The Lie Detectors (23 page)

What reason do people need to do what they want to do? What matters is that Kay’s departure confirmed some terrible blackness in Keeler’s soul: his view that the world was poisonous, cruel, and traitorous. He had come to the conclusion that the human race could be divided into "those who wished me dead and those who didn’t care."

Friends tried to comfort him. "I think so well of you as a man," wrote Agnes de Mille; "I honor you so as a worker that just the knowledge that you were quietly, to the best of your ability, cleaning up your corner of the world, without possibility of corruption or intimidation or exhaustion has sustained me greatly when the men I loved defaulted." This was not to say, she reminded him, that he was not capable, most of the time, of acting like a damn fool. "I did not add wisdom to your virtues. Smart as hell with a machine in your hands—not quite so bright when fingering a heart. Your own, for instance." She ordered him to stop abusing himself physically and emotionally, and recommended that he see a psychiatrist.

Keeler affirmed de Mille’s point, even when he misread her. "I thoroughly agree with you that I know very little about hearts, except my own, which often goes into spasm." In the meantime, he had his work. "I expect to be on the rush for some months or even a year or two before my
final
collapse."

During the course of his career hundreds of ordinary citizens wrote to Keeler—"master of the lie detector"—to untangle the knotty heartache of infidelity. A husband in Nutter, West Virginia, wrote to say that he wasn’t satisfied with his wife’s explanations for various "coincidences"; he wanted to put her on Keeler’s machine because he "wanted to know the truth." A farmer’s wife in Barton, Vermont, wanted her husband tested, not about his infidelities—she had known about those for years—but about how much money he spent in the local bordello. A young man in Fort Wayne, Indiana, complained that he was in a state of nervous exhaustion: could Keeler confirm his fiancée’s repeated assurances that she had never had an illicit sexual affair before the one she was currently having with him?

Double indemnity; the postman always rings twice: everyone knows that fate comes back to bite you. Yet day in and day out, people act as if the script could happen only to someone else, as if they themselves are immune to the operations of destiny. They read the book, they see the movie, and they still don’t get it.

The middle-aged editor of the only newspaper in Litchfield, Nebraska (population 400), took out a $500 life insurance policy on his wife, including a double-indemnity clause in case of accidental death, and paid the premium on the spot, in cash, so that the policy took immediate effect. The accident occurred the very next day. She had been at the wheel, he said, as they were returning from a celebration to mark their thirty-fourth wedding anniversary, when the car unexpectedly plunged down a thirty-foot embankment. He had managed to leap clear in the nick of time and crawl back to the road. But his wife, tragically, had died in the crash. How uncanny, his neighbors reported: only a few weeks before, the editor had had a premonition that his wife might die in a car wreck.

Except the car was undamaged. Except the two truckers who pulled over to assist the stalled car were surprised when it suddenly drove into the ditch. Except someone found a heavy iron pipe 150 feet down the culvert. Except the autopsy showed that the cause of death was four violent blows to the back of the head. Except according to rumors in town, the editor had been having an affair with a local woman.

Double indemnity; the postman always rings twice. Everyone knows the story, and nothing can alter the ending. The editor and his wife had been childhood sweethearts; they had a twenty-five-year-
old son; they were among the most respected citizens of Litchfield, where the editor had once been mayor. His name was Carl M. Anderson. An Everyman.

But as fate would have it, the assistant attorney general of the county had recently attended one of Keeler’s seminars. He knew that modern forensic science could transform an Everyman into a specific person who had done a specific deed at a specific place and time. He offered Anderson a chance to clear his name on the "truth machine," and Anderson agreed. On Monday morning, June 30, 1941, the local sheriff and assistant attorney general flew Anderson from the plains of Nebraska to the vertical heights of Keeler’s office on the eighth floor at 134 South La Salle Street. The test began at eleven o’clock in the morning, ten days after the Keelers’ divorce became final.

Keeler hooked Anderson up to the machine. He asked if Anderson had killed his wife. He asked if Anderson had killed her with a stone, with a stick, with a fist, with a shoe, with an iron pipe. He asked each question ten times. He went on like this for four hours. And every time Keeler mentioned the iron pipe, the nation’s newspapers would report, the "delicate needles of the detector, zigzagging on a graph, wavered violently."

In a break between runs, Keeler informed Anderson that while the questioning had been under way, he had sent the iron pipe out for chemical analysis. The analysis had just come in, and it indicated the presence of human blood, he said. At this, Anderson asked that the questioning cease. "You have all the information you need," he said. "I’ll not give you any more."

It was mid-afternoon, and Keeler agreed to take a late lunch break. Carl Anderson—a man of fifty-six, "fairly chunky," nearly six feet tall, weighing 200 pounds—was escorted by the sheriff down to a café in the Loop for a bite to eat. Then they rode the elevator back to the examination room and waited in Keeler’s office lobby.

Afterward, everyone agreed that Anderson was a phlegmatic, unemotional man. It was a hot summer day, and he said as much as he flipped through the pages of
Life
magazine. He said he was going to get some air. He stood up and stepped out into the corridor. The sheriff followed close enough to hear him say, "This is just as good a time as any…," before he dived headfirst through the open courtyard window and landed on a roof four floors below.

At the inquest, everyone denied telling Anderson he had failed the test: the sheriff, the assistant attorney general, Keeler’s assistant. Keeler himself was not present at the inquest. As his assistant explained, "Mr. Keeler has been suffering from a heart attack, he has a bad heart, and it is possible he has been suffering from that today." The jury returned a verdict of suicide by reason of temporary insanity. Keeler stayed at home—presumably liquored up—for several days.

BORN IN BERKELEY, TRAINED IN CHICAGO, THE LIE DETECTOR
was primed for its national debut. Tested on women, blacks, and criminals; deployed on cops and clerks, the machine was ready to take on grander roles. To a nation entering its mid-century struggle against totalitarianism, the lie detector promised to redeem the innocent, scarify the guilty, and ensure political loyalty. It earned a walk-on part in nearly every major scandal of the day: a magnifying mirror held up to America’s secret fears and desires. It did not presume to take the leading role, but like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern took its cue from the great players in the drama, an instrument of their larger purposes. Yet for just that reason its performance was all the more revealing.

William Moulton Marston was back for his second act in America. In his book of 1938,
The Lie Detector Test,
Marston asked readers to imagine an America in which everyone sat regularly for the test. He was already optimistic about the instrument’s value in taming the criminal mind (thanks, he said, to the work of John Larson) and its value in fostering honest business dealings (thanks, he said, to the work of Leonarde Keeler). Now Marston said he wanted an America in which "truth telling would be as important as dressing decently and washing your face and hands before going to a party or applying for a job." It was a banal enough ambition: honesty as good manners, instead of the contrary. And Marston had a plan for reaching this utopia, as well as a champion to lead America there.

Since his rebuke in the Frye case, Marston had bounced among academic jobs, while parlaying his study of the lie detector into a grand unified theory of the emotions. First in
The Emotions of Normal People
(1928), then in
Integrative Psychology
(1931), cowritten with his wife, he proposed that dominance and submission were the primary human drives, and that women were—or soon would be—the dominant sex. He considered this an optimistic theory of human development. In his scheme, the lie detector became a tool to bring about this necessary adjustment, by fine-tuning the emotional content of movies, by aiding the marketing of consumer products, and by teaching men and women what they really wanted. Marston did not shy away from announcing his conclusion: most people secretly longed to submit to a superior power. His goal was to help them submit to a benign one. For nearly twenty years, in one medium after another, he preached this message, until he finally succeeded in reaching millions.

In 1941, Marston offered America an alluring new champion, a cartoon character he named Wonder Woman. She embodied the benign principles Marston had first glimpsed in the science of lie detection. And where the masculine apparatus of her lie detector proved inadequate, she used her female power to compel love in order to defeat—and even reform—her Nazi foes, such as the Baroness Paula von Gunther, who demanded slavish sexual obedience. She fought for honesty, decency, and human liberation, with female liberation as a necessary prerequisite. She was the ideal mate that Dr. Frankenstein had not dared to create for his monster, a lie detector of curves and muscle and cheerful wit, a female superhero to whom America might safely submit because she herself had submitted to love.

Marston’s theory of human emotion identified two primordial feelings: pleasantness, defined as "the free and unimpeded discharge of motor impulses"; and unpleasantness, defined as "conflicts" in neuromotor consciousness. On this basis, Marston reasoned, an external stimulus could produce one of four emotional responses. When the stimulus was stronger than the motor consciousness to which it was antagonistic, the self became "compliant" to avoid unpleasantness. When it was stronger but allied, the self was "submissive." When the stimulus was weaker, but allied, the self practiced "inducement." When it was weak and antagonistic, the self asserted its "dominance." A mixture of these primary emotions, in greater or less degree, in passive or active forms, produced those familiar emotions that poets and others called fear, rage, jealousy, and love. With this theory Marston reinterpreted his lie detector experiments as an attempt to extract compliance from the subject, a contest to establish dominance, rather than a test for fear of being discovered in a lie.

The impetus for Marston’s theory had been his discovery that male and female subjects responded quite differently when he wielded the lie detector as opposed to when his young wife wielded it, especially when the topic was sex. Its confirmation came in a set of experiments he conducted in the mid-1920s at Tufts University. In the aftermath of Larson’s tests, Marston, with the aid of an undergraduate assistant named Olive Byrne, investigated hazing rituals at the sororities of its women’s college. The rules of the "Baby Party" ritual were silly but strict. For one week at the end of the school year first-year sorority sisters were forced to dress up in baby clothes and yield to the sophomore women, who blindfolded their charges, bound them by the wrists, and interrogated them about their misdeeds while threatening to beat them with long sticks if they dared to rebel or escape. Thanks to interviews conducted using lie detection techniques, Marston and Miss Byrne learned that this ritual was exceedingly pleasurable for both the dominant young women and the submissives, especially when their authority was challenged. "From these studies of girls’ reactions," they reported, "it seemed evident that the strongest and most pleasant captivation emotion was experienced during a struggle with girls who were trying to escape from their captivity." Yet Marston and Byrne also noticed that many sophomores expressed discomfort whenever the first-year students showed signs of fear or broke down in tears. At such moments, rather than use force, they derived the greatest pleasure from coaxing the younger women to continue. The more docile the final submission, they noted, the greater the "captivation emotion." As for the younger women, they experienced the greatest pleasure in submitting to those who acted selflessly. "A freshman girl reported herself as feeling pleasant passion emotion when compelled to kiss the feet of a girl whom she liked. But this same girl took a large amount of extra punishment rather than shine the shoes of an older girl whom she thought selfish."

By contrast, hazing rituals in fraternities produced very few cases of true "submission passion." There, attempts at resistance just led to more simpleminded punishment. However, Marston saw evidence suggesting that some of the young men would have been only too glad to submit lovingly to young women of sufficient emotional strength. Women, suggested Marston, were superior to men. Men had a stronger sexual appetite and a will to dominate, while women preferred to cultivate the love response. But this seeming submission would eventually enable women to take command of the species. When he polled college students 244 out of 248 men asserted that they would prefer to be an unhappy master, while 162 out of 260 women said they would prefer to be a happy slave. Yet people desired happiness. In surrender lay control; in submission (with proper inducement), dominance.

Olive Byrne clearly had captivation charms of her own. She soon moved in with the Marston household, becoming Marston’s assistant and joining him and his wife in a ménage à trois. It was by all accounts a harmonious arrangement. Visitors described a merry home, with Marston the genial leader, six feet tall and bulky, a former high school tackle. "He had a family relationship with a lot of women, yet it was male-dominated," one friend recalled. With his wife, Elizabeth, Marston had two children, Pete and Olive Ann. With Olive Byrne, he had two sons, Byrne and Donn, who were legally adopted by the Marstons. While Elizabeth worked as a lawyer to keep the family in funds, Olive stayed home to mind the children and assist Marston with his experiments. Their sons recall the arrangement as reassuring. An evening’s entertainment might include hooking up a guest to the lie detector and plying him with innocuous questions before popping a doozy.

As this arrangement was no more compatible with academic mores than his theories were, Marston looked to the wider world for validation. He wrote up practical suggestions akin to those of contemporary sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and his mistress Margaret Sanger. (Sanger was Olive Byrne’s aunt, and Olive was always grateful to the pioneering feminist for teaching her about the world beyond her sheltered Catholic upbringing.) Marston’s tips ranged from lovemaking to peacemaking. Genital mechanisms are the teachers of love. Inducement should proceed submission if it is to lead to love. Women should be on top. Men should learn to wait. Nearly half of all female-female love relations were accompanied by "bodily love stimulation," which was perfectly healthy. A normal adult should lead his or her lover to a state of devoted submission. Hate (or racism or "war fever") among individuals or peoples was caused by a failed effort to induce submission and a consequent urge for dominance, so the route to peace was to find terms to which each party could lovingly submit. Marston’s solution? It was time for women to take a dominant role in the political and social life of the nation. In 100 years, he predicted, "the country will see the beginning of a sort of Amazonian matriarchy." In 500, there would be "a definite sex battle for supremacy." And in 1,000, "women would rule over the country, politically and economically." This last prediction had just the right frisson to earn Marston hundreds of newspaper notices.

Marston had a knack for blurring the boundary between high and low culture, elite and popular science, provocation and uplift. Part of his charm was some uncertainty as to whether he was kidding. It took a showman to extend the use of the machine to domains where credibility was itself the principal commodity.

In 1928, while he was a part-time lecturer at Columbia University, Marston transformed the Embassy Theater in midtown Manhattan into a scientific laboratory and invited the press to ogle as he cross-checked the emotional temperaments of blonds, brunettes, and redheads. "The air was thick with euphemism," noted the reporter for the
New York Times,
as Marston strapped down three Broadway starlets, one of each tincture, and monitored their blood pressure while they watched John Gilbert and Greta Garbo make love in
Flesh and the Devil.
His conclusion was that "[b]londes prefer gentlemen, men prefer brunettes, and red-heads prefer a fight." He even maintained his scientific sangfroid when a reporter had the gall to ask whether the blond came from a bottle.

On the basis of these tests, Marston got his big break. Carl Laemmle, Sr., founder of Universal Pictures, hired him "to apply psychology to all departments of the motion picture concern." Marston was to use his lie detector to vet the studio’s screenplays for emotional content. "Motion pictures are emotion pictures," he liked to say. His job had as much to do with keeping criticism at bay as attracting ticket buyers. Under pressure from moralists, the Hollywood studios had just subscribed to a voluntary production code to censor their own films for violence and licentiousness. The industry had also begun to sponsor psychological and physiological research to repudiate the claim that movies had a pernicious effect on viewers, including on the dreams of children. Marston’s work fit neatly into this agenda.

Marston boasted that his tests would craft movies to touch the "better" emotions of the audience. "No other organization in the world, not even the church, is so powerfully equipped to serve the public psychologically as is the motion picture industry," he wrote. This power had to be tamed and refined for an age of mass audiences. No longer would Marston apply his lie detector to individuals one by one. Through the movies, he proclaimed, "I shall experiment with millions of people instead of hundreds."

In a sense, this alliance of lie detector and moving picture was incestuous: the two devices were siblings separated at birth. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Étienne-Jules Marey, the French physiologist who assembled the first polygraph to record the invisible interior actions of the body with several physiological instruments—the grandfather of Larson’s and Keeler’s machines—had also sought to record the fleeting movements of the body with sequential photographic images of trotting horses and human calisthenics, which he then recreated with his stop-action chronophotograph, the grandfather of modern cinematography. Both types of instruments enabled scientists to capture bodily actions below the threshold of conscious observation and probe elusive mental states: the polygraph to measure the bodily correlates of fear and anxiety; the cinematic apparatus to capture the fleeting expression of feelings in the human face. Nor was it long before practitioners reversed the influence so that both devices were being used to induce mental states—and consequently bodily states. Keeler used the lie detector to intensify his subjects’ fear of being caught, and Larson used it to relieve guilt. As for the motion picture projector, it had become the greatest emotion-generating device in human history. Reunited, the polygraph and the film promised to bring scientific control to the production of human feelings.

Marston’s mentor, Hugo Münsterberg, had been the first to articulate how this might be done. In his influential booklet of 1916,
The Photoplay,
he explained how cinematic techniques, like the close-up and flashback, made movies seem an inner process in which the picture appeared "shaped by the demands of our soul." When properly performed, the actors’ bodily expressions were then reproduced in the audience as if the audience members were emotional automatons, mimicking those of the performers. "The horror which we see makes us really shrink, the happiness which we witness makes us relax, the pain which we observe brings contractions in our muscles; and all the resulting sensation from muscles, joints, tendons, from skin and viscera, from blood circulation and breathing, give the color of living experience to the emotional reflection in our mind."