Certain aspects of the bogus New York test, however, conformed to orthodox polygraph practice. In his 1930 article, “A Method for Detecting Deception,” Keeler argued that suspects should be made wary of the machine and be reminded of the lie detector’s capabilities with the following preamble: “This machine to which you are connected has been used for some years on criminal suspects, and so far has proved a very reliable means of detecting the innocence or guilt of a man, and I’m sure we will not fail in your case.” A single test of ten to fifteen minutes was usually sufficient to ascertain guilt, Keeler suggested, but subsequent procedures could be introduced if necessary. A suspect could be shown the machine’s polygraphic tracings, for example, and asked to account for his emotional stress. Or a second test could be arranged so that the subject would be forced to watch “the excursions of the fluctuating needle.” It was important to utilize a suspect’s fear because “the tell-tale needles will only tend to magnify each excursion as he sees them recorded,” Keeler explained. By this point about seventy-five percent of the guilty suspects confessed. But if a confession was still elusive, “a night incommunicado” would doubtless assist. “The only ‘torture’ involved in such a test,” Keeler clarified, “is self-induced through fear of being caught, and that fear exists whether the man is being cross examined in the usual way or on a blood-pressure apparatus.”12
By enhancing the dramatic atmosphere surrounding their lie detector test, by drawing their suspects’ attention to the machine, and in attempting to produce a confession, the police of the East Fifty-first Street station were following established testing methodology.13 The two aspiring New York petty thieves might have been attached to nothing but a towel and an alarm clock, but they experienced many of the melodramatic features of an orthodox lie detector test. Although these two stories appear to be polar opposites, that opposition is quite unstable. The experiences of Joseph Rappaport and John McLaughlin delineate one of the lie detector’s most pertinent polarities. The instrument symbolizes the enlightened business of crime detection. However, it is oftentimes little more than a source of the darkly comic. The delectable irony of lie detector discourse is that the legitimate and the illegitimate regularly intermingle: this modern science of truth depends on an old-fashioned art of deception.14 This is a discourse in which scientists become celebrities, scientific instruments acquire magical agency, and standardized practices allow the nonviolent to become violent. It is a discourse that blurs distinctions between the eye and the ear, the scientific and the spectacular, the endogenous and the exogenous, and the normal and the pathological. The polygraph’s power is its ability to maintain credibility while tolerating these essential tensions.
Criminology’s first object of knowledge, Homo criminalis, was construed as a degenerate and pathological species, a reviled “other.” Although the belief that the criminal was a biologically flawed type of person was widely held, the theory was emphatically articulated, studied, and promoted by Cesare Lombroso. His notion of the born criminal dominated discussions about criminality from around 1875 until after the turn of the twentieth century. The establishment of criminology as a discipline went hand-in-hand with the conceptualization of criminality as an essentially biological problem. The theory was the touchstone that all investigators had to acknowledge, even if only to criticize. Later depicted by Lombroso as having come to him fully formed, in a flash of insight, a wide range of nineteenth-century intellectual and practical projects, including statistics, psychiatry, prison reform, philanthropy, evolutionism, and degeneration theory had, in fact, made his work possible. Lombroso also mobilized classical mythology, history, literature, and the natural world, not to mention anecdote and folklore in support of his thesis. It was out of this effervescent ether that the solid and apparently steadfast figure of criminal man materialized. Criminal man, then, was the solution to criminology’s first dilemma: crime would be confronted by invoking a eugenic mode of governance for the pathological body of the criminal.
Criminal anthropology had an eye for an arresting visual image and an ear for a compelling story. Yet behind the loquacious rhetoric lay an insecurity, a tension between the desire to govern and the desire for knowledge, and also between science and common sense. Criminology’s charismatic bricolage was unstable, and criminal man’s aetiology, prognosis, and even his existence were under perpetual threat. The dilemma between scientific expertise and charismatic authority—resolved by the mythopoetic figure of Lombroso— was one the lie detector would later inherit.
Criminal anthropologists were fascinated by the female body. In accordance with long-standing beliefs about gender differences, women were considered inherently secretive, deceptive, and duplicitous: they could not be trusted. They were believed to be essentially corporeal beings, enslaved by their bodies. An entrenched undercurrent of Western thought posited a binary opposition between the male rational mind at one pole and the female irrational body at the other. Like the primitive savage—also regarded as less evolved than the European male—women were thought to be insensitive to pain and generally less “sensible” than men, possessing ineffectual emotionalities.15 Whereas women were thought to be in need of governance due to their disruptive biologies, men were thought to be sufficiently rational to be able to suppress their emotional and sexual drives. Criminal anthropology had first sought evidence for criminality in the visible: in tattoos or facial physiognomies or via the assessment of the shapes and sizes of anomalous skulls. But this evidence proved elusive. Having decided that the stigmata of crime might not be written exclusively on the surface of the criminal body, criminology had to look ever deeper inside it for those hypothesized “internal lesions” of criminality. That women apparently exhibited no visible signs of criminality was, paradoxically, another reason why criminology came to regard them as perfect suspects. Criminal anthropology was obsessed with prostitutes; when it came to women, the discipline considered the distinction between the normal and the pathological a matter of quantity not quality. The prostitute’s criminal trade depended on invisibility—hidden deeds, concealed emotions—and yet the nature of her business was relentlessly corporeal. As the epitome of femininity, the prostitute also embodied criminality: degenerate and duplicitous yet devoid of external stigmata.
Criminal anthropology postulated that because criminals were savages living in the midst of modern civilization, they were indifferent to the suffering of others, devoid of empathy, and were less sensitive to pain compared to the law abiding. Incapable of displaying normal emotions, the criminal’s sentiments were vulgar, crude, and unrefined. Criminology, therefore, constructed emotion as either an absence, a deficiency of the criminal mind, or as a pathology, a deviation from the normal. Once the search for visible stigmata of criminality had floundered, an extensive range of physiological instruments was employed to measure the hidden world of pathological emotions. Invisibility, corporeality, femininity, emotionality: this was the discourse of female criminality, a discourse that overlapped with that of hysteria, the most widely-diagnosed female malady at the time. Emotion was the key because it was both concealed within the female body yet also denigrated as rationality’s criminal “other.” The female body came to occupy a numinous position within criminological discourse via the prostitute’s: “Find a solution to the enigma of women, and you will solve the puzzle of criminality!” By offering a solution to this puzzle, the laboratory study of the emotions inadvertently made possible the later development of the lie detector.
Concurrent with the emergence of criminal anthropology was the growing suspicion that crime was a normal if regrettable feature of society. Criminality was regarded by fin-de-siècle novelists as something distressingly ordinary. Criminal anthropology’s naturalization of crime had compromised the age-old distinction between the moral and the immoral. The concept of criminal man as a despised other, a species apart, was quickly challenged by novelists such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson
. The effect of these “Gothic” critiques was to undermine the notion of criminal otherness. In literature the human and the abhuman were inextricably mingled. By 1900, American criminology was also beginning to question the concept of criminal man as a separate kind of human being. University of Chicago sociologist Frances Kellor was convinced of the illegitimacy of conceiving of the criminal as a separate type of person. Using pneumographs and kymographs—“tests of respiration” as she called them— Kellor investigated the emotions of female offenders. Unlike her predecessors, who had also used such instruments, she considered her subjects to be normal, not deviant.
The American press was fascinated with the technology of criminology. From 1900 to 1920, a series of “soul machines,” “truth-compelling machines,” and “machines to cure liars” were described with great enthusiasm. But none of these devices were lie detectors in the sense with which the term was understood after the 1920s, because the predominant ambition was still to understand the pathologies of the intellect, emotional complexes, and, of course, criminal minds. These instruments were focused on studying the aberrant, the abject, the abhuman; their target remained the pathological human— a target that had already been deconstructed by novelists and criticized by sociologists. In the context of eugenics, the dream of criminology was, nevertheless, glimpsed as a real possibility: “There will be no jury, no horde of detectives and witnesses, no charges and countercharges, and no attorney for the defense. These impedimenta of our courts will be unnecessary.”
Frances Kellor’s association of emotion, criminality, and normality within the context of laboratory instrumentation was a significant development. It was only when criminology came to refute the theory of the born criminal that the idea of the lie detector became a real possibility. This refutation occurred first in fin-de-siècle novels and detective fiction during the first decade of the twentieth century, quite a few years before Marston, Larson, and Keeler began their work. During this period, writers such as Melvin Severy, Cleveland Moffett, Charles Walk, Arthur B. Reeve, Edwin Balmer, and William MacHarg all imagined lie detectors well before criminology embarked on solving the practical problems that turned these fantasies into reality. The writers of scientific detective stories no longer had a role for the born criminal, because their “whodunit” plots featured a range of possible suspects, all of whom were apparently equally culpable. Once criminology had accepted that “every crime was entrenched behind a lie”—and no longer the inevitable byproduct of the diseased “criminal mind”—it followed the novelists into accepting that anyone, not just born criminals, were capable of committing crimes. The lie detector was, therefore, made cognizable by the rejection of the obstacle of the born criminal.16 Because that obstacle had first been cleared away in literature, it is appropriate to credit the literary imagination with the creation of the lie detector.
Lie detector discourse has always been conflicted. What characterizes it is not, for example, an uncompromising attempt to amass empirical evidence to refute its reputation for brutality. Although use of this new technology promised to replace the third degree with scientific humanitarianism, an element of intimidation from the sweat box had its uses. Liberation and subjugation coexist with this technique. Although the instrument was often depicted as an automatic truth machine, the attending human expert could never become entirely obscured. The “charismatic authority” of the expert—to invoke a deliberate oxymoron—was vitally important to the success of the enterprise. The discourse is best understood as one that posits an interrelated series of dilemmatic oppositions between the broadly scientific and empirical and the largely theatrical and performative.17 The lie detector emerged when and where it did because the cultural conditions were right. The technology could not have emerged in Britain because “criminal man” couldn’t establish a foothold there and also because even toward the end of the nineteenth century, lying was not regarded as particularly problematic by the professional and bourgeois classes.18 In America, however, a Puritanic intolerance of lying (or, at least, a publically proclaimed intolerance of lying), together with a progressive faith in the utopian potential of technology, coincided with the professionalization of the police and the growth of a crime-obsessed sensationalist media. These forces, together with the democratic privileging of the lie as the central problem for criminology and detective crime fiction alike, created conditions for the emergence of the lie detector. If the technology was “socially constructed”, then it was so thanks to those excursions that were made back and forth across the boundary demarcating criminology from the wider culture. The instrument’s architecture, in other words, lay on the fertile boundary where criminology interacted with its public. In this sense, the lie detector was inherently transgressive. It is not so much that the lie detector was created as a result of “boundary work”—the attempt to demarcate science from nonscience19 —but rather that a series of deviations back and forth across boundaries—between nations, continents, disciplines, genres, genders, modalities of power, and so on—created the discursive space out of which the practice finally emerged. It was the persistent crossing of boundaries that was so productive, rather than the creation of those boundaries.
Modern criminology was itself created at the intersection of two enterprises: a “Lombrosian project” and a “governmental project.”20 The Lombrosian project proposed that the solution to crime lay in correctly demarcating criminals from noncriminals. The governmental project proposed that in order to administer justice in an equitable way, power must be deployed to take into account the nature of the criminal. Criminology thus emerged out of a double predicament: the solution to the dilemma of governance could only appear once the dilemma of the nature of the criminal had been confronted. The dilemmas of science and governance, then, represent criminology’s two foundations. The history of criminology, as well as that of the lie detector, can be understood in terms of how subsequent developments within the discipline posited different solutions to these tensions.
Lie detector discourse was characterized by several interrelated dilemmas. One set, focused on the nature of science, asked, “What is the appropriate object of knowledge?” and “How should knowledge be created?” The other set, focused on the nature of power, asked, “What is the appropriate target of power?” and “How should power be deployed?” Different actors responded to these questions in accordance with their own circumstances, sympathies, and positioning within the discourse. Those who were involved with lie detection had to confront these contradictory impulses.
Constructed on the borderlands between criminology and the wider culture, the lie detector retained its Januslike ability to look in two directions at once. Amid the smoke and mirrors, one thing is certain: the lie detector was not the invention of any one individual. It is not credible to think of it as a scientific “invention” at all. Most of the machine’s constituent parts (the sphygmomanometer, the galvanometer, the pneumograph, and so on) had long been in use within criminology, where they had been used to investigate the multiple pathologies of criminal man. Nevertheless, the myth of “invention” played a fundamental supporting role within lie detector discourse. The term that provided invention’s dilemmatic opposite—tradition—was only deployed by the machine’s advocates when discussing the history of the lie. Whereas the lie was an ancient vice, they argued, the lie detector was modern. To some extent the lie detector was an artifactual creation of the term “lie detector.”
All inventions, real or not, require an inventor. Two exuberant personalities came to embody this aspect of the technology: the criminologist Leonarde Keeler and the psychologist William Moulton Marston. These charismatic individuals skillfully resolved some of the lie detector’s dilemmas of science and governance. Like all the instrument’s advocates, they emphasized the instrument’s scientific credentials and promoted its use as an alternative to the brutalities of the third degree. They privileged the chart as the locus of truth and described the machine in terms of metaphor
s derived from the law courts. Both thought the instrument could assist in the administration of business and politics. But Keeler and Marston, and indeed Larson too, confronted these dilemmas in different ways. They took different positions on whether the instrument was a magic black box (as Keeler emphasized), whether it could intervene in romantic affairs of the heart (as Marston claimed), or whether it had a diagnostic role to play in medicine (as Larson suggested).
Table 1. The Lie Detector’s Discursive Architecture
In his insightful paper on the instrument’s role in solving the problem of trust in twentieth-century America, Ken Alder argues that the history of the lie detector “is part of the history of how America coped with the rise of a mass public, on the one hand, and the rise of new large-scale organizations on the other.”21 Alder suggests that the technology was part of a wider discourse that was itself an “uneasy hybridization” of two different strategies of expertise. The first strategy, open science, valued the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and its dissemination via meritocratic academic channels into the public domain. The second strategy, proprietary knowledge-making, took social utility as its starting point but sought to sell high value knowledge, expertise, or power to interested authorities. While Keeler embraced the latter strategy by patenting and marketing the “Keeler Polygraph” and a training course to go with it, Larson adopted the former strategy by using the instrument as a tool of psychiatric diagnosis. When, in 1924, for example, Keeler had informed Larson that he thought the lie detector was “altogether too much in its infancy to start anything in a commercial way,” Larson had responded by praising Keeler’s restraint and noting that science and profit were in opposition: “You did right to keep out of the commercial proposition,” he wrote, “for I think it would ruin you scientifically.”22 Although Larson would later dismiss the commercialization of polygraphy as “unethical,” the two approaches were not mutually exclusive in that “each strategy depended on the other, and each was wracked by internal tensions not easily overcome.”23 Keeler could complain that Marston’s work was scientifically worthless, as Fred Inbau, a close associate of Keeler, could claim that the Harvard-trained psychologist Marston lacked scientific credentials. In response, Marston could casually dismiss the myth of invention while claiming to have invented a technique of his own. As he was marketing proprietary knowledge in his populist book, The Lie Detector Test, he was claiming credibility for having discovered a scientific principle.
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