Ben Blatt - Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing

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ALSO BY BEN BLATT

I Dont Care If We Never Get Back: 30 Games in 30 Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip Ever (co-written with Eric Brewster)

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Copyright 2017 by Benjamin Blatt

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Interior design by Paul Dippolito

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-0538-8

ISBN 978-1-5011-0540-1 (ebook)

For my mother, Faith Minard.

And for my friends at 44 Bow Street.

A lexander Hamilton, James Madison, or John Jay?

For more than 150 years, historians argued over the authorship of 12 essays in The Federalist Papers , founding documents in the American march toward democracy. Though the essays are world-famous hallmarks in the lexicon of American history, the specific authors of each one remained unknown. The question of which Founding Father penned the essays had sparked such endless debate that it had devolved into a popular parlor game among historians. Just who exactly wrote the stirring arguments upon which our governing structure was based?

The answer was hidden in the words themselvesbut to find them, scholars needed not a close reading, but a close counting. They needed to look only at the numbers.

The mystery began in late 1787, when a series of essays advocating the ratification of the Constitution was published in New York newspapers under the pen name Publius. Shielding the true identities of the authors with the patriotic nom de plume was a somewhat farcical endeavor. In fact, of the near 4 million people living in the United States in 1787, all but three could be eliminated from contention.

It was an open secret that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were the authors, but none of the three wanted to step forward and admit to writing any particular essays. Each had political ambitions, later rising to the ranks of Secretary of the Treasury, President, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, respectively, so they werent without good reason. But their excess of caution left the mystery of authorship intact, titillating history professors and armchair enthusiasts alike for many years to come.

You might think that the scholars and astute politicos of the day would have been able to determine the authorship on their own. There were only three potential candidates, after all, each with his own political slant and style of communication. It would have been the equivalent of an anonymous editorial in the New York Times , penned by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders. Or an unsigned manifesto by George W. Bush, John McCain, or Donald Trump. All might be coming from the same side, but they were certainly not all identical.

In 1804, a solution finally seemed to emerge. Hamilton wrote a letter to his friend Egbert Benson listing the author of each essay. Hamilton was preparing to duel Aaron Burr. He sensed both the historical significance of The Federalist Papers and the chances of his survival. He decided not to let his knowledge of the authorship die with him.

This should have been the end of the mystery. A nation of curious observers had no reason to doubt Hamiltons firsthand knowledge. Yet 13 years later, soon after ending his second term as President, Madison put out his own list of authorshipone that differed from Hamiltons. Twelve of the essays that Hamilton claimed to have written were also claimed by Madison.

This reopened the debate with a new fervor, fueling spats among historians for more than a century. In 1892, future senator Henry Cabot Lodge wrote on the topic siding with Hamilton, while noted historian E. G. Bourne went with Madison.

Most historians tried to tease out the authors based on the political ideology presented in each essay. Would Madison really have argued for a central bank in those certain terms? Would Hamilton have supported limits on Congress so freely? Or maybe thats something John Jay would have written?

It wasnt until 1963, two centuries later, that the mystery was at long last solved. The definitive answer came from respected professors Frederick Mosteller of Harvard University and David Wallace of the University of Chicago. However, unlike the many professors who had attempted to solve the question before them, Mosteller and Wallace were not historians. They were not known for their scholarly work on early America. They had never published a paper on historical figures at all. Mosteller and Wallace were statisticians.

One of Mostellers most noteworthy papers dealt with the World Series and whether or not seven games was enough to statistically find the best baseball team. Just a few years prior to looking into the authorship problem, Wallace had published a paper named Bounds on Normal Approximations to Students and the Chi-Square Distributions, which probably sounds as close to nonsense to you as the thought of probability functions solving a historical mystery sounded to history professors in 1963.

Mosteller and Wallaces methodology for ending the authorship debate had nothing to do with politics or ideologies. Instead, they were two of the first statisticians to leverage word frequency and probability.

Their process was in some ways complex, featuring equations with factorials, exponents, summations, logarithms, and t-distributions. But the heart of their methods was strikingly simple:

Count the frequency of common words in essays that we know either Hamilton or Madison wrote.

Count the frequency of those same words in essays where the author is unknown.

Compare these frequencies to determine the author of the disputed essays.

Even before any of the fancy probabilistic equations come into play, the results of the statisticians approach seem wonderfully obvious in retrospect. In The Federalist Papers, Madison used the word whilst in over half the essays in which his authorship had been confirmedbut he never once used the word while . Hamilton, meanwhile, used the word while in about one-third of his essays but never once used whilst .