CHAPTER 8
“A bally hoo side show at the fair”
The Spectacular Power of Expertise
What are the facts about razor-blade quality? That’s what Gillette
wanted to know. And that’s why Gillette retained Dr. William
Moulton Marston, eminent psychologist and originator of the
famous Lie Detector, to conduct scientific tests that reveal the
whole truth. Truck drivers, bank presidents … men in every
walk of life … take part in this investigation. Strapped to the Lie
Detector … the same instrument used by police … these men
shave while every reaction is measured and recorded.
—Life magazine advertisement (1938)
Looking back on that period, it seems to me now that while
Nard had carried on hundreds of experiments with the lie
detector and had worked on numerous police cases during his
college years, he was still waiting in the wings. The stage was set,
the actors ready, but the curtain had not yet risen on the
big show.
—E. Keeler, The Lie Detector Man (1984)
On August 31, 1937, Look magazine explained “How a Lie Detector Works.”1 The article was illustrated with a photograph of a subject being examined and diagrams of two sections of polygraph chart. One was captioned “THE MAN IS LYING,” the other “THE SAME MAN TELLS THE TRUTH.” “If you tell a lie, you upset your emotions,” the piece clarified. “Your breathing becomes heavy, your blood pressure increases.” “That’s why Leonarde Keeler of Northwestern University’s crime detection laboratory has been able to invent a machine which, he claims, can test the truth of statements. The Keeler Polygraph or lie detector is used to determine the guilt or innocence of crime suspects. Many thousands of such tests are made monthly all over the U.S.” The following year, on December 6, 1938, Look magazine published another feature about the lie detector. This time, Marston was credited with inventing the instrument. “Would YOU Dare Take These Tests?” was the headline to the doublepage photo story: “Real Life Stories from a Psychologist’s Files.” Originating from “the Field of Crime,” the lie detector had now entered “the Fields of Love.” It was capable of telling you whether or not your wife or sweetheart loved you, and vice versa: “Dr. William Moulton Marston, the inventor, reports success with his device in solving marital or other domestic problems and adds that it will disclose subconscious secrets of which the subject is utterly unaware.”2 Not only did the machine discover that “the neglected wife and her roving husband” still harbored some affection for each other, but it also revealed that a young couple were in love, despite being engaged to other people. Once the “disinterested truth-finder” had diagnosed the cause of the symptoms, the consulting psychologist was able to confer his blessings on the unions. “United by the lie detector,” the happy couple thanked Marston for recommending marriage.
These two magazine articles reveal much about Marston and Keeler and their respective agendas for the lie detector. For Keeler, of Northwestern University’s crime detection laboratory, the instrument was an important weapon in the fight against crime. For Marston, a famous consulting psychologist, it could be used to resolve marital or other relationship problems by disclosing secrets unknown to the subject. Reporting on Keeler’s infallible lie detector back in 1924, Collier’s had reassured its readers that there was “no immediate danger of the lie detector following the talking machine and the radio set into the intimacy of domestic life.”3 By the late 1930s, this is exactly what Marston was enthusiastically advocating.
Marston received an LLB from Harvard Law School in 1918 and a PhD in psychology three years later.4 His doctoral research was concerned with the physiological detection of deception. Having performed experiments with the so-called “systolic blood pressure deception test,” and after testing it on suspected spies during the First World War, in 1923 Marston unsuccessfully attempted to get his deception test admitted as evidence in a court of law.5 During the early 1920s Marston devoted himself to empirical research on the detection of deception and the measurement of systolic blood pressure. In 1924 he traveled to New York City to work with the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, and then to Texas, where he later claimed to have analyzed “every prisoner, male and female, in the state penitentiaries” according to his theory of the emotions.6 He later advanced a “psychonic theory of consciousness,” debated the relative merits of materialism and vitalism, and speculated on the relationship between “primary colours and primary emotions.”7 This productive period culminated in his first book-length study, Emotions of Normal People (1928).
In 1928 Marston used his systolic blood pressure deception test to investigate the emotional responses of “blondes, brunettes and red-heads.” The experiment was reported by the New York Times, which was enthusiastic if skeptical. “Blondes Lose Out in Film Love Test,” it proclaimed. “Brunettes Far More Emotional. Psychologist Proves by Charts and Graphs. Theatre a Laboratory”: “By elaborate and allegedly delicate instruments known in scientific circles as the sphygmomanometer and the pneumograph, by charts and graphs, and by the simpler expedient of holding hands, Dr. William Marston, a lecturer on psychology at Columbia University, proved yesterday in the presence of a staff of coy press agents, camera men, motion picture operators and columnists that brunettes react far more violently to amatory stimuli than blondes.”8 The Embassy Theatre was an appropriate setting for the vaudevillian experiments. The technique involved strapping women to the apparatus and showing them clips from movies such as the Greta Garbo-John Gilbert pictures Flesh and the Devil (1926) and Love (1927). “The experiments more or less proved,” said the New York Times, dutifully reproducing Marston’s interpretation of events, “that brunettes enjoyed the thrill of pursuit, while blondes preferred the more passive enjoyment of being kissed.”
Marston was preoccupied by popular psychology from the mid-1930s. “His versatility enabled him to break into the high-class magazine field at once,” a biographical piece immodestly recalled, “and he has written articles for all the leading magazines, besides many newspaper articles and popular books.”9 A 1934 Chicago American magazine article—by “Prof. WM. M. Marston (Famous ‘Practical Psychologist’)”—was typical. Its inelegant title was “Science Derides the ‘Love-Slave’ Verdict, Crying ‘Woman is the Man’s Love-Master.’”10 The piece was a discussion of a recent New York City murder trial. Defendant Marquita Lopez claimed “she had acted under the compulsion of a man to whom she was passionately devoted; that as a ‘love-slave,’ she had merely done what her love-master desired.” She was found not guilty. Marston’s academic work had well prepared him to analyze true crime in a sensational manner, and his favorite psychological categories of dominance, submission, inducement, and compliance were perfectly suited to discussing the Lopez case. Psychological experiments, he claimed, had proved that “men really prefer to submit in the love situation, while women prefer to induce.”11 “To excuse her from criminal liability for murder on this ground,” Marston wrote, “is as psychologically antiquated as it is to believe that man is the master in a love situation.” Although circumstances forced him into leaving the academy to forge a career as a “consulting psychologist,” Marston discovered that his theories had wide application in the public domain. Unusual as they were, his ideas allowed him to become widely known.
In 1928 Marston used his systolic blood pressure deception test to investigate the emotional responses of “blondes, brunettes and red-heads.” Frontispiece to William Moulton Marston, Integrative Psychology: A Study of Unit Response (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1931).
Although Marston made a transition from professional academician in the 1920s to earnest populist in the 1930s, he maintained his faith in psychology as a liberating force for good throughout his life. It was a vision he might have acquired from his mentor. Hugo Münsterberg had not been averse to courting p
ublic controversy by involving himself in social and political causes. Nor had he been dissuaded from writing mass circulation popular psychology articles by condescending colleagues who dismissed them as “yellow psychology.”12 Münsterberg had a broad spectrum of philosophical and psychological interests, but it was the psychology of deception that his undergraduate student found most fascinating. Many years after Münsterberg’s death, and in a dubious tribute, his student recalled the Oedipal moment when he confronted his mentor with his new theory of deception: “I had been working on the Jung reaction-time test, I remember, and I was in despair,” Marston recalled. But he had a “half-baked idea” that would nevertheless “mean a new theory of deception”: “‘I’ve watched my subjects carefully. When they lie they seem to put more effort, more dominance or self-assertion into their story. That increased effort which, if I am right, is called forth by the act of lying, ought to make the heart beat harder. And if the heart beats more strongly then the blood pressure must go up.’” Münsterberg apparently dismissed the idea at first, saying it was very theoretical.13
In 1941 Marston created Wonder Woman, “a feminine character with all the strength of a Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”14 He provided her with a lie detector of her own—a “Golden Lasso of Truth.” The character first appeared in the November 1941 issue of All-Star Comics.15 The following summer she starred in her own title, and by the end of the year was appearing in four different comics.16 She was immensely popular. By the third issue alone, the comic book was selling half a million copies.17 As with his popular psychology, so with his super heroine, Marston structured Wonder Woman’s moral universe with the categories of dominance and submission. She was constantly being chained, imprisoned, tied up, handcuffed, and blindfolded.18 While such plot devices allowed her author to construct entertaining situations to challenge her ability and ingenuity, they also rendered visible his deeply-held philosophy of freedom. It was a philosophy that had initially originated during his early work with the lie detector.19
By the late 1930s, Marston had become a well-known public figure. Two factors were responsible for this. First, his theoretical ideas about the “primary emotions” of dominance and submission were perfect for discussing sex.20 Dominance and submission were loaded with sexual meaning, but they were also sufficiently flexible to be used to interpret a wide variety of social and political situations, such as crime or military aggression. Armed with such a philosophy, he found making the transition from academician to populist relatively straightforward. That he had an extroverted personality and was adept at dealing with the media also helped. Second, Marston was an enthusiastic advocate of the lie detector. In 1938, for example, he appeared in a series of advertisements in Life magazine for Gillette razor blades with the instrument. “Lie Detector ‘Tells All,’” announced the advertisement’s mock headline, “Reveals Startling Facts About Razor Blades!”21 The accompanying photograph showed Marston reading a lie detector chart from one of three men who were busy shaving. Non-Gillette blades evidently produced “emotional disturbances” in the subjects: “9 out of 10 men tested by Mr. Marston express preference for Gillette blades.”22
Marston refrained from publishing a book about the lie detector until 1938, even though he claimed to have discovered the principle upon which it was based in 1915. There was no mention of the lie detector or deception tests in his major work Integrative Psychology, and his Emotions of Normal People only discussed the deception tests in the context of “Abnormal Emotions.” In fact, his academic work had virtually ignored the lie detector. By the late 1930s, however, Marston had become a public personality through his newspaper and magazine columns, popular psychology books, and radio appearances. A captivating character, by 1938 he had successfully established himself as a psychologist in the public sphere. Only when Marston became a writer of popular psychology did the lie detector come to play a greater role in his career.
The Lie Detector Test (1938) was less a professional training manual (as John Larson’s 1932 Lying and Its Detection had attempted to be), as it was a collection of extraordinary claims and sensational anecdotes.23 About the Lindbergh baby abduction and murder case, for example, Marston hoped to find “a living human being whose mind contains information about the Lindbergh kidnapping. If such a person exists, his secret knowledge can be read like print by the lie detector.”24 Only someone with Marston’s arrogant exuberance could have opened a book by praising the Divine’s scientific acumen in the Garden of Eden: “God’s method was wholly scientific. He observed the suspects’ behavior and reasoned logically that this behavior was an outward, visible expression of hidden emotions and ideas of guilt which the man and woman were attempting to conceal. This is the true principle of lie detecting. From that first successful lie detection at the dawn of human history to the discovery of the blood-pressure test for deception in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, A.D. 1915, millions of human beings have attempted in thousands of different ways to apply this detection principle to specific cases of deception.”25 The “discovery” of the systolic blood pressure deception test in “A.D. 1915” finally ended “the 6000-year search for a truth test.”26
Given his ambitions for the lie detector, it was no wonder that Marston invested its discovery with such portentous significance. Crime had reached epidemic proportions by the mid-1930s according to him, and it was costing the nation a quarter of its annual national income.27 Nevertheless, there was a simple solution to this complex problem: “The deception test, or ‘Lie Detector’ as it has come to be called, is not to be regarded as one more tool in the police kit for making routine detective procedure a little more effective … the Lie Detector goes to the heart of the situation. It is a psychological medicine, if you like, which will cure crime itself when properly administered.”28 The root cause of crime was psychological. Because the essence of criminal nature was the power to deceive and the habit of deception, the purpose of lie detector was to “break down all the habits of lying and build up instead mental habits of telling the truth.” “The ultimate use of the Lie Detector”—“a kind of psychological X-ray capable of destroying the cancer of crookedness wherever it takes root”—was not for crime detection but for crime elimination: “For criminal investigators the Lie Detector supplies a master key capable of unlocking that vast storehouse of secret information, the human mind, hitherto impregnably protected by an invulnerable wall of deception.”
“It is a psychological medicine,” Marston said of his deception test, “which will cure crime itself when properly administered.” Frontispiece to William Moulton Marston, The Lie Detector Test (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1938).
Not only was it an efficient servant for prosecutors, police, and taxpayers alike, but the instrument could also assist with solving marital problems. “Only the truth can bring about a real emotional adjustment,” Marston wrote. “Deception always destroys love and happiness even though the lie be told from the finest of motives.” Problem children could be adjusted by testing their parents with the machine. Such a case was that of one Bobbie K., a troublesome six year old. The child had temper tantrums, was unruly at school, disobeyed his parents, and frequently ran away from home. The boy’s mother was undoubtedly over-indulgent, Marston reported. “But Mr. K. made up for that by sterner disciplines including occasional spankings which were the only punishments that seemed to have any effect on Bobby.” The psychologist thought that there might be some fundamental emotional conflict in the home, “reflecting itself in the child’s behavior as parental disturbances always do.” Both parents, however, denied having serious marital quarrels and professed ardent love for each other and for their child. Having persuaded him to submit to a lie detector test, Marston discovered that the father resented the boy as a barrier between himself and his wife in their hitherto passionate relationship. “I forced the father to acknowledge the truth. I did this as brutally as possible and the truth shocked him into adjustment.” Fourteen mon
ths later, Marston reported, the child’s behavior began to improve, the parental re-adjustments considered a success.
Looking to the future, Marston envisaged three possibilities for the lie detector: in politics, in marital and domestic affairs, and in supplying a motive for moral education. “Suppose every candidate for public office had to take a Lie Detector examination on his past record before his name went on the ballot,” he suggested. “Suppose every District Attorney had to take a test every six months, as bank officers do where the deception test system is in operation. Suppose governors, mayors, and lesser political office holders had to submit to Lie Detector examinations periodically concerning their use of the tax-payers’ money and their own personal contacts with racketeers, known criminals who somehow had always escaped prosecution, and other notorious representatives of predatory interests and the underworld. Suppose the results of these tests were made public automatically, by law.”29 Marston was advocating nothing less than a complete interweaving of the social fabric by the lie detector.
For Marston, the instrument was a means to an end; for Leonarde Keeler it was an end in itself. With no adjunct psychological project to promote, Keeler was devoted to developing scientific lie detection throughout his life. If any one person could be held responsible for furthering its cause in the United States, it was he. Keeler had come from a family that had been very much part of the Berkeley artistic and legal establishment. His father, Charles Augustus Keeler, was an eminent man in his own right, a civic leader, and writer of poetry and popular books. In 1909 he embarked upon a three-year world lecture tour when his son was six years old. At some point prior to the First World War, he arranged for Leonarde to live with the family of the daughter of Frederick Adams, judge of the Supreme Court of New Jersey. An important and well connected man, Keeler Senior was Director of the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce during the 1920s, and by the early 1930s he had turned to writing scripts for radio plays, committed to producing one a week.30 Following his father’s example, the young Leonarde gave radio talks, on one occasion on the subject of rattlesnakes, becoming an “instant celebrity” his sister later recalled.31
The Truth Machine Page 21