The following is excerpted from a press release from the publisher received by AntiPolygraph.org:
Over the course of the past eighty years, lie detection, one of America’s most hyped forensic techniques, has been dismissed time and again as pseudo-science. Yet it lives on, fueled by a public image born not in the laboratory, but in newspapers, film, TV and politics. In The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (Free Press; On sale date: March 6, 2007; $27.00), critically-acclaimed author Ken Alder exposes the history of an invention that succeeds because of the public’s belief in it its effectiveness, an image of infallibility that has been cultivated since the 1920s, when the press first coined the term “lie detector.†The result is a noir journey into the heart of America’s belief in truth, justice, and science.
Alder takes us inside the lives of the men who made the search for the truth their life’s work, an obsession that ultimately ruined them. Lie detection was far from a new idea in the 1920s when John Larson, the nation’s first cop with a PhD, began experimenting on the relationship between physiology and lying, but he was the first to develop a machine that could be incorporated into police interrogation. It is telling that the first crime “solved†by the lie detector exemplified the secret of the machine’s success—the lie detector itself did not have to solve the crime. Unexpectedly, the apparently guilty party collapsed under the emotional stress of the ordeal, and confessed. So began Larson’s life-long scientific quest to expose the truth, and the public’s obsession with the lie detector: a device that the press glorified as an incorruptible, objective instrument of justice.
In vivid detail, Alder transports the reader to Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Chicago during an age when nothing sold papers like tales of true crime. His book recreates the famous and infamous cases of the day in which the lie detector played a starring role. As Larson tested everyone—from burglars, bootleggers, and murderers to musicians, housewives, and students—the machine became whatever the circumstances called for: a police tool, a marriage counselor, a priest. For Chief August Vollmer, the nation’s most famous police officer, the lie detector was a chance to enforce the law without resorting to brutality. It was Vollmer who introduced Larson to young Leonarde Keeler, a collaboration that would determine lie detector’s fate.
Ironically, working on the lie detector bred mistrust. It was not long before Larson regretted taking Keeler under his wing, as he watched his student transform his inquiry into the human psyche into a purely commercial venture. Their relationship further deteriorated when Keeler began to use the machine as a kind of psychological third degree that Larson likened to torture. Keeler touted the machine as infallible, cultivating the public myth of the lie detector’s effectiveness. Larson, meanwhile, became obsessed with individual cases, forever fretting as to whether he’d definitively solved each one. In the end, the lie detector even controlled both men’s personal lives; both married women they met while interrogating them on the machine.
Although the polygraph flourished in the world of police investigation, it faced a crucial obstacle that went to the heart of its credibility. In 1923, in a ruling that set a legal precedent for the next seventy years, the lie detector was deemed inadmissible in court because it had not gained acceptance in the scientific community. Denied access to the legal arena, Keeler brought the lie detector into the business world, and millions of American employees were soon being obliged to undergo fidelity checks. Keeler later pioneered the government’s adoption of the polygraph, testing German POWs during WW II and using the device to safeguard the secrets of U.S. nuclear technology.
While the lie detector thrived, the men behind the machine suffered. In an ironic twist, Keeler’s marriage dissolved in mistrust: the creator of the detector was blind to his own wife’s infidelity. Her betrayal confirmed Keeler’s view of the world as corrupt, and he spent his last years philandering and drinking until his death at the age of 45. While Keeler had conceived of the lie detector as a mechanical god that condemned the guilty and absolved the innocent, for Larson, it had become a kind of Frankenstein’s monster. Larson came to believe that his innovation had been misused, and that the young man he had trained had betrayed their common purpose. He died of a heart attack at the age of 74 knowing that his name and scientific aspirations would be forgotten, but that the monster he had created would live on.
Live on it did, as the U.S. government became the world’s largest user of the lie detector. Keeler’s work during WWII paved the road for the CIA to begin using the machine during the Cold War. It became a prop of political theater during the era of McCarthyism, an arena in which it still thrives today. And just when it seemed that the era of the polygraph might be drawing to a close, September 11th renewed interest in the technique to protect homeland security, and spurred an effort to develop new techniques that could peer directly into the duplicitous brain. Apparently, America still dreams of a science that will render human beings transparent.
A gripping tale of doubt and truth, The Lie Detectors offers a unique window into the American soul, illuminating our values and beliefs.
Northwest University professor of history