Hegness, a collector of rare books and first editions, found in that auction lot a letter addressed to a man named John Beardsley. It was signed by the great author Upton Sinclair.
As Hegness read through the letter, the last paragraph caught his attention. “This letter is for yourself alone,” Sinclair wrote. “Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter. I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story.”
Hegness turned back to the beginning of the letter and read with rapt attention as Sinclair revealed the details of his fateful meeting in Denver with Fred Moore.
When Moore had asked Sinclair to reveal what he already knew about the famous case, Sinclair thought he might get better answers from Moore if he pretended to have already learned of Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt.
“Look, these two men are guilty as sin,” Sinclair had said. “You and I know both know they were guilty of the holdup and they killed those two men at the shoe factory.”
If Sinclair’s assertion offended the defense attorney, Moore didn’t show it. “Since you have got the whole story,” Moore said simply, “there is no use in my holding anything back.” Moore wasn’t going to lie to a respected man like Upton Sinclair. Maybe, he hoped, the world-renowned truth teller would keep silent in the interests of their shared political beliefs.
For hours that night, Moore spilled every detail of the case. He told Sinclair how he had ginned up a set of alibis for both Sacco and Vanzetti. He disclosed that they were in an active terrorist cell that had been buying dynamite and working to attack politicians and Wall Street bankers. And he revealed that the pair had previously performed a number of other payroll holdups in order to fund the acquisition of dynamite and weapons.
On his train ride to California, Sinclair had pondered his predicament. He had already announced to the world that he was going to write a book setting the record straight about Sacco and Vanzetti. Parts of it had, in fact, already been published in a leading literary journal. Fans assumed that the book would exonerate the martyred anarchists. But, after learning of their guilt from Fred Moore, Sinclair was faced with three options, none of them good.
First, he could rewrite the book, revealing Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt. That story would have the benefit of being true, but it could have horrible repercussions. It would set back the cause of socialism and, perhaps even worse, it would alienate Sinclair from his fans. They would stop buying his books. They would reject him and ridicule him as a sellout to the capitalists.
Second, he could drop the entire project. It was a better option than the first. The problem was that he was on the record as having praised both Sacco and Vanzetti. Thousands of words had already been printed. He had been convinced that the men were pacifists, not violent radicals who believed in “direct action”—the euphemism of the day for terrorism. Any decision to abandon the book now would telegraph to his fans that he had changed his mind and had concluded Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. And then he’d be no better off than if he had simply written the truth.
The third option offered the path of least resistance: write the book he had always intended to write, and disregard what he had learned from Fred Moore as the ramblings of a delusional, scorned defense attorney who had lost the case of the century for his clients. Sacco and Vanzetti would still be the victims of class warfare. The capitalists who had rushed to judgment and denied them a fair trial would still be the real criminals. The book would still become a bestseller. Sinclair would still make money and win all the accolades and applause he coveted. And the cause of socialism would still be one step closer to winning the war for the hearts and minds of the American people.
In the end, Sinclair treated the truth the same way he had treated his son—as a valueless distraction from the cause of socialism and his ever-growing ambition. By the time he died, the Sinclair who had spent a sleepless night on that train was long gone. All that remained was the confession Paul Hegness had accidentally stumbled upon in an old box of letters.
Why did Sinclair write the letter? It’s unclear—but one thing is certain: The day he wrote it was the only time in his life when he was willing to admit that Boston, one of his great works, was a lie.
Note: The entire text of Sinclair’s extraordinary letter to John Beardsley can be found in the appendix at the end of this book.
7
Alan Turing: How the Father of the Computer Saved the World for Democracy
50 Miles off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina
March 29, 1942
12 P.M.
The SS City of New York cut through the waves as it barreled northward toward the port that bore its name. Over the last week the ship’s officers had received radio reports filled with SOS signals from merchant vessels being sunk up and down the Atlantic Coast by Nazi U-boats. Most of the passengers had heard rumors about the onslaught, but they had no idea that these were not really rumors at all.
Those oblivious to the imminent danger included the ship’s doctor, Leonard Conly. The voyage to East Africa and back was his first journey at sea. Even now, after four months of sailing, life hadn’t improved much. He spent a good part of each day retching in his cabin as the swells pummeled the ship’s sides. Today seemed particularly rough. As he kneeled by the toilet, he closed his eyes and thought of his wife and one-year-old son back in Brooklyn. He would see them both again in just a few days.
He heard the ship’s bell summoning the passengers for lunch, and the thought of food made him retch again. It was Palm Sunday, the day of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem. But for Leonard Conly and the 144 souls aboard the ship, the day did not bring salvation.
• • •
The SS City of New York descended into its watery grave faster than anyone anticipated. Just as the passengers were sitting down to lunch, a crew member saw a periscope protruding above the water, followed by the unmistakable wake of a torpedo.
Everyone on board felt the explosion that followed.
It all happened so fast. The crew quickly evacuated the passengers to lifeboats. Dr. Conly stayed close to a blond, blue-eyed pregnant woman and helped her aboard. Now, hours later, they were at the mercy of the sea, drifting north in lifeboats in the waters of the Gulf Stream. The brutal cold had already taken the life of one of the survivors, his body cast off to sea.
But Leonard Conly had more immediate problems: Desanka Mohorovicic, the pregnant woman he’d escorted to safety, was about to give birth aboard a violently pitching lifeboat in fifteen-foot swells with a dozen shivering fellow survivors inches away.
The night was jet black and Conly could hardly see a thing. His two cracked ribs—broken when he slipped while jumping into the lifeboat—didn’t help matters, either. He might as well have been delivering the baby on board a roller coaster back on Coney Island.
Mohorovicic screamed in pain. This was the moment. Conly winced as he reached out to her and took a healthy, eight-pound baby boy into his hands.
March 30, 1942
4:30 A.M.
The destroyer USS Jesse Roper plied the inky black waters of the Atlantic Ocean looking for any more survivors from the sinking of the City of New York. The captain knew that the odds were long.
In the first six months of 1942, five thousand people, many of them Americans, were killed and 397 ships were sunk or damaged by German U-boats in the waters off American shores. That list included the Jesse Roper’s sister ship, the USS Jacob Jones. Almost all the sailors on board had perished.
The Jesse Roper had found a few lifeboats scattered like buoys across the Nazi-infested Atlantic, their beacons signaling SOS in bright white lights. As the destroyer pulled alongside another, the crew saw a woman inside cradling a newborn baby.
The child was named Jesse Roper after the ship that saved him. The press soon dubbed him “the baby Hitler couldn’t get.” As news of the rescue spread across America, spirits and morale rose.
While the country did
not yet know it, the rescue of Baby Jesse was not the only reason to celebrate: The British were taking on the fearsome U-boats—and winning.
And leading the charge was a most unlikely chap.
St. Leonards-on-Sea, England
April 9, 1919
The six-year-old boy’s hay fever was the worst at this time of year.
St. Leonards-on-Sea, a small, quiet town on the southeast coast of England, was a safe place. Safe enough for a boy to stroll down the street alone without his parents worrying about him. Not that Alan Turing’s parents even knew what he was up to; they were thousands of miles away in Madras, India, where Mr. Turing served in the Indian Civil Service. Alan’s parents were members of the British upper class who embraced the “white man’s burden” of empire building, leaving mundane matters, like the raising of children, to servants back home in England.
Alan’s allergies didn’t keep him from his daily stroll. There was not much that could deter this stubborn boy when he set his mind on something, and he loved to wander around by himself and daydream.
Today’s perambulation was typical in many ways. For starters, Alan was, as usual, a mess. His sailor’s outfit, standard attire for young boys at the time, was stained with fruit juice and his shirttail was untucked. His sailor’s cap sat askew atop his disheveled dark hair.
Carefree as he rambled between neighborhood gardens and houses, young Alan became entranced by the bees buzzing around him. Where, he wondered, is the nest for all the bees that are out today? He began observing, plotting the intersection of their flight paths in his mind, and following the likely path. He found the hive minutes later. Nothing was more fun for him than solving problems.
As he turned back toward home, Alan stopped to read the serial numbers stamped into the iron lampposts. He didn’t realize it yet—at least not consciously—but what attracted him most to numbers was that they always obeyed their own rules. They had a code, and they were true to it. That was the kind of world that the precocious boy wanted to live in.
North Wales
December 25, 1924
Alan couldn’t sleep. It was well past midnight, and he would celebrate Christmas morning with his older brother and parents, who were visiting from India, in just a few hours. The twelve-year old couldn’t wait to run downstairs to the parlor of his family’s vacation home. If his wish came true, the crucibles and test tubes of a chemistry set would be waiting for him under the tree.
In the meantime, he sat in bed reading E. T. Brewster’s Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know by candlelight. Its first chapter was titled “How the Chicken Got Inside the Egg” and, from cover to cover, the book made science approachable and exciting by defining life as the product of scientific processes.
Brewster’s book taught that the body was a machine made of living bricks. Alan’s favorite section was about poisons. “The life of any creature—man, animal, or plant—is one long fight against being poisoned,” Brewster wrote. With his homemade fountain pen, Alan had underlined “one long fight against being poisoned.” It was heady, somewhat morbid, and occasionally inaccurate reading material, but he stayed up all night revisiting his favorite passages and wondering about their implications for life in general—and his life in particular.
In this way, Alan was a most unusual boy. But when Christmas morning finally arrived, there was nothing unique about the joy in his bright blue eyes when his parents let him open his gift.
It was a chemistry set.
10 Years Later
German Countryside
June 7, 1934
A madman had taken over Germany, but like his many of his countrymen, Alan Turing was too apolitical and naïve to realize it. Therefore, it was far from extraordinary that upon his graduation from Cambridge with a degree in mathematics, he chose to go on a cycling holiday in Germany. It was a chance to celebrate his selection as one of the youngest dons in Cambridge’s modern history and to get away from his little corner of the world—a corner defined mostly by mind-bogglingly complex mathematical inquiries.
Alan’s cycling trip through Germany should have taken his mind off work, but even on vacation he couldn’t escape the pull of mathematics. In fact, a few days of isolation made him realize that he didn’t actually want to escape.
As he cycled from Cologne to Göttingen, which just so happened to be the math capital of the world, the five-foot, ten-inch mathematician with the bright blue eyes, unkempt hair, and omnipresent five o’clock shadow thought back to a puzzle that had attracted his attention in his last year of college. It was called “the decision problem” and the basic question it posited was whether a single mechanical method exists that could always correctly decide whether a mathematical assertion was provable. In other words, was it possible to design a set of principles that, if applied correctly, could serve as a lie detector for mathematical theories?
Three decades earlier, David Hilbert, the godfather of Alan’s generation of mathematicians, had hypothesized that the answer was “yes.” Alan Turing disagreed.
Alan had fallen in love with the predictability and reliability of numbers, but he never presumed that their dependability precluded the value of new ideas. He didn’t think that any single mechanical method could account for the infinite possibilities of numbers. And because man can manipulate numbers creatively, man needs creativity to prove the assertions he makes with those numbers. There is—there must be—Alan thought, a perpetual need for more intuition and innovation than any one single mechanical method could ever provide.
Far from using the trip as an escape from math, Alan spent the hours on his bicycle pondering the decision problem. He found himself enjoying the journey from town to town and feeling disappointed when he arrived at hostels and pubs at the end of the day. While he was bighearted and quick to share a laugh with those he knew well, he was uncomfortable around strangers. He despised small talk because he never knew what to say. That generally led him to say whatever was on his mind, which, unintentionally, often bored, insulted, or baffled his listeners.
Alan disdained pomposity and hierarchy of any sort. He never suffered fools or foolishness gladly. That attitude didn’t fit well in Nazi Germany, where it was dangerous to speak one’s mind. Alan didn’t go around purposely insulting the Führer, whom he viewed as more idiotic than evil, but he was unwilling to acknowledge “Heil Hitler” salutes. Nazism, with its inane slogans and silly salutes, seemed especially foolish to him.
English-speaking foreigners who refused to play by the Nazis’ rules were occasionally beaten up or harassed, but Alan skated by without any real trouble. For all of his short life, he’d been playing by his own set of rules, and so far, his luck had held out.
It never occurred to the absentminded soon-to-be professor that his good fortune wouldn’t last forever.
Cambridge, England
March 15, 1935
The twenty-two-year-old Cambridge don had added marathon training to his other hobbies, which included tennis, competing in bridge tournaments, and going to the cinema. Of course, he still pursued his interest in codes and amateur cryptography. But of all these pastimes, running was his favorite. It afforded him an opportunity to be alone, to release pent-up energy, and to daydream among the natural wonders of England’s rolling hills and glistening rivers.
As usual, today’s early-morning run began along the beautifully manicured quad of King’s College, then through the school’s ancient gates, down its cobblestone streets, past the towering spires of England’s seven-hundred-year-old university, and across the River Cam and Bourn Brook. Alan started relatively slow but increased his speed with every mile. By the time he had hit the ten-mile mark he felt like he was flying.
His wide, looping route eventually brought him back to within earshot of the university’s bell towers. He stopped in a quiet meadow just outside the Cambridge city limits in a little village called Grantchester. The dew was still on the grass, and Alan lay flat on his back staring at the sky.
Imagine a machine that could read instructions, he said out loud to himself.
I think a machine like that, he continued, a bit unsure of how far he could take this line of thought, could be the answer to the decision problem. It could disprove Hilbert’s hypothesis.
Alan paused. His speech had a natural hesitation to it, as if the words on his lips were having a hard time keeping pace with the thoughts in his head. At times like this, he wanted his speech to match the precision of his mind.
He continued thinking out loud. The machine would scan a tape, and the tape would have a numeric code on it. The code tells the machine what to do, and the machine does it.
With that, the pace of his thoughts picked up, and the tone of his voice reflected a budding confidence. At any given moment, he continued, sitting up now and barely unable to contain his excitement, the machine is reading one space on a tape, which moves backward and forward across the machine’s eye, and based on what the tape tells it, the machine will write more things on the tape. Imagine it! Numbers that talk to a machine, and a machine that talks back—with new and different numbers!
The part of the tape that the machine isn’t currently reading would be like our memory, he continued. It would be the machine’s memory. And anyone who writes code for the tape could add to the machine’s memory. Anyone who writes a proper code can instruct the machine to do almost anything.
His arms were waving, and he was growing increasingly animated. He began to think of the possibilities. With the right code, the machine could play music! Or chess! It could add numbers! It could process words! It would be like a phonograph and an adding machine and a typewriter—all in one single machine! It could hold the answers to countless questions, and the only thing you’d have to do to find out the answer is ask the question in a language the machine can understand!
By now, he was bubbling over with excitement, pacing around the meadow as a cool breeze blew his sweat-streaked hair from side to side. He remembered a line from Brewster’s Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know: “The body is a machine.” If that were true, then why couldn’t the inverse be true? Why couldn’t a machine be a body—or at least have a mind of its own?