The Truth Machine

by Geoffrey C. Bunn

  Although they had once been “close as brothers,” some rancor even developed between Keeler and Inbau.99 Inbau later recalled that Keeler “became a frustrated individual and began to look with some degree of envy on the success I was achieving in case investigation and with my writing.”100 Keeler was particularly resentful when he returned from a Caribbean cruise to find Inbau “in the limelight” having solved a murder case in his absence.101 Keeler’s “ill feelings … were really greatly augmented” in 1938 when the crime laboratory was sold to the Chicago Police Department, and the younger man was taken on as director. “The police department, for a variety of reasons that were never fully revealed to me, did not want Keeler… . Keeler, having developed some paranoia about me, thought that I had planned for this all along. In any event, he thought I had engineered this whole thing, which had no factual basis whatsoever, and that I can document.”102

  Larson’s disliking for Keeler extended beyond the latter’s death. In 1951, by then the Superintendant of the Logansport State Hospital in Indiana, Larson wrote Vollmer to keep him “abreast of some developments in the field of deception testing.”103 The field was “chaotic,” Larson complained; “everyone is talking about the so-called ‘Lie-Detector.’” Larson’s principal criticism was that Keeler and other “quacks” had commercialized the technology before it had been properly tested in clinical settings: “Keeler, Lee and many others with their polygraphs, psychographs, photopolygraphs, pathometers etc. have focussed their attention upon the sale of apparatus and the training of laymen whose background was inadequate.” No scientific interest had been shown by most of the apparatus promoters, “including Lee and Keeler.” Larson was particularly anxious to clear up any confusion regarding “the pioneer Berkeley work” that he had done. Keeler had neither “perfected any polygraph or improved any of the original technique as I used it.” Writing about events that had happened thirty years earlier, Larson’s report to the seventy-five-year-old “Chief” was curiously detailed: “If you recall, just before the first test I had been ill at home… . I then went to you, told you of Marston’s article, and asked your permission to conduct the tests in the University of California laboratory, and outlined my proposed methods. You agreed, and we all know the results… . Keeler was at that time a high school boy in short pants.” Larson was still annoyed that he had given Keeler credit as a collaborator on Lying and Its Detection, “even though he never even read the manuscript and contributed nothing to it.” “So you see,” Larson concluded, “that I, in your Police department, encouraged by you, was a good many years ahead of anyone else in using the “Lie Detector” in police work.”104 Even Larson, who disliked the term, wanted to go down on record as the man who had invented the lie detector.

  It might be predicted, perhaps, that an enterprise that ostensibly sought truth would have encouraged suspicion among the principal actors. Nevertheless, the extent to which mistrust features in lie detector discourse is remarkable. Anxious to avoid engaging with each other in public, in private the lie detector’s architects revealed their intense disrespect for each other’s work. They criticized each other’s questionable ethics, illegitimate qualifications, and grubby ambitions. Yet they also recognized that by engaging in a competition for the title “inventor of the lie detector” they undermined not only the claim that the lie detector was an invention at all but also that the credentials claimed on behalf of the instrument were scientifically valid. Although they each had different ambitions (and regardless of their own views as to whether the instrument deserved the invention epithet), Larson, Keeler, and Marston all believed that being known as the “inventor of the lie detector” was a prize worth fighting for. The title conferred status and fame on its holder, and held out the possibility of great wealth. But because in the popular imagination an invention could only boast a single inventor, competition for the title was fierce.

  Even astute critics occasionally fail to see past the entrenched myth of the instrument’s invention. As we have seen, Carl Jung wanted to use the galvanometer in order to comprehend the criminal’s emotional “complexes of ideas,” not to detect the lie. Nevertheless, one historian of psychodynamic psychology claimed that Jung’s work “culminated with the invention of the lie-detector.”105 Hugo Münsterberg’s biographer similarly alluded to his role in the creation of the polygraph.106 Two sympathetic scholars claimed he had administered a battery of lie detection tests to Harry Orchard in 1907. The case brought him spectacular publicity “and the idea of a lie detector was launched.”107 The main weapon in this “battery” of tests was the word association test. But Münsterberg’s description of how he interpreted the results of the test indicated that he was still committed to a pathological theory of the criminal.

  John Larson resisted the term “lie detector” but nevertheless wanted the credit for inventing it. John A. Larson, Lying and Its Detection: A Study of Deception and Deception Tests (New Jersey: Patterson Smith, 1932). Reprinted by permission of Patterson Smith Publishing, www.patterson-smith.com.

  The question who invented the lie detector is problematic because the answer one gives depends on what one means by the term “lie detector.” If the heart of the lie detector is taken to be the discontinuous technique of recording blood pressure then the credit is Marston’s. If the essence is taken to be the continuous technique then the credit is either Larson’s or Arnold Gesell’s.108 Yet as late as 1932 John Larson was insisting that the word association technique “must still remain a police tool—a very efficient police tool.”109 If the fundamental innovation is taken to be the assumed link between blood pressure and criminality then Mosso deserves recognition. In this last case, however, the relationship posited between blood pressure and criminality was quite different due to the different aims of the technology. And even if it were possible to decide on the basis of a single criterion of invention, there would still remain the problem of both Larson and Marston’s residual commitments to clinical case studies as legitimate objects of knowledge. And what of Leonarde Keeler’s claims to inventor status? After all, it was Keeler who designed a compact and portable lie detector.110 It was Keeler who attempted to patent an instrument mechanism in 1925. And it was he who refined and stabilized the software of interrogation procedure.111 In fact, none of the lie detector’s so-called inventors can be credited with making any notable, imaginative, or technological innovations. Journalists, novelists, and writers of detective pulp fiction made the principal conceptual shift that made the lie detector possible—namely the repudiation of criminology’s notion of the born criminal.

  Nevertheless, from the early 1920s, the notion of “invention” permeated accounts of the instrument in newspapers, magazines, and books. The construct was necessary precisely because the lie detector was a new blend of old wines in a new bottle, old technologies applied to a new end. That the machine was depicted as an invention boasting an inventor gave it a reputation of scientific credibility. Such a controversial idea as “detecting lies” would hardly have been acceptable had the lie detector been described as a sphygmomanometer, a pneumograph, and a galvanometer housed in a box and operated by a technician. This is also why the “invention” of the lie detector was partly a function of the invention of the term “lie detector,” a form of linguistic “black boxing”: the simplification of scientific complexity and human agency.112 “Invention” gave the lie detector credibility via a culturally valued origin myth, a numinous narrative that served to obscure the instrument’s social and historical origins.113 The myth of invention was primarily promoted in mass culture: national and local newspapers, the sibling-penned hagiography, popular psychology books and magazine articles, comic book histories, personal memoirs, pulp fiction. Although Marston objected to “picturesque press embroidery,” and Larson complained that much of the material concerning lie detection was “being dished out through rewrite men to various magazines and newspaper reporters,” both were reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which these domains
were establishing the lie detector’s very intelligibility. The untenable notion of invention—despite its lack of explanatory sophistication—nevertheless played a crucial role in the construction of this intelligibility.

  CHAPTER 7

  “A trick of burlesque employed … against dishonesty”

  The Quest for Euphoric Security

  “Myth … could not care less about contradictions so long as it

  establishes a euphoric security.”

  —Roland Barthes (1972)

  “Any kind of ordeal as a means of evidence is, of course, a

  derivative of charismatic justice.”

  —Max Weber (1922)

  The first accounts of the lie detector’s history emphasized the scientific credentials of the instrument’s advocates. Above all, they depicted the machine as being a product of modernity, the opposite of superstition. “In China there existed a practise of requesting an accused to chew rice and then spit it out for examination,” wrote Fred Inbau in 1935 in The Scientific Monthly, “and if the rice were dry the subject was considered guilty.”1 “In India the movement of a suspect’s big toe was supposed to be an indication of deception.” “The interrogation of criminal suspects may not be easier today than formerly,” wrote Paul Trovillo in his 1939 “History of Lie Detection,” “but it is at least on a more objective basis.”2 Trovillo’s history included accounts of the AyurVeda (900 BC), Erasistratus, the Greek physician (300–250 BC), ordeals of the Middle Ages, and the researches of Mosso and Lombroso. Lie detection “should be considered the fruit of centuries of germination,” he wrote, “some of which, indeed, was plucked before it was ripe.”3 Historical accounts generally claimed that while the need to detect the truth had been a recurring problem, it was only in the early years of the twentieth century that science had finally solved it. William Moulton Marston, for example, opened his The Lie Detector Test with a characteristic flourish: “Since that disastrous day in Eden when the subtle serpent said to Eve, ‘Eat the fruit, for surely thou shalt not die,’ lying has been the rule in human behavior and not the exception.”4 These accounts served an important function within lie detector discourse. First, they emphasized that the instrument was a modern scientific invention. Second, they deflected attention away from a fundamental truth of lie detecting: that the technology functioned according to one of the oldest methods of detecting deception available—the scrutinizing of body language, facial expression, words, and gestures. The origin myth of the lie detector thus contains a subtle falsehood.

  From its emergence in the early 1920s, the lie detector was portrayed as the “antithesis of ‘third-degree.’”5 “It is a far cry from the rack and torture chamber of the Middle Ages to the modern ‘Lie Detector,’” enthused Current Opinion in 1924.6 A 1937 issue of the picture magazine Look contained a condemnation of the brutal practice together with an explanation of how the instrument worked.7 “Prying open the stubborn jaws of the criminal for evidential data has always been one of the major tasks of the law,” wrote Henry Morton Robinson, writing in Forum and Century, “and one that has rarely been accomplished without an accompanying taint of human dishonor and cruelty”: “The rack, the pincers, and more recently the blackjack and rubber hose have been the favorite instruments used in this important legal process of ‘snatching the confession.’” Six hundred years of Western civilization had evidently not halted the use of torture and coercion in wringing guilty knowledge from criminal suspects. Robinson contrasted the brutalism of entrenched police practices with science’s humanitarian ambitions. He alerted his readers to a number of devices that had recently proved “tremendously successful in plucking desired truths from guilty lips.” Although not yet in general use, they were nevertheless “clearly destined to supplant the barbarous torments of the third degree.”8 “Perhaps the most dramatic and satisfactory of these instruments,” Robinson continued, “is the Keeler Polygraph, commonly known as the lie detector.”

  The lie detector emerged amid mounting criticism of the brutalities of the third degree. Progressive police theorists such as August Vollmer, together with periodicals such as The Nation and The New Republic, led the strident campaign to oppose the practice, a campaign that reached a crescendo in the early 1930s.9 Emanuel Lavine’s (1930) The Third Degree: A Detailed and Appalling Expose of Police Brutality was little more than a collection of sensational anecdotes. Published the year before the Wickersham Commission’s official investigation into police lawlessness,10 it nevertheless captured the public opposition to the practice. One author of the Report concluded that the regular and systematic use of violence to extract confessions was habitual in only the two largest cities of the United States. But if the third degree was defined as “threats, lies, display of weapons, exhausting grilling, and the like” then it was the exceptional American city where it was not practiced.11

  The dramatic air of the lie detector test was increased by the presence of a mysterious looking “black box.” Eloise Keeler, The Lie Detector Man: The Career and Cases of Leonarde Keeler (Boston: Telshare Publishing, 1984). Reprinted by permission of Telshare Publishing Company.

  Condemnations of police violence had been voiced from the earliest years of the century.12 “Decent public opinion stands firmly against such barbarism,” wrote Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, “and this opposition springs not only from sentimental horror and from aesthetic disgust: stronger, perhaps, than either of these is the instinctive conviction that the method is ineffective in bringing out the real truth.”13 Münsterberg’s student William Moulton Marston later asserted that the use of deception testing exercised “a control over the criminal mind which no ‘third degree’ [could] produce and which those who know criminal psychology fully understand.”14 “The process is operated with the utmost consideration for the individual,” remarked the Review of Reviews in 1932. “Third degree methods are discarded; the subject is given a cigar or cup of coffee if he desires.”15 The nation’s progressive police were quick to recognize the value of Keeler’s Polygraph, wrote Scientific American. “The need for such a device was acute. The old so-called ‘third degree’ methods of obtaining the truth had been proved inefficient.”16 Saturday Evening Post ridiculed the Chicago policeman who joked about having “‘a lie detector of my own about this long’ … indicating the length of the blackjack.”17 “As a matter of fact,” the Post concluded, “the lie-detector examination is the opposite of the third degree.”18

  The interest of the popular press in the “lie-detector” exploded from around 1930. The instrument was so famous by 1936 that Popular Science Monthly could describe “Two Simple Ways to Make a Lie Detector” to its readers.19 In some quarters, by the midthirties the instrument was synonymous with the “Keeler Polygraph.” Articles on the lie detector in the popular press invariably attributed inventor status to an individual or simply asserted that the instrument was an invention. But if the lie detector was to be depicted as an impressive scientific invention, then its validity had to be expressed in the most scientific manner possible: by deploying the power of numbers. Articles about the instrument’s accuracy and reliability invariably included a figure expressing either the rate of confession or the rate of lie detection. Although few methodological or technological innovations were made to the test during the 1930s, the accuracy figure gradually increased as the decade wore on. For a technology abounding in hubris, hyperbole was the norm.

  In 1932 the Review of Reviews reported that confessions have been obtained in more than eighty-five percent of the cases on record.20 In experimental cases, claimed the Scientific Monthly, “there is an accuracy of approximately 85 per cent.” In numerous criminal cases however, “full confessions have been obtained in approximately 75 per cent of those in which the record indicated deception regarding the pertinent questions propounded of the suspect.”21 Living Age ignored the distinction between experimental and criminal cases when it claimed the ingenious machine had registered accurate results in “75 to 86 per cen
t of cases submitted to it.”22 Forum and Century claimed, “in seventy-five per cent of cases the subject, on viewing the unanswerable evidence he has given against himself, breaks down.”23 Reader’s Digest enthused that “75 out of every 100 individuals who give guilty reactions on the lie-detector make full confessions after they are shown the polygraph’s remorseless record of their prevarications.”24 Newsweek reported Keeler’s belief “that on the average his machine is 85 per cent accurate in detecting lies to questions unimportant to the individual. Seventy-five per cent of all criminal cases found guilty by the apparatus have been substantiated by subsequent confessions.”25 After admitting some initial skepticism about the powers of the “Fordham psycho-galvanometer,” New Jersey Assistant Prosecutor Edward Juska claimed he was “now convinced that the detector is 98 per cent correct, as claimed.”26

  It was no wonder the lie detector was considered to be a cost-effective addition to any police department. In Wichita, Kansas, the police apparently obtained approximately twenty confessions a month that would have not been secured without the use of the instrument. Statistics showed that approximately sixty percent of those caught lying by the polygraph confessed.27 O. W. Wilson, a graduate of Vollmer’s “college cop” program, headed the Wichita department. Scientific American called Wichita “the proving ground for the Keeler Polygraph,” because apparently more people were tested there than anywhere else. Having tested more than thirteen hundred persons a year since 1936, the department had accumulated some four thousand recorded examinations by 1939—nearly half of which were the records of transients or vagrants, “picked up in the railroad yards or found loitering about the city streets.” The writer produced a statistic that would eventually achieve notoriety within the detection of detection discourse: “Otherwise stated, 99.9 percent of all persons examined were able to produce records upon which a definite and immediate decision could be made.”28 In 1941, Reader’s Digest claimed that the lie detector in regular use for six years in a large department store had “caught 90 per cent of the guilty, [and had] never convicted the innocent.” An official of a large detective agency said that while half of its cases could be solved by direct investigation, detectives ran up “against a stone wall” in the other half. “Here they have found the Polygraph 99 percent perfect.”29 Saturday Evening Post concurred, maintaining that in only “1 per cent of the cases, the lie detector findings are proved to be wrong.”30