The Truth Machine (32 page)

In a 1932
Review of Reviews
article “Science in the Detection of Crime,” William A. Dyche first listed the numerous activities of the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory before focusing on one particular technology: “An interesting feature of the laboratory has been developed through the efforts of Dr. [sic] Leonarde Keeler, one of the first scientists to see the possibilities of the polygraph, the ‘lie detector.' In the operation of this machine is found a combination of physics, biology, and psychology, which can be employed in nearly every situation where it is desirable to obtain knowledge which a suspect may have.”
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“It is believed that no more important invention has ever been made for successfully dealing with crime in the whole course of criminal science,” Dyche concluded. The article was illustrated with a photograph of Keeler performing a lie detector test and emblematic diagrams of “truth” and “lie” graphs.
Forum and Century
's piece on the “practical and humane” methods of the new scientific criminology opened with the claim that the Keeler Polygraph was perhaps “the most dramatic and satisfactory of these instruments.”
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Apparently able to commit the guilty and free the innocent, the lie detector was a wonderful public relations tool for the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, perfectly symbolizing the objective and humane ideals of criminology. As Keeler himself put it, the polygraph was a “modern scientific procedure,
the antithesis of the old third degree method for determining truthfulness.”
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But its appeal was not necessarily self-evident; its enthusiasts occasionally had to go to absurd lengths to make their point. Business was booming in the laboratory during the mid-1930s, recalled Eloise Keeler: “Every type of case one could dream up was brought in, including one involving the purported mummy of John Wilkes Booth. The mummy was being shown at fairs and carnivals, and, after lie tests, the owners ‘conceded' it was a fraud.”
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The instrument's capacity for attracting sympathetic publicity was a function Goddard was well aware of when he asked Keeler to organize the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory's exhibition stand for the 1933 Chicago World Fair. Despite a laboratory full of ballistics, forensic chemistry, handwriting analysts, and specialist photography, nothing could capture the public's imagination quite as well as the lie detector.
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A 1934
Literary Digest
article about Goddard's laboratory was almost completely devoted to the instrument.
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The machine was more than a lie detecting device; it was a scientific, humane, and moral technology of truth. And because every crime was apparently entrenched behind a lie, the instrument embodied what
Living Age
had claimed was “the constant dream of jurists and police functionaries.”
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The Chicago laboratory provided the inspiration for the creation of many others. Cincinnati established a scientific crime detection laboratory in 1934, stocked with “ballistic and other scientific identification apparatus, such as the lie-detector and equipment for chemical analysis.”
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In 1931, Charles A. Appel was instructed by the FBI to attend Northwestern's course in scientific crime detection before establishing the Bureau's first scientific crime laboratory.
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Publicity brought the Chicago laboratory a heavy case load. “Work is mounting up here faster than ever,” Keeler told Vollmer in July 1932. “I have had practically no time to do anything but work on cases, for they have been coming in from all over the state.”
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Furthermore, the volume of work had recently forced a relocation to another building: “We occupy the entire third floor,” Keeler continued, “and have a real honest-to-goodness show place, as well as an ideal laboratory set up.”
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But in spite of the enthusiasm, the laboratory soon ran into problems. By 1934 the university had become somewhat dissatisfied with its management. Its budget was to be severely cut, and although the director's salary had already been halved, his services would no longer be required. “Of course there were other reasons for dropping the Colonel” excepting purely financial ones, Keeler told Vollmer, “mainly because of rumors reaching the ears of the faculty members about ‘wine, women and
song.'”
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“Although Colonel Goddard is a fine person and we are all very fond of him personally, he is not very discreet about his overt activities, and sometimes the feminine call muddles his judgment a little in business affairs.” It was a rather odd comment coming from a man whose own wife fretted that he possessed “a gift of attraction for men and women alike.”
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Goddard's solution to his problems was revealing, considering the manner in which he had directed the activities of the laboratory prior to his dismissal: “Colonel Goddard opened a small office of his own next door to the laboratory and spent his summer months managing a bally hoo side show at the fair. He had a crime detection laboratory exhibit but, unfortunately, mixed into it crime-horrors, methods of torture, an electric chair demonstration and part of the time had Dorothy Pollock—“Chicago's most beautiful murderess”—as an exhibit in person.”
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“I'm afraid the show venture somewhat hurt the Colonel's professional standing,” Keeler lamented, possibly alluding to the fact that Goddard's gun display was burglarized twice during the fair.
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Keeler's letters to Vollmer during the 1930s regularly reported on the dire straits of the laboratory's finances. Its losses were $12,000 a year by 1934, compared to losses of $40,000 “before Mr. Massee lost in the market.”
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By the summer of 1936 its activities were increasing all the time, he recounted, and there were some prospects of obtaining endowments.
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The authorities were making a concerted effort to raise sufficient funds to put the Laboratory on a sound, permanent financial basis, he told Vollmer in early 1937.
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By then, the laboratory's managers wanted to increase its revenue from $20,000 per annum to $52,000 per annum by forging a better working relationship between the laboratory and the State Bureau.
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But it was hopeless. The end came in 1938 when the Dean of the University completely cut off the Laboratory's budget and it was sold to the City of Chicago Police.
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Although he was disappointed with Goddard's eye for publicity, Keeler was also at risk of turning himself into a one-man vaudeville act. Anxious to disassociate himself from trivial ventures, he acknowledged that the laboratory was inevitably a “show place” for the new criminology, and the lie detector its central exhibit. After being sued for $750,000 following a disastrous ballistics case, Goddard vowed never to take the stand again or deal with fire-arms identification. “He was going to make money now,” Keeler reported, “radio programs, stock promotion in patent medicine,—anything. He was through with being professional and ethical; he had decided just to make money, no matter how.”
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As the finances of the laboratory dwindled during the Depression-racked thirties, Keeler himself was also forced to commercialize
his activities. Despite financial problems, he attempted to maintain his integrity, claiming that his “real interest” was “in the study of human behavior and not in inventing and making money out of some instrument.” “Of course,” he added coyly, “if some money comes along, it will be welcome, but I think that is incidental to the problem.”
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The lie detector had always provided the laboratory's only real source of income, excluding gifts and grants. “The Polygraph work is going along as usual, bringing in approximately ten thousand dollars a year,” Keeler told Vollmer in May 1938, “and the other work in the laboratory consists mainly of research and occasional cases.”
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Acting on Vollmer's advice, and with the help of Bert Massee, Keeler opened his own lie detecting business, Leonarde Keeler Inc. While it would doubtless be a challenge, he had “many clients awaiting the opening of [his] new office” he reported in August 1937.
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By the fall of 1938 the business was well under way. “I am handling more cases now than were ever handled in a corresponding period at the old laboratory,” he told the Chief in November. “My gross income is approximately $1,000 a month which from all appearances will continue more or less indefinitely. As a matter of fact, I have cases scheduled for about a month in advance, and undoubtedly if I sought more work, I could easily double the gross income.”
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Business was so good by early 1939 that he found it necessary to recruit an assistant.

In addition to running polygraph examinations for the police, banks, insurance companies, and large department stores, Keeler also made money by selling his famous “Keeler Polygraph.” He also insisted that future operators take his brief course in the detection of deception. In 1939 the Chief of Police at Toledo, Ohio, reported that the city's officials “feel that our Keeler Polygraph for lie detection is an asset equivalent to an increase in personnel and has paid for itself several times over. In a great many cases, it has quickly broken down the alibis of hardened criminals.”
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In September 1939, a second company, Deception Tests Service Co., of Berkeley, California, followed Keeler into the marketplace. Prices for lie detector polygraphs in the late 1930s ranged from $250 for the Berkeley Psychograph to over $1000 for the Darrow Photopolygraph. Keeler's instrument sold for $450.
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Although he could no longer operate from within the safe confines of the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, Keeler's fame brought him all the work he needed. In February 1941,
Reader's Digest
reprinted a
Forbes
magazine article entitled “The Lie Detector Goes into Business.”
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“For 10 years,” the piece began, “many of Chicago's banks, department stores, chain stores
and restaurants have been using the Keeler Polygraph, or ‘lie detector,' with astonishing results.” By the early 1940s, according to the magazine, ninety-five percent of Keeler's work was commercial. In 1944, after the
Saturday Evening Post
published a series of three articles about him and his “Magic Lie Detector,” he told Vollmer that the articles were “bringing in all kinds of new business.”
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In 1946 Keeler was instrumental in tracking down $1.5 million worth of missing jewels. “There was enough to fill the windows of half a dozen shops like those on Madison Avenue, New York,” reported the Sunday
New York Times.
“As important as the loot, recovered with the aid of a twentieth-century lie detector, were the confessions that officials said had been obtained from principals in the fantastic crime.”
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Two senior Army officers had stumbled upon the Hesse-Darmstadt jewels in the Kronberg castle toward the end of the war and had secreted them to the United States.

Keeler was sufficiently famous by the 1940s that he could play himself in the Hollywood movie
Call Northside 777.
Starring Jimmy Stewart, the film told the true story of a reporter who employs the tools of scientific criminology to free an innocent man from jail. A fine example of film noir, the movie was released on February 18, 1948, some eighteen months before Keeler's death. In many ways it was the peak achievement of a widely celebrated career. By shooting the movie in the original Chicago locations and by adding cinema verité touches like Keeler and his polygraph, the filmmakers were aiming at documentary style realism. Keeler's appearance in the film was an appropriate finale to a career that having started in Hollywood, was destined to end there.

The lie detector was constructed by and in American popular culture. William Moulton Marston and Leonarde Keeler were the two most influential individuals responsible for establishing its use in the United States prior to the Second World War. A tireless popularizer of psychology who created “an entire oeuvre of ‘lowbrow' literature,”
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William Moulton Marston designed
Wonder Woman
to be an embodiment of his esoteric social philosophy. Appropriately described by one historian as having a “mania for publicity,” Leonarde Keeler was apparently the inspiration behind that other crime-fighting comic book hero
Dick Tracy.
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Both men had a flair for theatricality and were adept at dealing with the press. Both courted opportunities to appear in the media. And both possessed that quasi-magical quality of leadership that Max Weber called charismatic authority.

During periods of relative social and political calm, Weber argued, the habitual demands of ordinary life were brought about by mundane power structures
embedded in bureaucracies. Bureaucrats and patriarchs are afforded leadership roles because they embody those rational rules that made everyday governance possible. At times of rapid social change, however, a form of authority based on personal charisma can emerge. During such times, ordinary managers are usurped by leaders who come to inspire intense loyalty.
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“It is the
duty
of those to whom he addresses his mission,” Weber argued, “to recognize him as their charismatically qualified leader.”
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Neither patriarchal or permanent, charisma is a fickle resource. The charismatic hero's power does not arise from formal codes or statutes, traditional customs, or “feudal vows of faith,” as in patriarchy.
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It is gained solely by proving its strength, performing miracles or heroic deeds, and by embarking on extraordinary ventures. The “god-like strength” of the hero makes a sovereign break with all traditional or rational norms. In the case of the lie detector, charismatic authority was intimately tied to the myth of invention that was in turn the source of the machine's mystique and power. Invention was a highly valued commodity within the moral economy of lie detecting, and it played a crucial role in establishing lie detection as a credible and meaningful activity. The title “inventor of the lie detector” conferred status upon its holder and justified and consolidated his charismatic authority. And in turn, the charisma of the invention was itself a crucial component of the lie detector's spectacular powers.