The Truth Machine (34 page)

Concurrent with the emergence of criminal anthropology was the growing suspicion that crime was a normal if regrettable feature of society. Criminality was regarded by fin-de-siècle novelists as something distressingly ordinary. Criminal anthropology's naturalization of crime had compromised the age-old distinction between the moral and the immoral. The concept of criminal man as a despised other, a species apart, was quickly challenged by novelists such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The effect of these “Gothic” critiques was to undermine the notion of criminal otherness. In literature the human and the abhuman were inextricably mingled. By 1900, American criminology was also beginning to question the concept of criminal man as a separate kind of human
being. University of Chicago sociologist Frances Kellor was convinced of the illegitimacy of conceiving of the criminal as a separate type of person. Using pneumographs and kymographs—“tests of respiration” as she called them— Kellor investigated the emotions of female offenders. Unlike her predecessors, who had also used such instruments, she considered her subjects to be normal, not deviant.

The American press was fascinated with the technology of criminology. From 1900 to 1920, a series of “soul machines,” “truth-compelling machines,” and “machines to cure liars” were described with great enthusiasm. But none of these devices were lie detectors in the sense with which the term was understood after the 1920s, because the predominant ambition was still to understand the pathologies of the intellect, emotional complexes, and, of course, criminal minds. These instruments were focused on studying the aberrant, the abject, the abhuman; their target remained the pathological human— a target that had already been deconstructed by novelists and criticized by sociologists. In the context of eugenics, the dream of criminology was, nevertheless, glimpsed as a real possibility: “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.”

Frances Kellor's association of emotion, criminality, and normality within the context of laboratory instrumentation was a significant development. It was only when criminology came to refute the theory of the born criminal that the idea of the lie detector became a real possibility. This refutation occurred first in fin-de-siècle novels and detective fiction during the first decade of the twentieth century, quite a few years before Marston, Larson, and Keeler began their work. During this period, writers such as Melvin Severy, Cleveland Moffett, Charles Walk, Arthur B. Reeve, Edwin Balmer, and William MacHarg all imagined lie detectors well before criminology embarked on solving the practical problems that turned these fantasies into reality. The writers of scientific detective stories no longer had a role for the born criminal, because their “whodunit” plots featured a range of possible suspects, all of whom were apparently equally culpable. Once criminology had accepted that “every crime was entrenched behind a lie”—and no longer the inevitable byproduct of the diseased “criminal mind”—it followed the novelists into accepting that anyone, not just born criminals, were capable of committing crimes. The lie detector was, therefore, made cognizable by the rejection of the obstacle of the born criminal.
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Because that obstacle had first been
cleared away in literature, it is appropriate to credit the literary imagination with the creation of the lie detector.

Lie detector discourse has always been conflicted. What characterizes it is not, for example, an uncompromising attempt to amass empirical evidence to refute its reputation for brutality. Although use of this new technology promised to replace the third degree with scientific humanitarianism, an element of intimidation from the sweat box had its uses. Liberation and subjugation coexist with this technique. Although the instrument was often depicted as an automatic truth machine, the attending human expert could never become entirely obscured. The “charismatic authority” of the expert—to invoke a deliberate oxymoron—was vitally important to the success of the enterprise. The discourse is best understood as one that posits an interrelated series of dilemmatic oppositions between the broadly scientific and empirical and the largely theatrical and performative.
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The lie detector emerged when and where it did because the cultural conditions were right. The technology could not have emerged in Britain because “criminal man” couldn't establish a foothold there and also because even toward the end of the nineteenth century, lying was not regarded as particularly problematic by the professional and bourgeois classes.
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In America, however, a Puritanic intolerance of lying (or, at least, a publically proclaimed intolerance of lying), together with a progressive faith in the utopian potential of technology, coincided with the professionalization of the police and the growth of a crime-obsessed sensationalist media. These forces, together with the democratic privileging of the lie as the central problem for criminology and detective crime fiction alike, created conditions for the emergence of the lie detector. If the technology was “socially constructed”, then it was so thanks to those excursions that were made back and forth across the boundary demarcating criminology from the wider culture. The instrument's architecture, in other words, lay on the fertile boundary where criminology interacted with its public. In this sense, the lie detector was inherently transgressive. It is not so much that the lie detector was created as a result of “boundary work”—the attempt to demarcate science from nonscience
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—but rather that a series of deviations back and forth across boundaries—between nations, continents, disciplines, genres, genders, modalities of power, and so on—created the discursive space out of which the practice finally emerged. It was the persistent crossing of boundaries that was so productive, rather than the creation of those boundaries.

Modern criminology was itself created at the intersection of two enterprises:
a “Lombrosian project” and a “governmental project.”
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The Lombrosian project proposed that the solution to crime lay in correctly demarcating criminals from noncriminals. The governmental project proposed that in order to administer justice in an equitable way, power must be deployed to take into account the nature of the criminal. Criminology thus emerged out of a double predicament: the solution to the dilemma of governance could only appear once the dilemma of the nature of the criminal had been confronted. The dilemmas of science and governance, then, represent criminology's two foundations. The history of criminology, as well as that of the lie detector, can be understood in terms of how subsequent developments within the discipline posited different solutions to these tensions.

Lie detector discourse was characterized by several interrelated dilemmas. One set, focused on the nature of science, asked, “What is the appropriate object of knowledge?” and “How should knowledge be created?” The other set, focused on the nature of power, asked, “What is the appropriate target of power?” and “How should power be deployed?” Different actors responded to these questions in accordance with their own circumstances, sympathies, and positioning within the discourse. Those who were involved with lie detection had to confront these contradictory impulses.

Constructed on the borderlands between criminology and the wider culture, the lie detector retained its Januslike ability to look in two directions at once. Amid the smoke and mirrors, one thing is certain: the lie detector was not the invention of any one individual. It is not credible to think of it as a scientific “invention” at all. Most of the machine's constituent parts (the sphygmomanometer, the galvanometer, the pneumograph, and so on) had long been in use within criminology, where they had been used to investigate the multiple pathologies of criminal man. Nevertheless, the myth of “invention” played a fundamental supporting role within lie detector discourse. The term that provided invention's dilemmatic opposite—tradition—was only deployed by the machine's advocates when discussing the history of the lie. Whereas the lie was an ancient vice, they argued, the lie detector was modern. To some extent the lie detector was an artifactual creation of the term “lie detector.”

All inventions, real or not, require an inventor. Two exuberant personalities came to embody this aspect of the technology: the criminologist Leonarde Keeler and the psychologist William Moulton Marston. These charismatic individuals skillfully resolved some of the lie detector's dilemmas of science and governance. Like all the instrument's advocates, they emphasized
the instrument's scientific credentials and promoted its use as an alternative to the brutalities of the third degree. They privileged the chart as the locus of truth and described the machine in terms of metaphors derived from the law courts. Both thought the instrument could assist in the administration of business and politics. But Keeler and Marston, and indeed Larson too, confronted these dilemmas in different ways. They took different positions on whether the instrument was a magic black box (as Keeler emphasized), whether it could intervene in romantic affairs of the heart (as Marston claimed), or whether it had a diagnostic role to play in medicine (as Larson suggested).

Table 1.
The Lie Detector's Discursive Architecture

In his insightful paper on the instrument's role in solving the problem of trust in twentieth-century America, Ken Alder argues that the history of the lie detector “is part of the history of how America coped with the rise of a mass public, on the one hand, and the rise of new large-scale organizations on the other.”
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Alder suggests that the technology was part of a wider discourse that was itself an “uneasy hybridization” of two different strategies of expertise. The first strategy, open science, valued the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and its dissemination via meritocratic academic channels into the public domain. The second strategy, proprietary knowledge-making, took social utility as its starting point but sought to sell high value knowledge, expertise, or power to interested authorities. While Keeler embraced the latter strategy by patenting and marketing the “Keeler Polygraph” and
a training course to go with it, Larson adopted the former strategy by using the instrument as a tool of psychiatric diagnosis. When, in 1924, for example, Keeler had informed Larson that he thought the lie detector was “altogether too much in its infancy to start anything in a commercial way,” Larson had responded by praising Keeler's restraint and noting that science and profit were in opposition: “You did right to keep out of the commercial proposition,” he wrote, “for I think it would ruin you scientifically.”
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Although Larson would later dismiss the commercialization of polygraphy as “unethical,” the two approaches were not mutually exclusive in that “each strategy depended on the other, and each was wracked by internal tensions not easily overcome.”
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Keeler could complain that Marston's work was scientifically worthless, as Fred Inbau, a close associate of Keeler, could claim that the Harvard-trained psychologist Marston lacked scientific credentials. In response, Marston could casually dismiss the myth of invention while claiming to have invented a technique of his own. As he was marketing proprietary knowledge in his populist book,
The Lie Detector Test,
he was claiming credibility for having discovered a scientific principle.

Whether the epistemological impetus was to produce truth or to generate profit, here was a dilemma that different actors responded to differently, depending on their prior commitments. Early in his career, for example, Marston had pursued an open science strategy as he attempted to establish an academic career for himself based on his experimental research on the emotions. From the 1930s on, however, as he moved more into the domain of popular psychology, he adopted the proprietary knowledge-making strategy, positioning himself as a “consulting psychologist,” a priestlike purveyor of esoteric psychological knowledge. In claiming to have discovered an important technique of lie detection—and not laying claim to have invented the instrument—Marston was attempting to underpin his populism with scientific respectability. Wonder Woman, his greatest creation, embodied this dilemma of expertise. Although she professed to have no special supernatural powers (her athletic abilities being the result of sheer hard work and dedication), she was adept at operating mysterious technologies that law enforcement authorities were keen to exploit. Her Golden Lasso of Truth was a form of esoteric proprietary knowledge, yet it produced truth in a pure and systematic (albeit mysterious) way.

Marston's advocacy of the lie detector-as-therapy was unique. He maintained that the technique could become a tool of psychotherapy for families in crisis and insecure lovers. Having detected the subconscious secrets of the
subjects, Marston would then confront them with the results. Forcing them to acknowledge their “repressed feelings” would be therapeutic: the truth would set them free. Neither Marston nor any of the machine's advocates ever realized this ambition. Its therapeutic liberating potential was restricted to popular psychology texts and speculative magazine articles. The lie detector did not have the psychotherapeutic potential for governing the self, because that project required the willful and enthusiastic consent of its subjects.
Collier's
assertion in 1924 that there was “no immediate danger of the lie detector following the talking machine and the radio set into the intimacy of domestic life” remained true for the whole of the instrument's history.
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