May 21, 2020 • 46 mins
When James Frye, a young black man, is charged with murder under unusual circumstances in 1922, he trusts his fate to a strange new machine: the lie detector. Why did the lie detector’s inventor, William Moulton Marston, a psychology professor and lawyer, think a machine could tell if a human being is lying better than a jury? And what does it all have to do with Wonder Woman?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
known things go. A corridor of the mind, its walls
lined with shelves, stopped with proof, and cluttered with clues.
(00:36):
Here over, on top of this filing cabinet, a wooden
box with a brass nameplate, w M M damn. It's
locked this place. This vault stores the facts that matter,
and matters of fact, all that stands between reasonable doubt
(01:00):
and the chaos of uncertainty. It lies in a time
between now and then. The sign on the door reads
the last archive. Wind your watch back a century, step
across the threshold and into a lecture hall. The class
(01:27):
met twice a week at American University, two blocks from
the White House, in the spring of nineteen twenty two.
In the evening, all the students were lawyers. There were
young men. The professor, only twenty eight, was hardly older
than his students, William Moulton Marston. But Professor Marston had
a BA and a JD and a PhD. He was
(01:49):
an intellectual rogue, handsome, dangerously charming, almost as charming as
he was ambitious. He was trying to establish a new discipline,
the science of testimony. The science of how you know
whether someone is telling the truth. He liked to teach
by way of experiment, and on this particular evening he
was conduct getting experiment on what eyewitnesses can actually notice
(02:13):
and remember. It seems to be a regrettable fact that
little systematic psychological experimentation is being carried on in the
field of testimony. Much valuable material is being produced by psychiatrists, sociologists,
and criminologists from time to time, but the subjects of
(02:34):
such studies either psychopathic or criminal variants from the criminal
variants enter yes. In the middle of Marston's lecture, a
young man entered the hall. He wore leather gloves. In
his right hand, he carried an envelope. Tucked under his
(02:57):
left arm were three books, one red, one green, one blue.
I've read Marston's lecture, and I've read his report on
this experiment. What happened next, I like to imagine. Sorry
to interrupts, sir, but here the messenger handed the professor
the envelope. Professor Marston opened the envelope, pulled out a
(03:20):
yellow paper, and read its contents. While Professor Marston was
reading the message, the messenger slid a second envelope into
Professor Marston's pocket, and then the messenger, using only his
right hand, pulled out of his own pocket a long,
green handled knife. The messenger opened a knife and began
(03:44):
scraping his gloved left thumb with the edge of the blade,
sharpening it on the leather. Yeah, that'll do anyway, Yes, sir,
(04:05):
stood as that man was an actor, an experiment. Take
out a fresh sheet of notepaper, this very instant, and
write down every fact about what just occurred, every last detail,
no matter how seemingly insignificant. You have one minute, my
(04:29):
dear listeners. These people are actors, and this too has
been asharade an experiment. Please, now, this very instant. Tell
me what you just heard. Is that all you can remember?
All the details? Let me see if you left anything out?
(04:51):
What university are we at, in what year? What time
of days it? What part of the country was the
messenger from? What color was his knife? Time? Put down
your pencils, pass your paper to the front of the room.
All right. Marriston had identified exactly one hundred and forty
(05:15):
seven facts that the students could have observed about the messenger,
the number and the color of the books, the fact
that he held them under one arm is left. The
color of the paper in the first envelope yellow. And
then Professor Morriston collected his student's responses and tallied the results.
Out of one hundred and forty seven observable facts, the
(05:40):
class on average noticed only thirty six, and since two
of these facts were errors, I am only counting thirty four,
thirty four out of one hundred and forty seven facts,
for a testimonial accuracy rate of precisely twenty three percent,
and not a single one of you noticed the knife.
(06:07):
This is the last archive of the show about how
we know what we know, how we used to know things,
and why it seems sometimes lately as if we don't
know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This season we're
trying to solve a crime. Who killed Truth? This episode,
we're looking at a trial set in motion by the
(06:28):
experiment Professor Marston conducted that night in nineteen twenty two,
an experiment that involved a machine. A machine you've probably
heard about. Did you ever hear of a lie detector?
The lie detector? You probably know it from the movies.
You may lie to us, you can't lie to that.
(06:49):
The machine itself. The polygraph machine was invented by someone else,
but the test, the blood pressure test, that had been
invented by William Molton Marston, that professor who liked to
experiment on his students. Okay, most of us are very
good at telling whether or not other people are lying.
(07:09):
Marston thought a machine could tell better. See these needles.
You see the even little line this needle's making. When
you tell a lie, you're post quickens, and this needle
shows it on the chop. We take this sort of thing,
this sort of movie scene for granted. There seems like
(07:31):
it's all over the place, every police procedural, every episode
of law and order. But when you're conducting a historical investigation,
you're supposed to pause and think about the things you
take for granted, Think about them until you don't take
them for granted anymore, until they get weird. The way,
if you think about a word like pumpernickele, after a while,
it starts to sound really strange. Pumpernickele, pumpernickele, polygraph, polygraph.
(07:58):
And once things get strange, you can ask questions about
them because you can see them more clearly. So you
can ask why trust a blood pressure test more than
your own judgment. It used to be that only God
could decide the truth of testimony. For centuries, murder trials
involved the courts trying to get God to speak through
(08:20):
the dead body. If it bled when you touched it,
you were guilty. Even after trial by jury replaced this
sort of thing, Trial by ordeal, This idea that the
dead speak lingered in its way. The Lae detector is
a kind of ordeal, except it doesn't look for guilt
(08:42):
in the blood of the corpse. It looks for guilt
in the blood of the accused. Marston described his method
in his undergraduate thesis. The special problem suggested to me
in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory was an investigation in the
changes in blood pressure resulting from an effort to hide
the truth. Marston kept refining his truthscope all through graduate
(09:06):
school and law school, and during the First World War
when he did experiments on soldiers and prisoners of war.
He was seeking fame and fortune, for sure, but he
also had a noble motive. When police couldn't get criminals
to confess, they pretty often beat them up. They gave
them what was called the third degree. Marston had the
(09:26):
idea that if police had a lie detector, they'd stop
beating people up. In nineteen twenty two, at the same time,
as he was teaching an American university in Washington, Marston
decided that the time had come for a real world test.
He wanted to prove that his method worked. To do that,
he wanted to get the results of a lie detector
admitted as evidence in a criminal trial. He needed a
(09:50):
client desperate enough to hand his fate over to an
untried experiment. Inspector Clifford al Grad record of an interrogation
in August twenty second, ninety what is your name? James
Alfonso Frye. James Alfonso Frye would soon become the subject
of another one of Professor Marston's experiments. Fry was young
(10:11):
and unmarried. He was lean and handsome, with short hair
and big ears. He'd fought in the War. He worked
in a dentist's office, and he was broke. As he
later wrote, I was a young man of twenty one
years and penniless. The courts had to assign me a lawyer.
Police had charged James Alfonso fry with the murder of
doctor Robert Wade Brown, The President of the National Life
(10:32):
Insurance Company and the richest black man in Washington. Here's
what we know about the night Doctor Brown died. It
was a Saturday in November nineteen twenty. Brown was hosting
a party at his house celebrating his alma mater's football
victory when someone knocked at his front door. Brown went
(10:55):
to answer and was shot dead on his very doorstep.
The murderer, some people said, escaped down an alley. Browne's
grieving family and his company together offered a thousand dollars reward,
(11:17):
but the investigation had come up short. Although a lot
of Brown's guests witnessed the murder or at least glimpsed
the murderer, it all happened so suddenly that they could
remember hardly any details. Months later, the police were still
searching for Doctor Brown's killer when they arrested a young
black man on an unrelated robbery charge. It was Fry.
(11:39):
He and a cousin had robbed a guy of a wallet,
a ring, and a watch, a petty theft. During his
trial for robbery, one witness, a man who worked at
the same dentist's office as for I, told the police
that Fry had confessed to him that he Fry, had
killed doctor Robert Brown. And it turned out that Fry
had in fact been at doctor Brown's house on the
night of the murder, and that he had brought a gun,
(12:01):
And when the police questioned Fry, he confessed to the murder.
The police had to get that confession on record, so
they brought him into an interrogation room where they questioned
him all over again. They wouldn't have made an audio recording,
this is nineteen twenty one, a little too early for that,
but they made a transcript, and here in the last
archive we've got a copy. You have told my colleague
(12:24):
that you killed doctor Brown. Aw are you willing to
tell me about it? Yes, sir. When I first went
to doctor Brown's I had a dollar, and I asked
him to give me a prescription because I had been
told I had gone a rha real bad. He then
said he couldn't do anything for me for a dollar.
He said, don't you son of a bitches come around
here with only one dollar? Fry said, then he'd left
(12:45):
and gone to try to raise money for the medicine
by pawning his pistol, a forty five automatic. No luck,
so he said he went back to Brown's with his
loaded gun tucked into the belt of his pants, but
when he got there, he said, Brown sent him away again,
told him if he didn't have the money, to get lost,
and he struck me over the left eye. Did he
have any weapon in his hand, No, sir. Then I
(13:06):
took the butt of the gun and hit him, and
that didn't do good, because he struck me again. I
tried to run to the door, and he grabbed me again,
and I told him to put his hands up, and
he kept on hitting me, hitting me on the head,
and then the struggle. I think my gun was fired there,
just there, with that slight cautious admission, I think my
(13:29):
gun was fired. James Fry confessed to killing Brown. But Fry,
who didn't even have a dollar to pay for a prescription,
couldn't afford a lawyer. Here's where doctor Marston comes in.
In that course on the law of evidence, two of
his young students told him about the case, and then
they volunteered to take Fry's case for free, defending him
(13:51):
against the charge of murder. First, they went to visit
Fry in prison. The students, Professor Marston and his contraption,
a blood pressure cuff or a sphigmo monometer. Marston hooked
Fry up. Someone took a photograph. You can things in
a photograph that you can't see in a transcript. In
(14:12):
the photograph, Frye, a black man, is surrounded by white men.
Professor Marston and his law students, all in dark suits.
As they strapped Fry into Marston's machine. Marston grasps Fry's arm,
taking readings from his body. Fry later described the experience.
Several months after I had been confined in the DC jail,
(14:35):
my attorneys came to see me, accompanying a Professor Marston.
This learned doctor was later known to me as the
inventor of the lie detector. He asked if I would
submit to the use of this instrument to such requests,
I readily agreed. He asked me several questions, none pertaining
(14:55):
to the case. Then suddenly he launched upon several questions
going into every detail of the case at the Metropolitan
Courthouse one month later. This graph was supposed to be
the ace in the hole for Fry's defense, and perhaps
it would catapult Fessor Marston to fame as the greatest
legal mind of his generation. But the judge assigned to
the case, Chief Justice Walter McCoy, was famously stern, and
(15:18):
he was miffed. This was a big murder trial and
a lot of Deasey's black community had come out for it,
and Marston had alerted the press about it, so there
were a lot of reporters there too. Judge McCoy was
no fool. He saw early in the trial the long
game this Professor Marston was playing. Marston wanted to replace
trial by jury with trial by light detector all rise.
(15:43):
The prosecution called a detective who had taken Fry's confession.
I call the stand detective Clifford Grant. I interrogated James
Frye on August twenty second, nineteen twenty one. Detective Grant
testified that Fry had confessed to him, But then Fry's
lawyer Mattingly started bringing in his witnesses. I called to
st James Frye could have a glass of water. Not
(16:15):
a word of my confession was true. Fry recanted. He
insisted that he hadn't killed Brown. It's going to be
hard to convince a jury of this, But Marston offered
to prove with his lie detector where the real truth lay.
It was a slim hope Fry knew. Fry later wrote
that there had been no real chance for a black
(16:36):
man in Washington in nineteen twenty two to get a
fair trial. If I am neatly dressed and can explain myself,
I'm considered being a smart alec and must be guilty.
If I'm dressed in overalls unable to explain the situation,
then I'm considered a brute and still must be guilty.
(17:01):
In any ordinary trial, a train of witnesses would make
their statements, the guests at Brown's house, the police who
investigated the crime, the people who could give evidence in
support of Fry's alibi, and then the jury, twelve white
men would decide who to believe. Those men would find
the facts of the case an issue a verdict, but
(17:23):
which words of Fries were true, the confession he'd given
to the police or the recanting he did right there
on the stand. Fry's lawyer gamely tried to follow the
Marston defense plan. If your honor please, at this time,
I had intended to offer in evidence the testimony of
(17:47):
doctor William M. Marston, as an expert in deception as
testimony on what testimony as to the truth or falsity
of certain statements of the defendant? If your honor, please,
if you object to it, I will sustain the objection.
No other judge admitted the lie detector test as evidence,
(18:10):
and Judge McCoy didn't want to be the first one
to do it. He all but begged the prosecution to
object to this evidence, and when they didn't, he began
objecting himself. The witnesses here on the stand, and it
is for the jury to determine whether or not he
was telling the truth. That is very true, your honor.
But as expert testimony, is not this proper as competent
(18:35):
evidence to go before the jury to ascertain what doctor
Marston's opinion is at this time? Oh well, we get
to be more or less experts ourselves, and so do
the jury upon the question of whether anybody is telling
the truth or not. That is what the jury is for.
(18:55):
That is what the jury is for. It had taken
centuries for ordinary people, even if only still men, white men,
to gain the right to serve as jurors of the
guilt or innocence of their peers. But in the early
decades of the twentieth century, a lot of scientists calling
themselves experts. I thought they knew quite a bit more
than jurors, that they had tools, methods, even machines that
(19:18):
could find out the truth. Judge McCoy was smart enough
to see the size of William Marston's ambition, and he
was determined to foil it. When the next witness came
to the stand, Mattingly again approached the bench, he had
another proposition. I love this part, the jousting, the little duel,
but Mattingly was wildly outmatched. If your honor, please, before
(19:42):
this witness begins to testify, may I inquire whether your
honor would permit a systolic blood pressure test to be
taken during an examination of the witness on the stand.
If we are going to have a cystolic test, we
all have to test every witness who testifies in the case.
If there is any science about it, we might as
(20:04):
well apply the science to every witness. Mind you, I
do not know anything about the test at all. I
had certain pamphlets submitted to me yesterday to look at.
Of some doctor Marston. I believe his thesis when he
got his PhD degree I'm going to read them when
I come back from my vacation. I see enough in
(20:25):
them to know that so far the science has not
sufficiently developed detection of deception by blood pressure to make
it a usable instrument in a chord of law. When
it is developed to the perfection of the telephone on
the telegraph and wireless and a few other things, we
will consider it. I shall be dead by that time, probably,
(20:48):
and it will bother some other judge, not me. Jed
McCoy was a piece of work. After that, Mattingly bumbled
along for a little while before concluding, and then the
prosecution delivered its closing words. James Fry is the most
colossal liar that ever appeared in court. I rest my case.
(21:13):
The jury deliberated for less than an hour and found
James Fry guilty of second degree murder. Judge McCoy sentenced
him to life in prison, and Fry went by train
to Leavenworth. He was supposed to spend the rest of
his days in jail. Professor Marston was conducting an experiment,
(21:54):
but it's not an accident that his test subject was
a penniless black man accused of murder. Marston became a
psychologist at a time when social scientists of every stripe
were expected to try and solve what was called the
Negro problem. What that problem was shifted all the time,
but never the commitment to the notion that facts alone
(22:15):
couldn't solve the Negro problem. Only numbers could. Social scientists
counted everything they measured, the circumference of the skull, the
length of a life, the density of a neighborhood, the
pressure of blood. Nearly a century after the Fry Trial,
historians still spend a lot of time looking back at
this moment, the period from about eighteen ninety to nineteen thirty.
(22:39):
Some of the best work in this field is done
by a colleague of mine, Khalil Gibran Mohammed, Professor of History, Race,
and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. The first
time I met him was at an academic conference with
a one word title, Numbers. Were both really interested in
numbers and why people count things, what kind of knowledge
(22:59):
numbers add up to, and what they subtract. One of
the most amazing things about the late nineteenth century looking
at that kind of local and national data is added
looked today like an Excel spreadsheet printed out and folded
many many times over. A lot of Khalimahamma's work focuses
on how after the Civil War, after emancipation, sociologists and
(23:20):
government agencies collected statistics on black crime to argue that
black people were by their very nature criminal, that they
were genetically not fit for their freedom, and so had
to be watched and studied endlessly. You could almost think
of it like a person who is in rehab, and
(23:40):
you develop certain protocols to keep track of their progress.
How many meals, how many hours do they sleep, what
are the signs of a healthy lifestyle. Whereas you wouldn't
do this for a normal person, You wouldn't keep a
ledger of such things. And so, to use this metaphor,
it was that ledger keeping of African Americans that was
a reflection of those same progressives thinking black people are
(24:01):
not still fully ready for full participation, so we'll keep
an eye on this crime thing. Well, the truth is,
we live in the wake of all these ideas. They're
baked in to our consciousness already, so we know what
to make of it. We can either make of it
that black people have a crime problem, or that black
people are subject to systematic racism and system or we
(24:22):
might say some mixture of boat. These ideas we live
in that are already in our consciousness, A lot of
them go back to a man named Frederick Hoffman. In
eighteen ninety six, he published a book called Race Traits
and Tendencies of the American Negro. Hoffman wanted to argue
that Blacks were inferior. Up until then, those arguments had
(24:42):
been based on racial pseudoscience, measuring skull sizes or some
other physical differences. Hoffman was pretty innovative and shifting that
gaze to crime statistics, and from that point forward, the
framework that he used that the disproportionate evidence of black
people being in prison was was on its own, with
(25:05):
no further analysis, no footnotes, no asterisks. The best proof
that black people were inferior to people of European descent.
Police discrimination and brutality didn't matter, rates of conviction mattered,
other factors, and the culture just soaks it up like
a sponge. Yeah, and it still does. Professor William Moulton Marston.
(25:30):
He wanted to turn James Frye into a set of numbers.
The numbers on the graph paper from his lie detector
test Marston wanted to turn Fry into a number, not
to prove that he was a criminal, but to prove
that he wasn't. And maybe I should admit here, I
don't know whether James Frye was guilty or not. He
was at the scene of the crime, he had a motive,
he had a weapon, and he confessed. So it looks
(25:53):
pretty bad. But then again, Marston had a lot on
the line, and he was pretty sure that Fry was innocent.
I might not be sure whether fry was guilty or not,
but I'm pretty sure Marston ever expected to get fry acquitted. Instead,
he was hoping to take Fry's case all the way
to the Supreme Court to demonstrate the merit of his invention.
(26:15):
Marston dreamed of convincing the nation's highest court that his
machine could tell better than any jury who was telling
the truth. Men come to judge this question by certain
arbitrary standards in the course of their dealings with others.
After for I went to prison, Marston helped to student
(26:36):
lawyers file an appeal. Or to be honest, I'm pretty
sure Marston just wrote the brief himself. It asked, how
does the court tell whether or not someone is lying.
The decision may hinge upon the look in the eyes,
the expression on the face, the nervous condition of the witness,
the rosy flush which suffuses his countenance, or upon any
(26:57):
one of many other evidences which may or may not
be taken to indicate truth or deception. We say that
there is no standard and no logical or reasonable basis
for the determination of this question in general, in the
absence of positive evidence of deception, and that if science
has developed a method of accurately determining whether a man
is in a mental condition or state of truth or
(27:20):
of deception, the court and jury should be given the
benefit of this assistance. But the State, in its own
brief said that the idea of trial by lie detector
was ridiculous. Whatever may be said against the system of
trial by jury under the Constitution and laws, a jury
of twelve impartial men are peculiarly fitted to sift conflicting
(27:41):
and contradictory testimony and derive at a just verdict. As
for Marston, whether he can or cannot detect deception is
something that does not appear to be known to anyone
except doctor Marston. At the end of nineteen twenty three,
the DC Circuit Court of Appeals issued its decision and
(28:01):
Fry versus the United States. The court ruled against Fry
and also against Marston and his lie Detector, and the
decision established a new rule of evidence, something that came
to be called the Frie test. It became the most
cited precedent in the history of law and science. The
(28:22):
Frie test is a test of evidence, a rule that
a judge applies and deciding whether or not to admit
the testimony of a supposed expert. It's only eighty one
words long, but I'm going to make you listen to
all of them. Listen for what the rule says, but
listen to for what it doesn't say. Just when a
scientific principle or discovery crosses the line between the experimental
(28:45):
and demonstrable stages is difficult to define. Somewhere in this
twilight zone, the evidential force of the principle must be recognized.
And while the courts will go a long way in
admitting expert testimony deduced from a well recognized scientific principle
or discovery, the thing from which the deduction is made
must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance. In
(29:05):
the particular field in which it belongs. All of the
facts of Fry's case were stripped out of the ruling.
That's how the law works. All that survives when court
supply the Fried test are those eighty one words. Everything
else is erased, including one very important circumstance, something pretty
(29:26):
widely known at the time, but that since then has
been almost entirely forgotten. That fact is this. Between Fry's
trial and disappeal, federal marshals went to the office of
Professor William Molton Marston at American University, and there they
arrested him for fraud. It turns out that the inventor
(29:46):
of the light detector test, he was a notorious liar.
So did he ever give you guys a light detector test? Oh? Yes,
we were experimental animals. So tell me about that. Was
it like? Well, sham? Really, none of us hadn't believed
(30:07):
it at all, And as far as settling disputes around
the house, it was laughable. That's Burne Holloway Marston, the
son of William Moulton Marston, he of lie detector fame
Byrne is eighty eight, a retired obstetrician. He's a sweetheart.
I first met him a few years back when I
(30:28):
got fascinated by the crazy, truly crazy story of his father.
Burne was born in nineteen thirty one, nine years after
the Fried Child. Little Burne was beloved and like everything
else in his father's life, he was an experiment, a
test case, among other things, for his father's lie detector test.
(30:48):
So it was like, hoostile know Don's sweater? Was it you, Peter,
you Burne, Let's give you a lie detector tests? No,
it wasn't a regular basis, but it didn't happen. The
fact that Marston was a father of four and used
to use his lie detector test on his kids is
a good story, But there are other reasons to spend
a little bit of time with Marston's private life, because
(31:09):
it's completely zaney, and second, because Marston's public persona turns
out to have been one big lie. Marston lie meter
inventor arrested charged by Boston authorities with using the mails
to defraud. William Marston, a professor at the American University,
(31:30):
was arrested yesterday at a preliminary hearing. He was held
in a three thousand dollars bond Marston several months ago,
constructed a machine which he declared could detect lies. The
churches against Marston actually had nothing to do with the
lie detector. They had to do with a super sketchy
(31:52):
business scheme of his. The churches were also eventually dropped.
But all this was going on at the same time
Marston was working on Fry's appeal. Marston lost that appeal,
Frye lost that appeal, and Marston got fired from American University.
But that wasn't the end of William Moulton Marston. He
(32:15):
got another job teaching at Tufts, where he began an
affair with one of his undergraduates, a young feminist named
Alive Byrne. She came from a radical family. Her mother
and her aunt, Margaret Sanger, had together opened the first
birth control clinic in the United States. What became planned
parented my friend Burne Marston. Olive Byrne was his mother.
(32:36):
My mother was a swassie, blue collar, Irish, witty, attractive
black irish black hair and pale skin, freckles and those
blue eyes and a blue eyes. Since that was the
(32:57):
beginning of the ah Yes the manaji Professor Morriston had
radical ideas about sex and about gender roles too. He
had four children by two women, his wife Elizabeth Holloway
and Burne's mother, Alive Burne. Burne's own name is a
mashup Burn, Holloway, Marston. He's got the names of each
(33:18):
of his three parents. The grown ups lived as a threesome, which,
as you might guess, was something of a family secret
because at the time you could be blacklisted from academia,
from any job for homosexuality, not to mention polyamory. The
Marston clan eventually moved to Ryan, New York, to a
big house, a place they called Cherry Orchard. Burn always
(33:41):
says it was an incredibly fun way to grow up
with so much love and this kookie father. He did
not conform him. You could hear him coughing at night.
He smoked all the time, and he cerebrated better in
the reclining with a whiskey. And he was a big guy.
(34:04):
Yeah he was me, Yeah, he was, I thank you.
It's probably about six feet so his weight very one
st at the time. He got to three hundred and
then he said, that's great. I'm going to join the
fat Man's Club in New York. Which is actually that's
the real thing. But he that was his life. He
(34:29):
was always creating, I guess because as you know, the
variety of things that he did were incredibly He always
self helped stuff for leader, threw himself into things when
you know when he did them. Marston was furiously curious,
always conducting experiments, always looking for the next big thing.
(34:51):
But whenever anyone found out about his polyamorous family arrangements,
they fired him. He lost his job at Tufts, and
then he lost a job at Columbia. So then he went,
we're all disgraced academics hoped to go. He went to Hollywood.
He was in all the gossip columns New York Evening Post.
(35:12):
Doctor Marston, who won't write ba PhD in L'll b
after his name in another week because Hollywood is touchy
about such things, is going to be the psychological authority
behind all forthcoming motion pictures. From one big concern in
Los Angeles, Marston went to work for Universal Studios as
a consulting psychologist, mainly on horror films. What did he
(35:34):
do is he took up whole audiences to his wide
detector while they watched the rushes. Then he'd advised the
studio about whether the films were too racy or too scary,
or not scary enough or not racy enough. He did
other nutty experiments too. Doctor Marston and Emotions. It's eighteenth
of July nineteen thirty and doctor William Marston demonstrates complicated
(35:58):
device whereby he claims he can determine and compute comparative
emotions of blondes, brunettes and redheads. Says Marston, Ladies and gentlemen,
hold onto your hats. Here comes the real voice of
William Marston. This is the spigmamnometer, an instrument which measures
the subject's blood pressure. This is the kimograph drum, which
(36:21):
records the breathing. The breathing is taken with anomograph around
the subject's chest. We are now going to test the
girl's reactions to gambling. The announcer watches the needle etche
marks into a rotating drum. Thing of the jig a kinograph.
There's kidograph with the indicator showing one girl's reaction the
game of chats. Needle is moved by subject's breathing. Here
(36:45):
we see how redhead reacts to gambling and as she wins.
Marston's emotion finder indicates that redheads show a most emotion
when gambling. When I visited Bernard's house, we watched the
newsreel together. He did it come out the year he
was born? Oh man, that's just so it's like a
(37:07):
quack show from from the twenties? Is I don't know,
but like did he believe that? Where is that just showing?
I think it was shy. He had walk on the
parapose of in New York City. Uh, you know, twenty
stories up and see which one would react the most.
(37:31):
I mean it's a yeah, it's a little it's not
very scientific. Yeah, I have a theory. I think people
who study lying tend to be liars, compulsive liars. Marston
definitely was what are the facts about razor blade quality?
(37:51):
That's what you let wanted to know, and that's why
you let retain Doctor William Moulton Marston, eminent psychologist and
originator of the famous lie detector, to conduct scientific tests
that reveal the whole truth. Truck drivers, bank presidents, men
in every walk of life. These men shade while every
(38:14):
reaction is measured and recorded, not knowing which blade is which,
each subject shades, one half his face with a Gillette blade,
the other with the blade of a competitive brand, while
the line detector accurately charts the reactions. In more than
nine out of every ten cases, the shavers choose Gillette,
(38:37):
says doctor Marston, the results of my study make it
possible for me to state flatly and back my statements
with positive proof that Gillette blades are far superior in
every respect to competitive blades tested. Gillette blades precision made
(39:01):
The FBI apparently had by now had enough of doctor
William Moulton Marston and decided to investigate this Gillette scheme.
FBI agents brought Marston to a police station in Detroit
and told him to replicate his experiments while police officers
looked on. He couldn't. Only five and ten men tested
in the station preferred Gillette. FBI director j Edgar Hoover
(39:24):
wrote a note to himself in his Marston file. I
always thought this fellow Marston was a phony, and this
proves it. But if Marston was a compulsive liar, so
is olive Byrne. She wrote articles for a women's magazine
for years, and in those articles she'd quote the famed
psychologist William Marston as if he were a stranger, when
(39:46):
of course they lived together. She once wrote an article
about the Fry case, and in nineteen thirty six, when
Fry applied for a pardon, he included her article with
his application. I find this a little heartbreaking. Fry was
thirty four then, he'd been in prison since he was
twenty two. I don't know if he killed doctor Robert Brown.
(40:08):
I think there's a real chance he did, but I
do know for certain that he didn't get a fair trial.
He filed petition after petition, insisting on his innocence. Had
I been fortunate to have had lawyers, judges or intelligent
people on the jury, I would never have been convicted.
I'm anxious to have the case reopened, if possible, in
(40:28):
order that my name could be cleared. The courts denied
his petition two years later, in nineteen thirty eight, Marston
published a book called The Lie Detector Test and gave
a copy to Burn, inscribing it for Burn Marston to
help him always tell the truth with love from Daddy.
The next year, Fry was prulled. He'd served more than
(40:50):
eighteen years in prison. On his release, still determined to
prove his innocence, he renewed his petition for a pardon.
Since my freedom from prison, I have married and have
a fine wife. He petitioned again and again, even applying
for presidential pardon. I gotta wonder would a guilty man
have kept on pressing the case years after his release.
(41:12):
Most people are under an impression that because a person
has been indicted, tried, and sentenced, they are guilty. They
do not stop to realize the fact that and all
three conditions named above are human decisions, and that no
human decision is infallible. I am innocent of the charge
against me. I have every reason to believe that the
(41:34):
courts of the District of Columbia thought so. After all,
this is Washington, and the question of race plays an
important part even in the courts. James Fry died in
nineteen fifty six, his name was never cleared. Instead, it
(41:54):
lived on as the name of a test of evidence.
Fry's name also became a verb. To be fried is
to have your expert witnesses testimony deemed inadmissible. Marston's name
isn't a verb. He don't get Marston if you take
a lie detector test instead. Marston is hardly remembered for
(42:18):
the lie detector test. He's remembered for a different invention
of his called Onto Your Headphones. It's about to get weird.
In nineteen forty one, Marston, his wife Elizabeth Holloway, and
his other wife Alive Byrne created the comic book superhero
wonder Woman, the best known feminist icon of all time.
(42:38):
She fights for women's rights. She's in fact based on
Margaret Sanger, founder of Plant Parenthood. I came across the
evidence of this entire crazy story years ago in an archive,
and I had to write a book about it. It's
called The Secret History of Wonder Woman. It's a story
about feminism, but it's also a story about evidence and truth.
Wonder Woman fights for justice on her foe arms. She
(43:00):
wears two middle bracelets that can stop bullets. They look
just like the ones Alive Byrne used to wear, and
of course she has her own lie detector. Marston once
wrote a wonder Woman's story about the Fry trial. I
am pretty sure none of One Woman's readers recognize the illusion.
But in this particular story, Marston imagines a courtroom scene
and which wonder Woman tries to get a judge to
(43:22):
accept as evidence the results of an interrogation she's conducted
using her golden lasso of truth. I understand you examine
this defendant with your remarkable Amazonian lasso. Yes, oh well
it's highly irregular. I'd like to hear your finding. I
will show you judge objection sustain. Okay. So then Wonder
(43:46):
Woman lassoes the defendant Priscilla Rich and drags her to
the witness stand and gets her to confess that yes, yes,
she really is the supervillain known as the Cheetah, after
which the odd, grateful and besotted judge shakes Wonder Woman's hand.
Your advice was invaluable, Wonder Woman. I wish you'd give
(44:07):
me further call on me anytime. Marston rewrote the story
of the Fry Trial the way he'd wanted it to
come out, with himself as the hero and Judge McCoy
worshiping him. But in nineteen forty four, just when Marston
finally realized this triumph with Wonder Woman, he got really sick.
(44:31):
He had well apparently was polio, and this is coincided
with the success of Wonder What. He was finally making
it something as he kind of yeah, pay him enough
money to support all these people and watch something be
successful and watching be successful and it was I mean,
that's a kind of a tragic life and means yeah, right,
(44:55):
because Wonder Woman has endured outside of the Last Archive,
very little. Last James Fry is all but forgotten except
for his last name. A test of truth, but in
just injustice endures, and if you want to fight it,
you don't need a lasso of truth or a lie detector,
(45:17):
but you do need knowledge and evidence, even the kind
of evidence we'll try to find in the next episode
of The Last Archive, The Evidence of the Invisible. The
Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane mcabin and Ben
Natt of Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton and our
executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jason Gambrella is our engineer.
(45:40):
Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Boss
and John Evans Hostelwagen Symfinett. Many of our sound effects
are from Harry Janett Junior and the Star Ganette Foundation.
Our fool Proof players are Barlow, Adamson, Daniel Burger, Jones,
Jesse Hinson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis and Maurice Emmanuel Parent.
The last Archive is brought to you by Pushkin Industries.
(46:01):
Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater,
Emily Shulman at Harvard Law School, Alex Allenson at the
Bridge Sound and Stage, and at Pushkin to Heather Fane,
Maya Knig, Carly Migliori, Emily Rustick, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg.
Our research assistants are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham, Henrietta Riley,
Olive Ruskin Kutz, and Emily Spector. Particular thanks to the
(46:23):
National Archives and the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College.
I'm Jill Lapour.
Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
known things go. A corridor of the mind, its walls
lined with shelves, stopped with proof, and cluttered with clues.
(00:36):
Here over, on top of this filing cabinet, a wooden
box with a brass nameplate, w M M damn. It's
locked this place. This vault stores the facts that matter,
and matters of fact, all that stands between reasonable doubt
(01:00):
and the chaos of uncertainty. It lies in a time
between now and then. The sign on the door reads
the last archive. Wind your watch back a century, step
across the threshold and into a lecture hall. The class
(01:27):
met twice a week at American University, two blocks from
the White House, in the spring of nineteen twenty two.
In the evening, all the students were lawyers. There were
young men. The professor, only twenty eight, was hardly older
than his students, William Moulton Marston. But Professor Marston had
a BA and a JD and a PhD. He was
(01:49):
an intellectual rogue, handsome, dangerously charming, almost as charming as
he was ambitious. He was trying to establish a new discipline,
the science of testimony. The science of how you know
whether someone is telling the truth. He liked to teach
by way of experiment, and on this particular evening he
was conduct getting experiment on what eyewitnesses can actually notice
(02:13):
and remember. It seems to be a regrettable fact that
little systematic psychological experimentation is being carried on in the
field of testimony. Much valuable material is being produced by psychiatrists, sociologists,
and criminologists from time to time, but the subjects of
(02:34):
such studies either psychopathic or criminal variants from the criminal
variants enter yes. In the middle of Marston's lecture, a
young man entered the hall. He wore leather gloves. In
his right hand, he carried an envelope. Tucked under his
(02:57):
left arm were three books, one red, one green, one blue.
I've read Marston's lecture, and I've read his report on
this experiment. What happened next, I like to imagine. Sorry
to interrupts, sir, but here the messenger handed the professor
the envelope. Professor Marston opened the envelope, pulled out a
(03:20):
yellow paper, and read its contents. While Professor Marston was
reading the message, the messenger slid a second envelope into
Professor Marston's pocket, and then the messenger, using only his
right hand, pulled out of his own pocket a long,
green handled knife. The messenger opened a knife and began
(03:44):
scraping his gloved left thumb with the edge of the blade,
sharpening it on the leather. Yeah, that'll do anyway, Yes, sir,
(04:05):
stood as that man was an actor, an experiment. Take
out a fresh sheet of notepaper, this very instant, and
write down every fact about what just occurred, every last detail,
no matter how seemingly insignificant. You have one minute, my
(04:29):
dear listeners. These people are actors, and this too has
been asharade an experiment. Please, now, this very instant. Tell
me what you just heard. Is that all you can remember?
All the details? Let me see if you left anything out?
(04:51):
What university are we at, in what year? What time
of days it? What part of the country was the
messenger from? What color was his knife? Time? Put down
your pencils, pass your paper to the front of the room.
All right. Marriston had identified exactly one hundred and forty
(05:15):
seven facts that the students could have observed about the messenger,
the number and the color of the books, the fact
that he held them under one arm is left. The
color of the paper in the first envelope yellow. And
then Professor Morriston collected his student's responses and tallied the results.
Out of one hundred and forty seven observable facts, the
(05:40):
class on average noticed only thirty six, and since two
of these facts were errors, I am only counting thirty four,
thirty four out of one hundred and forty seven facts,
for a testimonial accuracy rate of precisely twenty three percent,
and not a single one of you noticed the knife.
(06:07):
This is the last archive of the show about how
we know what we know, how we used to know things,
and why it seems sometimes lately as if we don't
know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This season we're
trying to solve a crime. Who killed Truth? This episode,
we're looking at a trial set in motion by the
(06:28):
experiment Professor Marston conducted that night in nineteen twenty two,
an experiment that involved a machine. A machine you've probably
heard about. Did you ever hear of a lie detector?
The lie detector? You probably know it from the movies.
You may lie to us, you can't lie to that.
(06:49):
The machine itself. The polygraph machine was invented by someone else,
but the test, the blood pressure test, that had been
invented by William Molton Marston, that professor who liked to
experiment on his students. Okay, most of us are very
good at telling whether or not other people are lying.
(07:09):
Marston thought a machine could tell better. See these needles.
You see the even little line this needle's making. When
you tell a lie, you're post quickens, and this needle
shows it on the chop. We take this sort of thing,
this sort of movie scene for granted. There seems like
(07:31):
it's all over the place, every police procedural, every episode
of law and order. But when you're conducting a historical investigation,
you're supposed to pause and think about the things you
take for granted, Think about them until you don't take
them for granted anymore, until they get weird. The way,
if you think about a word like pumpernickele, after a while,
it starts to sound really strange. Pumpernickele, pumpernickele, polygraph, polygraph.
(07:58):
And once things get strange, you can ask questions about
them because you can see them more clearly. So you
can ask why trust a blood pressure test more than
your own judgment. It used to be that only God
could decide the truth of testimony. For centuries, murder trials
involved the courts trying to get God to speak through
(08:20):
the dead body. If it bled when you touched it,
you were guilty. Even after trial by jury replaced this
sort of thing, Trial by ordeal, This idea that the
dead speak lingered in its way. The Lae detector is
a kind of ordeal, except it doesn't look for guilt
(08:42):
in the blood of the corpse. It looks for guilt
in the blood of the accused. Marston described his method
in his undergraduate thesis. The special problem suggested to me
in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory was an investigation in the
changes in blood pressure resulting from an effort to hide
the truth. Marston kept refining his truthscope all through graduate
(09:06):
school and law school, and during the First World War
when he did experiments on soldiers and prisoners of war.
He was seeking fame and fortune, for sure, but he
also had a noble motive. When police couldn't get criminals
to confess, they pretty often beat them up. They gave
them what was called the third degree. Marston had the
(09:26):
idea that if police had a lie detector, they'd stop
beating people up. In nineteen twenty two, at the same time,
as he was teaching an American university in Washington, Marston
decided that the time had come for a real world test.
He wanted to prove that his method worked. To do that,
he wanted to get the results of a lie detector
admitted as evidence in a criminal trial. He needed a
(09:50):
client desperate enough to hand his fate over to an
untried experiment. Inspector Clifford al Grad record of an interrogation
in August twenty second, ninety what is your name? James
Alfonso Frye. James Alfonso Frye would soon become the subject
of another one of Professor Marston's experiments. Fry was young
(10:11):
and unmarried. He was lean and handsome, with short hair
and big ears. He'd fought in the War. He worked
in a dentist's office, and he was broke. As he
later wrote, I was a young man of twenty one
years and penniless. The courts had to assign me a lawyer.
Police had charged James Alfonso fry with the murder of
doctor Robert Wade Brown, The President of the National Life
(10:32):
Insurance Company and the richest black man in Washington. Here's
what we know about the night Doctor Brown died. It
was a Saturday in November nineteen twenty. Brown was hosting
a party at his house celebrating his alma mater's football
victory when someone knocked at his front door. Brown went
(10:55):
to answer and was shot dead on his very doorstep.
The murderer, some people said, escaped down an alley. Browne's
grieving family and his company together offered a thousand dollars reward,
(11:17):
but the investigation had come up short. Although a lot
of Brown's guests witnessed the murder or at least glimpsed
the murderer, it all happened so suddenly that they could
remember hardly any details. Months later, the police were still
searching for Doctor Brown's killer when they arrested a young
black man on an unrelated robbery charge. It was Fry.
(11:39):
He and a cousin had robbed a guy of a wallet,
a ring, and a watch, a petty theft. During his
trial for robbery, one witness, a man who worked at
the same dentist's office as for I, told the police
that Fry had confessed to him that he Fry, had
killed doctor Robert Brown. And it turned out that Fry
had in fact been at doctor Brown's house on the
night of the murder, and that he had brought a gun,
(12:01):
And when the police questioned Fry, he confessed to the murder.
The police had to get that confession on record, so
they brought him into an interrogation room where they questioned
him all over again. They wouldn't have made an audio recording,
this is nineteen twenty one, a little too early for that,
but they made a transcript, and here in the last
archive we've got a copy. You have told my colleague
(12:24):
that you killed doctor Brown. Aw are you willing to
tell me about it? Yes, sir. When I first went
to doctor Brown's I had a dollar, and I asked
him to give me a prescription because I had been
told I had gone a rha real bad. He then
said he couldn't do anything for me for a dollar.
He said, don't you son of a bitches come around
here with only one dollar? Fry said, then he'd left
(12:45):
and gone to try to raise money for the medicine
by pawning his pistol, a forty five automatic. No luck,
so he said he went back to Brown's with his
loaded gun tucked into the belt of his pants, but
when he got there, he said, Brown sent him away again,
told him if he didn't have the money, to get lost,
and he struck me over the left eye. Did he
have any weapon in his hand, No, sir. Then I
(13:06):
took the butt of the gun and hit him, and
that didn't do good, because he struck me again. I
tried to run to the door, and he grabbed me again,
and I told him to put his hands up, and
he kept on hitting me, hitting me on the head,
and then the struggle. I think my gun was fired there,
just there, with that slight cautious admission, I think my
(13:29):
gun was fired. James Fry confessed to killing Brown. But Fry,
who didn't even have a dollar to pay for a prescription,
couldn't afford a lawyer. Here's where doctor Marston comes in.
In that course on the law of evidence, two of
his young students told him about the case, and then
they volunteered to take Fry's case for free, defending him
(13:51):
against the charge of murder. First, they went to visit
Fry in prison. The students, Professor Marston and his contraption,
a blood pressure cuff or a sphigmo monometer. Marston hooked
Fry up. Someone took a photograph. You can things in
a photograph that you can't see in a transcript. In
(14:12):
the photograph, Frye, a black man, is surrounded by white men.
Professor Marston and his law students, all in dark suits.
As they strapped Fry into Marston's machine. Marston grasps Fry's arm,
taking readings from his body. Fry later described the experience.
Several months after I had been confined in the DC jail,
(14:35):
my attorneys came to see me, accompanying a Professor Marston.
This learned doctor was later known to me as the
inventor of the lie detector. He asked if I would
submit to the use of this instrument to such requests,
I readily agreed. He asked me several questions, none pertaining
(14:55):
to the case. Then suddenly he launched upon several questions
going into every detail of the case at the Metropolitan
Courthouse one month later. This graph was supposed to be
the ace in the hole for Fry's defense, and perhaps
it would catapult Fessor Marston to fame as the greatest
legal mind of his generation. But the judge assigned to
the case, Chief Justice Walter McCoy, was famously stern, and
(15:18):
he was miffed. This was a big murder trial and
a lot of Deasey's black community had come out for it,
and Marston had alerted the press about it, so there
were a lot of reporters there too. Judge McCoy was
no fool. He saw early in the trial the long
game this Professor Marston was playing. Marston wanted to replace
trial by jury with trial by light detector all rise.
(15:43):
The prosecution called a detective who had taken Fry's confession.
I call the stand detective Clifford Grant. I interrogated James
Frye on August twenty second, nineteen twenty one. Detective Grant
testified that Fry had confessed to him, But then Fry's
lawyer Mattingly started bringing in his witnesses. I called to
st James Frye could have a glass of water. Not
(16:15):
a word of my confession was true. Fry recanted. He
insisted that he hadn't killed Brown. It's going to be
hard to convince a jury of this, But Marston offered
to prove with his lie detector where the real truth lay.
It was a slim hope Fry knew. Fry later wrote
that there had been no real chance for a black
(16:36):
man in Washington in nineteen twenty two to get a
fair trial. If I am neatly dressed and can explain myself,
I'm considered being a smart alec and must be guilty.
If I'm dressed in overalls unable to explain the situation,
then I'm considered a brute and still must be guilty.
(17:01):
In any ordinary trial, a train of witnesses would make
their statements, the guests at Brown's house, the police who
investigated the crime, the people who could give evidence in
support of Fry's alibi, and then the jury, twelve white
men would decide who to believe. Those men would find
the facts of the case an issue a verdict, but
(17:23):
which words of Fries were true, the confession he'd given
to the police or the recanting he did right there
on the stand. Fry's lawyer gamely tried to follow the
Marston defense plan. If your honor please, at this time,
I had intended to offer in evidence the testimony of
(17:47):
doctor William M. Marston, as an expert in deception as
testimony on what testimony as to the truth or falsity
of certain statements of the defendant? If your honor, please,
if you object to it, I will sustain the objection.
No other judge admitted the lie detector test as evidence,
(18:10):
and Judge McCoy didn't want to be the first one
to do it. He all but begged the prosecution to
object to this evidence, and when they didn't, he began
objecting himself. The witnesses here on the stand, and it
is for the jury to determine whether or not he
was telling the truth. That is very true, your honor.
But as expert testimony, is not this proper as competent
(18:35):
evidence to go before the jury to ascertain what doctor
Marston's opinion is at this time? Oh well, we get
to be more or less experts ourselves, and so do
the jury upon the question of whether anybody is telling
the truth or not. That is what the jury is for.
(18:55):
That is what the jury is for. It had taken
centuries for ordinary people, even if only still men, white men,
to gain the right to serve as jurors of the
guilt or innocence of their peers. But in the early
decades of the twentieth century, a lot of scientists calling
themselves experts. I thought they knew quite a bit more
than jurors, that they had tools, methods, even machines that
(19:18):
could find out the truth. Judge McCoy was smart enough
to see the size of William Marston's ambition, and he
was determined to foil it. When the next witness came
to the stand, Mattingly again approached the bench, he had
another proposition. I love this part, the jousting, the little duel,
but Mattingly was wildly outmatched. If your honor, please, before
(19:42):
this witness begins to testify, may I inquire whether your
honor would permit a systolic blood pressure test to be
taken during an examination of the witness on the stand.
If we are going to have a cystolic test, we
all have to test every witness who testifies in the case.
If there is any science about it, we might as
(20:04):
well apply the science to every witness. Mind you, I
do not know anything about the test at all. I
had certain pamphlets submitted to me yesterday to look at.
Of some doctor Marston. I believe his thesis when he
got his PhD degree I'm going to read them when
I come back from my vacation. I see enough in
(20:25):
them to know that so far the science has not
sufficiently developed detection of deception by blood pressure to make
it a usable instrument in a chord of law. When
it is developed to the perfection of the telephone on
the telegraph and wireless and a few other things, we
will consider it. I shall be dead by that time, probably,
(20:48):
and it will bother some other judge, not me. Jed
McCoy was a piece of work. After that, Mattingly bumbled
along for a little while before concluding, and then the
prosecution delivered its closing words. James Fry is the most
colossal liar that ever appeared in court. I rest my case.
(21:13):
The jury deliberated for less than an hour and found
James Fry guilty of second degree murder. Judge McCoy sentenced
him to life in prison, and Fry went by train
to Leavenworth. He was supposed to spend the rest of
his days in jail. Professor Marston was conducting an experiment,
(21:54):
but it's not an accident that his test subject was
a penniless black man accused of murder. Marston became a
psychologist at a time when social scientists of every stripe
were expected to try and solve what was called the
Negro problem. What that problem was shifted all the time,
but never the commitment to the notion that facts alone
(22:15):
couldn't solve the Negro problem. Only numbers could. Social scientists
counted everything they measured, the circumference of the skull, the
length of a life, the density of a neighborhood, the
pressure of blood. Nearly a century after the Fry Trial,
historians still spend a lot of time looking back at
this moment, the period from about eighteen ninety to nineteen thirty.
(22:39):
Some of the best work in this field is done
by a colleague of mine, Khalil Gibran Mohammed, Professor of History, Race,
and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. The first
time I met him was at an academic conference with
a one word title, Numbers. Were both really interested in
numbers and why people count things, what kind of knowledge
(22:59):
numbers add up to, and what they subtract. One of
the most amazing things about the late nineteenth century looking
at that kind of local and national data is added
looked today like an Excel spreadsheet printed out and folded
many many times over. A lot of Khalimahamma's work focuses
on how after the Civil War, after emancipation, sociologists and
(23:20):
government agencies collected statistics on black crime to argue that
black people were by their very nature criminal, that they
were genetically not fit for their freedom, and so had
to be watched and studied endlessly. You could almost think
of it like a person who is in rehab, and
(23:40):
you develop certain protocols to keep track of their progress.
How many meals, how many hours do they sleep, what
are the signs of a healthy lifestyle. Whereas you wouldn't
do this for a normal person, You wouldn't keep a
ledger of such things. And so, to use this metaphor,
it was that ledger keeping of African Americans that was
a reflection of those same progressives thinking black people are
(24:01):
not still fully ready for full participation, so we'll keep
an eye on this crime thing. Well, the truth is,
we live in the wake of all these ideas. They're
baked in to our consciousness already, so we know what
to make of it. We can either make of it
that black people have a crime problem, or that black
people are subject to systematic racism and system or we
(24:22):
might say some mixture of boat. These ideas we live
in that are already in our consciousness, A lot of
them go back to a man named Frederick Hoffman. In
eighteen ninety six, he published a book called Race Traits
and Tendencies of the American Negro. Hoffman wanted to argue
that Blacks were inferior. Up until then, those arguments had
(24:42):
been based on racial pseudoscience, measuring skull sizes or some
other physical differences. Hoffman was pretty innovative and shifting that
gaze to crime statistics, and from that point forward, the
framework that he used that the disproportionate evidence of black
people being in prison was was on its own, with
(25:05):
no further analysis, no footnotes, no asterisks. The best proof
that black people were inferior to people of European descent.
Police discrimination and brutality didn't matter, rates of conviction mattered,
other factors, and the culture just soaks it up like
a sponge. Yeah, and it still does. Professor William Moulton Marston.
(25:30):
He wanted to turn James Frye into a set of numbers.
The numbers on the graph paper from his lie detector
test Marston wanted to turn Fry into a number, not
to prove that he was a criminal, but to prove
that he wasn't. And maybe I should admit here, I
don't know whether James Frye was guilty or not. He
was at the scene of the crime, he had a motive,
he had a weapon, and he confessed. So it looks
(25:53):
pretty bad. But then again, Marston had a lot on
the line, and he was pretty sure that Fry was innocent.
I might not be sure whether fry was guilty or not,
but I'm pretty sure Marston ever expected to get fry acquitted. Instead,
he was hoping to take Fry's case all the way
to the Supreme Court to demonstrate the merit of his invention.
(26:15):
Marston dreamed of convincing the nation's highest court that his
machine could tell better than any jury who was telling
the truth. Men come to judge this question by certain
arbitrary standards in the course of their dealings with others.
After for I went to prison, Marston helped to student
(26:36):
lawyers file an appeal. Or to be honest, I'm pretty
sure Marston just wrote the brief himself. It asked, how
does the court tell whether or not someone is lying.
The decision may hinge upon the look in the eyes,
the expression on the face, the nervous condition of the witness,
the rosy flush which suffuses his countenance, or upon any
(26:57):
one of many other evidences which may or may not
be taken to indicate truth or deception. We say that
there is no standard and no logical or reasonable basis
for the determination of this question in general, in the
absence of positive evidence of deception, and that if science
has developed a method of accurately determining whether a man
is in a mental condition or state of truth or
(27:20):
of deception, the court and jury should be given the
benefit of this assistance. But the State, in its own
brief said that the idea of trial by lie detector
was ridiculous. Whatever may be said against the system of
trial by jury under the Constitution and laws, a jury
of twelve impartial men are peculiarly fitted to sift conflicting
(27:41):
and contradictory testimony and derive at a just verdict. As
for Marston, whether he can or cannot detect deception is
something that does not appear to be known to anyone
except doctor Marston. At the end of nineteen twenty three,
the DC Circuit Court of Appeals issued its decision and
(28:01):
Fry versus the United States. The court ruled against Fry
and also against Marston and his lie Detector, and the
decision established a new rule of evidence, something that came
to be called the Frie test. It became the most
cited precedent in the history of law and science. The
(28:22):
Frie test is a test of evidence, a rule that
a judge applies and deciding whether or not to admit
the testimony of a supposed expert. It's only eighty one
words long, but I'm going to make you listen to
all of them. Listen for what the rule says, but
listen to for what it doesn't say. Just when a
scientific principle or discovery crosses the line between the experimental
(28:45):
and demonstrable stages is difficult to define. Somewhere in this
twilight zone, the evidential force of the principle must be recognized.
And while the courts will go a long way in
admitting expert testimony deduced from a well recognized scientific principle
or discovery, the thing from which the deduction is made
must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance. In
(29:05):
the particular field in which it belongs. All of the
facts of Fry's case were stripped out of the ruling.
That's how the law works. All that survives when court
supply the Fried test are those eighty one words. Everything
else is erased, including one very important circumstance, something pretty
(29:26):
widely known at the time, but that since then has
been almost entirely forgotten. That fact is this. Between Fry's
trial and disappeal, federal marshals went to the office of
Professor William Molton Marston at American University, and there they
arrested him for fraud. It turns out that the inventor
(29:46):
of the light detector test, he was a notorious liar.
So did he ever give you guys a light detector test? Oh? Yes,
we were experimental animals. So tell me about that. Was
it like? Well, sham? Really, none of us hadn't believed
(30:07):
it at all, And as far as settling disputes around
the house, it was laughable. That's Burne Holloway Marston, the
son of William Moulton Marston, he of lie detector fame
Byrne is eighty eight, a retired obstetrician. He's a sweetheart.
I first met him a few years back when I
(30:28):
got fascinated by the crazy, truly crazy story of his father.
Burne was born in nineteen thirty one, nine years after
the Fried Child. Little Burne was beloved and like everything
else in his father's life, he was an experiment, a
test case, among other things, for his father's lie detector test.
(30:48):
So it was like, hoostile know Don's sweater? Was it you, Peter,
you Burne, Let's give you a lie detector tests? No,
it wasn't a regular basis, but it didn't happen. The
fact that Marston was a father of four and used
to use his lie detector test on his kids is
a good story, But there are other reasons to spend
a little bit of time with Marston's private life, because
(31:09):
it's completely zaney, and second, because Marston's public persona turns
out to have been one big lie. Marston lie meter
inventor arrested charged by Boston authorities with using the mails
to defraud. William Marston, a professor at the American University,
(31:30):
was arrested yesterday at a preliminary hearing. He was held
in a three thousand dollars bond Marston several months ago,
constructed a machine which he declared could detect lies. The
churches against Marston actually had nothing to do with the
lie detector. They had to do with a super sketchy
(31:52):
business scheme of his. The churches were also eventually dropped.
But all this was going on at the same time
Marston was working on Fry's appeal. Marston lost that appeal,
Frye lost that appeal, and Marston got fired from American University.
But that wasn't the end of William Moulton Marston. He
(32:15):
got another job teaching at Tufts, where he began an
affair with one of his undergraduates, a young feminist named
Alive Byrne. She came from a radical family. Her mother
and her aunt, Margaret Sanger, had together opened the first
birth control clinic in the United States. What became planned
parented my friend Burne Marston. Olive Byrne was his mother.
(32:36):
My mother was a swassie, blue collar, Irish, witty, attractive
black irish black hair and pale skin, freckles and those
blue eyes and a blue eyes. Since that was the
(32:57):
beginning of the ah Yes the manaji Professor Morriston had
radical ideas about sex and about gender roles too. He
had four children by two women, his wife Elizabeth Holloway
and Burne's mother, Alive Burne. Burne's own name is a
mashup Burn, Holloway, Marston. He's got the names of each
(33:18):
of his three parents. The grown ups lived as a threesome, which,
as you might guess, was something of a family secret
because at the time you could be blacklisted from academia,
from any job for homosexuality, not to mention polyamory. The
Marston clan eventually moved to Ryan, New York, to a
big house, a place they called Cherry Orchard. Burn always
(33:41):
says it was an incredibly fun way to grow up
with so much love and this kookie father. He did
not conform him. You could hear him coughing at night.
He smoked all the time, and he cerebrated better in
the reclining with a whiskey. And he was a big guy.
(34:04):
Yeah he was me, Yeah, he was, I thank you.
It's probably about six feet so his weight very one
st at the time. He got to three hundred and
then he said, that's great. I'm going to join the
fat Man's Club in New York. Which is actually that's
the real thing. But he that was his life. He
(34:29):
was always creating, I guess because as you know, the
variety of things that he did were incredibly He always
self helped stuff for leader, threw himself into things when
you know when he did them. Marston was furiously curious,
always conducting experiments, always looking for the next big thing.
(34:51):
But whenever anyone found out about his polyamorous family arrangements,
they fired him. He lost his job at Tufts, and
then he lost a job at Columbia. So then he went,
we're all disgraced academics hoped to go. He went to Hollywood.
He was in all the gossip columns New York Evening Post.
(35:12):
Doctor Marston, who won't write ba PhD in L'll b
after his name in another week because Hollywood is touchy
about such things, is going to be the psychological authority
behind all forthcoming motion pictures. From one big concern in
Los Angeles, Marston went to work for Universal Studios as
a consulting psychologist, mainly on horror films. What did he
(35:34):
do is he took up whole audiences to his wide
detector while they watched the rushes. Then he'd advised the
studio about whether the films were too racy or too scary,
or not scary enough or not racy enough. He did
other nutty experiments too. Doctor Marston and Emotions. It's eighteenth
of July nineteen thirty and doctor William Marston demonstrates complicated
(35:58):
device whereby he claims he can determine and compute comparative
emotions of blondes, brunettes and redheads. Says Marston, Ladies and gentlemen,
hold onto your hats. Here comes the real voice of
William Marston. This is the spigmamnometer, an instrument which measures
the subject's blood pressure. This is the kimograph drum, which
(36:21):
records the breathing. The breathing is taken with anomograph around
the subject's chest. We are now going to test the
girl's reactions to gambling. The announcer watches the needle etche
marks into a rotating drum. Thing of the jig a kinograph.
There's kidograph with the indicator showing one girl's reaction the
game of chats. Needle is moved by subject's breathing. Here
(36:45):
we see how redhead reacts to gambling and as she wins.
Marston's emotion finder indicates that redheads show a most emotion
when gambling. When I visited Bernard's house, we watched the
newsreel together. He did it come out the year he
was born? Oh man, that's just so it's like a
(37:07):
quack show from from the twenties? Is I don't know,
but like did he believe that? Where is that just showing?
I think it was shy. He had walk on the
parapose of in New York City. Uh, you know, twenty
stories up and see which one would react the most.
(37:31):
I mean it's a yeah, it's a little it's not
very scientific. Yeah, I have a theory. I think people
who study lying tend to be liars, compulsive liars. Marston
definitely was what are the facts about razor blade quality?
(37:51):
That's what you let wanted to know, and that's why
you let retain Doctor William Moulton Marston, eminent psychologist and
originator of the famous lie detector, to conduct scientific tests
that reveal the whole truth. Truck drivers, bank presidents, men
in every walk of life. These men shade while every
(38:14):
reaction is measured and recorded, not knowing which blade is which,
each subject shades, one half his face with a Gillette blade,
the other with the blade of a competitive brand, while
the line detector accurately charts the reactions. In more than
nine out of every ten cases, the shavers choose Gillette,
(38:37):
says doctor Marston, the results of my study make it
possible for me to state flatly and back my statements
with positive proof that Gillette blades are far superior in
every respect to competitive blades tested. Gillette blades precision made
(39:01):
The FBI apparently had by now had enough of doctor
William Moulton Marston and decided to investigate this Gillette scheme.
FBI agents brought Marston to a police station in Detroit
and told him to replicate his experiments while police officers
looked on. He couldn't. Only five and ten men tested
in the station preferred Gillette. FBI director j Edgar Hoover
(39:24):
wrote a note to himself in his Marston file. I
always thought this fellow Marston was a phony, and this
proves it. But if Marston was a compulsive liar, so
is olive Byrne. She wrote articles for a women's magazine
for years, and in those articles she'd quote the famed
psychologist William Marston as if he were a stranger, when
(39:46):
of course they lived together. She once wrote an article
about the Fry case, and in nineteen thirty six, when
Fry applied for a pardon, he included her article with
his application. I find this a little heartbreaking. Fry was
thirty four then, he'd been in prison since he was
twenty two. I don't know if he killed doctor Robert Brown.
(40:08):
I think there's a real chance he did, but I
do know for certain that he didn't get a fair trial.
He filed petition after petition, insisting on his innocence. Had
I been fortunate to have had lawyers, judges or intelligent
people on the jury, I would never have been convicted.
I'm anxious to have the case reopened, if possible, in
(40:28):
order that my name could be cleared. The courts denied
his petition two years later, in nineteen thirty eight, Marston
published a book called The Lie Detector Test and gave
a copy to Burn, inscribing it for Burn Marston to
help him always tell the truth with love from Daddy.
The next year, Fry was prulled. He'd served more than
(40:50):
eighteen years in prison. On his release, still determined to
prove his innocence, he renewed his petition for a pardon.
Since my freedom from prison, I have married and have
a fine wife. He petitioned again and again, even applying
for presidential pardon. I gotta wonder would a guilty man
have kept on pressing the case years after his release.
(41:12):
Most people are under an impression that because a person
has been indicted, tried, and sentenced, they are guilty. They
do not stop to realize the fact that and all
three conditions named above are human decisions, and that no
human decision is infallible. I am innocent of the charge
against me. I have every reason to believe that the
(41:34):
courts of the District of Columbia thought so. After all,
this is Washington, and the question of race plays an
important part even in the courts. James Fry died in
nineteen fifty six, his name was never cleared. Instead, it
(41:54):
lived on as the name of a test of evidence.
Fry's name also became a verb. To be fried is
to have your expert witnesses testimony deemed inadmissible. Marston's name
isn't a verb. He don't get Marston if you take
a lie detector test instead. Marston is hardly remembered for
(42:18):
the lie detector test. He's remembered for a different invention
of his called Onto Your Headphones. It's about to get weird.
In nineteen forty one, Marston, his wife Elizabeth Holloway, and
his other wife Alive Byrne created the comic book superhero
wonder Woman, the best known feminist icon of all time.
(42:38):
She fights for women's rights. She's in fact based on
Margaret Sanger, founder of Plant Parenthood. I came across the
evidence of this entire crazy story years ago in an archive,
and I had to write a book about it. It's
called The Secret History of Wonder Woman. It's a story
about feminism, but it's also a story about evidence and truth.
Wonder Woman fights for justice on her foe arms. She
(43:00):
wears two middle bracelets that can stop bullets. They look
just like the ones Alive Byrne used to wear, and
of course she has her own lie detector. Marston once
wrote a wonder Woman's story about the Fry trial. I
am pretty sure none of One Woman's readers recognize the illusion.
But in this particular story, Marston imagines a courtroom scene
and which wonder Woman tries to get a judge to
(43:22):
accept as evidence the results of an interrogation she's conducted
using her golden lasso of truth. I understand you examine
this defendant with your remarkable Amazonian lasso. Yes, oh well
it's highly irregular. I'd like to hear your finding. I
will show you judge objection sustain. Okay. So then Wonder
(43:46):
Woman lassoes the defendant Priscilla Rich and drags her to
the witness stand and gets her to confess that yes, yes,
she really is the supervillain known as the Cheetah, after
which the odd, grateful and besotted judge shakes Wonder Woman's hand.
Your advice was invaluable, Wonder Woman. I wish you'd give
(44:07):
me further call on me anytime. Marston rewrote the story
of the Fry Trial the way he'd wanted it to
come out, with himself as the hero and Judge McCoy
worshiping him. But in nineteen forty four, just when Marston
finally realized this triumph with Wonder Woman, he got really sick.
(44:31):
He had well apparently was polio, and this is coincided
with the success of Wonder What. He was finally making
it something as he kind of yeah, pay him enough
money to support all these people and watch something be
successful and watching be successful and it was I mean,
that's a kind of a tragic life and means yeah, right,
(44:55):
because Wonder Woman has endured outside of the Last Archive,
very little. Last James Fry is all but forgotten except
for his last name. A test of truth, but in
just injustice endures, and if you want to fight it,
you don't need a lasso of truth or a lie detector,
(45:17):
but you do need knowledge and evidence, even the kind
of evidence we'll try to find in the next episode
of The Last Archive, The Evidence of the Invisible. The
Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane mcabin and Ben
Natt of Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton and our
executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jason Gambrella is our engineer.
(45:40):
Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Boss
and John Evans Hostelwagen Symfinett. Many of our sound effects
are from Harry Janett Junior and the Star Ganette Foundation.
Our fool Proof players are Barlow, Adamson, Daniel Burger, Jones,
Jesse Hinson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis and Maurice Emmanuel Parent.
The last Archive is brought to you by Pushkin Industries.
(46:01):
Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater,
Emily Shulman at Harvard Law School, Alex Allenson at the
Bridge Sound and Stage, and at Pushkin to Heather Fane,
Maya Knig, Carly Migliori, Emily Rustick, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg.
Our research assistants are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham, Henrietta Riley,
Olive Ruskin Kutz, and Emily Spector. Particular thanks to the
(46:23):
National Archives and the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College.
I'm Jill Lapour.
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