The Truth Machine
Page 32
73. Nealis O’Leary, “A Criminologist to the Rescue,” The Literary Digest 118, October 6, 1934, 22.
74. “Lie Detection,” Living Age 348, March 1935, 92.
75. “New Crime-Detection Laboratories,” The American City 49, October 1934, 13.
76. Deakin, Police Professionalism, 156–57.
77. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, July 19, 1932, AVP.
78. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, February 12, 1935, AVP.
79. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, March 19, 1934, AVP.
80. Alder, The Lie Detectors, 140.
81. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, March 19, 1934, AVP.
82. Alder, The Lie Detectors, 138.
83. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, March 19, 1934, AVP.
84. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, July 29, 1936, AVP.
85. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, February 26, 1937, AVP.
86. Ibid.
87. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, June 21, 1938, AVP.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid.
90. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, May 31, 1938, AVP.
91. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, August 21, 1937, AVP.
92. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, November 13, 1938, AVP.
93. R. E. Allen “Lie Detector Pays,” The American City 54, October 1939, 15.
94. “Lie Detectors for Employees,” Business Week, September 16, 1939, 36–37; Marston, The Lie Detector Test, 155.
95. J. P. McEvoy, “The Lie Detector Goes into Business,” Reader’s Digest (American Edition) 38, February 1941.
96. Alva Johnston, “The Magic Lie Detector I,” Saturday Evening Post 216, April 15, 1944; Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, May 2, 1944, AVP.
97. “Hesse Gems Found in Station Locker,” New York Times, June 9, 1946, 1.
98. Molly Rhodes, “Wonder Woman and her Disciplinary Powers: The Queer Intersection of Scientific Authority and Mass Culture,” in Doing Science and Culture: How Cultural and Interdisciplinary Studies Are Changing the Way We Look at Science and Medicine, ed. Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek (New York: Routledge, 2000), 99.
99. Ken Alder, “A Social History of Untruth: Lie Detection and Trust in Twentieth-Century America,” Representations 80 (2002): 11, 14.
100. Charles Thorpe and Steven Shapin, “Who Was J. Robert Oppenheimer?: Charisma and Complex Organization,” Social Studies of Science 30 (2000): 580.
101. Max Weber, “The Sociology of Charismatic Authority / The Nature of Charismatic Authority and Its Routinization,” in The Celebrity Culture Reader, ed. P. David Marshall (London: Routledge, 2006), 56.
102. Ibid.
Conclusion. The Hazards of the Will to Truth
Epigraphs. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R. J. Hollingworth (London: Penguin, 1973), 33. Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), 35.
1. “Lie Detector Seals Doom of Murderer,” New York Times, March 2, 1937, 44.
2. “Lie Detector: Marks in Ink Final Judges for Murder Case,” Newsweek 9, March 13, 1937, 34.
3. “Polygraph Proof: Illinois Murderer Dies Because of Governor’s Belief in Test,” Literary Digest 123, March 13, 1937, 9–10.
4. “Polygraph Proof.”
5. “Lie Detector Seals Doom.”
6. “‘Lie detector’ Gets $10 from 2 boys,” New York Times, June 8, 1937, 27.
7. Ibid.
8. The New York Times reported on a number of “fake” lie detectors during the 1930s. In one case, a confession was obtained “with [a] contraption of radio parts and hot peppers” (“‘Lie Detector’ Traps Philadelphia Youth”). In another, a school principal was forced to destroy his contraption—a “black box equipped with dials and electric bulbs”—despite having obtained a confession from a thief of a pair of gloves (“Principal His ‘Lie Detector,’” New York Times, September 25, 1936, 5).
9. Leonarde Keeler, “Debunking the ‘Lie-Detector,’” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 25 (1934–35): 153.
10. Ibid., 158
11. Ibid.
12. Leonarde Keeler, “A Method For Detecting Deception,” American Journal of Police Science 1 (1930): 48.
13. Such apparently extraneous procedures have since become codified as correct practice in polygraph textbooks. These texts advise polygraphers to pay careful attention to the design of the examination room, the placement and appearance of the machine, and even to their mannerisms and body language. James Allan Matté, The Art and Science of the Polygraph Technique (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1980); John E. Reid and Fred E. Inbau, Truth and Deception: The Polygraph (“Lie Detection”) Technique (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1977), 5–7.
14. Ken Alder, “A Social History of Untruth: Lie Detection and Trust in Twentieth-Century America,” Representations 80 (2002).
15. Stephanie A. Shields, “Passionate Men, Emotional Women: Psychology Constructs Gender Difference in the Late 19th Century,” History of Psychology 10, no. 2 (2007): 92–110.
16. Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind: A Contribution to a Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge. Intro., trans., and annotated by Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2002). First published in 1938.
17. Michael Billig, Ideological Dilemmas: A Social Psychology of Everyday Thinking (London: Sage, 1988).
18. Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in The Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 215–40.
19. Thomas F. Gieryn, “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 6 (1983): 781–95.
20. David Garland, “Of Crimes and Criminals: The Development of Criminology in Britain,” in Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan, and Robert Reiner, The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11–56.
21. Alder, “A Social History of Untruth,” 2.
22. Quoted in Ken Alder, The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (New York: Free Press, 2007), 68.
23. Alder, The Lie Detectors, 122; Alder, “A Social History of Untruth,” 12.
24. Frederick L. Collins, “The Future Looks Dark for Liars,” Collier’s, August 16, 1924, 26.
25. Michael L. Fleisher, The Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes 2, Wonder Woman (New York: Collier Books, 1976), 210.
26. Marston’s view of the lie detector must be seen in the light of his assertion that freedom could only be obtained through “submission to loving superiors.” He regarded the machine not as an instrument of bondage-as-torture, but rather a quasi-therapeutic technology that promoted freedom through its ability to produce truth. 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.
27. Fleisher, The Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes, 176.
28. Derek Hook, “Analogues of Power: Reading Psychotherapy through the Sovereignty Discipline-Government Complex,” Theory and Psychology 13 (2003): 605–28.
29. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
30. Peter J. Hutchings, “Spectacularizing Crime: Ghostwriting the Law,” Law and Critique 10 (1999): 27.
31. Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, ed. Miran Bozovic (London: Verso, 1995), 101.
32. Quoted in Hutchings “Spectacularizing Crime,” 42.
33. Ibid., 44.
34. Ibid., 35.
35. Peter J. Hutchings, The Criminal Spectre in Law, Literature and Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2001), 1.
36. John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 197–98.
37. Philip Smith, “Na
rrating the Guillotine: Punishment Technology as Myth and Symbol,” Theory, Culture and Society 20 (2003): 27.
38. Ibid., 43.
39. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), chap. 3. First published 1967.
40. Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), 35.
41. Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut, Warner Home Video, 1993. First released 1982.
42. Dick, Blade Runner, 41.
43. Paul M. Sammon, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (New York: HarperPrism, 1996), 106–7.
44. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voight-Kampff_machine (accessed August 31, 2009).
45. Deborah Jermyn, “The Rachel Papers: In Search of Blade Runner’s Femme Fatale,” in The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic, ed. Will Brooker (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 159.
46. Ibid, 161.
47. Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 80–83.
ESSAY ON SOURCES
The immensely useful Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature: An Author and Subject Index (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1901-) enabled me to locate a variety of lie detector and polygraph-related articles published in obscure magazines and journals. Useful bibliographies are Norman Ansley and Frank Horvath, Truth and Science: A Comprehensive Index to International Literature on the Detection of Deception and the Polygraph (Lie Detector) Technique (Linthicum Heights, MD: American Polygraph Association, 1977); Earleen H. Cook, The Lie Detector: Its Use in Law and Business (Monticello, IL: Vance Bibliographies, 1981); and Verna Casey, Lie Detectors and Detection: A Selected Bibliography, 1985–1987 (Monticello, IL: Vance Bibliographies, 1988).
The papers of Eloise, Charles, and Leonarde Keeler, August Vollmer, and John Larson are in The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. William Moulton Marston’s papers (mainly concerning Wonder Woman) are in the Dibner Collection at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. A comprehensive list of archival sources is in Ken Alder’s excellent The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (New York: Free Press, 2007), 275–77. Early histories of the lie detector include Paul V. Trovillo, “A History of Lie Detection,” pts. 1 and 2, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 29 (1939): 848–81; 30 (1939): 104–19; John A. Larson, “The Lie Detector: Its History and Development,” Journal of the Michigan State Medical Society 37 (1938): 893–97; and Eugene B. Block, Lie Detectors: Their History and Use (New York: David McKay Co., 1977).
On Leonarde Keeler see Eloise Keeler, The Lie Detector Man: The Career and Cases of Leonarde Keeler (Boston: Telshare Publishing, 1984). On William Moulton Marston and Wonder Woman, 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; Les Daniels, Wonder Woman: The Complete History (London: Titan Books, 2000); Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (London: William Heinemann, 2005). 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); William Moulton Marston and H. G. Peter, Wonder Woman Archives, vols.1–6 (New York: DC Comics, 1998–2010, first published 1941–45).
Important primary source lie detector material for students of history or science studies include John A. Larson, Lying and its Detection: A Study of Deception and Deception Tests (Glen Ridge: Patterson Smith, 1932); William Moulton Marston, The Lie Detector Test (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1938); Paul L. Wilhelm and F. Donald Burns, Lie Detection with Electrodermal Response, 5th ed. (Michigan City, IN: B and W Associates, 1954); John E. Reid and Fred E. Inbau, Truth and Deception: The Polygraph (“Lie Detection”) Technique (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1977); Robert J. Ferguson Jr., The Scientific Informer (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1971); Chris Gugas, The Silent Witness: A Polygraphist’s Casebook (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979); James Allan Matté, The Art and Science of the Polygraph Technique (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1980); Murray Kleiner, Handbook of Polygraph Testing (San Diego: Academic Press, 2002); John F. Sullivan, Gatekeeper: Memoirs of a CIA Polygraph Examiner (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2008).
More recent studies on the polygraph from a scientific standpoint include Anthony Gale, ed., The Polygraph Test: Lies, Truth and Science (London: Sage, 1988); Gershon Ben-Shakhar and John J. Furedy, Theories and Applications in the Detection of Deception: A Psychophysiological and International Perspective (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990); David T. Lykken, A Tremor in the Blood: Uses and Abuses of the Lie Detector, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1998); National Research Council, The Polygraph and Lie Detection: Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2003); Aldert Vrij, Detecting Lies and Deceit: Pitfalls and Opportunities, 2nd ed. (Chichester: Wiley, 2008).
Essential criminology and criminal anthropology primary sources include Enrico Ferri, Criminal Sociology, trans. W. D. Morrison (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895); Arthur Macdonald, Criminology (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1893); Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, The Female Offender (New York: D. Appleton, 1895); Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso, Briefly Summarized by His Daughter Gina Lombroso Ferrero, with an Introduction by Cesare Lombroso (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911); Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, trans. with a new intro. by Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Hugo Münsterberg, On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime (New York: Clark Boardman, 1927, first published 1908); Havelock Ellis, The Criminal, 5th ed. (London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1914); Hans Gross, Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students, trans. Horace M. Kallen (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1911, first published 1905); Charles B. Goring, The English Convict: A Statistical Study (London: H.M.S.O., 1913; reprint, Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972).
The history of criminology and criminal anthropology has experienced a scholarly renaissance since the appearance of Michel Foucault’s paradigm shifting Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996) is a useful place to start reading about Lombroso’s criminal anthropology. Important sources also include Arthur E. Fink, Causes of Crime: Biological Theories in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1938); Robert Nye, “Heredity or Milieu: The Foundations of European Criminological Theory,” Isis 67 (1976): 335–55; Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Marie-Christine Leps, Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992); Alison Young, Imagining Crime: Textual Outlaws and Criminal Conversations (London: Sage, 1996); Nicole Hahn Rafter, Creating Born Criminals (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Richard F. Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Peter J. Hutchings, The Criminal Spectre in Law, Literature and Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2001); Mary Gibson, Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); David G. Horn, The Criminal Body: Lombroso and the Anatomy of Deviance (London: Routledge, 2003); Peter Becker and Richard F. Wetzell, Criminals and their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Neil Davie, Tracing the Criminal: The Rise of Scientific Criminology in Britain, 1860–1918 (Oxford: Bardwell Press, 2006); David Garland, “Of Crimes and Criminals: The Development of Criminology in Britain,” in Mike Maguire, Rod Mo
rgan, and Robert Reiner, The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
On degeneration see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c 1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin-de-Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For phrenology see David de Giustino, Conquest of Mind: Phrenology and Victorian Social Thought (London: Croom Helm, 1975); Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); John Van Wyhe, Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); and Nicole Hahn Rafter, “The Murderous Dutch Fiddler: Criminology, History and the Problem of Phrenology,” Theoretical Criminology 9, no. 1 (2005): 65–96.
The most recent scholarship on the history of the lie detector includes Ken Alder, “To Tell the Truth: The Polygraph Exam and the Marketing of American Expertise,” Historical Reflections 24 (1998): 487–525; Margaret Gibson, “The Truth Machine: Polygraphs, Popular Culture and the Confessing Body,” Social Semiotics 11, no. 1 (2001): 61–73; Ken Alder, “A Social History of Untruth: Lie Detection and Trust in Twentieth-Century America,” Representations 80 (2002): 1–33; Ken Alder, The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (New York: Free Press, 2007); Geoffrey C. Bunn, “Spectacular Science: The Lie Detector’s Ambivalent Powers,” History of Psychology 10, no. 2 (2007): 156–78.
INDEX
Adams, Frederick, 162
Adler, Herman M., 118, 165
Albrecht, Adalbert, 44, 46, 63, 64
Alder, Ken, 183