On 5 December 1947, Kurt Gödel, the man Time magazine called the last century's greatest mathematician, had his citizenship hearing. One of Gödel's witnesses was the man the same issue of Time called the century's greatest person, Albert Einstein. The other witness was Oskar Morgenstern, co-inventor of game theory.
At the hearing, the prospective citizen has to answer a few basic questions. Not a big deal, you'd think, for the second greatest mind in the world, especially when he's got number one there to vouch for him. But Gödel, for better and for worse, was not like other people. In mathematics, Gödel could do the impossible. In the rest of life, Gödel had a way of making the easy difficult. By 2008, 60 years later, Gödel's citizenship hearing was legendary, but also something of a mystery.
Uniquely among mathematicians, Gödel was known for surprises. Most mathematicians prove things already believed to be true. Occasionally mathematicians prove things that other mathematicians weren't one hundred percent sure about. Rarely does a mathematician prove something most of the others thought must be false. And no mathematician had made a career of that kind of proof until Kurt Gödel came along.
When it came to this citizenship hearing, Einstein and Morgenstern were in no mood for surprises. So when Gödel told them he'd found a contradiction in the U.S. Constitution, one that would allow the U.S. to be turned into a dictatorship, they told him to forget it. But Gödel seemed to feel the need to share his discovery. If Gödel started expounding on defects in the U.S. Constitution to the wrong kind of judge, Einstein and Morgenstern knew there could be trouble.
In the decades since 1947, the tale of what happened at the hearing was told and retold, each time with differing incident and dialog. Certainly, there was a citizenship hearing. Probably Gödel had some kind of proof about the US constitution, one which had Morgenstern and Einstein worried. More than that I didn't think we'd ever know.
Not that there weren’t lots of stories. When I was a grad student, Gödel was still alive. In the halls and offices, I heard many a tale of Gödel's eccentric behavior. Over the years, I’ve learned that every one of those stories was unfounded and probably false.
I expected that none of the various recountings of the citizenship hearing was to be trusted. Faculty room yarnsmanship had "improved" them to the point where they were useless. I also expected that the hearsay versions omitted a lot of important details.
But now, to my surprise, we can know. I discovered Morgenstern's original account of Gödel's citizenship hearing, lost to scholarship for decades.
Until November 2008, there was a major obstacle to taking the story of Gödel's citizenship hearing seriously as history. We knew that Gödel had a citizenship hearing in 1947. Judge Philip Forman presided and Einstein and Morgenstern were there as witnesses. But the rest of the story depended completely on hearsay.
All participants at the hearing had been dead for 30 years. We had no first-hand account of the hearing from any of them. According to John Dawson, Gödel's very capable and thorough biographer, Morgenstern claimed to have written up an account for publication. But Dawson couldn't find it. To me that meant fuhgeddaboudit. But on Nov 23, 2008, much to my own surprise, I found the Lost Morgenstern Document.
By coincidence, I had written a novel that revolves around the serendipitous finding of lost Gödel documents. In The God Proof, the main character is sitting in his office when a woman shows up carrying a briefcase with $20,000 in cash and two long missing Gödel notebooks. The woman is famous, rich, mysterious, beautiful and in trouble. Unfortunately, that's not how I found the Lost Morgenstern Document. A shame, too, since I could have used the cash.
My real-life discovery of the Lost Morgenstern Document started with Wikipedia's article on Kurt Gödel. I'd revised its account of the citizenship hearing to stick to the facts as related in Dawson's biography. While Googling around, I hit upon a page that struck me as odd.
At first glance, it was Yet Another Retelling of the citizenship hearing, a bit more shaky than most. It described itself as an account of "Gödel's 1948 Trenton interview with an official of the Immigration Service." The hearing did take place in Trenton, but it was in front of a U.S. District Court Judge. And while Gödel took his citizenship oath in 1948, the hearing took place on 5 December 1947.
I'm not sure why I kept on reading. Possibly I wanted to check out how another writer handled the "lost document" trope. The "false document" method is a very powerful way to tell a story, but hard to do right. On one hand, it takes work to make the fictional document seem authentic. On the other hand, for the story to read well, the fictional document has to avoid the gaps, detours and general clumsiness of real-life documentation.
This writer was very convincing, but his story-telling was awkward. Which struck me as strange. Good yarnsmanship is not rare. Less common is the ability to catch the voice of someone like Morgenstern. This writer had Morgenstern nailed. What if the writer was Morgenstern?
Going back to the account, I looked for three signs of genuineness. First, if this was the Lost Morgenstern Document, I'd expect the writer to be perfect on any facts that Morgenstern would know. And, except for that screwy first sentence, the writer knew what Morgenstern knew. But the opening sentence used the third person and was outside of the quote marks. It could have been an introduction, added by another writer.
The second sign was detail not in previous accounts. This writer had lots of it. The writer said that he drove and that he picked up Gödel first. Gödel sat in back. He then drove to Mercer Street to pick up Einstein. The hearing was in a "big room". Gödel sat between Einstein and Morgenstern. And so on.
The third sign was the clincher. I looked for something which was unexpected but which seemed "right" in hindsight. And I found something new in the story which, once I thought about it, fit perfectly.
None of the retellings of the citizenship hearing story make the contest of intellects between Einstein and Gödel sound right. The Einstein in the hearsay versions was wishy-washy, the affable Einstein of the newsreels. The Einstein in the Lost Morgenstern Document was the real Einstein, brilliant and quite capable of ruthlessness when he thought it was important and in a good cause.
On 5 December 1947, Albert Einstein set himself the task of psyching out the world's greatest mathematician. His partner and wheel-man in this venture was Oskar Morgenstern, the co-inventor of game theory.
Einstein and Morgenstern were sure that Gödel's citizenship hearing would turn into a world-class fiasco if he were to start proving logico-philosopical contradictions in Constitutional Law before the wrong judge. And more was at stake than bureaucratic delay. Gödel was an Austrian citizen, the Cold War was starting up, and there were Russian occupation troops in Austria. Gödel might talk his way into a real bind.
On the newsreels, Einstein looks like a genial, harmless eccentric. That's one side of him, and it's the side he liked the public to see. But Einstein was shrewd about people and politics, and he could be ruthless if he thought the situation justified it.
"Are you really well prepared for this examination?" Einstein said to Gödel once they were on the way to Trenton. Gödel has sat in the back, and Einstein turned around as he said it. From behind the steering wheel, Morgenstern noticed the effect. Gödel was very worried, which was just what Einstein intended. Einstein's next task was to keep Gödel just as upset all the way to Trenton.
Einstein abruptly changed the subject away from the upcoming hearing, to a book he had just read -- a very detailed study on the history of the Russian Church. Gödel wanted to talk about his upcoming hearing, but a sardonic Einstein always turned the conversation back to the religious history of the Russias. As they neared Trenton, Morgenstern threaded them through the increasingly dense traffic, while Einstein wove more detail into his tapestry of theology and statecraft.
Listening to Einstein's tale of a Russian Church steering its way between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, Gödel grew more and more worried about whether he'd pass the examination. He became less and less interested in proving theorems about the U.S. Constitution. By the time the three came before the judge, Einstein and Morgenstern had Gödel where they wanted him.
But things unraveled with Judge Philip Forman's very first question. "What kind of government did you have in Austria?", he asked.
Gödel told Forman that it had been a republic but had been turned into a dictatorship. Einstein and Morgenstern squirmed.
"Oh! This is very bad," said Judge Forman. "This could not happen in this country."
"Oh, yes," Gödel answered, "I can prove it."
That Judge Forman was presiding was fortunate. Forman was a friend of Einstein's. After a brief discussion, Forman told Gödel that he need not go into more detail on the dictatorship issue and force-marched the hearing to a successful end.
The rediscovery of the Lost Document made the historiography of of Gödel's citizenship hearing much clearer. Since 1947, this story has been told and retold in many variations. It's one of the better known Einstein stories, and probably the best-known story about Kurt Gödel. In a draft dated 1971, Morgenstern wrote an authentic account up for publication. It was this draft which became the Lost Morgenstern Document.
Judge Forman had bent some rules at the hearing. This probably made the others reluctant to put an account of the hearing on the record, at least as long as Judge Forman was alive. Judge Forman died in August 1978, outliving the other three. Einstein had died back in 1955, Morgenstern in 1977, and Gödel a few months earlier, in January 1978.
On 17 October 1983, John Dawson interviewed Dorothy Morgenstern as part of his research for his biography of Gödel. At that point, Dorothy did not remember where the Morgenstern Document was. The very thorough Dawson tried to locate it in Morgenstern's papers at Duke University and among Gödel's papers in Princeton's Firestone Library, but without success. Dawson came to doubt that the Lost Morgenstern Document had ever actually existed.
Second-hand accounts of Gödel's hearing started to appear as early as 1978. A 1986 account is especially striking, because it appears in Gödel's Collected Works. Collected Works is for almost all purposes a source so reliable that it can used with confidence to check the others. It is quite willing to be dryasdust if that's what it takes to be absolutely meticulous.
All the more surprising, then, to find in Collected Works a version of the hearing with lively dialogue. Only if the reader delves into the footnotes does he learn that this dialogue comes from a source which mislocated the hearing from Trenton to Washington. The footnote goes on to admit that, since the source was in German, the dialogue must have been through a double translation, from English to German and back again.
In fact there was probably only one translation. Because thanks to the Lost Morgenstern Document, we now know that the dialogue that appears in Collected Works was invented.
In 1997 Dawson published Logical Dilemmas, his biography of Gödel. Confronted with the problem of trafficking in hearsay, Collected Works had chosen to dive in face first. Dawson was more prudent. He restricted himself to what Dorothy Morgenstern had told him. Her knowledge was second-hand, and we now know that on this matter her memory was not good, but of all the possible second-hand sources she could be thought to be the least bad -- she certainly must have heard Oskar tell the story many times. Until 2008 Dawson remained the only careful source for Gödel's citizenship hearing, and Logical Dilemmas remains one of the two most reliable sources for Gödel biography.
In 2006, the Spring IAS Letter headlined the "Kurt Gödel Centennial" --- the 100th anniversary of Gödel's birth. It contained an account of Gödel's citizenship hearing with this unpromising beginning: "On September 13, 1971, Oskar Morgenstern recorded the following memory of Kurt Gödel’s 1948 Trenton interview with an official of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)." Whoever wrote that sentence knew little about the hearing. While Gödel took the oath of citizenship in 1948, his hearing was in 1947. And the hearing took place before a District Court Judge, not an INS official. But we now know that the first part of this sentence was correct, and that the sentence indeed introduced an edited version of the Lost Morgenstern Document.
John Dawson saw this account in the IAS Letter and passed it over as yet another second-hand account of the hearing masquerading as the real thing. The IAS Letter appeared on the Web, and a version of its account of the hearing made its way onto another IAS web page.
In November 2008, I edited the account of the hearing on Wikipedia's Gödel page. I changed it to follow what was then by far the most reliable version of the story -- the one in Dawson's biography. Following up, I used Google to search for Web links on the hearing, and found an IAS Web page with the Morgenstern account. For my Wikipedia edit, I'd reread Dawson. I had seen his mention of a supposed Lost Morgenstern Document, a document which Dawson was not convinced had ever existed. On careful reading, I realized that, despite its erroneous first sentence, the account on the IAS web page was probably what it claimed to be. Morgenstern's Lost Document not only existed, I was reading it.
To confirm my idea, on November 23, 2008, I emailed John Dawson, who I'd never previously contacted. I drew his attention back to the IAS account, pointing out that if it was not authentic, then it was an improbably expert and painstaking forgery. The next day, Dawson replied. He'd contacted the IAS, and confirmed that the account on the IAS website was in fact based on the Lost Morgenstern Document, which they still had in their possession. Dawson sent me the PDF that I have put on the Web.
And with this, the Lost Morgenstern Document emerged from the shadows,
in which even its existence was a matter of speculation. The Document's
existence and contents were now documented facts. So was the history
of the Document, except perhaps for one small fact. The IAS, in its
online archive for the Lost Morgenstern Document, says that Dorothy
Morgenstern sent it to them in 2005. But in 1983, when Dawson had
asked to see it, she could not find it. Apparently Dorothy Morgenstern
found the document at some point between 1983 and 2005, in time for the
Gödel centennial, but too late for Dawson's biography.
Alas, the no-longer-Lost Morgenstern Document gives no direct answer
as to what Gödel's constitutional loophole was. Nonetheless,
a number of people has put forward theories about what Gödel had
in mind. The argument for most of these theories is something like: Confidence in the quality of one's ideas is, indeed, a good thing.
Excessive self-doubt has deprived humanity of a lot of good ideas.
In all probability not a few of these lost ideas were Gödel's.
But confidence should not be confused with evidence. Instead of pursuing an argument-from-brilliance,
I think it better to look closely at the actual evidence.
Recall that Gödel's blurtout happens
after Judge Forman
comments on the transformation
of Austria from a republic.
As Stephen Budiansky's new biography of
Gödel (Journey to the Edge of Reason, 2021)
makes clear,
the Austrian constitutional crisis of the 1930's
was about as traumatic to
Gödel as anything could be. The transformation of Austria from republic to dictatorship
is often associated with
Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938.
But this was actually the final stage
of years-long disaster.
Austia been already converted from a republic into a Fascist dictatorship in 1933,
when Engelbert Dollfuss assumed dictatorial powers,
in the process, among other things, banning the Nazi party in Austria.
Even before the Dolfuss takeover, Austria was a violent place,
and the University of Vienna, where Gödel was a student
and later taught,
was a center of that violence.
Violence had forced the University of Vienna
to shut down repeatedly. (Budiansky, pp. 81-87.) Dolfuss banned all parties except his own.
Dolfuss was a Fascist, but not a Nazi,
so this ban included the Austrian Nazi party.
This increased tensions at the University of Vienna.
By contemporary account, the University was 75% pro-Nazi.
Among Gödel's fellow Vienna mathematicians, the estimate
was "not far from 100%".
As a non-Nazi mathematician,
Gödel would have been a rarity.
(Budiansky, pp. 143-144.) It was in this context
Gödel has the first clear signs
of the serious mental disturbances that
were eventually to kill him.
In 1934, Gödel spent time in a sanatorium.
By 1936,
Gödel's mentor Moritz Schlick was writing to
a psychiatrist, "begging for his help" with
Gödel.
(Budiansky, pp. 165-173) Later in 1936, a former student named Hans Nelböck
shot Moritz Schlick dead on
the staircase to the University of Vienna's main building.
The Nazis openly celebrated Schlick's killing as a blow
against "logicism, mathematicism, formalism and positivism".
Nelböck may have acted for personal reasons,
but at the trial he claimed political motivations.
When he was sentenced to 10 years in prison,
the right at the University of Vienna proclaimed that
Nelböck was the real victim,
driven to an extreme action by Schlick's
"radically destructive philosophy".
When they took over in 1938,
the Nazis released Nelböck on probation.
Nelböck went on to work for the Austrian government
as a petroleum engineer.
(Budiansky, pp. 178-184, 260) Most of the suggestions for
Gödel's loophole made no mention
of Austrian constitutional law.
Given that
Gödel's blurtout was in this context,
and that the Austrian constitutional disaster
was, in the most literal sense,
a life or death concern for
Gödel, this seems to ignore the elephant in the room. To my knowledge, only one researcher has devoted any attention
to this elephant.
A draft by
Professor F. E. Guerra-Pujol of the University of Central Florida,
(Gödel's Interbellum,
available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2489673
or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2489673)
looks into European constitutional law between World Wars One
and Two,
with a focus on its relevance to Gödel: These pages are licensed under a
Creative
Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
License
V: What was Gödel's "Loophole"?
Gödel was brilliant. Here is a brilliant idea.
Therefore, this idea must have been Gödel's idea.
[D]uring his years at the University Vienna (1924-1940) -- first as a
student and then as a lecturer -- Gödel would have noticed that every
constitutional democracy in Central Europe ended in dictatorship. [...]
Simply stated, Gödel’s main concern was the theoretical possibility
of a "constitutional dictatorship." But how likely was this possibility
as a practical matter? It turns out, very likely, if the constitutional
history of interbellum Europe is any guide.