♪ ♪
(people talking in background, car horn honks)
LISA KORT-BUTLER: We've all lied at some point.
We've all tried to figure out
when someone else is lying to us.
We use these visual clues,
whether it's looking for people to avert their eyes,
or blushing or they shift their body weight,
giving off these tells, essentially.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: It was an ambition as old as humanity itself.
In the first decades of the 20th century,
three very different researchers claimed that by monitoring
the clues within our bodies,
they were able to strip away
the veils of deceit, detect a lie, and reveal the truth.
DOUGLAS FLOWE: People would be able to receive a fair trial,
be interrogated in a way that was humane.
KEN ALDER: You determine guilt or innocence
by use of a machine
that itself can't be corrupted, doesn't have prejudice,
treats everything objectively.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: But this powerful tool proved tragically prone to abuse.
ALDER: The idea is that the machine is doing the detecting,
but of course, that can't be true.
It's the human operator of the machine
that's doing the actual detecting.
GEOFFREY BUNN: People thought that it was going to uncover truths
which you yourself may not have even been aware of.
And they were frightened of it.
NARRATOR: Over time, the lie detector acquired power and reach
beyond anything its creators could have imagined.
Millions of Americans were being tested every year,
thousands of lives changed forever.
I am not, and never have been, a member of the Communist Party.
KORT-BUTLER: It becomes a tool in figuring out
not just are they telling me the truth or lying,
but are you really who you say you are?
FRANKIE BAILEY: They were peddling this idea
of being able to use science to discover truth,
that there is some objective truth
that we can arrive at with technology.
NARRATOR: The lie detector was a uniquely American phenomenon,
an amalgam of crime, science, mass media, and charisma.
It fed on doubt and bred the suspicion and jealousy
that finally consumed the lives of its inventors.
ALDER: Like Frankenstein's monster, it escaped its creators' control.
Indeed, everyone's control.
♪ ♪
MAN: Attention!
Forward! (gives order)
Hands on hips.
(continues): Face!
Control!
Turn!
Knee high!
Turn! (marching stops)
Ready.
One, two, three, four, five, six!
Turning to the left.
Stick 'em up!
(gun fires)
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: John Larson wasn't like the other cops.
The 29-year-old was a newcomer to California from New England.
He joined the Berkeley Police in 1920,
quickly proved himself the worst shot in the department,
and was such a bad driver that he wrecked two squad cars
in a single day.
Worst of all, as far as the old-timers were concerned,
he was the only officer in the country with a Ph.D.
He spent his spare hours auditing courses
on criminal psychiatry
and was writing a book on fingerprinting.
ALDER: John Larson was a working-class guy who really had
a kind of righteous indignation.
He isn't always that good with people,
but he does have a vision of, of clean policing,
scientific and clean policing.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: In the early 1920s,
policing wasn't scientific, and it was rarely clean.
♪ ♪ (crowd clamoring)
Most cases were solved by confession,
a terrifying number obtained by what was called
"the third degree."
FLOWE: It was expected and it was accepted
that officers would torture people.
♪ ♪
You can use any means necessary,
even if that means mutilating their body,
to get them to confess.
But a lot of the time, people who are being tortured
were innocent, and sometimes they would end up
maybe confessing just to make the torture stop.
NARRATOR: Fortunately for Larson, his boss--
Berkeley police chief August Vollmer--
was a pioneer of scientific, humane, and honest policing.
ALDER: Vollmer was the great police reformer
of the early 20th century.
His special tool for making cops themselves law-abiding
was to give them scientific tools,
things like fingerprinting
and analysis of crime scenes
and categorized methods of operation.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Perhaps the most revolutionary technology
on the horizon was what scientists were calling
a "deception test."
BUNN: There was a vision at the time whereby crime
was going to be solved through an instrument that could detect
a person in the act of telling a lie.
BAILEY: There might not even be a need for a judge and jury,
because the machine would reveal
to everyone whether or not this person was lying
or telling the truth.
NARRATOR: Vollmer knew that an effective deception test
was a huge challenge, but in the spring of 1921,
he asked his scientist cop to build one.
♪ ♪
Larson was taking on a daunting scientific challenge
using borrowed equipment;
his only assistant a local high school student.
ALDER: Vollmer brought Leonarde Keeler to study under Larson.
One is a Ph.D. dissertation writer,
the other one is a high school student.
But they became a kind of team, an oddball team, to some extent.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: For decades, scientists in Europe and America
had been looking for clues that a subject was lying.
They'd measure the rate and depth of a subject's breathing,
their blood pressure,
or the time it took to answer a question.
They claimed varying degrees of success,
but no single measurement could reliably detect a lie.
So Larson decided to combine several different monitors
in the same device.
KEN QUATTRO: He built a cumbersome machine that allowed him to take
continuous blood pressure readings,
and he also put a tube
around the person's chest
so he can notice variations in the respiration.
ALDER: The way that the machine registered the results gave
a permanent graphical record,
which would ideally be introduced as evidence in court.
BUNN: It was a genuine attempt, a well-meaning attempt,
to try to solve crimes without using violence.
The truth would come out through science.
(birds twittering, people talking in background)
NARRATOR: In the spring of 1921, Larson's device was ready
for a trial run.
Vollmer sent him to investigate a series of thefts
at College Hall,
a women's dorm on the University of California-Berkeley campus.
The case was trivial--
someone at the dorm was stealing money, jewelry, and clothing
from her housemates, but if Larson was able to solve it,
the implications would be profound.
♪ ♪
He started by running tests on each of the women in turn.
♪ ♪
After the first round of interviews,
Larson thought he had his culprit.
Sudden changes in blood pressure, heart rate,
and breathing: Helen Graham was hiding something.
Graham was grilled repeatedly until she confessed,
quit college, and left town.
Larson called his device the cardio-pneumo-psychograph,
but reporters came up with a catchier name.
The press treated the College Hall case as a triumph,
proof of the lie detector's revolutionary potential.
But for Larson, doubts began creeping in
when the College Hall thefts resumed
after Graham's departure.
She wrote him from her exile to explain her confession.
Graham had indeed been hiding something,
but it had nothing to do with the College Hall case.
MATTHEW BARRY JOHNSON: This young woman
actually had a really troubled history.
She'd been sexually abused early in life.
In her fear that this machine was going
to uncover her secrets,
she made admissions to try to forestall the questioning.
J. PATRICK O'BURKE: A polygraph's a very blunt instrument.
Human emotions
and other extraneous variables
cause, you know,
physiological arousals.
That was part of the problem in the College Hall case.
ALDER: Larson was never really able to be sure that
Helen Graham committed the crime.
It's the first big case, and right from the beginning,
all the ambiguities are there.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Larson would spend the rest of his life
with a permanent and vivid reminder of College Hall.
Over the course of the investigation,
he had interrogated the victim, Margaret Taylor, several times.
He found out that she had feelings for him
and he had feelings for her.
And they got married.
The newspapers, as you can imagine, loved this.
(train chugging, whistle blares)
NARRATOR: In the wake of the College Hall case,
Larson and his bride left Berkeley for Chicago.
He planned to study psychiatry there,
while exploring new applications for the lie detector
at the Institute for Juvenile Research.
Larson would continue to refine his lie detector,
but for the time being,
he was wary of using it for criminal investigations--
the stakes were too high.
"There is no test in its present state," he wrote,
"suitable for the positive identification of deception."
But not everyone shared Larson's scruples.
♪ ♪
In the fall of 1922,
Larson received a letter from William Marston,
29-year-old lawyer, head of the psychology department
at American University in Washington, D.C.,
and inventor of what he called the Marston Deception Test.
QUATTRO: It was just a matter of him
putting a blood pressure cuff on a person,
pumping it up,
and then anytime it went above a certain range,
it indicated to him that the person was telling a lie.
It was very crude in comparison to Larson's machine.
NARRATOR: According to its inventor, the Marston Deception Test
was practically infallible.
BUNN: Marston's a very gregarious, extroverted character.
He made expansive claims for the instrument.
And Larson was just the opposite.
He was scientifically minded and far more modest.
NARRATOR: In 1922, Marston was trying to get his deception test
introduced in court.
So as soon as he read about Larson's work
in the newspapers, he sent a letter asking for details.
Larson gently warned the headstrong inventor
that his deception test was unreliable.
Too late.
Already, Marston had wrangled himself and his test
to the center of a high-profile murder case.
♪ ♪
According to the police, James Frye had confessed
to killing a prominent Black doctor.
Frye said he'd been tricked into confessing.
JOHNSON: Marston comes in, examines Frye,
and reports to the defense attorney
that the confession was false, and that Frye is innocent.
♪ ♪
Well, the judge threw it out after about five minutes.
NARRATOR: Perhaps a time might come, the judge concluded,
when lie detectors would determine which witnesses
were telling the truth.
But not yet.
For now, he said, "That is what the jury is for."
A few months later, an appeals court validated
Larson's warning to Marston:
his lie detector hadn't been recognized
by the scientific community, so it had no place in court.
ALDER: It's on that basis that, with a few minor exceptions,
the lie detector has been excluded ever since
from being used as evidence in criminal trials.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: James Frye spent the next 18 years in prison,
his life collateral damage to Marston's ambitions.
JOHNSON: Frye maintained his innocence throughout his life.
He believed that his defense
was lost in all of the uproar about the lie detector.
The lie detector and Marston became the big story,
and his legal defense became secondary.
NARRATOR: The dream of revolutionizing the courtroom was dead.
The lie detector seemed headed for obscurity.
In fact, the device and its creators
were just getting started.
(newsreel music playing)
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: It's January 31, 1928.
Dr. William Marston tests his latest invention,
the Love Meter.
He's going to find out whether blondes or brunettes
react more to love.
NARRATOR: In 1928, Marston introduced the world
to a very different take on his deception test:
the Love Meter.
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: When results are interpreted, Dr. Marston declares
gentlemen may prefer blondes,
but brunettes prefer love scenes.
(newsreel music ends)
NARRATOR: The road to Marston's reinvention
had been a long one.
In the aftermath of the Frye disaster, he gave up
on the lie detector, stopped practicing law,
and lost his chairmanship at American University.
He got a teaching job at Tufts University,
but it was a big step down the academic ladder.
A more timid soul might have been chastened,
but Marston kept right on courting trouble.
QUATTRO: He became involved with Olive Byrne,
who was one of his students.
He went home to his wife, Elizabeth,
and he basically told her, "I want her to move in with us."
NARRATOR: Marston's wife, Elizabeth, was his equal in every sense.
She was an accomplished lawyer
and had played a crucial role in designing
the original Marston Deception Test.
They also shared abundant and unconventional appetites.
For some time, the couple had been involved
with a polyamorous clique of like-minded friends in Boston.
So Marston's proposal wasn't as outlandish
as it might have seemed.
Elizabeth accepted, and Olive moved in.
Neighbors were told that she was their widowed housekeeper,
but still, rumors spread.
Marston was fired from Tufts.
With his academic career in tatters,
Marston revisited his deception test--
or, as he now called it, the Love Meter.
Like Larson,
he became interested in using it to track emotions.
But where Larson's path
led to a juvenile reform facility in Chicago,
Marston's landed him in Hollywood.
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Carl Laemmle celebrated his 30th year in movies.
NARRATOR: In 1928, Marston's hair color tests
caught the eye of Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal Studios.
Laemmle was looking for a new way to measure
audience response to his movies.
(projector whirring)
(cries out, groaning)
KORT-BUTLER: Marston was in fact using his device to hook up people
and gauge audience reactions for these films
that were being screened.
♪ ♪
There's not a lot of detail,
but we do know that there were edits made to some scenes
that were deemed too emotional,
or too scary, or too violent.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: But instead of building on his success,
Marston managed once again to wear out his welcome.
At the end of 1929,
Marston was released by Universal,
and the job he had invented was handed over
to an ambitious young upstart.
Leonarde Keeler had come a long way since his days
as John Larson's teenage apprentice
at the Berkeley Police Department.
Back in 1923, when Larson left for Chicago,
Keeler followed August Vollmer to Los Angeles,
where the chief had been hired to clean up the L.A.P.D.
There, Keeler set about redesigning the prototype
that Larson had left behind.
Where Larson had obsessed over the device's limitations
and worried about injustice, Keeler dove right in,
taking on real cases and racking up "wins," as he called them.
♪ ♪
Larson was much more guarded
and thoughtful about the science,
whereas I believe that Keeler thought this is
a lot more marketable.
NARRATOR: The press fawned over the young inventor
and his futuristic machine.
So when Universal tired of Marston,
Leonarde Keeler was a natural choice.
(film music playing)
But Keeler's stay in Hollywood was short.
As far as he was concerned,
the movies were a distraction
from the main event.
Keeler and his lie detector were headed for the capital
of American crime.
♪ ♪
(flashbulbs popping, people talking in background)
QUATTRO: Throughout the 1920s, because of Prohibition,
organized crime really took hold in Chicago.
Guys like Al Capone, they became public figures.
♪ ♪
February 14, 1929, there was the famous
St. Valentine's Day massacre...
(guns firing)
...where Capone's men just machine-gunned
a bunch of guys in a garage.
NARRATOR: By the time Leonarde Keeler
arrived in Chicago at the beginning of 1930,
gangland killings had become routine:
500 since Prohibition,
and not a single conviction.
But even in Chicago,
the St. Valentine's Day Massacre stood out.
The public outrage inspired a new approach to fighting crime.
A group of businessmen in Chicago got together
and said, "We need to stop the gangsterism in our city,
"we need to put some money into scientific crime detection,
and create a national institution for solving crimes."
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: The Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory
was established at Chicago's Northwestern University
in the fall of 1929.
It featured specialists in fingerprinting, ballistics,
crime scene photography, handwriting analysis,
and toxicology.
♪ ♪
Leonarde Keeler became the lab's expert in lie detection
with a new machine of his own design.
♪ ♪
ALDER: The goal for Keeler
was to turn this delicate scientific apparatus
that Larson had created into a robust box that could be
easily transported and was simple enough to use
that even a cop--
not some Ph.D. cop, but just an ordinary cop--
could use the device.
NARRATOR: Keeler's design added a new feature,
a pair of electrodes that attached to a subject's hands.
BUNN: You measure the electrical conductivity of the skin,
on the theory that as a person
is telling a lie, they get nervous.
As they begin to get nervous, they start to sweat more,
and the skin can conduct electricity better.
NARRATOR: Keeler named his new device the polygraph,
the word for any device that recorded several symptoms.
But Keeler patented the machine and made the name his own.
For most people, "polygraph" soon became just another word
for "lie detector."
(bell ringing)
Even as Keeler began marketing his machines
to police and investigators, he was building up a promising
and lucrative new application.
ALDER: Keeler's brought in
to solve a number of crimes at banks,
and one of the things he discovers
is that many different employees of the bank
have committed petty crimes,
pocketing cash on occasion.
Keeler said, "I will come back and retest these people
"regularly every six months,
"and you will be amazed that these will become
your most honest employees."
And this began to spread really widely.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Where a criminal investigation often involved
a single interrogation,
Keeler tested over a thousand bank tellers
and department store clerks
during his first two years in Chicago.
He split those fees with the crime lab.
This side work soon became his main source of income.
Keeler introduced his polygraph
just as the practice of interrogation was about
to undergo a profound change.
It started in 1931,
when the government released
a study of lawlessness in policing.
♪ ♪
Americans had been hearing about the third degree for years,
but still, they were shocked by the horrors chronicled
in the Wickersham Report.
♪ ♪
FLOWE: This sort of treatment is not isolated
to some of the large cities,
but it's also happening in small towns.
It's happening in the South, it's happening in the West,
and it's happening in the states of the Heartland.
NARRATOR: In the wake of the Wickersham Report,
the Supreme Court finally banned confessions
obtained through violence.
We know that there continued to be
physical abuse in interrogation,
but it put a demand
on law enforcement to come up with less brutal methods.
NARRATOR: For ten years, very few police departments
had shown any interest in the lie detector.
As New York Mayor Jimmy Walker put it,
"The old-fashioned nightstick is far more effective
than new scientific ideas."
But now that brutality had been ostensibly banished
from the interrogation room, law enforcement started giving
the polygraph a second look.
It wasn't banned from police investigations.
If you confess during a police investigation,
even if it's oral, even if it's one time,
as long as there's a witness, you know, it'll count.
MAN: Have a seat, Joe, right here.
Sit down there, Joe.
We're going to take a little test on you, Joe.
And I want you to sit perfectly quiet.
And this won't hurt you in any way.
We're going to ask you a few questions
while you're connected to this apparatus.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: "The success of this device,"
Keeler explained, "is attributed in large measure to
the psychological effect it has in bringing about confessions."
Do you know George Evans?
No.
O'BURKE: Most people don't understand
how powerful a psychological wedge is
in the interview process.
People will see this instrument,
and it causes them to just crater
and go ahead and confess.
Joe, did you kill George Evans?
No!
BAILEY: We want to believe something is certain,
when, in fact, if we're looking at a polygraph test,
it's based on the skill
and the biases of the technician.
It's open to interpretation.
FLOWE: The lie detector doesn't really
play the role that it's supposed to play
in sanitizing the interrogation room.
It doesn't perform that function.
ALDER: What Keeler did was show
that the lie detector could get leads and confessions.
And to the extent he made the lie detector
a more aggressive form of interrogation technique,
the more it appealed to police officers.
NARRATOR: When Keeler started at the crime lab,
he was one of the only operators in the country,
and his department almost an afterthought.
Within two years, he was doing more business
than all the other departments combined.
In 1933, he was given an award
for the most outstanding civic contribution to Chicago.
Cops came from around the country
to study with him at the crime lab.
They spread the word back home.
♪ ♪
Keeler was becoming a media darling,
in no small part because of
a woman he'd met back in California.
He and Katherine Applegate first crossed paths
while he was entertaining friends with his lie detector.
They married shortly after he moved to Chicago.
The couple made the town their own.
ALDER: Kay was looking for
an identity of her own as a crime fighter,
so she trained up in handwriting analysis.
They really were living a high life.
They liked to drink
and then solved cases in their spare time.
They have a kind of career as a crime-fighting duo.
NARRATOR: Not everyone was impressed.
John Larson worked just a few miles away from Keeler,
but they inhabited different worlds.
ALDER: Larson goes to the Institute for Juvenile Research
to see if he can work with children to get at
what they're really feeling, and then resolve the issues
underneath their turn to criminality.
NARRATOR: As Keeler's fame grew, so did Larson's resentment.
KORT-BUTLER: In some of Larson's commentary, you see this sort of
disdain he has for what Keeler, in particular, has done,
sort of misusing the science, from his point of view.
ALDER: Larson really felt that Keeler had betrayed him,
he had betrayed the lie detector
and had turned it into this kind of tool of intimidation.
And he really began to despise Keeler.
(birds chirping, wildlife chittering)
♪ ♪
NARRATION: John Larson had an unlikely ally in his quiet war with Keeler.
By the late 1930s,
William Marston had walked away from careers
in academia, law, and movie production.
He had two children with Elizabeth,
and two more with Olive.
They all lived together
in the suburbs north of New York City.
QUATTRO: Olive's children thought
their father was a man who had died.
They were never allowed
to ask questions about him.
NARRATOR: Marston's life was a web of lies,
but he had a knack for marketing himself
as a purveyor of truth.
The lie detector suited him perfectly:
sensational, enigmatic, and endlessly adaptable.
He couldn't stand by and watch Leonarde Keeler
become the face of lie detection.
QUATTRO: In 1938, Marston wrote
basically an entire book
talking about how he invented the lie detector.
And he especially attacked Leonarde Keeler.
NARRATOR: Even though the book
contradicted almost everything Larson believed
about the lie detector, he agreed to write
an introduction endorsing its author.
Their shared dislike of Leonarde Keeler
overrode any misgivings.
But not for long.
ALDER: Marston goes to Madison Avenue, and said he could offer
his services to investigate
people's emotional responses to products.
QUATTRO: He would hook up his lie detector to a bunch of men
to get their reactions after they used
the Gillette razor blades.
And unsurprisingly,
they all loved the Gillette razor blades.
ALDER: Gillette was happy to print some of these ads,
but they wanted to check with other experts
before they pursued this ad campaign further,
and they went and approached John Larson.
And he actually conducted real experiments
and measured their responses
and found no difference with Gillette and rival brands.
QUATTRO: Marston contacted John Larson,
and he said,
"If you will validate what," you know, "I've said in these ads,
I'll give you $30,000."
NARRATOR: The marriage of convenience
between Marston and Larson was over.
Not only did Larson refuse the bribe,
he reported Marston to the FBI.
Marston managed to avoid criminal charges,
but he'd burned another bridge.
BUNN: The whiff of scandal followed him everywhere.
But he had the last laugh, of course.
NARRATOR: In 1941, Marston tried on another career,
pitching a new comic book character to Detective Comics,
better known as DC.
♪ ♪
QUATTRO: The character that he came up with was
totally innovative and extremely popular.
Comic books by 1940
were selling hundreds of millions of copies.
By late 1941, 1942, Marston is on top of the world.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Wonder Woman's most powerful weapon
was familiar to anyone who had followed Marston's career:
a golden lasso that could compel anyone to tell the truth.
KORT-BUTLER: Marston's showmanship
as important as
the work that Keeler does,
as they contribute to the lie detector
becoming ingrained in the American consciousness.
NARRATOR: But Marston had just a few short years
to enjoy the phenomenal success of Wonder Woman.
He contracted polio in 1944,
was diagnosed with cancer the following year,
and died in the spring of 1947.
William Marston went out rich, famous,
and widely heralded
as the inventor of the lie detector.
♪ ♪ (crowd cheering)
NARRATOR: Even as Americans were still celebrating
the end of the Second World War,
a new struggle was taking shape
against a new kind of enemy.
♪ ♪
O'BURKE: The fear is that Russian agents can penetrate us,
that Russian agents
can steal our technology,
that they can infiltrate our government.
The threat was terrifying.
And so what can we use that will make us feel better?
And polygraph was really
the only thing that filled that niche.
NARRATOR: Six months after America's nuclear program
was revealed to the world at Hiroshima,
Leonarde Keeler was summoned to the government's
top-secret uranium plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
♪ ♪
Keeler's orders: to determine the "loyalty,
"integrity, reliability, mental stability,
and suitability" of the plant's employees.
The program started by focusing on select workers,
but soon, everyone at Oak Ridge--
5,000 people--
was being tested on the lie detector every six months.
Fear and suspicion were seeping into the national psyche.
The lie detector's moment was at hand.
So was Leonarde Keeler's.
In the summer of 1948,
he was drawn into the first big show trial of the Cold War.
(newsreel music playing)
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Alger Hiss,
former high State Departmental official,
is branded a Communist spy.
His accuser, Whittaker Chambers,
self-confessed former Communist,
testified before the un-American affairs committee.
Mr. Hiss
represents the concealed enemy.
NARRATOR: The House Un-American Activities Committee
had taken up Whittaker Chambers'
accusations against Alger Hiss half-heartedly.
There was one conspicuous exception.
Freshman Representative Richard Nixon despised Hiss
and was working around the clock to bring him down.
I am not, and never have been,
a member of the Communist Party.
NARRATOR: The case boiled down to one question:
which one of these two men was lying?
Few Americans agreed with Nixon.
They trusted Alger Hiss
as President Roosevelt had trusted him,
and President Truman.
But on the 16th of August 1948,
as the hearing was wrapping up,
Hiss walked straight into Nixon's carefully laid trap.
"The committee has a difficult problem here," he told Hiss.
"I wonder if, under the circumstances,
you would be willing to take a lie detector test."
KORT-BUTLER: As the government becomes interested in figuring out
who may be spying on behalf of the Soviets,
threatening people with lie detector tests
becomes a tool of
discerning who those people might be.
NARRATOR: Nixon assured Hiss that the test would be conducted
by Leonarde Keeler himself.
Hiss understood the law.
His objections and evasions covered two pages of transcript.
The test never happened.
But Nixon understood political theater.
The test was never the point.
Hiss's credibility had been irreparably damaged.
"I don't know anything about polygraphs,"
Nixon later declared,
"but I know they'll scare the hell out of people."
When a grand jury decided that Nixon had been
right all along about Alger Hiss,
millions of Americans drew an ominous lesson.
ALDER: We needed to have
this constant vigilance against enemies within.
And that's what lie detectors did.
Mr. Keeler's all ready for you, Frank.
Sit down, Frank.
Just take it easy, relax.
NARRATOR: Around the same time that Keeler
was being drawn into the Alger Hiss affair,
he played himself in a major Hollywood feature
opposite one of the biggest stars in the business.
Now, just face forward, don't watch the machine.
NARRATOR: "Call Northside 777"
recounted a recent case
in which Keeler had helped free a man
wrongfully convicted of murder.
You're six feet tall, aren't you?
Five-foot-nine.
Just a minute now.
Just yes or no all the way through. Oh.
I'm sorry, sir. And sit properly.
NARRATOR: He was as well-known as
almost any lawman in the country.
ALDER: To the extent that Keeler
made the lie detector more coercive,
he became a kind of poster boy
for lie detection interrogation gone wrong.
What's the verdict?
ALDER: But then after the war,
Keeler gets involved in what today we would call
an innocence project.
Keeler begins to sell the lie detector
not just as something that will find that people are guilty,
but to use it to exonerate them.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: But Keeler's conversion
from jailer to liberator had hardly begun
before it was interrupted by his own multiplying problems.
His marriage was coming apart.
Leonarde hired a private detective to follow his wife.
ALDER: Kay had been cheating on him.
And it's clear that the fault was as much his as hers--
he'd been drinking very hard, and he was often a mess.
NARRATOR: Marital troubles, alcoholism, and paranoia
were all common afflictions in the profession.
O'BURKE: You're sitting there for hours and hours and hours
doing mental combat with someone who may be
the worst criminal you've ever seen
or someone who's absolutely innocent.
If I wrongly accuse you,
your life is over with.
If I say you're innocent
and you're, and you're guilty, and I let you go,
you're going to walk out to go out and commit more crimes.
And that, that stress is just palpable
to most examiners.
NARRATOR: At the end of 1948, Leonarde Keeler,
the man who'd made the lie detector
a feature of American life, suffered a major stroke.
He died on September 20, 1949, at the age of 45.
NARRATOR: John Larson had watched Keeler's downward spiral
from Logansport, Indiana,
where he was medical director
of the state's psychiatric hospital.
Larson was widely admired
for improving the lives of his patients,
but his attempts to use the lie detector in therapy
had met with limited success.
ALDER: Larson held out hope always for the device
as just a way to get people to sort of open up
and perhaps even resolve
underlying complexes within them.
Whether this is a successful strategy is a different story.
NARRATOR: But this earnest, quiet man
was consumed by jealousy for his dead rival.
Larson obsessively gathered news clippings,
letters, and reports for a book that he believed
would finally expose Keeler's fraudulence.
"Unmasking the Lie Detector" it was called.
Larson hoped it would drive a stake
through the heart of his own creation.
The machine had gotten out of his hands.
He starts out with this machine,
he's going to use the scientific method,
he has controlled experiments.
Now you have this psychological interrogation.
And people are telling you their secrets
because they believe that
the lie detector is actually working.
♪ ♪
ALDER: The lie detector is used first at Oak Ridge,
but then it expands.
It's used by the C.I.A.
It's used at nuclear facilities.
And it's used on
police officers and the Army to quite a heavy extent,
often just as a kind of prophylactic,
just as a kind of constant testing to make sure
that people have a sense that they're being watched.
NARRATOR: And businesses were catching on.
From banks to fast-food chains, thousands and then millions
of applicants and employees
were screened with lie detectors.
O'BURKE: The Cold War caused
this explosive growth
in the use of polygraph tests in America.
It was largely ignored anywhere else in the world,
but it was explosive in terms of
how quickly it spread in the United States.
(doorbell rings)
Oh, hello, Jedd. Hello, Tom.
I see you brought the machine.
Yeah, it's real heavy, too.
NARRATOR: More and more Americans
were encountering lie detectors in problematic situations.
But on television, in movies,
and comics, it was never wrong.
Uh, what is your name?
Joan Stevens.
TOM: See that, Jedd?
Needles are all moving evenly.
That's because she told the truth. Uh-huh.
FLOWE: In popular culture,
we've come to see lie detectors as entirely accurate.
And that in itself is probably the most powerful aspect
of a polygraph test.
I confess!
I did it, I did it.
I confess!
I'm sorry I did it, but I did it.
It's done and I did it, I confess.
I did it, I did it, I did it...
ALDER: From the era of the big headlines
to the era of the comic strip
and to the movies...
♪ ♪
What's it tell you now?
ALDER: ...the lie detector, in a sense,
lived in the media.
You got 16 positive reactions.
Yeah? What would that mean?
You lied, Henry, 16 times.
BAILEY: Most of us
do not have direct experience with serious crime.
And so much of what we think we know
about policing, about prisons, lie detection,
polygraphs, most of that is coming from
exposure to popular culture and mass media.
You feel that thing around your fingers, Bill?
And this thing over here on your arm?
You're hooked up to a lie detector!
KORT-BUTLER: The media and the movie industry
propelled this instrument into
this place in pop culture
that we have yet to escape.
All right...
NARRATOR: This aura of infallibility
was helping to fuel the phenomenal spread
of the lie detector.
In fact, it was a temperamental instrument,
easily misinterpreted.
Only a small percentage of operators
had any professional training.
Abuses were everywhere.
ALDER: In practice,
there weren't that many Communist spies
in the United States.
But what there were
were people with secrets to hide.
Secrets that might make them vulnerable.
And one of the sort of saddest parts of the lie detector story
happens in this period,
where in fact the lie detector is used
to out people as homosexuals,
particularly at the State Department.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: "The Purge of the Perverts" it was called.
"The Lavender Scare."
Through the 1950s,
anti-Communist witch hunts made more headlines,
but gay Americans made far easier targets.
The accused were offered a chance
to clear their names with a lie detector test,
but the odds of success were vanishingly small.
In the State Department alone,
1,000 employees lost their jobs
and suffered the social consequences
of being labeled homosexuals.
♪ ♪
FLOWE: Ultimately, while the lie detector
was supposed to circumvent the need for coercion,
it ended up being a part of the list of options
that the state could use
to coerce and manipulate someone.
NARRATOR: Larson could only watch as
his invention was used in ways he could never have imagined
in those hopeful days back in Berkeley.
"Beyond my expectation," he wrote,
"through uncontrollable factors,
"this scientific investigation became,
"for practical purposes, a Frankenstein's monster
which I have spent over 40 years in combating."
His book, his only weapon, had grown to 9,000 pages.
He died of a heart attack in September 1965
at the age of 74,
sorting through the pages of his manuscript.
♪ ♪
♪ You get what you want ♪
♪ When you want it at 7-Eleven ♪
♪ There's so much stuff ♪
QUATTRO: In the mid-1970s, I was dating a girl
who was a schoolteacher.
Well, during the summer,
she went to 7-Eleven to get a job.
She comes out after about an hour,
and her face is all red and everything,
and I go, "What happened?"
And she goes,
"I flunked the lie detector test."
Have you stolen anything from an employer?
MAN: Have you ever used illegal drugs?
Have you been convicted of a felony?
NARRATOR: In the decades since Keeler
introduced the lie detector
to banks and department stores,
it had spread throughout the American economy.
By the 1980s,
half the retail businesses
in the United States were polygraphing
their employees.
There were no guardrails on the lie detector's
exponential growth.
Things finally came to a head
when President Reagan ordered a dramatic increase
in the testing of government employees.
The public response was overwhelming.
300,000 honest Americans are branded as liars every year.
(gavel bangs)
NARRATOR: Reagan backed down,
and in 1988, Congress responded to the outrage
by passing the Polygraph Protection Act,
which effectively
banned the lie detector from the business world.
Overnight, usage plummeted by 90%.
But despite all the controversies,
the lie detector was too useful to discard entirely.
The new law did nothing
to limit its use by government, law enforcement,
or national security agencies.
O'BURKE: To go to the heart of the question,
the polygraph probably
works better than what a lot of people want to admit,
but sometimes it doesn't work as good as
what we're hoping it does.
♪ ♪
FLOWE: The lie detector persists,
even though we understand that it's not necessarily accurate.
It's about this uniquely American confidence
in technology.
NARRATOR: For over a century,
the lie detector has remained an American phenomenon,
largely ignored by the rest of the world.
ALDER: It does speak to a particular way that the United States
went about solving really contentious social issues,
turning over judgments not to fallible human beings,
but to machines.
BAILEY: Americans want to believe
that somehow there is this one truth,
this truth that represents who we are.
And we have the ability to reach in
and use this technology and determine what it is.
FLOWE: The lie detector takes a problem that can't be controlled
and turns it into something that,
at least in your imagination, can be controlled.
♪ ♪
There can be a sense of certainty.
And Americans are looking for certainty.
♪ ♪