The Lie Detectors (21 page)

Larson did take positive steps. He and Marge rented a house on an island that backed directly onto the Detroit canal. Their son Bill was born there in 1937. Moreover, it was in Detroit that Larson finally assembled the "clinical team" method that became his model for testing deception. Patterned on the teams used at the Institute for Juvenile Research, it combined several experts to diagnose psychopathology, expose false complaints, resolve domestic disputes, and identify embezzlers. In 1938 he organized a symposium that brought together physicians and lawyers to contrast his method with Keeler’s mania for publicity and exploitative practices.

Yet when a sensational case came along, Larson could no more resist its allure than Keeler, even if it meant sharing the stage with his rival. There was something about a terrorized public that drew lie detectors like moths to a flame. Add to the mix a psychotic serial killer—like Cleveland’s "Torso Murderer"—and Larson could not keep away. As he put it to a friend, "You didn’t think I would let a case like that slip by." In the end, he proved no more capable of solving the case than Keeler—though he did conclude that the principal suspect, a deranged surgeon from a prominent family in Cleveland, "revealed disturbances indicative of guilt."

In his frustration Larson looked to other bodily tracings for clues about the mental state of subjects. He began by trying to transform Vollmer’s successful program for classifying crimes according to the modus operandi of their perpetrators into a scheme for classifying criminal minds by correlating their modus operandi against the lie detector results he had obtained in 1,700 murder cases. "The crime," he suggested, "may be considered as the entering complaint in the case of disease for which the doctor is consulted." Larson’s method—a forerunner of today’s "psychological profiling," touted by the FBI and featured on crime dramas—did not meet with success. Nor did his effort to interpret another bodily mark that he thought might reveal the workings of the criminal psyche: the tattoo. He could not find any meaningful pattern in the 7,000 tattoos he gathered over the course of a decade: of the 63 percent of subjects he categorized as "feebleminded, alcoholic, schizophrenic" (itself not a well-defined category), he found that they sported 65 percent of the "mother" tattoos, 66 percent of the heart tattoos, and 74 percent of the crucifix tattoos. Unable to deduce any meaning from those numbers, he revisited a hypothesis of his youth: that fingerprints were not only inherited but expressive of "psychopathology, schizophrenia and other organic factors." Yet he never settled on an interpretive scheme that could explain his 12,000 cases of modus operandi; his 7,000 cases of tattoos; his 2,200 lie detector records; or his thousands of fingerprints samples. Vollmer had once teased him about his "magpie den"; Larson was a collector of singularities, not a systematic thinker.

Where Larson did succeed was in treating patients. This required not so much an orderly mind as an open and generous one. Yet even this success did not bring Larson solace. As his onetime adviser Adolf Meyer noted, there was restlessness in his soul, an unsatisfied curiosity that fed upon his sense that he had left his main work undone. Time and again Larson returned to the theme of how his discovery had been hijacked by charlatans; how the public accounted him its "inventor" despite his insistence that "no one has invented anything"; how his reputation, the thing he cared most about, was based on a misunderstanding about what he had done and why. Larson’s obsessive attacks on Keeler were attempts to resurrect his own version of the machine.

Meyer had urged his disciple to treat each patient’s life as an experiment in nature. But what does any single life prove? In the early 1940s, Larson gave up his job in Detroit to take a series of positions in various mental institutions across the country and work on a sequel to his book on the lie detector. Writing from one of these far-flung posts, soliciting another job reference from Meyer, Larson explained that there was "a method in this apparent nomadism"—by which he meant both his bodily and his intellectual travels. He was still determined, he assured his mentor, that he would set the record straight, reminding the world of what his invention had been and still could be.

Janet Henry laughed. "I didn’t make all of it up," she said, "but you needn’t ask which part is true. You’ve accused me of lying and I’ll tell you nothing now."

—DASHIELL HAMMETT,
THE GLASS KEY,
1931

AS LARSON’S DIAGNOSTIC PROGRAM FALTERED, KEELER’S
methods commanded the nation’s trust. Gradually in the 1930s, and then with increasing appetite in the years after World War II, the managers of American businesses turned to Leonarde Keeler’s mode of lie detection to supervise their workforce. First thousands and then millions of American job applicants and employees were obliged to pass a mechanical fidelity check.

When nineteenth-century Americans engaged in marketplace commerce with strangers, they assessed the reliability of buyers and sellers with the aid of characterological sciences like physiognomy, phrenology, and graphology, reading creditworthiness from a person’s look, head, or handwriting. But as these sciences were themselves hardly reliable, Victorians also made sure to build the cost of potential fraud into the price of the transaction. Economists argue that modern corporate capitalism emerged in the early twentieth century in large part as an end run around the "transaction costs" of such marketplace deceptions and uncertainties. Businesses increasingly found it more cost-effective to pay managers to run their own suppliers than buy doubtful materials on the open market. Thus arose the vertically integrated firm. But with expanding scale and accelerating turnover of employees, businesses came to have less and less personal knowledge about their workers’ characters. How could modern managers trust their employees any more than their grandparents trusted duplicitous traders?

This is where the lie detector stepped in. Not only did the instrument promise to vet employees for honesty; it acted as a deterrent against future deception as well. What Keeler had done for banks could be adopted by almost any large organization. Some social scientists even welcomed the device as a substitute for the old religious and moral injunctions which had once ensured honesty, but whose force had been weakened by the anonymity of modern urban life. The pioneering sociologist Ernest Burgess frankly called the lie detector "a scientific aid for social control" to deter those in positions of financial trust from "yielding to temptation." It would serve as the scientific conscience of a rootless nation.

Only in America was the lie detector used to interrogate criminals and vet employees. Abroad, it was disparaged as a typical American gimmick. Even those foreign forensic scientists who took an interest in lie detection treated it with skepticism. Keeler sold only one machine outside the United States, to Selfridges in England. Even in Canada the American instrument was spurned by both the police and business.

This is not to suggest that Europeans (or their police) were more intrinsically honest than Americans, or that they lacked scientific know-how, or that they somehow missed out on the great economic transformations of the twentieth century. The difference lies not in human nature, expert capacity, or market forces, but in the way that human institutions have been assembled over time by distinct cultures. The European police forces, for instance, had long served as a direct arm of the central state and were consequently far less subject than the American municipal forces to the tug of local politics, and hence less obliged to assuage public opinion about their neutrality or conceal their harsh interrogations under the veneer of science. Touring the United States soon after World War II, the president of the International Criminal Police Commission was horrified to see an ordinary patrolman interrogating a suspect on the device, which he deemed of dubious scientific worth, and worse, a "violation of the conscience." The commission expressed deep reservations about the machine.

As for the use of polygraphs in the workplace, given the resentment that lie detection aroused among employees even in America, it is not surprising that lie detection made no headway in Europe, where workers have generally had greater success in forming unions and negotiating labor conditions. (Tellingly, the first American states to forbid lie detectors in employment were those with the highest rates of unionization.) Besides, European bureaucracies have their own pseudoscientific means of vetting employees. In France, for instance, job applicants have long been required to supply a handwritten cover letter so that one of the nation’s 30,000 graphologists could assess their character. In Britain, employers used class markers like accent to evaluate applicants.

At the deepest level, the difference between American and European attitudes toward the lie detector turned on the proper sort of relations one should have with one’s fellow citizens and intimates. In André Maurois’s satire of 1937 on American life, translated as
The Thought-Reading Machine,
a French professor of literature visits an American university where a physicist has invented a "psychogram" that can surreptitiously record unspoken thoughts. The first person the professor thinks to turn the device on is his wife—
naturellement
—only to discover to his dismay that she still pines for her ne’er-do-well cousin. When his wife—furious at this "disgusting" violation—surreptitiously turns the device back against him, she discovers his half-baked notion to seduce a divorced student. Yet these revelations do not destroy their marriage: husband and wife agree that these daydreams are less "truthful" than their lifelong fidelity, and they agree never again to peer unbidden into each other’s thoughts. So the machine becomes a commercial hit in America, where it is used to unmask campus scandals, steal football plays, apprehend criminals, test the fidelity of lovers, and monitor the thoughts of employees; but in France, after some lamentable incidents—such as when the professor’s sister-in-law commits suicide upon learning of her husband’s infidelities—the device is roundly ignored. Besides, people there soon learn to mask their inner reveries, much as they have long masked their feelings’ outward show. In the end, the professor concludes, the "psychogram" is a curse—not because it drags sinful thoughts into the open but because it suppresses the free range of human feeling. Even the inventor concludes, "Interior language is no more authentic than ordinary speech; the latter is protection against others and the former against ourselves." The "psychogram" has simply extended deception to self-deception. Rather than enable citizens to trust one another, it renders them incapable of trusting themselves.

This was a common refrain in foreign commentary on the lie detector: that social life would grind to a halt if people were actually obliged to tell the truth to one another and to themselves. Even some Americans fretted that the machine would stop landlords from renting, hostesses from giving parties, lovers from wooing, and politicians from running for office. As for family life: "How would you like to have a little Lie Detector in your home? No, thanks? You’d rather have a washing machine? So would we all." We are better people for asking others to believe us, even if we sometimes lie. As Molière instructs us in
The Misanthrope:

In 1939 Keeler set himself up as Keeler, Inc., "personnel consultant," and began to franchise trustworthiness. Whenever possible, he still preferred to work cases himself, though he hired an assistant and trained Jane Wilson—Katherine’s friend and the wife of his partner Charlie Wilson—as the nation’s first female polygraph operator. But he now began to allow selected graduates of his course to buy his machine and set themselves up as Keeler Polygraphers with exclusive license to some territory. One former cop, Russell Chatham, took title to Indiana; another got Michigan. By contract the buyer could not resell the device or let anyone else operate it, and Keeler could even reclaim the machine if he decided that the buyer was in any way "prostituting the field." Keeler’s personal expertise was still his most valuable asset.

For just that reason he switched manufacturers. Over the years Keeler had been bombarded with complaints about the quality of his machine: the tambours leaked; the paper jammed; the pens failed. His manufacturer cannot have been satisfied either; in the span of a decade the firm had sold fewer than fifty machines all told. In 1939 Keeler dropped Oakland’s Western Electrico-Mechanical Corp. in favor of Chicago’s Associated Research, Inc. At this time, he also added a galvanometer to his apparatus. The price of his machine rose from $550 to $900, but the problems with quality persisted.

This put Keeler at a disadvantage against competitors like Orlando Scott and the Jesuit psychologist Walter G. Summers, who boasted of "100 percent accuracy" with a Psychogalvanometer of his own design. Each interrogator had his shtick. Scott had his medical mumbo jumbo; Summers had his clerical collar, plus two Ph.D.s. When Summers died in 1938 his successor was the son of a founder of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. All Keeler had was his salesman’s self-confidence.

Not until after the war, when his patent expired, did Keeler abandon all restrictions and tell his manufacturing company to "go ahead and sell to anybody." At the time Keeler Inc. was still the only place in the nation to go for training in lie detection: either a two-week orientation course for $30 a week, or the more extensive six-week courses for certificate as a graduate of "Leonarde Keeler, Incorporated"—though Keeler always pointed out that it took at least a year of supervised casework to become a proficient examiner. Among the challenging questions on the final was this one:

• (a)
  a large window from which the suspect can see the surrounding territory.
  
• (b)
  an imposing array of technical equipment such as "recording machines" etc.
  
• (c)
  only four bare walls, chairs and desk visible to subject.
  
• (d)
  a complete display of all known instruments of torture.
  

On graduation, the "boys" were given certificates; a cocktail party with five quarts of bourbon; and a copy of
Gracian’s Manual,
containing the wisdom of the Counter-Reformation Jesuit who believed that personality was a mask adopted for strategic purposes. "No. 26: Discover each man’s thumbscrew. It is the way to move his will, more skill than force being required to know how to get at the heart of anyone." Afterward the class went to a nudie show at the French Casino.

Keeler’s success was publicly recognized (and extended) by celebratory articles in popular magazines like
Forbes
and
Reader’s Digest,
which merged his scientific and business successes into a seamless sales pitch. When Keeler was hired by a chain of department stores that was annually losing $1.4 million in pilfering by its 14,000 clerks, he claimed to have discovered that 76 percent of the clerks were stealing; six months later, when he came back for his retest, the cheats had been reduced to 3 percent. The numbers were impressive. Keeler’s machine caught 90 percent of the guilty; it worked 99 percent of the time. No proof of the claims was ever forthcoming.

To be sure, there were naysayers. An article in
Esquire
in 1941 was the first to expose the lie detector publicly as "the bunk" and offer advice on how to beat the machine: intensify your emotions during the irrelevant questions, bite your tongue, never believe that the operator is your friend, and above all don’t be fooled into thinking that the machine works in the first place. Readers were reminded that no one was obliged to take the test, that the courts did not accept its verdict, and that it often served as "the third degree dressed up in white tie and tails."

Keeler did acknowledge that some employees resented the exams, but he dismissed their worries as the concern of namby-pamby "women’s clubs." After all, "the cash register with recording tape was also taken as an insult by indignant employees when it was first introduced." What Keeler refused to acknowledge was that whereas the lie detector strictly separated what belonged to the employee (his labor) and the employer (everything else), many workers did not consider their actions as theft so much as one of the perks of their low-paying jobs.

As before, it was Keeler’s competitor, Orlando Scott, who took his methods to their logical limit. At economical rates—$15 a person for high-volume clients—Scott promised to test employees for "integrity, intentions, loyalty, competency, intuitiveness, stability, alertness, efficiency, ambition, vocational stability, sabotage, etc." He even had a jingle to close the sale.

The lie detector did more than intimidate employees; it taught the virtues of "emotional management." The industrial psychologists who ran the famous Hawthorne experiments at General Electric from 1924 to 1933 had concluded that labor productivity depended more on morale than the actual conditions of work—hence the need to reduce workers’ "irritability" and rage. Personality testing became a new tool of pacification in the workplace, with personnel departments matching individuals to tasks for which their temperaments were said to be suited. Their triumph was the creation of the "organization man" of mid-century, an employee trained in emotional opacity and able to control fear and resentment behind a mask of "positive thinking." Only those at the very top of the corporate hierarchy were exempt from this regimen; their appetites and aggression were the engines of capitalism. Rank-and-file personnel were to heed the upbeat admonitions of Dale Carnegie, author of
How to Win Friends and Influence People
(1936), who taught his white-collar readers the emotional price to be paid for eliminating transaction costs.