Here’s a hotel meeting room with a bunch of clocks that are apparently set at random.
But it still seemed appropriate because these clocks were behind this man.
“I’m James Gleick and the book is Time Travel: A History.”
And there is one obvious question for a person who has studied the history of this strange
idea.
Would he travel back in time and kill baby Hitler?
“Oh, I don’t even know.”
Seriously?
That could not be the real answer?
“No.
Well…”
OK let’s go back.
When did we start asking this?
Baby Hitler has a publicity pop every few years, like this New York Times poll.
Or when former Presidential candidate Jeb Bush gave his answer to the Huffington Post.
“Hell yeah I would.”
But this dilemma has a longer history than what just went viral.
It reflects how we think about time travel and history.
And maybe the present, too.
Time travel is...oddly new.
Well, it depends how you count.
Some might count stories like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the Mark
Twain story that sent a modern man to medieval times once he got hit on the head.
Or there’s even a Spanish novel where the protagonists traveled in a cast iron box to
the 1860s, 1400s, 690s, 220s, and 79 AD before going to the distant past.
But HG Wells’ Time Machine was one of the first to truly put the words “time travel”
together.
Time travel through a machine wasn’t a longstanding Greek myth, or something Shakespeare invented
in the 1500s.
“That was the surprise.
HG Wells’ Time Machine — we think of that as being in the middle of the time travel
story — but really, it turns out to be the very beginning.”
“What was in the air was a kind of confluence of things.
One thing was an understanding of the speed of advancement of technology.”
“If you were living in the 16th century and somebody appeared from the sky and said,
how do you think life is going to be for your grandchildren?”
“You would have said, what?
It’s going to be the same.”
“If something new came along, a new kind of plow, that seemed like an accident.
It didn’t seem like part of inevitable progress.”
But by Wells’ time, technology’s pace was evident.
The telegraph had taken over and reduced the world’s news to a few taps and clicks.
And Wells’ time travel had the spirit of the era’s most futuristic gadgets.
“You look at the prose carefully and it describes quartz rods, and there’s a saddle,
and he seems to have an oil can, or something, he puts drops of oil in the gears, but it’s
all a little mysterious what this machine is, until suddenly it hits you —
it’s a bicycle.”
Wells’ description of the machine seemed inspired by bikes - which at the time were
exciting and new.
But it was the idea that really took hold.
People instantly understood the complexities and contradictions of Wells’ fantastic machine.
“You know, Wells thought he was just creating a fanciful story, an adventure.
But very quickly a reviewer said, no this is impossible, what if you went back into
time and met yourself?
What would happen then?”
“We’re you, dude!”
“No way.”
As time travel became more popular, so did all the twists that instantly enthralled an
audience.
And it was only a matter of time until time travel was used to kill.
This is Roger Sherman Hoar, a state senator and assemblyman from Massachusetts.
He was the author of 1932’s Unemployment Insurance in Wisconsin, among other works.
He was also Ralph Milne Farley — that’s the pen name he used to write “I Killed
Hitler,” the first story in the killing Hitler time travel genre.
“Pulp magazines, aimed at especially teenage boys, started to produce an outlet for people
who wanted to write this kind of fanciful story.”
Farley’s story actually appeared before the Pearl Harbor attack.
His narrator was supposed to be HItler’s cousin, who traveled back to 1899 to kill
Adolph.
And it opened up an enduring time travel dilemma.
“It’s two problems at once.
There’s a scientific problem — you can set your mind to work imagining could such
a thing possible and how would that work.
And then there’s an ethical problem — if I could, would I, should I...time travel is
so often about regret.
It’s about something in your past that you wish you could do over.
In this case, here is the entire planet allowing this monster to arise and kill millions of
people, does that justify, in advance, the preventive killing of this dictator?”
Killing Hitler, and time travel assassinations, gave a philosophical problem narrative tension.
Pulpy stories like “I Killed Hitler” took advantage of an increasingly time-travel savvy
public.
And assassination became a tradition, maybe even a cliche.
Time travel assassination plots soon showed up in arty sci fi movies like La Jetée,
And its remake 12 Monkeys.
It motivated naked Arnold, And almost naked thespian Jean Claude Van
Damme.
Killing some version of Hitler himself shows up in video games and
comic books.
And somehow the trope even has to be addressed in a time travel rom com by the guy who made
“Love Actually.”
“I can’t kill Hitler or shag Helen of Troy unfortunately.”
“OK stop.”
With all that, the most interesting thing about Killing Hitler might be how the story
manages to stay alive.
That story by Ralph Milne Farley: you can probably guess that killing Hitler didn’t
work.
The narrator killed Hitler, but then he became a Hitler-like figure himself.
Even former future President Jeb Bush realized “it could have a dangerous effect on everything
else.”
“The moral of the stories that I find somehow most believable is that when you change history
you don’t get the result you’re looking for.
“Every day, everything we do is at a turning point in history, whether it’s obvious to
us or not.
And of course some of these points really matter tremendously and others don’t.
But the difference is not announced to us.
Nobody rings a bell and says that what you do in the next five minutes may change the
course of history.”
“We are contemplating momentous decisions that we have to both feel the weight of and
at the same time, have to feel the futility of, because of the many laws of unintended
consequences.
We just have to do the best we can.”
“Now I can’t imagine a circumstance in which doing the best I can would involve killing
a person, much less a child, even if I had what you would consider quite certain knowledge
that that person was about to kill six million innocents.”
“So alright, I guess I wouldn’t kill baby Hitler, given the chance.”
Thank you to James Gleick for talking to me about Time Travel, and thanks to Roger Sherman
Hoar for writing awesome time travel stories under a pen name, and other books under his
own name, like “Constitutional Conventions: Their Nature, Power, and Limitations.”
That’s gonna be a Bruce Willis movie any day now.