CHAPTER 1
The Wonder Boys of Harvard
• 1 •
“The first thing my April Fool’s boy wanted from the great outside world was the moon,” wrote a young mother named Sarah Sidis, recalling her firstborn’s arrival in the family on the cusp of the twentieth century.
We stood at the window of the apartment together in the evening, with Billy in Boris’ arms, and admired the moon over Central Park. Billy chuckled and reached for it. The next night when he found that the moon was not in the same place, he seemed disturbed. Trips to the window became a nightly ritual, and he was always pleased when he could see the “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.”
The moon-gazing scene is a classic parental experience, a memory likely to stick, even if it goes unrecorded in a baby book. A brilliant sphere or sliver hangs in the sky. The baby arm reaches out, pointing, and the round eyes are even brighter than usual as they look first at the moon, then into your eyes, then back at the light out there in the darkness. “Moon,” you say, a word almost as mesmerizing, in English, as the sight. The tiny lips purse, and out comes a sound that no cow could imitate. “Yes, moon,” you say again, and the future seems full of promise for a young soul excited by a new word and fascinated by the view. This baby, who doesn’t want to turn away, will surely go far in life—and in the cool moonglow, you feel thrilled and perhaps also a little terrified at what may be in store for both of you.
Sarah Sidis told her unusual version of the story years after the birth on April 1, 1898, of one of the first, and for a time most famous, child prodigies of the modern era. Billy’s full name was William James Sidis, after the renowned Harvard psychologist who was her husband’s mentor and the boy’s godfather. At eleven, enrolled at Harvard, Billy made headlines when he delivered a lecture on the fourth dimension to the university’s Mathematical Club, “with the aid of a crayon which he wielded with his little hand,” wrote The New York Times.
By then Sarah and her husband, Boris, had made it their mission to jolt turn-of-the-century Americans with a thrilling, and terrifying, message: learning, if it was begun soon enough, could yield phenomenal results very early and rapidly. Russian Jews, they had fled the pogroms in Ukraine for the garment sweatshops on the United States’s East Coast in the mid-1880s. Within ten years they had worked their way to the top of American higher education. Sarah, by 1898 a rare woman with an M.D. (from Boston University School of Medicine), considered her husband “the most brilliant man in the world.” After tutoring Sarah, Boris had racked up a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard within four years. But inborn talent had nothing to do with their feats, or their son’s, they insisted: Billy was not miraculous, and Boris’s brilliance was more honed than inherited. (Reared in a polyglot world by a bookish merchant, he had been multilingual and a voracious young reader, who boldly began educating peasants as a teenager—for which he was imprisoned by the tsar.) The long-standing fear that precocity was the prelude to early degeneracy was groundless. An as-yet-unimagined potential lay in every child, and it was time parents started cultivating it, Boris urged. The country, more than ever, needed “the individuality, the originality, the latent powers of talent and genius” too often wasted.
Their zeal will sound familiar, echoed by current apostles of the “10,000 hour rule” of “deliberate practice,” begun the younger the better. The impatience with low expectations remains a refrain. So does the warning that if we heedlessly neglect childhood opportunities to excel, we’re jeopardizing a valuable national resource. The opposite concern, conveyed by William James in a letter, is alive and well, too. “I congratulate you on W.J.S.—what you tell of him is wonderful,” he wrote of his four-year-old godson in 1902. But he was clearly alarmed. “Exercise his motor activities exclusively for many years now! His intellect will take care of itself,” he told Boris. Did James realize that the rest of his letter—he cited a Harvard colleague’s prodigious son as a cautionary example—risked egging the Sidises on? That problem is familiar as well. James noted that the university’s first professor of Slavic languages, Leo Wiener—another remarkable émigré from tsarist Russia (he had taken the Bialystok high school entrance exams at ten and knew that many languages by his teens)—was several steps further along with his phenomenal son, Norbert. “Now at the age of seven,” James reported, the boy “has done all the common school work, and of course can’t get into the high school, so that his father is perplexed what to do with him, since they make difficulties about admitting him to the manual training schools in Cambridge.”
Seven years later, when both boys converged on Harvard—there was no stopping the mission—their fathers, with Boris in the lead, had the eye and ear of the public as they sounded a democratic call to Americans to get busy enriching their children’s fast-growing minds. An influx of underage standouts at the nation’s most prestigious university put them all in the spotlight. In the fall of 1909, Norbert, almost fifteen, arrived as a graduate student in zoology after getting his B.A. in math at Tufts in three years. Billy, now known as William, was admitted at eleven as a “special student.” They were joined by two children of the Reverend Adolf Berle, an ambitious Congregationalist minister in Boston—Adolf Jr., fourteen, and his sister, Lina, fifteen, at Radcliffe—and a scion of a blue-blooded Boston family, Cedric Houghton, also fifteen. (The following fall, a fourteen-year-old musician named Roger Sessions enrolled.)
The two superprecocious sons of the immigrant professor and doctor, outspoken men with bushy mustaches and accents, inspired the most interest—and the most suspense. The world was in ferment, and Harvard along with it. The basic contours of the flux haven’t changed. A new century of global migration and international tensions was under way. The pace of scientific progress had picked up. The fledgling field of psychology was taking off—Freud visited the United States in 1909—and Einstein’s revolutionary papers of 1905 had stirred baffled interest. The arrival of these brilliant boys, with their unusual pedigrees, fit the mission of Harvard’s outgoing president, Charles W. Eliot, a liberal Boston Brahmin and staunch believer in equality of opportunity. He aimed to open university doors to “men with much money, little money, or no money, provided that they all have brains.” And not just brains, Eliot warned complacent WASPs, who mistook “an indifferent good-for-nothing, luxurious person, idling through the precious years of college life” for an ideal gentleman or scholar. Eliot had in mind an elite with “the capacity to prove by hard work that they have also the necessary perseverance and endurance.”
Boris and Leo, more radically egalitarian than Eliot, promised that anyone’s children could soar like their sons—and do so without undue strain, if parents were prompt enough and pursued the right methods. The prospect stirred great interest, but also wariness, on campus and beyond. A. Lawrence Lowell, Eliot’s far stuffier Brahmin successor, was said to worry that the “new immigrants” from Eastern and Southern Europe just didn’t mix well with the “Anglo-Saxon race,” whose ascendancy he assumed. “What will become of the wonder child?” asked a New York Times article announcing William’s arrival at Harvard. The attention was tinted with suspicion: “Will he go the way commonly supposed to be that of most boy prodigies,” the Times went on, “or will he make a name for himself?” Boris had just given a speech at the Harvard summer school about liberating youthful genius. Norbert’s father was ready with the assurance that his son “was not forced. He is even lazy.” For one boy, an embattled and lonely quest for privacy lay ahead. For the other, a formative role in the information age awaited. More emblematic fates for two pioneering modern prodigies would be hard to find—which doesn’t mean that one path is a model and the other neatly conveys a cautionary moral. Both, as the boys understood sooner and better than their fathers did, were minefields.
• 2 •
“I tried at one time to unite the five of us into a sort of prodigy club, but the attempt was ridiculous for we did not possess a sufficient element of coherence to make a joint social life desirable,” Norbert Wiener wrote years later in his memoir Ex-Prodigy. The effort was a valiant, and rather poignant, gesture by a teenager well versed in the struggle to fit in while standing out.
In all of our cases, our social relations were better taken care of elsewhere than by a close social contact with those of our own kind. We were not cut from the same piece of cloth, and in general there was nothing except an early development of intelligence that characterized us as a group. And this was no more a basis for social unity than the wearing of glasses or the possession of false teeth.
When they arrived on campus in Cambridge, he and William certainly bore no physical resemblance. Round-faced Norbert was a stocky adolescent verging on plump—though he went to the gym every day, an article noted. Short and clumsy and severly myopic, he wore thick wire-rim glasses. There was no disguising that he was a “greasy grind,” the collegiate term for scholarly types. But having already graduated to long pants, at least he wasn’t obviously underage. In a photograph that circulated in the avid newspaper coverage that fall, Norbert looked like an unpriggish goody-goody. He conveyed confidence, a bow tie setting off a sober yet open expression. William, in bangs and short pants, was still very much a child. He sometimes even wore the neckerchief that was part of a grade-schooler’s uniform. What was most striking about the photograph of him that kept cropping up wasn’t the odd farmer-boy hat on his head, accentuating his stick-out ears. It was the sullen set to his mouth and his aggrieved gaze.
Their backgrounds blurred, though, in the welcoming press accounts that greeted the unusual new students. That fit right in with their fathers’ overarching purpose. Boris and Leo presented their sons and themselves as readily imitable examples, cut from a common cloth. As one headline in a long feature about “Harvard’s Four Child Students” put it, “Parents Declare Others Might Do Likewise.” Their boys had started out no different from other “bright” children. Their new methods were neither customized nor complicated—nor coercive. But they could work wonders. They opened “up to the human race vistas of possibilities and achievement unreached in any epoch of the history of the world.” So announced the Boston journalist and popularizer of psychology H. Addington Bruce, who claimed prime magazine space at a time when compulsory schooling laws were spreading, along with “child study” groups and new interest in early development. As Boris and Leo’s self-appointed quasi-publicist, Bruce created a de facto prodigy-fathers club.
It was a club whose maverick members were far too busy with their own work to hold any meetings, and whose educational mission definitely needed Bruce’s rhetorical polish. With his recent 1909 Harvard summer school address, “Philistine and Genius,” Boris had invited dismissal as a Cassandra. He issued dire warnings of catastrophic violence ahead for a benighted world that schooled its children in fear and obedient conformity, suppressing “the genius of the young.” As for Leo, his son later noted that he “could be overwhelming through the very impact of his personality, and he was constitutionally incapable of allowing for his own forcefulness.” That was a polite way of saying he could be a bully.
Yet with Bruce’s genteel help, Boris and Leo drew notice as the opposite of Old World scolds as their boys arrived at Harvard. There was no hint of the duress that Isaac Babel (Norbert Wiener’s exact contemporary) later evoked in his famous short story “The Awakening.” Among Jewish families back in Odessa, a prodigy industry churned out little violin virtuosi—“with thin necks like the stalks of flowers, and a paroxysmic flush upon their cheeks”—to satisfy their parents’ dreams of cultural distinction if not fortune. The young marvels in Cambridge were not to be mistaken for New World freaks either. They bore no resemblance to lopsided “lightning calculators” like Zerah Colburn, a Vermont farm boy born in 1804 whose father had toured him through Europe: big-headed wonders able to “perform vast sums in arithmetic, as some children have done,” as Boris put it. “Mere ‘reckoning machines,’ ” Bruce called such specimens, noting their otherwise often limited horizons. These émigré fathers promised that to cultivate well-rounded early genius was to reap, later on, a “liberal-minded citizen, devoted soul and body to the interests of social welfare.”
Boris and Leo boasted an enlightened modern advance beyond even the most illustrious Anglo-Saxon precedent. John Stuart Mill, the outstanding prodigy of a century earlier, had surged ahead on his father’s chilly regimen, only to suffer a depressive crisis as he reached maturity. His American counterparts got the same basic, and humbling, paternal message the young Mill did—that their only real distinction was having a father, as James Mills indicated, “willing to give the necessary trouble and time” to teach them. But they had the advantage of a curriculum weighted toward science, believed more suited to “children’s needs of the concrete,” one doctor noted, than the Millian diet of classics, heavy on abstractions. Norbert and Billy also thrived on cutting-edge pedagogical insights that promised to banish old-fashioned fears of debilitating precocity produced by “forcing.” Children’s “minds are built with use,” Boris taught, their brains undergoing rapid growth beginning in infancy. Seizing the window between two and three was crucial, and teaching must also appeal to their feelings. Boris’s signature contribution was “the psychology of suggestion.” Fascinated by hypnosis, he advocated the well-timed use of unconscious, emotionally charged associations and urged subtle priming to stimulate a child’s interest; the mind, he advised, was especially receptive before sleep.
Boris also promoted the theory of “reserve energy.” He claimed co-credit with William James for discovering this idea of “second wind,” which Leo swore by, too. Hitherto unknown levels of energy were accessible to those with real focus, the psychologists had decided. For adults, the emphasis was on endurance, working through initial fatigue to draw on otherwise unused sources of mental strength. The application to children, who were naturally given to scattered interests, was breezier. The point was to inspire effortless, deep absorption, which fueled the kind of learning that late-starters never tapped into. Once bad habits set in and vulnerable young minds were clouded by superstitious nonsense and fears—the crass staples of American child-rearing—the moment had been missed.
Copyright © 2018 by Ann Hulbert. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
