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The big lie: how America became obsessed with the polygraph—even though it has never really worked
Washington Monthly, April, 2007 by David Wallace-Wells
The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession By Ken Alder Free Press, 334 pp.
In May 1922, a wealthy family of four was driving home to San Francisco from a day trip in the Santa Cruz mountains when a second car forced them off the road. A gunman stuck a revolver through the driver's window and demanded money. The father, Henry Wilkins, handed him three $100 bills, but the bandit lunged for Anna Wilkins's diamond rings. Enraged, Henry reached for a gun stowed in his glove compartment, his two young children bunkered in the backseat, but the robber shot first, killing Anna Wilkins and disappearing before Henry could respond. "My daddy loved my mother," the Wilkinses' eight-year-old son testified. "She died to save the bandit's bullet from hitting him."
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The police were not so sure. A few days after the murder, two brothers, local exconvicts, tried to buy gas with a conspicuous $100 bill, and were picked up. Wilkins claimed he didn't know the men, but police later discovered Wilkins had previously employed one of them himself, in his auto shop. They told Wilkins that the best chance of clearing his name was to submit to examination on an oracular device that had come to be known in the tabloid press as "the lie detector."
The machine, a Rube Goldberg contraption of tubes, pumps, wires, and meters designed to monitor the subject's vital signs and record on smoke-blackened paper telltale jumps in blood pressure and breathing rate, was then chiefly known for finding thieves among honest sorority sisters in a series of breathlessly reported penny-ante Berkeley capers. Wilkins submitted and, as the city watched, passed the test; the police dropped the investigation, and Wilkins was invited to leave the courthouse unmolested. From there he went to meet one of the convicts he had earlier failed to identify. Money changed hands, and Wilkins was heard boasting about his performance on the polygraph. A month later, the other brother, already in jail on other charges, admitted that Wilkins had indeed paid the men to kill his wife and orchestrated the incident on the road. Furious and humiliated, San Francisco police vowed never to employ the lie detector again; at the next meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, their captain declared that future use of the polygraph could not be countenanced.
Since its American debut, the lie detector has been a persistent but extralegal feature of our juridical culture, not much evolved from the faulty contraption employed in San Francisco in 1922. The device has been derided by teams of experts as junk science, hardly more reliable than methods of pure chance, barred from the courts, a favorite tool of overzealous investigators and an instrument of state-sponsored vigilantism, a handmaiden to McCarthyism, an accomplice to the pink scare, and a nightmare vision of justice as arbitrary and expansive as the judgment of a totalitarian court, in a box no bigger or more conspicuous than the briefcase of a company man. And yet, as Ken Alder shows in his revealing, colloquial social history The Lie Detectors, by the time scientific scrutiny finally caught up to the scientistic ambition of the device in the late 1980s, generations of Americans had been seduced by it. For decades, the polygraph was a trusted tool of justice, treasured by beat cops and internal affairs investigators alike, celebrated across popular culture as an unerring arbiter of honesty and public virtue, used to test patients in psychiatric hospitals and job applicants in corporate interviews, and entrusted with some of the most valued secrets of the atomic age, the twitchy mechanical conscience of the cold war era. How did this happen?
The Lie Detectors is a shaggy dog, unruly with anecdotes and built loosely around the narratives of two outsize Jazz Age personalities: Leonarde Keeler, an avid amateur polygraph enthusiast, a charmer, a womanizer, and a drunk; and John Larson, a psychologist and America's first doctoral cop, who adapted and refined the lie detector from an earlier model assembled by the creator of Wonder Woman. In ascribing the power of the polygraph to the charismatic salesmanship of a huckster playboy and a starry-eyed psychologist, Alder suggests that the device represents neatly the scientific hubris and human folly of the machine age. The polygraph, he writes, belonged to the "American strain of the Enlightenment project to replace personal discretion with objective measures, and political conflict with science," and transform the central moral questions of our society into simple matters for scientific inquiry. A tall order.
One field that could legitimately benefit from such a scientific approach was law enforcement. At the time, rural justice in America could still resemble the lynch mob, and many cities were policed by corrupt departments rife with patronage and mob influence, and willing to countenance even the most brutal forms of interrogation. In some quarters, Alder writes, critics were so outraged by the methods employed by city cops that they called on courts to reclaim from police departments the long-lost monopoly on interrogating suspects.
