by Jill Lepore
28. These experiments were conducted in the United States as well, and not just at Harvard. At the University of Kansas, a professor staged a holdup in the middle of his psychology class. This experiment was originally reported by William A. M’Keever, “Psychology in Relation to Testimony,” Kansas Bar Association Proceedings (1911), an excerpt of which appears in JHW, The Principles of Judicial Proof, as Given by Logic, Psychology, and General Experience (Boston: Little, Brown, 1913), 581–83. Münsterberg routinely conducted testimony experiments during his lectures. “Last winter I made, quite by the way, a little experiment with the students of my regular psychology course in Harvard,” he explained. “Several hundred young men, mostly between twenty and twenty-three, took part. It was a test of a very trivial sort. I asked them simply, without any theoretical introduction, at the beginning of an ordinary lecture, to write down careful answers to a number of questions referring to that which they would see or hear.” The German experiments were more antic. In a lecture hall in Berlin, a professor arranged for two of his students to enter into a heated argument over a book. One drew a revolver; the other tried to grab it. The professor stepped between them; the revolver went off. Another fracas—this one involving “a clown in a highly coloured costume” and “a negro with a revolver”—was staged during a meeting of psychologists and jurists in Göttingen. After each of these scenes, experimenters stepped in, revealed that the action had been staged, and asked witnesses to write down everything they’d seen. Hugo Münsterberg, On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1909), 20–21, 49–52.
29. JHW, “Professor Muensterberg and the Psychology of Testimony,” Illinois Law Review 3 (1909): 399–445; the quotation is from p. 401. Wigmore’s review is bizarre and bitter. Twining calls Wigmore on Münsterberg “uncharacteristically acerbic” and “an effective satire” (Theories of Evidence, 136). I disagree with both characterizations. Twining cites the belief that “this scathing attack discouraged a nascent interest in testimony among American psychologists with the result that progress was delayed for a generation,” and although he considers that to be “probably an exaggeration” (Theories of Evidence, 136), I don’t think it is.
30. Münsterberg quoted in Hale, Human Science and Social Order, 59, 61–63.
31. Spillmann and Spillmann, “The Rise and Fall of Hugo Münsterberg,” 328, 332–34, and see Hale, Human Science and Social Order, 172–83; Hugo Münsterberg, American Traits from the Point of View of a German (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901); Hugo Münsterberg, The Americans (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1904).
4. JACK KENNARD, COWARD
1. Display advertisement, Olympia Theatre, Cambridge Chronicle, March 29, 1913; display advertisement, Scenic Temple, Cambridge Sentinel, February 24, 1912; Russell Merritt, “Nickelodeon Theaters, 1905–1914,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 59–79. Merritt demonstrates the dramatic expansion in the number of theaters in Boston in this era, from thirty-one in 1907 to forty-one in 1914. This change also affected the outlying neighborhoods: “The Boston theater district, which in 1910 was restricted to two downtown thoroughfares, gained considerable new ground by the outbreak of World War I. New movie theaters opened in virtually every major residential neighborhood surrounding the city. By the end of 1913, Dorchester, Roxbury, Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, Belmont, and Watertown had all succumbed to the rising movie fever and had permitted construction of motion picture theaters on their main streets” (Balio, ed., American Film Industry, 98–99). The era also marked a rise in the status of movies, from cheap working-class entertainment to legitimate, middle-class outings: “The climax came on November 23, 1914, when B. F. Keith announced that the Boston, the city’s oldest, largest, and most prestigious playhouse, would henceforth become a full-time movie theater” (p. 100).
2. Most of the digging was done by Irish laborers with the help of mules, who were worked so hard that their treatment occasioned an underground visit by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “Mules in Cambridge Subway Never See Light of Day,” undated clipping, probably 1911, in Boston Elevated Railway Company Scrapbook, Cambridge Historical Commission.
3. “Third Rail Kills Terminal Employee,” Boston Post, March 11, 1912.
4. “Open Subway to Cambridge,” Boston Post, March 23, 1912; “Harvard and the Hub,” Duluth Herald, March 4, 1911.
5. “Tremont Temple,” Cambridge Sentinel, April 27, 1912.
6. “From One Prize Winner,” Moving Picture World, April 17, 1915, 387.
7. Herbert Case Hoagland, How to Write a Photoplay (New York: Magazine Maker, 1912). WMM did not name the book, but only two other books available in 1912 also fit his description: Epes W. Sargent, Technique of the Photoplay (New York: Motion Picture World, 1913), and M. M. Katterjohn, How to Write and Market Moving Picture Plays: Being a Complete Mail Course in Picture Play Writing Prepared in the Form of a Book and Containing Twenty Complete Articles (Boonville, IN: Photoplay Enterprise Association, 1912). These seem less likely to have been available in Cambridge than Hoagland’s book.
8. Hoagland, How to Write a Photoplay, 6, 10–11, 13–14, 44, 61, 63, 67, 75. WMM could also have learned about the market by reading motion picture company requests in the Photoplay Author, which ran a regular column called “The Photoplay Market.” See, e.g., the column for February 1914, p. 61, in which the New York Motion Picture Company advises, “We are in the market for both double- and single-reel stories. We prefer plausible, short-cast, tensely dramatic scenarios with big themes carefully worked out with original business and careful characterization. All stories should have a well developed love or heart interest. Our greatest demand is for Indian-Military stories. We are also in the market for straight dramatic, Puritan and Spanish Stories.”
9. “From One Prize Winner,” Moving Picture World, April 17, 1915, 387.
10. WMM first applied for a scholarship on May 26, 1913. The file includes two letters of support, one from the principal of Malden High School, Thornton Jenkins, dated June 3, 1913, stating that Marston is rugged and steadfast, and another from the pastor of the First Congregational Church in Cliftondale, Harry C. Adams, dated June 2, 1913: “He is an only son and yet my impression is that he is in large part helping himself through College. He is a member of my church and is I am sure worthy of any assistance he may receive from the College.” Marston endeared himself to professors and deans as easily as he had to his principal and pastor. See, e.g., Marston’s correspondence with B. S. Hurlbut, dean of the college. See WMM, Application for a Scholarship, May 13, 1913; WMM to B. S. Hurlbut, January 12, 1915, and B. S. Hurlbut to WMM (“Dear Marston”), January 18, 1915; and WMM, Application for a Scholarship, Harvard College, April 27, 1914, all in WMM, Undergraduate File, Harvard University Archives, UAIII 15.88.10. Also in the file are WMM’s addresses: as a sophomore he lived in Weld 5, and as a junior, at 64 Dunster Street.
11. WMM, The Lie Detector Test (New York: Richard D. Smith, 1938), acknowledgments.
12. “I . . . wrote the episodes used in the experiments and mailed them to him,” EHM wrote to JE, January 11, 1973. And again: “I was at Mt Holyoke and supplied the ‘true’ stories used in the experiment.” EHM to JE, November 16, 1983, both in the possession of JE. And see EHM, autobiographical statement, Mount Holyoke Alumni Office, submitted August 18, 1986.
13. The whole of his life, Marston relied on women to help him with work that he published under his name alone. This wasn’t uncommon; the girlfriends and wives of scholars and scientists and writers helped them in their work all the time, in everything from typing to research to editing. Lillian Moller Gilbreth, who earned a PhD in psychology at Brown in 1915, not only edited most of the books published under the name of her husband, Frank Gilbreth but, it appears, wrote most of them, too. She was also a mother of twelve. (Her life was later the subject of the film Cheaper by the Dozen, based on a memoir written by two of her children.) Sh
e used the weeks after childbirth to work on her husband’s books. In 1911, after giving birth to Frank Jr., she edited Motion Study and wrote The Primer of Scientific Management. Both books are credited only to her husband. Lancaster, Making Time, 117, 164–65. And see Lepore, The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death (New York: Knopf, 2013), chapter 6.
14. WMM, “Systolic Blood Pressure Symptoms of Deception,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 2 (1917): 117–76. This work is cited by WMM’s former professor Herbert Sidney Langfeld in “Psychophysical Symptoms of Deception,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 15 (1921): 319–28.
15. “The Rubber Barons,” Wonder Woman #4, April–May 1943. For another scene in which Diana Prince administers a lie detector test, see “The Girl with the Gun,” Sensation Comics #20, August 1943.
16. Hugo Münsterberg, “Why We Go to the Movies,” Cosmopolitan, December 15, 1915, 22–32.
17. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: D. Appleton, 1916), 38, 39, 43. A modern reprint, which includes the Cosmopolitan article, along with a valuable introduction, is Hugo Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg on Film: “The Photoplay: A Psychological Study” and Other Writings, edited and with an introduction by Allan Langdale (New York: Routledge, 2002).
18. Münsterberg, Photoplay, 99, 112.
19. “$100 Offered for ‘Movies’ Scenario,” Harvard Crimson, May 21, 1914.
20. “From One Prize Winner,” Moving Picture World, April 17, 1915, 387.
21. “Colleges Fail in the Test,” New York Dramatic Mirror, February 24, 1915, 25; display advertisement, “The Prize Play of the Edison College Contest,” Moving Picture World, May 1, 1915, 693; “Scenario Prize Won by Senior,” Harvard Crimson, February 25, 1915; and “Harvard Senior Wins Movie Prize,” Boston Daily Globe, Feb-ruary 25, 1915. And see Edwin H. McCloskey, “Harvard Man Wins Edison Scenario Prize,” Moving Picture World, March 13, 1915, 1641: “It is claimed that when this photoplay is released that it will give the famous Cambridge educational institution the largest amount of gossip matter that it has had for many years. The author has worked his way through college by selling scenarios. He claims that the prize play deals directly with the adventures of star football players who are now in college. He also declares that the play has been written so that the students of the institution will recognize the men at whom the thrusts are directed.” McCloskey was the Boston correspondent for the Moving Picture World, but it appears that he got his information from the story about Marston in the Boston Evening Record, rather than from interviewing him; at least, his story does not go beyond that one.
22. “Exposes Harvard Gambling: Movie Scenario a Sizzler,” Boston Evening Record, February 26, 1915.
23. BHRM, “Memories of an Unusual Father,” 3. The drawing appears as an illustration for “A PBK Writes Comics,” Key Reporter, Autumn 1942, p. 5. That WMM was the president of his PBK chapter is mentioned in Herbert Langfeld to Robert Yerkes, October 8, 1917, folder titled “Ex Com: Committee on Psychology. Projects: Deception Test, 1917,” National Research Council Papers, National Academy of Sciences.
24. “Exposes Harvard Gambling,” Boston Evening Record, February 26, 1915.
25. “From One Prize Winner,” Moving Picture World, April 17, 1915, 387.
26. Joe Bertagna, Crimson in Triumph: A Pictorial History of Harvard Athletics, 1852–1985 (Lexington, MA: Stephen Greene Press, 1986), 16–17. The coach from 1908 through 1916 was Percy Haughton. There was no one on the team during Marston’s senior year with a name especially close to “Jack Kennard,” although both Stan Pennock and Tack Hardwick come close. Hardwick seems unlikely to have inspired WMM’s scenario, though. A three-time All-American, a plaque was later placed in his honor in front of the Dillon Field House, engraved: “Inspiring leader, eager competitor, loyal sportsman.” “ ‘Sock ’Em’ is Latest Football Cry,” Harvard Crimson, September 25, 1950.
27. John J. Reidy Jr., “Twenty Years of Harvard-Yale . . . a Day for Harvard Greats,” Harvard Crimson, November 20, 1937.
28. WMM liked to be known as a high school football star. The announcement of his wedding, in September 1915, referred to him as “a graduate of Cliftondale High School where he took part in athletics, especially in football, in which he starred.” Whitman (MA) Times, September 15, 1915, in Clippings file, WMM, Quinquennial File, Harvard University Archives. I can’t find any evidence that WMM ever tried out for the football squad or practiced with it. He does not appear on the roster of players; nor is he listed as those who will receive an H for playing, as per Minutes, December 4, 1912, the Committee on the Regulation of Athletic Sports, Athletic Committee Minutes, 1882–1951, v. 2, pp. 785–86. The only controversy I can find in these minutes involves faculty and alumni concern about the roughness of play on the field. There is, in 1913, a remark about “The case of A. Fleisher, ’15, a member of the second team squad [that is, the JV], whose tickets were sold at a premium,” Minutes, December 16, 1913, p. 815. In the fall of Marston’s senior year, the Committee on the Regulation of Athletic Sports voted to prohibit members of any team from writing signed articles “about a team or crew or squad of which he is a member”; moreover, “the question of the advisability of a rule to forbid a man’s rowing and playing football in the same year was discussed but no action was taken.” Minutes, October 6, 1914, p. 843. And: “Letters of protest at alleged unfair tactics of the Yale team at the football game on November 21st were submitted by the Chairman, and the matter was discussed. No action was taken.” Minutes, December 1, 1914, p. 847.
29. WMM, March On! Facing Life with Courage (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1941), 36–37. Also: “He played a little college football,” Marston’s son Byrne later wrote, “but he was more interested in psychology.” BHRM, “Memories of an Unusual Father,” 3.
30. Display advertisement, “The Prize Play of the Edison College Contest,” Moving Picture World, May 1, 1915, 693; “Releases of the Week After,” Motion Picture News, May 1, 1915; “CHARLES M. SEAY. Current Edison Releases. JACK KENNARD, COWARD—May 5. AN INNOCENT THIEF—May 11. Address care SCREEN CLUB.” This is a classified ad printed in the New York Dramatic Mirror, May 12, 1915. A description of the film had been sent to distributors at the end of April. “A single reel story of college life, written by William Marston, prize winner of the Edison College Contest, featuring Julia Calhoun, Harry Beaumont, Olive Templeton, and Marie La Manna. A college student in financial difficulties borrows money from a supposed friend, who uses the debt as a club to make his fiancée believe that he is a coward. He proves his physical bravery in a dramatic manner by rescuing a girl from being run over by a subway train, and the interrupted course of true love again runs smoothly. Directed by Charles Seay.” “Licensed Films,” New York Dramatic Mirror, April 28, 1915. I have been unable to find a print of the film.
31. I have found evidence of the film being played in Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Massachusetts: display advertisement, Royal Theatre, Mansfield (OH) News, June 9, 1915; display advertisement, Jefferson Theatre, Daily Democrat-Tribune (Jefferson City, MO), June 19, 1915; display advertisement, Walters Theatre, Star and Sentinel (Gettysburg, PA), September 1, 1915; “Movie Directory” (listing for the Harvard Photo Play House), Chicago Daily Tribune, May 13, 1915; and “Agreed,” Moving Picture World, September 11, 1915, 1824. Regarding the Cambridge screening, I believe the film was shown when it was released, in May; this story, “Agreed,” published on September 11, 1915, includes, as an illustration, two programs from Durrell Hall, one of which lists “Jack Kennard, Coward.” The programs are undated; the story concerns the typesetting on theatrical programs. The Durrell Hall programs submitted by the proprietor, E. B. Thomas, would have been sent to the editors of the Moving Picture World some weeks before the story was published.
32. Review of “Jack Kennerd [sic], Coward,” Moving Picture World, May 22, 1915, 1259.
33. “Drape Kaiser’s Gift: Harvard Students Commemorate the ‘Lusitania Massacre,
’ ” New York Times, May 10, 1915.
34. Josiah Royce to Lawrence Pearsall Jacks [June, 1915?], in Letters of Josiah Royce, 627–28. On the Harvard dead, see “War Exacts Death Toll,” Harvard Crimson, December 13, 1917, and Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe, Memoirs of the Harvard Dead in the War Against Germany, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 1:33.
35. Edward Estlin Cummings, “The New Art. Commencement Part, 1915,” in General Information About Harvard Commencement and Class Day, 1911–1920, Harvard University Archives, box 1, HUC 6911. “The Commencement Celebration,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin, June 30, 1915, 710–20, as filed in General Information about Harvard Commencement and Class Day, 1911–1920, Harvard University Archives, box 2, HUC 6911. The commencement program, Alvmos Conlegi Harvardiani Ornatissvmos, Concelebranda, Ad Sollemnia Academica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1915), is filed in General Information About Harvard Commencement and Class Day, 1911–1920, Harvard University Archives, box 2, HUC 6911. On the use of Latin on the diplomas, as well as the use of sheepskin, see Mason Hammond, “Official Terms in Latin and English for Harvard College or University,” Harvard Library Bulletin 35 (1988): 294. At the time, Marston’s advisers considered him with the set of their graduate students. “All our men are placed with the exception of Feingold and Kellogg,” Langfeld wrote to Yerkes. “Marston got his degree magna cum laude.” Herbert Langfeld to Robert Yerkes, June 17, 1915, Robert M. Yerkes Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives, box 30, folder 565.