The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

  Orchard had been charged with the assassination of the state’s former governor, an assassination allegedly ordered by Big Bill Haywood, head of the Industrial Workers of the World. He’d confessed to that crime, and to eighteen other murders, too; he said he was a hit man for the union. On the strength of Orchard’s confession, Haywood had been charged with murder. Haywood pled not guilty. He was defended by Clarence Darrow, the most celebrated trial lawyer in the country.

  Münsterberg visited Orchard in the state penitentiary in Boise. “I had come to examine his mind and to find out what was really at the bottom of his heart,” he said. For seven hours, over two days, he subjected Orchard to nearly one hundred deception tests. The press watched the professor’s every trip to the prison. “The entire reading world had its attention attracted by the visit of Professor Hugo Munsterberg of Harvard University to Boise, Idaho,” as one newspaper reported. All around the country, the devices Münsterberg brought with him to that jail in Idaho to hook up to Orchard’s arms and legs and chest and head captured headlines: “Machines That Tell When Witnesses Lie,” read one. Before Münsterberg began his tests, he was sure Orchard was lying. By the time he was done, he’d become convinced that Orchard was telling the truth.22

  Münsterberg left Boise before the trial ended, having promised the defense that he would keep the results of his tests secret until after the verdict, but on a train ride to his summer home in Massachusetts, he broke his promise: he told a reporter that “every word in Orchard’s confession is true.”23 Darrow accused Münsterberg of having been bribed by the prosecution. In his closing statement to the jury, Darrow called Orchard “monstrous” and “a liar.” It was preposterous, Darrow said, that anyone could be asked to take Orchard’s word for anything.

  “Gentlemen,” Darrow said to the jury, “I don’t believe that anywhere where the English language is spoken or where common law prevails any intelligent lawyer would ever have dreamed of convicting defendants upon evidence like this.” And a Harvard psychologist, Darrow hinted, had nothing to teach a juror. “You can’t take Harry Orchard’s face or his form and make it over again in a second, and you can’t take his crooked brain and his crooked, dwarfed soul, and make it new in a minute, and if you, gentlemen, are going to bank on that in this case, then you are taking a serious responsibility with Bill Haywood’s life.”24

  Haywood was acquitted. Münsterberg, afraid that he might be sued, decided not to publish “Experiments with Harry Orchard,” the article he had written for McClure’s. Instead, he published an essay about the importance of psychological testimony in criminal court cases.25 He predicted that a science of testimony, hard and exact, would one day replace standards of judicial proof, as sloppy and unreliable as the evidence and methods used by the historian—or a defense lawyer. He called into question the very idea of a jury: Why leave a finding of guilt or innocence to fallible jurors?26

  In 1908, Münsterberg published a book called On the Witness Stand, an anthology of his essays. The collection was reviewed by John Henry Wigmore, who was both the dean of Northwestern Law School and the author of the definitive four-volume Treatise on the Law of Evidence (1904–5).27 Wigmore set about reading everything written, in every language, on the Psychologie der Aussage—the psychology of testimony—an investigation centered in Germany whose objective was to evaluate the reliability of testimony by staging scenes in front of unsuspecting bystanders to be called as witnesses.28 Wigmore’s review took the form of a farcical trial in which a plaintiff—the legal profession—charges Münsterberg with libel for having declared “that there existed certain exact and precise experimental and psychological methods of ascertaining and measuring the testimonial certitude of witnesses and the guilty consciousness of accused persons.” Münsterberg’s defense is handled by two worthless attorneys named R. E. Search and X Perry Ment. The jury, unsurprisingly, finds for the plaintiff.29

  Even before Wigmore’s review, though, Münsterberg’s reputation had been devastated, partly because of his fidelity to Germany, despite its growing militarism, and partly because of his criticism of the United States as a nation suffering from an excess of equality. Münsterberg believed in hierarchy, order, and Germany. To him, there was no better illustration of American decay and German purity than the ridiculous aspirations of American women: “the aim of the German woman is to further the interests of the household,” he maintained, but “that of the American woman is to escape.”30 By 1905, William James had become so exasperated with Münsterberg that he threatened to resign. “I want a world of anarchy,” James said. “Münsterberg wants a world of bureaucracy.” Calls for Münsterberg’s deportation began in 1907. He spent 1910–11 in Berlin, where he founded the Amerika Institut: he wanted to explain Germans to Americans and Americans to Germans. When he returned to the United States, a Harvard alumnus, convinced that Münsterberg was a spy, attempted to have him removed from the faculty.31

  By 1912, when William Moulton Marston walked into Harvard’s Psychological Laboratory in Emerson Hall, Hugo Münsterberg was nearly ruined. The last of the Moultons of Moulton Castle would be Dr. Psycho’s last student.

  JACK KENNARD, COWARD

  MARSTON WORE HIS COONSKIN COAT; Holloway wore her hair pinned up, ringlets dangling. Arm in arm, they’d stride from Harvard Yard, down Massachusetts Avenue to Central Square, to the Scenic Temple, “The Home of High Class Entertainment in Cambridge.” Tickets cost ten cents. The price to get into a nickelodeon was almost never a nickel.1

  They had to watch where they stepped. Cambridge was a jungle of pits and cranes. In 1909, the Boston Elevated Railway Company had begun building a subway line meant to begin at Park Street station, tunnel under Boston Common, rise over the Charles River Bridge, burrow again at Kendall Square, bore beneath a corner of Harvard Yard, and end at a station beneath Harvard Square, where the pillars on the platform were painted with crimson H’s, like the letters on varsity sweaters.2 The digging alone took two years. On March 10, 1912, the mauled and decapitated body of James B. Dennehey, twenty-three, was found on the subway tracks under Harvard Yard. He’d been inspecting the tracks when he was killed during a practice run.3 Still, the subway opened as scheduled on March 23, 1912, at 5:24 a.m. By horse, the ride between Harvard Square and Boston’s Park Street station, a distance of 3.2 miles, had taken twenty-five minutes; by subway, it took eight.4

  The opening of the subway meant more trips to the movies. That spring, Holloway, when she visited, could have ridden with Marston from Harvard Square to Park Street to go to the Tremont Theatre, on the Common, to see an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Holloway would have liked that; she adored anything Greek.5 Marston had other reasons to go. His father’s business in quality woolens for gentlemen’s suits was failing, and Marston had decided to work his way through college by writing for the movies.

  In the Psychological Laboratory in Emerson Hall, Marston had been experimenting with machines that might tell truth from lies. To write movies, he had to turn lies into truths: he had to learn how to tell a story that wasn’t true but that, on film, would seem to be.

  Motion pictures—pictures that moved, or “movies,” as they were called starting in 1902—were so new that what to call a script hadn’t yet been settled. (“Screenplay” wasn’t used before 1916.) The word “photoplay,” meaning a dramatic film, was coined in 1909. Using “scenario” to mean a movie script dates to 1911.

  “I took up scenario writing during my second year at Harvard—the year 1912–1913,” Marston explained in an interview he gave in 1915 to a trade magazine called Moving Picture World. “I purchased a book on the subject and spent considerable time at the picture shows studying the plots, style of pictures produced by different companies, and the visual effects possible with moving pictures.”6

  The book he bought during his sophomore year was How to Write a Photoplay, by Herbert Case Hoagland, who worked for Pathé Frères.7 “To write a photoplay requires no skill as a writer,” Hoagland reassured his r
eaders. There was no need to write dialogue, for instance, since movies had no sound. The work mostly involved thinking of a good story and picturing how it could be told by piecing together scenes shot on reels of film that could be threaded through a projector. This was all so unfamiliar that much of Hoagland’s book is an explanation of the fundamentals: “After the actual taking of the pictures the undeveloped film is sent to the factory where it is developed, dried, and wound in a roll.… Each scene is developed and printed separately and the positives are all joined afterwards in their proper order with title and subtitles in proper place.” But the book was also bursting with practical tips for aspiring writers: “Life—everyday life—as you see it about you is full of good ideas for films,” he suggested. Girls are important: “Remember that very few stories are of great interest without the rustle of a skirt.”

  The going rate for a scenario was about twenty-five dollars, Hoagland reported, and “the market for photoplays is large and growing.” How to Write a Photoplay included a list of motion picture companies, along with their addresses and an account of the kinds of films they preferred, from the American Film Manufacturing Company of Chicago (“They are strong on the American cowboy”) to the Victor Film Manufacturing Company of New York (“This company has been formed to present photoplays in which Miss Florence Lawrence will be the star”).8

  “I sold several scenarios to various companies,” Marston boasted, but at the end of his sophomore year, he said, he “became too busy to pursue the work further.”9 Marston liked to say he stopped writing for the movies because he was drawn into his scientific research. In truth, he was broke. In the spring of his sophomore year, citing his father’s debts, he applied for a scholarship.10

  In his junior year, Marston returned to his research. He designed an experiment to determine whether systolic blood pressure could be used to detect deception.11 He wrote to Holloway, told her about his idea for an experiment, and asked for her help.12 He intended to conduct an experiment on ten psychology graduate students. (One of them was Leonard Troland, a friend from Malden High School who had studied physics and psychology at MIT before joining Münsterberg’s laboratory.) For each of the ten subjects, Marston needed a different story, and for the experiment to work, Marston wasn’t supposed to know what was in the stories, so Holloway wrote them.13 Each story involved a friend of the subject who’d been accused of a crime. Marston tucked each story into an envelope, gave it to the subject to read, told the subject to say something that could save his friend, and asked him to choose whether to do that by lying or by telling the truth. He then attached the subject to a blood pressure cuff, or sphygmomanometer, affixed to a machine that recorded the readings on a graph paper. So that he couldn’t see his subjects’ faces, Marston hid behind a screen. (To establish a baseline, Marston also took his subjects’ blood pressure while they were reading William James’s Pragmatism, during which, it turned out, their blood pressure remained entirely stable and regular.) Next, he questioned each subject about the fictional crime in the presence of a “jury” consisting of between two and ten students from Münsterberg’s elementary psychology course. At the end of the questioning, Marston attempted to determine whether each subject was lying or telling the truth, using only the blood pressure readings, while the jury made the same determination from having watched the subjects and listened to them speaking. Out of 107 cases, Marston was right in 103 instances, or 96 percent of the time, while the jurors, on average, were right only about half the time.14

  Marston, with glasses, giving a lie detector test to Leonard Troland at the Harvard Psychological Laboratory in 1914 (illustration credit 4.1)

  If he had never created Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston would be remembered for this experiment. He invented the lie detector test. A century on, it’s still in use. It’s also all over Wonder Woman.

  “Come, Elva, you’ll have to take a lie detector test,” Diana Prince tells Elva Dove, a secretary she suspects of spying, as she drags her down a hallway.

  “I’ll ask you questions,” Diana says, strapping Elva to the machine while Trevor looks on. “Answer truthfully or your blood pressure curve will go up.

  “Did you take that rubber report from the secret files?” Diana asks.

  “No, no!” Elva insists.

  “Well, I’ll be jiggered,” Trevor exclaims, reading the graph. “She is lying.”15

  In the spring of 1914, when Marston was conducting his early blood pressure experiments, Hugo Münsterberg went to the movies for the very first time. He went to see Neptune’s Daughter, released by Universal Pictures on April 25. After that, he went to every motion picture he could. “Reel after reel moved along before my eyes—all styles, all makes,” Münsterberg wrote in Cosmopolitan. “I went with the crowd to Anita Stewart and Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin; I saw Pathé and Vitagraph, Lubin and Essanay, Paramount and Majestic, Universal and Knickerbocker. I read the books on how to write scenarios; I visited the manufacturing companies, and, finally, I began to experiment myself.”16

  Diana Prince administering a lie detector test. From “A Spy in the Office,” Sensation Comics #3 (March 1942) (illustration credit 4.2)

  Motion pictures were an entirely new art form—as comic books would be later—one that psychologists could observe from its infancy and use to conduct experiments into how the workings of the mind are written on the body. In a 1916 book called The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, Münsterberg offered a theory of cinema at a time when cinema had hardly begun. He interviewed directors; he spoke to actresses. He explained the close-up. He explained crosscutting. He wanted to know: “What psychological factors are involved when we watch happenings on the screen?”17 What, to the mind, are movies?

  Münsterberg came to believe that there is no better psychological laboratory than a nickelodeon, in much the same way that Marston later came to believe that there is no better form of psychological propaganda than a comic book. Watching people watch movies, Münsterberg thought, might one day allow him to answer every question he had spent his life’s work asking—questions about perception, emotion, sensation, reaction, and deception. “To picture emotions,” Münsterberg insisted, “must be the central aim of the photoplay.” Consider the sequence of scenes in a motion picture that tells the story of a man brought to trial for murder: “The man who shot his best friend has not offered an explanation in the court trial which we witness. It remains a perfect secret to the town and a mystery to the spectator; and now as the jail door closes behind him the walls of the prison fuse and melt away and we witness the scene in the little cottage where his friend secretly met his wife and how he broke in and how it all came about and how he rejected every excuse which would dishonor his home.”18 Couldn’t this new kind of storytelling reveal this character’s hidden self—Mr. Hyde—and reveal, too, how the mind works, how a man sees and knows, remembers and forgets, feels and deceives?

  Marston took all this in with the air he breathed. Maybe he even went to the movies with Münsterberg. And then, at the end of his junior year, just as he was completing his first set of deception experiments, he read an advertisement in the Harvard Crimson: “$100 Offered for ‘Movies’ Scenario.”19 The Edison Company was holding a nationwide talent search among American college students, promising a cash prize to the author of the best scenario submitted by a student at one of ten colleges: Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, and the Universities of California, Chicago, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

  “I began to attend the picture theatres again,” Marston said, “looking especially for Edison films.”20 He made a study of story, reel by reel.

  By the time of the contest deadline, 337 scenarios had been submitted. The winner was announced in February 1915. “Ten colleges—the brainiest men of the country—were invited to this contest and ‘Jack Kennard, Coward,’ is the result,” the Edison Company reported. It was written by William Moulton Marston.21

  A reporter from a Boston newspaper i
nterviewed Marston, now a senior, in his room at 8 Hollis Hall: “Lying on the couch in his study, the author, famous overnight, told how he worked his way through college by selling scenarios, how he introduced the college atmosphere, and real deeds into the prize-winner and what he thinks will happen when the photo-play bursts like a bombshell into the quaint and sedate yard.”22

  “For the past three years I have led a rather stupid life,” Marston said. “I have done nothing but study and write these scenarios. I am taking an A.B. course and intend to enter the Law School next fall when I get my degree.”

  Marston had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, voted the chapter president, and admitted to Harvard Law School. (Till the end of his days, he kept his Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch chain. He once had Harry G. Peter, the artist who drew Wonder Woman, sketch her wearing an academic cap and gown and lassoing a professor with a Phi Beta Kappa key.)23 “This study of psycho-physics of deception is going to prove a great help to me when I begin to practice law,” Marston announced from his couch. He was awesomely cocky. He explained his research. “I have tried 100 experiments and every one has come out right. You can see what a valuable thing it will be to me when I cross-examine a witness. A blood pressure machine can be attached to the witness’ arm and by my knowledge of this course I can tell whether I am getting the truth or not.”24

  From the Phi Beta Kappa Key Recorder, 1944 (illustration credit 4.3)

  The reporter asked about the prizewinning scenario.

  “My inspiration for the plot of ‘Jack Kennard, Coward’ arose, in the first place, from a systematic search for a ‘big’ situation as a climax which would contain plenty of action,” Marston said. “I then built the plot with the purpose of constantly leading up to the climax. The ideas in the plot itself were drawn from various incidents of personal experience here at college.”25