The Secret History of Wonder Woman Page 5

  Jack Kennard, Coward tells the story of a high school football star from a small town who comes to Harvard, joins the football team, and then quits, leading everyone, including his girlfriend, to think he’s too scared to play. At the time, Harvard’s varsity football squad was led by two all-Americans from Marston’s class, H. R. “Tack” Hardwick and Stan Pennock.26 (It was a famously good squad. Even two decades later, the Harvard Crimson was still insisting, “This team was the greatest team in Harvard history.”)27 The names Tack Hardwick and Stan Pennock sound plenty like Jack Kennard. Still, if Kennard was based on a real person, that person was Bill Marston: a high school football star whose high school won the state championships but who never appeared on any football roster at Harvard.28

  “You see,” Marston said, leaping up from his couch, “here is where I bring my own experiences into the scenario and introduce the Harvard characters. The real reason why Kennard stopped playing football was because he got into trouble with the college office with his gambling debts. That really happened to one of the players on the Harvard team.”

  Later in life, Marston always said he chose not to play football at Harvard because he was so committed to his research. “Considerable pressure was put on me my first year to come for the freshman team,” he maintained, but “I resisted it.” This was a lie. Marston didn’t conduct any experiments his freshman year. More likely, he’d tried out and hadn’t made it, or had been too intimidated to try out, or maybe he’d tried out and then quit. Marston fell into a depression in the fall of his freshman year and very nearly killed himself; part of what pushed him there might have had to do with football. Three of his teammates from Malden High School had gone on to spectacular college football careers; one was the captain of the team at Dartmouth. Not Marston. “I went to Harvard and decided to quit athletics,” he said. He claimed to have been asked, again and again, even as an upperclassman, to try out. He declined: “It would have forced me to break off my psychological laboratory course.”29 Maybe. Meanwhile, his father had fallen into debt—or at least that’s what Marston told his dean, in his scholarship application, though maybe it was Marston who’d fallen into debt, gambling. Maybe Holloway thought he was a coward.

  Jack Kennard, Coward was cast, shot, and edited in less than two months. In its climactic final scene (the “ ‘big’ situation” upon which Marston had based the plot), Kennard proves his bravery when, in the brand-new Harvard Square subway station, he leaps onto the tracks to rescue his girlfriend, who is about to be run over by a train. For all his study of storytelling, Marston only ever patched together his fictions from his facts: the accident in the Harvard Square subway station, the high school football player who can’t play college ball, the student plagued by debts. Even his lies told the truth.

  A scene from Jack Kennard, Coward, 1915 (illustration credit 4.4)

  Jack Kennard, Coward was released on May 5, 1915.30 It played at scattered theaters across the country. In Gettysburg, it shared billing with Charlie Chaplin’s Keystone comedy Getting Acquainted. In Cambridge, where it played at the Durrell Hall theater, across the street from city hall, it was advertised as “a college play to stir the young and make the older patrons dream of younger days.”31 One reviewer said, “William Marston has written a fairly convincing tale of a young collegian in this one-reel drama. Charles M. Seay has brought its good points to the front, and Thomas MacEvoy looks and acts the title role capitally.”32

  It wasn’t a good week for the movies. Two days after the film opened, a German U-boat sank the Lusitania off the coast of Ireland. More than eleven hundred people drowned, including more than a hundred Americans; four were recent Harvard graduates. Outside Harvard’s Germanic Museum, undergraduates draped a statue of a lion, a gift from the kaiser, in black.33

  “To my German friends and colleagues,” Josiah Royce announced in his metaphysics class, all but addressing Hugo Münsterberg directly, “if they chance to want to know what I think, I can and do henceforth only say this: ‘You may triumph in the visible world, but at the banquet where you celebrate your triumph there will be present the ghosts of my dead slain on the Lusitania.’ ”34

  Holloway and Marston at Marston’s Harvard graduation, 1915 (illustration credit 4.5)

  A month of mourning passed. And then, on Thursday, June 24, 1915, an unseasonably cold day, Marston graduated from Harvard. In exercises held at Sanders Theatre, E. E. Cummings, a member of Marston’s class, delivered a speech about modernism called “The New Art.” He quoted a poem by Amy Lowell: “Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper / Like draggled fly’s legs”; he quoted a stream of prose by Gertrude Stein: “Please pale hot, please cover rose, please acre in the red stranger, please butter all the beef-steak with regular feel faces.” Then President Lowell conferred 124 degrees, handing out diplomas written in Latin on parchment.

  After four years in Cambridge, Gvilielmvs Movlton Marston carried home a scroll of sheepskin marked magna cvm lavde and engraved with the university’s motto: veritas.35 Truth.

  MR. AND MRS. MARSTON

  SADIE HOLLOWAY graduated from Mount Holyoke on June 16, 1915.1 She’d gotten her hair cut. Beneath her tasseled graduation cap, she wore her hair in a bob, her curls cut above the nape of her neck. Feminists in Greenwich Village had begun bobbing their hair in 1912. In 1915, it was still radical. “The idea, it seems, came from Russia,” the New York Times reported. “The intellectual women of that country were revolutionaries. For convenience in disguising themselves when the police trailed them, they cropped their hair.”2 Holloway was something of a revolutionary, too.

  When Holloway turned twenty-two, Marston gave her a book of poems written by the American poet Vachel Lindsay. (Holloway always wanted poems for presents.) He’d underlined a poem called “The Mysterious Cat.” She liked to be mysterious; she loved cats; she thought of herself as a Manx, a cat without a tail; Marston thought of himself as her slave. Marston liked these lines: “I saw a cat—’twas but a dream / Who scorned the slave that brought her cream.” It sounds a little filthy. In the margin, Marston wrote, “Ha! Ha!”3

  Holloway at Mount Holyoke commencement, 1915 (illustration credit 5.1)

  He proposed; she accepted; he gave her an engagement ring he bought with the prize money he’d gotten for Jack Kennard, Coward.4

  Holloway and Marston in 1916 (illustration credit 5.2)

  Marston was going to go to law school; Holloway decided she’d go, too. “It never occurred to me not to go if that’s what I wanted to do,” she said. She’d once gotten in trouble, at Mount Holyoke, in an ethics class, when the professor asked, “Now in the case of a lawyer who is hired to defend a guilty man, what should he do?”

  Holloway said: “Change his profession.”5

  She liked the idea of studying law. She liked arguing about rules. Her father objected.

  “As long as I am able to keep you in gingham aprons,” he told her, “you should be content to stay home with your Mother.” Holloway ignored him. To earn her tuition, she spent the summer selling cookbooks, door to door.6

  In September, Holloway and Marston married. Holloway was the first in her class to become a wife, at a time when only one in two Mount Holyoke graduates ever married.7 To the wedding, in the parlor of her parents’ house, she wore a white satin gown and a veil caught with lilies of the valley.8 Marston wanted her to take his name. She did, but she resented it. “As for names, we are stuck with either our father’s name or our husband’s, so choose the one you like the best,” she once advised a friend. “There’s no such thing in this civilization as ‘your own name.’ ”9

  Marston didn’t like the name Sadie, even though Holloway liked it rather a lot, especially, she said, “if you use its oriental spelling, Zaidee, the Earth Mother.” Marston didn’t like the name Elizabeth, either, so Sadie Elizabeth Holloway became Betty Marston. (I’ll keep calling her “Holloway.”) She was bitter about it, but she gave in. “I was stuck,” she said later.10

  T
hey honeymooned in Maine. Then they moved to a two-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, on Remington Street.11 Marston began studying at Harvard Law School.

  “Those dumb bunnies at Harvard wouldn’t take women,” Holloway said, “so I went to Boston University.”12

  “Studying at Boston University Law School and keeping house” is what Holloway listed as her occupation in the first report she sent to the Mount Holyoke alumni office in 1916. She tried to teach herself to cook, using a Fannie Farmer cookbook given to her by her mother-in-law.13 She never loved cooking but she did love law school.

  Boston University, founded in 1869, had admitted women from the start; it was the first coeducational college in Massachusetts. But in 1915, Holloway, with her bobbed hair, was one of only three women in her law school class. During a course in criminal law, when the topic was something like rape, the female students were asked to leave.14

  Holloway was an excellent law student, Marston an indifferent one. “I plugged along doggedly, doing every bit of the drudgery prescribed and getting exceptionally poor results,” he admitted.15 (He never earned higher than a C.) He’d gone to law school to learn the law of evidence. In the fall of 1916, his second year, he enrolled in Evidence with Arthur Dehon Hill. For a textbook, Hill used the second edition of James Bradley Thayer’s Select Cases on Evidence. Thayer, who taught at Harvard until his death in 1902, had taught John Henry Wigmore, Hugo Münsterberg’s nemesis. (When Wigmore wrote his Treatise on the Law of Evidence, he dedicated it to Thayer.) As Thayer saw it, there weren’t any rules of evidence; or, to be exact, there were two, and only two: “(1) that nothing is to be received which is not logically probative of some matter requiring to be proved; and (2) that everything which is thus probative should come in, unless a clear ground of policy of law excludes it.”16 What Marston wanted to figure out was how to introduce his lie detector test into court.

  The presidential election of 1916 turned on two questions: the war in Europe and woman suffrage. Wilson, who was running for a second term, advocated neutrality and remained opposed to a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. He was challenged by Charles Evans Hughes, a former New York governor and U.S. Supreme Court justice. Hughes urged American entry into the war.17 “A vote for Hughes is a vote for war,” explained a senator from Oklahoma. “A vote for Wilson is a vote for peace.” At the Republican National Convention in Chicago, five thousand women staged a protest. Hughes began supporting woman suffrage. Some women supported Hughes, because of his position on suffrage; others supported Wilson, because of his position on peace. In the end, it was women voters who, by rallying behind the peace movement, gained Wilson a narrow victory: he won ten of the twelve states where women had already been enfranchised. Without them, he would have lost.18

  Women as U.S. states, those in chains representing states where women could not vote, 1916 (illustration credit 5.3)

  All fall, Lowell, Harvard’s president, had been pressured to fire Münsterberg, for his support for Germany. In a letter written on November 2, Lowell refused, staunchly stating his decision as a matter of principle: “It has fallen to the lot of this University to be among the foremost in maintaining the principle of academic freedom, which has been severely strained by the present war. That principle, we believe to be of the greatest importance, and not to be put in jeopardy without tangible proof of personal misconduct, apart from the unpopularity of the views expressed.”19

  Münsterberg did not survive the controversy. On the morning of December 16, 1916, he woke up feeling uneasy and unsteady and walked more slowly than usual from his home at 7 Ware Street to Radcliffe Yard. He entered the lecture hall. Marston may well have been there, acting as his assistant. Münsterberg began to speak; he began to sway. In the middle of a sentence, he slumped to the floor. He had had a cerebral hemorrhage. He died within the hour. He was fifty-three.20

  There is a page in a Wonder Woman comic book that features a tombstone. It reads, “Rest in Peace Prof. Psycho.”21

  THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE

  IN DECEMBER 1916, while Wilson delivered his State of the Union address, suffragists flooded the galleries in the Capitol and unfurled a banner that read, “mr. president, what will you do for woman suffrage?” They were members of what became the National Woman’s Party, founded by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns after they split from the National American Woman Suffrage Association, whose strategy was to change voting laws, state by state. Paul and Burns fought, instead, for a federal constitutional amendment.

  New Women wanted to change the world. Burns had graduated from Vassar in 1902 and gone on to study at Yale, Columbia, and Oxford, but mainly, in England, she’d studied the methods of militant suffragism. So had Paul; she’d been in England between 1908 and 1910, where she’d been arrested during protests organized by Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union. Back in the United States, Paul earned a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, writing a dissertation on women’s legal rights. In January 1917, suffragists began a silent vigil outside the White House, carrying banners reading, “how long must women wait for liberty?” and pledging not to cease their vigil until the amendment passed. On March 4, 1917, on the eve of Wilson’s inauguration, more than a thousand women marched around the White House in an icy rain.1

  Suffragists from the National Woman’s Party outside the White House, 1917 (illustration credit 6.1)

  Days after Wilson’s inauguration, German U-boats sank three American ships. On April 2, a constitutional amendment to grant women the right to vote was introduced in Congress. That same day, Wilson asked Congress to declare war. Then he went back to the White House and wept.2 When the picketers around the White House refused to stop their protest, they were arrested. At trial, the judge said, “We are at war and you should not bother the president.”3

  On April 6, the day Congress declared war, experimental psychologists from across the country gathered at Harvard, in Emerson Hall. They were led by Herbert Langfeld, Marston’s undergraduate adviser, and Robert Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association.4 Yerkes, who had earned his PhD at Harvard in 1902 and had studied in Münsterberg’s laboratory, was a specialist in both primate behavior and intelligence testing; he was a prominent eugenicist. Out of that meeting came the Psychology Committee of the National Research Council, headed by Yerkes. Its first task was “the psychological examining of recruits to eliminate the mentally unfit.”5

  The war that Wilson hoped would end all wars all but silenced the campaign for woman suffrage, a campaign that had been closely aligned with the peace movement. Congress passed the Espionage Act in 1917 and the Sedition Act in 1918; both were aimed chiefly at socialists, anarchists, and pacifists (Wilson had called for authority to censor the press as well; Congress struck that down by a single vote). Winning the war seemed to the federal government to require the suppression of dissent and to require, too, the nation’s psychologists; war itself had become a psychological laboratory.

  Marston described his life during these years as a series of experiments:

  First experiment, teaching psychology at Radcliffe while still a Harvard undergraduate; result, unfortunate for the girls, who may have learned psychology, but not love. Second experiment, studying law; result, unfortunate for the law, which gained a poor advocate. Third experiment, 1917–1918, War and Army.6

  Steve Trevor administers test. From “The Milk Swindle,” Sensation Comics #7 (July 1942) (illustration credit 6.2)

  Marston’s research had obvious wartime applications: the interrogation of prisoners of war and suspected spies. He filled out a draft card on June 5, 1917, ten days before Congress passed the Espionage Act, and two weeks before the end of his second year of law school.7 By fall, he’d begun a correspondence with Yerkes.8 He wanted to continue his deception studies, asking Yerkes, “Why not set me at researching upon them in the Harvard Psych. Lab.?”9 Yerkes consulted with Columbia psychologist Edward L. Thorndike, who met with Marston and report
ed to Yerkes, “I have spent most of the afternoon with Marston and like him very much and have confidence in him. I am still a little shaky about his findings, but I think they deserve a real try-out with real cases.”10 Langfeld told Yerkes he would be glad to give Marston the use of the facilities in Emerson Hall. “He has much energy and push and is very resourceful,” he wrote. “He is very intelligent.” Still, Langfeld was not without worry about what he by now perceived to be Marston’s Achilles’ heel: “I have a mere suspicion that he may be slightly overzealous in grasping opportunities, which causes him to take the corners a little too sharply.”11

  Marston sent Yerkes a research proposal.12 In response, Yerkes established a special Committee on Tests for Deception, “to make inquiry concerning the reliability and practicability of certain procedures proposed by William M. Marston for the detection of deception.”13 Marston began a study in Emerson Hall, aided by Leonard Troland and another scientist named Harold Burtt. They conducted deception tests—using “iron clad precautions”—on ten men: five Harvard undergraduates and five second-year law school students. The results, Marston reported to Yerkes, were remarkable.14 Yerkes ordered Marston “to make application of his methods to a number of cases of actual crime.”15

  Marston undertook this next investigation in the fall of 1917, conducting deception tests on twenty criminal defendants who had been recommended by the Municipal Criminal Court of Boston for medical and psychological evaluation. His case reports read like this: