A Genius Among Us: The Sad Story of William J. Sidis
MATT BLITZ
sidisBefore
the terms “Tiger Mom” or “Helicopter Mom” entered our vernacular.
Before the moms on “Toddlers and Tiaras” tried to turn their daughters
into beauty queens. Before Earl Woods showed off his two year old son
Tiger’s golf skills on the Mike Douglas Show. Before Lindsay Lohan’s
dad, the mother in Psycho, and every other overbearing parent we know
from modern pop culture, there was William J. Sidis and his mom and dad.
Boris
and Sarah Sidis were Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who were both
brilliant. Having fled the Ukrainian due to political and religious
persecution, they decided to settle in New York City. Boris was a
psychologist who quickly became known (and somewhat infamous) for his
work with hypnosis and his studying of mental disorders. Sarah was a
doctor who was one of the only women of her time to earn a medical
degree. Both had highly successful careers, but they wanted children.
So, on April 1, 1898, Sarah gave birth to the couple’s first child,
William James Sidis.
Combining Boris and Sarah’s genes alone
should have been enough to produce a very smart child, but they didn’t
want merely a smart child. They wanted a genius.
William’s
education began in his very first days on Earth. Sarah quit her job
practicing medicine to mold their son into the image they had in mind
for him. They used the family’s life savings to buy books, supplies, and
any other tool they needed to encourage their son. Utilizing Boris’s
innovative psychology techniques, William was taught to recognize and
pronounce letters from the alphabet within months. He was using words
like “door” at six months. He became dexterous enough to feed himself
with a spoon at eight months.
His parents were proud of their
son, but possibly more proud that Boris’s techniques in teaching his son
were working, constantly publishing academic papers showing off their
successes. By two years old, William was reading the New York Times and
tapping out letters on a typewriter from his high-chair – in both
English and French. He wrote one such letter to Macy’s, inquiring about
toys.
Unfortunately, his time to act like a child had already passed young
William by. Studying seven different languages (French, German, Latin,
Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and one he made up himself – Vendergood) and
learning a high school curriculum at seven left Billy precious little
time to act his age. His parents wanted the whole world to know about
their prodigal son, as well as their participation in all of it.
He
was accepted into Harvard at age nine, but the university refused to
allow him to attend due to him being “emotionally immature.” His parents
took this perceived slight to the media and William was front page news
in the New York Times. This gave William the notoriety and fame he was
not prepared for. Tufts College, though, did admit him and he spent his
time correcting mistakes in math books and attempting to find errors in
Einstein’s theory of relativity.
His parents pressed Harvard
further and when William turned eleven, they relented. William Sidis
became a student at one of the most prestigious universities on Earth at
the age most kids were perfectly content playing stick ball and not
worrying about giving a dissertation on the fourth dimension.
On a freezing Boston January evening in 1910, hundreds gathered to
hear the boy genius William Sidis in his first public speaking
engagement, a talk about fourth dimensional bodies. His speech, and the
fact that it was over most of the audiences’ heads, became national
news.
Reporters followed William everywhere on campus. He rarely
had a private moment. He graduated from Harvard at the age of 16, cum
laude. Despite his success, Harvard was not a happy experience for young
Billy. According to Sidis biographer Amy Wallace, William once
admitted to college students nearly double his age that he had never
kissed a girl. He was teased and humiliated for his honesty. At his
graduation, he told the gathered reporters that, “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.”
After leaving Harvard,
society and his parents expected great things from William. He briefly
studied and taught mathematics at what later would become known as Rice
University in Houston, Texas. His fame and the fact that he was younger
than every student he taught made it difficult on him. He resigned and
moved back to Boston.
He attempted to get a law degree at Harvard, but he soon
withdrew from the program. William, brilliant as he was, struggled with
his own self-identity. In May 1919, he was arrested for being a
ringleader of an anti-draft, communistic-leaning demonstration. He was
put in jail and that’s where he would meet the only woman he would love –
an Irish socialist named Martha Foley. Their relationship was rather
complicated, mostly due to William’s own declaration of love, art, and
sex as agents of an “imperfect life.”
When in court, he announced
that he didn’t believe in God, that he admired a socialist form of
government, and many of the world’s troubles could be traced back to
capitalism. He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison.
Fortunately for him, his parents’ influence kept him out prison, but William decided he’d had enough of “crowds” and wanted his “perfect life.” He moved city to city, job to job, always changing his name to keep from being discovered. During this time, it’s believed he wrote dozens of books under pseudonyms (none of which were particularly well read), including a twelve hundred page work on America’s history and a book entitled “Notes on the Collection of Streetcar Transfers,” an extremely in-depth look at his hobby of collecting streetcar transfers. It was described by one biographer as the “most boring book ever written.” In another of his books, he divulges a theory on what later would become known as “the black hole theory.”
Seclusion fit William just fine. He wanted nothing more than him and his genius to be left alone.
In 1924, no longer talking to his parents and out of contact with anyone who truly cared for him, the press caught up to William. A series of articles were printed describing the mundane jobs and the measly living conditions the supposed-genius William Sidis had. Ashamed and distressed, he withdrew further into the shadows. But the public remained infatuated with the former boy wonder’s apparently wasted talents. In 1937, The New Yorker printed an article titled “April Fool!” which described William’s fall from grace in humiliating detail.
The story resulted from a female reporter who had been sent to befriend William. In it, it described William as “childlike” and recounted a story about how he wept at work when given too much to do. Sidis sued the New Yorker for libel and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, before they eventually settled seven years later. But the damage had been done. William Sidis, for all the potential he showed as a child prodigy, would never become the man he was supposed to be.
On a summer day in July 1944, William’s landlady found him unconscious in his small Boston apartment. He had had a massive stroke, his amazing brain dying on the inside. He never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at the age of 46 with a picture of the now-married Martha Foley in his wallet.
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