Pardoning Alan Turing

Heather Cox Richardson

Last week the British House of Lords declined to pardon Alan Turing for the crime of being gay. Convicted of indecency in 1952, Turing chose chemical castration rather than a prison term. Two years later, he killed himself by ingesting cyanide. Perhaps not ironically—since such symbolism was almost certainly intentional when committed by such a brilliant individual—he administered the poison to himself in an apple.

Alan Turing is widely considered to be the father of the modern computer. He was a key figure in Britain’s World War II code breaking center at Bletchley Park, inventing a machine that could break ciphers, including the difficult German Enigma codes. After the war, he continued to work in the world of artificial intelligence. Engineers still use the Turing Test to judge a machine’s ability to show intelligent behavior.

In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a formal apology to Dr. Turing. Noting that the brilliant scientist had truly helped to turn the tide of war, Brown called it “horrifying” that he was treated “so inhumanely.” “While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time, and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair, and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him,” Brown said. “So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work, I am very proud to say: we're sorry. You deserved so much better.”

The formal apology was followed by an on-line petition asking British government officials to pardon Turing. By February 2012, 23,000 people had signed it. Last week, the Justice Minister declined to do as they asked. “A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turning was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence,” he explained.

Never shy about his defense of gay rights, columnist Dan Savage compared the conviction of Turing to the conviction of a Swiss man who also broke a law we now find appalling. In 1942, Jakob Spirig helped Jewish refugees from Germany cross into Switzerland, and was sent to prison for his crime. In January 2004, the Swiss government pardoned Spirig, and all other people convicted for helping refugees escaping Nazi Germany. Savage asked the House of Lords: “Did the Swiss government err when it pardoned Jakob Spirig? Or did you err by not pardoning Alan Turing?

Much though I hate to disagree with Dan Savage, who could rest on his laurels for the It Gets Better Project alone, I’m not a fan of pardoning people who have committed the crime of being human under inhumane laws. This describes Turing. He doesn’t need a pardon; the society that made him a criminal does. As the Justice Minster went on to explain: “It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd, particularly... given his outstanding contribution to the war effort…. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.”

An apology is appropriate; a pardon is not.

Some things can never be put right. Pardoning a dead victim for the crime of being hated is a gift to the present, not the past. It lets modern-day people off the hook. They can be comfortable in their own righteousness, concluding that today’s injustices have nothing to do with such right-thinking people as they are. But they do. Laws reflect a society, and the ones that turned Turing and Spirig into criminals implicated not just their homophobic or pro-Nazi fellow citizens, but all of the members of their society who accepted those laws. A pardon in a case like Turing’s is a Get Out of Jail Free card not for him, but for us.

It’s way too late to pardon Alan Turing. And it’s way too early to pardon ourselves.

Stonewall, the Mafia, History, and Teaching

Heather Cox Richardson

A week or so ago, a group of high school sophomores asked me what the Stonewall Riots were. I could give the basic survey answer: 1969, New York, the spark for the gay liberation movement. The basics. But my young friends wanted to know more. What, exactly, happened, and why?

We went to the internet to poke around. And there, on some basic website, we found a throwaway line that went something like: “although the Stonewall Inn was owned by the Mafia . . .”

This was certainly news to me, so I wrote to ask Jennifer Fronc, author of New York Undercover, about it. She studies moral policing in communities and law, so I figured she might know why the Mafia owned a gay bar. She did. She answered:

The Stonewall Inn, and most gay bars in NYC at the time, were, in fact, owned by the Mafia (or at least petty criminals of Italian-American descent). The reason that they owned them was purely as a business venture--not out of some sense of civil rights or justice. The New York State Liquor Authority had very strict codes about dress and conduct in public houses, and you could easily lose your liquor license if your patrons did not abide by those codes. So, in the case of gay bars, the codes that affected the patrons were no same-sex kissing, touching, or dancing, and your patrons were required to wear 5 articles of clothing that corresponded with their biological sex (this was targeting drag queens but ended up nailing dykes much harder). So, what started happening is the cops would raid gay bars and frisk/strip search the patrons to make sure they were wearing the right clothes. Bar owners couldn't afford to pay off the police or get back their licenses after raids like this, so the mafia stepped in and started running the gay bars and paying off the local cops….

The Stonewall Inn was a frequent target of those raids, and there are 2 theories as to why they rioted that night, which was like any other: 1. they were just fed up and 2. the memorial service for Judy Garland had been earlier that night, and the men were drunker than usual. Although it was allegedly a tough dyke who threw the first punch at the cops.

For contemporary newspaper clippings, she sent me to an online exhibit at Columbia University:

This is, itself, one of those great connections in history (like Elvis and Nixon) that make it possible to survive January in New England. But it also raises for me two other issues.

First, it indicates the importance of a renewed historiographical interest in societal systems. In this case, the New York code dictating dress in public had huge implications for gay culture, suggesting that we must understand the legal codes in order to understand what happened at Stonewall. That code also clearly had big economic repercussions for business owners, suggesting that we cannot understand discrimination without looking closely at the economic systems with which it is intertwined.

There is a strong tendency among historians of America to see legal history, economic history, political history, and the study of similar systems as old-fashioned and reactionary, but it seems to me the very opposite is true. We can’t understand most aspects of social history completely without these systems factored in.

Second, the fact these high school students came to a neighbor who teaches history for information on Stonewall speaks to this blog’s on-going discussion of teaching. They asked me about Stonewall because they have a teacher who always has the answer to everything. They figured out in the first two days that she was often wrong, and their education has taken a fascinating turn. Rather than being turned off to history, the students have made it a game to learn everything better than she knows it. (The Stonewall question apparently came up when she tried to tell them that the “Stonewall Riots” had something to do with Stonewall Jackson.) Had she assigned them an essay on Stonewall, they likely would have grumbled and done as little as possible. But since they were doing it for themselves, they took their own time to find answers, and they didn’t stop with the job half done.

While making things up to drive students to try to embarrass us is hardly a model for how to teach, it does suggest that our job is less to have all the answers than to have enough answers just to whet curiosity, and then to make sure our students know how to keep learning. This, curiously enough, is the conclusion of a new study on learning conducted at the University of California.

[Thanks to Jennifer Fronc for her information, and for letting me post from her email.]