The Truth Machine
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41. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, July 7, 1948, AVP.
43. “Principal Wrecks His ‘Lie Detector,’” New York Times, September 25, 1936, 25.
44. Jaycox, “Scientific Detection of Lies,” 370.
45. Murray, “Two Simple Ways to Make a Lie Detector,” 63.
46. “Crime Wave? Try Vollmer’s Educated Cops,” The Literary Digest 101, June 29, 1929, 33–37.
47. “‘Lie Detector’ Doesn’t,” Science News Letter 49, March 30, 1946, 207.
48. “‘Lie Detector’ Traps Philadelphia Youth,” New York Times, July 7, 1931, 23.
49. Johnston, “The Magic Lie Detector I,” 9, 73.
50. Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg, The Achievements of Luther Trant (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1910), 169.
51. Dyche, “Science in the Detection of Crime,” 53.
52. “Detecting Liars,” The Literary Digest 114, October 22, 1932, 22.
53. “Catching Criminals With ‘Lie-Detector,’” The Literary Digest 119, February 23, 1935, 17.
54. Inbau, “The ‘Lie-Detector,’” 83.
55. “Polygraph Proof,” 10.
56. Pringle, “How ‘Good’ Is Any Lie?,” 75.
57. “Lie Detector Seals Doom of Murderer,” New York Times, March 2, 1937, 44.
58. A. A. Lewis, “Looking for an Honest Man,” Scientific Monthly 49, 1939, 269, 270.
59. Jaycox, “Scientific Detection of Lies,” 372.
60. Robinson, “Science Gets The Confession,” 17.
61. “‘Lie Detector’ Tried on Bomb Suspects,” New York Times, July 25, 1931, 15.
62. “Polygraph Proof,” 10.
63. “Lie Detector: Marks in Ink Final Judges for Murder Case,” 34.
64. Ken Alder, The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (New York: Free Press, 2007), 82.
65. Johnston, “The Magic Lie Detector I,” 9.
66. Rufus P. Turner, “Crime Detection,” Radio News 30, 1943, 20.
67. McEvoy, “The Lie Detector Goes into Business,” 70.
68. Pringle, “How ‘Good’ Is Any Lie?,” 75, 76.
69. Jaycox, “Lies-Truths,” 9.
70. Lewis, “Looking for an Honest Man,” 268.
71. Pringle, “How ‘Good’ Is Any Lie?,” 76.
72. “Spurn Lie Detector, Detectives Demoted,” New York Times, July 13, 1938, 4.
73. Johnston, “The Magic Lie Detector III,” 101.
74. “‘Lie Detector’ Used in Maine,” New York Times, October 12, 1935, 3.
75. “Lie Detector Proves Bloodhounds Are Liars,” New York Times, November 11, 935, 6.
76. Eloise Keeler, The Lie Detector Man: The Career and Cases of Leonarde Keeler (Boston: Telshare Publishing, 1984), chap. 13.
77. “Lie-Detector Test Asked By Prisoner,” New York Times, January 6, 1935, Section IV, 4.
78. “Hauptmann Pleads for a Truth Test,” New York Times, December 17, 1935, 3.
79. “Gov. Hoffman Urges Lie-Detector Test,” New York Times, January 24, 1936, 40. According to Ken Alder, Orlando Scott, John Larson, and Keeler were all angling to submit Hauptmann to a lie detector test. Alder, The Lie Detectors, 148.
80. “Coogan and Fiancée Robbed in Chicago,” New York Times, February 13, 1936, 25.
81. “Londes Bans Lie Test,” New York Times, November 8, 1949, 38.
82. See, for example, Inbau, “The ‘Lie-Detector.’”
83. Marston, The Lie Detector Test, 177.
84. Johnston, “The Magic Lie Detector III,” 102.
85. “Pros and Cons of the Lie Detector,” New York Times, August 22, 1948, IV, 7.
86. Dyche, “Science in the Detection of Crime,” 53.
87. “Admits Lie Detector in Compensation Case,” New York Times, August 20, 1935, 5.
88. “Lie Detector Seals Doom of Murderer,” 44.
89. “Polygraph Proof,” 9.
90. “Lie Detector Gains in Use,” New York Times, July 28, 1935, IV, 11.
91. “Lie Detector Proves Bloodhounds Are Liars,” 6.
92. “Truth Wanted,” Time 43, January 10, 1944, 60.
93. “Lie-Detecting,” Outlook and Independent 153, December 4, 1929, 533.
94. Jaycox, “Scientific Detection of Lies,” 373.
95. “In the Driftway,” The Nation 129, December 11, 1929, 719.
96. “Lie Detection,” Living Age 348, March 1935, 92.
97. Tom White, “Every Crime Is Entrenched Behind a Lie,” Scientific American 133, 1925, 298–99.
98. Marston, The Lie Detector Test, “Acknowledgments.”
99. Balmer and MacHarg, The Achievements of Luther Trant, 25.
100. Trovillo, “A History of Lie Detection,” 876.
101. Marvin S. Bowman, “New Machine Detects Liars,” Boston Sunday Advertiser, May 8, 1921, B3.
102. Frederick L. Collins, “The Future Looks Dark for Liars,” Collier’s, August 16, 1924, 7.
103. Anne Roller, “Vollmer and His College Cops,” Survey 62, 1929, 304. The photograph was a still from an educational movie made in Berkeley in which Chief Vollmer and his staff played star roles.
104. John A. Larson, Lying and its Detection: A Study of Deception and Deception Tests (Glen Ridge: Patterson Smith, 1932), fig. 1.
105. O’Leary, “A Criminologist to the Rescue,” 22.
106. Fred E Inbau, “The ‘Lie-Detector,’” Scientific Monthly 40, 1935, 82; Albert A. Hopkins, “Science Trails The Criminal,” Scientific American 146, February 6, 1932, 96.
107. “The Week in Science: Detecting Lies of Criminals,” New York Times, January 13, 1935, Section VIII, 4.
108. Murray, “Two Simple Ways To Make A Lie Detector,” 63.
109. Wayne Biddle, “The Deception of Detection,” Discover 7, March 1986, 26.
110. Johnston, “The Magic Lie Detector I,” 9.
111. “Lie Detector Tests on Workers,” Business Week, April 28, 1951, 24.
112. Geoffrey C. Bunn, “The Hazards of the Will to Truth: A History of the Lie Detector,” PhD diss., York University, Toronto, 1998, 245.
113. John E. Reid and Fred E. Inbau, Truth and Deception: The Polygraph (“Lie Detection”) Technique (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1977), 5.
114. James Allan Matté, The Art and Science of the Polygraph Technique (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1980), fig. 67, 132; Paul L. Wilhelm and F. Donald Burns, Lie Detection with Electrodermal Response, 5th ed. (Michigan City, IN: B and W Associates, 1954).
115. Trovillo, Keeler and Reid, and Inbau all employed office secretaries for the posed photographs. See, for example, Keeler, Lie Detector Man, 69.
116. Marston, The Lie Detector Test, 113, 115, 114.
117. “A Machine to Measure Lies,” Look, January 4, 1938, 29.
118. “It Really Understands Women,” newspaper clipping (May 1938), in Boder Museum Papers, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron, OH.
119. “The metaphorical associations of (un)veiling are rich and diverse, going far beyond their direct connections with scientific knowledge, encompassing religion (nuns, ideas of revelation, the cover of a chalice), clothing, crime, mystery, horror and deceit of all kinds.” Ludmilla Jordanova, “Nature Unveiling before Science,” in Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 91. See also Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983).
120. See for example Matté, The Art and Science of the Polygraph Test, fig. 67, 132; and Reid and Inbau, Truth and Deception, fig. 1, 5. Reid and Inbau also discuss some of the potential hazards of attaching the pneumographic tube to women (22, footnote 28).
121. Reid and Inbau, Truth and Deception, 152.
122. Matté, The Art and Science of the Polygraph Technique, 133; Reid and Inbau, Truth and Deception, 7.
123. “Popular electronics” for example, traditionally a mal
e activity, has often provided instructions on how to build a lie detector. See Murray, “Two Simple Ways to Make a Lie Detector”; Edwin Bohr, “Lie Detector,” Radio and Television News 49, 1953, 56–57.
124. Dori J. Pearl, “Why a Female Polygraphist?” The Journal of Polygraph Science 10 (September-October 1975): 1.
125. Roland Barthes, “Einstein’s Brain,” in Mythologies (London: Paladin Books, 1985), 77.
Chapter 8. “A bally hoo side show at the fair”: The Spectacular Power of Expertise
Epigraphs. “Lie Detector ‘Tells All,’” Life, November 21, 1938, 65. Eloise Keeler, The Lie Detector Man: The Career and Cases of Leonarde Keeler (Boston: Telshare Publishing, 1984), 28.
1. “How a Lie Detector Works,” Look, August 31, 1937, 23.
2. William Moulton Marston, “Would YOU Dare Take These Tests?” Look, December 6, 1938, 16.
3. Frederick L. Collins, “The Future Looks Dark for Liars,” Collier’s, August 16, 1924, 26.
4. On Marston see Geoffrey C. Bunn, “The Lie Detector, Wonder Woman and Liberty: The Life and Work of William Moulton Marston,” History of the Human Sciences 10 (1997): 91–119.
5. The rejection of the systolic blood pressure deception test in the Frye v. United States case on the grounds of its insufficient acceptance among scientific authorities was a landmark ruling, because it inadvertently established the legal criteria for the admissibility of scientific evidence. In 1979 the Kansas Supreme Court asserted: “The Frye test has been accepted as the standard in practically all of the courts of this country which have considered the question of the admissibility of new scientific evidence.” J. E. Starrs, “‘A Still-Life Watercolor’: Frye v. United States,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 27 (1982): 685.
6. “William Moulton Marston,” Harvard Class of 1915, 25th Anniversary Report (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library, 1940), 480–82.
7. William Moulton Marston, “The Psychonic Theory of Consciousness,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 21 (1926): 161–69; Marston, “Consciousness, Motation, and Emotion,” Psyche 29 (1927): 40–52; Marston, “Motor Consciousness as a Basis for Emotion,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 22 (1927): 140–50; Marston, “Primary Colours and Primary Emotions,” Psyche 30 (1927): 4–33; Marston, “Primary Emotions,” Psychological Review 34 (1927): 336–63; Marston, “Materialism, Vitalism and Psychology,” Psyche 31 (1928): 15–34.
8. “Blondes Lose Out in Film Love Test,” New York Times, January 31, 1928, 25.
9. “Marston, William Moulton,” Encyclopedia of American Biography, n.s. 7 (New York: The American Historical Society, 1937), 24.
10. William Moulton Marston, “Science Derides the ‘Love-Slave’ Verdict, Crying ‘Woman is the Man’s Love-Master,’” Chicago American, December 22, 1934, magazine section.
11. Ibid. (emphasis in original).
12. Jutta Spillmann and Lothar Spillmann, “The Rise and Fall of Hugo Münsterberg,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29 (1993): 329.
13. William Moulton Marston, The Lie Detector Test (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1938), 46–47.
14. William Moulton Marston, “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics,” American Scholar 13 (1944): 42–43.
15. Mike Benton, The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History (Dallas: Taylor Publishing Co., 1989), 32.
16. Wonder Woman appeared in All Star Comics, Sensation Comics, Comic Calvacade, and Wonder Woman. See Benton, The Comic Book in America, 32–36.
17. Peggy le Boutillier, “The Amazons are Coming,” The Woman, July 1943, 66–67. In 1944 the character was syndicated: “Wonder Woman Joins Superman-Batman in National Newspaper Syndication,” Independent News 1, no. 3 (April 1944): 3, MSS 1618B RB NMAH William Moulton Marston, “‘Wonder Woman’: Selected Continuities” (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Libraries, 1942–1970).
18. For a selection of Marston’s stories see Charles Moulton [William Moulton Marston] Wonder Woman (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston and Warner Books, 1972. First published 1943–49).
19. Bunn, “The Lie Detector, Wonder Woman and Liberty.”
20. His sexual “endocrine” theories were in keeping with what most popular psychology was promoting during the 1920s and 1930s. See John C. Burnham, “The New Psychology: From Narcissism to Social Control,” in Paths into American Culture: Psychology, Medicine, and Morals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. First published 1968); Burnham, How Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science and Health in the United States (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 98–99.
21. “Lie Detector ‘Tells All,’” 65.
22. Marston might have persuaded the readers of Life magazine of the lie detector’s capabilities, but he didn’t convince the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Writing to explain how the Gillette advert had come about, an FBI Special Agent told FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in July 1939 that Marston “stood to make around thirty thousand dollars for his part in the entire scheme.” At the bottom of the letter someone, possibly Hoover, scrawled “I always thought this fellow Marston was a phony and this proves it.” FBI File on William Moulton Marston, http://antipolygraph.org/documents/marston-fbi-file.pdf (accessed April 3, 2008).
23. For similar “confessional” autobiographical works by polygraphists see Robert J. Ferguson Jr., The Scientific Informer (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1971); and Chris Gugas, The Silent Witness: A Polygraphist’s Casebook (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979).
24. Marston, The Lie Detector Test, 87.
25. Ibid., 7.
26. Ibid., chap. 2.
27. Historians doubt the existence of a “crime wave” in 1930s, attributing the sense of national emergency to a few spectacular and well-publicized events like the St. Valentine’s Day massacre and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Supported by the press, Hoover’s FBI did much to whip up national hysteria. In 1933 two criminologists asserted, “No support is found for the belief that an immense crime wave has engulfed the United States.” Quoted in Samuel Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform: The Emergence of Professionalism (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1977), 152.
28. Marston, The Lie Detector Test, 15.
29. Ibid., 17, 16, 99, 103, 29, 132, 133, 142.
30. Charles Keeler to August Vollmer, March 14, 1930, August Vollmer Papers, ca. 19181955, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California (hereafter AVP).
31. Eloise Keeler, The Lie Detector Man: The Career and Cases of Leonarde Keeler (Boston: Telshare Publishing, 1984), 12.
32. Ken Alder, The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (New York: Free Press, 2007), 55.
33. Joseph G. Woods, “Introduction,” in Law Enforcement in Los Angeles: Los Angeles Police Department Annual Report, 1924, ed. August Vollmer (New York: Arno Press, 1974.)
34. It was Jacques Loeb who had introduced Vollmer to European criminologists such as Hans Gross. See Gene E. Carte and Elaine H. Carte, Police Reform in the United States: The Era of August Vollmer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Alfred Parker suggests that it was Gross’ discussion of lying that inspired Vollmer to instruct his department to build a lie detector. Alfred Parker, The Berkeley Police Story (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1972).
35. Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform, chap. 4.
36. Carte and Carte, Police Reform, 45.
37. Thomas J. Deakin, Police Professionalism: The Renaissance of American Law Enforcement (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1988), 89.
38. Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform, 82.
39. Carte and Carte, Police Reform, 57.
40. Quoted in Woods, Law Enforcement in Los Angeles, 162.
41. August Vollmer, The Police and Modern Society (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1936), 222.
42. James F. Richardson, Urban Police in the United States (Port Washington, NY: National University Publications, 1974), 135.
43. Walke
r, A Critical History of Police Reform, chap. 4.
44. Alder, The Lie Detectors, 76–77.
45. Ibid., 79.
46. Charles Keeler to August Vollmer, December 23, 1929, AVP.
47. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, September 17, 1937, AVP.
48. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, March 28, 1938, AVP.
49. Alder, The Lie Detectors, 239–40.
50. Ibid., 68.
51. Collins, “The Future Looks Dark for Liars,” 7.
52. Ibid., 26.
53. Leonarde Keeler, “A Method For Detecting Deception,” American Journal of Police Science 1 (1930).
54. Charles Keeler to August Vollmer, November 26, 1929, AVP.
55. Keeler, The Lie Detector Man, 28.
56. “Guilty By Lie Detector,” New York Times, May 24, 1930, 2.
57. Leonarde Keeler, “‘The Canary Murder Case’: The Use of the Deception Test to Determine Guilt,” American Journal of Police Science 1 (1930): 381–86.
58. “Lie Detector ‘Clears’ Winkler,” New York Times, November 26, 1931, 56.
59. Keeler, The Lie Detector Man, chap. 13.
60. “Lie Tracer is Honored,” New York Times, January 21, 1933, 17.
61. Keeler, The Lie Detector Man, 81.
62. Ibid., 83.
63. Fred E. Inbau, “The ‘Lie-Detector,’” Scientific Monthly 40, 1935, 81–82.
64. Keeler, The Lie Detector Man, 162.
65. Quoted in Keeler, The Lie Detector Man, 160–61.
66. “Paramount Pictures Presents Popular Science [1944],” in The Smithsonian Institution Presents: Invention, a production of The Discovery Channel and Koch TV Productions, Inc., in association with Beyond Productions PTY Ltd.
67. The New York Police Department was inspired to invest $7000 in a similar “Mobile Laboratory Truck.” See “Clue Wagon,” New Yorker 19, December 4, 1943, 28.
68. William A. Dyche, “Science in the Detection of Crime,” The Review of Reviews, January 1932, 52.
69. Henry Morton Robinson, “Science Gets the Confession,” Forum and Century 93, 1935, 15.
70. Keeler, The Lie Detector Man, 35.
71. Ibid., 97–98.
72. Fred Inbau later recalled that the Chicago World’s Fair crime detection exhibit was “a good ad for the university and for the whole cause of scientific crime detection.” Fred E. Inbau, “Scientific Crime Detection: Early Efforts in Chicago,” in Gene Carte, August Vollmer: Pioneer in Police Professionalism 2 (Berkeley: University of California Bancroft Library, 1983), 4.