The instrument’s capacity for attracting sympathetic publicity was a function Goddard was well aware of when he asked Keeler to organize the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory’s exhibition stand for the 1933 Chicago World Fair. Despite a laboratory full of ballistics, forensic chemistry, handwriting analysts, and specialist photography, nothing could capture the public’s imagination quite as well as the lie detector.72 A 1934 Literary Digest article about Goddard’s laboratory was almost completely devoted to the instrument.73 The machine was more than a lie detecting device; it was a scientific, humane, and moral technology of truth. And because every crime was apparently entrenched behind a lie, the instrument embodied what Living Age had claimed was “the constant dream of jurists and police functionaries.”74 The Chicago laboratory provided the inspiration for the creation of many others. Cincinnati established a scientific crime detection laboratory in 1934, stocked with “ballistic and other scientific identification apparatus, such as the lie-detector and equipment for chemical analysis.”75 In 1931, Charles A. Appel was instructed by the FBI to attend Northwestern’s course in scientific crime detection before establishing the Bureau’s first scientific crime laboratory.76
Publicity brought the Chicago laboratory a heavy case load. “Work is mounting up here faster than ever,” Keeler told Vollmer in July 1932. “I have had practically no time to do anything but work on cases, for they have been coming in from all over the state.”77 Furthermore, the volume of work had recently forced a relocation to another building: “We occupy the entire third floor,” Keeler continued, “and have a real honest-to-goodness show place, as well as an ideal laboratory set up.”78 But in spite of the enthusiasm, the laboratory soon ran into problems. By 1934 the university had become somewhat dissatisfied with its management. Its budget was to be severely cut, and although the director’s salary had already been halved, his services would no longer be required. “Of course there were other reasons for dropping the Colonel” excepting purely financial ones, Keeler told Vollmer, “mainly because of rumors reaching the ears of the faculty members about ‘wine, women and song.’”79 “Although Colonel Goddard is a fine person and we are all very fond of him personally, he is not very discreet about his overt activities, and sometimes the feminine call muddles his judgment a little in business affairs.” It was a rather odd comment coming from a man whose own wife fretted that he possessed “a gift of attraction for men and women alike.”80 Goddard’s solution to his problems was revealing, considering the manner in which he had directed the activities of the laboratory prior to his dismissal: “Colonel Goddard opened a small office of his own next door to the laboratory and spent his summer months managing a bally hoo side show at the fair. He had a crime detection laboratory exhibit but, unfortunately, mixed into it crime-horrors, methods of torture, an electric chair demonstration and part of the time had Dorothy Pollock—“Chicago’s most beautiful murderess”—as an exhibit in person.”81 “I’m afraid the show venture somewhat hurt the Colonel’s professional standing,” Keeler lamented, possibly alluding to the fact that Goddard’s gun display was burglarized twice during the fair.82
Keeler’s letters to Vollmer during the 1930s regularly reported on the dire straits of the laboratory’s finances. Its losses were $12,000 a year by 1934, compared to losses of $40,000 “before Mr. Massee lost in the market.”83 By the summer of 1936 its activities were increasing all the time, he recounted, and there were some prospects of obtaining endowments.84 The authorities were making a concerted effort to raise sufficient funds to put the Laboratory on a sound, permanent financial basis, he told Vollmer in early 1937.85 By then, the laboratory’s managers wanted to increase its revenue from $20,000 per annum to $52,000 per annum by forging a better working relationship between the laboratory and the State Bureau.86 But it was hopeless. The end came in 1938 when the Dean of the University completely cut off the Laboratory’s budget and it was sold to the City of Chicago Police.87
Although he was disappointed with Goddard’s eye for publicity, Keeler was also at risk of turning himself into a one-man vaudeville act. Anxious to disassociate himself from trivial ventures, he acknowledged that the laboratory was inevitably a “show place” for the new criminology, and the lie detector its central exhibit. After being sued for $750,000 following a disastrous ballistics case, Goddard vowed never to take the stand again or deal with fire-arms identification. “He was going to make money now,” Keeler reported, “radio programs, stock promotion in patent medicine,—anything. He was through with being professional and ethical; he had decided just to make money, no matter how.”88 As the finances of the laboratory dwindled during the Depression-racked thirties, Keeler himself was also forced to commercialize his activities. Despite financial problems, he attempted to maintain his integrity, claiming that his “real interest” was “in the study of human behavior and not in inventing and making money out of some instrument.” “Of course,” he added coyly, “if some money comes along, it will be welcome, but I think that is incidental to the problem.”89
The lie detector had always provided the laboratory’s only real source of income, excluding gifts and grants. “The Polygraph work is going along as usual, bringing in approximately ten thousand dollars a year,” Keeler told Vollmer in May 1938, “and the other work in the laboratory consists mainly of research and occasional cases.”90 Acting on Vollmer’s advice, and with the help of Bert Massee, Keeler opened his own lie detecting business, Leonarde Keeler Inc. While it would doubtless be a challenge, he had “many clients awaiting the opening of [his] new office” he reported in August 1937.91 By the fall of 1938 the business was well under way. “I am handling more cases now than were ever handled in a corresponding period at the old laboratory,” he told the Chief in November. “My gross income is approximately $1,000 a month which from all appearances will continue more or less indefinitely. As a matter of fact, I have cases scheduled for about a month in advance, and undoubtedly if I sought more work, I could easily double the gross income.”92 Business was so good by early 1939 that he found it necessary to recruit an assistant.
In addition to running polygraph examinations for the police, banks, insurance companies, and large department stores, Keeler also made money by selling his famous “Keeler Polygraph.” He also insisted that future operators take his brief course in the detection of deception. In 1939 the Chief of Police at Toledo, Ohio, reported that the city’s officials “feel that our Keeler Polygraph for lie detection is an asset equivalent to an increase in personnel and has paid for itself several times over. In a great many cases, it has quickly broken down the alibis of hardened criminals.”93 In September 1939, a second company, Deception Tests Service Co., of Berkeley, California, followed Keeler into the marketplace. Prices for lie detector polygraphs in the late 1930s ranged from $250 for the Berkeley Psychograph to over $1000 for the Darrow Photopolygraph. Keeler’s instrument sold for $450.94
Although he could no longer operate from within the safe confines of the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, Keeler’s fame brought him all the work he needed. In February 1941, Reader’s Digest reprinted a Forbes magazine article entitled “The Lie Detector Goes into Business.”95 “For 10 years,” the piece began, “many of Chicago’s banks, department stores, chain stores and restaurants have been using the Keeler Polygraph, or ‘lie detector,’ with astonishing results.” By the early 1940s, according to the magazine, ninety-five percent of Keeler’s work was commercial. In 1944, after the Saturday Evening Post published a series of three articles about him and his “Magic Lie Detector,” he told Vollmer that the articles were “bringing in all kinds of new business.”96 In 1946 Keeler was instrumental in tracking down $1.5 million worth of missing jewels. “There was enough to fill the windows of half a dozen shops like those on Madison Avenue, New York,” reported the Sunday New York Times. “As important as the loot, recovered with the aid of a twentieth-century lie detector, were the confessions that officials said had been obtained from prin
cipals in the fantastic crime.”97 Two senior Army officers had stumbled upon the Hesse-Darmstadt jewels in the Kronberg castle toward the end of the war and had secreted them to the United States.
Keeler was sufficiently famous by the 1940s that he could play himself in the Hollywood movie Call Northside 777. Starring Jimmy Stewart, the film told the true story of a reporter who employs the tools of scientific criminology to free an innocent man from jail. A fine example of film noir, the movie was released on February 18, 1948, some eighteen months before Keeler’s death. In many ways it was the peak achievement of a widely celebrated career. By shooting the movie in the original Chicago locations and by adding cinema verité touches like Keeler and his polygraph, the filmmakers were aiming at documentary style realism. Keeler’s appearance in the film was an appropriate finale to a career that having started in Hollywood, was destined to end there.
The lie detector was constructed by and in American popular culture. William Moulton Marston and Leonarde Keeler were the two most influential individuals responsible for establishing its use in the United States prior to the Second World War. A tireless popularizer of psychology who created “an entire oeuvre of ‘lowbrow’ literature,”98 William Moulton Marston designed Wonder Woman to be an embodiment of his esoteric social philosophy. Appropriately described by one historian as having a “mania for publicity,” Leonarde Keeler was apparently the inspiration behind that other crime-fighting comic book hero Dick Tracy.99 Both men had a flair for theatricality and were adept at dealing with the press. Both courted opportunities to appear in the media. And both possessed that quasi-magical quality of leadership that Max Weber called charismatic authority.
During periods of relative social and political calm, Weber argued, the habitual demands of ordinary life were brought about by mundane power structures embedded in bureaucracies. Bureaucrats and patriarchs are afforded leadership roles because they embody those rational rules that made everyday governance possible. At times of rapid social change, however, a form of authority based on personal charisma can emerge. During such times, ordinary managers are usurped by leaders who come to inspire intense loyalty.100 “It is the duty of those to whom he addresses his mission,” Weber argued, “to recognize him as their charismatically qualified leader.”101 Neither patriarchal or permanent, charisma is a fickle resource. The charismatic hero’s power does not arise from formal codes or statutes, traditional customs, or “feudal vows of faith,” as in patriarchy.102 It is gained solely by proving its strength, performing miracles or heroic deeds, and by embarking on extraordinary ventures. The “god-like strength” of the hero makes a sovereign break with all traditional or rational norms. In the case of the lie detector, charismatic authority was intimately tied to the myth of invention that was in turn the source of the machine’s mystique and power. Invention was a highly valued commodity within the moral economy of lie detecting, and it played a crucial role in establishing lie detection as a credible and meaningful activity. The title “inventor of the lie detector” conferred status upon its holder and justified and consolidated his charismatic authority. And in turn, the charisma of the invention was itself a crucial component of the lie detector’s spectacular powers.
CONCLUSION
The Hazards of the Will to Truth
The will to truth, which is still going to tempt us to many a
hazardous enterprise; that celebrated veracity of which all
philosophers have hitherto spoken with reverence: what
questions this will to truth has already set before us! What
strange, wicked, questionable questions! It is already a long
story—yet does it not seem as if it has only just begun?
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1886)
“This is not my idea,” he said.
“Yes, Inspector Bryant told us that. But you’re officially the San Francisco Police Department, and it doesn’t believe our unit is to the public benefit.” She eyed him from beneath long black lashes, probably artificial.
Rick said, “A humanoid robot is like any other machine; it can fluctuate between being a benefit and a hazard very rapidly. As a benefit it’s not our problem.”
“But as a hazard,” Rachael Rosen said, “then you come in.”
—Philip K. Dick (1968)
“CHICAGO, Tuesday, March 2.—Joseph Rappaport, murderer of Max Dent, a government informer, died in the electric chair early today after a struggle for a reprieve which had its climax when a lie detector was carried into the death cell and scientists, lawyers, jailers and witnesses stared at tiny needles tracing on a slowly moving paper ribbon what proved to be mute lines of doom.” Thus begins a 1937 New York Times article, “Lie Detector Seals Doom of Murderer.”1 Having won a stay of execution once by order of the State Supreme Court and four times on the order of Governor Horner, Rappaport’s hopes lay with the lie detector, a machine in which the Governor had declared himself to be a “great believer.” “Judge in the test,” enthused the Times, “was Professor Leonard Keeler of the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory of Northwestern University, inventor of the detector, scientifically known as a polygraph.”
Keeler and his party had filed into the cell, according to Newsweek, interrupting a card game between the condemned man and his guards.2 The criminologist “put an odd-looking black box-like machine, about two feet square, on the table” and then tightened a rubber tube around Rappaport’s chest.3 The suspect looked tense “as a rubber sack attached to quarter-inch rubber tubing filled with mercury was wrapped around his upper arm and inflated to midway between systolic and diastolic blood-pressures.” The interrogation began:
“Is your name Rappaport?”
“Yes.”
The stylus flowed evenly across the slow-moving ribbon.
“Did you kill Dent?”
“No.”
The pen dashed off an inch-high peak.
“Is your home in Cook County?”
“Yes.”
The needles graphed an even course.
“Do you know who shot Max Dent?”
“No.”
The needles quivered, flickering jagged lines on the tape—mute lines that sealed a murderer’s fate.4
“Rappaport went into the death chamber at 12.04,” the Times reported. “He was pronounced dead at 12.12.”5
Three months later, on June 8th, 1937, the Times told the story of another troublesome case whose resolution rested with the lie detector. Around 5:30 p.m. the previous evening two boys, aged nine and twelve years old, had stepped into a taxi at Lexington Avenue and Forty-second Street in New York.6 Flashing a ten dollar bill, one of the boys had instructed the driver to take them to a G-Man movie on Broadway. The suspicious driver had instead called a nearby policeman over to his cab. Patrolman Patrick Casey took the boys to the East Fifty-first Street police station for further questioning. While two detectives looked on “with expressions of exaggerated grimness,” the patrolman rolled up the boy’s sleeve, wrapped a towel around his arm and connected the towel with a string to an alarm clock on the windowsill. The detectives pretended to watch the clock intently, while Casey pointed his finger at the suspect and asked him, “Where did you get that money?” The boys quickly confessed to having found the money at home. They were held at the station until their parents came for them. Both agreed “that their experience with the police had been more thrilling than any G-man movie.”7
So we have two lie detector tests, one apparently legitimate, the other not. The Chicago test had been conducted on a convicted murderer, with the State Governor’s blessing, by the great Professor Keeler, a man widely known as the inventor of the lie detector. The New York test had been little more than a crude police station joke, a shameful charade whose intention was to cajole two bewildered boys into admitting their guilt of petty theft.8 In Chicago, justice was seen to be done, while in New York proper procedures were abandoned. The Chicago police used a real lie detector, but their New York counterparts rigged up a f
ake one.
The newspapers may have crowned Leonarde Keeler the inventor of the detector, but he always contended that “there is no such thing as a ‘lie-detector.’”9 The polygraph, he maintained, simply recorded the body’s physiological changes onto a chart, which the skilful examiner must then scrutinize in order to arrive at a “diagnosis” of guilt. Because a person undergoing a lie detector examination “responds almost continuously to his immediate environment, to other individuals, to sounds, odors, pain, and other stimuli factors,” Keeler argued, all attending circumstances must be devoid of “irrelevant factors” if correct procedures were to be followed.10 Drawing an analogy with the medical examination, Keeler believed that the subject of a deception test must refrain from eating or drinking for several hours, rest quietly for fifteen or twenty minutes before the test, and be undisturbed during it: “examinations must be conducted in darkened rooms, or in quiet environs.”11 Thus, even according to Keeler’s criteria, Rappaport’s last minute death chamber lie test was deeply compromised by the attendance of a rowdy group of “scientists, lawyers, jailers and witnesses,” not to mention journalists: the apparently genuine Chicago test displayed some troubling and dubious features.
The Truth Machine Page 23