Sincerity and Power in the American Imagination

The social history of the polygraph reaches back into early modernity and the creation of western commercial society. It shines light on America’s struggle to define sincerity as the country developed an exuberant, reckless, and risky form of capitalism in the nineteenth century. As inherited differences of social status eroded, writers, philosophers, and scientists in the Anglo-American world began to devise methods of detecting the inauthentic. As Lionel Trilling argued, it was the phenomenon of social mobility that introduced the figure of the villain or trickster in modern English literature and made sincerity—matching inner self and social norms—a middle-class ideal. During the eighteenth century, the English literary world was obsessed with fraud and hoaxes and discussed means to uncover them. A little later, within the crowded urban landscapes of nineteenth-century America, advice literature addressing anxieties about hypocrisy and the threat it posed to Victorian notions of middle-class virtue abounded.6 At the same time, the burgeoning American market economy also suggested advertisement and self-promotion—mastery of the art of appearance—as a useful tool for economic and social advancement. While confidence men appear in the popular imagination of many cultures, historian Walter McDougall declared “hustling” to be the archetypical American activity and Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857) to be the quintessential American novel. Put differently, legitimate and illegitimate market activity became hard to distinguish in modern America, which opened the door for lie detector advocates to offer yet another marketable service.7

The historiography of American capitalism raises important questions regarding the relationship among democracy, market society, and sincerity, because only in a society that valued individual achievement and maintained a distinction between the private and the public sphere could the choice between truth and lies become a source of individual empowerment. In Victorian England, writers like Thomas Hardy or Oscar Wilde (who famously declared lying a form of art) often wrote about characters with an authentic existence on the margins of middle-class respectability. These characters forged such an existence by pursuing the opposites of sincerity—secrecy, masquerade, reserve, and invention.8 In the more prosaic history of American capitalism and the importance it placed on salesmanship, individuals often struggled to maintain a strict distinction between advertisement and deception. Honesty and sincerity therefore held a precarious place in the American national imagination and in economic practice.

Accusations of hypocrisy have long existed toward world powers whose methods and morals appear to exist in conflict. The founding fathers had struggled to defend themselves against charges of two-facedness coming easily against a nation supposedly based on liberty but tolerant of the institution of slavery.9 In the realm of foreign policy, statesmen and academics in Germany, England, and America fired off mutual charges of hypocrisy when their countries began to compete for global power in the 1890s. The liberal British empire of the Victorian age, so the Germans argued, had acquired its dominance by force, yet its defenders claimed that British supremacy was benevolent since it facilitated global trade. While British writers countered that German Realpolitik was little more than an elaborate justification for naked Machiavellianism, German historian Friedrich Meinecke famously argued that it was the British who practiced “the most effective kind of Machiavellianism, which could be brought by the national Will of power-policy to become unconscious of itself, and to appear (not only to others, but also itself) as being pure humanity, candor and religion.”10 Such accusations were easily transferred to America, the new preponderant global power after the Second World War. Charges of hypocrisy stung many American diplomats, as when it came to explaining Jim Crow practices in the nation’s capital to foreign diplomats.11

By that time, however, the communist tactics of propaganda and infiltration served as a suitable foil to contrast American sincerity with communist deceit. “The Communist Party, USA, has been and is engaged in an all-out war against American freedom,” FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared in his (ghostwritten) 1958 bestseller Masters of Deceit. “Its tactics of confusion, retreat, advance, infiltration, and hypocrisy are in full play.” Hoover warned of communist “terrorism, espionage, sabotage, lying, cheating.” The defense of American national character would acquire new urgency when U.S. foreign policy attempted to advertise America’s core values and, in the process, define American national identity.12

According to polygraph examiner Gordon Barland, by the early 1990s, polygraphs as a routine investigation tool in law enforcement had spread to fifteen countries other than the United States, and overall fifty-five countries retained some public or private polygraph resources.13 Still, no country came even close in its reliance on the machine. Given the exceptionally wide use of the technology in the United States, it is not surprising that historians have raised the question of whether lie detection reveals something transcendent about the American national character. For example, in his authoritative group biography of the main characters who drove the development of the machine—William Marston, an academic psychologist who ended up as a comic book writer; John Larson, a psychologist-police officer who at the end of his life came to call the machine “Frankenstein’s Monster”; and Leonarde Keeler, the son of a famous poet who made the polygraph his claim to fame—Ken Alder emphatically calls finding out liars “an American obsession.”14 In contrast, since a variety of groups in American society participated on different sides in the debates over the polygraph and national security, this book highlights the conflicting demands Americans made of each other as they negotiated the need for both security and personal freedom. The result was a negotiated compromise that failed to satisfy either proponents or critics of the polygraph.

In contrast to Alder’s broad identification of lie detection with the American character, this study highlights the intense conflicts that the purposes of polygraph tests sparked among citizens and its role in national security policymaking. I want to explain not only why the lie detector became so popular in the United States, but also why it was attacked so enthusiastically at different times. Despite occasional spectacular appearances in celebrity cases, the polygraph has not become the standard expert witness before American courts. Nor did American psychology utilize it on a broad basis during the rise of the “therapeutic ideal” in postwar America, when top psychologists played a major role in government-sponsored efforts to emotionally manage the population.15 After three major investigations, Congress passed the 1988 Employee Polygraph Protection Act, which prohibited private companies from polygraphing applicants and from random testing of current employees. Exempted were companies concerned with national security, as well as national security agencies of the government. Since the polygraph borrowed legitimacy from the discourse of national security, we need to understand the history of this symbiotic relationship from the viewpoint of its supporters and its critics.

Surveillance Technologies and Global Power

As a variety of scholars in the fields of science and technology studies, sociology, literary studies, and the history and philosophy of science have established, the polygraph originated in nineteenth-century psychology, physiology, and criminology. The Victorian Age saw the rise of technologies to map individual appearance and open it to analysis. Accompanying the development of photography, for example, was a hope that the formal portrait would offer, as historian Alan Trachtenberg described it, “surety that persons were knowable in their visage, the image offering a surrogate for face-to-face sociality in an increasingly distended social order.” Artists such as the daguerreotypist Montgomery Simons, who in 1853 created a series of thirty portraits to build an exhaustive display of human emotions, believed that “a pictured face manifested inner-ness.” While the abolitionist Frederick Douglass firmly believed in photography as a means to reveal the human dignity of freedmen after the American Civil War, the white American middle and upper class employed photography to highlight racial and social distinctions. The “mug shot” also defined rather than liberated the individual. Making an early appearance in the history of photography (French authorities began to photograph prisoners in 1841), it became an instrument of surveillance and governance, allowing criminologists to search out types of criminals. Even as Kodak’s affordable photo technology and the introduction of the U.S. Postal Service’s one-penny stamp for postcards allowed millions of Americans to experiment with photographic self-expression at the end of the nineteenth century, the appearance of gruesome lynch photography reminds us that technology could be used to brutally constrict the ability of individuals to define themselves.16

The search for traces of in-born criminality made Victorian criminologists in Europe develop further technological devices to use the body itself, rather than testimony, as a witness. The medical technology that led to the development of the polygraph measured physiological changes in the human body invisible to the eye. Beginning in the 1860s, European physiologists such as Étienne-Jules Marey in France, Vittorio Benussi and Angelo Mosso in Italy, and Frederick Peterson in England developed devices to measure and record blood pressure, pulse rates, and respiration. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung employed the new galvanometer. It featured an electrode to detect galvanic skin resistance (sweat) by measuring an electric current running through a finger. Jung employed the device in combination with word association tests (first developed by Francis Galton in England). During these tests, the subject would be asked to freely associate based upon words read by the examiner. Jung’s goal in matching the chart of the galvanometer with the speed and content of the stated word associations was to identify emotional pathology—the sick mind. Hence, he mainly tested subjects with a variety of diseases such as epilepsy. This concern with the abnormal mind as a human type was prevalent in much of the early use of lie detection technology such as the galvanometer. Nonetheless, it set the stage for the polygraph to become a means to measure “normal” people and to monitor their behavior, as Geoffrey Bunn has convincingly shown.17

Given that terms such as “criminality” escaped a strictly medical definition, discourse surrounding the detection of certain types of individuals was to a prominent degree socially constructed. This holds true especially for concerns about the female offender, whom criminologists such as Cesare Lombroso or physicians such as Havelock Ellis viewed as uniquely influenced by their physique. To them as to others in the Victorian era, “the female body was associated with nature, passivity, emotionality, and irrationality.” According to Geoffrey Bunn, it was Lombroso’s research to detect female emotions that “led to a search for ordinarily invisible signs of crime within the body.” Only when these physiological assumptions about criminality came under sustained critique by psychologists and social reformers such as Frances Kellor in the 1890s was the search for “criminal types” slowly abandoned. Still, prominent polygraph advocate William Moulton Marston titillated audiences in 1928 with a test of the supposedly varying emotionality of blonde, brunette, and red-headed women. Keeping the gendered agenda of the instruments that led to the development of the polygraph in mind, we need to realize that exerting social power remained a concern when polygraph tests were unleashed on homosexuals, communists, and other marginal groups of people in the twentieth century.18

It was often fear of social disintegration that drove these technological developments and endowed them with cultural significance. We can, for example, see the birth of Victorian detective fiction like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories as an example of cultural fantasies about the power of truth to reaffirm social order. Indeed, Ron Thomas notes that the lie detector might be called “the fulfillment of a dream inspired by nineteenth-century detective fiction.”19 Expanding on the theme of the interrelatedness of science, literature, and technology, Melissa Littlefield argues that crime and science fiction literature throughout the twentieth century advertised the possibilities of lie detection beyond what science could offer. Such literature particularly elided the challenges of interpreting the charts produced by physiological data.20 According to Robert Michael Brain, the interaction between artistic imagination and the oddly symmetric charts of the new laboratory instruments even facilitated the rise of modernism in the fine arts. An intuitive viewing of the inscription of physiological data on paper would, so the hope of avant-garde intellectuals and artists, inspire a new formalist aesthetic. This aesthetic would utilize technological instruments and media such as film as extensions of the human sense organs and forge a new understanding of human nature based on the clues provided by those instruments.21 The penetrating analysis of the human body by recording physiological data thus could be based on pessimism about the effect of modern mass society and inspire utopian visions of what it meant to be human. My study is based on an appreciation of the dynamic interaction between the research that led to the lie detector and the different cultural contexts in which the graphs that the polygraph produced could exert their influence. But in contrast to existing studies, this book focuses on American foreign policy as the site of discourses of the polygraph.

While many scientists of the early twentieth century explored new ways to police populations by mapping and defining the inner life of individuals, a peculiar parallel activity took place: Western policymakers and their advisors mapped out global geography in search for danger spots to be policed more efficiently as well. With Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. foreign policy attempted to reimagine the global landscape and developed new doctrines of state authority and national security fit for the industrial age and America’s global economic ambitions. For example, the 1907 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, in which President Roosevelt unilaterally claimed American police authority in the Caribbean, complemented the American building of the Panama Canal, one of the technological wonders of the modern world. Indeed, the first decades of the twentieth century saw the radical shrinking of western conceptions of time and space, due to modern technologies such as the telegraph, telephone, steamboat, and railroad. These changes inspired the English geographer Halford Mackinder to develop the concept of “geopolitics.” This concept stressed the impact of geography on the global balance of power, but it also highlighted how modern technologies began to strike at that balance. Mackinder argued that the advent of modern communication and transportation technology shrank the globe to a “closed system” of interdependent power relations.22

President Woodrow Wilson was a crucial transitional figure in American geo-strategic thinking. As the British-German war on the Atlantic raged after 1914, Wilson was haunted by the specter of an interdependent world—full of opportunity but also danger—in which modern technology threatened to globalize all conflicts so that no country, even the United States, could stand apart anymore. This view of the globe as a shrunken space laid the intellectual foundation for the domino theory. Popularized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower during the early 1950s, the domino metaphor of conflict suggested that any local conflict could spiral out of control. As a consequence, the domino theory highlighted the need for proactive U.S. policies to prevent a potentially catastrophic chain reaction. Modern technology therefore had distinctly dystopian implications for many policymakers: it established a sense of the impossibility of an unthreatened homeland.23 The interplay between a sense of global threat and a belief in a unique American ability to benevolently police the globe was one major factor that set the stage for the American Cold War.

The Polygraph and the Concept of Cold War

This book aims to provide a narrative of the American Cold War. Historians have, with some notable exceptions, avoided methodological questions about how to conceptualize the compelling yet elusive concept of “the Cold War.” In a recent survey of the historical literature, Anders Stephanson observes that historians too often use the term as an “empty marker of time” with no analytical payoff. Applied as “shorthand for an amorphous epoch of enormous span,” the term confuses rather than clarifies which events of the period between 1945 and 1991 should be termed “Cold War” and what criteria should be used to make that call. For Stephanson, the Cold War was less an objective playing out of events than a narrative of America existing in mortal danger, justifying an offensive national posture and denying legitimacy to Soviet geopolitical interests.24

The ways in which the Cold War was a break with, or a continuation of, older American policy principles remains, in the final analysis, a matter of interpretation. One analytical challenge is that while the Cold War put many American long-term goals—such as a global system of free trade—temporarily on hold, in the minds of U.S. policymakers, it ultimately was meant to serve those ends.25 In addition, the process of how the United States came to assume expansive military, political, and economic obligations was historically contingent. It depended on the sense of global responsibilities that came with America’s unique position of power at the end of a period that had seen two world wars within a generation.26 In short, the American Cold War arose from circumstance but also according to numerous, and at times contradictory, predispositions in American political culture and economy. Because use of the polygraph was in many cases driven by a sense of mortal threat to American values, this book is then a Cold War history and, as in other Cold War histories, circumstances, contingencies, and coincidences matter.

While the concept and narrative of the Cold War came to be used and redefined by non-American actors as well, my book follows Stephanson’s lead in analyzing the Cold War as a narrative that was embedded in American debates. I also agree with Stephanson and other historians that, since most American policymakers grudgingly came to accept the Soviet Union as a fellow great power by the early 1960s, the Cold War as a narrative rapidly lost plausibility among American publics and policymakers.27 As a consequence, this book also investigates the practices that cemented elements of the Cold War after “containment” had lost its hegemonic status as the “privileged American narrative during the Cold War.”28 The polygraph thrived at the beginning of the American conflict with the Soviet Union and came under attack in the early 1960s. The fact that it became a target of persistent criticism, yet still existed in a more limited sphere of “national security” practice, suggests that its history should be understood as part of Cold War history, and that narratives of the powerful lie detector were containment narratives.

I would like to further emphasize that the history of the polygraph as a tool and symbol of the Cold War is consonant with existing approaches to American Cold War history. Historian Melvyn Leffler characterizes U.S. global strategy during and after World War II as, first, the encouragement of the economic and political consolidation of Western Europe; second, the pursuit of a nuclear arms race; and, third, vigorous opposition to allegedly communist nationalism in the Third World. When we abstract from this analysis, we can see that the strategy of containment was based on the perceived need to impose order on a world seen as chaotic—a world in which even the threat of an opponent capable of harnessing human and material resources demanded preparedness to actively intervene anywhere in the world and overwhelm any potential enemy. Based on these assumptions, the U.S. strategist Paul Nitze stated in 1950, “To seek less than preponderant power would be to opt for defeat.”29

The American Cold War worldview can be seen as an inherently technological view: an outlook on the world that demanded constant surveillance, assessment, and intervention through technology. A technological outlook is foundational for ruling foreign populations in modern times. Rule by technology, according to Gyan Prakash, is “an enframing that acts upon and organizes the world so as to make it available as a resource.”30 American methods of rule by technology did not grow evenly. This outlook originated with slavery, as when Southern states introduced numbered passes to identify slaves working outside their home plantation.31 However, the U.S. federal government at first did not match the ability of late nineteenth-century industrial enterprises to systematically collect, store, and assess information to identify citizens. Only after the “colonial laboratory” of the Philippines post-1898—with the creation of a comprehensive surveillance system that utilized (among other things) index cards based on intelligence from photography, fingerprints, and a network of local informants run by the Military Information Division and its affiliated indigenous organizations—did government officers such as Ralph Van Deman proceed to unleash these surveillance techniques on American society at home during World War I. The technological outlook therefore began to erode distinctions between the domestic and foreign realms even before the onset of the struggle with the Soviet Union.32 Although the technological power of the U.S. government grew unevenly, variations of a technological outlook were nevertheless pervasive in the imagination of a settler society bent on conquering a continent with the help of modern technologies such as the railroads.33

However, the worldview of technology competes with rival imperatives, meaning that different groups can make ownership claims to governmental power. For example, after declaring independence in 1947, Indian Hindu nationalists declared the technologically mobilized colonial state their own, claiming correspondence between its newly configured natural and human resources—the “legible” outer sphere—and its ancient, spiritual, inner sphere. Thus, for Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, India viewed through the frame of imperial technology could be transformed into an entity ruled by domestic elites for the benefit of postcolonial Indians, rather than by Westerners for their own benefit.34

The at-times paradoxical relationship between national identity and technology can also be seen in political discussions over the American national security state after 1945. During World War II, the federal government radically expanded its ability to govern the daily lives of citizens and formed new corporatist partnerships with private industries in the name of protecting individual liberty. “By cloaking new obligations to the state in this fusion of liberalism (with its valorization of freedom and equality) and nationalism (with its demand for unity, order, and loyalty), the federal government could expand its power radically without triggering opposition.”35 The controversies over the creation of the national security state—its ever-increasing defense budget, the terrifying development of nuclear technology, and the establishment of opaque bureaucracies such as the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency—were also laden with rhetoric of national identity: the Truman administration justified these measures as a means to protect American values. Only by appropriating the traditional American discourse of freedom and imbuing it with new technological meaning could the Truman administration and its successors justify the new power of the state. Thus, U.S. national security policy attempted to avoid the specter of a “garrison state”—sociologist Harold Lasswell’s vision of totalitarianism, in which an all-powerful civilian-military elite would dominate society.36 American militarization would instead mean mobilization of American human and material resources through corporatist public-private networks, consisting of government agencies and the private defense industry.37

This expansion of the American state during and after World War II led to a paradox: security policy became intensely inward-looking, even as its sphere of action grew global. The wider the reach of U.S. power, the more intensely Americans discussed their national purpose. As a result, public discussions of foreign policy were often driven by partisan politics and vice-versa.38 America’s “global nationalism” assumed the necessity for a global grand strategy to protect what was uniquely American.39 We can observe the impact of globalized domestic politics in the intense, but often unacknowledged, militarization of popular culture and domestic policy debates (from the “War on Poverty” to the “War on Drugs”), which—interrupted by the Vietnam War—underwent a resurgence under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Military power often became imbued with the mythical ability to solve political problems, and “national security” often served as a placeholder for a variety of domestic debates.40 Historians have studied congressional attempts to rein in the empowered executive branch at different times after 1945, but the repeated and often heated controversies about federal polygraph policies have been ignored so far.41

This book shows that discussions about the value or danger of the polygraph were a prominent part of the many debates to define the elusive term “national security” that became a powerful doctrine justifying American state-building during and after the Second World War. As one foreign relations textbook defines it: “U.S. national security is the ability of national institutions to prevent adversaries from using force to harm Americans or their national interests and the confidence of Americans in this capability.”42 National security therefore has physical and psychological connotations. Through the history of the polygraph, this study analyzes the meaning of “national security” as Americans negotiated it (often heatedly) with each other. An analytical focus on national security, Melvyn Leffler succinctly states, “demands that as much attention be focused on how the American government determines its core values as on how it perceives external dangers.”43 Leffler recently summarized his findings thus: “What I had learned was that national security itself was an amorphous notion shaped by external realities, domestic circumstances, and personal perceptions. It meant different things to different people at different times. It was a dynamic concept, always changing, always contentious.”44 This history of the polygraph may serve as a case study of Leffler’s insight. How did polygraph debates express different ideas about American core values? How does the history of the polygraph as a tool of national security transform our understanding of the technological project to create security and protect democracy?

The Polygraph and the Political Power of Measurements

The polygraph lastly illustrates the theme of measurement and the danger inherent in basing national policy on measurable data alone. National security policy had to iron out contradictions and changes and often pursued ad-hoc policies rather than following well-established doctrines. As the political scientist David Campbell reminds us, “The constant (re)writing of national purpose and the objectives of national security policy . . . so that which is contingent and subject to flux is rendered more permanent” is the task of the national security state.45 The polygraph was one technology that promised to measure security and establish an objective, scientific (and therefore fair and democratic) standard for achievable policies. But the question is: What exactly did the polygraph measure? How does a machine measure imponderables such as loyalty to democratic values?

Measurements such as numbers of Soviet troops, missiles, bombers, and so on were highly coveted during the Cold War, partly because they allowed the calculation of risk. In his classic study Strategies of Containment, historian John Lewis Gaddis points out the strategic shift from George Kennan’s conception of limited strong point defense to the comprehensive global policies outlined in security document NSC-68 that took place in the early 1950s. By 1950, after the outbreak of the Korean War, American policy was becoming increasingly based on worst-case scenarios of Soviet threat.46 This shift was due to an increased valuation of risk minimization: U.S. policy came to focus on Soviet military capabilities at least in part because capabilities could be measured more easily than intentions. Without sources of human intelligence inside the Kremlin (at least until the early 1960s), American policymakers often had to guess the intentions of the secretive Kremlin leadership. However, after the development of the U-2 spy plane in 1954, it became easier to measure what the other side was capable of. In fact, both superpowers in the end tended to interpret the adversary’s immense military capabilities as a measure of the other side’s aggressive intentions.47 This book suggests the history of the polygraph is part of the history of risk management in U.S. national security policies.

In addition to risk management, this study also attends to technology as a means for establishing governmental control. As Paul Edwards reveals in his book The Closed World, the strategy of nuclear deterrence led to the development of digital technologies for global surveillance, for example the Distant Early Warning Line, an interconnected system of radar stations in the Arctic region of the Atlantic coast, which NATO installed in 1957. But deterrence also created closed-world discourse. This discourse included “the language, technologies, and practices that together supported the visions of centrally controlled, automated global power.” Under this analytical heading, we can detect a unifying theme in U.S. national security policy: it calculated the predictability of human behavior in game theory, was often driven by worst-case scenarios of global war, and produced cognitive science that modeled human thinking after computer technology.48 The history of the polygraph is part of the history of the American project to create predictability by reducing human conscience to measurable data. In this sense as well, the history of the polygraph is part of Cold War history.

Another finding of this book that contributes to our larger understanding of U.S. national security policy is how a practice that at first was only an improvised, on-the-spot solution became enshrined in practice and eventually turned into established policy. The history of the polygraph therefore suggests the path-dependent character of U.S. Cold War policies.49 Bureaucratic convenience simply trumped science when it came to federal polygraph practices. In this context, my study discusses the way the executive branch of government—especially the CIA—used the polygraph to fight off congressional oversight. By emphasizing its critical contribution to national security, the CIA managed to carve out a sphere of control for itself by claiming the self-regulating, scientific nature of the polygraph as a neutral procedure. This discussion builds on the finding of historian Theodore Porter, who argues that quantitative methods allow American bureaucracies freedom from meddlesome outsiders (especially Congress) by depersonalizing knowledge and power. Using abstract knowledge gained from numbers is a strategy of modern government in the western world that especially resonates with traditional American distrust of elites and central authority. According to Porter, “Objectivity lends authority to officials who have very little on their own.”50 In a broader sense, the polygraph is therefore part of larger cultural forces that created what media theorist Neil Postman called “Technopoly.” To Postman, Technopoly “consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfaction in technology, and takes its orders from technology.” As part of this culture of technology, “Machines eliminate complexity, doubt, and ambiguity” and determine which questions people ask themselves and therefore direct their thinking.51 My study tells the story of one technology that contributed to the larger technological cultures of the twenty-first century, in which issues of national security and personal freedom are still at the forefront of public debates.

My investigation proceeds as follows. Chapter 1 outlines the scientific challenges of establishing sufficiently precise polygraph tests. My hope is that clarifying the underlying methodological issues of the polygraph beforehand facilitates an easier flow of the historical narrative. In chapter 2 I discuss the American researchers who pioneered lie detection technology: Hugo Münsterberg, William M. Marston, John Larson, and Leonarde Keeler. This chapter discusses the context and first use of truth technology in the spectacular 1907 court trial of International Workers of the World leaders, who stood accused of assassinating Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg—a case followed closely by the national press. The chapter discusses the first systematic testing of lie detection technology during World War I. I also analyze how emerging “modern” threats—transnational terrorism, socialist ideology, and border-crossing crime—became the prime target of the lie detector. While one group of lie detector advocates favored a therapeutic use of the technology, its preponderant use (highlighted by sensational press coverage) became the deterrence of threats and the detection of criminals.

In chapter 3 I lay out the introduction of the lie detector in the national security state that American civilians and the military created during World War II. This chapter illustrates the extent of its use—first in prisoner-of-war camps, then in the screening of federal employees for loyalty and security in the initial stages of the Cold War. I explore the role of nuclear weapons development, which laid the basis for a new, invasive protocol of security, and the demands for submission to this protocol from federal employees. This chapter therefore demonstrates the concurrent rise of the U.S. national security state out of the emergency situation of World War II and the deployment of the polygraph by the federal government as an emergency measure, which achieved permanence due to the development of nuclear weapons.

Chapter 4 tracks polygraph controversies in the public sphere during the early Cold War years, with particular emphasis on new fears of totalitarian government methods. The investigations of anticommunist members of Congress (such as Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon) hold a prominent place, but the investigative journalism of Dwight Macdonald and other journalists and academics—as well as responses from American citizens—are the focus of this chapter. The analysis highlights the ambiguous position of the polygraph as both a harbinger and a perceived protector from undue governmental power. The main finding of this chapter is that the polygraph added to, rather than subdued, the social anxieties caused by the domestic Cold War in 1950s America.

Chapter 5 builds a larger interpretive and factual frame for the role of national security discourse in relation to the polygraph. It develops the early history of U.S. Cold War policies and the creation of the CIA, which came to embody the new powers of the national security state. The CIA was a secret executive agency that was charged with implementing the strategy of containment while being largely shielded from congressional oversight. In this chapter I illustrate the striking family resemblance of U.S. Cold War strategy, ideology, and narratives with polygraph discourse.

In chapter 6 I track the way the polygraph became integrated into the CIA’s bureaucratic procedures. I conclude that despite attempts to make the polygraph a routine part of security procedures, the technology became embroiled in internal turf wars between professional interrogators, field agents, and security personnel. Bureaucratic needs therefore shaped the use of the technology. Further, this chapter illustrates that the sheer quantity of information produced by the lie detector obscured questions of how to properly assess the “security reliability” of individuals. Agencies such as the CIA could never resolve such questions. While the polygraph became a symbol of the relentless power exuded by federal security agencies, it revealed the inherent weaknesses of bureaucratized security procedures. Just like the polygraph, the CIA relied on reputation to establish credentials as a protector of national security.

In chapter 7 I discuss in detail the debates from the 1950s and 1960s to integrate the polygraph into U.S. nuclear deterrence strategy in order to overcome the stalemate in arms control. Largely confined to social scientists and policy analysts, this debate apparently never reached policymakers themselves. It nevertheless highlights the hopes and limitations of the polygraph’s ability to establish cooperation between the two main nuclear powers—the United States and the Soviet Union—by functioning as a substitute for genuine trust building measures. The main argument of this chapter is that attempts to incorporate the polygraph into nuclear arms control give a strong indication of the limits of technological and game-theoretical solutions to the political conflicts underlying the arms race.

In chapter 8 I follow congressional investigations of the lie detector in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. I focus in particular on John Moss and Bella Abzug in the House of Representatives and Sam Ervin in the Senate. This discussion shows that opposition to the polygraph reflected the growing importance of the individual “right to privacy” during and after the 1960s. Dozens of labor union publications and increased coverage by trade journals and within the scientific community drove this opposition. However, this chapter also argues that concern over the propriety and scientific credentials of polygraph technology transcended domestic political battle lines while simultaneously confirming the Cold War consensus that extensive measures against foreign threats were necessary. Lack of agreement on the scientific credentials of the polygraph thus led to a need to borrow ideological credentials from the national security state. This explains the persistence of polygraph tests in the federal government. “National security,” this study concludes, now had the power to trump science and civil rights.

I conclude with an epilogue that highlights the continued relevance of the issues discussed in the preceding chapters. Especially after the attacks of September 11, 2001, “national security” became an even more powerful discourse, undermining political opposition to preemptive military action abroad and invasion of privacy both in the United States and abroad. In this context, “new and improved” ways to detect deception continue to enjoy currency as well. However, I also argue that the paradigm of truth technology seems to have shifted from detection of specific deceptive statements to all-encompassing surveillance of populations with the help of Big Data. Security discourses and practices continue to evolve, but it is my hope that this study of the polygraph and the American Cold War will help to forge a historically grounded discussion of the uses and limits of truth technology.