The Secret History of Wonder Woman Page 6

  CASE NO. 2. WOMAN (COLORED). AGE, 31 YEARS.

  Record of Case Given to Examiner Previous to Deception Test.

  Colored woman, 31 years of age. Arrested six months ago for larceny of a ring and placed on probation on the strength of the testimony of a colored man from whom a ring was alleged to have been stolen. Defendant during the six months had not made restitution, as she had been ordered to do, and was suspected by the probation officer of having avoided her calls. Examination was to determine whether or not she stole the ring in the first place.

  B.P. Judgment.

  Innocent. Woman telling the truth as to the ring, having been given to her.

  Verification

  The judge dismissed the case, although probation officer advised six months further probation. New evidence had turned up indicating that the colored man who first alleged that defendant stole ring was a disreputable character, etc.

  In each of the twenty cases, the judgment of the blood pressure machine, as read by Marston, was subsequently verified by other evidence.16 Yerkes began to wonder whether Marston had cut his corners too sharply.

  During Harvard Law School’s winter break, Marston went to Washington. The National Woman’s Party vigil around the White House had ended, only to be followed by pickets protesting the treatment of the women who’d been arrested. Many, including Alice Paul, had gone on hunger strikes and were being forcibly fed. Burns had been beaten and hanged from chains. In November, a delegation of suffragists, including a feminist cartoonist named Lou Rogers, had gone to Washington to plead with Wilson to let the picketers out of jail. Paul and Burns, they said, were being tortured. At the end of the month, Burns, Paul, and twenty other women were released. In January 1918, while Marston was in Washington, Wilson announced that he had decided to support a federal woman suffrage amendment.17

  In Washington, Yerkes arranged for Marston to discuss his research with John Henry Wigmore, who was serving in the army in the Judge Advocate General’s office. Yerkes also tried to secure Marston a position that would allow him to apply his work in the field. At the Department of Justice, Marston met with the chief of the Bureau of Investigation (later called the FBI) and with a young J. Edgar Hoover. Asked to hire Marston, the bureau demurred. Yerkes then sent Marston to New York to meet with the chief of the Office of Military Intelligence, who turned him down, and handed him over to the New York chief of police, who wasn’t interested, either. For all of Marston’s charm, his near-perfect laboratory results generally failed to impress men involved in actual criminal investigation. Marston was exasperated. “I don’t care whether they call me Mr. or Mud,” he wrote Yerkes. “But I firmly believe that unless Headquarters orders that these tests be instituted in a certain definite place and that I be given certain definite powers to get at cases, we’ll go on and on piling up interesting thesis data and getting nowhere practically.”18

  Supervised by Wigmore, Marston conducted an investigation into a series of petty thefts, of scientific instruments, that had taken place in the building where Yerkes worked: “I was asked to examine all the negro messengers in the Mills Building who could have had access to the room from which the instruments were taken,” Marston explained. He subjected eighteen messengers to his deception test and reported that Subject #4, a man named Horace Dreear, was guilty. But he’d got the wrong man: it turned out, beyond any doubt, that someone else had committed the crime. Desperate to vindicate himself, Marston went to New York, where, he told Yerkes, he found out that Dreear came from a “ ‘bad lot’ of the New York negroes.” (Even if Dreear hadn’t stolen the instruments, he was still a guilty man, Marston was trying to argue; it’s just that he was just guilty of something else.) Marston told Yerkes that he had begun to think that the problem with his experiment might have been that he had failed to account for what he now suspected might be a racial difference: “The factor of voluntary control which, with white men, seems to make a deception rise regular and almost an absolute one, apparently is almost altogether lacking in negroes.”19

  Yerkes’s support weakened. Marston had been turned down by the Office of Military Intelligence, the Bureau of Investigation, the New York Police Department, the Department of War, and the Department of Justice. He’d also accused an innocent man. Yerkes decided Marston’s best use might be in the classroom. He began making arrangements for Marston to teach a course in military psychology to soldiers. This required Marston to leave his third year of law school without finishing his coursework, to which the dean reluctantly agreed.20

  Marston and Holloway graduated from law school in June 1918. In August, they took the bar exam together. Holloway got through it faster. “I finished the exam in nothing flat,” she said, “and had to go out and sit on the stairs waiting for Bill.”21

  In October 1918, Marston was commissioned as a second lieutenant and sent to Camp Greenleaf, Georgia, where he was appointed a professor at the U.S. Army School of Military Psychology.22 Holloway stayed in Cambridge. “During the war,” she said, “women left at home were bored stiff.”23

  There’s a Wonder Woman episode in which Dr. Psycho disguises himself as the ghost of George Washington in order to shout down the idea that women ought to be allowed to contribute to the war effort.

  “Women will lose the war for America! Women should not be permitted to have the responsibilities they now have!” he warns. “They must not be trusted with war secrets or serve in the armed forces. Women will betray their country through weakness if not through treachery!”

  “Why that loose-tongued double-talking phony!” Wonder Woman cries out, leaping to the stage. “I’ll stop him.”24

  Holloway, though, wasn’t able to stop anything. Mr. Marston went to war. Mrs. Marston stayed home.

  Marston, second from left, at Camp Greenleaf in 1918 (illustration credit 6.3)

  At Camp Greenleaf, Marston taught a course called Military Problems of Testimony. He designed an Aussage experiment: he took ten nickels and “about 50 articles, each of some intrinsic value to a soldier,” and hid them in a room on the second floor of the camp’s Psychology Building. He instructed thirty-five soldiers to go into the room, one at a time, and either steal nothing or steal something and hide it in a nearby barracks. Fourteen officers, some of them lawyers, were to watch the soldiers as they entered and exited the room, follow them, and, eventually, hook them up to a blood-pressure cuff and question them.25

  From “Victory at Sea,” Sensation Comics #15 (March 1943) (illustration credit 6.4)

  Nineteen soldiers had stolen something; sixteen had stolen nothing. (Before being interrogated, they wrote confessions, which were then sealed until the completion of the experiment.) The officers, using Marston’s deception test, were able to determine a soldier’s guilt or innocence in twenty-six out of thirty-five cases, or 74.3 percent. Marston, who did not conduct the interrogations but merely read graphs documenting the soldiers’ blood-pressure changes, was right thirty-four out of thirty-five times, achieving the astonishing success rate of 97.1 percent. His test, he concluded, was nearly perfect; the only problem with it was that some people weren’t as good at applying it as he was.26 It looked very fishy. As Yerkes delicately put it, Marston’s results “did not command the confidence of all members of the Psychology Committee.”27

  But Wigmore was impressed. He urged Marston to write up the research he’d conducted at Camp Greenleaf and submit it to the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, a publication Wigmore had founded. Marston’s article was accepted.28

  “Say,” Steve Trevor is forever saying to Diana Prince, “you’re quite the little psychologist!”29

  MACHINE DETECTS LIARS, TRAPS CROOKS

  MARJORIE WILKES, who believed in both suffrage and bondage, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1889. She was an only child. Her father worked for the Georgia railroad.1 She smoked from the age of thirteen. She was tough as nails and thin as a twig. She had eyes like a doe’s and hair as brown as a mouse’s. In 1912, when she was twenty-two,
she worked on a suffrage campaign in Chicago. She married a man named Huntley because she wanted a new name: she didn’t want to share a name with the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. In 1914, having left her husband, she started working as a librarian. In 1916, she marched in a suffrage parade at the Republican National Convention in Chicago; one Chicago newspaper cartoonist depicted suffragists marching with their wrists in shackles, dragging balls chained to their feet, slaves to the men who ruled them.2

  “No one knows more about the production of Wonder Woman than Marjorie W. Huntley,” Holloway liked to say.3 In the 1940s, Huntley helped out with the inking and lettering of Wonder Woman, including panel after panel depicting women shackled, hands and feet. “How can she run with that ball and chains?” one of Wonder Woman’s captors cries out.4 Huntley was schooled in suffrage, but she believed, too, in what she called “love binding”: the importance of being tied and chained. She also believed in extra-body consciousness, vibrations, reincarnation, and the psychic nature of orgasm.5

  She met Marston in 1918, after Armistice was declared, on November 11, and he was sent to Camp Upton, New York, to treat shell shock victims. Huntley was the camp’s librarian. Marston was twenty-five and far from his wife; Huntley was twenty-nine and divorced. They were together for six months. Marston was discharged from the army on May 9, 1919, the day he turned twenty-six.

  Suffragists as slaves in a parade during the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1916 (illustration credit 7.1)

  Wonder Woman and her friends as slaves in “Mole Men of the Underworld,” Wonder Woman #4 (April–May 1943) (illustration credit 7.2)

  The National Woman’s Party, which had staged demonstrations throughout the war—burning Wilson’s speeches, picketing the Capitol, and delivering addresses while wearing prison uniforms—finally achieved victory during the peace. On May 21, 1919, the House of Representatives passed the Nineteenth Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” It passed in the Senate on June 4 and went to the states for ratification.

  Marston went home to Cambridge. Soon, Holloway was pregnant. They moved into a house on Lowell Street, off Brattle Street; Holloway’s parents bought it for them.6 They rented out rooms to law school friends, and in one room they kept a patient of Marston’s, a boy who could not stop masturbating; he had to be watched night and day.7 Huntley came to visit. Marston had left her with an understanding that she ought to come whenever she liked. She talked, later, about how she and Marston and Holloway became a “threesome”; that may have started in 1919.8

  In September 1919, Marston enrolled in Harvard’s PhD program in philosophy and Holloway, five months pregnant, enrolled in an MA program at Radcliffe. All of the courses taken by Radcliffe graduate students were taught at Harvard’s graduate school, by Harvard professors. Mr. and Mrs. Marston enrolled together for two semesters of Psychological Laboratory with Herbert Langfeld.9

  On January 7, 1920, Holloway gave birth to a stillborn baby. They named her Fredericka, after Marston’s father. All Holloway’s life, whenever she had to fill out a form that required her to list the names of her children, she included that baby born dead.10

  That summer, the Marstons went on vacation in Bermuda; sailing back to the United States, they reached shore on August 9.11 Nine days later, the Nineteenth Amendment became law. On Election Day that fall, Marjorie Wilkes Huntley escorted women to the polls. With suffrage won, the National Woman’s Party began lobbying for the passage of equal rights bills in the states and for the ratification of an Equal Rights Amendment, drafted by Alice Paul.12

  Holloway and Marston struggled to find their own kind of equality. “Can it be in the divine order of things that one Ph.D. should wash the dishes a whole lifetime for another Ph.D. just because one is a woman and the other a man?” asked the writer of a 1921 essay called “Reflections of a Professor’s Wife.”13 Holloway might have asked the same question.

  In the 1920–21 academic year, Holloway and Marston enrolled, once again, in the same courses, with the same professors.14 As Holloway liked to tell it, much of Marston’s research was really her research, and she earned a PhD from Harvard as surely as he had, even if she was never awarded the degree. “I suggested the original Lie Detector experiment,” she always claimed.15 The only reason Harvard didn’t grant her a PhD, she said, was that she had balked at a requirement for proficiency in German. “I refused to accept the idea that it was necessary to read the German scientists if you were to keep up in your field, regardless of having completed the other requirements,” she explained. “I went to Radcliffe, signed some forms, criticized them from a legal point of view, wrote a thesis on Studies in Testimony, and was granted an M.A.”16

  Holloway was either lying or misremembering. Harvard didn’t admit women to doctoral programs; there was no question of a woman taking a qualifying examination, German or no German.17 Nor did an MA from Radcliffe require a thesis. And “Studies in Testimony” isn’t the title of a master’s thesis written by Holloway—she didn’t write one—but of a journal article later published by Marston.

  Despite her MA and her JD, Holloway had a hard time finding work. At the time, less than 2 percent of all lawyers in the United States were women.18 No one took a woman lawyer seriously, Holloway complained. “I have never met a woman who, in those days, actually tried a case before a jury,” she said. She told this story about when she was clerking: “One day I was in Court filing papers when His Honor leaned over the bench and intoned, ‘Young lady, please tell your employer not to send his secretary to court to file papers.’ ” She bided her time. She liked to say, about men who treated her that way, “I didn’t spit in his eye but I would have liked to.”19

  During the war, Holloway sold Lifebuoy soap outside a nickelodeon in Central Square. Anyone who bought fourteen dollars’ worth of soap got a free movie ticket.

  “Would you like to try some Lifebuoy Soap, Madame?” she would ask.

  “No, I wouldn’t; it smells like a hospital.”

  “You mean a hospital smells like Lifebuoy,” Holloway would say.

  She traveled from town to town. She got to know the other traveling saleswomen; they always stuck together. She had a friend everyone called “Blackie,” because she dyed her hair with shoe polish. Blackie’s favorite saying got to be one of Holloway’s favorite sayings, too. Blackie would say, “God, Missus, there ain’t a man on Earth worth a foot in Hell.”20

  Except Marston.

  The experimental life of William Moulton Marston involved a great many schemes. In his last year of graduate school, Marston opened the Tait-Marston Engineering Company, with a machine shop and foundry in Boston and offices at 60 State Street.21 He became treasurer of a fabrics firm called United Dress Goods.22 And, with two friends from law school—Felix Forte, who had helped Marston with his work on deception tests, and Edward Fischer, a founder of the Boston Legal Aid Society—he opened up a law firm: Marston, Forte & Fischer. Its offices, too, were at 60 State Street.23 Tait-Marston Engineering, United Dress Goods, and Marston, Forte & Fischer all failed. But Marston only ever admitted to the failure of the law firm, the fourth in the series of experiments that made up his life: “Fourth investigation, 1918–21, practicing law while continuing psychological work at Harvard; result, general dissatisfaction of all subjects concerned, especially clients.”24

  He thought, though, that there might still be money to be made in the detection of deception. He had a series of photographs taken on the porch of his house on Lowell Street, where he’d constructed a makeshift stage: a wooden table covered with laboratory equipment, including wheels, cords, clocks, and a sphygmomanometer. In the photographs, Marston wears a three-piece tweed suit and his owl’s-eye spectacles and is in the company of a very pretty young woman—the secretary at Marston, Forte & Fischer. Her long, dark hair is pinned back, her wide eyes impassive; she wears a pale dress. In one shot, she i
s seated in a chair, next to Marston, who leans over her. A blood pressure cuff is wrapped around her arm, and a strap is winched against her chest, just above her breasts. A black disk propped over one of her eyes blocks half of her vision.

  Marston administering a lie detector test to the secretary of his law firm, 1921 (illustration credit 7.3)

  In May 1921, Marston distributed the photographs to newspapers, along with a press release headed “Machine Detects Liars, Traps Crooks.” The story was picked up by papers all over the country: “Successful lying will soon be a lost art.”25

  The next month, Marston graduated with a PhD. He had spent nearly ten years at Harvard. He had studied history, philosophy, psychology, and law. He had earned three degrees. He liked to ponder the nature of evidence. He believed he knew how to find out who was telling the truth and who was not. He had become an excellent liar. The time had come for his next experiment: “Fifth research, founding the great (potentially) subject of legal psychology at American University.”26 For this experiment, Dr. Marston went to Washington.

  STUDIES IN TESTIMONY

  THE LECTURE had only just begun when there came a rap at the door. The professor walked across the room and opened the door. A young man entered. He wore gloves. In his right hand, he carried an envelope. Tucked under his left arm he held three books: one red, one green, and one blue. He said he had a message to deliver. He spoke with a Texas twang. He handed the professor the envelope. While the professor opened the envelope, pulled out a yellow paper, and read its contents, the messenger, using only his right hand, drew from his pocket a long, green-handled pocketknife. Deftly, he opened the knife and began scraping his gloved left thumb with the edge of the blade.1