The Truth Machine (28 page)

If a refusal to take the test signified guilt, volunteering to take the test signaled innocence. It was often worth the gamble because a suspect could be completely exonerated by a successful lie detector test. In 1935, for example, a lie detector test virtually cleared a Fairfield carpenter of suspicion of the murder of a young girl.
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Commenting on a different case a month later, the newspaper told its readers, “The lie detector said [the suspect] was innocent. He was released.”
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In 1933 a convicted inmate was freed from the Marquette Penitentiary in Michigan for having passed a lie detector test conducted by Keeler.
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“Lie-Detector Test Asked by Prisoner” read a
New York Times
headline in 1935: “Paroled Convict Would Have Machine Prove He Did Not Steal Automobile.”
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The same year, the accused Lindbergh baby kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann requested the opportunity to take a “truth test.” He also asked that an important prosecution witness take one too.
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Hauptmann understood the symbolic power of passing the test. The authorities knew it too, which might explain why his request was disallowed even though Marston had offered to conduct it himself.
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In 1936, Jackie Coogan and Betty Grable, “dancing sweethearts of the films,” volunteered for polygraph tests in order to prove that their story about a robbery was true.
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Requested to take a test to prove his innocence of fixing a prize fight, boxing promoter Nick Londes called the bluff on the police: “‘I'll take a lie test if the Police Commissioner will,' he snorted.”
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Anyone who volunteered to submit to the “lie box” was assumed innocent. Similarly, anyone who refused a test was considered more
than likely guilty. Being prepared to take a test was thus akin to being prepared to take one's case to court. Although it clearly represented the processes of law and order, it was as though the lie detector functioned as a legitimate alternative to the justice system, at least in public discourse.

The concept of the lie detector serving as an alternative legal system was further supported by its reputation as a test that could not be beaten. As expository articles made clear, polygraph records were either “innocent” or “guilty”; there were no intermediate possibilities (save perhaps “inconclusive,” which necessitated a retest).
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Like the law itself, the test was apparently applicable to all. But certain types of persons could beat the test. “Certain psychopathic subjects show abnormal irrelevant responses,” Marston wrote. “A feeble-minded person may not comprehend the situation sufficiently to become conscious of deception or its implications.”
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“Morons and psychopaths either don't react or react wildly,” the
Saturday Evening Post
confirmed, “so that it is often impossible to tell whether they are lying or not.”
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Only the trained expert could beat the machine, reported the
New York Times.
“Keeler himself has admitted that he can fool his own instrument,” it wrote, “but that is because he is so familiar with its working.”
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In principle then, the instrument could be applied to everyone except those such as “the moron,” “the psychopath,” “the feeble-minded person,” the child, and the lie detector expert. Beating the machine, like beating the legal system, was considered impossible for the vast majority of ordinary citizens. The polygraph was powerless against the pathological however. Unlike instruments such as the “soul machine,” whose advocates a generation before had deliberately sought out “morons” and “psychopaths” to study, the lie detector only worked on normal people.

The lie detector as an alternative legal system was most saliently evidenced by a set of metaphors centered on the law court. “The innocent man finds in the machine his most reliable witness,” said the
Review of Reviews.
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“It was the fourth time the lie detector has been admitted as a witness,” said the
New York Times.
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Reporting on the Rappaport case, the newspaper wrote that the “verdict of the recording needle was: ‘He lies!'”
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The
Literary Digest
wrote that the lie detector “had sealed his doom by returning the same verdict as the human jury of his peers: ‘guilty.'”
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The instrument “helped to bring another slayer to justice,” wrote the
New York Times
in 1935, as a suspect was betrayed “by the scientific crime revealer.”
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Later that same year, the newspaper reported on how use of the instrument exonerated a suspected burglar: “The lie detector said he was innocent. He was released.”
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“The lie detector gave
Goldman 100%,” reported
Time
magazine in 1944, “and Judge Leibowitz gave him his freedom.”
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The lie detector, asserted
Outlook and Independent
in 1929, “seems little more than another method of wringing out a confession after protracted questioning.”
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By describing it in the same terms as “a piece of rubber hose” and “a makeshift electric chair,” the magazine was ridiculing the claim that the instrument exhibited scientific humanitarianism. Such a claim was diametrically opposed to those of the instrument's advocates who unanimously presented it as an antidote to the notorious third degree. The
Outlook and Independent
recognized that the contrast between progressive science and reactionary brutalities was not so great as it appeared. Intimidation was an important quality attributed to the machine. That the lie detector resembled an electric chair was, therefore, not a particularly troubling problem.
Scientific American
's description of an examination of a “Negro porter” deployed a mixture of scientific rhetoric and intimidation: “The whites of his large round eyes were an extreme contrast to his face, and he shied at the boxlike instrument sitting on the table. After much explanation and assurance that the instrument would not injure him, the porter was finally induced to sit in the chair and allow the pneumograph to be adjusted about his chest and the blood-pressure cuff attached to his arm.”
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The porter's anxiety was well founded because of the common belief that the lie detector delivered an electric shock to the subject. To the uninitiated, the lie detector looked very much like a technology of execution. Both instruments were symbolically organized around the theme of the chair, the seat of final judgment.
The Nation
deliberately undermined claims that the instrument embodied humanity by comparing it to an electric chair.
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From the gathering of evidence to the carrying out of the sentence, the lie detector was considered competent in every step in the “fight against crime.” “‘Lie detection' by dependable scientific means,” recognized
Living Age
in 1935, was “the constant dream of jurists and police functionaries.”
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And because “every crime was entrenched behind a lie,”
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the lie detector therefore embodied nothing less than the dream of criminology.

By the late 1930s, the “male gaze” had been entrenched within orthodox lie detector procedures. 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. Reprinted by special permission of Northwestern University School of Law,
The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.

As criminal anthropology had done so before it, so the lie detector technique also accorded women a privileged place in its moral economy. Female bodies were depicted as setting a unique challenge to the lie detector. Emotions attributed to women—love in particular—played an important role. Both Larson and Keeler met their wives through the instrument, and William Marston credited his with the discovery of his main principle: “I shall always be grateful to ‘the girl from Mount Holyoke' for suggesting the idea that deception makes the pulse beat harder, and for assisting throughout the original research which established the systolic blood pressure deception test.”
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In the Luther Trant story “The Man in the Room” (1909), a woman, surrounded by four men, is seen lying in bed and speaking into a mouthpiece as part of a reaction time-word association test: “‘Dress!' he enunciated clearly. The pendulum, released by the magnet, started to swing. The pointer swung beside it in an arc along the scale. ‘Skirt!' Miss Lawrie answered, feebly, into the drum at her lips.”
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One notable feature of Trovillo's paper was a photograph of an ideal lie detector test situation.
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Taken from an elevated position so the viewer could observe the arrangement of the test, the photograph showed a man and a woman sitting on opposite sides of a desk, between them a Keeler Polygraph. The woman sits parallel to the length of the desk, gazing ahead into the middle distance. Her right arm rests on the desk, her left on the arm of her own chair. A blood pressure cuff is attached to her right arm, a galvanometer electrode to her left hand, and a pneumographic tube has been
wrapped around her chest. The smartly-dressed male examiner sits on the other side of the desk, his right hand holding a pen poised to write. He is staring intensely at the woman.

The demarcation between examiners and subjects was evident in the earliest visual depictions of the examination. In the illustration accompanying the
Boston Sunday Advertiser's
1921 piece on Marston's apparatus, the “suspect” faces the “Questioner” across a table while a second man takes the suspect's blood pressure.
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A similar arrangement can be seen in the photograph featured in the 1924
Collier's
article. Keeler fiddles with the apparatus behind the subject's back while the examiner faces the suspect and holds the chart in his hands.
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A photograph in a 1929 magazine article shows a subject attached to the machine facing his interrogator, a policeman, while another policeman and two surly looking detectives look on.
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The frontispiece to Larson's
Lying and Its Detection
shows a policeman giving a lie test to a disheveled-looking male subject.
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Two other photographs in Larson's book show subject and examiner surrounded by numerous other observers. The early photographs tended to feature male subjects, male police examiners, and any number of observers. A 1934 magazine photograph, for example, shows Leonarde Keeler, Calvin Goddard, and a third man observing a seated male subject while a police officer looks on.
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During the 1930s, however, images of lie detector examinations were gradually standardized. Keeler is seen sitting on the desk behind a male subject in one picture, standing behind him in another.
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A 1935 newspaper photograph shows him standing behind a female subject while she gazes passively ahead.
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Popular Science Monthly's
photograph was also of a female subject and a male examiner.
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By the late 1930s, the archetypal image was of a male examiner and a female subject, as in the Trovillo article. In one picture, Marston can be seen explaining the results of a lie detector test to a beaming young woman still strapped to the instrument.
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Alva Johnston's 1944 series of articles opened with the classic image. Seated to the rear of the photograph, Keeler operates his desk polygraph and gazes at the female subject who is looking ahead into space.
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A 1951 photograph features a standing male watching a seated female. He is wearing a white coat.
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The image of a male examiner actively gazing upon a passive female subject has since become a standard feature of lie detector test images.
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Not all visual portrayals of lie detector examinations feature female subjects. Nevertheless, considering that male offenders vastly outnumber female offenders, women are certainly disproportionately represented. Female subjects
tend to be used in ideal examination scenes such as those found in textbooks. The first photograph in Reid and Inbau's
Truth and Deception
—widely regarded as the essential polygraphy text—features a male examiner gazing upon a female subject.
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Other expository texts also use the male expert/female subject.
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Trovillo, Keeler, Reid and Inbau, and Matté all used women in their posed photographs of the examination situation.
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Why were women “ideal” polygraph subjects? Not surprisingly, Marston had something to say on the subject. “Women, agree masculine sages,” he wrote in 1938, “are the worst liars. But are they?” “Treatises have been written—by men—to prove that women lie more frequently because they are the weaker sex and must deceive continually to protect themselves”: “Women earn their livings mostly by deception, some cynics assert, pretending affection for men they don't love and tricking men they do love into unwilling generosity. But that sort of arm-chair indictment of the fair sex's truthfulness need no longer go unchallenged. The Lie Detector now supplies a method for scientific comparison between male and female truthfulness.” Not wishing to refute the apparent wisdom of gender differences in honesty, Marston merely wanted to replace supposition with truth. He concluded that “men are more dishonest in business and women in society.” Women apparently told “innumerable lies … to enliven social conversations and to manipulate other people for various petty purposes or oftentimes just for the fun of it.”
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