The Truth Machine (25 page)

Inbau received a dose of his own medicine, however, when Larson took the opportunity to review his
Lie Detection and Criminal Interrogation.
⁹⁷
“Unfortunately space does not permit an exposition of the inaccuracies and inconsistencies
of this book,” Larson began. “The glaring mistakes and the lack of familiarity with basic physio-psychological and pathological principles involved can be understood when we remember that the author is primarily trained in law and has no degrees either in physiology, medicine or psychology.” As Inbau had charged Marston of failing to recognize the contributions of others, so Larson accused Inbau: “he shows pages of charts with involved, inaccurate interpretations, and then presents garbled formulations in an attempt to explain a technique which is incorrect as described. He is apparently unfamiliar with the scientific literature, or he deliberately ignores key contributions which have scientific priority and arbitrarily assigns credit at will.”
⁹⁸

Although they had once been “close as brothers,” some rancor even developed between Keeler and Inbau.
⁹⁹
Inbau later recalled that Keeler “became a frustrated individual and began to look with some degree of envy on the success I was achieving in case investigation and with my writing.”
¹⁰⁰
Keeler was particularly resentful when he returned from a Caribbean cruise to find Inbau “in the limelight” having solved a murder case in his absence.
¹⁰¹
Keeler's “ill feelings … were really greatly augmented” in 1938 when the crime laboratory was sold to the Chicago Police Department, and the younger man was taken on as director. “The police department, for a variety of reasons that were never fully revealed to me, did not want Keeler… . Keeler, having developed some paranoia about me, thought that I had planned for this all along. In any event, he thought I had engineered this whole thing, which had no factual basis whatsoever, and that I can document.”
¹⁰²

Larson's disliking for Keeler extended beyond the latter's death. In 1951, by then the Superintendant of the Logansport State Hospital in Indiana, Larson wrote Vollmer to keep him “abreast of some developments in the field of deception testing.”
¹⁰³
The field was “chaotic,” Larson complained; “everyone is talking about the so-called ‘Lie-Detector.'” Larson's principal criticism was that Keeler and other “quacks” had commercialized the technology before it had been properly tested in clinical settings: “Keeler, Lee and many others with their polygraphs, psychographs, photopolygraphs, pathometers etc. have focussed their attention upon the sale of apparatus and the training of laymen whose background was inadequate.” No scientific interest had been shown by most of the apparatus promoters, “including Lee and Keeler.” Larson was particularly anxious to clear up any confusion regarding “the pioneer Berkeley work” that he had done. Keeler had neither “perfected any polygraph or improved any of the original technique as I used it.” Writing about events that had happened thirty years earlier, Larson's report to the seventy-five-year-old
“Chief” was curiously detailed: “If you recall, just before the first test I had been ill at home… . I then went to you, told you of Marston's article, and asked your permission to conduct the tests in the University of California laboratory, and outlined my proposed methods. You agreed, and we all know the results… . Keeler was at that time a high school boy in short pants.” Larson was still annoyed that he had given Keeler credit as a collaborator on
Lying and Its Detection,
“even though he never even read the manuscript and contributed nothing to it.” “So you see,” Larson concluded, “that I,
in your Police department, encouraged by you,
was a good many years ahead of anyone else in using the “Lie Detector” in police work.”
¹⁰⁴
Even Larson, who disliked the term, wanted to go down on record as the man who had invented the lie detector.

It might be predicted, perhaps, that an enterprise that ostensibly sought truth would have encouraged suspicion among the principal actors. Nevertheless, the extent to which mistrust features in lie detector discourse is remarkable. Anxious to avoid engaging with each other in public, in private the lie detector's architects revealed their intense disrespect for each other's work. They criticized each other's questionable ethics, illegitimate qualifications, and grubby ambitions. Yet they also recognized that by engaging in a competition for the title “inventor of the lie detector” they undermined not only the claim that the lie detector was an invention at all but also that the credentials claimed on behalf of the instrument were scientifically valid. Although they each had different ambitions (and regardless of their own views as to whether the instrument deserved the invention epithet), Larson, Keeler, and Marston all believed that being known as the “inventor of the lie detector” was a prize worth fighting for. The title conferred status and fame on its holder, and held out the possibility of great wealth. But because in the popular imagination an invention could only boast a single inventor, competition for the title was fierce.

Even astute critics occasionally fail to see past the entrenched myth of the instrument's invention. As we have seen, Carl Jung wanted to use the galvanometer in order to comprehend the criminal's emotional “complexes of ideas,” not to detect the lie. Nevertheless, one historian of psychodynamic psychology claimed that Jung's work “culminated with the invention of the lie-detector.”
¹⁰⁵
Hugo Münsterberg's biographer similarly alluded to his role in the creation of the polygraph.
¹⁰⁶
Two sympathetic scholars claimed he had administered a battery of lie detection tests to Harry Orchard in 1907. The case brought him spectacular publicity “and the idea of a lie detector was
launched.”
¹⁰⁷
The main weapon in this “battery” of tests was the word association test. But Münsterberg's description of how he interpreted the results of the test indicated that he was still committed to a pathological theory of the criminal.

John Larson resisted the term “lie detector” but nevertheless wanted the credit for inventing it. John A. Larson,
Lying and Its Detection: A Study of Deception and Deception Tests
(New Jersey: Patterson Smith, 1932). Reprinted by permission of Patterson Smith Publishing,
www.patterson-smith.com
.

The question who invented the lie detector is problematic because the answer one gives depends on what one means by the term “lie detector.” If the heart of the lie detector is taken to be the discontinuous technique of recording blood pressure then the credit is Marston's. If the essence is taken to be the continuous technique then the credit is either Larson's or Arnold Gesell's.
¹⁰⁸
Yet as late as 1932 John Larson was insisting that the word association technique “must still remain a police tool—a very efficient police tool.”
¹⁰⁹
If the fundamental innovation is taken to be the assumed link between blood pressure and criminality then Mosso deserves recognition. In this last case, however, the relationship posited between blood pressure and criminality was quite different due to the different aims of the technology. And even if it were possible to decide on the basis of a single criterion of invention, there would still remain the problem of both Larson and Marston's residual commitments
to clinical case studies as legitimate objects of knowledge. And what of Leonarde Keeler's claims to inventor status? After all, it was Keeler who designed a compact and portable lie detector.
¹¹⁰
It was Keeler who attempted to patent an instrument mechanism in 1925. And it was he who refined and stabilized the software of interrogation procedure.
¹¹¹
In fact, none of the lie detector's so-called inventors can be credited with making any notable, imaginative, or technological innovations. Journalists, novelists, and writers of detective pulp fiction made the principal conceptual shift that made the lie detector possible—namely the repudiation of criminology's notion of the born criminal.

Nevertheless, from the early 1920s, the notion of “invention” permeated accounts of the instrument in newspapers, magazines, and books. The construct was necessary precisely because the lie detector was a new blend of old wines in a new bottle, old technologies applied to a new end. That the machine was depicted as an invention boasting an inventor gave it a reputation of scientific credibility. Such a controversial idea as “detecting lies” would hardly have been acceptable had the lie detector been described as a sphygmomanometer, a pneumograph, and a galvanometer housed in a box and operated by a technician. This is also why the “invention” of the lie detector was partly a function of the invention of the term “lie detector,” a form of linguistic “black boxing”: the simplification of scientific complexity and human agency.
¹¹²
“Invention” gave the lie detector credibility via a culturally valued origin myth, a numinous narrative that served to obscure the instrument's social and historical origins.
¹¹³
The myth of invention was primarily promoted in mass culture: national and local newspapers, the sibling-penned hagiography, popular psychology books and magazine articles, comic book histories, personal memoirs, pulp fiction. Although Marston objected to “picturesque press embroidery,” and Larson complained that much of the material concerning lie detection was “being dished out through rewrite men to various magazines and newspaper reporters,” both were reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which these domains were establishing the lie detector's very intelligibility. The untenable notion of invention—despite its lack of explanatory sophistication—nevertheless played a crucial role in the construction of this intelligibility.

“Myth … could not care less about contradictions so long as it
establishes a euphoric security.”

—Roland Barthes (1972)

“Any kind of ordeal as a means of evidence is, of course, a
derivative of charismatic justice.”

—Max Weber (1922)

The first accounts of the lie detector's history emphasized the scientific credentials of the instrument's advocates. Above all, they depicted the machine as being a product of modernity, the opposite of superstition. “In China there existed a practise of requesting an accused to chew rice and then spit it out for examination,” wrote Fred Inbau in 1935 in
The Scientific Monthly,
“and if the rice were dry the subject was considered guilty.”
¹
“In India the movement of a suspect's big toe was supposed to be an indication of deception.” “The interrogation of criminal suspects may not be easier today than formerly,” wrote Paul Trovillo in his 1939 “History of Lie Detection,” “but it is at least on a more objective basis.”
²
Trovillo's history included accounts of the AyurVeda (900 BC), Erasistratus, the Greek physician (300–250 BC), ordeals of the Middle Ages, and the researches of Mosso and Lombroso. Lie detection “should be considered the fruit of centuries of germination,” he wrote, “some of which, indeed, was plucked before it was ripe.”
³
Historical accounts generally claimed that while the need to detect the truth had been a recurring problem, it was only in the early years of the twentieth century that science had finally solved it. William Moulton Marston, for example, opened his
The
Lie Detector Test
with a characteristic flourish: “Since that disastrous day in Eden when the subtle serpent said to Eve, ‘Eat the fruit, for surely thou shalt not die,' lying has been the rule in human behavior and not the exception.”
⁴
These accounts served an important function within lie detector discourse. First, they emphasized that the instrument was a modern scientific invention. Second, they deflected attention away from a fundamental truth of lie detecting: that the technology functioned according to one of the oldest methods of detecting deception available—the scrutinizing of body language, facial expression, words, and gestures. The origin myth of the lie detector thus contains a subtle falsehood.

From its emergence in the early 1920s, the lie detector was portrayed as the “antithesis of ‘third-degree.'”
⁵
“It is a far cry from the rack and torture chamber of the Middle Ages to the modern ‘Lie Detector,'” enthused
Current Opinion
in 1924.
⁶
A 1937 issue of the picture magazine
Look
contained a condemnation of the brutal practice together with an explanation of how the instrument worked.
⁷
“Prying open the stubborn jaws of the criminal for evidential data has always been one of the major tasks of the law,” wrote Henry Morton Robinson, writing in
Forum and Century,
“and one that has rarely been accomplished without an accompanying taint of human dishonor and cruelty”: “The rack, the pincers, and more recently the blackjack and rubber hose have been the favorite instruments used in this important legal process of ‘snatching the confession.'” Six hundred years of Western civilization had evidently not halted the use of torture and coercion in wringing guilty knowledge from criminal suspects. Robinson contrasted the brutalism of entrenched police practices with science's humanitarian ambitions. He alerted his readers to a number of devices that had recently proved “tremendously successful in plucking desired truths from guilty lips.” Although not yet in general use, they were nevertheless “clearly destined to supplant the barbarous torments of the third degree.”
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“Perhaps the most dramatic and satisfactory of these instruments,” Robinson continued, “is the Keeler Polygraph, commonly known as the lie detector.”