The Last Gasp
Scott Christianson
The Last Gasp takes us to the dark side of human history in the first full chronicle of the gas chamber in the United States. In page-turning detail, award-winning writer Scott Christianson tells a dreadful story that is full of surprising and provocative new findings.
First constructed in Nevada in 1924, the gas chamber, a method of killing sealed off and removed from the sight and hearing of witnesses, was originally touted as a “humane” method of execution. Delving into science, war, industry, medicine, law, and politics, Christianson overturns this mythology for good. He exposes the sinister links between corporations looking for profit, the military, and the first uses of the gas chamber after World War I. He explores little-known connections between the gas chamber and the eugenics movement. Perhaps most controversially, he has unearthed new evidence about American and German collaboration in the production and lethal use of hydrogen cyanide and about Hitler’s adoption of gas chamber technology developed in the United States.
More than a book about the death penalty, this compelling history ultimately reveals much about America’s values and power structures in the twentieth century.
Scott Christianson
THE LAST GASP
The Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber
For Myron and Jetta
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.
Acknowledgments
With a project of this sort, there are countless individuals to thank for many things. I can only single out a few persons for acknowledgment, while attesting to the fact that I alone am responsible for any errors or other shortcomings.
I am especially thankful to Michael Laurence of the Habeas Corpus Resource Center in San Francisco for providing access to the voluminous materials compiled as part of his historic constitutional challenge to lethal gas executions known as Fierro v. Gomez, and also for sharing with me some of his personal observations and experiences involving California’s gas chamber. This study could not have been completed without his assistance. However, he had no editorial control over the final product. I have also benefited from the lifework and generosity of the great Anthony Amsterdam, who graciously served as an advisor to one of my earlier death penalty documentation projects, just as in the 1970s I gained much from my discussions with Jack Boger, David Kendall, and other brilliant lawyers who were then staff attorneys at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., as well as from my frequent exchanges with the late Henry Schwarzschild of the American Civil Liberties Union Capital Punishment Project. A tiny but committed cadre of brilliant lawyers changed history in those years.
More recently I drew upon the tremendous work done on capital punishment by Deborah W. Denno of Fordham University Law School, Dick Dieter at the Death Penalty Information Center, Professor James Acker and Charles S. Lanier of the University at Albany Capital Punishment Research Initiative, David Kaczynski and Ronald Tabak of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty, Jonathan Gradess of the New York State Defenders Association, and Michael L. Radelet of the University of Colorado, to name only a few people. I also drew from the works of Hugo Adam Bedau, William Bowers, Craig Haney, and Austin Sarat. My participation in a series of programs for the History Channel in 2000–2001 spurred me to expand my research on the American gas chamber and other execution methods.
My long-term interest in the eugenics movement, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust were brought together by consulting the writings of Edwin Black, Stefan Kühl, the late Carey McWilliams (one of my former editors), Joseph W. Bendersky, Robert J. Lifton, Robert Jan van Pelt, Michael Thad Allen, and many others. I was deeply affected by my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Germany in September 2009. The staff of the Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau were exceptionally kind and helpful. Discussions with Myron and Jetta Gordon, Dr. Felix Bronner, and Rabbi Bill Strongin also added to my understanding. I further benefited from interviews of Nicole Rafter as well as Jan Witkowski, Paul Lombardo, Garland Allen, Elof Axel Carlson, and other scholars associated with the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Archives, interviews I conducted when writing a piece about the Jukes for the New York Times.
While working on this book I was aided by archivists and librarians from several institutions, including the staffs of the state archives of Arizona, California, Colorado, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wyoming, and the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, as well as librarians at the New York State Library, New York Public Library, California State Library, Bancroft Library of the University of California, Nevada Historical Society, Washington and Lee University Library and Archives, Cañon City Public Library, University of Oregon Library and Archives, Hagley Museum and Library, Denver Public Library, Princeton University Library, and Nevada Department of Corrections and Arizona Department of Corrections. Among the historians who enhanced my knowledge of Nevada’s first gassing were Guy Rocha, Phill Earl, and Bob Nylen. Robert Perske helped educate me about the Joe Arridy case in Colorado, and Dean Marshal shared his observations based on his long experience as a correction officer in Cañon City. Former Eaton Metal Products Company employee Nancy Thompson described that firm’s history as the world’s first gas chamber builder.
I am indebted to Howard Brodie for permission to publish his extraordinary eyewitness drawing of Aaron Mitchell’s execution, and I appreciate the assistance provided by his son, Bruce Brodie. Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, contains extensive information about E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Company and other chemical companies that proved very illuminating. Sam Knight of the Financial Times in London and Jane Wylen (daughter of Wallace Hume Carothers) also provided welcome assistance. Professor Anthony S. Travis of Hebrew University and the Leo Baeck Institute in London and author John V. H. Dippel kindly shared knowledge about German and American relationships in the chemical industry. Will Allen educated me about pesticides. My collaboration with the author and filmmaker Egmont R. Koch of Bremen, with whom I made a documentary film commissioned by the Arte and WDR television networks, has proven enormously valuable—in part because it enabled me to visit many of the locations named in this book.
For background about the Zinssers and John J. McCloy (whom I had the privilege to meet in 1975), I wish to thank Alan Brinkley of Columbia University, Kai Bird, Jules Witcover; the law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore; and Muriel Olsson, Fatima Mahdi, and their colleagues at the Hastings Historical Society.
I learned something about North Carolina from Paul M. Green of Durham, who shared information about his grandfather, the playwright Paul Green; Marshall Dyan, a longtime capital defender who represented David Lawson; Norman B. Smith, Esq., of Greensboro; Gerda Stein; Adam Stein; and Mary Ann Tally. During my visits to California I appreciated the hospitality provided by Bill and Linda Babbitt, Richard Jacoby, and Judith Tannenbaum. The staff at the Museum of Colorado Prisons in Cañon City provided special access to an Eaton gas chamber that was used in some of the executions described in this book.
Those who read one or more versions of the proposal and manuscript and offered constructive criticism include Tamar Gordon, Chuck Grench, Philip Turner, Iris Blasi, Ralph Blumenthal, Richard Jacoby, Charles Lanier, Ronald Tabak, Austin Sarat, Deborah Denno, Egmont Koch, Mike Allen, and two anonymous reviewers. Their input was invaluable. Early in the process I was most fortunate to connect with Niels Hooper, my savvy editor at the University of California Press, who offered several cogent and insightful suggestions and guided this work to fruition with great skill and good cheer. I am indebted to him and his colleagues for bringing this work into print. Suzanne Knott oversaw its productio
n and Sharron Wood served as copy editor; together they helped clean up what was a messy manuscript.
The nature of the subject has made this project deeply challenging emotionally as well as intellectually. As always, I wouldn’t have been able to pursue this work without the steadfast support and encouragement of my beloved: buddy Kenny Umina; my parents-in-law, Myron and Jetta Gordon; my Hastings hosts, Eve Gordon and Michael Gardner; my siblings, Susie Ouellette, Peter Christianson, and Carol Archambault; my daughters in California, Kelly Whitney and Emily Christianson; my son, Jonah; my son-in-law, Scott Whitney; and my father, Keith R. Christianson. My dear mother, Joyce Fraser Christianson, passed away as I was starting to write this book, but her spirit remains strong in its pages. Without the extraordinary patience and intelligence of my wife, Tamar Gordon, none of my scattered literary efforts would have ever reached completion.
Pursuing this haunted path has brought great sadness; my battered heart grieves in memory of those lost.
INTRODUCTION
The huge literature about the Holocaust has assumed that, in the words of one leading historian, “The creation of the gas chamber was a unique invention of Nazi Germany.”1 In fact, however, the lethal chamber, later called the execution gas chamber or homicidal gas chamber, was originally envisioned before Adolf Hitler was born, and the first such apparatus claimed its initial human victim nine years before the Nazis rose to power and more than sixteen years before they executed anyone by lethal gas.
The earliest gas chamber for execution purposes was constructed in the Nevada State Penitentiary at Carson City and first employed on February 8, 1924, with the legislatively sanctioned and court-ordered punishment of Gee Jon, a Chinese immigrant who had been convicted of murdering another Chinese immigrant, amid a wave of anti-immigrant and racist hysteria that gripped the country at that time.
America’s and the world’s first execution by gas arose as a byproduct of chemical warfare research conducted by the U.S. Army’s Chemical Warfare Service and the chemical industry during the First World War. Embraced by both Democrats and Republicans, including many progressives, and touted by both the scientific and legal establishments as a “humane” improvement over hanging and electrocution, the gas chamber was also considered a matter of practical social reform. Its adherents claimed that the gas chamber would kill quickly and painlessly, without the horrors of the noose or the electric chair, and in a much more orderly and peaceful fashion. But they were quickly proven wrong. Technocrats nevertheless kept tinkering with its workings for seventy-five years in a vain attempt to overcome the imperfections of lethal gas.
Eventually adopted by eleven states as the official method of execution, lethal gas claimed 594 lives in the United States from 1924 to 1999, until it was gradually replaced by another, supposedly more humane, method of capital punishment, lethal injection (see table 1). Along the way, the specter of the gas chamber evoked revulsion throughout the world and eventually contributed to the ongoing decline in America’s resort to the death penalty.
Beginning in the late 1930s, and with unparalleled ferocity immediately after the outbreak of World War II, the Nazi regime began using every conceivable means to murder prisoners: beatings, starvation, the guillotine, lethal injection, and firing squads, to name a few. The gas chamber turned out to be their most efficient form of mass slaughter. The Third Reich took the practice of gas-chamber executions from the Americans and expanded upon it, developing a huge industrial system to systematically slaughter millions of innocent men, women, and children in an effort to carry out genocide against the Jewish people and Gypsies and eliminate mentally handicapped persons, homosexuals, and political radicals. Unlike other execution methods, the gas chamber—sealed off and removed from witnesses’ sight and hearing—finally proved to be the preferred way for the Nazis to efficiently exterminate large groups of persons and with the least threat of exposure; it enabled the killers to better conceal their atrocious crimes against humanity, thereby reducing the dangers of resistance, reprisals, and self-incrimination. At the same time it offered the pretense of quick and painless euthanasia.
This book is the first in-depth attempt to trace the dreadful history of the gas chamber, providing both a step-by-step account of its operations and an analysis of the factors that contributed to its rise and fall.2 I recount some of the scientific, political, and legal background leading up to the adoption of lethal gas, describe the executions, and outline the struggle to abolish the use of gas-chamber executions, all within the social, political, and legal context of the day. Although the Holocaust figures prominently in this history, forever shattering the gas chamber’s image as a “humane” method of execution, most of this book focuses on its reign in the United States. There too its operation can hardly be described as painless or kind.
Table 1 AMERICAN GAS CHAMBER EXECUTIONS, 1924–1999
As hard as it may be to believe today, given what we know about Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps, the gas chamber originated as a grand but practical utopian idea. Like gas itself, the sinuous rise of what was first called the lethal chamber led (though not always intentionally) to other variants, although its sometime chaotic movements later proved difficult to track.
The lethal chamber was a construct of modernity. Charles Darwin’s formulation in Origin of Species (1859) of natural selection as the survival process of living things in a world of limited resources and changing environments transformed humankind’s relationship to nature and supplied a coherent discourse for Western capitalism. At first Darwin was writing about the natural world without reference to man, but many of his contemporaries and followers saw his model as having profound religious, social, and political implications for humankind as well as meaning for the lower animal and vegetable kingdoms, and Darwin himself later extended some of his musings into those realms as well. However, it wasn’t so much what Darwin intended or initially wrote as what others made from it that later caused so much trouble, particularly as his readers combined his theory with another notion gaining currency at that time.
The English philosopher Herbert Spencer popularized the term “the survival of the fittest,” envisioning a form of class warfare between the impoverished “unfit,” who were doomed to failure, and the privileged elite, whom he and many of his peers saw as worthy persons destined to succeed. “The whole effort of nature,” according to Spencer, was to “get rid of” the pauper classes “and to make room for the better…. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.”3 For some, then, after Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared, the notion of a battle for the “survival of the fittest” among lower forms of life gave rise to notions of human racial supremacy and imperialism that came to be called (rather unfairly) “social Darwinism” and “scientific racism.”
As Victorians raced to come to terms with some of these ramifications, a constellation of Britain’s intellectual elite—scientists, medical titans, visionaries, and social reformers—gathered around the newfound ethos known as eugenics. Its originator, Sir Francis Galton (who was Darwin’s first cousin), had coined the term in 1883 to signify the scientific betterment of the human race and the supremacy of one race and species over the others. He defined the word as referring to “the science which deals with all the influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.”4
Believing that degeneracy or degeneration posed a serious problem for humankind, many of these eugenicists scrambled to devise solutions they thought would advance the human race, in large measure by eliminating the defective or degenerate aspects of humankind. Such notions proved so powerful that within just a few years, by the turn of the twentieth century, eugenics took on the righteousness of a religion and became a growing social movement whose members longed to change the world. In short order the eugenicists’ discriminating beliefs about hereditarily superior and inferior classes would contribute to calls for immigration c
ontrol, intelligence testing, birth control, involuntary sterilization, racial segregation, large-scale institutionalization, and euthanasia. Intoxicated by such ideas, some eugenicists soon began to envision what came to be known as the “lethal chamber,” a modern mechanism to cull the gene pool of its defective germ plasm and free civilized society from unwanted burdens. It would be a quality-control appliance that would remove society’s unwanted pests and detritus as humanely and painlessly as possible.
Such visions were more than just idle thinking. Within a few years they had combined with other forces to make the lethal chamber a reality. Much of the materiel and technology behind the specific gases capable of killing human beings came from the military-scientific-and-industrial complex during the First World War. Moreover, during the next quarter-century, scientists, physicians, writers, industrialists, warriors, politicians, reformers, managers, and bureaucrats on both sides of the Atlantic would all make their contributions to the gas chamber’s conceptual development, many of them scarcely imagining that their utopian dreams would ultimately become implicated in the greatest crime of the twentieth century.
The thinking behind eugenics seemed to dovetail nicely with the American way, as evidenced in part by how the country had handled Native Americans and blacks. “What in England was the biology of class,” one historian has written, “in America became the biology of racial and ethnic groups. In America, class was, in large measure, racial and ethnic.”5 Despite its origins in progressive social thought, American eugenics by the 1920s had become virtually synonymous with biological racism and modern degenerationism. During that period American eugenicists achieved what one historian has identified as two great political victories: the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924), which set a quota holding that no more than 2 percent of all immigrants to the United States could come from southern and eastern Europe and closed the gates to practically all newcomers from Asia; and the ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927), which upheld the involuntary sterilization of a “mentally defective” inmate in Virginia.6 Following this line of thinking, one could also count Gee’s gassing as a third such “triumph,” for it turned out to have incalculable precedent-setting ramifications.
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