67. Ibid., 217.
68. Ibid., 213.
69. Ibid., 216.
70. Frances Alice Kellor, “Sex in Crime,” International Journal of Ethics 9, no. 1 (October 1898): 74–85.
71. Ibid., 76.
72. Ibid., 81.
73. Ibid., 82.
74. Frances A. Kellor, “Psychological and Environmental Study of Women Criminals I,” The American Journal of Sociology 5, no. 4 (January 1900): 527–43; Frances A. Kellor, “Psychological and Environmental Study of Women Criminals II,” The American Journal of Sociology 5, no. 5 (March 1900): 671–82.
75. Kellor, “Psychological and Environmental Study I,” 528.
76. Kellor, “Psychological and Environmental Study II,” 682.
77. Kellor, “Psychological and Environmental Study I,” 529.
78. Ibid., 530.
79. Ibid., 531.
80. Ibid., 532.
81. Ibid., 532.
82. Ibid., 536.
83. Kellor, “Psychological and Environmental Study II,” 679 (emphasis in original).
84. Ibid., 681.
85. Kellor, “Psychological and Environmental Study I,” 541.
86. Ibid., 541–42.
87. Ibid., 542.
88. Kellor, “Psychological and Environmental Study II,” 677.
89. Ibid., 677.
90. It is perhaps significant, given the hitherto male-dominated enterprise of criminology, that Kellor was female. According to Alison Young, fin-de-siècle discourses such as psychoanalysis, criminology, and sexology were convinced that the puzzle of women could be solved thanks to “the suspicion that women are known to themselves, enigmatic only across the divide of sexual difference.” Young, Imagining Crime, 31.
91. Kellor was the daughter of an impoverished widow. She graduated from Cornell Law School in 1897. A political activist and writer, Kellor founded the National League for the Protection of Colored Women in 1906 and by 1908 was the secretary of the New York State Immigration Commission. She wrote a dozen books and numerous articles, especially in popular periodicals of the progressive era. She was also a founder member and first vicepresident of the American Arbitration Association. See “Kellor, Frances Alice (1873–1952),” in Doris Weatherford, American Women’s History: An A to Z of People, Organizations, Issues, and Events (New York: Prentice Hall, 1994), 195–96; and Lucille O’Connell, “Kellor, Frances,” in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 393–95.
Chapter 5. “To Classify and Analyze Emotional Persons”: The Mistake of the Machines
Epigraph. Gilbert K. Chesterton, “The Mistake of the Machines,” in The Complete Father Brown (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1914/1982), 298.
1. Frank Marshall White, “The Soul Machine,” Harper’s Weekly 52, December 19, 1908, 12–13, 32.
2. Charles Edmonds Walk, The Yellow Circle (New York: A. L. Burt Co., 1909).
3. “Discovery Made by a Swiss Doctor May Play an Important Part in Criminal Trials,” New York Times, June 9, 1907 V, 8.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Eva Neumann and Richard Blanton, “The Early History of Electrodermal Research,” Psychophysiology 6, no. 4 (1970): 453–75.
10. E. Prideaux, “The Psychogalvanic Reflex: A Review,” Brain 43 (1920): 50.
11. Ibid.
12. Frederick Peterson and Carl G. Jung, “Psycho-Physical Investigations with the Galvanometer and Pneumograph in Normal and Insane Individuals,” Brain 30 (1907): 155; Neumann and Blanton “The Early History of Electrodermal Research,” 453–75.
13. Quoted in Paul V. Trovillo, “A History of Lie Detection,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 30 (1939): 104.
14. Frederick Peterson, “The Galvanometer as a Measurer of Emotions,” The British Medical Journal (September 28, 1907): 804.
15. Carl G. Jung, “On Psychophysical Relations of the Associative Experiment,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 1 (1907): 247.
16. Trovillo reports that Veraguth “was one of the first to make word-association tests with the galvanometer.” Trovillo, “A History of Lie Detection,” 105.
17. “Discovery Made by a Swiss Doctor” V, 8.
18. For the history of the clinical experiment see Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 52–54.
19. “Emotional complex” was a term Jung had introduced by amalgamating Theodor Ziehen’s “gefühlsbetonter vorstellungskomplex” and Pierre Janet’s “ideé fixe subconsciente.” See Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1970), 149, 692–94.
20. “Discovery Made by a Swiss Doctor” V, 8.
21. Peterson, “The Galvanometer as a Measurer of Emotions,” 804. See also Frederick Peterson, “The Galvanometer in Psychology,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 35 (1908): 273–74.
22. Peterson, “The Galvanometer as a Measurer of Emotions,” 805. See also Knight Dunlap’s critical review “Galvanometric Deflections with Electrodes Applied to the Animal Body,” Psychological Bulletin 7 (1910): 174–77. “The striking thing about all the work on psychogalvanism is that the enthusiasts have either been unable to conceive of the simplest and most obvious check experiments, or have been unwilling to carry them out” (176).
23. E. G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, Inc., 1957), 546.
24. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, 527–28.
25. E. W. Scripture, “Detection of the Emotions by the Galvanometer,” Journal of the American Medical Association (April 11, 1907): 1164 (emphasis added).
26. Jung, “On Psychophysical Relations of the Associative Experiment,” 247.
27. Ibid.
28. According to Kurt Danziger, the meaning of term “personality” as used by Jung would have still suggested a pathological dimension. Personality as a quality of the ordinary (nonpathological) business leader or charismatic movie star had yet to emerge. See Kurt Danziger, Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found its Language (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 124–33.
29. Jung, “On Psychophysical Relations of the Associative Experiment,” 250.
30. Peterson and Jung, “Psycho-Physical Investigations with the Galvanometer.”
31. Charles Ricksher and Carl G. Jung, “Further Investigations on the Galvanic Phenomenon and Respiration in Normal and Insane Individuals,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 2 (1907): 203.
32. Ibid., 215.
33. Peterson and Jung, “Psycho-Physical Investigations with the Galvanometer,” 172–73.
34. Ibid., 175.
35. “Invents Machines for ‘Cure of Liars,’” New York Times, September 11, 1907, 9.
36. Ibid.
37. “‘I Can Tell if You’re a Liar!’: Harvard Professor with Strenuous Name Invents Machine that Will Make Him Famous,” New York Times, September 15, 1907, E8.
38. Hugo Münsterberg, “Traces of Emotion and the Criminal,” Cosmopolitan 44, April 1908, 528.
39. Hugo Münsterberg, On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime (New York: Clark Boardman, 1927), 99–100. First published 1908.
40. “A Scientific Crime Detector,” Scientific American Supplement No. 1666 64, December 7, 1907, 363.
41. Quoted in Mathew Hale, Human Science and Social Order: Hugo Münsterberg and the Origins of Applied Psychology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 119.
42. Jutta Spillmann and Lothar Spillmann, “The Rise and Fall of Hugo Münsterberg,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29 (1993): 329.
43. See, for example, Hugo Münsterberg, “Hypnotism and Crime,” McClure’s Magazine 30, January 1908, 317–22; and Hugo Münsterberg, “The Prevention of
Crime” McClure’s Magazine 30, April 1908, 750–56.
44. Hugo Münsterberg “Nothing But The Truth,” McClure’s Magazine 29, September 1907, 532–36.
45. “A Psychologist’s Judicial Warning,” New York Times, August 25, 1907 II, 16.
46. Münsterberg, “Nothing But The Truth,” 536.
47. Hugo Münsterberg, “The Third Degree,” McClure’s Magazine 29, October 1907, 614–22.
48. Münsterberg, “The Third Degree,” 614.
49. Ibid., 615.
50. Ibid.
51. Ruth Benschop and Douwe Draaisma, “In Pursuit of Precision: The Calibration of Minds and Machines in Late Nineteenth-century Psychology,” Annals of Science 57 (2000): 1–25.
52. Münsterberg, “The Third Degree,” 615.
53. Ibid., 617.
54. Ken Alder, The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (New York: Free Press, 2007), 47.
55. Münsterberg, “The Third Degree,” 619.
56. Ibid., 622.
57. “Applied Psychology and Its Possibilities,” New York Times, September 22, 1907 V, 9.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. White, “The Soul Machine.”
62. Ibid., 12.
63. “Discovery Made by a Swiss Doctor” V, 8.
64. White, “The Soul Machine.”
65. Ibid.,12.
66. “Mr. B- was asked to charge his mind with the crime of having stolen the cigar-box and the articles it contained, and to produce himself with a conscience as guilty as possible at Dr. Peterson’s office the next evening, prepared to resist all efforts to extort his unholy secret from him.” White, “The Soul Machine,” 13.
67. O. Mezger, “Photography in the Service of the Law,” Scientific American Supplement No. 1765, October 30, 1909, 284.
68. Ibid.
69. “Why the Great Scientist will Supersede the Great Detective,” Current Literature 51, September 1911, 279–81.
70. “Why the Great Scientist will Supersede the Great Detective,” 280.
71. “Laboratory Study of Criminals,” The Literary Digest 45, November 16, 1912, 898.
72. Edward A. Ayres, “Measuring Thought with a Machine,” Harper’s Weekly 52, May 9, 1908, 27 (emphasis in original).
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid.
76. “Electric Machine to Tell Guilt of Criminals,” New York Times, September 10, 1911, V, 6.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid.
80. Raymond E. Fancher, The Intelligence Men: Makers of the IQ Controversy (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1985), 108.
81. Nicole Hahn Rafter, Creating Born Criminals (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 143.
82. Ibid., 145.
83. Ibid., 136.
84. Leila Zenderland, “The Debate over Diagnosis: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Medical Acceptance of Intelligence Testing,” in Psychological Testing and American Society 1890–1930, ed. Michael M. Sokal (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 59.
85. John A. Popplestone and Marion White McPherson, “Pioneer Psychology Laboratories in Clinical Settings,” in Explorations in the History of Psychology in the United States, ed. Josef Brozek (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1984), 241.
86. Rafter, Creating Born Criminals, 145.
87. Ibid., 146.
88. Ibid., 137.
89. “‘There Is No Criminal Type,’ Says Prison Expert.” New York Times, November 2, 1913, SM13.
90. Arthur E. Fink, Causes of Crime: Biological Theories in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1938), 244.
91. Fink, Causes of Crime, 243–49; John L. Gillin, “Economic Factors in the Making of the Criminal,” Journal of Social Forces 3, no.2 (January 1925): 248–55.
92. Fink, Causes of Crime, 251.
93. “Psychology Squad Latest Police Aid,” New York Times, October 30, 1915, 5.
94. Arthur B. Reeve claimed that the addition of science to crime in detective stories “began when several writers tried to apply psychology, as developed by Prof. Hugo Muenssterberg [sic] of Harvard and Prof. Walter Dill Scott of Northwestern University, to either actual or hypothetical cases of crime.” Arthur B. Reeve (1913) quoted in John Locke, ed., From Ghouls to Gangsters: The Career of Arthur B. Reeve, vol. 2 (Elkhorn, CA: Off-Trail Publications, 2007), 31.
95. Robert Sampson, Yesterday’s Faces: A Study of Series Characters in the Early Pulp Magazines II, Strange Days (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1984), 4.
96. Sampson, Yesterday’s Faces, 16.
97. Ibid., 11–12.
98. Ibid., 47. In “The Supreme Test” Wycherley subjects his subject to a blood pressure test to see if he is a true heir to a fortune or a fraudulent claimant. Sampson, Yesterday’s Faces, 48.
99. Ibid., 16.
100. Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg, The Achievements of Luther Trant (Boston: Small, Maynard and Co., 1910), 4.
101. Sampson, Yesterday’s Faces, 20.
102. Balmer and MacHarg, The Achievements of Luther Trant, 169.
103. Ibid., Foreword.
104. “The Red Dress,” in Balmer and MacHarg, The Achievements of Luther Trant, 76.
105. Ibid., 88–89.
106. Ibid., 95.
107. Reeve, retitled as “The Scientific Cracksman,” for Amazing Detective Tales (August 1930).
108. Balmer and MacHarg, The Achievements of Luther Trant, 355.
109. Compare, for example, “I believe that in the study of mental diseases these men are furnishing the knowledge upon which future criminologists will build to make the detection of crime an absolute certainty. Some day there will be no jury, no detectives, no witnesses, no attorneys. The state will merely submit all suspects to tests of scientific instruments like these, and as these instruments can not make mistakes or tell lies their evidence will be conclusive of guilt or innocence.” “The Crimeometer” 14, in Arthur B. Reeve, The Dream Doctor, The Craig Kennedy Series (New York: Heart’s International Library, 1914, originally published December 1912), 217; and “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. The State will merely submit all suspects in a case to the tests of scientific instruments, and as these instruments cannot be made to make mistakes nor tell lies, their evidence will be conclusive of guilt or innocence, and the court will deliver sentence accordingly.” “Electric Machine to Tell Guilt of Criminals,” New York Times, September 10, 1911 V, 6.
110. Quoted in Sampson, Yesterday’s Faces, 23. The fictional character eerily anticipated William Moulton Marston who in real-life combined science with law and had “both the University and Third Avenue melodrama in his make-up.” As Marston would later also do, Kennedy at one point gives a test to a woman while she watches a movie. See Reeve, The Dream Doctor.
111. Reeve was also involved with silent movie serials, some of which featured the Kennedy character. A television series, “Craig Kennedy, Criminologist,” was devised in the early 1950s.
112. Sampson, Yesterday’s Faces, 25.
113. Arthur B. Reeve, “The Truth Detector” in The Treasure Train (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1917), 29.
114. Arthur B. Reeve, “The Scientific Cracksman” in The Silent Bullet (New York: Dodd Mead, 1912).
115. Quoted in LeRoy Lad Panek, The Origins of the American Detective Story (Jefferson: McFarland, 2006), 105.
116. Charles Edmonds Walk, The Yellow Circle (New York: A. L. Burt Co., 1909), 69.
117. Arthur B. Reeve, “The Lie Detector” in The War Terror (Hearst’s International Library Co., New York, 1915). The story was first published in Cosmopolitan magazine in November 1914 but was only given the title “The Lie Detector” when published as chapter 27 in Arthur B. Reeve, The War Terror (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1915), 273–80. It was
also apparently reprinted in The Boston Daily Globe (February 25, 1917). Reeve also wrote stories around this time with titles like “The Detectaphone,” “The Crimeometer,” “The Truth Detector,” and “The Love Meter.” See John Locke, ed., From Ghouls to Gangsters, 189.
118. Cleveland Moffett, Through the Wall (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1909), 171.
119. Melvin L. Severy, The Mystery of June 13th (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1905), 523–24.
120. Although the criminologist Hans Gross had observed, “a large part of the criminalist’s work is nothing more than a battle against lies,” his discussion of the lie made no mention of its susceptibility to scientific detection. Particularly pertinent to criminology, however, were the lies of the “insane paralytic,” the hysteric, the epileptic, and the pregnant woman. Prostitutes were apparently addicted to a particular form of lie which Lombroso and other criminologists regarded as “a professional mark of identification.” The lie detector would be completely unconcerned with such “pathoformic lies” and how they signified personological types. Hans Gross, Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students, trans. Horace M. Kallen (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1911), 474–80. First published 1905.
Chapter 6. “Some of the darndest lies you ever heard”: Who Invented the Lie Detector?
Epigraphs. Charles Edmonds Walk, The Yellow Circle (New York: A. L. Burt Co., 1909). “What electric investigative device was invented by Nova Scotia-born John Augustus Larson in 1921?” Trivial Pursuit, Genus II question (Canadian edition).
1. Anne Roller, “Vollmer and His College Cops,” Survey 62 (1929): 304.
2. “Inventor of Lie Detector Traps Bride,” San Francisco Examiner, August 9, 1922. Quoted in Ken Alder, The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (New York: Free Press, 2007), 11.
3. “The Lie-Detector,” The Literary Digest 3 (December 26, 1931): 35.
4. John A. Larson, “The Lie Detector: Its History and Development,” Journal of the Michigan State Medical Society 37 (1938): 893–97.
5. Albert A. Hopkins, “Science Trails The Criminal,” Scientific American 146, February 6, 1932, 96.
6. “Lie Tracer is Honored,” New York Times, January 21, 1933, 17.
The Truth Machine Page 29