIS PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES 3

ie} OAK T WILL NOT CALL ON HAS STATUE OF YENUS

Vows REVERS GIRL BUT CAN CALL IN gis ROOM,AND USES
TO MARRY ON HER BROTHER \T TO HANG NECK TIES ON
 \ + . eS
aa Cann nrhowe Se bt Aeal©eV,
4

PHOTOGRAPHIC
SIDIS
ARCHIVES

EATS CRACKERS AND BECOMES YOUNGEST

MILK OR CHEESE THRE RIDES ON TROLLEYS COLLEGE PROFESSOR
TIMES A DAY FOR RECREATION IN THE WORLD

ARCHIVES
PHOTOGRAPHIC
SIDIS BRO
BRO
7. In front ofthe Institute, 1914. William, age
sixteen, stands alone at left. Front row: Helena,
Sarah, Boris, and Sarah’s youngest brother. In the
back row arefive ofthe Institute’s patients.
rf
8. Solarium and greenhouses, Sidis =
<
O
Psychotherapeutic Institute. 4
<
iS)
9. The drawing rooms, Sidis Psychotherapeutic a
z
i-4

Institute. IS=
ie)
=
10. William with Mrs. Whittemore—the Sidises’ ay
2
patron—in front ofthe Institute. Qn

10

ARCHIVES
PHOTOGRAPHIC
SIDIS PHO
SIDI
ARC
 SICIS OIHdVaASOLOHd
SHAIHDAV

i a

SICIS
OIRd
SICIS
SHAT
SHAI
OIHd
 ARCHIVES
PHOTOGRAPHIC
SIDIS

14

11. Sarah and Boris at Portsmouth.

12. Sarah and Boris.

13. Self-portrait of William and his

Brownie, 1916.

14. Helena, age twenty-two.

15. The Sidis family in Los Angeles, shortly

after William’s angry departure: Boris,
Helena, Sarah.

ARCHIVES
PHOTOGRAPHIC
SIDIS

15
16. A selection from William’s
collection ofmore than two thousand
transfers.

17. Diagram from Notes on the

Collection of Transfers.

18. William’s perpetual calendar,

which he invented at the age ofsix
and manufactured twenty-five years
later.

PHOTOGRA
ARCHIVE
SIDIS

16

DEVIGN FOR Pi ant:

TRANSFER Pi Teale
ENVELOPE - "srontof rvs
line
C,E Jehs fo be
DRAWN To f scate kesether, Bet € peuke
TAKE 1+250m / aes 1 then £.D, Loose Kap,
Glee ge ro7 pose D.

6m
720

EDGE -

i,
 ee

Perpetual Calendar
What day of the week was it— What day will it be—
RUBEN
EL
POE
+

that July 4, 1776 came on? that Christmas will come next year?
that Washington was born? Thanksgiving day, year after next?
that YOU were born? that next Election Day comes?
Directions when the Mortgage falls due?
For years 1900-1956, turn wheel till year desired appears.
Complete year’s calendar is belgt Week-day isi in same row with date,
and below the month.
For 1700, use 1909 For 1833-1860, add 68
For 1701-1736, add 220 For 1861-1899, add 40
For 1737-1764, add 164 For 1957-2012, subtract 56
For 1765-1799, add 136 For 2013-2068, subtract 112
For 1800, use 1902 a For 2069-2099, subtract 168
For 1801-1832, add 124 For 2100, use 1909

Patent Pending Copyright, W. J. Sidis, 1929

Appl. No. 370,713, Issued by Geprodis System
Ser. of 1925 112 West 119th Street
a New York, N.Y., U.S.A.
Rm
Sm
SR
ennTeo
Cake

For before 1700, or

after 2100, add or
subtract 400 years,
till within period
1700-2100.

ARCH
PHOT
SIDIS
I

18
 SHAIHOAV
OIHdVWAYDOLOHd
SICIS

Syre ee Es
oe
es

—_—

2
=

=
5

=.[Nees
SoG

ee
ss

s~ <a
ee
ss x=
33 S=eS
=
=

o >:
ray

Se S= =
S

§
ty
een:
ows
° Soo
as
ANVdWOD
NITddIN NOLHDNOH
 Rebellion, Romance,
and Reversibility

B...Sidis was in a truly difficult

position. Unlike his wife, who was an old-fashioned Republican, Boris
had certain sympathies with radicalism. As a young man Boris had
written fiery verse, which William translated from Russian at his
mother’s request. At first Boris was enthusiastic about the Russian
Revolution, but after a few months had passed he dourly told Sarah,
“Their slavery is going to be deeper than it ever was under the Tsar.”
In 1919, the year of his son’s arrest, Boris published a small book
devoted to his own political views. In The Source and Aim of Human
Progress: A Study in Social Psychology and Social Pathology, he described
war as a “mental epidemic,” a mass hysteria that fed man’s most
primitive impulses, his “fear instincts.” The result of fear run rampant

[ 147]
 The Prodigy

was mass hypnosis, which produced a population of robotic humans.

Boris condemned the Germans and the Allies with equal ferocity.
He contemptuously wrote of “the great ‘saving’ mania,” and its hyp-
notic effect: “Everything and everybody had to be saved. . . . Save
Belgium, save the country, save Democracy, save your food, from
potato peelings to the garbage can. The suggestion was irresistible, and
the weak human spirit yielded and fell into a deep social trance... .
Everybody was full of war... . Why wonder that when the air was
full of the germs that the war malady spread like wild fire?” This
pestilence, Boris declared, could only be compared with the crusade
mania: “In this world-war nations fell to the lowest level of savagery.
The frenzied, suggestible, gregarious, subconscious self, freed from all
rational restraints, celebrated its delirious orgies... .
“No man,” continued Boris, “is so low as to deserve oppression,
no opinion so mean as to merit suppression.” Every important step in
human life could be traced to an individual or group of men “whose
opinions were regarded as anti-social and dangerous, on account of
their extreme radicalism.”
But Boris now owned a mansion, ran a private practice. He had
reaped the very sweetest fruits of capitalism, from seeds sown by his
own fine mind, his hard work, his great ability. Boris was proud to
be an American. He would fight, with the written word, those Ameri-
cans who affronted the democracy he held dear, who perpetrated
Red scares and the deportation of aliens. But though he supported his
son’s rebellious spirit, he could not support his sympathy with com-
munism.
William had been emotionally and intellectually alienated from
his mother for many years. Now, for the first time, he and his father
stood divided. Boris and Sarah, too, were divided in their reactions to
the scandal of their son’s behavior. Sarah described their attitudes in
the years preceding William’s arrest:
“While this phase of his youth ran its course, Billy was loud in
his denunciation of everything done by any human who was older than

[ 148|
 Rebellion, Romance, and Reversibility

twenty-five, especially his parents. We were ‘bourgeois,’ he said, like

he was the first boy who ever thought of using the term to describe
his parents.
“Boris was entirely undisturbed. ‘It seems quite normal to me,’
he said. “Youth that has no rebellion in it is not worth its salt. Remem-
ber when you rebelled and studied though your mother wanted you
to marry the jeweler’s son? Don’t worry, this is good for him.’
“But it hurt me, to some extent. While my son was probably
right in describing me as ‘bourgeois-—I have enjoyed fame and money
—it seemed to me very shallow of him to be so loud in his condemna-
tion of his father, in whose image Billy was so molded.”
For Sarah, the shame of the family disgrace, the tarnishing of the
Sidises’ image, the editorials in The New York Times, were an agony.
To sully the image of “Dr. Science,” and of the immigrant family risen
from the slums—this was an unforgivable outrage.
For Boris, the argument was philosophical, ideological—rebel-
lion was natural to youth, but. communism was a wrong, an evil,
philosophy. When he headed the May Day parade, William had gone
to extremes Boris could no longer condone.
Elliot Sagall remembered Boris’s reaction: “William became a
radical. He and Boris had different philosophies. And Boris Sidis be-
ing a professor at Harvard . . . this was insufferable, to have his son
in an anarchistic parade on Main Street! He was put in jail, and we
heard his father used his influence to get him out. And he tried to
cover it up.”
William Fadiman recalled, “We were liberals, and so we under-
stood. But we all felt that Billy had been set up because his last name
was Sidis, and in Boston that was a very big name—Sidis of Harvard,
etc. He had been set up to be leader of the May Day parade, so that
the radicals would have publicity for their party. We thought he didn’t
quite know what he was doing. He was victimized to some degree.”
Clifton Fadiman shared his brother’s impression of Billy’s credulity:
“His communism, I think, was very naive in character. I never got the

[ 149 |
 The Prodigy

impression that it was anything but a wild outburst of general indigna-

tion.”

The events that followed William’s trial are among the most confusing
portions of Sidis history. Somehow Boris pulled the appropriate strings
and kept his son out of jail, but William was not exactly a free man.
As Helena described it, “He was cleared, sort of temporarily, but it
took a number of years before they were able to clear him so he could
even be in Massachusetts.” According to a number of accounts, the case
was eventually nol-prossed in the Superior Court, at the request of the
prosecution; if this is true, it was probably the result of Boris’s further
efforts. It is also possible that Boris and Sarah did not inform their son
when they achieved the nolle prosequi, as a way of maintaining control
over him. This is likely, since William remained frightened of possible
arrest for a good many years.
The ordeal that followed was a prison term nonetheless, in Wil-
liam’s opinion. His parents swooped down on Boston, scooped him up,
and took him to Portsmouth, where they set about to reform their boy
wonder. Little is known of what happened in the year that followed.
Sarah’s memoirs, despite their meticulous detailing of her son’s every
childhood action, shrivel up and end here. The last completed chapter,
“Billy Rebels,” is nothing more than a smattering of cheerful anec-
dotes, without mention of the harsh conflicts that rent the family.
William rarely spoke to his friends about this period of his life. Yet
twenty-five years later he was still bitter—he submitted the following
to a radical journal he coedited:

“RAILROADING” IN THE PAST

Lest anyone acquire the impression that sending conscientious

objectors to asylums is a new trick, it might be of interest to note
that the trick was known in the last war.
A CO [conscientious objector] who was too young to be
called on to register till late in 1918, and who thereby escaped

[ 150]
 Rebellion, Romance, and Reversibility

any actual draft call up to the time of the Armistice, was hauled
into court on a trumped-up charge in May, 1919. The sentence
was appealed (such procedure is normal in Massachusetts district
courts); but, before the appeal could come to trial, he was kid-
napped by his parents, by arrangement with the district attorney,
and was taken to a sanatorium operated by them. He was kept
there a full year—from October, 1919, to October, 1920—and
kept under various kinds of mental torture, consisting of being
scolded and nagged at (everything that did or did not happen was
grounds for a tongue-lashing protracted over many hours) for an
average of six to eight hours a day; sometimes this scolding was
administered while he was loaded with sleeping medicine, or after
being waked up out of a sound sleep. And the threat of being
transferred to a regular insane asylum was held up in front of him
constantly, with detailed descriptions of the tortures practiced
there, as well as of the simple legal process by which he could
be committed to such a place. He was unlawfully held in this
sanatorium, but he could not escape while watch was being kept,
for the criminal case was kept pending against him, and it was
on the court records that he had jumped bail (being kidnapped,
he could not appear for trial, or even know that trial had been
called).
In October, 1920, he was taken to California, to prevent his
communicating somehow with friends in his home city sixty
miles away. He made his escape from there in September, 1921,
by which time he appeared to be scared of his own shadow. The
attempt to get him back to the old tortures was never given up,
the parents resorting, from time to time, to various efforts to
track him down and to persuade his friends to turn him over for
“protection,” especially when any misfortune is known to come
his way. A particular effort to bring him under control of rela-
tives was made about a year ago, but was highly unsuccessful.
Since, in most states, any two physicians can commit a man,
without giving him a chance to defend himself, into a sanatorium

fre5t;]
 The Prodigy

or asylum, where he can be held incommunicado indefinitely, the

danger of railroading of that sort is still very much alive. In any
case where the prosecution is able to command the services of two
doctors, the victims would then simply disappear without leaving
any traces. _

This bizarre little document is virtually the only account of this

traumatic segment of William’s life, and it leads one to ask many
questions. Did his parents really dope him? Did they actually threaten
to commit him to an insane asylum? How could William truly have
been kidnapped and held prisoner? One of William’s closest friends
throughout his adult life, fellow radical Julius Eichel, addressed the
question of the “imprisonment”: “His father and mother had some
power over him. As far as he knew they could turn him over to the
police any time they wished—an old indictment was hanging over
him. For many years he dared not go openly to Boston, for he feared
arrest for that May Day activity.”
In Helena’s opinion: “Billy couldn’t take any correction. I could;
it didn’t bother me. Billy said to me, “You are like a reed, and you
bend and then come upright again. I am like an oak tree, and I get
uprooted.’ And of course, I have learned to be a little diplomatic, tell
little white lies. He was straightforward, and utterly frank, and would
tell everybody just what he thought of them—and that’s not the best
way. He always told me I had a New England conscience and it would
get me into trouble. But why would he say that, when he was far more
conscientious than I was and far more honest? I have learned to lie,
I don’t think he ever learned to. My mother could lie. I don’t think
my father could very well.”
According to Helena, all the family fighting was over petty
issues. Sarah harped and hammered away at her son with a daily refrain
of “Do it this way.” Recalled Clifton Fadiman, “I think Sarah, like
most mothers, wanted him to live like a mensch, you know, put on
a tie and eat right—chicken soup and so forth. But he thought of all

[ 152]
 Rebellion, Romance, and Reversibility

that as merely symbols of her dislike of him and he wouldn’t have any
of that. So I think what they quarreled about was life-style.”
A major source of friction was William’s appearance. At twenty-
one he had bulked out considerably, and despite his handsome face, he
was ungainly and sloppy. He had developed psoriasis and his sensitive
skin made it difficult for him to shave. At a time when men wore suits
and high collars, William was content with sneakers (without socks)
and an unfashionable cap. Both Boris and Sarah criticized their son’s
garb, which was odd, since neither of them was much concerned
personally about dress.
Helena, who was ten, adopted her parents’ point of view about
the May Day parade, and thought her brother had been foolish to get
involved in it. But brother and sister remained close, and little Helena
suffered acutely from the constant tension and bickering in the family.
She was particularly upset by a mother-son spat that occurred just a
few months after William’s trial and “abduction.” As she described it,
“My mother got really red in the face. He had insulted her. She just
sat down and said, ‘I am insulted.’ Then she went and sat somewhere
else and said, ‘I am insulted.’ Then she went and sat somewhere else
and said, ‘I am insulted.’ I was ten years old, and it was a big word.
I didn’t know what ‘insulted’ meant. I wondered what in the world
my brother had said, but she wasn’t the kind of person that you
could ask. I never found out what it was about. Now my father would
never have behaved like that. He might have yelled at Billy—he
did—but she pushed him into it. I don’t think my mother conscious-
ly encouraged my father to turn against Billy. But people ask,
‘Did she have enough power over my father to turn him against
Billy?’ She had plenty of power over anybody to turn them against
anyone!
“Another time, in California, my brother and father and mother
were fighting, I don’t remember what about. Billy was sitting in a
chair, suffering a very bad cold, or an allergy. A neighbor’s dog, Patsy,
used to visit us often; and that day Patsy ran over to him, and laid a

[ 153]
 The Prodigy

paw on his knee, and looked up in his face. Years later he told me,
‘That was the only sympathy I got there.’ 9

Not surprisingly, William parted ways with the Socialists and joined
the Communist party. However, he quickly became disillusioned with
the Communists. He observed that the Russian people had traded
slavery under the Tsar for slavery under Lenin, and he was disgusted
to see that the American Communist party was wracked by infighting,
and its members were more loyal to the central power in Russia than
they were to the United States. Horrified by Communist repression of
individual liberties, he quit the party, and began to talk to radical
friends about his vision of an American party: a party with no interna-
tional ties, and with democratic, cooperative ownership of industries
by workers, free from all governmental interference. Helena con-
cluded, “As a Red, he was pretty much a pink.”
William, like so many radicals, longed to go to Russia and see
communism in action. He almost had his chance. President Wilson
appointed Boris to an American “peace delegation” to Russia, and
William was to go along as interpreter. Shortly before the departure
date, Boris went to Washington to discuss the trip with Wilson,
withdrawing angrily when he discovered that the President did not
plan to bring home American troops still fighting with the Poles
against the Russian revolutionaries. Though the trip fell through, the
plans are revealing—if Boris and William planned to travel together,
the bad blood between father and son could not have been beyond
repair.
A reporter for the New York Sunday News, writing many years
later, referred to this period of William’s life with an astute observa-
tion: “He developed radical tendencies so extreme that even members
of the Communist party lifted their eyebrows a bit. This political
leaning was in itself strange. For the Communist, theoretically at least,
works for his fellows while from all one can gather, Sidis worked for
none but himself.”
Sarah wrote, “Billy’s communism did not last many months. His

[ 154]
 Rebellion, Romance, and Reversibility

rebellion was part of the quick blood of youth. A few years after the
Russian Revolution I asked him whether he thought communism was
working. He replied, ‘How should I know? Communism has never
been tried.’ ” In writing off her son’s behavior as “the quick blood of
youth,” Sarah failed completely to see that William remained passion-
ately devoted to radicalism; her blind spot could only have increased
the tension between them.
Other difficulties troubled the family. Helena underwent a series
of ailments, and Boris remained very sick. He had never fully recov-
ered from his bout with the Spanish flu, and in his weakened condition
he suffered a mild stroke. Helena recalled, “Father was ill for a long
time. He kept it to himself. I don’t think my mother was terribly
conscious of his illness. She was not terribly conscious of the fact that
I was ill.”
After a difficult year in Portsmouth, Boris was encouraged by his
doctors to return to California. What William referred to as his
“kidnapping,” Sarah saw in an entirely different light, writing, “In his
early twenties, after his flurry of revolt, Billy came out to California
with us.”
Because the Institute was closed, and because Boris and Sarah
rented a relatively expensive home in San Diego, there were money
problems on top of everything else. That winter Boris had his second,
more serious, stroke. Remarkably, he continued to work, producing
books and papers at almost his former pace.
William had two major forms of escape from the family tension.
When he was not suffering “tongue-lashings,” he took refuge in
writing and in travel. He often borrowed the family car or boarded
the bus, and toured the small towns that dotted the California coast.
Sarah reminisced about his travels: “Helena always turned to nature,
but it was the man-made world that Billy loved. He told me with a
glow of the pleasure that he got in going into strange towns, and eating
at little holes-in-the-wall with all the people who drive the trucks and
push the typewriters that make the world go. Thus Billy, who had
grown up among people who were above all intellectual, who made

[ 155]
 The Prodigy

their mark on their time, fell in love with the type of person who
leaves no record in this world, except in the memory of those who
loved them. He once told me, ‘Mother, a man who has lost his
anonymity has lost a precious and irreplaceable thing.’ Billy never left
America. He joked about his provinciality, but was stubborn in it,
and later when Helena and I traveled in Europe he flatly refused to
go with us.
“Billy read a great deal about any town he planned to visit, its
history and geography. Then he would go and explore it. ‘I can really
see a town, he told me, ‘because I am not in it, don’t belong to it. And
I have learned how to look so that I can see the town of fifty years
ago, or one hundred years ago. I can see the Indian mounds and trails
that were there first.’
“Not only did he love the history of these little towns, he loved
the ‘now’ in them, he said. He gave far more time when he was grown
to the language of the American people than he had ever given when
he astonished professors as a child by learning Latin, Greek, Russian,
and German. He wrote a dictionary of what he called the ‘lingo’ of
this land. He prided himself on his ear for dialect, for accent.” The
“lingo dictionary” is long lost, but it was not to be the last time he
would demonstrate a fascination with language not only “American”
but essentially “uneducated.”

In 1925, Richard G. Badger, owner of Boston’s Gorham Press and

publisher of most of Boris Sidis’s books, brought out The Animate and
the Inanimate by William James Sidis. Considerable mystery surrounds
the book’s publication. The preface was completed in 1920, when
William was twenty-two. Why had William waited five years to
publish it? Some, but not all, of Badger’s books were vanity publica-
tions—was this one of them? Why didn’t it receive a single review?
Since the name William James Sidis was always good for a newspaper
story, why was this major work completely ignored? How did it
entirely escape the attention of Boston’s reporters? Perhaps the press
wasn’t up to comprehending the work, and its level of brilliance was

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 Rebellion, Romance, and Reversibility

certainly no help to any reporter looking for a “genius gone crazy”

story.
And how did the academic community miss it? In 1979, fifty-four
years after its publication, a Columbia University graduate student,
Dan Mahony, brought the book to the attention of Sidis’s former
classmate Buckminster Fuller. Fuller wrote the following letter to
Gerard Piel of Scientific American, urging Piel to reprint the text:
“Imagine my excitement and joy on being handed this Xerox of Sidis’s
1925 book, in which he clearly predicts the black hole. In fact, I find
his whole book to be a fine cosmological piece. . . . Norbert Wiener
used to talk to me about him . . . and Norbert was grieved that Sidis
did not go on to fulfill his seemingly great promise of bril-
liance. .. . 1hope you will become as excited as I am at this discovery
that Sidis did go on after college to do the most magnificent think-
ing and writing. I find him focusing in on many of the same subjects
that fascinate me, and coming to about the same conclusions as those
I have published in Synergetics, -and will be publishing in Synergetics
Volume II.”
Fuller’s praise for The Animate and the Inanimate is not over-
blown. Indeed, the book explores the theory of black holes—collapsed
stars so heavy and dense that their high gravity prevents even light
from escaping—fourteen years before the publication of another work
commonly recognized as the first on the subject. The second book
suggesting the existence of these mysterious stellar objects was An
Introduction to the Study of Stellar Stucture, written by Subrahmanyan
Chandrasekhar in 1939. Sidis actually wrote his book five years before
it was published in 1920; and he had formulated his ideas as early as
1915 during his stay at Rice Institute. Since William did not fraternize
with scientists, he accomplished all this without knowing the latest
theories making the informal rounds of scientific circles. He reached
his conclusions using the same methods that his father taught his
mother when she wanted to learn geometry as a young, uneducated
immigrant—read the basic laws, and figure out the rest for yourself.
As the basis for The Animate and the Inanimate, William explored

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 The Prodigy

the possibility that all the laws of the universe are reversible in time,
with the apparent exception of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
This is analogous to running a film backward—theoretically, all laws
of physics would still hold true in a reverse-running universe, except
the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law is popularly known as
the Law of Entropy; that is, the universe is proceeding on an unstoppa-
ble course toward total chaos and “heat death.” All the particles of all
the atoms in the universe will eventually bounce off each other,
moving farther and farther away from each other, until they no longer
collide at all; then nothing will move, nothing will live, and the
universe will exist in a frozen tableau forever afterward. If one imag-
ines this happening in reverse, there is no energy source to cause any
particles to bind together in the ordered forms that make up matter
—therefore, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is believed to be
irreversible.
William offers the following image as a relatively simple intro-
duction to his theory: If one were to watch a film running backward,
for example a ball bouncing down stairs, it would appear that the ball
were being “pushed” by each stair, up to the next one. Where would
this “push” come from? Everything else about the picture would look
normal—gravity, mass, and so forth. But there is no physical law yet
to explain a normal stair “pushing” on a ball, so that a ball would
inexplicably come to rest at the top of the stairs.
William suggested that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is
not a law at all, but a probability. The fact that the Second Law of
Thermodynamics seems always to hold true is more or less coincidence
in our corner of the universe. Also, entropy is reversed in other corners
of the universe—elsewhere, chaos is proceeding to order. And if the
Second Law of Thermodynamics appears to dominate local events,
then probability suggests that there must be reversals of it all around
us that we haven’t yet recognized.
In the book’s preface, William credits his godfather, William
James, and not his own father, with the discovery of “reserve energy.”
Following the observations that led James to suggest a “reserve en-

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 Rebellion, Romance, and Reversibility

ergy, Sidis theorized that inanimate (dead) objects follow the Second
Law of Thermodynamics, while animate (living) things reverse the
law, and draw on a “reserve fund” of energy to mold the universe to
their will. Life provided the reversal of entropy that Sidis’s theory
required.
William’s theory remains highly speculative; there is no reason
to believe that a reverse universe exists. Also, biological processes are
no longer the mystery they were at the time of his writing. But while
working on this problem, Sidis came up with other conclusions that
are interesting to this day.
Cosmogeny is the study of the origins of the universe; the most
popularly known theory today is called the “Big Bang” theory. In
The Animate and the Inanimate, William proposed a “Great Collision”
theory, wherein two large, inert bodies, containing all the matter in
the universe between them, collided; this collision provided the energy
that started the universe in motion.
As our sun hurtles through space to an eventual frozen death, it
gives off energy. Somewhere in the universe there are suns that take
in energy, and death becomes life. This other kind of sun Sidis dubbed
a “black body,” since it would be taking in all light energy, and
therefore be totally invisible. This exactly describes a black hole.
Should the Second Law of Thermodynamics eventually reverse itself
in this “black body,” it would then start giving off energy and become
a sun. In this way, the universe would be in a perpetual state of ebb
and flow, all energy being conserved.
Scientists all over the world are still working on a problem
known as “Fermi’s paradox,” proposed by Enrico Fermi. If the uni-
verse is infinite, Fermi postulated, then everything possible must occur
somewhere sometime; therefore, there must exist a planet where the
inhabitants speak English. Why haven’t we met them? Why haven't
we met anyone out there? Young Sidis also said, “The theory of the
reversibility of the universe supposes that life exists under all sorts of
circumstances, even on such hot bodies as the sun.” Like Fermi’s
paradox, Sidis’s reversibility theory also requires that life must exist in

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 The Prodigy

every corner of the universe, in order to provide the necessary reversals

of the law of entropy. .
The theory is challenging, fascinating, and controversial on its
own merits today. It was far more so in 1925; and it must be remem-
bered that it sprang from the mind of a boy in his early twenties, who
devoted only a portion of his scholarship to this book, because he was
dedicated to such a vast variety of other intellectual pursuits at the same
time. Had he dedicated his life entirely to cosmogeny, who knows
what extraordinary body of work he might have produced?
Sidis himself called his work purely speculative in nature, since
there was a dearth of observations available to prove or disprove his
reversibility theory. How much faster might cosmology, cosmogeny,
and particle physics have progressed had his ideas been examined by
the scientific community? Sidis even went so far as to include a chapter
on his own objections to his theory: “All that is attempted here is, not
to prove this theory scientifically, or even to claim it as perfectly
consistent with itself or with facts, but merely to indicate that there
are... other possible theories than the one at present generally accepted
by physicists, and yet not more absurd or more inconsistent with facts.”
And in his preface, Sidis states: “At first I hesitated to publish my
theory of the reversibility of the universe, but . . . I have decided to
publish the work and give my theory to the world, to be accepted or
rejected, as the case may be.” As it turned out, Sidis’s theory wasn’t
even considered.
William never spoke of his thoughts or feelings about being
ignored. However, he ceased to write about mathematics, physics, or
cosmogeny. He never again published a book under his own name.
That he drew nationwide attention when he talked about girls in
Texas, and none at all when he broke ground theorizing about the
structure and laws of the universe, must have seemed to the boy
prodigy a sick sort of joke.

When William was twenty-three, he and his parents had their final
fight. According to his sister it was over an office job he lost for some

eo
 Rebellion, Romance, and Reversibility

trivial reason: “He didn’t do something he should have done—maybe

it was his clothes or his manners.”’ Whatever it was, it was the last straw
for William, and, as he put it, “He made his escape . . . scared of his
own shadow.”
Fearing arrest if he returned to Boston, he headed for New York.
That city held a number of attractions for him, not the least of which
was its new resident Martha Foley. William found his first refuge at
the home of his aunt Bessie Fadiman. She gave him a small room, with
the understanding that he could stay for a few weeks. Bessie was warm
and welcoming toward William, although he was something of a
nuisance. For one thing, his eating habits were bizarre. She was discon-
certed to see him attack a plate of food one article at a time—first the
meat, then the potatoes, then the peas, etc. This unusual approach
dismayed nearly every host who served William dinner. Also, he
followed his aunt around the house, complaining constantly about his
parents. One of his bitterest refrains, she remembered, stemmed from
his early childhood. William lamented that his parents had not taught
him the rudiments of grooming, and to his great embarrassment he had
found himself years behind other children in the simplest matters, such
as tying his shoelaces or getting dressed properly. At the age of twenty-
three, these humiliations still rankled (but not enough, evidently, for
him to change his now casual approach to these matters).
Eventually William rented his own, cheap apartment, and settled
into life in New York. He took a job as an interpreter with an agency
handling Soviet business in America. He expanded his political con-
tacts, and could often be found at the offices of the League for Indus-
trial Democracy or at the American Civil Liberties Union. He formed
what was to become a lifelong friendship with fellow conscientious
objector Julius Eichel, a Brooklyn pharmacist who at the time of
William’s arrest was already serving a prison term for his pacifism.
Eichel too listened to William’s complaints about his parents, who by
now had returned to Portsmouth.
The light of William’s life was Martha Foley, whom he saw
often. He confided the details of their meetings to Eichel, who wrote

sor |
 The Prodigy

about the trysting twenty years later. “Sidis sought out his new flame
and carried on a romance on Central Park benches. He was very naive
when he would tell this story of his lovemaking. The first time he had
her to himself in Central Park he kissed her with a great deal of ardor.
“Why, you kiss like an experienced lover,’ she said. “Where did you
get that experience?’ And he naively answered, as he later told us,
“Why, can’t you believe it comes as naturally to me as any other
man?’ ”
An elated William secured a photograph of Martha, which he
flourished at every opportunity. Cousin Clifton Fadiman saw it, as did
numerous other acquaintances. “He would suddenly take it out, her
picture. We might be talking about the price of eggs and all of a
sudden he would say, ‘Did I ever show you this?’ And it was Martha.”
William continued to drop in on the Fadimans, usually for a
meal. His visits made the teenaged Clifton uncomfortable. “He would
come to our house without any announcement—it never occurred to
him to use the phone. Because we were his aunt and uncle and cousins
we couldn’t throw him out. ‘Home,’ as Mr. Frost’s line has it, ‘is where
they have to take you in.’ But he was a damn nuisance. His conversa-
tion was never submitted to the ordinary conventional rules. It was
explosive. His voice would get very loud when he complained of his
mother and father. He certainly never asked for any pity, but he often
screwed himself into a state of excitement. In many ways his eccentric-
ities were the consequence of his not having the conventional censor
that we all have.
“T don’t think he had anything like a regular job. He lived in
third-rate little lodgings. He ate at the Automat. He was simply not
an attractive man. He was quite large, about six feet tall, overweight,
slovenly, with a mild skin disease. He was never ragged, but he didn’t
seem to change his clothes. Even we, who weren’t dressed very well,
felt somehow that this was somebody from the street—that’s what my
mother used to say. And she’d try to clean him up and give him food.
He was an enormous eater. When he came to our house, it was straight

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 Rebellion, Romance, and Reversibility

antique Jewish hospitality. And he would eat anything put before him
no matter how frequently it was repeated.”
William Fadiman, too, commented on his cousin’s clothing: “He
dressed not oddly, but shabbily. His clothes were ill fitting and un-
pressed. Shoes were always scuffed and dirty. And he didn’t bathe very
often. He always wore a vest, summer or winter, which is curious. He
wore a tie. He was quite formal, in a bizarre way.”
But more puzzling to the Fadiman brothers than William’s ap-
pearance was his attitude toward academic or intellectual matters.
When Clifton ventured to discuss mathematics with his illustrious
cousin, William turned on him furiously, saying, “I don’t ever want
to talk about that kind of thing!” According to Clifton, he referred
contemptuously to “the intellect and the world of ideas, particularly
mathematics. He didn’t say it was nonsense, but he would not talk
about it. We would ask him what he was doing and he would toss
it off. My impression is that he didn’t know what the hell was going
on in the intellectual world; that he abjured everything that his father
respected, everything about the academic, intellectual life. We thought
he was merely passing his time in some second-rate lodging house
doing nothing. And he read pulp science-fiction novels. I read them
too—they were great. But you wouldn’t think this great intellectual
would like that sort of thing.”
William was a little more forthcoming with William Fadiman.
He spoke to him at length and with great enthusiasm about a novel
he had been writing for several years, concerning the lost continent of
Atlantis. Nevertheless, his basic stance was consistent. According to
William Fadiman, “He abhorred being referred to as ‘the genius.’ If
someone found out about him in the beginning of a relationship, he
would get very choleric. He would get rid of and be furious at that
person. He never swore, but he indicated as clearly as a man could that
he was angry, that this was nobody’s business but his own.”
This, then, was the young man who had recently completed a
major work in theoretical physics. In a few years he would publish it,

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 The Prodigy

a work so undeniably brilliant, so profoundly intellectual, and so

heavily based in pure mathematics that his cousins, had they known
about it, would have been very bewildered indeed. Said Clifton, “T
never knew he had any interests.”
Though William would publish The Animate and the Inanimate
under his own name, it would be the last time he did, using pseudo-
nyms forever after. He had begun his double life.

[ 164|
 D.....the two years that William
spent with his parents, he had escaped the prying eye of the press. In
1922, when he was twenty-four, the Boston Traveler dug up enough
material for a front-page story: “What Has Become of Sidis, the Boy
Prodigy?” The article undoubtedly aggravated William, for not only
was it riddled with inaccuracies about his childhood, but it accused him
of cowardice: “Sentenced to jail, Sidis has neither served time nor
appeared in the superior court to fight the matter out.” The Traveler
sought information about William’s whereabouts from an unnamed
“former friend,” who supplied the curious information that Sidis was
now a teacher in “a New York labor-Socialist school. . . . Previous
to the May Day “Roxbury riots’ he had been teaching in ‘Hesperia,’

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 The Prodigy

the socialistic school for children set up in the south end by Frank
Mack and raided by the authorities in 1919.” Since the article is full
of erroneous information, some of this may be false. However, there
was a Boston Communist named Frank Mack who was deported to
his native Britain in 1922 after association with a radical school, and
it may well be that William had again assumed the role of teacher
despite his traumatic experience at the Rice Institute.
The former friend, evidently knowing nothing of William’s love
for Martha Foley, insisted that William was a woman-hater. He was
equally certain that William did not know how to enjoy himself: “He
has no conception of play or pleasure—outside his intellectual pursuits.
Likewise he has no conception of beauty. I once showed him a remark-
able picture of a mountain. ‘Don’t you think it’s beautiful?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s only a big hill.’ ”
Aside from this article, William received no publicity, and did
not participate in any more political demonstrations that might land
him on the front pages. His life was gradually becoming a happy one.
He no longer had his parents or journalists to torment him, he had an
active social life and, as always, an extraordinary intellectual life. His
courtship of Martha had not progressed beyond the kissing stage.
Although they remained close friends, she let it be known that she was
not interested in anything more. Apparently, this disturbed William
not at all, and he spoke about her to friends with the same enthusiasm
as before. Perhaps he held out hopes for the future, or perhaps he was
secretly relieved at the limits she set.
William eventually lost his job as an interpreter, and set out to
look for work. Thus began a series of menial office employments that
earned him enough to survive and little more—between fifteen and
twenty-five dollars a week—but enabled him to preserve his precious
anonymity. His real work, the writing of the books he loved, was done
on his own time and without moneymaking in mind.
This comfortable existence was shaken on October 24, 1923,
when William received a phone call from a friend telling him that his
father had died that morning at Portsmouth, of a cerebral hemorrhage.

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 In Search of Solitude

No one knows how William took the news, but he did not attend the
funeral. His reason for not appearing, however, seems not to have been
disdain for his father, but a refusal to see his mother. Since his departure
from California, he and Helena had corresponded steadily, often in
French. In his letters he explained that he wanted to visit her, but he
couldn’t abide their mother. Great as the tension had been between
father and son, it was not enough to keep him away. The possibility
of a painful run-in with Sarah was.
Boris Sidis’s death came as a shock to his colleagues and to the
public. He was only fifty-six, and even some of his best friends never
knew how ill he was. He had published seventeen books and more than
fifty magazine articles in twenty-five years, and at the time of his death
was hard at work on another book, The Psychology of the Folk Tale.
Boris had requested simple and informal services, which were
attended by family, friends, colleagues, and admirers from around the
country. The funeral was held at Maplewood Farms, and Boris was
buried on the estate. Obituaries ran in newspapers across the country,
some describing him as the first American doctor to practice psycho-
therapy. In spite of Boris’s distinction, his death was not the front-page
news that his son’s arrest had been.
Boris’s estate was surprisingly small, considering his wide reputa-
tion and the wealth of his clientele. The expenses of the last few years
—the trips to California, maintaining the Institute, and his illness—
had told on the family bank account. He left his children about four
thousand dollars each. Helena was to receive her inheritance at twenty-
one, while William could collect his immediately.
Though it meant braving Sarah, William went to Portsmouth to
claim the inheritance. Relatives and family friends looked upon his
decision with contempt. Because he hadn’t attended the funeral, some
felt he had no right to take the money. Others thought he should turn
his portion over to his mother, since she was a widow with an
enormous estate to run and he was a brilliant young man who could
easily make a fortune.
No one knows what passed between William and Sarah during

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 The Prodigy

this visit, but Clifton Fadiman described an unfortunate meeting be-

tween mother and son during this period: “Sarah visited us, and he
came in, apparently accidentally. And there was a real fight between
them, in our home.” Fadiman did not remember the cause of the
argument—some trivial matter—but he did recall his aunt’s aggres-
sion: “My aunt was a very arrogant, self-confident person. I think she
had a deep sense of guilt. And highly aggressive and arrogant people
like Sarah are hard put to accommodate their sense of guilt. So it
expresses itself in more indignation and more anger and more fury,
rather than reconciliation.”
After this harsh exchange, mother and son ceased altogether to
communicate. Helena now assumed the unenviable position of go-
between and buffer for the two, living with her mother and visiting
her brother on neutral territory at the Fadimans’ home in New York.
In the previous year, Helena’s situation had altered radically. She
missed her brother, and though Boris had told her “your cousin Jack
will be a brother to you,” it wasn’t the same. Shortly before her father’s
death, when she was thirteen, Boris had summoned her and announced
that he wanted her to take over the running of the Institute. Sarah,
though she managed the place brilliantly, got along badly with the
patients. Boris no longer nurtured hopes that William would fill his
shoes, and so he looked to his daughter, who began by helping him
with his patients and his voluminous correspondence with European
psychiatrists.
Despite her father’s seeming confidence in her, Helena was ex-
tremely doubtful that the patients would accept a thirteen-year-old girl
in a position of authority, and she suspected that her father privately
shared these doubts. He had been adamant about her other options for
the future: he didn’t want her to go to college because, as she said, “He
didn’t think much of women’s education,” or, as she speculated, “He
was so fed up with my brother that he didn’t want to educate me.”
Furthermore, there remained his general contempt for universities.
Helena was a budding poet, and Boris was convinced that if she went
to college, her professors would “destroy her literary talent.” Because

[ 168|
 In Search of Solitude

of her series of illnesses, he didn’t think she’d ever be well enough to

go out into the world and get a job, and so he wanted to groom and
prepare her to manage the Institute.
When Boris died, Helena realized what it was that she truly
wanted: to go to college. She’d had no tutors and had never been to
school, though with her father’s encouragement she was well grounded
in Plato and Aristotle. Still, that was hardly enough to prepare her for
a college entrance exam.
Helena decided that she couldn’t afford a professional tutor or a
private prep school, so she studied for the exams at home. She and
William had long corresponded in French, and now one of the patients
tutored her further. Her cousin Jack Goldwyn came to her aid, coach-
ing her in arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. Most important, Helena
followed her mother’s advice, the same advice Boris had given Sarah
}
out, you don’t need
some thirty years before: If you can reason things
to use_your memory.
areas
William was supportive if somewhat doubtful. He was worried
that his sister would strain her health cramming, trying to fit eight
years of grammar school and four years of high school into a single
year. But in spite of everything, Helena prevailed. She flunked her first
entrance exams to Smith College because she had never taken a written
test in her life. The second time, she ranked third out of a hundred
or more students. In 1924, Helena entered Smith College, but the stress
of her remarkable achievement caught up with her. She fell so vio-
lently ill with flu that she missed the entire first year, but returned in
1925 to major in sociology.
After her father’s death, Helena’s relationship with her mother
deteriorated. “My father died and I got the brunt,” she reflected. Boris
or William had always been there to leap to her defense, and now she
had no protection against her mother’s rages. “It is normal for a
mother, when she loses a child as my mother did Billy, to transfer the
attention to the remaining child. Well, she didn’t.” Helena hid from
Sarah, retreating to an upstairs bedroom to study, “away from her
yelling and giving orders.”

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 The Prodigy

Sarah was under an enormous strain, and it intensified the most

abrasive aspects of her personality. She missed her husband terribly, she
was completely estranged from her son, and she was shackled with a
huge estate and its attendant financial burdens. Somehow, in her inimi-
table way, she managed. The staff was reduced to an absolute mini-
mum, and when summer came, Sarah opened up Maplewood Farms
as a tourist resort.

After collecting his inheritance, William resumed his active social life
and his prolific writing in New York. He put a little of his money
aside for travel and the rest he invested in bus stocks. He made a brief
trip to California by bus, presumably to visit Martha Foley, who was
working as a newspaperwoman in San Francisco. (She remained in
California for three years, not returning to the East Coast until 1925.)
William’s customary cheerfulness was not dampened by her absence—
he continued to brandish her picture and chatter about her to friends.
Returning to New York, William got an office job, and he carefully
guarded from his employers and coworkers the secret of his genius.
His task was to run a comptometer, which was the first wholly
key-operated calculating machine. It was a far more difficult device to
use than present-day adding machines, and some of the operations
called for two hands crossing over on one machine, working two or
more keys in different columns at the same time. William was highly
skilled at his job—he frequently astounded employers by operating
two comptometers at the same time, one with his right hand and one
with his left, using his elbow for the space bar. As much as William
abhorred calling attention to himself, his passion for doing excellent
work overruled even this consideration.
On January 10, 1924, three months after his father’s death, the
New York Herald Tribune exposed William’s identity in a front-page
story:

Boy Brain Prodigy of 1909 Now $23-a-Week Adding Machine;

Son of Late Dr. Boris Sidis, Who, in Finee Pants, Lectured to

[ 170]
 In Search of Solitude

Harvard Professors, Lives as a Clerk; Shuns Mother and Friends;

Shrugs at Books, Theaters, and Girls and Prefers Job That Takes
No Thinking.
At 26, the boy prodigy of 1909 has become a mere cog in
the workaday world of 1924. For $23 a week he is working as
a clerk in the statistical division of an uptown office. . . . About
six months ago persons in New York who were interested in
young Sidis tried to find a job for him. They finally succeeded
in placing him with the concern for which he is now working,
but not without difficulty, for he insisted on being given work
that did not require too much thinking.

The reporter wrote of “the tragedy that young Sidis represents,”

castigating him for not attending his father’s funeral and for cutting
off contact with his mother. The most serious charges the reporter
leveled against Sidis were of eccentricity, sloppiness, and indifference
to common concerns:

As one of the tide of humanity that ebbs and flows at nine and
five each weekday in New York, young Sidis is distinguished
only by being less careful of his appearance than the average New
York clerk. Chided recently for a seeming lack of ambition,
he said:
“All I want is a little greater margin than I have, so I may
put something aside for a rainy day.”
“But don’t you care about books, the theater, girls, automo-
biles, all the things that are denied you on twenty-three dollars
a week?”
Sidis merely shrugged his shoulders.
Yesterday young Sidis was wearing a cheap brown suit,
much too tight for his fleshy frame. He had not been shaved; his
reddish moustache was a ragged fringe that appeared to have been
whacked off with a pair of manicure scissors. His mop of mouse-

[ 171]
 The Prodigy

colored hair was in need of trimming. His necktie was in a hard

knot, that did not come within inches of his collar.

Not only did William affront by not being dressed properly, he

offended by his lack of interest in “normal” pursuits: girls, the theater,
automobiles. On the one hand, he was expected to be special—that is,
to be brilliant, and above clerical work; on the other, he was expected
to be “normal”— interested in ordinary amusements. The conflict be-
tween these two requirements seems to have escaped the Tribune
reporter as it had so many before him. And, like so many of his
brethren, he thought nothing of publicly humiliating William with a
lip-smacking description of his badly trimmed moustache and his
“mouse-colored hair.”
The Tribune article prompted a snide editorial the following day
in The New York Times. Entitled “Precocity Doesn’t Wear Well,” it
began: “Parents whose boys show no indications of being or becoming
intellectual giants can get consolation from observing what has hap-
pened in the case of the once much-advertised son of Dr. Boris Sidis,
the Boston psychologist.” After thus reassuring the parents of dull
children, the Times gave a brief résumé of his activities in the interven-
ing years, and concluded: “The mental fires that burned so brightly
have died down, to all appearances. It may be, of course, that precocity
now takes the shape of realizing that all is vanity, and ordinary
successes are not worth seeking, but such philosophy is a poor result
of the speed shown early in the race; and while young Sidis is no more
to be criticized adversely than anybody else for not wanting what he
doesn’t want, it is hard not to regret that his marvels should have been
confined to adolescence.”
If he had been a man of different temperament, perhaps he'would
have sent a copy of The Animate and the Inanimate to the Times, or
written a letter of complaint. But he did not. He probably thought that
his great work of theoretical physics was not fit for such little minds,
and disdained to argue with them. He wanted only his solitude, and
now, exposed as a genius, he quit his job.

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 In Search of Solitude

Indeed, the editorial writer of the Times had hit on a point of

truth: For such a prodigy as William, “ordinary successes are not worth
seeking.” Where the reporter went wrong was in guessing the reason
for William’s indifference to these successes. It was not that the prodigy
had realized, as the reporter thought, “that all is vanity.” It was rather
that he had had enough of callous reporters and an insatiable public,
who seemed to believe that he owed them a debt just because he was
a genius—who felt he was obliged to perform marvels with the
regularity of a trained seal, and that if he did not, he ought to be
criticized, pilloried, and humiliated. But a mind is not public property.
William Sidis had only one debt—the same debt every man has to
himself—to achieve his own happiness and fulfillment, using his mind
to the best of his ability. To achieve this happiness, William chose an
extraordinary path: to lie about his genius, that he might remove it
from the public arena; to pretend he was ordinary; to maintain his
privacy; and to follow his star alone, publishing under pen names and
teaching small groups of students who would not betray him. His
choice was a brave one, but he never became cynical about it, and he
never lost sight of the stars he followed. While he hated academia and
spoke harshly of the world of academics, he became more and more
pedantic; while he pretended to dislike the intellect, he read and wrote
ever more prolifically. The strain showed on Sidis—it accounted for
many of his eccentricities and increased his reputation as a burnout and
a failure.
A growing part of the Sidis myth was that he had indeed had a
nervous breakdown. Different people placed it at different times in his
life—some said it occurred during his childhood, others after the May
Day affair. This rumor was so prevalent that even Norbert Wiener
believed it, writing in his memoirs of “how great a loss mathematics
suffered in his premature break-down,” and adding that “the collapse
of Sidis was in large measure his father’s making.”
After receiving his M.A. from Harvard, Norbert went in an
entirely different direction from William’s, and it is worthwhile to
compare the paths the two geniuses followed. Norbert himself had

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 The Prodigy

suffered a painful crisis after his graduation from Tufts College at

fourteen. He was physically exhausted and deeply pained by “one of
the greatest realizations the infant prodigy must make: He is not
wanted by the community.” Not only was he, like William, a social
misfit at Harvard, but a Jew whose mother, though Jewish, was anti-
Semitic and concealed his Jewishness from him. Norbert was stunned
by the revelation of his true race and crushed by the unexpected
anti-Semitism he encountered at Harvard. Under these strains, his
studies suffered.
Norbert studied biology at Harvard, but was not gifted in the
field and was uncertain whether or not to continue. In his memoirs he
wrote bitterly, “As usual, the decision was made by my father. He
decided that such success as I had made as an undergraduate at Tufts
in philosophy indicated the true bent of my career. I was to become
a philosopher. . . . This deprivation of the right to judge for myself
and to stand the consequences of my own decision stood me in ill stead
for many years to come. It delayed my social and moral maturity, and
represents a handicap I have only partly discarded in middle age.”
Norbert didn’t have the courage to rebel against his father,
though he resented his father’s decision bitterly. Unlike William, he
never made a statement of this urge to rebel, but instead bit the bullet
and entered into the study of philosophy, eventually managing to
specialize in an area that he loved, that of mathematical logic.
William’s rebellion, then, was 2 healthier statement of individual-
ity than Norbert’s obedience. On the other hand, Norbert enjoyed
certain advantages in his emotional relationship with his father that
William did not. As mentioned earlier, when a cruel article was
published during Norbert’s stay at Harvard, naming the college’s four
prodigies as social and emotional failures, Leo Wiener leapt to a
passionate defense of his son, wrote letters of complaint to the maga-
zine in question, and considered taking legal action. While the letters
of complaint yielded nothing in the way of a retraction or an apology,
that was not the point. Leo Wiener had acted on behalf of his son in
a way that it never occurred to Boris to do. Boris constantly defended

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 In Search of Solitude

William in theory, and defended his own method of education—but

he never saw the value in taking a stand against an abusive or humiliat-
ing article, except in order to correct educational theory. He did not
give his son the sense of personal protection that Norbert, however
much his father bullied him, seemed to enjoy.
More important, Leo Wiener only occasionally paraded the
proof of his theories’ success—Norbert—to the newspapers. Boris, of
course, advertised his boldly, blind to the harm it was doing to his son.
Writer Kathleen Montour, in a 1977 article in American Psychologist,
compared William and Norbert, and held to the common opinion that
Boris Sidis was a villain who had made a tragedy of his son’s life. Even
with these strong views, she conceded the crucial role of the yellow
journalism that haunted William: “Certainly, those who took pleasure
in holding [William’s] misadventures against him were as much to
blame for his outcome as his father. For all that Norbert Wiener and
William Sidis had in common, Wiener never had to deal with such
unrelenting ridicule.” #?
Norbert also cherished the frequent hikes and camping trips he
took with his father. Boris and William had no equivalent amusement.
Their intellectual discussions of mathematics, religion, and politics
were deeply satisfying and stimulating, but father and son were never
free of the feeling that Sarah hovered somewhere nearby, about to give
orders putting them to work while bitterly resenting being left out of
their discussions.
After completing his graduate studies at Harvard, Norbert spent
six unhappy years. At Cambridge University he studied under Ber-
trand Russell, who found him pompous and told a colleague, “He
thinks himself God Almighty.” Poor Norbert was wildly insecure, and
afraid he would be thought “a fool”—in his efforts to impress, he
succeeded only in appearing as an arrogant, if brilliant, boor. Like
William, he lacked the social graces, writing later, “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.” The great
difference between the two prodigies was this: Norbert never stopped

[975 |
 The Prodigy

worrying about whether he was tactless and out of step socially, while
William had never learned to care.
Returning to the United States at the age of twenty-one, Norbert
lectured at Harvard for a time. At his father’s urging he became a math
teacher at the University of Maine, where he was miserable. A series
of unsatisfactory jobs followed. Norbert did not find any happiness
until 1919, when he took a post teaching math at MIT.
Clearly, Norbert’s observation still held true: Just because the
boys were prodigies did not mean they had anything else in common.
At the time that William Sidis took up a double life as his solution
to the pains of his existence, Norbert settled into a respectable job at
MIT. Leaving philosophy behind, he slowly began what would be-
come a brilliant career in mathematics and science.
Equally important, Norbert began to court the woman who
would become his wife, Margaret Engemann, a language professor.
Norbert had had one previous girlfriend, of whom his family did not
approve, and they humiliated him mercilessly until the couple broke
up. “Family ridicule,” he wrote sadly, “was a weapon against which
I had no defenses.” The fact that his family approved of Margaret and
pressured him intensely to marry her disturbed both the young lovers,
and made them unduly cautious. “A courtship that might end in
marriage, he wrote, “could only be my own and could not represent
a decision imposed on me by parental authority.” Furthermore, Nor-
bert believed, his parents saw Margaret as someone who would “serve
as a ready instrument for holding me in line,” and “they supposed that
my marriage with Margaret would mean an indefinite prolongation
of my family captivity.” Happily, none of this was so, and theirs was
a true love match. But there were other problems—the beginning of
their honeymoon was spent at a depressing, musty New York hotel
that had been the headquarters of the American Mathematical Society;
and during their European honeymoon they were joined by Norbert’s
parents. Just when the couple most needed to be alone, Norbert faced
the sorry realization that “I had become too emotionally dependent on
my parents to ignore their summons.”

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 In Search of Solitude

In his autobiography, Norbert wrote frankly of this problem in

his marriage, stating that it was many years before he overcame his
parents’ domination, and that their “policy of glossing over my emo-
tional difficulties” made his struggle for independence all the more
difficult. This problem, in a nutshell, is common to many prodigies,
and like other prodigies, Norbert credited his marriage with defrosting
him emotionally. He wrote, “I wish no reader to draw the conclusion
that my emotional life has been restricted to my scientific career, or
that I could live with any satisfaction without the loyalty, affection,
and continued support of my lifelong companion. . . . | cannot express
how my life has been strengthened and stabilized by the love and
understanding of my partner.”
Had Martha Foley returned William’s passion as Margaret did
Norbert’s, perhaps the two prodigies would have had more in common
in the long run. The same year that Norbert married, Martha definitely
cast her lot with a man whom she had met in San Francisco, a troubled
young writer named Whit Burnett. Unlike William, Whit had no
interest in Martha’s great passions—politics, socialism, and feminism
—but he shared her other love, writing.
Martha returned to New York and set up housekeeping with
Whit. He got a job at The New York Times, she at the Daily Mirror.
According to friends, William treated this development as if it didn’t
exist. Martha still saw him socially, but without Whit, and William
did not attempt to prevail over Martha—he simply avoided discussion
of the interloper and carried on as before, but without the kisses. In
1927, Martha and Whit moved to Paris. William did not see Martha
again for five years. As before, William bore his unrequited love
cheerfully, continuing to talk about Martha and show the photograph
that he carried for the rest of his life.
In the life of a prodigy, perhaps more than in the average life,
a marriage or a requited love is the greatest single factor that can heal
the old childhood wounds. William and Norbert’s response to their
childhood and teenage rejections and humiliations was to retreat into
the painless world of ideas, where successes and satisfactions abounded.

[77 |
 The Prodigy

A successful love affair could be the key to reentry into the world of
feeling, bridging the gap between the cerebral and the emotional lives.
This was dramatically true in the case of that other great prodigy, John
Stuart Mill.
John Stuart Mill’s father was a more ferocious version of Leo
Wiener. Intensely critical and cold, James Mill lavished continual
attention on his prodigy son, but never affection. Like Norbert, John
did not rebel overtly against his oppressive father. Instead, his inner
pressures led to a kind of nervous breakdown at the age of twenty.
Outwardly, he went through the motions of his busy intellectual
schedule; inwardly he was morose and empty. He had lost the ability
to feel—neither poetry, nor music, nor even his favorite books, in-
spired any real emotion in him. He had lost his former zeal for the
altruism his father had taught him, and no longer felt excitement at
the thought of reforming mankind and bettering the lot of millions
of Hindus. If he did not learn to feel in a year’s time, John decided,
he would commit suicide.
To his despair, he discovered that his mood did not crack under
rigid self-analysis, the only tool his father had given him. Sadder still,
he could not think of a single person to confide in. His father was the
last person he would consider approaching—not only was John afraid
of him, but he was also, paradoxically, afraid of making James Mill
feel like a failure.
After suffering this depression for some six months, John’s first
breakthrough came when he was moved to tears while reading a
sentimental book. A passion for Wordsworth’s poetry followed, and
a hunger for all things emotional. He recovered, and resumed his
furious work pace. While he never declared any outright opposition
to his father, he realized that he needed emotion to supplement his
father’s brand of arid, dour rationality. At the age of twenty-four,John
met an intellectual, sympathetic, married woman, Harriet Taylor, and
they began an emotional, though not a sexual, affair. When her hus-
band died twenty years later, the lovers were finally married. Though
less perfectly satisfying than Norbert Wiener’s marriage, John Mill’s

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 In Search of Solitude

unconventional love affair did much to synthesize his feelings and his
intellect. Furthermore, the liaison was such an assault upon Victorian
mores that it served as a satisfactory, if indirect, rebellion against James
Mill, who heartily disapproved of his son’s coveting another man’s
property.
Leo Wiener and James Mill were both unlike Boris Sidis in that
they were verbally abusive of their sons, harshly criticizing the boys
when they failed to conform properly. However, there is a crucial
similarity that runs through the upbringing of the three—all of the
boys reached young manhood with a feeling of helplessness and inabil-
ity in regard to handling the practicalities of life, and all knew their
parents were to blame.
John Mill’s mother left her son’s training so wholly to her hus-
band that the boy never learned to take care of himself in trivial,
domestic ways. James Mill regarded his son’s ineptitudes with scorn.
Wrote John bitterly, “The education which my father gave me,
was in itself much more fitted-for training me to know than to
do. ... There was anything but insensibility or tolerance on his part
towards such shortcomings: but, while he saved me from the demoral-
izing effects of school life, he made no effort to provide me with any
sufficient substitute for its practicalizing influences. Whatever qualities
he himself, probably, had acquired without difficult or special training,
he seems to have supposed that I ought to acquire as easily . . . he seems
to have expected effects without causes.”
What shades, here, of William Sidis’s not being taught to tie his
shoelaces! The mistake of these parents of prodigies, then, was to
assume that their children, with their marvelous brains, would absorb
the commonsense details of life as easily as they would their Latin
declensions, and with less need of instruction.
Of these three prodigies, William, though by far the most outcast
by society, and appearing to be the greatest failure, was at this stage
in life finding the greatest happiness. He had hit upon a strategy—the
double life—which served him well, and he was both productive and
satisfied with his daily existence. If he had found a reciprocal love as

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 The Prodigy

had Norbert Wiener and John Mill, he too would have had the
advantage of a richer emotional life. But more important, he had
rebelled against his parents for all he was worth, and reaped enormous
benefits from it. He had no morose depressions or restless years spent
following his parents’ plan—he was his own man, however odd,
however eccentric, however unorthodox.

[ 180|
 0. of the most extraordinary
events in William Sidis’s extraordinary life was the publication of his
second, and last published, book, a year after the appearance of The
Animate and the Inanimate. A very small edition of Notes on the Collec-
tion of Transfers was published in 1926 by Dorrance and Company, a
Philadelphia vanity press, with William’s inheritance money. Most of
the copies were destroyed in a warehouse fire, and today the book is
extremely rare. This work is arguably the most boring book ever
written, and as every bibliophile knows, the competition is fierce. It
unquestionably placed him among the foremost ranks of literary eccen-
trics. Of course, literary history abounds with unusual books. Before
Sidis arrived on the scene, there had been a volume entitled Nothing

[ 181]
 The Prodigy

by Methela which contained two hundred blank pages. In 1634,

Charles Butler published The Feminin Monarchi, a history of bees
written in phonetic spelling. In 1802, there appeared A Pickle for the
Knowing Ones by Timothy Dexter, composed of a single sentence
unmarred by even one instance of punctuation (in a second edition,
all the punctuation was grouped together on the last page). And after
Sidis’s book, in 1939, there came Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright,
a complete fifty-thousand-word novel written without the single use
of the letter e.
William selected a peculiar pseudonym—Frank Folupa. Choices
of pseudonyms are rarely arbitrary, and given William’s near perfect
command of hundreds of languages and dialects, it is tempting to look
for meanings in his choice of a name. Folle is French for “crazy”; lupa
is Latin for “she-wolf”—could William have been calling himself a
crazy wolf? Certainly, anyone picking up Notes on the Collection of
Transfers might find this an accurate pen name.
The work, as its title indicates, was devoted entirely to William’s
beloved hobby of streetcar-transfer collecting. His passion for public-
transit systems began when he was a toddler. A pair of Harvard
professors visited the Sidis home and found the two-year-old poring
over maps of greater Boston. Little pink-cheeked Billy called to his
mother, who had just brought him back from a shopping trip. He
showed her the maps and pointed out a much shorter route to the area
they had just left. When he was five, in 1903, he collected his first
transfers; by the time he was in his mid-twenties he had more than
1,600. He corresponded with other collectors, swapped transfers, and
even acquired foreign transfers by mail.
William successfully memorized hundreds, if not thousands, of
transit routes throughout the United States. Among his friends and
relatives, stories abounded of his startling ability to give transit advice.
On one occasion, a friend of Jack Goldwyn’s wanted to know about
a train leaving Boston. “I said, ‘Now look, Frank—lI got a cousin who
knows a lot of stuff, maybe he knows that garbage.’ So I asked Billy,
and he said, “Sure, there’s a train leaving so and so from Boston.’ And

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 The Peridromophile

he told Frank there was a dining car and a sleeping car.” When a friend
of Helena’s wanted to go to Cleveland from Boston, she gave William
the name of the street that was her destination. “He told her exactly
what buses to take, and connecting buses and where to get them. She
was just amazed. How he knew places all over the country, without
having been to them, is really almost fantastic.” In his spare time,
William composed lengthy transit guides: The Transfer Guide to the
District of Columbia, The Transit Guide to the Northwest Suburbs of
Boston, etc. According to his friend Julius Eichel, “Most people had
preconceived notions that similar city guides were already in existence.
Nothing could be further from the truth. With painstaking thought
and logic he had evolved a system whereby anybody could, by looking
at the part of the city he wanted to reach, see at a glance what transit
facilities to use towards that end. He was constantly studying city
transit problems, and solving some quite elegantly, and that without
ever having set foot in some of the cities.”
There was a persistent rumor that William was offered a job by
the Eastern Massachusetts Railway Company, who gave him their
most difficult statistical problems to solve. As the story went, he spent
an hour surrounded by blueprints, charts, and statistics and was found
weeping over the documents. Figures, he purportedly told the com-
pany officials, made him ill, and he quit the job. It is difficult to say
whether or not this tale is pure fabrication. He did tell his sister that
the very sight of a mathematical formula made him ill, so perhaps it
is true. On the other hand, where Helena was concerned, he was
generous with this type of information. If she had a question, particu-
larly about paradoxes (his specialty), he warmly gave her an answer.
She seems to be the only one for whom he would make an exception.
If he had the slightest sense that anyone was making an exhibition of
his abilities, he would clam up completely and pretend uncompromis-
ing ignorance.
George Gloss, the owner of Boston’s Brattle Bookshop, recalled
a trip he made to Seagate, “an exclusive part of Coney Island. They
had some kind of a streetcar, and they issued a transfer. Well, I came

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 The Prodigy

back triumphantly, and I said, ‘I bet you haven’t got this!’ ‘Oh!’
William says. “They just issued that. ...’ And he knew all the details.”
Gloss knew William only slightly, but one incident in their acquain-
tance stuck out in his mind: “Once I took him home for dinner. As
we were walking, he saw a subway or heard an elevated, and he was
. . overcome by it. I had never seen such a reaction. Excitement and
admiration. Love. For the railroads and the railroad sounds.”
In the introduction to Notes on the Collection of Transfers, William
advises the reader to begin at the end of the book and work backward,
in order to avoid the driest material.
This suggestion is sound advice indeed, since Part I consists of
seven stultifying chapters, proceeding from the merely boring to the
staggeringly dull. The topics covered are: I. Transfers in General; II.
Transfer Privileges; III. Fares; [V. Reversibility; V. Fare Limits and
Overlaps; VI. Circumstances of Issue; and VII. Systems and Sub-
systems. What, one cannot resist asking, remains? A great deal, since
Part I represents only 69 pages out of 305.
Part II is titled Contents of Transfers, and delves deeply into the
following subjects: VIII. Transfer Tickets; IX. Transfer Forms; X.
Dating of Transfers; XI. Transfer Time Limits; XII. The Half-day on
Transfers; XIII. Routes; XIV. Transfer-Issuing Units; XV. Conditions
of Place; XVI. Miscellaneous Conditions; XVII. Standard Types; and
XVIIL. Coloring of Transfers.
Part II, despite the bludgeoning dullness of most of the material,
contains bits of charm. A wry comment here and there; or a note of
melancholy philosophy, when writing of obsolete transfers not im-
mediately withdrawn from usage: “Such forms . . . which are vestiges
of former transfer privileges, are called vestigial forms. . .
Vestigial transfer forms have the same interest as other vestigial rem-
nants—objects, manners, actions, that are entirely disconnected from
their present surroundings, and are simply survivals of a bygone past.”
If the reader makes it to Part III, Collecting Transfers (or has taken
the author’s advice and begun there), he will be amply rewarded, for
at last the going gets good, so to speak. After a tolerable chapter,

[ 184]
 The Peridromophile

Collection in General, the reader comes to one of the most interesting

parts of the book, the chapter titled Derelict Transfers.
“What is a Derelict? By the expression ‘derelict transfers’ 1 mean
the discarded transfers frequently found lying about, abandoned by
their rightful owners.” These abandoned transfers, Sidis stressed, form
an important source for the dedicated collector, and their acquisition
and treatment is described in rather tender detail:

Handling Derelicts. The collector picking up derelict transfers

should do it as inconspicuously as possible, and should generally
not let it be noticed that that is what he is doing. Although
picking up a derelict for a souvenir to put in a collection is a
perfectly legitimate action in itself, still it would hardly do to
appear as one who picks up rubbish, or especially as one who is
trying to pick up transfers to evade payment of carfare.
Wet transfers can be kept in a special pocket for a while,
and will dry fairly rapidly. In any case, when unfolding a trans-
fer, especially a wet one, care should be taken not to tear the
transfer itself in the process. If a transfer is dirty, it is best not
to keep it where it is liable to soil clean ones, especially if it
is wet.
Wet transfers are often found adhering closely to the pave-
ment, and there special care is needed to avoid tearing, especially
if there is already a slight tear. Where there are attached coupons,
these are quite likely to come off if care is not observed. Some-
times the process of detaching such transfers can be done very
effectively, and quite inconspicuously, too, with the point of an
umbrella, which can also be used to pick up the transfer if handled
properly. [Sidis constructed his own litter stick—a stick with a
pointed metal end attached to it, rather like the kind streetcleaners
used.] Snow will very frequently keep them frozen in all winter,
and many derelict transfers can be found under a deep layer of
snow; these may be treated essentially as ordinary wet transfers,
but great care should be used if they.have to be taken out of ice,

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 The Prodigy

in which case it may be best to break off the whole piece of ice
and let it melt.

The proper storage, labeling, and indexing of the collection is a

matter of many pages, including detailed instructions on how to make
envelopes in which to store the transfers, complete with a diagram.
The next chapter is titled Local Exploration, and details the
advantages of transfer-hunting as an aid to gaining knowledge of a
city; and indeed, Sidis makes a very good case for his thesis:

The transfer collector, besides the information acquired from

reading and analyzing the inscriptions on transfers, gets a thor-
ough and firsthand knowledge of more details of his city and its
vicinity than the average inhabitant would be likely to get
... other inhabitants or visitors will not see the city so much as
a whole. A city and its environs will thus appear to the transfer
collector not merely as on a map, but rather as a dynamic map,
one into which some life and motion has been put... . If a city
is passed through on a train, the parts seen are anything but
characteristic, since the neighborhoods about a railroad track are
apt to be rather run down in appearance. The opposite will be
true of the city as seen from an auto, which will be principally
from the point of view of the boulevards. But the local trans-
portation lines will take in everything, business sections and all
other types of sections of the city and suburbs. . . . This in itself
should be enough to lend some interest to the collection of
transfers.

In the final and most intriguing chapter, Miscellaneous Items of

Interest, William stated his case for the hobby, allowing that “it is
hardly fair to assume that the reader will be interested in collecting
streetcar transfers, since such a hobby is, to say the least, a rare one.”
However, he cited a number of advantages to collecting, such as that
of visiting historical sites, and the pleasure to be derived from “arith-

[ 186]
 The Peridromophile

metical or statistical figuring . . . in connection with the calculation

of car indexes.”
As if this were not inducement enough, William wooed his
readers with, of all things, “Transfer Humor”: “According to this story
99. 66

a man applied for admission at the gates of St. Peter, and was told to
go to the other place. He immediately replied: “Gimme a transfer.’ ”
Another went: “It is said that a Harvard College student got on
a streetcar, and wishing an extra ride, asked the conductor for a
transfer. When asked where to, he said, ‘Anywhere.’ The conductor
winked and said, “All right, I will give you a transfer to Waverley.’
The student was afterwards laughed at when he told the story, and was
informed that the asylum for the feeble-minded was located at Wa-
verley.”
A little transfer poetry followed the jokes. First, an excerpt from
the eleven-year-old William’s ode to the opening of the Cambridge
Subway. And then, “an extract from a verse in the form of a Mother
Goose Alphabet to explain the letters on the cars of the Los Angeles
Railway.

A is for Adams, well-known man of

state.
B is for Brooklyn, that borough so great.
C is for Crown Hill, or Crooked, maybe.
D is for Depot, where stops the Espee.
E is for Eagle Rock, towards the north.
F on the top of a car stands for Fourth.

In conclusion, William wrote:

One thing in which the collection of transfers differs from other

kinds of collection, is that such collection can never be commer-
cialized, since trading in transfers is illegal, being presumably
fraudulent even where there is no specific law in regard to
transfers as such. Therefore, collectors must always be amateurs,
collecting for the intrinsic interest in it; the professional collector

[ 187]
 The Prodigy

cannot very well appear in this field, nor would it be desirable

that he should. The collector of transfers will, therefore, not be
faced by the problem of the stamp collector of issues printed
exclusively for sale to collectors and not for circulation.

While any number of passages from Notes on the Collection of

Transfers lend themselves to psychological interpretation, it is perhaps
this last speech that is the most revealing. Since William’s very genius
was “commercialized” from his earliest childhood—by his mother in
her eager display of him, by his father in Philistine and Genius, and
most of all by the press, who used him for reams of good copy at the
expense of his feelings and who continually urged him to commercial-
ize his genius in adulthood by offering it up to society—the deep love
of a truly, eternally amateur hobby is a symbolic cry for freedom from
exploitation.
Kathleen Montour, in her perceptive article on Sidis in American
Psychologist magazine, made the same mistake that many others had
made in analyzing this odd book. She wrote, “Unlike Notes on the
Collection of Transfers, The Animate and the Inanimate is a serious
treatment of a scientific topic; it involves the philosophy of science.
The contrast in the content of these two reflects the change that Sidis
underwent, from scholar to cynical eccentric, hostile to intellectual-
ism.” In fact, there is nothing cynical about Notes. On the contrary,
it is its very innocence that is bizarre; to present a passionate work
about a hobby that would certainly appear absurd to most people, even
if done pseudonymously, takes a little bit of courage and a great deal
of enthusiasm.
Dan Mahony, a political psychologist who has been studying
Sidis’s writings, observes: “A hobby is a very idealistic activity. I think
what Sidis is doing is exploring the borderline between work and play.
The average person is an expert in their hobby; because they think it’s
a hobby, it keeps the academes at bay—if it’s a hobby, it’s not official
and it’s okay to have it. But there are experts in hobbies that are bet-
ter than most college professors. You’re free to think within your

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 The Peridromophile

hobby. And Sidis is saying, ‘In your hobby, you’re free to be a perfec-
tionist.’”

In September 1926, William began a monthly publication for transfer

collectors, titled The Peridromophile, available at ten cents an issue or
one dollar per year. This unlikely magazine ran for six and a half years,
resurfacing under several more titles in the years that followed.
The first issues featured columns on predictably dry topics, such
as the written matter (usually advertisements) featured on the backs of
transfers, special “revival issue” transfers and their peculiarities, etc. A
regular contributor to The Peridromophile was one Mr. M. W. Nash,
who drew a monthly cartoon chronicling the adventures of “General
Phorm,” who cavorted with a transfer-stabbing stick and a collector’s
box slung over his shoulder. To add to the levity, there was a regular
humor column, called “Rail-ery,” featuring William’s latest collection
of bad transit jokes, such as the following:

“Excuse me, does this train stop at Reading?”

“Yes; get off one station before I do.”
“Oh, thank you.”
conbuctTor: This transfer has expired, madam.
LaDy: I don’t blame it a bit. This streetcar is so poorly ventilated.

Overheard on the Boston streetcar during the 6 p.m. rush hour:

“We are in a jam. Heaven preserve us!”
A man was seen walking a car track—an old, abandoned line—
and gazing intently at the rails. A bystander called out to him:
“Hey, what are you doing there?”
“Why, I’m a detective!”
“What are you looking for?”
“The president of the streetcar company.”
“Well, you don’t expect to find him here, do you?”
“No, but I’m on his track, anyhow.”

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 The Prodigy

In 1927, one year after William launched The Peridromophile and

authored Notes, the Boston Sunday Post published an article titled
“ “Fourth Dimension Sidis’ Becomes Peridromophile—Not as Bad as
It Sounds, Though; Harvard’s Mathematical Genius Collects Street Car
Transfers.” In a warm-hearted review of Notes, the reporter says, “Be
a Peridromophile! It’s the very latest fad—so new that only one man
has taken it up... . Think of the strangest things you have ever heard
of a collector amassing. And then decide that William James Sidis, the
former Brookline boy prodigy of Harvard, has started the queerest
collector’s fad you or anyone else has ever heard of.” The reporter gave
special attention to the streetcar poetry and jokes, remarking amicably,
“The readers must understand that transfer collecting isn’t old enough
to have gathered many good ones, so a little indulgence.”
Sixteen years later a second article on the subject appeared in the
Baltimore Evening Sun. Titled “Peridromophily and Mr. Willie Sidis,”
it was authored by one James P. Connolly. His column was subtitled
“Bus Correspondent’s Apology,” for he had made an error in a previ-
ous column. While reporting on the passing of the Charles Street bus
line, he had hobnobbed with some of the assembled crowd and was
informed (or so he thought): “We're philomorphilists—like philatel-
ists, only, instead of stamps, we collect streetcar transfers.” Mr. Con-
nolly considered the whole business a joke, but when he wrote a
column about it, he received his comeuppance. The president of the
Baltimore Transit Company sent him a copy of the Frank Folupa opus,
thus setting him straight about the hobby, and its adherents’ proper
name. Peridromophile, he discovered, came from the Greek—the prefix
peri- means “around” or “about”; the suffix -dromos means “running
track” or “course”; and the suffix -philos, “dear, friendly, loving.” In
conclusion, wrote Connolly, “The Evening Sun’s Bus Correspondent
herewith makes a sweeping apology to ‘peridromophiles’ all over the
world. He is heartily sorry for ever having thought of them as ‘philo-
morphilists.’”” Notes on the Collection of Transfers was the subject of
only these two reviews—not many, but curiously, two more than The
Animate and the Inanimate received.

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 The Double Life

D... William’s dedication to his

unconventional hobby, it remained just that—a hobby, an occupation
for his spare time, a relaxation for his racing mind. He was busy at
all times with at least a half-dozen serious writing projects, in addition
to his regular workaday job. He appeared to have the energy and zeal
of ten men, and the decade between his thirtieth and fortieth birthdays
was his most productive. Despite his ceaseless activity, he was usually
under financial strain, receiving small loans from friends.
After publishing Notes on the Collection of Transfers, he had in-
vested almost his entire four-thousand-dollar inheritance into bus
stocks. It was a sound enough plan, since many bus companies thrived
in the 1920s. “His principles prevented him from living extrava-

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 The Prodigy

gantly,” explained Julius Eichel, “but he was looking forward to the

day when he could use the nest egg from his investment to start the
cooperatives he was always planning. Financial manipulation carried
on by the parent bus company resulted in his being squeezed out of
his holdings, and he suffered a complete loss of his inheritance. He had
not enjoyed a penny of it.” By the late ’20s the stocks were, in the
words of Helena Sidis, “little more than wallpaper.”
Consequently, William took job after job that he hoped would
preserve his anonymity and leave him free to do his life’s work after
office hours. Yet he was unable to settle into a single, satisfactory
employment. Most of his jobs were procured for him by friends, or
came from passing civil service examinations, and paid fifteen to
twenty-five dollars a week. (William scored so high on these exams
that he was frequently offered managerial positions, which he turned
down in horror.) Almost invariably, William lost these jobs after a
matter of months.
One of his main difficulties in acquiring a job was his utterly
nonconformist appearance. The following description, which was
written by Eichel and applies to Sidis in his late thirties and forties,
gives a good overall impression:

Sidis was as indifferent to his personal appearance as was Samuel

Johnson in an earlier age. But he suffered more than Johnson for
this, for whereas Johnson was the literary leader of the groups
then congregating in coffeehouses, Sidis had no such admirers,
and few could overlook his careless appearance and uncouth
manners. The result was that first appearances would shut out his
genius to those who met him casually. Sidis was about five feet,
eight inches tall, stocky and broad boned, and weighed about 220
pounds. In appearance and habits he could have passed for a
longshoreman rather than a white-collar worker, yet he insisted
that the only work he was fitted for was that of operating a
comptometer in an office. That incongruity made it difficult for
him to get such office work, and that was at the root of his

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 The Double Life

financial troubles. No one could complain about his work; it was

accurate and efficient, and he would be asked to locate mistakes
that others would make. If only he had paid more attention to
cleanliness and his distasteful habits. But in spite of friendly
advice he could not overcome such weaknesses. He wore a dirty
old cap, musty with age. He always seemed to need a shave,
although he did not cultivate a beard. His trousers were unpressed
and dirty, and his shoes always remained unshined, when he wore
shoes. In later years he wore ordinary gym sneakers, with socks
in winter, and without socks in summer. His coat was ragged,
with the lining usually showing where the stitches or wear had
loosened it from the cloth. His tie was usually cut six inches from
the knot, and usually dirty. In an age when dress and appearances
count for so much, his carelessness was an obvious handicap.

Another extraordinary account of Sidis on the job appeared in

The Come As You Are Masquerade Party, author Samuel Rosenberg’s
collection of essays. Rosenberg was told the following story by Ed-
ward T. (“Ted”) Frankel, an auditor who worked in the same office
with William:

In 1928 the National Industrial Conference Board, a research

organization, hired Sidis to operate a Burroughs calculating ma-
chine for $25 a week. At first, he managed to keep his story secret,
but when it was discovered that he knew higher mathematics he
was immediately offered some advanced work with the promise
of more money. But Sidis, who had been through the same
situation before, stubbornly refused and stayed with his calcu-
lator.
“He was good with that machine,” said Frankel. “So re-
markably good, in fact, that his immediate supervisor, J. M.
Robertson, became obsessed with the idea that Sidis was really
performing all his calculations mentally and only pretending to
operate the machine to throw him off the track! A hilarious

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 The Prodigy

Charlie Chaplin comedy developed, with Robertson watching

Sidis like a hawk but pretending not to, and Sidis pretending not
to know that Robertson was watching him. But it was no match.
Sidis ran that machine right under Robertson’s nose so cleverly
that Robertson never knew what in hell was going on.”
While Sidis was employed at the NICB, according to Fran-
kel, several experts in the organization tried to involve him in
discussions of mathematics or philosophy, but he insisted angrily
that he had forgotten everything that he had known. “But on one
occasion he slipped,” said Frankel. “Somebody showed him a new
set of tables that had been prepared by some of our top experts
as an aid in solving certain complicated statistical problems. The
tables were useful but admittedly incomplete. Sidis studied them
for a while and suggested a simple way of eliminating all the
difficulties. It was obvious that he had forgotten nothing. After
that brilliant demonstration, the pressure on Sidis to conform
increased, he began to look and behave like a trapped animal, and
he finally resigned.
“T really felt terribly sorry for him. He was like a child. He
told me that he didn’t know how to apply for another job and
that it was useless to write letters of application because they were
all thrown in wastebaskets. He really needed help. I spent many
of my lunch hours going around to the offices of the big compa-
nies around Grand Central station trying to find a job for him.
I told the office managers that Sidis was a wizard, but, since I
knew that they would discover his story (people always did), I
had to tell them that he was only interested in a subsistence job
and that he would refuse any promotions. When they heard that,
they said that they were definitely not interested. They didn’t
want to have a man like that around.”

The following tale was told by Grace Spinelli, whose husband

Marcos was one of William’s dearest friends. Mrs. Spinelli said simply,
“Frankly, we didn’t care whether he bathed or not. Whether he ate

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 The Double Life

one way or the other. We liked him for what he was. It had nothing
to do with the surface behavior—we didn’t care about that. My
husband called him ‘Pop,’ because he said, “He was my intellectual
father.’ ”
Marcos and William struck up their acquaintanceship in an un-
conventional manner, according to Grace: “Marcos knew him before
we were married. He met him on his job on Wall Street, where Sidis
was working for a spiritual publishing house. My husband was out of
work, and someone sent him there for a job.
“They met in the men’s room. There was Sidis in the men’s room
with stacks of newspapers. He would buy them in the subway and lock
himself in. He’d be in there for hours, reading his papers. And they
just happened to say hello to each other. And Bill said, “What are you
doing here?’ And Marcos said, “Well, I’m applying for a job, but I
don’t know anything about finances.’
“You know how it is. Somebody refers you to somebody. Mar-
cos eventually got the job through a friend, but he was embarrassed.
He said, “What am I gonna do? I don’t know anything about math.’
Math was his weakest subject in school. So Sidis says, ‘I'll help you
out. I don’t know what he did. He showed him something. But
Marcos was still worried. And William said, ‘T'll help you. Don’t you
worry about it.’ By eleven o’clock, Sidis was through with his work.
And of course he didn’t have to use adding machines, but if he did use
the adding machines, he added with both his hands, all his fingers—
an adding machine for each hand. Sometimes he could do the thing
quicker than the machine could do it. By eleven o’clock in the morning
he was through, but he wasn’t allowed to go home. He had to stay
there, and then he did whatever he wanted to do, because the work
didn’t keep piling in. Probably he was writing one of his newsletters.
The rest of the staff wouldn’t have anything to do with him. They
thought he was weird.
“And once, the office was moved from one room to another, and
they asked him to move his machines. He wouldn’t do it. He said, ‘I
can’t do it. It’s not good for my health. It’s too heavy for me.’ They

[ 195]
 The Prodigy

insisted that he move his own typewriter and machine, which in those
days were heavy, not as streamlined as they are today. And Marcos said
William took hold of a stick and said, “You come near me, I'll hit you.’
It was a matter of principle, and he was not going to do anything for
which he was not employed. He stuck to his job.”
If he would not do more than he was hired for, neither would
he pretend to dawdle over his work and stretch it out throughout the
day. Often, he completed an entire day’s work in twenty minutes, and
in another twenty he would do Marcos’s work and pass it to him under
the table. His habit of retiring to the men’s room with a collection of
newspapers offended his fellow workers, who complained to their boss.
Like the bright student who finishes his schoolwork in twenty minutes
and is left twiddling his thumbs in class, William was deeply resented
by his coworkers and his employers, and thus lost job after job. When
Helena begged her brother to seek another type of employment, he
told her, “I just want to work an adding machine, so I won't have to
use my mind on it—I want to use my mind for other things.”
There were a great many of these “other things.” One was an
organization William founded with a friend in 1929, which he called
the Geprodis Association. The meaning of the word Geprodis is
a mystery. There was a fourth-century Scandinavian tribe called
the Gepidae. Or, perhaps the word was an acronym, or a word in
one of William’s invented languages, such as his childhood Vender-
good. :
This association was formed to promote a variety of enterprising
business projects, potentially to be run on a cooperative basis. With
his passion for constitutions and legal documents, William drew up a
fifteen-page “Syllabus Program of the Geprodis Association.” He had
mellowed considerably since the days of the fascistic Hesperia Consti-
tution, and this latest, idealistic system attempted to meld communism
and democracy. Small groups, no larger than twenty-five, made policy
decisions, electing delegates to make decisions in higher-up groups of
twenty-five, and so on. Contributions from members outside the orga-
nization were welcomed, but moneys made by the businesses under the

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 The Double Life

Geprodis umbrella were to be recycled back into the cooperatives—

personal profit to any great degree was discouraged.
Despite his visions of expansion, William never got his coopera-
tive venture going on a large scale. He did, however, manage to start
a few small businesses under its wing, and published newsletters and
other written matter. He wrote a lengthy revision of Robert’s Rules of
Order, emphasizing the replacement of traditional parliamentary pro-
cedure with group rules tailored to the aforementioned small groups
of twenty-five or less. This work, which remained unpublished, was
circulated in mimeographed form and was called the “Geprodis Code
of Group Procedure.”
The organization’s first order of business was to market the
perpetual calendar that William had invented at age five. In the years
since, William had improved on the device. The difficulty with all
perpetual calendars existing at that time concerned leap years. To
calculate a day of the week on a leap year involved the consultation
of special tables and charts, thus-making the devices cumbersome and
troublesome to use. William was among the first to conquer this
problem, incorporating leap-year calculations into his pocket-size,
easy-to-use device. He applied to the U.S. Patent Office, saying that
he believed himself to be “the original, first and sole inventor” of the
improvement, and was granted his patent.
William and a partner, Joseph Resnick, next set about promoting
the calendar, employing the services of attorney Hobart S. Bird, who
would later see William through a serious legal crisis. Bird negotiated
sales contracts with bookstores and private distributors, and in six
months the Geprodis Association had sold 1,500 calendars at ten cents
each. Sales were brisk in New York, Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago.
Sidis and Resnick started a monthly newsletter, the Geprodis
Organization News, which advertised The Peridromophile, William’s
transit guides, and the perpetual calendar. It also advertised two
unusual services. For twenty-five cents, Sidis’s “City Information Ser-
vice” would supply all the transit information necessary to travel
door-to-door between any of fifty major metropolitan cities. For fifty

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 The Prodigy

cents, one could purchase the “Itinerary Service,” which provided an

itinerary for railroad travel anywhere in the United States or Canada,
including any local transit information necessary at the starting point
of the journey. The partners then started the Geprodis System Transla-
tion Service and the Geprodis Manuscript Library. The latter was based
on a clever idea for the circulation of unpublished manuscripts on a
lending-library basis, and it must have appealed to any number of
struggling authors. The Association printed an attractive circular that
read:

Writers! ATTENTION!
Ir—You Have BEEN UNSUCCESSFUL IN GETTING YOUR WORK
PUBLISHED
Ir—You WouLp Like Your WorK TO HAVE A Few READERS
WHILE WAITING FOR A PUBLISHER—HERE IS A CHANCE
The Gepropis Manuscript Liprary, now being organized, is
looking for unpublished manuscripts only, preferably by unknown
writers, for the purpose of introducing them to the public by
lending them out on a circulating library basis.
Your work can become known to readers—possibly even
to publishers in this way.
You will get a small royalty—a nominal sum, but more
than if your manuscript remained totally idle during the same
period. |
The Gepropis MANuscriPT LiBRARY is not intended as a
regular means of income to its writers. It is intended to bring their
work before the public, and serve as a practical test of popularity
of works which might otherwise get little or no consideration
from publishers. It is intended to rescue from oblivion much
good work which is at present passed over by publishers’ crit-
ics... . You can lose nothing by it, and you stand a chance of
gaining recognition which might otherwise be more difficult to
obtain.

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 The Double Life

There is no record of the success of these various projects. The

calendar seems to have done moderately well over the years, but
judging by the comments of Sidis’s friends, he was never out of
financial straits for long. Either his projects were unsuccessful, or he
invested what money he made into such a myriad of new enterprises
that he saw little profit. For a brief period, he reported on the progress
of the various projects in the Geprodis Organization News.
The Peridromophile, William explained in the fourth issue, had
long endeavored to maintain a neutral editorial policy; given the
nature of its contents—transfer trivia—this was not exceedingly diffi-
cult. However,
.
A neutral policy was more difficult in the case of G.O.N., its
purpose being almost a propaganda purpose by its very nature;
and yet, in accordance with Geprodis policy, this paper has
become an explanatory organ rather than one which presents
definite opinions. -*
It has been alleged by critics that it is impossible, in any
statement of facts, to avoid completely all trace of the writer’s
opinion; and this is undoubtedly true. But nevertheless, this does
not mean that it is impossible to avoid going out of one’s way
to air the writer’s opinions; and omission of out-and-out editori-
als is certainly a possibility. At any rate, such is the variety of new
journalism that Geprodis proposes to create.

William, the subject of hundreds of opinionated, if not down-

tight slanderous articles and editorials, longed to maintain the utmost
objectivity and neutrality when he placed himself in the position of
journalist or author. This ardent concern showed itself fully in Wil-
liam’s next magnum opus: a 1,200-page revisionist history of the
United States.

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 The Tribes
and the States

A.the same time that William was

collecting transfers, running his half-dozen Geprodis projects, and
working a nine-to-five job, he was composing a massive manuscript:
two volumes describing America from earliest prehistory to the twen-
tieth century. Unfortunately, only six hundred pages—the first book,
called The Tribes and the States, and a single page of the second, The
Peace Paths —have survived. The tone in which the first volume is
written reflects William’s desire to be a perfect, neutral observer and
reporter.
The single remaining page of The Peace Paths gives fascinating
insight into his purpose in the epic work of The Tribes and the States.
William wrote:

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 The Tribes and the States

Through all this it is hoped that the reader will never lose sight
of the fact that it is all intended to be a story—that it is in no
instance the Pesult of any deliberate research—that the atmo-
sphere is lost if you begin to scrutinize evidence in detail—that,
even if any considerable part of it turns out to be untrue, the saga
can be the basis for a new (and let us hope, finer) tradition of
the origin of American ideas and ideals.
This tale is hardly an epic of America, and is not intended
to be such; but it has the broad legendary type of basis on which
such an epic—if one is ever composed—should rest. Kipling once
expressed the sources of Homer’s epics as follows:
When ’Omer smote ‘is bloomin’ lyre
"E’d ‘eard men sing by land and sea,
And wot ’e thought ’e might require
’E went an’ took, the same as me.

Our own sources are precisely that; and we claim no better

investigation of authenticity, than just that. It is, after all, not a
history, but a story, even if some history has crept in unwittingly.
We may also warn the reader against supposing that the
story deals with “Indian lore,” just because it starts with mention
of that race. The very concept of “Indian lore” implies an un-
bridgeable gulf between the history of the red race and the white
people of this continent; and the tale of the Peace Path is an effort
to bridge that gap. It deals neither with the red race nor with the
white race as such, but deals with America, whoever its people
may have been at any time.

Though this tantalizing snippet was written for The Peace Paths,
the basic point of view is the same as that expressed in the stodgier
introduction to The Tribes and the States. Since this latter book is so
vast in scope, covering as it does prehistory to the year 1828 in six
hundred closely typed pages, it is impossible to go into its contents at
any length here. Furthermore, much of it is dry, scholarly, and labored.

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 The Prodigy

According to friends of William’s who read it, the second volume was
written in a far more popular, accessible style.
Since the entire work contains not a single footnote, a frustrated
scholar might conclude that the book is in large part speculative fiction
mingled with fact. Certainly William was thumbing his nose at aca-
demia when he said, “it is in no instance the result of any deliberate
research . . . the atmosphere is lost if you begin to scrutinize evidence
in detail,” but William was simply too meticulous a scholar to have
made the entire thing up.
However, in William’s opinion, the percentage of verifiable
truths contained in this book is not nearly so important as its point of
view toward American history. William treated his subject with loy-
ing detail. The surviving book constitutes an impressive, intelligent,
and coherent revisionist history of the American population. The task
of verifying William’s stories belongs to historians. A number of
modern scholars have dedicated themselves to proving similar theories,
and none has heard of William James Sidis. An excellent work, com-
plete with footnotes and an extensive bibliography, is Bruce E. Jo-
hansen’s Forgotten Founders, published in 1982 by Gambit Publishers.
Johansen, in a concise 126 pages, reaches conclusions remarkably simi-
lar to Sidis’s.
William’s basic premise is that American history properly begins
before the landing of the Mayflower. The inhabitants of America,
William stressed, had developed enormously diverse cultures. In 1930,
the following remark sounded a note that would come into vogue only
in the 1960s and ’70s:

The mere fact that their white conquerors have lumped them all
together under the incorrect heading of “Indians” does not make
them all alike... any statements about customs, forms of govern-
ment, etc. applying to one red nation would be likely to be false
as applied to their neighbors. . . . The tribes of Indians are
considered, not as savages or barbarians who created nothing of

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 The Tribes and the States

importance, but as the real founders of the best and most impor-
tant parts of modern American institutions.

The Tribes and the States, William acknowledged in the introduc-

tion, was full of controversial material:

There are points of difference from the established text-book

view of history, such as: picturing America as a country where
popular revolts have been the rule rather than the exception, and
even as the origin and inspiration of such revolts throughout the
world; describing George Washington, not as the hero of the
American Revolution as he is ordinarily considered, but rather
as one who had little sympathy with democracy, and finally
overthrew by conspiracy the republic the Revolution established;
the existence of a First Republic (John Hancock being its first
president) representing the American Revolution, and a Second
Republic representing a political counter-revolution. . . . All
these will doubtless be difficult for the average reader to swal-
low. ... To those who have been used to reading into American
history the idea that the administration is always right, or that
the people always follow the governing power, or that it is
un-American for the people to take the law into their own hands,
this version of American history might prove somewhat of a
shock. . . . But let us also hope that the new point of view will
make the reader “think it over’ —that it will excite his interest,
and make him reconsider much that he has taken for granted
about his country.

William made no effort to publish The Tribes and the States,

though he did circulate copies to his friends under the guise of a secret
society he had founded, the American Independence Society (AIS).
There was a close link between the book and the organization, as the
society claimed to be the modern exponent of the political philosophy

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 The Prodigy

presented in the revisionist history. Since it was a secret society, no

account can be made of the membership or its activities—although it
appears from surviving correspondence to have been limited to friends
and friends-of-friends in the New England area (William had by now
moved back to Boston from New York).
William wrote a detailed program, or manifesto, for the AIS,
along with an account of its origins, a credo, poetry, and other interso-
ciety memoranda. In the AIS’s credo, William wrote:

We believe that the right of equality, as stated in the Declaration

of Independence, does not mean that all persons are exact dupli-
cates of one another, and does not, cannot, imply any sort of
forcible leveling, discipline, or regimentation; for such leveling
action can provide no equality except that of equal submission
to a superior authority, which is in itself the most flagrant denial
of equality, liberty, pursuit of happiness, as well as of the require-
ment of consent of the governed.

Instead, William took “equality” to mean “that no person should

derive either reward or punishment from any accident of birth or from
any acts of other than himself; . . . that no person should be granted
superior consideration before the law by reason of possession of wealth,
control of organizations important to the life of the people, or for any
other reason whatever.”
This view of individual liberty differs from the ideas William
expressed in his constitution for the utopia of Hesperia, wherein every
citizen would in effect be a government employee. Clearly, William’s
ideas had changed since that first pubescent credo, and since the days
of his May Day parade arrest. William probably saw his treatment then
at the hands of the authorities and his family as a form of censorship,
and he gave that subject special attention in the AIS credo.
William made it clear that he did not consider himself unpatriotic
because he advocated a new order; on the contrary, he wrote that
government by consent of the governed made rebellion just the patri-

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 The Tribes and the States

otic thing to do whenever the authorities got out of hand. Harkening

again to the Declaration of Independence, he stated that a “government
has no rights whatever as against its own people—not even that of
self-defense.”
While William was trying to make his position clear, he simul-
taneously took great pains to obscure it. His AIS was so secret that it
met in abandoned subway tunnels, and was organized so that no
member ever knew the identities of more than nine other members.
And whenever he referred to his writings in correspondence, he made
it very clear that he was not the author—that he had “heard” from
his friends in the Okommakamesit Indian tribe that a meeting was
scheduled on such and such a date, or that a new historical fact had
been “told” to him for inclusion in his book, or that a certain “John
Shattuck” had written some freedom songs, with radical lyrics put to
the tune of “Fair Harvard.”
In fact, there is no indication that William ever met with anyone
of Indian blood. Rather, he selected carefully from among his friends,
and “initiated” them into the tribe. With his great love of codes,
rituals, and secrets, forming a club of modern-day Okommakamesits
suited him to perfection. He liked to hint to friends that he was in
touch with a line of direct descendants; and there was a boyishness in
his dedication to these rites and rules, adhered to with all the passion
of a Tom Sawyer or a Huck Finn. When William told his friend Isaac
Rab that members of the group met in the subway, Rab replied
acerbically, “Do you meet in telephone booths, too?” William ex-
panded on this theme in conversation with George Gloss, explaining
that members met on the subway line from Harvard Square to Park
Street, signaling to one another with a secret sign.
William also liked to hint that the tribe was a large underground
organization, but his friends suspected otherwise. Of the Rab family
members, William deemed only fifteen-year-old Ann worthy of initia-
tion. Said her younger brother Bill, “He didn’t select me. I think I was
a little too frivolous. My father, no, because he was far too logical.
But my sister was closer to him. I was play. She was business.”

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And so, Ann went with William to an Okommakamesit meeting,

expecting to join a large group. To her enormous surprise, the gather-
ing was in a home on Beacon Hill, and consisted of only four or five
“Beacon Hilly people—very Waspish. Cultured. Refined. I thought
they would be people like Bill!” The next surprise was that the main
topic of conversation was an informal discussion of the different types
of solitaire; William knew twenty or thirty kinds. When a puzzled
Ann tried to question William, he just laughed. She was never invited
to another meeting, but she continued to receive excerpts from The
Tribes and the States. Ann concluded that the tribe was similar in spirit
to the Druids of England. “They’re certainly not the descendants of
the original Druids, and Bill certainly wasn’t an Indian. But he was
a spiritual descendant of the Okommakamesits.”
Julius Eichel, too, was invited to be an AIS initiate. “My wife,
Esther, and I were the subject of one of Bill’s initiations. It lacked
atmosphere—only the three of us were present—and we did not show
too much enthusiasm for the event. He had a secret sign which we
could exhibit to the initiated, a method of indicating danger by sign
language, and an oath to remain true to the principles of the organiza-
tion. We were willing to go through that for the sake of getting things
started, but they never seemed to prosper. We eventually resigned
from the organization. His secrecy was too much for us.”
To one degree or another, many of William’s friends and rela-
tives thought he suffered delusions of persecution. Given that his
political activities were so radical and that most of his acquaintances
did not know the extent of them, his fear, as Eichel said, “had some
foundation” and may have appeared exaggerated at times when it was
legitimate. Even bearing this in mind, however, there is no doubt that
William had a strong streak of neurotic fear in his makeup. As Clifton
Fadiman stated, “He was very radical. He was afraid of authority, he
evaded all symbols of authority. And because he’d had a traumatic
experience, the May Day arrest, he was scared. So there was both
evasion and fear. But I think the fear was part of a generalized fear
of living, of the world in which the rest of us live—that world seemed

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to him to be full of threatening objects. I think he was afraid of

everything. Not in the sense of being a physical coward. Rather that
the human race was an alien kind of life that he couldn’t adjust to.”
As a result of his obsession with anonymity, William’s friends
were often confused. Obviously he was the prime mover behind his
publications, but what could they say to his protestations? In several
letters to Eichel, William stressed that he had not authored The Tribes
and the States. “I have got hold of three more copies of The Tribes and
the States, and sent them to you, as you ordered. I do wish it to be
understood that, as the pamphlet states in the introduction, it is not to
be considered the work of any individual, but of an organization. I
may have helped on it, but I certainly do not wish to be considered
the author, as there are lots of things that I would not care to take
personal responsibility for; so please do not represent the pamphlet to
anyone as my work.”
His efforts reached comic proportions. He circulated a newspaper
purported to be written by the Okommakamesits, called the Penacook
Courier. This paper demonstrated his interest in languages and dialects,
as it was written in the English dialect spoken around New England
at the time of the Revolution. The Penacook Courier pretended to be
a current periodical of that time, with datelines of January 1621, June
1774, etc. He wrote to Eichel, “That tribal organization just surprised
me by sending—from some place in New Hampshire I never heard of
before—an historical newspaper written in American, and which
seemed to be good and exciting stuff. Hope they can keep it up.”
The Penacook Courier told stories from The Tribes and the States
in journalistic form. Although the language reads humorously, Wil-
liam tried to communicate his revisionist ideas seriously. Under the
protection of the anonymity provided by the fictional authorship,
William felt free to write about his most controversial historical
interpretations. George Washington, generally viewed as a national
hero, was to William an enemy of the democracy being built by the
Americans. From the Penacook Courier, this flash: “Congress just ap-
pointed a commander-in-chief for the buncha rebel fighters beseigin

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 The Prodigy

Boston. He’s George Washington, who’s botherin Congress by too

much Tory talk, so they’re gettin ridda him that way an sendin him
to Cambridge. He’s gotta bitta reputation for knozin fightin.”
William was understandably shy of openly inciting rebellion
himself, though that was clearly what he was hoping would follow
from the spread of his American independence ideas. He was particu-
larly inspired by a rebellion against Sir Edmund Andros, governor of
New England. Andros frequently marched his Redcoat troops through
the streets of Boston as a show of power. On one spring day in 1689,
wrote William in The Tribes and the States,

Andros marched proudly down the Cornhill, but, on turning the

corner into King street, suddenly found himself face to face with
a defiant mob. . . . The governor shouted orders to fire into the
crowd; but the crowd’s reserves in the buildings started pouring
out into the street . . . and the militia were seized and disarmed
before they could have time to take aim. Sir Edmund Andros
himself was also seized by the crowd, and . . . he was promptly
hustled in [jail], while Bradstreet, the last Puritan governor, was
found and hailed as the new governor of Massachusetts, and he
was installed in the Province House the next day.

William’s commentary on this rebellion aptly sums up his hopes

and motivations for the fledgling American Independence Society:

It has very rarely happened in the world’s history that a powerful

administration was so speedily and completely overthrown; and
it probably could never have happened without the self-reliant
population guided by a secret organization unknown even to the
rebels, such as was the case in Massachusetts then. Once again
New England proved itself a center of the fight for liberty.

William had always loved the New England legend of “The

Gray Champion” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales. In

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1938, he penned a curious document in which he obliquely hinted that

he was the actual incarnation of the mysterious Gray Champion, “an
earthly representative of [his] spirit.” According to this legend, the
Gray Champion was a mythical character who appeared at key mo-
ments in the history of the young American nation. He would incite
the patriotic spirit in the hearts of Americans and then vanish into thin
air when his leadership was no longer required. William’s version of
the legend has it that “The Modern Gray Champion” was present at
the Andros Rebellion, and again at the Boston draft riots of 1917.
William also credited the Gray Champion with founding, in 1936, a
movement that bears an unmistakable resemblance to William’s own
AIS group.

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 Woes: elaborate, absurd ruses of
anonymity, which probably fooled no one, were absolutely necessary to
his peace of mind. If he made his friends promise not to name him as the
author of his works, he would never, he hoped, attract the attention of
an inquisitive reporter. And he could continue to disseminate his radical
ideas. There were other, stranger ruses. In one letter to Eichel he stated,
“Took another Civil Service exam, and was informed that I passed the
state clerical exam, and am No. 254—not so encouraging.” How could
William James Sidis possibly score as low as 254th on a Civil Service
exam? Either he botched it on purpose, so as not to draw attention to
himself, or he was having fun with Eichel.
Two months later, in January 1935, Eichel wrote sternly to

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William: “We hope that you are still employed. If it depends on

ability, you should be able to hold down your job. As for having a
reputation which you cannot live up to, this is a burden which many
of us with less ability must be willing to shoulder. None of us is
perfect, not even on demand. If we get along at all it is because of luck
and the willingness to struggle with responsibilities that are thrust on
us.” Less than a month later, William began a letter to Eichel with a
rare reference to his childhood drama: “Not so good now. Was fired
Jan. 31—as I said, having a reputation makes the situation completely
hopeless. Really fired for net being a mental calculator.”
What story lay behind this remark? Probably, once again an
employer or fellow employee discovered that they shared an office
with the former wunderkind, and in the ensuing tension William lost
his job. Of William’s many ruses, his denial of his mathematical genius
was the most outlandish, and the most intensely adhered to. Friends
and relatives nearly all tell the same tale:
“He would always deny that he had any ability for anything but
running a comptometer”’ (Eichel). “He completely denied any knowl-
edge of math” (Ann Feinzig). “You know the greatest phobia he had?
He absolutely resented anybody who told him that he was a good
mathematician. He resented being referred to as an expert, or anything
like that. He would deny it” (Rab). “Of all things, he didn’t want
anything to do with math . . . because that was his talent. He resented
it. It was one of the things that had been exploited. This is what he
led us to believe” (Grace Spinelli). In Helena’s opinion, this distaste
for mathematics “was probably something in Harvard itself and not
anything my father did. Because he also took an aversion to law. And
he always maintained that he was a normal person and not a genius
—and he didn’t want people coming to his place and asking him
questions.”
William made exceptions for certain of his friends. Helena en-
joyed talking about mathematical paradoxes, so they discussed them at
length, and he seemed to relax completely and relish the subject. He
willingly gave legal advice, especially to Julius Eichel, who was on

| arr|
 The Prodigy

trial for draft resistance. He helped Ann and Bill Rab with their math
homework, though as before, he could never explain how he arrived
at his answers. Said Ann, “It could be that he really couldn’t tell me
how, or he just didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that he could.
Now if it came to something like a historical theory, he would just
say, ‘Well, it’s a story. Either you believe it or you don’t.’ ” If the topic
was a less sensitive one, he could be a gold mine of facts. Len Feinzig,
Ann’s husband, recalled, “I did a paper on the Federal Reserve Bank
and he had information in his head I’d have to spend hours look-
ing up.”
William discussed The Animate and the Inanimate with his sister
and with both Isaac Rab and his son, Bill, though he rarely discussed
it with anyone else. It’s not surprising that the Rabs were privy to
conversation that William withheld from others—they were among
his favorite friends. He visited them nearly every Sunday, appearing
on their doorstep unannounced. Much as they loved Bill Sidis, the
family could not always welcome him. As Bill Rab explained, “There
were two or three occasions in which we were expecting company,
and it would have been very awkward. Because Bill was not the kind
of guy who would fit into a social group. He never came announced,
and I don’t think he had a phone. So a few times we pretended not
to be home.”
For the most part, the visits were a pleasure for one and all. The
head of the household was the distinguished Socialist Isaac Rabinovitz
(the family took the name “Rab”), whose wife and two children, Bill
and Ann, were great friends of William’s. “Rab,” as Isaac was affec-
tionately called, held an informal weekly salon in his home, dubbed
“The Headquarters” by Boston leftists. The atmosphere was lively, yet
William’s privacy was respected completely. No one ever pressed him
about his childhood or referred to his genius. He was often invited to
stay for Sunday dinner, when he would discuss politics with Rab,
Indians with Ann, and physics with Bill, who was in high school. Bill’s
colorful memories of these visits prompted him to say, “I wish I could
go through it all again—believe me, I'd take notes.”

Exe
 Friends and Relatives

“On the brightest sunny day,” he reminisced, “William always

wore a three-piece suit, usually dark, and he’d always carry a raincoat
or an overcoat over his arm. I don’t think he ever untied a tie—he’d
just take it off, over his head. He wasn’t dirty, though that’s the
impression that everybody got. Not unkempt, but careless. He re-
minded me of a Buddha. Well rounded. He always had his jacket open
with his vest buttoned tight. And he always had an ear-to-ear grin,
without showing his teeth.
“He would arrive with his vest pockets full of illustrated cartoons
and jokes clipped out of the Boston Post. And he’d have his pockets
pretty well oriented, so he could always pick out the right joke. And
if he told you one that he thought was funny, he couldn’t hold back
at all—he’d let it all out! He loved a good laugh.”
William Fadiman had a slightly less charitable attitude toward his
cousin’s sense of humor. “He laughed at his own jokes. He would break
out before he finished. He was one of those people who start telling
you a funny story and then start laughing. It isn’t funny at all, but they
think it’s hysterical.”
In addition to his joke-telling, William’s proficiency at crossword
puzzles was legend among his friends. Bill Rab remembered the infor-
mal competitions that occurred in his home: “He and my father used
to have good-natured contests. Once in a while, my father, with a sense
of humor, and Bill, with a sense of humor, both with their own
self-assuredness, attempted to do The New York Times crossword puz-
zle. My father would do it in ink, right off the bat. But Bill—Jesus!
He would just look at the thing. He had that photographic memory
and didn’t have to write down too much. Maybe one letter instead of
a word, sometimes in the middle so he wouldn’t lose his place, while
he was doing the Downs. But it was mostly done mentally. Then my
father would quiz him. “What have you got for thirty-six across?” It
was just that one of them hoped he would catch the other in a mistake.
They’d ask each other, ‘How did you arrive at that word? Where did
you get that information?’ And they’d surprise each other.”
From time to time William helped Bill Rab with his homework.

pais: |
 The Prodigy

“I was particularly stupid in chemistry. I had problems with it in

school. But Bill’s approach made it hold some scope. It helped me out
a hell of a lot.” William also taught Bill Rab how to make a hecto-
graph. Hectographing was one of the earliest techniques for copying
written material, and laborious as it was, William spent hours making
copies of his newsletters by this painstaking process, which Bill Rab
described:
“He had a little pie tin, like a shallow cookie dish, and he put
in a gelatinous yellow material, an eighth of an inch deep. The process
is similar to a ditto. You type or draw through a carbon onto a piece
of paper, put it face down in contact with the hectograph jelly, press
it, and leave it for a few minutes. When you lift it up, the analine dye
would have transferred to the hectograph jelly. Then you put another
piece of paper on top of it, rub it a couple of times, lift it up, and
youve got an image, the original. It came out purple, just like conven-
tional ditto. This was good for twenty copies or so. That’s how he did
every bit of it. He had a very tiny one for postcards.
“T took him up in the attic of my house, where I had a simple
chemical lab. He and I made my first hectograph up there. We had
to make substitutes since I didn’t have all the chemicals. I remember
saying, ‘How come you're using this when you wrote such-and-such
down on the formula?’ And he derived a molecular composition of a
particular chemical and explained how it would serve the same func-
tion. And believe me, he had a wonderful way of expressing this. But
to him this was pure play. Fun. He explained other things that kids
love—the nature of light refraction, and how the molecular structure
of crystals and liquids created different optical illusions. And it wasn’t
just chemistry. I’d ask, “Why is grass green?”
“And there was history. I was in my junior year of high school
and I had to write a book report, and I chose the Boston Tea Party.
And Bill says, “Oh. ...’ And I said, ‘Do you know anything about
it?’ He replied, “Oh, I know a little bit about it.’ I pumped him, and
he gave me a little story about the political and economic relationships
that were behind the concept of the Boston Tea Party. And I discov-

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 Friends and Relatives

ered that my school textbook was a highly edited version of the

original book, with certain aspects eliminated. So I wrote my report.
I got an F! So I said to myself, “Holy Jesus! I know I’m right. It all
makes sense. If anything, I should have been given credit for doing
original research, rather than having stuck to the pat thing.’
“My father went up to school. He was really buddy-buddy with
Walter Donne, my headmaster; they were Latin School graduates.
They had quite a discussion. I was sitting in the anteroom. Donne came
out and he says, ‘Look,’ pretty much man-to-man, ‘we’re dealing with
a teacher who only knows one thing, what the textbook says. I’ll let
you write the report over again, with another teacher.’ All this was
my father’s doing—he was very forceful in his arguments, he had a
hell of a lot of charisma. This incident didn’t make me cautious of Bill.
Not at all. If anything, it conditioned me never to accept anything on
face value just because it’s printed.”
Though most of his friends didn’t know it, William wrote a great
many short stories, all of which are lost. He did not show them to
many people, but one of the exceptions he made was for Bill Rab, who
liked the stories immensely. He read two that were centered on Atlan-
tis, and several that could be classified as science fiction. Bill Rab
considered them all “well written. . . They didn’t have the flavor of
contemporary science fiction; they weren’t sophisticated in that respect.
But they were convincing, real good stories in themselves. My favor-
ite, favorite, favorite—far and away—was a science fiction story
similar to a Jules Verne concept of a time machine. Now Bill didn’t
give any preliminaries, any scientific orientation as to why the thing
worked. I wish I knew then what I do now about time warps, black
holes, parallel existences, because it was pretty much in that vein. It’s
about a contemporary man who gets a concept of how to go back in
time, I’m not certain about the future. But he was able to go back in
time, and picture the social relationships as they once existed. In other
words, it was a vehicle for social comment. I didn’t realize that as a
kid, I took it as just a well-written story. I had that manuscript for
a long, long time—lI just wanted to read it over and over again.

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 The Prodigy

“Starting in Lorraine, Ohio, this man took several trips into the
past, through colonial and Indian days, through the Ice Age, and back
through geological eras.” According to Bill Rab, there was one prob-
lem in the story’s construction that greatly irked William: “This time
capsule was not physically removed from its original geographical
location. In other words, if we were to transport back a hundred years,
at this moment, we would appear at a very precise longitude and
latitude. So the operator of the time capsule had to do research in order
to assure that when he went back in time he wasn’t going to wind up
in the middle of a mountain, or some body of water.
“T don’t know of anyone else who read those stories. My sister
wanted to do her homework at the time, so I don’t think she read them.
Bill didn’t want me to pass them around. It never entered his head that
the ideas would be stolen—it was the possibility that it might get to
a newspaper somehow, to some kind of journalist. I was terribly
worried about that too.”
The company of the Rab household constituted only a small part
of William’s social life. Before he moved from New York to Boston
in the early 1930s, William saw a great deal of his sister, who was
studying sociology at Columbia University. He saw nothing of his
mother, who was busy running the Portsmouth mansion as a tourist
resort. She lost virtually all of her capital in the stock market crash of
1929, including her daughter’s four-thousand-dollar inheritance,
which Helena had been pressured to let her mother invest. Soon Sarah
would make a small fortune playing the stock market, more than
recouping her losses; but for a time she was in difficult straits.
After Helena graduated in 1929, and before the crash, she and her
mother had taken a trip to Europe. Helena, at her brother’s request,
looked up Martha Foley at the Paris Herald Tribune office, met her,
and liked her enormously.
Martha and Whit Burnett were married in 1931, and had a son
in November. That same year, they also gave birth to the first issue
of Story magazine, which was devoted to publishing the short stories
of both established and struggling young talents: William Faulkner,

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 Friends and Relatives

Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, and Willa Cather, among others.

In 1932 Whit and Martha returned to America, bringing Story with
them and launching its soon-to-be illustrious American career. They
were on their way to popularity, if not fame, and a few years later
were well known enough to appear in Current Biography, which
described Martha as “a little woman who wears tailored suits and
horn-rimmed spectacles and looks like a pleasant young housewife.”
Martha had lost none of her charm for William, and although
her marriage to Whit was difficult—according to Martha, he was often
arrogant and petulant, and they fought—she was not tempted to
reconsider William as anything more than a former friend. According
to Julius Eichel, they saw each other only once more: “When she
returned from Europe with the baby, he wrote asking permission to
visit her. He discounted the husband altogether—was not interested in
meeting him. Actually, he considered him an interloper who had best
be forgotten. He had Martha Foley all to himself at that meeting; he
was permitted to fondle the baby, and he had to take leave for-
ever. . . . I know that Sidis was deeply disappointed at the cold
reception and forever sad at the parting. Sidis admitted that her love
might have achieved wonders with him, for whereas he might be
stubborn with others, there is nothing he would not have done to
please her. He carried her photograph with him from 1920 until the
day he died, and was always anxious to be asked about it, and would
flourish it in the face of any newcomer to arouse a curiosity which he
was fast to satisfy on demand. That was the only lady he ever loved,
and would admit it, just as readily as he would admit that she did not
love him.”
There was nothing “he would not have done to please her.” Even,
he told Eichel and other friends, break the vow of celibacy he had
taken at the age of fifteen. Recalled Eichel, “To direct questioning,
Sidis admitted to me that he had no desire for any sex experience.
Intellectually, it was distasteful, and he could not think of submitting
to that experience unless Martha Foley would demand it. He would
do anything to be near her.” Helena affirms this: “We talked a lot

207, ]
 The Prodigy

about Martha. I’m very sure he was celibate. A relationship, for him,
wouldn’t be dependent on sex—he would want people who were as
intellectually minded as he was. He did tell me that he never got
married because our parents fought so much.
“He reminisced about some of the girls at the Rice Insti-
tute... . And according to his friend, Marcos Spinelli, he used to do
plenty of flirting with the girls in his office, and they smiled back—
when Billy told me stories about it, he’d get a twinkle in his eye and
he’d laugh. He had a way of going around that Constitution of his.”
William paid regular visits to the Spinellis’ apartment in Jersey
City. Said Grace, “I never met any of William’s friends. The only
name I remember is Martha Foley. Marcos used to tease him about his
platonic affair with Martha, and he loved it. Marcos would say, ‘Come
on, come on, show me the picture, and they’d chuckle. And they’d
go through this little routine every time.”
In 1980, Martha Foley’s posthumous memoir, The Story of
STORY Magazine, was published. William received only a single
mention, and parenthetical at that. After explaining that her mother
had dedicated a volume of verse to her—the first of many such
dedications to Martha—she wrote: “(The second was a volume on
higher mathematics, by William James Sidis, the famous and tragic
prodigy who was the first boy ever to pay court to me. [The first part
of this sentence is incorrect—The Animate and the Inanimate was not
dedicated to anyone; perhaps Martha was given an inscribed copy, and
she remembered incorrectly some forty years later.] Ready to enter
Harvard at the age of nine, he was held back until eleven, became a
university professor at fifteen, pioneered discoveries in the fourth
dimension, became the focus of international attention, and had his life
blasted by notoriety.)”
William settled into his bachelorhood, devoting himself, as ever,
to his work and his friends. Few of William’s multitude of friends
knew each other; many assumed they were his only friends. The Rabs
believed this; and certain relatives held the absolute conviction that
they were the poor genius’s only link to society. Some lived in New

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 Friends and Relatives

York, others in Boston. William bounced back and forth between the
two cities for several years, finally settling in his beloved Boston in
the early thirties, evidently no longer afraid of being jailed for his May
Day “crimes.”
When in Boston, he periodically dropped in at his cousin Elliot
Sagall’s home, generally for a quick meal. Like all of William’s hosts,
the Sagalls vividly recalled their guest’s eating habits: “He would eat
one dish at a time. He would eat the vegetables, then he would eat the
potatoes, then the meat. If there was a box of candy, he would finish
the whole box.” Conversation was usually light, but occasionally
William spoke of his dislike for his mother. “Many times,” recalled
Elliot, “he would come and visit and go out the back door when she
came in the front door. But he never spoke of his father.”
William frequently arrived unannounced at Jack Goldwyn’s
home, wearing rubbers and carrying an umbrella, even in fine weather.
Jack and his wife, Polly, have fond memories of these visits—they even
accepted William’s eating habits, which they referred to as “methodi-
cal.” William never spoke to the Goldwyns of his parents. Said Jack,
“T never heard him speak in anger about anyone. Billy reminded me
so much of his father, but his father’s talents were harvested properly
by my aunt Sarah. Now, this Martha Foley, I never saw her, but I was
hoping that he would marry her, because she could organize him
better.”
William told the Goldwyns little of his intellectual life. Jack
“pulled a few things out of him’”—that he had written a book on
Euclidean geometry and another on Atlantis. He never spoke to them
of American Indians, or pacifist politics, or streetcar transfers. They had
never heard of The Animate and the Inanimate. The main topic of
conversation was William’s quest for employment. Jack told him,
“Billy, the first thing you do is . . . well, shave! Be a little bit more
acceptable. Take care of your clothes. Look more presentable.”
Jack and Polly loved William’s visits, and are proud that he felt
comfortable in their home. “He was a very fine person,” insists Polly.
“He never bragged. Very humble, gentle, tender. I loved him, but I

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always felt sorry for him. I felt sorry because here is a genius, and he’s
ahead of the world.” Added Jack, “He was always happy! He’d sing
songs, and he had the lousiest voice. He’d sing, and recite poetry and
hum. Yes, he was a very happy person. He loved people. He had no
malice in him—just honesty and integrity.” Like the rest of William’s
relations, the Goldwyns were certain that he visited no other relatives.
Said Jack, “He never had close contact with any relatives except us—
we were the only ones who were any fun. Other relatives didn’t
tolerate him. We were the only ones he visited.”
Clifton Fadiman was one of the few relations who was convinced
that William visited largely to get a good meal and to discuss triviali-
ties. “I don’t think he really trusted us,” said Clifton, “but I thought
he had no one else to talk to. In all the time I knew him, Martha was
the only one I ever heard him speak of outside of his family.”
Making the rounds of family and friends for meals and compan-
ionship, William had his favorites. Along with the Rab family, the
Spinellis were probably the most beloved. After moving from New
York to Boston, William sent Marcos a constant stream of letters—
unfortunately, all of these have been lost. But Grace Spinelli’s recollec-
tions give us a picture of one of William’s favorite friendships.
Marcos was a little-known novelist who wrote more than one
hundred books. William read every one of his friend’s novels, and gave
him a single book as a present—The Psychology of Laughter by Boris
Sidis. Besides literature, the two men talked politics. When Marcos,
who was an Italian immigrant, applied for his citizenship, he was asked,
“Who was the first President of the United States?” Primed by Sidis,
Marcos responded with an elegant lecture about federated America
pre-George Washington, startling the judge no end.
The Spinellis, of all William’s friends, showed the least concern
over his habits and appearance. Grace said, “He was uninhibited in his
own way. He belched openly. He wouldn’t take a bath. He smelled
badly. He wore sneakers with no socks and he would scratch his legs
in the summer. We thought, “Well, he’s a brilliant young man and he
lives the way he wants to live, so what?’ ”

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 Friends and Relatives

The question of whether or not William bathed is an exceedingly

controversial one among his friends. Many swore he never bathed, and
that the stench was brutal. Mrs. Rab once tried to draw a bath for him,
and he was infuriated. Occasionally, some poor unfortunate would be
delegated by a group of friends to speak to William about bathing.
Many insisted that though he was slovenly, he was always clean. Other
themes are more consistent. He never told the Spinellis when he was
coming, preferring to appear on their doorstep. And he ate his food
one item at a time, following the meal with an entire quart of milk,
which Grace would sneak out and procure when he arrived, just to
please him. He never smoked, never drank liquor, and never drank
coffee—just milk, and occasionally a cup of black tea.
Naturally, William showed Marcos some of his writings, and
Marcos took a special interest in an essay on floods. He gave the article
to his agent, along with a few of William’s newsletters, without telling
his friend. By accident the papers were returned directly to Sidis, who
was shocked and enraged. Marcas insisted, “Really, I was only trying
to help you. I thought there was a chance for publication; and you
wouldn’t be labeled the Wonder Boy.” William forgave Marcos, but
insisted, “We will never talk about this again.”
William’s attitude toward the publication of his writings was
highly idiosyncratic and variable. He was furious with Marcos; yet in
1934 he wrote to Eichel, “Last summer I started in to write up a
‘Grammar o th’American Lingo,’ and last Sunday I was talking to
someone in the Bronx who is going to take it up with Simon &
Schuster as to arranging for publishing it.” Three years later he made
an effort to have portions of his Atlantis manuscript published by the
McClure Newspaper Syndicate.
William’s friends came from all rungs of the social strata, and his
remarkably active social life included a rare diversity of types. In
addition to men such as the struggling novelist Marcos Spinelli and the
dedicated Socialist Isaac Rab, there were a number of well-to-do
sophisticates. One of these was Creighton Hill, head of the editorial
department at Babson’s Statistical Office in Wellesley Hills, Massachu-

ff22H|
 The Prodigy

setts, and a wealthy resident of Beacon Hill. Creighton was devoted

to William and made unsuccessful efforts to have The Peace Paths
published. Coming to the conclusion that what William Sidis needed
most was a regular social life—since, like the rest of William’s friends,
he assumed he was the only one—he organized a once-monthly meet-
ing, at which Sidis was to lecture on any subject he chose. (William
already lectured a few times a year to the Vagabond Club, a group
of teenage boys organized by Isaac Rab.) Creighton was too busy to
attend, but he put together the core group of three or four selected
from his friends and employees at Babson’s. They were instructed
never to ask William about his personal life. The classes began around
1935, expanding to as many as eight members, and continued until
shortly before William’s death nine years later.
The group usually met evenings in the office of Shirley Smith,
who ran a rental agency in Boston; and occasionally at the home of
a Babson secretary, Margaret McGill. The members paid fifty cents per
evening, which sometimes added up to as much as four dollars. Ac-
cording to these ladies, the meetings were a combination of lecture and
party. There were always refreshments—peanuts or cookies (once,
when a full dinner was prepared, William ate nothing but baked
potatoes the entire evening)—and William would begin by lecturing.
The topic was generally American history, Sidis-style. He never read
from notes, though he occasionally handed out portions of The Tribes
and the States or The Peace Paths. Shirley Smith described a typical
meeting:
“We would mill around and say, “Hello, Mr. Sidis. How are
you?’ It was a small, comfortable room. And we had all ensconced
ourselves. And then he’d stand up, near a table decorated with the
peanuts and candy. He had a terrific sweet tooth.
“Tt was very characteristic of him to make his points by nodding.
Although his voice was somewhat soporific, I don’t think we ever went
to sleep—it was interesting. And it was not too long. And then,
presently, he would come to the conclusion. Meantime, he had been
dipping into the peanuts. He’d work closer and closer to the table and

[saz |
 Friends and Relatives

then reach out and grab them and stuff them into his mouth, and keep
right on talking. Afterward, we had soft drinks and cake.”
According to Margaret McGill, “We called him ‘Mr. Sidis,’ but
once in a while we'd slip and call him ‘Bill,’ on an especially festive
occasion. On the whole it was very informal, except when he was
talking. And if it got too long, we’d hold out a bag of peanuts. He’d
just automatically reach for it—and that’s how we’d get him to slow
down or rest. But I don’t think he realized it, because he was so intent
on what was going on in his head. He really was an extraordinary
person.
“He had a peculiar way of standing, as he would deliver a talk
to us. He’d stand on one foot, and twist around, and bend. It sometimes
got a little stuffy at the meeting and we wished that Bill would take
more baths. It could get to be pretty bad. He had no use for conven-
tions at all. If it was hot in the summer, he’d cut off his shirt sleeves
—he went to his office jobs like that.
“After the lecture, he sometimes tried to make us sing. I can’t
carry a tune, so I sat down in the corner and laughed. He made up
songs, too, even though he.couldn’t sing either. And he made up
guessing games, and some of them were good. He was almost like a
small boy in his pleasure in getting us to do these things. We never
did anything as absurd as wear funny hats or anything like that. But
he grew on you. He was a curious mixture of a small child and a very
superior person.”
William dropped in on Shirley occasionally at her office, and she
took him to lunch around the corner. She kept a careful eye on him
as they crossed the street; he was so deeply engrossed in whatever he
was discoursing on that he barely noticed the oncoming traffic. Though
they were frequent lunch companions, Shirley never visited Bill at his
home. Very few of his friends did, so careful was he about his privacy.
One of the few visitors was young Bill Rab, who made two trips
to the room on West Canton Street. “It was a typical rooming house,
with the bathroom down the hall. There was a bed in the corner, a
desk, and bookcases; and orange crates to supplement the bookcases.

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 The Prodigy

It was never brightly lit, and the two light bulbs were always bare.
It was stark. The wallpaper gave you the feeling that it was the cover
of an old, old manuscript—aged, and aged, and aged. He had a little
shelf over his hot plate, on which he kept the staples. Underneath it
he had a cabinet, in which he kept the packaged staples. There was a
little anteroom—it couldn’t have been any bigger than four by six. It
was probably just loaded with manuscripts. He had as many folders
filled with manuscripts as he did books. He had a few Western scenes
from magazines thumbtacked on the wall—by Remington—that’s all.
The room wasn’t disheveled. It was just a bare minimum.
“And he had two typewriters. A conventional Miracle type-
writer, and a Lichtenstern. That was an interchangeable-face type-
writer—like the IBM balls. It was a very compact thing—it folded
down so you could put it in a silverware drawer. It looked flimsy, but
he did all his work on it, at least all his foreign-language work. He
could type in Russian, in German, and in Spanish. He was a great
protagonist of Esperanto, which he taught me.”
As a host, William was predictably negligent. He did not care
for conventional greetings, was reluctant to say “Hello” or “Good-
bye,” or to shake hands. He rarely gave gifts to anyone, with the
exception of Helena, to whom he brought boxes of candy. He once
stunned Julius Eichel by producing a box of candy and offering it.
William, nearing the age of forty, was fully as eccentric as
Samuel Johnson, but except for trouble keeping ajob, and his attendant
worries about money, he hummed along happily, always productive
and usually contented. On August 15, 1937, William’s carefully built
fortress of anonymity was attacked. A local newspaper, the Boston
Sunday Advertiser, published an article about the former boy wonder
—the first offensive article in more than a decade. And for the first
time in his life, the former boy wonder did something other than
retreat further into that fortress—he fought back.

[ 224]
 T..article in the Boston Sunday Ad-
vertiser was titled “Sidis, Genius, Discovered Working as Boston
Clerk” and subtitled, “Child Prodigy of 1914 Shuns Publicity.”

Genius in a tawdry South End boarding house. Genius driven by

some strange mental quirk to seek obscurity in dullness and
mediocrity.
That is the story of William J. Sidis, child prodigy and
mathematical wizard, who yesterday was discovered working as
a clerk in a Boston business house.
William J. Sidis, now thirty-nine, was once declared by a

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 The Prodigy

group of eminent scientists to be a coming innovator in the field

of science, with potentialities as great as Einstein and as brilliant
as Marconi.
Yet yesterday a Sunday Advertiser writer found him in a
small room, wall-papered and dark, where for the past five years
he has lived unknown, unsung, uncaring.

He LoAtTHES GENIUS

Master of Latin and Greek when he was barely large enough

to mount a bicycle, Sidis prefers that room to the more palatial
quarters that might have been his, according to a source close to
him.
He hates to be a genius.
He prefers to be a clerk.
The writer yesterday stood in the street before Sidis’s home.
On either side were identical rows of red brick turret-front
houses. From them, as he watched came men and women on their
way to work—shipping clerks, waitresses, laborers. Next door a
Chinese laundryman nodded now and then to a passing acquain-
tance as he industriously ironed shirts. In the middle of the street
a man fed bread crumbs to a flock of pigeons.
Each day, five days a week, the man who was graduated
from Harvard University in 1914 when he was barely sixteen
years of age, comes out his door—like the laborers, like the others
—and goes to work.
He runs an adding machine.
Publicity shy since his early youth, Sidis avoided question-
ing. While an embattled landlady stood grimly at the foot of a
staircase, Sidis remained on the first floor landing. He made but
one statement that could be recorded.
Asked for an interview, he snapped in a high voice:
“Decidedly not!” Then he shut his door and cajoling,
arguing and flattering failed to move the Horatia at the stair-
case.

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 Invasion of Privacy

He Lives in Soutu Enp LopcINcs

KEEPS JOB SECRET

The people with whom Sidis lives say he is a quiet, well

behaved man. He has few friends “none of them very close to
him, though,” and for relaxation he writes books about streetcar
transfers.
A large, heavy man, with a light moustache, Sidis is reticent
to an extreme point. So afraid is he that his brilliant gifts will
be uncovered that in the five years he has lived in the South End
house he has never told the other people in it where he works.
Opportunities galore offer themselves to him, but Sidis
consistently turns them down, it was learned. Only recently, a
friend took him to an office, where he applied for a clerk’s job.
Recognizing him the prospective employer exclaimed:
“Why you don’t want a job like that! You ought to be on
the Boston planning board.”
But Sidis doesn’t want the planning board type of work. He
showed that clearly in 1918, when at the age of 20 he was a
professor at a Texas college. He quit the position, returned to
Boston and unobtrusively went to work as a clerk... . From time
to time enterprising newspapers rediscovered him, but Sidis
evolved a way of fooling them. He simply threw up what ever
job he had and moved to another city.
His shyness toward the press had been evidenced at the time
he was nine, when he astounded scientific leaders of the day with
a learned lecture on the fourth dimension.
At that time he would turn and flee, old time reporters here
recalled, whenever approached.
And so today—unless he has moved since this was written
—he lives in the tawdry South End room, with its flower-
covered wallpaper, and writes treatises on floods and streetcar
transfers.
He lives a clerk, unsung, unknown, uncaring.

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 The Prodigy

Mobilized at last by over thirty years of wrath, William sued the

Advertiser on four counts. Because few documents pertaining to the
case are extant, we know only what the first count was: libel. As a
result of the article’s publication, Sidis claimed, he “had been held up
to ridicule, and had suffered great anguish of mind, and his reputation
had been seriously injured, and he otherwise suffered great loss and
damage.”
This daring step—exposing William as it did to the possibility
of further publicity—had barely been taken when a far larger bomb
fell on his fortress.
On August 15, 1937, The New Yorker magazine made William
the subject of a lengthy article in its “Where Are They Now?” series.
It was the most publicity to which William had been exposed since
he was front-page news in The New York Times at age eleven, and this
time the publicity was far from favorable.
The article was titled “April Fool!” and was accompanied by a
small cartoon of William in knickerbockers lecturing to the Harvard
Mathematics Club. The author of the article was given as one Jared
L. Manley, a regular New Yorker writer; but that name was actually
a pseudonym for the famed humorist James Thurber, who was on the
staff of the magazine.
“April Fool!” began with the standard rundown of William’s
childhood accomplishments, with an eye to the development of neu-
roses. The prodigy’s youthful fear of dogs was mentioned, and Manley /
Thurber wrote, “Those who remember him in those years say that he
had something of the intense manner of a neurotic adult.” The article
contained a great many factual errors, including the claim that William
had attended Tufts College, which was actually Norbert Wiener’s alma
mater.
The usual story of a nervous breakdown at Harvard and treat-
ment at Boris’s sanatorium was copied, after which “|William] began
to show a marked distrust of people, a fear of responsibility, and a
general maladjustment to normal life.” To William’s famous gradua-
tion quote, “I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the

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 Invasion of Privacy

perfect life is in seclusion. I have always hated crowds,” was added this
commentary, “For ‘crowds’ it was not difficult to read ‘people.’” A
brief account of the years preceding the May Day arrest followed, and
a lengthy explication of the trial and William’s testimony. Much text
was devoted to Notes on the Collection of Transfers, with several excerpts
from the book.
The New Yorker had traced one of William’s New York City
landlords, Harry Friedman, and Friedman’s sister, a Mrs. Schlectien,
who refused to pass on his current address, though they still forwarded
mail to him. A few particulars of William’s life were extracted from
these individuals: “ “He had a kind of chronic bitterness, like a lot of
people you see living in furnished rooms,’ Mr. Friedman recently told
a researcher into the curious history of William James Sidis. Sidis used
to sit on an old sofa in Friedman’s living room and talk to him and
his sister. Sidis told them that he hated Harvard and that anyone who
sends his son to college is a fool—a boy can learn more in a public
library. . . . Once the young man brought down from his room a
manuscript he was working on and asked Mrs. Schlectien if he might
read ‘a few chapters’ to her. She said it turned out to be a book on
the order of ‘Buck Rogers,’ all about adventures in a future world of
wonderful inventions. She said it was swell.”
The conclusion of “April Fool!” read as follows:

William James Sidis lives today, at the age of thirty-nine, in a

hall bedroom of Boston’s shabby south end. For a picture of him
and his activities, this record is indebted to a young woman who
recently succeeded in interviewing him there. She found him in
a small room papered with a design of huge, pinkish flowers,
considerably discolored. There was a large, untidy bed and an
enormous wardrobe trunk, standing half open. A map of the
United States hung on one wall. On a table beside the door was
a pack of streetcar transfers neatly held together with an elastic.
On a dresser were two photographs, one (surprisingly enough)
of Sidis as the boy genius, the other of a sweet-faced girl with

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 The Prodigy

shell-rimmed glasses and an elaborate marcel wave. There was

also a desk with a tiny, ancient typewriter, a World Almanac, a
dictionary, a few reference books, and a library book which the
young man’s visitor at one point picked up. “Oh, gee,” said Sidis,
“that’s just one of those crook stories.” He directed her attention
to the little typewriter. “You can pick it up with one finger,”
he said, and did so.
William Sidis at thirty-nine is a large, heavy man, with a
prominent jaw, a thickish neck, and a reddish moustache. His
light hair falls down over his brow as it did the night he lectured
to the professors in Cambridge. His eyes have an expression
which varies from the ingenuous to the wary. When he is wary,
he has a kind of incongruous dignity which breaks down sud-
denly into the gleeful abandon of a child on holiday. He seems
to have difficulty in finding the right words to express himself,
but when he does, he speaks rapidly, nodding his head jerkily to
emphasize his points, gesturing with his left hand, uttering occa-
sionally a curious, gasping laugh. He seems to get a great and
ironic enjoyment out of leading a life of wandering irresponsibil-
ity after a childhood of scrupulous regimentation. His visitor
found in him a certain childlike charm.
Sidis is employed now, as usual, as a clerk at a business
house. He said that he never stays in one office long because his
employers or fellow-workers soon find out that he is the famous
boy wonder, and he can’t tolerate a position after that. “The very
sight of a mathematical formula makes me physically ill,” he said.
“All I want to do is run an adding machine, but they won’t let
me alone.” It came out that one time he was offered a job with
the Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway Company. It seems that
the officials fondly believed the young wizard would somehow
be able to solve all their technical problems. When he showed
up for work, he was presented with a pile of blueprints, charts,
and papers filled with statistics. One of the officials found him
an hour later weeping in the midst of it all. Sidis told the man

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 Invasion of Privacy

he couldn’t bear responsibility, or intricate thought, or computa-

tion—except on an adding machine. He took his hat and went
away.
Sidis has a new interest which absorbs him at the moment
more than streetcar transfers. This is the study of certain aspects
of the American Indian. He teaches a class of half a dozen
interested students once every two weeks. They meet in his
bedroom and arrange themselves on the bed and floor to listen
to the onetime prodigy’s intense but halting speech. Sidis is
chiefly concerned with the Okommakamesit tribe, which he
describes as having a kind of proletarian federation. He has writ-
ten some booklets on Okommakamesit lore and history, and if
properly urged, will recite Okommakamesit poetry and even sing
Okommakamesit songs. He admitted that his study of the Okom-
makamesits is an outgrowth of his interest in socialism. When the
May Day demonstration of 1919 was brought up by the young
woman, he looked at the portrait of the girl on his dresser and
said, “She was in it. She was one of the rebel forces.’’ He nodded
his head vigorously, as if pleased with that phrase. “I was the
flag-bearer,” he went on. “And do you know what the flag was?
Just a piece of red silk.” He gave his curious laugh. “Red silk,”
he repeated. He made no reference to the picture of himself in
the days of his great fame, but his interviewer later learned that
on one occasion, when a pupil of his asked him point-blank about
his infant precocity and insisted on a demonstration of his mathe-
matical prowess, Sidis was restrained with difficulty from throw-
ing him out of the room.
Sidis revealed to his interviewer that he has another work
in progress: a treatise on floods. He showed her the first sentence:
“California has acquired considerable renown on account of its
alleged weather.” It seems that he was in California some ten
years ago during his wanderings. His visitor was emboldened, at
last, to bring up the prediction, made by Professor Comstock of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in 1910, that the

[ 231]
 The Prodigy

little boy who lectured that year would grow up to be a great

mathematician, a famous leader in the world of science. “It’s
strange,” said William James Sidis, with a grin, “but, you know,
I was born on April Fool’s Day.”

William was horrified, enraged, and hurt. Some of his friends

didn’t speak of the article, out of deference to his feelings. Others, such
as Julius Eichel, offered condolences: “Esther and I read the article that
has so upset you in The New Yorker, for it was widely advertised. I
knew that it would make you feel miserable. I had no notion that the
reporters would add to your troubles by hounding you.”
When Norbert Wiener read the story, he was stunned. Of all
people, he understood all too well the mortifications that a child
prodigy endures. The New Yorker piece offended him enough to
warrant two pages of discussion in his autobiography. He called the
article “an act of the utmost cruelty,” pointing out that Sidis had
“ceased to be news for nearly a quarter of a century . . . the question
of the infant prodigy was not a live issue, even in the public press, and
had not been for some time, until The New Yorker made it so.” He
thought it offensive that the editors of the magazine rationalized and
justified their story “by the claim that the actions of people in the
public eye are the object of fair newspaper comment.” In Wiener’s
opinion, Sidis in adult life “was a defeated—and honorably defeated
—combatant in the battle for existence” who, as a result of the article,
“was pilloried like a side-show freak for fools to gape at.” Wiener
concluded:
“I suspect certain members of The New Yorker staff of muddled
thinking. In many literary circles, anti-intellectualism is the order of
the day. There are sensitive souls who blame the evils of the times on
modern science and who welcome the chance to castigate its sins.
Furthermore, the very existence of an infant prodigy is taken as an
affront by some. What, then, could constitute a better spiritual car-
minative than an article digging up the old Sidis affair, at the same time
casting dishonor on the prodigy and showing up the iniquity of the

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 Invasion of Privacy

scientist-prodigy-maker? The gentlemen who were responsible for this

article overlooked the fact that W. J. Sidis was alive and could be hurt
very deeply.”
If the public mockery were not enough, William rankled under
the added outrage of having been spied upon. He had certainly not
granted an interview to anyone he might have suspected was a reporter.
How, then, did The New Yorker secure its story? Speculations as to
who “leaked” William’s tale abound. Shirley Smith and Margaret
McGill are convinced that the mole was none other than John, a
member of their study group.
Cheery, sociable, and a close friend of Creighton Hill’s, John was
above suspicion when he brought a female guest to one of the meet-
ings. The members occasionally invited guests, as did William, and
there seemed to be nothing strange in it when John brought along a
good friend. According to Shirley Smith, she was the daughter of an
editor at the Random House publishing company. She sat quietly
during the meeting, and did not exchange a single word with Sidis—
she certainly did not interview him at that time.
Shirley and Margaret became suspicious only when The New
Yorker article came out, and John behaved guiltily. According to
Shirley Smith, “We were ready to murder him after that. He admitted
that he was afraid to come to any more meetings. As far as I know,
he never met Sidis again.”
It is not known whether Shirley and Margaret passed this infor-
mation on to William; nor is it a certainty that John’s friend was the
“interviewer” referred to in the story. Nor is it known whether a
reporter actually saw the inside of William’s room. William always
maintained that the entire article was a combination of imagination
and old stories about him, and that no stranger had gained access to
his room.
In any case, no amount of sleuthing on the part of Sidis or his
friends could change the fact of the article’s publication. Frustrated and
angry, William had come to the end of his tether with reporters.
Armed with a good deal of rage and years of legal training, he set about

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 The Prodigy

to sue The New Yorker, on two counts of invasion of privacy, and one
count of malicious libel. He sued for $150,000. James Thurber, in his
autobiography The Years with Ross, called the suit “far and away the
most important legal case in the history of the magazine, and the only
one that ever reached the United States Supreme Court.”
Sidis commenced his suit in the New York Federal Court on July
7, 1938. He had turned forty thirteen weeks before, and the little joke
he habitually made on his birthday—about April Fool’s Day—had
been spoiled by the publication of the article. His friends never heard
him make it again.
William employed the firm of Greene & Russell, and according
to his friends he prepared many of his own briefs. In his complaint,
Sidis stated that as the result of the article’s publication he had been
held up to “public scorn, ridicule and contempt, causing him grievous
mental anguish, humiliation, and loss of reputation” and “for a long
time to come will be severely damaged and handicapped in his employ-
ment as a clerk or in any other employment and in his social life and
pursuit of happiness.” Furthermore, “the plaintiff was besieged in his
residence by reporters from the newspapers and the press of the country
and was forced to remain in seclusion and was rendered unable to
attend to the duties of his daily occupation.” This last must have been
a terrible torture for William. It had been twenty-five years since
reporters beat down his door en masse. But however strong his urge
to pack up and leave, to run away from this onslaught, the courage
of his convictions was stronger, and he stayed to fight the case.
William objected to a series of specific points in his first com-
plaint. Besides the falsities about his education and nervous break-
downs, he added one interesting objection: “That plaintiff is in the
habit of withholding from his employers an alleged extraordinary
mathematical ability which defendant’s said article states that plaintiff
possesses, and thereby not rendering service to his employers to the best
of his ability.” Of course, William was right in essence—he was a
responsible employee, and always performed to the best of his ability.

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 Invasion of Privacy

But in treading this ground, he must have been prepared to state, before
a judge and a jury, that he possessed no mathematical prowess.
The New Yorker’s attorneys, the renowned firm of Greenbaum,
Wolff & Ernst, responded that the facts of William’s life were matters
of great public interest, importance, and concern. They had not dam-
aged his reputation, because he “was not favorably known among
people generally and did not have a good reputation, but on the
contrary had the reputation for being peculiar and eccentric.” Besides,
they argued, The New Yorker magazine had offered to print any letter
William cared to write in his defense, but he had refused to avail
himself of the offer.
Judge Goddard in the lower court and Judge Clark of the Circuit
Court were highly sympathetic to William; nonetheless Goddard re-
jected his suit for invasion of privacy. Clark stated his opinion:
“Tt is not contended that any of the matter printed is untrue. Nor
is the manner of the author unfriendly; Sidis today is described as
having ‘a certain childlike charm.’ But the article is merciless in its
dissection of intimate details of its subject’s personal life, and this in
company with elaborate accounts of Sidis’s passion for privacy and the
pitiable lengths to which he has gone to avoid public scrutiny. The
work possessed great reader interest, for it is both amusing and instruc-
tive; but it may be fairly described as a ruthless exposure of a once
public character, who has since sought and has now been deprived of
the seclusion of a private life.” In spite of this sympathy, Judge Clark
concluded, “Regrettably or not, the misfortunes and frailties of neigh-
bors and ‘public figures’ are subjects of considerable interest and discus-
sion to the rest of the population. And when such are the mores of
the community, it would be unwise for a court to bar their expression
in the newspapers, books, and magazines of the day.”
William was not to be daunted. He changed attorneys, and was
next represented by the firm of Sapinsky, Lukas & Santangelo, whom
he employed to appeal the case; this time he asked to appeal as a “poor
person.” After red tape which dragged on for several years, the appeal

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 The Prodigy

was denied, and William was charged court costs of $31.45. In 1940,
the U.S. Supreme Court listened to arguments and refused to hear the
case.
“The article,” wrote James Thurber, “. . . was to become forever
celebrated in legal and publishing circles everywhere because of the
important precedent established by the courts, affecting all so-called
‘right-of-privacy’ cases... . A decision in favor of Sidis would, to
summarize it briefly, result in continual and multitudinous cases of
public figures suing the authors and publishers of newspapers, maga-
zines, books and encyclopedias. The opinion of the judges could be
condensed into eight words: “Once a public figure, always a public
figure... . The great importance of the Sidis case lies in its having
become the principal authority in all similar cases in which the right
of privacy is claimed by a person who is, or once was, a notable public
figure. It was to save The New Yorker from a similar suit... .”
Thurber, writing over a decade after the courts’ decisions, ex-
pressed his disappointment that the judges had not grasped the article’s
intention. “The general tenor of the article was called ‘amusing and
instructive’ but nowhere was there any indication whatever of what
I thought had stood out all through my story, implicit though it was
—my sincere feeling that the piece would help to curb the great
American thrusting of talented children into the glare of fame or
notoriety, a procedure in so many cases disastrous to the later career
and happiness of the exploited youngsters.” Thurber expressed no
regret at having disturbed the career or happiness of a vulnerable, and
very much alive, individual.
Determined not to give up, William continued the suit—the
libel charges remained standing—and he pressed on.
In the meantime, William had experienced a small victory—
perhaps one that gave him the courage to continue his battle against
The New Yorker. In 1941, he won his suit against the Boston Sunday
Advertiser, and received a settlement of $375.

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 The Pacifist and
the Transfer War's

Whee: time-consuming legal ac-

tivities didn’t make a dent in his productive output. He churned out
newsletters, manuscripts, and correspondence with a greater vigor than
ever before. With only his cumbersome hectograph equipment, he
produced a volume of work in five years that surely would have taken
another man twenty.
Increasingly, the newsletters written when he was in his forties
dealt with pacifism. Violent in his opposition to all war work, William
despised the CO camps that were the fate of conscientious objectors
during World War II if they wished to escape imprisonment. He
regarded them as little more than concentration camps. As he told
Helena, “Those who do war work while refusing to fight put the ‘fist’

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 The Prodigy

in ‘pacifist.’”” As the war progressed, William developed a passionate

devotion to a work plan of his own devising for objectors, which he
called Volunteer Urban Self-supporting Projects. The VUSP, he
dreamed, could be a national, cooperative venture centering on any
number of industries, with none of the profits going to support the
war effort. In the interests of receiving government sanction for the
project, he wrote reams of letters to politicians and laymen, sent out
petitions, and poured out newsletters. The VUSP’s first project, he
hoped, would be a series of urban transit guides.
The Penacook Courier gave way to the Continuity News, begun
in 1938 and published under one of William’s favorite pseudonyms,
Parker Greene. It bore the mottoes “The Past Is the Key to the
Present,” and “We Attempt to Explain Rather Than to Advocate.” In
one of the first issues he used the word libertarian as a solution to the
quest for “a new name for government with limited powers.”
The content of the Continuity News was what we think of when
we use the term libertarian today. Sidis railed against Roosevelt’s New
Deal, “with its idea of making money appear bigger by shortening the
measure.” He criticized the New Deal for introducing fiat or paper
money into the economy and entitled the following commentary
“Screwball Economics”: “The main point common to the various
brands of screwball economics is the fanatical belief that, given proper
juggling, there is no difficulty in making something out of nothing,
and that the particular candidate for office could do it if elected.”
The Continuity News was followed by The Orarch, beginning in
December 1938. The Orarch’s motto was “Grant to Others All Rights
You Would Have Others Grant to You.” Each issue bore the same
disclaimer: “Issued by the Boston Liberty Group. This paper is issued
by a group, and is not the property of any individual.” Its contents
were similar to that of the Continuity News, with more emphasis on
conscientious objection and the evils of racism.
William published The Orarch for five years. During this period
he formed a group that he dubbed the Liberty War Objectors Associa-
tion (LWOA), “a CO organization based on individual rights as

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 The Pacifist and the Transfer Wars

grounds of opposition to war,” and released an assortment of constitu-

tions and articles under its auspices.
Beginning in September 1943, William served as associate editor
to Julius Eichel’s CO newsletter, The Absolutist. William wrote a
weekly column again under the pen name Parker Greene, in which he
plumped for his pet VUSP, attacked current government programs for
objectors, and stressed the point that he opposed the draft on the
grounds that it violated individual rights. This was a position few COs
emphasized. Wrote William, “Where pacifist organizations have so far
been merely opposed to war on the basis of humanitarian sentimentali-
ties, the LWOA bases its objections solidly on the destruction of civil
liberties involved in war.” And, “The VUSP plan is not a plan for
‘humanitarian’ work. ... An absolutist cannot be a consistent “humani-
tarian’ oozing love toward all and sundry; for he must refuse to do
war work even if it consists of ‘saving life’ instead of ‘taking life.’ ”
William was opposed to the martyring of COs who went to
prison. While a great many of his fellow COs supported these martyrs,
he felt that a successful draft dodger had made a far better choice so
long as he continued to seek a remedy (preferably the VUSP) to the
situation that sent COs to prison. This stance made him unpopular
with numerous fellow pacifists, who found a jail term and a hunger
strike more romantic than a plan for alternative CO work.
Eichel, as William’s editor, grew increasingly peeved, and their
longtime correspondence grew ever more strained and pettish. Eichel
wrote in November 1943: “There is a certain amount of tolerance we
must exhibit even when we are absolutely sure the other fellow is
wrong. ...I admire your unbending devotion to principle, and often
wish I could stand my ground as unflinchingly as you do in the face
of great opposition, but our sheet will lose in influence if we make
mountains out of the molehills of personalities.” William replied
hotly, “Once and for all, it is a choice between me and censor-
ship. ... As I have said before, I do not think that everyone who can
mumble ‘I hate war’ should be immune from criticism. In many ways
the interests of ‘pacifist’ politicians and those of absolutism are con-

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 The Prodigy

stantly clashing, and I don’t feel we should deliberately lie down to

let those leaders rule our thoughts. To my mind, even FDR has a better
claim to sincerity in his ‘I hate war’ than have some who claim to be
pacifists. . . . If that be treason, make the most of it.”
Matters worsened with each passing issue of The Absolutist, as
Eichel edited portions of William’s columns, and William threatened
to resign and start his own paper. Finally he announced that he had
begun a “censorship strike.” Eichel maintained his temper beneath the
barrage of letters, and finally agreed to print William’s column in its
entirety with a disclaimer. This suited William admirably, and in his
next letter to Eichel, he wrote, “I might have something on Anne
Hutchinson, the Puritan martyr who suffered for the right to knock
respected leaders. She was my inspiration in the ‘censorship strike’; I
have often looked at the old site of her house; and she has rated about
three pages of The Peace Paths. Expect me Christmas weekend.”
The truce did not last long. A month later Eichel wrote to
William, “It was a mistake in the first place to agree to an associate
editor so far away. Perhaps we could have gotten along better if you
were closer. Now it is out of the question. You can write for The
Absolutist if you wish but there will be no guarantee that it will be
mimeographed.” Hostilities heightened, and in the January 18, 1944,
issue, Eichel took a low blow at Sidis. He announced that the paper
was dropping the promotion of VUSP, and wrote, “For further infor-
mation . . . readers will be referred to William James Sidis.” Eichel
knew very well what it meant to William to keep his real name a
secret, and especially never to allow it to appear in print; this was
certainly a hostile act, intended to wound.
In February 1944, William finally managed to put out his own
four-page CO newsletter, as he had threatened to do for so long. Titled
The Libertarian, it was devoted solely to his favorite CO topics, and
to taking a number of digs at Eichel and his policies. It was edited by
“Parker Greene,” and bore the motto, “That Government Is Best
Which Governs Least—Thomas Jefferson.” William sent a copy to
Eichel.

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 The Pacifist and the Transfer Wars

In the accompanying letter, William noted that “the VUSP plan

is changing, and it is withdrawing from political controversy.
“I have always hated politics in general, and am coming to the
conclusion that pacifist politics is as poisonous as any other variety of
politics. . . . I hope you are satisfied [with the direction we are now
taking ]—but it makes little difference whether you are or not. Use
your own discretion as to whether to continue me on your mailing
list or not. My own suggestion is, don’t do it. I am not especially
interested in the welfare of prisoners—there are so many other angles
that I find more important.”
In April 1944, the vituperous correspondence reached a climax.
In William’s final letter to Eichel, one that ended a friendship of
twenty years, he wrote, “In case you do not know it, the dodo was
a bird which, when faced with men armed with clubs, walked up and
openly challenged the hunter. Result—there are now no dodos. To my
mind, such is the attitude of most of those whom you are holding up
as heroes. I could feel more admiration for someone who frankly did
a good job of dodging. And it makes no difference if you take that
as personal antagonism—I would still feel the same if I had never
met you.”
Eichel retorted, “I have received your letter referring to dodos,
and I feel it is about time I spoke out frankly on your social attitude
towards others. Everyone seems to be aware of your lack of consid-
eration, and I take it for granted you are aware of the same
fault. . . . If human beings must be compared to birds, besides dodos
there are ostriches who think that by sticking their heads in the sand
they are completely hidden from view.” Sidis and Eichel ended their
friendship on this bitter note.
As for The Libertarian, its primary function had been as an organ
enabling a crabby William James Sidis to bluster at Julius Eichel. In
issue number 2, Parker Greene announced that “the VUSP is with-
drawing from all political controversy,” and “The Libertarian is taking
this opportunity of saying goodbye to its readers. ... A refund is being
sent to all paid subscribers.”

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 The Prodigy

William seemed to be going off the deep end when it came to

his CO politics. The contrast between his first essays on conscientious
objection and plans for alternatives to the work camp system, and the
ones he penned for The Absolutist, is striking. The strain of his ongoing
lawsuit, and his constant financial duress might have accounted for this
difference. Another factor probably played a considerable role in this
change—William’s deteriorating health. Although he refused to be
bothered about it, he had very high blood pressure. Even if he had been
willing to go to a doctor, he lived in an era that had no effective
medications for his condition.

Though William pursued his CO activities with his usual burning

intensity, spending countless hours hectographing newsletters, engag-
ing in correspondences, and arranging his secret meetings and initia-
tions, it was not the only—nor even the central—activity in his life.
For almost two years—from January 3, 1941, to September 18,
1942, William wrote a weekly page in a Boston magazine, What’s New
in Town. The column was titled “Meet Boston,” and ran under yet
another pseudonym, Jacob Marmor. It is not known what salary he was
paid—probably very little since he continued to complain of financial
difficulties. The magazine did volunteer to advertise his perpetual
calendars, the sale of which brought in a steady trickle of income.
Of all William’s writings—tfrom those about higher mathematics
to streetcar transfers to American histories to French poetry to pacifist
propaganda—"Meet Boston” is the most readable, the most accessible,
the most professional. It is a cheerfully patriotic and varied collection
of trivia about the city William Sidis loved.
The column’s first appearance was topped by a headline in the
Robert Ripley tradition: “Strange but True.” William saw and re-
ported with the eyes of a true Boston-lover. He fueled the ever raging
New York—versus—Boston debate, writing of the “insular Manhatta-
nite,” and he peppered his columns with items such as the following:
“According to the census of 1930, there were about 2,700 cows

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 The Pacifist and the Transfer Wars

resident in New York City. And only 90 in Boston. Which would

seem to prove that Boston is nowhere near as much a cow-town as
New York. Or does it mean that the larger population of New York
consists mainly of cows?”
William’s choice of trivia was often fascinating. He told the story
of Benjamin Franklin’s leaving one hundred dollars in his will to his
native town of Boston, to be put out at 6 percent compound interest
for a century, then used for a work of public benefit. At the end of
that period—in 1890—the one hundred dollars had grown to forty
thousand dollars. The money was used to build Franklin Park, which
is the same size as New York’s Central Park.
William had collected a great deal of material about his home-
town of Brookline. “In colonial times it was reputed to be the hangout
of idlers who, so ran the belief of the more ‘respectable’ townspeople
in ‘the Village,’ never did any work, but spent their time ‘puttering
about.’ And so this region is still called Putterham.”
Naturally, William slipped many of his pet interests into the
column. He plugged his transit guides. He announced that “the small
and obscure habit of peridromophily” had been organizing, and its
national headquarters were now in Boston where it issued the hobby’s
only organ, The New Peridromophile.
William went so far as to quote a work by the ubiquitous Parker
Greene titled American Descriptions, an unpublished book “giving some
interesting descriptions of incidents in America.” One such incident
occurred when William (alias Parker Greene) saw a refraction mirage
from the window of his Cambridge office building. In fact, he had been
extraordinarily fortunate in seeing more than one. The first experience
had proved so exciting that he watched the sky daily from his office
window, hoping for the precise concurrence of light and timing that
would bring the seemingly magical image into view again. William
knew everything about the proper conditions for the appearance of
such a spectacle. As Helena explained, “Of course, it’s very rare, and
you have to be very observant and know a great deal about

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 The Prodigy

meteorology. Billy knew plenty about meteorology, inside and out.

He knew the time when the winds and clouds and everything else
would be just favorable. He explained it to me in detail. But I was
so mad when one of those reporters wrote up the thing. He said that
my brother was some kind of an oddball, who used to spend most of
his lunchtime looking up at the sky. The other people in the office
didn’t understand it, either. He was always looking up.”
The following week, Jacob Marmor ran a correction of a minor
error that had appeared in the preceding article, and offered “Our
apologies to the author of “American Descriptions.’ ” William’s idea
of a really good joke, it seemed, was to apologize pseudonymously to
himself, using yet another of his pseudonyms!
While William battled The New Yorker, which fought to prove
him a pathetic, useless wreck of a man leading a burnt-out life, he was
producing professional, well-received pieces of journalism.
In “Meet Boston” William decided to tickle his anonymity
funny bone. The following excerpt is William’s only, not-too-veiled,
reference to his Harvard days, and those of fellow prodigy Norbert
Wiener:

Over thirty years ago, Tufts College turned out the youngest
college graduate on record—age fourteen. He would appear to
have been the only extra-young college graduate in America who
specialized in mathematics; for, though another boy shortly after-
wards was reputed to be a mathematician, there was nothing
authentic about such reports, which were 100% pipe-dream. The
Tufts graduate now teaches mathematics; the victim of the press
hoax is unable to even understand the subject. Case of mistaken
identity.

At no time during his busy life did William neglect his hobby.
He continued to publish transfer-collecting newsletters, to correspond
with other enthusiasts, and to run a “transfer deposit bank” called the

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 The Pacifist and the Transfer Wars

“Transfer-X-Change,” whereby collectors could make deposits and

withdrawals through the mail. For fifty cents a new collector could
purchase a sample pack of fifty transfers from the bank. William’s own
collection consisted of well over 2,000 items. Some correspondents
claimed collections as large as 50,000 transfers strong, representing over
nine hundred cities. However, all was not bliss in the world of transfer-
ania. Far from it.
An undercurrent of tempestuous unrest seethed among America’s
transfer collectors, all of whom were easily as dedicated as Sidis, if their
correspondence and publications are any indication. Rival publications
and organizations sprang up like mushrooms, hurling accusations and
invective at one another. At times, the atmosphere of frenzy reached
such proportions that it is a wonder William had time for the other
pressing affairs of his life: his New Yorker lawsuit, his weekly “Meet
Boston” column, his American history classes, his pacifist newsletters,
and his books. The depth of feeling shown by some of the correspon-
dents is not unlike that which emerged in the Eichel-Sidis exchange.
The letters to William, and editorials in the major rival newsletter,
The Transfer Collector, give the flavor of life in the transfer trenches.
The editor of the Transfer Collector—or TC as it was popularly
known—was an impassioned character named Charles S. Jones who
operated out of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and appeared to rule his neck
of the woods with an iron transfer. He editorialized loudly and pas-
sionately, writing that “TC tolerates no slackers. . . . If you are not
in a position to give time and effort to your collection, we suggest that
you seek some other less diversified avocation. Peridromophily is not
a lazy man’s hobby.” (The word that William had coined in 1926, as
Frank Folupa, had been appropriated by all like-minded hobbyists.)
Relations between The New Peridromophile and the Transfer Col-
lector had begun amicably enough. Jones respectfully referred to Sidis
as “one of the ‘patriarchs’ of transfer collecting.” The publications
shared subscription lists as early as 1930. William even wrote the
occasional article for the rival organ, using his own name and referring

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 The Prodigy

to “the Folupa book on transfers.” In 1932, the Transfer Collector

interviewed William on the subject of a slump in the hobby, and
printed his response, again under his real name: “I think we should go
after new recruits, and get them organized somehow to keep them
from back-sliding too quick, then we could slowly work some of the
old hands back into the game.” In 1933, the papers “merged.” William
had just moved to Boston, and decided to stop publishing The Peri-
dromophile. He sent his complete set of back files to the TC, and
generously donated a hectograph kit to Jones.
However, the passage of time saw increasing tensions among
collectors. William had launched his New Peridromophile and there was
bad blood between the two publications. In 1939, Jones turned the full
force of his wrath on William in the April edition of the Transfer
Collector:

‘TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT

On page 1 we stated that only one dissenting vote had been sent
in on the question of a national organization. That vote was sent
in by a person who has been opposed to almost every constructive
plan that the TC has proposed in the past two years. We refer
to one Parker Greene, who, with his magazine, has attempted to
overthrow everything that we of the TC and the [Peridromo-
phile Society] have worked so long and hard to accomplish. This
gentleman comes forward with the mistaken idea that we are
attempting to establish some sort of an autocracy, with your
editor and Mr. Reinohl as co-dictators. If Mr. Greene had taken
the trouble to read the constitution more carefully, he would
have seen that there was no basis for any of his foolish accusations.
The entire matter sums up to the fact that we are not organizing
in a way suitable to Mr. Greene—a way which failed miserably
under his leadership some months previously—and that there are
no immediate plans for city transfer groups. However, this gen-
tleman has no one to blame but himself, if our plan does not meet

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 The Pacifist and the Transfer Wars

with his approval. An offer of cooperation, tendered Mr. Greene

by our Mr. Reinohl last November, met with not even a courte-
ous reply. Can the blame for this be laid at our door?
As for Mr. Greene’s plan to hold a counter-meeting of those
opposed to our society at the World’s Fair, we are afraid he will
have to be twins—if he wants any company!

The following week’s editorial again pointed to Sidis /Greene, as

an “instigator of riot.” Jones cautioned that Greene and his ilk should
“either cease their action or come into the open with their fancied
grievances, or they will find themselves definitely out in the cold.”
While Jones was obviously something of a madman, it cannot be
denied that William had willingly entered the fray, and it is curious
to consider that he did so with nearly the same intensity he dedicated
to dangerous and important issues, such as conscientious objection. In
fact, he had no option in the matter—his mind raced at an astounding
speed that could not be turned down or off, regardless of the issue
involved. Perhaps, in fact, memorizing lists of thousands of bus and
streetcar routes throughout the country with every variation and
alteration, in all their overwhelming detail, was for William a kind
of quiet, low-key occupation, a lulling pleasure to be enjoyed much
as the average man would muse over a baseball score, try to piece
together the words of a popular song, or drift into reverie about his
plans for Saturday night.
One transfer buff in William’s circle guessed that there were
about two hundred serious collectors in the United States. William
received letters from several teenagers (“I am a very serious railroad
fan of fifteen, with no ‘kid stuff about my hobby,” wrote one from
Brooklyn), but only a few were from women. One collector wrote
to William, “I believe Mr. Dunlop of Cicero has left the hobby. He
told one collector ‘that he wanted to devote all his time to his wife’
—of all things!” For some collectors, such as this one from Cincinnati,
the hobby occasionally resembled a drinking problem: “One doesn’t
take to collecting transfers overnight—it grows on you. I can’t recall

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 The Prodigy

offhand just how I started. It was about five years ago. With each year
it accelerated until the present, and I’m up to my neck now.”

Although William used his actual name in some of his transfer activi-
ties, he also used several of his pseudonyms, and he never let his
subscribers know just who was running the papers. One collector broke
the ice and wrote to Mr. Greene, “Are Frank Folupa, Parker Greene,
Mr. Sidis and Transfer-X-Change one and the same person?” Another,
from St. Louis, discovered the truth: “I am writing this letter as a
congratulation. I didn’t learn until a week ago that it was you whom
the transfer collectors of the world have to thank for that brilliant
work Notes on the Collection of Transfers. You have missed your due
all these seventeen years by not revealing that you wrote that splendid
book.” He had discovered William’s true identity by chatting with
friends who worked at the transit company offices. A company official
mentioned Folupa /Sidis as “the founder of the hobby.” The collector
concluded glowingly, “I think much credit belongs to you for your
long struggle to establish and organize the hobby.”
Most collectors did not share this relaxed attitude toward Wil-
liam’s aliases. In 1941, William wrote a long Code of Ethics for
Transfer Collectors, in which he addressed this topic: “A transfer
collector is entitled to use a pseudonym for the purpose of making
contacts with other collectors; and other collectors are bound to respect
his right of privacy in this regard. A collector may adopt a new
pseudonym as often as he finds reason to believe that the privacy of
his pseudonym is being threatened; and collectors are bound not to
discriminate in any way against collectors using or changing a pseudo-
nym in the hobby.”
The Code of Ethics was controversial, and William circulated it
widely among his fellow collectors. It consisted of twenty-six points,
several of which were strict and dictatorial. “Peridromophily,” he
wrote, “must not be made to extend to anything but the collection of
local transit transfers. . . . Collectors who have other hobbies besides
peridromophily should be careful to keep the collection of transfers

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 The Pacifist and the Transfer Wars

separate from all other hobbies, and not to classify them together for
any purpose.” William went into detail explaining what was and was
not admissible as part of the hobby—overlap fare receipts were, tickets
were not. Derelict transfers were admissible and should never be
overlooked just because they had been thrown away.
William stressed that violators of the Code of Ethics would be
punished, ifjudged guilty by the Peridromophile Federation, although
he did not say what form this punishment would take. Moreover,
recipients of the code who belonged to the federation were “bound
by this code upon its issuance.” Nonmembers who read the code, then
corresponded with members, “shall be considered as having accepted
this code and consented to being judged in accordance therewith for
any offenses against transfer collectors’ ethics.”
The code caused quite a stir, and William received a variety of
letters in response, many written by incensed collectors. The St. Louis
collector did not find “the whole Code of Ethics to be wrong. The
exchange of transfers need be governed by certain moral considera-
tions. .. . But the idea of any group or individual be he yourself, PS,
NP, Jones etc. dictating what should be collected or how it should be
displayed etc. is foreign to me. I believe in individual taste governing.”
One collector wrote, “Baseball fans are not told how to root or when
to root—I’ll do it my way, you do it yours.” The most strident voice
wrote, “I see you, as all dictators do (like Hitler does) passed your
Code of Ethics even though some of us voted against parts of the code
you didn’t alter it any, that will not do, The PF is, I believe to follow
the lines set by democracy governments. . . . Now why does the PF
cloak themselves in darkness? Just who heads the PF is a mystery—
I associate this with fraud—are they afraid of their lives if they make
themselves known? Yes, I demand an answer. And another thing—
why the Jawbreaker of a name permidromophile—my thought is
whoever thought up a name as that should be committed to an insane
institution. Awaiting your answer to redeam yourself and do see what
you can do to revive the art of collecting transfers.”
Charles Jones also objected to William’s anonymous Peridromo-

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 The Prodigy

phile Federation, writing, “It is a rather soul-less occupation, writing

to an organization rather than to another individual.” But his true
resentment toward Sidis lay in another area, one he finally revealed
after years of hinting. “I feel personally that collectors should be
permitted to correspond with other collectors as individuals rather than
through the auspices of a central group. Such collectivism borders on
the verge of Communism—a political science with which at least one
of your members is familiar.” The postscript to the letter read: “The
member of your group whom I charge with Communistic tendencies
is, of course, your leader, William Sidis. I refer to a 1937 issue of The
New Yorker which contained a short biography of this person.”
One of William’s most poisonous correspondents also hailed
from St. Louis. A typical missive from his pen read, “Dear Mr. Greene:
I received the package of wastepaper, dignified by the name of trans-
fers. When I say wastepaper, I mean just that, nothing but common
stuff, such as New York City and Boston. All Boston transfers I ever
saw looked like they were picked up out of the gutter. Boston has some
of the lousiest transfers of any city. I don’t recall what I sent you, but
it couldn’t have been as bad as what I got back; if that’s the way your
transfer exchange works, you can have it.”
The collector had his own transfer club in St. Louis, but he wrote
William, “By the way, the second notice of dues I sent you was just
a formality, and is of course to be ignored by you, since we don’t
expect you to join. Speaking for myself, I don’t give a damn if you
ever join again,” and then, in a fit of pique, dealt William the lowest
blow one streetcar transfer collector ever dealt another: “No doubt you
are a bus lover, tsk, tsk! What a pity, oh well!”
Indeed, the vicissitudes of the hobby seemed worse, at times, than
those of an antiwar struggle or a lawsuit against The New Yorker, but
William bravely fought his battles on all fronts. There was only one
battle that William would not fight face to face, one battle from which
he still thought it wisest to withdraw in silence: the battle against Sarah
Sidis.

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 “Americas Greatest
Brain

| n the years following Boris’s death,

Sarah and Helena continued to run Portsmouth as a summer tourist
resort. The clientele consisted of people driving by on the road and
word-of-mouth recommendations. It was a grueling life for Helena,
who was pressed into heavy service by her mother (much as Sarah
herself had been as a girl). From eight in the morning until eleven
o'clock at night she made beds, swept floors, and waited on guests. For a
few years there was a maid, but eventually the maid left and Helena did
everything. Her health was still delicate, she was still studying hard, and
she was taking her first jobs as a social worker and a teacher.
In 1933, Sarah bought property in Miami Beach and began to
build apartment houses. She had recently played the stock market with

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 The Prodigy

considerable success, and while the Sidises’ standard of living was

hardly luxurious, Sarah was able to make several trips to Europe. Her
business acumen was excellent, and by 1936 she was doing extremely
well in the market and expanding her Florida investments. Each win-
ter, Sarah and Helena migrated to Miami Beach, returning in the
summer to run the resort. Though Helena didn’t have to please tourists
in Florida, she nonetheless found her life harder than in Portsmouth,
“where we had a big house. If my mother started yelling, why, I'd just
go into one of the other rooms.”
Helena’s jobs periodically separated her from Sarah. At various
times in the 1930s she worked in Connecticut, New York, and the
Boston area, often in close proximity to her brother. When necessary,
he traveled considerable distances to visit her, his only concern being
the fear of running into his mother. In the ’40s, Helena spent several
summers in a Brookline lodging house only a few blocks away from
William. When Sarah visited Helena, William refused to stop by and
risk a run-in until Helena arranged for their mother to be gone in the
evenings. Then William came over every night, while Sarah stayed
away—months passed like this, and mother and son never met. Despite
the humiliation this must have been for Sarah, she never admitted to
it in her autobiography.
When Helena and William were separated, they corresponded
voluminously, William sending batches of jokes and funny clippings
with every letter. All but two letters are lost. One was written to
Helena in Miami in 1936. She had requested information about the
constellations to be seen in the Florida night sky. According to friends’
reports, William had a complete star map in his mind’s eye, and could
describe the conformation of the stars at any given place in the world
at any given time. He modestly began his letter, “I hardly think I could
give you a good star description now—it is so many years since I
followed that up.” He then proceeded to give an impeccable descrip-
tion of what to look for and when to do it, and illustrated this with
a drawing of several constellations.
He displayed a similar modesty in the second letter, which began,

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“Sorry to hear you are down with the chicken-pox. However, you
need not worry about your letters infecting me—I had it in 1923; and
did Martha [Foley] laugh when I phoned her and told her about it!
As to your Portuguese dishes, I don’t know why you consider me an
expert on anything Portuguese, but I’ll try.” William then proceeded
to give a precise and clear explanation of Portuguese pronunciation,
with a list of examples—obviously, Portuguese was on the tip of his
tongue, just as any language was.
It was in the first letter, the one with the star map, that William
made the only surviving written reference to his mother. After a
longish discussion of the weather in New England (one of his favorite
topics) William wrote, “Had an awful nightmare about Miami a
couple of weeks ago—but maybe that is best left undescribed. You
probably know what is down there that I am so scared of.”
While William admitted his fear to his sister, he usually showed
his anger to his friends. George Gloss remembered: “He expressed over
and over again a hatred for his mother. He said she was ‘horrible.’ He
also spoke very bitterly of the time his parents tried to rehabilitate him
in their sanatorium.” According to Ann Feinzig, “There were occa-
sions when people would say, “Perhaps you should see your mother,’
or ‘Perhaps you should become reconciled.’ And he really got in-
furiated. A good fury, too. He was a gentle person, but certain things
would rouse him, and if you mentioned anything about reconciling
with his mother! He used the word ‘hate.’ ‘I hate my mother and I
don’t want to talk to her! I don’t want to talk about her!’ He would
really become very, very tense and very, very angry if you mentioned
her. I never heard him mention his father.”
What fell to Helena, then, was the terrible task of trying to satisfy
her mother, who wanted not only a reconciliation with William but
to renew her domination over his life. She constantly relayed messages
through Helena: “She’d say, ‘Make him do this and tell him to do that
..., but I couldn’t make him do anything. And Billy would say to
me, ‘She'll never change.’ She was expecting me to be able to iron out
the situation between them, which I couldn’t. All her life she wanted

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 The Prodigy

to make up, but there wasn’t any point in her trying. Billy would never
accept.
“Tt was hard to talk about this with my brother; in fact, we didn’t.
I wanted him to get over this feeling about my mother. I wanted them
to get together, because it was very hard for me to be a buffer between
them. My mother never stopped talking about Billy, hoping I could
have some influence on him—but nobody could have any influence
on him.
“She criticized me all the time, found fault in everything I did.
You could never do anything right with my mother, she was a
perfectionist. I always thought she was still taking it out on me that
my father and my brother and I had left her out, because she didn’t
fit in.”
Besides the problems over William, Sarah remained quite a hand-
ful for Helena. “She always demanded a lot of company, and I wasn’t
enough for her. I was teaching summer school and I couldn’t give her
all my time. I called up some of my ex-students, and asked them to
mother-sit.””
By all accounts, Sarah worsened as she got older, becoming
increasingly demanding, impatient, and abrasive. According to Helena,
her mother was still considered a very beautiful woman; she told her
- daughter she had received many, many proposals after Boris’s death,
but never considered remarriage. There were rumors that she’d had an
affair with Dr. Herbert T. Kalmus, the inventor of Technicolor and
an old family friend and patient, or, implausibly, with Howard
Hughes, whom she met in Miami Beach—but if she did, it did nothing
to soften her personality. When she reached the age of seventy, her
relatives began to notice a slight mental deterioration. She was slowly
developing senile dementia, which took the form of obsession about
certain subjects, and incessant rambling. She stopped reading and stayed
up all night playing solitaire.
Earlier, in 1936 when she was sixty-two, she decided to write a
book about William’s childhood and her views on child rearing. She
wanted a collaborator, and Helena sent one of her brightest students,

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who found Sarah maddeningly obstinate and impossible to work with.

The very idea was pathetic—mother and son were completely es-
tranged, yet she continued to revel in the glory of his childhood, and
to write the same early chapters over and over and over. When the
book reached the point where William left the family, she returned
to the beginning and began again, rather than face the hard fact of her
failure to earn her son’s love and respect.

William introduced most of his best friends to Helena, who in turn

invited several of them to visit Portsmouth. Marcos Spinelli boycotted
any contact with Sarah Sidis out of loyalty to William, but his wife,
Grace, met her once. She said, “I could see why Sidis would have
disliked her. Helena was very gracious, but Sarah was a very, very
aggressive woman. I remember that she was short and chubby and she
still spoke with an accent. A very dominating woman. I remember she
had definite ideas, about food—she had to have cottage cheese. She
spoke with very positive, nonargumentative attitudes. You just
couldn’t argue with her. And this is where I got the feeling that,
although people say it was the father’s idea that you could develop a
child genius, I thought it was hers.”
Ann Feinzig, too, met Sarah once. She recalled, “I was perhaps
twenty-one or twenty-two, very pensive, and I wanted to say things
Bill would have said. And I did say something to Sarah that I probably
shouldn’t have. She replied that people were very unkind about the
way Bill was raised, that he was born exceptional, and that there was
no way he could have had a normal childhood. She was defending
herself and her husband. She told me at length about how Bill taught
himself Greek as a gift to his father. And she talked about how
reporters grabbed him and while one held him down, the other took
his picture.” This diversion from the Boris-and-Sarah party line, that
they made a genius out of an average boy, was most unusual. Sarah
never admitted to anyone else that she thought her son was “born
exceptional,” and perhaps she switched attitudes as a defensive posture,
or revealed to Ann a change of outlook that was not part of her public

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image as a genius-creator. And while she defended herself by citing the

stories of cruel reporters, she didn’t tell Ann how she had regularly
dragged her son to teas and dinner parties against his will, to show him
off to her friends.
Sarah’s complaints about William were so numerous that Helena
found it difficult to describe a single example. “It would be easier to
say what she didn’t complain about,” said Helena. However, one
persistent area of aggravation was money. With a mind like his, why
did her son worry about finances, and whether or not he would keep
his latest clerking position? Even the ever loyal Helena was angered
by her brother’s refusal to accept high-paying work, particularly dur-
ing the Depression.
“For one thing,” said Helena, “I felt that if he would only get
a job that was more what people would expect of him, reporters would
leave him alone. And his colleagues at his office jobs didn’t like him
because he did the work so fast. For some reason, he just wouldn’t
conform and do it slowly. He was offered plenty of jobs. He never
told me about them, but I would find out from other people.
“T got really mad at my brother one time. I was very disgusted
with him. He was offered twelve thousand dollars, which was an awful
lot of money at that time. The Boston Subway System heard all about
what he was doing with the transfers and everything else, and they
wanted him to straighten out some of their problems. He refused, and
I didn’t find out till later—he didn’t dare tell me. And my mother
wanted me to give him some money! She said, “You must give him
something.’ I was very upset and angry. I was living .. . not very well
—in a furnished room. And I wasn’t being offered any million-dollar
jobs. I was willing to go here, there, and everywhere for a job; it was
the Depression and I accepted anything. But he wouldn’t do it. He
wanted to go to Boston, he wanted to be in certain places. Well
... then my mother got mad at me and I got mad at her... . And
the upshot of it was that I gave him some of my own money. I tried
to have him do a little something for me in exchange—he typed some
of my poems. But it made me so mad that he wouldn’t work when

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he could. On the other hand, I didn’t know that he was ill. His blood
pressure was very high, and he never told me.”
There was a similar incident that particularly upset Helena. Bar-
ney Sagall, one of Sarah’s nephews and Elliot Sagall’s father, was a
dentist practicing in Revere, Massachusetts. In 1942, he wanted a
problem solved that involved occlusion of the teeth, which he recog-
nized as a mathematical problem, and not a dental one. Though he had
access to the finest minds at MIT and Harvard, he was convinced that
only William could figure it out. As Barney told it, “I once offered
to subsidize William if he would do some research for me in the
medical dental field. But no go. He wouldn’t. I offered him a wicked
salary. And he wouldn’t do it.”
Helena elaborated: “At that time William was earning very little
money. This problem that my cousin needed solved involved the
striking surfaces of the upper and lower teeth. Barney told me, ‘Only
William can do it, only William. Ioffered him three thousand dollars.
I think he could have done it in half an hour, two hours maximum.
It was worth three thousand to me.’ That’s worth at least forty-five
thousand dollars today, for only a couple hours’ work.
“And I got a little mad at him. After all, he said he needed a job.
I said, ‘It’s only half an hour, Billy, for heaven’s sake, why don’t you?’
He said, ‘No. I don’t want to do it. The numbers would just make me
sick.’ ”
The story is almost paradoxical. He would talk to Helena about
mathematics, or help Bill Rab with his math homework; but he could
not take a job of complex figuring without risking emotional and
physical illness. The amount of money his cousin offered would have
funded all his newsletters, co-ops, groups, and meetings—but it wasn’t
worth the mental suffering he would have had to endure.
There is no doubt that he was perfectly capable of the calculations
involved. The New York Sunday News printed the following story
when William died, and it proves that his mathematical mind was no
less sharp as an adult than it had been as a boy of eleven:

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 The Prodigy

Once a friend of his laid a copy of Einstein’s final formula for

relativity on the table near Sidis while they were dining in a chop
suey house.
When he saw the Einstein formula he drew back slightly
without a word as if he were puzzled. He was reading the figures
upside down from three or four feet away. Then out of a clear
sky he said without emphasis:
“That’s a seven.”
What he meant was that the friend had copied one little
figure wrong in Einstein’s formula. He had set down a quantity
to the sixth power when it should have been to the seventh
power. The power was indicated by a small number written
above and to the right of a letter on the lengthy equation.
But if the friend thought Sidis would enlighten him on the
theory of relativity he was mistaken. Sidis’s mind had long since
refused to contemplate anything deeper than the problem of who
stabbed the Count in the latest detective novels to which his last
years were devoted.

The reporter for the Sunday News understood little of Sidis’s

motive for stopping—it was not, of course, inability, but aversion of
a painful, neurotic origin.

Naturally, what conversation William did have about mathematics

with his sister or the young Rabs was limited by their knowledge. The
only person for whom Sidis made an exception, discussing high-level
math almost freely, was Nathan Sharfman, a friend he made during the
1930s through the Rabs. Perhaps this was because Sharfman and Sidis
had something very uncommon in common. Like Sidis, Sharfman was
an exceptional intellect who rejected academia and worked as 2 cab
driver in Boston. He was a protégé of the famed philosopher Alfred
North Whitehead, who taught at Harvard between 1924 and 1936.
Whitehead guided his student’s brilliant career at Harvard, where
Sharfman had a teaching fellowship and was studying for his doctorate;

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 “America’s Greatest Brain”

Whitehead proclaimed him to be the hope of American philosophy.

Sharfman married a beautiful young girl and had a child, and it seemed
he had a magnificent life and career ahead. However, he took to drink,
lost the wife, and made an outrageous drunken scene at a dinner party
at the Whiteheads’ home, throwing his steak on the floor and insulting
everybody. One of his best friends, British writer Dr. Paul Saunders,
reminisced: “He broke all contact with Harvard. They gave him up,
and he ended up driving a taxi. I can see him now, in front of the
Copley Plaza Hotel, sitting there in his cab, slumped over the wheel
with his hideous little black pipe in his mouth, and I thought, “Oh,
my god! That’s the chap that Whitehead thought was the hope of
American philosophy!’ When he met Sidis he was breaking up with
his wife, and with Whitehead.
“I remember the first time Sharfman brought Sidis round. I went
to the door, and he pushed Sidis in ahead of him, saying, “This guy’s
the best goddamn brain in the United States.’ That was his introduc-
tion. Sidis sort of leaned back and said, “Oh, don’t be silly, Nat,’ or
something like that, something very lame. And Sharfman gave him
another push, and he came into the room and sat down. For some
reason I thought, It’s not going to do any good to flatter this chap,
or make a normal reply to the most brilliant brain in the United States!
So I said, ‘Sit down, will you have a cup of tea?’ He thoroughly
enjoyed a cup of black tea. When I offered him wine, he turned it
down rather contemptuously.
“Then we had a general conversation. Something made me hesi-
tate to plumb the depths of this brilliant mind, as it were. Inevitably,
we got to talking about Boston. I lived in the west end; like all
bohemians in those days, in the slums. But it was a nice apartment, and
I had a very large library, three or four thousand books. These inter-
ested Sidis, of course, and he rather hesitantly asked me what most of
them were. I said, ‘I’m in English Lit., but I’m stuck at a horrible war
job now.’ So we got to talking. He was very cautious, putting in a
word now and then, when all of a sudden—this is the first meeting
—he began to expatiate on the significance of Boston, as far as Indian

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 The Prodigy

origins in the United States went, about what he’d assumed from
geological phenomena, and the area that had been cleared in Back Bay,
and what was discovered when layers of clay were removed, and so
on. I don’t know where he got this information. He must have talked
for well over an hour, without interruption. Then Sharfman said rather
brusquely, “Well, what proof have you got?’ and Sidis shut up like a
clam. He said, ‘I’m just a simple person. I don’t make any claims. These
are just my surmises. I hope you won’t take this too seriously.’ From
there he went on and spoke about girls—not erotically, but as though
he was trying to change the subject.
“Sidis and Sharfman were very fond of each other, but Sharf-
man’s relationship with Sidis was quite unusual. He spoke to Sidis in
a brusque manner that I felt would normally offend him. Sometimes
Sharfman would rib Sidis. He’d say, “Alright, how’s the genius work-
ing today?’ and things like that. It would upset Sidis terribly. Or
Sharfman would start on some paean about Sidis, and Sidis would say
‘No, no, no, no—that is not so!’ Sidis didn’t want to be treated as an
exhibit; he resented being called ‘America’s greatest brain.’ He’d reply
with words to the effect of ‘I’m not a prize guinea pig, you know.’
Actually, it’s amazing that he tolerated Sharfman, he seemed to have
a certain awe of him, as a lot of people did.”
In no other relationship did he tolerate that kind of teasing.
Apparently, William was willing to put up with a lot for some actual
intellectual camaraderie. Paul Saunders was witness to some high-
spirited conversations between the two ex-Harvard men. As he ex-
plained, “Sharfman was a brilliant man, and when he was not in liquor
he was a reasonable debater. Once he tried to bring up the matter of
the high points of music, and Sidis wasn’t receptive. But they discussed
mathematical phenomena and philosophy a great deal. They argued
about it a lot but the trouble was, it was a noncombat. Sidis would
always back down and let Sharfman have the floor. It wasn’t a back-
down in ideas, ever—it was a backdown in the sense of “Well, I’m not
going to argue about it.’ Sidis was a little bit autocratic in his reaction.
When he was speaking he’d gesticulate a bit, he liked to perform a

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point. But you never knew when he was going to shrivel up. He
repeatedly said, “Well, I wouldn’t know—I don’t claim to be an
authority on things like that.’ Of course, he did claim to be an
authority. He would expatiate for endless periods about something
when he got under way, and you could tell he thought he was pretty
good. But if you said, “Well, of course, Bill, you know much more
about this than I do—’ he’d say, “Oh, not necessarily, not necessarily!’
He thought he was being modest, but in many respects he floored you
with his erudition, even when he was trying to curb it. The Indian
prehistory is what most impressed me, and everybody; along with his
profound geographical knowledge and his mastery of tongues. You
wondered where he found this information. I didn’t know right away
he’d been a prodigy. When I asked Sharfman about it, he just said, ‘Oh,
you don’t know that fellow. I’m telling you, Paul—that is the greatest
brain in the United States. oe.

William never went alone to visit Saunders, he always accom-

panied Sharfman. On a few occasions Sharfman, who was having an
affair with a married woman, used Saunders’s bedroom, leaving Sidis
and Saunders in the library. “Sidis never commented, never said a word
about what they were doing in there,” said Saunders. “And I found
it a bit uncomfortable without Sharfman. Sidis was a bit awkward, and
he’d relapse into silence, sipping his tea. I can see him now—he used
to sit with one arm over the back of the settee, sipping his cup of black
tea. He would get up occasionally and go over to the bookcase and
take a book out, and ask me about it. Then he would take out another.
I’m one of the few people who has a complete twenty-volume Golden
Bough. He’d take a book like that, and he’d know where to turn to.
He’d turn some pages and say, ‘Did you ever hear of this phenomena?’
And for a moment he’d be the pedant. Then he’d relapse into his
modesty again. I think he thought of my place in a vague way as a
haven of refuge, since all the walls were surrounded by books.”
Many of the friends who visited Paul Saunders were leftists. As
he put it, “Everybody was Marxist then, but I never thought of Sidis
as a Marxist. I never was one, but my Marxist friends used to come

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and have all-night sessions in my place, right under a big picture of

George the Fifth! I knew Sidis was a pacifist. But of course Sharfman,
who was Jewish, was absolutely for the war, and they argued about
it. [Sidis, of course, was also Jewish.] Sidis’s attitude was, ‘It need never
have happened. . . . If there hadn’t been such decay in society, the war
wouldn’t have arisen.’ In other words, he didn’t argue that we should
try and stop it, he went back further than that—Hitler shouldn’t have
existed. A lot of pacifists then were secretly pro-German—I never got
that impression from Sidis, I just thought he was a very, very pacifist
sort of person. I don’t mean he thought Nazis shouldn’t be stopped,
but he thought there were complications and ramifications that took
place years and years before that made this terrible war possible. He
was concerned with what had happened before.”
William’s historical perspective toward the war upset a number
of his friends. Helena was also upset, since she believed in all-out war
against the Nazis. They had their only real falling-out over this issue.
Still, Helena was convinced that her brother’s sympathies lay with the
Allies. She explained, “Although Billy always claimed to be ‘neutral,’
he was like the Quakers during the Revolutionary War—one knew
where his sympathies lay. He favored England, and after the fall of
France he sent me this joke:
“Two Germans met in Paris. Said Karl to Fritz: “Have you a good
job here?
“Yes, I have a fine job. I sit on the Eiffel Tower and wait for
the English to wave the white flag,’ said Fritz.
“ “Good pay?’ asked Karl.
Not much,’ Fritz answered, “but it’s for life.
coe 999

According to William’s theory of geographical /political conti-

nuity, a people tended to repeat its political history over and over
again. For example, the Russians replaced their Tsar with brutal Com-
munist dictators; Americans continually strove for the proud democ-
racy that was their first form of government; and the Nazis were
another manifestation of the evil Kaiser’s reign.

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 “America’s Greatest Brain”

Back in 1936, on the November 4 that saw Roosevelt reelected

to a second term, William had written to Julius Eichel, “You seem to
be wondering about what the remedy is for the troubles across the sea.
I am afraid that, first, I have no remedies ready at hand for anything,
though I think I have a vague idea as to how to strike out in the case
of America; second, there probably is no remedy ‘over there’ and the
best thing we here can do is simply write off the so-called European
civilization as a total loss and proceed to take care of our own troubles.
And it won’t be through governmental channels, so that yesterday’s
returns, for example, is a highly irrelevant matter, and the political
campaign is simply a circus we like to have every so often. (As a circus,
it wasn’t so bad.)”
If being a conscientious objector during World War I had been
radical and dangerous, it was considered even more un-American
during World War II. William had been classified 1-A for a time, and
was eventually reclassified 4-F, though it is not known why. Perhaps
it was his high blood pressure and/or weight. Thus, while he was free
from the onus and risk of being a draft dodger, he was a part of the
very small American minority to oppose United States involvement
in the Second World War.
William’s political activities had already attracted the attention
of the FBI. In 1940, one of the bureau’s agents—who remains anony-
mous under the Freedom of Information Act—wrote two letters to
Bureau Chief J. Edgar Hoover describing his meetings with “Peri-
dromophilists,” whom he believed to be dangerous radicals. He wrote,
“There is a new group .. . the ‘Boston Metropolitan Transfer Group’
and the leader of that outfit has been arrested for several various
picketing and communistic disorderly conduct charges. His name, or
one of them, is ‘William Sidis’ but he has others also. He is not
associated with the Peridromophilists which I know, though he is
trying to win them over.” In his second letter, three months later, the
informer had discovered William’s alias of Parker Greene. “I checked
the article in The New Yorker,” he wrote, “and he is therein written

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 The Prodigy

up as a most ‘promising’ ‘Red.’ ” Though William’s wartime antidraft

activities were far more radical than his transfer-collecting activities,
the FBI made no further inquiries.

Despite the enormous amount of time and attention William gave to

his pacifist activities, they were still being juggled along with a multi-
tude of projects, not the least of which was the lawsuit against The New
Yorker. In 1939, William wrote a letter to Eichel grumbling that his
case was withering for lack of proper attention from his lawyers, and
inquiring whether Eichel could help him find new counsel.
The case took several disappointing turns. William wanted a jury
trial, but was unable to secure one. In 1943 his lawyers made an
unsuccessful effort to keep the “right of privacy” issue alive by point-
ing out that Sidis was an infant when his life in the public eye began,
and consequently could not have waived his right of privacy; nor had
he, as an infant, ever sought publicity. When this tactic failed, William
had no recourse but to press his suit for libel alone.
Once again William changed attorneys, employing Hobart S.
Bird, who had served him in the past by assisting with his applications
for the perpetual-calendar patent. On the defendants’ side Harriet F.
Pilpel, a member of the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst, took over
the day-to-day work on the case, for Morris Ernst.
Bird and Pilpel threw themselves into a hearty and time-consum-
ing exchange of insulting red tape, and matters heated up once again.
Pilpel observed that more than five years had elapsed since Sidis
served his original complaint, during which time the case had “had a
complicated and busy history.” Why, she asked, had Sidis waited so
long to press the issue of falsity in The New Yorker article? Further-
more, she objected that he had done so “in the broadest possible terms,
despite the fact that obviously a great many of the hundreds of state-
ments about him must be true.” Bird answered irately, “Must be true!
Indeed! Unless publication in The New Yorker makes it ipso facto true,
there is no warrant whatever for assuming that there is any single
statement in the article that is obviously true.” Much debate followed

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 “America’s Greatest Brain”

over whose job it was to detail the libelous portions of the article, the
responsibility falling finally to the prosecution.
Sidis, said Bird, was the victim of The New Yorker, which injured
him “without justifiable motives or good ends and with a reckless and
careless disregard of the plaintiff’s reputation and feelings.” In short,
he stated, the magazine had libeled him by causing the readers of The
New Yorker to believe the following statements to be true of the
plaintiff:

. Was a reprehensible character;

. Disloyal to his country;
. A supporter of enemies of his country;
. An insulter of the American flag;
. A criminal;
. A fugitive from justice;
A loathsome and filthy person in his personal habits;
. Of having suffered a mental breakdown;
OS. Of being afflicted with phobias;
NAN
ANND
BON

—© . Of being a neurotic person and having a deranged mind and

having received treatment as such;
re— .
s4 As one pretending extraordinary intellectual attainments and
being a genius, yet in fact a fool, incapable of making a
decent living and living in misery and poverty.

The New Yorker published its article with “evil design and wan-
ton cruelty,” wrote Bird hotly, leaving Sidis “greatly mortified and
humiliated” and having “suffered greatly in his peace of mind and sense
of dignity.” To what extent these briefs were written by Bird, and to
what extent by William, will never be known. William probably did
prepare much of the material, since he was so deeply dedicated to the
case. When the Boston Transcript went out of business, he obtained the
morgue file on himself through an employee and gave it to his attor-
ney, to dispute The New Yorker’s defense that they had obtained their
information from accurate newspaper articles. When the case ended,

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 The Prodigy

William insisted upon having the morgue material returned to him,

and he destroyed the entire file.
On March 24, 1944, the case was put on the calendar for trial.
On April 3 and 4 of 1944, William was called to the office of Morris
Ernst, who represented The New Yorker, and was asked to give his
depositions.
Ernst was one of the most respected attorneys in America; he had
become famous a decade earlier by defeating the U.S. Customs Office’s
ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses. Now Ernst personally undertook the
confrontation with William Sidis.
To the astonishment of his friends, William purchased a new suit
for the occasion. These depositions are not among the records of the
case in the Federal Court files, but were found among the papers of
William’s lawyer, Hobart S. Bird, by his daughter Caroline Bird
Menuez. Mrs. Menuez made some efforts to publish a sensational
article about William after his death, and used the vividly colorful
depositions as the meat of her essay. Because it is the only source extant
for these transcripts, it is not certain that her reconstruction of the
conversation between Ernst and Sidis is 100 percent accurate. Nonethe-
less, William’s statements have a ring of truth about them, and one can
easily imagine him taking part in the following extraordinary ex-
change.
Mrs. Menuez wrote that William went to the meeting with the
intention of proving that he was just “an ordinary person” and not a
genius; nor had he ever been one. He denied all allegations of extraor-
dinary achievement, and pointed out that he had graduated from
Harvard cum laude, not magna cum laude.
According to Menuez, Ernst and the rest of the examiners had
“a pack of papers and photostats of his record a foot high on the table,
and they began questioning him about the facts contained therein.”
They first asked him if he spoke any foreign languages, to which he
replied no. Aware that he currently held a job as a translator, the
lawyers asked William what his present employment was. He replied,
“Translating.”

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 “America’s Greatest Brain”

“What languages?” they inquired. “French?”

yes
“German?”
ress
“Spanish?”
“Yes/
“Russian?”
Ves
“Ttalian?”
DYves
“Portuguese?”
nY es.
“What do you mean by saying that you don’t speak any foreign
languages?”
“I don’t speak them, I read some of them.”
“Didn’t you write a book when you were a child, entitled The
Animate and the Inanimate ?”
“T don’t remember.”
Ernst turned to a page of the book, pointed, and said, “Isn’t that
a mathematical formula?”
“T don’t know what a mathematical formula is.”
“Did you write that?”
“Tf I did, I didn’t know what I was talking about.”
“Does a mathematical formula make you sick as alleged in the
article?”
“No.”
“Well, what is the fourth dimension, anyway?”
“All I know about it is what I’ve read in the newspapers. The
newspapers at one time said it was spiritualism, then later they said it
was mathematics. I don’t know anything about it. People who do say
it’s not an abstruse subject.”
“Did you ever attend Tufts College?”
“Nox
In answering a question, William made a slight grammatical

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 The Prodigy

error, and Ernst asked, “Do you want to correct your grammar, Mr.
Sidis?”
“No,” William replied, “I prefer to speak American.”
Turning to the topic of his early childhood, Ernst asked him how
long he stayed in the Brookline elementary school.
“About three months.”
“Why did you leave?”
“T was kicked out.”
“Why?”
“I was never able to find out.”
“Did you have any trouble with the teachers or students?”
Halon
“Did they say you were incorrigible?”
“No.”
“What studies did you take?”
“Just the ordinary things they take in school.”
“Then did you go into the Brookline High School there?”
BY ccm
“How long did you stay there?”
“Well, perhaps a year.”
“Why did you leave?”
“T was kicked out.”
“What for?”
“T was never able to find out.”
“Did you ever translate the Iliad from Greek into English?”
“No.”
“Did you ever read the Iliad?”
“T may have looked at it.”
“In what language did you read it?”
“T don’t remember.”
William was then handed a two-page typewritten account of
some episodes from his childhood and asked to read it carefully. He
took a quick glance at it, and returned it to the interrogator.
“Have you read it?” he was asked.

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 “America’s Greatest Brain”

“T have looked at it.”

The interrogator began to read from the paper, when William
interrupted, “Hold on, it doesn’t say that”—the interrogator had made
a slight error. The questions continued.
“Did you ever study mathematics?”
“T never studied anything.” William replied truthfully.
Ernst was discouraged by the depositions. Clearly, William was
willing to fight tooth and nail to prove that he was ordinary, and
would do so in front of a jury. Such a battle, fought by so great a
genius, would be bitter. The New Yorker had no desire to allow the
libel portion of the suit to go to trial. Rather than proceed, they
offered William a settlement out of court.
William accepted. Consequently, wrote Menuez, the deposition
was never filed. There is no record of the sum; friends believe it was
between five and six hundred dollars. James Thurber wrote: “The libel
charge, at first held in abeyance, was decided as late as 1944, in favor
of Sidis. The judgment was small, for the libel, whatever it was, had
been a minor slip and not intentional denigration.”
The New Yorker considered that it had won, naturally regarding
this tiny payment for libel as negligible. But William was jubilant. He
had fought on and on, and caring little for money, had won at last
on a matter of principle. For William had been libeled from birth—
he had been libeled for forty-six years. From the age of fifteen, he had
run from the sensation-mongering press; and, finally making his stand,
he had won. A meaningless victory to the rest of the world, but a great
triumph for William James Sidis.

Margaret McGill saw William for the last time a few days later. He
arrived to teach his history class wearing his new suit, to the delight
of his friends. William, who had never spoken a word to them about
his past or his life, told the group all about the article and the lawsuit,
explaining point by point the manner in which he had been libeled.
William did not regard the issues of libel and invasion of privacy
as separate. He wrote to Eichel on April 10, “I got a settlement from

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 The Prodigy

The New Yorker of the seven-year lawsuit I had pending against them.
I feel that it was at last some sort of victory in my long fight against
the principle of personal publicity.”
According to Caroline Menuez, when William went to New
York to receive his settlement, Morris Ernst invited Sidis and Bird into
his office for a few words.
Said Ernst, “If you should come to New York at any time, come
in to see me. And if you ever need any money, come to me, and I'll
give it to you without any obligation. I’m a rich son of a bitch, and
I'd just like to give my money to a fellow like you.”
William’s exact reply to this distasteful speech is unrecorded, but
it must have been negative, for it prompted Ernst to say, “I'll give you
one thousand dollars right now for any article you write of any length
on any subject. You will not have to use your own name. I will not
disclose the fact that you are the author.” William refused.
“But why?” pressed Ernst.
“Because I wouldn’t trust you,” replied Sidis.
When William left, Ernst grumbled to Hobart Bird, “He’s a sick
boy.
”?

[ 270]
 B,the standards of Morris Ernst
and those of most of the people the world deems successful, William
James Sidis, the most intelligent human being alive and a twenty-
dollar-a-week comptometer operator, was “‘a very sick boy.” Certainly
he was a very eccentric, and in many ways a neurotic, man. But at the
core of his mind he was remarkably healthy and strong. “There is no
question about it,” said Bill Rab. “It’s a wonder he could bear up all
those years, under the forces of exile . . . his self-imposed exile.”
In a literal sense, however, one that neither Ernst nor anyone in
William’s life was aware of, he was a very sick man. By 1944, Wil-
liam’s debilitating blood pressure had been worsening steadily for at
least a decade. The outward manifestations were few. He had become

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 The Prodigy

exceedingly overweight, yet Helena described her brother as “pink and

laughing.” He had occasional difficulty breathing, especially when
climbing stairs.
According to Julius Eichel, William’s room in a Shailer Street
rooming house was “an attic which was very cold in winter.” Conse-
quently he caught a cold in the winter of 1943 and never quite shook
it off. Since William had won a settlement of at least five hundred
dollars in April 1944, it is strange that he did not leave the rooming
house for more healthful lodgings. On the other hand, it may have
been a matter of pride. Though reporters had hounded him since he
began suing The New Yorker, he no longer cared to run from them
by changing residences. Or it may simply have been a matter of
indifference, since he was so little concerned with bodily comfort.
The five hundred dollars was a substantial enough sum in 1944
to have freed him from the necessity of working, at least for a time.
Exactly one year before the settlement—in April 1943—he had writ-
ten to Eichel, “My economic situation is probably in the worst spot
- it has ever been. It is beginning to look as though I will not be able
to keep myself alive for much longer—barring some miracle, which
I hardly expect.” Since then, he had had several jobs. Even after
winning the five hundred dollars he continued to work—his last
position was at an actuarial research company, operating a comptome-
ter. When the job was finished, he promptly sought another. In July
1944, he was hired for a job with a small chain of low-priced depart-
ment stores, and was to begin Monday, July 17.
Early in July, he ran into Shirley Smith on the street and she asked
him how he was. He answered in some detail, explaining that he felt
a bit unwell; Shirley teased him, saying, “You know, William, when
people ask you how you are, they don’t want to hear the details.” He
taught his regular history group a few days later. On July 13, just after
he had finished his dinner, one of the boarders in the rooming house
heard a thud in the hallway. Rushing upstairs, the landlady and her
son found William unconscious. Unable to revive him, they called the

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 A Superior Spirit

police, who rushed William to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in an

ambulance.
William had suffered a stroke, the result of high blood pressure;
it was a cerebral hemorrhage, the same type of stroke that had ended
Boris Sidis’s life. That night, the Boston Traveler carried a front-page
story: “One-Time Child Prodigy Found Destitute Here.” They re-
ported that William was in a coma, and the hospital described him as
“fairly comfortable.” Because the hospital was short of rooms, Wil-
liam’s bed was placed in a curtained-off section of hallway.
William’s landlady did not know any of his friends or relatives
and had no idea whom to contact. Searching William’s effects, the
police discovered that he had an aunt in Boston, whom they eventually
notified. All his friends and his closest family members had the horrible
experience of finding out what had happened by reading about it in
the papers. Helena, recently returned from the hospital after a serious
operation, was living in a subleased apartment in the Bronx, and Sarah
had come up from Miami to-be with her. The apartment had no
telephone and they didn’t take any newspapers, so they did not learn
about William’s condition until a friend of the family brought them
a newspaper the next day.
Sarah and Helena rushed up to Boston. Meanwhile, a number of
people had already converged on the hospital. Ann Feinzig visited
William, and Rose Hirshfield, a friend and coworker, stayed at his
bedside.
H. Addington Bruce, who had known William since birth, also
saw the story. Bruce had written a great many articles about prodigies,
and in the early forties mentioned William in one of them. William
had been furious and had told him off harshly. Bruce hadn’t held the
incident against William, whom he regarded as practically his own son.
Bruce rushed to the hospital, for some reason certain that despite the
reports, William was not in a coma. At the bedside, he took William’s
hand and said, “Billy, this is Mr. Bruce. If you understand me, if you
know me, squeeze my hand three times.” William squeezed twice, and

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 The Prodigy

then his hand fell away, as if he hadn’t the strength to press a third
time. Bruce told the hospital staff to send him the bills, if they could
not locate any relatives.
According to Helena, William was not actually in a coma; rather,
the stroke robbed him of his power of speech, and the newspapers
reported it incorrectly. Because he was not unconscious, Sarah was
afraid to enter his room. She told Helena, “He may see me and have
another attack.” Said Helena, “It was so sad. We were very anxious
to avoid any sort of excitement, so she stood outside his door. But she
was afraid to go in the room, because she was afraid he was going to
get excited. She still wanted to right the wrong, but she just couldn't.”
While Sarah sat her lonely vigil in the hallway, Helena and Rose
sat at William’s bedside. By now, several newspapers had circulated the
story. Between reporters and friends, the hospital was deluged with
phone calls. Said Shirley Smith, “I always felt very sorry that I did
not go to see him in the hospital. The news came out in the evening
paper, and I thought, “Oh, I ought to go!’ And there was a tremendous
thunderstorm, so I thought, ‘ll go tomorrow.’ And there was no
tomorrow.”
William died on July 17, 1944, of a cerebral hemorrhage leading
to pneumonia. Anxious to avoid the presence of the gaping press, Sarah
hastily arranged the funeral, which was held at Portsmouth the follow-
ing day. She allowed only a handful of friends and relatives to attend.
William was buried next to his father at Harmony Grove cemetery
in Portsmouth.
Sarah and Helena, joined by a few relatives, went to the Shailer
Street apartment to clean up William’s effects. Helena found a letter
addressed to her, full of the latest batch of jokes and clippings from
the Boston Globe. There were few possessions, but there were stacks and
stacks of research materials and unpublished manuscripts and articles.
There were piles of transit guides covering forty major cities, and
several thousand transfers, the first one dating from 1903, when Wil-
liam was five years old. They found the patent for the perpetual

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 A Superior Spirit

calendar, a small book of transfer photographs, sheaves of correspon-

dence, an assortment of maps drawn by William, the Gregg Shorthand
Dictionary, a Russian/English dictionary, the Pickwick Papers and a
play by Moliére (both in Russian), a Guide to American Esperanto, a
copy of the U.S. Constitution—and, curiously, William James Sidis’s
Harvard degree, which he had saved for thirty years.
William did not leave a will. At only forty-six years of age, he
probably had little inkling that he would need one. However, he did
wish Helena to be executrix of his estate, such as it was. She discovered
that her brother’s bankbook contained $652.81. The day of his death
he was to have begun a menial job at a department store—yet the entire
sum of his settlement from The New Yorker had been left untouched.
Perhaps the money was tucked away for a rainy day. Or, more likely,
William enjoyed knowing it was there, whole, the symbol of his fight
and his victory.
After expenses—$211 to the funeral director, $50 to the monu-
ment company, $12 in unpaid rent, $67 in hospital bills, and $112 in
legal fees—Helena was left with $200. Sarah had paid the funeral and
hospital bills; but, wealthy as she was, she demanded to be repaid out
of her son’s account, rather than allow Helena to keep the extra $200.
This distasteful action was only the first of several that Sarah
would perpetrate. Many, many times during her son’s life she had been
accused of exploiting him in his childhood. She made an even greater
effort to exploit him in death. However, it was several years before
Sarah’s efforts got fully under way. The press had its day immediately.
William’s obituaries were an orgy of reveling in his supposed
failed life. Most of them contained a high proportion of factual errors,
and all harped on the following point, as it appeared on the front page
of The New York Times: “Acquaintances often said he never enjoyed
childhood and had no conception of play or pleasure.” Every obituary
stated that his only published writing was Notes on the Collection of
Transfers —not a single one referred to The Animate and the Inanimate.
The New Yorker piece was the primary reference source for the obit-

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 The Prodigy

uaries and editorials that appeared in newspapers and magazines nation-

wide; consequently, the story of William’s childhood nervous break-
down was repeated in every article. Writers theorized ineptly about
the cause of William’s decay. A New York Times editorialist wrote,
“Perhaps his brain was tired and his interest dulled by long excessive
stress on his intellectuals [sic].”
Psychiatrists were quoted. The Boston Traveler interviewed Pro-
fessor Wayland F. Vaughan of the Boston University psychology
department, who supposed that William’s spectacular decline occurred
because “he never had time to whittle a willow or dam up the gutter
with painstakingly collected stones and twigs. He was always busy
with books. . . . He was obviously a child who never had any fun.”
Parents who had a prodigy on their hands, advised Professor Vaughan,
should seek the testing guidance given by Yale’s Professor Gesell, who
had developed a system for monitoring the progress of gifted children,
in order to “guide parents and teachers in controlling the safe rate of
progress for any young genius.” Concluded the Boston Traveler, “How
to treat a genius need worry only about 1% of the nation’s parents
because 90% of the population never will give evidence of sufficient
brilliance to inspire anyone to push them ahead.” The attitude of
virtually every article can best be summed up by these words that
concluded an editorial: “So I guess it doesn’t pay to be too smart,
either.”
Both Time and Newsweek devoted several pages each to Wil-
liam’s obituary, and both overflowed with factual errors. Time’s article
was titled “Prodigious Failure” and Newsweek’s was “Burned-Out
Prodigy.” Both contained every myth and bromide imaginable that
pertained to William. Newsweek featured quotes that made William
sound especially cretinous; for example, “A year ago Sidis went to
work for the Financial Publishing Co. of Boston for $22 a week. ‘Gee,’
he exclaimed, ‘that’s big money for me.’” According to Newsweek,
“The record of Sidis’s later doings is sketchy. His single published
work, Notes on the Collection of Transfers, appeared in 1926. Acquain-
tances report that he discoursed occasionally on American Indian dia-

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 A Superior Spirit

lects. Later in life he went to the movies and liked to hang around and
talk.”
William’s friends fought back. Shirley Smith wrote a letter to the
editor of the Boston Traveler:

His numerous friends do not like the false newspaper picture of

him as a pauper and anti-social recluse. . . . Bill Sidis paid his way;
he was not a burden on society.
Sidis had plenty of loyal friends. All of them found his ideas
stimulating and his personality likable. Very few people knew as
much about the Indian background of our social customs as he.
His manuscript study of it is worthy textbook material and very
readable. He knew dozens of stories from Boston’s history and
told them with relish. He recently submitted a plan for post-war
Boston.
But William Sidis had one great cause—the right of an
individual in this country to follow his chosen way of life. . . .
Whenever Sidis saw interference, by individuals or governments,
with anyone’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he
fought it any way he could. He won a legal fight against a
nationally known publication on the ground that it had invaded
his privacy.
Bill Sidis was a quiet man who enjoyed the normal things
of life. His friends respected him and enjoyed his company. I am
glad to have been one of his friends.

William Aronoff, an attorney who had represented William,

wrote a particularly interesting letter, which he sent to several publica-
tions. Its curiosity lay in the fact that it contained a number of
well-intentioned but utterly false statements about William’s life
(along with many accurate ones), which William had evidently con-
vinced Aronoff were true. Some of them were very farfetched indeed,
and William must have made them at the height of his struggle for
anonymity. A portion of the letter read:

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 The Prodigy

He was not a mathematical genius, nor any other type of genius

or “prodigy” in spite of so many allegations to the contrary. He
never lectured to any group of professors on the 4th dimension
and never knew of any theory as the 4th dimension. . . . He
always wanted to be a lawyer, contrary to the wishes of his
parents; and in fact spent two years at Harvard Law School,
during all of which time they wanted him to study medicine. His
later desire to work as an office clerk rather than at any other
vocation was based upon his physical inability to do any manual
labor, and general inability to get and maintain any more lucra-
tive position because of the “prodigy” publicity that hounded
him for so many years.
Mr. Sidis was in my office about twenty-four hours before
he was taken suddenly ill. . . . He was just as sincere, respectful,
courteous and normal at that time as he had always been. He
never engaged in any riot or incited others to riot... . It is to
the shame of certain publications, which continuously published
the fact that he had been sentenced, but ignorantly or conven-
iently neglected to mention the subsequent nol pros.
[He was] an individual who lived a decent life in a decent
manner, in spite of all the handicaps that were put in his way
from the time of his early childhood.

When he heard about William’s death, Creighton Hill wrote to

Margaret McGill: “There are real tears very close to my eyes as I write
this note. . . . Bill was a gentleman and something very gracious and
kind and lovely was in him. And now, we shall never see those
marvelous mannerisms and g gestures again...
g . I’m sure Bill doesn’t like
the way the government is run, wherever he may be right now. In
whatever Valhalla of superior spirits he is abiding, he is unquestionably
in the opposition.”

Articles about William have continued to pop up in books and maga-

zines to this day. By 1959, the facts of his life had become so distorted

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 A Superior Spirit

that in the book Stranger Than Science one could read about the
four-year-old prodigy composing French treatises “under orders from
his father,” and concluding the Harvard Math Club lecture and turning
from the lectern “giggling hysterically and uncontrollably.” One
could also learn that “he was permitted no playmates. His world was
a prefabricated playhouse of the abstruse. Month by month his incred-
ible development continued, to the amazement of his father’s col-
leagues and to the bewilderment of his helpless mother.” The article
concluded, “To the bitter end, genius William Sidis refused to touch
the money of the parent who had ruined his mind.”
As a result of such articles, modern psychologists now refer to
the Sidis fallacy—that pushing gifted youngsters may have adverse
consequences. Sadly, the Sidis fallacy has given a bad name to the idea
of tending to the special needs of bright children.

Sarah Sidis lived fifteen more years, dying on July 9, 1959, at the age
of eighty-four. She was buried at Portsmouth beside her husband and
son. Her obituary was minor national news; The New York Times
referred to her as “a noted psychiatrist,” though she had never practiced
medicine or psychiatry on a single patient.
During the fifteen years that followed William’s death, Sarah
never gave up the ghost. In various editions she wrote and rewrote
three books: her autobiography, The Sidis Story; and two books about
raising children, Formula for Genius and How to Make Your Child a
Genius. None of them was finished or published in any form. She
persistently rewrote the first chapters of her life story, the ones that
told the tale of her youth in Russia, her marriage to Boris, and the
story of William’s singular childhood. Among her effects was found
the projected table of contents for the book, which was to consist of
fifteen chapters. She never got past the first few pages of chapter 10,
“Billy Rebels,” preferring instead to repeatedly pen glowing accounts
of her son’s successes, dwelling on his infancy, his years in the limelight,
and his startling accomplishments. Sarah’s ability to avoid the bitterness
of the truth is amazing. Had she completed the proposed chapter 12,

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 The Prodigy

“Billy’s Later Years,” what would it have contained? How could she
have explained for public consumption the gargantuan rift between
herself and her precious wunderkind?
In the late 1940s, Sarah’s personal secretary, Paula Bloom, wrote
in her diary, “Dr. Sidis lives for nothing except the book. . . . She has
no idea about her poor memory and everyone treats her with the
greatest of respect... . Nephew Ben talked with Sarah about the book
almost the entire day and she really kept him from his own work,
interrupting him every few minutes with new ideas.”
In fact, Sarah had a second obsession—the founding of a “Boris
Sidis Institute,” an educational institution that would teach children
the “Sidis method” (nebulous as it was) and would instruct teachers
in this method. Sarah wanted to found the institute at the University
of Miami. She appealed to various wealthy friends and acquaintances
—such as Herbert Kalmus and Howard Hughes—for donations, but
she did not succeed in raising a substantial sum of money.
In 1949, Sarah received an audience with Eleanor Roosevelt,
which she used to promote her plan for the institute. Mrs. Roosevelt
wrote about their conversation in her syndicated column “My Day,”
but still nothing materialized in the way of funding. In 1952, Sarah’s
ideas were the subject of a lengthy article, “You Can Make Your Child
a Genius,” which was nationally syndicated. Quoted in the article,
Sarah bragged about William’s youthful accomplishments, yet said
little about his adult life. She offered parents a list of eight pieces of
advice about raising geniuses:

1. Avoid punishment in all ways possible—it is the first cause

of fear.
2. Try not to say “Don’t.” Instead, explain why what you say
is SO.
3. Awaken curiosity—it is the key to learning.
4. Never fail to answer and never put off your child’s questions.
5. Never force your child to learn nor judge his ability to learn
by adult standards.

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 A Superior Spirit

6. Implant ideas at bedtime, just before sleep. Suggestions made

then will make a solid impression.
7. Never lie to your child or use evasions.
8. Refrain from showing him off.

“What happened to Billy can happen to your Johnny too,” said

Sarah.
When Norbert Wiener read the article, he was horrified. He
wrote angrily in his autobiography:

As a piece of reporting, it is an ordinary journalistic hack job,

neither better nor worse than a thousand others that appear in the
Sunday supplements and the slicks. As a human document, it
scarcely merits consideration.
Sidis’s failure was in large measure the failure of his par-
ents. . . So you can make your child a genius, can you? Yes,
as you can make a blank canvas into a painting by Leonardo or
a ream of clean paper into a play by Shakespeare. My father could
give me only what my father had: his sincerity, his brilliance, his
learning, and his passion. These qualities are not to be picked up
on every street corner.
Galatea needs a Pygmalion. What does the sculptor do
except remove the surplus marble from the block, and make
the figure come to life with his own brain and out of his own
love? . . . Let those who choose to carve a human soul to their
own measure be sure that they have a worthy image after which
to carve it, and let them know that the power of molding an
emerging intellect is a power of death as well as a power of life.

[ 281 |
 Epilogue

There have always been men of intelligence who went on strike,

in protest and despair, but they did not know the meaning of
their action. The man who retires from public life, to think, but
not to share his thoughts—the man who chooses to spend his
years in the obscurity of menial employment, keeping to himself
the fire of his mind . . . refusing to bring it into a world he
despises—the man who is defeated by revulsion, the man who
renounces before he has started, the man who gives up rather than
give in, the man who functions at a fraction of his capacity,
disarmed by his longing for an ideal he has not found—they are
on strike, on strike against unreason . . . in the darkness of their
hopeless indignation, which is righteous . . . as rebels who never
learned the object of their rebellion, as lovers who never discov-
ered their love.
—AYN RAND, Atlas Shrugged

[ 282|
 W.. was wrong with William
James Sidis? Said Ann Feinzig, “I don’t know what happened to Bill.
People who loved him, like my father, were always fighting someone
who had no knowledge of Bill, to defend him. But it isn’t quite true
that nothing happened to him. If no one knew anything about Bill
Sidis at all and he walked into a room he would be eccentric at least.
And if he still really had all his childhood abilities, and I don’t doubt
that he did, then something terrible happened to him emotionally.”
The answer to the question can be found by first discarding the
swamp of myths and lies that surrounds the memory of America’s
greatest prodigy. Author Abraham Sperling, director of New York
City’s Aptitude Testing Institute, became deeply interested in Sidis in
the period immediately following his death. Sperling had been testing
intelligence quotients since the 1930s, and was startled to see the
obituaries that proclaimed Sidis a burnout. Said Sperling, “My knowl-
edge told me that this was completely erroneous. I learned, much to
my satisfaction, that there’s no evidence that his intellect had burned
out. This business of a nervous breakdown was nonsense.
“In recent years, I have tested more than five thousand people.
Of all the mentally superior individuals that I have seen, nobody begins
to approach the intellect and perspicacity of William Sidis. According
to my computations, he easily had an IQ between 250 and 300. [Albert
Einstein’s IQ was 200, and John Stuart Mill’s was estimated to be 190.]
I have never heard of the existence of anybody with such an IQ. I
would honestly say that he was the most prodigious intellect of our
entire generation. And he did not burn out.”
No, the intellect did not burn out, but its owner took it under-
ground. The double life of William James Sidis was based on a mixture
of righteousness and fear. The portion of fear is highly ironic, and
terribly sad, for above all else, in books, lectures, and interviews, Boris
and Sarah Sidis inveighed against fear, against the tragedy of a fright-
ened child. They failed to see that their own son was, indeed, afraid.
And had the adult William been emotionally capable of applying even

[ 283|
 The Prodigy

a portion of his intelligence to the study of his own psychology, how

different his life might have been!
Where, precisely, did his parents fail him? Though the mythmak-
ers have held Boris and Sarah’s child-rearing methods at fault, there
is in fact nothing to fault in them. Upon the closest inspection, they
are similar to the basic, sensible techniques popularized by the brilliant
educator Maria Montessori. William James Sidis was not pushed, he
was taught to reason. He did not merely conquer forty languages, or
one hundred—he had the mentai te-unology to grasp any language,
no matter how difficult, in a day. His was not a genius of mere
retentive ability—it was that of a magnificent reasoning machine.
Boris and Sarah did not create his high IQ through training—their
genes provided the better part of it—but their training nurtured and
encouraged in a superb manner the rare plant they had borne.
Their failure lay in the painful emotional environment created
by the degeneration of their marriage, the criticizing domination Sarah
Sidis exercised as William approached adolescence, and the fact that
although she advised other parents against it, Sarah did show William
off. The other factor that damaged William, perhaps the most impor-
tant one of all, was his parents’ inability to shield him from the
merciless envy of the public and its vicious desire to resent and cripple
greatness and reduce it to normalcy and mediocrity. While it is not
easy to explain to a child, however brilliant he may be, that he will
be hated for the very reason that he is brilliant—the job must be done,
and it must be done well. The child must be taught, in no uncertain
terms, that his own standards, carefully reasoned out, are the only
standards he must live by, and that he must courageously disregard all
public standards. This was not an instruction that William Sidis re-
ceived clearly. Rather than teach William how and why to ignore his
cruel detractors, Boris and Sarah concentrated all their attention on
reforming the educators of the world. Not a poor mission, but hardly
worthwhile at the expense of their son’s self-confidence. Boris, blind
to the urgency of this matter, made several grave mistakes. He advised
William how to manipulate reporters, rather than shielding him from

[ 284]
 Epilogue

them as much as possible; and he permitted himself to publish a book,

Philistine and Genius, that drew enormous attention to a child with an
already insufficient coat of protective armor.
In 1957, Norbert Wiener wrote an article for The New York
Times Magazine entitled “Analysis of the Child Prodigy.” It was the
era of the highly popular television stars the Quiz Kids, and the
question of the proper treatment of brilliant children was strongly on
the minds of millions of viewers. Wiener, speaking from the other side
—as one who had been a child prodigy himself—disapproved of the
television show. He urged Americans to emulate European education,
where “there is much less pressure on the bright youngster to keep in
lockstep with the average and below-average student, who is the
darling of our American educational system.” In Europe, he wrote,
brilliant children were encouraged to blossom early and inconspicu-
ously, well out of the public eye.
He continued sagely:

One thing is necessarily true of the precocious child, in so far as

he is not intrinsically one-sided and a freak. He is brought up
against the contradictions of the world outside him at a time
when he has not begun to develop the hard shell of the adult. He
finds soon enough that the copybook maxims of life are in many
cases an oversimplification or a deliberate falsification of what he
sees in the world about him.
This hurts him deeply at a time when his defenses are not
yet developed. He thus is more bare of protection either than the
average child or than the adult and can be badly hurt. Without
an understanding and sympathetic environment he can easily
come to grief. It is the duty of his parents and counselors, if they
really wish to give him a chance to come into his own, to shelter
him during this difficult stage when he is neither the one thing
nor the other.
This is the time in which exploitation by the press or the
radio may do him great harm, as may also the fact that he is

[e3s5.3]
 The Prodigy

growing up in a society which loves conformity and has little

sympathy for inner achievement. It will not do merely to protect
him from the realities of life nor to make believe that society
really wants his sort of person, but he must be given a fair chance
to develop a reasonable thick skin against the pressures which will
certainly be made on him and a confidence that somewhere in the
world he has his own function which he may reasonably hope
to fulfill.

It has been suggested by many writers and commentators that

William James Sidis, in not living up to any of the goals predicted for
him in his youth, betrayed society. This is not so—Sidis owed no debt
to humanity. Nor did society betray Sidis. But its many members who
inspired the retreat of an intellect of Sidis’s magnitude unwittingly
worked against society’s best interests. Sidis may have found his own
path to happiness, but at what cost to the world? How many Einsteins
and Galileos has the world lost by treating prodigies as unwelcome
freaks in their youth? What mountains might William James Sidis
have moved, had he not been stunned into hiding by the public’s
mockery of his eccentricities and achievements?
Let us hope that in the future all gifted, exceptional children will
grow up in a world that instead of shunning them as oddities, will
welcome and nurture their talents, their achievements, and their vision.

[ 286]
 A

Absolutist, The, 239-40, 242 Animate and the Inanimate, The (Sidis,
Aliens during the “Red Scare,” 137-42, W. J.), 156-60, 172, 188, 212, 218,
148 267
American Civil Liberties Union, 161 as ahead of its time, 157, 160, 163-64
American Communist Party, 116, 136, 154 basis of, 157-60
American Descriptions (Greene [Sidis, W. publication of, 156
J.]), 243-44 rediscovery of, 157
American Independence Society (AIS), “reserve energy” and, 158-59
203-209 William on, 160
American Magazine, 31 Anti-Semitism:
American Psychologist, 175, 188 during the “Red Scare,” 137
American Socialist party, 116-17, at Harvard, 57, 103, 174
128-30 in the Ukraine, 2
foreign-language groups in, 136 “April Fool” article in The New Yorker,
Great Rift of, 133, 136 228-32, 250, 263-64
“Analysis of the Child Prodigy,” 286-87 as reference source for William’s
Andros, Sir Edmund, 208, 209 obituaries, 275-76

[ 287]
 Index

“April Fool” article (cont’d) Boston University, 141, 276

Thurber on, 234, 236 School of Medicine, 10, 11, 13, 17-18,
Weiner on, 232-33 96
William’s lawsuit over, 233-36, 244, Brookline High School, 44-47, 268
264-70 Bruce, H. Addington, 29, 38, 46, 273-74
appeal of decision, 235-36, 264 Burnett, Whit, 177, 216
deposition, 266-69
judge’s ruling on, 235 Cambridge University, 175
as libel case, 234, 264-69 Carver, Professor T. N., 72
out of court settlement of, 269-70, Castle Garden, 4, 8, 135
272, 215 Century Magazine, 16
as “right of privacy” issue, 234-36, Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan, 157
264 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 14
Aptitude Testing Institute, 284 Chekhov, Anton, 127
Aronoff, William, 277—78 Chicago Journal, 111-12
Atlantic Monthly, 16 Child prodigies, 56-58, 102-103, 236, 276,
Atlantis, 119-20, 163, 221 284-87
Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 283 William compared to others, 54, 62-67,
Autobiography (Mill), 65, 66 72, 173-80, 244
Cohen, Morris Raphael, 11-12
Babson’s, 222, 223 Colburn, Zerah, 62
Badger, Richard G., 156 Columbia University, 157, 216
Baltimore Evening Sun, 190 Come As You Are Masquerade Party, The
Behrman, S. N., 101 (Rosenberg), 193-94
Bennett, James Gordon, 31 Communism, 130, 136—42
Bentham, Jeremy, 65 Boris on, 147, 149
Berle, Adolf, Sr., 97 William and, 136, 149-50, 154-55,
Berle, Adolf A., 56, 58, 97 196-97, 250, 261, 263-64
Berle, Lina, 97 Comstock, Dr. Daniel F., 53-54, 135,
Best American Stories, 141 231-32
“Big Bang” theory, 159 Connolly, James P., 190
Bird, Hobart S., 197, 264-66, 270 Connolly, Thomas G., 142-45
Black holes, 157, 159 Conscientious objectors (COs), 161
Bloom, Paula, 280 Absolutist, The, and, 239-40, 242
Bogle, Dr. Jessie T., 61-62 camps for, 237-38
Bolsheviks, 136-42, 144 Continuity News and, 238
Book of Vendergood (Sidis, W. J.), 41-43 Eichel’s conflict with William, 239-41
“Boris Sidis Institute,” 280 Libertarian, The, and, 240-41
Boston Globe, 274 Liberty War Objectors Association
Boston Herald, 37-38, 48, 53-55, 114 (LWOA), 238-39
“perfect life” interview, 106-12, martyrdom of, versus draft dodging,
122-23 239, 241
“Boston Metropolitan Transfer Group,” as pro-German, 262
263 as un-American, 263—64
Boston Post, 190, 213 Volunteer Urban Self-supporting
Boston subway system, 72-73, 256 Projects (VUSP) and, 238-42
Boston Sunday Advertiser, 224-27, 228, William during World War I, 132,
236 135, 150-51
Boston Transcript, 6, 35-37, 45, 60, 265 Continuity News, 238
Boston Traveler, 165-66, 273, 276, 277 Cosmogeny, 159, 160

[ 288|
 Index

Cosmology, 120, 156-60 May Day arrest of, 140-41, 142, 145
Current Biography, 217 platonic relationship with William, 140,
Current Literature, 60 141, 161-62, 166, 217-18
speculation about, 177-80, 219
Davidson colony, 26-28 William’s picture of, 162, 170, 177,
Debs, Eugene, 116, 129 229-30, 231
Depression era, 216, 256 Folupa, Frank (pseud., William Sidis), 182,
Dewey, John, 26 190, 245, 246, 248
Dolbear, Katherine, 102-103 Forgotten Founders (Johansen), 202
Donne, Walter, 215 Formula for Genius (Sidis, S.), 279
Dorrance and Company, 181 “Four-Dimensional Bodies,” 59-61
Frankel, Edward T. “Ted,” 193-94
Eastern Massachusetts Railway Company, Franklin, Benjamin, 243
183, 230-31 Freeman, H. W., 115
Eichel, Esther, 206, 232 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 31, 50, 91, 94
Eichel, Julius, 183, 224 Friedman, Harry, 229
correspondence with William, 207, Fuller, Buckminster, 72-73, 101-102
210-11, 232, 263, 264, 272 on The Animate and the Inanimate, 157
describing William, 192-93
end of friendship with William, 239-41 Gauss, Karl Frederich, 54, 63-64
on Foley, 161-62, 217 Geprodis Association, 196-99
as a radical, 152, 161, 211-12, 263 code of group procedure, 197
on William’s fear, 152, 206 Manuscript Library, 198
Einstein, Albert, 47, 94, 126, 258, 284 newsletter of, 197-99
Eliot, Charles William, 11 perpetual calendar and, 197, 199
Engemann, Margaret, 176-77 syllabus program of, 196-97
Ernst, Morris, 264, 266-69, 270, 271 transit information services, 197-98
Esperanto, 43, 119, 120, 128, 224 Gloss, George, 183-84, 205, 253
Espionage Act of 1917, 129, 138 Goldwyn, Jack, 87, 90-91, 92, 126, 168,
Evans, George W., 55-56 169, 182, 219-20
Evans, Griffith, 59 watching William, 132-33
at Rice Institute, 112-15, 117, 120 Goldwyn, Polly, 93, 219-20
Ex-Prodigy (Wiener), 57-58 Goodhart, Dr. Simon, 32—33
Experimental Study of Sleep, An (Sidis, B.), “Gray Champion, The” (Hawthorne),
94 208—209
Gray’s Anatomy, 28, 29
Fadiman, Bessie, 88—89, 95, 161, 162-63 Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst, 235, 264
Fadiman, Clifton, 88-89, 149-50, 152-53, Greene, Parker (pseud., William Sidis),
162-63, 164, 168, 206-207, 220 238, 239, 243, 245-47, 248, 263-64
Fadiman, William, 87-92, 149, 163, 213 Greene & Russell, 234
FBI, 263-64 Guérard, Albert Joseph, 119
“Fear instinct,” 132, 138, 147-48 Guérard, Albert Léon, 117, 118-19, 120
Feinzig, Ann Rab, 205-206, 211, 212, 253,
DS Ise), PALS), Pao Hanna, Reverend Thomas, 32-33
Feinzig, Len, 212 Harper’s Weekly, 47, 60
Fermi, Enrico, 159 Harvard Graduate Magazine, 55-56
“Fermi’s paradox,” 159-60 Harvard University, 114
Flu epidemic of 1918, 134, 155” anti-Semitism at, 57, 103, 174
Foley, Martha, 220, 253 Boris at, 11-17, 32, 49-50, 149
marriage of, 177, 216-17 described, 100-101

[ 289|
 Index

Harvard University (cont’d) Huxley, T. H., 114

HCKP Club, 73 Hypnosis, 14-15, 94, 148
Psychological Laboratory of, 11-12
Sharfman at, 258—59 Inaudi, Jacques, 62-63
socialism at, 115-16, 125 Independent, The, 60
Summer School Association, 71 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
William at, 48-72, 100-112 (“Wobblies”), 116-17, 129
being bored, 71 Infant of Liibeck, 63
boarding at dorm, 100-101 Intercollegiate Socialist, The, 115
compared to other child prodigies, Intercollegiate Socialist Society, 115-16
56-58, 102-103 Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure,
entrance requirements, 51—52 An (Chandrasekhar), 157
grades, 104-105
as graduate student, 112 J. P. Morgan Fund, 14
graduation, 105, 106, 266, 275 James, William, 11-18, 26, 30, 32, 50, 88,
in his own apartment, 101, 107, 125 96, 116
journalists and, 51-55, 59-61, 69-70, Wiener and, 56
71-72, 102, 106-12, 174-75 William and, 19, 28, 44, 158
in Law School, 125, 135 Janet, Pierre, 14, 31
Mathematics Club lecture, 59-61 Johansen, Bruce E., 202
nervous breakdown, 69-71, 101 Johnson, Samuel, 192, 224
ostracism and humiliation at, Jones, Charles S., 245-47, 249-50
101-103, 112, 125 Jones, Frank, 83, 84
resentment in later years, 211, 229, Jones, Martha, 83-84, 92
244 Journal ofAbnormal Psychology, 50, 85, 94,
Sara on, 104 130-32
as the youngest student ever, 50
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 208-209 Kalmus, Dr. Herbert T., 87, 254, 280
Hayden, Judge Albert F., 141, 142, 144,
145 Law of Entropy, 158-60
Haywood, “Big Bill,” 116 League for Industrial Democracy, 161
Hectographing, 214, 237 Lettish Workmen’s Association, 139
Heinecken, Christian Friedrich, 63 Libertarian, The, 240-41
Henderson, Kathleen Wilson, 118 Liberty War Objectors Association
Hesperia, constitution for, 73-78, 117, (LWOA), 238-39
204 Lippmann, Walter, 116, 125
Hill, Creighton, 221—22, 233, 278 Lovett, Edgar Odell, 113, 117
Hill, Joe, 116
Hirshfield, Rose, 273, 274 McClure Newspaper Syndicate, 221
Hitler, Adolf, 249, 262 McGill, Margaret, 222, 223, 233, 269,
Hoover, J. Edgar, 263 278
Houghton, Cedric Wing, 56 Mack, Frank, 166
Houston Post, 124, 142 Magliabechi, Antonio da Marco, 63
How to Make Your Child a Genius (Sidis, Mahony, Dan, 157, 188-89
S.), 19-20, 279-80 Mandelbaum, Bernard, 6—9
Hughes, A. L., 114 Mandelbaum, Fannie Rich, 6-7, 9, 12
Hughes, Howard, 254, 280 Mandelbaum, Ida, 6, 7, 9, 10
Huntington, Dr. E. V., 39, 104 Mandelbaum, Jack, 134, 135
Hutchinson, Anne, 240 Mandell, Joe, 89
Huxley, Julian, 114, 118, 120, 123 Manley, Jared L., see Thurber, James

[ 290]
 Index

Maplewood Farms, 84-99, 135, 155, 167 New York Evening Telegram, 121-23
advertisement for, 85-86 New York Herald Tribune, 170-72
after Boris’s death, 168—70 New York Morning Telegraph, 123
described, 85-86, 87-88 New York State Pathological Institute,
fees at, 86-87 16-18, 31, 32
gift of, 84 New York Sunday News, 119, 154,
Helena at, 95-99, 168-69 257-58
patients at, 86-87, 91-92 New York Times, The, 23, 51-53, 149, 177,
purpose of, 85 213, 228, 279, 285-86
relatives at, 87-94, 95 on the mathematics lecture, 59-61
Sara’s control over, 84, 87, 89, 90, 92, obituary in, 275, 276
95, 168-70, 216 on the “perfect life” interview, 111-12
staff at, 84, 87, 92, 95 “Precocity Doesn’t Wear Well,” 172,
as a summer resort, 168—70, 216, 251 173
townspeople and, 93 on William’s health, 68-69, 70
William at, 90-91, 92, 95, 96, 101, 126, New Yorker, The, see “April Fool” article
150-53 in The New Yorker
Marmor, Jacob, 242, 244 Newsweek, 276-77
Massachusetts Institute of Technology North American Review, 27-28, 47
(MIT), 44, 46, 48, 54, 135, 176 Notes on the Collection of Transfers (Folupa
May Day 1919, 138-46 [Sidis, W. J.]), 181-91, 229,
antiradical violence, 138-40 245-46, 275, 276
prelude to, 136-38 contents of, 184-88
Roxbury riots, 139-40, 165 psychological interpretation of, 188-89
William being victimized, 149-50 | reaction to, 190, 248
William’s arrest, 136, 140-42, 204, 229
Boris and, 149, 150 “Okommakamesit Indian tribe,” 205-206,
fear resulting from, 151-52, 161, 2%
206-207, 219 meetings of, 206
Foley and, 140-42, 231 Penacook Courier, 207-208
“imprisonment” after, 150-54 Orarch, The, 238
resolution of, 150 Ouija board, 127-28
sentencing, 145—46
trial, 142-45 Packard, John C., 46, 47
“Meet Boston” column, 242—44 Palmer, Alexander Mitchell, 137-38
Menuez, Caroline Bird, 266, 269, 270 Palmer, Herbert, 15, 16
Mill, James, 64-67, 178-80 Peace Paths, The (Sidis, W. J.), 200-201,
Mill, John Stuart, 62, 64-67, 79, 178-79, 222, 240
284 Pedagogical Seminary, 102-103
Mondeux, Henri, 62 Penacook Courier, 207-208
Montessori, Maria, 284 Periodromophile, The, 189-90, 197, 199,
Montour, Kathleen, 175, 188 246
Multiple Personalities (Sidis, B.), 32-33 successor to, 243, 245-46
Peridromophile Federation (PF), 249-50
National Industrial Conference Board, Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, 273-74
193-94 Philistine and Genius (Sidis, B.), 79-82, 94
Nature of Hallucinations, The (Sidis, B.), 30 condemnation of institutional education,
New Deal, 238 79
New Peridromophile, The, 243, 245-46 guidelines of, 79-80
New York Daily Mirror, 177 William in, 79-82, 285

[ 291]
 Index

Pilpel, Harriet F., 264 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 56, 238, 263
Powick, Wilmer C., 61 Roosevelt, Theodore, 16, 97
Prince, Morton, 31, 50 Rosenberg, Samuel, 193-94
Psychology, 14-15, 50 Royce, Josiah, 12, 13, 16, 17, 47-48
child rearing, 20-22 Runkle School, 34-38
“department” of, at Harvard, 11-12 Russell, Bertrand, 175
Pathological Institute, 16-17 Russia, 1-4, 6—7, 15, 154
Psychology of Laughter, The (Sidis, B.), 94, Russian Revolution, 130, 133, 138, 147,
220 155
Psychology of Suggestion, The (Sidis, B.),
Sagall, Barney, 257
Psychology of the Folk Tale, The (Sidis, B.), Sagall, Elliot, 89-90, 126, 149, 219, 257
167 Saltonstall, Leverett, 142
Psychopathological Hospital and Sapinsky, Lukas & Santangelo, 235
Psychopathic Laboratory, 31 Saunders, Dr. Paul, 259-62
Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud), Scientific American, 157
50 Second Law of Thermodynamics, 120,
158-60
Rab, Ann, see Feinzig, Ann Rab Sessions, Roger, 56
Rab, Bill, 205, 211, 212-16, 223-24, 257, Sharfman, Nathan, 258-62
258s 271 Sheldon, Luran W., 60-61
Rab, Isaac, 205, 212, 213, 215, 221, 222 Sidis, Boris, 1-6, 9-18
Radcliffe College, 101, 115 atheism of, 30
Rains, Della, 124~25 childhood of, 1-2
Rand, Ayn, 282 college degrees and, 13, 17
“Red Scare,” 137-38, 148 compared to other psychologists, 14, 31
“Remark on the Occurrence of death of, 166-67, 273
Revolutions, A,” 130-32 described, 15, 31, 90-91
“Reserve energy,” 31-32, 52-53, 57, educational attitude, 79-82, 104
158-59 emigration, 2, 4
Resnick, Joseph, 197 Freud and, 50, 91, 94
Reversible laws of the universe, 158—60 at Harvard, 11-17, 32, 49-50, 149
Reynolds, Ruth, 119 health of, 134-35, 155, 166-67
Rice, William Marsh, 113 Helena and, 96-99, 168-70
Rice Institute, 112—20 imprisonment of, 3, 132
described, 113 James and, 11-18, 26
Guérard at, 118-19 libraries and, 5—6
socialism at, 115-17 Maplewood Farms and, see Maplewood
William and: Farms
at Bachelor House, 113-14, 117-18, marriage of, 12-13
120 M.D. degree of, 28, 32, 49
described, 114, 115, 117-19 meets Sara, 9-10
press ridicule after leaving, 121-25 money and, 12, 29-30, 31
scientific theories developed at, offer to return to Russia, 15
119-20, 157 at the Pathological Institute, 16-18, 31,
teaching position at, 114, 115, 117-19 52
women at, 114-15, 119, 121-25, 218 private practice of, 30, 32-33, 83-84
Right-of-privacy cases, 236, 264 publications of, 16, 30-33, 49, 79-82,
Robertson, J. M., 193-94 94-95, 147-48, 155, 167
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 280 relatives of, 90-94

[ 292]
 Index

“reserve energy” theory of, 31-32, Boris’s death and, 167

52-53, 57, 79-82, 158-59 depth of feelings, 253-54
Roosevelt and, 16, 97 Helena and, 168, 253-58
in Russia, 1-4 inheritance and, 167-68
in San Diego, 134-36, 155 origin of, 160-61
sports, 28, 80 as family manager, 31
William and, 29, 49, 67 family of, 87, 88-94, 134
break with, 160-61, 167 fear of dogs, 38
childhood of, 20-29, 179-80 finances of, 216, 251-52, 275
health of, 70, 71 Helena and, 168-69
journalists and, 55, 69-70, 174-75 birth of, 49
parental failure, 281, 283-86 Maplewood Farms and, 168-69,
Philistine and Genius, 79-82, 285 251-52
politics and, 130, 132-33, 147-54 upbringing of, 96-99
on World War I, 147-48 Maplewood Farms and, see
Sidis, Helena, 47, 83, 134, 192 Maplewood Farms
birth of, 49 marriage of, 12-13
college and, 169, 216 meets Boris, 9-10
Foley and, 216-18 in Miami Beach, 251-52, 254
health of, 155, 253 nickname of, 13
Maplewood Farms and, 86, 90 in San Diego, 134-36, 155
after Boris’s death, 168-69, 251 William and:
in San Diego, 135, 136, 155 books about, 19-20, 254-55, 278-81
on Sara, 94-96, 169 childhood of, 20-29
upbringing of, 96-99 death of, 273-75
William and, 95-99, 112, 126, 127— 28, fairy tales, 20-21, 80
224 Harvard, 104
celibacy vow and, 217-18 journalists and, 55, 69-70
communism and, 154-55 law school, 125, 135
correspondence between, 167, 169, oppressive role, 67, 95-96, 106,
252-53 152-54, 155, 284
death of, 272, 273-75 parental failure, 281, 283-86
as go-between, 168, 253-58 politics and, 136, 147, 148-54, 155
mathematics and, 183, 211 postmortem exploitation of, 275,
May Day arrest and, 152, 153 279-81
meteorology and, 243-44 on his “slow progress” in school,
Sidis, Moses and Mary, 1 45-46
Sidis, Sara Mandelbaum, 6-18 taking him to school, 38, 54, 101
after Boris’s death, 167—70 see also Sidis, Sara Mandelbaum,
aging of, 254 estrangement from William
childhood of, 6-7 “woman’s work” and, 96
death of, 279 Sidis, William James “Billy”:
described, 88—96, 98-99, 168, 169, American Independence Society, see
253-55 American Independence Society
dream of becoming a doctor, 8, 9-11, as “America’s greatest brain,” 259-62,
13, 17-18, 96 271
education of, 9-11 anatomy, 28-29
emigration, 7-8 anonymity and, 54-55, 155-56, 163-66,
estrangement from William, 216, 219, 170-72, 192, 206-207, 210
250-58, 279-80 anti-Semitism and, 103

[ 293]
 Index

Sidis, William James “Billy” (cont’d) health of, 47, 68-71, 81

antiwar sentiment, 117, 132, 135, deteriorating, 242, 257, 271-72
150-51, 161; see also Conscientious nervous breakdown, 67, 69-71, 81,
objectors (COs) LOT M733 283
astronomy, 22-23, 29, 34, 36, 54, 120, stroke, 272-73
156-60, 252 hectography and, 214, 237
atheism, 30, 35, 46, 75-76, 144 in high school, 44-47, 268
birth of, 18-20 admission to, 44
calendars, 25-26, 43-44, 74, 197 journalists and, 44-45, 47
as center of attention, 23, 24-26, 55, MIT entrance exam and, 44, 46
69-70, 78-79, 256 years following, 47-49
chemistry, 214 history, 156, 199-209, 214-15, 222
as childhood author, 39-44 hobbies, 29, 58, 73; see also Transfer
crossword puzzles, 213 collecting
at the Davidson colony, 26-28 home education, 22—29
death of, 273-78 homes of, 223-24, 229-30, 272, 274-75
death of father, 166-67 honesty, 70, 152
inheritance, 167-68, 170, 181, 191-92 “imprisonment” of, 150-54, 155
delusions of persecution, 206-207 interview of, see Boston Herald, “perfect
described, 132-33, 166, 192-96, 219-24, life” interview
226-32, 271 1Q of, 283, 284
bathing and, 220-21 jobs of, 135, 160-61, 162, 165-66, 191,
as a child, 46, 81 192, 210-11
eating habits, 161, 221, 222-23 appearance and, 192-93, 194, 219
at Harvard, 53, 58, 101-102, 106 civil service, 192, 210
at Rice, 114, 115, 117-19 as comptometer operator, 170-72,
by Sanders, 259-62 192-96, 211, 230-31, 272
as sloppy and unkempt, 153, 161, Helena on, 256-57
162-63, 171-72, 192-93, 213 last, 272, 275
double life of, 179-80, 191-99, 283 at Rice, 112—20
as example in Philistine and Genius, journalists and, 175, 216, 278-79
79-82, 286 after leaving Rice, 121-25
failure of parents, 281, 283-86 Boston Sunday Advertiser article and
father and, see Sidis, Boris, William and lawsuit, 224-28, 236
fear and, 151-52, 161, 206-207, 219, cartoons, 106-107, 122, 228
283-84 on cramming, 48
of dogs, 38, 228 on discovering he was a clerk,
finances of, 166—68, 170, 181, 191-93, 170-72
199, 242, 256-57, 272, 275 during childhood, 27-28, 255-56
as free of conceit, 37, 52, 55 in grammar school, 35-38
friends of, 210-14, 258-62; see also at Harvard, 51-55, 59-61, 69-70,
specific individuals 71-72, 102, 106-12, 174-75
Geprodis Association, see Geprodis in high school, 44-45, 47
Association May Day arrest, 142, 149, 154,
godfather of, 19 165-66
in grammar school, 34-38, 268 New Yorker article and lawsuit, see
as the “Gray Champion,” 208-209 “April Fool” article in The New
happiness and, 173, 179-80, 220 Yorker
at Harvard, see Harvard University, obituaries, 275-78
William at on peridromophile, 190

[ 294]
 Index

shielding from, 55, 69-70, 174-75, money, attitude toward, 29, 52, 166,
284-85 256-57
languages, 73, 118-19, 224, 284 mother and, see Sidis, Sara
during childhood, 25, 28, 34, 52, 156, Mandelbaum, estrangement from
255 William; Sidis, Sara Mandelbaum,
lingo, 126-27, 156 William and
translation of, 126-27, 136, 161, 253, mysticism, 127—28
266—67 other prodigies and, 56-58, 102-103
Vendergood, 41-43, 128, 196 compared to, 54, 62-67, 72, 173-80,
Venusian, 127—28 244
as lecturer, 222-23, 269, 272 patent of, 197
logic, 27, 54, 56, 285 physical activity, 26-27, 28, 35-36, 54
at Maplewood Farms, 90-91, 92, 95, 96, politics, 39, 47, 54, 166
101, 126 arrest due to, see May Day 1919
see also Communism; Conscientious Hesperia, see Hesperia, constitution
objectors (COs); Socialism for
potential of, 47, 52, 102, 103, 157, 179, trusts and the gold output, 71-72
231-32, 286 spelling, 23, 24-25
privacy and, 54-55, 223, 248 transfer collecting, see Transfer
invasion of, 224-36 collecting
pseudonyms, see Folupa, Frank; Greene, transit routes, 182-83, 197-98, 247
Parker upbringing of, 20-29, 179-80, 255-56
reasoning, 27, 54, 56, 284 adult companionship, 26
rebellion against parents, 148-50, 174, love and, 20, 21-22
179-80 ae physical activity, 26-27, 28, 35-36
relatives of, 88, 90-91, 92, 126, 167, pleasing father, 20, 24, 25, 29
218-20 psychological principles, 20
“reserve energy” and, 31-32 recognition of genius, 22
at Rice, see Rice Institute “steering” during, 38-39, 53
Russian Jewish heritage of, 52-53, 54, treated as an adult, 20, 21
56, 262 as “a very sick boy,” 270-71
as “self-imposed exile,” 271 Wiener on, 58, 60, 157, 173, 281
sense of humor, 55, 99, 123, 141, 213, women and:
244 celibacy vow, 106, 107-109, 217-218
Sharfman and, 258-62 Foley, see Foley, Martha
Sidis fallacy, 279 at Harvard, 101
sister and, see Sidis, Helena, William at Rice, 114-15, 119, 121-25, 218
and sex, 217-18
small towns and, 155—56 World War II and, 262-64; see also
Socialism and, see Socialism Conscientious objectors (COs)
maps, 22, 29, 47, 182 writings of, 166, 170
mathematics: attitude toward publication of, 221
as a child, 23-28, 38-39 on Atlantis, 119-20, 163, 221
at Harvard, 51-52, 53-54, 58-61 as a child, 39-44
helping people with, 126, 195, on cosmology, see Animate and the
211-12, 257-58 Inanimate, The
jobs using, 112, 135 Geprodis Association, 196-99
refusal to deal with, 163, 183, 193, “lingo dictionary,” 126-27, 156, 221
194, 196, 211, 230, 244, 258 magazine column, 242-44
meteorology, 243-44, 253 objectivity and neutrality in, 199, 200

[ 295]
 Index

Sidis, William James “Billy,” Thurber, James, 228-32, 234, 236, 269
writings of (cont'd) Time, 276
on pacifism, 237-42 Transfer collecting, 29, 58, 244-50
“Railroading” in the past, 150-52 Code of Ethics for, 248—49
on revolutions, 130-32 “dangerous radicals” and, 263-64
short stories, 215-16 fierce conflicts over, 245-50
on transfer collecting, 181-90, 243, founding of, 245, 248
244-50 New Peridromophile, The, 243, 245-46
translations, 126-27, 136 Notes on the Collection of Transfers,
Tribes and the States, The, 199-209 181-91, 229, 245-46, 248
“Unconscious Intelligence,” 105-106 Peridromophile, The, 189-90, 197, 199,
using pseudonyms, 164, 182, 207, 238, 246
239, 242-50 proper name of, 190, 245, 249
on Venusians, 127—28 seriousness of, 245, 247-48
Sidis fallacy, 279 Transfer Collector, The, 245-47
Sidis Story, The (Sidis, S.), 279 “Transfer-X-Change,” 244-45, 250
Smith, Blakely, 114-15 Transfer Collector, The (TC), 245-47
Smith, Shirley, 222-23, 233, 272, 274, 277 Tribes and the States, The (Sidis, W. J.),
Smith College, 169 199-209, 222
Socialism, 115-17, 125, 128-30, 136-38, author of, 207
144, 154, 165-66, 212 introduction to, 203
antiradical hysteria, 133, 137-38 Penacook Courier and, 207—208
antiwar sentiments, 117, 125, 128-29 premise of, 202-203
attacks against, 129-30 see also American Independence Society
Espionage Act of 1917 and, 129 (AIS)
introduction to, 115-16 Tsanoff, Radoslav Andrea, 114, 118
left wing of, 133, 136-37 Tufts College, 51, 57, 174, 228, 244, 267
in “perfect life” interview, 109-10 Medical School, 50
see also May Day 1919 Twain, Mark, 126-27
Source and Aim of Human Progress, The Twice-Told Tales (Hawthorne), 208-209
(Sidis, B.), 147-48
Sperling, Abraham, 283 Ukraine, the, 1-4, 6-7
Spinelli, Grace and Marcos, 194-96, 211, “Unconscious Intelligence,” 105-106
QIS=220 5221255 University of Maine, 176
Story magazine, 141, 216-17, 218 University of Miami, 280
Story ofSTORY Magazine, The (Foley), Unusual books, 181-82
218
Vaughan, Professor Wayland F., 276
Stranger Than Science, 279 Vendergood, 41-43, 128, 196
Straus, Mr. and Mrs. Isidor, 24, 25—26
“Venusians,” 127-28
Streetcar transfer collecting, see Transfer Volunteer Urban Self-supporting Projects
collecting (VUSP), 238-42
Sun-spots, 130-32
Symptomatology, Psychognosis, and Diagnosis Waggaman, Camille, 114-15
of Psychopathic Diseases (Sidis, B.), Washington, George, 203, 207-208, 220
94, 105 Washington Herald, 47
Synergetics (Fuller), 157 What’s New in Town, 242
Whitehead, Alfred North, 258-59
Taylor, Harriet, 178-79 Whittemore, Mrs. Buck, 84, 92, 93
Thresher, The, 124-25 Wiener, Leo, 56, 65, 101, 174~75, 176

[ 296]
 Index

Wiener, Norbert, 228 Wilson, Woodrow, 116, 128, 129, 141, 154
“Analysis of the Child Prodigy,” World War I, 125, 128-30, 133, 135
285-86 aftermath of, 137-38
on Billy, 58, 60, 157, 173, 281 Boris on, 147-48
as child prodigy, 56-58, 96-97, conscientious objectors, 129-30, 132, 263
100-101, 102-103 Espionage Act of 1917 and, 129
compared to Billy, 173-77, 244 World War II, 237-42, 262-64; see also
at Harvard, 57, 58, 100-101, 103, Conscientious objectors (COs)
174-75
Jewishness of, 57, 103, 174 Years with Ross, The (Thurber), 234
marriage of, 176-77 “You Can Make Your Child a Genius,”
on The New Yorker article, 232—33 280-81

[ 297]
 (Continued from front flap)

and then to one menial job after another,

where he hid the secrets of his genius
while he produced book after book under
false names: including a theory for black
holes fourteen years before anyone else
hypothesized PNoletima Cite >«Cycom
|Today, the name William James Sidis
means one thing to a handful of edu-
cators: a burned-out failure who died,
ironically, of a cerebral hemorrhage, the
victim of Svengali parents anda high IQ.
Now, in the era of “superbabies” and the
“quest for excellence,” forty years after
his death, the possibility of William’s—
and his parents’-—failure is more rele-
vant than ever. In The Prodigy Amy
Wallace; one of our most engaging writ-
ers on the subject of the sometimes
bizarre, always enthralling, breadth and
variety of the human experience, ex-
plodes the myth of William James Sidis’s
failure and investigates and reveals his
unique success. .

|
AMY WALLACE is coauthor of The Book of
Lists, among others. She and her hus-
band live in Berkley, California.

da chet design by Earl Tidwell ~~

Jacket photograph courtesy of

the Harvard University Archives

ee
er i wig

Printed in the United StatesofAmerica “ ge

ae
 niu
ISBN 0-333-43

9 "780333'432235