The Lie Detectors (25 page)

Marston defended his heroine. Wonder Woman without erotic appeal, he declared, would be like "Superman without muscle." But he denied that she was sexual. None of his "jury" of local kids would stand for anything "mushy." He pointed out that even his own mother, director of the New England Woman’s Club, found the costume unobjectionable. This was an outright fib: only a few months earlier Marston’s mother had asked her son if the artist might not lengthen Wonder Woman’s pants "even a wee bit….And how about an embroidered scarf of red, white, and blue? It might save her from an attack of pneumonia."

Above all, Marston denied the charge of sadism, which he defined as taking enjoyment in the suffering of others. Bondage was not just a symbol of the peril his heroine overcame: it was also (properly understood) the basis for civilization.

Throughout those early episodes Marston contrasted Wonder Woman’s cheery sexiness with the dark and sexualized power wielded by fascists, such as her nemesis, the Baroness. He also highlighted America’s relatively positive attitudes toward women, without neglecting the continuing struggle for equality at home.

One of Wonder Woman’s early foes was Doctor Psycho, a brilliant, stunted psychologist, who had turned misogynist after being spurned by his fiancée, Marva. In the episode entitled "The Battle for Woman-Kind" (June–July 1943), Doctor Psycho sets out to reverse the freedoms won by women, aided by the mythical Duke of Deception, emissary of Mars, the god of war, who is infuriated that 8 million American women are contributing to the American war effort. Using his hypnotic powers Psycho forces Marva to marry him and become his psychic medium; bound and enslaved, she enables him to transform himself into any bodily form he desires. Initially Psycho assumes the form of Mussolini, but he soon hits on a more dastardly plan, better suited to his American audience. Before a large crowd, including the skeptical Wonder Woman, he conjures up President George Washington himself, and in the voice of the great truth-teller warns America, "Women will betray the country through their weakness if not treachery!"

No sooner is this prophesied than a munitions plant staffed by women is sabotaged, and Psycho tricks the female office workers into hiding secret papers in their undergarments so that they must be strip-searched and led away in chains. Even Wonder Woman’s square-jawed boyfriend Steve is half persuaded of their perfidy, until Psycho captures him and impersonates his voice and body to lure Wonder Woman into a trap. Thanks, however, to the interventions of the Holliday Girls she breaks free, releases her boyfriend, and liberates Psycho’s shackled wife, whom she later interrogates on both a lie detector and her magic lasso:

The episode ends with the Holiday Girls chasing Psycho with a giant paddle. "Catch him kids, give him the Lambda Beta treatment!"

Marston understood that as a piece of physiological apparatus the lie detector was nothing. Its power—like that of movies, advertisements, and fiction of all sorts—derived from its capacity to amplify people’s fears and hopes. Marston openly embraced the instrument’s ability to compel belief. He removed the lie detector from the realm of science and repositioned it in the more popular (and remunerative) reaches of science fiction. Wonder Woman was Marston’s female lie detector: to submit to her authority was to be free. She was the good monster Dr. Frankenstein had not dared create: a creature Marston was proud of. Perhaps this was why he escaped the blow-back that afflicted his coinventors. It also helped that he retained his copyright on "Wonder Woman." After he died of skin cancer in 1947, his two widows supervised the cartoon scripts until new editors in the 1950s domesticated Wonder Woman and took her in romantic directions they did not condone. Wonder Woman may have routed the foreign fascists, but she couldn’t defeat the hard-hearted men of the 1950s who trumpeted their right to protect America and its women. Not until the 1970s was "Wonder Woman" rediscovered as a feminist icon, albeit without Marston’s subversive acknowledgment of the human need for submission. Elizabeth Marston and Olive Byrne continued to live together until their deaths in the 1980s.

GUILDENSTERN:
The scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear.

—TOM STOPPARD,
ROSENCRANTZ AND
GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD,
1967

IN HEAVEN, AS IN EDEN, WE WILL PRESUMABLY GO UNCLOTHED.
Or perhaps, Saint Augustine speculated, we will be transparent, for in the angelic company, we may be as crystalline as the celestial spheres. Human opacity is a consequence of the Fall. Having eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the story goes, the knowledge we acquire is of a mortal kind, and we see the world as through a veil, darkly. Our souls are concealed from one another, and all too often from ourselves, "wrapt up here in the dark covering of uncrystallized flesh and blood." So Adam plucks a fig leaf to cover his nakedness and like a toddler thinks that because he dare not examine his own conscience it is likewise hidden from God’s sight. "Adam, Adam, where are you?" begins the world’s first inquisition, according to one of Spain’s most notorious Inquisitors. But isn’t human opacity, fount of mutual mistrust and discord, also the basis of human freedom?

It was Francis Bacon, godfather of experimental science, who updated the medieval millenarians when he boldly promised a return to Eden, not by way of innocence, but by way of knowledge. Though Adam and Eve had filched their capacity for knowledge in violation of God’s command—and for this sin been condemned to lives of toil and pain and mutual deception—God had also, in His beneficence, seen to it that this same capacity might, if properly applied, enable their children to reverse the curse. Cultivate that form of knowledge called science, and human beings might ease their common toil, alleviate their daily pain, and perhaps even abate their mutual duplicity. Science offered a superior way to organize human lives, a form of collective knowledge that thrived on reciprocal honesty and shared information. It would even mitigate the deceptions to which thoughts and senses were necessarily prey. But there was always a dark undercurrent to Bacon’s thought. What if nature’s investigators themselves became corrupt or put their powers to destructive ends? Bacon devoted the final chamber of his imaginary House of Solomon to instruments of deception, though he quickly added: "But we abominate Imposture and Falsehood; insomuch, that all our fellows are strictly forbid, under pain of Ignominy and Fines, to shew any natural Work, or Thing…otherwise than pure and simple as it is in itself." Against the dangers of deception, Bacon could only return full circle and urge strict sanctions on the circulation of new knowledge. His ideal scientific society is a secretive outfit unwilling to reveal all it knew.

Since Bacon’s day we have learned much about how to manipulate the world to our advantage and our misery. There have even been times when Eden seemed just around the corner: at the dawn of the atomic age, for instance, when a source of unlimited power seemed to promise an end to human toil, even as it threatened to end human existence altogether. Monitoring the balance between peril and hope, some Americans—mostly scientists—urged a universal sharing of nuclear know-how as the surest route to mutual trust and peace. Others, more suspicious, sought to lock down the secrets of the atom. At that crucial juncture, the lie detector was called in to mediate at the boundary between open knowledge and secrecy. For seven years, from 1946 to 1953, the atomic city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, aspired to be an honest town, a state-of-the-art utopia of crystalline transparency in which there was no need for democracy because there was complete disclosure and public trust. And it was all designed to protect a secret.

The nuclear age began with a desperate plea. In his famous letter of 1939 to President Roosevelt, Albert Einstein begged Roosevelt to take charge of nuclear weaponry. The discoveries in fission trumpeted monthly from Paris, Chicago, New York, and Cambridge had already led German scientists to alert the Nazi government and prompted the Soviet Union to begin atomic research. With western scientists unable to keep nuclear secrets, Einstein and his colleagues wanted the president to clamp down. The challenge for the Manhattan Project was to nurture the open exchange of ideas thought necessary to build the bomb, while building protective walls around ideas and techniques lest others learn how to replicate their feat. Robert Oppenheimer convinced the army that because the bomb’s designers were isolated on a high desert mesa in New Mexico, these scientists might communicate amongst themselves without interference.

Secrecy proliferates much as knowledge does. It is, after all, just another form of knowledge, from the stonecutting secrets of the Masonic guilds to the design of atomic weaponry. The latter form of secrecy—classified knowledge—began to breed prolifically during World War II. One historian of science has estimated that in recent decades the United States has been adding five times as many pages each year to the universe of classified knowledge as are added to the Library of Congress.

The boundary between open and secret knowledge is notoriously hard to police. This is not because "information wants to be free," as partisans of the Internet would have it. Nor is it because some knowledge is intrinsically "born secret," as U.S. official classifiers assert of the designs for nuclear weapons. Rather, it is because knowledge is produced in particular settings whose rules are themselves subject to conflicting pressures. Classified knowledge and open science grew up symbiotically. Indeed, many of the features of "open science" that we take for granted—publicly funded scientific research at elite universities, double-blind peer review—emerged in response to the postwar regime of secrecy. When Congress funded the National Science Foundation in 1950, it did so because leading scientists wanted to carve out a domain of autonomous action within the new secrecy regime and because they convinced those who held the purse strings that only a system of open science could train the cadres of scientists who would work on secret research, as well as replenish the stock of public knowledge on which military and corporate researchers relied. The transfer of people and ideas between the open and closed worlds was always part of the plan.

As a nation whose principal military advantage was a weapon assembled from secret knowledge, America at mid-century needed a new kind of barrier against its foes. As an open society whose oceanic defenses offered less protection than ever, it needed a different kind of defensive border. This would have to be an interior border, a mental border. For these reasons, the U.S. government became the world’s largest user of the lie detector. Keeler showed them how.

No sooner had America gone to war than some observers suggested that all citizens employed in sensitive government and industrial posts be polygraphed on being hired and regularly thereafter. Commander McDonald advised his pal Keeler to market his ability to root out "subversives" in industrial plants. To set an example, he hired Keeler to vet all his employees at Zenith for "first, their loyalty to the Government, and second, their loyalty to the company." Within months of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Keeler was offering the army his services for testing personnel.

Originally, he hoped to serve in naval intelligence. But not even the Commander’s pull could disguise Keeler’s dicky heart problem. When his friends arranged a captaincy in a military crime lab for him in 1942, Keeler scheduled his medical exam for Wright Field, Ohio, where no one knew his history. He "was getting along beautifully" until the physician checked his blood pressure. "It was a terrible bump." The reading was 180 over 100, too high for clearance. Keeler returned on three subsequent days hoping that it would subside. The next day the systolic pressure hit 180 again, then 190, and finally 210. As Keeler knew better than anyone else, the stress of the test itself explained these numbers. "Of course, the 210 reading was obtained when I knew my physical examination was turning out poorly." For once, the lie detector had worked as advertised. Keeler’s body had betrayed him.

The rejection for service and Keeler’s 4-F status were particularly galling because his former wife had joined the Women’s Air Force Service Pilots, one of the few chosen from among 30,000 applicants and by far the oldest. Though the age limit for recruits was thirty-five and she was thirty-seven, Katherine fibbed her way through. Her dashing new husband, meanwhile, had parachuted into occupied Norway to help sabotage its supply of heavy water. He would later drop into Normally two weeks before D-day. Known as "Commandant Bazooka," he was one of the most decorated soldiers in World War II, honored for single-handedly liberating the city of Thiers.

Against such heroics, Keeler could only ply his ambiguous craft. Ironically, the new governor of Illinois made him chair of the medical advisory board, where he used his lie detector to expose malingerers seeking to evade army service.

But though he never made it into uniform, Keeler sold the army on his technique. His first assignment, identifying the killers of a German POW, led directly to something much bigger: the first mass use of the lie detector to gauge political loyalty. In transforming the lie detector from a discloser of deeds to a disgorger of thoughts, Keeler extended the deterrence logic he had perfected for business to the new world of ideological conflict. The lie detector stepped eagerly into this new role, for which it had long prepared, but which only the U.S. Army could have sponsored, and only wartime could have legitimated.

Keeler’s work for the U.S. government began with a criminal case, so it was familiar work despite the new setting. On March 13, 1944, a German POW named Werner Drechsler was found hanged in the bathhouse of the Papago Park internment camp in Phoenix, Arizona. The camp was one of dozens across America holding in all some 372,000 German prisoners of war. Fellow prisoners who had served in U-boats had apparently recognized Drechsler as a former shipmate rumored to have spied for the Americans. The Office of the Provost Marshal General came under intense pressure to solve the murder. J. Edgar Hoover was warning Americans of the "potential menace" posed by the Nazis in their midst. Prominent liberals were accusing the government of letting Nazis bully their fellow prisoners. And nativists were complaining that the military coddled prisoners.

Unable to make headway with the silent prisoners, the army’s criminal investigation division called Keeler in. Working his way through 125 suspects who supplied only name, rank, and serial number, he finally got one soldier to admit knowing the identities of the killers, though the soldier refused to divulge their names. At this point, Keeler used his peak-of-tension test and interrogated any prisoner whose name produced a physiological reaction. He identified twenty suspects for transfer to a secret camp in Stockton, California, where they were subjected to methods akin to torture: sleep deprivation, intense heat, strip-searches, and physical abuse. Some were made to wear a gas mask containing an onion. Seven POWs confessed to the murder, claiming to have done what any loyal German soldier would do. Two weeks after the war they were hanged in the last mass execution in U.S. history.

By then the killing of Drechsler had led to a rethinking of the POW problem. Liberal journalists cited the killing when they brought the problem of Nazi rule in the camps to the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, and thence to President Roosevelt. For the past year the U.S. government had been pondering a POW reeducation program, primarily because the Soviet Union had organized its German prisoners into a Free Germany movement. In anticipation of the coming occupation of Germany, an American program was quickly approved, though it was kept secret to avoid the appearance of contravening the Geneva Conventions, which forbid indoctrination of prisoners of war.

But how were U.S. officers to distinguish "white" Germans amenable to reeducation from hard-core "black" Nazis? One German officer didn’t think it would be easy. "The Americans want to know today exactly what we think. But we do not permit him this favor." Also, many Americans doubted that Germans could live by democratic rules. In his book
Is Germany Incurable?
the psychiatrist Richard Brickner argued that Nazism was a symptom of the "paranoid emotional core of German culture." To undo this psychopathology, the reeducation program sought to instill democratic values through open discussion. "Democracy," suggested one organizer, "was a way of life, not just a form of government."

Among the most pressing needs of the new Germany were policemen who respected their fellow citizens. After a decade of Gestapo terror, Germany needed a dose of Vollmer’s police professionalism. Shortly after the war in Europe ended, a police school was authorized for Fort Wetherill, Rhode Island. The initial plan was to train 2,000 to 5,000 POWs in two-month courses. The brass wanted to weed out "militarists" (Nazis) and those "with definite communistic backgrounds or tendencies." Preliminary screening yielded 250 candidates for final vetting by Keeler and his team of six assistants.

The school’s instructors objected that screening by the lie detector would damage the recruits’ faith in the practice of democracy—especially if the examiners weren’t fluent in German language or history. Major Maxwell McKnight, the program coordinator, thought Keeler had "sold someone a bill of goods." McKnight was a lawyer who had worked for the U.S. attorney general and noted that the FBI had considered the lie detector unsuitable. He feared that its use would create a "cross-current of suspicion" among recruits.

But the army’s security officers actually wanted to create an atmosphere of suspicion, and not just among the prisoners. Keeler’s main sponsor—Colonel Ralph Pierce—saw the tests as a check on the American instructors. One security officer had denounced the camp commander, a former physicist, as a crypto-socialist. Another considered Captain McKnight’s sympathies demonstrably "pro-communist in scope."

Keeler arrived in Rhode Island the day before Hiroshima. The three-day tests began on August 15, the day Japan surrendered. Each examiner used a translator to ask about membership in the Nazi Party and belief in Nazi principles; about communism and religious freedom; and about mental disorders, masturbation, criminal acts, atrocities, homosexuality, the elimination of the Jews, and whether Hitler was a great man. These were matters sure to confound men who had lived through a dozen years of Nazi rule.
Was
Hitler a great man? But the ambiguity of such generic questions was intentional; they functioned as what would soon be known as control questions. They highlighted, if only by comparison, a guilty person’s response to a more specific question about a crime. In this instance, however, the crime was itself so ambiguous that Keeler’s reports slid all too easily from political loyalty to psychological state to physical health: that is, from Nazism to anxiety about Nazism to cardiac disease.