The Lie Detectors (13 page)

From a different angle, others accused Meyer of moralizing. Like the "personality studies" he inspired, psychobiology was meant to coax human beings into conformity with the social norm, honing the personality into a tool for advancement. In this, psychobiology suited the managerial cadres who were transforming American life and for whom "people skills" were the means of social and professional success. Here too the lie detector intersected with Meyer’s program. Even if it was not used to detect lies as such, by measuring emotional deviations it might be used to coax individuals back to the straight and narrow. Emotional self-management, meaning control over bodily functions and their outward display, was the new ideal of American maturity.

Larson spent two intense years under Meyer’s influence and was tempted to continue to pursue his research, but there were obstacles. In the first place, Meyer quickly lost patience with Larson’s fixation on the lie detector, and insisted that he stop conducting "autopsies on old records." Moreover, the Depression had given Larson several households to support, including those of his in-laws and his own separated parents, and no fellowship could cover his needs. Nor could he return to the Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago as long as Adler was in charge there. This intellectual and financial conundrum brought out Marge Larson’s loyalty. In a "private note" to Meyer, she solicited a post for herself as an office nurse so as to free her husband for research. She explained that "something in his personality seems to draw him irrestably [
sic
] toward unsolved problems—and I can’t bear to have him turn from his natural inclinations because of financial pressure."

In the end, Larson took a well-paying job at a psychopathic hospital affiliated with the University of Iowa. Three months into his stay he was already on the outs with his colleagues and angling to get to Chicago. Big changes were afoot in the capital of crime. Not only had Keeler persevered in Larson’s place at the Institute for Juvenile Research, but August Vollmer himself had been offered a position as a professor of police administration at the University of Chicago. More, Volmer’s allies were fanning rumors that he might be appointed the city’s police chief. With the team from Berkeley reassembled, perhaps Chicago was finally due for reform, ready or not. Then, as luck would have it, Adler quit his job as director of the institute, and Vollmer persuaded the new director to hire Larson. And more: Vollmer had also arranged for Keeler and Larson to team up on a definitive study of lie detection.

There ain’t a police force in the country could do its job with a law book. You got information and I want it. You could of said no and I could of not believed you. But you didn’t even say no.

—RAYMOND CHANDLER,
THE LONG GOODBYE,
1953

LIKE A REFORMERS’ TAG TEAM, VOLLMER’S BOYS WERE
determined to clean up Chicago. The racketeers and naysayers may have temporarily run John Larson out of town, but Keeler had arrived to take his place, and he had brought with him a new lie box, much improved from Larson’s crude device. Also, Keeler was a smoother operator, more politically savvy and with better connections. He knew how to handle people. He was determined to make his mark. And he would do so, though his ascent proved precarious. Even as Keeler promoted his machine as an antidote to police violence and political corruption, he had to sell it to the police as a technique that served their interests.

Keeler shared Larson’s commitment to police reform. On his first day in Chicago, Keeler confided his plans to his private journal. Herman Adler had given him a tour of the Joliet penitentiary, where he would live while he conducted his research. "The prisons are well in the grasp of politicians, most of whom are ignorant and irresponsible," he wrote. Chicago would remain corrupt "until the whole system is conducted by non-political scientists." The warden—a former fish and game warden who had helped Governor Len Small out of his embezzlement scrape—was an "old double-saggy-chinned, fish-eyed, cigar-sucking fool [who] can hardly sign his name." The trick was to convince the warden and other officials that reform was their idea. As for the convicts, they would have to be duped too. Ruled by favoritism, they would suspect any reform as "an underhanded method for furthering their suppression." Stealth and secrecy would have to light the way to the dawn of science.

In the meantime Keeler dined at the officers’ table, where he was waited on by a laughing "smoke," an African-American stickup man; got his hair cut at the barbershop, where the trusties had all tested negative for syphilis; and received his morning shave from "a nice kindly fellow who raped his daughter."

Such was life under the old regime. In the coming era, even the convicts would enjoy "freedom of personality," by which Keeler meant that each "will be treated according to his ability to respond properly to his social environment." The previous warden had already set up a "progressive merit system" to track each prisoner’s rehabilitation. Keeler now wanted to weight these merits and demerits scientifically: subtracting, say, seventy-five points for planning an escape, ten points for sex offenses against others, and 2.5 points for sex offenses against oneself; and adding points for productive labor, cooperation with the authorities, and so forth. By correlating this behavioral scorecard with statistical data and the findings of the lie detector, the prison’s mental health officer—aka the "bug doc"—would advise the parole board on whom to release. Over time, he hoped similar protocols would diffuse into the ranks of the police, probation officers, and social workers, and into every corner of American life.

In 1929 Chicago was in the process of violent transformation. In the six years between Larson’s arrival and Keeler’s, the consolidation of organized crime begun under Johnny Torrio had reached maximum ferocity under Al Capone’s syndicate, to the point where the monopolization of crime was giving birth to its logical counterpart: a consolidated political machine. Into these "corrupt cesspools of humanity," the lie detector shone the bright light of truth. Three days after his arrival in Chicago Keeler wrote to his father, "absolutely on the Q.T.":

It was machine versus machine now. Against a patronage machine which thrived on the exchange of favors and boodle, Keeler, Larson, and Vollmer imagined a justice machine that ran to the logic of fair play. Theirs was a characteristically American solution to the problem of justice, one analogous to the contemporary push for intelligence testing and Taylorist industrial management. Like them it was proposed by a coterie of applied psychologists, and like them it was subject to severe criticisms.

Consider intelligence testing. Intended by the French psychologist Alfred Binet to diagnose gross mental deficiencies on an individual basis, the IQ test was refashioned during World War I by American psychologists such as Robert Yerkes of Yale and Lewis Terman of Stanford, who made it into an instrument to assign millions of middling Americans to a fixed rank on a continuous scale. They designed the grading to require so little judgment that a machine could do it, and one soon did. But the test was not just intended to cope with the scale of a mass society; it was also meant to introduce a semblance of scientific evenhandedness to the contentious new competition for spots in the education meritocracy and civil service. Indeed, the egalitarian appeal of the IQ test and its successor, the SAT, lies in the way they ostensibly treated everyone alike. In practice, of course, the content of these tests could (and did) favor some social groups over others. Nor did these paper tests necessarily predict those professional abilities that went into being an inspiring military leader, a resourceful police officer, or an attentive physician. Some Americans even challenged the notion that narrow criteria of this sort could ever define a citizen’s worth. As Walter Lippmann wrote in 1923: "I hate the impudence of a claim that in fifty minutes you can judge and classify a human being’s predestined fitness for life. I hate the pretentiousness of that claim. I hate the abuse of scientific method which it involves." Yet the IQ test triumphed in America as nowhere else in the world.

Similar logic drove the contemporary movement, led by industrial engineer Frederick Taylor, to introduce scientific management to American business. By calculating the "one best way" to perform each worker’s task, Taylorist time-and-motion studies appeared to provide a scientific solutionto the bitter dispute between labor and capital—seeming to ease the workers’ burden, while standardizing a more profitable degree of exertion. In their wake, a new breed of industrial psychologists, led by Hugo Münsterberg, extended Taylorism to the realm of behavior, treating workers’ attitudes as a "human factor" to be engineered like their bodies. As critics have complained, both then and since, the new industrial psychology enforced a new code of emotional self-management in the workplace, discouraging even legitimate displays of passions, like anger at shoddy conditions of labor. Aspects of Taylorism also appealed to Europeans (notably Lenin), but only in America was applied psychology touted as a solution to industrial conflict.

The lie detector belonged to this same American strain of the Enlightenment project to replace personal discretion with objective measures, and political conflict with science. It proposed to do this by redefining its object of inquiry—the lie—in narrow yes-or-no terms, much as IQ redefined intelligence as a single factor "g," or Taylorism redefined the worker’s task as a series of bodily motions. Just as Americans dreamed of resolving disputes over merit and industrial relations with machinelike objectivity, Vollmer and his disciples hoped that the lie detector would enable them to administer justice with machinelike fairness. Indeed, some in the African-American community welcomed the device as an antidote to prejudice in the criminal justice system. This explains the main appeal of the lie detector in the United States: the charade that it is the polygraph machine and not the examiner which assesses the subject’s veracity.

Such a project, of course, had little appeal for politicians who made patronage appointments or police officers who selectively enforced their authority on the streets. No wonder, then, that most old-style officials resisted the lie detector—at least initially—especially as they were among the first Americans subjected to the test. But like intelligence testing and Taylorism, the lie detector offered only the veneer of science. Behind the public facade, the polygraph, depending on how it was operated, did not necessarily restrict the discretion of examiners. Indeed, as Keeler conceived it, the lie detector might even enhance the power of the police, by becoming a psychological third degree. And it was here that Larson and Keeler would part company.

Within a few weeks of his arrival at Joliet, Keeler was running prisoners on his new machine as fast as the prison psychologist would clear them. And unlike John Larson, he was having success. All he had to do, he discovered, was put himself on the same social level as the inmate, and the prisoner would loosen up and confess. At that point "the man’s conflicts, his secretiveness and his dishonesty become a thing of the past." Not that Keeler necessarily thought of the inmates as his social equals: "Damn rotten bunch of money grubbers," he wrote to his aunt.

Success bred success. Just as Keeler had predicted, his tests of prisoners netted him the chance to test law enforcement officers. The new warden, a former military man, authorized Keeler to refuse employment to any guard at Joliet who failed to meet his standard for honesty. At the tender age of twenty-six Leonarde Keeler had become the solution to that ancient conundrum
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes
—Who will guard the guardians? Henceforth, he wrote to his father, he would see that the prison employed only a "higher type of man."

Keeler’s father responded warily. He warned Leonarde against making the machine the sole determinant of a person’s fate. He urged him to think of the device as a "truth finder" and use it to attack the problem of "the human personality in relation to society and to life." He imagined Leonarde working in conjunction with the Cosmic Society to bring harmony to the relations of science and religion, mind and body, mind and spirit, and perhaps even confirm the presence of psychical powers as yet unacknowledged by official science. He wanted his son to conceive of the lie detector as a first step in tracking "the soul to its lair." In his own halfhearted way, Keeler was trying to do just that, with his own soul as the hare.

Several times a week for an hour before work, Keeler lay on a couch, like a psychiatric patient, providing "a rescitation [
sic
] on my life and habits" while a device akin to his own lie detector went "swinging its telltale record" and a waxed cylinder recorded every word. His analyst was Harold D. Lasswell, a charismatic professor at the University of Chicago, who wanted to categorize the psychopathology of politicians and nations, and hoped the lie detector would calibrate his analysis for diverse individuals and cultures. His methods horrified orthodox psychiatrists, and Keeler dismissed the sessions as "a lot of nonsense," though he did admit to Vollmer that Lasswell might well "get my wrath up before we’re through." The topic often turned to Keeler’s relationship with his father. Lasswell seems to have written Keeler up as "subject A," a young man who pretended to cooperate, while his polygraph record indicated considerable inner tension. Subject A was secretly so wary of suggestion and "anxious to maintain his independence" that he postponed interviews and was discontinued after only minimal insight into his "aggressive motivations." Lasswell was especially disappointed that he tried to "discipline himself into emotional passivity." Obviously, if anyone was going to do the interrogating, it would be Keeler himself.

Then, in 1930, Vollmer himself arrived in Chicago. Only the year before he had surveyed the terrain while writing the chapter on police corruption for the
Illinois Crime Survey.
Now he was to teach police science at the University of Chicago, while reformers maneuvered to have him appointed police chief if the coroner, Herman Bundesen, won the Democratic primary for mayor. No such luck. Instead, for the next two years, Vollmer achieved his greatest national influence as a force behind the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, known as the Wickersham Commission. The most shocking revelations came in the volume devoted to police lawlessness. This volume walked readers through a national horror show of police abuses that reached its maximum intensity in Chicago.

In theory, persons arrested in Illinois had a right to be promptly heard by a judge; even the threat of violence was forbidden; and convictions based on coerced confessions were to be overturned. In practice, the police secured confessions by alternating extreme heat and cold; depriving suspects of sleep; and taking them on trips to a "goldfish" room where they were lashed in the stomach with a rubber hose, half-drowned, and kicked in the shins, and had the Chicago telephone directory slammed against their heads until they saw goldfish. As the report noted, the Chicago phone book "is a heavy one."

The members of the International Association of Chiefs of Police reacted with fury to these slurs on their conduct. They called the report "the greatest blow to police work in the last half century," and denied the existence of the so-called third degree. They also insisted that the police couldn’t do their job without it. Besides, only guilty suspects were beaten up. Moreover, the rough justice of the station house deterred crime and secured the confessions that prevented criminals from slipping through the judicial system. One police official in Chicago warned that without the third degree 95 percent of his department’s work would be nullified.