The Truth Machine (20 page)

The press encouraged scientists to claim that the new machines could discern mental facts by measuring bodily effects in order to diagnose morbid conditions. The newspapers were fascinated by McLane Hamilton's “mysterious little machine,” Peterson's “soul machine,” and Münsterberg's “machine for cure of liars.” Spectacular knowledge claims found receptive audiences. Having emerged from the new psychology, the popularity of these “truth-compelling machines” was also partly a function of their ability to resonate with broader social concerns such as the fight against crime. Science and technology was to assist the quest for law and order. A brief notice in the
Scientific American Supplement
for 1909 was typical of the progressive sensibility: “Photography in the Service of the Law. The Scientific Detection of Crime.”
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The piece was illustrated with a picture of the “microphotographic camera” and a number of images taken with it. “These few examples,” the article concluded, “may serve to give an idea of the important service which photography, in the hands of experts, is able to render to the cause of justice.”
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A reviewer for
Current Literature
predicted in 1911 that “the great scientist will supersede the great detective.” Employing science to fight crime was doubly necessary now that criminals were arming themselves with the new scientific techniques. “The swindler and the murderer are proving themselves psychologists of power, chemists of great knowledge, electricians of genius. The great detective must meet the great criminal upon a plane of intellectual equality. He fails to do that nowadays, and this circumstance accounts for the relatively large amount of undetected and mysterious crime.”
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The training of the detective
of the future would take place in the scientific laboratory. The caption to a photograph of a physiological laboratory at the Sorbonne suggested that a certain Professor Lapicque was “A Sherlock Holmes of Science.” It was here that “the Paris police have more than once made tests that brought some evildoer to destruction.”
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“In physical science the fundamental thing is laboratory experiment,” agreed
The Literary Digest
, “and something of the same kind is necessary in the study of crime if we are to have trustworthy knowledge and permanent results.”
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Describing the workings of the galvanometer in
Harper's Weekly
, one physician admitted that although the mechanism by which the conscious will acted on the body was unknown, passion nevertheless had an emphatic effect on “heart, lungs, vessels, sweat glands, muscles, on all motile portions of the body. These things being so, why should not some instrument measure thought
by its effects on the body?
To be sure!”
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Linking science and mystery, body and mind, and technology and humanitarian progress, the physician asserted that the galvanometer would “become exalted as a mind-reader, and ‘sweat-box' interviews [would] take rank as scientific performances instead of will-breakers.”
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Studying a criminal in his cell “mentally, morally, and physically, and with instruments of precision” constitutes a laboratory, asserted Arthur MacDonald, who wished to “turn our prisons into laboratories for studying the symptoms of evil-doers.”
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MacDonald's proposal is instructive because of the contrast between its own encyclopedic ambitions and the lie detector's humble efficiency. His ultimate target—the criminal degenerate—would be of no concern to the lie detector's advocates. MacDonald proposed that his painstaking study “would consist in a physical, mental, moral, and social study of each boy, including such data as age, date of birth, height, weight, sitting height, color of hair, eyes, skin, first born, second born, or later born, strength of hand grasp, left-handed, length, width, and circumference of head, distance between zygomatic arches, corners of eyes, length and width of ears, hands, and mouth, thickness of lips, measurements of sensitivity to heat and pain, examination of lungs, eyes, pulse, and respiration, nationality, occupation, education, and social condition of parents, whether one or both are dead or drunkards, stepchildren or not, hereditary taint,
stigmata
of degeneration.”
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Having written the first American treatise on criminal anthropology ten years earlier, MacDonald remained committed to Lombroso's personological theory of the born criminal. Because criminality was thought to be manifested in multiple ways, enormous efforts had to be devoted to discovering “all the corporal manifestations” of the criminal's being. But as
MacDonald described it, even though criminal anthropology's methods were laborious they could not guarantee results.

In 1911, a
New York Times
article was intriguingly titled “Electric Machine to Tell Guilt of Criminals.”
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“If It Is Perfected So As to Be Infallible,” claimed the subheading, “It Will Make Expert Testimony Unnecessary and May Eliminate Juries in Trials.” The iconography of the piece was revealing. Portraits of Professor Edward R. Johnstone and Dr. Henry H. Goddard were placed at the bottom of the page above a photograph of the psychometer. Two further views of the psychometer were placed below the headline. Connecting the five pictures was an illustration that would later play an enormous rhetorical role within lie detector discourse: the graphical record of the examination. “A Record of the Psychometer” was the caption; “Note the Disturbance in the Patient When the Word Whiskey Was Spoken.” Sure enough, the tortuous vertical line indeed showed a disturbance—a high peak—following the utterance of the important word. The piece began with a futuristic fictional flourish: “May it please your Honor, the State accuses this man of the murder of his wife. I offer for your Honor's inspection these documents which prove beyond a doubt that the prisoner is guilty.” “The documents are the records made by various instruments to which the prisoner was subjected in the State's psychical laboratory, and your Honor will find recorded there the incontrovertible evidence that this man committed the crime, the exact details showing every step taken prior to, during, and after the murder, the motives, and the attempts to throw suspicions upon others.” The fantasy continued by directing the judge to “consult the record of the psychometer” for evidence of the prisoner's weakening determination: “a full confession will be forthcoming in a short time. In view of this conclusive proof the State asks for the maximum penalty of the law.”
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There was every reason to believe, the piece concluded, “that it will be a common thing for our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren to listen to just such arguments in criminal cases.”

The writer was convinced of the psychometer's future role in the courts: “There will be no jury, no horde of detectives and witnesses, no charges and countercharges, and no attorney for the defense. These impedimenta of our courts will be unnecessary. The State will merely submit all suspects in a case to the tests of scientific instruments, and as these instruments cannot be made to make mistakes nor tell lies, their evidence will be conclusive of guilt or innocence, and the court will deliver sentence accordingly.”
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It is not surprising that great things were expected of it, given that “even in its present crude state no living man can conceal his emotions from the uncanny
instrument.” Nor was it implausible to imagine that the men who were “delving deeply into the most intangible of all things—human thoughts and emotions”—would “go down into scientific history.” Although the piece had opened with a description of the instrument's potential legal impact, it was, however, predominantly a description of how the psychometer could be used to diagnose the “insane or weak-minded” thus benefiting “the mental health of the entire race.” The article described the activities and ambitions of Johnstone, a leader of the American eugenics movement and Superintendent of the New Jersey Training School for Feeble-Minded Boys and Girls in Vineland, and Goddard, Director of Research. It was Goddard who explained to the reporter that the psychometer could be used to see whether or not a child with Down Syndrome “had any emotion in him or not.” The presence of a female assistant or the sight of a piece of candy would apparently effect a reaction. The plan was to “take up the emotions one by one until we know just what departments of the feeble minds are dead and what are still alive. In that way we will have some basis for future psychologists to work upon in the hope of improving minds which to-day are hopeless even under the best treatment.”
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Despite describing the scientists as being “big-hearted” and “self-sacrificing,” the article concluded on a sinister note: “if, a hundred years from now, there is an insane or a weak-minded person in all the world, it will not be the fault of Goddard or Johnstone.”

The research at Vineland was motivated by a commitment to eugenics, the science of the managed selection of people according to their putative “fitness.” Appointed director of research in 1906, Henry Goddard was “a superenthusiast of the eugenics movement,” obsessed with halting the spread of feeble-mindedness.
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Goddard demonstrated the connections between feeblemindedness and criminality in two books,
The Kallikak Family
(1912) and
The Criminal Imbecile
(1915).
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These works of eugenics propaganda enjoyed a wide readership thanks to their richly mythopoeic storytelling qualities.
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In 1908 Goddard had returned from a trip to Europe armed with a new method for measuring intelligence. The Binet-Simon tests he had encountered in Belgium suggested that the current system, which was based on medical classifications of feeble-mindedness—such as “microcephaly” and “Mongolism,” could be replaced with a uniform scale of achievement based instead on performative abilities.
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Intelligence tests promised to be able to identify the unfit with greater accuracy than had been previously possible, but they were criticized for being inaccurate and improperly administered. This is perhaps one reason why Goddard retained an interest in instruments such as
the psychometer. Earlier in his career he had used an ergograph “to test will power,” and an automatograph to measure involuntary motions.
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One inventory of the training school's holdings lists the following pieces of apparatus: plethysmograph, pneumograph, ergograph, automatograph, dynamometer, and chronoscope.
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Goddard proposed that feebleminded criminality could be detected through the deciphering of stigmata or other physical means. Criminality was an invisible problem, one that could only be revealed through psychological testing and family genealogies. Secrecy, appropriately, was a major theme of Goddard's popular books, which foregrounded the difficulties involved in penetrating appearances to reveal underlying realities.
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For a while after 1910 Goddard was the most influential criminologist in the United States, the national expert on the causes of crime.
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By collapsing upper-grade feeblemindedness and moral imbecility into the single category of the “moron,” he delivered the “coup de grace to criminal anthropology.”
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Even so, because of its commitment to defective human kinds, the Vineland Training School could never have been the place where the lie detector was invented, even if it did help to consolidate some of the conditions for the instrument's later emergence. The lie detector could not materialize in a setting where criminality remained conflated with feeblemindedness, degeneration, hereditary defect, or any other form of inherent psychopathology.

A paradigm shift was imminent. “There is No Criminal Type,” the
New York Times
announced in November 1913 in a full page article: “In other words the criminal is a normal person, not markedly different from the rest of humanity who have managed to keep out of prison. In other words, there are in ministers and Cambridge undergraduates and college professors the making of pickpockets and thieves, as well as murderers and forgers.”
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The article was a detailed account of Charles Goring's
The English Convict
, the book that, according to the historian of criminality Arthur Fink, “was more decisive perhaps than any other factor in undermining belief in a criminal anthropological type.”
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Other factors challenging the notion of the born criminal included William Healy's intensive study of a thousand delinquents (1915), the psychometric testing of over a million American army recruits in 1917, aetiological findings produced by the case study method of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and, as we have already seen, the development of a sociological approach to crime.
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Fink dated the end of criminal anthropology in the United States to 1915, the year in which the term “lie detector” was first coined. By then, he concluded, the study of crime “had come a long way
from the time when the madman was indistinguishable from the criminal, from the time when it was held that the shape of the skull or of the brain determined criminal or non-criminal behaviour, from the time when it was believed that there was a fixed criminal anthropological type … when it was asserted that every feeble-minded person was a criminal or a potential criminal.”
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It was also in 1915 that a “Psychology Squad” was established to advise the New York Police Department on “how to differentiate mental defectives from crooks.”
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